History lesson

I find myself engulfed by an inexplicable obsession with the past. It’s like being trapped in some imaginary time capsule that involuntarily catapults itself into some time in the past.

With music I guess it was because of too much Buble in college. So I’m talking Frank Sinatra-old, Elvis Presley-old. As a kid of 10 or 11, I used to listen to father’s collection of oldies cassettes. I never got to like Tom Jones or Engelbert Humperdink but was fond of his “ultimate” collection of Abba and listen to famous songs of The Beatles. And I used to sing with this song called “It’s My Party”.

Simon and Garfunkel’s lyrics appeal to me a lot. I think The Boxer and The Sound of Silence are among the most beautifully-written songs in history along with Don McLean’s American Pie. The film Almost Famous is also memorable because it added to my zest in learning and discovering more of the classics. The soundtrack has one of my favorite songs, It Wouldn’t Have Made Any Difference by Todd Rundgren. But still, I have a lot to catch up with: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, The Who, Janis Joplin, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, the early Santana, the early blues and jazz etc. etc.

With books, my favorite one is a classic – William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the classic apocalyptic tale of innocence lost and survival of the fittest. There’s also F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, George Orwell’s 1984 and Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange.

In photography class, our professor let us watch Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane which then I didn’t know is the greatest film of all time. Watching the classics is not only essential for any film buff, it’s also fun. I like Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Preston Sturgess’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). One of my all-time fave is Francois Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows, 1958). I also like Michaelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) and Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), which I first saw during a literature class.

I’d also love to have a turntable or a phonograph, the vinyl records, a Corona typewriter like that of Robbie’s in Atonement, a convertible or any vintage car, and more vintage shirts.

Care to give me some of the old stuff?

**

Besides a very poor diligence and adeptness in math, I find myself with a lack of sense of world history. High school history was forgettable, I can’t remember if world history was actually taught and I can’t even remember the date the katipuneros tore their cedulas and cried freedom. But I guess it’s more important that I remembered there was a tearing. I liked that during the first semester of college when we had Philippine history, it was more introspective. Our professor was much more concerned about how we thought of the events of the past. Which should be the case, right? I just thought that because of too much attention given on details, we lose track of the whole essence of history, which is a study of events. And details like dates and figures are too much of a distraction that you end up not retaining much of it, say when you’re twenty-something.

In one of my favorite 2006 films, Half Nelson, Ryan Gosling plays a druggie grade school history teacher. The kids he teaches were mostly Hispanics and African-Americans in a working-class suburb. In the introductory lecture, Dan, Ryan’s character, describes history as a study of oppositions, an examination of contradiction, of opposing forces – which make up the events in history. I never saw it that way but it was refreshing and striking. And these were grade-schoolers.

They always say history repeats itself. When you think of major political upheavals, environmental catastrophes, world wars, corrupt regimes and governments, you cannot even gasp as you begin to imagine the old adage. Even in Scream, the famous slasher film of all slasher films, the resurgence of psycho-killers is attributed fatalistically to the saying. But I guess history has its destiny too. And maybe that’s why it sometimes creeps up stealthily to devastating effects, is because we are always bound to never learn from it.