The Rhythm of Thorns

Apo Whang-Od is tired.

The 95-year-old mambabatok, tattoo artist, sets her tools in a soot-stained plastic ice cream tub, and wipes her intricately-inked wrinkly hands on the sides of her shirt as she slowly stands up from the rock she was sitting on in front of her decrepit wood-and-tin house, which also serves as her tattoo shop, in the mountain village of Buscalan, Kalinga.

She has just finished working on a tourist’s arm kayyaman, a centipede tattoo believed to bring the gods’ guide and protection to its bearer. But the work is not quite done yet, for the client, a young lawyer and previous tattoo virgin, wants another whatek, another tattoo – a five-inch python slithering next to the centipede.

The remaining job is left by Apo for her teenage grandniece and only apprentice, Gracia “Grace” Palicas, to continue.

Sitting on her grandaunt’s rock, the budding tattoo artist gathers herself and slips into pure concentration. In a split second, the bubbly girl with the playful smile is gone. Through her dark almond eyes, you might think her soul has drifted somewhere distant. Yet, the way she moves tells you that she remains united with her body, and allows the rustling of the trees and the sound of the wind to take control of it.

She fixes her eyes on the tourist’s bleeding bicep, and gently trails her fingers on his skin. She takes one last deep breath before she finally starts drawing the python with a bamboo strip dipped in whiyug, a soot-derived ink.

The python, a symbol of strength, is depicted by the Kalingas through uncomplicated lines and geometrical patterns, which, when put together, look like a chain of squares, linked from corner to corner with two stripes inside.

It does not take another minute after completing the snake’s outline for Grace to start hammering the ink into her client’s skin by striking the gisi – a tool fashioned from a stick and pomelo thorn, which serves as the needle – with a pat-ik, a long and sturdy wooden rod.

Tick – tick – tick – tick – tick…

The sound of wood beating wood beating skin is fast like a metronome on an overdrive. It conjures a unique melody that joins nature and spirit. Above all, it is a rhythm that reverberates an ancient Philippine tradition that has been practiced for thousands of years, with a future now in the hands of a bright-eyed 18-year-old girl.

Grace and the Whatek

Dubbed as the most beautiful young woman in Buscalan, Grace has a silky black river of hair flowing from her head to the middle of her back, enviable sun-kissed brown skin, and an infectious smile. She is not tall, but her muscled arms and legs speak for her strength.

Just like most teenage girls, her toenails are painted. For this week, she chose a nice periwinkle blue shade. An ornate half bracelet tattoo, a collection of thick and fine zigzag lines, wraps the area just below her right arm’s inner elbow. She has two other tattoos inked on her back by Whang-Od, including a kayyaman, her favorite design.

Grace developed a keen interest in her tribe’s tattooing custom at a tender age, and began learning the art of the whatek through her apo Whang-Od when she turned ten. The time she had away from rice paddies, school, and house chores, she spent on polishing her tattooing skills, her little hands meticulously mimicking the movements of her grandaunt’s, hoping one day, she’d be able to perfect her talent.

“I am confident that it is Grace who will take over my place as this tribe’s mambabatok when I’m already too weak to work,” apo Whang-Od says in the Kalinga dialect.

Eight years later, Grace has dropped out of college, completely ending her short-lived dream of becoming a teacher and totally committing herself to the whatek tradition, carving a name of her own – quite literally – in the rich tattooing scene one body at a time.

“Ipagpapatuloy ko pa rin ‘to kahit anong mangyari,” the girl is steadfast in defending her duty as the only guardian of her tribe’s vanishing custom.

While the number of Kalinga’s mamababatoks has gone down from a handful to two, people wishing to get a whatek are growing at a surprisingly fast rate, keeping Grace and her apo preoccupied every week with throngs and throngs of clients, Filipino and foreign, who hike for some two hours from the main road in Bugnay, another village in the municipality of Tinglayan, to reach Buscalan and get inked.

“Halos araw-araw may nagpapatattoo dito. Kapag holiday, mas marami ang dumadayo. Nagkakapila yung mga gustong magpatattoo,” Grace says.

The whatek gained popularity among thrill seekers and tattoo aficionados, when it received coverage from mainstream media in the 2000s, a result of the piqued interests of local and international documentarians, including renowned American tattoo anthropologist Lars Krutak, who featured the Kalinga tattoo in “Tattoo Hunter”, a series of documentaries about indigenous body art forms aired on the Discovery Channel.

Although the reemergence of the Kalinga tattoo is seemingly healthy for the region’s tourism and the tradition itself, it is its true essence that’s gradually becoming obsolete.

The whatek used to be reserved only for the brave head hunters of Kalinga, who defend their tribes from intruders and enemies, and Kalinga women, who wear tattoos on their bodies as marks of beauty and to bring fertility. Inked Kalinga women accentuate the concept of ambaru, the concept of beauty.

Today, however, the whatek is often treated more like a souvenir or reward for making the dangerous trip to and from Buscalan. 

Nevertheless, Grace considers tourists sporting Kalinga tattoos as an extension of their culture. “Hindi lang Kalinga ang may tradisyon [ng pagtatattoo],” she says. “Marami tayong kababayang naghahanap ng tatak Pilipino.”

She also heavily disagrees with people who call her apo Whang-Od the “last” Kalinga tattoo artist. “Siya lang yung last sa old generation. Ako na yung new generation na mambabatok,” she explains.

In an effort to keep the custom alive outside Kalinga and in sync with the beat of the modern Filipino life, Grace takes part in the annual Dutdutan – a tattoo convention in Manila that exhibits the talents of the finest Filipino tattoo artists – on behalf of Whang-Od, who is now too weak to travel.

“Lahat sila, puro ‘bzzzzz’ yung tunog ng pangtattoo nila. Sa akin lang yung maingay na tick-tick-tick yung tunog,” Grace laughs, recounting her first Dutdutan experience.

In a few days, she will be setting out on another journey to Manila for her sophomore stint at Dutdutan. Grace proudly says that the event’s organizer Ricky Sta. Ana, himself, invited her to participate in the two-day convention, which will be held on September 26 to 27, 2014. She obliged, with high hopes of introducing her tribe’s culture to more people in the country’s capital.

Dutdutan 2014

It’s a few minutes past one in the afternoon on a Saturday, and the crowd at the Kalinga tattoo booth near the entrance has grown once again. Bewildered eyes are fixed on the chocolate-skinned teenage girl, who is hammering ink into the forearm of a man with the use of sticks and a thorn. Some are snapping photos. Some are taking videos.

This is the kind of sight that even a heavily-tattooed man would stop to see.

But Grace remains indifferent to all the attention she’s getting. She has slipped back into her own realm that is not to be disturbed by anyone.

Tick – tick – tick – tick – tick…

Grace has already tattooed dozens of people since the opening of Dutdutan 2014. Today is the convention’s last day and business is still going strong. A lot of her clients are foreigners and professionals, most of them driven by curiosity to get a whatek.

In Buscalan, Grace would take any amount, even a simple present like a box of sweets, from tourists after inking them. But in Dutdutan, the prices of exhibitors’ services are fixed. For a whatek, one has to pay one to two thousand Pesos, depending on the pattern’s size and intricacy.

Seated on a black cushioned chair, Grace’s client watches the thorn play a painful game on his skin. He chose to have a series of arrows inked underneath his completely-healed kayyaman. He has subjected himself to the same ordeal in the past, and yet, he still winces every now and then as Grace hammers the ink into his skin.

The ways people deal with getting a whatek greatly differ, and Grace has seen them all. There are some who have screamed or pulled their bodies back in fear of the thorn, but most who find the ritual painful often go through it in silence. There are also some others who sing, just like how the tribal elders of Kalinga would, whilst getting their tattoos back in the day.

Only a few have described getting a whatek “painless”, including a woman in her fifties who dropped by Grace’s booth to have a centipede done on her back. “It’s not painful at all,” she kept saying. The hint of disbelief in her tone never faded.

Grace is down to the last arrow, and the crowd has begun to thin.

The audience of the young mambabatok come and go, but one can easily tell when she has stopped tapping. It’s when the frantic ticking of an invisible bomb comes to an abrupt halt.

Beads of crimson-red blood seep through her client’s exhausted skin, which Grace carefully wipes off with a piece of fabric dipped in oil. She takes one last look at the fresh whatek, and leaves it to be admired by its bearer.

It is complete…

And it is beautiful.

♥Andz

Burning Thoughts and Feels After Watching "Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials"

I went to see “Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials” yesterday, and honestly, I still can’t decide whether I liked it or not. Now, don’t get me wrong here. I’m not saying that it was bad, because it’s not. There were a lot of good things about it, but, of course, there were also a handful of bad stuff that happened in the film, which were pretty major – stuff that fans of the books may or may not take nicely.

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

You've been warned.

Scorch opens with a quick peek into the childhood of Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) with his mum handing him over to WCKD (World In Catastrophe: Killzone Experiment Department – in the books), but the story picks up exactly where the previous film left off – on a helicopter after an apparent rescue of the Gladers. They are then brought to a secured facility, where they are fed, given fresh clothes, and promised a new life. Everything seems too good to be true, and soon enough, the Gladers find themselves taking a run out of their rescuers’ den and out in the Scorch, where they face a new test of survival.

It’s pretty much a whole different story.

Our favourite Gladers are back! But if you have seen the trailers, you probably know by now that a lot of changes have been made in Scorch. Well, what they showed in the trailers were just bits of the big jumps director Wes Ball, writer T.S. Nowlin, and their team pursued. I have read James Dashner’s Maze Runner trilogy, and I can tell you that the movie runs in a totally different direction.

In fact, the word “trials” in the title almost seems irrelevant, since the Gladers are not sent to the Scorch for any kind of trial, or at least, not in the context of them being lab rats of WCKD. The Gladers voluntarily got themselves out of the facility against the wishes of WCKD, who were, by the way, the people behind the staged rescue (duh). That is the biggest plot difference that I can pinpoint, since all the new stuff branched out from it.

Some elements in the third book have also been incorporated into the second movie, just like what Ball has said in interviews. The reason: to ease the franchise into a big ending, which he said will be “cool” and more “futuristic”. Was it a smart move? Perhaps. But we’ll have to wait for more than a year until we find out if the changes he made will pay off or not. In the mean time, let’s just put our trust in Ball’s vision, and hope for the best. 

The visual effects are sick!

Trust me when I say that you are in for a CGI extravaganza when you see this film. While the setting is a lot darker, the visual effects team didn’t see that as a reason to downplay things. Instead, they used that as an advantage to give the film the creepier, hair-raising, and heart-thumping feel it deserves.

Less dialogues, more action.

Scorch is an adrenaline-pumped film and fans of action will not be disappointed. It’s fast-paced and intense, leaving little room for the characters (and the audience) to catch their breath and even speak to each other! I also guarantee you that this movie has a lot more running than the previous one. Watch out for Thomas’s slide through the closing door and Minho’s knee to chest attack – I have to admit, those were pretty awesome.

Forget romance. You won’t be getting it.

One of the things I really liked in the Scorch movie is how unromantic it is.

I do understand that romance plays a great role in young adult stories, and that ruling it out is a big risk (we’re talking about millions of fangirls losing their minds here), but for me, the filmmakers behind Scorch bypassing the romantic aspect of the story is a risk well taken.

Through a subtle way, the movie gives you the idea that Thomas has strong feelings for Teresa and Brenda, and that’s better than doing something drastic that would push fans to gang up and form “Team Teresa” or “Team Brenda”, pitting both girls against each other. That is so yesterday, and that's not what The Maze Runner is about.

Having said that, while Scorch is not a movie that has a lot of romance to offer, it is certainly a movie about different kinds of relationships, and that’s what’s so great about it because instead of watching two people getting cosy together, you see everyone genuinely caring and looking out for each other.

There’s the brotherhood of the Gladers, the foster father-daughter relationship between Jorge and Brenda, and even the complicated link of Teresa with WCKD and her twisted affection for the Gladers. If you don’t think that’s love, you better get yourself a new heart.

The cranks are terrifying.

They are not zombies. They are not an army of the undead. They are just terribly ill people who look terrifying and run way too fast. And just in case you’re wondering, the “rose took my nose” crank wasn’t in the film. The cranks past the gone do not speak but they let out haunting screams every now and then. 

You will get to hear Newt call Thomas “Tommy”.

Happy now? And, yes, Thomas Brodie-Sangster as Newt is as cute and young-looking as ever, proving that life is, indeed, unfair.

More Minho? More like foreshadowing.

My favourite character in The Maze Runner series is Minho (Ki Hong Lee), so it was a great treat for me to see him in almost every scene in the movie. Little did I know there was a bigger reason behind his almost-constant presence around Thomas, for towards the end of the film, Minho unexpectedly becomes a driving force of the story…

After finding some relief in a camp of immune and uninfected humans, the Gladers are once again found by WCKD (How? You'll find out later.) and they try to make another escape. In the middle of all the chaos, Minho stays behind his friends to ensure their safety, while exchanging bullets with WCKD soldiers, who eventually incapacitate him. Too stunned to move from their hiding places to help Minho, the Gladers don’t get to save the former keeper of the runners, who is then taken away by WCKD on a Berg.

With Minho gone, Thomas loses it, and decides to go back to WCKD and find his maze-running buddy, sticking to a promise he previously made that no more Glader will be left behind. His friends along with Jorge, Brenda, and Group B, who were all hesitant at first, resolve to join Thomas, and that’s where Scorch ends.

Now does this really have anything to do with Minho being in almost every scene? Well, I like to think of it as a foreshadowing technique used by the filmmakers. Thing is, if they fail to establish the idea that Minho is someone who means a lot to Thomas (especially in Scorch), then him going back to WCKD to find his friend, when freedom is almost at reach, would be rather impractical if not pointless.

As for Minho's sass, we'll get that, but just. His hair is still on fleek, though! :D

Teresa’s actions are more reasonable.

The book has some motivation issues when it comes to the characters’ actions, so I’m glad that Ball and Nowlin made Teresa’s (Kaya Scodelario) dedication to WCKD (which makes Thomas eventually lose his trust in her) more believable and reasonable. 

In Scorch, Teresa’s memories are restored, and her desire to help WCKD in finding a cure for the Flare is reignited. She goes along with the Gladers, but towards the end of the film, she gets in touch with WCKD authorities who arrive at the colony of immunes. Chaos ensues. Trust is lost. Minho is taken. Shuck this life. 

But it’s not all bad, because we also get to see the sensitive side of Teresa as she recounts a memory of her as a helpless little girl seeing her once-beautiful mother turn into a crank. That part gave me (and probably other fans out there) a reason to sympathise with Teresa. I mean, if I were her, I would have the same determination to look for a cure and eradicate whatever killed my mum and billions of other people. 

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m starting to like Teresa. 

It just came to me: Teresa is reportedly named after Mother Teresa (just like how most of the other Gladers are named after prominent people in history: Thomas from Thomas Edison, Newt from Isaac Newton, Alby from Albert Einstein…), and if there’s one trait they have in common, it’s that they put the welfare of others before their personal interests – Mother Teresa being the living saint that she was and Teresa wanting to find a cure. If you’ll think about it, Teresa is not selfish. She genuinely cares for everyone – and I mean everyone – just not in the way we and the Gladers want her to.

Winston gets his moment.

Thank God, Ball and Nowlin did not include the scene with the head-swallowing molten metal in the film! It's one of the parts of the novel that I didn't like. So yeah, good riddance! But then such omission means only one thing: Winston dies differently in the movie. 

Winston (Alex Flores), the former keeper of the slicers, makes it out of WCKD's facility alive and well with his fellow Gladers. But after an encounter with the cranks who claw him, he gets infected by the Flare and his health rapidly deteriorates. The effects of the disease on Winston were undeniably grotesque. After dropping unconscious midway through the journey, he wakes up coughing out blood and when he lifts his shirt, he reveals his exposed sick-coloured innards. He then begs the Gladers to leave him behind - a scene that was surprisingly emotional.

In my opinion, had Winston's character been developed better in the first film, his farewell scene would have conjured more feels, since it's a great display of the friendship among the Gladers.

Brenda is made to be more likeable in the film.

I found it difficult to like Brenda (Rosa Salazar) in the books. I actually hated her and her unreasonable and almos creepy touchy-feeliness towards Thomas. The movie, however, made her a lot more likeable and a bit more kick-ass.

Salazar did a great job portraying Brenda. She brought a fresh female presence to the film that Kaya Scodelario as Teresa wouldn’t have done, and she just blended so well with the rest of the cast. Whether she will be romantically linked to Thomas or not in the last film, it doesn’t matter because Brenda is someone you’d totally cheer on even without the romantic arc Dashner originally wrote.

Giancarlo Esposito makes a great Jorge.

I pictured Jorge to look more Latino so I was a bit taken aback when I found out that Giancarlo Esposito (you’ve probably seen him on Breaking Bad) was playing the role. He’s just not Jorge… or so I thought. Damn, he was perfect! He may not look the part, but he carried Jorge’s cleverness, tenacity, and soft  side in a good, balanced way.

Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight” is surprisingly a great background music for an intense and explosive action scene.

Who knew, right? I enjoyed this part immensely, and I might have sung through the entire song. Haha!

Apart from Aris, members of Group B don’t appear until the last part of the film.

Aris joins the Gladers shortly after they arrive at WCKD and has stuck with them throughout the journey. However, Harriet and Sonya do not appear until the last quarter of the film, when the Gladers, Jorge, and Brenda get ambushed by immunes who live in a colony which the two girls are part of.

Janson is just… boring.

As the assistant director of WCKD, Janson (Aidan Gillen) goes about looking for the Gladers in the entirety of the film, trying his best to be on the good side of Chancellor Ava Paige (Patricia Clarkson) like an overly-obedient lackey – that’s all there is to him. He’s not even called the Rat Man! I personally think Gillen could have given more to the character if he were just given the chance.

Nobody is safe.

With all the plot changes, the characters in the movie are at their most vulnerable. All I can say is that everything is too uncertain for everyone at this point that it makes you fear of what Ball can do to the characters you've been rooting for from the beginning.

FAST FORWARD TO FEBRUARY 2017, PLEASE!!!

♥Andz