Tito Genova Valiente
BusinessMirror
Contact Tito
Discover and connect with journalists and influencers around the world, save time on email research, monitor the news, and more.
| Recent: |
|
| Past: |
|
Past articles by Tito:
A writer’s delicate sense of the terrifying
IN Neni Sta. Romana-Cruz’s world of terror, memory is an insidious instrument. Houses ancestral are remembered, deaths of loved ones are recalled but it is in the remembering that the past haunts not as a metaphor but as the present accommodating what should have been gone, or vanished. And so… → Read More
Resurfacing: Carlos Castaneda and the Teachings of Don Juan
Para mi solo recorrer los caminos que tienen corazón, cualquier camino que tenga corazón (For me there is only the traveling on paths, that have heart, on any path that may have heart.)—Don Juan I am writing about Carlos Castaneda out of nostalgia for a period long gone. A week… → Read More
These rights to life
What happened to indigenous people during the pandemic? If there is an element in the collective memory of lowlanders, those living in towns with remarkable population density and especially those in the cities, it could be the enforced lockdown that separated us from each other. But the degree of separation was never the same. In → Read More
Counting cultures
Can one count cultures? Why even count cultures? Last 24th of October, I received an invite to attend the Fourth International Conference on Cultural Statistics and Creative Economy organized by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts in cooperation with Unesco. At the core of the program was the attempt to measure the effect → Read More
Observing/Understanding/Negating Cultures
Last October 21, 2022, I had the privilege of delivering the keynote speech for the conference organized by the Philippine Cultural Education Program (PCEP), titled “Re-Thinking and Re-Imagining Philippine Culture-based Education: Critical Engagement, Affective Investment, Decolonial Practice.”For the event, I was given the task to talk on this subject matter: “Teaching Human Rights Through the → Read More
The tale of two cats
Innova was the first cat to arrive in the Savage Mind Bookshop. For all the innovations and readiness for change implicated in that word, the name of the cat came from a most undramatic provenance: he was found under a car bearing the said name. Unimaginative as the moniker may… → Read More
Exorcism: The devil once more with feeling
Exorcism is alive in the country. It is in fact getting a structure that will house the St. Michael Center for Spiritual Liberation and Exorcism in the city of Manila. It is touted to be the first of its kind in Asia and maybe in the whole world. The center… → Read More
Learning from directing
IN a film industry that is actor-centric, it is heartwarming to discover a simple—and succinct—book on directors. Written by Dian G. Smith, the book is about the Great American Film Directors, a categorization that is also the title of this exciting resource. In listing, one always has to encounter the… → Read More
The persisting memory
They have been demonized and rightly so—these online technologies that connect us seamlessly and so quickly we do not have time to deny them entry into our lives. But these programs and applications, some as common as SMS or texting and as ubiquitous as Facebook, are now not only wreaking… → Read More
Eating and warring onscreen
TWO films—one that features actors with food and angst, and another with the story about a war and the most fabulous display of bravery—have preoccupied me lately. This state of thinking, which seldom invades my thought process, could only mean one thing: these two films have touched me in such… → Read More
Love among/for the ruins
There is a new issue creating a social and intellectual/cultural divide: the restoration of the La Loma Chapel, what was then considered an ancient church inside one of the oldest cemeteries in the country. No one has an optimum memory of that structure. Perhaps, it is even safe to say… → Read More
Treasuring festivals at the peripheries
THE pandemic has not stopped filmmaking altogether. In the periphery, filmmakers give me this sense that they merely paused for the first few months of the lockdown and it was back to fleshing out their imagination, taking slices of realities from the pre-filmic universe and turning them into movies. As… → Read More
The city surviving
IT was almost six in the morning when the bus entered the city. It has been two years and nearly three months that I have been away from this city. Has it changed? Have the people shifted in their ways? But why even ask the question, you might say. I… → Read More
Ode to sweetness: Susan Roces, 1941-2022
BORN in Bacolod, Jesusa Purificacion Levy Sonora would travel to Manila not to seek her fortune but, as the tale goes, to find a school where she could train in Speech and Drama. A teacher had encouraged her to train in that field having shown her skill in drama and… → Read More
Dissecting our own Age of Reason
I am by no means Eurocentric when I begin this discourse with the aim of looking into how Reason has seeped into our consciousness. Aware of how different the conditions that gave rise to political articulations in the other nations are, it must be said that something occurred in our… → Read More
Unzipping the nation
AS fate would have it, Marlon Brando and his biographies – Brando Unzipped and Songs My Mother Taught Me – are placed again in the back burner. For the second time. I know what political scientists – the true, ardent ones – believe in: that politics is never a matter… → Read More
Chronicling the peripheries: Personal dispatch from Bikol
MY last good memory of this 2022 election was the photo of Leni Gerona Robredo, standing in line to vote. To non-Bikolanos, the public school where her precinct was located looked similar to the other voting places—nondescript, low-roofed buildings, unused for some two years because of the pandemic. But journalists… → Read More
Dreaming of gold, drone shots, corrupt mothers and receipts
"Receipt” is the newest word to enter the ordinary man’s lexicon in the electoral process recently held. It does not refer to that small sheet stores issue you when you buy a commodity (or it could also be that, which is not given to you in the market despite your… → Read More
‘We have the power to prevent disasters’
Risk creation is outstripping risk reduction in the world. Humanity’s broken risk perception is reversing global progress in a “spiral of self-destruction”, according to a new United Nations report. The Global Assessment Report 2022 (GAR2022), released last week by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, said that between 350 and… → Read More
Blaming my generation
BY the time I write my column next week, there should be a new president. That person could resume the dark, evil days of martial rule in which my generation spent as a 19 or 20-year- old citizen, or one that would promise, at the very least, a hope for… → Read More