komentaryo

the death of us all

in conversations with my Pinay friend Sunshine who left for the US five years ago, and who came to visit in the middle of January, tears were necessarily in order. what was surprising was that while these would be shed in the first two hours or so for the distance we had kept and the things we had survived separately, the rest of our time together would be spent crying about nation, if not shaking our heads in dismay.

by the end of it i found that what needed to be articulated, what needed to come from me, what Sunshine needed to hear, was this: Catholicism, as we know it in this country, is the death of us. (more…)

komentaryo

Malacanang’s miscommunications team strikes again!

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…)

komentaryo

criticism interrogates, questions, shatters

from “on criticism” by eli guieb:

Criticism shatters.  It shatters the shibboleths of our silenced lives, the deep silences about the wrongs of society.  To challenge those silences has often come to mean courting tragedy.  Criticism challenges those silences.  It breaks silence free from its silence.  It proffers breakthroughs that break down debilitating silences, and, in the process, rejoices in the breakdown of unwanted silence.  (more…)

kultura

in the end, it is just about love

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…)

kultura

declared absences in nothing to declare

What might not have occurred to anyone who saw the call for submissions for the project “Nothing to Declare” was how big it could be. And when I say big, I mean huge; I mean in terms of the kind of space it would require, in terms of the kind of curatorial agency it would be premised on.

Across the two museums and one gallery that carried the exhibit, the one that’s still running is at Yuchengco Museum—a good thing too, if we are to consider the kind of context it necessarily has there: in the company of the Botong Franciscos and the Juan Lunas, given too the ceiling to floor installation of falling paper rocks “Suspended Garden” by Tony Gonzales and Tes Pasola, that the museum has kept from an exhibit in 2010. (more…)