kultura

check out charice’s cheeks, or it’s a vicky belo world, good lord, save us!

and no, this isn’t about hayden kho, at this point staying in bad relationships and publicizing them seems more stupid than it is unacceptable. but really, the way this woman has crossed that line between selling beauty and making it an ideology, even a religion, as if beauty is the end all and be all of our lives, and no do not tell me about artistas.

because there are plenty of artistas who don’t have, and will choose not, to go through medical and dermatological procedures to be “perfect”, plenty artistas who in fact refuse perfect and say, well, i’m talented, and what are  you?  we grew up seeing Judy Ann Santos’ big cheeks, and what did she do? when it was time she lost weight and lost it, too. Iza Calzado was a big girl on television, and yes with fuller cheeks, and the next this we knew she had lost weight and was being healthy about her diet.

there was no Belo to do an injection here, a tuck there, no Belo to tell them, well, this is what you need to be pretty. because what is this pretty that Belo sells? plumper lips? less of a chin? pointed noses? deep-set eyes?

botox on those cheeks para “mawala ang bulge”? thermage on the face para “lumiit ang mukha”? good lord, Vicky Belo, when does it stop? and at what age,  praytell?

because to have even allowed Charice Pempengco to go through that botox procedure, one that’s suppose to bring back how the international singer looked three years ago! is just sick. three years ago she was 15! tell me, show me, how important it is that an 18 year old girl look like she’s 15. tell me how this is all important, the enterprise of the cheeks, let’s all get smaller faces people, this is what’s deemed important by the best-looking woman on the face of this third world planet.

and please, read up on the order of events, and realize that this whole TMJ ailment that they now say Charice had, ergo the botox and thermage? it happens after the fact. and really, if there was an ailment, why not go to a real doctor? Belo meanwhile had what seemed to her a perfectly rationale, albeit shallow, explanation for why she herself recommended these procedures to this young girl. Charice herself would go on to say that she wanted to look “fresh” for her Glee role.

well honey, that show has a guy in a wheelchair, an overweight girl, a chinky-eyed pale teenager, and big-mouthed wide-eyed lead star. the whole point of Glee is that these highschool nobodys, these stereotypical outcasts, find their voices and selves in the glee club through sheer acceptance of their flaws, as it is the realization of their talents. and i say to your supporters, google it and read up.

looking “fresh” is farthest from Glee’s repertoire. and so are smaller cheeks. elsewhere in the world, it is not a Vicky Belo aesthetic or ideology that rules. now Charice appears in websites like famousplastic.com and awfulplasticsurgery.com. how can that be a good thing?

radikalchick.lit

in process: travel with no man

speaking literally, in the sense that you carry your own bags, with no real options for help, no man to take pity, at least no man that’s yours. and this is the story of you, having a boy all the time, since you were in college to post-grad, working as teacher, living alone. there was always a boy.

and you do this on purpose of course, calling all your men, boys.

because that’s how they become, you find. they become such in the course of time, because you have the temerity to stay in relationships even when there were signs that told you to go, leave, walk away while you can. but alwaysyou see it through to what are generally painful ends, thinking it right that you do so, there is no other way,  you are proven wrong not soon enough.

and you struggle with your heavy bags and pray to the heavens that you’re going in the right direction to your bed and breakfast. you get to your room and find it unkempt, the last customer just left, the one who’s responsible missing. you get to the Eiffel tower by pressing on, you get there hungry, and with blisters on your feet, you chide yourself for these mistakes, no one else is at fault. you are always at fault.

you are in the Metro and it’s dingy and smelly, yet you need it to find your way, so you deal with its smell and chew some gum, light a cigarette. you plod on with a confidence that’s mistaken for certainty, you always know your way, you’re the one who knows what to do.

you shuffle through too many Metro stations, you walk through long unfamiliar streets. with blistered feet, you take some photos, plenty of them bad, some of them good. you have no conversation save for what’s in your head, and in there it is plenty and dynamic and brilliant, you wonder who can get it.

you wonder where you are. except that you’re here, where it’s clear what you’re up against and where you need to go. this is more than you’ve known of yourself since you’ve had a man. you should know to take this one as a sign.

kultura

Heroism and cliche in Looking for Juan 2010

a version of this was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 31 2010.

It is everything and fantastic this CANVAS project that is Looking For Juan. After all, the overwrought discussion of identity seems to be at a dead-end, where insisting on Filipino-ness is adjudged too nativist and always anti-America. This forgets that when we insist on being part our colonizers, there seems to be a refusal to deal with looking at our identities as separate still from these colonizers. Meanwhile it’s easy to see why we’ve arrived at this roadblock.

And yet, this year Looking for Juan (Vargas Museum, U.P. Diliman) is in a bigger, brighter (also hotter) venue (where are those rich UP alumni to air-condition this place when you need them?), and doesn’t seem to want to stop with talking about identity. But maybe too much of a good thing can be bad?

Because with the question of everyday heroes, cliché is the name of this game. It doesn’t help that the way in which the exhibit was curated grouped the works thematically, making the clichés more obviously about sameness. And when I say that there are paintings that are the same, I mean the artistic individual creativities (difference in media, notions of genre) get dissolved in the stark similarities, of imagery, of thought-process, of just basic idea.

Workers as working heroes

Name it, and you’ve got that Filipino worker here. There are no call center agents, or yuppies, or any enslaved white-collar workers thought, instead there are images of the kargador, the fisherman, the farmer, the magtataho, the teacher, the health worker, the basurero (that last one is a sculpture). One wonders at what point it becomes less respectful and more a politically-incorrect romance with these images. After all, these workers aren’t given lives other than the work they do, and in the few paintings that show workers’ conditions, badly-written captions that accompany the work ruin things altogether.

Thank goodness for “Minimum Wage Earner” by Renato Barja, where the construction worker is rightfully the color of the soot that he creates and lives with, where he is given a cup of coffee, a cigarette and a fiery sunrise in the background, where his big eyes are allowed its sadness and its weariness, even more importantly its defeat. Where the last thing you will think of is celebration or romance, or cliché.

Jojo Ballo’s “Tuwing Umaga”, which uses charcoal on canvas, would’ve been more powerful left without its caption cum explanation. Maan de Loloya’s “Kargador” meanwhile, fails at its cleanliness, which doesn’t work as irony for what it is that the main image is doing, i.e., carrying on top of her head a “crime scene” of her oppressive past and present: an MMDA sign, pink stilettos, guns, a balikbayan box, a buwaya. Had this been dirtier it would make sense that the smaller versions of this character look up dumbfounded at, some are apathetic towards, this bigger image’s act of cleaning up.

The cliché of the OFW, and motherhood

Because we know this to be true: that the OFW is the new hero of nation. And so, there are a good number of works here that are all about this heroism, and while some do fail at bringing something new to the OFW stereotype, there are those that just succeed. Yveese Belen’s “In Every Corner” is a canvas divided into 8 x 4 square, with every other square filled with an image of tiny brown workers doing various jobs. What is extraordinary here is the detail where the workers are actually in action, doing their jobs, making it more of a tribute to what they do, versus a romantic notion of just them.

The other OFW paintings don’t quite survive their captions, although Cana Valencia’s “Bagong Bayani” does just because it’s a different image compared to all the others here: much of the canvas is taken up by a Swiss knife made into the Philippine flag, the sun used as the O to the FW. From this center, what the knife’s various tools reveal are Filipinos’ various jobs across the world. It’s everything and refreshing, removing the sadness implicit in the mere fact of OFWs.

And those mother images? All about the clichés of pregnancy and giving life, or holding the child’s hand and protecting her, of motherhood as powerful in itself, period. That might be true, but there are so many other ways in which mothers are heroes, that would’ve been nice to see, too.

Some powerful imagery

Dante Lerma’s “Call Juan-24/7-Heroes” has such a powerful image that’s failed by its title and caption. A woman in a Maria Clara costume stands against a Coca-Cola refrigerator. Her foot is up against the wall, revealing running shoes, and she is holding her phone as if writing a text message. From afar, it was easily a rendering of the notion(s) of womanhood and tradition, the powerful woman vis a vis the meek and tamed. With that title about heroes being on call? It is everything and disappointing.

Cathy Lasam’s “Mommy” is wonderful in its experimentation with texture, folding up paper to create a pattern that renders the quiet – and I daresay cliché – image of the mother more dynamic, more interestingly alive and truthful to the multi-dimensionality of all our mothers in our lives. Janelle Tang’s “May Bago Akong Laruan” layers acrylic on canvas to create the layers of a paper doll. Here, the clothes floating on the canvas create the images of a mother and a child, even when they don’t exist on the page itself. The heroism would lie in the idea of powerfully creating our own images, yes? But that caption is an absolute let-down.

Fernando Sena’s “Tatay, Nanay, Mga Tunay na Bayani” was a refreshing complexity in the midst of these works, where abstraction seemed to be few and far between. Sena’s take on the cliché of parents as heroes is done in cubist abstraction, where two tiny one-dimensional faces represent parents, that create what look like structures that go up higher and higher, evolving into darker, deeper, more serious colors, as it goes up the canvas. It’s a celebration of the default power of parenting to build, to create, regardless of whether it wants to or not; it’s a reminder, maybe even a warning.

The universal Pinoy hero

What becomes infinitely more problematic here though is the idea of every Filipino as hero. It is here that the paintings seem to all work towards the media-created notion that we can all change this world just by voting once. As if things are ever that easy. Here, laughter is celebrated even when it’s really more a negative than a positive in the way that it fails to consider oppression. There is the teacher, the student-journalist, the environmentalist. There are hands! Just too many notions of hands, both in titles and captions, and outright in images that we’ve all seen before, some of them in our grade school art projects.

The ones that survive this part of the exhibit are those works that have different images, even when these titles and/or captions want to kill the work altogether. Dante Aligaen’s “It’s In Our Hands (It Always Was)” is a black and white mixed media work of a skull from which emanates a halo and the rays of a sun, flowers/grass/weeds spewing out from the main image, and bombs ready to fall from the sky. It’s a fascinating take on pride and yabang, the kind that can get us all messed up about what’s good and what’s evil.

Liza Flores’ “You, Me” could’ve done with a more creative title and less of a caption, because it is wonderful in itself, where the notion of reflection works both with and without another, except for oneself, where the dark and cold and the bright and sunny seem to be one and the same, versus being two sides of the same coin, where heroism is ultimately about staying where you are, regardless of how difficult, or how seemingly easy.

The rest of the many works here insist that we can all be heroes, be it through images of Rizal (too many of them, too!) or through the images of the youth as the future. But while this seems wonderful, the idea of our own individual heroisms at this point doesn’t seem all that possible, does it? Maybe it isn’t even truthful, as it is more than anything about romance and false hopes? Buen Calubayan’s “Pinger” seems to be the answer. It’s nothing but a black tarpaulin with an enlarged red digital print of the artist’s dirty finger, accompanied by this line: “Ako ang simula ng pagbabago? O panggagago?”

How’s that for a caption that works.

komentaryo

anti-activism, anti-freedom of assembly: who survives?

Ces Drilon is who. And the policeman she featured on I Survived on May 13 (early morning May 14, 1t’s 12:56 am on my clock). It is also GMA who survives in this, even the next president, or every other person who says that rallies are mob rules and should be dispersed or else, forgetting that the freedom of assembly IS A RIGHT.

In the end it is all just lazy research and documentation, and irresponsible journalism.

So in the course of the show, you are made to find out that this policeman was victimized by the crowd during EDSA Tres. You find out that he was injured and all that, that he risked life and limb to fulfil his duty as policeman. Sige na nga.

But. This doesn’t excuse the fact that anti-riot policemen are alwaysthe ones on the offensive. They’re the ones with truncheons and shields. They’re the ones who are pasugod at any given point. Even this policeman Ces was interviewing and who survived said that he was victimized by the tear gas that they threw into the crowd because the wind went in the policemen’s direction. He also said that in the end, what was used against him were the things that he and his team had used against the rallyists. What does that really say about who is oppressed in a rally situation?

Obviously Ces hasn’t been part of a rally in a long time, the kind that’s about rallyists riskinglife and limb to fight for their rights? Obviously she hasn’t been on the receiving end of the police’s/military’s unjust anger.

Obviously Ces and whoever her writers are for this show, were so intent on showing the violence of EDSA Tres that they just decided to interweave videos with no dates, no indication of when and where things happened.  In fact, footage of the police’s preparations for EDSA Dos and EDSA Tres were exactly the same. Footage of rallyists were messed up. When Ces and the policeman were talking about EDSA Dos and EDSA Tres, footage showed the PMP (partido ng masang pilipino) flags that went to EDSA after Erap was impeached, yes, but this was interwoven with an organized rally that had flags of legal and valid leftist groups that are now partylist organizations, including Anakpawis and Bayan Muna.

So these leftist partylist organizations are now considered part of the mob rule, Ces Drilon? You actually are saying that these organizations, which were in fact in EDSA Dos, even on stage in those days, are a mere minority, the kind that was out to kill policemen?

How horrible this portrayal to begin with of rallies and rallyists across the board. How horrid that given the kind of military and police power that GMA has used against the people during her term, here’s a show that says, these policemen/military officers are oppressed by the people, too.  AS IF the dynamics of power between the military/police and the people, rallyists and otherwise, have ever changed.

I wonder if they realize that in the process of featuring this policeman injured during EDSA Tres, and showing undated/unverified footage that cuts across rallies by both valid leftist groups and the political organizations like PMP, that it LOOKS VERY PRO-PRES-ELECT-NOYNOY (and Kris, I dare say given the money she brings into the network). How can ABS-CBN 2’s news and public affairs even begin to say they are responsible and not for any candidate? Come on, this episode of I Survived in fact reeked of the whole Aquino discourse of the left as a noisy minority. So lump them together with the mass mob rule of EDSA Tres, and tadah! you prepare the nation for no rallies, no assemblies, don’t do that because kawawa naman ang pulis.

WTF Ces Drilon. WTF ABS-CBN’s news and public affairs. for people who insist on responsibility and being worthy of our attention, talaga naman, sometimes you just failus. In this case, you fail the freedom(s) you should be fighting for. The freedom(s) in fact upon which you stand. Ang galing. Congratulations.