The F word in an F world
June 12, 2005 | 12:00am
Our cities are built as defenses against nature, in order to contain its unfathomable power. But civilization has never effectively guarded itself from nature’s malevolence; the day will come when the enraged waters of Boracay will devour all the city trash that has colonized its shores. The natives who were forcefully evacuated from their ancestral homes to make way for golf clubs and shopping centers shall also one day summon nature to emancipate their lands from the tyranny of cement and steel. Nature is free to do as she wishes, and she can be very ugly and unforgiving.
History, like nature, is merciless. The struggle for freedom is always mired in violence, injustice, and corruption. And once emancipation does happen, it is short-lived, until the same vicious cycle starts unfolding again, creating man-made disasters that parallel the Baguio earthquake, the Pinatubo eruption and any one-hit wonder’s so-called "acting career."
The Filipino is a veteran starrer in such movies about freedom – freedom from economic poverty, freedom from emotional abuse, freedom from social conditioning. But they are all projections and wish-fulfillments staged in the theaters, not real actions found in the streets. In Eddie Romero’s Ganito Kami Noon, Paano Kayo Ngayon? (1976), Christopher de Leon wanders through the Philippine revolutions against Spain and America, a roving camera and acting as witness to the country’s fight for freedom and search for a national identity. Similar themes of national consciousness and political freedom, though diverse in treatment, appear in Peque Gallaga’s Oro, Plata, Mata (1982), Lino Brocka’s Orapronobis (1989), Joel Lamangan’s Flor Contemplacion Story (1995) and Mark Meilly’s La Visa Loca (2005), which puts Robin Padilla as the driver who desperately wants to go to the US. And like a lot of Filipinos who wait in line at the US Embassy only to get "denied," Robin still tries and tries until he…
Face it: A lot of Filipinos are not free to roam. Freedom, like airfare to Europe, is expensive. Free in another sense also means we are exempted from taxes and duties, thus cheap and irresponsible. We love f***bies, and why not. The luxury to travel for the sake of it is not common practice here, so one must always be resourceful.
I remember a joke that a friend once told me. It’s about a Filipina overseas worker who stuffed all the family pasalubongs inside her dead mother’s casket. The corpse was wearing brand-new Nikes, layers of Adidas socks, and Victoria’s Secret panties, all for the different ates, kuyas and pamangkins back in the probinsya. Deposited in their mother’s mouth were jewels and pills, supporting her body were rows upon rows of canned fish and Pringles potato chips. Even the casket’s fabric lining was torn apart to make room for the bags of American coins and Waldorf Astoria giveaways, then sewn back anew. Yet despite such cost-cutting measures, the migrant daughter still didn’t have enough money for a plane ticket to the Philippines. Besides, she was a TNT in America, or tago nang tago. The Filipina martyr, as always, wants the freedom of others first before hers. She sends the casket, her dead mother, and all the money and goods to her family, hoping that her hard-earned cash can afford them some freedom, even though she has little of it. Funny how a joke so dead hilarious can be tellingly tragic.
"A nation is born into freedom on the day when such a people, molded into a nation by a process of cultural evolution and sense of oneness born of common struggle and suffering, announces to the world that it asserts its natural right to liberty and is ready to defend it with blood, life, and honor." –Diosdado Macapagal, on June 12, Independence Day
Next Saturday, the Tate Museum in London will hold a talk entitled "Freedom to Roam" in conjunction with an upcoming exhibition that deals with landscape, travel and cultural identity. I advise those who are itching to get out of the country to check this out, and never to come back. While in Europe, they might as well go to the 51st Venice Biennale – the Oscars of the art world – and support our fellow Filipino, the brilliant filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik. His most famous work is Perfumed Nightmare, a film that has won accolades from the likes of J. Hoberman of the Village Voice, cultural critic Susan Sontag and German master filmmaker Werner Herzog. The Biennale’s curator, Rosa Martinez, expounds on the show’s title, "Always a Little Further":
"The title of this exhibition at the Arsenale di Venezia is taken from one of the Corto Maltese books, a fictional character created by the Venetian writer and comic designer Hugo Pratt. Corto personifies the myth of the romantic traveler: Always independent, always open to chance and risk, and always crossing all kinds of frontiers in pursuit of his own destiny… Art is a fight in the symbolic order – the most relevant creators are those who open new perspectives for linguistic, social and ideological transformation. Today, questioning the autonomy of art and taking aesthetics into everyday life is part of an unstoppable widening of frontiers, of an extension of horizons that goes beyond established models. The adventurer, the philosopher, the scientist, the artist or the exhibition organizer try constantly to discover new lands and to create new possibilities of thought."
That other F*** thought included.
History, like nature, is merciless. The struggle for freedom is always mired in violence, injustice, and corruption. And once emancipation does happen, it is short-lived, until the same vicious cycle starts unfolding again, creating man-made disasters that parallel the Baguio earthquake, the Pinatubo eruption and any one-hit wonder’s so-called "acting career."
The Filipino is a veteran starrer in such movies about freedom – freedom from economic poverty, freedom from emotional abuse, freedom from social conditioning. But they are all projections and wish-fulfillments staged in the theaters, not real actions found in the streets. In Eddie Romero’s Ganito Kami Noon, Paano Kayo Ngayon? (1976), Christopher de Leon wanders through the Philippine revolutions against Spain and America, a roving camera and acting as witness to the country’s fight for freedom and search for a national identity. Similar themes of national consciousness and political freedom, though diverse in treatment, appear in Peque Gallaga’s Oro, Plata, Mata (1982), Lino Brocka’s Orapronobis (1989), Joel Lamangan’s Flor Contemplacion Story (1995) and Mark Meilly’s La Visa Loca (2005), which puts Robin Padilla as the driver who desperately wants to go to the US. And like a lot of Filipinos who wait in line at the US Embassy only to get "denied," Robin still tries and tries until he…
Face it: A lot of Filipinos are not free to roam. Freedom, like airfare to Europe, is expensive. Free in another sense also means we are exempted from taxes and duties, thus cheap and irresponsible. We love f***bies, and why not. The luxury to travel for the sake of it is not common practice here, so one must always be resourceful.
I remember a joke that a friend once told me. It’s about a Filipina overseas worker who stuffed all the family pasalubongs inside her dead mother’s casket. The corpse was wearing brand-new Nikes, layers of Adidas socks, and Victoria’s Secret panties, all for the different ates, kuyas and pamangkins back in the probinsya. Deposited in their mother’s mouth were jewels and pills, supporting her body were rows upon rows of canned fish and Pringles potato chips. Even the casket’s fabric lining was torn apart to make room for the bags of American coins and Waldorf Astoria giveaways, then sewn back anew. Yet despite such cost-cutting measures, the migrant daughter still didn’t have enough money for a plane ticket to the Philippines. Besides, she was a TNT in America, or tago nang tago. The Filipina martyr, as always, wants the freedom of others first before hers. She sends the casket, her dead mother, and all the money and goods to her family, hoping that her hard-earned cash can afford them some freedom, even though she has little of it. Funny how a joke so dead hilarious can be tellingly tragic.
"A nation is born into freedom on the day when such a people, molded into a nation by a process of cultural evolution and sense of oneness born of common struggle and suffering, announces to the world that it asserts its natural right to liberty and is ready to defend it with blood, life, and honor." –Diosdado Macapagal, on June 12, Independence Day
"The title of this exhibition at the Arsenale di Venezia is taken from one of the Corto Maltese books, a fictional character created by the Venetian writer and comic designer Hugo Pratt. Corto personifies the myth of the romantic traveler: Always independent, always open to chance and risk, and always crossing all kinds of frontiers in pursuit of his own destiny… Art is a fight in the symbolic order – the most relevant creators are those who open new perspectives for linguistic, social and ideological transformation. Today, questioning the autonomy of art and taking aesthetics into everyday life is part of an unstoppable widening of frontiers, of an extension of horizons that goes beyond established models. The adventurer, the philosopher, the scientist, the artist or the exhibition organizer try constantly to discover new lands and to create new possibilities of thought."
That other F*** thought included.
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