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The New York Times on new Brocka and Bernal DVDs.
“When the Torino Film Festival, in Italy, tried to mount a tribute to the Filipino filmmaker Lino Brocka last year, the programmers were astonished to discover that only 5 of the 55 theatrical films he directed from 1970 until his death in 1991 existed in a projectable state. The others had been lost or allowed to deteriorate. . .”

Fabrica: Les yeux ouverts
Centre Pompidou, Paris
6 October – 6 November, 2006

Established in 1994, Fabrica is a communications research center whose range of activities extends from graphic design to cinema, taking in industrial design, writing, interactive media, photography and music on the way. Divided into four zones, the exhibition Fabrica: Les yeux ouverts will reveal to the public the work of a multidisciplinary research center whose horizons extend to the whole world.

We’re in the Colors Notebook zone, a project for Reporters Sans Frontieres. Blank notebooks were sent out to people all over for them to fill up with whatever (Freedom of speech being the theme). The finished notebooks are displayed in the exhibition or included in a video installation.

“Bow Wow Wow Philippines” features conceptual art by Leo Abaya, paintings and collages by Jay Lozada, assemblages by Stephanie Palallos, digital art by Guillermo Ramos, general fabulousness by Marlon Rivera, spooky bug-eyed children by Pol Sta. Maria, pornography by Ricky Villabona, drawings of dead people seen lurking around the neighborhood by Jobert Vizcarra’s children (who, being minors, were not exposed to the rest of the material or the artists), and text and serial killer calligraphy by Jessica Zafra.

Useless factoid: Jay, Marlon, Ricky and I all used to live in adjacent apartments on the same floor of the same Makati building, at different times, before we all met.

Post pictures later.

What I love about Martin Scorsese movies: the moment they begin, with those crazy swooping cameras locking on a face and that blast of pop music on the soundtrack smacking you upside the head, you know you’re in for a ride. You get a sense of the huge, thrilling world outside the screen. Over three decades after Mean Streets and Taxi Driver the man still gets a charge out of make movies, and you feel the voltage as you sit in the theatre, your hand poised to reach into a bucket of popcorn. When Marty’s really on, your hand doesn’t make it to the popcorn, it stays motionless in mid-air because all your faculties are engaged by the movie. Sure, sometimes the movie doesn’t live up to its opening sequence—I didn’t care for Gangs of New York and The Aviator, so I just blamed Leonardo Di Caprio—but so what. It’s the Cinema!

Watch The Departed, it’s in theatres now.

The next official flunky or power company stooge who says power has been restored to 99 percent of the metropolis will find himself gutted and used as a human battery like the poor schmucks in The Matrix, but without the simulacra.

Ted my publisher sent me the Director’s Cut DVD of Kingdom of Heaven and I can’t watch it so I’m just going to sit here and sharpen my broadsword in preparation for meeting those billboard people.

The thing is, it doesn’t feel like stealing. To call it stealing would be too sordid. You’re convinced that you’re restoring sense to an irrational universe. Why is that book on that shelf when, if justice and fairness truly exist, it would rightfully be yours? Why leave it there to be pawed over by cretins who don’t deserve to read it, much less turn its pages? To have those hallowed words register on the optic nerves of some creature who can’t read without moving his lips! It’s an abomination! Might as well smear your hands with peanut butter and jelly and touch Leonardo’s notebooks.

Or maybe you just want it. You have to have it, but you don’t have the money, and by the time you get the money it might be gone forever. Or maybe you’ve lived an exemplary life and you just want to do something bad, but nothing so tacky as to shoplift a shirt or a comb. A book distinguishes you from (other) petty thieves: you’re not filching a mere object, but a life with paper for flesh and ink for blood.

OF COURSE IT’S A CRIME. But at the exact moment when you casually take the book, slip it into your bag, and walk out the door, it feels like a mission. You are all that stands between the forces of enlightenment and the hordes of ignorance. You are a knight of the printed word.

You are a thief rationalizing your offence.

Here is your chance at expiation. Confess and be shriven. (If your pseudonym does not provide enough concealment, attribute the crime to “My friend”. My own friends I conceal under the names of royal houses, historical and science-fictional.)

Arisugawa-no-miya snitched The Complete Works of V.I. Lenin from Erehwon Bookstore in Katipunan in 1972. He assures me that Erehwon and Katipunan Avenue both existed in 1972.

The House of Zogu (royal family of Albania, possibly related to Florante at Laura), stole The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich from a bookstore. “It was a stupid, stupid thing to do since it was a hardcover book and more than a thousand pages thick, with a giant swastika on the cover. I just walked out with it on Avenida, Rizal, and forever abjured a life of crime. Never read the damn thing.”

Hohenzollern-Singmaringen swiped The Rape of Tamar from the Harvard library. The girl he was seeing at the time made him give it back. He never spoke to her again.

Thyssen-Bornemisza stole a Spanish-English Gideon Bible from a hotel room in Madrid. “I needed to work on my Spanish,” he explains. “That’s not stealing,” I point out. “The Gideons wanted you to have it.” “But you’re supposed to put it back in the drawer.” He insists it was stealing.

Hohenstaufen and Swabia took T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone from the Assumption grade school library. “I felt that it was mine to begin with—because it WAS mine to begin with.” She had left her book in school, and someone put it in the library. It still had her name on it, so she simply stole it back. Later she pilfered Economic Cooperation in ASEAN from another library, and is still wracked with guilt—not at the theft, but at the choice of reading matter.

Fushimi-no-miya made off with a Stanford University library copy of Little Brown Brother by Leon Wolff.

Borbon y Battenberg pilfered Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Marquez from a bookstore “dahil sa pagmamahal ko kay Marquez. Gusto ko lang siyang kunin dahil wala akong pambili. Gaya ni Marquez, nagnanakaw ako dahil ganid ako sa kaalaman.”

House Corrino took The Philippine-American War, compiled by Fred Cordova, from the library of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, but insists it was not stealing because they were going to throw out the books anyway.

Harkonnen-Atreides pinched The Collected Stories of John Cheever from a bookstore.

Fenring and Rabban hatched an elaborate plan to get free books. They managed to convince a foundation that their thesis room in the UP Department of Chemistry had a real library. For years they regularly received donations of chemistry and science-fiction books. I was a happy beneficiary of this scheme.

Confess.
P.S. “Too bad the Index doesn’t include perps who were actually caught. Are they now famous politicians or CEOs who have moved on to greater public larcenies (after trying to steal Archie Comics), or are they now lost souls, potential laureates who failed at stealing the one book that could have changed their lives? The evidence may still be found in fading mugshots scotchtaped to the broken glass doors of bookstores that closed years ago.” – The House of Zogu

1. I feel like I’m in Kabul. No power, no telephone service for two days. My Mac (James Tiberius Kirk—now you know what the T stands for) is powered by a very long extension cord plugged into the generator on the ground floor. There’s light in my building, but the generator hum is driving me nuts.
2. Is anyone actually named “Milenyo”? Then again there are people named “Heherson” and “Jejomar” so anything’s possible.
3. The malls are packed with humans driven out of their houses by cabin fever. Many areas still have no water service and electricity, so most everyone looks like crap. Remember in Tim Burton’s Batman where the citizens of Gotham stop using hairspray and other beauty products because The Joker has laced them with deadly chemicals? That’s what people look like.
4. You’d think that after a big storm it would at least be cold, but it’s hot and clammy.
5. From the Lifetime Underachievement Awardee: “I’m hearing that it could take up to two weeks to get The Big Queasy back to just the normal fucked-up conditions.” Manila, The Big Queasy. Brilliant.
6. Meanwhile, in Baguio, they’ve just unveiled the longest longganisa in the known universe. They can serve it with the biggest “toss salad” in the galaxy.
7. The streets of Metro Manila are covered with fallen billboards, electric posts and trees. The taxi driver put everything into perspective. “Wala na si Kris Aquino!” he cried, cackling madly.
8. My friend Tina went to Cash and Carry the day after the storm and reports that the shelves are well-stocked with rice and other food supplies. However, they are completely out of chips, chichirya, and soft drinks. Faced with impending disaster, the citizens panic-buy the basic food groups: junk food and soda.
9. Goddamnit I’m going to miss the replay of Jon Stewart’s interview with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. And Veronica Mars, which is my Buffy the Vampire Slayer substitute.
10. I’m always quoting from Say Anything (Cameron Crowe’s first movie, starring John Cusack and Ione Skye) and I just realized that I don’t own the DVD. Got Say Anything? I’ll buy you a coffee at UCC Rockwell.