Youth Lens: Responsible use of Facebook?

It's interesting how social networking sites have made so much smaller for all of us. While I can't exactly remember when I got my Friendster account, I remember the wild abandon with which I added several hundred of my closest friends whose email I could recall. Needless to say, I stopped using my Friendster account soon after.

While the most recent incarnation of social networking sites have become much more sophisticated in terms of allowing the user to filter the information he or she is willing to share with the people they are friends with, it seems people are still adding "friends" with as much recklessness and wild abandon as my younger, thinner self. We read in The 12 Most Annoying Facebookers:

The Friend-Padder. The average Facebook user has 120 friends on the site. Schmoozers and social butterflies -- you know, the ones who make lifelong pals on the subway -- might reasonably have 300 or 400. But 1,000 "friends?" Unless you're George Clooney or just won the lottery, no one has that many. That's just showing off.

One of the reasons why I blog, other than to host friendly disputes on the RH Bill, is to share some of the cooler things that have come my way. One of the reasons why I leave the comfortable little nest that I blog from is to share how using blogs and social networking sites can help promote legitimately enlightening, non-threatening, and reasonable discussion on important issues.

I will be giving a talk tomorrow on the 4th Youth Lens Forum at University of Asia and the Pacific. This year's theme is "Getting (Dis)Connected: Youth Engagement in Social Network Sites." Talks begin at 9 am and will continue into the afternoon. For more information, please call 634-2828 and ask for Dr. Maria Riza L. Bondal (rbondal@uap.edu.ph).

Enjoy!

Free to Choose

I recently read the article, Reiterating the CBCP Position on Family, and I was struck by the reaction of the people both for and against proposed RH Bill 5043. It seems that much of the discussion for or against the Bill has taken a decidedly "religious" dimension, and not in a good way. Allow me to offer my humble opinion on this very important issue by making my opposition to the RH Bill 5043 very clear:

As a practicing Catholic, I am well aware of the Church's stand on, to borrow from Archbishop Lagdameo's letter to the Filipino people, "truth and morality, the value and dignity of life, family and marriage".

As a citizen of the Philippines, with the demonstrated ability to doom any presidential candidate I vote for with the ignominy of defeat, I would like to summarize my objections to the Bill as follows:

1. Like Archbishop Lagdameo, I believe that "The Bill dilutes and negates Section III (1) Article XV of the Constitution which provides 'The State shall defend the right of spouses to found a family in accordance with their religious conviction and the demands of responsible parenthood.'"

2. In particular, Sec. 21. (a) 5 seems to be a violation of our duly recognized right to practice religious and civic freedoms:

The following acts are prohibited:

a) Any health care service provider, whether public or private, who shall:

5. Refuse to extend reproductive health care services and information on account of the patient’s civil status, gender or sexual orientation, age, religion, personal circumstances, and nature of work; Provided, That all conscientious objections of health care service providers based on religious grounds shall be respected: Provided, further, That the conscientious objector shall immediately refer the person seeking such care and services to another health care service provider within the same facility or one which is conveniently accessible: Provided, finally, That the patient is not in an emergency or serious case as defined in RA 8344 penalizing the refusal of hospitals and medical clinics to administer appropriate initial medical treatment and support in emergency and serious cases.

How can a practicing Christian's health care worker's religious freedoms be respected if that health care worker is required by law to turn over persons seeking care and services not consistent with the practice of his or her faith to someone who surely will?

Many friends have told me that once the Bill is passed, certainly, amendments may be made. But after consulting with experts on the legislative process (who have no position whatsoever on the proposed RH Bill 5043) taking out or amending key portions of the Bill are close to impossible, or at best, unbelievably difficult due to the legislative process itself. Perhaps other people can take that chance, but I can't. Not when so many brave people have sacrificed so much to provide me with the freedoms my family and I enjoy.

Any proposed law or piece of legislation that forces a person, regardless of personal belief, to do something contrary to their legally upheld beliefs, is despotic. The Catholic Church, at most, can only excommunicate. This only affects you if you're Catholic. But a proposed law like this doesn't discriminate: it applies to everyone regardless of belief. It is anti-freedom, which our beloved former President Cory Aquino helped restore in our country not too long ago.

Allow me to end by saying that if there is one thing, among the many, that both people for or against RH Bill 5043 can agree on it is this: we must find a viable solution for the widespread poverty in our country. In my experience though, solutions that unite people, as opposed to divide people, have a better chance of helping more people. Shall we allow ourselves to be prisoners to ideology? Or shall we try to find a way for equally well-meaning people to get on with the business of helping people?

We're still free to choose.

Art That Renews: Kings, and The Privilege of the Sword

In his eulogy for our dear friend Alexis Tioseco, Paul Dumol thanked Alexis for his indefatigable efforts in championing cinema's finest undiscovered marvels "because art revitalizes, and every time I watch these films and experience the grace which art brings, I will be thankful for your persuasive enthusiasm". While my taste doesn't run to the sophisticated artistic fare that my colleagues bravely consume, I have come across some lovely works of art that could bear, in lieu of the graceful oblivion they are currently consigned to, the burden of more notoriety.

First, and more closely related to the medium that both Alexis and Paul adore, is the recently cancelled NBC series, Kings. A modern-day retelling of the story of King David, Kings is one of the few high concept projects involving the Christian faith that achieves a scope and power of truly biblical proportions. This series doesn't just boast sophisticated political drama, a rivetingly familiar vision of the modern world as a monarchy, or sophisticated narratives that largely succeed in making us care for characters based on well-trod biblical archetypes. It boasts, in my humble opinion, some of the finest actors and actresses currently working in television today. Reverend Ephram Samuels, played by Oz alum and critical darling Eamonn Walker, is alternately mellifluously soothing and quietly damning as the cleric who helped make, and will help unmake, a king. Brian Cox, as King Silas Benjamin's deposed predecessor, in the smattering of episodes that he appears in throughout the series, elevates all his scenes to a veritable master class on acting.

But this show belongs to Ian McShane, and rightfully so. As King Silas Benjamin, McShane gives one of the most indelible, forceful, elegant, and nuanced portrayals of a monarch in recent memory, in any medium. There are some fine, critically acclaimed Shakespearean performances of King Lear that were obliterated from my conscious memory by the performance that McShane gives here. No one radiates the fierce individuality, selfish sense of obligation, and pathos present in all human monarchs like McShane. His performance as King Silas is the axis upon which all the fine performances on Kings hinges. Without him, the terribly delicate conceit that informs the show's premise, would have fallen apart in the first episode alone. Truly remarkable.

Second, I just finished Ellen Kushner's fantasy novel The Privilege of the Sword, another delightfully understated, yet wholly subversive reconceptualization of a tired old literary genre. There is no magic in Kushner's world. Moreover, this is a world that doesn't need to be saved, at least in the grand, cosmic, earth-shattering way that previous forays in high fantasy always demand. Rather, we have a rambunctious, breezily literate, wickedly fun comedy of manners, only with swords in the place of the rapier wit that characters in such comedies seem to wield with equal efficacy.

Yet at the heart of all the polished repartee and the clever attention to social conventions that characterize a comedy of manners, there lies well, heart. The characters, which include an impoverished junior noblewoman forced to work for her seemingly mad uncle, the said mad, yet frustratingly intelligent and disturbingly kind yet cruel uncle, and an urbane young servant who is not below engaging in behavior just a hair's breadth above that of a guttersnipe, are not all quite the paragons of virtue that high fantasy requires, but their resulting stories of even partial redemption, are what all good coming of age tales live on.

Enjoy!

Photo Credits:

Picture of Kings comes courtesy of What's Alan Watching?

And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

My memories of last week remain bittersweet. My family and I celebrated my son Manuel's 3rd birthday while I, along with so many others, mourned the passing of a dear friend, Alexis Tioseco. I recall, with some wistfulness, how I used to dismiss the juxtaposition of the beautiful with the ugly as both being opportunities to encounter grace. Of course, this was before I encountered the heartbreak, and the frightening numbness that accompanies a sudden, tragic loss. Now, I long for the days when I could explain loss away so easily.

Fortunately, many people, braver and wiser than I, of varying persuasions and with varying degrees of success, have tried to make sense of the senseless.

Paul Dumol wrote:

What is clear right now is that his death has reinforced something we also experienced only recently, with the death of that other person who lived in his neighborhood: The power of ideas, the power of example. Alexis was not a political person, although he graciously agreed to organize a lunch in which I made a PowerPoint presentation to Lav and Khavn and Sherad about my analysis of what our society is going through. Nika was in that lunch, sick, but she was listening, more intently I thought than Alexis. With time she might have made him political. The idea that movies, good movies, reveal to us what it means to be human—and Alexis was, if anything, a humanist; he was no ideologue—this is something Alexis believed in, as you might see in four movies he introduced me to and are now among my favorites: In the Mood for Love, Amores perros, Yi Yi, and Bresson’s Au hasard, Balthazar. He loved these movies for the same thing he loved in Lav’s movies and the same thing he looked for in Southeast Asian independent films. Thank you for that, Alexis, because art revitalizes, and every time I watch these films and experience the grace which art brings, I will be thankful for your persuasive enthusiasm. Thank you, above all, for demonstrating with your own life what you loved most in film: the difficult art of being human, how to be kind and generous and respectful and cheerful and honest and hardworking and friendly to all without, it seems to me, exception.

And Philip Peckson shared:

From Kit Kwe:

This is from a chat with Alexis on yahoo. This is one of Alexis's favorite passages from his beloved John Berger. It could've been talking about his beloved Nika.

alexistioseco 11/30/08 2:55 AM
can i share with you the opening and closing of "and our faces, my heart, brief as photos"?

alexistioseco
11/30/08 2:58 AM
"What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your left ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough."

alexistioseco 11/30/08 2:59 AM
These are the first and last words of the book. The rest speaks of all that lies between these two.

But it remains for ordinary people like myself, betrayed by the inability of either the spoken or written word to provide consolation that can mute or redact grief, to move on the only way we know how.

Requiescat in pace, dear friend. I will be at mass later. If anyone else wishes to remember Alexis, kindly drop by Santuario de San Antonio, Forbes Park, Makati City, later at 6 pm.

THIS is How Lovers Look!

When my wife and I paid our respects to Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc last night at Capilla de San Francisco in Santuario de San Antonio, Forbes Park, Makati, we were overwhelmed by the number of people who came to mourn the passing of a lovely, talented couple. Their dedication to capturing and encouraging beauty and truth, twenty four frames per second at a time and every second they spent with one another, will truly be missed.

But you might want to give what passes for "news reporting" on the tragic killing of these beautiful people a pass. My friends and I are incensed at the gross insensitivity with which the two major nationwide news networks have treated the slaying of Eggy and Nika.

Those who know me also know that I always credit my sources whenever I blog. This time, however, I refuse to give these character butchers the satisfaction. ABS-CBN immortalized these fierce dreamers and the passion with which they loved each other by reporting:

A Filipino-Canadian film critic and his Slovenian live-in partner were shot dead inside their home in Quezon City, Tuesday night.

GMA 7 came up with the brilliant headline "Film critic, lover killed by robbers in Quezon City home" and provided video that showed digitally blurred footage of both Eggy and Nika sprawled on the floor.

It seems that these major news networks exhausted whatever compassion and sensitivity they had with their coverage of Tita Cory's passing. It's a shame that their humanity extends only to revered former presidents.

Sadly, the finest news reporting of Eggy and Nika's murders were provided by a smaller Filipino newspaper which I remember as having been a tabloid featuring scantily clad young starlets, foreign news agencies and movie blogs. If you want to read the heartfelt sorrow that our young friends' passing has caused, kindly check out fellow Filipino Jeffrey G. Damicog's remarkably sensitive news report in Tempo, and Kim Voynar's moving meditation on love and loss in Movie City News.

Oh, and people? The picture above is how lovers look. Just for future reference.

Photo Credits:

Picture of Eggy and Nika comes courtesy of Chris Yambing.

Requiescat in Pace Eggy!

One of the fondest memories I have of Alexis "Eggy" Tioseco was when we both attended the wedding of common friends in Cebu a year ago. Eggy was already by then a distinguished film critic and a passionate supporter of the nascent independent film industry in the Philippines. I kidded him that his taste in cinema was too elitist: if it was visually striking, narratively dense and required a panel of independent film critics simply to understand what it was all about, then it was Eggy's kind of film.

"Case in point, Eggy. You watch movies that practically require you to bring pillows, army rations and urine bags to the theater."

"That was for class. And it was a great film."

"All the films you like need a class to understand them. And it was a great film: for people who have cast-iron bladders."

"That's also why I don't watch Hollywood movies. I lack a cast-iron esophagus."

"You're a movie snob!"

"Steven Seagal. I've seen all his movies."

I stopped dead in my tracks. I motioned for Eggy to go on and explain, without having to go into too many actions that could disrupt the delicate fabric of cinematic space and time, how an otherwise reasonably intelligent and passionate cineaste could so thoroughly eschew the fine artistic and commercial films that Hollywood studios churn out on a semi-regular basis but have all the time in the world to go through the the filmography of the man who now does this:



And then Eggy started telling me of how his dad used to watch Steven Seagal's movies when he was younger, and, as he tried to find a more comfortable spot to watch the movie with his dad, how Eggy marveled at how such broadly sketched violence could bring his dad so much joy.

For Eggy, despite the fact that I think most of the movies he watched were primarily exercises in cinematic obfuscation, and how some people shouldn't be given a digital movie camera, ever, films were always an opportunity for him to recapture joy, however fleeting, however he can.

Rest in peace, my dear friend.

Photo Credits:

Picture of Alexis comes courtesy of his Facebook profile pictures.

Weekend Delights!

One of the reasons why I look forward to long weekends is for the opportunity to reacquaint myself with the more idyllic concerns of family and friends. As I am still hung over from the generous amounts of rest and recreation that I wallowed deliriously in over the weekend, allow me to resort to using bullet points as opposed to coherent paragraphs in order to give an adequate summary of what transpired:

Saturday!

Ralph Lumo and the rest of Singles Encounter#6 hosted their reunion at Megatent. A reunion, especially in the context of Catholic charismatic communities is not precisely a celebration of talent. But it a celebration, of sorts. Pictures may be seen here. The video of Ralph dancing to Nobody by Korean pop group Wonder Girls may not be widely distributed due to the incendiary elements of Ralph's choreography, but a copy may be seen here.

Sunday!

I took my kids to Esteban School, where I played football with some old friends. There's nary a shot of me playing, but here's one of my lovely little princess, Lucia!


Monday!

My sister Therese came over and we watched Up. Lovely movie, and such an appropriate title. For those who have yet to watch this delightful little snowflake of a movie, please try to catch it at the nearest cinema. Carl and Ellie share only a few minutes of screen time, but they will nestle in your heart close to forever.