…Which, if we think about it, actually makes sense. Its subject matter is Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesian novelist, jailed by the Suharto regime for his writings, the closest a Southeast Asian has come to being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. (more…)
been doing reviews of the Virgin Labfest 9 plays for GMA News Online. it’s the first time in three years that i’ve made the effort to see all three sets of new one-act plays within the first week, and the full-length play early in the second week. (more…)
in undergrad in 1990’s University of the Philippines, i was taking a required Filipino 50 class that was teaching us all to spell in the prescribed Filipino. prescribed, which means that it was up to a Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino, to tell me how to spell my English. that is how to spell English words like engineer into injinir. i asked then why could we not leave English words alone, if only because the need to spell all these English words our way, just really fucks with our sense of those English words.
you do not only spell it in a new and unfamiliar Filipino way, you also end up teaching students how to wrongly spell the word “engineer.”
in 2013, we are being told by the same Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino (KWF) that we must now call nation Filipinas. not Pilipinas. not Philippines. but FILIPINAS. (more…)
I have nothing but love for Charice. No, I am no fan really, but I find it infinitely interesting when popular culture icons give their mass audience the unexpected or taboo, or something difficult to talk about, something against what we know to be proper or consider as important. (more…)
there is no doubt in my mind that joking about the rape of a woman is a no-no, which is like joking that you will kill a faggot. these are black and white, they are premised on gender discrimination, these are violent thoughts we do not think, and do not think to articulate when we actually do think about them out of anger or spite.
and yet i get it, too, that really fantastic comedy, the kind that’s intelligent enough to be irreverent, can talk about rape without it being an attack on women, as it does become an attack on the men who think it correct. Vice Ganda was far from intelligent about this joke, and as such there is no saying that members of the audience “didn’t understand it.” (more…)