Ten Things About Me and the ZTE

1. Sec. Romulo Neri is making waves without rocking the boat at all! After all the suspense and drum-beating about being "ready to lose his job" on account of appearing before the Senate to testify on the NBN ZTE contract, it was quite lame of him to remain tight-lipped on Gloria Arroyo's involvement in the deal. Sure, Neri dropped a big, stinky pooper right smack on Abalos' head. But he flew away from the heat he created afterwards, singing to the tune of "executive privilege". Not quite the hero. No wonder he still has his job intact!

2. Fleeting thought: Sen. Miriam has no business diverting the issue with theatrics and rascist remarks on how the "Chinese invented corruption". Especially when some Filipinos are developing it to such an appallingly sophisticated degree.

3. It's nice to see how the NBN ZTE controversy has generated a lot of inspired and lively blog entries. I had so much fun reading Ina's blow-by-blow account of the Senate hearings yesterday and Pangkulitan's not-so-flattering comparisons between past and present Presidential spouses. After a brief hiatus from blogging, the husband writes about how the Philippines needs a national information network, not corrupt deals such as ZTE nor profit-hungry schemes. But the best thing I've read so far is Kapirasong Kritika's 'Mga Placard ng Panahon ng ZTE" (wala ka talagang kupas, Teo!).

4. Let your protests register on cyberspace! Sign the online petition by the Computer Professionals Union (CPU) to scrap the ZTE NBN contract.

5. I'm getting the last song syndrome (LSS) from hearing the ZTE ringtone by Txtpower. Husband and several other people I know have it on their cellphones, and every now I find myself accidentally humming to the ABC-ZTE-FG jingle.

6. In addition to the ZTE NBN contract, the Arroyo administration is planning to enter into other deals with the Chinese government and private firms, this time involving agricultural and bioethanol production. These, too, should be scrutinized, for their impacts on the people's livelihood and the environment . Among the MOAs that the government is planning to sign is between Yong Kai Industry Group and the Negros Southern Integrated Biofuels Company and BM SB Integrated Biofuels Company, whose biggest stockholder is a close friend of Presidential brother-in-law Ignacio Arroyo. Remember that Iggy Arroyo did not want CARP to be extended to prevent it from covering their sugar farms in Central Negros, which he is reportedly eyeing as an entry point for future biofuel projects. Is this another ZTE in the making?

7. Ang galing ng kuha ng Inquirer kay Abalos at Neri (left). A good photograph can indeed tell more than words.

8. "Big fish"Abalos should just tell all he knows and pinpoint the "Mother of All Fishes". Tutal sila-sila naman ang naglalaglagan!

9. Around 75% of all Filipinos are poor, have no access to technology and the government services that will "benefit" from the ICT infrastructure that the NBN will put in place. Yet it is this 75% who will foremost be shouldering the tax burden that the ZTE NBN contract will bring about.

10. Coinciding with the ZTE controversy is the Philippine's all-time low ranking (133 out of 179) in the Corruption Perception Index. Take note that the Philippines is already ranking as among the worst in other areas, such as recent press freedom indexes, and even in environmental degradation surveys (such as the recent one pinpointing the rivers in Bulacan as among the world's 'Dirty 30').

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Mong tagged me a month ago, I noticed only now (sorry, Mong!).

According to Mong's post: A person who gets tagged must write in his or her blog ten weird things or habits or little known facts about himself or herself. He or she should also state this rule clearly. At the end, he or she should tag six other people, except the one who tagged him or her.

So here goes--ten "weird" things about lisa:

1. When typing, my left hand automatically presses the save controls (Ctrl+S) on my keyboard every few seconds or so. This habit started way back in the Collegian. An article I was typing for one and a half days straight (without sleep and with very little food) literally vanished without a trace after a power surge because I--stupid writer--failed to hit the save button all throughout. Since then I kept hitting Ctrl+S like my life depended on it. People used to wonder what the crap was wrong with my left pinky finger and I always have to explain why.

2. I still drink Yakult. Because it tastes good.

3. When I entered the university, I was the lone Art History major in a college with a student population of around 300. It was ironic because I refrained from applying as a Painting major mostly since I thought that there were too few students in their program (around 20).

4. I have this nasty nervous habit of pulling out my hair when stressed out or worried, to the point of creating bald patches if left unchecked. Dermatology and psychology textbooks refer to this as trichotillomania, a minor anxiety-related disorder.

5. Maldita daw ako when I was a kid. Afterwards, I got all the 'Best in Conduct' awards in grade school and ended up as my high school's awardee for "National Discipline", heheh. Only shows that I know when to behave and when to raise hell!

6. I dislike hanging bridges. But that doesn't mean I won't cross them.

7. My first (and hopefully last) TV appearance was at 12 or 13 years old, at a kiddie noontime show with other half-Japanese children. All of us were wearing kimonos and singing a children's song. At that time, we were part of an organization of half-Japanese families in Paranaque. This group mostly got together for Nihongo lessons and field trips, but did a one-shot "performance" for that show's RP-Japan Friendship Day chuva. Thanks to this, I realized that I would never make it in showbiz early on.

8. Before becoming an activist, I also became involved in the following other organizations from grade school to college: Girl Scouts, Peer Counselors Club, Archdiocesian Youth Council, Red Cross Youth, Artists Club, Youth for Christ, and Kontra-Gapi. In that order.

9. I always bring along a small plastic container filled with things for imagined emergencies. Contents for now include USBs, a Bayan Muna pin, a stapler and a box of staple wire, rainbow face paint (for rallies), paper book tabs, band aids, a liquid eraser pen, an invisible ink pen, a spotlight, triple A batteries, wet wipes, and a Swiss knife.

10. My husband says that I sneeze and cough like a cat (imagine that!).

Tama na sa blogging! Back to work!

A tragic little story and a lesson

I feel so sad. Our newly-adopted kitten, Neko, has been missing since this morning. Gani woke up to find Neko gone and the door of our laundry area ominously open. Apparently, we forgot to lock it after arriving home from an exhausting day at the SONA rally. While we were sound asleep, Neko must have ventured outside and slipped while navigating the window. The steep drop below runs up to several storeys, perhaps low enough for a kitten to survive the fall. Or perhaps not.

We tried searching for Neko downstairs, but didn't find anything, not even a tiny paw print. Neko has such a tiny, croaky, pipsqueak meow that it would have been impossible to hear him even from a few meters away. He has been with us for only two days, not long enough to find his way back to our place. And there's no way to protect him from all sorts of imaginable predators: rats, stray dogs, kids, rain, and wheels.

I remember Neko's last night with us: he was snuggling up on the sofa and nuzzling his head on our chins. He kept clambering up onto my lap while I was typing, a pesky, papansin ginger tabby kitty who would tirelessly scamper after our feet whenever we walked across the room, thinking that they were toys.

Now I just want to mope around, sob my heart out, and wallow in bitter misery until the weekend sets in. But putting things into perspective can be sobering in a mortifying sort of way: all around activists are being abducted and killed by this wretched government, and here I am, lamenting over a missing cat. As much as I'd like to shed earnest tears for our lost Neko, I realize that dissecting this event at length runs the risk of bordering on the absurd, something conceptually similar to this story posted in gmanews.tv: Dog given to Shaina as Valentine's gift is dead.

Ka Bel freed!

Finally, something happy to blog about!

This is a pathetically overdue post, something that I should have written the hour right after it happened, but didn't (fell asleep right upon reaching home). Anyway, Ka Bel, Crispin Beltran of Anakpawis, was released last July 10 after 16 months of illegal detention by the Arroyo administration.

It's about time! Ka Bel, his family and colleagues have suffered so much for the year and a half that he was detained in Camp Crame and at the Heart Center. The release is partly vindication for the wrongs done to him by the government, a crisp slap in the face at the villains behind his ordeal. And just in time for Pres. Arroyo's upcoming State of the Nation Address and the opening of the 14th Congress, where Ka Bel shall serve as a duly-elected solon for a third and final term.

I'm glad not just because Ka Bel's finally free, but also because he survived and prevailed over this unshaken, unbowed, and undefeated. He even jokes about it occasionally. And he's ready to take on more, like Manny Pacquiao minus the braggadocio and messianic illusions. From the sidelines, it felt good to clap and cheer him on, knowing that we've all gained a small step forward in the fight.

As with most happy events, we tried to document it in our own little ways. I TRIED to take some decent phone video footage of the moment when Ka Bel exited the hospital's elevators at around 9 p.m. and strode into the emergency exit where supporters cheered him on.

Just to give an idea of how happy everyone was, I'm posting it here. The shots are pretty lousy and downright amateurish, sorry. For those who don't know what to make of this chaotic scene, Ka Bel is the man in a red shirt, the one who suddenly appears out of the elevator door and hugs the other guy wearing a red shirt (KMU's Bong Labog, I think). The woman joyfully jumping up and down in the background is Ka Bel's Chief of Staff and uber-writer Ina. The rest are mostly staff, well-wishers, mass leaders. I couldn't hold my hand still because everything was literally shaking from behind the glass walls of the lobby where we were: there were just so many more people outside cheering and jumping and jostling and lining up for some real hugging and handshake space.

(As for your juvenile camerawoman, she was preparing to inch closer and take a better shot of how Ka Bel would step outside into the arms of the crowd when her cellphone suddenly rang and cut everything else out. Drats!)

July 11: It was my father's birthday. And our 30th monthsary :)

As with the past six years since Papa passed away, I found myself deliberately keeping busy on that day. I remember planning to write a blog entry the other evening but for some reason didn't. This evening I realized that, ever since putting up this blog two years ago, that I have never written at length about events deeply personal since 2005: coping with events, getting married, watching my mother-in-law pass away, starting with a new slate, being with my grandmother when she died last January. Maybe someday I'll be able to patch all these memories together into a cohesive whole.

I used to think that the power of writing encompassed everything. Language is a wonderful intervention on consciousness, a means of defining the world. Through it one is empowered to find significance in the mundane, humor in coldness and chaos, nobleness in the humble. Because of it, there are infinite ways to converse about comfort, ways to articulate elation and celebration. Even things which we often wish to turn away from can be confronted through language. Truths are woven and unravelled in the turn of a phrase. Dissent will always have its way of spelling itself out on the page. Anger is fluid: in the absence of restraint it shall surely spill and stain everything in its path. But for sadness? Sometimes there are just no words.

Painting the Disappeared

I'm posting a short write-up I did for Yasmin Sison's show The Punky Brewster Session held at mag:net gallery Katipunan from May 24 to June 11 this year (hope the artist and mag:net both don't mind) .

In the course of freelance writing for galleries, I guess there are times when some art works are personally striking (and exciting) in a significant way: not only in terms of exquisite visuals but also in their contextual significance to myself as a viewer. The works may or may not be overtly "political" in their imagery and themes, but nonetheless make good sense when understood in the context of these disturbing times. At their best, these are works that have the power to make us think of--or rethink--relations between prevailing realities. I think that was the case when I saw Sison's paintings for this show.

The effect of the works may have been unintentional. Perhaps it has to do with personally having friends who were victims of human rights violations, but the first thing that I thought of when I opened the file images of her works were all the photographs of people who were abducted under the Arroyo administration, images of people who have been literally cut off from being seen and held by their families, friends, and colleagues, cut out from the rest of society by unknown abductors.

I remember the photographs of the desaparecidos: some are from IDs but others are snapshots of the victims during happier days. Sans the texts and slogans, Karen Empeno looks like just another young girl, no different from you and me, grinning in what looks like a cropped shot of a crowded rally or a field trip on a sunny day.

Now, whenever I look at Sison's works, where images of people are cut out from their immediate surroundings, a chill runs through my spine. I think of what Karen and Sherlyn's abductors have done, and are trying to do with many others--eliminate the person from existing so that nothing, not even the memory of them, remains. And this is why abductions are said to be the most cruel forms of human rights violations that can ever be committed against a person: without the certainty of closure, in whatever form it may take, their abductors and the masterminds behind it shall forever leave a gaping hole in the lives of the people their victims leave behind, like a jigsaw puzzle with the last piece missing.

Their abductors from the military may think that this is all a whimsical game, a project that needs to be implemented in the course of "knowing the enemy". But for those whose lives have included and intersected with that of the victims, the loss painfully alters and shatters repeatedly, in the absence of knowing.

I think the most of the works in the show have the power to quietly articulate that sense and process of displacement. I wanted to do a longer and separate article on this but ran out of time before the show ended: May and June being such crazy, busy months with the national elections and mining campaigns and other equally important mid-year deadlines. Oh well. Anyway, here's the partial text of the write-up:

Memory, presence and the various excisions of these are explored in The Punky Brewster Session, Yasmin Sison's latest one-woman exhibition at mag:net. Sison exhibits paintings in oil on canvas, ranging in size from 6 x 4 ft. and 3 x 4 ft., which the artist considers as a "continuation of previous works that deal with memory, collective memory and the mutability of memories and thus its inherent possibilities".

In her previous show entitled Unmade (this time at mag:net Paseo), Sison "covers up supposed personages" whose photographs fill the pages of found fashion magazines, rendering them anonymous, cut out and erased from the pretty picture plane. Barely a year later, her follow-up exhibition ventures beyond the confines of pictorial shoots and comfortable interiors. It features works that focus on the people either engaged in acts or located at the peripheries of sites which can be initially associated with amusement and fun: the carnival grounds, an unmade bed ready for a sleep-over session, a classroom in a state of disarray.

But more than to merely effect a change of scenery, the works dare disturb. Though the artist professes that the series is perhaps "more about…images that have a [sense of] play"—her take on the formal aspects of the work emphasizes the process of creating negative images from cut outs "that tend to look like a grade school project"—one can not help but sense the incidental social irony denoted by the show. For Sison's paintings—which deal with excisions of bodies and presences—are being exhibited at a political and social period rife with intermittent reports of human rights violations: mutilations, erasures of words and lives, literal disappearances and rub-outs. At a time when the body count of desaparecidos (a Spanish term referring to South American victims of state terrorism and later assimilated into the Philippines during Martial Law) has reached over 200 since Arroyo took over the Palace seat back in 2001, the paintings indirectly recall the memory—no matter how suppressed—of how people are being mutilated, made to disappear, and similarly excised inside classrooms, homes and malls.

Whether Sison intentionally alludes to this or not, the 1980s American sitcom Punky Brewster (from which the exhibition derives its title) ironically revolves around the life of a little girl whose parents have disappeared and abandoned her while still an infant. Sison may have initially chosen the title based on the effects of colors and textures utilized in her works (defining these as more of a "pop song more than an opera" if made into a song), but this whimsical and innocent juxtaposition of the works in the context of the ongoing human rights crisis make the irony of all this seem grimmer. What is being exhibited, thus, is not only a conceptual representation of a grade school project, but documentary evidences of Mutilation: a defacement of form, recollection, and presence. More than being formal exercises in visual perception, the works are indirect reminders that life outside the gallery, unlike in TV sitcoms, does not always end up with happy, picture-perfect endings.
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From a recent press conference:

I repeat, I accuse the Army
of the crime of kidnapping my son Jonas
on April 28, 2007
at the Ever Gotesco Mall in Quezon City.
I strongly suspect that either or both
of the former commanding officers of the 56th IB,
Lt. Col. Clement and Lt. Col. Feliciano
are participants in that crime.
And the Chief of Staff
of the Armed Forces of the Philippines,
Gen. Hermogenes Esperon,
is covering up the crime
committed against Jonas.

--- Dr. Edita T. Burgos,
mother of abducted agriculturist and activist Jonas Burgos

The No Excuse Dare

Here's a tiny doodle I did recently during a very boring meeting. It's part of a standing dare between me and Ina, which should take effect after this is uploaded now.

The drawing wasn't meant to represent anything in particular. It looks like a clenched form trying to burst out in all directions, like a dismembered fist.

The Picture That Alston Did Not Want To See

This is a photograph of our friend Isaias Manano, Jr, as shown by his own mother to United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions Philip Alston during his visit to the Philippines last February. For being the Secretary-General of Anakpawis in Mindoro Oriental and for many other reasons that do not make sense, Isaias was shot dead by an suspected military assassin while walking home last April 28, 2004.

Alston reportedly did not want to see this photograph. Well, neither did we. But we did not have the option to please ask that this photograph be taken away from our eyes, to beg off and ask to be shielded from this sight because it was an unbearable one indeed.

Almost four years have passed since Isaias was murdered. At the time of his death, the number of activists murdered by the government was pegged at 62. Now, the number of extrajudical killings has risen to over 800. The vermin suspected of masterminding the killings are now eyeing a seat in Congress. Military agents prowling the provinces and rural communities where people such as Isaias worked are now being deployed to slum areas in the cities in time for the 2007 elections. Alston, as a duly-acknowledged UN Special Procedures representative, did issue his official statement , only to be preempted and disrespectfully dissed by Justice Secretary Raul Gonzales as an unwelcome muchacho "brainwashed" by the Philippine Left. Later today, President Arroyo signs the Anti-Terror Bill into law.

If all these aren't symptoms of a government gone mad, then I don't know what this is. It's like seeing Isaias die over and over again.

Remembering Braveheart
May 23, 2004

"BNARIL C ISAIAS. PATAY NA." I received this text message from a friend at 10:30 p.m. on April 28 and slumped into numb shock. The airconditioning in the fast food chain that humid night sunk into a sickening chill. Isaias was gone, the dissident exile from Mindoro who tirelessly trekked around in his cap, rubber slippers, and hunched, lean frame. Isaias, who risked sojourns throughout numerous sites of struggle, armed only with a guitar, the strongest of principles, and the humblest of words. [Continue]

Moving and Removing

February 25: We're moving out again, my husband and I. It's past midnight, the pick-up truck arrives tomorrow dawn but we're barely halfway through with packing up stuff. We should be panicking by now but for some reason, are going through our chores breezily while listening in random rotation to a whimsical mess of New Wave, J-Pop, progressive rock, Aimee Mann, and whateverelseisonthemp3player and editing work-related stuff in between.

Times like these remind me of the time when I was a kid, when my little nuclear family would change houses and neighborhoods every other year or so. It was because of this that I came to associate my childhood past not really with a single location, but with a litany of sites and journeys and people I've met across the way. That, and lots of cardboard boxes and packing tape.

It's a busy week ahead, the calm before another monsoon. But temporary solace surprisingly resides in strange comforts. I wish I could suspend and extend these crazy, transitory spells of time where, ironically, all things are again simple and clean and quiet, when one world ends where another begins.

The Year of Crossing Over

Three years summarized in cliches*: 2004 was the year of jumping into the abyss. 2005, the year of tying up loose ends. 2006, the year of crossing over.

2006 was a year of literal and figurative departures: of working for still-detained labor leader and lawmaker Ka Crispin Beltran, of shuffling between Congress and Camp Crame and the Heart Center after Ka Bel's arrest, of getting married, of losing my mother-in-law to lung cancer, of moving house thrice, of starting work at an environmental network, of mournful but meaningful departures: Erika, Mommy Cel, Ka Pido, Roval, Ka Ochie, Auntie Tess, Ka Tirso, Lyn and Randy's fathers, Atty. Gojol and other activists assassinated by the Arroyo administration's death squads.

Will be spending New Year at the hospital, as my grandmother has pneumonia.

*Still can't figure out the exact character key for the letter 'e' with that strange mark on top.