Category Archive for: bayan

komentaryo

Dear Pinay,

March is International Women’s Month and March 8 is Women’s Day.

It’s the perfect time to kick-off The Be Cause. This is a tiny project that I’ve been wanting to launch as a way of dealing with contemporary women’s issues, central to which can only be the images of womanhood that we’re bombarded with everyday. It isn’t just that these images are false – if not impossible – for a majority of us; it’s also that this has normalized superficiality in discussions about being Pinay in this day and age. (more…)

kultura

Independent life is good for you.*

helped out with Better Living Through Xeroxography (BLTX) 2 which happens tomorrow, March 2, at Ilyong’s in Cubao. it’s the one independent book fair that happens in these shores as far as i know, and the one that gathers together the writers / illustrators / artists you wouldn’t see in bookstores. am launching a teeny tiny book to end the life cycle of an essay that should’ve been printed / published a long time ago. do come! (more…)

kultura

WTF FHM!

this piece went up yesterday on that horrid cover for March that FHM Philippines was set on putting out. which it has pulled out, announced via that official statement posted on their website. that might be a success, but seriously? why is that official statement not a public apology? it needed to be an admission of having made a mistake, full stop. (more…)

kultura

february in fact, is national arts month

in mid-2010, i wrote this as introductory piece for what was planned as a column on arts and culture in a publication under the editorship of exie abola. it is perfect that i remember it now in light of National Arts Month, with the National Commission on Culture and the Arts (NCCA) celebrating it via the Philippine Arts Festival 2012. that we are more than halfway through February, and we have yet to feel this celebration at all? that this still applies almost two years since? welcome to the state of the arts and culture in this country.  (more…)

komentaryo

poverty, human rights & PNoy’s devt plan

In a land where a president takes pride in conditional cash transfers and poverty alleviation disbursements, it is not surprising that there is no real long- term solution to solve poverty. Worse, poverty is seen only as by-product of corruption: such was Benigno Aquino III’s campaign slogan, such is the continued tagline for what it is that ails the nation. It is corruption not poverty, it is corruption not human rights, it is corruption not a systemic dysfunction that keeps the poor where they are. (more…)