The Bajau people are migrants, and for centuries, they've travelled from the Philippines to Sabah, where they've built homes and raised families. Today, they're a sizable part of Sabah's population and an important block of the workforce. Many consider themselves residents of the state; they speak very little Filipino and call Kota Kinabalu their home. Yet they're treated like second-class citizens.
Unable to secure documentation, they lack access to education, health care and other basic services. They're also often (and unfairly) blamed for crimes that take place in the city. The island where they live is said to be a no-go for tourists, but I came to visit them and walk through their stilt houses, armed with just my iPhone. The place was dirty and hot and had no plumbing or electricity. But all I saw were peaceful people, warm smiles, and a rich traditional culture. The government of Sabah must do more for the Bajau.
Thank you to the Kota Kinabalu International Film Festival and the Sabah Economic Development and Investment Authority for the hospitality in Kota Kinabalu. Beautiful place, great food, lovely people.
Went looking for hidden gems in Intramuros last Saturday and was not disappointed. Found beautiful pieces of street art, discovered that the old Banco Sentral building has been taken over by dogs, and in some off-limits corners, got transported to a different time.
Our city is not the cleanest of places, but I’d take soul and character over sterility any day.
Patrick Flores: A portrait of the critic as a Filipino
With the Philippines back at the Venice Biennale after 51 years, I interviewed Patrick Flores, the curator of our provocative exhibit. This article was originally published in The Philippine STAR’s Supreme.
Photos by Czar Kristoff.
From May 9 to Nov. 22, the art world shall descend on the Venice Biennale. It’s the oldest contemporary art event on the globe, and in its 56 editions — one held every other year since 1895 — it has arguably become the most prestigious. The world’s superpowers always participate, having built permanent pavilions in the beautiful Italian city to welcome top artists, curators, critics, collectors, and gallerists. This has all been out of reach for the Philippines, but next Saturday, that shall change.
On a rented space of barely 150 square meters at the Palazzo Mora, the Philippine national pavilion will stand. It will be our first presence at the Biennale since 1964. Behind the exhibit is the vision of a singular man — curator Patrick Flores, an art historian, critic and professor at the University of the Philippines. He received the job after his proposal bested 16 others in an open call by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts. And his proposal is radical.
Our country’s exhibition features new works by intermedia artist Jose Tence Ruiz and filmmaker Mariano Montelibano III — but according to Flores, what visitors shall see isn’t a showcase of Philippine art as much as it is a statement. “(My) proposal is a provocation, and we have an important issue to thresh out,” he tells me.
Flores’ act of defiance is entitled “Tie a String Around the World”, a phrase lifted from the Manuel Conde film Genghis Khan, which was shown in Venice in 1952, and now forms the centerpiece of Flores’ exhibit. He used it as the starting point of his proposal for two reasons: “I was thinking, maybe if we return to Venice, we might as well return with something that had already gone there; something that speaks of a broader world and dissolves the dichotomies between local and global,” he explains. But the bigger objective, he says, is to use it as a way to start a discussion on world making.
“We have experienced successive colonialisms, from Spain to America and Japan, and there is a current issue about the South China Sea,” he says. “So I was thinking the pavilion might be able to initiate a conversation on this current problem of world making. What makes a country? Where does the limit lie? How does one really take possession of something quite common like the sea? Art is an invitation for engagement."
A large poster of Manuel Conde as Genghis Khan looms over Flores as he speaks to me at his office at UP’s Vargas Museum; the angry glare of the Mongolian tyrant is a stark contrast to the curator. Soft-spoken and gentle, there is nothing about Patrick Flores that betrays a fighter. But in the following conversation about art, criticism, and what these have to do with a developing country, I discover a man with a battle cry to follow.
How will our participation in the Venice Biennale benefit the art scene here at home?
The fact that we are there — people will notice, and we get some kind of mileage out of it. Secondly, it will also generate or even stimulate interest in the local art scene. The government has promised to fund the next two participations, so artists can look forward to being part of the next pavilions. I also envisioned this pavilion to have as many afterlives as possible. There will be a homecoming exhibition at the Vargas Museum in 2016. We also produced a catalogue, and there are things in the catalogue that are not in the exhibition.
Me with Dr. Flores
What is the mission that drives you?
To inspire others to engage with art. It’s difficult to teach the audience to look at art or to understand it, but I think the marching order for us is to get them involved; to have them engaged.
For many people though, art is seen as a frivolity. How do you tell struggling family that they should pay more attention to art? Why should they?
For me, the notion of art should be broadened. Art could be about creative form — how you fix your garden, how you dress up, how you combine colors. If aesthetic education is about this, then you’ll get a broader response, and people will not get intimidated and say, “Oh, art is only for the elite,” or “It can only be found in museums.”
Art is more important now because of our mediatized environment. People need training to see through images, to explain the context of images. This is very important. People don’t really know how to sort out or make sense of what they have in front of them.
We shouldn’t stop at gut-level engagement. If we have critical thinking, then we think about what we feel. Why do we like Vice Ganda, for instance? Without critical thinking we just say we like Vice Ganda, and that’s it. But if people develop a critical instinct then they begin to question certain things and also question themselves; why they behave the way they do.
What is the state of criticism in the Philippines?
There’s practically… none. The media is not hospitable to criticism. That’s the main problem — you want to write but where do you write?
Is it also a problem that many Filipino artists, or Filipinos in general, don’t seem to be receptive to criticism?
Ah, yeah, that too. (Laughs.) The personalistic culture; artists take criticism of their work as a personal affront and a diminution of their talent. But that’s part of it; that may be an occupational hazard.
What is the value in criticism, though? How does it help?
First, it develops a more nuanced level of discernment for everyone — audience, collectors, artists. Second, it also encourages and even provokes artists to level up or to go beyond their comfort zone. It also instigates the production of things; it prompts people to innovate, to move beyond what they have been accustomed to.
Looking at the art scene, what scares you?
Partly the hyperactive market. It’s scary, the prices. We don’t really know why certain artists are bought for a very high price, for instance. That kind of unpredictability in the market is scary. But the market has a way of correcting itself. Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but this is a common sentiment.
Another thing that causes unease is the lack of critical discourse. Very few people are writing and writing critically. For me, that’s not healthy. In the absence of critical discourse, market discourse takes over and the market sets the value. They can say, “This is an important artist.” Critical discourse invites people to ask, “Why is this so important?”
Looking at the art scene, what excites you?
The activity. The production of talent. The Philippines is still a rich source. For me, in Asia, it’s Korea and The Philippines that are the most strongly positioned to produce something interesting in the very near future. And it has something to do with our historical context, our very dense layers of historical experience.
It’s also an exciting time because more and more, there are independent curators working in the scene. Younger ones. My curatorial practice is an extension of my historical training. I became a curator because I studied art history, but some people now study curatorship as a distinct discipline. It will produce a different kind of platform, a different kind of community, a different set of works. It’s exciting.
Spend a weekend in Bohol this month and had an amazing time. Discovered a virgin beach called Pamilacan Island and got a massage on its powder-white shores. Went dolphin watching, and saw not just one dolphin but entire families of them, jumping out of the water. Bisited beautiful century-old churches that reminded me of Europe —these cathedrals were destroyed by the earthquake in 2013, but are being painstakingly restored by the government. Saw the Chocolate Hills and the tarsiers, ate good food and met great people — what a trip.
These are my #postcardsfromparadise to Beatle Ringo Star. The Beatles hated the Philippines in 1966 and swore never to come back, but a new campaign by Ely Buendia, the Department of Tourism, and BBDO Guererro hopes to change that. To promote his new album, Ringo is asking people to send him postcards from their own paradise. Send him yours by tweeting @ringostarrmusic with the hashtag #postcardsfromparadise.
This article was originally published in The Philippine STAR's Supreme.
When I was in high school, I saw a beheading. I don’t remember when it happened exactly, but it was between 2002 and 2004, when the United States was waging its “War on Terror” in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I know now that the beheading was either that of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped by Taliban sympathizers in Pakistan, or that of Nick Berg, the 26-year-old engineer who was abducted by Al-Qaida-linked militants in Iraq. At the time, however, all I saw was a man sitting helplessly on the floor surrounded by masked murders. They pounced on him, sliced open his neck with a knife and separated it from his body. I remember that the victim didn’t struggle. His face was blank, his body was limp — he was probably sedated. The death that I saw was likely Nick Berg’s, because according to reports, Daniel Pearl was not sedated.
I did not choose to see this beheading. It caught my senses completely by surprise. I was sitting in class at the computer lab; my classmate was the one watching it on his screen and I just happened to look his way. I remember getting this sick feeling, a bloodcurdling feeling — it was as if my insides were flushed out of my body. When the video ended, I couldn’t move. I just looked back at my monitor and stared. What the fuck, I thought, what the fuck did I just see? I was 15 or 16 years old.
Ever since, I’ve tried my best to avoid seeing deaths on video, from the executions that came from the Middle East after Pearl’s and Berg’s to any of the decapitations committed by ISIS in the past year. It isn’t because I’m scared to see them. I refuse to watch because I ask myself if it’s necessary for me to watch — if I need to see another human being’s death to know what horrors there are in this world — and my answer has always been no.
That is, until this month.
In the first week of February, a video surfaced showing the death of Moaz al-Kasasbeh, the Jordanian pilot that was burned alive in a cage by ISIS. Two weeks later, another shocking sight spread on the Internet, and this time, its origin was closer to home. It was the cellphone recording of the summary execution of PO2 Joseph Sagonoy, one of the Special Armed Forces members killed in Mamasapano on Jan. 25.
Thumbnails of these videos popped up on my Facebook feed — a neatly-framed screenshot of a man engulfed in flames, and a pixelated image of an officer lying lifeless on the earth. Like the video I saw when I was a teenager, I did not choose to see the thumbnails — friends had posted them faster than Facebook could take them down. Unlike before, however, I found my fingers moving closer to these pictures. As much as it shames me to say this, deep inside of me, I wanted to click.
Curiosity
With the ISIS video, what drove me was curiosity. For one thing, there was the unconventionality of the situation — death by burning; an act so cruel and archaic, it seemed incredulous it was being done today. But there was also the allure of the flames; the spectacle of fire. ISIS was tapping into a dark, twisted part of my psyche — the kid in me who liked playing with matches.
With the Mamasapano recording, I began to justify watching it by arguing that it needed to be seen. In the aftermath of the ill-fated encounter, media has been so full of noise from grandstanding politicians and quick-tempered warmongers that the facts of the case have been overshadowed by political agendas. This video represented a way to cut through the crap and see the truth about what happened.
I wrestled with these thoughts for a few days. Things just didn’t sit well with me, though. It couldn’t possibly be right, I thought, to watch the ISIS videos because it would be exactly what ISIS wants. And watching the SAF video would not bring me any closer to the truth — it would only lead me to make angry assumptions.
So, what I did instead was to read as much as I could. I read detailed descriptions of how Moaz al-Kasasbeh watched as flames inched closer and closer to the cage that contained him; how the fire quickly latched on his gas-drenched clothes; how his face writhed in agony as the heat engulfed him; how he screamed; how he curled up in a fetal position and stopped living. I read about how PO2 Joseph Sagonoy lay down on the dirt, trembling; how he struggled for his life; how a hand emerged and shot him with a gun at point-blank range — twice in the head, and then on the chest. I read that there was a man’s voice on the video, and I asked my friend, Mindanao-based filmmaker Teng Mangansakan, for a translation. “This will finish him off, this will kill him for sure!” it said, according to Teng.
I read about all that, and I realized I didn’t need to watch the videos anymore as my curiosity had been satisfied. More importantly, I was left with feelings of sadness, pain, and empathy for the victims and their families, and with this, I developed a burning desire to learn more about the issues.
Those who saw
Contrast that with the reactions of my friends who had seen the videos. When one friend texted me to say that he had seen the ISIS snuff film, he quickly changed the topic and started talking about his dinner. When another friend shared the Mamasapano video, he reduced his feelings to a sad face emoticon and ended his post with a call for more bloodshed. These reactions seem almost inhuman to me.
I can only understand those reactions by going back to where I began this column — the first time I saw a beheading. In a way, that experience took away my innocence because, after it, I never saw gore the same away again. I never again got that sick, blood-curdling feeling that came over me when I saw Nick Berg’s head get sliced off. I’ve looked at pictures of the SAF 44 corpses and felt no horror; on the day that I write this, I saw a New York Times documentary that showed the mass killing by ISIS of Egyptians, and I didn’t even flinch.
Perhaps it’s because my mind developed immunity to death videos. It is now able to tell itself, “These are just images. What you’re looking at is a screen. Don’t panic, you are safe.” And therein lies the rub. Whenever we watch these videos, our brains reduce human lives into a set of square pixels, creating a barrier between us and the gore on display. By doing so, we become detached spectators; players in the twisted theater that the murders have staged.
Front-row seat
Anthropologist Frances Larson recently wrote about this phenomenon in an article for Salon. “(The videos) draw viewers who watch unapologetically and viewers who watch despite their own deep misgivings, and the Internet offers everyone anonymity,” she says. “The camera promises spectators a degree of detachment, but the action is only a click away, and this combination gives the videos far greater reach.”
Larson continues, “The murderers are offering their viewers a front-row seat at their show; and what they want to show is their strength, their complete control and domination of their victim… The crowd is compliant too. By turning up to see the show, or by searching Google for the latest execution video, the people watching also have their part to play.”
Now, the horrors of this world will continue to spread on the Internet in these tumultuous, hyper-connected times. More and more, we’ll be confronted with the question, “To view or not to view?” The answer, surely, will not always be simple. But my point is this: choosing not to view does not mean turning a blind eye. Many times, it’s the option that allows us to feel, to empathize, to understand, to go deeper, to seek perspective. Many times, it’s the option that gets us to see beyond the screen.
* * *
On that note, if you’re interested in learning more about ISIS, The Atlantic has a long but illuminating piece by Graeme Wood, entitled “What ISIS Really Wants.” The article makes the point that ISIS is a religious group, not a political one, and that it is driven by the belief that it is an agent of the apocalypse. With this in mind, Wood puts forth a few well-researched strategies to stop the group.
If you’re interested in learning more about the Mamasapano incident — and I hope you are — one source that’s a must-follow is journalist Ed Lingao, who has been covering events on the ground with the context and perspective often missing in the news.
"It's not where you take things from but where you take them to." Here's a cool video by Andrew Vucko that talks about the creative process. Absolutely agree that creativity is about finding connections between ideas that already exist.
Sooo, uhm, hiii everyone, haha. I was recently shot for Metro Society Magazine together with a bunch of super talented directors and actors. (The issue's out now, please get a copy! I talk about filmz.) Thanks so much to Franco Laurel for the feature, JC Inocian for the photo, H&M for letting me wear these clothes and Anacleta Parades for making me up to look presentable! I really cannot get used to being in front of the camera, but this was fun.
A glowing review of ‘Above the Clouds’ from The Hollywood Reporter!
"To his credit, Diokno never stoops to caricature or cliché as he highlights the differences between young and old, city and country, modernity and tradition. Instead, he unceasingly celebrates the ravishing beauty of the rural Philippines. Shot at Mount Pulag National Park on the island of Luzon, Above the Clouds provides stunning settings for both Andy and the grandfather to release and resolve their internal turmoil. Carlo Mendoza’s camerawork provides a stirring survey of the landscape, while deftly highlighting the characters’ relationship to all this nature, while Johann Mendoza’s music also helps heighten the drama within.
"Above all, however, are the excellent two lead performances, both perfectly tuned to Diokno’s scheme of subtle things. Surprisingly, chemistry abounds between the upstart Madrid and local showbiz legend Smith, whose four-decade career in Filipino rock has earned him a reputation as something like his country’s answer to Mick Jagger. To those who know and love his work, Smith’s haggard, grandfatherly turn in Above the Clouds is sure to come as a compelling surprise."
Click here to read the full review!
Wow. This review of “Above the Clouds” in The Hollywood Reporter caught me completely by surprise. Making the film was a struggle, and getting it out there has been a slow, difficult challenge. This is a big dose of encouragement. Thank you so much, Clarence Tsui, for the kind words!
This article was originally published in The Philippine STAR.
In the five days that Pope Francis spent in the Philippines this month, he gave four speeches, delivered three homilies and repeated one word: “Family.”
“A fundamental role in the renewal of society is played by the family. Families have an indispensablemission in society,” the Pope said at his first official function in thecountry, a welcome ceremony on Jan. 17 at Malacañang Palace. Later that day, at a “Meeting of Families” at the Mall of Asia Arena, his speech contained 32 separate instances of the word. “Every threat to the family is a threat to society itself," it read. “The future of humanity, as Saint John Paul II often said, passes through the family.”
The Pope really went to town in his homily at Quirino Grandstand. “[Saint Joseph] reminds us of the importance of protecting our families, and those larger families which are the Church, God’s family, and the world, our human family. Sadly, in our day, the family needs to be protected against insidious attacks,” he said before a gathering of an estimated six million people.
Even when he spoke of other topics, the Pope kept coming back to “family”. Corruption, he said, threatens the “beauty of our human family”. Natural disasters, he said, cause suffering to “countless families”. The Filipino diaspora “strains many households”, and materialism is “destructive of family life”. It’s easy to see what the Pontiff was getting at. His message to Filipinos is that there is nothing more important than our families; that we're under attack by the evils that come from this country, and so we must protect our children, brothers, sisters, and parents at all costs.
It's a message that many Filipinos will agree with, and even valorize, but I have trouble accepting it.
‘SAVE THE FAMILY’
The first part of Pope Francis’ message is indisputable. Families are indeed so central in Filipino culture that their influence is felt in every nook and cranny of our lives. It’s common practice for us, for example, to live with our parents until we're old enough to have children of our own. Our relatives, for Christ’s sake (sorry, Pope), have a say in everything from what career we choose to who we marry. In school, the sentence, “Family is the basic unit of society” is hammered into our heads from elementary to university.
It's the second part of the Pope's message that I disagree with. In calling for the protection of families, he paints them as sources of pure good. (“It is in the family that children are trained in sound values, high ideals and genuine concern for others,” he said.) But if this is true, then why are families the source of so much suffering in this country — from the dictatorship that murdered, suppressed, and pillaged from Filipinos for two decades, to political dynasties that keep their constituents in poverty, to warring clans in the provinces that cover their regions in blood, hacienda owners that work farmers like cattle, and tycoons that pave parking lots at the expense of the environment?
The answer is that we Filipinos put our families above everything else. It’s heroic, sure, when we put family above our own wellbeing, which is why millions of Filipinos risk their lives working abroad. But we also tend to put our families above our country. Everyday, we make decisions that involve our families without so much as even thinking of the good of the nation, and this is a problem because many times, what’s good for our families is not good for the nation.
I’m not just talking about people in power. The Marcoses, the Napoleses, and the Ampatuans may have taken it to extremes, but we’re all guilty of this “my family is more important than everything else” mentality. It’s why low-level public servants can dare to ask for kickbacks, why we don’t hesitate to break traffic rules and pay bribes when we do, and why we throw trash on beaches, sidewalks, and parks. When something benefits our families, we can justify a little corruption and a few shortcuts to get it — and these things add up.
‘A DAMAGED CULTURE’
Foreign observers have been pointing this out to us for decades. In 1987, The Atlantic published an essay by American journalist James Fallows, entitled, “A Damaged Culture: A New Philippines”. Nothing, perhaps, sums up our tribal mentality more beautifully than this piece.
“Filipinos pride themselves on their lifelong loyalty to family, schoolmates, compadres, members of the same tribe, residents of the same barangay,” Fallows wrote. “But when observing Filipino friendships I thought often of the Mafia families portrayed in The Godfather: total devotion to those within the circle, total war on those outside. Because the boundaries of decedent treatment are limited to the family or tribe, they exclude at least 90 percent of the people in the country. And because of this fragmentation — this lack of nationalism — people treat each other worse in the Philippines than in any other Asian country I have seen.”
“Practically everything that is public in the Philippines seems neglected or abused. On many street corners in downtown Manila an unwary step can mean a broken leg. Holes two feet square and five feet deep lurk just beyond the curb; they are supposed to be covered by metal grates, but scavengers have taken the grates to sell for scrap… In the first-class dining room aboard the steamer to Cebu, a Filipino at the table next to mine picked through his plate of fish. Whenever he found a piece he didn't like, he pushed it off the edge of his plate, onto the floor. One case of bad manners? Maybe, but I've never seen its like in any other country. Outsiders feel they have understood something small but significant about Japan's success when they watch a bar man carefully wipe the condensation off a bottle of beer and twirl it on the table until the label faces the customer exactly. I felt I had a glimpse into the failures of the Philippines when I saw prosperous-looking matrons buying cakes and donuts in a bakery, eating them in a department store, and dropping the box and wrappers around them as they shopped,” Fallows continued. It’s painful to think that these words were written 27 years ago because they ring so true today.
‘REPRIVATE OF THE PHILIPPINES’
Last year, local news portal Interaksyon published an article that talks about Manila’s urban development but raises the same points as Fallows’.
In the essay, “Why Metro Manila continues to deteriorate”, Spanish scholar Jorge Mojarro writes, “Dutch anthropologist Neil Mulders published a tiny but solid book in which he depicted the Filipino mindset. According to him, the main reason for the lack of social cohesion in the country is Filipinos make a very deep distinction between two spheres: the public and the private. The private sphere belongs to the kin and friends, and utang na loob obliges one to reciprocate help, support, favors, and even money. The public sphere, on the other hand, becomes the jungle where anything is valid in order to bring commodities to the private sphere."
"Therefore, street vendors are allowed to occupy sidewalks and sell anything there... Some barangay outposts and small police stations occupy entire sidewalks, forcing pedestrians to walk on the road… Then we have the big companies distributing electricity: Their huge posts occupy free of charge big portions of the streets... Lastly, we have the businesses (banks, restaurants, convenience stores, etc.) using the sidewalks in front of their establishments as their own private parking lots," he continues.
"We also have the eternal issue of traffic, something that is technically easy to solve, as Benjamin De La Peña has proved in a series of articles on urban planning, but is permanently delayed due to the pressure of the [private-sector] public transportation lobby (buses and jeepneys) and the lack of vision of public servants… Filipinos tend to distrust other Filipinos in public spaces, lack of courtesy is the rule, and the much-touted bayanihan is blatantly absent. The Republic of the Philippines should perhaps thus be referred to as the ‘Reprivate of the Philippines’ to reflect this apathy to the notion of sharing responsibility for public space," Mojarro ends his article saying.
‘SHALLOW CAPITALISM’
I’d like to cite one more piece. This one talks about how our family-centered mentality affects our economy. It's a blog post by Richard Javad Heydarian, entitled, "Philippines' Shallow Capitalism", and it was published just a few weeks ago by The Huffington Post.
"The Philippines, shaped by its colonial legacy, has emulated Western lifestyles and urban architectures. But it has not truly modernized, at least in the Weberian sense. We are yet to see truly rational, impersonal state institutions, which stand beyond patronage and personalized politics. Even much of the business sector is dominated by few old families, so it is preposterous to talk about 'free market' competition," Heydarian writes.
"Modernity is not about having big shopping malls, wearing global brands, and preaching liberal socio-political values per se. Those are only manifestations of modernization, not the core of it. Modernity, above all, is about placing efficiency, meritocracy and knowledge above connections, patronage, and discredited traditions. This is precisely why many of the Philippines' neighboring countries, which have held onto much of their cultural heritage, stand as significantly more modern and prosperous: Social mobility, merit-based success, and knowledge-intensive productivity are incredibly more visible in places such as Taiwan or South Korea than the Philippines," Heydarian continues.
"The Philippines' rapid rates of economic growth in recent years haven't brought about an egalitarian, modern form of capitalism… Perhaps it is time for the Filipino elite to rediscover the true meaning of modernity, democracy, and progress. And for the wider population to fight for genuine prosperity," he ends.
PAPAL, DON'T PREACH
This is why Pope Francis' message frustrates me. At best, his message is a distraction; at worst, it's destructive, dangerous, and a downright mistake. When the Pope talks about the "importance of protecting our families, and those larger families which are the Church," he reinforces the twisted nature of Filipinos to protect only the people that we're affiliated with; to care only about our own social circles and place our wellbeing above others'. Country above family — that's the way it should be.
Fallows wrote that Filipinos need "to look beyond themselves rather than pursuing their own interests to the ruination of everyone else." True goodness, after all, is about caring for people even when they are not related to you; even when they went to the rival school or pledged to the rival fraternity or live in the opposite barangay or subscribe to a different religion. Looking out for the greater good, after all, is a sacrifice. It means giving and not expecting anything in return — even when it hurts ourselves.
This should have been clearer in the Pope's message. He should not have said that Filipino families are under attack, because it's the future of our county that is. We must shoot down his notion that in order to "save the family", we must take a hard look at society. In order to save society, we must take a long, hard look at the Filipino family.
Awesome visualization of the "Beginners" quote from Ira Glass — the best piece of advice I've ever heard; something everyone in the creative field must hear.
Spent a few days in Kota Kinabalu this month, and I stumbled on this beauty. A few meters from the heart of the city, down the road from the markets and malls, rests the ruins of a 100-year-old British Colonial building. Different artists have taken over the place and covered it completely in street art. I’ve heard some locals call this an eyesore, but I disagree. Street art makes a city come alive. The works are awesome — they’re fun, colorful, chaotic, and some of them raise questions about society, which is not as common in Malaysia as it is in the Philippines. I had to stop and take photos.
I don’t know why, but I really find myself drawn to street art. In Paris last year, I went to the In Situ Art Festival — took lots of photos to blog, but unfortunately, my phone was snatched as I was walking home from the festival. (I made the dumb choice of putting my phone in my jacket pocket while walking through a crowded street in a Paris suburb. Should’ve taken the train instead.)
Whenever I travel though, I seek out graffiti — if you follow me on Instagram, you may have noticed this. Must be the Manila boy in me, but I like the gritty, dark corners of a city. My favorite ones are the works I saw in Penang, and Paris is just love.
dededos
stormborns
annaxmalina
snowghoul
yousharknotpass
origamiaround
