| testing testing |
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| 05:56am 11/05/2009 |
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music: Natural Calamity - Dark Water and Stars
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Evening, July 23, 2005
Me and this taxi driver chap, we were going to pull off a heist on an unsuspecting coconut hawker. We were in his taxicab, staking out the hapless mambubuko for what felt like the fourth day or so. In the trunk sat dozens of fake coconuts, which we intended to use in a classic bait-and-switch maneuver. My partner was the sleazier of us two, and he wore a panama hat with a Hawaiian shirt.
I wore a pinstriped suit.
It turns out that what he really intended to rob was a branch of the United Coconut Planters’ Bank. I can’t remember what happened next.
Morning, July 24, 2005
1: All I could remember about this dream was that it involved an ad for floor wax, and that the sole advertised characteristic was that it was colored ube purple instead of the usual red.
2: I was at home, and my family and I were packing stuff up into these big balikbayan boxes. We were leaving for San Francisco the very next day, apparently. There wasn’t enough room for all of my things, as my mom was using up most of the space for the junk she’d accumulated over the years (she was the sort that never threw things out – lifestyle sections of newspapers, hopelessly shot appliances, etc.). I was surprised at the extent to which I had put down roots here, and at the fact that I was about to leave a lot of it behind just because my mom can’t bear to throw Tim Yap’s columns and a broken electric fan away.
Evening, July 25, 2005
I had to bring my sick brother (who really is down with the flu right now) to a hospital notorious for its undead population and its inadequate parking space. I had a bit of trouble once they got him all fixed up, as I could not remember where I had parked the car. So my mom, my brother and I ended up threading our way around the mostly-empty complex at midnight, careful not to spring any traps that the zombies laid out. The architecture of the hospital was similar to those gray monoliths that Marcos put up – something of a cross between the main theater at CCP, the Philippine Children’s Memorial Center, and a videogame medieval dungeon.
It turns out that I was parked next to a friend’s car, someone I haven’t seen in a long while. And as luck would have it, he was heading towards his own car, and so we traded gabs right then and there, at midnight, in the amber-lit parking lot of some Marcos-era hospital with a zombie infestation.
I just realized that ‘finding a parked car at night’ is a recurrent theme in my dreams, although I’ve never had the problem in real life.
Afternoon, August 1, 2005
In my hand was a piece of fried chicken that could pass for a relief map of France. I took a bite out of the Bordeaux region, and all of a sudden I understood why it was famous the world over for its wines – Bordeaux was absolutely delicious. Normandy, on the other hand, tasted like stale, salty bread.
And then I dreamt that this dream would make a great dream journal entry.
August 2, 2005
I dreamt of the smell of freshly toasted, freshly buttered bread.
This sort of dream usually happens when I chew caffeinated gum before I sleep, which I did. The last time I did, I dreamt of nothing but the smell of cinnamon buns. |
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Read 3 - Post |
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| 9-11-1973 never forget |
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| 04:29am 04/09/2008 |
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music: El Clamor Popular - Venceremos
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A Moment of Silence Before I Start this Poem
Emmanuel Ortiz
Before I start this poem, I'd like to ask you to join me
In a moment of silence
In honour of those who died in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon last September 11th. I would also like to ask you To offer up a moment of silence For all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned, disappeared,
tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes, For the victims in both Afghanistan and the US
And if I could just add one more thing...
A full day of silence
For the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the hands of US-backed Israeli forces over decades of occupation. Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people, mostly children, who have died of malnourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year US embargo against the country.
Before I begin this poem,
Two months of silence for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa, Where homeland security made them aliens in their own country. Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Where death rained down and peeled back every layer of concrete, steel, earth and skin And the survivors went on as if alive. A year of silence for the millions of dead in Vietnam - a people, not a war - for those who know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their relatives' bones buried in it, their babies born of it. A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of a secret war .... ssssshhhhh.... Say nothing ... we don't want them to learn that they are dead. Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia, Whose names, like the corpses they once represented, have piled up and slipped off our tongues.
Before I begin this poem.
An hour of silence for El Salvador ...
An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua ...
Two days of silence for the Guatemaltecos ...
None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years. 45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas 25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could poke into the sky. There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains. And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, and the west...
100 years of silence...
For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears. Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the refrigerator of our consciousness ...
So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust.
Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won't be.
Not like it always has been.
Because this is not a 9/11 poem.
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.
This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written. And if this is a 9/11 poem, then: This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971. This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa, 1977. This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison, New York, 1971.
This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.
This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks The 110 stories that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and Newsweek ignored. This is a poem for interrupting this program.
And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children
Before I start this poem we could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.
If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit.
If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window of Taco Bell, And pay the workers for wages lost. Tear down the liquor stores, The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the Penthouses and the Playboys.
If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton's 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful
people have gathered.
You want a moment of silence
Then take it NOW,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand,
In the space between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all... Don't cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime. But we, Tonight we will keep right on singing... For our dead.
* * *
Translating thought to word--on the decade of hundred-dollar flip-flops and trillion-dollar wars, on the strange, tingly sensation of awe and fear that the stricking, spectacular views offered by the Precipice of Human Hubris brings--will commence shortly.
¿Venceremos, venceremos, venceremos? |
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Post |
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| Allez-oup! |
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| 07:07pm 07/09/2007 |
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mood: nasolid music: Stan Getz & Joao Gilberto - Desafinado
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Elsewhere in the world, Castro breathes his last few thousand lungfuls. Syrian missiles home in on Israeli jets, which could make for even more interesting times. Raul Gonzales munches on an adrenal gland plucked fresh from a dead infant, his fourth for the day. My Econ 100.1 classmates plow, brain-dead, through their corrected midterms.
But then and there, all that mattered was the long, slight uphill ahead, the downshift, the reassuring thnick of the rear derailleur, and me matching cadence; I don’t give a shit, expressed in meters per second.
Glory be to the machine, to the afternoon sun, and to my momentarily free spirit. |
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Read 1 - Post |
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| So it goes |
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| 11:33pm 17/04/2007 |
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When the tupelo
goes poop-a-lo,
I'll be seeing youp-a-lo. |
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| Language rarely does justice to these moments of clarity |
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| 08:39am 16/10/2006 |
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mood: calm, oddly enough music: Lonnie Liston Smith - Expansions
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Case in point: I think I just figured out exactly what to do for the next ten to fifteen years.
* * *
Expand your mind
to understand
we all must live
in peace
todaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay |
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Read 8 - Post |
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| What I did with my rocket fuel |
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| 04:04pm 08/10/2006 |
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mood: good music: Late Night Alumni - Heaven
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I’ve been meaning to commit some thoughts to writing for so long, now. I haven’t succeeded, yet, but I intend to see this attempt through, no matter how badly it turns out.
My attempts so far have been characterized by bad starts, by first few keystrokes that didn’t have that starter cough-starter cough-vroom resonance to them. I’ve always hated the way I write when I’m happy; it’s a mood I’d much rather spend drawing, or in conversation. Writing is for introspective early-morning lulls, or for when I feel like dropping a pile of logorrhea.
(
Still: this pogo-stick hijink, which took me three-quarters of the way around the sun, deserves a proper paragraph. ) |
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| my god, what is that awful smell? |
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| 07:01am 02/09/2006 |
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music: The Chillitees - Parang Bula
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"I'm sick of making my liver pay for mistakes that my limbic system made,"
was the exact same thing I told myself the last time this happened. |
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| motherfucker I'm cool with attitude and ego to spare |
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| 11:32pm 07/07/2006 |
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music: Cody Chesnutt - Look Good in Leather
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denas: i'm an arts and crafts guy, myself
denas: renaissance like motherfucken da vinci, dawg
joe: so you collect garbage and present it as abstract art that nobody dares question lest they look like ignoramuses in the finer things in life?
denas: no i'm post-postmodern
denas: i.e. i see that shit for what it is and am not afraid to point and laugh and possibly kick the "artist's" ass
joe: great, just great, another loon.
denas: my art = inventing a fucking time machine, stepping into the post-apocalyptic world of 3023, acquiring the Deadliest Weapon That Will Ever Be Conceived By Man, traveling back in time, and using said weapon on them fake-french postmodernist fucks
denas: possibly vaporizing the MOMA while i'm at it but hey THAT'S ART MOTHERBITCHES
* * *
From Carlo: ( Leave your name and ) |
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Read 1 - Post |
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| ang pangarap kong jackpot |
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| 12:06am 27/04/2006 |
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music: Kyoto Jazz Massive - The View from Her Room
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+ Natapos ko na yung first stage ng pagrestore sa bisikleta
+ Okay ang reading/viewing list
+ Walang problema sa acads
+ Nakapagbeach, natuto mag "ultimate" frisbee at mag skimboarding kahit palpak
+ Nakapagpalipad ng saranggola
+ Relaks lang all day all night
-------------------------------
= AYUS
+ Tapusin yung pagkalikot sa bisikleta
+ Alamin kung anong asa dulo ng Commonwealth Avenue
+ Take up karate
+ Asikasuhin yung application sa internship
Dapat din ata asa reality TV show ako ngayon (yung premise ata eh low-rent na the Apprentice set in a call center ahhahahhh) pero di ko nirereturn yung tawag eh |
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Read 13 - Post |
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| SCIENCE! |
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| 10:09am 28/03/2006 |
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mood: -- music: Etro Anime - Summer Rain
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Pigs have been genetically modified to make their meat as healthy as seafood, researchers report.
The premise of the work, published yesterday in the online journal Nature Biotechnology, is based on cloning pigs to genetically express higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids, a type of natural oil that is thought to fight heart disease and various immune disorders. The oils are typically found in fish.
"Omega-3 fatty acids are crucial to human health," said Jing Kang, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
"But the source is increasingly limited, due to declining fish stocks and contamination from mercury and other harmful chemicals. We need a cheap, land-based alternative to meet the growing demand, and these pigs could be the answer." (more here)
Panalo. |
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Read 9 - Post |
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| 11:00pm 01/03/2006 |
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mood: spent, but alive music: Atmosphere - Party for the Fight to Write
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I think it's now our responsibility to encourage discussion on the issue, whether through debate or through other means.
Let’s get right down to it, then.
We haven’t set anything definite just yet, but me, Inna, and Joan have been organizing a series of forums with a couple of UP institutions. Jack’s bassist friend Mikey is also on board. (Jack/people who know him: how do I get in touch with him?)
The idea, so far, is for these institutions to provide unimposing, comfortable venues for unaffiliated students to come as they are and air their own two cents on the recent events, free from the fear of being drowned out by more organized voices or the fear of a violent dispersal.
These informal afternoon gatherings will lead up to weekly forums with key speakers from the government, civil society, the academe, and other experts, who could then respond to the questions, opinions, and thoughts articulated in the informal round table discussions.
To frame the discussions, each week’s afternoon sessions (Mondays to Thursdays) and forum (Fridays) will be themed: first week, 1017 and average, everyday Filipinos; second week, military adventurism; and so on.
If you’ve got anything to say – even if you support 1017, even if you aren’t sure of your own position just yet, or even if you just want the politicians to let you get on with your life – please please please please come and share your thoughts. You matter; it may not seem like it, but you do. We want to provide you with an opportunity to shape others' thoughts, and perhaps to shape national policy as well. I’m posting concrete details as soon as they become available.
I’m spent, and I’m not in the condition to type out everything I want to say. Its times like these that make me wish I didn’t need so much downtime, and its times like these that remind me just how good falling in love with a cause feels. |
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Read 3 - Post |
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| One day after |
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| 09:53am 25/02/2006 |
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It must be kept in mind that the existence of clear and present danger has yet to be established, either by Malacañang or by the outfit behind the armed threat. So far, all the shows of force on the streets of Manila were by government troops and policemen. No anti-government armed threat materialized. All we have are reports and rumors.
Of course, by Malacañang’s own account, government forces have already neutralized the group behind the attempted power grab. So: if (1.) the threat had already been neutralized and (2.) was apparently so small that it had been resolved within a few hours, without any shots being fired, then what justification remains for the declaration of a state of emergency?
Two devil’s advocate possibilities: first, assume the threat hasn’t been neutralized just yet. If this is the case, then why is it that we haven’t heard from its instigators at all? There haven’t been any pirate radio broadcasts, no cloak-and-dagger interviews, no shows of force, nothing – not even in the span between Gen. Senga’s announcement of a foiled coup attempt (around 5 a.m.) and the declaration of 1017 (around 10:30), when the media was still free to broadcast whatever it wanted to. From experience, anti-government forces would've taken advantage of the broadcast media by then, if only to show that the neutralization wasn't effective.
Second, assume that the group behind the armed threat had been neutralized – so effectively, in fact, that nary a peep from it can be heard, nor was it able to fire any shots in its defense. If this is the case, then why is it that the government hasn’t shown any tangible proof of its actions? Names of people in Senga’s “personal custody” have been dropped, but so far, no detainees have been presented to the media.
Given that there haven’t been any manifestations of a clear and present danger – and I trust that the list above exhausts the possibilities – it is the citizenry’s responsibility as the final check and balance to question whether the declaration of a state of emergency was justified. This responsibility is beyond politics: one may disagree with the opposition and/or support Gloria’s policies, but one cannot simply disagree with the principle behind civil rights, nor should the rights to free expression and assembly be so passively relinquished.
The circumstances surrounding the alleged ‘neutralization’ – that it was quick, effective, and total – are unrealistic, probably because the armed threat never existed to begin with. Based on what can be seen so far, I'm inclined to think the reports - reports are all we've seen so far, after all - of an armed threat was merely a Malacañang ploy to justify the restriction of civil rights. This, in turn, was designed to allow them to break up demonstrations and silence the press with impunity. The actions of the government since yesterday better fit this hypothesis than the one it would have us believe: that is, that an armed threat exists, and that 1017 is supposed to facilitate the elimination of this threat.
To wit: the first manifestations of 1017 – the ban on all demonstrations, the arrest of Prof. David along with 19 other demonstrators, and the confiscation of several mock-up copies of the Friday Daily Tribune – were against civilians who were merely exercising their rights, and had nothing to do with any armed threat. So far, these are the activities that the government considers to constitute the “clear and present danger”: the exact set of activities that the citizenry should have a guaranteed recourse to if and when the government oversteps its bounds.
Such is our Catch-22: it is our responsibility to raise questions over the government’s actions, but the government’s actions were designed precisely to prevent us from raising these questions.
Updates: ANAKPAWIS Representative Crispin Beltran and his wife were arrested earlier today in Bulacan; BAYAN MUNA Representative Satur Ocampo successfully eludes capture after military men show up at an opposition-led forum in Sulo Hotel. |
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Read 24 - Post |
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| The Reichstag fire and Gleichschaltung |
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| 05:12pm 24/02/2006 |
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On the night of February 27, 1933, a large fire broke out in the Reichstag building, the assembly hall for the German parliament. Judging from the speed and size of the blaze – most of the building had been gutted by the fire by the time the authorities were able to respond – investigators on the scene concluded that fire had broken out in multiple places, and was probably the work of an arsonist, or a team of arsonists.
A Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was found naked and cowering behind the building. Nazi party members Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring, who later became the head of the Gestapo, arrived on the scene shortly, and van der Lubbe was presented before them. Based on van der Lubbe’s presence in the scene of the crime, Göring declared the fire to be the handiwork of communists, and promptly had Communist Party members arrested. Hitler, in his capacity as Chancellor, used the fire to justify the declaration of a state of emergency. Within a day, Hitler was able to convince the aging President, Paul van Hindenburg, to declare the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended the rights to warrants for arrest, search, confiscation, the freedom of the press, and the freedom of peaceful assembly.
Thus began the process of Gleichschaltung – literally, synchronization – by which the Nazi Party consolidated its hold on the democratic Weimar republic. Within a month, all legislative powers had been effectively transferred to Hitler and his cabinet. Opposition parties were either banned or dissolved themselves voluntarily, and their members arrested; labor unions were forcibly broken up. The formation of new political parties became illegal, transforming the republic into a one-party state. The assassination of enemies of the state was legalized. Finally, upon the death of President van Hindenburg a year and a half after the fire, a secret law transferring the responsibilities of the Chancellor and the President into a single office came into effect and eliminated whatever check and balance remained.
In hindsight, it is clear that Hitler and the Nazi Party took advantage of the situation. Worth noting is how they were able to use the pretext of a single incident to gradually introduce increasingly totalitarian policies, through superficially legal and constitutional means. Beginning with what was ostensibly a temporary measure to resolve an urgent state of emergency, they eventually succeeded in transforming a democratic state into the Third Reich.
Also worth noting is the way the Nazis were able to do all of this without ever establishing the complicity of the communists, even though the rational behind the Reichstag Fire Decree was to facilitate a crackdown on their activities. While van der Lubbe was indeed a communist, it wasn’t as if he was acting as one: the communists were quick to distance themselves from van der Lubbe and his actions, and it eventually became clear that he was acting on his personal megalomaniac tendencies.
In other words: the justification used for the declaration of the state of emergency might not have existed at all.
In fact, some comments made by Nazis at the Nuremberg trials seem to indicate that some Nazis – including Göring – were involved. If this was indeed the case, then the Reichstag fire was part of a larger ploy to drum up support for their policies: an instance of orchestrated lawlessness to justify the creation of a totalitarian police state. |
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| Niftacular. |
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| 08:38pm 21/02/2006 |
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Do you ever find yourself staring at a blinking caret on a blank page for hours on end, for want of a way to structure your ideas? Ever toyed with your own personal Theory of Everything that you never commit to paper and eventually forget about? Need a method for making sense of your notes? Try Freemind. It’s a free application that generates a diagram for linking words, images, ideas, hyperlinks with each other using an intuitive, easy-to-use interface.
( Feature summary + screenshots )
In the three days since I’ve downloaded Freemind, I’ve used it to generate a conceptual framework for a research proposal, an outline for a report on resource wars, and a reviewer for a theory class - shit I'd usually take a whole week to wade through. It certainly helped with organizing ideas into systematic trains of thought, cataloguing and contextualizing concepts within a framework, and developing raw, unstructured thoughts to the point of coherence and clarity. I’ve found that seeing all my ideas mapped out on a neat, structured diagram also helped with generating new ideas as well, if only because it freed up my mind from having to do the organizing on its own. |
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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
denas's journal
