Category Archive for: kultura

kultura

Icing on the cake: MTRCB, censorship, conservatism #CulturalCrisis

While it’s easy to jump in on the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB) decision to issue a summons to the producers of “It’s Showtime” for the purported “indecent acts” of real-life couple Ion and Vice Ganda, it is as easy to start finding even more offensive TV content that we imagine the MTRCB should find just as indecent.  But the more difficult conversation that needs to be had is this one: why does the MTRCB continue to exist in a purported democracy whose Constitution completely disallows censorship?

Maybe we can start with easier questions: how can one thing that happened on “It’s Showtime” be offensive, but the same thing happening on E.A.T. not be offensive at all? We could extend that to other shows that continue to use skimpily clad women dancing provocatively to sell products, or to function as counterpoints to macho show hosts and their punchlines.

Contrary to what the dominant mob on Twitter and Facebook (group-)think, it has nothing to do with homophobia, at least not on the part of Lala Sotto or the MTRCB.

Rather, it has everything to do with the way in which the MTRCB was imagined as a government agency that is supposed to “protect” our children and audiences from inappropriate TV and film content through the exercise of regulation-and-classification. It has everything to do with a government agency that is built on deliberately ambiguous notions of morals and public good. It has everything to do with an agency that is nothing more but an outdated vestige of the Martial Law regime, but strengthened and empowered during the Aquino admin that deliberately refused to engage with the cultural sector as a response to the Marcoses’ use of culture to further its oppressive regime.

It has everything to do with us — a public that cares little about cultural regulatory institutions like the MTRCB until it does something that’s “controversial” enough for our social media feeds. (more…)

kultura

Run Barbi(e) Run*

But of course she can’t, not with those feet on tiptoes, ready for stilettos. In fact, with those big boobs, she might not be able to run at all. Barbie might be the most impossible and horrifying model for any young girl, who sees the big boobs and tiny waist, sleek long hair and made-up face, and think ah, that’s how I want to look.  And since Barbie apparently now represents the modern woman who has graduated from college and can keep every job possible, earning enough to have her own house (townhouse, 3-story dream house, Malibu dream house, take your pick) with fancy appliances and to party like there’s no tomorrow, then she does become a perfect aspiration, doesn’t she?

Except that Barbie is false, her whole lifestyle is. And even when there are seemingly more powerful images of her as career woman (most recent careers? News Anchor and Computer Engineer!), she has remained the same in many ways: she’s still as thin, regardless of how her hair or skin color have evolved; she still has the same features, the same particular body type, the same… uh… impossibilities. Yes, even when she has already run as Presidential Candidate Barbie (in African-American and White skin colors!).

Because Barbie cannot run, she has no knees for it. Yet as I began to run to get that endorphin high (over the more obvious need to lose weight), I found that much of it was about Barbie. And no, it isn’t about the body, for I got over that (im)possibility long ago, instead it’s about what Barbie does continue to stand for, over and above those jobs she can now have: it’s about being fashionista. (more…)

kultura

Growing up with Joey*

No, not Tribbiani, but de Leon. The Joey de Leon of Tito Vic & Joey fame. Anyone born in the 70s would’ve grown up with noontime show Eat Bulaga over lunch, and therefore would remember the Vic Sotto and Coney Reyes relationship, would know of how Aiza Seguerra was the cutest thing on Little Miss Philippines, would watch as Tito Sotto disappeared to run for and win a seat in the Senate. We would see the barkada growing to include late Master Rapper Francis Magalona and Joey’s son Keempee, the name being shortened to EB, and the show creating a family, that might include us who have grown up with them after all.  We would see countless rival noontime shows being born and dying in the face of Eat Bulaga.

To the joy of Tito Vic & Joey  (TVJ), but most obviously to the pride of Joey, who will defend the show to his last breath, get into fights about decency and kabastusan with Willie Revillame from the rival show – the one that has survived Eat Bulaga the longest. Joey, who delivers jokes cum sexual innuendoes daily, would be calling the kettle black, except that really, Revillame is not just bastos, he’s also … crass.

Which does allow Joey an amount of class, one that shines through whenever he’s forced to explain himself and his kind of humor, as he proves that he knows what he’s doing, he is not just a dirty-minded guy.  In fact, Joey educated comedy knows that when he disrespects a belief or a kind of conservatism, it is with a sense of what he’s up against, and what he deems a mature enough audience who will take that joke and think, ah, that is funny because it’s so true. (more…)

kultura

The poet is alive

Mula Tarima Hanggang (University of the Philippines Press, 2014) is Ericson Acosta’s new book of poetry and songs, one divided across the periods within which he wrote them. The heart of the book are the poems he wrote while in detention; framing this are poems on the bigger space that the poet navigates beyond jail, from Cubao to nation.

Given who Acosta is, you might imagine that you already know these poems: many writers have been jailed before him after all. You might also think of activist writing to fall within a particular aesthetic: the raised fist on the page can look the same, sound the same, be the same.

But where an argument can be made for the redundancy – the easiest one being how systems do not change, and therefore the demands of the people remain the same – the bigger argument that Mula Tarima Hanggang makes is for the poet’s voice as independent and distinct, no matter that it might form part of the bigger narrative of militant literature.

It is no different from every text’s insistence that it has something new to say. Acosta should not need to prove himself deserving of readership any more than the next poet.

The silenced artist

Tatuan mo ‘ko, kosa, sige pa.
Tatuan mo ako ng kamao.
Tatuan mo ‘ko ng maso, ng karet, ng tabak.
Tatuan mo ako ng bangkaw, ng AK-47.
Tatuan mo ‘ko, tadtarin mo ‘ko ng pag-asa at ng tapang.* (more…)

kultura

Badoy, banned books, and the Marcos challenge

Every day, I spend a good hour on a Tiktok algorithm that I’ve nurtured since last year, when the election campaign began and I realized that the Marcos campaign was releasing videos and photographs from the old man Marcos years (Papa FEM to this Tiktok algo), which I thought then was, and think now is, important.

But also, it is on Tiktok that I catch what government is doing, every day: what the First Lady is doing, what Bongget (that’s President Marcos V2 to the rest of us) is busy with, which government officials delivered the best soundbite. It’s also here that one realizes how much the algorithm lives off the press briefings of Press Secretary Trixie Angeles, who is celebrated and touted as one of the better voices from the new administration. Often, this algorithm fascinates me in its complete and utter removal from the echo chambers my algorithms on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram keep. It still confounds me, sure, but only in the way that the unfamiliar always does.

But then on certain days, even I have to say that the Tiktok algorithm makes more sense. That’s what happens when you listen to Lorraine Badoy, speaking on her new show on Quiboloy-run SMNI, where for two hours every day, she is free to spout anti-activist and anti-Left rhetoric like it’s nobody’s business—which is to say to absurd proportions, which is to say to attack anyone at all, really, and tag anyone as “red.”

(more…)