Carnage
This is a story about death in a place they call the Promised Land, where the heat punches with a sweaty fist, and a crescent moon rises with the Christian sun.
It happened on a lonely hill in a quiet town, where every bridge is a checkpoint manned by young men in fatigues. Esmael Mangudadatu, Buluan vice mayor, threatened with violence, sending his wife Genalyn, his sister, his nieces and his lawyers to file his certificate of candidacy because he believed women would be safe. Esmael Mangudadatu, inviting a pack of journalists to cover the event, because he believed his family would be safe where the media were. Esmael Mangudadatu, answering the last phone call from a wife who told him they had been stopped by Datu Unsay Mayor Andal Ampatuan Jr.’s private army.
Read more…
Many waters
In my head, I call it the storm. I see the letters from, whenever someone says it, whenever I do. I don’t give it a name, naming gives a thing power, and the Storm has too much.
I’ll tell you where I was when it happened, because everyone does – I was in the office, I was in school, I was in the john when I heard – saying it, again and again, because saying it means you’re alive. I was in my apartment, and there was water swallowing cars in murky brown muck. I’ll say I was a writer first, and because I was I was out the door with a camera before I understood that flood meant I was being flooded, and the water rising in the hallways was water rising in my hallways. The water whipped sideways. Everything outside was a blur, like photos shot through foggy lenses. The maintenance man was banging at doors – get ready, get ready, it could still get worse.
Read more…
Alexis
On Sept. 1, 2009, 27-year-old film critic Alexis Tioseco and his film journalist girlfriend Nika Bohinc were brutally murdered by three men in their home along Times Street. A maid who had been hired the previous month had let the men in. Tioseco and Bohinc had just come in from dinner when they were shot. Nika was leaving for Slovenia the following day.
I met him by accident, in a bar. There was music playing. The walls were green. It was dark, and loud, and crowded. There were laughing writers in long orange skirts and ponytailed old men sneaking sips from silver flasks of whiskey they snuck out of their pockets.
Read more…
In the court of the crimson king
When the doors open, the chatter stops, and the people rise as a body. There is silence as he strides up to the dais, grave-faced and sober-eyed. In this temple he is high priest, his is the way, the truth, and the light. He does not understand, however, that they do not rise only because he is Reynato Puno, champion of human rights, hero of the press, the anointed son of Holy Mother Church. They stand because of the dark robe that falls in heavy folds to his feet, because of the gavel he carries, because of the soaring ceilings, because of the compulsion of decades of other men and women rising to the idea of a judge, the man of unimpeachable character who has risen above all men to preside as the Chief Justice.
Read more…
The uncrowning of the ‘Komiks King’
On July 30, Malacanang announced that it had chosen to award seven individuals with the 2009 Order of National Artists. The conferment, signed on July 6, included four names that were not in the original set submitted by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) and the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP). Three nominees survived the whim of the presidential pen – musicologist Ramon Santos was not so fortunate. Four others took his place: Cecile Guidote-Alvarez, presidential adviser on culture and NCCA’s executive director, comic book novelist Carlo J. Caparas, architect Bobby Mañosa, and fashion designer Pitoy Moreno.
Read more…
After Cory
I was born in 1985, a few months before the revolution that flooded Edsa with tanks and flowers. Edsa was not my revolution. People Power is a series of grainy black-and-white photographs my grandfather pasted to an old album, a heading chalked into the blackboard in third grade history class, the yellowing reels shown in television specials.
Juan Ponce Enrile, M16 on his hip, crossing to Camp Crame protected by a horde of civilians. Ramos, carefully calm and unarmed, waiting for the bombs to fall, with a cigar at the corner of his mouth. Aquino, pale and resolute, as she is sworn President of the Republic of the Philippines
Read more…
The talented Mr. Villar
The president is firm.
“Let me say, in no uncertain terms: There will be elections in 2010. There’s your headline for tomorrow.”
In a country where we doubt even the sincerity of the half-naked 6-year-olds who beg for coins at car windows, there is no word for the sort of morons we must be to unconditionally believe the nation’s chief executive, who is guilty of some of the most dramatic lies in national memory. And yet, just as she announced last Friday that she promised elections, President Macapagal-Arroyo also issued a threat.
Read more…
Column
Never take up with a writer, I tell you they notice everything, including the hole at the bottom of your argyle sock, the inconsistency in your choice of cheeseburger, and that confession you made one drunken dawn in 2006. They will stay awake at three in the morning, and insist on walking down stretches of street in the July rain. They are useless at parties, and either stare blankly into space or ramble about prepositional use. They will correct your every sentence, forget vital pieces of underwear, and will not hesitate to record your conversation on a scrap of damp McDonald’s tissue paper. They are afraid the sky is falling, and more afraid when it doesn’t. They conveniently forget birthdays and unpaid phone bills, will hiss at good friends who make the mistake of breathing while they pound away at what they mistakenly believe is the Great Filipino Novel, and have fits of moaning in dark corners when the voices in their heads refuse to go away. And there are voices, I tell you.
Read more…
The woes of Ms Marcos
Over a month ago, Imelda Marcos – longest running first lady of the Republic of the Philippines, the butterfly-sleeved half of the conjugal dictatorship, the woman whose signature had once led Sotheby’s to cancel a two-day auction after she bought the whole collection with a $6 million check (and then attempted to buy the apartment where it was kept) – announced to the national press that she was penniless.
Read more…
Franco’s war
Franco liked to dance. He loved cars, and called his Daddy’s Innova “Franco’s car.” He smelled of soap and giggles and baby skin. “Give me a kiss,” his daddy would say. “No,” Franco would answer. “Come give dada a kiss.” And Franco would pretend he couldn’t hear. “All right, don’t kiss dada.” And then the small body would launch itself at the laughing father, whose face would be smothered with Franco’s wet kisses.
His Daddy says Franco was expressive. “I’m happy,” Franco would say, when the sun was bright. And sometimes, on days that the world did not behave according to the plans of a three-year-old man, “I’m sad.”
Read more…