crying tiger

there’s a warmth coming up

i’m restarting this blog thing. as much as i liked the idea of constantly restarting every month, i did like the idea of still having an archive as a way of encountering who i was to remember who i am. cliche as that sounds, i like to be reminded.

it is ironic that i propose an idea of warmth to encapsulate my august now as a typhoon enters this september. the heat of august may be alluded to the clice salt air of the same taylor swift song, but i’d like to beg it’s somewhat similar to being placed under this guise of an imaginary weighted blanket. a continuous “ghost month” haunting me for the past couple of months.

just last month i had drastic shifts from: friends just encouraging me (den who actually got me into wordpress, cidee for bullying me into writing) invitations to be let in (jeyem for inviting me to the tori kelly concert, harley for getting me into the perfume workshop, anton for seeing after almost a decade, tizzle for reaching out), and vacations (family outing !, terra’s date streak not yet broken!)

but it also came with loss of a friend, rude awakenings of being in a tech copywriting job, and currently an unchecked injured shoulder.

but despite these counteracts, i feel like it was necessary to maintain this sort of balance? the pattern app does tell me i’m currently undergoing a set of reality checks until 2025!

ive been actually also thinking about quitting writing. or to be more specific and hardlined, i thought about quitting being creative all together. and its not just the whole not having time or energy for it. i dont think its worth engaging in such acts in systems that thrive off illusions of community in our local scene. maybe one day i’ll be able to convene with everyone and talk about it in the way that gives me and my friends justice. this one profile in the new yorker was quite uninteresting but left me with this one quote i’ll be taking with me for a while:

“for there can be no objectivity where love has lived.”

-A Frank Account of an Unequal Art-World Friendship

for now i guess i’ll settle for the essay. this is the only format that allows yapping after all.

An essay is good if it fits a context made up of 1) the truth, 2) the intellectual needs of the writer, and 3) the reader’s mind. The better the form fits that context—the truer, more insight-generating, and resonant it is—the better the essay.

–Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process

some august preoccupations:

been heavily HEAVILY contemplating taking graduate studies literary, cultural, performance studies in dlsu. i still dont have any idea what my research exactly would be but here’s some rabbit holes i got into in thinking about that:

Visual markers of difference fall into the narrative that we can see who our comrades, colleagues, and enemies are on the spot. This is very easy, this is very desirable. This is also sloppy and damaging surveillance. It manages and faults the body for the violences of the structure. It fails to see (cuz it can’t) the many reasons—for differing survival concerns—how some bodies remain actively undifferentiated, or falsely differentiated: their politics, their positions actively, visually, impenetrable.-

Nikki S. Lee’s “Projects”—And the Ongoing Circulation of Blackface, Brownface in “Art”

What was the name of that guy who made “A CHILL MIX” playlists on his Spotify and was exposed for making multiple similarly-titled playlists for a bunch of other girls? Crazy. A turning point. A Twitter main character.

–What aesthetic is this?

I don’t think that you can be a good artist if you’re not a serious intellectual. Art is about ideas. Understanding your history is certainly important for younger artists, but I think it’s also crucial to understand how the history that precedes you is relevant in your own moment. Your job is not to simply duplicate history, but to have a sense of it and try to expand it in some way.

–Clifford Owens on writing your own history

Paradoxically, this erosion of cultural touchstones does not affirm the validity of direct personal experience or one’s immediate surroundings (which would make the whole process more rewarding). Instead, it produces a kind of apophenia—seeing patterns where there are none, overloading the particular with excessive significance, and reframing one’s own disparate observations as generalizable cultural commentary. On Tiktok, Twitter, Substack, and in august publications like the New York Times, this is just how we talk now.

–Microtrends at the End of the World

Artistic expression, as history will tell us, is limited and would also require an actual revolution for its ideas to come to life. If the state’s parapolitical figures resort to their terrorism just to hide the truth; the independence of the independent filmmakers may have to depend not on artistic expression alone to defend their truth. Perhaps, when Jean-Luc Godard suggested years ago to not make political films but to make films politically, it is to hold a gun on the other hand while holding the camera on the other. Maybe, the idea of having an armed wing of this “independent cinema” that’s supposed to be a “movement” is not a bad idea to protect our interests? What should we call this armed wing, the Cinema People’s Army?

–On Cinema and Parapolitics

Borders are the ultimate fake thing—arbitrary lines invented to criminalize and contain certain people for the benefit of others. And so the movement of counterfeits across borders is where you can really see the fakeness of the nation in action, and how dedicated the nation is to presenting itself as real through various violent activities.

–a tale of two canal streets

Too broke to be Carrie Bradshaw and too old to be a wunderkind, I become an essence, a vibe. I squeeze myself into this canon of glamorous online philosophers and nymphet social critics, where our mediocrity is conferred with specialness and our contradictions are viewed through the kindest eyes. I perform this identity for maximum approval. I transmute unmet needs and buried desires into value through that performance. With each bit of disclosure, efforts and failures curated for relatability, I make a version of myself more legible to people I wasn’t put on this earth to be witnessed by, yet find myself in close proximity to because of the social internet. They are always in the room with me, witnessing me glamorously aestheticize and philosophize.

–just a girl examining the lives of other women

In order to make a living off creative output, the commodification of self not only makes sense, but is absolutely necessary. In a world where art is already devalued, if artists are only as “great” as their last piece, then they will inevitably fail. Artists must not rely on subjective notions of quality, but rather their personas. As long as people buy into that designation, then there’s always the potential for artists to create more good work despite the bad. While many artists and entertainers have proven this to be possible, it’s a lonely and unforgiving pursuit. When so much thought and care is sacrificed in effort to preserve an outward facing identity, one’s focus on their actual work will inevitably suffer. Today, visual artists at the highest stature have factory-like studios working behind them, with much of the work being made by studio assistants. Although participation varies by medium, project, and the specific studio, a famous artist’s principal occupation is not to paint or sculpt, but instead to maintain a public image that revolves around posing for photographs, providing insightful commentary in interviews, attending events, and shaking the hands of people with money.

–8.15 (group dynamics)

What I mean is that sometimes, when we say “visual” as fiction writers, the word carries an implied objectivity so that one might guess that when we say cinematic in a fiction-writing workshop, what we mean is “objectively visual.” In this way, then, we might say that what we mean by “cinematic writing” is writing that recreates the objective literalness of a camera’s recording by using a written text. But that falls apart rather quickly when we realize that in cinema, there is very seldom such a thing as an objective lens.

–the miserly eye

“Painting is the only art form except still photography which is without time. Music takes time to listen to and ends, writing takes time and ends, movies end, ideas and even sculpture takes time. Painting does not. It never ends, it is the only thing that is both continuous and still. Then I can be very happy. It’s a still place. It’s like one world, one image.” – Joan Mitchell, 1986.

some visual media i finally decided to visit/finish:

some books to reconsider:

and of course a playlist, consider it a hug.