NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

I wrote a column for the Marianas Variety titled "Sympathy for the Taotaomo'na" a while back, it provided an overview of different beliefs about Guam's particular brand of spiritual phenomena and how most people may need to expand their understanding of them. For most on the island, taotaomo'na are ghost stories. When you start talking about them, people begin to get intrigued, to get frightened, hairs on their body begin to stand up. For me it is very interesting that when Destination Truth visited Guam years ago almost everyone hated the show they produced. They were here for a few days, met with people, filmed in the jungles, at beaches, in Tumon. While they were here they seemed to those I spoke to friendly, nice and understanding. People were almost universally irritated and appalled when they saw the Guam Zombie episode they created. The idea that taotaomo'na were somehow zombies made sense to people. It was disrespectful and ignorant. We watched the

I have a weird fascination with movies that people generally don't like. I've never found anyone else for example who enjoyed the film The Postman directed by Kevin Costner from the book by David Brin. In the spectrum of what makes a movie enjoyable or likeable a film like The Postman, seems to fall inbetween the crack of everything. You can like movies because it connects with something in you, because everyone else likes it, because so many people say it is great. You can hate it because it offends you, bores you, is just plan stupid or terrible. Interestingly enough when something reaches the point where its meaning is too assured, that is precisely when your response may end up on the opposite end of the spectrum. If a movie is too poorly put together, it can become charming, unique, silly, bad in a good way, etc. The Postman, which tells the story of how certain symbols of daily modern life, such as mail, play an inspiring role in rebuilding communities aft

In the film The Matrix, the Agent Smith played by Hugo Weaving holds a short, but memorable philosophical session with his captive, resistance fighter Morpheus. He tells him about the first versions of the Matrix that were created in order to keep the imprisoned human population occupied while their energies were siphoned from them like batteries. In the early versions of the Matrix everything was perfect. It was like paradise, free of conflict and problems. It was a perfect world. That perfection is what made it impossible for humans to accept, and so when confronted with this perfect world humans rejected it wholesale and so those early versions of the Matrix were total failures. So instead of having the Matrix make people happy and give them a perfect world, the machines decided to give them a world similar to what they already knew. Imperfect, full of struggle, pain, loneliness, doubt and rejection. People accepted this and the Matrix continued to functi

I've seen Slavoj Zizek use the example of "the red ink" many times over the years in many books. Interesting to see him now use it to describe what the Occupy movement is attempting to describe.  ************************** Published on Tuesday, April 24, 2012 by The Guardian/UK Occupy Wall Street: What Is To Be Done... Next? How a protest movement without a program can confront a capitalist system that defies reform by Slavoj Žižek What to do in the aftermath of the Occupy Wall Street movement, when the protests that started far away – in the Middle East, Greece, Spain, UK – reached the center, and are now reinforced and rolling out all around the world? In a San Francisco echo of the OWS movement on 16 October 2011, a guy addressed the crowd with an invitation to participate in it as if it were a happening in the hippy style of the 1960s: "They are asking us what is our program

My summer ends tomorrow. It wasn't much of a summer because I had to teach the entire time and took on several other projects in order to get by, but it was nice not teaching 5 or 6 classes a week for two months. I want to celebrate the end of the summer by watching some senseless movie tonight. I was thinking of Final Destination 5 . I've always been a fan of horror and suspense movies. When I say fan I don't mean that I particularly enjoy watching them, since a lot of the time I'm watching with my glasses off or watching events out of the corner of my eye. But I am always a fan of the simple plots and narratives that horror movies employ. Like any genre there are conventions and there are attempts to break those conventions. There are ways of citing older films, attempting to break into new territories. Alot of times horror and suspense films are simply taking an experience everyone is already used to and moving it into a new location where you can do the same thing

In my Guam History class this week we’re getting to one of my favorite periods of Guam’s history, but one which my students usually don’t like hearing about. It’s the pre-war American period, from 1898-1941, where the United States controlled Guam and ran it like a Navy base, with Chamorros forced to go along for the ride. The government of Guam during this period was an autocratic Naval regime where a single man, the Naval Governor, had complete control over the island, and whatever he said, went. Most of these Naval Governors didn’t give a crap about Guam and were only here for a year or two and so didn’t do much. Lao despite that caveat, this is still a very screwed up and racist period of Guam history. One where, the racism of the United States is not some abstract thing we hear about as being conquered by Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama, but something that was literally scrubbing the tongues and policing the fields and gardens of Chamorros who are still alive today. For

In a presentation I made earlier this year, I made the interesting claim that the film X-Files: Fight the Future is a better film to identify with for conceiving and articulating indigenous resistance in the Pacific than the film Whale Rider. Naturally to alot of people, this was a wild and outlandish claim, that most wrapped their minds around, by guessing that the humans are the indigenous people and the aliens are the colonizers. In this guess however, people tended to forget that when I make strange claims such as this, I am usually situating myself within a Lacanian psychoanalytical framework. The incredible popular emphasis today on interpreting dreams and water cooler dreamwork stems from Freud's work in shifting the meaning of dreams away from both divinity and meaningless to become a link with something internal (or it could be argued depending on how you conceive of the unconscious as external) to man, a bewildering clue to his processes. Most take this as a cue to delv