On gentlemen (and a bit on ladies)

My Ate asked me once what kind of guy I like and I said I like a gentleman. She asked me what a gentleman was and I gave some concrete examples of what I figured a gentleman did, and she retorted with a “What is this, a slave?”

Okay, so all those chivalrous acts like opening doors for you and carrying some books for you when you’re lugging around too many things, or offering to take you home (and then taking you all the way to your doorstep and saying hi to your family) may be a bit old-fashioned for today’s “lifestyle,” but it doesn’t make anyone a slave. Besides, it’s not all his work—ladies also have a role in helping men be gentlemen, after all.

But I’m not here writing about what a gentleman should be—that’s a topic too vast for this blogger’s short attention span for the time being. (Besides, that would require more than one entry, but I digress.) What I really came here to write about is how all that modern lifestyle PR talk has gotten us all to think that traditional is out of date…it would be at worst, “anti-feminist” (hello, women are not damsels in distress etc.) and at best, a simple inconvenience (because everyone’s in such a hurry!).

Condo-living, for instance, practically rules out the fact that when a gentleman takes a lady out on a date, he should be polite enough to come knocking at the door, say hi to the family, take her out on the date, and then bring her back home, seeing her to the door. Too tedious? It’s only proper; this way, the family knows who their daughter is out with and they get a good impression on the young man too—this is a guy who’ll be responsible, thoughtful… and so forth.

But condominiums offer so little parking spaces for guests—sometimes it’s not inconvenient anymore but rather impossible. How will he see her to the door when he can’t even park the car for five minutes? Condominiums are meant to suit the “modern lifestyle” and it seems the modern-ness of it all doesn’t include these traditional practices.

I suppose when a gentleman really wants to be, er, gentlemanly, there will be a way to do it. (There’s more to being a gentleman than following traditional practices to a T, though it’s always best to follow them when possible.) One, there is doing the simple acts of chivalry: offering his seat, offering a hand when walking down a flight of steps, etc. And then there’s doing more character-building acts like holding back that supposedly uncontrollable male weakness (which is fiction, btw, created by money-motivated culture villains), which, in a great way, shows how much respect he has for that lady he’s pouring all his attention to.

Because no matter how speedy today’s lifestyle suggests us to be, there are still those things we can’t hurry. And sometimes, it’s the waiting—it’s the “inconvenience”—that does us (ladies and gentlemen) a lot of good.

Cinemalaya starts on Friday!

"The Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival is a film competition and festival that aims to encourage the creation of new cinematic works by Filipino filmmakers – works that boldly articulate and freely interpret the Filipino experience with fresh insight and artistic integrity. It also aims to invigorate the Philippine filmmaking by developing a new breed of Filipino filmmakers. Each year, ten fresh talents are given a seed grant in order to create the film of their dreams. These films are then featured in a nine-day long festival at the Cultural Center of the Philippines every July and compete for the coveted Balanghai Award. Awards are also given in twelve other categories, as well for the best efforts in short narrative features. Along with these competition films, are an array of exhibitions that include Tributes to Past Indie Mavericks of Pinoy Cinemal, a Cinemalaya Kids’ Treats, World Premieres of New Digital Works (the Cinemalaya/NETPAC Prize), and other modules."

I have no idea which of the entries this year are good to see, but it would be nice to go and discover for oneself! Click here to see what's going to show in CCP this July. Maybe after all that Hollywood-y Harry Potter 6 hubbub, we'll all need something a little different.

Where is Up???

It was released last May and it's still not being shown here in the Philippines. Maybe in August. Here's a little article about Up that someone shared with me. Perhaps it's the fact that a story about an old man is hardly marketable that it's been put off so much in our cinemas. Nauna pa Harry Potter 6. Sigh.

I'm sharing this not only because of its insights--I pretty much like the way it's written; it may look long, but it doesn't read so long, you'll see!
---

Up

Why is an animated film from Pixar about a grumpy old man raking it in at the box office?

I think I would make you laugh if I said "Disney" and "artistic integrity" in the same sentence. But for once, at least, there might be a good reason. Disney must have known that a film featuring a lonely old man would not send toy companies scrambling for the licensing that makes successful children's movies so profitable. But they went ahead with Up all the same, and the result is a film more exciting to cinema buffs (it was the first animated feature ever to open the Cannes Film Festival) than to profit machines (Thinkway Toys passed on Up despite their long-standing relationship with Pixar).

Yet, if not quite a franchise, Up looks to be the biggest hit Pixar has produced in years; the weekend grosses for the first three weekends are much closer to Finding Nemo (Pixar's highest-grossing film) than Wall-E or Ratatouille. Why? How did Up shut up the Wall Street demographic analysts? Maybe behind his quality-first positioning, Disney CEO Rober Iger knew something Wall Street didn't. Maybe a positive, heroic vision of aging can ring true in spite of the standard narrative of the increasing uselessness of the elderly as a growing economic burden on the younger generations.

What exactly did T. S. Eliot have in mind when he wrote, "Old men ought to be explorers?" My guess is he wasn't picturing a squat codger towing a floating house and an overweight cub scout from one end of a vast Venezuelan tepui to the other. The plot of Pixar's latest movie might sound like an all too literal dramatization of that line from Eliot, but the beauty of it is that that's just the point of Up: the main theme of this movie is the moral danger of taking things too literally.

---

I found where this article comes from! (Finally!) Read the rest at MercatorNet. :D

July!!!

I haven't gotten my hands on a real copy of July 2009 issue of Baby Magazine but I have an idea what's in it! And it's all awesome stuff, including the winners for the PBBY children's book competition (Salangga and Alcala prize), lots of articles on brain development, and seeing beauty in your pregnant (and post-pregnancy) body.

And isn't that baby on the cover really cute? Her name is Therese dela Cruz Murrf Trinidad, and someday she'll solve that rubiks cube if she wants to. Photo by Ralph Alejandrino.

Baby magazine is published by Marathon Publishing Co. and is sold at all National Bookstores, Babyland (Robinsons Galleria, Shaw Blvd. near Cherry Foodarama), Baby & Co. (The Podium and Power Plant Mall), Bufini, Procreation Shangri-la mall, Big & Small Co. Shangri-la Mall.

Are we mice or are we men

I had a conversation with one of my high school friends a few months back...or longer, I can't be sure. Ah, I think it was at the time when this big name in useless men's magazines had just announced that they were starting out on this side of the planet. (Let me just say that even before this publication began there were already others like it, and it's already pretty jaded and cynical of me to admit I wasn't surprised.)

The conversation was not about the magazine, really. It was about the prevalence of this kind of stuff. I was telling my friend that maybe we'll do better without these things--think about what it will liberate women of yadda yadda. She, perhaps thinking practically or economically (can't find right word), said it means business. Ok, point taken--this culture of disrespecting women does make money, but for now let's forget at whose expense.

What bothered me about her argument was not the fact she said it makes monies. It was what she said about guys, in general. She said that this type of "entertainment" is available and will never be extinguished because by nature men NEED it. So... are men not expected to have temperance? While so much is expected of women?? Ganun na lang? We'll keep polluting convenience stores, the TV and the Net with these things because men are like animals and must be satisfied at every turn?

I don't believe it.

If people go on thinking that men do not have brains enough to understand what is truly good, to appreciate what is truly beautiful, and to put their hearts in the right place, then shouldn't it follow that eventually no one would expect any virtue to come from men? And how unfair is that?

Guys, you tell me.

The minx, the moron and the parasite

All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: "O God, make me a normal twentieth century girl!" Thanks to our labours, this will mean increasingly, "Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite."

This quote is from The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis. The persona is Screwtape, a devil who has "expertise" in the art of temptation. Throughout the book, Screwtape writes to his nephew Wormwood, who seems to have just graduated and is now assigned to his first "patient". Sometimes Screwtape praises Wormwood for something he did, but most of the time the uncle lectures him on things he could've done better, and gives advice on damage control or how to make a good thing work for the dark side (e.g. see advice given above).


How true is Screwtape's definition of the modern girl? (Let's ignore "twentieth century" for now.) I know a lot of awesome women and certainly they don't fall under that category, you may well think, and to this I must agree. Because today's women as we meet them in real life are sensible!

But look at the media--what kind of girl are they glorifying? Fashion magazines have a certain kind of girl in mind. Hollywood, another. MTV, yet another. And these brands of women get so familiar to us that sometimes we think that they're the norm--they're what women of today are.


And because this brand of woman is what we're all supposedly trying to be, it's no surprise advertisements are going into that direction as well. You can't even commute home without hearing that advertisement on the radio about a guy trying to sell a cold drink to a girl by calling her sexy. A beauty product company keeps coming out with outrageous ads that work along the lines of "your husband will love you again, only if you look young" or "guys will only notice you (or marry you?) if you have pinkish white skin."

How dumb do they think we are?


If you haven't noticed yet, I didn't use pictures of the "typical" woman that the media insists on. You might even say the women here look a bit outdated, even that one on the cover of Esquire. But I just wanted to show that women are so multi-faceted that you can't box them like that--why should she be a minx when she respects herself? why should she be a moron when she can be bright? and why should she be a parasite when she has skills enough to be useful--even during the pre-feminist movement era?

What the media shows us is not always real (and you probably know that). I just hope that more sensibility goes into what goes on out there. Perhaps the solution to that is to not be swayed by what's popular (or what they say is popular), and to stay true to oneself. And then maybe Screwtape or the likes of him won't be able to redefine us so easily.

Cora Cooks Pancit

Oh, I am drooling! My lola just made some pancit for us yesterday when we visited her in Cavite. You could smell it from the living room, a warm savory aroma, and when you put it on the plate, the whole bottom heats up so fast you might burn yourself if you're not careful. Nothing beats lola's cooking!

I discovered this book on the Internet--it's published by Shen's Books, and it has a Pinoy theme. How very interesting! Must keep eyes peeled for a copy somewhere. Here's the synopsis from the website:

Cora loves being in the kitchen, but she always gets stuck doing the kid jobs like licking the spoon. One day, however, when her older sisters and brother head out, Cora finally gets the chance to be Mama's assistant chef. And of all the delicious Filipino dishes that dance through Cora's head, she and Mama decide to make pancit, her favorite noodle dish.

With Mama's help, Cora does the grown-up jobs like shredding the chicken and soaking the noodles (perhaps Mama won't notice if she takes a nibble of chicken or sloshes a little water on the floor). Cora even gets to stir the noodles in the pot—carefully-- while Mama supervises. When dinner is finally served, her siblings find out that Cora did all their grown-up tasks, and Cora waits anxiously to see what everyone thinks of her cooking.

Dorina Lazo Gilmore's text delightfully captures the warmth between mother and daughter as they share a piece of their Filipino heritage. With bright and charming illustrations by Kristi Valiant, Cora's family comes alive as Cora herself becomes the family's newest little chef.