Walang pagkilos na kultural na hindi nababalot ng kontradiksyon.
Kontradiksyon ang eleksyon at ang pagsampa ng kahit na sinong artista sa entablado ng sortie.
Kontradiksyon ang pagsusulat bilang hanapbuhay para sa pulitiko.
Kontradiksyon ang pagsusulat ng opinion column para sa diyaryong pagaari ng big business o oligarkiya. (AKO) (more…)
Walang paglagyan ang aking galit. At lungkot. At galit.
To my mind, there is no reason for farmers to have been killed on April 1. No reason for farmers to have been gunned down. No reason for the violent dispersal. Not today, not on any day.
On radio, some military official said soon after the news broke about the violent dispersal of farmers in Kidapawan: the rallyists started it. They are not real farmers. They are professional rallyists. They have done this before. They threw rocks at policemen, he said. And the police are the ones who are injured.
That the spin didn’t surprise me is telling of what we’ve had to deal with the past six years with matuwid-na-daan. (more…)
If I were the Liberal Party, I’d be congratulating myself. After five years they have successfully dumbed down public discourse, selling us the true, the good, the beautiful about matuwid na daan, making us believe that it is all we need, handling criticism and crises via spin, always using notions of anticorruption and transparency to respond to anything at all. (more…)
we knew it was coming yes? i mean Manny Pacquiao was always coddled and forgiven, he could do no wrong. this is what we tend to do for anyone we declare hero. because in a nation in dire need of some good vibes, some wins in the midst of too many losses, we make heroes out of, and i paraphrase Pia Wurtzbach here: basketball stars, beauty queens, and boxers.
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.