Point Blank
laquino@theguidon.com
I try not to romanticize my love affair with writing, but sometimes I just can’t help but walk around with a pen in my hand like Che with an M14. No, that’s not an effort to appropriate his swagger, nor an attempt to afford my words the gravitas of his revolution—but with a pen in hand, I feel like I’m a man on a mission, with a bomb of ideas I need to detonate through writing. Ever wondered why I named my column ‘Point Blank?’ Well, here’s your answer.
Of course, my passion for the craft is one reason I entered the School of Humanities. Some relatives’ raised eyebrows notwithstanding (“Philosophy? How do you expect to succeed in life?”), I find immense pleasure that I’m studying in one of Asia’s foremost institutions of the humanities, under the tutelage of the country’s best thinkers and writers. The Ateneo, after all, has a brilliant tradition in the humanities.
This tradition is never static, though. Throughout the years, our community’s conception of art, letters, high and pop culture, and other things have evolved a lot. We have learned to move on from a literary culture that saw religion as its sole reason for existence. We have also learned to appreciate the poetry of and in Tide boxes, and we have learned to relax our bourgeois tongues so we can speak in the language of the masses.
This noble tradition fascinates me, but I also fear for it today; it’s in real danger of being entirely dismissed to irrelevance by the people least qualified to do so.
After all, today is no longer the world of the inspired poet-warrior; it is now the (new) age of the hipster, of the self-affected, artificially struggling artist shopping for tattered jeans, of the brat buying beautiful things and pretending to make them too. The lumpen culturati are once again kings of the Hill, and they dominate the Ateneo enough to serve as a threat to our socially-conscious and socially-relevant humanities tradition. They are a problem, for the lumpen culturati thrive on an ignorance that is incredibly hard to remedy. Indeed, they thrive on masturbatory art, and any high school kid would tell you that in such cases, disturbances are never welcome.
Pretty soon, though, these artists would find people trying to knock them down, trying to bang their heads against the wall in an effort to wake them up. Opulent, meaningless art just doesn’t sit well with a starving populace—and I do mean genuinely starving, not the I-haven’t-had-Starbucks-my-essential-daily-boho-fix kind of starving.
All this talk about art and starvation remind me of Lourd de Veyra’s memorable plugging of one of his band’s albums, Tangina Mo Andaming Nagugutom sa Mundo Fashionista Ka Pa Rin; there was a time he intentionally replaced the word ‘fashionista’ with ‘Atenista.’ Our better artists could probably argue with him about what he was trying to imply, but definitely not the multitudes of Atenean artsy-fartsy types who seem to think that, like light in the dark, meaningless splendor amidst poverty is a beautiful thing.
Well, it is not. Hipster, it’s time to wake up. We’re not in Bohemia. We’re in the Philippines.
