Inspiring Words for Soon-to-Be-Graduates

My brother Jeri and I had a rare chat over YM this afternoon (midnight in Manila). Like many other seniors, he's living out hell week (or hell month) like a zombie on caffeine.

So, this video is my good luck to Jeri, Cha, and all my former students who face their final set of exams, essays, and orals this fateful week of February.

Taken from one of the most ambitious and heart-tugging (not to mention sadly short-lived) TV series ever, Jack & Bobby (The WB), here Prof Grace McAllister addresses students at the beginning of their schoolyear. And she talks about fear and failure, taking chances, and embracing new beginnings. I'd say it's the type of speech that will keep you going, whatever you're doing, wherever you may be in life.



Once again, this simply demonstrates that 'death and life are in the power of the tongue'.

V for Vivienne

(published in The Philippine Star, 22 Feb 2008)


The day before Valentine’s, I got an unexpected call from my fellow PhD here at Cambridge Benedetta inviting me to meet Vivienne Westwood the following day. “Omigod, yes! I’m free on Valentine’s!” “That’s great! I’ll meet you at 6!” “I’ll be there! Vivienne is a designer, right?”
(Now it’s understandable if you, dear reader, would stop right here and switch to another article more worthy of your attention. This is a fashion page, after all. But I ask in the name of Miranda Priestley to give this Andy Sacks a chance.)

After a talking down from Benedetta, who also happens to be a journalist from Milan, she told me that she had backstage passes for London fashion week, and among all her “other” PhD friends (read: awkward, nerdy, unbathed), she thought I was most worthy to pretend that I’m her producer for CNBC Italia. V-day aside, she had me at London fashion week. I may not know my designers, but I’d like to believe that I know good clothes and fun people.

We got to the venue and produced our ID tags. I was warned that there would likely be goodie bags, but unfortunately they had none. The burly bouncer simply pointed us to the press entrance and then a Vivienne Westwood PR lady escorted us backstage.

Now I had been backstage in TV productions before, but I had never been to one of a fashion show. And already I could spot two major differences: 1) the clothes, honey, are simply gorgeous, like real pieces of art even limp in their bony hangers — the antithesis to the padded, sparkly gowns I had seen in our variety shows. Heck, security people were even patrolling the rows of clothes racks! And, 2) Unlike those that I was used to in my TV/ad agency days, the buffet table had an (over)abundance of food — from tuna sandwiches to Perrier to Disarono Amaretto liqueur. But it took one emaciated-looking model to remind me though that, oh yeah, starvation is industry practice.

Parallel to the rows and rows of clothing was the row of blindingly bright lightbulbs of the hair-and-makeup section. Save for two or three models getting their final touch-ups, the section saw no action outside from trendy MAC people chatting up each other.

Until she arrived. Benedetta pointed me to this white old lady with flame-red hair entering from the stage door. Vivienne! I did my research beforehand, and I knew that she was famous for punk and that she was a Dame. I didn’t know how those two identities mixed, but now I do. Her outfit was grunge-y and street, with a gold necklace with peace symbols and statement-buttons adorning her top. Fierce, to say the least. She sat on a makeup chair and was instantly hounded by the select press people backstage. Benedetta started panicking when the PR person told her she was next but then her cameraman wasn’t there. So we had to run outside and look for Paolo in the photographer’s pit by the catwalk.

And then the reveal: apparently, they would need someone to reserve the prime spot that Paolo had been sitting on for the past hour while they interviewed Dame Vivienne. A true sport, I took one for the team and did the dirty job that any true producer would do. Of course it helped that I had spotted some cute and bored photographers tinkering with their wares.


In the half-hour I sat there, I managed to chat up this photographer from The Daily Telegraph. He said that Vivienne’s show was supposed to be the highlight of fashion week, as she had not participated in it for almost 10 years. Then this other guy approached me asking what time the show would start, as he couldn’t wait for the after-party. Ahem. When I introduced myself as a graduate student helping out my journalist friends, he immediately excused himself to go check on “his lenses” though.


The waiting wasn’t bad at all, especially when people started coming in. At first, it was the usual high society-ish overdressed lot that came in. But then I spotted this blindingly white girl with spiky hair in this sleek, satin red dress and realized: It’s Kelly Osbourne! I took out my camera and made my way to her while she went unnoticed by all the other photogs. She spotted me from afar, and when I came near enough she went, “Hi. My friend and I are looking for our seats. Where is B1?” At that moment, I was just thinking, it must be a compliment that she thought I was PR and not press.

This weakness of the British press in recognizing celebrities continued on for the rest of the evening. When Benedetta and Paolo came back, they saw I wasn’t camped out in their spot anymore; I had begun pointing out to the other photographers the rest of the celebrities on-hand. Impressed, Benedetta decided I should be the one to escort Paolo to hound the celebs and get their photos. We managed to get Cuba Gooding, Jr, Kyle McLachlan, and Lily Allen. There were a few other D-listers that I failed to identify. For this, I blame my PhD for taking up the brainspace of my pop culture knowledge.

When security people started glaring at us for getting in tooclose to Kyle (I had just wanted to praise him for Desperate Housewives’ resurgence in Season 4!), it was a sign that our show was about to start. Paolo took his spot by the pit, and Benedetta and I took our second row seats.

As the lights flashed and the music pumped and the first model came out in prison-orange panties with a protest placard which read, “Fair trial my arse. Justice for the prisoners of Guatanamo Bay,” I felt a sudden rush come over me. All my preconceptions of what a catwalk was all about were shattered then and there. The advertiser in me thought a catwalk as equivalent to a product launching. The pop culture geek in me thought a catwalk as a delightful D-lister congregation. The social climber in me thought a catwalk as a ticket to the inner circle. The sociologist in me thought a catwalk as a legitimation of upper-class cultural capital. And the “guy” in me thought a catwalk as something incomprehensible, like seriously, what are they wearing?

But. Epiphany. As part of the catwalk audience that night, I began to see it was something so much more. A catwalk is narrative: It is the telling and a sharing of a statement about our society, our culture, and even our politics. See the many handcuff accessories that adorned the models. A catwalk is voice: It is the communication of a person who does not “make clothes” but creates art and gives other people shared expressions of their identity, and even facilitates belonging. See Vivienne’s appropriation of counter-culture punk in some models’ half-shaved hair alongside more traditionally British Miss Marple get-up. A catwalk is signification: It is the mixing of myriad signs and symbols separately meaningless but together profound. Biker hats, military boots, ‘60s silk screen art, and short-short skirts all seem terribly random, but altogether they composed a palette that meant possibly sexy for some, over-the-top for others, or — as I saw it, in more ways than one — in your face. And finally, a catwalk is ritual: it is a high holiday that celebrates the extraordinary of what is ultimately, for each one of us, every day: clothes. On a daily basis, we put them on, we use them, we get used to them, we put them away. Catwalks would be the ceremony when we’re reminded that, yes, they come from somewhere, they are creations, they are ideas, they are identities. Appropriately enough, the evening did end with a play of identity, as the girl who opened the catwalk in her Guatanamo-orange underpants turned out to be a guy, now shirtless for all to see, perhaps released from the prison-house of identity that his clothes initially “chained” him to.

And with that, the night ended. I said goodbye to my friends, who then had to rush off to edit their piece for immediate broadcast. While I had to skip the after-party to take the train back home, I thought Vivienne made an excellent Valentine’s date. Perhaps it’s time to wear those prison-bracelets and punkify my Cambridge gown.

Finally... My Approved PhD Topic

I think I've met my match in Mirca Madianou. Mirca is my brilliant and beautiful PhD supervisor of course, and she has been delightfully diligent in reading and critiquing my work. I've always thought I was a good reader myself--like, I lovelovelove editing other people's work, giving many, many comments, suggestions, words of encouragement. But then Mirca is the same thing! Unlike my other readers (cough! Jason! cough!), who sum up their comments with one or two points, Mirca notices everything. Big picture, little picture, big screen, small screen... er, oops carried away by Roger-isms. Anyway, yes, Mirca notices everything. The media anthropologist par excellence talaga.

Last term, she assigned a writing exercise that turned out to be what I consider my best work ever. But instead of a cheery reaction, I got a "it's very good, you obviously love writing... I have a few questions..." Then I ended up defending the article for over an hour while we went through it. It was a good discussion though.

And now with the PhD topic. I started with four proposals in the Abstract Idol competition: Suffering Strangers, The World in Third World Eyes, Coming Home to Media, and Children of Diaspora. Mirca picked Children of Diaspora before Christmas. Then over the new year, I changed my mind and did a fifth one: We Are the World. But then we decided to drop children altogether because Mirca foresees theoretical and methodological pitfalls. So now I'm doing Through the Eyes of Others. And after FIVE revisions--more than any I've had in any one piece of written work (excluding communications plans I've done in my past life as corporate whore)--it's finally approved. And I'm overjoyed. I can now enjoy the inexplicably early springtime in Cambridge.

So here, my friends, is the topic I'm married to for the next three-plus years of my life. It took so long for me to commit to it--dropping the children angle was painful--and be convinced by it. And when I finally did, I had to go through four rough patches. But now I have you. And I'm proud of you.

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Through the Eyes of Others: Cosmopolitanism, Media and Morality

This study seeks to examine how individuals relate with distant others in the context of media consumption. As such, it is situated within the field of media and morality, which in recent years has fanned the debate as to how the work of the media--in reflecting and refracting the world through the screens, pages, and interfaces that likewise constitute the world--is central to understanding distant peoples, distant cultures, distant events. The cosmopolitan orientation of recognizing the Other as paradoxically different from us and same as us (Silverstone 2006) has been sought by scholars in spectacles of suffering (Chouliaraki 2006), disaster marathons (Tester 2001), and mediated conflict (Cottle 2006), among others. But while this moral-ethical 'turn' in media studies has given us a critical new vocabulary by which to critique the media and its routinized, stereotypical, and exoticized representations of otherness, little scholarship has dwelt on how exactly audiences make use of these representations in their everyday life. So while scholars analyze texts in arguing whether the media provide audiences with an enlarged, cosmopolitan mentality or leave them helpless with compassion fatigue, dialogue with audiences--in their creativity, diversity, and unpredictability--has been minimal. Roger Silverstone's forceful question 'The media may have extended reach, but have they extended understanding?' is, after all, not simply rhetorical; it is a question that can only be answered by talking with users, consumers, viewers, listeners, and publics at home engaging, or perhaps disengaging, with the world through their media.

In this light, this dissertation employs a bottom-up approach in examining how individuals express perceptions of otherness in relation to images that they encounter in the media. How do individuals define 'us' and 'them' in their reception of news about suffering others, or even fiction films about marginalized groups? Between broadcasts of a disaster in the West or the non-West, how do audiences express notions of guilt, pity, and responsibility? Furthermore, the study aims to examine the links between media discourse, individuals’ everyday discourse, and individuals’ practices and actions. How do individuals with various kinds of mobility and transnational connections get involved with peoples of other cultures in their media-related practices? Are people more willing to donate to telethons in their home countries or regions? How do labor migrants exposed to a variety of global, local, transnational, and national media ‘think or act beyond the local’ (Pollock et al, 2000) as compared to rural workers with more restrictive media diets? Here I wish to examine the media’s tenuous double economy of freedom and constraint, as it enables or disables moral responsibility for the Other depending on the quality of representation.

This study gains even greater relevance in the primary site of investigation: the Philippines. While much theorization has been made in relation to how Western publics are interpellated into a position of we-ness by the 'global' media, it is crucial to reverse the angle of spectator-/scholar-ship and see the world through the eyes of others. As non-Western people are routinely represented by the global media, it is important to ask how they themselves see their ‘others’, who they are, and how they develop feelings of care, trust, or fear towards them. As Filipino families are greatly affected by the material and symbolic flows of migration, with 11% of the population living abroad, stories about the globe and its many ‘others’ feed the national imagination. As such, it is crucial to look at how they negotiate the ever-shifting boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’. For example, in what occasions do they see themselves as part of the CNN public or the Al-Jazeera public? And how do their media talk and media practices make them reflect on what it means to be Filipino and at the same time ‘citizen of the world’? Cosmopolitanism then becomes an important analytical tool for this study, as I pay close attention to how forms of solidarity and sociality are enabled or disabled in the context of mediation. And cosmopolitanism—imagined as idealistic and utopian, but empirically many and discrepant (Clifford 1998; Beck 2006)--deserves its own examination outside Western spaces for it to live up to its vision after all. By comparing Filipinos living in Manila (urban), Davao (rural), and London (1st- and 2nd-generation migrants), we examine how different cosmopolitanisms can exist in multiply mediated contexts of asymmetry and responsibility.

Cambridge Media Seminar

Hello, UK readers! :) We hope that you can come and support the first (and only) Media Seminar this year! While we may come from different backgrounds/disciplines and have various research interests, it is perhaps significant to reflect on the media and its centrality to everyday experience. Our capacity or incapacity to make sense of politics, economics, culture--really, our selves and others--depends as much on the media and how it enables or disables reach and understanding.

We hope to see you all as active audiences on the 21st! :)

CAMBRIDGE MEDIA SEMINAR presents

New Media Audiences: Recent Anthropological Research
A Public Lecture by John Postill (Sheffield Hallam University)

SPS Seminar Room, Free School Lane
21 February, Thursday, 500-630PM

*Mobile phone porn in Indonesia*
*YouTube street performers in Madrid*
*Backyard wrestling in the USA*

Media anthropologist John Postill, Senior Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University and author of _Media and Nation-Building: How the Iban Became Malaysian_, presents a fascinating talk on recent anthropological studies of audiences' creative consumption of media in everyday life. He discusses recent trends such as ICT domestication research, audience construction by TV producers, and mobile media audiences, and relates these to ongoing efforts to theorise media as practice. His lecture draws partly on work to be published in his co-edited volume _Theorising Media and Practice_.

This talk will prove to be relevant to those interested in media studies, internet research, social anthropology, cultural sociology, cultural geography, among others.

Entrance is free!

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(image copyright tatambatatam)
(to my Ateneo audience, yep, this is no MediaTalk@admu, but this would hafta do. For now.)