Maniolas

In this Feb. 7, 2015 photo, veteran clown Ricardo Farfan, popularly known as “Pitito,” poses for a portrait after performing at his 91st birthday party in his home in Lima, Peru. Farfan began painting his face to perform as a clown when he was three-years-old, alongside his father who owned the traveling Farfan Brothers Circus. “Chiminea” was his father’s clown name. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix) LIMA, Peru — Ricardo Farfan doesn’t get the jobs he used to. Sometimes his only audience is his wife. But every morning the 91-year-old clown still sips his coffee and studies an old notebook where he keeps hundreds of pages of jokes and comedy moves he has built up over almost nine decades in the circus. “I look at a page and repeat all the jokes by memory,” Farfan, known as Pitito the clown, said in his small home in a poor Lima neighborhood. In a closet he keeps his wigs, brightly colored socks and jackets, and enormous shoes. At age 3, Farfan began to paint his face together with his father, Chimenea the clown, who owned a 600-chair circus that traveled up and down Peru’s Pacific coast, over the country’s towering Andes mountains and across its vast Amazon jungle. “In my father’s circus I was a clown, magician, tightrope walker, trapeze artist, stilt-walker, electrician and painter,” he said. He sometimes worked in foreign circuses that visited Peru for its national holidays in July. The extra money helped Farfan mend and paint the big top for Read More …

MANILA, Philippines – For those about to rock with art, we salute you. In its third edition, Art Fair Philippines has grown from strength to strength with its show-stopping display of contemporary art right at the heart of the financial and business capital, Makati City. For this year, a total of 33 galleries, seven of which are either based in Singapore, Hong Kong, Jakarta or Taipei, will showcase their respective roster of artists working in a diverse variety of media and embodying a kaleidoscope of artistic temperaments. Attendees will get to familiarize themselves with some of the most important artists working today — from the influential Roberto Feleo with his mythological folkloric art to the London-based Maria Taniguchi with her haunting, conceptual work, from Ronald Ventura with his omnipotent eye sculptures at the Bench pavilion to Tad Ermitaño’s interactive video work, which Erwin Romulo says “is one for the family: it makes nice noises, squiggly lines and live worms.”  Aside from being a platform of new works, the fair is also an avenue of conversation into the nature of art and its vital place in the world. For the Christie’s Art Forum, celebrated gallery owner Sundaram Tagore will drop by to talk about the ever-evolving art environment. At once casual and serious, local and international, contemporary-oriented and forward-looking, Art Fair Philippines has emerged to become the biggest (art) show in town. So, boys and girls, fair thee well. Lifestyle Feature ( Article MRec ), pagematch: 1, sectionmatch: * * * Read More …

I’m back in the US for a few weeks, to give a series of lectures on Philippine culture and politics as a Pacific Leadership Fellow with the Center on Emerging and Pacific Economies at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS) of the University of California, San Diego. The PLF is a post usually reserved for senior government officials and business leaders engaged in economic and political affairs, and it’s the first time they’re bringing over someone from the humanities; some years ago, I was preceded in this fellowship by former Central Bank Governor and NCCA chairman Jimmy Laya. I have a major talk coming up this week on the ponderous topic of “Democracy and Cultural Expression: Confronting the Challenge of Modernization in the Philippines,” but last Wednesday, I sat down with a group of graduate students from IR/PS for a more personal chat. The general topic was “The Youth and Social Reform,” and I decided to share some of my experiences as a former student activist in the 1970s and to observe how protest movements and actions have changed since then. I began by talking about the First Quarter Storm — our own version of Tiananmen, to use a metaphor more familiar to my audience, and the subject of my current research — my arrest and imprisonment in 1973, and the novel that I wrote about that experience. I recalled the many friends and comrades I lost, remarking on the ironic truth that “If I hadn’t been Read More …

MANILA, Philippines – “18 roses. 18 candles. Cotillion de honor. I have always dreamed of being a debutante. Walking into an elegant ballroom wearing a beautiful gown and surrounded by my loved ones and friends. It was supposed to be my ‘coming out party.’  Instead, I was in hiding. I was six months pregnant at 18.” Such riveting words are written at the back of the book Sex, Virginity and Relationships: What I Wish I Knew in College, written by author and women’s rights advocate Pammy Godoy. A fervent supporter of women and empowerment and gender equality, Godoy bares her soul in this book that serves both as a cautionary tale — with lessons gleaned from her own personal past — and a catalyst for change, as it encourages teen girls to unleash their potential.  The volume includes an intimate portrait of the writer, providing a work book and tool kit that will drive readers to reflect on sexuality, teenage pregnancy, motherhood, and the need for young people to form a strong sense of self in the face of society’s often unequal stance between women and men.  Godoy has long been in the forefront of the fight for greater awareness. A graduate of University of the Philippines, Los Baños, and a holder of a master’s degree in Communication from UP, Diliman, Pammy has taught Gender Studies and Women’s Studies at De La Salle University–Manila and St. Scholastica’s College, respectively. She has been working with a United Nations agency since 2008 addressing Read More …

The poem uncannily titled “Repetition Compulsion” has this second and final stanza: “In the binds of tenderness, we reach./ Yet we are not who we touch./ In altered words, we speak of futures/ glimpsed in mirrors we are wedded to/ where the remnant of the child/ restores. She of the soft flesh/ given to the marvels of the wound —/ the cuts that heal many times over/ into scars nurtured beyond notice,/ skin burnished by the hands/ of voice chasing after her name/ as she runs breathless/ each instance of embrace.” As a love poem, it has all the merits of intrinsic value: images of choice intimacy, evidence of cyclic hurt (from “wound” to “cuts that heal” to “scars”), the chase, short of breath, for an instance of fugitive endearment. It is one of the first six poems in the first of four sections of Naming the Ruins, Dinah Roma’s third poetry collection, published by Vagabond Press / Asia Pacific Poetry, which is based in Australia. This first section is titled “The Wayside of Love.” What follow are: “Mercies of Camouflage” (which includes “Beyond Ondoy”); “Of Mortal Grasp” (including a poem “in memory of the victims of Haiyan…”); and “The Gift Beyond” — where the poems are on Asian temples, motifs, a river, tradition. We have to cite these demarcations and thematic taglines to stress the obvious gravitas that marks this collection as a mature, responsibly calibrated array of verses, whose concerns dwell beyond the familiar personal frippery of much Read More …