I Remember Love

I was watching TV one lazy morning in the summer vacation of 1997 when I chanced to switch channels to ABS-CBN. On the screen I saw an old anime or cartoon, I wasn't sure where it came from then, because the characters spoke in English and were of different nationalities, but they were drawn in an old anime style possibly from the '80s since the local networks were a decade or two behind with their anime. Later I learned that it was from 1982, two years before I was born. Notwithstanding the age disparities, I, a 12-year-old incoming high school student at that time, was mesmerized by the fighter planes in the show. It was just a few years earlier that I had watched Top Gun and I remembered how its combination of music and visuals made a pulsating awesome depiction of high-speed dogfight action. Finally I had found its anime equivalent, or more accurately, I found the origin of that concept.









To be honest, I was slightly let down, just slightly, mind you, when the planes started transforming into robots. About a decade worth of watching kiddie shows had already enabled me to identify robots as overused insta-cool storytelling tool. In all fairness though, the show I was watching was actually one of the originals that had revolutionized the robot genre--or now more commonly known in anime as "mecha"--by introducing the concept of transformation.









There were more factors that had made me like it. Not only were the abovementioned transformable or variable fighters capable of dominating the atmosphere, they could also fly in space--in space! And they "landed" on none other than a big bad-ass carrier spaceship with a really powerful gun. This lone ship had to contend with alien giants possessing thousands of ships scattered across the Solar System and bearing bad-ass enough mecha and other military hardware of their own. I had been fascinated with capital ship combat, and the show having such premise, the young geek that I was would have been more than satisfied.

Still, there was more.

The alien adversary was bent on capturing the lone spaceship of the humans, for they suspected it to hold secrets they had long forgotten. The ship was, in fact, of alien origins that was reverse-engineered. Inside the ship was a city of civilian refugees where the human element of the story occur: people celebrate culture, listen to music and fall in love. The young "innocent" me never paid enough attention to the love triangle of the main characters, but a later viewing impressed upon my grown up self that it was fine space opera that had me coming back for more even after the big battles were over. Eventually, the aliens would stumble upon these human stuff and discover things about themselves. Could music, culture and love be the key to ending the war?

For me, the answer to that question remained on hold for almost a decade. Just when the planet Earth was surrounded by millions more enemy ships for the climactic battle, the series looped back to the first episode. This was one of the sins of ABS-CBN. I had heard spoilers, but I had to wait until the existence of YouTube to finally see pure awesome--a battle among many battles and scenes in the series that had haunted children of my generation and the generation before me.

The beauty of this series was that it could be enjoyed at different levels. This post predominantly described my shallow enjoyment as a child. Future entries would discuss further the profundity that I had comprehended as I grew up in experience and wisdom. This and perhaps the fact that it had successfully blended a number of my interests (for instance: spaceships, outer space, aliens, war stories, fighter planes, music, romance, apocalyptic themes, technology, United Nations) had made it my all-time favorite anime.

Twenty-five years later, the series had become a franchise consisting of two other TV series, two movies, two original video animations (OVAs), and many video games and mangas (comics). The soundtrack albums had launched the careers of composers, pop idols and rock stars. Its influence had helped shaped the anime industry for the past two decades. Behold the anime, Super Dimension Fortress Macross.

I am Dave, also known as CaptGloval or Gloval in anime circles, and I remember love.


Image Credits
- First nine images are screenshots from the SDF Macross OP (detext version, video source)
- Next three images have been shared in the AnimeSuki Macross image thread

You Pinch Me, I Pinch You

Happy Valentines everyone! I'll be sharing with you a Bicol folk song about love. No it's not Sarong Banggi (One Night), but a lesser-known ditty that involves something I dig in love stories: the childhood friends. Below is the version I usually hear being played over the radio back in my childhood. It is also the version included in the square dance medley of Bicol songs. As I did in my previous blog, I have also provided a English translation that can be used to sing along.

Kudot-Kudotan

Kan ako sadit pa, sadit ka pa man,
Nagkarawat kita nin kudot-kudotan.
Kinudot mo ako, kinudot ta ka man,
An simbag mo sako, "luhay-luhaya man."

Haen ka na baya kakawat kong madaya?
An kudot na matarom sakuyang giromdom.
Haen ka na baya kakawat kong madaya?
An kudot-kudotan tighahanap ko ngonyan.


The Pinching Game

When I was a little kid, and you were little too,
We went out and played a simple pinching game
You would go and pinch me, then I would pinch you too
But you'd say in reply, "do it gently, will you?"

O-oh where have you gone my naughty wily playmate?
I still remember it, your piercingly sharp pinch.
O-oh where have you gone my naughty wily playmate?
Now I have been yearning for the good ol' pinching game.

As with most folk songs, the lyrics will vary a lot. The Bicol Wiki provides other lyrics as well as a link to a video. It can be noted that the version above contains subtle sexual innuendos. Indeed, the additional lyrics in the wiki have more blatant references, for instance (with my liberal, sing-able translation):

Duman sa looban, igwang kamposanto,
Na piglulubongan, nin mga angelito.
Mabayad man ako, minsan pa gurano,
Makalubong lamang sakong payo-payo.

There was a li'l alley which had a cemetery
Where the cherub boys had all been buried.
I'd be willing to pay with all of my money
To bury my li'l head down a grave of cherries.

Of Interest in the Heavens

There are two professions that started at the dawn of humankind, or so common knowledge says. One is prostitution, but I'm not going to talk about that in this entry... maybe on a later post, heheh. The other oldest profession is astronomy. The conjecture suggests that the regularity of the heavens have made the primitive humans take note of what's above their heads. When this regularity can be linked to the seasons that mark the abundance or scarcity of food, it became serious business.

To my three-year-old self, such patterns would not have been evident. What got my attention instead was the pictures of multicolored spheres from an astronomy and meteorology picture book from Japan (strangely enough, the meager text on it was in English). I later learned that the book is just one volume in a set of books on science and technology. With further explanations from family members, that was how I formed my first interest and from then on I had been mindful of what goes on in the sky.

Of course the interest will not last if it isn't nurtured. There were other science books in the house, and when my reading skill was good enough, I started reading them too. Never mind that the books were a decade or two behind the times, but being written in the 1970s, in the age of lunar exploration, the tone of enthusiasm was there, that the possibilities for humankind were endless, and those were enough to keep my own interests up. I think I would recommend for learning about the sciences in general and space in particular, fiction or non-fiction, material made during that period 1960-1979. We didn't have cable TV yet when I was a kid. I wonder how I would've geeked out at Discovery Channel that time. Nevertheless, the written material was plentiful enough: Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian, Air & Space, National Geographic, Scientific American among other subscriptions my father maintained for some time.

School was a disappointment in developing my interest. Before third grade, there was no science subject at all and whatever science there was, it was only integrated in a monthly newsmagazine meant for that subject which combines geography, history, civics and social studies in one blurry mess. When the science subject did come, astronomy, a topic located at the final chapters of the textbook, was almost never discussed. Woe was me who couldn't show off my knowledge in astronomy.

With all these seemingly keen interest, it would've been a matter of consequence that I end up an astronomer. Yet space is just one of my interests. I might really be more of a jack of all trades than to be specialized in something. On the other hand, I might just be making a feeble excuse for the lack of enough zeal, or worse, lack of enough capacity to grasp the knowledge and skills to become an astronomer. Alas, it might have been easier a hundred years ago, yet the science and math have grown leaps and bounds since then. Thusly I take refuge in my other interests like, in this case, writing, such that I may mentally explore along with my gentle reader, the intricacies of the study of the stars, and contribute to it as other writers of science in fiction and non-fiction have done so before me.

Launch

I guess I got tired of drifting along the highway, so I decided to blast myself off to drift in outer space instead. Perhaps this is my way of attempting a more detached look on things or maybe retreating further inside my Ivory Tower. However, I'd like to think of it as like most astronauts who have contemplated their existence amidst the vastness of stars: the ability to present a new perspective that is beyond surface level. And since going to space require some degree of development--we could say growth--I hope this blog would reflect such growth through the quality of entries.

Well, enough of the lofty stuff above, where I myself rolled my eyes while I typed. I noticed in my previous blog that I didn't write much about my own interests, not that I am not capable of tackling the topics of the moment and indeed I must say I did well enough, but that I find it to be tiring maybe because of lack of enthusiasm. So what then are these interests of mine? Actually, they're a lot, since I am a jack of all trades kind of person. The most obvious, and possibly the first interest that I formed, would be astronomy, the motif for this blog. Branching off from that, I'm also interested in space travel of the real and fictional kind.

Branching further on the side of the real world, other related interests would be vehicles that travel through aerospace, my favorite of which are fighter planes and related to these are other military stuff. Then there's the high technology associated with space-farers. This leads to my profession which is in IT, and my education which is in applied mathematics (I'm afraid, with non-practice, my skills in it have been slowly disappearing). I'd like to think of myself as a man of science, but it's not unusual for me to be open to supernatural phenomenon. In fact, I do have a strong religious upbringing and this may come out in occasional homilies (which may sound more like rants).

On the fictional or artistic side this leads to my interests in science fiction or alternative/future realities. Explorations of such topics are mostly prevalent in anime. But of course it's not just for the geeky stuff that I consume anime, videos and other literature. When it comes to the arts, my tastes are varied and my tolerance is high, but let me mention the other thing that I'm such a sucker for, it's pretty much related to the idealism from the Ivory Tower of outer space: let's just say I'm a hopeless romantic.

I'm sure there are some other interests I have left out, but I fear that I might ramble on and on and end up with a kilometric entry. Indeed that's another thing I'd like to practise here: to refrain from tl;dr entries that had plagued my previous blog. Besides, like the expanding universe, this is an expanding blog where I could spread out my thoughts with posts after posts.

Spaceoutpost has launched, good luck and Godspeed.