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Dog cage quarantine
An officer of the neighborhood night-watch with five young men locked inside a dog cage after breaking community quarantine rules in Laguna province, the Philippines on March 20, 2020 (Eric Panisan Ambrocio via Facebook/Human Rights Watch) When my sister told me not to make plans to come home to the Philippines over the…
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Mythological tricksters in Indonesia and the Philippines
There, tricksters tend to come in a paunchy and less nimble guise, as either apes or tortoises. In one such tale, an ape is said to have befriended a heron, and they engaged in the common practice, at least among the humans who told these tales, of delousing one another. The heron went first and…
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Protected: Land of the Morning: The Philippines and Its People (Asian Civilizations Museum, 2009)
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Outline of Philippine Mythology (F. Landa Jocano, 1969)
This compilation, curated by the esteemed Filipino scholar Dr. F. Landa Jocano, presents a selection of Philippine myths and magical tales, categorized broadly and connected with minimal editorial input. Sourced from both published works and Dr. Jocano’s field research, particularly in Panay’s remote areas, the collection, while not exhaustive, impressively showcases the diversity of Philippine…
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Cebuano Sorcery: Malign Magic in the Philippines (Richard Q. Lieban, 1967)
Book Review of Cebuano Sorcery: Malign Magic in the Philippines The practice of witchcraft in the Philippines has long fascinated observers, with early Spanish explorers documenting its prevalence among locals who employed sorcerers to inflict illness on adversaries through magic. By the 1960s, anthropologist Carl Lieban noted that such practices were still deeply rooted…
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Protected: After the Storm (Hirokazu Kore-Eda, 2016)
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Rage against the image
On the night of February 25, 1986, the Filipino people took to the streets to celebrate the downfall of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Around ten thousand protesters held a vigil to retake Malacanang, the presidential palace originally built by the Spaniards for the Governor-General of the former colony. The plaza which was once open…
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Protected: Gasgas ng alikabok
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Pantasya ng bayan
From the 1950s to the late 1990s, the use of the word “pantasya” has acquired a number of meanings. I suppose our grandfathers and grandmothers used the word in its oldest sense, of fantasy or phantasy, which they probably labeled improbable literature. In other words, out of this world. I’ve always been fascinated by the…
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The decollage we live in
It’s hard to explain, even to myself, why an artwork from more than fifty years ago can speak to our time without resorting to clichéd notions of the timelessness and universality of artistic language. I try to think of concrete experiences that can constitute a right mindset to write about Jacques Villegle, a Parisian artist…
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Kung ako’y mahal mo (Gregorio Fernandez, 1960)
Kung Ako’y Mahal Mo (If You Love Me) is a charming romance melodrama with an incredulous narrative plot. I know all melodramas require some stretching of your suspension of disbelief but this one takes the prize. Ramon (Nestor de Villa) is a car mechanic who hears a cry for help from Lydia (Charito Solis). Ramon…
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Azimat (Rolf Bayer, 1958)
I discovered a wonderful website that archives film locations in Singapore called www.sgfilmlocations.com. Browsing through the copious material, I found a rarely-seen 1958 movie called Azimat or Seal of Solomon, written and directed by Rolf Bayer, who did the screenplay for iconic postwar Filipino film, Anak Dalita. The movie stars Pancho Magalona and Tita Duran…
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Meaning over spectacle: Gerhard Richter retrospective online
The abrupt closing of Gerhard Richter’s retrospective at the Met Breuer, among other art world events in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has refocused the energies of its curators to use online platforms. While it serves its purpose well of extending the reach and lifespan of art exhibitions, the Met Museum’s website is not…
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Sulat galing sa Praga (Angga Dwimas Sasongko, 2016)
Nasa kalagitnaan ng magastos na diborsyo si Larasati (Julie Estelle) at kailangan niyang makipag-ayos sa naghihingalo niyang ina, si Sulastri (Widyawati). Bagama’t hindi naging maganda ang kanilang relasyon mag-ina, ipinamana nito sa kanya ang lahat ng kanyang ari-arian sa kondisyon na ideliber niya ang kahon ng mga sulat kay Jaya (Tio Pakusadewo), isang matandang janitor…
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Admiring hell from a distance
William Blake’s drawings for Dante’s “Divina Commedia” as a dialogue with the written word In 1824, The comeback wave of the Dante craze had just reached the shores of England and the artist John Linnell asked the perpetually penniless William Blake to make a series of illustrations based on the Divine Comedy. William Blake had…
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Protected: A heap of broken images
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Protected: The Woman who left (Lav Diaz, 2018)
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Portrait of a lady on fire (Celine Sciamma, 2019)
Marianne must cross the rough seas when she is summoned by a countess (Valeria Golino) who would like to have a portrait of her daughter, Heloise. The portrait will be sent to Heloise’s fiancé, an Italian aristocrat, as a confirmation of their arranged marriage. Hoping to save their crumbling estate or move back to an…
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Crash Landing on You (Lee Jeong-hyo, 2020)
Over the spring break I was able to catch up with trends on social media and watched smash-hit K-drama Crash Landing on You (CLOY), a Netflix series directed by Lee Jeong-hyo, starring Hyun Bin, Son Ye-jin, Kim Jung-hyun, and Seo Ji-hye. The hilarious plot begins with Seri, a South Korean chaebol heiress and influencer (think…
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Villem Flusser on Artistic Freedom
With his statements in Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Vilém Flusser opened a new understanding of photography, and gave the term a new meaning. While he describes the photograph as a “flyer-like image distributed by the apparatus,” the Photographer for Flusser was a critic; a gadfly: “a person who attempts to place within the image,…
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Democracy’s Doppelganger
Abraham Lincoln once confessed to friends of seeing his double on the night of his first election. He was resting on his couch when he happened to turn in the direction of a mirror and saw two faces. Next to him, was his pale and ghostly doppelganger looking at him. He sprung up from…
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The Revolution of Everyday Life
Jacques Villeglé became known in the mid-1950s in Paris when he took street posters as material, tore them from the walls or peeled them off, and exposed them in art galleries as artifacts of urban life. He was an original member of the Nouveau Réalisme movement. While the group fused only in 1961, in a…
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Outlaws (Javier Cercas, 2014)
The fifty-eight-year-old Javier Cercas made his latest breakthrough outside of Spain with his novel “Anatomy of a Moment”, which the most important Spanish daily newspaper “El Pais” named Book of the Year in 2009. The well-known Argentinian author Albert Manguel had praised this novel, which revolves around the failed military coup in 1981. It received…
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Poems in the shape of paintings
With a history of cultural iconoclasm, the Arab region has become a fertile ground for abstract art. Yet Arab artists remain marginal in the global conversation of modern abstraction. An ambitious project initiated by the Barjeel Art Foundation seeks to issue a long overdue corrective. Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s, slated to…
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Protected: Ruang Rupa: Between critical and marketable art
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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A rainy day in New York (Woody Allen, 2019)
Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York follows a young couple whose romantic weekend in Manhattan dissolves into a chain of misunderstandings and revelations. Gatsby Welles (Timothée Chalamet), a privileged but disaffected student from an old New York family, invites his girlfriend Ashleigh (Elle Fanning), an earnest journalism major from Arizona, to spend a…
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Ang tunay na world domination
Optimistiko si Slavoj Zizek sa future ng Tsina sa kanyang artikulong “My dream of Wuhan” na lumabas sa Welt. Ako rin. Bukod pa sa mga sinabi niya sa artikulo, umaasa ako na magsisikap pa lalo ang Tsina na makuha ang loob ng komunidad ng mga bansa sa responsableng ehersisyo ng cultural capital at iba pang…
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A romance in the provinces (Kornel Filipowicz, 2017)
I just read A romance of provinces (1960), by the Polish poet, novelist and screenwriter Kornel Filipowicz (1913-1990), who was for more than twenty years, and until his death, life partner (each one, in his house) by the poet Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012), Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. The affinity of worlds and tones is…
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Geronimo Cristobal 