Burgers, bubbly and blogging
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending one of the most unique launches I can remember. Let’s start with the lunch menu: McDonald’s burgers and champagne. The venue was a cavernous restaurant called Republic in the huge Resorts World complex across Terminal 3. The guests tended to fall into one or more of three general categories: theater and music, the media, and the bloggerati (aka people who write about their lives or the lack of it online). In the center of the room, where the buffet table would normally be, was a row of laptops; at the far end was a large screen on which something was bound to happen and it did.
Threading all these elements together was the man who soon occupied center stage to welcome us all—the veteran theater, concert and events director Freddie Santos, who had gathered his closest friends and associates for the launching of what he called his “blography,” the online, serialized version of what could have been a standard autobiography between two covers. Drawing on nearly four decades of his work directing live performances of every variety, Freddie had decided to commit his memories and their embedded lessons to the World Wide Web indeed, just about as live a medium as anything today. Titled “Direksions: Life Blogs of a Live Director” (www.direkfreddie.com), Freddie’s project defies even our expectations of a regular blog.
As he puts it in his intro, “I’m no book writer so to try and write down these memories in book or biography form would be way too daunting for me. Neither am I into blogging, which, as I understand blogging to be, is more of a journal of events as they happen. However, I do like the casualness of a blog and, since this could be considered a biography of sorts, I’ve decided to make this effort a Blography… casual writings of life memories as they come to mind.”
Well, casual yes and no. While there’s a delightful candor and spontaneity in the entries (I arrived from Arvada at the age of 17 brimming over with aspiration and opinion … not always a great combination. I expected to become a star, IMMEDIATELY. I mean, didn’t this country realize how fantastic, how astronomical a star I could be?! No. Oh.), the design of the “blography” itself is the most comprehensive and deliberate you’ll ever see in a blog site. Instead of writing about life at random, Freddie has mapped out the entire terrain of his professional life, covering all the groups and personalities he’s worked with, leaving titles as placeholders to be fleshed out when he finds the time.
At the launch, we saw the barest skeleton of this grand design. Today, it’s begun to acquire more body and shape, and true to his many talents, Freddie has even provided a voice track just in case you’d rather hear than read him as well as eyebrow-raising German and Spanish versions of the page. A blog entry about growing up in Cebu moves from a map of the place to a YouTube outtake from the 1945 Frederic Chopin film bio A Song to Remember and Grace Moore as Cio-Cio-san, early but powerful influences on his impressionable senses. If this is a preview of things to come, then we’ll be looking not only at Freddie Santos’ life but a multimedia history of Philippine musical theater.
Oddly enough, while we greeted each other warmly like old friends, Freddie and I had never personally met before. I’m sure that given the 500-plus shows he’s directed and the fact that we’re about the same age, and that I love musicals I would’ve seen a Freddie Santos opus or two. But it’s a fact of theater life that you hardly ever get to see or to know the director although you will, now, with this blography.
Freddie and I have been corresponding for years I as a columnist and he as a faithful reader and commentator. This blog of his makes the reverse possible, and I look forward to more fascinating entries soon from Direk Freddie.
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Some friends couldn’t keep from ribbing me about my new toy, the iPad, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. Did I really need it? Did it really improve any aspect of my writing or my social life?
Of course not, I said. It’s pure extravagance, a gift to myself at age 56, which requires no excuse or explanation, other than pleasure and convenience. Anyone who says he can’t live without an iPad is, as far as I’m concerned, a liar we did, and we can. But then again, if you can live with one, why not?
So far, after about a month of carrying it around, I’ve found that I’ve been using it for a few basic things: as storage for my digitized class readings, getting around the need to bring my thick, printed reader to class; as an e-book reader, through which I’ve already read more books in a month than I have in years; as a movie viewer, for those long rides to Makati or out of town; as a Skype machine, for calling my daughter and sister in the States; as a world radio and TV set, allowing me to listen to Broadway musicals 24/7 or to National Public Radio, or to watch the Poker Channel and British ITN TV on the road; and as a magazine and newspaper reader, for all the free news and features you can download. On top of these, of course, it does most of the other things my laptop (which is increasingly becoming my desktop) does e-mail, surfing, and photo and music libraries.
Very recently, the iPad App Store came out with a free application called Flipboard, a virtual magazine covering everything from hard news to arts and culture, sports, and technology. Flipboard is probably the best example of what the iPad can truly be useful for as a portable, readable, and essentially free (well, post-hardware) carrier and updater of vital and interesting information online.
Flipboard also integrates your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Not that it matters to me, because this is where I draw the digital line, just beyond my blog no Facebook and no Twitter for me, because I’ve also realized that, the older I get, the more misanthropic I tend to be. I’d like to have the world at my fingertips, but I don’t want the world to find me.
It’s a strange world, indeed, where you can blog to all humanity about what a private person you are.
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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.
