Real men don't have abs

Untitled, Jalisco, Mexico, June 2007.

Hay!Men! Ang blog ng mga tunay na lalaki (Hy!Men! The blog of real men) had me ROFL today that I just had to share it.

This photo blog from the Philippines is is a catalog of what makes a man a real man; more precisely, a real Filipino man. What a real man eats (anything made with violence, e.g., tilapia from dynamite fishing); a real man's job (jeepney driver, congressman); a real man's furniture (double bunk bed); a real man's drink (Robitussin DM); a real man's toilet (fancy shopping mall, and he won't flush).

The blog passes judgment on the manliness of famous people (and things): real man (Chairman Mao); not a real man (Bono, because real men don't use guitars as props); under consideration: (God the Father, because an omnipresent god can be in your ass and a real man will never be in anyone's ass).

Opinionated and tongue-in-cheek (although a real man will never admit to that), Hay!Men! is a hilarious and knowing look at the very many quirks of Filipinos.

Here's the Real Men Manifesto, according to Hay!Men! The original is in Tagalog so a lot is lost in translation:

1. Real men don't sleep.

2. Real men don't text back except to get free load. And when they do, you still won't know what they're saying.

3. Real men always ask for more rice.

4. Real men are not vegetarian.

5. Real men don't have abs.

6. Real men don't dance.

7. Real men will admit they are wrong only to other real men.

8. Real men always have skid marks in their underwear.

9. Real men don't wash dishes or clean their rooms; women do that for them. Real men become even more of a real man if they don't know the woman or can't remember her name.

10. Real men don't go to church.

This graphic world

Zoe in the madding crowd, San Francisco, April 2007.

These are my favorite images from Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi masterpiece. The movie is set in Los Angeles in the year 2019, a mere 10 years from today. In Ridley Scott's vision of the future, Los Angeles has become a Babel-like city of foreign noises, more East Asian than American, a city on the verge of sensory overload. Talking electronic billboards loom like IMAX screens against the night sky, their advertising relentless like the rain and the darkness.

Eliminate the shuttle crafts from Blade Runner's hypergraphic world, and you're in present-day Times Square on a rainy night. Or Mumbai with its wall-to-wall Bollywood posters plastered all over the city. Or Causeway Bay, Hong Kong's maddening shopping district. Along Manila's highways, mammoth billboards of models in their underwear create havoc on the road by obstructing the views of drivers and distracting their libidos.

Cities have become canvases; and like a Jackson Pollock painting, every square inch of space is taken. High above skyscrapers, down on the street, further down subway stations, on walls, buses, and lampposts, cities inundate us with graphics and light, competing for our ADD-addled attention.

The images plead to us: to look, to read, to buy, to swoon, to vote, to enlist, to engage, to enrage, to copy, to care, to believe.

They belong to our reality but transport us out of it. A mad hour dash to the commuter train becomes a confrontation with armed men and a lost child in war-ravaged Darfur. A bus blocks the crosswalk, and six larger-than-life marines in parade dress appear and disappear. In that flashing moment, the martial image transports us into the realm of patriotic duty and an unpopular war. Without a doubt, the daily barrage of graphic images can be unsettling, but we can't escape from them. We see them everywhere, we step on them, they even invade our dreams.

Still it is not enough that we must plaster an entire city -- and everything that moves in it -- with graphics and messages. People themselves are compelled to put messages on their clothing. This, to me, is just silly behavior. Like satirist Fran Lebowitz said: "If people don’t want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?"

Tropical cowboys

Philippine movie lobby card, Alamat ng Pitong Kilabot (Legend of the Deadly Seven), 1969.

We interrupt this blog to talk about Philippine cowboy movies, the most enduring movie genre in my country. That there are practically no cowboys in our tropical island nation is beside the point. We Filipinos love our John Wayne; more precisely, we love our version of him -- suited and gloved in spite of the sweltering humidity, heroic against the palm trees.

The Philippines is unlike any other country in Asia. Unlike our neighbors, our culture is Latino in spirit and American in most everything else, the legacy of a colonial past that can be summed up as 300 years in a Spanish convent and 50 years in Hollywood. The movie still on the left, from a wildly popular 1967 tearjerker, may well be a scene from Carmen. But the movie is unabashedly Filipino. And so, for that matter, are our tropical cowboys.

Actors who played cowboys are some of the most beloved celebrities in the Philippines. And like beloved celebrities everywhere, they become politicians. The mounted actor on the right (second from left) became the 13th president of the Philippines (1998-2001). He was ousted from office before he could finish his term, convicted of plundering in 2007, sentenced to at least 40 years of imprisonment, and pardoned a month later. He has signified his intention to run for president again in 2010. And perhaps indicative of our people's all-forgiving love for actors who played cowboys, he is ranking highly in the electoral polls.

A note about these pictures: They are part of a cache of movie lobby cards that my brother-in-law rescued from a dumpster in South San Francisco. Most of the pictures are from movies that were made in the 1960s and 1970s, the movies I grew up watching on television. I know the names of every actor in these pictures by heart, and that includes the villains and their sidekicks. Sure, they look a bit loopy now with their cowboy hats, turtle necks (!) and bow ties, but back then they were my action heroes.

Covering Tehran

INTERVIEW LINK


Newsha Tavakolian, a 28-year old photojournalist for Polaris Images, took the spectacular photo above of Mir Hussein Moussavi and his supporters last Tuesday. Tavakolian, a Tehran native, has been covering the brewing maelstrom in her city while riding a motorbike. She talks via email to Lens, the New York Times photography blog, about her work and the challenges of documenting the demonstrations.

Defiance

Anti-war protest, San Francisco, March 2008.



It remains to be seen whether or not the escalating protests in Tehran will ultimately overturn the outcome of the controversial elections, and change the power structure in Iran. As news and images of the demonstrations unfold virally in blogs and Twitter and Youtube, the world is held spellbound by the people's phenomenal display of defiance -- the same people who have been conditioned to acquiesce for almost three decades, and who now anxiously await the response of a regime that is unaccustomed to dissent. One thing is certain: futile or victorious, the demonstrations in Tehran will find an important place among the epoch-changing civil protests in modern history.

Defiance, as seen from the lenses of great photojournalists:

Marc Riboud captured the essence of the peace movement in this photograph from the 1967 anti-war demonstration in Washington, DC, that altered the public's perception of US involvement in Indo-China.

In the Spring of 1968, Paris was a combat zone and the country found itself on the brink of revolution. What began in the month of March as sporadic student protests in the city's universities escalated to other sectors of the city. By May, 15 million workers were on general strike, hundreds of factories were shut down, government buildings were seized, and students from all over the country marched in solidarity with the workers in protests marked by rioting and police action. Sweeping reforms, notably in minimum wage rates, were enacted by De Gaulle to quell the insurgency; by early June, the strikes ended, order was restored, and dreams of revolution were subverted.

In June 1989, 2600 Chinese demonstrators were killed in Tiananmen Square, the bloody outcome of a series of pro-democracy demonstrations that started in April in the form of student protests to commemorate reformist Hu Yaobang. As the protests and mass sit-ins grew in number, the government responded by declaring martial law on May 20. On June 3rd, the military was ordered to retake the Square at all costs. More than 10,000 students confronted the armed troops, resulting in one of the bloodiest massacres in recent memory.

On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King proclaimed to the world that he had a dream. The forum for that historic address was a rally in Washington, DC, attended by 300,000 people, a watershed event for black civil rights that has come to be known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

The rally was a cry for equality and opportunity by African-Americans. Malcolm X famously called the rally a farce, underscoring sharp divisions within the black community at the time. But no one can undermine the importance of the march as an impetus to unprecedented civil rights reforms in America. The years that follow saw the passing of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the National Voters Act (1965).

Defiance can be as much about social change as it is about political change. This 1972 photograph by Leonard Freed shows a demonstration during the incipient stages of the post-suffrage feminist movement. Called into action by Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, women across the country took to the streets demanding equal rights, equal pay, and more importantly, a re-examination of the role of women in society.

In my native country, the Philippines, civil protest in 1986 turned to nonviolent revolution, ending the 21-year dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. The seeds of discontent scattered in 1983 following the assassination of opposition senator Ninoy Aquino, whose wife, Cory, assumed the reins of power after the revolution. Protests in Manila, as seen in the photograph by Susan Meiselas, oftentimes assumed an air of festivity as workers showered the streets with yellow confetti. Confetti served as stand-ins for the yellow ribbons in the pop song "Tie a Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Old Oak Tree," the song Aquino supporters appropriated as an anthem to welcome the former senator back from exile, a homecoming that turned fatal.

Finally, back to Tehran. In 1979, at the crest of the revolution that would bring fundamentalist Islamic regimes into power, David Burnett photographs an anti-Shah demonstrator, his hands covered with the blood of a fallen comrade on the day before the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini from exile.

Gunfire in Tehran


Tehran photos from The New York Times.
Marc Riboud, Washington DC, 2967.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, ruie de Lyon, mai 1968.
Claude-Raimond Dityvon, boulevard Saint-Michel, 23 mai 1968.
Gilles Caron, rue Saint-Jacques, 10 Juin 1968.
Stuart Franklin, Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1989.
Leonard Freed, March on Washington, August 28, 1963 (detail).
Leonard Freed, March on Washington, August 28, 1963.
Leonard Freed, Feminist demonstration, New York City, 1972.
Susan Meiselas, Remnants of political posters. Manila, Philippines, 1986.
Susan Meiselas, Manila, Philippines, 1983.
David Burnett, Tehran, Iran, January 1979.

A balancing act

Untitled, Malecon, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, June 2007.

Along the boardwalk of Puerto Vallarta's malecon (literally, a pier), on a narrow stretch of beach, you will find these young men when the winds are calm and the tourists are aplenty, balancing rocks on top of stones. They do this feat of marvel for the tourists' coins and cameras, but anyone who observes carefully can tell that they are also doing it for themselves. They're competing; and the rivalry is fierce and palpable: to pile higher, to balance larger on top of smaller, to make it stick. They check each other out, oblivious to the crowd, clutching a rock using both hands with laserlike focus. It seems like an eternity, but when they finally release their grip on a rock, it remains standing on its tip like a ballerina's foot on pointe.


The malecon dons the air of a fiesta on weekends when the locals come out to stroll along the pier, mingle with tourists, and watch all sorts of performers vie for the attention of the crowds. A few feet away from the rock balancers, a troupe of Huichol Indians who call themselves Flying Birdmen, spin like a carnival ride across the air as they are slowly lowered to the ground by wires attached to an 80-foot pole. The spectacle, supervised by a flute-playing shaman, is derived from a Huichol ritual and is meant to symbolize the meeting of heaven and earth. Elsewhere on this festive block, musicians play traditional folk songs; a mime performs in a small sunken amphitheater near the beach; and a group of young girls watch everything transpire from a narrow stone footbridge over the canal, which is the best seat in the house.

On the walk back to the sentro, we pass the rock balancers who are still at it. Their handiwork lines the beach like monoliths from Easter Island. Even as the late afternoon wind blows through the pier and the waves hit the shore a little harder than before, the rocks remain glued to each other without a wiggle.

It says a lot about the grace of a community when its residents can gather together in festive spirit. Festivity, like religious ritual (of which Puerto Vallarta has many), keeps the balance in a community; it gives its people respite from reality so they don't topple over.

Flying Huichol Birdmen

What do you hang on the walls of your mind?

American photographer Eve Arnold asked herself that question.

These would hang in mine, the works of my favorite Flickr friends. For the most part, the pictures included here are the ones that introduced me to their work. Different styles, all. What they have in common are sensitivity, lyricism, and grace. What would you hang on the walls of your mind?


1.China Rules!, 2. Self Discovery, 3. Untitled, 4. Gulliver, 5. MoNtErA, 6. Annecy, 7. DSC_9689, 8. no, 9. *, 10. Non ritorno, 11. *, 12. Ogliastra, 13. Street sellers, 14. Room, 15. Pierrot #1, 16. Death in her Hands, 17. Untitled, 18. Località S. Francesco, 19. Modeling Fall Fashions at Richland, Declassified, 20. Untitled, 21. Secret time, 22. quiet before the storm, 23. Almost self-portrait :D, 24. My Youngest, 25. Untitled, 26. Euridice, 27. Danza che ti passa, 28. El Cristo del Volley, 29. sainte lucie au centre culturel suédois, 30. Le Quesnoy, 31. In a different light, 32. ride or die, 33. ali 6/8/07, 34. Untitled, 35. eventually, 36. 20060812 - Weekend


1. santa_cecilia, 2. Untitled, 3. Those footsteps, deep into the silence, 4. cigarette vendor, 5. Untitled, 6. Scapular, San Roque, 7. artherosclerosis, 8. Before Breakfast 79 of 120, 9. black snow, 10. bubbles, 11. flavor safari, 12. Lewis Carroll Try, 13. boxe, 14. Untitled, 15. Orchids, 16. Grail, 17. Sagada, Mt. Province, 18. isolation, 19. Mom / Мама, 20. Untitled, 21. NOTHIN' AGAIN GRANDPA ?, 22. The Fist Project -- Unity is Within Everyone, 23. inked_photograph, 24. Engot Under The Bed, 25. Modern romance, 26. hair, 27. County Fair - 159th Year, 28. Mayo Uno Labor Day Rally, 29. I suoni delle Dolomiti // Dolomiti sounds, 30. Me. My back. Long story., 31. Shells on the beach, 32. Untitled, 33. rockclimber, 34. Tongue tied, 35. *, 36. Galleri