radikalchick.lit

Disquiet #2024

We go through the motions, I think, as we shift from one year to another. There is little to celebrate outside of the personal, and when we are self-reflexive about our privilege, the middle class guilt can only kick in. We refrain from posting food photos. We keep from the usual displays of celebration. We stay distant from the predisposition to overshare on social media.

There are a multitude of reasons, of course, to tell the world the year was good for you. And gratefulness is a good thing. For some of us though, it almost feels excessive to put it on display. This is not to question what others are doing, as it is to lean into why it is that this shift from 2023 to 2024 has demanded differently of the self. It isn’t why has it been hard to celebrate, but how it’s been difficult to put that on display. It isn’t about why there is a refusal to flex, as it is about how this denial of the reflex to share speaks to a specific kind of processing of the present.

That this sensing of the act of biting one’s tongue, almost as if (and ironically) in resistance, is happening on the first month of a new year is expected — what better time to find these words than in preparation for how we re-live the coming year?

(more…)

komentaryo

“Gaza today has become the moral compass of the world” #FreePalestine

Excerpt from Bethlehem Pastor Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac’s sermon, during the Church service, 23 December 2023*

Christ under the rubble.

We are angry. We are broken.

This would have been a time of joy.

Instead we are mourning. We are fearful.

More than 20,000 killed. Thousands are still under the rubble.

Close to 9,000 children killed in the most brutal ways.

Day after day. 1.9 million displaced. Hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed.

Gaza as we know it no longer exists. This is an annihilation. This is a genocide.

The world is watching. Churces are watching. The people of Gaza are sending live images of their own execution. Maybe the world cares. But it goes on. (more…)

komentaryo

Ponder propaganda: Fueling the Duterte machine

If there’s anything that one has consistently been reminded about throughout 2023, it is that we still do not know how to deal with the propaganda landscape that the Duterte leadership had established for six years, and which, regardless of the Dutertes’s “lesser” position politically, is the game we are all stuck playing.

I speak of 2023 because in 2022, we were all just in a post-election haze, regardless of where we were / are on the political spectrum. If you were on the side of Marcos-Duterte, you were just on a high, doing the parties, enjoying the perks that come with having campaigned for the winner. If you were on the side of Robredo-Pangilinan, then you would fall under either of two groups: the ones who disengaged completely from politics and governance, maybe in disgust, probably as a by-product of despair; or the ones who tried to keep the anger going by carrying on as if nothing had changed — after all, a Duterte is still in power, and Duterte himself seemed to have set the stage for a Marcos win.

Presidential sister Imee has said it in so many words: President Duterte had eradicated their enemies.

But also, and this seems important to realize for all of us, Duterte had set the stage for this present, where the opposition, at best, has completely lost its footing, regardless of where we are on that spectrum that spans the Liberals and the Left. (more…)

kultura

Drag Them! The case of Pura Luka Vega, conservatism, and us

When Pura Luka Vega was arrested and detained in late September, one of the dominant reactions was surprise: how can this happen in the Philippines? What happened to creative freedom? How could they get jailed for a case they had no idea had been filed, when they had been going from one city to the next facing persona non grata charges, in full drag, with Instagram documentation, and stories about the openness of these spaces to seeing them and their artistry?

But the curse of the Philippine present is that we are reaping the outcomes of our refusal to have the more difficult, because complex conversations about arts and culture, much of which is not simply about data and history, but about fleshing these out, tearing these apart, so that we know better the state of discourse, freedom, and creative work in the present. At the very least, we need these conversations so that we might be reminded that our freedoms — including all those enshrined in the Constitution — are never guaranteed.

Especially not when we are talking about artistic freedom. A sense of (recent) history in fact reveals how in the post-Marcos leaderships from Cory to Duterte, censorship was a constant. Sure, not in the Martial Law era kind of way, but in ways that were equally dangerous because insidious and consistent. And yes, there’s the MTRCB and its mere existence as a regulatory board; but there are also the acts of censure, the bannings, the cancellations that are borne of an ever-growing conservatism, one that is bound to the ways in which Catholicism is practiced in these shores, and in the age of online platforms, a predisposition towards simply swinging between black-and-white, right-and-wrong, acceptable-and-unacceptable for the loudest voice, the bigger mob. There is also a constant mistrust of creative work, as there is an insistence that it must serve the purpose of espousing a certain kind of morality, that is about a fixed set of rules, a list of lessons to be learned.

It is for this reason that Pura Luka Vega—their artistic practice and their performance—would never be understood. It is also why they have been victimized by these acts of censure. Because there is nothing simple about drag, and certainly nothing simplistic about the art practice of Pura Luka Vega. But censorship lives off simplicity, the black and white, and in the case of the Philippines, it lives off feelings of offense.

Which is why the better question is not: when did this start happening in this democracy? It is: how has our democracy come to this? How did we come to this point when being offended by something, disagreeing about a specific portrayal, a kind of artistic work, has to mean actions that curtail artistic freedom, from the cancellation of individuals, to campaigns to boycott their work, from online bullying to legal cases filed?

(more…)

kultura

Legit bulaga: TVJ gets its groove back

It was difficult not to be brought to tears by that last moment of Tito Sotto, Vic Sotto, and Joey de Leon on Eat Bulaga! at once looking defeated and trying to contain their anger, as they said goodbye to their audience on GMA 7. It really was about the unceremonious ending and how these three men—icons and institutions all—weren’t even allowed to say goodbye to a time slot and an audience it has had for decades. For some of us, we grew up only knowing of noontimes with this show, our childhoods filled with memories of segments and jokes and moments that had it as backdrop, as subject, as familiar viewing habit.

That I cared at all was a surprise in itself. I had stopped watching Eat Bulaga! a long time ago. It could’ve been at some point in the Aldub phenomenon when admittedly, I couldn’t understand what the fascination was about. It is more clearly about Tito Sotto, when he took a strong anti-Reproductive Health Bill stance. Either way for over a decade or so, Eat Bulaga was ever only in my peripheral vision, a fixture in one’s popular consciousness.

Which might be why that goodbye, happening after the abrupt and disrespectful act of taking the show off the air, might have been emotional for viewers. It didn’t matter if you liked TVJ or not, or were watching Eat Bulaga! or not in recent years. To me, what was clear was that an injustice had been done to the people whose cultural labor went into that show. It didn’t matter what was happening behind the scenes, or whether we think they are the bane of pop culture (—to be clear, they are not). To have cut this team’s access to their audience, disallowing them a proper goodbye from a show that they had built for over three decades—that speaks to issues bigger than our beef with the show’s humour or hosts or mishaps. (more…)