Happy 2013!

An apt beginning to the beginning of the new year: the first few minutes of Kidlat Tahimik’s Perfumed Nightmare (1977).

This sequence is an earnest but wry account of the great determination needed and the great labor involved in taking leave of colonialist oppression, cultural constraints, parochial censure, social prejudices and stigmas, and not least of all, the isolating security of the familiar. Meanwhile, Tahimik notes, established powers and their followers parade across the thoroughfare. The bridge is mediation, says Fredric Jameson in The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992). The bridge is our bridge of life, says Tahimik.

May we make all crossings–metaphorical and real, difficult and effortless–with Tahimik’s brashness, tempered in equal measure with humor and critical skepticism. We choose our vehicles and we can cross this, any, all bridges!