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notes on TEDx Diliman: ideas worth spreading? #2!

TEDx Talks are independently organized TED talks across the world, which is about “riveting talks by remarkable people.” TEDx Diliman was my first. This is a review of each of the TED talks that were part of it, done in 18 minutes or less, because that’s the time limit of a TED Talk. Read more about TED here, and check out this really good video on TEDx here.

Aureus Solito and his search for magic

what struck me about Aureus Solito’s TEDx talk was that he was the first to do it extemporaneously, as a TED talk should be.

which is not to say that there was much in Solito’s talk that made for an idea worth spreading as is the promise of a TEDx talk. what he did in fact, was tell the story of his life as it is tied to his Palawan roots, and he spends all of his 18 minutes just moving from childhood, to elementary school, to highschool, to college, and how the stories of Palawan would riddle his years, would make him weird in school, would give him the advantage of having stories magical and real.

this was interesting for sure, but not quite what should take most of those minutes spent in a TEDx talk.

ideally, you tell these stories as context for how you’ve used those experiences of your roots and your traditions, towards coming up with some bright idea that works, something that helps in saving these traditions that you find are important to you.

this Solito suddenly throws into the mix in his last two minutes onstage, where he talks about people and nature being one, where he mentions in one quick sentence that what he does through film is to try and achieve a certain kind of magic, a certain healing, which also means warding off the evils that are apathy and mediocrity.

this was Solito’s bright idea worth spreading. this was not what he talked about in the 18 minutes that he was onstage.

one realizes: all stories might be personal, and that is well and good. but TEDx talks demand ideas. ones that might be emulated, ones that could inspire, ones that have already taken steps in changing the world. in that sense, stories are but the premise of ideas worth sharing, and without the latter, the magic Solito grew up with becomes nothing but the words in a story that’s only his, not at all ours for the taking.

komentaryo

notes on TEDx Diliman: ideas worth spreading?

TEDx Talks are independently organized TED talks across the world, which is about “riveting talks by remarkable people.” TEDx Diliman was my first. This is a review of each of the TED talks that were part of it, done in 18 minutes or less, because that’s the time limit of a TED Talk. Read more about TED here, and check out this really good video on TEDx here.

Roby Alampay on freedom is our competitive advantage

the thing with saying that the Philippines’ advantage is our freedom is that the only idea it gets across is a romance with the freedom of expression we enjoy (as exemplified apparently by having the TEDx talk to begin with, Alampay says), which of course also means limning over the fact of activists being jailed and disappeared, cultural worker Ericson Acosta still being in jail, and really begs the question: what freedom?

Alampay’s 18++ minutes (yes he was allowed) was spent talking about freedom being our competitive advantage because it can mean making the country the center not just of civil society which feeds off of freedom, but also the center of academic freedom (“Kaya namin ‘yon!” he says). both will mean generating jobs and contributing to the economy, creating an industry out of our freedom.

for Alampay, freedom is the card we can play, because, and i quote: 

freedom is the one thing we do better than anybody else.

do we? really do freedom well I mean? Alampay uses the example of CCP’s closure of the Kulo exhibit (without mentioning it of course), without realizing that in fact in fact more than proving that the gov’t can just take away our freedom, that incident also proved that when we are questioned about our freedom, we have no idea how to defend ourselves. we mess it up completely: our artists, curators, cultural workers. we do not know how to defend ourselves, we do not know how to talk to media, to the people who don’t care for our art but will care about religion, and we mess it up. that is us messing up even as we are free. that is proof that we don’t do freedom well.

even more false? the idea that there’s academic freedom where we are. i’ve lived off of two universities in this country, and when you’re immersed in that manner you also know that in fact your freedoms are false in these institutions, they are limited to what is the intellectual parochialism that’s there, they are limited by the people who have been in the academe all these years.

most importantly, academic freedom, artistic freedom, freedom of expression are all highly questionable when you come from here and know | feel | see that freedom is also overrated when it cannot will not put food on people’s tables and more and more people are falling below the poverty line.

and if you live in the Philippines, you must also know — and must admit — that most of the time we are delusional about our freedom because we are middle class educated English-speaking TEDx speakers. or, as Alampay says, he’s an economy of one, dreaming.

dreams are good. but as ungrounded and unfulfilled, as romanticized and sophomoric as this? not at all worthy of a TEDx talk. but it sure sounds like something the PNoy government would love to hear.

kultura

admitting to class differences, the dream of readers at home: Butch Dalisay and Phil writing

<…> if these two talks of Dalisay are any indication <…> what our texts have and what ails our texts by default given colonial history <is that> we are out of the Commonwealth loop <…> and while American colonization gave us the English that we use for our writing, we all seem to have forgotten that, and we’re like the bastard children that appear at the family Christmas dinner. There are no favors to be had from our colonial fathers here, and it can only be difficult to deal with expectations.

Such as what Dalisay sees to be the “mournful wail of oppression” as the one thing expected of work from the Philippines, the main thing a writer must be able to work against. But towards what? Again another bottomline: the problem is that even we don’t know what we’re about, so how do we even begin projecting ourselves to the world?

Maybe we begin with what is inescapable. As far as Dalisay is concerned, there’s no escaping class, not for any writer, not for any kind of writing. There’s no avoiding the divide between rich and poor, and in that sense it could be a trope, the one thing that we cannot ignore in the task of writing, especially in English, especially given that this means having very few readers where we come from. And it is a trope that encompasses even that which Dalisay considers to be the most important story for Filipinos of our time: the diaspora. 

read the rest here!

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because literature IS serious business

It seems like a foregone conclusion: how else would Singapore do a writers’ festival but with seriousness and business-like professionalism? What’s striking about the first few days of the Singapore Writers’ Festival (SWF) though is this: while business sense would dictate the selling of books in relation to the event, there’s also a clear sense here of going beyond that. And the SWF does so by showing us how literature and writing might on the one hand be celebrated as creative endeavor, and on the other assessed as end product with goals of publication and readership, always with the possibility of the text affecting change.

This is to say that each of the panels I went to were done professionally at the SWF, where moderators had read the books of the writers they were to have conversations with, where they actually become credible points of reference for a discussion with the audience. My context obviously is the Philippines, where even international conferences suffer not just because of sloppy work by local scholars, but even more so unprofessional moderators who think that hosting à la talk show is what this role calls for.

But I digress, and I only do so because of envy: much might be said after all for professionalism especially when it comes to literature and writing, particularly because by our mere existence as writers and critics we demand that it be seen as important. At the SWF, the first thing that’s equated with its importance is a clear respect for writers, which begins with reading their work beforehand.

Read the rest here!

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on Digging In The Dirt, an exhibit

and how art criticism fails in this country. stop talking to the artists! start looking at their work!

"Pure" by Martin Honasan
"Pure" by Martin Honasan

The endless gaze in Digging In The Dirt

In literature we always say the author is dead, a convenient and highly questionable concept really that allows the reader a pretense of reading only the text, ignoring as much as possible the notion of the writer as center of truth. In reviewing art, it still seems like a contradiction to do an interview with the artist in relation to a new work; always this means falling into the trap of making him explain himself.

This is what’s working against Digging in the dirt, an exhibit that’s interesting enough to talk about extraneous to who the artist is – or what that name holds. What’s in a name, when you’ve got some art to look at really, and portraits that already demand a conversation? This is the work of Martin Honasan.

The first thing that strikes you is the breadth of the portraits that are here (and the fact that it’s in the midst of a busy mall’s hallway): from huge canvases with heavy acrylic paint to small canvases with sparse almost pen and ink sketches rendered in watercolor, from dark almost dank colors to bright yellows and reds and stark whites. Even just the heavy hand in the large canvases vis a vis the lighter hand used for the smaller work is unique in itself, especially when one considers that across these portraits are the eyes as focal point, no matter how it’s rendered, regardless of the size of the work.

Read the rest here!