Publicado el

Monday… once again

It’s a wheel turning. A day in, a day out. And what for? That’s the real issue. The focus on something worth be-ing. And that is achieved in a long process of questioning yourself. Questioning the learnings in your education, in the system, in society. And still, there is no right answer.

Things are tough. And we are dealing with stuff in our very own personal circumstances. The things within our heads. The voices that speak just to us. And the deamons.

But somehow, the struggle within is just a one man show. Or an insider’s job. There is something of us in every conspiracy. And the opposite two. The white angel and the red devil that inhabit our elbows. The duality starts right there. And you are stuck in the middle.

There is no clear alternative but to go on. And find the inspiration in every step along the way. Every step with the confidence that it is taking you places. Places you need to attend to. To show up. And deliver a good version of yourself. Maybe so by inspiring trust. Or building it. Or recovering it. It’s still a massive effort to get out and do your thing. Unless you’re in the zone. But that takes work. And time. And effort.

I’m close to that feeling. The zone is close by. And I’m ready to make that final sprint.

Or this initial drive.

Let’s start the week with this first step: Monday.

ALLS

Publicado el

Ain’t no script for you in Hollywood

Denial letters will keep you going

When am you going to write a script? You think all the script you’ll get for you are going to be as good as «Boys N the Hood»? Hollywood ain’t got no scripts for you. Unless you wanna do bullshit. You can write songs like you write, you can write a movie.

John Singleton to Ice Cube

Representation will not come to you just as mainstream drive. You need to present a case for yourself. You got to do that part of the job. It’s not going to happen just because you think it would be fair. You need to make it happen. You.

The singularity of everyone’s perspective is determined by the uniqueness of our experience, from our very own little point of view. We are the active actors of the development of our vision. And no one else is going to pave the way for you.

I know this shit from way back when. And I’ve never come out myself. I’ve held on to something else. A lame excuse that holds to my very own insecurities to avoid the stepping into the abyss drill. And I’m pretty sure this shit ain’t working, because no one has taken that step for me. As only I can.

As only I should.

Damn, it’s a hard shit.

I feel for the feeling of the underrepresented. Their voices haven’t been heard. They don’t get the chance mainstream stories are depicting. But who’s to change that. The scriptwriters write about what know. About what works. About their own little formulas. The establishement works like that because that how it got established. Something else is up for the up and coming voice within you. And if you are searching for recognition, maybe you should try searching within to find your truth, your soul, your arguments. And from there on, built the narrative that represent the stories you wish you had. The truth you would like to see on the screen. And then you have the type of shit that would look in the character you are playing, in the scenes that you are directing, or in the films you are producing.

Open the door. Assume the responsibilities. Act upon them. Write your own shit. Walk your own talk. Stop complaining to the world, and start showing up with your own voice.

Start with the first.

Start today.

ALLS

Publicado el

La cocina, de Alonso Ruizpalacios

La migración de mexicanos a Estados Unidos es una vieja historia. La segunda generación de mexicanos-americanos, o chicanos como se les etiquetó en un sitio en donde la raza, la religión, la procedencia y el dinero sirven para segmentar la sociedad, han votado a Donald J. Trump como presidente. Esto es un reflejo de que la vida del que emigra adquiere un sentido de renuncia y otro de aceptación, pero nunca del todo satisfecho con lo que en un lado u otro de lo que en el stio de partida o en el destinación se define como «propio». El que emigra siempre sigue ausente, quizás esperando su momento de aceptación. Y su integración siempre está en duda. Quizás porque debe asumir ciertos elementos propios de otra cultura, o asumirse en un contexto en el que desarraigarse de sus raíces le parece contradictoriamente imperativo. O justo al revés.

No hay un crónica única de la emigración. Sin embargo parece que los sitios con historia de emigrantes suelen tener el foco en otro momento anterior, cuando entonces los que llegaron eran los que valían la pena. Pero en algún momento esto se tiene que acabar. Hay que cerrar el grifo. Que es el mantra con el Don T. ha llegado otra vez al poder. El «nosotros» de la Great América de Trump los incluye a ellos; a esa segunda o tercera generación. Ellos ya son de allá.

Y el que es americano de verdad está motivado por la victoria. Por el ganar. Ganar dinero. Ganar el super bowl. O que lo gano tu equipo. Ganar las elecciones. La sensación de ser parte de una mayoría. Ya nos aceptaron, pensarán. No somos como aquellos. Los come-gatos.

Alonso Ruizpalacios acaba de sacar una película que retrata la vida de una cocina en Times Square, que sirve cada día a turistas comida de medio pelo, en un contexto de las cocinas americanas que están llevadas en su mayoría por emigrantes mexicanos. Es el acceso a tener una chamba, con lo que implica para empleadores y trabajadores formar parte de la sociedad, y cómo representa un juego de rol de los que «dan oportunidades» y los que las «toman», como si hubiera alternativa.

El sistema de los indocumentados en USA o en la EU persigue una diálectica de invasión que no es del todo fidedigna, mientras las oportunidades a los migrantes se ven empantanas por burocracias que simplemente se formulan como un sistema perverso que ni avanza ni expulsa, pero que en medio de esa situación genera distorciones y desigualdades de poder en el que aquellos que se mueven entre escalas de grises se encuentran. No es un tema de ahora, sino de siempre. Y reconozco que no sabría cómo plantear un modelo en el que dichas violencias subterráneas dejaran de existir.

Como siempre la mirada y la crítica social de Alonso nos permiten analizar con matices situaciones en las que debemos prestar atención, y disfrutar del buen momento del cine mexicano.

Entrevista de Alonso con Carmen Aristegui sobre su peli La Cocina

¡Hay que verla!

Publicado el

The lazily mood and moves of cats

Seldom slow pace is a trait

Nowadays everything needs to be super fast. Super quick. It’s as if we need to disregard the pace of time, the different levels of indiference, if really consider that it’s all relative, according to Eistein, even speed itself. So where are we trying to go at this pace?

Slow down, your are moving too fast, sings Paul Simon. It’s rebelious. But also a sign of trait. A kind of mood. A way of looking at life. Like cats do. Or sloths, to bring it home to a protected reference species from my own little tropical country: Costa Rica.

I used to yawn evertime I was about to compete in a track and field competition. Or right before the whistle sound in futbol game. It was a sign of concentration. It was part of an inconcious routine. This happens to cats, as described by the narrator in Woo Pak:

It moves with such confidence, he said, that the world seems to belong to it. It moves lazily, he said as we approached the ponds. It moves quietly. It is as if its whole body was nothing but an eye, an ear. Sometimes, he said, you will see it yawn, perhaps as a sign of nerves, perhaps only out of a massive indifference.

Gabriel Josipovici, Woo Pak

But it was a latter reference which really caught my attention towards cat’s attitude towards the fleeting pray. They take no pain or thought in wasting time after the prey has scaped a sudden unsuccesful attempt.

The mature cat, he said, does not waste any effort on what has not been caught or what, he realises, is not going to be caught. It is as if, the prey gone, even if he has been stalking it for a considerable length of time, he is able instantly to forget about it.

Gabriel Josipovici, Woo Pak

This is a superpower. It’s also what builds up resilience in competitive sports, and even more in the case of a 9, in futbolartistry, as it is scoring he’s supposed to be excelling at. When you’ve missed a chance, you’ll score the next one. You are sure of it. You must forget as soon as possible. Waste no time in anything realted to the past. But rather build upon the next opportunity to strike. And make it happen.

ALLS

Publicado el

People frightened of silence

Moo Pak ins and out

I’m walking along with this book like a walk in a park with a conversationalist. I’m steping in and out cause I need to come back to it, and then I feel the rush of comming here to write. It’s an exercise I’ve been forced to do by the fact that I cannot jot down a single scribble on the pages, as I am used to, because the book is borrowed. I need to give it back, eventually, as I got it. And it is in impecable conditions.

Nobody imposed this on me. I did. It’s always you who drive things around. In or out. It’s all in your head anyway. And you categorize the exercise. You make it happen so we understand the feeling of where this system is going. The personal system you own set of microcomponents, soul, body and shit… make up for. You are a complete social ecosystem. Yet, you still are just on your own, among the masses of an interconnected society.

So for quite some days I’ve had this urge to go back to Moo Pak to write about this. Silence. Solitude. Being with yourself. But as it turns out, the book has this beautiful constant voice that keeps talking and walking, and there is no stopping. It’s a single thread of a thought that connects logically with the next, and so on, and so forth. Sudenly, I don’t feel alone.

I do the same. This is how I write. No matter the intention. I just show up and start. And I’ve become obsessed with this. It’s time with myself. Alone. In silence. Just meeting the point of interconnectivity with my fingertips, my voice, unheard, within my head. Does anybody knows where this is going? No. And that’s no problem.

The problem is I leave map from Donosti to as a page marker. It’s a bit chunky but it does the job. It does less damage than leaving a pen, which I will avoid doing in this case, as I would like to spill ink, or some shit like that. You know that’s always a chance. Specially with a borrowed item. You are constantly on the verge of messing up. I know. We all know. It’s the pressure of staying consistant, and logical, and sane. We fool ourselves to stay on the game. And it’s there, a little bit on the edge, glancing at the scene.

In any case, what I was trying to say is that every time I go back to that point in the book where I last left my reading, I need to be able to go back to the point where Woo Pak left that last intense message I needed to come back to. To make a point. To deliver this other thought. Writers do that. I’ve heard them say it when they show up in that other state of mind you get yourself into when you are speaking for an audience. And then you are no longer a writer, but also an entertainer. Publicly addressing crowds, sometimes even larger than 9 people.

So when I go back to read I’m not in the page where the last message that signal my writing spirit erupted, so I need to go back to the last two or three pages, in order to get back in track with a stream of consciousness. So I do. And then I wonder what I was looking for. For everything turns out to be truth. Slightly more intense in places I hadn’t wondered upon. And I keep going back, maybe, to find what my past reading found that now is eluding me. And I wonder if I put then, on this second reading, the Donosti map a page earlier than the last time I read, because I’d be already signaling the place where I needed to come back to, to write, not to keep reading.

So you see, Woo Pak becomes like this pleasent conversion of time. I can move back and forth this stream, as time should allow to do, for any given timeline. But we are always so focused on going forward, we sometimes disregard the fact that time also has that negative ride: backwards.

And this also why I don’t feel alone anymore. I found a place in which I can excercise this going back. And I am enjoying myself. In this silent mode. Everytime Woo Pak kicks me out of that book, and into this one.

I keep reading back and back and get entangled with that direction of the book. And I’m already hooked. I’m back to the point that I last wrote about. About typing in a computer or typing in a typewriter. As an exercise to rewrite a single page. Over and over. Until you have cleaned it up. Something I never do. As write directly on the cloud. And almos never edit. Which is my own little purgatory.

It’s the sense of writing. The interconection with reading. How they are both there. The silences. Of the book. But also of this other time: the writing one. Even if it is closer to something you may relate to, like reading a post. Or like reading an actual book. Just to organize your time around something physical. Not just a screen. A real human interaction. I also write on paper. It nos just gives me pleasure, it also sits on a different table than writing on the computer or right into the page with an Olivetti. I used to own a typewritter. Not anymore.

The labour of scribes and editors and printers and proof-readers, [ ] Because of the work of these dedicated people, he says, we can now pick up the words of singular men and women and read them and listen to them and question them and live with them in greater intimacy than we do with our own spouses or partners. For a persona like myself, he says, with no country and no language to call his own, a life without Sophocles and Dante and Donne and Stevens would be intolerable.

Gabriel Jsopivici, Moo Pak

In fact I came into this writing exercise today to speak about the silence in books. The silence in writing. The intimacy of being alright with yourself. How writing and reading is part of it. How the author is aligned with Proust about the kind of special silence books have. And I’ve gone back too far back, to point out he craft of those who rescued the ancient voices of the past. Others burned books and libraries. Entire cultures. Washed away and mistreated by our current western ways, disregarding our infliction of damage in this bluring effect.

The most terrible thing that has happen to people today, he says, is that they have grown frightened ofsilence. Instead of seeking it as a friend and as a source of renewal they now try in every way they can to shut it out.

Gabriel Jsopivici, Moo Pak

This is has grown worst nowadays. Silence is not there anymore. Everyone’s got some source of continuos distraction in the mobile phone. It’s not even a complete song. It’s a message to keep you hooked to a short spasm of blabering. Something intense as pill, or distractful enough to catch your attention. We are switcing channels all the time. Endlessly. Which leaves no space for silence. And that’s not just a thing to miss, but also the source of being alright with yourself. No matter what. Books, silence, writting, it’s all part of the source of inmense power we have refill ourselves. We can bring it up as a routine to heal. Walks. To the mountain. Walks with a friend, with different kinds of friends, to align and talk, and to share the silences in between.

ALLS

Publicado el

Between the 45th and the 47th president

This is an era of disruptive mechanisms to establish who shouts the loudests, and who used the IA tools in the best way to drive transformation and change in our society. It’s not clear. It’s not entirely out there, but the capacity of minorities to drive some doubtful and unproven evidence to the mainstream has turn the seek for truth in a distorted gullible everchanging scene.

It’s like a morphing meme.

Life has taken a turn. And we are riding a wave we don’t control. So the hidden forces has taken a stand and have looked for mechanisms to empower what they believe is most holly. To try to make it happen… for them. A new collective of desperate middle class has erupted with anger and dispear and has taken the lead and command in following the natural-born NEW leader.

This distopic scenario has been also the same sort of thing I’ve been dealing with along the path to understand we are at in this ever-changing world. And the character of that crazy candidate that comes from the raging force of societal cry against the machine used to be a feeling of some people, artist, dreamers, who were fighting to say something that was going against the flow of tides. And from that erupts an emergent field and force. And this takes over. For good.

That seems to have happened with the scenario of Don J. Trumb (like J. as Homer J. Simpson, if we must find a valid reference… everyman) comming back to the number one job at the top of the power ladder in the social scene that has been established in the risk board game we are all watching unfold. The regular players are sitting on the table. The forgotten ones are listening in, without a voice. There might be eight players in there, and their alliances, their similarities, their sinergies, their strategic partnerships, their codepencies, their histories, their commonwealth, their trade relationships, their common ancestors, the common culture, the common law, the kinds of governance, the royal families, the paradoxes. But there lies a ninth seat empty at the table. This is the only space left for us to take a stand. And I wasn’t ready for it, until now.

I’m not going to watch the American entretainment that this NEW american campaign has unleashed, one more time, for us to witness without a vote. The relationship of that executive body will lead to many experimental scenarios where those new people in charge will deal with the way in which the oldest democratic experiment is put to the test of withstanding a balancing act of checks and ballances that are to be ruled by a holy emperor who’s been send by God, according to his fellowship of whisperers and ballot validators.

Will the USA institutional system withstand after four more years of the Trump era. The setting the scene for a radical act is already going to happen as yet another entertainment show that is going to unleash the deamons that have some interconnection with the movilizing of resources and funds that come from highest debt generator since the gold-backed system turn the world around the printing money scheme that supports the modern economic theory of the last 60-80 years. Keynes vs Friedman. But the new set of people in charge are not that kind of theoriest. They are the Bannon-era of Cambridge analytica turn into the perfect gathering machine of a massive movement. This exercise, as Bannon intended yet back in the day, is intended to find the allies in external systems, in order to influence elections and restore leaderships. Something in the line of Russia’s hackers introducing fake-news in other peoples elections. It’s now mainstreamed. And people are already raging on it. Russia is already made a move in fueling the war economy to shaken the options of enemies and allies in terms of a response. This fuels the war economy and those who benefit from it, and also puts presure on the energy business, creating yet even greater havoc into people lives: everthing becomes more expensive.

So we are about to witness some geopolitical movements that will reshape some frontiers and some priorities in how we defend ourselves (always military budgets going up). De-escalation of violence is going to take yet another act of threat: we’ll take piece along the promise of some sort of giving up. Renouncination time. Some of our liberties and hopes. And we are going to move our red lines as well as our values as well as our frontiers. The enemy is always close by. The scape goat. The alibi.

If the world is going to move somewhere in the following four years, my guess is that it should move ortogonally in the direction where the given dimentions of our collective understanding have allowed up to now. The revolts in MAGA, the far right movements, the Arab Spring, Indigandos, the Catalan independentist, the Occupy Wall street, the 8M,… name any given sudden burst of revolution, is not nearly enough to find the common ground for an understanding. Now the situation is not equitable in each case. The actors and history. The violence is not equally distributed. The war on terror somehow shifted the scene into the new wars after COVID: Israel genocide in Gaza, and Russia invasion in Ukraine. The starting point are in the results from the WWII, a NEW state, a balancing act on how to repair the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the holocaust, and sionist dream of coming back home, as stated in an ancient tale. Because God said so. The ever-present man.

Where are thou?

Hear my son.

Here.

ALLS