radikalchick.lit

on Lola Nena*

IV.

At eight years old, my task was to read to my Lola, then blinded by cataract and cancer. Articles from the two newspapers and the monthly Newsweek Magazine that Lolo subscribed to were already chosen early in the morning, long before I was due back from school at noon. Lolo, having read some of these articles by the time I arrive for my task, would doze off as I read to Lola. Meanwhile, Lola would be attentive to my mistakes in pronunciation and enunciation, and try to explain what it was that made reading certain words difficult, in between reacting to the opinions of the day’s columnists. (more…)

komentaryo

(mis)handling heritage

I am the last person to defend SM, and I do think we’ve got enough malls and condos in this country. But one of the first things I asked when the petition to save the Philam Life Theater began to gain ground was: why?

And no, not why did SMDC buy the Philam Life property, but why was this property sold at all?

Yet that doesn’t seem to be a question that many people are asking. Instead we are asking questions about why SMDC needs to build more condos, why it needs to build more malls. Instead we throw expletives at Henry Sy and his empire, and say he is greedy and nothing else, forgetting that while the latter might be true, what drives this greed is the fact that they can afford it. And that the government allows it.

This is not to say it’s right, as it is to ask: who allows oligarchs to buy this country’s lands and services? Why is it even acceptable that basic services are owned by one, two, three families? Whose fault is it that our oldest structures, the ones that are monuments to our past, are being sold, one after the other? Why is the only other option for these structures, neglect and forgetting?

And who is blameless in this oft repeated enterprise of a piece of heritage being lost to time or capitalists, and us all raising our fists too late?

read the rest here.

kultura

12 Pinay celebrities to be thankful for

It was difficult to celebrate Women’s Month at a time when the Pinay remains under attack, even when she’d like to think otherwise. To me it happens on the level of a beauty industry that has standardized what it is we mean by beautiful, as it does happen on the level of a Catholic Church that continues to take a stand against the Reproductive Health Law, after we have fought for it for 14 years. Scientific and common sense would tell this Pinoy Catholic Church that RH is nothing to fear, but we know how sometimes what we refuse to understand is the scariest thing.

We also know that at some point, the most absurd things | images | words can be so normalized by the media and the celebrity culture, that these cease to be absurd.

In that sense, it seems that a couple of days late, it is precisely the right time to celebrate the Pinays who are the dissenting voices and images in a sea of women who have been standardized by the beauty industry and celebrity culture. At a time when whitened skin and fake bodies have become the standard, at a time when we are telling our young girls that they need to look—and be—a certain way to achieve their dreams, here are the Pinays who seem to navigate their celebrity with an amount of independence.

So no, this isn’t about the thoughtless and careless celebration of self, as it is acknowledging those women on TV, online, in advertisements, who are able to navigate the shallowness of this current beauty and showbiz industries. Here, the Pinay celebrities who refuse to be boxed, sealed, delivered as mere puppets of impossible perfection. Because yes, nobody’s perfect. And someone who sells perfect?

It’s close to irresponsible.

click here for the list of 12 (turned 17) Pinays! 

komentaryo

Rage

What the UP Administration and the governments who have supported that 300% tuition fee increase have created here are the conditions for the poor’s discomfort and embarrassment, in a space that should be the bastion of equality and sameness.

In the 90’s, paying at most a P5,400 tuition fee, one of us was not better than another, and in fact, discomfiture was for the rich who were even there at all. In the 90’s, the best and the brightest from the public schools and provinces outdid all of us middle class and rich in the classroom: they were in the State U for reasons that had everything to do with their skills and intelligence. The rest of us were statistics, the smaller number of students who paid full tuition, because we could.

In 2013, you can only imagine the kind of stigma attached to a student being told by a teacher that she has to step out of the classroom because she has yet to pay her tuition fees or student loans.

Imagine what goes through a student’s head, faced with the fact of unpaid fees, but wanting to learn and thinking the world still of education, and of the State University in particular. Imagine what it is like to go to school for five months, with only the desire to learn fueling you, the empty stomach and pocket things you can ignore.

Imagine a context within which you are the strange one having a difficult time, if not the one who has nowhere to run. Imagine a University whose bureaucracy is most unkind, and which instead of being source of comfort and identity, becomes stark reminder of how hopeless one’s poverty is.

the rest is up at The Times column.

komentaryo

explaining Kristel away

as i continue to wrap my head around the aftermath of Kristel’s death, as one grapples with what ultimately is an injustice, one is also forced to respond to the most insensitive comments cloaked in notions of being “more objective” or being “scientifically, medically correct.”

and while we mourn, we are also fuelled to fight. and as many others are out on the streets, are boycotting their classes, i fight the best way i know how: with words.

at a time when social media Pilipinas is revealing its elitism, its utter lack of sensitivity, its denial of the real conditions of poverty that a majority in this nation suffer, i will fight word for word. word for fucking word.  (more…)