Fete dela WSK presents: TUJIKO NORIKO

Schizophrenia, cats and art

A 20th-century artist, Louis Wain, who was fascinated by cats, painted these pictures over a period of time in which he developed schizophrenia. The pictures mark progressive stages in the illness and exemplify what it does to the victim’s perception. (via yourhumanitydies)

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Happy birthday Johnny Marr!

“It’s like turning your daydreams into sound.”

Johnny Marr describes his guitar playing with The Smiths. “I wanted to sound like an entire record when I played.” He plays his Rickenbacker and plays snippets of “What Difference Does it Make”, “There is a Light That Never Goes Out” and “How Soon is Now”

“Yeah, it’s all kinda of ringy and melodic, and…. There’s a lot of emotion in there, I think. So I …I play that way cause that’s how I feel.”

Here’s Marr describing how he started playing guitar. And, yes, playing a bit of “This Charming Man” (also featuring the Manic Street Preachers’ James Dean Bradley).

…and here again talking about playing guitar and plays more Smiths but also The The and The Kinks.

To the faithful departed

“Uutusan Ko ang mga angel: Bubuhatin Ka nila sa Kanilang mga Kamay upang hindi matisod ang mga paa mo sa bato”

Salmo 90:11-12 (BSP)

- salin ni Manuel Principe Bautista (1916-1996)

And the devil is six…

Of all cinematic genres, nothing draws or provokes a response quite like horror. Sure you can laugh at Jim Carrey or cry at the latest Sharon Cuneta tearjerker but a joke – even a good one – becomes worn out pretty quickly, and tears evaporate as soon as they dribble down. But horror lingers; it’s no secret that many childhood traumas – in the absence of real abominations (like, say, a paternal ogre) – are due to seeing a particularly scary movie. It is also common knowledge that men prefer taking out their dates to horror films rather than any other kind. The reason? It gives them an excuse to grab and grope what they presume (usually mistakenly) to be a willing victim.

(Random tidbit: As they were preparing to work on Eyes Wide Shut Stanley Kubrick asked Nicole Kidman if she had seen The Shining. She answered him with a yes and no. Yes, she did go to watch it at her local cinema in Australia but, no, she was too busy “snogging some fella” during the movie. According to Kidman, Kubrick was very amused.)

Of course, Jason or Freddy soon cease to frighten after repeated viewing, laughing at the celluloid bogeyman’s face, immediately pointing out the inept special effects and makeup and eagerly watching friend’s faces. But what happens when you find yourself alone in your room at night, watching the feral shapes that form on your walls as you listen to your house – all known occupants asleep – come alive with sounds that transcend the mundane and become sinister. That screensaver on your monitor of Sadako climbing out of the well flickers, making the figure move.

It isn’t so ironic now, is it?

(Of course, if you’re an unimaginative f**k, then you got bigger problems and await a more terrifying fate.)

As always, during this time of the year, when ghouls wear their true faces at the numerous parties around the metro, it is customary for this column to give a list of the films we suggest you see to help get in the mood of the season.

Why six? To quote Black Francis, “If man is five/Then the devil is six/And if the devil is six/Then God is seven… This monkey’s gone to heaven!” Of course, that explanation makes no sense but it’s best we have to offer. Without further ado, here are six good reasons to sleep early or under heavy sedatives – but, of course, dreaming can only be worse.

Cannibal Holocaust (Dir. Ruggero Deodato) It’s a simple premise. Three Western filmmakers – two males and one female – who go into a remote part of the Amazon to make a sensationalistic documentary about a tribe that indulges in the “last taboo.” They were never seen again. Some time later a search party finds the disappeared filmmakers’ footage in the jungle. Brought back to civilization, the film is pieced together, revealing the gruesome fate of the three. Sounds familiar? This 1979 film is, however, a much more savage affair than its progeny. Rarely screened in its entirety, Cannibal Holocaust derives its shock not only from its depiction of cruelty upon humans – of which there are plenty, including a scene wherein a woman is impaled through her vagina up to her mouth – but by unflinching footage of real animal slaughter. Thus, we are treated to the unsavory sight of a tortoise being skinned alive and roasted by the more seemingly civilized Westerners. A former assistant of noted Neo-Realist director Roberto Rossellini, Deodato takes pains to give the impression that what we are seeing is really “found” footage by putting awkward zooms, scratches and even laboratory marks (where the hell did they process the film?). He couldn’t resist, though, using particular stylistic devices such as putting saccharine-sweet music to the sight of natives being kept inside a burning hut. A sick cinematic joke but still nonetheless affecting.

Häxan (Dir. Benjamin Christensen) “Lock them out and bar the door/ Lock them out forevermore!” intones cult figure and Naked Lunch William S. Burroughs at the start of the 1968 version of this silent classic. Collaborating with avant-gardists such as Antony Balch and cut-up technique proponent Brion Gysin and musicians like Jean-Luc Ponty, Burroughs narrates the film with a death’s head grin audibly on his face. He maintains a penumbral presence throughout, hovering like a maleficent deity at its edges of the screen, giving much credence to Scott Garceau’s branding of him as the “Holy Ghost in the Beat Trinity.” Yet what startles about the film is that even its 1922 version, unadorned by Burroughs voice or Ponty’s violin, manages still to astound with its sheer visual eloquence. Taking much inspiration from painters like Bosch and Goya, Christensen conveys much of the horror of the witch trials and the fevered delusions of unfortunate women forced by circumstance to confess a dalliance with the devil. (One can imagine Burroughs, an alleged misogynist, licking his lips while explaining their condemnation.) Although eclipsed in stature by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferatu – which was released a year before – Häxan has made its imprint with what surrealist film historian Ado Kyrou calls its indictment of “the criminal church, its inquisition and its instruments of torture.” It is also very comedic, with the director – also an actor who played the role of an ageing homosexual artist in Carl Dreyer’s Mikael – casting himself as the devil. This disparate mix of elements surely won him many admirers and one can see his influence in later horror films like 1968’s critical favorite Witchfinder General starring Vincent Price and directed by 25-year old Michael Reeves who committed suicide shortly after making the film.

Zuma (Dir. Jun Raquiza) To ask if there’s anything scarier than a barely-clad, green-skinned muscle man with a two-headed serpent on his shoulders begs the obvious retort if there’s anything funnier than what is basically Mr. Clean only green and with snakes. Yet no one can deny the sleepless nights this monster has caused, sometimes leading to real adult traumas (one UNO editor comes to mind, eh Mr. De Veyra?) Also there’s the number of sequels it spawned and the brief career it afforded its lead actor, which can’t be easily put down to mere camp value. Sure, the direction is awkward, the script incoherent and the acting passable only if seen as a postmodern exercise but those who only watch this film for kitsch might soil their Scooby Doo underpants. This is due largely to the fact for the first half of the film we hardly see Zuma at all. He is there stalking in the shadows, his features engulfed in darkness. One particularly effective shot shows him munching on something we are told is a human heart: we can’t see anything but the beast’s maleficent eyes fixed in an intense stare, enjoying unspeakable pleasure. On another point, the film succeeds in making something so innocuous and ridiculous as a little blot of fetus being pulled by a string a cause for women all over to press their legs tightly together. Of course, there are many more acknowledged masterpieces of Pinoy horror (such as Mike De Leon’s Itim or Gerardo de Leon’s Curse Of The Vampires) but Zuma is surely more popular fare. It deserves no less attention for that.

Cure (Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa) Serial killers are already common fodder: the only variations being the peculiar quirks you give to your villain. The rate things are going it wouldn’t be surprising if the next Hannibal Lecter or Jack the Ripper listens to ABBA, wears a tutu and kills his victims by smothering them with his original Care Bears pillow cushion. (Of course, he will reminisce by collecting their fallen hairs and ingesting each strand while weeping – and all because his pre-school teacher didn’t allow him to go to the toilet during class!) Charming these individuals might seem – especially when faced with wooden counterparts played by anyone from Hollywood’s endless supply of bland beauties – it only serves to drive home how a genre film can easily devolve into becoming an unwitting parody. Cure starts out pretty safely: a dead murdered body – apparently not the first. All victims have an X slashed across their necks, severing the carotid artery and jugular vein. Suspects for the otherwise random crimes are suffering from amnesia and cannot recall what they did at the crucial hours. Enter world-weary detective Takabe (Koji Yakausho) who soon follows the thread to a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara). Also an amnesiac, Mamiya was studying medicine before he disappeared and was apparently very interested in mesmerism. There is no mystery here. From the very start we know it is Mamiya who’s hypnotizing people to kill. As played by Hagiwara (who is the spitting image of Batang Westside’s Yul Servo) Mamiya is blank: he drifts in and out of coherence and asks the same questions even after they’ve been answered. One might be even tempted to say that he is without personality, only snatching the nearest thought balloon that comes into orbit, yet he is more real than any Hollywood killer in recent memory. As for the plot, it’s really just a retelling ofThe Cabinet of Dr. Caligari only with a heightened sense of despair that only the Japanese seem to fully understand. Deliberately oblique, its integrity is intact as no comforting answers are forthcoming even as the credits roll. (Originally published in The Philippine Star, October 24, 2003)

Women

Girls aren’t beautiful, they’re pretty. Beautiful is too heavy a word to assign to a girl. Women are beautiful because their faces show that they know they have lost something and picked up something else.

Henry Rollins

The best damn thing

Two songs during the wrath of Juan (the storm, not Caguicla)

Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich “Hold Tight”

Jim O’ Rourke “Never Again” (2000)

ALSO SPRACH ZARA by Oliver X.A. Reyes

* Photograph courtesy of Grace Velasco

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

-  Arthur C. Clarke

It was inevitable that the Quezon Memorial Circle would take flight. The 1989 J. Erastheo Navoa film Magic to Love is hardly embedded in the national consciousness, or even any good, but it is on regular rotation at Cinema One, the cable channel that preserves Nova Villa for future generations to enjoy. There are enough people of a certain age who will recall, however vaguely, that there was this movie where the Quezon Memorial Circle turned out to be this spaceship that, in the end, flew up up and away. That movie is Magic to Love, yes it does feature Nova Villa, but the alien in this case was Martin Nievera. I had never paid close attention to the film whenever it aired, usually at 7 in the morning, at an hour when listening to familiar patois rather than the Eurobland accents of the anchors at CNN seems the more reassuring way to embrace the morning. I can’t tell you whether the monument had been implanted in the heart of Diliman by beings advanced enough to have conquered the space-time continuum. Or maybe the explanation is more mundane; if the alien is gifted with magic, which he can use to love, then surely his magic is powerful enough to conquer less finicky matters such as mortar and marble. What I do remember is that when Martin’s alien flies away, taking with him the mausoleum that houses our revered second President, those he leaves behind (Martin, not the Quezon family) wave back with nonchalant ease as if seeing off a Cebu Pacific flight. What would Quezon say when he is of course reanimated by the love magic of the alien race. Punyeta of course.

In the movie universe, nations are expected to surrender their national monuments for destruction, desecration or just plain misuse. During his heyday, Alfred Hitchcock was the most subtle employer of this convenient trope. Today, beginning with their implosion of the White House in 1996(?)’s Independence Day, it is the team of Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin who are best known for defiling the great buildings of the world, though they do so with considerably less humor than, say, J. Erastheo Navoa. For someone like me who think these symbols matter as unifying forces, and as embodiment of the skill and art of humanity, scenes showing the Eiffel Tower or the Washington Monument falling limp after having been bisected by alien spacecraft distressingly convey the message that the human race was fucked. Don’t those filmmakers appreciate the leaps in human creativity that allowed these monuments to be formed? The man-hours devoted, sometimes decades or hundreds of years, in order to create these marvels that satiate the soul?

Another popular movie trope which causes me distress in a similar vein the mad scientist – perhaps Mary Shelley’s more enduring contribution to popular culture. Scientists in fact have made it possible for us to live mundane lives that are generally free from the torments wrought by forces of nature or from the taunts of superstition. However, the scientific method is laborious and the scientific language is wedded to incomprehensible jargon. We mock what we don’t understand, and since the intricacies of science are beyond comprehension of mass audiences, the mad scientist of addled mind yet undeniable wizardry becomes the figure of ridicule. And because the general public refuses to fathom a world dictated by math – a world without God and magic – mocking the mad scientists of the movies becomes a cathartic experience. I’d like to think it no accident that Lou Veloso has played his fair share of mad scientists, as well as the High Priest Caiaphas from that Christ it’s Mat Ranillo film from some years back.

Which brings me to Gregorio Zara (1902-1978), National Scientist of the Philippines.

I had never known about Zara until a few years ago, when I heard that there had been this Pinoy scientist who had built a plane engine that flew on alcohol. That scientist was Zara, and the engine that he designed powered a FEATI Tech PI X-72 aircraft which took off from the old Manila International Airport on 30 September 1954 – a flight that lasted for 45 minutes. This flight was supposedly the first alcohol-powered flight in the world, claimed Dr. Zara. However true that may be, the accomplishment has not left him a household name, or ushered the advent of alcohol-fueled flight.

Zara was known as an inventor, and many of his patented inventions paint him as the sort of crackpot visionary that we see in our mad scientists. During a creative period that peaked in the 1950s and 1960s, he patented a wooden microscope, a solar-powered stove (the “Solarsorber) and water heater, a robot (the General Marex X-IC) which frequently guested and answered questions on TV, a photo-phone which allowed for teleconferencing in 1955, and a mass-produced wooden propeller. That none of his inventions found their way into the consumer culture sadly taints his resume as either too quaint or too idiosyncratic. Yet Zara was no homespun isolated genius. He was a graduate of MIT, earned his Masters and Doctorate at the University of Michigan and the Sorbonne respectively, graduating summa cum laude in both instances. This was a first rate mind who unlike the medicine man or the acupuncturist, was in touch with the mainstream sciences.

I got this information on Zara from the tome National Scientists of the Philippines (1978-1998), which was published by our Department of Science and Technology. The same biographical entry explains that Zara “had shown the typical scientist’s indifference to amassing wealth…[h]e chose to serve the country by working in government offices and he harnessed the talents of his young students instead of putting his inventions into business.” I mistrust government-published hagiographies so I’m not going to go rave, oh wow mabuhay kang Pinoy! But if Zara had found his sinecure with a multinational industrial giant instead of government offices and the academe,  his current reputation will most likely be more fashionable. Sad to say, Zara’s devotion of his energies to the public service sector has not exactly translated  into the wider use for the greater good of his ideas. Whether this is an indictment of our government’s apathy towards research and development or a sign of a greater creative energy that invigorates capitalism, I do not know. I do feel though that until ideas are put to actual utility, they remain in the realm of magic.

(Originally published in UNO August 2010)