today, it's freezing
and my tropical heart starts
to dream of the sun
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
order
we were late for lola’s birthday party. and it was all papa’s fault.
as was to be expected, papa told me to drive mama to the big house. without looking at us, he said he had to finish something at the farm. on a saturday night.
manong raul was more blunt. he told mama he could not stand tito nieto for more than a hour. that left me and mama alone for the party.
mama wore one of the dresses manang loling made her from the swatches of cloth they got for a song from a used clothing store behind the church. she did not wear the pink and white cocktail dress I bought her from the city, the one she wore for papa’s birthday party last month.
tito nieto was already drinking beer at the porch of the big house when we arrived.
“so, efren’s future engineer has arrived already.” I told him semestral break started last week yet. mama did not mill about by the porch. I followed her to the sala where everyone else was waiting for us.
“where’s efren?” lola’s voice was still as sprightly as I used to remember it.
lola was seated in an unfamiliar big steady chair. louise, therese, and michelle were bickering for space on lola’s rocking chair beside the big capiz windows.
mama told lola that papa had failed to take the last bus trip home from the city earlier. mama was looking at the girls when she told lola this.
tita bebeth, the armholes of her dress wet, waved at everybody and told us that dinner was getting cold already. upon hearing this, tito nieto’s girls rushed toward the dining room.
tito nieto came in from the verandah and helped lola rise up from the big chair. he then walked her toward the dining room. mama grabbed my hands as we marched after them.
the chandelier over the dining table was dusted and lighted. not all of the bulbs were working but it gave the massive dining table a sheen like that of the caskets displayed at tito nieto’s funeral parlor near the fish market. the blue and white thick china were set up so far apart from each other on the table. on the middle of the table was an old silk flower arrangement, most of what would pass up for red roses, have fraying petals.
a little square table with just a plain white table cloth thrown over it was set up at the far end of the big table. the children all trooped toward it.
“jorge, since your father is not around, sit beside me,” lola faintly said.
I suppressed a smile while avoiding mama’s stare. upon hearing lola’s invitation, mama immediately sported this sickeningly sweet smirk.
with flourish, tito nieto helped lola settle at the massive chair at the head of the table. lola rubbed tito nieto’s arms lightly after she plunked down in the high backed chair. lola loudly thanked him many times for helping her. mama averted her gaze from the spectacle.
tito nieto then took his rightful spot and sat at lola’s right. lola pointed the chair across tito nieto for me to occupy. mama, without being told, just occupied the chair beside me.
tita bebeth, her forehead glistening with sweat beads, came in from the kitchen with another platter of painstakingly arranged food, one that I could not identify.
“uy, lilibeth, you sit down. ising can do it. she has some help,” lola barked.
tita bebeth sat beside tito nieto and attempted to smile at mama. upon tito nieto’s instructions, the girls from the small table started singing the birthday song. their shrill voices downed the racket coming from the kitchen. as the kids were singing, mama furiously tried to iron out an invisible crease in the front of her skirt with her sweaty palms.
after the girls’ well-rehearsed piece, I asked where the cake was. everyone just stared at me.
lola answered “no one else seems to like cakes in sta. elena, hijo. but we have callos.” mama rapped my knees from under the table.
I grabbed and offered the rice bowl to lola. she looked mama straight in the eye. “roberta, you’ve raised a good son. efren’s blood can be diluted somehow.”
mama beamed back at me. lola took the bowl from me and offered it instead to tito nieto. he then ladled out a small hill of steaming white rice on to his plate. mama looked away and watched instead tito nieto’s girls fight for food at the little table.
then tito nieto started to talk about the family’s corner lot in front of the town plaza. he had this grandiose plan to transform it to the town’s only gasoline station. only that, he continued, he didn’t have the capital to jump start his project. “you want me to loan you the capital for it?” mother laid down her silver and stared at lola. tita bebeth then tried to shush her girls. I feigned not hearing what lola said and reached out for the bowl of callos. the table top tottered over slightly, as I did that. all our silver, I noticed, inched towards me. no one else, however, saw it.
“and what would efren say to that? that it’s really you I favor over him?”
I felt mama’s legs quivering beside me. tito nieto didn’t pursue the topic the rest of the dinner.,
after dinner, the kids went running rambunctiously up and down the big winding staircase. no one else minded them.
manang ising and the two new help came in and removed our plates. manang ising came back with a large platter of ube custard with macapuno strips arranged neatly on top of it. huffing, one of the helpers rushed back to the kitchen and came back with the dessert plates and tiny forks.
“jorge, now this is your favorite, isn’t it?” lola shoved the platter of ube custard toward me. I thanked lola and sliced myself a big one. again, the table leaned towards me. everyone, this time, noticed it.
“uy, jorge, soon, you’re going to be the engineer. why don’t you fix this table while you’re still around?” tito nieto snarled at me.
“I’ll try, tito,” I answered. mama suppressed a cough.
tita bebeth chirped in “that was a lovely dinner you had, ma.”
“thank you. you have ising to thank for all of that.” lola did not even bother to look at her. she was trying to see which leg of the table made it totter.
then for the first time since dinner started, mama said something. “but you arranged it so beautifully, ma.”
lola did not say any word to her, either.
instead, lola peered under the table. as she sat up back, she said, without looking at anyone in particular, “all my life, I don’t remember ever, of putting things in order, beautiful order.”
then she stooped down again, this time toward my side. then she shoved one of her gold embroidered tsinelas under the leg of the table nearest me. that steadied the table.
-- j.e.g.
as was to be expected, papa told me to drive mama to the big house. without looking at us, he said he had to finish something at the farm. on a saturday night.
manong raul was more blunt. he told mama he could not stand tito nieto for more than a hour. that left me and mama alone for the party.
mama wore one of the dresses manang loling made her from the swatches of cloth they got for a song from a used clothing store behind the church. she did not wear the pink and white cocktail dress I bought her from the city, the one she wore for papa’s birthday party last month.
tito nieto was already drinking beer at the porch of the big house when we arrived.
“so, efren’s future engineer has arrived already.” I told him semestral break started last week yet. mama did not mill about by the porch. I followed her to the sala where everyone else was waiting for us.
“where’s efren?” lola’s voice was still as sprightly as I used to remember it.
lola was seated in an unfamiliar big steady chair. louise, therese, and michelle were bickering for space on lola’s rocking chair beside the big capiz windows.
mama told lola that papa had failed to take the last bus trip home from the city earlier. mama was looking at the girls when she told lola this.
tita bebeth, the armholes of her dress wet, waved at everybody and told us that dinner was getting cold already. upon hearing this, tito nieto’s girls rushed toward the dining room.
tito nieto came in from the verandah and helped lola rise up from the big chair. he then walked her toward the dining room. mama grabbed my hands as we marched after them.
the chandelier over the dining table was dusted and lighted. not all of the bulbs were working but it gave the massive dining table a sheen like that of the caskets displayed at tito nieto’s funeral parlor near the fish market. the blue and white thick china were set up so far apart from each other on the table. on the middle of the table was an old silk flower arrangement, most of what would pass up for red roses, have fraying petals.
a little square table with just a plain white table cloth thrown over it was set up at the far end of the big table. the children all trooped toward it.
“jorge, since your father is not around, sit beside me,” lola faintly said.
I suppressed a smile while avoiding mama’s stare. upon hearing lola’s invitation, mama immediately sported this sickeningly sweet smirk.
with flourish, tito nieto helped lola settle at the massive chair at the head of the table. lola rubbed tito nieto’s arms lightly after she plunked down in the high backed chair. lola loudly thanked him many times for helping her. mama averted her gaze from the spectacle.
tito nieto then took his rightful spot and sat at lola’s right. lola pointed the chair across tito nieto for me to occupy. mama, without being told, just occupied the chair beside me.
tita bebeth, her forehead glistening with sweat beads, came in from the kitchen with another platter of painstakingly arranged food, one that I could not identify.
“uy, lilibeth, you sit down. ising can do it. she has some help,” lola barked.
tita bebeth sat beside tito nieto and attempted to smile at mama. upon tito nieto’s instructions, the girls from the small table started singing the birthday song. their shrill voices downed the racket coming from the kitchen. as the kids were singing, mama furiously tried to iron out an invisible crease in the front of her skirt with her sweaty palms.
after the girls’ well-rehearsed piece, I asked where the cake was. everyone just stared at me.
lola answered “no one else seems to like cakes in sta. elena, hijo. but we have callos.” mama rapped my knees from under the table.
I grabbed and offered the rice bowl to lola. she looked mama straight in the eye. “roberta, you’ve raised a good son. efren’s blood can be diluted somehow.”
mama beamed back at me. lola took the bowl from me and offered it instead to tito nieto. he then ladled out a small hill of steaming white rice on to his plate. mama looked away and watched instead tito nieto’s girls fight for food at the little table.
then tito nieto started to talk about the family’s corner lot in front of the town plaza. he had this grandiose plan to transform it to the town’s only gasoline station. only that, he continued, he didn’t have the capital to jump start his project. “you want me to loan you the capital for it?” mother laid down her silver and stared at lola. tita bebeth then tried to shush her girls. I feigned not hearing what lola said and reached out for the bowl of callos. the table top tottered over slightly, as I did that. all our silver, I noticed, inched towards me. no one else, however, saw it.
“and what would efren say to that? that it’s really you I favor over him?”
I felt mama’s legs quivering beside me. tito nieto didn’t pursue the topic the rest of the dinner.,
after dinner, the kids went running rambunctiously up and down the big winding staircase. no one else minded them.
manang ising and the two new help came in and removed our plates. manang ising came back with a large platter of ube custard with macapuno strips arranged neatly on top of it. huffing, one of the helpers rushed back to the kitchen and came back with the dessert plates and tiny forks.
“jorge, now this is your favorite, isn’t it?” lola shoved the platter of ube custard toward me. I thanked lola and sliced myself a big one. again, the table leaned towards me. everyone, this time, noticed it.
“uy, jorge, soon, you’re going to be the engineer. why don’t you fix this table while you’re still around?” tito nieto snarled at me.
“I’ll try, tito,” I answered. mama suppressed a cough.
tita bebeth chirped in “that was a lovely dinner you had, ma.”
“thank you. you have ising to thank for all of that.” lola did not even bother to look at her. she was trying to see which leg of the table made it totter.
then for the first time since dinner started, mama said something. “but you arranged it so beautifully, ma.”
lola did not say any word to her, either.
instead, lola peered under the table. as she sat up back, she said, without looking at anyone in particular, “all my life, I don’t remember ever, of putting things in order, beautiful order.”
then she stooped down again, this time toward my side. then she shoved one of her gold embroidered tsinelas under the leg of the table nearest me. that steadied the table.
-- j.e.g.
Monday, December 27, 2004
upon learning of a friend's suicide try
how does it all start?
voices? crushing sadness? how?
do i need to know?
Sunday, December 26, 2004
movie moron-athon
top ten
i have always known this but sometimes, there are just facts, sweet morsel from one’s provenance, (that outsiders take as emblematic of one’s society) that just feels out and out alien to oneself.
several sundays ago, the new york times magazine (the one with the dishevelled Almodovar on the cover) carried this little sidebar citing Philippines as one of the top ten movie producing countries in the world, way up there with the bigshots of Bolly and Hollywood.
this doesn’t feel right but it is true. must be true. by now, the venerable grey lady must have beefed up its fact checker department after the jayson blair scandale’.
however, there are only a handful of local films that I can still recall watching as a kid growing up just two blocks away from a movie house.
most of my early film memories are only either those of the technicolor hollywood spectacles (think of the parting red sea) if not the slam bang of the hongkong chopsockies (think of drunken shaolin master, the series).
and it’s not just me (okey, I, for those purists). all of my high school and college buddies, we spoke the same filmic idioms stemming from what could only be our shared cinematic upbringing.
religious experience
i grew up in a very remote island off the northern tip of cebu province.
in this preponderantly catholic island town, the local cinema, (before the advent of the clunky betamax), was rightfully considered the other church.
this was when my mother could still dupe me into wearing gabardine shorts. but times, they are hardly a-changin’ in my sweet archipelago.
fast forward to last week.
the location: outside of sto. domingo church along quezon boulevard in urban and sophisticated quezon city.
the scene: fpj’s wake.
action: a big telon was unfurled in the church grounds and on it was projected some of da king’s more arcane movies.
the procession of fpj devotees, after ignoring the tropical heat and the occasional pickpocket along the queue, had two guaranteed major epiphanies upon reaching the sanctum sanctorum of the cavernous church.
one is the religious experience of watching an fpj movie on an old fashioned telon and the other having to be within a frightfully grabbing distance of the corpse of the man animating the silver screen outside.
to celebrate or not, that is the question
every end of the year, nothing drives to apoplexy the movie critics of the media establishments (mostly east coast) here in the states than the intimidating task of coming up with a top ten best movies of the year list.
this is not so much as an exercise in canonizing (although that is the very raison vitale of coming up with an exclusionary list) but rather more as a celebratory exercise, a yearly valentine to cinema in this country.
what totally separates the movie lovers here in the states and us back home is this. there is this palpably tendentious and very partisan urge among cinephiles here to fete the best of the crop for the year.
back home, every end of the year, what we do have instead is more of a movie moron-athon, also known as the metro manila film festival.
we go into this pathetic and economically discredited exercise of nationalizating a particular industry, this time, the film industry, for a week. only filipino produced films being shown in all the theaters in metro manila.
for me and my friends then, this was our hell week. and this during the holidays where it was supposedly our god given right to enjoy comfort and joy.
nothing guarantees mediocrity of an industry really than good old protectionism. so in the absence of competition, off the sleazy local movie producers go, hawking their middling wares and passing them off as “quality films.”
“pinaghirapan namin talaga ito” (we busted our asses for this).
goodbye, dragon inn
ever since I could read newspapers and trashy fan magazines, every movie insider back home has always been prophesying of the inevitable death of the local film industry.
among other reasons, they posited that it is the current species of hollywood movies, with all their computer graphic enhanced spectacles, that would draw down the curtain to the last of pinoy films.
one of the films that easily coasts into this year’s top ten lists of most critics here is this taiwanese movie, the openly elegiac “goodbye, dragon inn.”
in tsai ming-liang’s latest plotless oeuvre, a passing of a world is hauntingly documented almost without any words. or any computer guided imagery, for that matter.
the movie almost breaks your heart by ushering you into the last night of operations of a taiwanese movie house. what was being shown was “goodbye, dragon inn,” a lush sword–fighting epic of the 60’s, a movie that I may have seen as a child.
two of the men who came out for this last showing were the stars of that very movie itself. in the lobby, after the movie, the two wistfully engaged in small talk.
"no one comes to the movies anymore," says the older of the two. "and no one remembers us anymore," responds the other.
sure the movie is mournful, yet it’s hardly depressing at all. it’s a movie that doesn’t dwell too much in mourning the past than being (with trepidation, let me use this adjective) optimistic in the present, almost jubilant.
this is a film for every one who love the movies even if they don't know why.
after the 70’s, well, after brocka and bernal, I should say, the filipino film industry has been in a downward spiral (cliché, I know it is. but what else can I say?). not because the film industry did not get any hefty tax rebates from the government or any other form of state protection.
the filipino film industry will continue its deathly slump not until young filipino directors, as passionate of movies like tsai ming-liang (a taiwanese of malaysian provenance), will be allowed, nay, encouraged, propped up, to make movies that they truly love to make.
i have always known this but sometimes, there are just facts, sweet morsel from one’s provenance, (that outsiders take as emblematic of one’s society) that just feels out and out alien to oneself.
several sundays ago, the new york times magazine (the one with the dishevelled Almodovar on the cover) carried this little sidebar citing Philippines as one of the top ten movie producing countries in the world, way up there with the bigshots of Bolly and Hollywood.
this doesn’t feel right but it is true. must be true. by now, the venerable grey lady must have beefed up its fact checker department after the jayson blair scandale’.
however, there are only a handful of local films that I can still recall watching as a kid growing up just two blocks away from a movie house.
most of my early film memories are only either those of the technicolor hollywood spectacles (think of the parting red sea) if not the slam bang of the hongkong chopsockies (think of drunken shaolin master, the series).
and it’s not just me (okey, I, for those purists). all of my high school and college buddies, we spoke the same filmic idioms stemming from what could only be our shared cinematic upbringing.
religious experience
i grew up in a very remote island off the northern tip of cebu province.
in this preponderantly catholic island town, the local cinema, (before the advent of the clunky betamax), was rightfully considered the other church.
this was when my mother could still dupe me into wearing gabardine shorts. but times, they are hardly a-changin’ in my sweet archipelago.
fast forward to last week.
the location: outside of sto. domingo church along quezon boulevard in urban and sophisticated quezon city.
the scene: fpj’s wake.
action: a big telon was unfurled in the church grounds and on it was projected some of da king’s more arcane movies.
the procession of fpj devotees, after ignoring the tropical heat and the occasional pickpocket along the queue, had two guaranteed major epiphanies upon reaching the sanctum sanctorum of the cavernous church.
one is the religious experience of watching an fpj movie on an old fashioned telon and the other having to be within a frightfully grabbing distance of the corpse of the man animating the silver screen outside.
to celebrate or not, that is the question
every end of the year, nothing drives to apoplexy the movie critics of the media establishments (mostly east coast) here in the states than the intimidating task of coming up with a top ten best movies of the year list.
this is not so much as an exercise in canonizing (although that is the very raison vitale of coming up with an exclusionary list) but rather more as a celebratory exercise, a yearly valentine to cinema in this country.
what totally separates the movie lovers here in the states and us back home is this. there is this palpably tendentious and very partisan urge among cinephiles here to fete the best of the crop for the year.
back home, every end of the year, what we do have instead is more of a movie moron-athon, also known as the metro manila film festival.
we go into this pathetic and economically discredited exercise of nationalizating a particular industry, this time, the film industry, for a week. only filipino produced films being shown in all the theaters in metro manila.
for me and my friends then, this was our hell week. and this during the holidays where it was supposedly our god given right to enjoy comfort and joy.
nothing guarantees mediocrity of an industry really than good old protectionism. so in the absence of competition, off the sleazy local movie producers go, hawking their middling wares and passing them off as “quality films.”
“pinaghirapan namin talaga ito” (we busted our asses for this).
goodbye, dragon inn
ever since I could read newspapers and trashy fan magazines, every movie insider back home has always been prophesying of the inevitable death of the local film industry.
among other reasons, they posited that it is the current species of hollywood movies, with all their computer graphic enhanced spectacles, that would draw down the curtain to the last of pinoy films.
one of the films that easily coasts into this year’s top ten lists of most critics here is this taiwanese movie, the openly elegiac “goodbye, dragon inn.”
in tsai ming-liang’s latest plotless oeuvre, a passing of a world is hauntingly documented almost without any words. or any computer guided imagery, for that matter.
the movie almost breaks your heart by ushering you into the last night of operations of a taiwanese movie house. what was being shown was “goodbye, dragon inn,” a lush sword–fighting epic of the 60’s, a movie that I may have seen as a child.
two of the men who came out for this last showing were the stars of that very movie itself. in the lobby, after the movie, the two wistfully engaged in small talk.
"no one comes to the movies anymore," says the older of the two. "and no one remembers us anymore," responds the other.
sure the movie is mournful, yet it’s hardly depressing at all. it’s a movie that doesn’t dwell too much in mourning the past than being (with trepidation, let me use this adjective) optimistic in the present, almost jubilant.
this is a film for every one who love the movies even if they don't know why.
after the 70’s, well, after brocka and bernal, I should say, the filipino film industry has been in a downward spiral (cliché, I know it is. but what else can I say?). not because the film industry did not get any hefty tax rebates from the government or any other form of state protection.
the filipino film industry will continue its deathly slump not until young filipino directors, as passionate of movies like tsai ming-liang (a taiwanese of malaysian provenance), will be allowed, nay, encouraged, propped up, to make movies that they truly love to make.
Saturday, December 25, 2004
Friday, December 24, 2004
largesse
this is decidedly qrotesque. even by my standards.
barely twelve hours before christmas, and still i am taken up with the death of an actor whose movies i have never grown fond of. there’s no contempt when i say this, but fpj is indeed this year’s grinch.
i was about to finish my i-hate-you-because-you’re-having-so-much-fun-back-home-while-i-am-slaving-here-in-NY calls to my friends in manila, and it just came to me that they, too, (meaning my mostly showbiz apathetic friends) are still obsessed with fpj’s death. haunted, i should say.
friend number 1.
her major gripe this holiday is this. nobody there to help her prepare her grand noche Buena spread.
“but where is manang (meaning their help)?” I asked.
their house help asked for two days off during what could only be considered rightfully as the manila observance of the unofficial fpj burial holiday. manang told her she would probably need two days off: one to attend the burial itself, and the other one to recuperate.
“from what?” I asked again.
“well, to follow fpj’s cortege from sto. domingo church all the way to north cemetery is no mean feat. you probably would need a full day of rest the day after. so I gave her another day off,” friend number 1 answered.
it’s been three days now since the orgy that manila staged in burying fpj, manang has apparently not yet recharged her usually unflagging energizer bunny self.
“well what can i say,” she said in her most resigned voice, “the death of a loved one can be a total bummer.”
friend number 2:
i must have roused him up from a light sleep. his voice reeked of made up dreams.
“why are you asleep at this time?” i asked him. “it’s almost christmas.” he told me he can’t stand his cousins.
“but you adore your cousins,” i told him back.
“not this time,” he said.
this year, he was finally able to wangle some unheard of days off, a feat which he was never able to finagle in the first few years that he worked in this major english broadsheet in manila.
after almost being bumped off from his flight to his northern mindanao city hometown, he was truly salivating at the idea of spending some serious down time in what he still considers his rustic hometown, one that already boasts of an airport and a huge international shipping port.
but the very moment he plunked down into his favorite big ratty chair in their sala, his cousins immediately swamped him with questions ad nauseam about some really arcane details about fpj’s burial.
“was it true that the horse that pulled fpj’s cortege can understand tagalog?” one of his cousins asked him.
in the tv coverage, the two other actors who drew the horse’s reins were seen shamelessly aping robert redford (think horse whisperer) talking to the white steed.
his cousins must have thought that because he worked for a major broadsheet, he must have had access to juicy insider stuff that was not reported in the electronic media, if that was possible at all after the wall to wall tv/radio coverage of the major networks.
so he fled to his room, feigning migraine. which eventually he had.
friend number 3:
two days before fpj’s burial, my friend had to fetch two of his Wisconsin-born-and-bred cousins from the international airport.
their mother, my friend’s aunt, had to dump them to manila as she herself was going to what my friend described as quite a long winter cruise. trust me, it would not have done me any good had I needled my friend more on her aunt’s mysterious cruise. so end of story in what could have been a racier twist in this snippet. but anyway.
so my friend decided to baby sit her two midwestern teen cousins, a no mean task at all for her to undertake being the tendentious will-never-have-kids lesbian that she is. or so she says, for the moment.
on the very day of fpj’s burial, my friend, ever heedless of local news, decided to wow the apparently blasé american raised teens by bringing them to at least two of the gargantuan manila malls. so off they drove in my friend’s beat up third hand corolla.
end of a very long story: they got stuck in traffic for almost six hours. they took a wrong turn near quezon boulevard (where the funeral procession commenced) and got stuck somewhere near what she described as the slum area of roxas district.
my friend was seething when she recounted how she almost screamed at her cousins every time they covered their noses as their car crawled by the hovels and shanties.
“snooty bastards, snooty bastards,” she kept on muttering.
Unknown friend:
my friends and i, we are of a generation that should been intimate with fpj’s filmography. But neither of us could scrape up a measly explanation why we were never into the man, at least the man who the legions of fpj fans thought he was.
one of the now legendary (should i say apocryphal?) stories that has been bandied around during his necrological services is this.
after the recent catastrophic slew of tropical storms in the country, fpj immersed himself like a mad man in relief operations. but unlike most traditional politicians, he insisted on not emblazoning his name on the relief packages that he was about to mete out.
in a way, my friends and i were the recipients of the man’s anonymous largesse. I know most of my friends would balk at this. “largesse, my ass,” i can hear my lesbian friend already.
but in a sense, I suppose, without even knowing it, our film experiences have been greatly enhanced because of this man’s body of work.
and in quite an astoundingly profound way, the way we look at ourselves as a nation, has been, for better or worse, touched in a not-so-anonymous way by the life and passing of fpj.
but just don’t ask me yet how. I suppose, I have a lifetime to figure it how. to figure out how this reticent actor has made us four and millions others feel an inexplicable expansive feeling about ourselves as a people.
barely twelve hours before christmas, and still i am taken up with the death of an actor whose movies i have never grown fond of. there’s no contempt when i say this, but fpj is indeed this year’s grinch.
i was about to finish my i-hate-you-because-you’re-having-so-much-fun-back-home-while-i-am-slaving-here-in-NY calls to my friends in manila, and it just came to me that they, too, (meaning my mostly showbiz apathetic friends) are still obsessed with fpj’s death. haunted, i should say.
friend number 1.
her major gripe this holiday is this. nobody there to help her prepare her grand noche Buena spread.
“but where is manang (meaning their help)?” I asked.
their house help asked for two days off during what could only be considered rightfully as the manila observance of the unofficial fpj burial holiday. manang told her she would probably need two days off: one to attend the burial itself, and the other one to recuperate.
“from what?” I asked again.
“well, to follow fpj’s cortege from sto. domingo church all the way to north cemetery is no mean feat. you probably would need a full day of rest the day after. so I gave her another day off,” friend number 1 answered.
it’s been three days now since the orgy that manila staged in burying fpj, manang has apparently not yet recharged her usually unflagging energizer bunny self.
“well what can i say,” she said in her most resigned voice, “the death of a loved one can be a total bummer.”
friend number 2:
i must have roused him up from a light sleep. his voice reeked of made up dreams.
“why are you asleep at this time?” i asked him. “it’s almost christmas.” he told me he can’t stand his cousins.
“but you adore your cousins,” i told him back.
“not this time,” he said.
this year, he was finally able to wangle some unheard of days off, a feat which he was never able to finagle in the first few years that he worked in this major english broadsheet in manila.
after almost being bumped off from his flight to his northern mindanao city hometown, he was truly salivating at the idea of spending some serious down time in what he still considers his rustic hometown, one that already boasts of an airport and a huge international shipping port.
but the very moment he plunked down into his favorite big ratty chair in their sala, his cousins immediately swamped him with questions ad nauseam about some really arcane details about fpj’s burial.
“was it true that the horse that pulled fpj’s cortege can understand tagalog?” one of his cousins asked him.
in the tv coverage, the two other actors who drew the horse’s reins were seen shamelessly aping robert redford (think horse whisperer) talking to the white steed.
his cousins must have thought that because he worked for a major broadsheet, he must have had access to juicy insider stuff that was not reported in the electronic media, if that was possible at all after the wall to wall tv/radio coverage of the major networks.
so he fled to his room, feigning migraine. which eventually he had.
friend number 3:
two days before fpj’s burial, my friend had to fetch two of his Wisconsin-born-and-bred cousins from the international airport.
their mother, my friend’s aunt, had to dump them to manila as she herself was going to what my friend described as quite a long winter cruise. trust me, it would not have done me any good had I needled my friend more on her aunt’s mysterious cruise. so end of story in what could have been a racier twist in this snippet. but anyway.
so my friend decided to baby sit her two midwestern teen cousins, a no mean task at all for her to undertake being the tendentious will-never-have-kids lesbian that she is. or so she says, for the moment.
on the very day of fpj’s burial, my friend, ever heedless of local news, decided to wow the apparently blasé american raised teens by bringing them to at least two of the gargantuan manila malls. so off they drove in my friend’s beat up third hand corolla.
end of a very long story: they got stuck in traffic for almost six hours. they took a wrong turn near quezon boulevard (where the funeral procession commenced) and got stuck somewhere near what she described as the slum area of roxas district.
my friend was seething when she recounted how she almost screamed at her cousins every time they covered their noses as their car crawled by the hovels and shanties.
“snooty bastards, snooty bastards,” she kept on muttering.
Unknown friend:
my friends and i, we are of a generation that should been intimate with fpj’s filmography. But neither of us could scrape up a measly explanation why we were never into the man, at least the man who the legions of fpj fans thought he was.
one of the now legendary (should i say apocryphal?) stories that has been bandied around during his necrological services is this.
after the recent catastrophic slew of tropical storms in the country, fpj immersed himself like a mad man in relief operations. but unlike most traditional politicians, he insisted on not emblazoning his name on the relief packages that he was about to mete out.
in a way, my friends and i were the recipients of the man’s anonymous largesse. I know most of my friends would balk at this. “largesse, my ass,” i can hear my lesbian friend already.
but in a sense, I suppose, without even knowing it, our film experiences have been greatly enhanced because of this man’s body of work.
and in quite an astoundingly profound way, the way we look at ourselves as a nation, has been, for better or worse, touched in a not-so-anonymous way by the life and passing of fpj.
but just don’t ask me yet how. I suppose, I have a lifetime to figure it how. to figure out how this reticent actor has made us four and millions others feel an inexplicable expansive feeling about ourselves as a people.
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
now close the windows
now close the windows and hush all the fields;
if the trees must, let them silently toss;
no bird is singing now, and if there is,
be it my loss.
it will be long ere the marshes resume,
it will be long ere the earliest bird:
so close the windows and not hear the wind,
but see all wind-stirred.
--- robert frost
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
touchy feely
because of the gelid arctic air, it felt like minus two yesterday morning even if it was officially only in the 'teens. and when one of my jamaican workfellows graciously volunteered to drop me off from work, i readily accepted her offer.
as my wont--that if the weather's fine--i would usually be in my toady pinoy s.o.p.(feel free to exchange pinoy with immigrant; would still read fine). i would have profusely thanked her for flinging along my way this act of undeserved sweet charity (sniffle, sniffle, sniffle), refused flatly the offer, and with histrionics strangely spliced in genes of timid immigrants, feigned embarrassment as to being singled out for the favor.
oh no, but not this time.
as we plowed on along the freshly salted road out of our hospital's parking lot, my phone started to go off. it was one of those totally unnecessary text messages from friends back home that oddly enough i look forward to receiving.
this one from a lady friend who decided to quit work after her husband got promoted assistant vice president of the company they both first spotted each other's charms.
she exhorted me to disregard my humanly need to sleep (this after working throughout the previous freezing new york night) so that i can just "wats internt brodcst of fpj burial." riveting.
clearly, my co-worker was baffled with what i was doing after i started keying in furiously my response. i told him i was texting.
"text what?" she shot back.
now, if you are an immigrant from a third world country (yup, that's right, philippines, you pinoy denial queens) that hardly merits any blip at all in the national public consciousness, there are but few chances in your stay here in this country as a second class citizen where you would feel good, i mean too-big-for-one's-breeches good, about yourself. this was one of them, or so i thought.
so i started to launch my grand explanation of how sms (short message service) works because this was the preamble to my grander claim that--tadada--the country, make that the poor, insignificant country, that i come from is anointed--well, perhaps by its very own citizens--as the text capital of the world. top that us of a.
"oh ya, them take too much time, ya know?" she said as she veered right towards the exit ramp nearest my place.
"but it's cheaper," i shot back. "but ya can squeeze in more things to say if ya just kal them," she answered.
i was stumped. i had no clue as to how to get right back to my message that my country is a whole lot better than anybody else's just because pinoys are so dam gud @ txtng. hell, we even ushered this verb--texting--right into the new lexicon of the century. so we should be darn better, right?
so i clammed up (which i have belatedly discovered in life to be always a good thing for my personality).
and there we were, two poor immigrants, from two hard up island nations, making sense of the insane morning rush, making choices that we think are best for our piffling existence here in the land of supersized promises and value meal realities.
as her car made a pell-mell screech in front of my building, i thought maybe the pinoys are just text mad because we are indeed a tactile culture. we just love touching. we just love the feeling of feeling something. anything tangible, corporeal must be infinitely preferrable to us than say stuff heard, spoken, or sung. maybe in our hierarchy of senses, the perception derived from touch supersedes any of the other (is it five or six?) senses. we are not so much as the vaunted oral society that ours is reputed to be as much as we are really a touchy feely one.
then i thanked her profusely, and harnessing the peculiar histrionics somehow spliced in my genes, i feigned embarrassment for being singled out this favor.
"oh thank you, thank you, thank you so much," i gushed.
she didn't say you're welcome but instead she just hugged me. the hug, abrupt and tight. and flat out unfeigned.
i slinked away from her warm hug into the lashing early morning frost curiously feeling shamed.
as my wont--that if the weather's fine--i would usually be in my toady pinoy s.o.p.(feel free to exchange pinoy with immigrant; would still read fine). i would have profusely thanked her for flinging along my way this act of undeserved sweet charity (sniffle, sniffle, sniffle), refused flatly the offer, and with histrionics strangely spliced in genes of timid immigrants, feigned embarrassment as to being singled out for the favor.
oh no, but not this time.
as we plowed on along the freshly salted road out of our hospital's parking lot, my phone started to go off. it was one of those totally unnecessary text messages from friends back home that oddly enough i look forward to receiving.
this one from a lady friend who decided to quit work after her husband got promoted assistant vice president of the company they both first spotted each other's charms.
she exhorted me to disregard my humanly need to sleep (this after working throughout the previous freezing new york night) so that i can just "wats internt brodcst of fpj burial." riveting.
clearly, my co-worker was baffled with what i was doing after i started keying in furiously my response. i told him i was texting.
"text what?" she shot back.
now, if you are an immigrant from a third world country (yup, that's right, philippines, you pinoy denial queens) that hardly merits any blip at all in the national public consciousness, there are but few chances in your stay here in this country as a second class citizen where you would feel good, i mean too-big-for-one's-breeches good, about yourself. this was one of them, or so i thought.
so i started to launch my grand explanation of how sms (short message service) works because this was the preamble to my grander claim that--tadada--the country, make that the poor, insignificant country, that i come from is anointed--well, perhaps by its very own citizens--as the text capital of the world. top that us of a.
"oh ya, them take too much time, ya know?" she said as she veered right towards the exit ramp nearest my place.
"but it's cheaper," i shot back. "but ya can squeeze in more things to say if ya just kal them," she answered.
i was stumped. i had no clue as to how to get right back to my message that my country is a whole lot better than anybody else's just because pinoys are so dam gud @ txtng. hell, we even ushered this verb--texting--right into the new lexicon of the century. so we should be darn better, right?
so i clammed up (which i have belatedly discovered in life to be always a good thing for my personality).
and there we were, two poor immigrants, from two hard up island nations, making sense of the insane morning rush, making choices that we think are best for our piffling existence here in the land of supersized promises and value meal realities.
as her car made a pell-mell screech in front of my building, i thought maybe the pinoys are just text mad because we are indeed a tactile culture. we just love touching. we just love the feeling of feeling something. anything tangible, corporeal must be infinitely preferrable to us than say stuff heard, spoken, or sung. maybe in our hierarchy of senses, the perception derived from touch supersedes any of the other (is it five or six?) senses. we are not so much as the vaunted oral society that ours is reputed to be as much as we are really a touchy feely one.
then i thanked her profusely, and harnessing the peculiar histrionics somehow spliced in my genes, i feigned embarrassment for being singled out this favor.
"oh thank you, thank you, thank you so much," i gushed.
she didn't say you're welcome but instead she just hugged me. the hug, abrupt and tight. and flat out unfeigned.
i slinked away from her warm hug into the lashing early morning frost curiously feeling shamed.
mga ibong -bahay sa farmer's, cubao
itim pa rin ang buga ng hangin
sa paligid ng tupok na palengke.
itim ang balat ng bubog, kahoy, semento at trapo.
itim ang lansa ng hininga mula sa nangalirang na gusali.
ngunit mula sa kung saan,
tatlong ibong-bahay ang dumapo
sa itim na pasimano ng bintana--
ibinuka ang tuka, sumiyap-siyap,
luminga-linga, kumibot ang buntot--
at nabasag ang itim na lungkot
na nakabalot sa palengkeng tupok.
--- danton remoto
Monday, December 20, 2004
Sunday, December 19, 2004
ten ways of looking at fpj's so called immortality (or why i stopped, perhaps, worrying whether i am not so pinoy enough)
I - despite growing up in a movie gaga town in the 70's, i have no recollection, no matter how i tried, of sweltering afternoons being whiled away watching fpj movies inside my hometown's nipa roofed moviehouse.
the first fpj movies i saw were those shown as the other film in a double bill(the other film being the soft porn ones) in an off campus rundown theater of this genteel university town south of manila. this was when i went to this protestant university in the late 80's.
batas sa aking kamay (law in my hands, 1987) was it.
oh the pun i had fun telling people as to the movie's title and the thing i most likely did with my hands while watching the soft porn one.
II -- in a fit of trivial pursuit, my roommate regaled me with his pop culture acumen by claiming that fpj was also referred to as da king. the royal ambition of the moniker ticked off something Macbethian inside me.
college was when i was knee deep into progressive causes. the sobriquet was as anachronistic and paternalistic as it could get for me then. and maybe now, as well.
III -- the first fpj movie that somehow got to me was this celso ad castillo feature(asedillo). i must have seen this in one of those ubiquitous teach ins during my college salad days.
in a pivotal scene, fpj (playing a southern tagalog rebel leader) enters a town and everyone slams their windows shut on him.
in his trademark rasp, he then addresses the cowed townfolk, "huwag ninyo akong talikuran, ako ay isda, kayo ang aking dagat. (don’t turn your backs on me, I am a fish, and you are my ocean."
having had a passing familiarity with some of chairman mao's (yup, that chubby chinese guy) literature, i was more than taken aback by the almost direct allusion to one of mao's more arcane pronouncements by this reticent action star. i believed chairman once said “the guerrilla is like a fish in the sea.”
IV -- two words: lo' waist.
V -- just recently, i asked my mother why she never went out with manong tonyo. his family, rich but pedestrian, owned the only abattoir in the island town i grew up in.
i remember him leading this rowdy posse, all of them dressed similarly. the low-waisted jeans with a leather belt, a collared plain shirt (never a t-shirt) and pointy leather boots.
i asked my mother was it because he was most likely a pedophile? my other image of manong tonyo was this: always with a young boy in tow wherever he went around then. my mother spent some precious minutes of pan pacific long distance call just laughing at my suggestion.
in her best sunday school teacher sing song voice, mama explained that manong tonyo only hired these young boys to always accompany him to complete the fpj look that he was after.
i didn't get mom's explanation until i saw an fpj film with the cute pre-pubescent jay ilagan as his co-starrer. but then again, manong tonyo must have had some fun with these boys as well. or else, mom would have hooked up with him then in a heartbeat.
VI -- and then cable tv happened. and then i saw those archival fpj movies. there was there was this lino brocka disappointment (santiago) where fpj played a guilt-racked guerrilla fighter.
but one i can still quite remember was this feature where he stretched the limits of cinematic fictional license by becoming a muslim warrior (perlas ng silangan).
my new york friend, who grew up in mindanao, claimed that because of this movie, fpj had the undying fealty of the muslim voting populace. in the most recent presidential elections, the predominantly muslim areas down south went red for bush, i mean, for fpj.
talk about lasting and potent presidential campaign admaking in the land of the gullible. carl rove must have studied under fpj for quite a profitable period of time.
VII - when i started to date men, this university professor who ushered me out of the closet told me that it's all in the kiss. according to his famed boyfriend taxonomy 101, one can tell which one's the right guy by the way he kisses you.
by this test, an fpj guy would never be my boyfriend. that if he would give me the time of day to begin with.
i most probably would have gone out with with a tony ferrer (yup, that lame pinoy version of double 007) kind of guy. he would literally suck the face of the girl and shamelessly bask in the warm glow of the girl's chagrin at being kissed by a pompadoured man.
even if i personally detest erap (yup, that thieving ex president), i would have gone out with his type as well but never the fpj type. in the movies, erap would kiss the girl and then wink at the audience almost like the shakespearean richard III.
the forever reticent fpj type of dude would never be caught dead expressing his love for you by blurting out those three precious words. he just sat there like a moron even if takes a year, he's still going to be there -- silent, even morose at times.
but at any moment he deemed right, he would lift the girl off the ground and kissed her hard but never moving his lips. a dry oral hump indeed. who needs that?
VIII - my first newspaper job back in manila had me subalterning for this gruff city editor of a broadsheet better known as that one with a celebrity editor in chief. this editor in chief moonlights as a host of this low rating but ad heavy late night tv gabfest.
all news story for this city editor can be juiced down to basic class conflicts, the fight between good and evil, freedom against bondage.
our paper was never known for its social advocacies. in fact, in the industry, we were jokingly referred to as the society paper with a front page news section.
but despite this fact, this city editor would always make it known to me that to be the good journalist that i was ostensibly trying to become then, one should know when to do battle for that good fight, whatever that meant to him.
and he would quote fpj movie lines, the way a revival pastor would quote scriptural verses, whenever he felt the urge to proselytize me and the other cub reporters.
his favorite was "kapag puno na ang salop, kailangan kalusin."
perhps, there must have been more fpj movie folk wisdown that he would have quoted although the spaced out cub desk editor that i was, i'm sure i had them slink over my head.
this city editor died the very same year i decided to come work as a nurse here in new york. had he known me abandoning the print trade to clean up some white asses here in the land of milk and honey, he would have looked me in the eye, and without flinching, would have asked me "would fpj be doing that kind of shit you're doing now?" probably not, sir.
IX - most manila film critics claim fpj's best film was alamat (legend, 1972). have never seen the film and, i guess, most of my generation either. explains perhaps why the young people's voting bloc never went to fpj during the last presidential election.
here's a piece of recent electoral legend. during the heat of the elections, should you have googled the word "bangungut ng bayan" (national nightmare)what comes first in the results list was the fpj for president website. stuff of legend, you say? this ain't no ripley's.
X - talk about lore. here's one more. after my stint in that celebrity broadsheet, i had the misfortune of being an entertainment editor of a spunky little taglish tabloid that finally had its end run two years ago.
anyway, in one of those interminable dull showbiz gatherings i am forced to attend--must have been the birthday party of a big film studio boss--guess who made a surprise show?
as the party wore on, fpj was patently drunk. slurring his sentences and at one time, dismissing his lovely wife curtly in front of so many people.
so, i asked a senior movie scribe beside me if this is quite a normal thing for fpj, i mean his not being so good at holding his drink. the movie columnist nodded.
and then he added, "you're not going to write this in your paper, are you? and i asked him why not? "because he's da king."
the next day at the office, i wrote about how this sexy starlet was seen with another female personality making out inside her new sports utility vehicle in a not so patronized shopping mall's parking lot.
the first fpj movies i saw were those shown as the other film in a double bill(the other film being the soft porn ones) in an off campus rundown theater of this genteel university town south of manila. this was when i went to this protestant university in the late 80's.
batas sa aking kamay (law in my hands, 1987) was it.
oh the pun i had fun telling people as to the movie's title and the thing i most likely did with my hands while watching the soft porn one.
II -- in a fit of trivial pursuit, my roommate regaled me with his pop culture acumen by claiming that fpj was also referred to as da king. the royal ambition of the moniker ticked off something Macbethian inside me.
college was when i was knee deep into progressive causes. the sobriquet was as anachronistic and paternalistic as it could get for me then. and maybe now, as well.
III -- the first fpj movie that somehow got to me was this celso ad castillo feature(asedillo). i must have seen this in one of those ubiquitous teach ins during my college salad days.
in a pivotal scene, fpj (playing a southern tagalog rebel leader) enters a town and everyone slams their windows shut on him.
in his trademark rasp, he then addresses the cowed townfolk, "huwag ninyo akong talikuran, ako ay isda, kayo ang aking dagat. (don’t turn your backs on me, I am a fish, and you are my ocean."
having had a passing familiarity with some of chairman mao's (yup, that chubby chinese guy) literature, i was more than taken aback by the almost direct allusion to one of mao's more arcane pronouncements by this reticent action star. i believed chairman once said “the guerrilla is like a fish in the sea.”
IV -- two words: lo' waist.
V -- just recently, i asked my mother why she never went out with manong tonyo. his family, rich but pedestrian, owned the only abattoir in the island town i grew up in.
i remember him leading this rowdy posse, all of them dressed similarly. the low-waisted jeans with a leather belt, a collared plain shirt (never a t-shirt) and pointy leather boots.
i asked my mother was it because he was most likely a pedophile? my other image of manong tonyo was this: always with a young boy in tow wherever he went around then. my mother spent some precious minutes of pan pacific long distance call just laughing at my suggestion.
in her best sunday school teacher sing song voice, mama explained that manong tonyo only hired these young boys to always accompany him to complete the fpj look that he was after.
i didn't get mom's explanation until i saw an fpj film with the cute pre-pubescent jay ilagan as his co-starrer. but then again, manong tonyo must have had some fun with these boys as well. or else, mom would have hooked up with him then in a heartbeat.
VI -- and then cable tv happened. and then i saw those archival fpj movies. there was there was this lino brocka disappointment (santiago) where fpj played a guilt-racked guerrilla fighter.
but one i can still quite remember was this feature where he stretched the limits of cinematic fictional license by becoming a muslim warrior (perlas ng silangan).
my new york friend, who grew up in mindanao, claimed that because of this movie, fpj had the undying fealty of the muslim voting populace. in the most recent presidential elections, the predominantly muslim areas down south went red for bush, i mean, for fpj.
talk about lasting and potent presidential campaign admaking in the land of the gullible. carl rove must have studied under fpj for quite a profitable period of time.
VII - when i started to date men, this university professor who ushered me out of the closet told me that it's all in the kiss. according to his famed boyfriend taxonomy 101, one can tell which one's the right guy by the way he kisses you.
by this test, an fpj guy would never be my boyfriend. that if he would give me the time of day to begin with.
i most probably would have gone out with with a tony ferrer (yup, that lame pinoy version of double 007) kind of guy. he would literally suck the face of the girl and shamelessly bask in the warm glow of the girl's chagrin at being kissed by a pompadoured man.
even if i personally detest erap (yup, that thieving ex president), i would have gone out with his type as well but never the fpj type. in the movies, erap would kiss the girl and then wink at the audience almost like the shakespearean richard III.
the forever reticent fpj type of dude would never be caught dead expressing his love for you by blurting out those three precious words. he just sat there like a moron even if takes a year, he's still going to be there -- silent, even morose at times.
but at any moment he deemed right, he would lift the girl off the ground and kissed her hard but never moving his lips. a dry oral hump indeed. who needs that?
VIII - my first newspaper job back in manila had me subalterning for this gruff city editor of a broadsheet better known as that one with a celebrity editor in chief. this editor in chief moonlights as a host of this low rating but ad heavy late night tv gabfest.
all news story for this city editor can be juiced down to basic class conflicts, the fight between good and evil, freedom against bondage.
our paper was never known for its social advocacies. in fact, in the industry, we were jokingly referred to as the society paper with a front page news section.
but despite this fact, this city editor would always make it known to me that to be the good journalist that i was ostensibly trying to become then, one should know when to do battle for that good fight, whatever that meant to him.
and he would quote fpj movie lines, the way a revival pastor would quote scriptural verses, whenever he felt the urge to proselytize me and the other cub reporters.
his favorite was "kapag puno na ang salop, kailangan kalusin."
perhps, there must have been more fpj movie folk wisdown that he would have quoted although the spaced out cub desk editor that i was, i'm sure i had them slink over my head.
this city editor died the very same year i decided to come work as a nurse here in new york. had he known me abandoning the print trade to clean up some white asses here in the land of milk and honey, he would have looked me in the eye, and without flinching, would have asked me "would fpj be doing that kind of shit you're doing now?" probably not, sir.
IX - most manila film critics claim fpj's best film was alamat (legend, 1972). have never seen the film and, i guess, most of my generation either. explains perhaps why the young people's voting bloc never went to fpj during the last presidential election.
here's a piece of recent electoral legend. during the heat of the elections, should you have googled the word "bangungut ng bayan" (national nightmare)what comes first in the results list was the fpj for president website. stuff of legend, you say? this ain't no ripley's.
X - talk about lore. here's one more. after my stint in that celebrity broadsheet, i had the misfortune of being an entertainment editor of a spunky little taglish tabloid that finally had its end run two years ago.
anyway, in one of those interminable dull showbiz gatherings i am forced to attend--must have been the birthday party of a big film studio boss--guess who made a surprise show?
as the party wore on, fpj was patently drunk. slurring his sentences and at one time, dismissing his lovely wife curtly in front of so many people.
so, i asked a senior movie scribe beside me if this is quite a normal thing for fpj, i mean his not being so good at holding his drink. the movie columnist nodded.
and then he added, "you're not going to write this in your paper, are you? and i asked him why not? "because he's da king."
the next day at the office, i wrote about how this sexy starlet was seen with another female personality making out inside her new sports utility vehicle in a not so patronized shopping mall's parking lot.
Saturday, December 18, 2004
Friday, December 17, 2004
settling in
new york
the empire state building. yes, that quintessential of all new york landmarks. this is where my income tax preparer holds office. (go figure why his professional fees are astronomical?) and for the past three years now, every nasty tax season, i have been forced to pay him a not so cordial visit to his 42nd floor suite.
but until now, i have yet to ride up all the way to this iconic building's viewing deck. in fact, during the heat of tax season (which is smack right in the middle of the equally nasty northeastern winter) my tax preparer hands out complimentary viewing tickets to this building's viewing deck. this is his sly way of defusing frequent client temper eruptions. the waiting time in his office is epic. up to half a day. yes, that would be ten to twelve hours, virginia.
and yet, i have been such a notorious holdout. in fact, i can still show you, with glee and gloating, the unused ticket from last year. it is still in the pocket of my musty pea coat lumbering in my closet. that reminds me. dry cleaners tomorrow.
when i went back home recently, one of my friends, ever the internet news savvy guy (read: helplessly nerd), asked me whether i have finally huffed and puffed all the way to the top of lady liberty now that homeland security has finally deemed it safe to open her innards to the slew of tourists again. ditto. same answer as the above.
i have been busting my ass out in this town for almost half a decade now and yet the right reasons to throw myself together with the other tourists in kilometric queues just to see these emblematic landmarks still has to dawn on me. well, you may call me a snob and a half and somehow i can find deep inside me reasons not to go ghetto on ya'll, sista.
everyone, locals or transients, has their own new york postcard image. for most out of towners, it's the troika of empire state, lady liberty and broadway.
for me though, ever raised in gritty cop tv dramas (which are incidentally shot in fake sets in sunny los angeles), i've always associated new york with narrow streets, pre-war gloomy walk ups and fast talking intellectuals, pseudo or the genuine upper west side ilks.
there's no wonder here why one of the very first few landmarks i've hauled my ass to after settling into this town is this fiercely independent bookstore down union square, the strand.
if you are into sleek and spit shiny chain bookstores that offer more square footage for its much more lucrative cafes than actual bookshelves, the strand is not your cup of whatever java or chai. this is a plucky bookstore and one of those few left in this town solid enough to be called an authentic new york institution without sounding phony, postcard phony.
it's selling point, well aside from cheap ass prices, is that somehow it can miraculously offer 18 miles of used, new, out of print and rare books, despite the cramp, not to mention funky smelling, quarters it occupies down lower broadway.
as i've said, no coffee bar here. nor does it boast of the most helpful of staff. oh, the infamous snooty staff of strand, mostly m.a. students whose main goal in their young lives so far in this world is to show you how really unknowledgeable--make that ignorant--you are of what's coolest (i'm not even sure this adjective is cool enough for them, either) in today's publishing world. oh, no one's more hip and intelligent than they are and you better believe that. but you don't go to strand for service or coffee. you go to strand because you love books, great ones that are sold cheap.
ten dollars. that's how fiddling a price i paid for this thick dictionary, still a pristine copy of the very same red leather bound, gilt edged dictionary my fiercely pentecostal protestant mother gave me for my tenth birthday back in the island of bantayan, in cebu, philippines.
barangay binaobao, bantayan island, cebu, philippines
from the old unpainted house, we carted most of our things in huge boxes. hope, bowling green, but mostly marlboro boxes. sweet smelling boxes. mama begged for them from manang karing's mom and pop store.
mama though despised manang karing. she told everybody that bought something from her store that mama was going out with tito fred, manang inday's husband.
mama decided we move in to our new yellow house before the big rain. manang lucing, our laundrywoman who smelled like the boxes, told mama earlier that day that the air smelled like lent already. it was still february.
on the first night in our new house, the rain pelted our thatched roof. the raindrops were as loud as beetles tumbling down the kamachile tree into the roof of our previous house during last year's monsoon.
the morning after, we had a brown water lagoon inside our new house. it filled up the cantilevered area in the living room. some three upturned beetles, still alive, were lounging upon it.
she has not whipped up breakfast yet but mama decided that we unpack the boxes immediately. she started opening the ones with their bottoms wallowing in the brown pool. the sides of these boxes had growing trees of wetness.
in our new house, three rungs of wooden shelves jutted out from the wall under the stairs. the previous tenant of the house had these shelves built for their own sari-sari store. mama decided we would dry some of our wet clothes and books there for the time being.
at the end of the topmost rung, where it was closest to the landing of the first tier of stairs, was a warped image of a byzantine looking woman with a bleeding heart.
mama was not sure whether it was glued there by rubber cement or just got stuck there by the rain. mama climbed toward the image, stepped on the unopened boxes, and started to gouge it out with her short, unmanicured nails. each time she was succesful, an indecently large part of the icon would tear, disfiguring the serene woman's face.
instead of unpacking first the wetter boxes, mother told me instead to open the tallest and driest of all the boxes. it was one of the three that held all our books. she asked me for the squat bibles.
she immediately plunked them in front of the drenched image. but the halo of the woman with two puny angels, each carrying bizarre loads, around her still peered from behind the thick bibles.
mama jumped down from her perch and dug for herself the red dictionary inside the box. she leapt back up, stepping on the now mushy, unopened boxes and slammed the dictionary against the icon. the dictionary's gilt edge glistered and for a moment made me wince.
beside it, she stacked our bibles, the one in our dialect, below the three different english translations. all four of them buried any trace of the woman's saintly aura.
throughout grades five and six, while we were still in that yellow house, i never remembered reading that dictionary. nor any of our bibles.
the empire state building. yes, that quintessential of all new york landmarks. this is where my income tax preparer holds office. (go figure why his professional fees are astronomical?) and for the past three years now, every nasty tax season, i have been forced to pay him a not so cordial visit to his 42nd floor suite.
but until now, i have yet to ride up all the way to this iconic building's viewing deck. in fact, during the heat of tax season (which is smack right in the middle of the equally nasty northeastern winter) my tax preparer hands out complimentary viewing tickets to this building's viewing deck. this is his sly way of defusing frequent client temper eruptions. the waiting time in his office is epic. up to half a day. yes, that would be ten to twelve hours, virginia.
and yet, i have been such a notorious holdout. in fact, i can still show you, with glee and gloating, the unused ticket from last year. it is still in the pocket of my musty pea coat lumbering in my closet. that reminds me. dry cleaners tomorrow.
when i went back home recently, one of my friends, ever the internet news savvy guy (read: helplessly nerd), asked me whether i have finally huffed and puffed all the way to the top of lady liberty now that homeland security has finally deemed it safe to open her innards to the slew of tourists again. ditto. same answer as the above.
i have been busting my ass out in this town for almost half a decade now and yet the right reasons to throw myself together with the other tourists in kilometric queues just to see these emblematic landmarks still has to dawn on me. well, you may call me a snob and a half and somehow i can find deep inside me reasons not to go ghetto on ya'll, sista.
everyone, locals or transients, has their own new york postcard image. for most out of towners, it's the troika of empire state, lady liberty and broadway.
for me though, ever raised in gritty cop tv dramas (which are incidentally shot in fake sets in sunny los angeles), i've always associated new york with narrow streets, pre-war gloomy walk ups and fast talking intellectuals, pseudo or the genuine upper west side ilks.
there's no wonder here why one of the very first few landmarks i've hauled my ass to after settling into this town is this fiercely independent bookstore down union square, the strand.
if you are into sleek and spit shiny chain bookstores that offer more square footage for its much more lucrative cafes than actual bookshelves, the strand is not your cup of whatever java or chai. this is a plucky bookstore and one of those few left in this town solid enough to be called an authentic new york institution without sounding phony, postcard phony.
it's selling point, well aside from cheap ass prices, is that somehow it can miraculously offer 18 miles of used, new, out of print and rare books, despite the cramp, not to mention funky smelling, quarters it occupies down lower broadway.
as i've said, no coffee bar here. nor does it boast of the most helpful of staff. oh, the infamous snooty staff of strand, mostly m.a. students whose main goal in their young lives so far in this world is to show you how really unknowledgeable--make that ignorant--you are of what's coolest (i'm not even sure this adjective is cool enough for them, either) in today's publishing world. oh, no one's more hip and intelligent than they are and you better believe that. but you don't go to strand for service or coffee. you go to strand because you love books, great ones that are sold cheap.
ten dollars. that's how fiddling a price i paid for this thick dictionary, still a pristine copy of the very same red leather bound, gilt edged dictionary my fiercely pentecostal protestant mother gave me for my tenth birthday back in the island of bantayan, in cebu, philippines.
barangay binaobao, bantayan island, cebu, philippines
from the old unpainted house, we carted most of our things in huge boxes. hope, bowling green, but mostly marlboro boxes. sweet smelling boxes. mama begged for them from manang karing's mom and pop store.
mama though despised manang karing. she told everybody that bought something from her store that mama was going out with tito fred, manang inday's husband.
mama decided we move in to our new yellow house before the big rain. manang lucing, our laundrywoman who smelled like the boxes, told mama earlier that day that the air smelled like lent already. it was still february.
on the first night in our new house, the rain pelted our thatched roof. the raindrops were as loud as beetles tumbling down the kamachile tree into the roof of our previous house during last year's monsoon.
the morning after, we had a brown water lagoon inside our new house. it filled up the cantilevered area in the living room. some three upturned beetles, still alive, were lounging upon it.
she has not whipped up breakfast yet but mama decided that we unpack the boxes immediately. she started opening the ones with their bottoms wallowing in the brown pool. the sides of these boxes had growing trees of wetness.
in our new house, three rungs of wooden shelves jutted out from the wall under the stairs. the previous tenant of the house had these shelves built for their own sari-sari store. mama decided we would dry some of our wet clothes and books there for the time being.
at the end of the topmost rung, where it was closest to the landing of the first tier of stairs, was a warped image of a byzantine looking woman with a bleeding heart.
mama was not sure whether it was glued there by rubber cement or just got stuck there by the rain. mama climbed toward the image, stepped on the unopened boxes, and started to gouge it out with her short, unmanicured nails. each time she was succesful, an indecently large part of the icon would tear, disfiguring the serene woman's face.
instead of unpacking first the wetter boxes, mother told me instead to open the tallest and driest of all the boxes. it was one of the three that held all our books. she asked me for the squat bibles.
she immediately plunked them in front of the drenched image. but the halo of the woman with two puny angels, each carrying bizarre loads, around her still peered from behind the thick bibles.
mama jumped down from her perch and dug for herself the red dictionary inside the box. she leapt back up, stepping on the now mushy, unopened boxes and slammed the dictionary against the icon. the dictionary's gilt edge glistered and for a moment made me wince.
beside it, she stacked our bibles, the one in our dialect, below the three different english translations. all four of them buried any trace of the woman's saintly aura.
throughout grades five and six, while we were still in that yellow house, i never remembered reading that dictionary. nor any of our bibles.
Thursday, December 16, 2004
there's a certain slant of light
THERE’S a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
walking around
it so happens i am sick of being a man.
and it happens that i walk into tailorshops and movie houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.
the smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse sobs.
the only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.
the only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,
no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.
it so happens that I am sick of my feet
and my nails and my hair and my shadow.
it so happens I am sick of being a man.
still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
it would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died of the cold.
i don't want to go on being a root in the dark,
insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
taking in and thinking, eating every day.
i don't want so much misery.
i don't want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief.
that's why Monday, when it sees me coming
with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night.
and it pushes me into certain corners,
into some moist houses, into hospitals where the bones fly out the window,
into shoeshops that smell like vinegar,
and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.
there are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines
hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,
and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors that ought to have wept from shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords.
i stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes,
my rage, forgetting everything,
i walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops,
and courtyards with washing hanging from the line:
underwear, towels and shirts from which slow dirty tears are falling.
translated by robert bly
--- pablo neruda
"don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."--- holden caufield
i don't know why we still fetishize this very juvenile obsession.we,meaning this g&d (gloom and doom, i.e.) friend of mine back in manila and, of course, the equally g&d (grim and determined, i.e.) personality of mine.
and this obsession? you will know later.
some really brutal facts first. we are so (wince!)into our thirties already yet both of us still have not been able to caulk this gaping personality flaw inside ourselves that still feel very much adolescent, breaking-out-zits adolescent. that is, we almost always never make it anymore to the second date with whomever we went out in the first place.
so we get into this game of depressing one-upmanship. this usually occurs whenever he gets into one of his all too frequent drinking spells (way to go, Colt 45 whore!) and whenever i feel this urgent need to just talk the shit out of someone, which is practically all the time.
after dispensing with pleasantries, we begin by deciding who starts to tell the most depressing story. almost always, these are about our failed attempts to connect meaningfully with another homo sapien.
in our most recent game,i volunteered to first spill my guts out. and into the first paragraphs of my narrative there was no way, i felt, that this bitch would top my story.
________
i did not tell my friend this because i know he would go ballistic on me but when i recently went home, i saw my old boyfriend. he was the one who used to play ball for a top seeded UAAP basketball team.
oh and i guess this is salient to the story. he was the one boyfriend of mine who, at several times in our relationship--and this was kind of frequent, i may add--would lay a hand on me, you know, beat me up, whoop my ass (oh and that, too) during his inexplicable rages--which i may add, too, was frequent.
it did not even take 48 hours after my plane landed in manila that i was able to trace him and call him again in his new cell phone. intrepid happens to be my middle name. at least for the purposes of this story. and we decided to hook up again.
so we went to this straight bar. he can't be seen in a dyed in the wool gay bar because he is working his way up in the second tier professional basketball league back in manila.
and just like in old college days, mr. man oh-i'm-so-hot cager drank one too many cocktails. happy consequence, he became horny. unhappy result, he became verbally abusive again. like this would deter me.
end of scene: a plush bed in a three star hotel in the heart of Malate. him,feigning sleep, me, unable to just shut the fuck up.
me: so when are you going to marry her? (meaning his college girlfriend?)
cager: mmm....can we not just talk about it?
me: why not?
cager: (tosses in bed and faces me, still with eyes closed.) do you still smoke?
me: not anymore. i don't take things that are bad for me anymore.
cager: aww.
me: so when is the wedding? i know they always say december is an ominous month to marry but no. a feng shui expert i know back in new york told me that it ain't so.
cager: you know why we were never good together?
me: could you invite me? to your wedding? i promise i would behave.
cager: because you are just too clingy.
he left me at the hotel room insisting that i don't call him again, ever. i said yes. both of us knew i lied. again.
________
it was my friend's turn.
he met another newspaper man two weeks ago. works for a competing broadsheet. discrete and most importantly was into him. which was always a good thing.
so they both decided to go for the dreaded first date. since the guy claims he is no averse to drinking cheap pilsen, they decided to go to this seedy along-the-road ihawan. so far, so good.
apparently the guy can hold his drink, too (Red Horse), which makes my friend really horny now. he is so into guys who have their way with alcohol.
so my friend started being comfortable with this guy, really comfortable, like housedress comfortable. he told him about his previous asshole of a boyfriend, everything about him, from his pseudo halitosis to persistently sweaty armpits.
and this new guy was soaking up my friend's story. so far, so definitely good.
now when my friend was about to close the deal, the guy, who claimed he was with the malacanang press corps, said he had to cover the president early the next day.
my quitely-approaching-the-desperate-zone friend, not wanting to let a good thing pass, pressed on.
my friend: so can i call you?
reporter: no, i'll call you.
my friend: when?
reporter: soon.
end of the night.
three days passed since their first date, still no call from mr. newspaper man. so on the fourth night, my friend, being the bagong-millennium-maria-clara bading that he is, took the initiative and called the guy. the guy's cell phone was perpetually unattended.
this drove him to drink a little bit harder that night. which inevitably made him hornier, if that is possible at all. which drove him to a cruisy park in quezon city just to blow off some steam, so to speak.
end of scene: the cops came to round up the gays cruising the park and my friend, together with a dozen or so freaked out gays, were hauled to the nearest police station.
and guess who was at the station? mr. newspaper man. apparently he was a cub police beat reporter, not the top dog presidential reporter that he claimed to be.
my friend: oh, hi! i called you up but your phone was left unattended.
reporter: oh, you found time to call me?
some four hours later, my friend and the rest of the harassed gay men were released without being charged for this really antedeluvian spanish colonial government era felony called vagrancy. my friend lingered on at the police station to look for the newspaper man. he found him smoking outside.
my friend: so can we go out again?
reporter: i'll call you.
despite the sun being already out when my insomniac friend went home, he miraculously was able to doze off. he, however, was shaken out of his sleep and hangover when his house phone went off.
my friend, thinking it was him calling, jumped out of bed and flew down the stairs toward the living room where their land line phone was.
my friend: hello? hello?
he couldn't hear nothing.
my friend: manang (talking to their house help), is something wrong with our phone?
manang: nothing. it's not our phone ringing, it's the other apartment's.
my friend decided to call in sick that day.and all throughout the day, the only phone that he could hear ringing was that from the next door, never his.
and this obsession? you will know later.
some really brutal facts first. we are so (wince!)into our thirties already yet both of us still have not been able to caulk this gaping personality flaw inside ourselves that still feel very much adolescent, breaking-out-zits adolescent. that is, we almost always never make it anymore to the second date with whomever we went out in the first place.
so we get into this game of depressing one-upmanship. this usually occurs whenever he gets into one of his all too frequent drinking spells (way to go, Colt 45 whore!) and whenever i feel this urgent need to just talk the shit out of someone, which is practically all the time.
after dispensing with pleasantries, we begin by deciding who starts to tell the most depressing story. almost always, these are about our failed attempts to connect meaningfully with another homo sapien.
in our most recent game,i volunteered to first spill my guts out. and into the first paragraphs of my narrative there was no way, i felt, that this bitch would top my story.
________
i did not tell my friend this because i know he would go ballistic on me but when i recently went home, i saw my old boyfriend. he was the one who used to play ball for a top seeded UAAP basketball team.
oh and i guess this is salient to the story. he was the one boyfriend of mine who, at several times in our relationship--and this was kind of frequent, i may add--would lay a hand on me, you know, beat me up, whoop my ass (oh and that, too) during his inexplicable rages--which i may add, too, was frequent.
it did not even take 48 hours after my plane landed in manila that i was able to trace him and call him again in his new cell phone. intrepid happens to be my middle name. at least for the purposes of this story. and we decided to hook up again.
so we went to this straight bar. he can't be seen in a dyed in the wool gay bar because he is working his way up in the second tier professional basketball league back in manila.
and just like in old college days, mr. man oh-i'm-so-hot cager drank one too many cocktails. happy consequence, he became horny. unhappy result, he became verbally abusive again. like this would deter me.
end of scene: a plush bed in a three star hotel in the heart of Malate. him,feigning sleep, me, unable to just shut the fuck up.
me: so when are you going to marry her? (meaning his college girlfriend?)
cager: mmm....can we not just talk about it?
me: why not?
cager: (tosses in bed and faces me, still with eyes closed.) do you still smoke?
me: not anymore. i don't take things that are bad for me anymore.
cager: aww.
me: so when is the wedding? i know they always say december is an ominous month to marry but no. a feng shui expert i know back in new york told me that it ain't so.
cager: you know why we were never good together?
me: could you invite me? to your wedding? i promise i would behave.
cager: because you are just too clingy.
he left me at the hotel room insisting that i don't call him again, ever. i said yes. both of us knew i lied. again.
________
it was my friend's turn.
he met another newspaper man two weeks ago. works for a competing broadsheet. discrete and most importantly was into him. which was always a good thing.
so they both decided to go for the dreaded first date. since the guy claims he is no averse to drinking cheap pilsen, they decided to go to this seedy along-the-road ihawan. so far, so good.
apparently the guy can hold his drink, too (Red Horse), which makes my friend really horny now. he is so into guys who have their way with alcohol.
so my friend started being comfortable with this guy, really comfortable, like housedress comfortable. he told him about his previous asshole of a boyfriend, everything about him, from his pseudo halitosis to persistently sweaty armpits.
and this new guy was soaking up my friend's story. so far, so definitely good.
now when my friend was about to close the deal, the guy, who claimed he was with the malacanang press corps, said he had to cover the president early the next day.
my quitely-approaching-the-desperate-zone friend, not wanting to let a good thing pass, pressed on.
my friend: so can i call you?
reporter: no, i'll call you.
my friend: when?
reporter: soon.
end of the night.
three days passed since their first date, still no call from mr. newspaper man. so on the fourth night, my friend, being the bagong-millennium-maria-clara bading that he is, took the initiative and called the guy. the guy's cell phone was perpetually unattended.
this drove him to drink a little bit harder that night. which inevitably made him hornier, if that is possible at all. which drove him to a cruisy park in quezon city just to blow off some steam, so to speak.
end of scene: the cops came to round up the gays cruising the park and my friend, together with a dozen or so freaked out gays, were hauled to the nearest police station.
and guess who was at the station? mr. newspaper man. apparently he was a cub police beat reporter, not the top dog presidential reporter that he claimed to be.
my friend: oh, hi! i called you up but your phone was left unattended.
reporter: oh, you found time to call me?
some four hours later, my friend and the rest of the harassed gay men were released without being charged for this really antedeluvian spanish colonial government era felony called vagrancy. my friend lingered on at the police station to look for the newspaper man. he found him smoking outside.
my friend: so can we go out again?
reporter: i'll call you.
despite the sun being already out when my insomniac friend went home, he miraculously was able to doze off. he, however, was shaken out of his sleep and hangover when his house phone went off.
my friend, thinking it was him calling, jumped out of bed and flew down the stairs toward the living room where their land line phone was.
my friend: hello? hello?
he couldn't hear nothing.
my friend: manang (talking to their house help), is something wrong with our phone?
manang: nothing. it's not our phone ringing, it's the other apartment's.
my friend decided to call in sick that day.and all throughout the day, the only phone that he could hear ringing was that from the next door, never his.
Monday, December 13, 2004
sonnet 76
why is my verse so barren of new pride?
so far from variation or quick change?
why with the time do I not glance aside
to new-found methods, and to compounds strange?
why write I still all one, ever the same,
and keep invention in a noted weed,
that every word doth almost tell my name,
showing their birth and where they did proceed?
o, know, sweet love, I always write of you,
and you and love are still my argument;
so all my best is dressing old words new,
spending again what is already spent.
for as the sun is daily new and old,
so is my love still telling what is told.
-- william shakespeare
Sunday, December 12, 2004
the peace corps volunteer from wichita, kansas speaks to the mothers of barangay binaobao, bantayan island, cebu
"no single food group meets comprehensively all the nutritional needs of our body. we need all of these food groups. listen, i don't mean we have to have some of that everyday," she points at the scrawny sow, its ribs more apparent than its sagging teats, rummaging on the heap of dry garbage in front of the barangay hall.
"what i'm sayin is that it's important to incorporate all of these food groups into our diets. daily. how are we to do that? say protein. roselyn told me it's fine if the monsoon isn't around yet. your husbands surely can bring home the fish."
she smiles at the picture i am holding up. it is of a fat ham dripping with caramel glaze and topped with plump pineapple rings, one of the many she asks me to show to the mothers as she speaks.
translating her last sentence, i realize i was not able to capture her pun in our dialect. she asks for the other pictures of foreign foods, those i haven't passed on yet to the mothers, and dumps it back to her coarse raffia bag. straining, she then beams widely at the mothers. the freckles, already faint in her unevenly tanned face, almost disappear.
"besides, roselyn also told me that pork and beef are not sold here everyday." "sunday only," i butt in. i don't find it necessary to tell her that beef isn't sold at all at the town market some two hours of brisk walk away from where we were sitting. we only have the opportunity to eat beef here on special occasions, mostly on weddings of those who have worked in Saudi Arabia.
"so what i'm saying is we substitute. we substitute food groups we can't afford with those having the equivalent nutritional values but are readily available from around us. say from your backyards."
"beans," she says. "monggo," i tell the mothers. "i am certain you grow them in your backyard garden. the key here is self-reliance."
she stops talking. i, too. i can not look for a single word equivalent for her last word in our dialect. she pulls out more pictures from her other bag, the dirty canvas tote with a logo of some university in the midwest, and starts showing the mothers pictures of african malnourished children. she says something but i don't bother translating further what she is saying. these mothers should get it. pictures alone.
five mothers, those by the window, continue to stare at the gaunt sow, absorbed. manang talya, the one to my left, asks me, in whispers, if there is milk, powdered milk. i nod looking at the three big, strong boxes occupying more than half of the space of this nipa thatched barangay hall. the bold letters emblazoned on them, usaid, make me want to laugh at my dream five years ago. that dream dragged me into that nursing school in the big city. usaid. makes me laugh still at this only job i can get now after graduation. barangay health worker, barangay binaobao,bantayan island, cebu. usaid. usa. ha.
she passes on more pictures of underfed children to the mothers, some are no longer of african children, some even look like pictures of local kids. manang gloria quickly passes them on to manang lala who passes them on, without looking at them, to this first time pregnant mother i have not visited yet.
the rest of the mothers continue to gawk at the boxes not even bothering to feign listening to her. most of them, i am certain are now dreaming of well nourished pigs, untied, yet no longer rummaging for anything edible in their barren and unfenced backyards. fattened pigs ready to be sold for a fatter price in time for the next month's barangay fiesta.
--- j.e.g.
"what i'm sayin is that it's important to incorporate all of these food groups into our diets. daily. how are we to do that? say protein. roselyn told me it's fine if the monsoon isn't around yet. your husbands surely can bring home the fish."
she smiles at the picture i am holding up. it is of a fat ham dripping with caramel glaze and topped with plump pineapple rings, one of the many she asks me to show to the mothers as she speaks.
translating her last sentence, i realize i was not able to capture her pun in our dialect. she asks for the other pictures of foreign foods, those i haven't passed on yet to the mothers, and dumps it back to her coarse raffia bag. straining, she then beams widely at the mothers. the freckles, already faint in her unevenly tanned face, almost disappear.
"besides, roselyn also told me that pork and beef are not sold here everyday." "sunday only," i butt in. i don't find it necessary to tell her that beef isn't sold at all at the town market some two hours of brisk walk away from where we were sitting. we only have the opportunity to eat beef here on special occasions, mostly on weddings of those who have worked in Saudi Arabia.
"so what i'm saying is we substitute. we substitute food groups we can't afford with those having the equivalent nutritional values but are readily available from around us. say from your backyards."
"beans," she says. "monggo," i tell the mothers. "i am certain you grow them in your backyard garden. the key here is self-reliance."
she stops talking. i, too. i can not look for a single word equivalent for her last word in our dialect. she pulls out more pictures from her other bag, the dirty canvas tote with a logo of some university in the midwest, and starts showing the mothers pictures of african malnourished children. she says something but i don't bother translating further what she is saying. these mothers should get it. pictures alone.
five mothers, those by the window, continue to stare at the gaunt sow, absorbed. manang talya, the one to my left, asks me, in whispers, if there is milk, powdered milk. i nod looking at the three big, strong boxes occupying more than half of the space of this nipa thatched barangay hall. the bold letters emblazoned on them, usaid, make me want to laugh at my dream five years ago. that dream dragged me into that nursing school in the big city. usaid. makes me laugh still at this only job i can get now after graduation. barangay health worker, barangay binaobao,bantayan island, cebu. usaid. usa. ha.
she passes on more pictures of underfed children to the mothers, some are no longer of african children, some even look like pictures of local kids. manang gloria quickly passes them on to manang lala who passes them on, without looking at them, to this first time pregnant mother i have not visited yet.
the rest of the mothers continue to gawk at the boxes not even bothering to feign listening to her. most of them, i am certain are now dreaming of well nourished pigs, untied, yet no longer rummaging for anything edible in their barren and unfenced backyards. fattened pigs ready to be sold for a fatter price in time for the next month's barangay fiesta.
--- j.e.g.
Saturday, December 11, 2004
%20of%20walanasiya.1.jpg)
on leaving some friends at an early hour
give me a golden pen, and let me lean
on heap'd up flowers, in regions clear, and far;
bring me a tablet whiter than a star,
or hand of hymning angel, when 'tis seen
the silver strings of heavenly harp atween:
and let there glide by many a pearly car,
pink robes, and wavy hair, and diamond jar,
and half discovered wings, and glances keen.
the while let music wander round my ears,
and as it reaches each delicious ending,
let me write down a line of glorious tone,
and full of many wonders of the spheres:
for what a height my spirit is contending!
'tis not content so soon to be alone.
-- john keats
deaf maya
"a poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why." -- percy bysshe shelley
________
the world's greatest zoo in the world's greatest city. this is how the bronx zoo bills itself modestly, p.t. barnum modest. and for impressionable immigrants, comme moi, who inhabit the environs three, no, four blocks around this sprawling forest of a complex, one can not help but be sucked in to this hype vortex.
i got my first apartment in this area during what east coast society columnists would have described perhaps as a gorgeous late spring-early summer weekend. people from the hood were out on the streets, uncharacteristically smiley and wont to strike up unprovoked conversations.
but then, i have probably wasted many a gloriously splendid day just staring at the animals, times i could have productively employed initiating valid human contacts.
from the thirty or so animal exhibits, indoor or outdoor, i try to have no particular favorite, although starting last year, i have shunned the world of birds pavilion.
________
i have always been drawn to the world of birds pavilion ever since i started going to the bronx zoo. irresistible bird songs, dazzling displays of plumage, and the most gorgeous intern/guest greeter in the entire zoo.
he is one of those ethnically ambiguous stunning guys. to me, he looked like he was sired by a dark skinned hunky puerto rican papi from a voluptuous west indian hot mama. the greenest of taut olive skin, the most piercing brown-green eyes, a very proud castillian nose, the works.
oh, did i mention that this guy was absolutely ravishing?
so there it was, the bashful mortal gay Pinoy trying so hard to make contact with the olympian latino adonis.
what to do, what to do? pitiful ruse: come up to the guy and ask any question. about what? about birds, perhaps? genius. great idea.
moi: hi, how's it going?
god: it's aight.
moi: (sigh!)
god: can i help you?
moi: (in more ways than one) hi, could you tell me if the national bird of my country. i mean, i come from the philippines. um, could you tell me if our national bird, we call it maya, is it represented here? i mean do you have mayas here in this pavilion?
god: i'm sorry but if you're from the philippines, then your national bird would be the monkey-eating eagle or simply the philippine eagle.
moi: (blush) oh, thank you.
nothing else to do but fly to the nearest exit. fly, fly away, sister, fly.
________
this was like two or three months before my immigrant visa was approved.
i decided to do my friend here in new york a favor. i agreed to house sit his newly built mansion on a hill in a bucolic northern mindanao town.
so from frenetic manila, i flew to what i thought would be an idyllic month of literary pursuit. i reckon, this would have been the most opportune time to finally sharpen those juvenile poems that two years ago i have had the temerity to submit to the university of the philippines national writers workshop.
end of story, the american consulate approved my visa uncharacteristically early, my poems stayed sophomoric and I was inducted into this cabal of local gay men, totally screaming and could not care less about it, whose sole purpose in their daily existence was this unrelenting pursuit of the best fuck, ever. well, at least for any given night.
was not really into the local guys. always felt slightly pedophilic whenever i was with any one of them, even the avowed mature ones. but there was this guy who, for all the most puzzling reasons, i was drawn to.
i have always been partial to lanky men, the ones whom you could reasonably suspect to have had some serious bout of primary complex (read: adolescent tb). but this one was chubby and had some ghastly sartorial taste.
it turned out, i was not the only one, as well, to have issues with this boy. my newly found best friend was trying his very best to dissuade me from hooking up with this portly boy.
"but why?" i asked this parlorista friend of mine. "mayang bungol man na siya, (he is a deaf maya)" he said.
a deaf maya? this is the gang's code name for a closet case.
i persisted and asked why would they call them this. "because they are the types who refuse to hear the true song of their heart," this manicure and pedicure gay person said this like it was the most banal thing in the world to say.
and then just like that. then and there, i have decided i can never be the poet i have always deluded myself to be. i can never come up with a metaphor as soaring as this one.
________
the world's greatest zoo in the world's greatest city. this is how the bronx zoo bills itself modestly, p.t. barnum modest. and for impressionable immigrants, comme moi, who inhabit the environs three, no, four blocks around this sprawling forest of a complex, one can not help but be sucked in to this hype vortex.
i got my first apartment in this area during what east coast society columnists would have described perhaps as a gorgeous late spring-early summer weekend. people from the hood were out on the streets, uncharacteristically smiley and wont to strike up unprovoked conversations.
but then, i have probably wasted many a gloriously splendid day just staring at the animals, times i could have productively employed initiating valid human contacts.
from the thirty or so animal exhibits, indoor or outdoor, i try to have no particular favorite, although starting last year, i have shunned the world of birds pavilion.
________
i have always been drawn to the world of birds pavilion ever since i started going to the bronx zoo. irresistible bird songs, dazzling displays of plumage, and the most gorgeous intern/guest greeter in the entire zoo.
he is one of those ethnically ambiguous stunning guys. to me, he looked like he was sired by a dark skinned hunky puerto rican papi from a voluptuous west indian hot mama. the greenest of taut olive skin, the most piercing brown-green eyes, a very proud castillian nose, the works.
oh, did i mention that this guy was absolutely ravishing?
so there it was, the bashful mortal gay Pinoy trying so hard to make contact with the olympian latino adonis.
what to do, what to do? pitiful ruse: come up to the guy and ask any question. about what? about birds, perhaps? genius. great idea.
moi: hi, how's it going?
god: it's aight.
moi: (sigh!)
god: can i help you?
moi: (in more ways than one) hi, could you tell me if the national bird of my country. i mean, i come from the philippines. um, could you tell me if our national bird, we call it maya, is it represented here? i mean do you have mayas here in this pavilion?
god: i'm sorry but if you're from the philippines, then your national bird would be the monkey-eating eagle or simply the philippine eagle.
moi: (blush) oh, thank you.
nothing else to do but fly to the nearest exit. fly, fly away, sister, fly.
________
this was like two or three months before my immigrant visa was approved.
i decided to do my friend here in new york a favor. i agreed to house sit his newly built mansion on a hill in a bucolic northern mindanao town.
so from frenetic manila, i flew to what i thought would be an idyllic month of literary pursuit. i reckon, this would have been the most opportune time to finally sharpen those juvenile poems that two years ago i have had the temerity to submit to the university of the philippines national writers workshop.
end of story, the american consulate approved my visa uncharacteristically early, my poems stayed sophomoric and I was inducted into this cabal of local gay men, totally screaming and could not care less about it, whose sole purpose in their daily existence was this unrelenting pursuit of the best fuck, ever. well, at least for any given night.
was not really into the local guys. always felt slightly pedophilic whenever i was with any one of them, even the avowed mature ones. but there was this guy who, for all the most puzzling reasons, i was drawn to.
i have always been partial to lanky men, the ones whom you could reasonably suspect to have had some serious bout of primary complex (read: adolescent tb). but this one was chubby and had some ghastly sartorial taste.
it turned out, i was not the only one, as well, to have issues with this boy. my newly found best friend was trying his very best to dissuade me from hooking up with this portly boy.
"but why?" i asked this parlorista friend of mine. "mayang bungol man na siya, (he is a deaf maya)" he said.
a deaf maya? this is the gang's code name for a closet case.
i persisted and asked why would they call them this. "because they are the types who refuse to hear the true song of their heart," this manicure and pedicure gay person said this like it was the most banal thing in the world to say.
and then just like that. then and there, i have decided i can never be the poet i have always deluded myself to be. i can never come up with a metaphor as soaring as this one.
Thursday, December 09, 2004
Wednesday, December 08, 2004
Monday, December 06, 2004
nessun dorma, nessun dorma
this is one of the more despicable facets of living in a city inundated with high art options. making decisions which one to patronize can be morbidly paralyzing.
case in point: the current season at the met (i.e. metropolitan opera) is already on its third month and yet i have to decide which production i must go to. unlike those old rich upper east siders, a met season pass is way out of my league. there, i've said it and strangely enough, i am no longer embarrassed about it now that i've blurted it out.
odds are i am going to be drawn again to this puccini warhorse, turandot (which will have its season premiere next year yet). i am not about to apologize for my own predilection for the melodramatic puccinis--la boheme, et.al.. the more snooty new york opera aficionados only have disdain for the melody mired body of works of this italian maestro. oh, you should hear what they say about his saccharine arias.
i do enjoy my wagner sometimes although i confess, i have yet to see the entire ring cycle. (there's a decent set of wagnerian offerings in the current season, incidentally.) but seeing something asianey staged at the decidedly occidental and imperial met gives me ample resolve to bundle up and brave the frigid east coast winter just to be dizzy for about two hours or so from my seat way up at the met's vertiginous fourth ring. this is met's nose bleeder section.
--------
beijing, legendary times. this is turandot's mise-en-scene. and turandot is the man-hating princess who is being hawked in marriage by her father to anyone, royal pedigree preferable but not required, who can answer three riddles. death is the consequence for the witless suitor who can not guess all three correctly.
the long and short of it anyway is that the tenor part, prince calàf, correctly answers the riddles much to the consternation of the princess. characteristically, turandot begs her father not to abandon her to a stranger. the love struck calàf generously offers turandot a riddle of his own: if she can learn his name by dawn, he will forfeit his life.
on pain of death, no one in the forbidden city shall sleep until turandot learns the victorious prince's name. thus the title of the opportunity aria of the prince, the now very familiar nessun dorma.
"nessun dorma, nessun dorma." no one sleeps, no one sleeps.
the aria crawls to a start almost like the way a dirge should initially be sung, tentatively, gingerly. but then the prince, as the song soars, gets to feel like rumplestiltskin, so smug that no would know his secret (i.e. his name). he then gathers all the air in his chest and howls in victory at the end.
"vincero! vincero!" i shall win! i shall win!
----------
there is no doubt in my mind that he is already dead tired of my whining. this is my friend who edits the online edition of one of the leading english broadsheets in manila. he has this very unoriginal way of telling me to grow up. he just brushes off my instant messages.
ever since i came back to the east coast, there never was any conversation we had--phone or im--that didn't include me complaining about how i still got the blues from totally missing the roaring night life of manila.
"but you live in new fucking york city," my friend would remind me over and over in his best impression of joe pesci.
"yeah, yeah, yeah. pero iba talaga diyan." i could already hear my voice, tinny and downright annoying.
i know, i know. the kander/ebb anthem, the one that liza can probably belt even in her drunken stupor, proclaims that i am back living in a the city that never sleeps. but had these two jewish upper west siders spent some serious r & r in manila, they would sing a different tune, to speak of.
case in point: after ten at night, there is not a single food store that dares to open in our neck of the woods. the closest 24-hour diner in this bronx area i am holed in is a six dollar cab ride away. back in manila, even the family restaurant mcdonalds go on 24 hour red eye operations. top that new york.
nothing says crazyroaringsexycool night life (and blisteringbringyourownairconditioner day scene) like 12 million fiesta crazy people sardine packed in one balmy city by the bay.
i guess this one belongs to the list of apocryphal yogiberrisms. but many swore to have heard him say that in new york "it gets late early out (t)here." sounds like a classic yogi berra quote, way up there with "nobody goes there anymore because it's too crowded."
"maraming beses na kitang nilayasan...." still remember this 70's song? there's no shame in singing along. we're not called the karaoke nation for nothing. just follow the jumping ball. "manila, manila, i keep coming back to manila."
case in point: the current season at the met (i.e. metropolitan opera) is already on its third month and yet i have to decide which production i must go to. unlike those old rich upper east siders, a met season pass is way out of my league. there, i've said it and strangely enough, i am no longer embarrassed about it now that i've blurted it out.
odds are i am going to be drawn again to this puccini warhorse, turandot (which will have its season premiere next year yet). i am not about to apologize for my own predilection for the melodramatic puccinis--la boheme, et.al.. the more snooty new york opera aficionados only have disdain for the melody mired body of works of this italian maestro. oh, you should hear what they say about his saccharine arias.
i do enjoy my wagner sometimes although i confess, i have yet to see the entire ring cycle. (there's a decent set of wagnerian offerings in the current season, incidentally.) but seeing something asianey staged at the decidedly occidental and imperial met gives me ample resolve to bundle up and brave the frigid east coast winter just to be dizzy for about two hours or so from my seat way up at the met's vertiginous fourth ring. this is met's nose bleeder section.
--------
beijing, legendary times. this is turandot's mise-en-scene. and turandot is the man-hating princess who is being hawked in marriage by her father to anyone, royal pedigree preferable but not required, who can answer three riddles. death is the consequence for the witless suitor who can not guess all three correctly.
the long and short of it anyway is that the tenor part, prince calàf, correctly answers the riddles much to the consternation of the princess. characteristically, turandot begs her father not to abandon her to a stranger. the love struck calàf generously offers turandot a riddle of his own: if she can learn his name by dawn, he will forfeit his life.
on pain of death, no one in the forbidden city shall sleep until turandot learns the victorious prince's name. thus the title of the opportunity aria of the prince, the now very familiar nessun dorma.
"nessun dorma, nessun dorma." no one sleeps, no one sleeps.
the aria crawls to a start almost like the way a dirge should initially be sung, tentatively, gingerly. but then the prince, as the song soars, gets to feel like rumplestiltskin, so smug that no would know his secret (i.e. his name). he then gathers all the air in his chest and howls in victory at the end.
"vincero! vincero!" i shall win! i shall win!
----------
there is no doubt in my mind that he is already dead tired of my whining. this is my friend who edits the online edition of one of the leading english broadsheets in manila. he has this very unoriginal way of telling me to grow up. he just brushes off my instant messages.
ever since i came back to the east coast, there never was any conversation we had--phone or im--that didn't include me complaining about how i still got the blues from totally missing the roaring night life of manila.
"but you live in new fucking york city," my friend would remind me over and over in his best impression of joe pesci.
"yeah, yeah, yeah. pero iba talaga diyan." i could already hear my voice, tinny and downright annoying.
i know, i know. the kander/ebb anthem, the one that liza can probably belt even in her drunken stupor, proclaims that i am back living in a the city that never sleeps. but had these two jewish upper west siders spent some serious r & r in manila, they would sing a different tune, to speak of.
case in point: after ten at night, there is not a single food store that dares to open in our neck of the woods. the closest 24-hour diner in this bronx area i am holed in is a six dollar cab ride away. back in manila, even the family restaurant mcdonalds go on 24 hour red eye operations. top that new york.
nothing says crazyroaringsexycool night life (and blisteringbringyourownairconditioner day scene) like 12 million fiesta crazy people sardine packed in one balmy city by the bay.
i guess this one belongs to the list of apocryphal yogiberrisms. but many swore to have heard him say that in new york "it gets late early out (t)here." sounds like a classic yogi berra quote, way up there with "nobody goes there anymore because it's too crowded."
"maraming beses na kitang nilayasan...." still remember this 70's song? there's no shame in singing along. we're not called the karaoke nation for nothing. just follow the jumping ball. "manila, manila, i keep coming back to manila."
Friday, December 03, 2004
bronx kaingin
of all the days to fix our sidewalk, the aldermen of the city of gotham has decided to repave our block--from the sicilian cuisine restaurant to the mexican produce store in this neck of the bronx woods i live in--in the very week we are expecting the first snow of the season. as people would say here (i know this is one of those trite New Yorkese you always expect to hear in any movie ostensibly shot in the Big Apple) "well, whatcha gonna do, huh?"(complete with the requisite shoulder shrug and the double open palm air throw). gotham operates by its own labyrinthine logic. and one's mental hygiene is well served if one doesn't attempt to pull a Theseus.
and in the true ethos of inner city existence, it did not even take half an hour after the contractors left the scene when the still wet cement was already claimed by the neighborhood scractchitti artists as their constitutionally afforded canvas.
from among the doodles, there's the usual juvenile shout outs and chest thumping. para mi gente, dedicates one boricua (i.e. puerto rican) scratchitti artist but whatever he was offering to his peoples totally escapes me. the requisite dick drawings (uncut, of course, but definitely tumescent) make unabashed appearances. and this being the bronx, various attempts at drawing high powered guns (most of them of the 9mm mold) blast through the gaggle of pavement scratchings loud and clear (or should i say loudly and clearly for syntax purists out there).
but what literally stopped me cold was a plaintive sign that was clearly doodled on the run on the soon-to-be hard grey taffy. the script looked like it was written by someone from my mother's generation, you know, someone who was schooled by the first wave of the Thomasites (it's a joke, mom, okey?) where penmanship was taught almost as the fourth R in the curriculum. (the three others being reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic). the sign sighed "mahal kita, Rodel."
well, it's not exactly e.e. cummings but you could not even begin to realize how mythical the moment was when i first read this line. as Emerson would have it "the true poem is the poet’s mind."
the poet gemino abad (of the university of the philippines) titled the collection of philippine poetry in english he anthologized years ago as a native clearing. this of course in a not so subtle allusion to the way pioneering farmers during the homestead era (just right after the second world war) slashed and burnt a piece of the jungle to transform it to what they believed was their god given lot to cultivate.
in his/her monumental way, this love sick pinoy scratchitti artist has made his/her own kaigin here in the new york concrete jungle using but the flimsiest but highly incendiary kindling of heartfelt emotion.
now he's started one conflagration of emotions, at least within me, all right. now i can't stop playing this mental game of matching who, among the very sparse Pinoy barangay in central bronx, may have written it.
it could not be this flaming queen who works as an ER nurse because he hardly gets out of his leased BMW top of the line sedan. the more that it could not be this portly manang who i always see every morning in the local diner eating two eggs sunny side up, double toast, double bacon with an ample mound of potato fries on the side. she hardly talks to anybody. but then again, one never knows.
two, maybe three days from now, the first snow of winter will powder over the fallow fields of the bronx. but no amount of frost or sleet or snow can pave over that blazing spot where that sign was etched. easily, the still scorching emotion of that pinoy street poet thaws whatever crippling cold this foreign clime smothers its tropical guests.
and in the true ethos of inner city existence, it did not even take half an hour after the contractors left the scene when the still wet cement was already claimed by the neighborhood scractchitti artists as their constitutionally afforded canvas.
from among the doodles, there's the usual juvenile shout outs and chest thumping. para mi gente, dedicates one boricua (i.e. puerto rican) scratchitti artist but whatever he was offering to his peoples totally escapes me. the requisite dick drawings (uncut, of course, but definitely tumescent) make unabashed appearances. and this being the bronx, various attempts at drawing high powered guns (most of them of the 9mm mold) blast through the gaggle of pavement scratchings loud and clear (or should i say loudly and clearly for syntax purists out there).
but what literally stopped me cold was a plaintive sign that was clearly doodled on the run on the soon-to-be hard grey taffy. the script looked like it was written by someone from my mother's generation, you know, someone who was schooled by the first wave of the Thomasites (it's a joke, mom, okey?) where penmanship was taught almost as the fourth R in the curriculum. (the three others being reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic). the sign sighed "mahal kita, Rodel."
well, it's not exactly e.e. cummings but you could not even begin to realize how mythical the moment was when i first read this line. as Emerson would have it "the true poem is the poet’s mind."
the poet gemino abad (of the university of the philippines) titled the collection of philippine poetry in english he anthologized years ago as a native clearing. this of course in a not so subtle allusion to the way pioneering farmers during the homestead era (just right after the second world war) slashed and burnt a piece of the jungle to transform it to what they believed was their god given lot to cultivate.
in his/her monumental way, this love sick pinoy scratchitti artist has made his/her own kaigin here in the new york concrete jungle using but the flimsiest but highly incendiary kindling of heartfelt emotion.
now he's started one conflagration of emotions, at least within me, all right. now i can't stop playing this mental game of matching who, among the very sparse Pinoy barangay in central bronx, may have written it.
it could not be this flaming queen who works as an ER nurse because he hardly gets out of his leased BMW top of the line sedan. the more that it could not be this portly manang who i always see every morning in the local diner eating two eggs sunny side up, double toast, double bacon with an ample mound of potato fries on the side. she hardly talks to anybody. but then again, one never knows.
two, maybe three days from now, the first snow of winter will powder over the fallow fields of the bronx. but no amount of frost or sleet or snow can pave over that blazing spot where that sign was etched. easily, the still scorching emotion of that pinoy street poet thaws whatever crippling cold this foreign clime smothers its tropical guests.
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