this piece went up yesterday on that horrid cover for March that FHM Philippines was set on putting out. which it has pulled out, announced via that official statement posted on their website. that might be a success, but seriously? why is that official statement not a public apology? it needed to be an admission of having made a mistake, full stop. (more…)
in September of last year, in a conversation about the PNoy government that was riddled with questions from a British filmmaker newly met, i found myself talking about the disappointment that is Malacanang. the palace with a three-headed communications office that takes pride in being connected to the people, and yet has proven time and again to be releasing either the wrong information, too much information, or just not speaking up when it should.
that conversation led to many things, though an interesting tangent was this: the new-acquaintance-turned-friend tells me that he had sent a proposal to Malacanang in the mid-2011 to do a docu-film on a-day-in-the-life of PNoy, an inside story of the Palace and the President’s life kind of thing, much like those done for and on Obama. the proposal had landed on the lap of employee #1, who works within one of them communications offices, who had seemed interested in the project, and promised to take it up with his superior. my filmmaker friend was optimistic. (more…)
It’s easy to dismiss “Next Fall” by Geoffrey Nauffts as another gay play, as another one of those that romanticize the narrative of love that is different, because it’s not heterosexual. But that would be to miss out entirely on what else is unfolding in front of you as spectator, it would be to miss out on the nuances that’s in the rest of this narrative’s necessary transformation of the ways in which we might view homosexuality on the one hand, religion on the other, love across the board. (more…)
because i’d be lying if i said that Maria Ressa throwing the words libel and malicious my way didn’t render me speechless, literally and figuratively.
but maybe what was worse than throwing that my way was the fact that it was also retracted with a brush-off: filing a case would be too much for too little. i haven’t been patronized like this publicly, have never felt let down by someone i respect since, oh i don’t know, i applied for a job at UP Diliman and got a version of this from an ex-teacher. but this is different from the latter in that i was not applying for a job with Ressa, and there is no — there is no — notion of seniority that should have mattered here. of course randomsalt has so succinctly pointed out that it isn’t what it seems from where Ressa stands. (more…)
what is being brought to light too, i find, is that while Lito Zulueta’s biases are questioned precisely because of the place he occupies in the Philippine Daily Inquirer vis a vis UST, his engagement with this issue has not happened in the broadsheet he works for. whereas Luis Teodoro’s attacks on him have happened in a regular Business World column.
the discussion, thankfully, continues. (more…)