Category Archive for: libro

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.”

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kultura

Tweeting EDSA1986

It came to me on the evening of February 21: why not “live” tweet the events of the EDSA People Power Revolution of 1986 as it happened?

How hard could it be, I thought. I remember one year when the now defunct (but quite missed!) communications office of the previous government, which had Manolo Quezon in charge of history, actually sought to “live” tweet EDSA 1986, too. Besides, the original chronology of EDSA’s four days by Angela Stuart-Santiago is online (www.edsarevolution.com). All I had to do was sit and schedule tweets by the hour or minute, as the chronology unfold.

Sure the 140-character per tweet limit would take getting used to, but it was a challenge worth taking on if it meant getting a new audience “reading” about EDSA, albeit through a different medium, in a different way. (more…)

kultura

15 from 2015: kultura

I wasn’t very good at doing arts and culture in the country the past year. But here’s a list of the strange, the good, the surprising in culture for 2015, not at all a best or worst list because … see the first sentence.

First a critical aside: having worked as dramaturg for Kleptomaniacs and a bit with Tanghalang Pilipino in 2014 meant keeping the theater reviews to a minimum in 2015. I needed that time to let go of the little inside stories that I know, if not to forget the petty tsismis. Distance is a good thing, and one is glad when it is given.

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kultura

the voice of celebrity: love and alex gonzaga, life and bianca gonzalez*

I will always spend some hard-earned cash on books proclaimed as “bestsellers” – not by the non-existent bestseller list of local books (because we compete with uh, Fifty Shades of Grey), but based on the ever reliable, absolutely credible opinion of the National Bookstore ate manning the cash register.

These two books are placed among the magazines at the cashier’s counter, and with one hot pink cover, and another that’s filled with eye-catching illustrations, these books easily catch one’s eye.

Dear Alex, Break Na Kami. Paano?! Love, Catherine by Alex Gonzaga (ABS-CBN Publishing 2014), and Paano Ba ‘To?! How to Survive Growing Up by Bianca Gonzalez (One Mega Group Inc. 2014), are less than 200 bucks each, and as per the Ate kahera at the National Bookstore in Robinson’s Magnolia: “Sobrang benta po nito Ma’am. Laging nauubusan.” She was of course referring to Gonzaga’s book in bright pink, with a poodle and a photograph of her on the cover, a face now made familiar by TV.

About Gonzalez’s book meanwhile, the Ate kahera in National Bookstore Shangri-La Mall said: “Maraming bumibiling teenager Ma’am.” (more…)

radikalchick.lit

Lola Nita, 1923-2014.

“At a certain time of day, between the high heat of noon and the cool afternoon, the streets of Casay have a strange quietness — of a leaf arrested in its fall, or of a vacuum from which air and life have suddenly been drained — a quietness which seems to bide its time. Very infrequently, a car, a truck, or a cart may disturb the stillness, raising brown dust in its trail and sowing screeching echoes into the silence. But a minute after, the dust settles, the noise fades away, and it is quiet again. Even when the wind blows and rustles leaves, sways branches, scatters blossoms, it is still quiet. (more…)