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.