Comedians share the same question with John Stewart who acknowledged the Obama situation last wednesday, right after the results were announced .
13.11.08
"How are we going to make this shit funny?!"
7.11.08
Susulat ka ha.
Pindot dito para sa mas marami pang litrato ni Dubya.
imahe mula sa http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-36649.html
14.10.08
Hindi pa huli ang lahat!
Anu ang pwede mong gawin? Gusto mong malaman?
click ka dito!
at kung sa tingin mo eh ubod ng bangis ang button sa kaliwa (at may pagka-inggetero ka), click ka dito.
Tandaan mo, hindi pa huli ang lahat.
11.10.08
Welcome to Banksy's Village Pet Store And Charcoal Frille
Again, another genius critique of our twisted sense of appreciation. The shop opened last Oct 5. (World Teacher's Day ito, stray) and will run until Halloween. This is the first time Banksy used animatronics. Maybe Star City could invite the englishman over. Tingin nyo?
“New Yorkers don’t care about art, they care about pets. So I’m exhibiting them instead. I wanted to make art that questioned our relationship with animals and the ethics and sustainability of factory farming, but it ended up as chicken nuggets singing. I took all the money I made exploiting an animal in my last show and used it to fund a new show about the exploitation of animals. If its art and you can see it from the street, I guess it could still be considered street art."
~ Banksy
3.10.08
Crack is the new Cake
Here's Banky's strike on wall street's brand of apathy. Did i hear someone type,
Everytime i see a banksy art i wonder if a similar breed of artists thrive here in the Philippines. I've seen several urban protest art in the Diliman area, sadly none of them is at par with the notorius englishman's wit. Although there's this painting of an old man with the coke logo about to pierce his heart. Can't remember the title.
image taken from: http://theworldsbestever.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/banksy-wall-street-rat.jpg
2.10.08
For Everything Else...
Treatment for cuts and bruises: Hell, who cares!
Look on Gloring's face: priceless
For everything else, ...
30.9.08
"Kill every one over ten."

- Gen. Jacob H. Smith
Ang sipi ay tugon ni Smith sa sinasabing Balanggiga Massacre na naganap 107 taon na ang nakakalipas.
P.S. Hindi pa rin sinasauli ang mga kampana ng Balangiga.
imahe mula sa http://www.bibingka.com/phg/balangiga/default.htm
17.9.08
Ang Ating Bagong Panatang Makabayan*
29.8.08
Banksy Strikes America!
taken from http://www.woostercollective.com/Bart1.jpg
5.8.08
'Indi na Indie*
Isa pa, sa alaala ko, may sinulat si Prof. Lumbera hinggil sa indie cinema at alternative cinema. Sa salaysay ay pinag-iba nya ang dalawa. Habang ang una ay may pangunahing katangian di tali sa pinansya ang produksyun, ang pangalawa ay mas depenido ang katuturan - ang mag-alay ng mga mapagpalayang ideya gamit ang pelikula. Marahil ito dapat (/sana) ang tunguhin ng Cinemalaya - ang magpalaya ng kaisipan, hindi pa talaga ang magbenta ng tiket.
Palagay ko hindi rin siguro maiiwasang ma-coopt ng Estado ang ganitong porma ng subersyon. Bagama't mahina ang kawing ng Estado sa mga Ideolohikal na Aparatong ng Estado, may kawing pa rin. At nakita nga nila ang efektibidad ng ganitong Aparato. Mula sa kooptasyun ay mukhang lumabnaw na nga ang dati'y malapot-lapot na diskursong hinahain ng mga pelikulang indie. Dinagdagan na ng tubig, nabawasan na ang substansya. Bagama't lokal ang mga kwento, nananatili at nakukupot sila sa personal na lebel (tulad ng sa boses). mangilan-ngilan na nga lang makikitaan ng pagtatangkang tumawid sa diskursong panlipunan, madalas palpak pa.
Kaya siguro kelangan tuloy-tuloy ang pagkontra sa mga tangka ng Kapangyarihang agawin ang mangilan-ngilang lunsarang pook ng subersyun at kontra-gahum.
* komento ko sa post ni R. Tolentino na Indie cinema bilang kultural na kapital. Nahabaan ako kaya nilagay ko na rin dito. Isang post din yun, akala mo.
R. Tolentino, ukol sa Hollywoodization ng Indie Cinema
Wala na ang lingering camera movements ng poverty films at surrealist look na ang artist at manunulat ang pangunahing tauhan. Na-Hollywood-ized na ang indie films, o nagmistulang indie films sa U.S. na nag-aantay ma-pickup ng major studio. Na kaya na lamang indie films ang mga ito ay dahil hindi pa nga naipapalabas—bagamat kahit ngayon pa lang ay nangangarap na—sa komersyal na sinehan.
~ Roland Tolentino sa Indie cinema bilang kultural na kapital
2.8.08
BAWAL ANG MGA MAHIHIRAP DITO!
And "Edukasyon para sa lahat hindi lang sa mayayaman" greeted UP hopefuls today as they took UPCAT. (The former statement probably referring to UP's tuition and other fee increase.)
Claimed by Pambansang Grupo ng mga Mural na Artevista (ironically acronymed PGMA), the graffiti hinted of the situation of UP, and education at large. UP's admin said that if found out, members of PGMA could face suspension. (Why not suspend PGMA, instead?). Read more here.
They should have done it banksy-style.image taken from: http://www.carrotrope.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/banksy-again.jpeg
17.7.08
Howl!
Allen Ginsberg*
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
cohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other
skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
scripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat
and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
&tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
&the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
moon,
with mother finally fucked, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-
nished room emptied down to the last piece of
mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted
on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that
imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of
hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of
time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
ing plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna
Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intel-
ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
years.
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
nation?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
ned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-
tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De-
spairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the
street!
III
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful
typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the
abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col-
lapse O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're
free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night
San Francisco 1955-56
* Born in the 1920's, American poet, Allen Ginsberg was one of the more prominent icon of the beat generation. Taking root from William Blake's tradition, Ginsberg experimental verses attack the normalized and the conformed.
"Ginsberg read on to the end of the poem, which left us standing in wonder, or cheering and wondering, but knowing at the deepest level that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America..."
~ Michael McClure
image taken from http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/8
6.6.08
because life balance is just too zen (and other random memory)
Halina explained the other day why the term, "work-life balance" contradict itself.
The construction ("work" and "life") imply that work is separate from life, wherein fact, it is (/should be) just a part of it. Seeing it as another category/concept (of the self) is tantamount to putting prime in to it.
Hay.
Semantics.
Here's something from Chaplin's Modern Times.
ba-a-ah! ba-a-ah! ba-a-ah!
I remember this incident with the crew of the 11 illegally detained punk (they were simply hitchhiking). It was may 1 and the clique decided to join the mobilization to popularize the cause of their brethren.
Having no directed knowledge of may 1 and the Labor Movement, they made the fatal mistake of making banners that read, "go anti-work."
I liked their other material though. One read: "work to fast? apply resistance." Its wit was coupled with an image of a monkey wrench being crushed under two gears.
No need for semiotics there.
2.6.08
not porn. i think.
A friend eagerly informed me of this series on YouTube. Consequently, he's bored and unemployed. Not to mention that his back pay is already running slim.
(Unemployment, you gotta love it.)
Behold...
Counter-culture at its finest!
Yahoo v. Hard Gay part 1
Yahoo v. Hard Gay part 2 (:Hard Gay Strikes Back!)
A big, fat *toot* *toot* to Yahoo! for allowing spam!
* acknowledgments to Cocoy for posting an "idiot's guide" on embedding video on blogger.
23.5.08
Holy Dog, Saintly Horse

Yano: AFP ‘on track’ to crush communists in 2010 (inquirer.net headline)
Yano: Kamusta na? Ayus pa ba? Ang buhay natin, kaya pa ba?
One's a bad motherfucker, the other's simply a motherfucker.
image taken from http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/nation/view/20080523-138336/Yano-AFP-on-track-to-crush-communists-in-2010 and http://www.freewebtown.com/presmarcus/dong1.jpg
Fierce!
[or the "Martin Masadao* + Used Clothing (+ etc) + Semiotics = The Ukay Ukay Handbook!" post]
Again, I was scavenging through Cimatu's blog** (partly out of habit, partly because I have nothing better to do) when I found this relevant article on one of Baguio's novelties. Much like Fiske's "Jeaning," the essay acknowledges (albeit, subtly) the dualistic character of the phenomena.
Here's Cimatu's:
A French anthropologist while doing the ukay-ukay at Bayanihan in 1998, told me she remembered reading a book about the dumping of used-clothes in Nigeria. She said the clothes came from French and my mind swam over a sea of Christian Dior and Coco Chanel haute couture in some Nigerian version of Bayanihan. It is worth digging up on how ukay-ukay eventually became wagwag and why Baguio became the center of it all. Ukay-ukay, which means "dig up - dig up" in Visaya, was the term for these garments, accessories, toys and other thingamajigs packed in huge cartons and unloaded in piers. "Ukay-ukay" first cropped in the port areas like Zamboanga, Cagayan de Oro, San Fernando and Manila. They had been around since the Second World War but hardly anyone noticed them.Even in Baguio, used clothings shipped from the US were already being sold in the Baguio Market in the 1950s***. European countries got the Marshall Plan and what we got were the jeep and the ukay-ukay. These were the Big Brother's hand-me-downs.And since Baguio was established as the Summer Capital exactly a hundred years ago by the Americans, it was inevitable that ukay-ukay also find its way up there. But PX was all the rage then and ukay-ukay were thrift shop fodder.The epiphany came when ukay-ukay (which suggest digging into the piles of unsorted clothes) became wagwag. There are many theories about wagwag. One suggested that the ukay-ukay originated behind the rice section of the Baguio Market, hence the borrowing of wagwag variety of rice. The most probable one is the act of shaking the clothes ("wagwag"in Filipino and Ilocano) from the pile. So the evolution is from digging them up (ukay-ukay), you eventually shake off the dust in the hope of sizing them and wearing them.The period that ukay-ukay became wagwag in Baguio was in the 1980s when the source of garments shifted from US to Hongkong and Japan. The Philippine Japanese Association, which is very strong in Baguio, started the weekly sale of used clothes from Tokyo until the floodwaters broke. Used garments from Hongkong also started pouring in.If in the past the ukay-ukay (shortened into U2 by the sellers after a popular brand of clothing not the rock band) were unloaded in piers, now the wagwag traders or viajeros fly every other week to HK and accompany the boxes with them. Many of these viajeros were former HK domestics who knew their way around the former Crown Colony. Opening the boxes (done mostly on Saturdays) is like Pandora opening that damned box. You wouldn't know what you get. A box of used bedsheets and blankets is a losing cause while a box of children's clothes is a jackpot. At first, the shops lay out whatever they got. But as the shops proliferate (almost a thousand now compared to only 200 in 1997), in-trading has become the norm. Some shops now sell only toys, others only baseball caps and jackets. When a wagwag shop exclusively for left-handed (Remember Simpsons?) would be created, you know that the end is near.When the 1990 earthquake hit Baguio, the thing that drove the tourists back were the U2 and the ww.com (gayspeak for wagwag). Now it is the main crowd drawer. This will find its significance when we realize that Bayanihan (the Ground Zero for wagwag) was one of the first hotels in Baguio. From rest-and-recreation, the thrust of Baguio shifted to shop-till-you-drop.Why Baguio? Because if you have a U2 shop, for example, in hot CdeO and the box you got were all fur coats, what would you do? Wear them and sweat like a hog or deconstruct them into seat covers? At least in Baguio you can wear them and if you find them tacky, ship them to Lepanto where Fashion TV has yet to be shown in cable. U2 is the new drug and the network is as extensive. I bought a used scarf in Banaue. Does this forebode the over-commercialization of our tourism industry? Don't be silly. It's still the fight against the rich vs. poor, the North vs. the South. If Hongkong kept all its clothes like my mother does, it would sink on its sheer weight. They would only be glad to dump these on us. That is why there are still so many of us who fear the wagwag, seeing these are harbingers of AIDS and other imagined diseases.The garment trade is a social and ecological nightmare, just ask Kathie Lee and her sweatshop scandal. At least when you wear recycled clothes, you are assuaging the guilt of those who owned it first. You also help Planet Earth. Globalization is not always a sell-out. American books and magazines destined for landfills are sold here cheaply and the best thing you can do is to read them and learn. The key is to wear not-so-innocent wagwag yet keep your virtues pure. I remember treading along the foggy Baguio-Bontoc Road when out from the mist in Atok loomed an old woman wearing a long white coat with fur collars. She was carrying a bouquet of cala lily. The gown can only be wagwag. My friend, a photographer who forgot his camera, cried at such a surreal sight. I can only mutter, The White Lady of Cordillera also wears wagwag.
*Martin Masadao (et al) won the best production design for the 2007 Cinemalaya entry, Pisay.
** Am apologizing for the shameless stealing, Mr. Cimatu. May the Force be with You (and me as well).
*** Hilltop, back of Baguio Market, is the best place for a true-blue-(h)ukay-(h)ukay experience. If itchiness persist, consult your doctor.
P.S. Corrected - from Masadao's to Cimatu's. Again, apologies to Mr. Cimatu.
image taken from http://witerary.com/2006/signoff/signof44.jpg
20.5.08
Sad That Sartre Didn't Have a Chance to Meet Ka Bel
Remember, Che? Then again, his face coopted by the the system may be one of the last things Ka Bel would want.
16.5.08
10.5.08
Fanny Slumbook
Hindi madaling maging ina. Lalo pa siguro ang hirap kung iba ang pangangailangan ng anak.Sa Erick Slumbook (2004) ay binagtas ni Garcia ang pag-unlad ni Erick (at ng sarili na rin) sa larangang familyal at sikososyal. Matiyaga si Garcia, kita/ramdam ito (pag-akda o pangangalaga man ang usapin). Mula sa pagkadiskubre na awtistik nga si Erick, hanggang sa pagkatuto ng ating bida tumipa sa computer, andun sya. Beaming proudly (minsan), ika nga niya. Frustrated (madalas).
Sa kabila nito, hindi kailangan ng awa o hinayang. Dahil wala namang kailangang kaawaan o panghinayangan. Alam ito ni Prof. Garcia. Nalaman ko ito sa kanya.
Ang buhay ni Erick (at ni Fanny na rin; tali ang isa sa isa, sa maraming punto't dahilan) ay naging libro. Mula rito, ang libro ay nabuhay, naging organikong behikulo tungo sa pag-unawa sa awtismo at sa sinasabi ni Virginia Woolf na "angel in the house."
Marahil, para kay Garcia, ang slumbook ay paalala ng kanilang narating, at dapat pang puntahan. At sapagkat ang special child ay bahagi rin ng mundo.
Pero ngayo’y alam na alam na alam ko nang autistic ka, anak. At mula nang malaman ko, ang buhay ko ay waring isang roller coaster ride ng mga emosyon…Gayunman, sasabihin ko pa rin sa iyo nang buong katapatan, paulit-ulit at ilang beses man, sakaling muli akong bigyan ng Lumikha ng pagkakataong tahakin pabalik ang landas ng buhay at pagkatapos ay muli akong magsimula at ngayo’y may opsiyon na akong pumili ng gusto kong gawin at hindi gustong gawin, walang pero-perong hahanapin at tatahakin ko pa rin ang landas patungo sa iyo, anak, susunduin kita at magkahawak-kamay at magkaagapay pa rin tayong maglalakbay.”
(Now I know so very well that you are autistic, my son. And since that day I knew, my life has been one emotional roller-coaster ride… But I tell you with all honesty, and I repeat this over and over, if the Creator would give me the chance to trace back my life and start again, if I were made to choose what to do or not do, I would have no ifs and buts in seeking and taking the same path toward you, my son, I will take you, and hand in hand we will make the journey together.)
~Fanny Garcia
* Si Prof. Fanny Garcia ay manunulat, mananaliksik, higit sa lahat, ina ni Erick. Kasalukuyan siyang tagapangulo sa Departamento ng Filipino sa De La Salle. Ilan sa mga naisulat ang Sandaang Damit (1994) at Apartment 3-A Mariposa St. (1994). Si Erick ay 18 taong gulang na ngayun (ata).
** Sa aking nanay, (na bagama't di ako awtistik ay nahirapan din) xoxo. Ang anghel sa aming bahay.
image taken from http://www.anvilpublishing.com/books.php?cat=010200
