Culture

My brother and sister are classically trained musicians. I grew up in a house where I spent weekends curled up on a couch constipated over Dostoyevsky and Chekov as I listened to my sister shake the ear wax out of our neighbors with relentless strains of Tchaikovsky and Chopin. When she left, my brother took up the viola and resumed the neighbors’ mandatory classical music education. Even when I wasn’t at home, I heard them play when I hung out at their music schools or attended their performances.

My distress was understandable then when I moved to Cagayan de Oro nearly a decade ago and discovered the absence of my usual auditory comforts. There were no public performances of classical music then. There was only the perennial videoke.

The videoke, by the way, is an excellent machine when in the hands of superb vocalists like my father-in-law. It becomes a tool of torment however, when entrusted to screaming banshees intent on letting us personally inspect their tonsils while singing in keys that have yet to be identified. I would vote for any senatorial candidate who promises to draft a law making prolonged singing by people without talent a crime.

The classical concert scene eventually crept into Cagayan de Oro with the inauguration of the Rodelsa Hall in 2005. The problem is that it costs an arm, a leg and some internal organs to get tickets to a show.

I had to crack open a piggy bank to get tickets and clothes to watch the Cebu Philharmonic Orchestra, the UUU Orchestra (Japan) and Rudolf Pelaez Golez perform at the Rodelsa Hall last Saturday. I had to watch. Some of the musicians were members of the same orchestra my brother played in before he left Cebu.

More than the music (which was superb), what I was after was the comfort of memories, of my lazy days on a couch listening to the work of musicians who suffered from depression while reading depressing literature. Strangely, I count those as happy times.

I wonder if the music meant anything to the rest of the audience. Except for the infernal sound of Cherry Mobile in between pieces, the audience was incredibly polite and gave the performers a standing ovation. But were they being more than polite?

When more pressing concerns such as hunger, poverty and security have been significantly addressed, my hope for Cagayanons is that we’ll find meaning in classical music if only because its true value lies in its ability to comfort, elevate and liberate the human mind and spirit.

Red Dawn is proof that Americans can make really awful movies too and they don’t even need a washed up senator (like we do) in boots and a leather tunic to top bill. They’re perfectly capable of crafting awfulness with legitimate Hollywood actors.

There is no redeeming value to it. I realized that the moment North Korean soldiers dropped from the sky like giant snowflakes of aggression. In good fiction, there is such a thing as an element of plausibility within a story’s contextual boundaries. Red Dawn does not pretend to posses such an element. We are forced to believe that the enemy is able to cripple the systems of what would be modern day America, enough to render their lightning attack undetected.

The movie is a remake of a 1984 hit, but the original paints a far more believable story, placing events in the context of crumbling international relations and global political unrest. North Korea may seem like a logical choice for the adaptation’s antagonist but there is little to suggest that the rest of the world was so engrossed watching Lady Gaga split her pants that no one suspected what was going to happen.

The threat of real world North Korea is slightly more believable and disturbing. They’ve already said that if they were to attack America, it would be with long range nuclear missiles, not paratroopers in flying lanterns.

The forced conflict is not the only loose screw in the story. There’s also the grating drama between lead characters, the Eckert brothers. We were required to often pause between action scenes to watch one brother or the other stare into space and brood over the past while it was the other brother’s turn to flex his jaw muscles and look teary-eyed. If they were aiming to tug at my heartstrings, they missed it by a few inches and tugged at my gallbladder instead.

Then there’s the sad casting of Josh Hutcherson. Just because he convincingly portrayed a wimp in The Hunger Games does not mean he should now have monopoly over all wimpy characters. Poor Josh. I can imagine him now in his old age accepting a lifetime achievement award for consistently portraying wimps.

I suppose the only one we can forgive for being in this movie is Chris Hemsworth and that’s just because he’s cool as Thor.

This was this year’s best movie for non-thinkers with a story fueled entirely by guns, knives, mixed martial arts and heavy foreign accents. The movie’s plot you could very well write on a square piece of tissue paper with a drop of your own blood, but nobody cared. No one came to the movie house to think. They came to see all those big names together. I did too.

Sly Stallone figured that out of course, long before he drafted the story on his shred of tissue. Really though, he should have just called the movie The Reunion or The Predictable or even The Arthritis Club. None of the big names were truly expendable (except for Jet Li whose character, to my dismay was thrown out of a plane ten minutes through the movie) and you knew even before the first scene what to expect from the story and the actors.

Starring Barney, er… I meant Stallone.

Because Stallone said so, his was the role of the reluctant hero even if the slick Jason Statham could have acted his way through the role better. Heck, a bag of potatoes could’ve done better than Stallone. If I died and Stallone gave me the same eulogy he gave to his slain comrade, I’d have gotten up from the grave and laughed.

Not even his action moves could save him. Stallone’s character is incidentally named Barney and when he does a barrel roll, what comes to mind is not macho Rambo but his purple/fuchsia/magenta dinosaur namesake rolling while suffering from arthritis.

He was surpassed only by Dolph Lundgren as a purveyor of the “stoned” expression, but Lundgren I can excuse if only because a man who looks prehistoric but has a degree in chemical engineering deserves respect.

Liam Hemsworth was the dead good guy. As soon as he started telling his sob story and his dreams of a better life, you knew there was already an advance party sent to the hills to dig him a nice grave.

What’s-her-name-with-the-irritating-tendency-to-tilt-her-head-to-the-direction-of-her-sideways-split-hair was the obvious token love interest. What you probably didn’t anticipate was the distance you’d be able to hurl your lunch with that suggestion. I can accept Sly’s aspirations of becoming a geriatric action star but he is no Hugh Hefner.

Chuck Norris was perhaps the only oddity on set. Could he have been placed there merely to showcase his antiquated facial hair? I can’t explain why but he made me think of wild ducks. That’s probably because his thick, perfectly combed beard probably looks more fitting on animals in the wild that need it to survive.

Poor duck. Oh why when I see Norris I think of thee? (Mallard Duck by FinlayCox143)

The one thing I wanted that wasn’t there were Van Damme’s trademark split legs. Then again, at his age, such a stunt could only land him in the infirmary.

We got exactly what we knew we’d get and I bet we’d go for a third ride if there was one but Schwarzenegger’s reference to retirement at the end of the movie is appropriate advice. The grandfathers of action deserve to enjoy the remaining years of their lives without broken bones.

I disappeared for a week to watch sixteen episodes of a Korean romantic comedy. I needed a shot of feel good nonsense to deal with life. Now my family will disown me. Telenovelas are a crime here.

Of course I’ve seen bits and pieces of telenovelas before. In this drama obsessed country, they’re unavoidable. Remember the time when those flower boys, who had smoother armpits than real females, were on TV? They were so ever present that even the tattooed musclemen at the wet market secretly watched their show, but even then I did not watch in full. This series I’d watched recently was the first I’d completed.

I’m guilty. I watched this drama. Feel free to disown me now.

My official excuse is that I was stressed out. I engage in so much mental weightlifting that I’m convinced my brain now has a six pack. I needed some form of therapy that didn’t have to make me think, hence, my venture into this Korean drama.

Lie to Me is the story of Gong Ah Jung, a civil servant who lies to her friends about being married. By some misunderstanding, it becomes widely circulated that she is married to the rich, stuck up business executive Hyun Ki Joon. The lie spirals out of control, turning their lives upside down.

In Korea, the story hit rock bottom ratings and some say it’s because of the implausibility of the plot. I’d argue though that viewers really look for the implausible. Otherwise, a show would approach real life so closely it’d have the appeal of a root canal. I dare say the secret to a series’ success is in the proper execution of the implausible.

This is where the series fails. Even the love story which is at the core of it all is forced upon our consciousness like Dionisia Pacquio in her latest gown disaster. The struggling civil servant and the snobbish executive are given little excuse to fall in love but we are required to accept it.

The rest of the characters and their relationships are equally underdeveloped, served uncooked to viewers, thereby causing some fair amount of food poisoning. To make matters worse, there is so much drinking going on that the show deserves the award for most characters under the influence of alcohol in a romantic comedy. It increasingly looked like the abundance of alcohol was a precursor to the crying parts. No alcohol, no crying.

Still, there must have been something in it to have made me watch up to the end. I must give the credit to Kang Ji Hwan (Ki Joon) and Yoon Eun Hye (Ah Jung). Ji Hwan is the anti thesis of the meek, feminine boys that are now taken as a standard for male beauty and yet he is smooth as silk himself. All of a sudden you realize that this is how you want your man to be, not some kid who’d gone gung-ho over his mom’s waxing kit.

If I were asked, “When did you realize you were female?” I’d say it was right when I discovered Kang Ji Hwan in Lie to Me. Prior to this I had no clue of my gender.

Eun Hye, though seemingly overpowered at times by the physically and emotionally charged Ji Hwan, is at her element and promptly makes short work of the comic relief that is her job to dispense like an old veteran.

Then there’s Jeju Island which they shamelessly exploit to set the mood for the perfect romantic close. The running from opposite directions to meet at the middle of a cliff overlooking the sea scene makes you want to hurl the writer (or director) over the cliff as a sacrificial offering to Poseidon, but Jeju ultimately tugs at your appetite for scenic beauty and before the credits roll, you’ve forgiven the writer.

But I would have forgiven the writer anyway even without Jeju Island because I know that the show’s primary goal is to entertain. If I wanted something more real, I would have just watched the six o’clock news.

The courage to rock!

Growing up, I wanted to be a rock star. That was until I found out I was afflicted with such a chronic form of shyness that I could only really sing to inanimate objects like rocks, trees and a husband watching NBA.

Fine, I thought. I’d be happy to just be a bar singer instead, but I realized that compared to the existing talent pool, my voice sounds like the croaking of a frog with a sore throat and a blocked windpipe.

So I gave up on my dream, determined to make life bearable by looking forward to the breakfasts, lunches and dinners that are the main diversions to my endless workdays. I now only trawl YouTube on weekends for songs to sing when there’s no one within hearing range to cripple with my croaking.

It was on one of these closet singing sessions that I first came across Arnel Pineda’s cover of Heart’s Alone, a song that elicits pity when brave but less gifted singers start to look like they’re about to spit out their tonsils or lose their sanity. As soon as Pineda flawlessly belts out the heart attack inducing wail, AAAAHHLLOOOWNNN… I was a goner and what followed was two days of watching all his videos.

Of course I heard the news when he became Journey’s lead vocalist but other than rejoicing in his good fortune, I paid little attention. I WAS not a Journey fan. I once likened the experience of listening to their overplayed ballads to overdosing on hard cheese.

His life story was therefore a fairly recent discovery for me: homeless and living on scraps at 13; singing in bars at 15; descending into vice and losing his voice at 27; rallying to patch up his life and attempting to start a career but giving up the dream at 40. Enter Neal Schon who finds his cover videos online and invites him for an audition. He gets the job.

Happily ever after? Not quite for this Cinderella in tight pants and leather boots on the other end of the gender spectrum. Listen to his interviews and you’ll realize this is not a simple success story.

A poor man from Manila gets plucked from obscurity and is thrust before rock demigods. Not long after that, he is made to sing before 18,000 live viewers for the first time, a figure that dramatically dwarfs his usual bar audience. 

After this initial trial by fire, he repeatedly performs before thousands more, including unforgiving and vocal critics who cannot accept his presence in an all American band and that he is wearing the shoes of the legendary Steve Perry.

All of a sudden you realize that his life isn’t an invitation for everyone with a dream to upload videos of themselves singing (or hyperventilating) to Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You. It isn’t a suggestion that you “don’t stop believin’” you’ll eventually hit those notes if you squint your eyes just a little more.

The message is a lot simpler than that. Courage. Nothing will happen to your life if you do not have the foresight to recognize opportunity and the courage to go after it.   

I’ll probably never be a rock star now but I have other talents besides inducing ear infections among my listeners. I resolve to have the courage to chase my happiness. I deserve to give myself a chance.

Talk about unflattering angles.

Last week’s alarming news that Chinese ships were patrolling Scarborough (Panatag) Shoal was promptly eclipsed by the tussle that transpired over the airport floor. Instead of updates about the conflict with China, we were assaulted by replays of a rumble that had been shown in every conceivable angle, left, right, over and under.

The video of the scuffle had so often been repeated, I can now almost memorize the size of Claudine’s hips as they appeared on the clip. It was more than a mere fist fight, mind you. There were legs, feet and other body parts flying in violence everywhere, which probably explains its greater mass appeal over serious discussions about our diplomatic relations with China.

Like a record in perpetual loop, the story repeats itself in our heads. Cebu Pacific offloads the luggage of showbiz couple Claudine Barretto and Raymart Santiago. Barretto confronts ground staff and is photographed in the act by broadcaster Mon Tulfo. The couple face off with Tulfo and a fight ensues. The scene is so violent, it should have found its way into the final cut of the Hunger Games.

Santiago wraps his arm around Tulfo and we are treated to the sight of Barretto’s generous backside as she and her friend descend upon their prey to pound an all natural patch over his eye.

The series of unfortunate events don’t end there. Because of what happened, Santiago’s children are in a state of shock, the berated clerk is in a sad emotional state, security guards may lose their jobs and Tulfo’s broadcaster brothers were suspended over public threats against the couple.

At the end of it all, they’re all more traumatized than nuns in a Lady Gaga concert, so much so that they all now require counseling, probably including the executives of TV5 who have temporarily lost a show and 3 anchors.

Enter netizens who, since the birth of social media, now feel the urge to constantly display their knack for bad grammar, lack of breeding and abundant ignorance in the guise of exercising their right to their opinions — “Tulfo s sach a jerk. Santiago must bows to his olders and Barretto should keep away from extra rice.”

My take in all this? Suspend judgment. You weren’t there. You didn’t see it. You weren’t involved and even if you were, there’s no telling if you’d act in a less disgraceful manner or if you’d look more videogenic than Barretto. We should all just donate some cash for the purchase of a CCTV camera for the airport.

While we were all glued to this drama by the way, did anyone notice that new Chinese flag flying over Panatag Shoal?

I was in the dark, screaming for salvation, but when Flavio squinted into the morning sun and raised his sword in an attempt to convey the noble struggle of the reluctant hero, I knew I was doomed for another hour in purgatory. Purgatory. But I think I was closer to the brink of the pits of movie hell.

I should have paid closer attention to the promotional frame; respectable, bespectacled, looking-like-experts people heaping rave reviews at Panday 2 and the implied postscript that said it was for kids.  To paraphrase: Get ready for a senseless swashbuckling spectacle devoid of depth and a rational plot.

The idea should have been simple enough. Find the resurrected bad guy and kill him, simplicity I can accept and potentially appreciate, but they take the thought, pepper it with nettles, ram it down our throats and force us to believe it’s still digestible.

The problem with the story begins when Lizardo rises from the dead. Baruha’s intervention barely affords us an explanation as to the means of his resurrection other than, “She’s just got the power, man! Got a problem with that? “

If I clipped my nails, clicked my heels or did any other random act, I’d have been able to resurrect him too. That’s just saying the writer had to find any lame excuse to bring him back to life. Otherwise the movie would have been Panday 2: The Story of Flavio’s Boring Domestic Life.

It gets worse. Flavio learns of the return of his arch nemesis and promptly begins to wander aimlessly in search of him. Good for him, Lizardo loves to always be in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason, hence affording the opportunity for some sword tickling with Flavio. When Moses wandered the wilderness, he had a destination. Flavio’s was just wherever, whenever.

What’s worse than the story are the characters and the people who play them. There’s Bong Revilla, Jr., the king of massive jaws, whose utter lack of empathy for Flavio’s inner conflict is made obvious by his perpetually pained look; not the “I’ve got a deep dark conflict boiling inside of me” look, but the “wow, these lines are so difficult to deliver convincingly” look. An elephant on tranquilizers would have done a better job.

It didn’t help that Flavio was pitted against equally uncreative and thoroughly uninspired villains. Both Baruha and Lizardo have had extra shots of laughing gas, hence explaining their unstoppable urge to incessantly laugh their lines out, an unconscious message to kids that bad guys have so much more fun than the good guys.

Twins separated at birth.

Baruha bears the burden of the stereotype more. She is a cut out from an old Halloween catalogue. Whoever dressed her is clearly unaware that Hogwarts opened 14 years ago, where hip, modern witches are no longer required to wear pointed hats and sport crooked noses. Tsk, you are so 1950s Baruha.

The special effects should have been the movie’s saving grace, perhaps the best in the Philippines, until you spot the missing twin. It’s either the Clash of the Titan’s Kraken had a twin brother separated from him at birth or cut and paste is now a standard practice in the special effects department.

Okay enough already. If I go any further I’ll lose my ability to string two thoughts together.

Warning: Severe rambling ahead.

As a little kid, Christmas to me meant breathing cool air, eating ham in pineapple juice, listening to the sound of feel good carols and showing goodwill to all. As a parent, recollections of Christmas are now peppered with memories of sardine cans the size of malls, filled with irate shoppers smelling of arm (pit) sweat in mile long lines to cashiers dressed like Santa’s haggard little elves.

This year I was officially inducted into the arm (pit)-scented society as I squeezed into congested mall aisles. My mission was to look for a Santa cap, red shirt, shorts, sneakers and knee high red and white striped socks.

The socks were the hardest to find. Every school had the “original” idea of making all their kids wear the same socks for their school programs so by the time I hit the shelves, there were only green striped socks for green elves. But my daughter is a red elf!

Good thing the man in the red suit himself seemed to be trailing my route as I ransacked every major and minor store for the seemingly mythical red socks. He was trying to cheer me on, I say!

There he was on a stand in one mall playing the saxophone. I drew close to listen to some uplifting music to inspire me in my futile search for red socks. To my surprise he didn’t seem to be playing a popular Christmas song. In fact, it sounded faintly like Careless Whisper.

In another store, I came across the man in the flesh, all 4ft. 11 inches of him, dressed in a suit so thin he looked like he was going to shiver from the cold in a tropical country. He was carrying a placard, making him look more like the bearer of bad news, “Repent! The end is nigh!”

“Will you put my photo on Facebook?” Santa asked. “Why sure Santa, so that the world may know how you’ve been reduced to a shadow of your former self and into a department store employee.”

Several more stores and Santas later and I started wondering where the guy whose birthday it is we’re supposed to be commemorating on the 25th was. I suppose Santa is the preferred bearer of commercial good cheer because store employees in newborn swaddling cloths will probably sell fewer red socks, green socks, toys and whatnot.

I finally found a pair of red socks in a quiet Chinese-owned store that didn’t seem to be celebrating Christmas. Great. Now I can tell my arm (pit)-scented community members where they can buy their socks so they don’t have to go through the hoops I’d been through and run the risk of losing their Christmas spirit.

If it weren’t for this dress’ brand tag and the two lines in front that I took to mean “This side up” I wouldn’t have known front from back. I don’t like dresses but I had to get one for a family affair. My fashion consultant, a.k.a. my husband, who is also my makeup and footwear adviser (I hope he’s not gay), picked this one. I suspect it’s because this is the one that can hide my convex curves best.

The dress was only the first hurdle. There were a hundred other things to think about— hair, makeup, shoes, accessories, dead skin cells, constantly forgetting to sit with my legs crossed, etc. For most of these I figured I just needed some Gatsby, extreme facial exfoliation, ancient baubles from Jack Sparrow’s chest and an appointment with a Halloween makeup artist. My only real great problem was the footwear. Would my dress look best with Nike or Addidas?

I kept an old pair of heels (clearly for emergency purposes) in a box along with other things I’d rather forget. Because I was certain rubber shoes would be treated like an atrocity, I had to take out the heels for a test walk. Shortly after, a trail of fine white powder started following me. Oh yeah, that’s right. Like a lot of other things you bury for three years, earth friendly sandals decompose. The fine powder was parts of it joining Mother Earth.

Of course I had to get a new pair. My first order of business was to ask the sales clerk if I could swap my pick for a pair of sneakers if I came to my senses in a day or two.

Problems solved.

Not really. Despite the ingeniously designed dress, the facial diamond peeling and the new sandals, there was a great deal of pain, discomfort and feeling like fish out of water. The dress clung on sweaty skin, the makeup artist made me look like a cheap walking undead movie extra and the heels felt like weapons of mass destruction, massively destroying the muscles in my legs.

I can’t believe any female can be feminine and be entirely comfortable.

I distinctly remember the power of pregnancy, not the “life-changing, awe-inspiring realization of true womanhood” kind of power. I mean the power to cut through lines and attract free unsolicited assistance anytime, anywhere. All I needed to do was exaggerate the difficulty of carrying the biological basketball in front of me and even snatchers gave me a free pass.

Last month, I witnessed an even greater kind of power, the power of senior citizenship. My mother despite having hidden her real age in a top secret, maximum security facility, finally gave a clue to the number of corrupt presidential terms she’s had to live through.

She is at least 6 decades old. The senior citizen card she keeps in a special red flip case proves she passed the application to the exclusive twilight club. Amazingly, her age was an advantage for us when we were in Cebu. We used her like a charm. Everywhere we aimed her at, we got great deals. How did she do it? Aside from discreetly making her eyes glow red in front of service crew, she flashed her ID card like a police badge and exerted her power of discount!

In instances when cashiers declared ignorance over the procedure for processing senior citizen discounts, my mother said the magic words, “I’ll report.” Those that actually cared for their employers suddenly gained the exemplary research abilities of doctorate degree candidates and found out how to work the calculator.

When we left, my mom was still having a blast with her badge but she did have one issue and she asked me to blog about it. Apparently, some who get shown the senior badge kick, scream or put up a fight.

Cebu’s water district is subtle about it but they seem to be succeeding at discouraging some of the more arthritic seniors from jumping through hoops and loops to get price cuts. Ma says, showing the senior ID isn’t enough. To get the discount that’s mandated by law, she’s required to submit a number of documents and a photo of herself holding a recent newspaper issue.

Maybe ma should start using her laser beams.