Monthly Archives: April 2008

Media Versus Blog

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Jester-in-Exile maintains by his belief that there can be a synergy and cooperation between mainstream media and bloggers. Jester is just one of the many bloggers in the Philippine blogosphere today who are reacting to a Korina Sanchez special called “Beware of the Blog.” But with all due respect to Jester and Ms. Sanchez, I do not think that a synergy or a cooperation – much less a compromise – can be met or established between traditional media and new media.

I think the sudden, if not belated, reaction of The Mainstream Media (you know what happens when I capitalize first letters of words) towards blogging is caused in great part by the Brian Gorell blog. I think that the consequence of Gorell’s online rantings is not the popularization of blogging as a form of social discourse, but of blogging becoming a venue for the kind of blackmail coddled by society.

I don’t know what’s worse: online blackmail, unhealthy doses of psychological prostitution, or blogging being unjustly labeled “bourgeois-decadent.” Like I said before, there is great power in blogging. Advocacy can be translated both online and offline. The Internet has made it possible for ordinary people to become gatekeepers of information, so much so that The Mainstream Media is losing its (figurative) choke-hold on the creation and distribution of information. To invoke Marshall McLuhan, the medium is indeed the message.

The problem (at least in my estimation) is that Mainstream Media – that is to say print – is no longer responsive to their task of being the gatekeepers of information, so much so that bloggers have taken it upon themselves to either a) provide an alternative, or b) be the resistance.  This becomes, at least, a legitimate threat to the
media orthodoxy.

“Fairness” is not something we should expect from The Mainstream Media at this stage.  What we do need is more opinions.  What we do need is more questions asked.

Shortest Distances Between Two Points

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I stop at Shaw Boulevard Station at around 6:45 AM.  As I run along that sidewalk that is the theoretical administrative border between Mandaluyong and Pasig, I start to get really pissed off…

Who in the blue hell designed Ortigas Center?

I finally figured out why an “enterprising” taxi driver (driving a “Eulincoln” Nissan Sentra taxi, plate number TVU 227… e-mail me for the cellphone number) was able to legitimately hoodwink me out of P100 for a cab ride on a rainy Friday afternoon last week (from SM Megamall to my office at Tycoon Center).  One-way routes all over the place are designed for pissant taxi drivers to milk the wages out of poor writers like myself who do not know how to count change.

In my anger, I still have a draft of a strongly-worded letter to the local transport bureau to arrest and discipline this moron who offered me the services of a quack doctor for the sum of P500, and even took a nudge at the possibility of my fare justifying a replacement for his cheap-ass radio “made in China.”

I guess this is my own hazing to the many manloloko‘s and pa-simple‘s of all 17 cities and municipalities of Metro Manila.  I am sure that this nation’s capital is not short on thieves and hoodlums who plunder the pockets of the common man to get ahead in life.  I don’t need to swim along and across a certain polluted river to get close to some shining examples of the decay of Filipino society.

I’m sending that letter tomorrow.  Next up: another draft of a letter to be sent to the MetroStar Express to curb shoving in the MRT.

Resistance and Blogging

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Yesterday, I attended the 4th Philippine Blogging Summit – iBlog 4 – even with a bout of rage-induced depression.  One of the highlights of iBlog, on a more personal note, was exchanging small-talk with Mr. Manuel Quezon III, who was rather surprised to meet me in person for the first time.

(If you were in iBlog 4, I was the guy in the t-shirt with a fiery skull design who doesn’t talk to anybody.  I have issues with crowds.  No, I’m not emo.  And yes, I sound like Satan whenever I talk through a microphone.)

An important insight I learned from iBlog 4 is the growing importance of blogging as a means towards genuine social change.  As Luz Rimban, Manolo Quezon, and Jeanette Toral pointed out in their talks at iBlog 4, there are few political bloggers in the Philippines.  The few political bloggers that we have, given the number of blogs – or “blogs” – that there are in the Philippines would mean that the “growing importance” of blogging is still on the embryonic stage.

Please disagree with me on this one: I think – and this is a completely subjective and personal observation – that most bloggers do not utilize their blogs enough as a vehicle to (at the very least) exact a political influence among their peers.  It’s not that people don’t see the importance of political blogging, it’s just that people do not exercise their political views and commit them to a blog entry.

I’m not saying that this practice is wrong, it’s just that blogging can mean so much more than a healthy dose of emo or psychological prostitution.  We, as bloggers, need to speak out more on issues.  Not personal ones, but social ones.  Or maybe social ones that we find personal affinities and empathies with.

I can personally vouch for the dangers and consequences of having a disagreeable view or an opinion.  I’m not talking about people who disagree with me online, but people who disagree with me offline.  I don’t have time to check spam messages or Google my own name to look for people who want to kill me.  Yet realities sink in all too often when you have to delete a threatening comment or an e-mail (thankfully, they are few-and-far-between), or hear about real-world slander.

Yet in effect, this is what resistance is all about.  Blogging is not about resistance, it is resistance.  Even in the embryonic stage of political and social blogging, The Media look upon us as, well, threats.  I myself am quite dissatisfied with the way The Media treats blogging, focusing more on the irrelevant non-issue that is Brian Gorrell vs. DJ Montano, instead of the growing social and political resistance in the blogosphere…

But that’s for another entry.

Bipolarity

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As much as I should write about my experience in iBlog 4, I’ll have to postpone that for tomorrow.  I’m too depressed.

I don’t have a reason to feel depressed at all, but then again, I feel extremely depressed.  Any other person in my shoes would have absolutely no reason to feel depressed.  Compared to a lot of people, I have it made: a nice job, a roof above my head, money in the bank.  I don’t make much, but it’s enough for me to go beyond the rigors of survival.  There’s just that empty feeling inside… that empty feeling that I’m filling up with the absurd irrationalities of rage.

I find myself treading the tightrope between slash-wrist-emo and sex-drugs-and-violence.  Part of me feels sorry for imagined failures, and yet another part of me is filling in those inadequacies with rages long since forgotten.  I grieve over a love lost two years ago.  At the same time, I find myself back in the millstone grinding my ax against people who don’t even deserve to be nicked by my disposable razor.  On the one hand, I cry myself to sleep over real – and imagined – inadequacies and insecurities.  On the other hand, I pollute my mind with morbid delusions of helpless enemies – real and imagined – and me doing whatever the hell I want to do to them with pinking shears and an embroidery needle (like, say, literally knitting their eyebrows).

Ah, what do I care for this bipolar kind of depression, anyway?  I can walk around the Metro right now and find people who have worse problems than I do.  There’s bound to be a jobless, homeless, broke person out here who would think of my own problems as nothing more than figments of my imagination.  This person would have been left by his or her spouse, and couldn’t even dream of revenge against enemies because of helplessness and powerlessness.  This person would feel insecure for better reasons than I do, like not having enough to eat.  You give this person pinking shears and embroidery needles, and he or she will sell it for a meal: not grotesque, Jason Voorhees-esque violence.

All it takes is the recollection of a man like Brian Gorrell to put a smile on my face.  Things aren’t so bad after all.

Then again, they seem to be.

Eating Words

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This is for FilipinoVoices.com’s blog carnival.  I’d like to dwell in the more human aspect a bit… I find myself really, really depressed.  Sorry, Nick, this is unusually half-assed.  – Marck

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I literally eat my words.

My job as a writer for a company in Ortigas Center means that the phrase “eat my words” takes a whole different meaning for me. Writing pays for my rent, for my food, for my transportation needs, for my weekly laundry, for my cigarettes, and for just about everything else. I am not a writer by virtue of a pretentious self-ascription on the “Occupation” field in a Friendster account: I write for a living.

Do I consider myself part of the “working class?” Hell no. I have been writing for as long as I can remember that I don’t even look at what I do as “work.” Work – in a physical sense – is all about locomotion. If my bosses are physicists, they would pay me only for bathroom breaks, cigarette breaks, and lunch breaks where I actually move out of my cubicle to go somewhere.

This Labor Day, I would not even dare take my place among workers who were once exhorted by Karl Marx to unite and lose their chains. I am not a laborer. If there’s anything I learned, “employment” and “labor” are two very different things. “Employee” is not synonymous with “laborer.” If you work from a cubicle in an air conditioned office for eight hours a day breaking a creative sweat, you are nowhere in the same league as a street sweeper who works for eight hours a day breaking real sweat.

I could bore you with unemployment statistics, the rates of wages, the injustices of the capitalist system, and so on. Pardon the archaic Latin: you don’t shit in your own yard. Capitalism – the juggernaut in the funeral procession of global economics that it is – puts food on tables. It would border on hypocrisy if I spoke out against “imperialist capitalism” if I am employed because of capitalism. Conversely, it would be defeated principle if I spoke for capitalism just like Ayn Rand referred to it as “the virtue of selfishness.”

I guess that I’m defeated on this one. You don’t shit in your own yard.

Shari Cruz: The Blogger I Knew and Never Met

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I don’t blog as often as I used to (mainly because I’m working), so this entry is a rather belated dedication to Sharline Cruz of Misteryosa.com fame.  In her latest entry, Shari says goodbye to blogging.  I hope that in a way, this little entry would fulfill at least one of the following ends:

  1. Shari starts blogging again (because this entry would probably read like a eulogy), or;
  2. Shari sees this entry as a fitting conclusion to the world that was Misteryosa.

Here goes…

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I first “met” Shari Cruz back when we were both studying at the University of the Philippines in Baguio.  There was this quaint computer shop at the back of Convention Center called ComShop, and by some strange accident, she “stalked” my blog.  My blog, then called “Planet Marocharim,” and now takes the form of Original TMX, was something of a horrifying exercise in writing.  It sometimes embarrasses me that she once credited me for being a sort of “inspiration” to the success of her own blog.

I think it has more to do with time, more than inspiration.  The character of Misteryosa was born on December 2005; the very first entry I ever made was dated November 9, 2004.  If the blogosphere were Star Wars, I think Shari would make for Luke Skywalker, and I’m Darth Vader.

I can honestly say that I never really met Shari.  Which is a pathetic excuse, since if we blogged at the same computer shop, joined the same political organization, and went to the same school, we should have known each other.  But if it is any consolation, we both know a lot about each other through our blogs.  Shari says she visits my blog often; if I may say so myself, no evening of blogging for me is complete without reading an entry by the blogger known as “Misteryosa.”

I think I speak for many bloggers when I say that when Shari won the Best Personal Blog award in the 2007 Philippine Blog Awards, she deserved it.  Most of us old-fart bloggers masquerade and posture as jacks or jills of all trades and topics.  Shari was different in her approach: she was completely personal.  We knew a lot about Shari simply by reading her deeply personal thoughts.  Shari was above prostituting herself in cyberspace: if asked for a political opinion, she will be vocal about it.  Her many reviews are very critical and analytical.  Her many writings over the past three years are very personal.

One of my favorite “Misteryosa stories” was when Shari got in trouble because of me.  When I “synthesized” a very unflattering metaphor involving Manny Pacquiao and Gloria Arroyo, Shari echoed it with her own take on the issue.  Needless to say, Shari got into a lot of trouble.  But I will always be grateful to her for saving my blogging hide on many occasions, and for serving as a source of inspiration.

Now that I am living in Metro Manila, there are opportunities for me to meet Shari in person and to know more about one of my favorite bloggers in my very short list of blog links.  It will always be my privilege to have, in a way, “inspired” the blogger known as Misteryosa, and to be perfectly honest, the effect is mutual.  My hope is that as I keep Misteryosa.com on my links page, you who read this blog would have a pretty good idea why Shari Cruz is there.

Shari Cruz, or Misteryosa, or whatever you want to call her, is simply one of the best bloggers in the Philippines.  Period.  To see her leave is a challenge to any blogger out there to step up to the plate, and see if your fingers would match up to her keyboard… because I know that even my own fingers cannot.

Love in a Time of Extreme Annoyance

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I was listening to some performances of Shooter Jennings, but “Electric Rodeo” is not the Video of the Week.  I personally would nominate “Sweet Soul Revue” by Pizzicato 5, but I opted against it considering last week’s video, which was “Saigo No Iiwake.”

The inspiration for the Video of the Week is a conversation with an old friend: among the many love songs out there, what song are you guilty of listening to that is completely off your personality?  Oh boy.

So it’s not “Perfect” by Alanis Morissette, “Crash Into Me” by The Dave Matthews Band, nor is it “Wonderwall” by Oasis.  Not “Linger” by The Cranberries, and certainly not “Wonderful Tonight” by Eric Clapton.

To a probable stalker, the Video of the Week is useful Marocharim trivia.  Just what love song can make this cold-hearted jerk with arteries of stone and ventricles of concrete weep with the passion of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez protagonist?

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You may now descend into meaningless, inconsiderate, ego-deflating laughter.  Yes, the original soundtrack to “The Lake House” is the song that never fails to make me cry.

“This Never Happened Before” is the kind of song that I would like played on my completely hypothetical, theoretical wedding (I had to emphasize that).  After all, a lot of possible ocassions can call for my rather weird interpretations of songs.  Consider the following examples:

  • On my funeral: “Staying Alive” by The Bee Gees.  Everyone should wear tight bell-bottomed polyester pants, and two dancers should do the scene from “Dirty Dancing” right on top of my mirror-encrusted neon-lighted coffin.

  • On the day of my daughter’s wedding: “Bitch” by Meredith Brooks.  I am very certain that my daughter will be a sexy lesbian dominatrix in leather and lace.

  • On the day of my son’s wedding: Those country guitar twangs from “Brokeback Mountain.”  I am sure that my gay son will be asking for a honeymoon with his husband and ask me for two horses, a tent, and a big flock of sheep.

It’s not like I’m Keanu Reeves material (though I can imitate his voice), but I am very certain that you have to agree with me: this is one pretty nice song.  But my appreciation for this song is offset if I translate it into Filipino, since it sounds like it could be the next (oh boy) Willie Revillame hit.

I won’t go that far.