20090717

Dear darlingest Miyang,

I saw the 6th movie installment to J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series of books and only one word comes to mind to sum up the whole experience - abrupt. Each of the last five movie installments treated the whole Harry Potter story like they were complete stories within themselves so you could walk away feeling almost completely satisfied. But this last one really left you hanging for the 7th and final installment. It was great fun - shocking, sweet, dark and funny - always with that sense of refinement that only the British could genuinely produce. Take the I.T. Crowd and Red Dwarf for example - not to mention the original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I loved it.

Movies and Free Choice

Movies, my love, can be many things. For the imagination of Man can be many things. You know, I remember some years ago that there were some concern within my Holy Mother Church about the whole Harry Potter concept. And since the Roman Catholic Church does not get concerned about anything just willy-nilly, it is always a good exercise to try and get to understand if not the concern itself, the reason behind the thinking to let caution rule the hearts of the Laity. For the plain and simple reason that a Mother shall and never will wish for any of her children any ill.

Now, my point is that this doesn't necessarily mean that we have to divide ourselves bitterly for and/or against each other. It only means that we must be guided by what good there is for all of this is a reflection that there is indeed, evil sufficient for us in our days.

My own personal viewpoint is that there is nothing wrong with my Mother Church for her sense of maternal concern nor is there anything wrong with the Harry Potter series for its wonderful and innovative imagination.

But there is something there that can not be lost in between which must be an evil repaired amongst ourselves but not for evil's own sake. For where ever the will of Divine Providence allows any evil to tarry, there must likewise always be a unifying and ascendant good that must be recognized, understood and addressed so that the work of creation may advance as it should.

Indeed, there is a re-evangelization that should work to rekindle the flame in the hearts of all of blessed Christendom and I would that this labor begins within my own Roman Church.

Movies can be many things, my darlingest dear, but one thing movies can not be, they can not fail to represent something that is of ours - for the human imagination can be many things but all these things can only be human things and they are vast and almost limitless things, indeed.

I believe that movies are the product of many worker's crafts and elevated to an art, they represent something that is a reflection of every present society. And in the case of the Harry Potter films, our own present society.

Now, this reflection might need some degrees of interpretation and it is from this labor of understanding that movies become the object of judgment. Granted there are movies that do need to be censured - most especially pornographic ones - to protect the social consciousness of any civil society.

But a vast majority of them must depend on the moral grounding of the audience themselves because a lot of it is entertainment therefore, all of it has got to do with making choices.

This is the way it should be, we go to the movies to be entertained (save for documentaries or historical films that we see to be informed). The problem begins when one mixes up reality with entertainment and entertainment with reality for it is then when fantasy and truth intermingle, that our own world become vulnerable to things other than truth and time.

Indeed, the labor of the entertainment industry, like all labors in this world, must also hold to a sense of responsibility that is in keeping with how we must keep to each other as keeper and as friend. But how we consume their product by and large, most especially so in the new age that we, as one family of nations, are presently trying to correctly enter into, is solely up to the nameless masses.

It is like smoking cigarettes - it is the demand and not the supply that ultimately drives the need that tobacco companies understandably feel they need to responsibly fill in the common market.

And in our world of today, just like in every world of their own day, there is always a need for good and wholesome entertainment - for play.

In the end, each of us shall always remain the owner of our own free and human choices for no one else can make our own choices for us and shifting the blame is not the reason time is a flow.

Movie Piracy

It is very tempting indeed even for me to just go and spend 100 pesos on three pirated DVD's instead of paying 130 pesos to go and see a movie usually only once.

But I have made my own personal commitments to people I have decided to be my friends and I do not make these commitments lightly.

And let me please say that though I make seldom mention of it (for I do not get a lot of chances to do so these days), I completely support our own local movie business over here as well. How can I not? They are also part of the reason why I chose to make this commitment not to support movie piracy at all times and at all levels.

I know that I speak much about what might be seen here as foreign films like Harry Potter but this is all a part of my own upbringing (for I am a product of my own time) which I have come to accept in myself and which I shall not speak about in this entry.

But fast forward all of those painful and confusing years of adolescent and young adult formation and the value of Universality becomes the manifest result of all of this in myself.

For I have worked long and hard over the years in myself with you, my loveliest love, to be able to reconcile past with present so as to bring all of my hopes forward into my own timeless sense of sacred remembrance - suffice to say, I view things very differently now than I used to before.

Not to say that I am anything more than what I am, a human being, but as a Roman Catholic Christian, I must always be willing to work the work to become the best at who I am, despite what I am, in the vision that our LORD sees in me and this work takes up all of our natural life.

And so I have pondered much on the problem of movie piracy here in the Philippines as well as what good we need to be able to bring out from our modern movie culture as well. My response to it is called "Twilight Pawprints" and it still has a long ways to go.

This issue of movie piracy, if we fast forward it - like all false economies - will dry up the particular industry that it is preying after. Allowed to continue, it will drive costs and will hold the real economy hostage. But this issue is more complex than that for there are vulnerable people who are also caught up in it. There are people who are just trying to get something to eat from out of it and they are most certainly not guilty of anything.

In my own view, the only way of even beginning to sort this problem out must be done through the right understanding and with the complete cooperation of all sectors concerned.

Movies are a part of our modern culture which means it has deep roots and false economies are always concerned with the exploitation of any of our many human vulnerabilities (manifest as those common human needs) which means it is always more difficult than what the surface of things indicates. Therefore, an overly simple or easy solution as regards to this specific problem would be a sure indicator of a false solution or a lack of will to solve the problem itself.

But I have too much of an appreciation for pretty cats (and you know it, my loveliest love) to be lacking of will and too much appreciation for friendships to not want those things that hurt my friends to not go away - for good. So I continually ponder these things, I pray about them and then I place them in the care of my own hopes for a better world. And I would like to please say that this is a good start for any of those other hearts just as willing as mine to see these evil days through to the good that we all desire to attain.

Human Rights

I have a note on my agenda today about human rights. There is an intimate bond between authentic human freedom and human rights. And this I will try to raise in the second part of the work on Women's Rights which I am still working on at the moment. It just needs some more proofreading and editing.
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I love you, my darlingest Mrrrowley.

Always to always,

Pusing

P.S.

Michael Jackson

I still find it hard to believe that Michael Jackson is gone, you know. My first awakenings to the wonderful music of our world were sung by the sound of his songs, you know. I was 11 or 12.

One never really misses a person until that person is passed away from this reality. It's like having family overseas so most Filipinos know this - one really doesn't grieve about distance nor profoundly long for the beloved because of any temporal separation.

What really hurts our hearts is absence and the lack of that certain nearness which we as human beings almost always find reassuring in the ordinary physical sense of being able to share in the same reality with the beloved but which we must now struggle to find in each ourselves once again with the beloved, recast under a different sky as the reality of our lives and our loves together must continue, as all stories told by an eternal Mind should, upon unseen realms ruled by the one, sublime, spiritual Light.

My uncle who spent decades over in the States who also just recently passed away feels exactly the same way. What is left here with us is their hope which we must know to carry on and the implicit knowledge that all the good things they have done, these things will always remain long after our very last tears have been shed.
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