gelo lagasca
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Collection of treasured works from past to presentTRANSCRIPT
GELOLAGASCA2011
Book Design & Layout, Art Direction, 2011(Unpublished; confidential)
Somewhere else in the metropolis was a dead mother waiting to be buried. “She sleeps with angels,” as the Neil Young song goes. Ely Buendia purportedly sang his mother to sleep as a child, and he did it again—thirty years after, and from beyond worlds. Before the opening bars of “Alapaap” kicked in, the singer would look up and point a finger skyward, his eyes shaded by his signa-ture aviators. He looked like he was addressing the woman who must have, by then, been sleeping with angels.
Propriety—nay, humanity—dictated that the show must not go on that time. But would it not, ever?
And then, it all goes black. A hasty curtain call.
“It was a feeling I’ve never experienced before. It was definitely a big effort on my part—more than usual—to sing the high notes. I could feel my body actually reacting to the high notes, and I felt really tired.
“For the first time in my life, I felt really, really, really tired,”
Buendia recalled the moment in question, that moment when time
Graphic Design,Layont 2011
West Point Cadet Fidel Ramos with proud father Congressman Narciso Ramos
freedoms enjoyed by dem-ocratic-loving people. But unfortunately, communism was able to gain foothold in the country.
t is widely speculated that Ramos had fought wars under the idea of
democracy and freedom espoused by the Ameri-cans. Ramos is seen as having been influenced by his years of schooling (1946 to 1950) at the famed US West Point Academy and at the University of Illinois, where his views on western democracy have been enhanced. That earned him the label “Amboy,” or American Boy. Although it has never been proven, the Amboy tag stuck but continued to remain a speculation, so that even American chroniclers have dismissed it.
But amid the reality that his homeland and its aspira-tions for freedom were under siege, he could not avoid,
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as a Filipino, and especially as a soldier, to respond to the threat. It so happened that both American and Philippine democratic interests were at stake.
Ramos first got involved in an anti-communist war in the early 1950s when he got assigned to anti-insurgency campaigns in Luzon to stem the tide of the advance of the communist Hukbalahap Army, which was planning to wrest political power.Soon he was in the Korean Peninsula in 1952 as part of the United Nations contingent sent to stop communist invasion of the whole Korean peninsula. In Hill Eerie in Chorwon, he was with the Philippine Expeditionary Force to Korea (PEFTOK) when it fought hand-to-hand combat with Chinese soldiers. He did not even think that the close-quarters encounter could easily snap his life as well as his bright prospects for future leadership in the Philippine military, he being a West Point alumnus.
n the mid-1960s, he was in the plains of Vietnam where a communist war popular-ized by Viet Cong and North Vietnam as a “war of national liberation” raged. That war
exacted a heavy toll on the US-led coalition forces. In Vietnam, Ramos was an officer assigned to civic-action missions providing non-combat and engineering support to the coalition. As part of the Philippines Civic Action Group (PHILCAG), Ramos earned honors for the country and its military. It was there where he honed his knowledge of military-civic action tactics that he later pushed to be made part of Philippine military doctrines in fighting armed communist dissidence.
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Ramos, in the late 1960s, would soon find out that the bothersome Hukbalahap move-ment has transformed into a countryside war adopting the Maoist tactics. No one had predicted at that point that the Maoist Re-established Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing, the New People’s Army, will carry out the longest-running insurgency in the world.In the early 1970s, as Ramos continued to rise in the military hierarchy and earned a wider perspective of conflicts, he found himself in a bind when then President and Armed Forces commander-in-chief Ferdinand Marcos, under the pretext of forestalling a communist takeo-ver, declared martial law. Marcos, a relative of the Ramos family, imposed authoritarian rule and abolished the rights guaranteed by the 1935 Constitution. The odd part of the
episode was that the then continuing CPP-NPA insurgency also had in its objective the dismantling of the political order that ensured fundamental rights of the people.
Ramos’s role in the two-pronged threat to Philippine democracy -- one by a dictator and the other by an ever-growing local communist group -- continues to be a subject of discussions. As he was fiercely anti-communist, as head of the Philippine Constabulary, he focused on anti-insurgency drives, thus delicately avoiding scenarios that would put him at odds with the po-litical objectives of martial law. Although Ramos was part of the military hierarchy at that time, it was known that he had passively positioned himself during the dictatorial Marcos regime as a compassionate figure to whom incarcerated anti-martial law activists and, among others, newsmen, turn for advice. Thus, for the duration of the martial regime, he earned the image of a professional and independent-thinking
FVR 6 FVR 7
Emblem for a US based energy company2011
Branding , 2011Local Apparel for men
THE NINES
Branding , 2011 Internet Radio
Branding , 2011, USA
Cover Design, Art Direction 2009
Art Direction, Design & Layout, 2004
Art Direction, Design & Layout, 2009
Art Direction, Design & Layout2008
ART DIRECTIONProduction, 2010
WEBUser Interface, 2010
PACKAGING PRINT
Art Direction, 2011
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