Blasts from the Past

The Internet generously caters to our whims—for one, allowing us to re-inhabit the past and stay there as much as we want.

Take the case of AIMP, a freeware audio player for Windows and Android, which features player skins—from Akai to JVC to Kenwood to Sony—even Telefunken Magnetophon 77, which you just probably saw in an old movie—brands of hi-fi systems paraded around in the 1980s up to the 1990s as prized possessions.

In those days, these sound systems or what they simply called ‘component’, along with the still-tube TV sets, were the centerpiece of the houses of the working and middle class.

Alagad kun kaidto, pagtitipunan mo an arog kaining klase nin patugtog—ngonyan, may laptop ka lang, yaon na an gabos na brands: makakapili ka pa depende kun anong kapritso mo!

Today’s technology has trivialized the fact how my own folks—uncles, cousins, brothers—and even I valued these sound systems as prized possessions or even status symbols. Now it has aggregated these household names—and features them as options to time travel to any user, as it were. 

            For one, I get to own all these in my laptop and indulge in reliving the past:

Say, when I choose Kenwood KX-800 and play Air Supply’s “Love and Other Bruises” or “Don’t Turn Me Away” I am easily effortlessly transported to Manoy’s mixed tape in the 80s right away.

How about clicking Akai GX-F90 and play Kenny Rogers’ “Islands in the Stream” and “You and I”—then I easily bring myself to my Uncle Harben’s living room where he loved to play the Kenny Rogers 1983 Bee Gees-authored vinyl the whole day?

Late last night, I picked Cassette Player 3D and played Fra Lippo Lippi’s “Stitches and Burns” and “Thief in Paradise” among their greatest hits, and so high school memories came flooding in, later engulfing the room.

One afternoon, I will click the JVC skin and play Toad the Wet Sprocket's “Walk on the Ocean” or R.E.M.'s “Losing My Religion”, then, there he would be, my cousin Jokoy whispering in my ear, praising Michael Stipe to high heavens. Nice...

This evening I will click the Sony Media Tower skin and load in my playlist Enigma’s “Sadeness, Part 1,” among many other chill-out cuts—and soon, I will return to some familiar place where I once went to, a state of mind which gives me serenity.

With all these possibilities now only at the tip of my fingers, who could have ever known that the past is never gone, that the past is rather ever-present?

 

Mutiny and the Bounty

Coming to Iloilo City in 2005, something immediately caught my attention.

Passing General Luna Street, I saw streamers and makeshift tents in front of the University of San Agustin. From friends and new acquaintances I would learn that the union employees of the university were protesting unlawful acts committed by the administration against them and their members.

For the succeeding months, I would see [and read] these streamers denouncing the administration for having been unjust to the employees who had served the university for a period of time; the streamers and protests also raised a number of other issues against the administration.

It was the first time I saw a dramatic interplay between two forces going on. I would see the same setup, up to the time the streamers became soiled and muddied that I could not read the words in them anymore, or that I found them annoying—because they would block my view of the university.

But the sight only drew my attention and scrutiny.

Once, I saw a public meeting by a number of people in front of the university gates, rallying aloud for their concerns. From other people I would learn that the strike by the employees was without basis; and that some of them were reinstated in their service to the university; and that others were relieved from service.

It was only later—in the official statement of the university published in the local papers that the facts became clearer.  The court finally denied the legality of the employees’ mobilization against the university.

Even before the court handed down its decision, a friend confided to me once how he pitied the union employees because despite legal assistance, their acts and even the subsequent measures they took were baseless, lacking ground and orientation. 

It does not require anyone to be a lawyer to understand an issue like this. It is easy to articulate how and why these things are made of, only if we were more than observant. 

For one, unrest in the labor sector might stem from people’s discontent. Administration, any status quo, for that matter, naturally defends itself because it normally conducts matters with much discretion and decorum, and utter deference to the people it serves—thus, its confidence in the manner of doing things is simply effortless.

Meanwhile, social realities like labor unrest do not fail to interest artists because they involve the dynamic interplay between elements in the society. 

Scenarios like this must have given inspiration to age-old masterpieces as French naturalist Emile Zola’s Germinal, a turn-of-the-century novel about the miners’ unrest against their employers in a French coalmine. The same reminds me of Mike de Leon’s Sister Stella L., a film which looms large in the social realist genre.

Artists, writers, film directors, and people of similar occupations can consider the subject for a more incisive study, so they can later put forth something from which people can learn and be inspired further.

Such experiences merit a more incisive introspection, a careful study that renders more truth. 

If rendered more truthfully, their act of writing—the work itself created after having been moved, inspired or bothered by these realities—can make persons out of individuals, or turn souls out of institutions.