1) find my own place, where I can set up an armchair with a standing lamp in a room filled entirely with books;
2) make my own beer;
3) hang out at the kalayaan centre;
4) get cable and get the filipino channel, discovery, and national geographic;
5) subscribe to discover, scientific american, and leonardo;
6) hire a personal trainer;
7) watch more sunsets;
8) write more songs
Hey Dan,
Someone was supposed to do the video, but for whatever reason they weren't at the performance. It really was unfortunate. Sara Coffin---the lead for the project---could really have used video documentation if she decides to continue (and I hope she will) the project.
I can tell you a little about the process and what we did: Sara was interested in virtual worlds, such as secondlife.com, with embodied representations of human beings. As someone who looks at the world and analyses it largely through looking at human bodies, Sara was intrigued (maybe disturbed?) at the quality of movement of the avatars. The avatar bodies didn't have a sense of weight. They had no "intention", a term that Sara uses whose meaning I am only beginning to guess.
The lack of weight in the avatar bodies is clearly caused in part by the limitations of the second life ("SL") technology. Of course, animators are becoming better at conveying weightedness by simulating the physics behind material interactions. Recoil, momentum, elastic and inelastic collisions, acceleration/decceleration due to gravity, that sort of stuff. However, the computational constraints on simulating real world physics in such an unpredictable environment as SL (which has three or four million users now) are probably still astronomical.]
For the showing, we presented (after much arguing and thinking and experimenting) two short studies. The first was a 5-minute piece of choreography based on the ideas of "nothing ever happening" and "disconnection". The movement was sometimes sparse and pedestrian in an unnatural way. But because we were working with a mentor---a fabulous dance artist, Dana Gingras---who had her own way of creating work, it became a somewhat typical dance-y thing.
The second study was in some ways more interesting and has more potential for future work. We projected a single avatar on the screen, human-sized. Two dancers danced in front of the avatar and, basically, attempted to regard it as a thing worth our attention. With the memories of endless nights of programming and debugging and reading scholarly articles on simulating human behavior in animation, I regarded the avatar with some respect. The other dancer tried to relate to the avatar, but she said that because of her personal practice and interests, she was "uninspired" by the technology.
And I have to say that I think the avatar was---because of all its imperfections and its innocence---as (if not more) compelling than the humans on stage.
On Sara's term "intention": I think what she means is that SL avatars don't have bodies that can make choices. When they move, you don't see the initiation, you don't see the sequencing of muscles and bones that follow right after a decision has been made. The movement is still too clean, too uniform, too slick. If I saw human beings in real life move in that manner, I would think that they had no free will.
In Manila, I live in an apartment complex called BLISS, which is appropriate enough for this little oasis of quiet and greenery in the middle of the noisy, smoke-choked city.
These, from left to right, are the members of our household.
Toni, our psychotic dog
His name had originally been Tino, short for Valentino, because he was a Valentine's day present from my mother's ex-partner, also known as ex-girlfriend-from-hell. EGFH--after being appointed as the executive director of the women's NGO with whom my mother has been involved for the better part of her life---fired the accountant, caused the unaccounted disappearance of about 1.5 million pesos, and had computers and the files they contained burnt. And that's the least of her work. One would think that Toni's continued presence in our household would be a constant reminder of EGFH's destructive spree, but Toni's bouts of psychosis---marked by the menacing growling noise he makes when anyone comes within a 6-foot radius---amuse us, I suppose. Sometimes I wonder whether nanay takes care of him as sort of penance for partnering up with Voldemort (as EGFH is now known in several circles of friends and progressives). Or maybe it's even some sort of nose-thumbing at fate. "I survived that bitch. I will survive this canine freak."
Ezhot, "ang kasama namin sa bahay"
Kasama (literally, "companion") is the new euphemism for katulong ("helper"), which in the first world is probably known as a "live-in housekeeper". Ezhot's stories are worth a blog of their own. On the measly two days of the entire month that he gets off, he and his posse gay friends go to the funeral vigils for people they don't know. They get fed. They make friends. Heck, they even hook up... which is yet another example of how death and sex are intimately linked.
I have been told that Malay culture (from which the Philippine culture derives its most fundamental traits) has historically featured slavery. Ezhot's tenured service in our house offends my Western sensibilities, but given the present realities in the Philippines, I cannot think of any other solution to the problem of running our particular household/office. It is fair to say that we treat Ezhot well, but even that sounds demeaning.
Tita Lita, my nanay's sister
Tita Lita brightens the place. In the morning, I wake to see her smoking her first cigarette of the day and drinking her coffee on the veranda, framed against the early morning sun. In the evenings when I come home from work, there she is again with a cigarette, sans coffee. By this time of the day, Tita Lita would have collected an assortment of soap opera-quality stories about people we know: who lied to whom, who mouthed off to whom, who stole what from where.
Jasmine
I tend not to start a description of someone with a racial classification, but it seems appropriate in Jasmine's case. Jasmine is half Filipino, half American. And in-betweenness forms a major chunk of her interests and identity, especially now that she has returned to the Philippines after being away for years and years and years, and not knowing how to speak Tagalog. Inspired by the brave---some might say insane---souls that ride their bikes along the most dangerous streets of the Manila, Jasmine is dead set on cancelling her overpriced membership to a local gym and take up biking as her primary means of fitness and urban transportation.
Here's my favourite Jasmine line: "Thinking is an occupational hazard."
