komentaryo

Who’s afraid of a yahoogroup?

COMMUNICATIONS Secretary Martin Andanar, that’s who.

It’s still unclear to me what he thinks his office should be doing, but it sure continues to do very little towards actually providing the public with correct, proper, and urgent information.

Instead it’s been revealed that Andanar is doing this: listening to the pro-Duterte noise on social media, printing out “information,” and making it an urgent and important concern because OMG! it has gone viral.

And what is it exactly? Well, screencaps of YahooGroup messages, with email addresses and names of anti-Duterte personalities, but also some messages that seem to have come from the staff of Vice President Leni Robredo. Reading through these messages, all of it seems harmless enough, and honestly, any destabilization plot that happens on a yahoogroup—one that is so easy to hack—should not be taken seriously by government.

Ah, but of course Andanar takes it so seriously! (more…)

komentaryo

Social class before beauty

The first time I heard about the tax on cosmetics, it had already been framed against the hashtag #DontTaxMyBeauty. But as with many things that happen via hashtags, there was little fleshing out of what this so-called Vanity Tax was going to be about.

A day after the hashtag happened, the three-page House Bill No. 4723 was uploaded online, but many remained disinterested in what it contained: it is easier to jump on the bandwagon of calling something anti-woman, than to actually sit down and read about it after all. Media fed the frenzy – the better to get hits with; days after, there is still little critical discussion about this proposal and the backlash against it, even as politicians weigh in using big words like “sexist.”

This, in a country that has allowed the Miss Universe to happen at such a large scale, using government resources and the face of Chavit Singson. One can only wonder what we actually mean by sexist – or feminist – these days. (more…)

kultura

Selling relevance, using current events

The family drama is … ahem … a Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF) tradition, one that’s produced some interesting enough versions from the Tanging Ina series to Mano Po. And so it was no surprise that the purported / sold / imagined “change” via MMFF 2016 would deem it necessary to have a “family drama.”

It was “Kabisera.” And while it did fulfill all the requirements for a family drama, i.e., there was a family, and there was a crisis, and the family pulled together — sitting through the convoluted loop-holed narrative made one think it was particularly chosen not because of artistic merit but because of elements that might have rendered it relevant … or at least “more relevant” than the family movies of MMFFs past.

Apparently all it takes these days is to throw in some corrupt politics, play around with images of impunity, and then engage in a discussion about these as superficially as possible. Have I mentioned the caricature of a human rights Chief that was obviously a jab at De Lima? Yup, one that didn’t work at all.

(more…)

kultura

The Uncritical Subjects, Or How The Empire Strikes Back

One would understand how an exhibit such as Artist And Empire, (En)Countering Colonial Legacies might crumble under the weight of its own baggage – and we’re not even talking about the uproar that surrounded the fundraising gala dinner which the National Gallery Singapore (NGS) had called “The Empire Ball 2016” with attire “black tie and empire.”

That’s a trifle really, when one considers that the major exhibition that inspired that gala was conceptualized and done by Tate Britain to plot British colonial history through art. Entitled Artist And Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past, the reviews of the Tate exhibit were underwhelming at best, with some angrier than others, pointing out the exhibit’s evasion of the violence intrinsic upon colonization.

When I heard about NGS bringing the same exhibit closer to home that is the Philippines – which of course comes with its own postcolonial baggage – I allowed myself to imagine the possibilities for subverting, retooling, rethinking something that had been seen as part of the continuing project to justify the colonial projects of the past. (more…)

kultura

Beyond the horror

I’m a sucker for the Pinoy horror film formula: a scary setting, well-done sound design, the gulat factor. I’m the person in the cinema who will scream first, and the loudest, the person who is so ready to be scared.

But of course the fear factor is only one of many aspects of the horror film, and one realizes given the effort that is put into a movie like Seklusyon (directed by Erik Matti, written by Anton C. Santamaria), that there is more to doing good horror than just getting an audience scared shitless. And certainly the cinematography, the context, the narrative itself of Seklusyon is enough to warrant some of the awards it has won: it speaks of the evil within us, the fears that haunt us, given the lives we live. It speaks of how in a Catholic country like the Philippines, the good is trumped by what is easy, and it is the false saviors that might be biggest enemy. (more…)