Category Archive for: kapitalista

kultura

dear Manila Contemporary,

1. let me begin with this:

gallery doors on January 26 2011.

2. how is it that this is NOT the We Are Not Aimless exhibit? nope, none of those paintings are part of it, not that gallery set-up, nothing. how does this even make sense?

3. i was at your gallery for close to an hour, even used the comfort room while there, and three of your gallery people saw me. NONE of them told me i was looking at the wrong exhibit, or the right exhibit with the wrong title, or the right title with the wrong works. in the galleries more respectful of guests, basic but non-obvious information is offered. none was offered me here. i took that to mean things were obvious.

4. had the gallery people told me i was looking at a stockroom exhibit, I would’ve promptly walked out o there: what a waste of time to look at works on gallery walls that have no point for being other than being unsold.

5. had your people said go on to the second floor, that’s where the REAL exhibit is, i would’ve stayed; had they said it was outside in the heat, i would’ve walked through it still. i spend too much time looking at art, taking curatorship and works seriously. i do so for no other reason than to value what’s here: people spent time money energy / blood sweat tears for any exhibit to be set-up. i respect that by spending time with the work.

6. i’ve reviewed you before eh? been through your gallery often enough, even the guard by the gates of Whitespace knows me. i’ve been doing the art beat for the past two years. never NEVER has this happened to me. nor has it happened that no one would point out to the girl taking 10 million pictures that this exhibit ain’t what she thinks. goodness gracious what a waste of time.

and so i promise that i will stop wasting time at your gallery. i shall boycott you all this year. maybe that doesn’t matter to you. but then again, that only means you don’t know what matters.

***

I’d like to apologize to the curator of the real We Are Not Aimless exhibit. That review wasn’t written out of stupidity; if you read it at all, it was an example of how seriously I take art / curatorship / exhibits. I take responsibility for it, and I’m sorry for whatever stress it caused you.

I’d also like to apologize to GMANewsOnline which put up the story and had to receive the flack first. Lesson learned. It won’t ever happen again.

kultura

entangled and powerful

The rewriting of fairy and folk tales into more politically correct versions is an old task, one that’s been done by the best fictionists (think Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber 1979) and poets (think Anne Sexton’s Transformations 1971), one that’s been analyzed by every kind of feminist there is. We all generally agree: tales are archetypal stories that limit what we can be. Stereotyping is the basic accusation against these stories we’ve grown up on; current cultural theory tells us this doesn’t just happen for femaleness but also for maleness, gayness, every other sexuality in between.

The more dominant and overwrought critique of course happens for women’s images in fairytales; it’s one that has is proven by those of us who at some point thought it true that we are damsels to be saved from distress by a man; it is one that has as proof generations of female children who believe that there wasn’t, isn’t much she can do without a man. It might be said: what a stretch. I say: have you lived my life?

It’s in this context that I enjoy every Disney Princess Movie there is, long before that label even began to be used. This doesn’t include Snow White, Cinderella and Aurora’s (Sleeping Beauty) first incarnations as traditional princesses; it doesn’t include Ariel’s first incarnation as the Little Mermaid who barely goes through suffering in the way she does in the original Brothers Grimm story. Maybe these stories were Disney’s learning curve.

Because by the time we were treated to Belle in Beauty and the Beast we were also shown someone who was reading, who knew of the world and her freedomsbecause she read books. She stands up to the beast, responds to him kindly but firmly, is unafraid. Jasmine in Aladdin was barely a step forward, with a title that speaks of the male lead instead of the female one, and with the princess’s conventional rebellion against royal duties easily and simply presented to be about getting out of the castle, and going on a carpet ride, too. By the time Pocahontas and Mulan showed in theaters, Disney seemedto have found its niche in creating new and different images of being female, of dreaming, of freedom for its audience — kids and adults alike.

This is my context for the movie Tangled, a retelling of Rapunzel, a reassessment of the fairy tale that names all its silences and puts it up for examination. Right here is the complexity in this reconfiguration of the story of Rapunzel: nothing is easy here, everything is complicated, and almost overpowers the simplicity of family and dreaming which might seem to be its easy stereotypical point, but isn’t all that’s here.

Because there is freedom from want like we don’t know it: Rapunzel lived in that tower and filled her days with every possible activity within its walls. Here it becomes crucial that Rapunzel as a teenager was doing the more conventional chores of cleaning house and baking alongside new(er) images of female hobbies: reading up on the sciences and the world, playing the guitar, painting across her tower’s interiors from the walls to the ceiling, mural upon mural. In the latter, Rapunzel is allowed an amount of self-reflexivity, a skill that’s always difficult.

She draws herself looking upon the world. For someone who hasn’t been seen by the world, she knew what she must look like to it. She knows of the world and rationalizes the fact that she’s kept safe from it: Rapunzel was thankfully not stupid, nor was she naive in the conventional sense. Her naivete isn’t borne of innocence; it’s one that’s premised on possibility.

So when Flynn Rider finds his way up the tower, bad guy as he is, Rapunzel didn’t see him as savior, as he was about possibility: she was going to use him to find her way beyond the tower. When Flynn becomes a real guy distinct from those wanted posters with his face on it, Rapunzel didn’t simply think they were falling in love, as she thought this would prove the world wrong about him. Because her naivete is such, Rapunzel isn’t like most princesses we’ve seen in Disney retellings: she wasn’t stupidly in love, didn‘t require that we suspend belief in the process of watching her character unfold.

Instead we are enamored by her lack of self-consciousness, we are drawn to her emotional turmoil. This she had plenty of, a new and funny aspect of the retold Rapunzel, and so real given the fact that she’s been locked up in a tower for 18 years. Her psychosis bordering on the crazy, her ability at a combination of joy and guilt, ecstatic celebration of the outside world and the sinking feeling that it might end in pain and suffering, all seems real and probable for Rapunzel. None of it is stuff for fairytales.

rapunzel

When she finally gets angry at the mother she always new, evil as she is, it is all real, too. And when her hair meets it’s logical end, we were set up to think that it didn’t matter after all, the hair isn’t all that Rapunzel was about.

She was also about being barefoot, a wonderful image for these times of shoe craziness among females, starting them on the obsession younger than ever before, even in their version(s) of heels! (Good gracious.) Rapunzel wasn’t just barefoot, she had none of the princess-y qualities we see in animation, in the female protagonists on TV and romantic comedy movies, in romance novels and chick lit.

Here is her value in the midst of popular productions of femininity and womanhood: Tangled de-centers Rapunzel as a girl who simply dreams. Instead she is created to become the girl with short hair, the one with average looks, the one who does art and plays the guitar, walks barefoot, enjoys the simplest of things, and in the process actually lives. The point is that this girl lives, and her life isn’t a fairytale at all.

komentaryo

plump and pretty and political correctness

on an otherwise quiet Saturday, driving home from a jog in the Fort, I could only be jarred into the realization that the cities we live in survive on activities within and in and by itself. and no this doesn’t mean fiestas anymore, not in this day and age.

it seems that the city’s local beauty pageant had just been held, a tarp with the Mayor’s face actually announces the event. the Miss Mandaluyong candidates had one tarpaulin each, hung on a post each, around the City Hall Rotonda.

tarps are the new “in” thing, a way of saying: “Sikat ako, ikaw?”

on posts, alongside advertisements
ms.mandaluyong 2011!

yes, those tangled wires represent the state of electrical maintenance in this city that has a beauty pageant. but i digress.

as i turn right into Boni, it takes me a while to realize that the set of tarps that line this narrower minor street actually has a different set of women. it was also about a different pageant altogether, one that obviously wasn’t just about beauty.

 you are reading that right: Bilbiling Mandaluyong 2011. and i cannot tell you how stunned i was at the idea of a whole city having excess fat, though i imagine that is beyond what the city hall thought when they put together this pageant.

this pageant that we’ve actually seen done on TV and the movies, yes? but also in the current scheme of health consciousness and early mortality rates is just startling. the gut reaction is to think: how politically incorrect is this? the other reaction is: but who’s to say, really?

in these times when being healthy is everything and commercialized, when it necessarily sinks into a consumerist culture that’s about the brands that matter, the places to run in, the workouts to do. in these times when impossible thinness has come to be seen as normal; when all thinness requires is a lot of money to go to some slimming clinic of other of which there are plenty.

in these times when we should know better. we should know that half the time it isn’t about misrepresentation as it is about class, the other half maybe those who worry about the world less actually get it right. in these times when we should know that all the time we are all victims of the culture of beauty of any given time, and yes this includes the men, too. in these times when whitening the skin and straightening the hair, whittling the waist and trimming the thighs, and for men being buff and sleek and metrosexual, is what’s seen as normal.

maybe the ones who don’t want to take some diet pills have got it right, are actually better off, are actually on a healthier track spirit-wise.

in context, on the street.
tabi-tabi portion eh?

i’m far from calling this revolutionary of course, but i will say this: maybe it makes for the most uncanny of steps in the right — because different — direction. hopefully these ladies refused to be made into the laughingstock of the pageant, ideally they are given the same kind of courtesy and respect accorded Ms. Mandaluyong. because there is more to Bilbiling Mandaluyong than the additional weight. especially if these Bilbiling candidates prove that their intelligence is just as big, their brilliance equally overwhelming.

now, maybe i hope for too much.

kultura

art art art!

these were up elsewhere that i love because they are untouched, unexpurgated, and i’m left to fawn or freak out and everything in between. art can only be about how it makes you feel eh?

(1) Pilipinas Street Plan at the Lopez Museum’s Extensions. (2) The end of the art world via Kin Misa’s rust and color. (3) J Pacena’s After Mall Hours. (4) the Pinoy toy as art form and mythmaking.

(1)

pilipinas street plan still at Lopez Museum

komentaryo

dear Dep Ed, on EFA and another additional year

early in the week, on one of those hectic mornings that I keep the TV on to Sapul sa 5 for company, I heard your plans for instituting public kindergarten as part of our educational system, and I could only tweet about it as violently as I could.

though of course in the midst of the violence in Egypt then (now turned into a version of people power eh?), and the fare hike, this was barely carried by the rest of the day’s news.

but I feel it needs to be said: it is stupid. and I say that with all due and possible respect to Bro. Armin Luistro. I imagine many others want to say it too, but will not for fear of the heavens. I have no such fear.

what I fear is that all the money that’s been allocated for education (wow, P207 BILLION PESOS!), something that the Dep Ed is so proud about, will go to nothing but a false sense of what ails the educational system. there are real problems of teaching teachers, changing the curriculum, improving learning attitudes in students, that the plan of the K-12 program fails to problematize.

given that, institutionalizing kindergarten is just unfair if not unjust, and ultimately heartless. just heartless.

it means a 13-year educational cycle yes? it means creating the need for extra classrooms, extra skills, extra money from teachers. and there is no point in saying that it will be free — because public education is free! — when anyone who’s talked to a parent who sends a child to public school will tell you that they spend, more than they can afford. and when that money runs out, when there’s no money other than for putting food on the table, education rightfully becomes a non-priority.

and here lies the problem with institutionalizing kindergarten for our poor: it begins the cycle of spending earlier, it creates a need that isn’t there at all.

because who truly goes to pre-school in this country other than the middle to upper classes? and they do because their families can afford it, because there is a pre-school industry that has burgeoned in the recent past. this is not to look down of pre-schools, but it is to say this: in many ways and many places (like Tiaong Quezon) it is nothing but a way of making money, preying on parents who are made to think their kids need it, that it is imperative to their growth and learning. these are the same spaces that have pre-school teachers with questionable capabilities, the ones who are un-learned in that particular area of expertise that is pre-school education.

In light of this, I want to know who Dep Ed imagines will be teaching public kindergarten. in the real and credible pre-schools, teachers studied to teach on this level, having gone through courses in child psychology and education, and are adept at handling children. what I can imagine is that Dep Ed’s getting existing teachers to teach additional classes for the younger students, forgetting that teaching pre-school is a very particular specialized skill. no one will get me to do it even with my years of teaching and my love for children.

it also seems like 10 steps back in pre-school education. instituting kindergarten in our public schools when it is being questioned, and when the notions of home schooling for the middle and upper classes is becoming more and more viable and logical: it keeps parents responsible for their children’s formative years, and if that means showing poor children how difficult life is in this third world context, then so be it.

meanwhile, Dep Ed’s overactive imagination allows them to piece two and two together –kindergarten and two more years to the education system — and see that it will fix our educational problems. that they even think this is the first step instead of curriculum revision, teacher seminars, wage hike for teachers, extra classrooms, better textbooks is beyond me. that they haven’t even called on volunteers from the industry to help out is proof of its refusal to change its policies, to revise it given other perspectives.

because really. tell me that i can teach in the public school closest to my house, and i will. tell me to teach teachers and i will come up with a plan. tell me to write a textbook and i will. on minimum pay, on practically volunteerism, and i will do it. as so many others will, i tell you. as so many others are willing to.

but you need to include us, you need to include the members of this nation, the ones who have taught for years, the ones who are willing to learn. Dep Ed has fantastic imagination as it is, but maybe what it lacks is creativity. along with some good sense about the educational system of decades past, what ails this, what will truly and really fix it.

creativity would also allow them to create a plan that isn’t about adding more years to the problematic 10 that’s already there, but about fundamentally changing from within, because they know what is wrong from within.

give us a plan Dep Ed, show us a plan that will allow us to help out, and feel like we’re part of the change this administration promises. additional years are stupid. even more so kindergarten. it’s a plan that’s doomed to fail. and one that no intelligent teacher will be for, will want to help out.

and pray tell, how will additional years mean fulfilling the goal of Education For All (EFA)? it will only mean more impoverished families giving up on education, because it takes longer to finish it now, which means it will cost more. and yes, this will only bring us to that vicious cycle of arguments about “but public education is free!” that only the naive would think to say.

EFA is the goal? well, at this point, EFAk naman Dep Ed.