Don't take it black...

I'm an average Joe Juan who likes to have his coffee quite regularly, I guess moreso because my family hails from Batangas, the land of the flavorful Barako.  I remember that even in my pre-school years, I would already consume moderate but regular amounts of brewed coffee for breakfast, with either my favorite pan de sal and butter, or fried rice and dried or smoked fish.  And mind you, I don't just drink the coffee.  The pan de sal gets dunked into it, or it's poured into the fried rice.  This has become a breakfast habit which I gladly and proudly carry to this day... all the way to Jollibee and McDonalds!

My affair with coffee beyond my morning meal really got kindled in college when I had to stay up till the wee hours of the morning to finish programming assignments or, as they were called then, machine problems.  This affair blossomed as I landed my first 8-5 job as a one-man EDP department - writing, testing and running Accounting & HR applications in a long, narrow and extremely cold corner room.  Easily, I consumed 4 to 6 16-oz. soup cups of coffee a day - and that's BLACK!  It didn't help that I became good friends with a coffee addict who drank even more coffee than myself! Years after, as my carreer brought me out more onto the field, spelled as: M-A-L-L-S, my long-time coffee affair got sealed with my frequent kisses with the double-tailed mermaid's cup.  She has been witness to countless meet-ups with friends and family, holiday get-togethers, business meetings, job interviews (from both the giving and receiving end) brain-storming sessions and, ahem ahem, dates of course.  Except for the occassional griping sessions with some friends about my their current significant other bosses or jobs, my trips to this coffee shop have almost always been pleasant. Though if Tats were alive, I'm pretty sure he'd object to the kind of money I've spent on Starbucks.

Fast forward, and forward, and forward some more. A couple of months ago, a second Starbucks Coffee shop in BF Homes, Pque opened on Aguirre St., right across the front parking lot of the PCJ Parish Church.  This is were I sing with the PCJ Grand Choir during the 6:30 pm Sunday mass and where we practice on most Saturday nights till quite late.  Of course we wouldn't pass up on being some of the first customers to try it out.  Besides, it was much nearer than the President's Ave. branch for our after-rehearsals kape-kapihan. 

And so we went one Saturday after practice, on its 2nd day I think.  Since the store was still on soft-opening mode, service wasn't as fast, and products weren't as good.  Nevertheless, we were having  fun because we were in the company of friends.  We also noticed that the seating was still awkward and a bit sparse both inside and ouside the shop.  I though maybe that's why there were a lot of customers milling outside. But I quickly realized I was wrong, they were streetchildren - parking boys, sampaguita girls and very young mendicants, some of whom are just toddlers.  My heart sank, that was the first time I've seen so many of these kids in this part of BF at this time, it was almost 12 midnight!

I knew that the people who run this coffee shop did not cause this endemic problem.  I also knew that they most likely can't offer a solution.  But I thought they'd probably wouldn't want to be contributory to this very serious problem.  I approached the shop manager (or rather the on-duty MT), introduced myself and brought up my observation.  I also gave a suggestion that maybe the store can do something to dissuade their customers from giving money to the kids, perhaps even a simple sign can help.   If nobody will  give them money, they will not stay out in the streets.  The MT said that she'll bring it up on their next mancom.  Since then, I've gone back to the store a number of times. The big bunch of kids are still there and their number seems to be growing.  I haven't seen any sign inside or outside the store.  I can understand, being an international franchise, Starbucks would have SOPs that would probably not allow special signages. The guard seems to be oblivious to the presence of the children and is focused on opening the door to welcome guests and on keeping the shop clean.  Perhaps, that's also part of their SOP and training. Honestly, I really can't tell if anything was done regarding the influx of streetchildren in the Starbucks area or if the matter even went past the conversation I had with the MT.  I surely hope it did. 

It is so sad to think that nowadays, some people can no longer tell between black and white.  Maybe, for the people in Starbucks Aguirre, employees and customers alike, it is easier to see that Black is Espresso or Americano, and White is Latté or Frap.   I hope that we will all recognize that with the problem of streetchildren, doing nothing is BLACK, and doing something is WHITE, no matter how little.

This time, please don't take it black.

All for the sake of art...



Nikolay Arzanov - "Naked" 1997

We've all heard this cliché so many times, especially those who were born in the same decade as myself, or earlier, who've seen the eras of adult oriented Pinoy films evolve from bomba to bold to TF to ST (if you don't know the meaning of these acronyms, you may be too young to be reading this post) to the DVD scandals and now to the purported 'indie' films.  No, this post is not going to be about porn or sex. It's going to be about the law of supply and demand.

When I was mulling over the prospect of blogging, I had quite a few concerns.  What will I write about? Hopefully stuff that will be a bit different from the usual on-line diaries of most blogs.  Will I be able to sustain the writing with my oftentimes convoluted schedule?  Who will read my posts?  Will they be interested enough to give me a decent following?

Lev Voronov - "Nu" 1970

I think blogging is initially self-gratifying since it is an expression of oneself.  The writing on its own is the motivation.  The blogger realizes the depth of his vocabulary. He discovers his skills in thought organization and poetic expression.  He also soon stumbles upon what a lot of artists refer to as artistic license, not much different from what movie directors often claim to to be exercising.  As they say, it’s all for the sake of art.  Blogging seems to be not too far from any other art form, just like writing a short story or novel, or creating a screenplay or script.  But apart from wanting to tell his story, the blogger quite soon discovers that the telling will only be as good as the reading it gets.  Quite simply, with all the reasons that the blogger has for blogging, admit it or not, somewhere in there is the desire to be read, or in blogger parlance, to be followed. 

At the onset, I didn’t have the particular desire for my blog to be popular.  But the availability of readership info such as audience & traffic sources as well as number of pageviews, ultimately raised my awareness of what among my posts where being read and which sites and countries they were coming from.  I blame thank a co-blogger for showing and teaching me this.  Although I had already a pre-conceived concept for my blog, of what kind of materials I was going to write, I slowly realized that I had this growing desire to please my audience.  This post is only the 8^th in my 2 months of blogging.  And yet, with the measly 620 pageviews I’ve gotten, what appeals to my readers among what I've written has already become quite apparent.



Shot taken w/ my iPhone - May  2010, Calatagan Batangas

So that's how it feels!  It's a bittersweet kind of freedom cum pressure knowing that you have to stay within your chosen bounds as a blogger, but with this palpable desire of wanting to be read more and more.  And to think, it was so easy for people like me to judge those film directors and producers who’d make those sleazy films like Seiko’s, or those unrealistic action flicks like FPJ’s, or those copycat horror films & slapstick comedies like Regal’s, or those juvenile love stories like Viva’s & Star Cinema’s.  Those movie companies were in it for the business, I’m not.  Their art meant money, mine does not.  And yet, even for the lowly newbie blogger me, the temptation pulls quite hard!



Good for me, it's still just a temptation.  I will stick with my art.

The keyboard is mightier than the sword

I saw the movie The Social Network on its second day of showing about a month ago, soon after I started blogging.  Since I'm one of the minority who resisted the social networking bandwagon for quite a while (my FB account was just a little over a year then), I was looking forward to knowing how this phenomenon called Facebook came to be. It was a pretty good movie and I enjoyed it: professionally made but had a sort of a dark indie feel to it. A line in the movie affirmed a thought I've had about the internet that I've long been carrying in my mind and I made a mental note to blog about it.  It slipped my memory & only resurfaced a couple of weeks ago when a blogger friend made a short post about the movie.  I guess this post will not be as short.

"When  you  post  something  on  the internet, it's  not written  in  pencil  Mark, it's written in permanent ink..." 

These words were thrown by Erica Albright to the lead character, Mark Zuckerberg, who recently trashed her on his blog immediately after she broke off with him.  Mark's post contained stuff that are not much different from the things we read, see or hear on the 'local' net such as those about Manny Pacquiao and his indiscretions many many months ago, or the Hayden bedroom videos even earlier, or the recently resurrected audio clip of the foul-mouthed Filipina balikbayan calling the Citibank call center. 

How are the examples that I cited different from each other?  Well, anyone's guess is as good as mine on the veracity of the first one.  The second has been confirmed as true, even by the courts.  The last may well just be a fabrication of an overly active (and negative, not to mention, ksp) mind.  How are they then similar?  Just like Mark's blog about Erica, all three are destructive.  All three were written in permanent ink and has left indelible marks, not only on the subjects of the material but also on the thousands or even millions who read, watched or heard them.  In the cyberworld, we are not only what we post (or repost).  We are also what we read, watch and hear.

The internet is such a vast and wonderful venue for the exchange of data, information, ideas and opinions.  It's like one giant library.  One big difference though is that the conventional library is properly catalogued and sectioned under specific categories such as History, Autobiography or Fiction.  The internet is not.  It is where fact may sometimes be difficult to distinguish from fiction, where information can be clouded by opinion, where gossip and rumors can be peddled as truth.  True, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing... especially if it comes from the mass media, including the internet. 

Indeed, the keyboard  has now become mightier than the pen, even mightier than the sword...  The power of the written word cannot be more apparent than on the internet.  Its readership knows no bounds, no time zones or border lines.  Almost everything is accessible to nearly everyone.  It's one big marketplace.  What proliferates is what sells.  What sells is what proliferates.  Can you be proud to show what's in your basket?