Category Archive for: bayan

komentaryo

the Boy of the arts: not even a patron

ambassador. — noun. 1. a diplomatic official of the highest rank, sent by one sovereign state to another as its resident representative. (via dictionary.com)

granted that diplomacy is what Boy Abunda has plenty of and “his ability to communicate ideas” is the soundbite that’s suppose to explain why he’s been appointed as Arts Ambassador.  of course there are so many other people who do this just as well if not better: i can give you 10 names off the top of my head across culture and the academe. but most of them are not on TV, aren’t almost-sisters with Kris Aquino, and most of them will most probably be critical of government. and right there you have the REAL reasons why Boy has become Arts Ambassador.

it’s not that he’s extraordinarily skilled, or even skilled at this job at all. it’s that he’s the right friend at the right time. and you know what’s clear about PNoy: he is paying his debts. because this ability to speak that they say is Boy’s specialty? he’s a PR guy turned showbiz talkshow host, who can spin, if not wrap you around his little finger: this is every marketing person’s specialty. and this is not to look down on people who do PR; this is to be truthful about PR. it’s about selling, about making something look good, regardless of how bad it truly is. they should just put Boy in PR for the whole government: right there is where they need image boosting and fakery.

but for government to pay its debt to Boy in this way? it’s one that the arts and cultures sector of this country will pay dearly for.

owned by ABS-CBN. not just the photo really.

this is not at all to question Boy’s abilities as talk show host, or as talent manager, or as PR person. this is to point out that Boy’s Arts Ambassador appointment  is just depressing to those of us who are part of the creative sphere and know that it’s in the throes of suffering, of disregard, of neglect. this is to point out that there are countless people more deserving, more experienced, who have for years been at the forefront of and living and suffering within the arts and cultures sphere.

some life advice in a CD for someone who doesn't sing

this sphere that has suffered long enough, because government just doesn’t seem to care about it. Boy is part only of TV and no other cultural production, unless you count his CD of life advice and advertising given his endorsements. this appointment is so telling of what this government thinks about arts and culture, how they imagine that someone who hosts on TV must be the best choice. it’s like saying that anyone who travels can be a travel writer, anyone who eats food a food critic.

which i understand, this uh, horrid dismaying presumptions about what is art and culture; after all Cory’s presidency didn’t just kill the local movie industry, it also put Kris on TV. but surrounded as PNoy is with advisers and writers who make him look good, surrounded as he is with people from the arts and academe, i thought we’d at least have a bunch of better choices for Art Ambassador.

now i’m the last person who will say that popular productions aren’t culture; but i’m also the first person who will tell you that TV is but a drop in the large river of art and culture that we create. the ability to interview people is an even smaller smidgen — katiting lang ‘yan ng kakayahan ng napakaraming manggagawang kultural na kumakayod sa Pilipinas araw-araw.

kayod. Boy did not have to work for this, and hasn’t really worked for culture all this time. i don’t know why the NCCA even believes that he is an “advocate for arts and culture” when in the years that i have heard Boy on TV with the equally noisy presidential sister, they have not once struck me as supporters of the local arts other than when one of Boy’s talents are part of a movie or show or photo exhibit, other than when it’s an ABS-CBN / Lopez cultural empire product.

they will talk about a Cory exhibit, but really talk about Cory and not the art; they will mention art and photography, but only when ABS-CBN talents are its subjects; they will mention a book, but not once have I heard them talking about Philippine literature; they will give you a list of the books they love but it is rare if at all that this includes a local author; they will talk about movies and it’s always just Star Cinema films, or Regal Films depending on whether or not Kris stars in it, and then the rest of the time it’s Hollywood; they will talk about foreign designer clothes in the midst of a sea of local designers; Boy will endorse a foreign book, one that talks about God, which of course already limits the realm of arts and culture that he can even begin to wrap his head around.

and this realm, IS HUGE, just in case it isn’t being realized at all. arts and culture in this country is a diverse dynamic world of crisis and contradiction, and in the ideal world an Arts Ambassador would include all of that — all of us — in his vision.

this is not about reading Maya Angelou (who Boy always quotes, goodness gracious). this isn’t about watching Oprah all the time and copying her interviewing style. this is not about supporting one or two or three Pinoy designers for one’s clothes. this is not at all about watching Pinoy TV and film and being a fan of it. this is not about studying for a post, which he promised he’d do when he said no, not yet, to a government post.

this is about having read our Filipino writers all this time,  and having a sense of what ails the publishing industry. this is about keeping track of what’s going on in the academe, in the arts and culture it churns out, and seeing what ails our intellectual production. this is about watching plays and going to art exhibits, watching all of TV and not just ABS-CBN, going to the movies mainstream and indie, and seeing how much more — how so much more — can be done to spread that wealth around. this is about knowing the regions and seeing particular pockets of arts and cultures in languages as diverse as there are islands. this is about not being indebted to anyone — anyone at all — and being responsible for the kind of cultural products you yourself produce.

boy blind tastes a corned beef brand on nationwide television

because as Arts Ambassador, Boy’s own productions come into play. as Arts Ambassador it is respect and credibility that are difficult to earn, locally and internationally, given the diversity and division, given the lack of a clear Pinoy identity and agenda.

but here you have an Arts Ambassador indebted to the greatest cultural empire this side of the earth, which disallows unions and illegally dismisses its workers. he sells — is endorser of —  a mobile service provider, detergent, corned beef, pineapple juice, a beauty center, writer for a particular newspaper and magazine, and is in TV shows only on ABS-CBN 2. this in itself is replete with bias, and a limited view of what else is there about culture, about the arts.

ambassador for the arts sells beauty and surgical center. that's him with a trench coat in the middle of the photo.

and i won’t even go into becoming laughingstock of the bigger international world of arts and culture. not just because of the fact that our arts and culture ambassador is a, uh, product endorser but more than that because when and if they Google him what they’ll see is this:

via http://leviuqse.blogspot.com

and a photo for what is a hypothetical show that regardless, appears on Google:

via http://chuvaness.livejournal.com/557621

ladies and gentlemen, our Arts Ambassador, the guy who will face guests, art practitioners, cultural ambassadors all over the world at the up and coming Philippine International Arts Festival!

you can tell i’m excited.

komentaryo

babae kase!

fact: i grew up around men who, whenever there’s an accident on the road, or there’s undue traffic, would say: “Babae kase!” with a shake of the head, sometimes hands up in the air. yes, they let go of the steering wheel to show their disgust.

fact: i grew up around women who are crazy ass drivers, cousins and an aunt about whom is said: “Parang lalake ka magmaneho” complete with that head shake, by the men in our lives.

when the MMDA announced that it would propose that bus operators be required to hire women drivers, that is, ascertain that at least 50% of their bus drivers are women, the reactions, especially from women in media, were wanting. the early morning show hosts made fun of the idea — and in effect of women — saying that this would only mean people being late for work because women drive slow, saying that masyadong maingat the female driver for comfort. this was a general reaction that i now fail to remember who said what, but i do remember Shawn Yao of Sapul sa 5 saying that this reeked of sexism.

though one does wonder, is it the MMDA that’s being sexist? or is it us, all of us, who reacted to this with a shrug and a mental image of very very slow buses plying EDSA?

there was in fact, nothing sexist about the MMDA’s proposal. what was absolutely wrong was the premise for these statements by MMDA Chair Francis Tolentino. because when he said that female drivers rarely get into accidents, which female drivers was he talking about? obviously private vehicle owners, yes? and that’s us who don’t need to drive our cars for a living, who don’t ply EDSA as a matter of feeding our families at the end of the day. more than being sexist, Tolentino created a world where every woman is the same, forgetting that the women drivers he speaks of aren’t the ones who will be driving those darn buses.

those buses are the source of livelihood for driver and the conductor, who need to earn a certain amount for the bus company first before they earn their keep for the day. if that system isn’t going to change, then really, those female drivers will be as reckless on the road as their male counterparts. because they need to be, because they have no choice.

to reduce the issues of class and the systemic dysfunction of the bus industry to an issue of gender is unfair. it’s also just dumb.

and really, some common sense please: traffic and accidents on EDSA and Commonwealth are also such because while private vehicles cannot go beyond that yellow line, buses can. where lies the discipline? it is the rules, the ones that aren’t followed, that endanger lives. those rules the MMDA is responsible for, those lives they are responsible for.

‘wag niyo na kami bolahin na mas okay kami mag-drive, para kunwari magaling kayo sa trabaho niyo. though maybe the wish is for women, especially the ones who drive their own cars and are in media, to see this for what it is: a classist proposal, that they’ve reacted to in the most sexist of ways.

komentaryo

coming in 2011: The (presidential) Troubleshooter!

yes, it’s as absurd as it sounds.

i now have visions of Mar Roxas as The Troubleshooter, a new superhero, who’s urgently needed for any and every trouble that needs to be fixed in Malacañang. not that there’s trouble now, but Mar will be gifted with those troubles soon.

because this is a gift for Mar, PNoy has said. yet, i do wonder if being labelled The Troubleshooter is a gift, much less an honorable position at all. my personal experience with the idea of troubleshooting is technology. a Windows user for most of my adult life until recently, any Windows problem, i found, had the troubleshoot-this-problem option. this process of course asks the most basic questions, you almost want to get offended. as with a printer that won’t work, it will ask: are you sure the cable’s attached? are you sure your printer ink cartridge is installed correctly? click on this to test. are you sure you clicked at all?

ok, ok. that last bit’s an exaggeration, but you get my drift. troubleshooting as a verb is to do some problem solving that, given its roots in technology, means looking at all possible reasons for a problem and eliminating them one by one until you get to the real cause (definitions are here and here). now this of course seems like a valid need of any presidency, to have a troubleshooter, i mean. but to call it this, versus, oh i don’t know Chief of Staff? just seems … juvenile.

of course it’s possible that this is really just a problem with — a failure in — rhetoric, but goodness, if they still don’t know the right words to say, and if they’re still not creating proper categories and labels for the offices and people they include in their Malacañang plantilla, we can only wonder what’s being said behind closed doors. language and communication must be first in a list of presidential image priorities: because really, all we’ve got to hold onto as citizens are words. words! we wish for a government that chooses its words well, especially to go with what it actually does well.

ah, but the already insecure government might say we are picking on them by picking on the petty, which ain’t true. in fact, it is because we take nation and government seriously that we can’t let things as small as this or as huge as foreign policy pass, that we don’t want to. nothing is too petty, especially in the age of double-checking with Google. not tourism logos, not the spelling of scientific names, not claiming to fame wrong animals as indigenous.

but here, to humor government and support Mar in his new superhero role as The Troubleshooter! these are the first things that come up when you actually Google the concept of troubleshooting, the troubleshooter, the troubleshot.

1: Relax. When faced with a problem, don’t panic. — such sound advice really, except that this government has proven itself too relaxed, i.e., as with the way it handled the bus tragedy last year. too steady for comfort they are, eh? and in which case maybe The Troubleshooter! will give them a sense of urgency.

2: Choose which problem you’re having among a list. Remember that this is only some of the thousands of possible problems. For more specific issues, contact Mr. Hope. — yes, naman. there are a thousand possible problems and specific issues for this government, Mr. Troubleshooter, and these are piling up from the petty to the fundamental. this is a long list seven months hence, you do need to enter your troubleshooter role with a whole lot of hope.

3: Standard troubleshooting step: Restart. — yes, let’s. hopefully the kind of restart that means all bad memory and viruses — including Kris food and mouth disease — will be erased. PLEASE?

4: If trouble persists, restart on Safe Mode. — ah, this The Troubleshooter! doesn’t have to even tell this government, we’ve been in safe mode for the past seven months eh? no big change without big dangerous decisions.

5: If problems persist, Delete Program then Reinstall. — yes, please. and delete all instances when the President’s love life was mentioned especially by his four witch-sisters who insist we all stop talking about it, delete all of Mai Mislang’s tweets, delete all of the Pilipina Kay Ganda campaign materials from the face of the Earth especially the smiley PNoy suggested be drawn on the coconut tree. please keep all programs that force us to reckon with our international image such as the Manila Bus Tragedy. only so we can open that program and click on Help.

6: If it’s a virus or worm, take out your Motherboard Manual. — ah, yes, the specter of Cory does live in this Presidency every day. that’s not just a manual that PNoy uses, sometimes it’s also what goes wrong. what of the motherboard that’s also the virus and worm? what of the President who knows not to decide against his mother? yes, we’re getting bored.

7. You can leave it running all the time, but you must restart periodically to fix minor glitches that arise after using it for long periods of time. — oh yes, minor glitches might be solved by some amount of restarting, but what of a government that doesn’t want to be running all the time? dear Mr. Troubleshooter, there must be a way to keep this glitches from happening, which might mean just Googling it.

now i know i might be expecting too much from him, about as much as i do from this government, but there has got to be no problem too small or too large for The Troubleshooter! right? after all this government has got its hands full with problems. who knows, maybe The Troubleshooter! will actually save the day.

the more important question might be: what color costume will he be wearing?

kultura

may nunal sa paa

i remember growing up and being told that i must have a mole somewhere on either foot, because i couldn’t stay put. gala, lakwatsera, may nunal sa paa.

putting it to an amount of good use at http://www.travelbook.ph.

so far:

History Survives in Sariaya

Lost in Lucena

The Quiet of Tiaong

komentaryo

pinky and press ethics

you’ve got to give it to the Webbs, yes? I mean you may believe differently about Hubert etal getting that acquittal. you may want to read up regardless, because at the very least those in Bilibid Prisons need an open mind — your open mind. I believe that 15 years is enough, I even think that 10 is enough, even just one year, when there’s a slim slim possibility that anyone’s innocent, a teeny tiny chance that they aren’t guilty of the crime they’ve been accused of. to a certain extent, the shame, the lost years, the lost time, the sadness, the silence, is enough.

and it is silence that someone like Pinky Webb, politician’s daughter, media personality, sister of recently freed Hubert, knows to keep, and consistently. if there’s one thing that needs to be said a day after Hubert’s acquittal, if there’s one thing that we might want to see as one particularly bright light in all of this, it’s this.

in another media personality’s hands, this sister would’ve considered this her scoop, this would’ve been milked all it was worth, almost her chance at fame and fortune given the kind of media stardom that is now possible for members of the press.

especially in recent years when the media personality has made the news not necessarily for her professional achievements or public service, as it has been for the personal news that she herself feeds, Pinky is a breath of fresh air, one that’s surprising actually, but is such a measure of breeding. as it is of a clear sense of ethics that in this case is about the distance she keeps from the media spotlight that wants nothing but for her to speak of her private self.

this refusal to speak, the decision at silence, for me is just a wonderful example — one that we rarely see, yes? — of how the public media personality should handle any news related to her private life.

of course in third world philippines the extreme opposite of Pinky is the peg that Kris Aquino has created, also a politician’s daughter, also a TV personality, who likes to get the scoop, who uses her personal relationships as scoop, whose lack of ethics is most measured in instances when her own family is in the news — and they always are, not just because her mother was president, and her brother is now president, also because she likes to make the news. literally, she creates news about herself. case in point: if you saw that TV Patrol live patch, Ted Failon actually didn’t know what hit him as Kris just kept going on and on. making fun of others should be illegal in Kris’ hands; i wonder about the freedom of speech, too.

and it is because of Kris and every other media personality who has appeared in a magazine talking about her personal life, every media personality who speaks of personal things in 140 characters or less on Twitter, every media personality who has turned — quite shamelessly — into a lifestyle host in the guise of current events host. it is because of all these that we barely know to see Pinky Webb here, maybe because we don’t know how to deal with such class, such grace, such a display of press ethics.

sometimes and here, in the most tragically beautiful of ways, we are still surprised by members of our media. and in this horrid state of affairs when Kris and Boy are considered credible, and Korina and Noli can just go back to being “objective” newscasters, well.

thank goodness for Pinky Webb. may she be remain the peg for the right amount(s) of silence and quiet, the correct refusal to sell private self, that we so aspire for in the members of media. because that is a measure not just of their ethics, but also of their trust in us as audience who are mature enough to deal with media personalities without the personal. we get what we deserve, I know. and maybe Pinky Webb’s proving to us that sometimes we deserve the people with breeding and class, the ones who hold their privacies dear, because we all should, too.