A quote from Alice

"The time has come, " the Walrus said, "to talk of many things:

Of shoes-- and ships-- and sealing wax--

Of cabbages-- and kings--

And why the sea is boiling hot

And whether pigs have wings."

                                            -Lewis Carroll, Alice Adventures in Wonderland 


An open and inquiring mind sees everything under the sun, including those which are hidden and even those which are deemed inconceivable.

The Cheshire Cat from Alice Adventures in Wonderland.

For quiz show geeks out there, the real name of Lewis Carroll is Charles Lutwidge Dodgson who wrote the story for kids. But it doesn't end there since it has also captured the imagination of practically all ages. This makes Alice in Wonderland required reading, even for engineering students. As a matter of fact, Science, Technology and Society lectures have reference to the social parodies of Alice, which places the book together with Thoreau's Walden and Pirsig's Zen and the  Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, to name a few, among the best in their discussion of the role of science and technology in the society.

There is a copy by Bantam Classics which incorporates Alice and the sequel, Through the Looking Glass, in one book. If you're going to tell me you'd rather watch the movie instead, or there's no need to read because you already watched the movie, then accept my look of combined disappointment and derision.

The X-Men Situation

Halfway through watching X-Men First Class someone sat on the chair beside me and started using her hand sanitizer that smelled like strawberry grown in the arid soil of Dante's hell. With that, I am being kind. The putrid odor I suppose came from the essences of plants grown in Mordor, in the fires of Mt. Doom, tended by Orcs. That being said, I think we could all agree of the degree of aversion I had with that offensive smell, and by extension, that woman. If not for the awesome scenes I dared not miss, I would have stood up and grappled that woman out of the cinema, or at least where diffusion would not allow her scent to cause distress.

Then I thought this is exactly our general attitude towards something different, eccentric or shall we say, something which stands out. Our collective revulsion against something different from what we like, or what we are used to, manifests in our fear of the unknown, racial and gender discrimination, prejudice, and in the case of the X-Men, all of these.

Basic genetics tells us that we are all different from one another and sometimes our differences elicit varied reactions from people. We sometimes find ourselves among the mutants at the shore, bombarded with a shower of missiles that could instantly annihilate us and forever eradicate our uniqueness from the face of the earth. The good thing is, we can always be Magneto and it is up to us whether we stop the missiles in their tracks and make them drop dead without harming anything other than your feelings, or make them turn the other way around and destroy the very entities that caused injury in the first place.

If you were to have that power, what would you have done? What do you think is a better judgment, to believe that you could live in harmony with the others who might someday accept your differences, or strive to eradicate them in your life as they have sought to eradicate you from theirs? If they can't stand you, will you hope for that to change or do otherwise?

By the way, I still want to wrestle that woman beside me.


Photo from piccsy.com

JanMell Vanity Scripts #02: Pain

Between physical and emotional pain, the classic stand is that physical pain is more tolerable and therefore preferred over its intangible counterpart. The good thing about being physically mutilated, it seems, is that the pain is gone together with the gauze and bandages. On the other hand, emotional pain lingers, pestering like a deep, throbbing wound. The truly painful is not the sustained physical damage while lying at the hospital bed, but the wreckage brought by the one you hold dear who did not drop by and wish you well because he or she don't give a damn anymore. Imagine sleeping with a broken heart-- the waking up is the hardest part. 

Fair enough, but snap out of it. Although emotional pain do cause a great deal of pain, it is at least preferable. Consider the pain of a break-up. At least with a broken heart I could become a poet, or become one of those DJ's in the local radio station who call themselves Dr. Love. (In this case, suicide is an option for people with impaired cognitive function who are so willing to eliminate themselves from the gene pool.)  But what would I do with a painful tooth besides silent sobbing and sleeping to oblivion? 

This brings to mind the conundrum posed by the classic forwarded text message:

Which is more painful, your bf/gf leaving you or your finger getting crushed by a slamming hardwood door? Ouch.

Choose your ending. The Six paths of Pain.

JanMell Vanity Scripts #01: Sacrifices

No life claiming to be worthwhile has not endured any amount of sacrifice. History tells us that sacrifice is an act of noble cause. In the ancient civilizations it is in order to please the gods that they roast human beings or cut their hearts out, dancing and yelling in praise, hoping these would placate their gods' anger and give them the rain for sustenance. In the modern society, however, where human sacrifices are an outrage, man's world view has become so complex that each time, at the major turning points in our lives we have to make sacrifices of a different kind. We can no longer  turn at other people to mutilate with impunity in order to please our God and make everything better for us, so we must find someone else who might not take offense-- ourselves. In order to get that job, we sacrifice our leisure time and work hard. In order to get that coveted grade, we deprive ourselves of sleep. For us to provide for our family, we must bear the pain of loneliness in a strange land away from them. Because we truly love a person, we let them go where their happiness takes them, even at the expense of our own.

It is an integral part of the human condition that one must endure the pain of prioritizing. The thing that matters most is the one that can cause all the pain against everything else. Yet this is not a reason to despair. Since time immemorial, sacrifices for our utmost priorities serve a great objective. The ancient had their rains, we too, will have what we have longed for. After all, Michelangelo went blind after painting his magnificent work at the Sistine chapel. He may have lost his vision, but the beauty of his work-- a masterpiece of sacrifice-- reveals beyond sight.


Photo by Michael Vincent Mosquera

[06.07.11]

This is the question

and this is the answer.

Of course, I got it right.

Breezy evening fix at the famous Dipolog City boulevard...

is another way to say that on one evening, I went to the Kultura exhibit where artworks of several Dipolognon artists were on display. Of course, Lea Abigail Prima's work was there. This time, the paintings revealed something quite familiar. No, it was too familiar. When the stupidity faded away, I realized it was Lea herself that Lea had drawn. 

This piece is entitled 'Baguio Morning Fix." A very apt one. I didn't know she had a cat in Baguio. The other painting on display was evidently ethnic, something characteristic of Lea's works. It was entitled " Bali in my Dreams."

I insist that I am not in this picture. Anyway, it was a good way to spend a balmy evening. I felt so affiliated with the arts. Dipolog should encourage the local arts to flourish. With gifted artists like Lea, prominence in the field might just be a stone's throw way. Plus, Dipolognons can have access to real artworks and art appreciation, something necessary for a cultural well-being.

Macvinced

During my final year as a chemical engineering student, I took up Humanities 1. Yes, it's that subject where you have to pretend you do not know anything about the humanities because you do not want to spoil your teacher's enthusiasm to actually teach you something you already know.  It was nothing new, nothing that I haven't read somewhere or heard about countless times. But it made me ask a simple question: 

What do you do with Iligan City?

Hah. After some time, I figured out an answer: Photograph it.

But first I had to complete a checklist. I needed interesting subjects and a good camera. There was no problem with thinking about good spots to photograph. (Oh please it's not because Iligan City overflows with those, but because of simple narcissism: everything I think interesting is, to me, really interesting.) The minor dilemma was obtaining a good camera. With that I mean a dSLR. I have a friend who owns one but it spawned a new problem. I do not know how such a camera works. Poor me. By some unexplained force of inexplicable origin, (thru the efforts of my friend, the Renaissance painter) I actually got not just a camera but  a photographer as well. Think about it. For my humanities project, I get to tag along a photographer.

So with everything all up, we toured the city proper taking pictures when I feel like telling him to. I felt like a director, pointing here and there, explaining where the best angles would be and what subjects display the drama of the life of an Iliganon. Except that most of his shots were his ideas. ( Manaka-naka lang ang sa akin, anoobaa!)

In reality, I looked like his personal assistant. I, dressed like a troglodyte, tagged along by the photographer looking so preppy with walkshorts, fitting shirt and Sanuks, with the dSLR hanging on his neck as if not to burden him of his task but to accentuate the look of a "journalist" from the metro. And when he's not futzing with the camera, the Ray Ban gave him a look of a tourist prowling the streets of a strange land. That's probably why people keep asking if we are reporters. I mean, they asked that to me. What they asked him was when his next teleserye would be airing.

I tried hanging the camera on my neck, hoping that I would exude the same look. But it just won't. How frustrating.

Rarely do I accept dissolving in the background, much more as a P.A., but the evidence was unarguable. Plus, I cannot spoil his look (in addition to being a camera no-brainer) so I dare not took it from him. We went to the bustling streets of Iligan City, to the Pala-o public market and to St. Michael's Cathedral. The streets were teeming with interesting subjects. Equally of interest was the everyday life of people in the public market and well, the cathedral was perfect for pictures in time of the feast of the Black Nazarene.

Since I was ironically just tagged along, I spent the time observing what he'd do. At the market, he pointed the camera to a Moslem woman brewing coffee, adjusted the focus, zoomed in and out as much as he desired, and with a click, the woman brewing what seemed like delicious, native coffee, was macvinced. 

These kids who are in the talipapa most of their lives, with that camera-shy giggle, turning to each other for cover, afraid that their realness would be captured by the camera, something they haven't had the luxury of thanks to their meager life,  were macvinced.

Outside the church, he sat on the bench, casually talked to the woman selling Black Nazarene necklaces, asked her why they were around, arched a little and did the same: point, adjust, shoot. There was something very human about this photo. It was as if the essence of what she does not just for a living but also for her faith, was permanently captured on the picture. The woman, too, was macvinced.

Next, he went to the business of getting all these red candles macvinced. By that, I mean capturing on photograph an emotional response to a seemingly ordinary thing. The flame is awe-inspiring and the dripping candle is haunting, like blood from your own bleeding conscience.  

But I digress. 

I told you he was good, didn't I? For someone who always shirks compliments and says he is still learning, the pictures suggest how fast that learning proceeds. We now advise him: When you're this good, humility is an annoyance. 

Seeing apparently that you want more, these are but a few of the pictures he took during that photo walk. This blog will be featuring more of these as photo essays in later posts.

By the way, because he is my friend, and most of all because he's good, I told him I will let him photograph me for my first book. To be able to photograph me successfully, (that is, adding aesthetic value to the photo) is quite a feat. Actually,  I just like to get myself macvinced too and see if it works.

Hey, did I just coin a new adjective?  Get yourself macvinced, everyone.

All photos by Michael Vincent Mosquera.