Good night, Cubao!
The dark side of the moon stores records of your innermost secrets.
Photo by JR Dalisay / April 21, 2017
Tuesday, January 11, 2022
One Message To One Of 229 Friends, One Every Night Of The Year
You with four syllables in your name: Don't just ensure protection for yourself,. Ensure protection for your entire household as well.
Monday, January 10, 2022
Watched 20th Century Fox's 2008 Mirrors (1:51:05). It's the usual, Hollywood horror story formula in which the protagonist and his family are challenged by a life-threatening force, the protagonist hunts for an antidote, the conflict leads to a spectacular climax, and the downbeat ending shows us that evil is not completely vanquished. Not quite a B movie because of a well-thought-out production design and special effects.
Ben Carson, a rehabilitated alcoholic separated from his wife and kids (yes, the stereotype protagonist) must take on a job as night security in the multi-story ruins of New York's Mayflower Department Store, which was devastated by a fire in which many died. During his rounds of the ruins he discovers that the mirrors inside the store reflect strange images, images that already caused the deaths of at least two men, and now, his sister. Very soon his wife and kids are also threatened by images in mirrors.
Ben discovers that the site of the Mayflower was formerly a hospital, its psychiatric ward being in the basement. The mirrors instruct him to bring them Anna Esseker, a former schizophrenic patient who was 12 years old and treated with a program involving mirrors in 1952. Ben tracks down Anna Esseker to Saint Augustine Apostolic Monastery, where she is now a nun in recluse. He takes her with him to the basement of the ruins in New York.
I'd rate this movie a good screening because it was entertaining and at least did not depend on a ridiculous screenplay, but I wouldn't watch it again, and neither was my interest piqued enough to watch its sequel.
One Message To One Of 229 Friends, One Every Night Of The Year
You with two syllables in your name: Know when to be selfish at the right times. Not only does it help you survive, it also helps you progress.
Sunday, January 9, 2022
Watched all six episodes of the first season of Japan's Tokyo Mystery Sake. A young actor (Sugino Yosuke playing himself) averse to doing a horror movie is assigned by his agent to interview a series of persons who've encountered ghosts on his radio program and visit the places they'd been to, in preparation for his starring in the lead role of a horror movie. In each location, he is required to drink sake to open his psychic senses. The subtitle word "merging" is used to refer to the meeting of his intoxication with his fear. He is served a delicious dish in the company of his agent and interviewees after he survives each adventure. A horror comedy shot like a reality show, but it does have creepy moments.
The episodes are short, averaging 20 minutes each, and the whole season can actually be watched in one, long sitting. Sugino Yosuke plays the role with such spontaneity and naivete that one can't help but watch everything through the end. The places he visits are an apartment in which a woman in white appears; a cat cemetery; a home still inhabited by a stern man in his 70s, addicted to porn magazines featuring high-school girls; a love hotel room filled with ghosts beset with yearning, especially a jealous woman; a comedy theater built on the site of an old elementary school and haunted by the ghosts of an old woman, a boy, and a girl; and a stigmatized building with a dangerous ghost on every floor (a landlady stabbed to by a tenant after an argument, a murderer who committed suicide, a middle-aged man beaten to death by his friend, who afterward hanged himself, and another tenant who jumped off the roof).
In fact, all of these places could be anywhere in the Philippines!
One Message To One Of 228 Friends, One Every Night Of The Year
You with five syllables in your name: When something happens, good or bad, or when someone says something about you, good or bad, know how to say "So what?" and mean it.
Saturday, January 8, 2022
A delivery arrived--alas, not the canvases.
Can't wait to start my first painting for a prospective exhibit, though completing a substantial number of works will take me time. But, it will be heavenly to be painting for myself again, for a change.
I remember when, several years ago, my former classmates asked me to do an exhibit for a fund-raising project. I went out of my way to do ten paintings. Unfortunately, the liaison they assigned to organize the exhibit was a lazy bum who expected me to do all the work. I had to draft letters to the art gallery, since he was neither a writer nor an impresario, and set appointments for meetings on my own. He would show up at my house close to lunchtime, perhaps expecting me to serve him meals. He would ask to see me in coffee shops and then not order anything, just sitting there and gabbing about his life in general. And then, after all of my works had been varnished, he came to the house and said he would pull them out to deliver to my former classmates--without receipts or documentation of any kind. I asked him for an update on the status of the project but he had nothing; evidently he wanted me to give HIM an update that he could then report to my former classmates. I had him leave and shut the door on him. End of project. Thankfully, I was able to sell off most of the paintings to friends.
Waiting for the delivery of new canvases. These will be for an exhibit comprised of ten or more pieces to be mounted a year of two from now. I'm now alternating work between paintings for Maryhill School of Theology and a prospective exhibit. Serendipitously, a new novel is brewing in my mind, though I haven't gotten down to writing its first line.
One Message To One Of 228 Friends, One Every Night Of The Year
You with three syllables in your name: The industrious parent fulfills all duties and chores when no one else is looking.
Dinner at home after Angelique's last exam for the day. I ate downstairs; the granddaughters took their dinner while watching a show on a tablet in Angelique's room.
Brought some food over to M.'s cafe staff.
Night chores.
My favorite time of the day has come again: an evening shower, and then snuggling in bed with a Netflix movie. Watching something from Japan for a change.
Friday, January 7, 2022
One Message To One Of 228 Friends, One Every Night Of The Year
You with seven syllables in your name: You feel dizzy and fatigued because you forget to take your vitamins.
Watched all episodes (51?) in all five seasons of Spain's Money Heist (Lacasa de papel). Gripping and suspenseful and full of surprises, the viewer has no choice but to sit back and expect the unexpected. Exposition and characterization are spread throughout the length of the movie all the way to the end, so that the viewer is incapable of making up his mind about the characters and projecting himself ten steps ahead of the story. It succeeds because, unbeknownst even to their creators, the technique is that employed by the Russian master Leo Tolstoy, and, to a certain extent, that of Boris Pasternak. That, and because the direction, cinematography, casting, and performances are excellent, showing us shot after breathtaking shot with creative angles and lighting, and the equally creative development of relationships. I also know that is extremely difficult to shoot scenes involving fire and pouring rain, and there were quite a few of them.
Sometimes interest in the plot is sustained by means of introducing complications that the characters must then immediately resolve. Wherever that is not enough to keep one's attention from flagging, nudity and sexual tension are made to take over. Unfortunately many of the scenes were redundant and were mere variations of previous scenes, making the story move two steps forward and then one step backward. This is an apparently laid-back though very expensive production, but gets long-drawn and tedious after Episode 13. Things start hopping again--and intensely--in Episode 20. That being said, the second season has a magnificent ending. As for the third, rather than function as an epilogue it brings the viewer back to Square One. It became too much of a good thing. The fourth and fifth seasons pick to a satisfying climax and denouement.
It was rather disturbing to me that the dialogue was peppered with very anti-feminist curse words and phrases such as "puta", "cono", and "la madre que te pario". Of course there was also the non-sexist "mierda", the equivalent of the American and British "shit" that students of Catholic universities have taken on as a favorite expression. Movies, indeed, influence audiences: the first thing they influence is language. I remember all too clearly how audiences kept saying "Shit" after viewing the 1976 movie Carrie. That is how the word conquered the Philippines some forty years ago. But how do we tell people that they shit because they keep stuffing their mouths with all kinds of food and drink? Shouldn't "food" then be used as a curse word as well? All these verbal obscenities convince me that no country is a Catholic country. After all, it is what comes out of people's hearts and mouths, with our without reference to what comes out of their anuses, that reflects what their religion is.
The series, however, does preach three, twenty-first century truths:
--for any urban setting to be paradise, it is money that must flow like milk and honey, and, despite others' poetic mooning and crooning about love and light, it is a truth that is always all too easy to prove. Movies and beautiful faces can be tedious and boring, but money never is, and never will be.
--there is nothing as decadent as bureaucracy, and it is the clever and the creative who will bring it down. The only cheap trick I found, however, was comprising the band of heisters of "social outcasts" verging on stereotypes, but that might have been done merely to gain the audience's sympathy.
--in real life, everybody wins.
Thursday, January 6, 2022
One Message To One Of 228 Friends, One Every Night Of The Year
You with two syllables in your name: You have to love what you do in order for it to love you back.
Finished my Peter painting with the sixty-third glaze in half an hour. I could have completed the entire work in less than 29 days except that, two years ago, I swore that I would no longer paint after 5:00 PM because, when I did, I would go on and on through late at night and miss getting any sleep.
Aubrey came down to her mid-afternoon lunch, then Angelique and Aubrey had coffee and dessert in the dining room.
Watered the ground-floor plants.
Nino watered the plants in the roof deck, side balcony, and front balcony gardens.
Wednesday, January 5, 2022
Peter Is Called to Ministry and Martyrdom
Peter Is Called to Ministry and Martyrdom
Oil on cradled canvas
6’ x 4.5’
December 8,
2021 – January 6, 2022
This is a companion painting to The Pauline Letters.
Daybreak. After catching a net full of grouper, the fisherman Peter is about to turn his boat and paddle home. As he does so, he has a vision of the medieval papal crown, and the tip of his oar’s shaft takes on the image of an inverted cross.
The painting alludes not only to the miracle of the fishing nets, Peter’s calling as a fisher of men, his martyrdom, and his designation as the rock on which the Catholic church is built, but also to the later blinding of Paul of Tarsus and Constantine’s vision of the cross in the heavens.
The Galilean boat is a smaller version of the fishing boat in Christ Calming The Storm. The throat and blade of the oar, however, are not Galilean; they are a memory of the artist’s visit to Pagsanjan Falls many years ago. The halo round the papal crown was made to simulate the shape of a Tibetan ghau gau, or portable shrine, as, in The Pauline Letters, Paul’s halo is comprised of the Tibetan lotus mandala.
The auditory stimulus I used while making this painting is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLjEtvNe7CI. Do listen to it while viewing the painting.
One Message To One Of 227 Friends, One Every Night Of The Year
You with seven syllables in your name: Will you live the rest of your life without telling the person you love of your love?
The Europeans and Americans should be encouraged to use face shields. I personally believe that face shields provide additional protection against the virus. So what if no one provided scientific backing for their use? Common sense is enough--the same common sense behind the use of windshields, umbrellas, window panes, caps, hats, visors, sunglasses, and motorbike helmets.
Tuesday, January 4, 2022
One Message To One Of 227 Friends, One Every Night Of The Year
You with two syllables in your name: To motivate you to save more money within the month, assume that the following month will be a very lean one.
Monday, January 3, 2022
One Message To One Of 225 Friends, One Every Night Of The Year
You with six syllables in your name: When you are unable to kill the mosquito, it is because the house lizard needs to catch it for its supper.
Sunday, January 2, 2022
Your Messenger message:
"Hello sir Tony, good afternoon and Happy New Year
"You were in my dream last night. I was going down a dark staircase but went back up because there was a large green spider, it was about a foot wide with long spindly legs. You seemed disappointed that I did not proceed and you went downstairs, grabbed the spider, probably killing it in the process, and slammed it to my face. I could feel the legs against my skin.. creepy, disgusting feeling. I freaked out, and screamed my lungs out. You said, 'See it's not so bad. There is nothing to fear.'
"I forgot the rest of the dream, after waking up. Whew.
"Hope youre having a great time, sir Tony. All my best wishes for you and your family this 2022 
"My reply:
Hello _______!
Your dream was about an albeit aborted descent to the Unconscious, a must for every creative person. In this dream you refused to confront your Shadow, represented by the spider, and I practically had to force you to face it, pun intended. No, the Shadow cannot be killed, and it will also never go away.
You will dream of your Shadow, appearing in many forms, in the future. Do not run away from it. Dialogue with it. Make it your ally. After you have done so, many wonderful changes will occur in your life.
One Message To One Of 225 Friends, One Every Night Of The Year
You with two syllables in your name: Be aware that not everyone who asks for help really needs it.
I survived the holidays and even managed my fifty-fourth glaze this afternoon.
Jazz goes back to work tomorrow, Angelique resumes her online classes, and Aubrey resumes her work at home.
Dinner at home with Angelique and Aubrey.
Asked David to bring some food over to M.'s cafe staff.
Night chores.
My favorite time of the day has come again: an evening shower, and then snuggling in bed with a Netflix movie.
Saturday, January 1, 2022
I love sitting inside the small loggia past midnight, smoking silently in the dark, before retiring to bed. It is always a magical time for me. The only illumination around me comes from the front porch of the compound office, two doors away, from the street lamps on P. Tuazon Boulevard, from the lighted windows of the Cyberpark buildings in Araneta Center, from the top floor of Regalia Tower across EDSA, from the upper stories of the police trainees' quarters on Camp Panopio Compound, and, of course, on clear nights, from the moon and the stars and the silver-gray clouds. Yes, I have Posted about this magical time several times before, except for the following:
I must give up this practice because it renders me an invisible man. Compound tenants reporting to night-shift work pass by, fully dressed for outdoors with backpacks strapped to their shoulders, looking like they wished they had kinder jobs. A young woman dolled up for some party pauses at the gate to wait for a taxi--where is she going and what will she be doing in the wee hours of night? Lovers hold intimate conversations, believing that only the dark can hear them. An anxious man with eyes glued to the bright screen of his cell phone paces to and fro as though hoping that someone would finally come home; he then unzips his pants and takes a leak between two parked cars in the driveway, confident that no one can see him.
Whenever these things happen I hold my breath and keep still, pretending to be a potted plant, lest they suddenly see me and think I am a ghost who has materialized in the night and come to frighten them.
Ah, my neighbors are so different in the daytime and so different at night, and they often make me wonder if I also am!
One Message To One Of 225 Friends, One Every Night Of The Year
You with two syllables in your name: Continue saving money even after the holidays. Making this your habit will enrich you the entire year.
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