Category Archive for: review

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pinoy rock ‘n’ roll: dead and alive

Probably the best and the worst that could possibly happen to a rock concert happened this rainy Saturday night. In the midst of an early Flores de Mayo (complete with floats and throngs of people) on the streets fronting the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and the traffic that’s expected of any payday weekend in the metro, Fiesta ng Musikang Filipino (An OPM Chronicle) was celebrating its second night of, well, what they made us believe would be pure unadulterated Pinoy rock ‘n’ roll. That expectation of course, has its basis in the fact that the Juan dela Cruz Band had topbilling for this concert series of three nights, and that my friends and I were just giddy at the thought of watching Pepe Smith on stage – a rare treat for those of us who came to Pinoy rock ‘n’ roll when he was already considered a legend. But there was nothing rakenrol about ticket prices (which were steep at P1000 pesos for orchestra seats – thankfully ours were free courtesy of 105.9 RJ Underground DJ Mikey Abola), and that would only be the beginning of an evening that celebrated what seemed to be both the death and life of Pinoy rock as we know it. (more…)

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why say sorry?

or the dynamic of women’s choices.

the romance as a genre in philippine movies has, since the turn of the millennium, been common and surprising in turn. the surprises i personally trace back to regine velasquez’s foray into her julia-roberts-type of romantic films, where situations are perfectly created for both her limited acting skills, and for the middle class women that she portrays (and has as audience). although it can be said that much much earlier than that, judy ann santos and piolo pascual, as well that ricoyan-claudinebarretto-dietherocampo movie were the beginnings of more interesting takes on the romance (hello, boksingero si judy ann? naman). (more…)

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On Lumbera’s Plenary

“National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera reaffirms Asian identities in the national languages, as Int’l Literature Conference closes”

This was a most fitting end. After two days of plenaries and panel sessions that talked about particular aspects of a very diverse set of cultures within Asia, Filipino National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera tied everything together by highlighting our dependence on, and thus the importance of, translation in his paper entitled “The Necessity of Footnotes: Translating the Culture.”

In light of the various languages in this region we call ours, this couldn’t come at a better time. (more…)

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Where’s the Bitch? – A Review of Chinie Hidalgo’s Bitchy Poetry

published in the national daily newspaper Malaya, March 21 2002

What does it take for a book to be picked up amongst rows upon rows of confused (and confusing!) National Bookstore arrangements? A salesgirl who has the sense not to place a thin book tome-facing-the-customer on the shelf; a groovy cover that screams “different book! different book!” amidst conventional local book covers; and the word “bitch” in big colored letters.

Chinie Hidalgo’s TheBlair Bitch Project: A Book of Bitchy Poetry (2000) was apparently sooo successful (self-published as it was) that the author – or authors, as she’d make us believe – found the need and the market for a sequel, which was un-creatively titled The Blair Bitch Returns, Another Book of Bitchy Poetry (2001). Now, in a publishing industry where only Jullie Yap Daza and Margie Holmes are asked for sequels, and with a limited local reading and book-buying public that is wont to avoid poetry like the plague (think poetry, think Shakespearean sonnets or e.e. cummings – blame it on our educational curricula), Hidalgo’s achievement is hard to come by. I mean, when more than one student in a class of 20 submits Hidalgo’s book as a review topic, one knows that this is the closest anyone has ever gotten to this text generation’s “literary likes” after Jessica Zafra’s hayday. Hidalgo must have something going that others don’t. Or, like me, her book covers were just too hard to resist for the young Pinoy reader who rarely sets eyes on “bad words” in big bold letters – unless of course one has seen the walls of public bathrooms.

And relative to bathroom walls, Hidalgo’s poetry is only a tad bit better.

While I don’t agree with the kind of poetry that our educational system has subjected students to all these years since the Thomasites landed in Manila, I also don’t think that Generation X, Y, Z reading Hidalgo’s kind of poetry is any more promising. Given that this might be all of local poetry – if there’s any poetry at all – that this text generation might ever read, how terrible that what Hidalgo treats them to is poetry that’s stuck in the tradition of hickory-dickory-duck in bitch mode. This practically eradicates all the effort that Filipino writers in English, Filipina writers in English in particular, have worked so hard on all these years – poetry that has more than just rhyme and meter, but content that can change minds about and open eyes to this society’s nooks and crannies, dirty and grimy as they most often are.

Of course one might say that in fact, the bitchiness in these books is all about how this society is dirty and grimy. Because as we pretend that things are fine and dandy, we are stuck in familial ties that bind so tight it actually hurts and we are bound to societal rules of politeness that we have mouth sores from biting our tongues. One finds though, that as far as these books are concerned, this would be an over reading. As the introduction says, its bitchiness is really only about saying things that are usually left unsaid or, as far as I’m concerned, are said behind peoples’ backs. Why? Well, because these are mean things to say. And here lies the confusion. In a hypocritical Catholic country like ours, we are told to bite our tongues and say only good things about our neighbors, at the same time that we are taught that truthfulness and honesty are the virtues of a good person, and the pain that may be inflicted can only be for the better. But why the hell would you waste time in telling a mother who says that her baby’s the cutest little boy who has ever been born that she’s living in a dream? Kids will grow up and find out for themselves that they’re not as pretty or handsome as their playmates, and mothers are suppose to handle the insecurity at that point. To inflict pain on the mother’s ego by telling her that her son looks like a monkey (as the book puts it), is not only pointless, it’s also just downright mean.

And here lies one of these books’ biggest problems. It creates the stereotype of the bitch as a mean person, who is really only truthful and honest. Come on. The greatest bitches are those who don’t waste time griping about ugly children with proud mothers, or dates with bad English. Instead, they are women who have the capacity to be well-meaning and are well-grounded as they choose the words worth saying and the battles worth fighting. One doesn’t go about saying “hey, I’m a bitch, watch me roar about this terrible looking person with a huge zit on his face!” But one does go about living a life that’s truthful and fair, and that which has a point in critiquing (not lambasting) the way people live their lives and what those lives stand for in the context of a society that is impoverished. Those are the bitches that all Pinays can be proud of. Not the woman who’s really only, in common parlance, pintasera.

In the end, this is what Hidalgo reveals her concept of bitchiness to be. A person who is not critical of, just cynical about, people. A person who is so shallow she can’t go beyond a person’s looks, diction, or clothing as if that’s how the worth of a person is measured. A person who counts how much other people give her, and how much other people stand for. And a person who is just richer than everybody else that she can tell if what another person is wearing is fake, in the same way that she can tell if a person is a fake Fil-Am or not (as if that was the important thing to gripe about as far as Fil-Ams are concerned – but that’s another essay). And to say that the poems in both books were actually written by a lot of people who helped her with everything from topics to rhyming words, and pointing out that in fact she’s a nice person (even teaching religion!), just adds to the falsity with which this book treats its readers. A true bitch knows she is one, knows she has a point in being so, and won’t find the need to apologize for it – the way Hidalgo does in practically every other poem. So really, the poems can’t even pretend to be bitchy, as the writer (and apparently publisher) destroys the concept even before one starts reading.

What a lousy excuse for a book of poetry this fake bitchiness has turned out to be. And what a terrible way of revealing that one does not have a sense of Pinay history and literature of which any Pinay writer is inevitably part. Angela Manalang-Gloria must be turning in her grave.

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Lording it Over

published in the national daily newspaper Malaya, February 18, 2002

Rarely do I see an adaptation of any literary text without having first seen it on paper. Not out of some obsessive-compulsive need to know the story ahead of time, but out of the need to find out wherea given adaptation comes from, as this does not only give one a history of the text itself, but a sense of how it’s retold through another medium. The downside to this is the fact that most of the time, the adaptation – and in this day and age of “Disney-ized” fairytales, these are mostly movies – are such failures compared to the original texts. Too often, I’ve found myself regretting having paid 50 bucks for a movie that not only missed the point of the original text, but also added onto the original in an effort at selling the movie version. Think Rica Peralejo in the role of, uh, an originally old, fat, ugly maid who becomes the Tatarin.

Having been disappointed far too many times, for far too long, and quite recently (while Tatarin may be forgettable, Harry Potter is not) with movie adaptations, I wasn’t too hot about seeing the firstinstallment of the movie version of Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. But since I read the trilogy as an adolescent and didn’t really remember much of it, I figured I had less to lose. At least the disappointment in yet another adaptation will be hampered some by a certain level of unfamiliarity with the original text. At least, without my usual expectations, I could dismiss the movie as just another adaptation that miserably failed just because adaptations are meant to – what with producers who are only out to make money, directors who work against instead of with the original text, and writers who just decide to take on a text literally, albeit with some “needed” subplots and additions (a kissing/sex scene, an action scene, a god in a basket).

But director (and co-writer) Peter Jackson wasn’t one to disappoint. As the story of The Fellowship of the Ring was told me all over again, it didn’t matter that I could barely remember the original text. The movie took it upon itself to tell the story, without taking the easy way out and just putting the story on the screen word for word, event by event. Instead, it took on Tolkien’s original story and made a story of it for the big screen – choosing events and concepts that would tell a whole story. Too often movie adaptations suffer because there is an unthinking effort towards re-creating the whole text for the new medium. The Fellowship of the Ring doesn’t even work towards this goal, and in the process, the movie did not only remind me of what the original story was all about, it also brought me back to that point in adolescence when I was fascinated and awed by this world that Tolkien had created. The only way the movie could’ve done that was by being fascinating in itself, in the manner in which it told Tolkien’s story.

In the end, one realizes that the power of a text’s adaptation lies, not in its “faithfulness” to the original text, but in its ability to take the text and make it the medium’s own. A text that’s different altogether, but which is clearly and honestly tied down to the original. That Jackson, together with his co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, was able to do this is not only tremendous; it’s proof that one cannot give up a text to another person who does not admire and respect the text enough to give it as much work as it deserves. Jackson has spent the past 7 years of his life working on this film and the years before that being a fan of Tolkien’s writing. He had wanted to take on the film when there were countless others who could do it; then he feared having to do the film when it was obvious that he was the only one who cared enough to keep working at it. It is this kind of respect for a literary text, and for the writer who brought the text into being, that produces a retelling that becomes, not only a success for the director and writers, but for the writer of the text himself/herself. One finishes watching The Fellowship of the Ring not only awed at the cinematic experience that it was, but at J.R.R. Tolkien himself, more than 50 years after he wrote the piece.

This is not to say that this adaptation was so unlike others that it did not add onto the original text. As is the issue with practically every LOTR discussion, Arwen is given more mileage in the film than in the practically all of the (three!) Lord of the Rings books combined. But that the movie’s writers had found this to be the only worthy, major addition is admirable, as it does not make the text suffer. Instead, it re-invents Tolkien and makes him more, um… gender conscious, than he actually is in the original trilogy. That’s not a revision that Tolkien – or any male writer in the year 2002 – would (should) want to go against.

And yet I find that the most thrilling experience I’ve had in relation to this movie, is realizing that like British Harry Potter, The Fellowship of the Ring did not only have Finnish Tolkien for a writer, the author’s estate also decided to have a Kiwi director take this on. In this day and age of America touting itself as the savior of mankind from anything that’s remotely un- or anti-American, it’s just fantastic that some people can still ultimately, snub America.