Present tense

“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

–Toni Morrison

I mourn the loss of my previous blog. It was a record of a time and place different from what came before and the present. I also mourn the loss of my old life for its imagined promises and, yes even, the despairs it held. However, here we are, years later, in another place, quite literally, as I live in another country and occupy a slightly different frame of mind. The doubts are the same–and so is the passion for cinema. (For a few years there, I had to distance myself from it, mostly because no good movies were available and the internet was slow in my exile in the Philippines. The sun was ablaze in the tropical country but my soul remained gray.) There’s huge difference with regards to how I think and write about movies these days. Race, which was previously ignored or diminished, has come to the forefront. Not just in racial representation but how race is articulated even in its apparent absence on the screen. The shock came in the form of realizing how my racialized sexuality and identity in my North American life shaped my fate, especially the psychic one. The blog is about finally finding the vocabulary that was not available in my personal life (for years and decades) that I can now use in the form of film reviewing. It also explores how race, class, sexuality, among many others, animate Western cultural texts. The reviews were always written off-the-cuff and posted on social media. For the blog, they have undergone some editing to clarify ideas and correct grammar errors though at times I have left them there to maintain the raw quality of my (mis)judgements. More ambitiously, I am hoping that these notes and writings are a form of cultural criticism by someone who imagines themselves as an queer, exiled outsider. The tone is decidedly combative and impassioned; and, like most internet ephemera, I expect the blog and it contents will likely disappear and be forgotten as the terms of engagement for social justice values broaden and move on. Finally, the aim is not to preach nor accuse but to identify knotty social issues like race to see ourselves arrive at an impossible future of equality, sustainability, and solidarity beyond the multiplex.

#2019 #July