Today’s Creative Blog

I’ve been stumbling onto quite a bunch of creative sites in this virtual digital world in the handful of years I’ve become a netizen. I thought I’d pay a little gesture of thanks to these sites for making my day.

Today’s creative blog: yellowpulp

I came across it while searching images on Greenpeace. If you’re looking for creative visual humor this blog’s the way to go.

Cover Fun

I couldn’t help but mess around with this.

Ampersand Cartoonized

I Writer

In childhood I had always wanted to become one sort of writer or other, sometimes a playwright, other days a novelist, and then much later, a poet, but in any case, I was going to become a writer whatever kind of writer I was. I wrote my silly four line verses and my equally childish treasure hunting stories, invented tales about alien worlds and used them as themes in the games that I played with my twin sister, wrote poems that used to come to me then through lyric and melody in the form of the song, imagined other bizarre and fantastical beings and conversed with the spirit of trees and tree-dwellers knowing somehow that these were the prerequisites to a writing life. I was definitely going to become a writer. I wrote and it was easy, and above all things writing was an enjoyable experience, like playing in the sandbox or

Dual Purple Writer

eating ice candy.

I do not know what I was looking forward to as a child. Did I expect that someday I would receive a plaque where it said Congratulations we have identified based on your childhood scurrying here and there that you are indeed a writer. Now write!? But somewhere along the years I was growing up something must have happened, I cannot tell exactly what. I ended up in a different endeavor altogether, in a cause that commits me to the transformative education of humanity. Where did the dream of becoming a writer go? In the last few months of my senior year in high school taking up a creative writing degree had not even crossed my mind. I only knew I had violently discarded the thought of journalism from my future. I was disgruntled in those last years of high school disillusioned by writing and how rhetoric could so easily be constructed without sincerity. As it turns out I was disillusioned by one sort of writing, and this was writing with its pretentions of objectivity and non-bias. Perhaps it was this that made it clear to me I was never going to earn my bread and butter from writing. I was going to hate myself if I became a speech writer. I would feel trapped if I assumed the strict rigor of journalistic writing. I did not foresee nor even had an inkling that I would pick up the desire to become a writer again midway into college.

All that time, of course, I had never stopped writing. The short fiction and the poems, especially the poems, had always been a persistent writing endeavor in that long stretch from childhood and on to adolescence. But becoming a writer had slipped from my mind. Writing “stuff” did not make me a writer. I was just playing around as usual. I was just thinking out loud on paper. I wrote as part of my personal reflection, not because I was a writer. I had looked to other causes to define myself in the world. I was going to become a teacher. There were a lot of things in the world (I mean this in the sense of society and reality) that I wanted to change and I took it up as my personal cause out of frustration and angst from the many disappointments of a teenager. Yet as I emerged from that long depression, the writing had accumulated into two volumes of poetry and short stories. Many of them were juvenile, of course. Only a handful, to my mind, hints at potential, and however faintly, the ambition of brilliance. But what was important to me was that the writing I had ignored had never been silent. It had always been there with me during those difficult awkward years (which have not stopped being awkward and difficult, by the way). Perhaps somewhere along the way the sensibility had been formed. Or I had been born with it. The answer as to whether writing is nature or nurture is of little import. In whatever fashion it came, the sensibility was there, and I recognized it finally after such a long and convoluted search for an explanation of my difference, my inability to be satisfied, my restlessness, the strange way I saw the world for which many people have marked me odd (or silly). I have my childhood to thank and whatever else. I am a writer. First before anything else, I am a writer.

Now that I am older, writing while it may still be a pleasant experience, is not enjoyable in that childlike way, is not easy, is no longer just a game of uniting sound and sense, or a simple play with words. Some writers may still experience writing in this way even way into adulthood, but this innocence has escaped me. Writing is now a focused and deliberate effort, and most importantly, a gesture towards some sort of meaning-making, at grasping hold of something whatever it is, being human perhaps, or at least something as close to that like dignity. As a child I was determined to become a writer. Now a decade later, it is something that cannot be helped. Being a writer is now a constant becoming furiously reinvented and recreated in the different writing endeavors that I am always, and at times simultaneously, undertaking. The sensibility that makes one a writer makes all the aspects of life, all that may be witnessed, all that is thought and mulled over, a material for the writing life. It is a certain kind of lens, a filter, and it is all there is to it. There are no plaques.

Photoshop Quickie

Blue Man from behind

I just like backs. They are quite evocative. In an extended sense this is me gesturing to Caspar David Friedrich. To looking from behind!

Mr. & Ms. Cool

Mr. Cool

Ms. Cool

Mr. & Ms. Cool

Moderator Announcement

I have decided to undertake a period of revision for all entries posted here that fall under the category of poems and/or verses. I will be taking them down gradually, and they shall not be posted until further notice. I calculate the revisions will probably take me the next six months to finish.

I’m taking a comparative literature class on poetry this semester, and I’m prompted by the things I’m learning to pay attention to craft.

Blog posts about other matters written in prose or fiction shall still be posted here.

Face

WhiteOut

Photoshopped sketch, ca. 2008

These are the sort of things I come up with in between periods of attempting to “study”.

BlackOut

These sketches are based on a poor attempt at reproducing Koyama Keiichiro’s face. This is my version of fangirling.

Ryo Nishikido meets Albert Einstein

Another product of my hits and misses with Adobe Photoshop.

Explorations

Because I was learning how to make GIFs from my twin (lumpofmud/Rachel) and I missed reading verses out loud and the film boy A was too much with me then:

Movie Review

I went to see the independent film 100 with a friend. I was (as it is turning out these days) yet again a kaladkarin. The movie stars Mylene Dizon and Eugene Domingo, Filipina actors who have a string of good films under their belt.

The film is about dying. Cancer. Everyone seems to be dying from it these days. Mylene plays Joyce, and Eugene is Joyce’s childhood friend, Ruby. It’s Joyce who is stricken with the disease. In her last months, she makes a list of things she wants to do bucket list style, only more down to earth. Real. Cleans up her house. Organizes her photo albums; finds Pinky, the ugly toy she’s alwas liked as a child. Quits from her job. Travels. Eats. Eats and eats. Like there’s no tomorrow. Well, there isn’t, really.

It’s a good film. Go see it. Count on me. Count on my good taste.

Photo grabbed from http://cdmartinez.multiply.com/

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There’s this other movie. My roommate and I did not intend to watch it. We happened to pass by the cinema and she’d seen a trailer of it somewhere. She said Let’s go see it and I went but we have to buy your sister a dress. Turns out everything had been taken care of and I thought what the hell are we here for then? So I ended up in an SM theater watching The Day the Earth Stood Still. It stars Keanu Reeves.

My impressions? Keanu’s grown old. He’s got wrinkly skin now. Quite different from the Keanu of Speed. I watched that film like a thousand years ago. I must be getting old. Anyway, it’s a good film, too. I haven’t seen a decent Hollywood film in a while, made me feel good about the 146 bucks I spent on it. Worth every peso, I tell you. Good film, really.

Photo grabbed through Google Search, original link: http://www.circuitempire.edison.secure-xp.net/Comingmovie.aspx?MID=1196

Good film. Simple plot (You can never go wrong). Mysterious sphere lands in Central Park (Why there of all places?). Everyone thought it was an asteroid and prepared for the aftermath. I thought it was another blow up Manhattan kind of movie. Turned out not. After the huge sphere lands, out goes an alien. They shoot it. OF COURSE. Count on the Americans to shoot anyone an alien. You have invaded our airspace, crippled our defense systems, therefore, you are hostile and a threat to national security. Shoot the thing. Shoot the unknown. Shoot. Shoot. Shoot. So they shot the damn thing. Then the scientists take charge. They operate on it. Voila! to their surprise the alien is human (wearing a bio-organic spacesuit). Or at least, the alien is in human form. He speaks of all things, ENGLISH. How convenient. He has come to save the earth says Keanu Reeves the alien. Let me give you a hint: Save the Earth from what/whom? That’s the question to ask. Now, go see it.

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For a decent summary of 100 look up: http://cdmartinez.multiply.com/