Psalm I: The Litany of Hatred (Video)
Artistic pretensions rock!
The Call to Arms
I don’t exactly know why but writers are usually a quiet and long-suffering lot. Sure there are a few of us cantankerous alpha male bastards who frequently get into trouble for baring our fangs at producers and directors too often, but generally speaking writers are better at being alone with our thoughts than interacting with other people, especially the non-writer kind. If you go to a production party, chances are you’ll see the show’s creatives in a corner of the room, quietly debating art, politics, and philosophy amongst themselves while the rest of the staff noisily chatter about world-shattering things like who bought what kind of luxury car. It is this timid attitude in our ranks– this lack of desire to fight– that has led our kind to this state. Recently though, more and more writers are rattling the chains. There was a time when fellow wordmongers I talk to would merely scratch their heads and make jokes about the situation. Those days are over. It seems that the years of getting cheated, exploited, and demeaned have finally sunk in. Nowadays, when writers get together in a room, there is a sense of something about to detonate.
The Coin of the Realm
I can tell you I earn a hundred grand a month cranking out television scripts faster than a teenager screws. I can tell you I blow most of that moola feeding my periodic table of illegal vices. I can tell you I’d probably be earning more than that if only I didn’t spend most of my nights in bacchanalian parties where– with a certain panache that would put Giacomo Casanova to shame– I pick up sixteen-year-old Catholic schoolgirls whose Daddies are fortunately too busy making money to pay much attention. I can even tell you said panache is backed up by a ten-inch cock that shoots pure, unadulterated awesomeness.
This, after all, is the Internet. Pretension, if not outright bullshit, is the coin of the realm.
The Tower of Babel
FilipinoWriter.Com is one
such enclave that I’ve been regularly visiting since its inception a
few years back. A community of wordsmiths both professional and
amateur, this niche in cyberspace is a hotbed of talent waiting to
erupt, threatening to engulf the mainstream scene and give established
writers a run for their money. Consider one of the most popular novellas published in that site:
Judas
Priest on a burning bicycle! Okay, so the proposed cover art leaves a
lot of room for improvement. In fact, I think it’s about as abominable
as an aging, washed-up Thai prostitute getting boned by a mangy
Doberman named Rex on streaming video for a few grams of meth. Jeebus,
but less excretable artwork have led wretches to the guillotine!
Holy Shit! More Doodles!
Won’t win me any awards but they’re not too bad, I think. Some of these
drawings are from my sketchbooks when I was still in college, a time
when I was more inclined to do stuff without expecting to get paid for
it. Others are from my notebooks, which is why you’ll notice
handwriting peering through the paper from the pages beneath it.
Scanner’s dead and gone so I took pictures using my webcam instead,
thus explaining the shitty quality. Click the pics to view the full
images.
Writing for a Living Sucks Part VI: Kalashnikov Blues
Consider the Avtomat Kalashnikova model 1947, a beast made for sound and fury:
Anyone
with a nominally decent grasp of the action movie genre would know it
as the AK-47, or possibly as the Kalashnikov. Fully automatic, it spits
out 7.62 millimeters of pure death at a rate of 600 rounds per minute
and with a maximum effective range of about 400 meters. The M67
projectile that erupts from the its barrel was designed to blossom in
human flesh at 13 centimeters from the point of entry, causing massive
tissue trauma, substantial organ damage, and a particularly nasty exit
wound. Due to its unsurpassed durability and reliability, it quickly
became the standard infantry rifle of the Red Army and is still
currently used by most of the member states of the former Warsaw Pact.
It is the favored thunderstick of irascible mujahideen,
genocidal warmongers, Third World hordes, European extremists, and
communist firebrands. It was this implement of destruction, this potent
totem of human wrath in the blood-encrusted fists of an angry and
desperate peasant that turned a ragtag band of barefoot farm yokels
into a formidable army that succeeded in driving the American war
machine out of Vietnam. Truly, this primitive-looking union of wood and
steel is one of the most terrifying instruments of warfare ever
invented.
Nevertheless,
awesome as the AK-47 may be, no one in his right mind would deign it
fit to be used as a farming tool. Against flesh and bone it is
undoubtedly the stuff of nightmares, but against the earth it is the
dullest spade imaginable. Tools, like the men who make them, have their
own natures. A thing that goes against its nature is liable to break. A
plough taken into the battlefield will shatter beneath the hail of
bullets. A rifle tied to a beast and dragged across rice paddies will
rot in the mud.
A storysmith compelled to tell tales for which he cares little will lose his soul.
Veritas
What I’m supposed to be is a wordslinger, a son of that tribe of men
conversant with the strange secrets of the universe, an oracle in the
wilderness acquainted with the esoteric voices that spring from God’s
vast belly, a hierophant who brings the great unwashed closer to the
sacred and arcane truths of the cosmos.
What I’m supposed to be
is a storysmith, a Zen musician of mortal emotions, a connoisseur of
the spirit, a warrior-poet who drinks from the cup of life deeper than
most of my brethren, who intimately experiences humanity, who
understands what makes us rapt or wretched or divine or damned.
What I’m supposed to be. The truth is much more sober.
Super Inggo at ang Super Tropa Trailer
There are two major reasons why I haven’t been posting very often:
1. Super Inggo at ang Super Tropa.
2. I’m a lazy bastard.
Since the second reason doesn’t put me in a very good light, let’s just stick to the first one. And that leads me to a trailer of the show below. Note, however, that this isn’t the trailer shown in cinemas after the movie SupahPapalicious, starring Vhong Navarro and Makisig Morales. I think that one was pretty awesome. The fact that I wrote that trailer and the episode it refers to doesn’t affect my judgment at all. I’ll post that trailer here soon as I get a decent copy of it. What you are about to view is a trailer done last year merely for marketing purposes. The asskickage has improved a lot since this was made, trust me.
In Pursuit of Awesome
I entered the world of television writing with an intellectual boner
roughly the size of a small child. Had it been something visible and
tangible, I would have made a successful career starring in
pornographic movies. At any rate, it was the turn of the millennium, I
was young, and like most upright citizens of Geektopia, my head was
crammed full of strange and wonderful things drawn from years of
voraciously consuming comic books, videogames, anime, movies, the
internet, and the more bizarre permutations of fiction. I was a
canonist of cool, an apostle of awesome, an aficionado of asskickage…
and I was planning to own this bloody town like Samson owned a thousand
of the Philistine horde with the jawbone of an ass. That is, until the
first major problem presented itself: television can only be as cool,
as awesome, and as kickass as the taste of those watching it.
Dusty Old Farts
I never had much of an opinion regarding Malu Fernandez when she started getting flak last year due to an article she wrote for People Asia Magazine that revealed her low regard of OFWs.
I don’t actually read lifestyle articles since I think the culture
vultures who write them are a lame bunch of dilettantes trying to
supplant lack of talent with their ditzy enthusiasm in the more
decadent arts and in things urbane. When, out of curiosity, I perused
Fernandez’s damning article and some of the other crap she wrote, my
reasons for not appreciating her ilk were merely reinforced. Long story
short, she was booed all over the media, especially in the Internet. It
would’ve been a different story if she turned out to be hot since I,
like most dudes, would be willing to absolve a chick of first-degree
murder provided that she was hot. Unfortunately for her, Malu Fernandez
is about as hot as a week-old piece of penguin-turd in Antarctica.
Some days ago, Fernandez again, ah, hogged the spotlight because of an article in the Manila Standard dissing bloggers.
Bloggers. The same blokes who carried the torch of righteous
indignation for the OFWs. The fat cunt is out to recapture her fifteen
minutes of fame by spitting on the dragon’s eye. Christ have mercy on
her immortal soul. The barbaric landscape of the blogosphere surely
won’t.
