Word: ferdinand
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...couple to begin with: one an ex-Talking Head and lateral-thinking pop singer, the other a star club DJ and dance-music producer. So the news that the two were collaborating on a disco musical about the life of Imelda Marcos, the widow of Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos, was something of a head-scratcher. Peculiarity, though, is Byrne's specialty, and the recorded version of Here Lies Love is a winning twist on the "album musical" tradition. Twenty-two different singers (including the likes of Tori Amos and Nellie McKay) alternate in the roles of Imelda Marcos...
...lyrics on Here Lies Love, in fact, are adapted directly from the principal characters' own words. (The quotations from Imelda tend to be enormously self-aggrandizing, of course, but that's part of the fun.) The story arc follows Imelda from her troubled childhood through her whirlwind courtship with Ferdinand Marcos, her gradual assumption of political power and her break with Cumpas. By the last few songs, however, everything falls apart: following years of martial law and the assassination of Marcos' rival, Benigno Ninoy Aquino (who had briefly dated Imelda in their youth), the Philippines are on the verge...
Pick a dictator, almost any dictator - Cuba's Fulgencio Batista, the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos, Haiti's Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier, the Shah of Iran, Central African Republic Emperor Jean-Bédel Bokassa - and they all have this in common: they allegedly stashed their loot in secret, numbered accounts in Swiss banks, safely guarded by the so-called Gnomes of Zurich. This association - of bank secrecy and crime - has been fed into the public's imagination by dozens of books and movies. It's a reputation that rankles the Swiss, who have a more benevolent view of their commitment...
...affected British accent, particularly on the otherwise appealing “Stars and Stripes.” Though that song is capable of overcoming Rogue’s misstep, on “You Have Boarded,” his vocals make the song sound like a poor Franz Ferdinand B-side...
...time Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos came to power in the Philippines in the mid- to late 1960s, Amorsolo's influence over neorealist painters like Anita Magsaysay-Ho, Jose Joya and Fernando Zóbel had been virtually obliterated. Drawing inspiration instead from American artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, the cool mathematical lines of Zóbel fitted surprisingly well into the Marcoses' own propagandistic aims. According to Ramon Lerma, director of Manila's Ateneo Art Gallery, the Marcos regime was preoccupied with modernity. "They wanted to present the Philippines as keeping up with the rest...