new year high

both our kids were off to the beach – one to montemar, the other to boracay – for the new year with their significant others, so cholo and i, after decades of hewing to supposedly good-luck traditions that never really guaranteed good luck, decided we were old enough to break out and do something different, something previously unthinkable, which was to hole up in a small makati av. hotel to escape the nerve-wracking noise and awful soot of firecrackers, feast on room service, usher in the new year quietly, for a change.

just in case cable tv got boring, cholo brought his portable dvd player and laptop. i brought a bottle of chardonnay and two books i was in the middle of, carlos fuentes’ terra nostra (what a story about spain’s phillip ii ), and rainer maria rilke’s in praise of mortality. not that i even got to open either book.

the unexpected treat was a 15th floor view of city lights. almost a 180-degree area around the makati bridge – no, not facing ayala or luneta, which would have been fantabulous, but what we got was wonderful enough, facing mandaluyong and san juan and ortigas all the way to quezon city. what a sight. as midnight approached, the fireworks grew more and more frenzied and spectacular. we wondered if we were missing something by missing the noise, should we go down and drown ourselves in the pandemonium outside kahit sandali? we stayed, deciding to be kind to our aging eardrums, okay lang the muffled sound effects, besides we’d miss the climax of the show, which was splendid, magical, fireworks of all colors and shapes shooting up from the dark to a kaleidoscope sky.  what a treat.

siyempre i remembered a friend who used to work with government who now lives in a penthouse in an ayala av. condomnium with a breathtaking 360-degree view of the metropolis. i bet she was having a party. i would, in her place. share the view from above.

forecast 2008

from llewelyn’s 2008 sunsign book, based on certain angles three heavy planets are making to each other in the coming year as they proceed along individual orbits. you don’t need to know where your sun or moon or ascendant is to benefit from this reading:

2008 at a glance

the planets move through the heavens at different rates of speed, interacting with each other many times a year or, in the case of the slow-moving outer planets, only in certain centuries. for example, the moon transits each sign in 28 days. pluto’s time in a sign is measured in decades. and all but the sun and moon have retrograde periods, where they appear to stop, move backward, pause again, and move forward. the most well-known of these is mercury, which is retrograde three or four times a year.

because of these different rates of speed, it is impossible for all but the fastest moving planets (sun, moon, mercury, venus, and mars) to contact each of the outer planets (jupiter, saturn, uranus, neptune, and pluto) every year. any year in which saturn, urnaus, neptune and pluto contact each other is usually a momentous one in some way. and that is exactly what makes 2008 a very unusual astrological year.

year there is a configuration involving three of the outer planets — jupiter, saturn, and uranus. jupiter, which is the focal point of this configuration, will contact both saturn and uranus, which will contact each other, forming a scalene triangle in which the three sides are 60 degrees, 120 degrees, and 180 degrees.

it is rare that any three outer planets align like this. these three last formed this particular configuration in 1829. and the next occurrence will be in 2146.

jupiter represents expansion, saturn represents contraction, and uranus represents the unusual and the unexpected. when all this diverse energy is active during one period, as they will be in november 2008, you can expect major events in the world, in your personal life, and in the lives of those around you.

jupiter will form a favorable contact to saturn that signifies a positive mix of expansion and restriction; one balances the other, and each keeps the other in check–a good mix of optimism and pessimism. jupiter will also form a favorable contact with uranus, which signifies opportunity and luck. this is the fabulous opportunity that comes out of left field. you will find yourself moving in new directions to take advantage of jupiter’s growth potential through the houses of saturn and uranus.

that sounds terrrific, and it is. the catch is the stressful contact between saturn and uranus. the energy of these two planets couldnt be more different: saturn is restriction; uranus is freedom, change, the expected. this means that you will in some way encounter a hurdle as the universe challenges you to break from from restriction, as jupiter encourages you to look to the future and to envision the possibilities. a cautionary note: think and act carefully. action taken this year will probably be irreversible.”

imagine if we were a more enlightened race. then we would be thinking not of self but of nation, and how to make the most of the terrific vibes of 2008 to make sure the changes are truly beneficial to the majority and not just to a few. but who knows, maybe it’s not too late. for all our flaws, we are also a race capable of surprising ourselves.

happy 2008 y’all !

scandalous silence on sumilao

totoo namang nakakaiyak ang nangyari at patuloy na nangyayari sa sumilao farmers. malinaw ang karapatan nila to that agricultural land. kaya lang, talaga naman, iba kung dumiskarte ang big landowners tulad ni quisumbing. basta ayaw nilang mag-share, period. at ang ating gobyerno, ang ating mga presidente in particular, mas sympathetic to big landowners talaga, big contributors kasi sila to presidential campaigns? how else explain fvr’s overturning dar after the sumilao farmers had already been awarded certificates of land ownership? ang lakas lang talaga ni quisumbing, di ba?

and how else explain the findings of dar’s research team headed by the very credible arsenio balisacan, summarized by solita monsod for inquirer, that after almost two decades of the comprehensive agrarian reform program:

most private landowners, representing 82 percent of the lands that should have been given to agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs), are still holding on to their land 19 years after the law was passed.

grabe. yan ba ang rule of law? obviously, rule of law does not apply when it does not serve the interests of the ruling elite, no?

The supreme irony is that landowners, having successfully staved off the compulsory acquisition, are demanding that CARP be terminated, since it is a failure (which means they get to keep their land). It is also clear that 72 percent of the ARBs are operating their farms with one arm tied figuratively behind their backs — since they don’t have individual titles; not only are the incentive effects of ownership not present, the farmers also have difficulty getting credit and are more prone to selling their rights or abandoning their lands.

so, wonder no more kung bakit di na umasenso ang pilipinas. talagang di tayo aasenso habang ang mayayaman ay puro tipong quisumbing at san miguel foods inc. kung dumiskarte. sa kanila, what’s good for (their) business is good for the country, which is pure hogwash, um, propaganda.

most scandalizing of course is the silence of the pork fiends in congress, particularly of the senator presidentiables and vice-presidentiables. nagkakabukingan tuloy. malamang, kabilang kasi sila o may pinoprotektahan silang campaign contributors na kabilang sa BIG landowners who just refuse to give up their land in the name of social justice. social justice? not in their vocabulary.

what say mar roxas and manny villar? what say jinggoy estrada and chiz escudero? what say loren legarda and ping lacson?

what kind of opposition party is it that remains silent on agrarian reform and the sumilao farmers? parang hindi opposition, di ba? more like the other side of a bad coin.

rene villanueva – before batibot, there was sesame

i met rene villanueva in march 1983 under not very easy circumstances for either of us. he was already a two-time palanca awardee and (if memory serves) teaching literature in u.p. while i, i was a u.p. psych-major drop-out writing a showbiz column notes of a tv junkie for a weekly magazine. yet i ended up headwriter of the philippine sesame street project, and rene was just one of my writers.

ang totoo niyan, january pa lang nabalitaan ko na that imee marcos was negotiating for a philippine version of sesame street. i had been looking forward to reviewing the show, not writing for it, so i almost fell of my seat when june keithley and then her friend project director lyca benitez-brown called, asking me to take on the job. i hardly felt qualified. my only experience writing for tv was for keithley’s late-night talkshow for adults, and my only experience writing in tagalog was a couple of adaptations of broadway hits staged by leo martinez and susan calo-medina, also for adults. besides, i told lyca, i wasn’t hot to be part of a marcos project. why not tap tv gagwriters instead or creativewriters from academe?

lyca begged me not to think of it as a marcos project, rather as one heaven-sent for filipino children, then gave me a sob-story about how professional gagwriters had too many bad habits, like resorting to slapstick and put-downs and other no-no’s to get a laugh, while the academics who went all the way to new york for orientation still had to get the hang of writing for tv in a tagalog that was light and simple. besides i was a mom with two kids and grounded in psychology, so she was convinced I could do it, learn the ropes and teach it to six new writers.

i still didn’t want to do it, i wasn’t sure i was up to the task, and i didn’t want a full-time job, no matter how great it paid. but my kids, ages 9 and 6 then, were so disappointed I changed my mind, dropped my column, and plunged in.

as it turned out i had to play catch-up with my pool of writers who had been through workshops and chosen on the basis of scripts they turned out after. rene was easily the best of them, the best of us.

as headwriter i was expected to produce scripts for a season’s 90 shows, to start airing in october, just six months away (akala nila ganoong kadali). each show required scripts for 10 segments of varying duration – from 15 seconds to 3 minutes – at least 3 segments to be written for two puppets, pong pagong (as huge as big bird) and kiko matsing (as grouchy as oscar) and the 6 adult characters they lived with in a sesame-like street; the other 7 segments to be written for other formats, such as light-action film, limbo, and animation. given the notoriously short attention-span of 3- to 5-year olds, every single script had to be funny, complete with a “tag” or punchline (!), and it had to be visually appealing and constantly moving on in surprising ways (like cartoons and tv commercials) even if we couldn’t count on help from special effects (pinoy tv was so low-tech then). writers also had to hew to a set of values that did not allow props or toys or accessories that would “raise material needs” or slapstick routines that would show disrespect of others. the 10 scripts per show were each pre-assigned a specific “goal” by the research team so that in every show, the whole person of the child was addressed—the physical, the intellectual, the emotional, the social, and the child’s relationship to home, neighborhood, and environment.

i lived and breathed sesame, no time for anything else. scripts went through rigorous review and comment by the executive producer (lyca), the research team (of psychologists and educators headed by feny de los angeles-bautista), the art department (headed by rodel cruz), the studio directors (kokoy jimenez & bernardo bernardo), the laf directors (noel anonuevo & herky del mundo), and last but certainly not the least, the ctw co-producer tippi fortune, a big egay who didn’t speak a word of tagalog. i learned (with great difficulty and humility) to take criticism without batting an eyelash (!!!) and to rewrite, rewrite, rewrite until everyone (as in every one) was happy.

i was just getting the hang of it when exile ninoy aquino came home in august to lead the opposition against marcos. i was heartbroken when he was assassinated at the tarmac in broad daylight. and when my car with its yellow ribbon was refused entry in sesame‘s studio grounds in imelda’s university of life, i knew it was time to go. contracts were being extended/renewed all around. i asked only for another month, time enough to finish writing 45 of the 90 shows, put together a guidebook for the writers, and prime rene to take over when my time was up.

it was painful, tearing myself away, not so much from the job and responsibility, but from the friends i had made, people i had worked and struggled and created with for seven months. maybe i would even have stayed if not for rene, if i weren’t convinced that i was leaving the writing in good hands. a year later when sesame morphed into batibot, i knew i had done the right thing. ang galing talaga ni rene.