on August 11 the presscon of the group Palayain Ang Sining became interesting to me for many reasons, least of all what was being said. and no, this wasn’t a measure of who was speaking, or what was being said, but the kind of room it became, filled with media as it was.
and no, pinky webb wasn’t even there. neither was karen davila. but there were men with huge versions of their penises, este, long hard lenses. and they weren’t pointing it at who was talking.
media and their lenses
i’m this close to that man’s elbow because he was practically standing over the girl beside me. we were facing the front of the room where National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera, Karen Flores-Ocampo, Myra Beltran, etal., were making their statements about freedom of expression, which should’ve matter to all of us in the audience. except that these men weren’t interested in who was talking, nor did they want to gain a better sense of what’s actually going on here, complicit as they’ve been in the manner in which freedom of expression has been compromised given media’s treatment of the exhibit Kulo.
instead they had their sights set on the one person they had sacrificed and made into their headline, and who was refusing to speak that day, who has (thankfully) refused to speak since.
media & mideo 1
what astounded me about these members of the media, in this small conference room of the college of mass comm in UP, was not so much that they were zeroing in on mideo, but that they were ultimately bastos about it. they not only had their backs turned to the ones speaking in front, they also kept disrupting the proceedings as they reprimanded each other and talked in loud whispers among themselves. they didn’t evenstop taking pictures as we sang the national anthem. they didn’t stopfor the national anthem when there was a Philippine flag in that room.
that morning, and without a doubt, the media showed what it is they’re made of, and why they are so capable of irresponsibility and sensationalism. we should all just admit that in the end, when push comes to shove, all we want is to find an enemy and serve him on a silver platter to the religious and conservatives and powerful in this country, thinking that we’re gaining tickets to heaven by doing so.
in truth, we’ve built a version of hell here, and it’s pretty clear who the devils are.
been living under a rock, or just in the midst of book production and thesis writing, that i only realized people were finally angry with Bench for their darn sexy ads when the Philippine Volcanoes’ images (the National Rugby Team for you) were removed from the Guadalupe northbound stretch of billboards. Now know that on this stretch I have seen too much of Kris Aquino, strangely photoshopped Calayan beauty clients, and recently fully-clad Bench boys doing pretend-dancing, that when i saw photos online of the Philippine Volcanoes’ billboards i was overwhelmed with regret: why oh why did i NOT see that when it was up?
yes i am exaggerating (sort of), because really, from afar (and i mean zoomed out on my computer screen) those billboards looked no different from the other fictional men i’ve seen top naked, o sige na nga, bottom na rin kung naka-brip lang. i mean at this point we’ve seen them all topless: Piolo, Dingdong, Aljur, Derek, and the question could only be: what was wrong with the Volcanoes? or the Azkals for that matter. before the uproar, there was that Century Tuna billboard of Phil Younghusband, topless; and the Ally Borromeo billboard on southbound Guadalupe, about which all i thought was: baket naka-pucker ang lips ni kuya?
Aly Borromeo with puckered lips.
but the straight men in government weren’t looking at these men’s faces, and for the Philippine Volcanoes it was their lower halves that was reason for offense. when i say straight men i mean Mandaluyong Mayor Benhur Abalos, Valenzuela Mayor Sherwin Gatchalian who covered his nieces’ eyes when they passed through EDSA lest they see the men in briefs, as well as MMDA chair Francis Tolentino. which does beg the question: bakit ngayon lang? not even related to all the skimpily-clad women in billboards, but in the context of all those other men we’ve seen in briefs before?
ah, the truth of the matter is in MMDA assistant general manager for planning Tina Velasco’s words:
bulging crotches! voluptuousness! the straight men in government might not have wanted to articulate it, but they knew of it enough to take offense. and in which case it seems that they don’t mind bulging (augmented and otherwise) boobs, or the woman’s crotch since walang bulge ‘yon? they don’t mind women’s and men’s come-hither looks no matter how voluptuous, as long as walang bulge? got it.
kapag side view, o likod, ni Michael de Guzman, ok lang?
that this reeks of gender politics is the foregone conclusion, but the more important assessment has to take into consideration the gay gaze, the one that the liberated men of the Philippine Volcanoes and the Azkals, and every metrosexual man in between, have ceased to mind. if all i saw in the Borromeo billboard were his puckered lips, and if all i thought when i finally saw those boys of the Volcanoes in their underwear is: ang babata naman ng mga ito! then i obviously ain’t its market, as it might be every kafatid, vekz, vekla who passes through EDSA.
they're just boys!
call me a girl but i will swoon at a man’s eyes on a billboard (Derek Ramsey’s), and his moreno smile (Jericho Rosales’), and his silliness (John Lloyd Cruz) fully clothed as he might be. kebz sa kung may abs siya o wala.
oh, but Mayor Gatchalian insists that his goal is to:
sige sir, lagpasan ko muna ang paggamit mo ng salitang irregardless, i want to know if you cover your nieces’ eyes when you pass billboards of skin whitening products and boob jobs. no seriously, sir. because that is our little girls’ enemies if the goal is to bring them up confident in themselves, with as little superificiality as possible, comfortable in their own skins. whitening in the land of morena skin, beauty clinics in the the third world? that is what’s ultimately problematic about our billboards; celebrities who are white to begin with selling whitening products? that is the lie little girls will grow up believing.
at least with a real man’s body on a billboard — bulge and all — they won’t grow up afraid of the crotch. unless those are the kinds of little girls we want to bring up: afraid of men, afraid of her own brown skin, afraid of being themselves? que horror.
meanwhile let me end with this: if we’re against bulges and suggestive images here let’s be clear what the rules are. because the ad board is right: if we’re selling briefs, then damn it show me the body that will wear them! so dear straight government official, pray tell: how big is an acceptable boob? because you know a D-cup looks obviously augmented, but so do C-cups in the land of Asian women. and how big is the acceptable bulge, given the fact it would seem strange for bulges to be missing, in tight fit jeans or board shorts, and i’m sure you don’t want your kind to look castrated, yes? and while we’re at it, how seductive can the eyes be? are puckered lips now disallowed? how about men’s hands? because you know i find those sexy.
Arnold Aninion and Darran Seeto: nothing like some arms and hands for some sexy eh?
and then there’s this question, one that i truly wonder about: should we remove men’s feet from billboards altogether?
It might be out of the way, and painfully in the middle of the corporate hustle and bustle of Makati, but Rizalizing the Future was a good enough reason to leave anti-corporatism in the car and step into the Yuchengco Museum.
The hook, and one of the more powerful things in this exhibit, is the inclusion of Team Manila’s contemporary renderings on wood of Jose Rizal in shades (and later on their other Pepe products), in colors too vivid you forget he’s national hero. In “Rizal in Shades” one can only thank the heavens for Team Manila’s reconfiguration of history into interesting and viable images that comes from a stable and consistent sense of popular nationalism. Let me forget, of course, that I have yet to be able to afford one of their products.
Truth to tell, in the context of the museum, this was a feat in itself; in the context of the exhibit it would be the portent of the diversity that’s here, only united by notions of Rizal. Contradictions are welcome! Hear! Hear! Your telling of this story is as good as mine!
As it turns out, this works infinitely well with the Rizal heirs’ exhibition of things / correspondence / lives equated with our national hero. At first glance the collection seems too trivial for comfort, but in reality, it is more inspiring than we’d like to admit. Art as inspiration to do better in our lives seems cliché, never mind that it has as market the younger students among us, yet there is an amount of greatness in Rizal that’s difficult to ignore, or not be inspired by, the jaded among us notwithstanding.
At the very least, you must get goose bumps looking at the pencil sketches of portraits Rizal did himself.
in 2006, and just the past week, Nestor Torre had the same complaint about Sam Milby, and the same conclusion. complaint: his lack of Filipino language skills. conclusion: his roles and acting are limited by it. in 2006 he said:
now i know Torre’s generally unhappy with the romantic-comedy, thinking it limits actors such as John Lloyd Cruz’s acting (yes, i will respond to that soon), but it might do him well to go through Sam’s filmography. for even when it is a rom-com, he began doing it better than most from the moment he did the fat guy in Jade Castro’s My Big Love. there also wasn’t much comedy in his character in I Love You Babe where he played an irritable architecture professor, and no comedy at all in And I Love You So where Sam in fact proved he could do a character with not a whole lot of cuteness.
Sam as fat guy Macky Angeles in My Big Love by Jade Castro
now it isn’t clear to me which “shallow balikbayan types” Torre’s saying Sam has played, but there was complexity even in his characters as the policeman-wannabe in You Got Me and the US embassy consul in You Are The One. it might not have been as complex as Torre wanted them to be, but that might be a limitation of the genre more than anything else. a genre, we repeat, that he apparently doesn’t like much.
now of course Sam’s smile shouldn’t be a problem. except that for Torre, it is:
this begs the question: there are no cute smiles in a drama about cancer and dying?* or is it just Sam’s smile that we question? granted he praises Sam as “committed” and “present” here, in the same breath Torre says Sam winged it in his previous films. i’d like to know which ones, and how. because his Chris Panlilio resonates not at all with its darkness but with its free spiritedness, even when yes, he was the dark rocker dude there. his Chef Macky Cordova where he was put in a fat suit has yet to be attempted by any other actor in these shores and is still absolutely enjoyable.
Sam broods as Chris Panlilio in andiloveyouso directed by Laurenti Dyogi
in the end Torre fails at considering the kind of development that’s in Sam’s filmography, which would be fine were he NOT making conclusions and generalizations about Sam’s acting, were he just seeing him in light of this recent film and nothing else. Forever And A Day as he says was a storytelling failure. why drag Sam’s whole film career with it? and why suggest that he stop making movies altogether? that’s to simply look down on all the movies and all the work he’s done so far, yes? i’m the last person who will say Sam’s the best actor in these shores, but i will give him credit for roles, in rom-com and otherwise, that are undoubtedly his. without giving him that credit, all Torre does is criticism un-constructive, and where would we all be with that.
*and while we’re on Forever And A Day, it’s unclear to me why Torre would think this a romantic-comedy when it so obviously wasn’t from the beginning, not when the main female protagonist was revealing so little about herself. had he seen much of the rom-coms we churn out, it would be clear to him that this was farthest from it from the start. too, he obviously didn’t see Chris Martinez’s beautiful glossy portrayal of a cancer patient’s last 100 days which would debunk his idea that medical conditions and gloss don’t go together. goodness.
Alwin Reamillo’s Ang Balut Viand exhibit is like balut: it looks like a standard generic egg from the outside, but is an unborn duck on the inside. Which is of course to say that you might not have the stomach for that sisiw literally and figuratively; or find that you actually quite have a taste for it, from sipping that hot balut liquid straight from the shell, to the process of slowly peeling the shell, and downing it whole: the eating of balut isn’t just about eating, as it is of knowing, of identity.
The balut is one claim to fame we’re uncertain about, seeing as it is equated with hissing cockroaches on Fear Factor. Talk about bringing us back to the dark ages of being the exotic and barbaric brown siblings of America.
In Reamillo’s hands though the balut becomes reason for pride, as it is reclaimed in its process of being changed: there are no duck fetuses here, but there is plenty of balut made out of plaster and emulsion.
