PCN Workblog 3: Wet Clay

Justin Pansacola December 1, 2008

There's that feeling you get the night before school when you lie in your bed. Or when the handle bars come down on the roller coaster. Or when you cast your line into the black ocean at night, and wait. For me, that feeling has been going for 203 days now, and it will continue for a few more.

As I write this, the second, but never final, draft of the script has been submitted to my cast. Did I mention that I have a cast? It's a strange, odd feeling to attach voices and faces to these roles that I had previously attached to other voices and faces. Ones that I could never cast, like Hugh Laurie or amalgamations of several people I know. At the risk of sounding demeaning, it's like having new toys to play with. But I still have a month before I get to really break them.

The meatiest work begins, and it begins soon. Sometimes,when I'm alone with my mind, I run through the game plan over and over again. Research the insurance. Call the stage hands union. Solicit from Chancellors, Vice Chancellors. Invite faculty. Write press releases. Send contract. Cut checks. Buy props. Solicit from corporations. Create sponsorship packets. Meet with local business.

Essay | Something I Heard About Changing The World

Justin Pansacola October 12, 2008

When I went to the Student of Color Conference in Santa Cruz last year, a gathering of young activists mobilizing around issues that affect minority and low-income communities, one of their great speakers told us, "be prepared to never enjoy the fruits of your labor."

It was like someone told us a secret we weren't supposed to know. It was something that was painfully true, yet familiar, something we must have known on some level but never acknowledged. I thought about the causes I had a hand in, and even more, the causes that I didn't have a hand in. I thought about the petitions I signed and didn't sign, the people holding them, the people knocking on doors and holding rallies and making movements. There's so much of it out there in the community and yet there's that universal element of it. All of us who care about something more than we are expected to, will likely never get to see the fruits of our labor.

Activism is hard. Activism is draining, tiresome, frustrating, and consuming. It is also the only way we are ever going to get out of this mess.

Essay | Place and Patriots

Justin Pansacola September 4, 2008

I'm going to attempt to do something that I hope is not taken the wrong way. But with the question of patriotism bouncing around the conversation of our current event, it's hard for me to not try and express it. This is an attempt to explain the function and place of patriotism for the rest of us -- that is, those of us for whom it's not an automatic given. It's not a criticism, a rebuke, or even denial. Just a description and a hope to convey how people like me have come to grapple with the idea since we were little kids.

My early childhood was marked by trips abroad: Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Canada, London and more. My dad worked for an airline and so we were a band of jet-setting travelers. Early on, I understood that the world was big, varied and unpredictable. I knew that much more extended beyond the playground.

Personal Tastes

Justin Pansacola August 14, 2008

"What kind of music do you like?" is a question that I've always felt a little bit uncomfortable answering. I have an answer - several of them. But it has always struck me as a question that is awkward for me to answer. It is at once revealing, personal, difficult and over-analyzed.

Back in high school, I used to simply say, "Shitty." That is, shitty music. I like shitty music. That's not what I believed, of course, but it was an easy joke answer that would deflect the question. I have a friend who didn't like that answer. He asked me once, "How does that go over when you answer like that?" I had never thought about it in those terms, so I haven't really used it since.

In time, I began to begrudgingly answer, "indie" and sometimes I bolster it with "folk." Well, truthfully, I say it more like: "Indie...?" and let the word die off hoping they won't notice.

It's not about shame or embarrassment. Part of it is disliking labels and revealing a lot about myself in such a small answer. But most of it is about knowing the almost inevitable follow up question: "Like what, exactly?" That's the real question I don't like to answer. That's the one I try to avoid. To explain what I think "indie" means would take far too many sentences and generally be a staggering display of arrogance. But it's the label that best describes the sounds I like.

PCN Workblog 2: Shitty First Draft

Justin Pansacola August 1, 2008

PCN Workblog 1

As I type, at long last, "THE END" on the 85th page of my first draft, I realize I am in deep, deep trouble.

This is gluttony. This is excessive ambition. This is building skyscrapers in the basement.

I got my script software to compile the statistics of my first draft just to make myself feel crazy. Almost 17,000 words, including descriptions, stage direction and titles. 30 scenes, which is 4 more scenes than last year when including dances. 797 lines of dialogue for the poor souls of actors. 27 characters of varying sizes. 6 curse words, 4 of which are "damn." 5 stories.

Obviously, it's not going to stay this way. In order to at least be comparable in size to last year's script, I am going to have to cut about 30 pages, which can't be done just by making the dialogue snappier. I really am going to have to dismantle it with a crowbar until it fits in my trunk.

Review | The Words You Sigh

Justin Pansacola July 21, 2008

For me, it's always easy to find something I like but hard to find something that completely devours me. Those are the bands that become part of your identity, that never leave your playlist, that you will listen to when you're old in a rocking chair with your grand children. If you find someone that hates them, your brain can't wrap around that possibility. You don't need to be in the mood to listen to them, you just do and it works. I've been blessed to find many - Cursive, Sufjan Stevens, Bright Eyes, M. Ward, Broken Social Scene - and every new album is like going home.

I need this every few months. I need to find songs to absolutely love, to sing every morning when I get up, and to fall asleep to every night. Music just isn't as sweet when something new and beautiful hasn't smacked in the face. A few years ago, when I was going through new music in one of these valleys, a band called Okkervil River took me to a peak.

It was the album, "Black Sheep Boy." It didn't happen from track one or two. Instead it was a slow build, a gathering of strength. The trumpets bled these beautiful notes and the vocals were a bare, beaming wound, but it was the writing that grabbed me. Reading the lyrics to their song can improve it tenfold. At my personal high point of the album, the angry-catchy "Black," you were unsettled as you delved into the words and story. That's one of the hallmarks of Okkervil River - they are a band that will unsettle the shit out of you if you let them. Plenty of bands make you happy, plenty more make you sad, and some entire genres are dedicated to scaring you or channeling your anger. There are a few bands that hit that subtle, delicate spot of unsettling. It's rare and real, and one of the few things that carries over into the way you live your life.

Video | 2007 Dies in Seattle

Justin Pansacola July 15, 2008

There's actually a little bit of Portland at the start there. Deal. Song: LCD Soundsystem - "All My Friends"

PCN Workblog 1: Germinal

Justin Pansacola June 30, 2008

I have 10 months to plan and organize an entire night of story about the Philippine culture. The script is my responsibility, it's the burden I chose to take, and I've decided to chronicle all the whizzing (and non-whizzing) of the gears in my head as I go through this long, soul-draining process. I know it will be painful, it will be exhausting, and I may lose spirit a few times over. But it's all part of the job. You do it for the 1300 people in the seats and the 70 people behind the curtain. You do it because you'll never get the chance to do it again.

I've officially been working on the first draft of the script for just over one month. Not every day, but for big chunks of time when I do. I sit and I stir and I do my best impression of a Serious Writer. It's not all daisies, but I've learned enough in 3 years of Creative Writing courses that the first draft isn't supposed to be. It's going to be turds from which daisies will hopefully grow by the fourth or fifth draft. It's also really long - If there were no dances, I could probably write a whole night's worth of story. But essentially, I have to write somewhere between one half and 3/4ths of a show. The plan is to write the first draft to be exactly as I envision it, raw guts and everything, as long as it needs to be. Then I'm going to take a crowbar to it and dismantle the piece of shit until I can fit it in my trunk.

Essay | Superconnected

Justin Pansacola June 19, 2008

I think at how history will look back on us a lot, and the only thing I'm sure of is that my generation is the internet generation, and somehow that feels more world-changing and significant than the roaring 20's, or the hippie 60's. It's not just a new way to spend time, or a place where you can look at videos of dogs riding skateboards (although it is that too and we should never forget the contribution of animals doing human things on YouTube.) It's the expansion of the mind in a greater context. A dissenting opinion is a few clicks away. But it also so much bigger with the realization, like the top of your skull opening, that the world is so goddamn full of so many people. It is the first glimpse at the vastness and variety of the human experience, and we are growing up with that with every kilobyte.

That's what the internet is to me. It's the access into the greater world, into the subcultures that were once kept in secret club houses, and into the subsubcultures that divide them. It is the spread of ideas - the good, enlightening ones and the awful, horrific ones that make you lose hope in the human spirit. But it's human all the same, we just take a shot of the terrible and chase it with the good.

I know it's been a defining part of my life. I feel pretty privileged to be able to be part of the generation that can be the first to say that. I came upon the internet at the unusually young age of 9 -- 1996, just as the internet blew that dot com bubble out of a soapy plastic hoop.

Essay | Let Us Not Pat Our Backs So Hard

Justin Pansacola June 13, 2008

Previously, on the greatest spectator sport in the world: Barack Obama, as we have all expected for at least a month, has become the presumptive Democratic nominee for President of the United States. When it finally, finally, finally became official, the media could finally let loose all the stories about it being a historic first and world changing event that they've been holding in. Tim Russert exclaimed that he'd like to be a teacher in an inner-city school on that day. People were marveling at being part of history, about the possibility of electing the first black leader in a predominantly white country. Not just a first for the US, but for the entire western world.

That's great. It really is. But it strikes me that the rhetoric going around is starting to get awfully self-congratulatory. People, like Frank Schaeffer at the Huffington Post, are saying things such as, "All over the world our country ... looks immeasurably better because we have grown up enough to embrace a black candidate, our fraught and sordid racial history notwithstanding."

Worse yet, angry lawn protectors like Pat Buchanan have proclaimed that black people should be grateful because all that slavery & oppression has ultimately led to the most prominent black people in the world, as opposed to all that violence going on in the homeland (And white colonialism had nothing to do with that no siree)

There is a general air of, "Damn we're really progressive and great" that is going to be dangerous in the long run to even more progress. Look at the arguments today. When people try and argue that racism is not a problem in America, they point to ridiculous trivia like Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama. While good signs, they are nothing more than that. Signs of getting better, not evidence that we are cured. They are exceptions and not the rule. Mouthpieces like Buchanan are effectively telling people, "You're not a slave anymore so what is left to complain about?"

A Culture of Disconnect

Justin Pansacola May 11, 2008

Since the 1970s, Filipino Americans in college took it upon themselves to make themselves feel more Filipino, whatever that meant to them. What was clear was that there was a void, a disconnect, and a wish to be closer to that archipelago a whole hemisphere away. What followed is a quiet phenomenon. It was an annual show that incorporated dance, drama and music all through the prism of Philippine culture.

Today, generations later, it continues with every new class, eager to sink their teeth into the connection and the experience. At my school, we've done 19. The biggest of the Filipino clubs, Samahang at UCLA, has just put the cap on their 31st. It's become an annual mainstay of Filipino clubs, spreading even to High Schools, to other ethnic groups, to the point where it becomes a culture in and of itself. It has warranted academic analysis, study and research papers. This attempt to represent Philippine culture became one of the few things that belonged solely to Filipino American youth. Not Americans, not Filipinos, not even our immigrant parents. Just a specific subset of educated, young, Filipino Americans with little to believe in.

What Is Often Misunderstood

Justin Pansacola March 22, 2008

Or, "The Problem With Sean Hannity."

Speak Easy

Justin Pansacola February 18, 2008

When I was in the Philippines last summer, when I sat among family and watched the way they spoke instead of listening to the words, I often yearned to take Tagalog class in the Fall. When I felt isolated during the post-dinner conversations, surrounded by relatives, I would reinforce my will to whittle away at this language barrier, somehow.

It hasn't been as easy as I expected. Ever since those years of French in High School, I've come to suspect that learning languages is not one of my strengths. Even when it comes to vague definitions of "language" like HTML and Javascript, I often stop just before I reach any level of usefulness. It would be easy to blame it on the wiring of my brain, some natural order of things beyond my control. But as a Creative Writing major, someone who thrives on the word engine and the craft of language, taking Tagalog has been a lot like getting shot in the kneecap. Four days a week for one or two hours, I fall to the ground and grit my teeth through the pain.

It's not bad. It's a fun class, great teacher, great classmates. It just takes away from me what I'm supposed to be good at: articulation. I built up this knowledge bank of words, of ways of expressing and communicating and conveying and whenever I take this class it's taken away from me. My tools are gone and I am still asked to build a house. It's an odd feeling, one that I'm not yet accustomed to. I am honestly one of the least knowledgeable people in the class. I've never been this close to the bottom, but it's humbling and awakening.

Bound by Symmetry

Justin Pansacola February 10, 2008

The worst part about being a junior in college is that it is the beginning of the countdown. You are past the halfway point, and everything from here on is a two year exit. You are no longer going into the forest.

Most of what dominates my mind these days has been on the subject of my future. Who I'm becoming, what I will be doing, and who will be around me when it happens. This is all an assumption that I'm around to see the future, but that's not really what I loaded up the browser to talk about.

I got an e-mail from the past around New Year's.

See, there's this website, futureme.org, where the whole idea is to send a message to your future self. You type it in, put in an e-mail that you will hopefully still have, and then the machine will store it and send it out during the date you assigned. Apparently, I had told the site to send the message to me in one year. So, in the closing days of 2007, I recieved a message to myself from the closing days of 2006.

I Will Never Make Anything This Good

Justin Pansacola January 31, 2008

The way most Creative Writing classes work is that you write something, a story or poem or essay, and then you "workshop" it. That is, you show up to class, full of anxiety, pass out the story that's been incubating in the deepest ventricle of your heart and then wait for people to rip it up. My first workshop was nerve-wracking. My second was full of regret. My third was interesting and fulfilling.

My fourth is tomorrow.

The thing is, I've still got to workshop a couple of stories by my peers before I pass out mine. The worst part, the part that makes me so fucking wrecked that I had to type it up on my goddamn childish blog, is that it's so fucking good. It's like a lightning speed guitar solo that bleeds emotion. It's so good and astounding that it makes you cringe. And I have to follow that! It raised the bar and I have to follow it.

See, I believe us Creative Writing majors keep tabs on each other. We bare our souls and personalities and vulnerabilities in our work, a side that others don't normally get to see. So we make notes on who's great, who's not, who is pretentious and who drops way too many references. There was this one person, who's been in a couple of my classes, that I've always thought was uniquely talented and usually had the best story in the class. This time around, that person had a good story - but not great. Kind of obviously flawed in certain areas. It was comforting that someone that I held in pretty high regard was as fallible as the rest of us.

I Just Failed My Novel

Justin Pansacola November 29, 2007

I haven't written anything this month because I was busy. There was so much writing to do this month. There's my short story for my workshop, which I ended up revising and sending in to a magazine as a manuscript, and the first 30 pages of a screenplay for another class. Then there was my novel. My NaNoWriMo novel.

NaNoWriMo is the odd abbreviation for National Novel Writing Month. It is, essentially, a marathon for writers. You have 30 days to write a novel. Go. Some people liken it to a religious experience for writers. There is no real, tangible prize or any recognition. There is just a community. This is for writers and their own benefit. So, how are you supposed to write a novel in 30 days? How could you expect quality to come from such a rush job?

An Attempt to Understand Folk

Justin Pansacola October 14, 2007

If people ask me to describe my primary taste in music, I go with the easy, interpretable terms of "Indie" and "Folk." I don't especially like using the term "indie" - there's something arrogant and meaningless about it, but there's no other good word or straight answer to describe it, so I've deployed it. But folk music, that's something different. People, generally, don't have a clear idea of what folk is. For a long time listening to it, neither did I.

In this late night typing exercise, I will attempt to define what Folk music is to me. I might be completely, utterly, embarrassingly wrong. But I can only describe it in the terms that I've come to really fucking feel this music. So if I'm historically inaccurate, or just bullshitting, so be it. This is is the only way we come to figure things out.

Balikbayan, pt. 3

Justin Pansacola August 31, 2007

One of the things that I miss the most about the Philippines is that everything was interesting. It took me back to a time when looking out the window of the backseat of a car was a viable entertainment option. Wherever we went, be it the crawling pace of the rain covered city or the speeding, winding roads along the tropical hills, everything was interesting. Not pretty, not vibrant, not even infusing any particularly good feelings. It was just always stimulating to thought, giving you, the outsider, something worth examining. The titanic billboard for Coca-Cola has you concocting sociological theories. The rural unfamiliarities have you picking and prying at who you claim to be. The pile of electrical wires, hanging precariously overhead, has you wondering what big ideas are to blame for the shape of things.

Act three of our trip to the Philippines had the most to see. It's a story that starts off with lots of gleaming tourist attractions, funnels down into a complacent sense of family, and ends as all good stories do: A conclusive finale where the characters are changed and exit stage left. Curtains drop.

Balikbayan, pt. 2

Justin Pansacola July 21, 2007

The first three days in Metro Manila were an exercise in privilege. A big city, with American franchises, air conditioning and pavement. The next week or so would be a few steps towards the other end of the spectrum. This was Angeles City in Pampanga. We had experienced what the successful in capitalism had to offer. Now it was time to see the rest.

Angeles, and the surrounding areas like Dau, are not minor villages full of living-off-the-land types. It is still a city by every means, but not a major, highly developed, nicely planned out one. They don't build their structures to the sky, they don't put lines on their roads, they don't paint over every cement wall. But it's not the province. The air is thicker with smog and nothing looks like it was ever new. It is urban decay bustling with activity, but not wealth.