komentaryo

freeze

If there’s anything that fascinates about PDAF or pork barrel, and now the Development Acceleration Program (DAP) fund, it’s how much money this country actually has. No, correction: it’s how much money government has.

I’ve said this before, and I say it again: it is fantastic that we are talking about the National Budget, that we are being forced to scrutinize these numbers, that we are looking at the state of nation vis a vis the amount of money that’s unaccounted for by government and our politicians. (more…)

kultura

not a Santi Bose

Leon Gallery is holding what it calls a “Magnificent September Auction” tomorrow, September 28. as of today, its catalogue for tomorrow carries a work entitled “Heart Assemblage” that it has wrongfully attributed to Santiago Bose.

Leon Gallery has been contacted about this major faux pax (i am being kind) by the family of Bose. a letter received by the gallery on September 16 from Bose’s wife Peggy asked that Leon Gallery “kindly and immediately remove the name of Santiago Bose as the creator of ‘Heart Assemblage.”

11 days since, as of 1:09 PM today, Bose’s name is still appended to this work that isn’t his. the artist of this untitled and unsigned work has since claimed it: Rene Aquitania, also a Baguio artist. (more…)

kultura

on “Ang Kwento ni Mabuti”

That not much happens in “Ang Kwento ni Mabuti,” is precisely its power. And while its premise is poverty as crisis and its context is the distance and removal that the poorer among us live with, not once did the film seem like poverty porn. Neither was it full of itself.

It would of course be easy to hate this film for not doing more, not being more, when it could’ve been less restrained. Yet, there is the fact that it didn’t need to be more than what it was, because what this movie has to drive this story is what most other films don’t have.

That is of course Nora Aunor. (more…)

komentaryo

faith

The task, to me at least, seems simple enough. We want to continue the fight against pork barrel. We find it in our hearts to come together, no matter our politics, our religious beliefs, our social class.

The latter of course, as it turns out, is the worst division there is, mostly because it is not something we like—or know— to talk about. Anyone who even had her eyes wide open at the August 26 rally would know that the class distinction of that gathering was about as stark as the white that the middle and upper classes decided to wear. And it was fantastic of course, to see this social class come out of their homes and spend a holiday in a park all the way in Manila with family and friends. (more…)

kultura

on “The Mind’s Eye”

It seems simple enough, a play that is limited to a set that is one room with three beds, all of them occupied by women from different contexts with the most diverse set of needs, cutting as they do across generations. This room is sparsely furnished, has a TV that doesn’t work, stark white sheets that speak as well of the cold cold winter outside.

It is in North Dakota as it is in the middle of nowhere. It could also be anywhere really, this narrative of two lives intertwined by the limits of a room, the sadness of an ending, the undoing that’s in the lack of a future.

For teenager Courtney (Jenny Jamora) and elderly lady Elva (Joy Virata), this room is all of the world that they have. This is all they need. (more…)