kultura

Beauty and gold #CulturalCrisis

I watched with amusement the way that the controversy over Beauty Gonzales’s jewelry at the GMA Ball unraveled, with the call-out coming from a member of the academe, Marian Pastor Roces, angry and seemingly shooting-from-the-hip, done via a Facebook status. On the one hand, understandable, if one were living in the bubble of one’s algorithm, where such righteous indignation would get the expected likes and shares and comments of support. On the other, a real missed opportunity to engage in what could be a teaching moment, on a public platform, where a call-out could be phrased in a way that is calm and collected, an opening to a discussion instead of a door slammed shut on one.

Were there less anger about the gold Beauty was wearing, we could’ve started a discussion about the manner in which artefacts from our dead are excavated and brought into private hands. How does that even happen? Is it always about greed outweighing respect for collective heritage? Is it greed and the wilful disregard of the law? Or could it be an utter lack of knowledge about what exactly to do with artefacts of our past?

This was of course layered with the non-discussion on those artefacts being ear and eye covers for the dead. But at a time when we have been culturally changed by six years of a leadership that thought nothing of dead bodies, at a present where everyone with a modicum of power (including those in the arts and culture and heritage sectors) can be seen “flaunting excess”, don’t we know of more grotesque — “odious” — things? (more…)

kultura

Icing on the cake: MTRCB, censorship, conservatism #CulturalCrisis

While it’s easy to jump in on the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB) decision to issue a summons to the producers of “It’s Showtime” for the purported “indecent acts” of real-life couple Ion and Vice Ganda, it is as easy to start finding even more offensive TV content that we imagine the MTRCB should find just as indecent.  But the more difficult conversation that needs to be had is this one: why does the MTRCB continue to exist in a purported democracy whose Constitution completely disallows censorship?

Maybe we can start with easier questions: how can one thing that happened on “It’s Showtime” be offensive, but the same thing happening on E.A.T. not be offensive at all? We could extend that to other shows that continue to use skimpily clad women dancing provocatively to sell products, or to function as counterpoints to macho show hosts and their punchlines.

Contrary to what the dominant mob on Twitter and Facebook (group-)think, it has nothing to do with homophobia, at least not on the part of Lala Sotto or the MTRCB.

Rather, it has everything to do with the way in which the MTRCB was imagined as a government agency that is supposed to “protect” our children and audiences from inappropriate TV and film content through the exercise of regulation-and-classification. It has everything to do with a government agency that is built on deliberately ambiguous notions of morals and public good. It has everything to do with an agency that is nothing more but an outdated vestige of the Martial Law regime, but strengthened and empowered during the Aquino admin that deliberately refused to engage with the cultural sector as a response to the Marcoses’ use of culture to further its oppressive regime.

It has everything to do with us — a public that cares little about cultural regulatory institutions like the MTRCB until it does something that’s “controversial” enough for our social media feeds. (more…)

kultura

Run Barbi(e) Run*

But of course she can’t, not with those feet on tiptoes, ready for stilettos. In fact, with those big boobs, she might not be able to run at all. Barbie might be the most impossible and horrifying model for any young girl, who sees the big boobs and tiny waist, sleek long hair and made-up face, and think ah, that’s how I want to look.  And since Barbie apparently now represents the modern woman who has graduated from college and can keep every job possible, earning enough to have her own house (townhouse, 3-story dream house, Malibu dream house, take your pick) with fancy appliances and to party like there’s no tomorrow, then she does become a perfect aspiration, doesn’t she?

Except that Barbie is false, her whole lifestyle is. And even when there are seemingly more powerful images of her as career woman (most recent careers? News Anchor and Computer Engineer!), she has remained the same in many ways: she’s still as thin, regardless of how her hair or skin color have evolved; she still has the same features, the same particular body type, the same… uh… impossibilities. Yes, even when she has already run as Presidential Candidate Barbie (in African-American and White skin colors!).

Because Barbie cannot run, she has no knees for it. Yet as I began to run to get that endorphin high (over the more obvious need to lose weight), I found that much of it was about Barbie. And no, it isn’t about the body, for I got over that (im)possibility long ago, instead it’s about what Barbie does continue to stand for, over and above those jobs she can now have: it’s about being fashionista. (more…)

kultura

Growing up with Joey*

No, not Tribbiani, but de Leon. The Joey de Leon of Tito Vic & Joey fame. Anyone born in the 70s would’ve grown up with noontime show Eat Bulaga over lunch, and therefore would remember the Vic Sotto and Coney Reyes relationship, would know of how Aiza Seguerra was the cutest thing on Little Miss Philippines, would watch as Tito Sotto disappeared to run for and win a seat in the Senate. We would see the barkada growing to include late Master Rapper Francis Magalona and Joey’s son Keempee, the name being shortened to EB, and the show creating a family, that might include us who have grown up with them after all.  We would see countless rival noontime shows being born and dying in the face of Eat Bulaga.

To the joy of Tito Vic & Joey  (TVJ), but most obviously to the pride of Joey, who will defend the show to his last breath, get into fights about decency and kabastusan with Willie Revillame from the rival show – the one that has survived Eat Bulaga the longest. Joey, who delivers jokes cum sexual innuendoes daily, would be calling the kettle black, except that really, Revillame is not just bastos, he’s also … crass.

Which does allow Joey an amount of class, one that shines through whenever he’s forced to explain himself and his kind of humor, as he proves that he knows what he’s doing, he is not just a dirty-minded guy.  In fact, Joey educated comedy knows that when he disrespects a belief or a kind of conservatism, it is with a sense of what he’s up against, and what he deems a mature enough audience who will take that joke and think, ah, that is funny because it’s so true. (more…)

komentaryo

(Middle Class) Crisis: Why rising from May 2022 has been difficult

It would be silly to talk about the present of politics in this country without acknowledging two, maybe three, things.

First, that we are at a standstill. From the ranks of our specific educated, middle to elite classes, generally woke and politicized, that campaigned hard for a Marcos-Duterte loss in May 2022 — there is little movement happening. Sure we went back to our old lives since May, we went back to the daily grind, but that is a movement that is about survival for majority of us — we have no choice given skyrocketing prices and the multifarious crises nation faces. We have no choice, and know no other way, but to go back to the lives we had pre-elections, no matter how frustrated, angry, sad we are. No matter how little we understand (or how much) of why things turned out the way it did.

Which brings us to two: here, where we are, a year after the 2022 elections, we have to admit the possibility that we have stood still all along — because that is what happens to movement when all it does is go around in circles, or repeat its own mistakes, or deny how big the enemy is and how the battlefield has changed.

It is what happens when we cannot get over ourselves, when we only listen to what we have to say, when we insist that we are the only ones who know what’s happening, who know what should be done, who have the answer to questions — because we lived through a past that was similar, because we are older, we are the fourth estate, which is replaceable with what’s unsaid: we are the gatekeepers, we are the bearers of truth, we are sacred cows, not to be questioned, not to be critiqued.

It is what happens when we refuse to see the possibility that maybe we should start with first asking the right questions, so that we get the productive answers, in dialogue with as large a group of people as possible, open to the probability that the ways we know, the perspectives we take, might not apply to the present anymore. (more…)