Showing posts with label Aging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aging. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

The World in 2010.


Indeed all Life is strange: complexities of Nature punctured with mysterious happenstance or fate in random places.

Listen. Mother Earth’s solid crust shuddered more than once,

tearing down an entire race of a chaste class. (Haiti)

Hear Her waters crushed onto shores without restrain,

claiming in its path the sorrows of a million lives. (Pakistan)

Watch Her roots, the Earth’s pillars, succumb to sudden fires,

causing both wild and peaceful herd to flee. (Russia )

Feel Her winds wrestled with the horizon calm,

crashing any and all that is tangled in its swirl. (New York)

Fear Her mounds spewing black ash across vast lands,

breaking the silence of the sublime. (Indonesia)



Then understand it is only either by greed or by fault:

Human error spilled the oil across the Gulf.

Chilean miners are trapped,

Allied soldiers are bombed,

Afghan Talibans are shunned.

Make sense out of the nuclear tension in Korea;

the labor unrest in Greece.

The looming jobless in the once “green pastures” of America.



When Nations fall into the new divide,

Count the Final Tally.

Then let Father Time forestall its warning.

as we wait for Mother Nature to cleanse her earth.


But yet, there are compensations, things to console with:

Rescue and aid from strangers they may be, leap across all corners of the World.

Homeless birds, though soaked to death in oil, heal in human hands to soar again.

Ocean species, while besieged by tainted currents, converge in untouched territories to breed again.

Pine trees & purple flowers, though aging & uncared for, bloom in eternity.

Races unite for many a cause,

And for many, a new consciousness arises.



Come, assemble under the changing weather

And let Mankind shift itself.

It is only in its transformation that the season bequeaths itself away.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Poetry In Motion.

Flaccid and feeble she makes her way

a once hopeful past trailing behind her wrinkled face

into a narrow path of light she succumbs unnoticed

a once famous name hiding behind her measured steps .

Then from somewhere out of nowhere

an overachieving call center agent overtakes her way

a shoplifting addict flees around her curb

a philandering wife wanders around her corner

a dope-dealing punk intersects the alley across her

a self-serving politician moves quickly past her

a corrupting policeman prances behind her.

Then just as sudden as the fleeting enigma of Father Time,

a fledgling artist traverses her path

calling out ' Isabel ? '

Suddenly the junction is crammed with moving figures

gradually my face is teemed with wrenching tears

not knowing for certain if it was the homespun ethnic music

or the silhouettes of the dancing figures

or the Poetry in the Motion of Life

or an amalgamation of All.

it mattered not.

oblivious of one another, yet

One moment.

is All At Once.





On a neo-ethnic theatrical ballet piece created by the Philippines' premier ballet & dance artist Agnes Locsin, in an interpretation of National Artist Ben Cabrera's poem entitled 'Dance, Sabel'. Performed at the PETA Theater Center 2010.

Friday, November 5, 2010

The Season's End.

A children’s TV show that strives on the delicate balance of ‘edu-tainment’, one that airs weekly on mainstream weekend TV here in my country, an easy favorite among kids from toddlers to pre-teeners, is playing its final episode tomorrow, November 6, 2010.

Not a finale episode to bring to the fore a new season, or a re-formatted program, or a new set of characters. But it is THE Season’s End, one last episode with the teary-eyed star cast of 8-to 10-year olds saying goodbye to its loyal audience.

The production and post-prod staff bid each other farewell in an afterparty on the last day of taping. Many of them cried for losing a show that started out some five years ago with another title, then evolved into a faster-paced narrative, and then re-formatted years later to incorporate 3D environments and character animation.

The child stars and their parents hated the almighty Network for its abrupt and callous decision. But of course the network execs were quick to say that such business direction had been based on serious studies conducted by the research, marketing and programming departments which had been uneasy over the show’s single-digit ratings these last 5 weeks.

Many crew members, all those small heroes below the lighting gaffers --- the minimum wage-earners who carry camera equipment from one location to the next and risk their lives in halting traffic or cabling wires so the taping can go smoothly and who make the coffee and run errands for the Executive Producer, Associate Producer, Supervising Producer, Line Producer, Segment Producer and all kinds of other producer geniuses --- lost a steady income and beyond that, the comfort zone of a weekly work environment.

But as the Network Chief says: this is television in action, we gotta move on, we have to stay on top of competition, we have to constantly break our own ratings records, blah-blah… Anyway, he says, there will be new shows for the child stars, the staff and crew.

Meanwhile, my company, which creates the animation and 3D environments for the show, is perhaps suffering the most. It won’t be part of whatever new show the network has lined-up. As a result, a major source of income has just been lost.
In our workspace, both our senior & junior visual artists are sulking over the demise of the show. My partners are now worried, and are prompting me to find a replacement to finance our company overhead.

Everyone is critically affected with this season’s end. But, this is one ending I really LIKE.

It had happened before. The painful process of losing a show teaches one how to live a life in television.

Once upon a recent past, I had raised hell and cried for nights when the powers-that-be robbed me of a top-rating teen drama soap that aired daily on primetime television. Sixteen seasons to my credit, I had created, founded and directed that show which handled serious themes of young love, teen angst, familial conflicts and campus riots. It was top-ranking on the audience rating charts and on the commercial spots. They wanted it so badly for themselves --- the triumph of a successful series, the prestige, the monies --- so much that they had to deviously take it away from me and claimed it to be their own.

Back in the 90’s, when I was a beginning TV director, I introduced the concepts of electronic sets and digital imagery for a visually-driven quiz show for high school students. At stake were millions of pesos in college scholarships and the honor to be qualified in a standard-bearing national quiz show. It rated double-digit on a weekend timeslot, but was unpopular with the advertisers. After 6 years of telecast, the Network axed it. I defended and fought hard to keep it on the air. Backed with the signatures of 400 schools and universities nationwide, I begged the Network to allow us to run for the 7th consecutive year. After all, our show grand champions who got their million-peso scholarships were studying to be doctors and physicists and lawyers. I thought I could appeal to their compassionate hearts using the Network’s tagline In The Service of The Nation. But long before I understood the dichotomy of broadcast dynamics, I realized that that tagline did a good job for brand hype and network image-building but meant nothing more than lip service .

In the more recent years, I had done one or two seasons of various other TV shows, in four other TV networks. There was a culinary travelogue, a couple of dance exercise shows, and a sports show. TV shows would always come to an end with either of these reasons: the show poorly rated, or the producer had run out of money, or the advertisers fell short for lack of hype and star value, or in remote cases, the network grabbed the idea to claim and re-format it into their own.

And that’s the back story to why I have come to abhor all season-enders on television.

But NOT this children’s show’s Season’s End.

This time around, I am relieved to find an excuse to leave my partners, and the Company.

My hands had been full. Despite a life devoid of children of my own to care for, I’ve been loaded with (or actually, they have damped on me) more demands and expectations to make this Company grow, to nurture its CG & animation artists, to hunt and close production deals and post-prod contracts.

That could have all been just fine, if only my partners looked after some of the other needs too, and perhaps a little of mine as well.

The daily grind of studio operations and a working life that compromises Creativity to Costs had left me barely any time to look after my own wishes, my own desires, my own dreams.

A hundred boring details to make other people’s interests work, to meet network goals, to grow their businesses, to turn their dreams into realities as though they were my own, had consumed me.

In each time I felt exhausted, I would tell myself it’s fine, for a life well-lived at the end of the day saves my soul from feeling wasted.

But like many other things in a working life, everything that really matters to me took a backseat.

I used to say when the dream film comes, I’ll take my options. And each day, I lived for that.

But today at this Season’s End, I decide to take My Turn.
My Time.

Counting 45 days up to the end of the year to wind up online projects and put the corporate set-up to a close, I am done here. With corporate chains unleashed, I will return to the back door to open new horizons for a free-lance life.

By then, and soon, I can watch more sunsets, walk the dogs and write.

Monday, February 1, 2010

Life On A Cusp

Ocean waves crumble, crawl and cede

repeating its cycle in restless motion.

My pen strokes fumble, mumble, tremble

rotating its themes in timeless cycles.

A first film in the writing,

A picture book in the making,

Long cherished dreams are no closer than before

as the routine of a working life

and the daunting tasks of providing for others

take first precedence over feeding my own.