As you all may or may not know, Maganda Magazine Issue 21 “Legal” is now available for distribution. If you’d like to purchase an issue ($10-$15 sliding scale donation w/ additional $4+ for shipping & handling) please contact maganda.distribution@gmail.com for more information.

Editor in Chief: Cristal Fiel
Production Coordinator: Justine Rivero
Literary Editors: Jacqueline Fauni and Brian Adrias
Media & Layout Editors: Christine Ilagan and Janina Concepcion
Marketing & Finance Coordinator: Jaime So
Events Coordinator: Elaine Legaspi
Distribution & Public Relations: Patricia Carino
Campus Relations Coordinator: Brian Batugo
International Liaison and Correspondent (from China): Alex Tan
Webmaster: Justin Gonzaga
Consultants: Keith Licardo and Alex Cariaso

Here’s to an exciting new year!

Crazy busy planning for two events, the finalization of this year’s issue, staff selections, and a collaborative publication with other UC Berkeley campus publications.  We ambitious, we is.

EVENTS:

MONDAY, APRIL 28th, 7pm in 200 Wheeler Hall (UC Berkeley Campus):: PINOY SIGHTINGS: FILM SCREENING AND WORKSHOP WITH PATRICIO GINELSA (director of Black Eyed Peas Bebot videos and film Lumpia) 

 Come join {m}aganda magazine and featured artist Patricio Ginelsa April 28th, 7-10pm in 200 Wheeler as we dive into the world of hollywood, movies, and music videos.

Ginelsa, most famous for his work directing Black Eyed Peas music videos, will be presenting Pinoy Sightings: a video presentation on Pilipino representation in the media, behind the scenes, and in hip-hop.

Pinoy Sightings, made over the course of 7 years, is a compilation of Pin@y Sightings in the media. A Pin@y Sighting is defined as a rare occurrence in mainstream media, when a reference to the Pilipino community is made. You’ve most likely caught one. Here you are watching a TV sitcom one night and all of a sudden, the main character says “Joey’s friend is Pilipino” out of the blue. Or perhaps, you’re sitting in a movie theater and all of a sudden, the cook enters the scene in the background speaking Tagalog and offers the movie star some chicken adobo.

While some of the clips may be familiar, there are some that will surprise you. Are these Pinoy Sightings for real??? Ginelsa is here to prove to you they exist!!

Please Join us for a fun and challenging night as we explore the implications and manifestations of representing culture in mainstream media.

What does it mean to represent “culture” in a mainstream space?
How do the realities of working in an industry where your voice is not always represented affect decision making and opportunities?
What is it like to work behind the scenes and in hip hop?

Come join us April 28th and find out!!

RSVP on Facebook if you wanna come!!

SATURDAY, MAY 3rd, 2pm in Tilden Room, MLK Bldg (UC Berkeley Campus):: MAGANDA MAGAZINE ISSUE 21: LEGAL LAUNCH RECEPTION

 Please join Maganda for an afternoon of performances, artwork, raffle, food, an open mic, and most importantly the release of our 21st issue: Legal!!  Our entire year has been culminating in to this one event, so it would be kinda sad if you read this blog, and then miss out.  (But we don’t blame you if you’re busy!!)  Attendees will get the opportunity to speak their piece as it relates to the theme following scheduled performers.  Don’t miss out on this opportunity.  Also, our t-shirts will be on sale!!!

RSVP on Facebook or email m21reception@gmail.com if you’re interested in going and need more details.

Also, please email maganda.distribution@gmail.com if you want to purchase our latest issue!!!

STAFF SELECTIONS:

Deciding who our up-and-coming Maganda heroines and heroes will be is so important that we are going to make an event out of it.  Are you interested in partaking in the production of our magazine and vision as an arts organization?  Join us on Tuesday, April 29th, at 7pm as we select staff for Maganda Magazine 22!!! Email maganda.magazine@gmail.com if you have any questions.  More details to be posted soon.

THE X MAGAZINE:

In collaboration with Onyx Express, hardboiled magazine, la voz, and Al Bayan (UC Berkeley Campus publications), Maganda will co-publish THE X MAGAZINE, to be distributed on Monday, May 5th.  More details to come.

By the way, we are pleased to announce that we were awarded “Best Literary Publication” at the ASUC Publication Awards that took place last Wednesday for issue 20: Our Activisms. We’d like to specially thank all contributors of last year’s issue, as your work made it best literary.  Thanks to you all, we were able to receive a monetary award to continue publishing your voices! Hurrah!! We do mattter!!! Of course, we knew that already.  But it’s nice to get an affirmation from someone else every now and then.

It’s going to be an exciting next week. Join us!!!

- C. Fiel

Sorry.  We’ve been a studious blog lately and haven’t had the time to write anything meaningful during this midterm season.  We are lame, inconsistent liars.  Or at least I am…. Yes, I am a liar… In any case, since I just finished a midterm today and I’m at work staring at the computer screen, I thought I might take this time to be more productive by updating you readers on the Maganda haps.

Next week on Thursday March 20th, we have our second Artists Dialogue/Open Gallery of the year in 170 Barrows at 7pm.  You’ll get an opportunity to get personable with the artists and their work, which is always fun.  If you’re interested in submitting work, it’s not too late! Just email “magandagallery AT gmail DOT com” by this Thursday, March 13th for more information.

Also, please remember to mark your calendars for our first ever Film Event on Wednesday, April 9th, more details to be announced. 

And don’t forget about our most important event of the year, our annual magazine launch reception.  This is to take place on Saturday, May 3rd from 2-5pm, location TBA.  Contributors of the magazine get to display their work and/or perform their words as the public gets to enjoy its first contact with our 21st issue: Legal.  Yay!  And if you weren’t able to submit anything, don’t worry!  There is sure to be an open mic after scheduled performances, and Maganda lurves first timers, so you are encouraged to start thinking about what to write, then actually writing it, and then possibly practicing it before the event.  But friends, you’re getting two months notice and that is plenty of time.

As Distributions coordinator, my basic responsibility is to get our magazine out in the public.  On a personal level, it is kind of hard because of lack of resources and time.  So my apologies if you’re like, “WTF? I don’t see Maganda anywhere!“  If you feel like you can do my job better than me, by all means I am open to constructive criticism.  In fact, I’m not sure why I have never thought of advertising this before, but if you are interested in purchasing our issues, or if you have any sort of suggestions on how we can effectively distribute our magazine, please email “maganda.distribution AT gmail DOT com” and I’ll be happy to fulfill our request and/or read your advice.

On that note, if you have any comments or suggestions for us blogger(s) and/or what you would like to see more/less of,  let (us) know!

- C. Fiel

In 2006, the San Francisco Giants started an annual Heritage Week to celebrate diversity in baseball and in the San Francisco Bay Area in general.  This year, we will find ourselves immersed in ballpark diversity the week of May 12th, with the first-ever Filipino Heritage night taking place on Wednesday, May 14th.

According to the official SF Giants website, tickets are being sold at a discount of $20 to sit in the special Filipino Heritage section.  The night will consists of Filipino entertainment and a customized item themed after Filipino heritage.  Overall, the night will appreciate Filipino-owned businesses and families.

I don’t know about everyone else, but I think it’s pretty cool that the Filipino culture is being recognized and celebrated at a national baseball game that will hopefully be televised.  (Let’s hope that if it is televised, they actually express that it is Filipino Heritage night.)  I actually haven’t heard about Heritage Week until my parents told me last night that they bought tickets for it. I’m not going because they only bought tickets for themselves (lame), but it would be interesting to see how this pans out, and what they mean by “Filipino entertainment.”  Is there going to be a dance team that goes out to the field during half time to perform the tinikling?  And what exactly is this special item that they speak of?

In all honesty, although it sounds pretty cool, I also question the validity of reducing the celebration of Filipino heritage to one night.  But then again, look at Pilipino Culture Night (PCN).  Even though people have their criticisms about whether or not it is entirely feasible to truly celebrate culture in one night, it still happens and participants work really hard to put it on.  I have been fairly satisfied with all the PCNs I have seen in my past (minus one that is a different story entirely) and it takes a lot to make me happy with stage productions and like events.

Let’s hope that the Giants have a consultant of Filipino heritage helping them out with this so that it is less commodified and wrapped in a pretty $20 discount package than it currently sounds like on the website.

- C. Fiel (the pessimist)

Image Source: http://www.springtrainingtours.com/images/giantslogo.jpg

Note: This is not a post about Bob the Builder or Barack Obama.

In this fast-at-you technological age that allows one to come into contact with a distant relative across the world within a millisecond flat, we here at Maganda wonder:

Is it possible for us to keep up with the times?  Can we actually achieve the status of a well-read, well-researched blog that puts out entries at least twice a week?  A blog that goes beyond being a website for event announcements with (sometimes) quirky one-liners to add a bit more detail than what is already stated on a flier?  Can we be what we say we are on our about page?

We’ll be the first to admit that in the past six months since our new site has been up and running, we haven’t been the blog that we said we were.  And we are a little ashamed, yes.  But as our co-editor in chief, Patrici Flores, has previously stated, “students are wholly responsible for running Maganda Magazine.”  Amidst studying for school, attending weekly Maganda meetings, producing a magazine, event planning, and all that good stuff that you have to be involved with during college (like protests and rallies and other avenues of civil disobedience), maintaining a blog is probably at the back of every one’s mind.  Our apologies for being busy college students.

That said, we are hesitant to promise that this blog will be any less sporadic than it has been, but we are going to try our darnedest to update it more often.  Maganda is just coming into blogging, so we still have a lot of fine-tuning to work out.  We still remember the days of Xanga and talking about school like it was interesting to anyone else.  The funny thing is that that wasn’t so long ago.  Now blogs have turned into an arena of professionality and the Maganda blog is meant to be professional work. 

So whilst we transition from the Xanga realm of he-said she-said into what a professional blog should look like and speak like, we are going to do the event announcement thing just so you know that we still exist.  And hopefully, that is enough for you all, good readers.

Here, we leave you with a quote we found in a post that was never published.  In response to why he does photography, Rick Rocamora stated at our Artist Dialogue event back in October:

“We have to be the ones to define ourselves [through art/writing/photography/our actions] or it will be others who reflect our history.”

Let that marinade.

- C. Fiel

That’s right friends. It’s that time of the year again. Lovers may know it as Valentine’s Day, while the more cynical folk refer to it as Singles’ Awareness Day a.k.a. SAD. Whichever your preference, our annual open mic to celebrate the Hallmark holiday is next Wednesday, February 13th at 7pm in 126 Barrows Hall (UC Berkeley campus). Join {m}aganda and other lovers and haters as we partake in a mind orgy of words, music, and maybe even dancing (if that one dance breaker comes from last year, that would be awesome).

Also, remember to dress in your Sunday best (or clubby best) because we may have a schmancy PHOTO BOOTH this year prior to the open mic. If you’re a hopeless romantic, odds are you may meet your soulmate at the open mic so you should be looking good anyway (as we’re sure you always do).

Thanks to over thirty different UC Berkeley student and Bay Area organizations and their amazing capacity to organize a week-long series of events within a month (and over the winter break… wow, right?), UC Berkeley is host to the first ever annual Activism Right There Festival. The festival kicks off at 7pm in Naia Gelateria Lounge (Lower Sproul, UC Berkeley campus) tonight with an Open Mic on Gender and Sexuality, hosted by CalSlam and The Vagina Monologues. And if you can’t make it tonight, fear not! You have the opportunity on Wednesday, and Thursday, and Friday to check it out.

And Friday night in Zellerbach should be especially awesome, as it will feature a panel of well-known activists speaking on student activism at UC Berkeley, including: author of Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, Jeff Chang and Bettina Aptheker of the Free Speech Movement.  Following the panel will be a concert with such performers as world reknown spoken word group iLL-Literacy (that’s right, they came to our theme unveiling) and Bay Area hip-hop legends Zion I.

And the best part of this festival? Free Fun!!!

If you’re in the area and have some extra time on your hands this week, we command you to go!

That’s right folks, we extended the deadline!

Passions, rants, articles, visions, love songs and more will be accepted until January 20th, 2008. For more information on how and what to submit, visit our Call for Submissions page!