Dear you,
So much has changed since we last spoke. I’m writing to you from my little New York apartment. For a long time, I’ve meant to tell you about moving here but I haven’t found the words for it. Maybe I won’t for a long time. It’s interesting to me that I’ve stopped feeling the urge to flash-freeze my emotional state in a way that’s cohesive and presentable to the public realm. It’s giving maturity! Or something like it.
I’ve come to find it more useful to keep kinds of diaries. Most of mine are on my phone and none of them would be comprehensible to any prying eyes. One note for stray thoughts on every project I’m working on. One note for stray scenes I see in my head or catch in the world around me. One note for lines I’ll give a character someday. One note per dream, groggily typed up in bed. A folder of videos of birds circling. A lot of this is sort of just aggregating in silence; classified documents of an inner world.
We were assigned a self-portrait film in our directing class1 and it was a surprisingly tender exercise in the ways people saw themselves. One shot a straightforward documentary about her work as a filmmaker. Another made a grotesque faux luxury commercial. A few went for surreal narratives declassifying something of themselves. One combined laptop screen recordings and mini-DV tapes from her childhood so her past and her present could commune with one another.
As for me, I had kisses on my mind. The kiss is this intimate emotional transference2. You kiss someone because you love them. You kiss someone hello or goodbye. You kiss someone you miss. You kiss someone you want. You blow kisses halfway around the world. You kiss animals because it’s the language you share. You close the circuit and give yourself a kiss.
I shot a diary of kisses for a month and called it “Kinikisskiss.”3 I knew I wanted to shoot on my phone, but the visual language of the piece was elusive for a while. Of course the most obvious answer was the correct one: it just needed to be selfies. Anything staged felt so obviously staged; all I needed to do was record and kiss. I kissed my friends and family. I shot kisses everywhere I went, even if I was alone. I shot my favorite kisses from movies. I shot things I wasn’t sure were kisses (some of them turned out to be).
Editing was a nightmare. While I’d given myself over a week to do the work and organized the hour of footage as best as I could, there was no real guide or script I could make for it. All I could do was tinker towards the emotional rhythm of this amorphous thing. Dear reader, there was a night I lay distraught on the floor of the editing suite and said, “I made a nothing sandwich.” So I took two days off, went to Bushwick, partied on Halloween weekend and shot even more kisses. The next day, things started falling into place. The final piece turned out to be old videos on my phone: kisses from Manila.
When I presented it for critique a few days later, what I found most fascinating was the suggestions to end it differently: end with Tita Pepper because it’s the most emotional, end with sunlight kissing the water because it’s the most abstract. I ended with me kissing me and I couldn’t really explain why. Now I realize it’s because (to me, at least) a kiss isn’t any one thing. Perhaps I needed it to stay in motion so it could be anything and everything, so it could elude these semantic traps.
I was going to end this with a litany of things I kiss and “kiss” but after what I’ve just said, that feels all the more reductive. I’ll let the kisses fly free and leave you with some tunes. Go kiss someone today.
Kiss them for me; I may find myself delayed,
Apa
with the iconic Anocha Suwichakornpong
I am always trying to transfer emotions. I carry little pails to scoop out of the ocean of things I feel. I can never get it all but I have to try and pour some of it somewhere.
My simple explanation for non-Filipino speakers is “kini” makes it a verb. When you explain a pun, it stops being fun!