Category Archive for: kawomenan

kultura

when art and music collide

a version of this was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, September 14 2009.

It was on two seemingly disparate occasions that the interweaving of art and music came to life for this writer. The first one involved the unfinished and unfulfilled CD project of the arts organization CANVAS and Ambient Media, where local musicians collaborate with visual artists on the theme of Filipino identity. The second was what seemed to be a run-of-the-mill album launch of Grace Nono, in a genre all her own, singing her versions of various Visayan-Cebuano love songs.

In the end, both experiences meant a letting go of the ways in which I view art in itself, or listen to music by itself, as both collide into an intertexuality that’s both of the moment, but is entirely universal as well. (more…)

radikalchick.lit

cory and (lost) memory

the only thing that links me to Cory Aquino is really memory. because while yes, it has been about these images of yellow my grandfather and mother carried, as her death sinks in it’s also about many other images in my head.

of Butz Aquino and ATOM, and an uncle who was part of it. of Kuya at 13 asking that he be allowed to go with our older cousins to EDSA because, as he told my mother, what if there are 999,999 people there? he would make it one million! of a lola who scolded my lolo waving a huge foam laban sign at helicopters hovering over their house: friend! baka mabaril ka!

of being 10 years old, and not knowing much, really. except that three years earlier, Mama was so depressed that Ninoy Aquino was murdered. of finally seeing Cory, his widow, and of watching her campaign with Doy Laurel, and of the yellow and green fighting it out with the red and blue. of crazy elections, and walking with my father to Sto. Domingo Church to see who was winning in our district.

but too, i remember how at a certain point, there were no bottles of San Miguel Beer at our reunions. and the blue tubs of Magnolia Ice Cream were conspicuously absent, too. i imagine now that the adults must have had some Gold Eagle Beer, because what the kids had were Selecta Ice Cream, the less famous, therefore we presumed, less tasty choice.

but it must have tasted the same. after all ice cream is just ice cream to a kid.

what was different, i realize now, was how that unfamiliar tub of ube ice cream was a symbol of a nation coming together. of supporting this woman battling it out with the masculine dictatorship. of believing that it was possible to change things by choosing a different ice cream — or beer — brand. i realize now that this belief in Cory’s call for a civil disobedience campaign, did bank on innocence. a naivete about how capitalism works, and how a boycott rarely does.

that it was successful is also so telling of why our collective memory as articulated by the media has yet to remember this aspect of Cory’s rise as the widow who beat a dictatorship. maybe we have become afraid of remembering that it is possible to hold capitalism by the balls. maybe we have also ceased to appreciate our capacity at believing in one person enough, to change our lifestyles around her cause. maybe we have lost all innocence.

and with Cory dying, in the midst of another dictatorship, maybe even all hope.

kultura

seeing yellow

last friday, along katipunan avenue, ugly pink MMDA street dividers had yellow ribbons. today, driving through The Fort, lampposts and trees adorned with the same. on GMA 7’s sunday noontime variety show earlier today, all artists had yellow ribbons and pins on their shirts, Judy Ann Santos was in a crazy yellow bustier.

the UAAP’s main game between U.P. and Ateneo this afternoon had all basketball players and coaches with yellow ribbons attached to their uniforms.

and as in 1983, when mama had a yellow ribbon tied to our car, i found myself tying a yellow ribbon on my car last friday. it was meant to disappear, which it surely did by late that evening. but it was also meant to fly with the winds of the University of Makati, where the car was parked the whole day, the only car that was yellowed.

my love for cory isn’t so much about what she did for country as president — my activist-self keeps me from appreciating her in that way. but her icon is replete with memories. (more…)

kultura

on The Male Voice

a version of this was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer yesterday, June 8 2009, Arts and Books Section.

It begins simply enough, with four chairs, four small tables, and two clothes racks onstage. The moment the actors begin the first monologue “I Am Man” though, it becomes clear that this is going to be more complex than that stage and its four actors.

Because there is more to making a powerful and revolutionary play than just being inspired by the Vagina Monologues, and reconfiguring it to highlight man’s “humanity”. There more to the project of New Voice Company’s The Male Voice than just telling the individual stories of countless men to pinpoint their existence as affected members of family and society. There must be more to this than that cliché of an ending: men will choose to be part of the solution, instead of the problem. (more…)

komentaryo

sex without love*

If there’s any soundbite that I absolutely hated hearing in relation to the Hayden Koh sex videos, it’s from Boy Abunda, saying that sex, whether on video or not, must be about LOVE.

Goodness. Is this the dark ages? How many women have been oppressed precisely by this notion of love? I love you girl, therefore sleep with me. This dialogue is what has brought women to bed, before they are of an age when they can handle it, before they are even aware of their bodies. This is what has allowed for women’s bodies to be made into objects, because they enter the bedroom and think, oh, I love this man and this must be the way to prove it.

Love is what has allowed women to imagine love triangles to be acceptable, precisely what has kept all these women in Hayden’s bed and on his camera, what has allowed for Vicky Belo to imagine that she must stay, to prove she loves him.

Talk of love in relation to these sex videos is an injustice to love.

But maybe this is really just us, as audience, in over our heads about these sex videos, enamored with the ongoing debate, the continued media coverage, the chismis. It really is so juicy, yes? But all of these seems like we are, as audience, unprepared to deal with sex as sex, period. Ill-equipped to deal with the kind of technology that propagates videos of two people getting it on. Unprepared to look at sex in the eye and view it for what it is: two bodies articulating desire.

For who’s to say there was sex but no love or any emotions, and vice versa? This is only obvious when the act is done with no consent, and that would make it rape, no ifs and buts about it. And yet this isn’t porn either, nor your usual sexy movie. Both of these are done for profit, and presume what it is that the audience wants to see, over and above anything else.

But these Hayden videos have more than consent, and just run-of-the-mill movie sex. It has enjoyment. It has desire. It has libog, in the Pinoy sense of lust-desire-passion-tulo-laway-bodies-against-each-other-bahala-na-si-Batman sense. Only real life – not necessarily true love – would allow for that kind of desire. And two bodies acknowledging that desire, acting on it, enjoying it, is difficult to ignore. And maybe shouldn’t be debased to the level of just a sex video.

Or easily, and simply, oppression of one woman, or two or three. In the aftermath of these videos, we are told to see only the woman’s body, and how she had no idea something like this was going to be released to the public. All we’ve seen, in fact, and considered, are the women’s bodies. What about Hayden? Is he not objectified as well in this whole enterprise of sex videos? Yes, he taped these sexcapades, but it is obvious that he was not the one who released them. That makes him a victim, too. And he is twice victimized by the fact that no one has seen him as victim. I’m not saying Katrina and the other girls aren’t victims, too, I’m saying that they are not the only ones.

But again, to us as audience, Hayden is not victim because we imagine that he is the one in power here. He’s the one in a position to enjoy the sex, the videotaping, the different positions. But what of the women? Did they not enjoy it as well?  Isn’t it possible that in this whole enterprise of sex-video-talk, that we are the ones bringing the discussion to the level of shame and embarrassment?

Isn’t it that it is us, as audience and chismosas, who have oppressed Katrina and Maricris and whoever else will come out in these videos, as women whose lives are now over? And aren’t we the ones to actually, and truly, give Hayden an even bigger ego, as we refuse to even acknowledge that he is oppressed too?

In our insistence that only the woman is oppressed here, aren’t we also allowing for Hayden to get away with it? To get away with imagining his power to be more than it actually is, to be something to be proud of? In the age of masculinity studies and hypermasculinity experimentation, this can be turned around in his favor, you know. And after all, despite the threat of losing his license to practice medicine, he will still find himself a career – if only in the eyes that have objectified him through these videos. And maybe if only as Vicky Belo’s constant man, the one she proves her true love through (an absolute craziness in itself, of course).

In the process, what we fail to do is bring this discussion to the level of sex as truth, as real, and as something that we must all – particularly the women – deal with and be responsible about. In the age of technology, yes, but also in the age of sex without love, or at least questionable/ unstable/dishonest love. Here, women are being taught to have the stomach, the mind, the heart, for every other consequence that happens after the sex. We are being told that we will be alone, with no laws to help us, no reproductive health consciousness to bank on. As such, we must all bring this to the level of responsibility, of talking about it beyond the chismis, of making women – and men – realize that in the end, we do pay. For what our body wants, and for heeding its otherwise normal desires, in the face of a society that has yet to be  mature about sex. And love.

Over and above whether it’s on video or not.

*Title taken from Sharon Olds’ poem :

Sex Without Love

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other’s bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the     come to the     God     come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health–just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

From Strike Sparks, Selected Poems 1980-2002. U.S.: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Page 24.