Category Archive for: kawomenan

kultura

Ethnic-abstraction evolves in Ebarle’s hands

We are told many things about being an artist, one of which is that you must start young. The other is that there’s no money in it, unless you’re one of the lucky ones who ends up having a fixed market for your art, or the one to whom money doesn’t matter. Jane Arietta-Ebarle doesn’t fall under any of these categories. In fact, she falls nowhere near them.

This isn’t just because she has come into painting again only after seeing three kids through to their own careers; nor is it just because she’san established professional and president of the Philippine Art Educators Association. More than any of these, it is because Ebarle has found herself – literally and figuratively – in a kind of art that’s rare in these shores.

In her first one-woman show, Ebarle rendered ethnic patterns onto canvas, using acrylic as her chosen medium. It was in “Pagluwas”, her second exhibit though, where the inspiration of ethnic patterns became secondary to what would become Ebarle’s abstract art. In her Maranao series for that exhibit, the repetition of ethnic weaves are not only less structured, but are stunted altogether by the random strokes that permeate each work. (more…)

kultura

hello, i love you (goodbye!)

Or when Derek Ramsey just ain’t enough.

There are many good things about I Love You Goodbye really, including of course the fact that Derek Ramsey exists in it at all. It did want to talk about the travails of a May-December affair, as it did try to highlight the problematique of class when it comes to love, as it did use as premise the necessity of migration in the creation of a young Filipino couple’s dreams. With all of these issues integral to its plot, this movie could’ve undoubtedly gone beyond the usual commercial movie formula — something I always have high hopes for.

But this movie, more than anything, is proof of how a badly written story, is really just a badly written story, despite all efforts at making it more substantial – and even when the only meat you get is some of Derek’s bare naked back.

A well-written story after all, requires a complexity in its characters that this movie doesn’t have. You prove this through the fact that it was most difficult to suspend disbelief about someone Gabby Concepcion’s age (what, in his 40s?) falling for someone Angelica Panganiban’s age (in her 20s), alongside the fact that Angelica was a waitress and he a doctor; or that someone Derek Ramsey’s age would even imagine using someone who looks sixteen (Kim Chiu, yes despite the thick make-up and more mature clothes) to get to Angelica, who was the love he left behind. Even the whole Kim-Chiu-is-now-an-adult was a stretch here. (more…)

kultura

the young and the giddy

a version of this was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s Arts and Books section, October 26 2009.

She was obviously overwhelmed silly by the fact that she was chosen as one of ten most exciting young artists. Which is no surprise really. Dina Gadia is the youngest of the group at 23, and just might have more going for her other than her age: she has a clear sense of what it is that interests her, where her art must lie, and what it is she can do without – or must necessarily rebel against. (more…)

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.