Monday, January 13, 2025
8:01 PM |
In Café Maria, A Restoration of Exquisite Flavors
From last Sunday’s “Culinary Cuts” column I share with Renz Torres for the Dumaguete MetroPost.
There is a particular alchemy to restoration, and Casa Paquita in Fatima Village in Dumaguete embodies this magic to the hilt. Once a stately home built in the 1920s along Acias Pinili Street, then slowly abandoned in the ensuing decades, and finally relocated and restored to its old glory in this part of Bantayan, the heritage house’s hallowed walls now reverberate with fresh culinary ambitions as it also plays host to Cafe Maria.
This marriage of heritage and gastronomy is more than mere coincidence—it’s a conversation, a song, an invitation to sit and savor. But what does it mean to dine within restored elegance? Let us begin.
Stepping into Cafe Maria feels like entering a sepia photograph splashed with modern color. The dark wooden beams overhead and the artful interplay of antique tiles and contemporary decor are not merely aesthetic choices but an homage to time. The air carries faint whispers of the past, and yet, it’s also unmistakably alive with the murmurs of current diners and the rhythmic clatter of plates. This is a setting built for storytelling—and no better storyteller exists than food.
We started with a dish that dares to walk the tightrope of excess: the Bangus na Tambok. Its name, with a chuckle of self-awareness, declares its fatty splendor outright. Here is a whole milkfish fried to an audacious crisp, glistening under a drizzle of atsuete oil. And yet, the dish is anything but overwhelming. The crackling skin yields to flesh cooked with an assured tenderness, and the supporting cast elevates it to a star’s performance. The kalamansi aioli delivers a citrusy zing, while the atchara slaw provides crunch and acidity. It’s a platter that asks, “How far can we push indulgence before it topples?” The answer: just far enough. One of us wished for crisper skin, but we’ll let that pass—to each their textural preference.
From bold flavors, we segue to opulence with the Negros Wagyu Kaldereta, a dish that seems to whisper, “Trust me.” And trust, indeed, is warranted. This is not your grandmother’s kaldereta—it is richer, deeper, and more unapologetically decadent. Sourced from Montenegro Farms, the wagyu beef collapses under the gentlest nudge, as if surrendering itself willingly to your spoon. The sauce, bolstered by liver paté, vodka, and a lively interplay of olives and fresh tomatoes, brims with a complexity that defies its humble origins. There is a symphony of flavors here—a crescendo of salt, acid, and umami—but alas, the potatoes falter. They lack the golden crispness that might have crowned this dish triumphant. Yet even in imperfection, the kaldereta’s stars shine brightly.
The prelude to our feast arrived in the form of the Dukot Salad. Its title, a nod to scorched rice, suggests playfulness—and what a play it is. Whole lettuce leaves cradle a mélange of textures: crispy dukot, slender strips of singkamas, bursts of tomato, and the smoky umami of thin bulad. It’s a salad that leans into its contradictions: rustic yet elegant, familiar yet novel. If the rice had achieved a sharper crunch or the vinaigrette more assertive acidity, it might have sung louder. But even as is, this dish feels like an echo of home cooked with a touch of finesse.
And what’s a meal without a little indulgence of the liquid sort? Cafe Maria’s signature cocktail, Pangpa-Igat, flirts unapologetically with its name. The drink arrives like a spell in a glass—swirls of green apple and elderflower dancing in soda water, buoyed by gin’s subtle sting. It is, by all accounts, a pretty drink—gentle, sweet, and deceptively harmless. But therein lies the rub: where one might expect the bold flirtation of tartness or the audacious burn of spirits, it instead plays coy. It’s a pleasant sip, no doubt, but for a drink named after mischief, I’d hoped for a wilder night.
Perhaps the truest triumph of Cafe Maria lies not in any single dish but in its vision. To dine here is to partake in a dialogue between past and present. The restored Casa Paquita lends gravitas to the dining experience; the creak of its wooden floors, the glint of its antique windows, the shadows cast by its ornate beams—all these whisper tales of Dumaguete’s storied past. Yet the menu is firmly rooted in today, with a sly wink toward innovation and an embrace of locality. The use of Negros-sourced wagyu, for instance, is not just a statement of quality but a celebration of place.
There is an audacity in Cafe Maria’s promise to comfort and challenge in equal measure. Its menu teeters on the edge of the familiar and the experimental, sometimes stumbling but never losing its balance entirely. Here, you are invited to reconsider the bangus of your childhood, to reimagine the kaldereta of your lola’s kitchen, to find new possibilities in the humble scorched rice. It is an act of culinary storytelling, woven through the threads of an old house that has seen countless meals and conversations.
As we lingered over the last sips of our drinks, we found ourselves thinking of restoration not just as an act of revival but as an invitation to rethink what was and what could be. Cafe Maria, with its heritage setting and bold kitchen, has accepted this invitation with aplomb. It is not perfect—but then, perfection is not the point. The point is the journey, the effort, the joy of discovering something old made new, something familiar made surprising. And for that, Cafe Maria is well worth the visit.
Labels: dumaguete, food, heritage
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Sunday, January 12, 2025
10:00 PM |
Finally Recuperated!
My first time out of the apartment in days since I got sick last January 5. I'm with Renz, having dinner at Palmitas while watchig RuPaul's Drag Race.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
9:00 AM |
Life Lessons from a Ghost
I have been watching a lot of Japanese movies lately. It is, after all, “Japanuary,” a kind of cinephilic trend which calls for devoting the month of January to screening Japanese films. Of late, I have turned to the films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa simply because this is also film awards season, and his latest film, Cloud, was the Japanese official entry to the International Feature category of the Oscar Awards. [Last year, he also gifted us with a truly horrifying short film, Chime.]
I do not ordinarily get my life lessons from the films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The Japanese auteur, who burst to international fame in the late 1990s and early 2000s with his uncanny contributions to what we now call as “J-Horror,” is known for exploring in his films themes of existential dread, isolation and the fraught relationship between individuals and society, the dour impact of technology in our lives, and the fragility of memory—often giving his stories a supernatural bent involving ghosts, which are often malevolent and vengeful.
In his seminal Cure [1997], we follow a police procedural involving a series of grisly murders which seem to be connected—because all the victims have the mark “X” carved into their necks. But as the story unfolds, we learn that the murders are being committed by disparate individuals who have no memory of what they have done, nor have any motives for doing them. The clues soon lead to a mysterious figure named Mamiya whose presence evoke a profound sense of alienation that he causes otherwise ordinary people to succumb to their violent impulses, challenging the idea that identity and morality are stable constructs. In Pulse [2001], we gradually learn that the dead have begun infiltrating the living world through the Internet, causing people to succumb to despair and vanish, leaving behind only dark, shadowy marks.
Not exactly films to take away endearing life lessons from.
In 2015, Kurosawa released Journey to the Shore, which from the get-go already presents itself as a ghost story. We meet Mizuki, a piano teacher for children, whose melancholy is evident from the way she goes about her daily routines. She has reasons to be sad: her husband Yusuke has been missing for three years, and presumed dead. She misses him, and still grieves. One day, after her piano lessons, she comes home to find the ghost of her husband in her living room. But the ghost of Yusuke also inhabits a corporeal reality the movie never questions—he is truly a ghost, but he can also be touched, and he can be seen by other people. He even eats and sleeps. Sometimes, however, he disappears into thin air.
Yusuke informs Mizuki that he drowned at sea—and his body has already been eaten by crabs. But somehow he found himself entering the living world, interacting with people, some of them living and some dead—ghosts who are exactly like him. He has been traveling and meeting people since passing away, and now, to finally say goodbye, he wants to take Mizuki with him to meet all the individuals who have been part of his life these past three years, so that she, too, can see, touch, and feel what Yusuki did while he was gone. She packs her bag without question, and goes on this journey with her ghost husband, sometimes taking the train, sometimes the bus. The movie proceeds on an episodic structure, with each visit becoming Kurosawa’s way of instructing us about the relationships between people and their ghosts, about remembering and forgetting, about forgiving and longing.
In the penultimate “episode,” Yusuke, with Mizuki in tow, returns to a farm he worked in, where the community of farmers has learned to gravitate towards him as a kind of philosopher and storyteller. He was known to give the farm folk the occasional capsule lectures about varied things, like Physics, in their small community hall, and sometimes strings these educational talks with poignant observations about life. One such talk begins soon after Yusuke’s return to town. He begins to discuss the matter of light as both a particle and as a wave:
“Light is both a wave and a particle,” Yusuke begins. “A light particle has zero mass. Light, as its name implies, travels at the speed of light. If you apply Einstein’s equation, anything traveling at the speed of light should have infinite mass. But a tiny particle of light couldn’t possibly have infinite mass. The only solution is for it to have zero mass. A particle of light must have zero mass. But can you say that something of zero mass even exists? What is this particle which is like a lot of nothing? And remember, light is also a wave. It has a wavelength, which is like the wave’s width. But if you keep reducing this wavelength, is there a point where it becomes zero? If it’s a zero, that’s not a wave. However tiny it is, a wave has a wavelength. So the smallest wavelength of a wave of light also has a quantity of zero.”
He continues: “The thing is, in the world of the very small, zero does have a width. In other words, zero isn’t zero. The whole universe is filled with an infinite number of zeroes. Zero is the basis of everything. So nothingness isn’t the same as meaninglessness. Nothingness is the foundation of everything. Mountains and rivers, the earth and human beings. Everything is composed of combinations of this nothingness. This would seem to be a true representation of the world.”
Truly, this whole monologue does not seem to come from a typical Kiyoshi Kurosawa movie.
And I’m glad.
Yusuke made me think. What does it mean to live a life that matters? Perhaps the answer lies not in grand proclamations but in the tension between light and shadow, between the tangible and the ineffable. Yusuke makes a point that the universe itself—both vast and microscopic—offers us a metaphor for this paradox, to consider light—a force that is both particle and wave, both zero and infinite. It is something and nothing all at once, the very essence of the contradictory truths that define existence.
This duality of light captures the enigmatic foundation of reality.
We wake each morning with an unspoken hope: to find clarity, joy, or purpose in the hours ahead. Yet life often undercuts these expectations. The coffee spills; the news disappoints. But even in the mundane—in the routine of commuting, working, returning—there lies an unspoken wonder. The banality of the everyday is not meaningless; it is an intricate dance of forces seen and unseen, much like light itself. Fleeting and fragile, life compels us to create, to love, to leave a mark. It is as if we are each a beam of light, our trajectory immeasurable yet undeniable.
Take, for example, the quiet courage of a mother waking early to prepare her child for school. Or the rhythmic precision of a farmer tending his crops under the rising sun. Or the solitary writer chasing words that might outlast time. These acts, so ordinary they often escape notice, are like photons scattering through space. They are small, yet they illuminate. They are fleeting, yet they shape the world.
Perhaps meaning is not found in answers but in the act of seeking. Meaning is a mosaic of personal truths: the way sunlight pools on a wooden floor, the laughter shared among friends, the feeling of holding a book that feels like an old companion. It is in the particulars that we discover the infinite—the zero that is not zero.
But life is not only light. It is shadow. Loss, grief, and suffering carve through our days with an unrelenting hand. Yet these shadows sharpen our perception of what truly matters. Consider those who have endured unimaginable loss and emerged with a greater capacity for love, for connection. In their lives, we see a profound truth: that even in the void, there is creation; even in absence, there is presence.
And so, we circle back to the question: what is the meaning of life? It is perhaps a flawed question, for it assumes meaning to be a fixed point, a destination. But what if meaning is found in the journey? What if it is the striving, the questioning, the living that gives life its shape?
This reminds me of a story about a fisherman who spent his days casting nets into the ocean, watching the tides. One day, a scholar asked him, “What do you see out there?” The fisherman, gazing at the horizon, replied, “Possibility.” The scholar pressed on. “But what does it mean to you?” The fisherman laughed. “It doesn’t have to mean anything,” he said. “It just is.”
There is wisdom in the fisherman’s humility, an acceptance of the universe’s enigmatic nature. To search for meaning is not to find a definitive answer but to grow through the seeking. It is to recognize that we are participants in an infinite dance, a constellation of lives intertwined by joys and sorrows, by light and shadow.
Perhaps the meaning of life is not a puzzle to solve but a question to live. It is as vast and unknowable as the ocean the fisherman watched, as fundamental and paradoxical as the light that travels through it. And when the end comes—as it must—the measure of a meaningful life will not be the monuments we’ve built or the accolades we’ve received. It will be the ripples we leave in the hearts of others, the moments of light we shared in their shadows, the quiet assurance that, for a while, we were here. We loved, we wondered, we lived. And in that fragile, infinite dance, perhaps we were enough.
Labels: film, life, physics
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Wednesday, January 08, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 221.
Labels: poetry
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Sunday, January 05, 2025
8:33 PM |
I'm Taking to Bed. I'm Sick.
Labels: health, life
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Wednesday, January 01, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 220. Happy New Year!
Labels: new year, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, December 29, 2024
Something caught my eye on Facebook a few weeks ago—it was not a meme but a snippet of story about a therapist telling some patient some hard truth about living in the now: “The reason you feel ‘behind’ isn’t because you have failed at timing. It’s because you’re measuring your life against a timeline that was written for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Your parents’ milestones were mapped for an economy that died, a housing market that vanished, and relationships that didn’t have to survive social media. You’re not behind, you’re navigating a new way through.”
I bumped into this on social media because the playwright Dustin Celestino had added a rejoinder to the above: “The same goes for most industries, these days,” wrote Dustin. “We’re ‘navigating a new way through.’ We’re trying to be artists in a world where AI can generate art at speeds we can’t compete with. We’re trying to start businesses in a world where some of the most successful companies don’t actually have any products of their own—Grab, Food Panda, Angkas. We’re trying to make films for an audience with a wide selection of streaming platforms, with hundreds of foreign movies they can watch—on demand—from the comfort of their living room. No one knows the ‘right way’ to do anything. There is no ‘tried and tested strategy’ anymore. It’s a scary, but exciting time. Today, we are all pioneers.”
Pioneers navigating a new way through.
The thought lingered, reverberated in my mind long after I logged out from Facebook and went about the task of facing Christmas and the New Year. I realized that this feeling about navigating a new world wasn’t just a personal thing; it was universal, a veritable anthem of people grappling with a shifting reality, the rules of which we never wrote in the first place but are undeniably here now, and cannot be ignored. The milestones we’re been told to chase— the stable job, the house by 30—feel like ghosts from another time, haunting us as we build lives in a landscape that have utterly transformed.
What gets me though are the changes in this vein we have now come to face as artists. Artists today are charting paths through unfamiliar terrain where the old maps have been rendered useless. The ways of creating things—of writing, of painting, of making music—are being vastly rewritten. I look back on the path I undertook to become a published author only two decades ago, and it galls me to realize that what was once assured is no longer quite viable. And when I do publish, do people still even read? From recent, pandemic-era statistics, I’ve learned a hard truth: more than 90% of tenth graders in the Philippines cannot read, or at least read properly. What is the future?
Do I stop writing then, or trying to get published? But I have been writing for so long I know that this has become a vital part of who I am, how I define myself. Where do I stand in these seismic changes? Like Dustin, I once thought that the creation of art was sacred labor, rooted in painstaking hours honing craft. Today, AI can churn out a painting, a poem, or a musical score in seconds. And while there is a certain soullessness to these creations—a lack of the human heart, a lack of trembling hands shaping clay, a lack of beautiful uncertainty choosing the right word—it still forces us to ask: what now? What does it mean to create in a world where machines can mimic us so effortlessly?
I don’t really know the answer. There are days when I think that perhaps it’s no longer about competing with AI, but redefining art’s purpose. Perhaps it’s about returning to art as communion—a connection that no algorithm can replicate. But what does that even mean?
Dustin mentioned the world of business in these changing times. The rules have changed here, too, and not subtly. Some of the most successful companies of our time don’t actually make anything tangible. Grab and Uber don’t own cars; Food Panda doesn’t own restaurants; Angkas doesn’t own motorbikes; AirBnB doesn’t own hotels. Looking closely into what they do, we realize they thrive on connection, on being the middleman in a transactional world. For would-be entrepreneurs, this begs a reevaluation of ambition. Should we make something, or simply make something happen? And if the latter, does it cheapen the enterprise—or does it speak to an evolving ingenuity?
Dustin is a playwright but he is also a filmmaker, and has helmed several films, including Utopia in 2019 and Ang Duyan ng Magiting in 2023 [before turning to VivaMax to produce such flicks as Cheaters, Nurse Abi, and Pilya]. Which is why he mentioned film in his addendum. Once, a filmmaker’s primary hurdle used to be getting audiences to theaters. Today, the new challenge is cutting through a sea of endless content—to lure viewers away from Netflix’s treasure trove of international films or the irresistible call of YouTube’s algorithm. The tools to create films have become democratized, yes, but so has the competition for attention. How do you make something that stands out, that matters, in a world where stories are abundant and attention is finite?
And so we stumble through, trying to figure out a “right way” when no such path exists. The old strategies—go to school, get the degree, stick to the formula—feel like relics from another era, artifacts buried under the rubble of rapid technological advancement and global shifts.
But there is beauty in this chaos. There is freedom in being unmoored from the past. Pioneering—the very act of navigating—is a declaration of hope, a rebellion against inertia. The fear is real, yes. But so is the excitement. To be here, now, in this liminal space between what was and what will be, is to participate in an unfolding experiment: what does it mean to live, to create, to love, in this brave new world?
We are all of us, pioneers in this new world. And yes, there will be missteps, failures, moments of crushing self-doubt. But I hope there will also be discoveries—the thrill of finding a new path, the satisfaction of creating something that didn’t exist before, the forging of connections in the shared experience of figuring it out as we go. The milestones we inherited are no longer our burdens to bear, but we are free to redefine them, to craft lives and careers that speak to the world as it is—messy, interconnected, uncharted.
And so I—we—navigate, all of us pioneers of a present that is still inventing itself.
PHOTO BY JUSTINE MEGAN YU
Labels: future, life
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Wednesday, December 25, 2024
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 219. Merry Christmas!
Labels: christmas, poetry
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Sunday, December 22, 2024
9:00 AM |
All My Accidental Christmas Cheers
It is harder to feel Christmas when you’re older. The holidays harden into a mercenary plot that defies whatever magical understanding we used to have of it when we were children, when even the slightest Christmassy thing had the sheen of absolute joy and we were still given to believing that Santa Claus existed. Now, I am nearing 50 years old, alive for almost half a century already, and even I know—from what scraps of memory science I have read—to cast doubts whether the Christmases I remember when I was young were truly as joyful as I remember them to be. Or is this just nostalgia talking? I have learned since then that the memories we have are actually palimpsests of other memories of the same thing—and never the thing itself; in other words: ghosts upon ghosts piling together to create an image of the past that might not have been. I have not believed in Santa since I was ten; at near-fifty, I no longer believe in memories either.
Even then, an optimistic part of me still behold these memories as a kind of sacred ghost. How can I not? The ones that I have the sharpest recall of are taken from the years in my family’s life when we were poorest: for most of the 1980s we rented a ramshackle downstairs “apartment” of an old house somewhere in the bowels of Tubod, complete with an outhouse for a toilet—really what you would call a pit latrine; and “ramshackle” this apartment might have been, but somehow my mother and older brothers made into livable quarters through sheer ingenuity. [I say ingenuity because I’ve visited this apartment again only a couple of years ago for a documentary—and it is ghastly, and made me think: how were we able to live in this godforsaken place for quite a number of years?] And yet, this place is where most of my cherished Christmas memories are located.
I remember the night my brother Rocky came home from Cebu, and asked us kids to catch the shower of gold coins he flung to the air from a couple of bank pouches. We scrambled like mad, and with such joy, to collect what we could. [Those “gold” coins were newly-minted 25 centavo pieces, which at the time were just released as legal tender, dating this memory to 1983.]
I remember all the noche buenas we’ve had in that apartment, which was always swarming with friends and visitors. Those noche buenas must have been very simple—but for a kid not used to a regular feast, a Tupperware full of spaghetti [or chicken salad, which was my brother Rey’s specialty], a ham gifted by some friend, and plentiful rice must have been the very vision of wealth.
I remember my brother Edwin buying us our first Christmas tree. This was already in a time, perhaps around 1988, when we could finally breathe a little easy finances-wise, but that trek with my mother and my brother to Nijosa, and choosing just the one perfect plastic Christmas fir tree for the family to enjoy, and choosing the tinsels and decorations and lights to go with it—finally signaled to my boyhood consciousness that perhaps our fortunes have changed, and perhaps we did not have to go hungry anymore. After all, we just bought a Christmas tree!
I’m sure these memories are real. My remembrances of them may be palimpsests—but I am also aware that these memories are what makes me a human uniquely myself. Largely jaded I may have become, but these memories serve a purpose of reminding me I was once a boy full of Christmas brightness [that kid catching those gold coins], and fulfillment [that kid sated with simple noche buena], and hope [that kid happy with his new Christmas tree]. After all these years, these memories are still the kindling that sparks some joy in me come Christmas time, although the sparks have been muted by time and the joy blunted by the very adult reality of the withering world around us.
Christmas is really for children, no?
Christmas for adults is dancing unwillingly in a program for an office party.
Christmas for adults is all the utang paid after getting your 13th-month pay.
Christmas for adults is fretting over all kinds of holiday anxieties—the gifts to give, the parties to attend, the cards to send out.
In adulthood, I know I’ve tried my best to hang on to the magic of Christmas. I would attend the family Christmas dinners on the eve of the celebrations—although of late they have become obligations rather than a source of joy; I would listen to a personal playlist of Christmas songs that constituted mostly the Christmas albums released by The Carpenters—although admittedly I would play these songs mostly in July [don’t ask why]; I would foment new Christmas rituals, like watching annually a bunch of movies that made me feel Christmas joy—among them, Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, A Charlie Brown Christmas, When Harry Met Sally..., and It’s a Wonderful Life, but I have not actually done this since the pandemic. One time, to make the family Christmas dinner more personal, I attempted to make curated and handmade gifts for everyone—which was something completely out of the blue because my family never give each other Christmas gifts. The effect I was going for did not come to fruition, so I never did it again. I think it was that one Christmas that I finally grew up and told myself to stop trying too hard.
That realization of not trying too hard has been a gift. Because these days, I find Christmas joy in the accidental things. Like, one time, I was in Manila in early December and just happened to wander into a park somewhere in Makati—and right at that moment, a cascade of brilliant lights suddenly covered everything. It felt truly magical, because unexpected.
Or that time we were navigating holiday traffic from Cebu to Dumaguete, and we were trapped waiting for the next ferry to take us from Bato to Tampi, and while we waited in the light of stars of early evening, a bunch of folk singers sang daygon—or traditional Christmas songs in Binisaya—to us. That felt like a blessing.
Or this year, when all thoughts of celebrating Christmas was erased by the specter of a semester ending in December. While other people thought of parties and gifts, my only focus was on completing students’ requirements and grading—a backbreaking effort that nullified any kind of holiday cheer. But I hastily accepted some intimate Christmas dinners—and they have been lovely. A soothing balm for a harried soul, a reminder that we are still human despite our anxieties and expectations.
Once this very same December, on a particularly fretful day, Renz took me to dinner at Meltin’ Pot, at their new branch along Hibbard Avenue. He wanted to eat ramen, and I wanted sushi. Out of the blue, while we were waiting for our food to arrive, a youth group came in, asked permission to serenade all of us in the premises with Christmas songs [for a “donation,” of course], and proceeded to give us a number of songs of high octane holiday cheer. That made me smile.
This is me wishing everyone—cheerful child or jaded adult—the best of Christmas cheer, accidental or not.
Dinner with the Antonios, hosted by Jacqueline Veloso-Antonio and Myrish Cadapan-Antonio.
Dinner with the Sincos [Stephen, Mira, and Luis] and Arlene Delloso, with Renz Torres
Labels: christmas, dumaguete, family, friends, life, memories
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Friday, December 20, 2024
3:38 PM |
St. Luigi Patron Saint of Health Care as Human Right
Labels: health, human rights, humor, murder, people
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Wednesday, December 18, 2024
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 218.
Labels: poetry
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Tuesday, December 17, 2024
4:49 PM |
Plays! Plays! Plays!
I just finished editing and preparing a packet of full-length plays by Silliman writers [most of them Palanca winners] for Dessa Quesada-Palm’s directing class next semester. Was happy to note that three of them are comedies, and one — Lemuel Torrevillas’ Enter Edison, or What’s the Name of the Guy Who Invented Something — is an absolute farce of the first order. I also loved the pre-colonial shenanigans of Leoncio Deriada’s Maragtas: How Kapinangan Tricked Sumakwel Twice, the Basay-set agrarian reform family melodrama in Bobby Flores Villasis’ Eidolon, the rape legal melodrama of Elsie Coscolluela’s Original Grace, and the forbidden love sarswela of Rolin Migyuel Cadallo Obina’s San Nicolas. [There is another musical in the mix: Lakas ng Mahirap by Rosario Cruz Lucero.] Three are by former students of mine: Mike Gomez’s Tirador ng Tinago, Beryl Andrea Delicana’s Mango Tree, and Jireh Catacutan’s Una't Huling Gabi sa Ramona Disco. I have nine in all so far, and waiting to source out three more [one by Edilberto Tiempo, one by Linda Faigao-Hall, and one by Krip Yuson]. This really should be an anthology.Labels: dumaguete, philippine literature, silliman, theatre, writers
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Sunday, December 15, 2024
11:20 AM |
Lina Sagaral Reyes, 1961-2024
The last time Lina and I chatted was only a month ago. She wanted me to join her for a journalism event slated in Mindanao next year. Of course I said yes. Silliman and Dumaguete will miss you, Lina. Thank you for being a gentle guide when I was going through my own mental health crisis during the pandemic.
Lina Sagaral Reyes was a poet and journalist. She was born on 6 July 1961 in Villalimpia, Bohol, which according to her was a "a village of blacksmiths, nipa thatchers, fishers, carpenters, a few teachers, sailors and other professionals, and women who live on their own."
She moved to Dumaguete City and took courses in Journalism and Creative Writing at Silliman University between 1978 and 1983, and made the distinction of being the first female student elected as President of the SU Student Government. In 1987, she was diagnosed with a disease, which doctors claimed would take her life in two years. She wrote furiously in this time, and was quite prolific — but she outlived the diagnosis, and she returned to Bohol, reclaimed her parents' house, and transformed it into the office of the Center for Creative Women. She began researching on the life stories of creative women in villages for the Writers Involved in Creative Cultural Alternatives [WICCA]. She won the Palanca Award for her poetry in 1987 [first prize, for “(Instead of a Will These) For All the Loved Ones”] and then in 1990 [third prize, for “Istorya”]. She would author the poetry collection, Honing Weapons, published by Lunhaw Books in 1987. Another collection, ‘Storya, was published in 1993 by the Babaylan Women's Publishing Collective and the Institute of Women's Studies of St. Scholastica's College.
As a journalist, she wrote for the Philippine Daily Inquirer and the Mindanao Gold Star Daily, and often reported on the intersection between gender, the environment, climate change, culture, the arts, and mental health. As one of the directors of the The Cagayan de Oro Press Club Journalism Institute, she fostered collaborations with other organizations and drafted programs to enhance the media community. In 1998 she received the Jaime V. Ongpin Award for Investigative Journalism, for an expose on sand dredging to accommodate an international resort. In 2000 she received the National Science and Technology Journalism Grand Prize for an investigation into an algal bloom in Macajalar Bay, and in 2020 her in-depth probe into corporate pineapple farms and their questionable carbon-negative claims won her the Globe Media Excellence Awards.
She died on 14 December 2024.
Here’s a poem by Lina from her Palanca-winning collection, ‘Storya, in 1990:
Here’s a poem in tribute to Lina by Adonis Durado:
And another poem in tribute to Lina by Elio Garcia:
Labels: dumaguete, journalism, obituary, philippine literature, poetry, silliman, writers
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9:00 AM |
The Beauty of Old Houses
The old house along Acias Pinili Street in Tinago was easy to overlook, even if you’ve lived in Dumaguete for so long. We tend to avert our gaze from what looks like the apotheosis of the decrepit—the fading brownness of old wood making what is otherwise an imposing structure blend into what background there is: often that’s wild vegetation; sometimes it’s the other buildings around it. Old houses always melt into nothingness. Structures of this kind—the heritage houses of the community’s landed families of long ago—are easy to miss, indeed, except when one trains their eyes to see beauty in the old and often abandoned.
So many of these still abound in Dumaguete—some still being used in myriad ways by their owners, some seemingly abandoned. Here’s an incomplete rundown: There’s the imposing one between the local branch of Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas and the building that houses a Mercury Drug in Daro, right near the crossing of the National Highway and E.J. Blanco Drive. There’s the one just along Perdices Street, near Ever Mall, right in the center of town, which was converted into a now defunct budget hotel. There’s the one owned by the family of the late Teresa Basa—her of the infamous murder case in Chicago solved by her ghost—right near the corner of Lorenzo Teves Street and Calle Sta. Catalina, which has seen better days.
My two favorites are contrasts: the small white house at the corner of Pinili Street and Calle Sta. Catalina, which is still beautiful to behold after all these years; and the Flores house at the corner of E.J. Blanco Drive and Hibbard Avenue, which is still largely intact—but has lost its beautiful front lawn and garden [which had a beautiful willowy tree at the corner] to an ill-conceived structure that has housed an ever-revolving array of businesses, from an eatery to a barber shop.
Some are lost forever, like that splendid small white house with Greek columns beside the Dumaguete Rural Bank, which was later demolished to make way for an ugly grill house, which soon closed shop anyway. But I’m just happy to note that this fate has escaped the historic Locsin house at the corner of Dr. V. Locsin Street and Calle Sta. Catalina—important for being the house that hosted the final meeting that divided Negros Oriental and Negros Occidental early in 1901. Today, it has been largely preserved.
These structures are repositories of family histories—the people who helped make Dumaguete become a vibrant community—and in turn, they have helped create the makeup of local history as well. So when we lose them, we lose a small but significant part of that history as well. We lose our stories with their loss.
The conundrum, of course, lies in the fact that these are privately-owned structures whose fates lie in the hands of owners. Some are neglectful, or ignorant of family history. Some only see these as pieces of real estate—and valuable in that sense only. But some owners see value in the old structures—because they are truly beautiful once restored—and have made good cases for adaptive reuse, because restoring the original architectural splendor actually do add value to the property. Adaptive reuse refers to the process of reusing an existing building for a purpose other than which it was originally built or designed for, and has been specifically used as a term to salvage heritage buildings. Wikipedia notes that “with adaptive reuse becoming an effective strategy for optimizing the operational and commercial performance of built assets, “ it has “prevented thousands of buildings’ demolition and has allowed them to become critical components of urban regeneration”—with stakeholders such as architects, developers, builders, and entrepreneurs making sure “that the finished product will still serve the need of the market, that it will be completely useful for its new purpose, and that it will be competitively priced” once rejuvenated and restored. For me, adaptive reuse of an old structure is still better than demolishing it and then replacing it with a new one that has no character, whose aesthetics are so bland they actually are eye sores. [Don’t get me started on the tendency of current Dumaguete builders to drop another “box building” on us.]
Many of the old sugar mansions along Rizal Avenue, like the Serafin Teves mansion [which now houses Starbucks Dakong Balay] and the Manuel Teves mansion [which now houses Sans Rival], are great cases of adaptive reuse. So is The Spanish Heritage at the corner of Calle San Juan and Calle Sta. Catalina, built from an old warehouse. [I’m also glad it is back to being used as an events place, after being used as a church for so long—a strange kind of sequestration which felt like a loss to the cultural heritage of the community.] Another good case for adaptive reuse is Buglas Isla Café, which used to be the Rotea heritage house in Bais City, transferred brick by brick and wood panel by wood panel to Dumaguete by the Lhuillers. [The Lhuillers also restored the old Wuthrich mansion along Rizal Avenue.] I was also happy to see the Blas Elnar building—a splendid Art Deco building at the corner of Dr. V. Locsin Street and Calle Maria Christina, whose beauty was lost to the ravages of time—restored, although it has yet to show any sign of being in use.
The best recent example remains the Dumaguete Presidencia—which used to house many of the offices of City Hall, and whose architectural integrity, as designed by the great architect Juan M. Arellano, was lost to ill-conceived renovations and expansions over the decades, which reduced the 1936 building to an ugly shadow of its former self. Restoration started in 2017, and now it houses the Dumaguete branch of the National Museum of the Philippines.
But the upkeep of old houses is expensive, and proper restoration needs expertise—and a considerably deep pocket. I don’t blame owners for hedging on their properties on economic reasons alone. I don’t blame them for abandonment, especially if all other recourse beyond selling seems impossible to undertake.
Casa Arrieta, built in the 1920s, is a house that I have loved for many years, and I have always been concerned that the owners were “neglecting” it and was not seeing its full potential. But we must also consider the Arrieta family who owned the heritage house, and how it must have been prohibitive for them to do the upkeep of an old house, even though they might not have wanted to part with it. Anna May Cruz would later tell me: “My aunt’s family didn’t want to part with it but no one could afford its upkeep. The neglect was not intentional.”
One day, a few months ago, passing by its old location, it was just ... gone.
That really made me despondent, and I thought again about how many heritage houses in Dumaguete were disappearing.
And then I was told that this old house, about to be demolished, was actually bought wholesale by Leon Gallery’s Jaime Ponce de Leon, and transferred from Pinili Street to a lot located in Fatima Village in Bantayan.
It has been restored to its full glory, and now called Casa Paquita, named after Doña Francisca “Paquita” Somoza Arnaiz-Ponce de Leon, Popong’s lola. [Doña Paquita was the wife of Dr. Ramon Ponce de Leon, the first Filipino resident director of the Mission Hospital—the precursor of the Silliman University Medical Center—and its medical director during the Japanese occupation of Dumaguete.]
Last December 12, it finally opened via the small restaurant in the premises called Café Maria, named after another lola, Doña Maria Arnaiz-Diaz, and managed by Mikel and Nadia Teves of Si, Señor. [The legendary Inday Iyay Diaz was once provincial board member, and was active in civic work all over Negros Oriental—including involvements with the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and the Philippine Mental Health Association. She also founded East Negros Institute in Tanjay to accommodate secondary school aspirants in the then town, and built chapels, basketball courts, reading centers, health centers and the like, even after her terms in the provincial board, when she retired from politics.]
Save for the restaurant, there are no set plans for the rest of Casa Paquita for the moment—but I am told that Popong intends to make it a showcase for how a 1920s residence in Dumaguete looked like, and has currently furnished it with things appropriate to the period. A museum of 1920s Dumaguete residential elegance, so to speak. Dumaguete, bereft of heritage projects like this for so long, needs this capsule of history as a token to its past. At this juncture of our story as a community when the city seems to be bursting in the seams in the name of progress, Casa Paquita is a necessary corrective.
Labels: architecture, dumaguete, heritage, negros, old houses
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Wednesday, December 11, 2024
11:00 PM |
Nikki Giovanni, 1943-2024
I've been teaching this poem for years. Rest in peace, Nikki Giovanni. Her obituary at the New York Times here.
Labels: obituary, poetry
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7:00 PM |
Casa Paquita
I’ve been wanting to share the photos below for a few months now, but Jaime Ponce de Leon asked me to wait. You see, I’ve loved this old, old house along Pinili Street for many years, and I have always been concerned that the owners were neglecting it and was not seeing its full potential. Then one day, passing by its old location, it was just ... gone. That really made me despondent, and I thought about how many heritage houses in Dumaguete were disappearing, because some owners consider them useless, or their possible restoration would take so much work [and finances]. For the Arrieta family who owned the heritage house, it must have been prohibitive to do the upkeep of an old house, even though they might not have wanted to part with it. Anna May Cruz would later tell me: “My aunt’s family didn’t want to part with it but no one could afford its upkeep. The neglect was not intentional.”
And then I was told that this old house, about to be demolished, was actually bought wholesale, and transferred to somewhere in Fatima Village, restored to its full glory. Tomorrow, December 12, it finally opens as Cafe Maria in Casa Paquita, a restaurant and a gallery. Congratulations, Mikel Teves and Nadia Teves!
[Cafe Maria is named after Maria Arnaiz-Diaz and Casa Paquita is named after Paquita Arnaiz-Ponce de Leon.]
Labels: cafes, dumaguete, gallries, heritage, negros, old houses, restaurants
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7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 217.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
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Tuesday, December 10, 2024
4:11 PM |
Delegating Cleanup
Slept very late last night [this morning?] because of work but I had to wake up early because the cleaners were coming, and I really wanted the apartment clean for the holidays. This is where I am right now, delegating what I really cannot do on my own anymore. I loved the swiftness of the cleanup professionals do, but I couldn’t help but think that cleaning time used to be my time for self-reflection. But I really cannot do that anymore. I’m reserving my energy for other things. After the cleanup, I went right back to sleep, needed it. So here I am, in the middle of the afternoon, finally awake, and back to work once more.Labels: life
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Saturday, December 07, 2024
3:50 PM |
Creativity is Work
I remember this one particular low point in my life as a writer and as a cultural worker. I once put together a publication—let’s be obscure about this and not say whether it was a book or a magazine or even a pamphlet or brochure—that meant so much to me at that time. I said yes to it because I believed in the work and what it could potentially contribute to the cultural life of the community. I knew there was hardly any budget—most of these things barely have any, which is sad fact about cultural work. But like most of these things that I do, I often compel the universe to somehow find me just compensation for the work load I am sure to have.
And the work load, indeed, was backbreaking.
I wrote, I edited, I designed everything. It took two months of painstaking concentration, but I did it. I finished the project.
Finally, off to the printers the publication went—and now came the awkward time to ask the project manager about the compensation.
“Five thousand pesos,” the project manager told me.
I gulped. I knew it was going to be small—but not that small. Ten thousand felt like the lowest I could mark my creative labor down, but five? I felt myself deflate. I was in a tricycle, on the way to the mall to watch a movie, and, dear readers, I found myself crying.
Was that it? Was the price for the hard work I just did? Why am I even doing this?
This was many moons ago, and of course, judging by the work I still do, I have not really stopped pursuing creative projects—even when I find myself staring at the abyss. Once in a while, especially when a crisis of confidence hits, I talk with fellow creatives to try to find, once again, my bearings. The theatre artist Dessa Quesada-Palm has always been one person to turn to in times like this, and what she told me once keeps coming back to me: “Why do we do this, even if the returns are not exactly giving? Because we die if we don’t.”
We die if we don’t.
This is the reason.
But I also hope this will not be used as an excuse for always underrating the importance of creative work in any community.
I read a disheartening article a few years ago that studied people’s perception about projects we pursue because of creative talent: apparently, for most people, passion seems to be compensation enough ... hence there is no expected real [read: monetary] compensation.
Passion is enough compensation daw.
This is why creatives are often asked to render their talent for things where no budget is ever allocated for them, sometimes asking them to do their bit for “exposure.” Dancers, singers, designers, visual artists, theatre artists, writers, musicians can all attest to this.
I get asked to write/edit for free all the time. Sometimes I do, for friendship’s sake or for project’s sake, to be fair—but that should be my call. I think that people have this idea that because it springs from talent, this must be “easy” for us to do. [But, if this is so “easy,” how come you’re not doing it yourself, and why are you asking me?]
This is why I’ve mostly stopped accepting requests for speeches/judging competitions if the only compensation I get is a coffee mug and a parchment paper with my name on it. We render time and hard work for these things. For example, people don’t know the sheer effort of having to write a speech with a theme, and having to perform it, too!
People also ask for free copies of my books, sometimes. But exploitation of creatives have been part of the system for so long, some of the egregious practices are even now considered “standard”: beware, for example, about competitions—kanang mga logo-making, poster-making, theme song-making competitions, which asks many, many creatives to do hard work essentially for free. Of late, musicians in Dumaguete are finally in an uproar about this unfair state of things. And apparently writers, too, courtesy of Beverly Wico Siy’s ongoing crusade about publications that [1] don’t pay writers, or [2] don’t even give them complimentary copies of the projects their writings appear in—although they do have a budget to pay their printers.
This is complicated stuff, to be honest, with nuances I haven’t even begun to explore. I have projects, too, where I cannot seriously compensate talent [like events for Pride Month, which is a movement that’s basically voluntary]. I learned this from Gang Capati when we were still doing RockEd Dumaguete: be prepared to at least feed your volunteers.
But, overall, this is the plea: please pay your creatives, and if you like their work, please be their patrons. We have bills to pay, too.
Labels: cultural work, life, work, writing
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Friday, December 06, 2024
11:49 AM |
Last Class of the Semester
Still recuperating, but I got up to attend my last full class of the semester. Slowly and surely ticking off my last classes before the semestral break. Critical Writing Workshop, done! Fiction Workshop, done! Playwriting Workshop, done! Asian Literature, done! And finally done with Literature and Cultural Studies [which I'm just subbing for]. Now to rest.
Labels: health, life, silliman, teaching
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