Volume 4, Issue No. 48
OPINION/COMMENTARY
/ News That Fears None, Views That Favor Nobody /
Our latest as of Monday, February 20, 2023
~ This year portends to be a season of doom and gloom for the once-go-to festival of choice in the Greater Toronto Area. It's all quiet on the western front, it seems, and I am not referring to the multi-award nominated German movie of the same title. I mean the Taste of Manila (ToM) street festival in the hub unofficially called Little Manila. During a visit last week, there's hardly a sign of any festival coming through this summer. And to make matters worse, ToM's biggest supporter in local government, 68-year-old Mayor John Tory, has resigned his elective post over an extramarital affair with a woman staffer nearly twice his junior.
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IT'S ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
Bleak Prospect for Taste of Manila Festival
Top Official Said to Be in Hiding
By ROMEO P. MARQUEZ
Editor, The Filipino Web Channel
TORONTO - By this time in years past when Spring approaches and Summer beckons, most Filipino establishments in Little Manila would be bedecked with all kinds of posters and flyers announcing upcoming Filipino festivals.
Not so this year, it seems. The atmosphere in that part of town appears bleak save for the sight of a few visitors and families exiting in and out of the restaurants, coffee shops, bakeries, and remittance centers that dot the junction of Bathurst St. and Wilson Ave. in North York.
The fickle Winter weather must have something to do with it - once sunny but chilly in sub-zero temperatures, sometimes rainy with a sprinkling of snow flurries, and many times with bountiful snow that makes walking and driving difficult.
In recent times, no rain or snow could stop organizers from disclosing their respective festivals, concerts, or what have you, either with their presence or with banners, leaflets, and the like. The preferred mode now seems to be impersonal websites and social media outlets.
From the comfort of my home office, I ventured out, cameras in tow, bundled in layers upon layers of clothing that would withstand the cold and snow, and determined to interview people in Little Manila about anything.
Sure enough the information - raw, unverified, gossipy, hearsay, fantastical - came in trickles from individuals who work, live, and hang out in the area. They are my eyes and ears, my trusted informants whose friendship I've cultivated in years as a journalist.
Some tidbits of information may not be reliable at the outset, but who cares? They are intel subject to meticulous processing through verification, cross-checking, and cross-referencing with people who knew, and are in positions to know.
One such info is the widespread talk in Little Manila that the ubiquitous self-proclaimed founder of the Taste of Manila (ToM) festival, Rolly Mangante alias kabise, is nowhere in sight since late last year. (Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4ap92btLM8).
"Nagtatago na siya. Matagal na," says one informant speaking in Tagalog to mean Mangante is in hiding a long time ago. There may be a plausible reason for this claim. In fact, he himself has been telling people about his alleged health problem. That could mean he has limited his movement within the confines of his home.
(Neither of the allegations has been independently confirmed but the always-unresponsive Mangante can react to this one way or another).
For some people familiar with his ways, however, the sick claim is merely a "press release" to gain sympathy for his plight, especially now that he's being held legally liable for some alleged wrongdoing. "It's the usual pa-awa chika for effect," says one source.
To my informant's knowledge, Mangante, a former driver at the Philippine Consulate who had walked off with the idea of a ToM festival and claimed it as his, had bailed out of a lawsuit filed by organizers of the 2022 ToM, the purported not-for-profit International Entertainment Company (IEC).
IEC partners Cecille Araneta (video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdTnX700_a8) and Mon Datol aka Mondee have sued Mangante and his new collaborators in SPARC (Society of Philippine Artists, Recreation and Community) led by Danilo "Sani" Baluyot and realtor Rose Ami aka Rosemarie Ami-Seaborn, the self-identified online gossipy troll behind the pseudonym Marites Tolits.
In its lawsuit, IEC alleged that Mangante breached their three-year contract to undertake ToM by signing in SPARC as his new partner in holding the festival for the next three years beginning in August 2023.
The IEC apparently suffered a huge financial drain in staging the 2022 ToM and is hoping to recoup some of its losses and pay its debts through the lawsuit. (Full story at: https://filwebchannelmagazine.blogspot.com/2022/12/volume-4-issue-no.html).
Before the suit, Araneta, Datol, Mangante, and other role players like Dannasol Luna, Philip Beloso, and Pete Torralba (no relation to the popular Torralba couple Ramon and Teresa) were goody-goody friends who had pirated film footage from published videos of The Filipino Web Channel. (Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_398v7dDQhQ).
Datol even defended the steal during a press conference launching IEC's ToM fest in April 2022. (Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qd02DO503DU&t=45s). IEC and its officers refused to apologize for the infraction, neither would it compensate nor remove the stolen film clips from their promotional video.
If there's someone more familiar with poaching like what IEC did, it is IEC's lawyer, Atty. Jarvis Yap Ortega of the Ortega Law Office, who knew it is wrong and legally actionable.
I caught Ortega's Pahayagan tabloid plagiarizing my story of an event at Bathurst-Wilson Parkette and told him about it. Whereupon he issued a hollow apology for the deed. (Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7I0bHcFMP_o).
Here is part of my story published online and in Balita (note: already removed from its website for some reason) on September 21, 2016:
TORONTO - A Filipino lawyer who stands as editor-in-chief of a local tabloid has apologized for plagiarizing parts of a commentary this reporter had written last week online and on print.
"We will issue an apology in our newspaper," Jarvis Ortega said in an email on Tuesday on behalf of Pahayagan, the paper that lifted the story and published it without attribution. The same article is printed in the current issue of Balita, Toronto's largest Filipino newspaper.
In its September issue out this week, Pahayagan publicized a story about the opening of Mabuhay Garden in the Filipino community's Little Manila and mistaking it for the inaugural of the long-standing Bathurst-Wilson Parkette. The language, tone, substance and structure of the story were the same as this reporter's article.
"Our sincere apology for using you as a source in our write up about the Garden without your permission and adding up our own notes and observation," Ortega stated.
His emailed apology came within hours of publication of the reporting on his paper's plagiarism, which this reporter found out after reading its coverage of the same event that took place on Sunday, Sept. 11.
Ortega explained, in his own words: "When we were doing our write, we went online and try to read about other reports on their comments and observation. We found your article as factual as it was since we were there also".
.
"Our apologies also for the mistakes in our grammar due to time constraint. We will do better next time," he promised.
So. stealing video footage and plagiarizing a story are practically one and the same. Isn't this practice like shit? (pardon the French). There's IEC and its lawyer to look at for example. Now I leave it to my readers to decide what they have in common. (Copyright 2023. All Rights Reserved).
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