That’s me with my BTS light stick ver. 3 in that photo, taken near the close of the Quezon City proclamation rally for Leni Robredo, Kiko Pangilinan, and their slate of senatorial candidates. (Next to me is someone holding another BTS light stick — that would be the special edition released for the Map of the Soul tour that was canceled by the pandemic.)
Yes I wore pink. Yes I joined an entire bunch of k-pop people who wanted to support Leni and Kiko. Yes we waved those light sticks like we were at a concert! That’s the point of having these things!
I want to go to a night-time event next time, so I can turn the light stick on, set it to pink, and wave it around like a beacon. The song to keep in mind there is probably “Liwanag sa Dilim (literally, “Light in the Darkness”).
I’m gonna keep on working on these campaign things until May. These are important — dare I say critical — elections to be working towards. If the wrong people get elected to national and local positions, no one is ever coming back to the Philippines to host concerts again. You mark my words.
And the selca I uploaded from that day. What a lovely sky that was. What a wonderful way to spend a morning.
There aren’t enough superlatives in the world to describe the feeling of being at a concert — virtually, in this case — and still feeling that love and that passion and that joy.
There aren’t enough reassurances to tell seven guys that, for those of us who were already fans before the pandemic, that we are here and we aren’t leaving. But they were made to feel it by practically an entire establishment. The same establishment that used the pandemic as a weapon against the guys who just wanted to perform and to meet with their fans and to make music. They used the pandemic to tell the guys their ARMY was made of bots.
I hope the guys were convinced that we were not bots. After last night, I hope they felt our presence. Because we have felt their presence all along, in these years of quarantine.
And yes, there aren’t enough expletives in the world to help me express how angry I am and disappointed I am that I can’t go to the concerts. I am stuck in this country because it has been mismanaged all throughout this pandemic. I cannot express how unfair the situation is. I am over-full of the anger that I need to point at everyone who just stood by, filled their pockets with money, and made us poorer and dumber and UNSAFE in these past two years.
I know what my goals for the future are: and they include superlatives, because I deserve them. They include expletives and banishment for the ones who were so venal and greedy and vicious. I know what I need to do, going forward. That’s my plan for the next year.
Take Friday off from work because I was attending an online concert on Thursday night, I mean.
And yes, my bosses know I’m attending a concert. One of them even laughed at me and said, let’s see if you sound hoarse next time we speak (on Monday the 6th)!
I’ll forgive you if you think this is only about the concerts happening over the weekend in LA. Actually yes, those concerts sparked off this line of thinking, but this is a complaint I come back to again and again, whenever people on my side of the world wish for this or that artist to come here and perform in concert.
Look, I can perfectly understand the wanting those artists to come here. To show love to their fans, to let them see that their fans love them, et cetera. I’ve been a fan long enough. I know exactly how that feels. And for a while there the Philippines was the place where all those 70s and 80s and 90s acts would come to show their appreciation for still being listened to — although I kind of was mean in framing it as such: the Philippines is where all the boomer musicians come to say goodbye. I swear the music of old decades gone long past by will not stop getting airplay around here. I suppose that tells you something about the actual people programming the radio stations in my home cities. You’d barely hear new acts like Bad Bunny or Megan Thee Stallion or — you get my drift. It’s like everyone’s radio stopped somewhere in 2000 and only ossified from there.
I digress. What I was trying to say is, of course it makes sense that local ARMY want BTS to come back here. Was it 2016 that they last performed locally? (I just learned about the dates. I’ll talk about that some other time.) (Erratum: they were last here May 2017, and my point still stands.) And we want them back here except: and here’s the crux of my counter-argument.
I don’t want them to come here unless we have venue and security facilities that are good enough.
I’ll be blunt: is there a concert venue here in the Philippines where it’s safe enough for Jungkook to do that Euphoria flight thing?
Come talk to me when that is actually a thing.
Because I don’t want the Philippines to be the place where something wrong happened to the artists for lack of quality venue, lack of security, lack of respect.
(And if you don’t want to believe me, why, I had better point you in the direction of what the Philippines did to the Beatles. — I don’t care if you take potshots at me for this. It’s what happened. That regime disrespected the Beatles. Link here.)
But yes. Pink, suddenly. Nearly everywhere else online I’ve chosen to switch to pink, and I’m doing it to get into a fight, into a campaign, into a kind of — this is my part of the struggle for both the immediate future and the longer term.
Specifically this kind of pink. And I think I love that this pink was already there, as if waiting, as if someone knew it would be needed at some other point in the future?
That’s the cover to Map of the Soul: Persona, the 2019 EP from BTS, and it was the lead-in to the next year’s full-length Map of the Soul: 7. Not coincidentally, I became ARMY juuuuust before this one came out, in February 2019.
Here’s the intro — and yes, that’s my bias, that’s my leader, that’s RM dropping the mic right here.
So why pink? Because of things that happened in my country over the past two days. Because there are fights I’m getting into, the same fights that have been going on for a long time and they’re ramping up again. There’s a campaign to sign up for and do things with. There’s a conflict that’s been going on since 2015 and it’s been thrust back into the spotlight. There are women who have been recognized as leaders, who will continue to be leaders, who will be the faces of these ongoing fights.
I’m #ARMYforLENI. Please do not come at me for “politicization” because you and I both know that I am a Filipino citizen first and I also happen to be ARMY, and I intend to remain both as I campaign for Leni Robredo for next year’s presidential elections. I want to help her get to a position of being able to help. I want to be able to scrutinize what she does, how she helps, how she leads. I want to be able to survive the next couple of years, dammit, and the ARMY thing goes hand in hand with being a citizen.
And, I’m proud to say it, with the things that BTS themselves has been fighting for, from pre-debut. If you don’t believe me on that, or if you can’t, I invite you to listen to their work, and I will also ask you to pay attention to Leni’s work. It’s all worth getting into.
I’m also — entirely shaken by the fact that someone from my country has just been announced as a co-winner of a Nobel Prize. The Peace Prize, at that. What is really scrambling my emotions is who the laureate is, and why she was so honored. Again, this is a thing that goes back to somewhere in the vicinity of 2016. Her name is Maria Ressa and apparently her crime is to be a journalist, fearless and independent and unsilence-able, in the time of this monster of a current president of the Philippines.
A co-Nobel Peace Prize for the specific action of being a fearless and independent journalist who has borne far, far more than her share of slings and arrows and trollery from this corrupt, murderous, incompetent national government. (I don’t think it was an accident that I’m writing this portion of this blog post to BTS’s track “Am I Wrong”. My offline playlist is on shuffle, and it came on of its own accord, perhaps to keep me on track with what I am writing. Again, please, look that track up, and never never tell me they’re not politicized. I know that “Spring Day” is a song with political overtones. Yes, that “Spring Day”.)
I don’t honestly know if I can call this thing that has come up in my chest “hope”. It prickles too much. It goads and it feels like there is so much that needs doing, there is so much fighting up ahead, and I feel tired on the instant and know that I can feel tired, but have to pick myself back up and keep going, like BTS, like Leni, like Maria. People to emulate, I suppose. People to watch out for. I follow each of them for specific reasons. I want to achieve something in this world after their fashion. — That’s a small goal and a lofty one at the same time.
And for now, pink is the color that reminds me of all of this.
I think, sometimes, that I may have missed one kind of calling. I wish I’d been brave enough to try being a radio DJ, once. Until then, playlists whenever the mood takes me, I guess.
(This playlist was inspired by several I saw circulating online, the weekend immediately after the release of “My Universe” [the original version].)
I want to say something to the very young girls who follow me, everyone below the age of 18. I want you to listen to me, and listen to me VERY carefully, because the day may come where you'll regret it if you don't. https://t.co/IjuRUX4mDM
Look, I donāt know where that awful first comment was coming from, but it makes me roll my eyes every time it comes around, and I must be an Olympian at rolling my eyes by now.
The thing, summarized as calmly as I possibly could, when Iām undercaffeinated on a Sunday afternoon (blasting BTSās āPied Piperā, and some of you will appreciate the joke, I hope).
> Fandom is a thing that only exists and should be propagated and enjoyed by young people.
> Fandom is a thing that becomes weird-wrong and gross once a person in it passes a certain age / life threshold.
> Fandom is a thing that people who identify as female should give up because they have to pay taxes, give birth to children, raise those children, etc.
Iām going to try and break that down, okay? Without breaking my brain or any idiot down in the process. I do have a reputation to maintain.
> Fandom is a thing that only exists and should be propagated and enjoyed by young people.
Said young people in the 2010s and the 2020s, fandoming online.
So I wonder if these young people know who built their fandom platforms? They didnāt, for sure. They donāt have the money, they donāt have the skills, they donāt have the networks, they donāt have the experience.
They arrived onto fandom platforms thinking they give those platforms relevance, but well. I donāt think they ever want to admit that it was older people who built those platforms. Who still maintain them and who think about building better, about making safer spaces (another concept these idiots scoff at, to their peril).
Fandom is as old as literature, but these young people donāt want to stop and think about that, do they.
> Fandom is a thing that becomes weird-wrong and gross once a person in it passes a certain age / life threshold.
And who made these young people the sole and binding arbiters of ā anything?
The story I like to keep close to my heart involves the women on just one side of my family: my maternal grandmother, my mom, and then me, and my much younger sister. We were / are fans of something. The past tense is used in commemoration of my maternal grandmother. She never stopped being a fan, was a fan all her life, and after retirement she watched anything and everything and enjoyed media that I never got into myself. Which one of us watched Buffy and Angel and CSI? She did. I never really got into any of those. But she got a lot of enjoyment out of those shows, never missed an episode, all the way up until she could no longer do so.
My momās into sports personalities now (she always has been, but bigger range at present, across more sports), but when she was younger she was a big fan of local movie and TV folks too. Went to concerts, followed their doings avidly in the papers and on the air, sang their songs.
Being into fandoms never impeded either of them from doing the other things, too. Raised kids, made money, that kind of thing coexisting together with being fannish.
And also notice that a man who professes to be a fan of sports or of male actors or media personalities never gets this kind of BS thrown at them: people make movies of male sports fans, and make fun of female sports fans, saying theyāre just doing fandom stuff to get laid and whatever.
Thereās so much grief thrown at a person who identifies as female, when that person identifies as a fan, too. So many accusations of being fake and shallow. Iāve seen way too much of this. Iāve been a fan a long time. I donāt even know everything my sisterās a fan of and hey, as long as it makes her happy, I stay out of it, I donāt butt in, I donāt tell her sheās supposed to be doing literally anything and everything else.
I just get angry that young people in fandoms these days love to tell the older people in their fandoms to go away and curl up and die.
> Fandom is a thing that people who identify as female should give up because they have to pay taxes, give birth to children, raise those children, etc.
Meaning, essentially, older people who identify as female should get the fck out of fandoms. Have to devote their resources to everything else in their lives. Have to live dreary lives, according to these young people in fandom.
Iām just going to be blunt, here: if you tell the older creators in your fandoms to go away, you will automatically lose much of the creative depth in your fandoms. The creative depth comes from life experiences. Comes from things learned and understood over time. Time you think should be given over to other things? Is fandom the be-all and end-all of your existence? Is it the only source of your validity? Because thatās not how it works.
So you chase people out of your fandoms at your own risk, but youāre gonna miss that point in epic ways, because youāre young and you wonāt see past the end of your own nose.
And donāt get me started on you. Like: if you wanna tell the older people in your fandoms to buzz off ā are YOU gonna buzz off when you hit that imaginary age threshold? When you pass a certain stage in your life?
I can actually summarize it that quickly, and you know why? Because Iām in my late thirties, Iāve been in fandoms for over 20 years, and Iāve seen this come and go and repeat itself too many times to count. There is no shortage of young people who think only they have the answers for everything.
Just sit down and try to learn something from older people ā and from older people who identify as female. It wonāt hurt you, much. It might even help you grow and become better in your own life.
* sighs, drinks her coffee, goes back to watching it all from a safe distance *
I didn’t think I was going to wake up as early as I did today, and yet that happened.
I also didn’t think I was going to wake up and then suddenly get hit in the face with a reminder of …. fandom life? Being a part of a fandom? This is a good thing. I’m just a little like shocked, and it’s this thought of the passage of time, and how that passage goes. Slow, or fast, or jagged-edged tempos, and sometimes the passage of time even involves all of those things in the same day.
(If you’ve ever had to question your brain, or your trains of thought, about how time seems to go by way too fast or way too slowly or anywhere in between, welcome to the party — and that goes double for this whole panini thing.)
Anyway, the reminder was in this tweet, which talks about how it’s been eleven years since the movie Inception was released.
That crash you just heard again, like weird thought-echoes, was my brain breaking.
Wait, what? Eleven years? But how did that happen? Where did the time go — and where is it still going now?
The short version of this story is that I was still heavily immersed in non-Western fandoms prior to 2010; I think I was still trying to process some of the things I had learned about myself from following several troupes of theater performers, who danced and sang and emoted their way across their Japan stages. I’d been a little bit emotional following some retirements from those stages, and then maybe that drifting state was the right one to be in, to go to the movies to watch a group of people break into other people’s dreams.
It was — eye-opening, and I know that’s a really weird pun, but that is how it had been for me. I felt like I had been woken up, myself. I came home from the first time I saw Inception wondering: who the hell are these characters? What else can they do, what else have they done, what kinds of dreams could they possibly have? The whole spiral of getting way into the story, wanting to know everything, wanting to tell so many possible stories about them.
Which is how I got myself dropped headlong into Western-style fandoms, again. It’s not the same as being in non-Western fandoms, particularly the Japanese-language one that I had been in.
I think that it was a damn good couple of years. I learned a hell of a lot of things. This was the fandom that formalized my devotion to the structures and craft of a good suit. This was the fandom where I learned how to handle guns, even if I haven’t actually picked one up with my bare hands — like I know now that if the opportunity were ever given to me, I know that I’d have to be extremely respectful of the object, and that I’d have to be in an extremely rational place inside my own mind.
And I think that the real gift I got out of being in this fandom is — the friends. The people who actually have known me for a long time, at this point; some of my longest-lasting friendships are based in this fandom. And all of this without having ever met the vast majority of them offline. I’ve never stopped hoping that I could go and see some of them, but — that’s okay! That’s the point! Online friends are still friends! These are my people, and they’ve really seen me through an entire huge spectrum of life experiences and emotions.
They went to my wedding, virtually speaking; hell, some of them helped me pick out my wedding dress.
And they were there when my marriage fell apart in the way it did.
Just talking about the sweep of 2010-2016 makes me dizzy: and they saw me through it, you know? Six years!
What a gift it is to have that feeling of: in dreams, I can think about seeing these friends. Getting on that imaginary platform with them, seeing them through their own changes and everyday lives, staying in touch however we can (including losing touch and then getting them back). What a gift it is to have these people, and I never would have met any of them if I hadn’t gone to see that movie.
What a gift it is to know them. Time seems to stop mattering, and then it just comes down to the lives and days we’ve spent, together, online.
What a shock! Eleven years! How have I known and loved these friends for eleven years? How grateful I am for them. How I love them all, wherever it is that they are now.
And, of course,the track for this post: “Time”, by Hans Zimmer.
starting over every time 