kultura

15 from 2015: kultura

I wasn’t very good at doing arts and culture in the country the past year. But here’s a list of the strange, the good, the surprising in culture for 2015, not at all a best or worst list because … see the first sentence.

First a critical aside: having worked as dramaturg for Kleptomaniacs and a bit with Tanghalang Pilipino in 2014 meant keeping the theater reviews to a minimum in 2015. I needed that time to let go of the little inside stories that I know, if not to forget the petty tsismis. Distance is a good thing, and one is glad when it is given.

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radikalchick.lit

december 3: count

“7 years old.”

It surprised her how easily that rolled off her tongue, like the truth that it is, like the lie that it is. The unsaid is her sanity. It seems careless to risk a nervous breakdown with strangers.

Besides, the lie is only in the telling, not in what is told. She is seven years old this year.

She would be. She would have been.

She could have been?

She might have been.

She would have been.

The tension in these tenses is in the silence she carries as she walks to the back of the bus, finds a seat, and stares out the window at this strange city. The question had been so simple.

How old is your daughter? The stranger asked.

“7 years old,” she said. Painless. Emotionless. Motionless on that bus, oceans away from seven years ago.

komentaryo

Deserving Duterte

If there’s anyone that I am now afraid might win the 2016 elections—because who knows what kind of electorate we have at this point—it is Davao Mayor Rodrigo Duterte.

Yes, there are pros and cons for all the presidential candidates and the possibility that each will win. But what Duterte promises are such simple, commonsensical things. What he promises are things that all presidential candidates should be promising, and they should be promising it with a progam to back it up. A holistic take on peace and order and public safety that need not fall back on action star rhetoric, and need not mean committing every human rights violation imaginable. (more…)

kultura

Cultural crisis #APEC2015

On November 18, Malacañang issued a non-apology to the public who had been inconvenienced during APEC 2015.

A non-apology worded as a thank you “for your patience and understanding over the inconvenience brought about by our enhanced security measures.” And then it spun the difficulty of the commute to work, the fact of absences and tardiness that will mean less wages, and said: “You have shown to the 10,000 delegates what Filipino hospitality means.”

If it’s to sacrifice our time, energy, earnings the past week – well, we were forced into that kind of hospitality. If it’s Manila streets emptied of people and vehicles, shops closed, turned into ghost towns – that does not speak of the Manila we know at all.

If it’s the display of culture as revealed by the final APEC Dinner Performance for Leaders – then please lang. Not in our name.

Because that was a monstrous failure, an ill-conceptualized variety show, that was far from displaying “the best” of Philippine culture. (more…)

komentaryo

Of silence, Paris, the Lumad

The month’s been long and it isn’t even over yet. Much of my mind and heart have been taken over by Lumad stories, ones that we rarely hear about first hand, and so it’s been critical (at least for me) to hear the Lumad themselves speak.

But of course this came with the realization of distance. How far is a land like Mindanao to Luzon, how far is Surigao, Davao, CARAGA, SOCCSKARGEN, from Manila. If the silence that surrounded the Lumad killings are any indication, it could be a continent, a country, a whole world away.

That it is like Paris, that it is not Paris, is precisely the point. (more…)