Days after the elections, we watched Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver in grad school cinema studies class. It wasn’t my first time to see the film. Yet, seeing Travis (Robert De Niro), the ex-Marine turned taxi driver, trying to kill a senatorial candidate and a gang of criminals, and remembering how politics and organized crime are hardly confused in the Philippines nowadays, I find it easier to relate to him this time.
It is difficult to understand how security guards of a downtown shopping mall could beat to death a man they mistook for being a shoplifter. There could be no justification for it, even if it was true that the victim stole a few items. How could they have overreacted in such a violent way against an obviously unarmed civilian?
He freezes a shot from a black and white movie and blows it up into a big drawing using charcoal or black stone. Placing the drawing on a wall in a small darkened room of a gallery, he then projects the original still frame of the shot on the drawing, this time adding slight movements to break the register of the filmed image on its drawn copy.
Ang dakit usa ka dakong syudad ug ang kawayanan tupad niini usa ka lapad nga hi-way.” (“The banyan tree is a big city and the bamboo grove beside it is a wide highway.”) The artist-poet Josua Cabrera opens his tale with a mother saying these words to her son as he lies down on a makeshift bed of bamboo and straw mat.
It was in one of those plenary sessions where some international big shot “creative” in the advertising industry was speaking that my student and I decided to sneak out of the auditorium to join local artists mount outdoor installations at a public park in what was rather a hastily organized Art Congress that had for its theme the question: “Art ba o ad?”
Friends call him Cebu’s Van Gogh, owing to the expressive distortion, bold strokes and thick impasto of his paintings that evoke the work of the Dutch postimpressionist. And although, he comes from a prominent Spanish family here in Cebu, Joe Mari Picornell, an ex-pilot, chose the austere life of a full-time painter.
The studio looks huge and equipped with cameras that include one mounted on a crane. Yet almost all of the shots are close-ups. The camera fixes on her face, breaking down at the questions, yet still looking pretty as ever. It was grace under pressure.
While most people complain about the searing heat these days, Bosing, my suki buko or coconut juice vendor across the University of San Carlos in Talamban, smiles even as he wipes the sweat on his brow with a face towel.
We call each other “bay” and exchange comments or chat on Facebook in a mix of very rudimentary Tagalog, Cebuano, and Bahasa words. He has probably more Filipino artist-friends than me in the social network. But he said he has never been to the Philippines, although his mom is a Filipina born in Zamboanga who married his dad, a Malaysian living in Kota Belud in Sabah
Manila is the place Cebuanos love to hate. The “imperial” capital has siphoned the region’s money in the name of the national budget. At the time when Cebuano was actually more widely spoken, it imposed a “national” language based on Tagalog. Its TV networks give more air time to showbiz and the traffic situation in EDSA than the more tragic news in the south. It forces the rest of the nation to watch crappy movies in the yearly Metro Manila Film Festival, when, as the name suggests, it is anything but national. It makes fun of us when we speak Tagalog with a Cebuano accent and typecasts the Bisaya as “tsimay” or unsophisticated “promdi”.
As she comes home to Cebu after 13 years of living in the United States to take care of her ailing mother, my former teacher Ploi Pagdalian dreads the fact that she has very little time left to be with her mom who is now over 80 years old. She thus uses the few remaining [...]
Like all first-time visitors in Bali, I was awed by the lavish display of native creativity in practically all places of the island. All buildings reflect the mandated style of local architecture, which includes the usual decorations of carved deities and gargoyles derived from Hindu iconography.
