Malay mo totoo?

The Logic of Online ‘Cursed’ Messages

I have long been irritated by messages that I’m sure you’d find in your e-mail inboxes, YM offline messages or friendster/myspace bulletins. Some controversial header would catch your attention: “Yahoo Messenger is Shutting Down”, “Urgent, please read” or as absurd as “Don’t Open”, “My family was massacred”, “Walang Pasok!” or “Crush Kita”, “Goodbye”. You’ll get curious so you’ll open the message and lo and behold, a message strikes fear on you, “Since you opened this message, someone will call you by phone and you’ll die in seven days, unless you repost this” or try “Repost this message quickly and blessings will come to you in 3 days.”

And you wonder why such absurd messages run amok in the internet. So let us analyze this social phenomenon, shall we? The message is obviously designed to attract your attention. Because curiosity is a human thing, and no one can resist opening a message with a header “Do not read”, you open it. To your shock, the message has that FEAR factor. Familiar thoughts would come to mind: “What if this is true?” or “I won’t lose anything naman if I repost this.” Applying a twisted version of Pascal’s Wager, you just say “If this is true and I repost this, nothing will happen to me because I just did what the post told me to do. But if in case this isn’t true, nothing will happen to me as well.”

Well truth be told, Gossip has those same elements with these so-called “Online Doomsayers”.

It’s like saying, “Don’t tell this to anyone ha?” to make the person interested in what you’d say. Then you change your voice modulation, with an eerie ghostly feel to it: “Because you’ve listened to me, you’ll die in seven days.”

Apparently these rumors are rampant among us Filipinos, because we still believe in what we call, ‘chamba’ or ’swerte/malas”. Everything depends on chances. “Malay mo totoo. Wala naman mawawala di ba kung gagawin mo?” That train of thought has the assumption that there’s no telling if this is true. Chances are, these might happen. Wala naman mawawala di ba? I beg to disagree. Something was indeed lost. That is, our will to choose, that capacity to summon our energies to redirect our so-called ‘fate’. Lose that and you’d just end up being a victim of circumstances (in this case, a victim of a measly piece of message) and not a mover in history.

I mean, c’mon… would you even believe a baseless statement?

Would you believe “The Earth is Flat” simply because I said it? Of course not. All the more so, considering the one reposting the message you just received just got tricked by that message. One can logically conclude that the sender of the message is a ‘victim’ of the message that was sent.

So here is my suggestion. If you ever encounter such message again, even if it threatens you by telling you, “If you don’t repost this, something terrible will happen to your family”, don’t believe it. You’re not a victim of ‘what ifs’ and other irrational statements. You have every right not to believe simply because it doesn’t have any basis at all. Don’t be easily convinced and resort to resignation.

Trust me, you’ll save people in your email address book from reading another message that may yet waste their precious time. Just treat it as spam.

~resplend3nt

Why Leonardo Hated Botticelli and Vice-versa

 

I’ve been researching about the Florentine Renaissance for the past weeks for a comparative lecture on classical and modern movements in western art history. While studying, I remembered writing a paper on the parallelisms and differences between Romanesque and Baroque sculptures for a theory class in art school. For some reason, I’ve always been enamored by Romanesque art and the function that it served in ecclesiastical architecture during the Middle Ages. I found the schematized and fantastical depiction of the human figure to be enigmatic and interesting. The artworks were fitting relics to the zeitgeist of their time. The pursuit for answers to the universal questions of life during the medieval times was a severe shift in focus from the expansionist battle cry of the Roman Empire.

Human representation during the Middle Ages

I developed a curiosity over the Renaissance primarily because of the way the artists of the quattrocento contradicted medieval ways of painting and seeing. If Medieval sculptures which depicted nature and humanity without individuality and personality were subordinate to architecture, human representation and spatial depiction during the Renaissance saw a rebirth of naturalistic representation. This stark contrast shows of a kind of movement throughout Europe during those times. Southern Europe, on one hand, reveled in the invention of linear perspective and the emergence of mathematics as a tool to understand nature. Popular examples of which are Paolo Uccello’s Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino unseats Bernardino della Ciarda at the Battle of San Romano, a work which depicts, with subtle humor, horses dying in perspective; and Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of the Christ. On the other hand, Northern Europe saw the development of a technique that unified mathematical observation and human experience – fine examples of which can be seen in the works of Jan van Eyck.

Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino unseats Bernardino della Ciarda at the Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello

In the south, particularly in Florence, humanism took center stage as the common battle cry of artists. Even those who adhered to irreconcilably divergent persuasions, particularly Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli, produced works that celebrated the humanistic ethos of their era.

Speaking of Leonardo and Botticelli, these two masters simply couldn’t get enough of disparaging one another.

Alleged self-portrait of Sandro Botticelli

Botticelli did not quite share the aesthetic preferences of Leonardo as he chose to conspicuously delineate the outlines and elongate the proportions of his human figures. Adhering to Marsilio Ficino’s neo-Platonist philosophic view about the importance of beauty as an aesthetic objective, he opted to prettify the facial attributes of his mythological subjects. In fact, manifestations of his philosophic and stylistic inclinations can be seen in his seminal works The Birth of Venus and La Primavera. Botticelli’s partiality to the beautiful explains the highly ornate and colorful character of his frescos. His body of work expressed the humanistic chest-thumping pride of Florentine Renaissance by divorcing itself from the art espoused by the established church. Botticelli departed from the aesthetic norm on two levels: first, he portrayed mythological themes from classical antiquity, and second, he veered away from strict naturalistic representation advocated by painter Cennino Cennini.

Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci

Since Leonardo considered painting to be the ‘daughter of nature’, there was no way that he would acknowledge Botticelli’s assertions. For him, artists must not idealize nature nor depart from it given that the world can be scientifically measured and recorded in precise terms. In an obvious attempt to glorify the use of value (light and shade) over line and color, Leonardo slammed Botticelli by saying that the neo-Platonist artist painted ‘very sorry landscapes’. He even cleverly went around Ficino’s emphasis on the beautiful and the ideal by using his famed sfumato technique in painting the ‘soul’ of his subjects. For him, artists who ought to paint the beautiful may do so in accordance to the laws set by nature. The Mona Lisa, his most famous painting, masterfully illustrates the genius of Leonardo in capturing the enigma and transience of human expression.

The golden regalia (detail on upper left portion of image), a four-kilogram halter made of intricately woven gold strands, is the only one of its kind in the world.

Being an Asian audience of western art, I always ask myself about the happenings in the Orient during the quattrocento. Southern Europe may boast of a Florentine Renaissance that saw the emergence of the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Raphael and Masaccio among others, but Asia, particularly the Philippines, may boast of a rich cultural heritage that produced the finest golden treasures that predated the quattrocento by at least 400 years. The four-kilogram golden halter made from intricately woven golden strands featured in the Crossroads of Civilizations exhibition at the Ayala Museum among hundreds of other golden objects gave me a glimpse of a sophisticated society that produced exquisite works of art that could possibly rival the masterpieces of Europe in terms of craftsmanship and sheer beauty. I may never know the names of the goldsmiths who had woven in their masterpieces a clue about the identity of my precolonial forefathers nor know of the intense rivalries among the master artists and craftsmen of our precolonial history; I am nevertheless immensely proud of our priceless precolonial jewelry that could possibly give the Mona Lisa a run for her money.

~Speck Tackle