while elsewhere in the world the discussions for women’s day and women’s month 2016 have been on the level of celebrity women’s bodies and slutshaming, role models and raising our young girls, in the Philippines we have a government that cannot even pretend to know what women need, much less what we want. (more…)
I wasn’t very good at doing arts and culture in the country the past year. But here’s a list of the strange, the good, the surprising in culture for 2015, not at all a best or worst list because … see the first sentence.
First a critical aside: having worked as dramaturg for Kleptomaniacs and a bit with Tanghalang Pilipino in 2014 meant keeping the theater reviews to a minimum in 2015. I needed that time to let go of the little inside stories that I know, if not to forget the petty tsismis. Distance is a good thing, and one is glad when it is given.
If there’s anyone that I am now afraid might win the 2016 elections—because who knows what kind of electorate we have at this point—it is Davao Mayor Rodrigo Duterte.
Yes, there are pros and cons for all the presidential candidates and the possibility that each will win. But what Duterte promises are such simple, commonsensical things. What he promises are things that all presidential candidates should be promising, and they should be promising it with a progam to back it up. A holistic take on peace and order and public safety that need not fall back on action star rhetoric, and need not mean committing every human rights violation imaginable. (more…)
On November 18, Malacañang issued a non-apology to the public who had been inconvenienced during APEC 2015.
A non-apology worded as a thank you “for your patience and understanding over the inconvenience brought about by our enhanced security measures.” And then it spun the difficulty of the commute to work, the fact of absences and tardiness that will mean less wages, and said: “You have shown to the 10,000 delegates what Filipino hospitality means.”
If it’s to sacrifice our time, energy, earnings the past week – well, we were forced into that kind of hospitality. If it’s Manila streets emptied of people and vehicles, shops closed, turned into ghost towns – that does not speak of the Manila we know at all.
If it’s the display of culture as revealed by the final APEC Dinner Performance for Leaders – then please lang. Not in our name.
Because that was a monstrous failure, an ill-conceptualized variety show, that was far from displaying “the best” of Philippine culture. (more…)
The month’s been long and it isn’t even over yet. Much of my mind and heart have been taken over by Lumad stories, ones that we rarely hear about first hand, and so it’s been critical (at least for me) to hear the Lumad themselves speak.
But of course this came with the realization of distance. How far is a land like Mindanao to Luzon, how far is Surigao, Davao, CARAGA, SOCCSKARGEN, from Manila. If the silence that surrounded the Lumad killings are any indication, it could be a continent, a country, a whole world away.
That it is like Paris, that it is not Paris, is precisely the point. (more…)