millennials – Reverse Delay

Coasting

La Union, The Ransom Collective, and embracing my youth (before it’s too late).

There’s a song that plays in my head when I think about my first visit to San Juan beach in La Union: Shelter (Oh No), by the happy little indie folk band named Ourselves the Elves. When I’m packing stuff for a trip it’s become my habit to load my phone with new music, which I would listen to on the bus (or plane), and in idle moments, as in that lazy hour before noon, before checking-out, while my travel companions mill around gathering their belongings. Pieces of music, once they imprint on a memory, can preserve moments in a way photos can’t. Pictures allow me to replay the visuals of a moment weeks, months, or years after it has passed, but they don’t always trigger the emotions. I have beautiful pictures from that trip to San Juan more than three years ago—sunset, waves, and lots of sand—but I can’t say that I truly remember that time, unless I hear Shelter, unless I feel the feelings only that song can stir in me.

It’s not that the words of the short but spirited song mean anything particular to me. The song is technically a duet, featuring Aki and Aly’s wonderful, interweaving boy-girl vocals, but I hesitate to call it one, because all the words seem to belong to the same persona—a character losing a metaphorical battle, and calling out to the listener to be her (or his) shelter and shield.

Well, I wasn’t quite feeling vulnerable when I listened to the song in a room by the sea, despite the relentless crash of waves resounding through the window shutters. I merely thought it a rather joyful song, in a swinging way, even if its somewhat foreign texture tinges it with melancholy. It was a great song, an appropriate addition to the soundtrack of my weekend in a carefree, blissful place.

Continue reading “Coasting”

‘Shift’ captures the transient millennial spirit

Passions, youth, diversity: ‘Shift’ is about the millennial and their fleeting desires.

Shift sells itself as an offbeat romance film, about the boyish Estela (Yeng Constantino) and the proudly gay Trevor (Felix Roco). While this is its heart, it is not its spirit.

The story follows Estela more than it does Trevor. Once, strolling through the quaint shops at the Cubao Expo, she spots a Che Guevara portrait, the bold reds of the artwork matching her own fiery dyed hair; she asks Trevor to take her picture with it. This is more than a whimsy: she studied sociology in school, and she knows what Che stands for. There are no flashbacks in Shift, but the film teases with details here and there, and we figure out that she used to be an activist—a rough, full-blooded tibak, a past life that corroborates with her boyish manners.

Now she spends her days, and nights, in call centers, taking up jobs to sustain her impractical passions. She answers a phone interview once, with remarkable confidence and skill—but underneath that compelling corporate talk is the contradiction between her past convictions and her present place. She keeps this simmering irony under wraps, mostly unspoken, though it manifests in her lethargic attitude to work: she often comes in late, and her performance has not been up to standard.

Continue reading “‘Shift’ captures the transient millennial spirit”

‘Sakaling Hindi Makarating’: a tribute to the “beautiful process” of coping with heartbreak

The passion project of a film is a gorgeous love letter to journeys of all kinds, be it across an archipelago or through the depths of heartache.

Director Ice Idanan, when asked how she came up with the story of Sakaling Hindi Makarating, does not hesitate to share that it was directly born out of personal experience. She wrote, initially, to help her cope with heartbreak, and the first story drafts thoroughly reflected the bitterness she felt at the time. But as months passed, she found beauty in the process of recovering from pain and rediscovering herself, and this newly brightened outlook similarly found its way onto the pages of her script.

Portrait of Ice Idanan, director, cinematographer, co-writer, and co-producer of Sakaling Hindi Makarating (2016). — Filmmaker Ice Idanan had four roles in the making of Sakaling Hindi Makarating: director, cinematographer, co-writer and co-producer. (Press kit photo)

It would take many more years and many more pains before Sakaling Hindi Makarating would be completed—at least one script development and two film financing grants later, to be exact—but the film will finally arrive in theaters across the country.

Continue reading “‘Sakaling Hindi Makarating’: a tribute to the “beautiful process” of coping with heartbreak”

On the meaning and value of work

Work, as a concept, is a rich and multi-dimensional idea. As a starting point, I will take the definition I once heard (from a priest, if I remember correctly), that work is simply the transformation of our environment.

Defined this way, work becomes an encompassing aspect of life. Work can be physical and tangible, as in the work of mining and refining minerals from the earth, or synthesizing substances in a chemical factory, or constructing structures from pieces of wood, metal and glass. Work can also be intangible, as in intellectual work, gathering and synthesizing knowledge in various fields of science, or sharing them with others in education.

Work has a similar definition in the physical sciences, where it means the transfer of energy when a force is applied to matter resulting in motion of a definite distance. The idea is similar, because it also involves a transformation; without movement or results, mere application of force does not become work. To perform work in physics is to transform the shape and location of objects in our surroundings.

Continue reading “On the meaning and value of work”