Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
Aside from the basic utilities—electricity, water, internet, and mobile phone—one cannot live without, I have some subscriptions I pay monthly or annually: [1] Netflix, [2] Disney+, [3] WOW Present Plus—intermittently, [4] an Adobe Suite containing Photoshop and InDesign, [5] the New York Times, [6] Letterbxd, [7] Spotify, [8] WordPress, and [9] GoDaddy. You can say that, more or less, I do pay for the things I think need to stay alive and informed in this increasing consumerist world.
But I am also a pirate, mostly of movies, and I make such admission without regret or self-recrimination. As of the moment, I have 14 external hard drives that contain—as of this writing—16,727 movies of all sorts [short films, experimental films, and documentaries included], but not counting TV shows or filmed plays. [I used to do the same for music, but I have done away with that, now relying mostly on Spotify for that need.] This movie library evolved because I do teach Film at the university, and must have certain films at my disposal when needed. It’s also really because I am an avid cineaste. This library has also shifted platforms over time. In the 1990s, I used to collect titles in VHS, often spending godawful amount of time recording things off TV via my trusty VCR. These were my college days, and I used to look forward to the Holy Week, because I could then record the classic Filipino films ABS-CBN used to air over at Pinoy Blockbuster Channel, their movie channel on SkyCable. This was how I was introduced to inaccessible titles such as Kisapmata and Himala and Ganito Kami Noon, Paano Kayo Ngayon? and Oro Plata Mata—titles you could never rent at your local VideoCity, and titles I only read about but never got to see.
I stopped collecting VHS tapes because of the sheer issue of lack of space that eventually happened. Then I shifted to DVDs. But then I began to notice that the silver plating that held the digital information eventually faded away—leaving only the useless plastic discs behind, and I realized I was hoarding material that faded. So finally I shifted to torrents. Torrents gave me sizable library without the inconvenience of physical storage—with the only concern being the care of these hard drives, which can be easily damaged. I once dropped one such hard drive, and erased 2 TBs worth of television shows.
It’s a painstakingly assembled collection, and a worthy effort. Last year, during the birth centenary of Eddie Romero, a couple of film archivists came to Dumaguete to participate in the celebration, and in their talks at Silliman University, they held out something to the audience that most archivists actually believe: piracy is good, especially for archiving purposes. Pirates are the modern Prometheus.
I think about Prometheus often—the god who, out of defiance and compassion, stole fire from Olympus and gave it to humanity. He did not ask for permission. He did not wait for the gods to share fire and all that it entailed. He simply acted, knowing that the gift he brought down would mean the difference between darkness and light, between mere existence and civilization. And for that act of piracy, he was punished for eternity.
Piracy, I believe, has always been this way. It is Promethean. It is a defiant act of preservation against forces that would rather keep the fire for themselves, letting the rest of us grope in the cold. In an era where digital media vanishes as quickly as it appears, where books go out of print, where films are unceremoniously scrubbed from streaming platforms, and where video games disappear behind a wall of corporate bureaucracy, piracy stands as a quiet, radical form of conservation.
It is no secret among archivists and media conservationists that they rely on piracy to do their work. When HBO Max (or whatever it calls itself now) removes shows from its platform as if they never existed, who ensures their survival? Pirates. When film reels decay, when early television broadcasts are wiped, when companies refuse to re-release or even acknowledge the existence of old video games, who steps in? Pirates.
If not for piracy, the first seasons of Doctor Who—253 episodes in total—would have vanished. Every early master videotape of the program was destroyed by the BBC, which thought that TV shows were at best ephemeral products, and were not worth storing. But these episodes eventually survived, often only in audio form, recorded off-air by fans at home.
If not for piracy, the audio of the TV broadcast of Dragon Ball Z might have been lost because of corporate mishandling. The audio of subsequent airings of the TV show sounds terrible and muffled, because it was in mono, and because Toei decided to use cheap audio tapes and not the actual recording. But pirates recorded the first airing of the show in Japan, and kept them on tape, and soon uploaded online the crystal-clear audio of the first broadcast—and the difference is night and day. The Mr. Potato Head Show was also considered lost for many years, until members of the Lost Media Wiki found all the episodes of the series online. As of 2016, the series in its entirety has resurfaced.
If not for piracy, the pioneering works of French filmmaker Georges Méliès would have vanished. In 1923, when he was facing financial ruin and his studio was taken over by Pathé, Méliès burned his films in a fit of frustration, destroying many of his film negatives stored at his Montreuil studio. Luckily for us, many of his films were duplicated by early movie pirates—which is why we still have a good number of his films with us today, including the great early sci-fi Trip to the Moon (1902).
If not for piracy, F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) would have disappeared. It was plagiarized by the filmmakers from Bram Stoker’s famous book, Dracula, changing only a few details to create their own version. Sued successfully by Stoker’s widow, the filmmakers were ordered to destroy every single copy of the film—and they did. But pirates had already stored away their own duplicates, which is why this great silent German Expressionist vampire film is still with us today.
I actually call piracy—especially in its manifestation as an archiving effort by regular people—to be an act of cultural hoarding. The best example of such cultural hoarder is Marion Stokes, an American access television producer and businesswoman, who hoarded and archived hundreds of thousands of hours of television news footage spanning 35 years, from 1977 until her death in 2012—shows that these television networks never archived. Her effort started in 1979 with the Iranian Hostage Crisis, and soon she amassed an archive of 70,000 tapes of news reports, operating nine properties and three storage units to keep them all. Why did she do this? In Recorder, the 2019 documentary made on her life, Stokes’ son says she was fascinated by “how media reflects society to itself”—and, according to Brooklynn Shively from Establishing Shot of Indiana University, “not only was [Stokes] motivated to record primary news cycles for decades through this fascination, but that she also felt a responsibility to create this personal archive for fear that history would be erased.” She pirated to preserve vanishing news.
The frustrating irony is that the industry that fights piracy the hardest is often the one that fails to preserve its own art. Video games, once released, are often abandoned—trapped behind expired licenses, outdated hardware, and corporate neglect. If anyone wanted to play The Amazing Spider-Man from 2012, there is actually no legal way for me to do so. The game, once sold in stores, is now a ghost, a relic of commerce rather than art. If I were to find a second-hand disc, its downloadable content—pieces of the game that were meant to complete the experience—is gone forever. How can we claim that piracy is theft when, in reality, it is often the only way to save these works from oblivion?
I do not dismiss the concerns of artists whose livelihoods depend on their work being purchased. I understand the impulse to defend intellectual property, to insist that piracy undermines the value of creativity. I am also a creative, a writer and artist, and I do would like to be compensated properly for my intellectual property.
But I also believe that piracy is, at its core, a service issue. If something is available, easily accessible, and fairly priced, people will pay for it. The resurgence of vinyl records, the success of digital bookstores, and the proliferation of streaming platforms all prove that people will support art when it is within reach. But when that reach is restricted, when entire swathes of culture are locked behind artificial barriers, when access is denied simply because a company decides it is no longer profitable—so what choice do we have?
This is not about entitlement. This is about history. The Iliad and Odyssey survive today in written form, but the rest of the so-called Epic Cycle—a collection of Ancient Greek epic poems including the Cypria, the Aethiopis, the Iliupersis, the Nostoi, and the Telegony—are now lost to time. We do treat the written word with reverence, yet we fail to afford the same to digital media, which now consists most of our contemporary outputs. Super Mario 64, the Mona Lisa of video games, exists today not because of corporate preservation but because of cultural hoarding. Most of the early Internet is now gone, except as ghosts in the Internet Wayback Machine. I once moderated the largest collection of everything Philippine literature in a website called A Survey of Philippine Literature in the early 2000s. I hosted it on Geocities. And when that platform was scrubbed in 2009, so did my website—and all the important archive of Philippine literature I placed in it. On 31 January 2024, CNN Philippines quietly signed-off—and with that, their website, which contained hundreds of important news and feature articles that were important to the culture, also disappeared.
Nothing digital in official channels survive—trust me.
Let me end with two stories. When Leonardo da Vinci painted The Last Supper between 1494 and 1498, he did the work in a process that would not keep, and in conditions that were not conducive to the painting’s survival. For example, the wall the famous fresco was painted on was at the back of a busy kitchen, which allowed for moisture to seep through and slowly destroy the painting. Soon, the paint began to peel. Within twenty years, the painting needed restoration. How did restorers know how to bring it back to its original imagery? This was only made possible because copies of the fresco by Leonardo’s students—such as that by Giampietrino—existed, so everyone knew how the original looked like, and Giampietrino’s copy has come to be a great aid in The Last Supper’s constant restoration efforts over the centuries.
I once saved a short story by a writer friend of mine—not only because it had won a Palanca, but also because I happened to love it very much and had included it in one of the anthologies I had edited before. But this was also because I like hoarding pieces of Philippine literature in my hard drive, where you can see them catalogued according to genre, and arranged alphabetically by authors’ surnames. I have tons of poems, short stories, plays, essays, and even novels by Filipino writers in my archive. Now this friend of mine wanted to expand that short story into a novel—but to her horror, she found she no longer had any copy of her original. And so, when she needed it, when she thought it was gone forever, I was able to give it back to her. This, too, is piracy. But this, too, is preservation.
Going back to Prometheus, I think of piracy not as the theft of fire but actually its keeping. It is not an act of destruction, but an act of care. I want to believe that someone, somewhere, many years from now, will still be able to play Super Mario 64 and marvel at the strange, brilliant excess of a civilization that once was. If that means we have to steal fire from the gods for that game to still be around, then so be it.
Many of us were complicit, perhaps without our knowing it, in the grand project of perfuming the reputation of the Marcoses after they were allowed to come back to the country. They played the long game, insinuating themselves into the public's consciousness, slowly crafting a story of redemption that would have eventual fruition years and years later. What a fantastic gameplan, and we were hoodwinked!
Case in point: this 23 April 2003 issue of Flip Magazine, a publication edited by novelist Jessica Zafra. This was 19 years ago, around the time [according to a report by The Washington Post] that the Marcoses laid the grand plan on how they could stage a comeback, which would involve winning the hearts and souls of Filipinos through media, and revising history in the process.
Adam David shared this photo on Instagram yesterday. In that same post, Jessica gave this response: “That was a mistake. We thought we could do profiles of people who by all rights should be tearing each other’s throats out, but were actually cordial [at least in public] and were all in Congress at the same time, sometimes on the same side of an issue. If you read Roby Alampay’s interview with Imee Marcos you will see that it is a real interview in which he asks her questions which society magazines do not touch. About the time her mother’s plane had left Rome airport and she had it turn around because she forgot to buy cheese. (She confirmed it). And her mother’s shopping sprees and enormous entourage. (So cool, she said.) Her human rights cases, the abuses of power. She answered everything. The piece is heavy on irony, and she knew it and participated anyway. The funny haha cover is a terrible mistake. As editor my mistake was in treating her like a regular human being. Lourd de Veyra did the interview with Satur Ocampo. I did the interview with my former publisher and mentor, who at the time was closer to me than my parents. I ended our friendship in 2016, in the last column I ever wrote. Flip Magazine died shortly afterwards, not that it’s any consolation.”
The soft onslaught continued over the years, with all kinds of magazines and TV shows featuring many “gilded age stories [of the] Marcoses,” as CNN Philippines’ Don Jaucian observed. We swooned over Borgy Manotoc as a heartthrob. We marveled at Imee’s Philippine Tatler cover. We giggled over Imelda’s cameo in the film Mariquina. We were subconsciously taught to “move on” when Kris Aquino interviewed Bongbong on TV in 1995 — because if Kris could move on, why couldn’t we? Most. Likely. All. Part. Of. The. Game. Plan. We allowed this for almost 20 years or even more, thinking it was all harmless. Now it has bitten us in the ass: we learn too late that soft power is tremendous power — and lifestyle sections of newspapers are never not political. Their ruthless effectiveness lies in the sheen of their being seemingly benign. The Marcoses already knew this at the height of their powers in the two decades of their rule — they used the arts to perfume their stench, and even until now we have apologists who use these totems of cultural patronage as signs of a “golden age.”
Jessica Zafra’s admission — that her mistake was in treating [a member of the Marcos family] “like a regular human being” — is telling. This, I think, was the heart of the gameplan. To turn their story around as the poster children of massive thievery [according to the Guinness Book of World Records] to that of being regular human beings, just like you and me, who also hurt, who also make mistakes, and who implore you to not treat them like the shadows of their ancestors. [Bongbong’s recent words.] But they are not regular human beings. They have billions [of our money] at their disposal to finance a long game to hoodwink us. The redemption story they want you to buy has been cleverly baked for you, with all of our help [knowingly or unknowingly] — and you ate it up.
Many of us are so ready to blame the masa for being “bobo” for voting the way they did this year. But, as Biboy S. Hernandez would like to remind us, the elites were the first to welcome them home, and the middle class fawned all over them. It’s so easy to be complicit pala, we realize too late.
Dumaguete media people are brave. I need to say that, because the ganging up on local journalists is a little too dramatic. When they report the bad news, you hate on them for reporting without gloss. When they cannot report the bad news, you hate on them for the roadblocks they face. You have no idea what they are going through, the hoops they jump to be able to report truthfully. But they have also been targets of numerous, unsolved killings of late. Where was your outrage when news people like Rex Cornelio, Edmund Sestoso, and Dindo Generoso were killed? You’re enjoying your privilege of getting the news from the safety of your keyboard. Stop being a bitch. You don’t have a job that can get you killed.
The clips we got in our social media feeds were actually cropped, incomplete -- edited to be race-baity. The white woman actually eventually turned into an Asian woman, and so on and so forth, suggesting a theme of fluidity more than anything else. Context changes perception. It's still a campaign that should have been rethought before execution, but the complete story should give us pause. The quick outrage that followed may have harmed more than helped our fight for POC concerns. In this age of click-baits and fake news, it is always wise to verify and research everything, even things that preach to our kind of choir.
Every year since 2010, I've devoted the month of October to watching horror movies of all kinds, from slasher films to psychological thrillers to haunted house movies, from the classic to the contemporary. (Except torture porn. I draw the line there.) This year, I've decided to do "Women in Peril" as a theme. It is an intirguing subgenre of horror, and I intend to catch a full range of its varieties. I'll try to stay away from the "final girl" trope, however. So, no Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween for me. If you have any suggestions, drop me a line in the comments.
[5] Here is a documentary that runs like an unconventional horror movie of the true crime variety -- with a coda in the end that horrifies and curdles the senses for its depiction of the desperate reach we sometimes have to do to grasp the “closure” we think we deserve. It springs from a murder that has now become almost mythological -- partly sociological parable and partly urban legend.
In 1964, a young woman by the name of Kitty Genovese came home from her work as manager in a neighbourhood bar in Queens, New York when she was accosted by a man named Winston Moseley. She is our woman in peril for this series. Moseley knifed her in the open air, along the quiet sidewalk only a corner way from her apartment. Her terrified screams for help alerted several people in the neighbourhood, and she frightened her assailant just enough that he immediately walked away. Bloodied, she carried on slowly towards the front door of her apartment building -- only to find that the assailant had come back to rape her and finally finish her off. According to the newspaper accounts at that time, with the venerable New York Times leading the charge in reporting, about 38 people heard her scream and watched her die, and did nothing, most of them reporting later on the same mantra: “I didn’t want to get involved.”
The news story proved a sensation, spurred people into action, and seized the wider cultural imagination: it has since given birth to the term “bystander syndrome,” which describes the apathy of people in stopping a crime they’re witnessing, and also allowed the installation of the 911 system of calling the police.
But James D. Solomon’s The Witness (2015) is more than just mere true crime sensational retelling. For me, at its basic level, the film is a thorough and powerful examination of the subconscious biases we bring and even nurture in order to tell the stories we need to tell. Its title then is a perfect capsule of its [unintended?] theme: we are only witnesses to the truth we are comfortable with, and from that springs our versions of the tale.
Ostensibly, the documentary follows the investigations of Kitty Genovese’s younger brother Bill, who was closest to his sister and was a very young boy when she was murdered. Now much older, legless, and ambling around in a wheelchair, he feels a consuming need to find out what exactly happened that fateful night on March 13, 1964. Did 38 people really turn away as his sister was being assaulted? What explains this psychologically? All his life, this murder and this knowledge of what was now being called “bystander syndrome” have singularly defined every choice he has made -- including signing up for the Marines at the height of the Vietnam War. In a culture where young men like him were finding ways to shirk from the war, he had volunteered -- because he didn’t want to become one of those “38.”
And yet the questions remained, and his family was not much help either: Kitty’s death also murdered her memory within the family itself, with most of its members having since refused to talk about her, preferring instead the comfortable silence. Perfectly understandable, given that the murder totally devastated everyone, leading soon to the deaths by stroke of Kitty’s mother and then father. As a much-younger niece recounts in the film: “I first read about the story in my high school class. I was deep into reading it when I finally realised it was actually about my aunt.”
Thus begins Bill’s decades-long investigation: first, he pursued leads and compiled the names of the 38 witnesses, and interviewed those willing to meet with him. Many of them had since died, complicating the filling out of the narrative, but for some of those who are still alive, a significant detail soon comes out from their telling of what they remember: some of the witnesses actually did try to help, and some actually called the police.
The first version of the story then is the newspaper version, as well as the prosecutor’s version: that 38 saw and did not help.
But now a second version comes out: only a very few of the 38 saw the assault, most only heard screams, and almost all did not know a murder was being committed.
Bill tracks down the legendary journalist Abe Rosenthal, who was City Editor of the Times who had given the green light to publish what was now clearly erroneous reporting. The third version of the story now emerges. In hindsight, for Rosenthal, the details of the report were flawed and not entirely factual, but he insists on the “power” of the story: it is now a story discussed in classes, in books, in films. Its implications have become important sociological theory which has in turn done much good, including the implementation of 911 and the better policing of tough neighbourhoods.
But for other critics, there is a fourth version of the story, a shadow narrative of Rosenthal’s insistent one: Kitty’s murder and the 38 have became a metaphor for “big city indifference,” for the soullessness of metropolitan living. It transformed New York into a dangerous place of the imagination.
The inconsistencies in the original reporting leads Bill to find out that his sister was not a “bar maid” as reported, but actually the bar manager -- and then he stumbles on Kitty’s secret life as a lesbian. He tracks down an old lover, and from her he gets his fifth version of the story: about young women in the closet in 1960s America, and the perils of having to identify the body of a murdered secret lover.
Further in his investigation, Bill finds his interest slowly leading to the murderer himself. Upon arrest on an unrelated case of robbery, Winston Moseley had confessed to police about an earlier murder of another woman, and later on also the murder of Kitty Genovese, which was brought about apparently by another psychopathic hankering to randomly kill another woman. That’s the sixth version of the story: the original confession of the killer.
The seventh version came some years later: in an earlier bid for parole [since denied], Moseley wrote an editorial for the Times where he proclaimed himself reformed, and now ready to become “an asset to society.” This is no longer the story of Kitty Genovese but the story of a poor man who had lost his way, and now was ready to make amends to the world.
Bill approaches prison authorities to arrange a meeting with the convicted murderer. Later on he learns that Moseley has denied the request, feeling that the media has already “exploited” him much too much for a good number of years; being filmed in conversation for a documentary with the brother of the woman he had killed was not something he wanted to do.
Undaunted, Bill seeks out Moseley’s grown-up son, now apparently a minister. The conversation that happens is fraught with tension, and here an eighth version of the story comes out: the son obliquely accuses Bill Genovese of belonging to an Italian crime family [not true], and tells him that his father Winston had suggested that Kitty had been killed because she had verbally attacked him, calling him racist epithets, and he had snapped.
Later, learning that Bill had talked to his son, Winston finally writes him from prison, and in the letter, a ninth version of the story comes out: Winston now claims he never killed Kitty, that he was just the getaway driver for the true murderer who had warned him never to tell the real story.
Bill Genovese responds with what for me is the truest line in the documentary: “It’s kind of like the human condition,” he wearily tells his wife who read the letter with him. “One believes their own bullshit in evolving stories.”
Now fully cognisant of the fact that he can never really truly get to the truth, he turns to one device that makes the film a perfect real-life turn for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: he stages a “reenactment” of the crime in the very neighbourhood his sister was killed. He requests a friend, a young woman, to go to the Kew Gardens neighbourhood with him, and in the exact locations of the unfolding of that 1964 murder, he instructs her to do the exact same screams.
From the opposite side of the road, Bill becomes the titular witness -- the young woman follows Kitty’s haunted footsteps, how she had walked from the nearby parking lot where Kitty had parked her car, on to the sidewalk where she first encountered the shadowy form of Winston Moseley, on to the first screams she made upon being knifed, on to the pained walk she struggled through as she sought her apartment building door after the assailant had run away, on to the second screams she made when she found out he had come back to finish her off. The screams curdle as the night wears on.
Are we witnessing catharsis for Bill? Did the reenactment give him the closure he needed? The tenth and final version of the story, after all, is the personal legacy of that night, and it involved him: in not wanting to become one of the “38,” he had gone to Vietnam, and in the middle of the hell of that senseless war, he became seriously injured and he lost his legs.
In the end, he confesses to the futility of his obsession to find out the truth of that night. There is no truth, only versions of the “truth,” and every witness has a bias to skew it for a story that best fits them.
And so, in the light of the tumult in our ongoing political tribulation that seems to have no end, we must remember that we have accused everyone of bias -- particularly the media. Is media biased? Of course it is; to tell a good story it can sell. But then so is everyone, including you. We all trumpet the story we want to hear because we love the smell of our own bullshit.
And everything in the world, in fact, is bullshit.
8:39 PM |
The Fate of ‘Bias’ Media, Courtesy of Hugo Chavez
All this talk about media being biased, being “dilaw,” being a force of destabilization may have a purpose after all. They set the grounds and the mind-set for a possible eventual erasure, or at least diminishment, of freedom of speech -- and the formula may be old. It is Hugo Chavez’s Venezuelan media adventure. In the book The Dictator’s Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy by William J. Dobson, we first get a glimpse of the Televison Chavez, a man with a rambling TV show where he rants and lambasts and make bold pronouncements... We don’t have a current national equivalent for that yet, but it pays to remember that Davao would know of a similar TV show for years, something called Gikan sa Masa, Para sa Masa. Now there’s talk of making that a nationwide show. Is Venezuela’s past our future? Read the excerpt from the book:
The centerpiece of Chavez's media universe is his unscripted Sunday afternoon television show, Aló, Presidente (Hello, President). Here, each week, Chavez sings, dances, rams, raves, shouts, jokes, questions, reports, prays, and — sometimes — calls Fidel Castro on the telephone. The show has no precise running time, although it averages a little less than five hours. It is a rambling program that resembles a telethon with a heavy dose of politics — a cross between Jerry Lewis and Glenn Beck but with an emphasis on “the socialism of the twenty-first century.” (For the show’s tenth anniversary, he aired a four-day special episode.) Chavez will often use the show to visit government projects, lambaste his opponents, or denounce the United States. As he downs one cup of coffee after another, he unveils new policies and makes bold announcements. Famously, during one episode, he ordered the head of the military to send ten tank battalions to the Venezuelan-Colombian border. Special guests have included Danny Glover, Diego Maradona, and, of course, Fidel.
Although the showman never acts like a head of state, one of the program's more important elements is the picture it gives of Chavez governing. Amid his monologues and impromptu tirades, Chavez will quiz his ministers — whose attendance is mandatory — often berating them for their failings. The Comandante has even been known to fire a minister live on television. The whole lot of them sit among the audience, wearing socialist red, their heads tilted down, praying that they are not called out on a whim. Chavez dressing down a hapless minister for the pleasure of the viewing audience on national television is what passes for accountability in Venezuela today. It is also a vital part of the image making that keeps him blameless for the country's mounting troubles. The message is clear: if the incompetent ministers and bureaucrats would only do what Chavez told them to do, everything would be fine.
If Chavez's antics are unrehearsed, his creation of a media state is anything but spontaneous. It began in the wake of the April 2002 coup. When Chavez came to power, the Venezuelan government operated one state television channel and two radio stations, and Chavez had done surprisingly little to change that in the early years of his presidency. After the coup, Chavez saw the crucial role the media played in shaping events and, in his view, encouraging his ouster. He referred to the four private television channels as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. "[Chavez's government] saw how weak they were after April 11, 2002," says Canizalez, referring to the short-lived coup. "They realized they were a communication minority, so they developed a strategy to create a strong media infrastructure."
In 2004, the National Assembly provided the government with the legal framework to control the media. The government was given broad discretionary powers to punish slander and disrespect of public officials. Defamation of the president can lead to thirty months in prison, and the government has the right to impose hefty fines on any media company for "offending" public authorities. Two of the major television channels — Venevision and Televen — soon changed their editorial stance to fall in line with the government's wishes. Politically objectionable shows were canceled, and the channels’ focus shifted to entertainment. In one telling example, a popular political talk show was replaced with a program on astrology and tarot readings. A third channel, RCTV, was closed, and the fourth, Globovision, remains in a bitter struggle with the government, always under the threat of sanctions. (In October 2011, for example, Globovision was fined $2 million for reporting on deadly prison riots a few months earlier.) Meanwhile, Chavez has poured millions into creating his own pro-government media conglomerate. Today, there are six government television channels, two national radio stations, three thousand community radio stations, three print media companies, and a growing presence on the Internet. “These channels are clearly a propaganda machine of the state,” Cañizález told me. “It is sort of what you would think of the official state TV of Cuba.”
Perhaps the regime's most sophisticated tool has simply been uncertainty. In August 2009, Chavez shuttered 34 radio stations for alleged “administrative infractions.” At the same time, the government announced that it was investigating 240 other stations for similar violations. However, it never specified which stations were under its microscope, nor did it intend to notify them. With the threat of closure already made real, the government knew the stations would do its censorship for it. In such an environment, any story that comes too close to the edge is either watered down or killed. “Their strategy is to keep them on their heels,” says Cañizález. “This is a way that media critical of the government can exist, but always under threat and at a high cost. Because the government doesn't give a clear set of rules, it puts independent media in a constant state of uncertainty.”
1:26 PM |
The One with the Constantly Surprised Look on Her Face and Needs to Lay Off on the Botox
It wasn't hard to miss Greta Van Susteren -- or The-One-With-the-Constantly-Surprised-Look-on-Her-Face-and-Needs-to-Lay-Off-on-the-Botox -- and her recent post-election interview with Sarah Palin in FoxNews for some reasons. Every conceivable news channel worth its salt in responsible journalism was covering, fervently, the attack on Mumbai, and here was FoxNews -- "We Report. You Decide." Whoopee -- doing such a loving, loving coverage of a certified political "old news." The difference in coverage was simply jarring.
And The-One-With-the-Constantly-Surprised-Look-on-Her-Face-and-Needs-to-Lay-Off-on-the-Botox's almost-bedroomy demeanor with the Alaskan governor was so gosh-worthy it bordered on the sapphic. "Have you eaten?" Greta asked Sarah somewhere in the interview, and then proceeded to Palin's kitchen, where both "palled around" (FoxNews' recent favorite term) like they were on a date. And Sarah went pa-cute and gave another one of those kilometric answers without periods or a point. I switched to CNN. There was new information about gunmen in Taj Mahal Hotel. I switched back to FoxNews, and the headline below Sarah's talking head went: "Gov. Palin talks about caribou and moose hunting."
Seriously, this is news?
FoxNews is the dumbest thing on television. I have a couple of good friends who work for "Fox & Friends" (and you know naman that I love you guys), but FoxNews is the dumbest thing on television. Which may be why every time I hear somebody confess that he or she watches FoxNews regularly, I have a tendency to give that person wide berth, avoid them like the plague. It's like admitting you're retarded, and are proud of it.
11:45 PM |
"Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define"
Just before Valentine’s Day this year, The New York Times' Sunday Styles section asked college students from all over America to "tell the plain truth about what love is like for them." They got more than 1,200 essays by deadline, and none of them about red roses and white tablecloths. (Well, there were three.) They've published the winning essay, by Marguerite Fields, now, and it is one brilliant personal piece. It is funny, witty, and sad -- and damning, too, about the way we love now. Read it.
I've been really sick for the past week. Blogging helps, sometimes.
2.
I was watching this Chris Ware video from This American Life, and it perfectly encapsulates one moment from a play I've been trying to write for the past year: how our memory sometimes tricks us into remembering something we never even experienced in the first place.
What is with Austria? My fantasies of it have always consisted of Mozart, Strauss, grand palaces, and The Sound of Music. But now, it's all Arthur Schnitzler (author of the novella Traumnovelle, the basis for Eyes Wide Shut), Elfriede Jelinek (Nobel Prize winner for such harrowing work as The Piano Teacher), Michael Haneke, underground captivity, and incest and more underground captivity. And now this. There seems to be an Austrian race to debase humanity in print, in film, and in real life. What's up with that?
What's strange: I'm actually planning to be in Austria to work and maybe study within the next eight years.
Mine is watching Ryan Seacrest. Seriously. Of course I know all the closet jokes from Jay Leno. (But what can you expect from an unfunny homophobe?) Of course, there's the too-meticulous attention Ryan has for his hair. But I find the guy really likable, and he does know how to spin every goddamn minute of American Idol, stringing everything with his own brand of wit and thinking-on-his-feet. The guy does not get tired -- and that's the crux of my admiration. A media mogul in the making, he hosts dozens of TV and radio shows, co-owns several restaurants, and has a fashion line, and his ambition to rule all of TV as the next Ed McMahon, Larry King, Regis Philbin, and Dick Clark combined is also quite impressive. Washington Post's Tom SHales writes: "Seacrest couldn't care less about rumors of his sexual relationships, because he keeps adding corporate relationships to his repertory. 'Coca-Cola; that's a very good relationship. The strategy is to get them to spend dollars on our programs,' he says cryptically." When I grow up, I want to be Ryan Seacrest, hehe. Hail Ryan!
What's your secret guilty pleasure? Spill the beans...
That's what Frank Cimatu says. And he's right. And it is about time, too. The Philippine Daily Star girl (Rica Bolipata-Santos) and the Manila Bulletin boy (Luis Joaquin Katigbak) have already given their spiel.
I finally know why this current generation of young filmmakers - Eli Roth of Hostel, James Wan and Leigh Whannell of Saw, John Stockwell of Turistas, Larry Cohen of Captivity, Rob Zombie of The Devil's Rejects, and their ilk -- seem hell-bent on unleashing torture porn on us.
What the heck are Murky and Lurky doing to Moonglow? Did our parents really know what we were watching on '80s Saturday morning TV? Oh, dear God... This perfectly explains why parts of my life have taken some turns to the delightfully perverse.
Let's chant like the Care Bears once did: "Goodness makes the badness go away... Goodness makes the badness go away... Goodness makes the badness go away..."
I have a certain fondness for the weird and the strange. Creepy advertising, for example. Would you buy a loaf of bread because of this manic-eyed little girl? Ahh, the weird old days of print advertising. You can see more over at Weirdomatic.
In today's Sunday Inquirer Magazine, Ruel S. De Vera has a great feature on Dean Alfar and speculative fiction in the Philippines.
In the New York Times, reporter Jason DeParle has a well-written reportage on the OFW phenomenon, and does a fine job of fleshening out the complex issues of the Philippines being increasingly a migrant nation.
12:36 AM |
A Glimpse of Holy Week and the Mananambals of Siquijor
The three-day trek across the hills and dust roads of Siquijor -- on foot and on motorcycles under the heat of the April sun -- chasing after shamans can be both heady and exhausting. Coming back from it all, I spent the entire morning in Dumaguete sleeping off the bottled up tiredness and the excess of adrenaline and excitement. Later in tbe afternoon, it was off to Sans Rival for a little bit of civilized cake, and to Lee Cimbali for coffee, and to the new Jo's By the Sea in Sibulan for dinner of chicken. It was as if I wanted to immerse myself so quickly into my city ways.
But I can't quite forget Siquijor, and its magic, and its even more magical people so easily. This is a glimpse of the story in my head...
This is the mananambal from Barangay San Antonio, in Sitio Buac-Bato, Juan Ponce Dako, preparing the lana for the inadlip he will be preparing from the pangalap of seven Fridays...
This is apprentice mananambal Manong Noel chopping the forbidden ingredients for the inagdaut, or the hex potion, which includes chipped human bones which he has gathered from the old cemetery back in Siquijor town...
This is the small black pot of ingredients for the hex potion burnt to charcoal in the middle of the San Antonio jungle, ready for the masa.
But what I really want to write about is the brightness of these people, how beautiful and funny they are, how hospitable, colorful, and engaging. There's Manang Juling, for example, who engages us in banter while talking about how she once healed a young man of impotence on the eve of his wedding. There's Lola Lauriana who can divine the future and the spot of lost things, but plafully insists that people come to see her because she is the most beautiful mananambal around. (She's 88 years old.) There's Lolo Indoy whose quiet ways and unassuming manner almost makes him the poster boy for Siquijor shamanism -- and indeed he is. (GQ Cover Boy for the mananambal set? You bet.)
The thing is, so many negative things have been written (or blown up into bad horror movies starring Assunta de Rossi) about this beautiful island -- all of which have created the crudest perspectives and the weirdest superstitions which are largely untrue. That seems to be my challenge now as I begin the stories I will be submitting to Men's Health and Marie Clare and Inquirer: to dig deeper than the awful tabloid stories, and show the humanity of it all.
4:00 AM |
Initial Political Decisions Prompted By TV Ads
Richard Gomez is pathetic. I'm not voting for Cesar Montano because I want him to make more films, not more politics. And I'm not sure I can vote a vegetable (Pichay!) into office. What will they do all day? Wither and turn yellow? And I can't stand the dancing of Manny Villar. Anybody that stiff doing a small jiggy cannot be trusted. And anything Kris Aquino endorses is shit, so no Noynoy. And everybody in the administration ticket -- except perhaps for Joker Arroyo -- are all a joke and a half. And I'm a probinsyano, but Chavit cannot speak for me: I have never betted on any numbers game. Only that Cayetano guy seems to put a semblance of a political issue in his ad campaigns but looks too much like a matinee idol gone to seed for me. Who to vote for?
A few weeks ago, in the wake of the James Yap-Hope Centeno sex scandal, I wrote about the widespread fascination for Kris Aquino, but never did take sides. (Trust me, there are camps in blogosphere and beyond: one camp that is truly devoted, and another that is truly vitriolic in their dislike.) Last weekend proved to be the last straw upon my fragile neutrality, however. I remember an ABS-CBN show (was it The Buzz?) giving an "exclusive" on the Kris Aquino situation, showing a segment where a camera crew visited the convalescing talk show host in her hospital bed, where she waxed all martyr-like but welcoming as she recounted her strict diet, how her unborn baby had yet to gain the necessary weight, everything. I was riveted. But it slowly dawned on me: to what lengths will this media monster go to to cannibalize her life para lang may pansin mileage? Didn't she willingly "disappear" from the local TV scene to "concentrate" on her marriage and her "failing" health, away from the spotlight and the stress of TV cameras? What was she doing inviting the whole world into her hospitable bed, when all she could have hoped for was for everything to just fade away?
Why do we even bother to watch this pornography of attention-deficiency, even when we all willingly acknowledge that her life is our current favorite soap opera? Should we let her continue to manipulate us with her endless tales of woes and what-not?
Frankly, I have enough. I boycott Kris Aquino -- and all products she endorses -- from now on. I will not watch any of her TV shows, and I will not read anything about her anymore. (Who's with me?) Hell, I won't even vote for Noynoy, just because. She's a sad, sad, pathetic woman who can no longer recognize plain sanity -- or blogs, for that matter, hehehe. ("What's a blog? Do we need a password to access that?")
9:00 AM |
Prometheus the Pirate
