NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Estaba guaha tres na manga ni' hu gof tataitai yan hu tattitiyi kada simana pat kada mes. I fine'nina "Naruto." I mina'dos "Gantz." Yan i uttimo "Berserk." Gi entre este na tres i fine'nina ma tutuhun "Berserk." I yiyinga' tumutuhun ayu gi 1990. Para Naruto matutuhun gi 1999 yan 2000 para Gantz. Lao pa'go Naruto yan Gantz esta munhayan. Makpo' Naruto gi issuen 700 (lao ma fa'tinas ensigidas un nuebu na series) yan makpo' Gantz gi issuen 383 (taya' nuebu na series para este, lao olaha mohon na guaha). Achokka' "Berserk" i mas amko', guiya i mas nateng lokkue'. Gi 25 na sakkan, matto gui' gi issuen 342 ha'. Ya guaha na biahi i yiyingga' ha fa'tinas unu na pat dos na issues gi unu na sakkan. Lao magof yu', sa' gi Fanuchan'an, put fin, ma na'huhuyong regulamente "Berserk" ta'lo. Hu diseseha na sina ma konsigi mo'na taiguini, sa' sen y

I'll be at the Sukicon this weekend at the Phoenix Center at Father Duenas school in Mangilao. I will have a bunch of interesting things to display and even some stuff to sell. Sukicon is a gathering or cosplayers, gaming nerds, anime/manga nerds and even comic book geeks. There is an artist alley and different booths by exhibitors. For me, I'll be displaying/selling the following things: 1. I'll be displaying some of my grandfather's tools. I have a nice complete set of the seven traditional tools that I'll put out, as well as some examples of the 150 year history of Chamorro blacksmithing in my family, most notably a machete that is more than 100 years old, and made by my great-grandfather Mariano Leon Guerrero Lujan (Bittot). I also have some tools that my grandfather made and one or two that I helped him make more recently. This will be interesting as I'm sure most of the people attending Sukicon think of "culture" a bit differently, as usually

I haven’t done this in a while, but I’m traveling this week and so it gives me quite a bit of down time on planes, with little to do other than get airsick. A few years ago I was watching quite a bit of anime and one thing I really enjoyed doing was taking anime theme songs, from shows like Gantz, Naruto and Cromartie High School and then translating them into Chamorro. Each translation was an interesting experiment, since although many of these shows are considered to be low-plebian culture, pop culture animated shadows on the cave wall for the masses, the lyrics to the theme songs tend to have a very epic and sophisticated feel to them.   These songs presented interesting challenges since translating them directly would be difficult and not necessarily match well with Chamorro. But finding ways of expressing similar epic thoughts in Chamorro, while trying to maintain a sense of the language would be fun and worthwhile. I still read manga regularly even if

For me, the most depressing aspect of the past US presidential campaign was the final debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. After months of trying to create stark contrasts between them, and trying to incite people to vote for them and not think of them as just being two slightly different flavors of the same soda, the façade fell fast and in an almost embarrassing fashion when the President and his challenger appeared to not only share the same talking points on foreign policy, but possibly share the same brain entirely. They looked more like long lost twins who had just found each other, rather than two distinct sides of the American ideological spectrum. This benefited Obama significantly, because Romney could not make the case that he offered something new in terms of how the US relates to the rest of the world. As a result the incumbency of Obama made him appear to be more solid, made it seem like the ideas they both supported belonged to him and

After months of nothing there are finally some new issues of Berserk.  I only read 3 mangas, Gantz, Naruto and Berserk. The other two are released regularly and are slowly moving towards their conclusions as a series. Berserk is supposed to be in a similar twilight phase, but sometimes there are months between chapters. The excitement of the plot itself has long since dissipated as the characters and the investment in the story becomes to fade in my mind since it has been so long since they last visited me. The most recent issues of Berserk don't continue the main story arc, but instead give us a view of the main character Guts when he was a child mercenary. The story is interesting, although it is only three issues long, but I look forward the main story arc being kick started again. I was so happy to be reading Berserk this morning that I decided to do something I haven't done in quite a while. I took the latest issue of Berserk and translated it into Chamorro. It was f

Today's fina'kuentos or as I like to call them empe' finayi is ideal for those who have kids. When I say kids, I mean more than one child of course since having at least two children creates an entirely different home dynamic than having just one. For example, my two kids, Sumahi and Akli'e' get along most of the time. Sumahi is the captain of the ship, while her younger brother Akli'e' is like the Chamorro Brown Steward. He isn't really the first mate because Sumahi doesn't trust him to take charge if she's taigue. Neither does he man any weapons or hold any real responsibility because Sumahi doesn't trust him to do much of anything. So instead he just sits in the galley of the ship, peeling potatoes and washing pots and pans. Because Akli'e' looks up to Sumahi so much this works out fine for the time being; as he develops more and more of his own personality, I suspect there will be some personality conflicts. One thing that t

Like everyone out there I hate haters. Even haters most likely hate haters, and while it is usually better not to think about them, sometimes you just can't help yourself. Este na post hu tuge'i'i i manggaichatli'e' siha! Although I am by no means a celebrity on Guam, or anywhere else, there is something to be said about when your name does become increasingly larger than yourself. No human can control the world of discourse around them anymore than the world of discourse about them. They may seek to try and dominate it, make it follow a certain course, mean what they would wish, and while it can appear to follow your desires, it never actually does. Part of becoming larger than life means being reduced to mean certain things, reduced to certain social/political shortcuts. In my case, there are people out there who I don't know, who know about me. The number of people who know about me in some way seems to be getting larger than the number of people that I c

One of the strangest things about this blog, is the people who read it or pass through each day. Although the focus of this blog is Chamorro and Guam issues, people searching for those topics and end up in my blog, count for only half of the people who read my blog. The rest arrive at my blog looking for random pop culture related images or posts, the most common of which is people who end up on my blog while searching for images and information on the character Kakashi Hatake from the ninja manga Naruto. Yesterday alone, people from Indonesia, Dennmark, Mexico and the US ended up on my blog looking for pictures and poems about Kakashi. As I've written about before on my blog, Kakashi is one of my favorite manga characters, and so I do have several posts about him, and for a while my profile picture was an image of him reading his favorite Make-Out Violence book. Last year, there was a major scare for Kakashi fans, as he (and many others) came close to dying during the "

I got an email the other day which featured the "purest" example of ideology I've seen in quite a while. It contained an email that had been sent to my friend (who I won’t name in case she wants her identity kept secret) from a “Marxist” professor which basically attacked her for not being Marxist enough. I only know some of the context, but she had just recently helped organize an Ethnic Studies summit in San Diego and so the listserv for the conference has been the site for a lot of pointless posturing, of which this purely ideological email is a perfect example. Reading the snarky, snippy Marxist email was both hysterical and depressing. It represented on the one hand something so hilarious in the way in which the author took himself and his orthodox defense of Marxist theory, thought and intellectualism so seriously. It was depressing because it made him look like someone so sublimely out of touch with reality and even the nature of the very theories he was shrou

This Friday, July 16th my most recent art show, "Before the Storm, After the Fire," at I.P. Coffee in Mangilao, will be coming down. In its place a new exhibit by artist and editor of the Marianas Variety Mar-Vic Cagurangan, called "Naked Truth" will be opening. So Friday night from 6-8 pm we'll be having an opening/closing party, where you can meet both artists, enjoy some good food and wine and also try to pick up some of my pieces before they get stored in the trunk of my car. For this last show I divided my artwork up into different themes. When I paint things, even abstract imagery, they tend to follow a set of regular themes. So even though the artwork is abstract and open to interpretation, when I paint it and when I title it, I often end up coming back to the same sorts of themes: movies, song lyrics, puns, Guam history and so on. So when I was figuring out how to hang my show, I decided to divide them up into groups based on shared imagery or names. Th

The painting above is called "Samehada Strikes." If you are a geek or a fan of the manga Naruto then you may know what Samehada refers to and therefore what this abstract image is named after. If not, you can still enjoy this somewhat brutal image, which appears like the waves of an ocean, with a geyser of blood emerging from behind them. I painted this piece and a number of other pieces last weekend in preparation for an event coming up next month called Otaku Recon. Its a manga, video games and anime event which will be held on May 15th at the Holiday Resort and Spa in Tumon. For more information you can check out the website by clicking here . There's plenty of info and links to check out. They'll be cosplay, contests, screenings, and what I am most excited about, artist displays and tables. For the past few months, because of work, family and dissertation related afflictions, I haven't had much time to create art. I've made a little here and there, such