Wednesday, June 28, 2023
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 141.
Labels: poetry, Pride, queer
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Saturday, June 24, 2023
8:49 PM |
The Eight Needs To Be a TV Show
In high school, I loved many, many books, but there are three novels I consider most memorable: The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer, and The Eight by Katherine Neville. These were the kinds of books I wanted to write, and still hope to write in the future.
But Neville’s book is the one that stays most in my mind. And I am surprised no one has made a limited series out of this 1988 novel yet. Because it has everything: chess, nuns, computer nerds, the search for the source of ultimate power, mysteries and puzzles, espionage, royalty [from Charlemagne to Catherine the Great to Napoleon], history [from the Medieval Period to the French Revolution], great scientists and artists, car chases, North African sojourns, spirituality, sex, etc. This is basically a Netflix show waiting to happen.Labels: books
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Friday, June 23, 2023
Currently watching a documentary on Charles and Ray Eames — artists and designers after my own heart. They believed that all art connects, and in their case, architecture and design, film and photography, and painting in particular. I love that they were mavericks. I love that they started their career with a failure [i.e., the famous Eames chair was notorious for starting out to be a literal award-winning failure of a chair — they could not find a way to manufacture it, until they actually did]. I love that they did film. My favorites are still
Powers of Ten [1977] and
Day of the Dead [1957] and
Symmetry [1961], because these short films are so beyond what you would expect Eames to do.
Labels: artists, design, documentaries, film, short films
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Wednesday, June 21, 2023
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 140.
Labels: poetry, Pride, queer
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Saturday, June 17, 2023
7:06 PM |
Gentle People
Grab this art book! Produced by
Pinspired Art Souvenirs [ IG: @pinspired.ph ],
GENTLE PEOPLE is an art craft book that contains the collaborative work of thirty amazing Dumaguete artists, including Hersley Casero, Jarome Rey Simon, Portia Nemeño, Moshi Dokyo, Alma Zosan Alcoran, Angelo Delos Santos, Cil Flores, Dan Dvran, Phil Gad Sabuga, Paul Benzi Florendo, Dyck Cediño, Leah Navarro, Kat Banay, Jerald Junn Teves Bongcawel, Gerabelle Rae, Shaoi, and Sabrina Skye Diago Benito. Go to their website for more details on ordering!
Labels: art, dumaguete
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Wednesday, June 14, 2023
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 139.
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Monday, June 12, 2023
11:30 PM |
Story Finished
There's nothing as satisfying as finishing a story. Allowing myself to float on this cloud for a while.
Labels: life, writing
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Friday, June 09, 2023
6:01 PM |
The Endless Striving
Currently battling with a story for a deadly deadline. Grappling with the third act, convinced everything so far is trash.
Labels: life, writers, writing
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Thursday, June 08, 2023
4:34 PM |
Love is Paying Attention
There is a dialogue at the beginning of Andre Aciman's Find Me, his sequel to that tome of longing Call Me By Your Name, where we find Elio's father on a train to Rome, and he's having a conversation with a beautiful woman to whom he eventually confides: “It’s just that the magic of someone new never lasts long enough. We only want those we can’t have. It’s those we lost or who never knew we existed who leave their mark. The others barely echo.”
Once upon a time, the jaded romantic in me would have agreed wholeheartedly — but now, when I read that passage, I found myself thinking: “I beg to disagree.”
Of course, there’s some truth to that. The new always seems to lose its edge in the long run of things, and what once excited us about it becomes part of the whole white noise that becomes our lives. Many of us mistake that white noise as boredom and discontent. But I have loved the same man for the past ten years, and what I’ve found is that I actually love him more, and deeper, today than how I felt for him when I first met him. This is my understanding: when something true and real comes to our lives, I think it morphs from the excitement of the new to the renewable excitement of what deepens. And in that deepening you find your source of magic.
Take this, for example: I’ve been hugged by this man for so many years now, but just a few days ago, he came into my apartment when I was still sleeping, gently woke me up, and when I did, he quietly pressed his body against mine in a comforting bear hug, his head embedded in the cradle of my neck, as if to smell all of me. I felt the intensity of that hug. In the quiet of that room, it was an earthquake. It was an embrace for all-time, and in that moment I thought: “This is love.” All such realizations will always be new, even ten years into a relationship.
I love that my beloved laughs and giggles like an excitable baby when he watches Survivor or RuPaul’s Drag Race, or Trixie and Katya on YouTube. I love that he squirms in his seat when I force him to watch horror movies with me. I love that he allows me to drag him to horror movies, although he really hates them. I love that he cannot help but nod off to sleep in a church or a boring lecture. [I love it when his mother tells me stories of him as a toddler nodding off while still eating.] I love that he loves his dogs. I love that he sends me cat memes and videos to cheer me up. I love that he spends at least an hour a day going over his diary — essentially a list of things to do. I love that he loves doughnuts [and often sneaks away on his own to have me-time in a doughnut cafe]. I love that he watches endless food videos on YouTube, and takes what he learns to the kitchen, where he reigns supreme. [I love his cooking; and he knows his culinary stuff like a walking encyclopedia.] I love that he grows his own mushrooms [and I think because he knows I love to eat mushrooms]. I love that he loves noodles and knitting and trinklets and beads that he wears as bracelets [he’s never without them in his daily get-up]. I love that his fashion sense is unique and quirky, and I made a vow a thousand days ago never ever to impose my own sense of style on him because his own just fits him like a good floral shirt. I love that he's a geek, and that we actually first bonded when he invited me to watch him cosplay. I love that he knows what irks me and what pains me, and saves me from myself often. I know he hates ripe papayas. I know he hates drinking Coke [but he loves tea]. I know that he loves milk tea to death, but denies it. I know that he had a traumatic time in high school, but I love that he wills himself to go on reunions with old classmates. I love that he worries that I don’t spend enough time with my own friends. I know that he cannot concentrate that much on long-form reading, but he tries to read novels anyway — and also read my long-ass stories because he is my first reader. I know that he loves and cares for his friends so much, and would go out of his way to help them, but I know he feels hurt when he doesn’t seem to get reciprocation from some of them. [He only ever gave up on a friend just once in his life.] I love that he is the nicest guy I know, but curses and rages in his car in bad traffic. I love that he loves his mother, who mothers us both with thorough devotion. I love that every time I see him do all of these things, I observe something more — reflections of a profound humanity in my beloved whose depth is endless and is always surprising.
Someone once said that love is paying attention. I agree with that, and I always strive to be attentive, the way the beloved has been with me. When you pay attention, everything about the beloved feels deeper, more magical; not new, but more profound and more intense. And his presence in my life assures me that I have broken from that prison of always longing for the one that got away, for the one that I lost. That’s a trap; and there is a reason they are no longer in my life — and in hindsight, thank God for that. They did make their marks, but they are scars. This one, this present one, is my balm, and the echo that resounds in my ears that says, “Thank heavens he found me.”
Labels: life, love
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Wednesday, June 07, 2023
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 138.
Labels: poetry, Pride, queer
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Tuesday, June 06, 2023
11:41 PM |
The Sissies in Dolphy's Wake
I’m finally able to watch [a very bad copy of] Mars S. Torres’ Jack and Jill [1954], the first significantly queer Filipino film, which catapulted Dolphy to stardom playing sissy roles, but when viewed through the contemporary lens unfortunately suffers by centering heterosexuality as the sneering norm, and by being the epitome of the retrograde sexual politics common at the time. I’m currently studying how this depiction of Gorio/Glory paved the way to the sissy superstardom of Herbert Bautista [briefly, in the 1980s remake of Jack and Jill], Joey de Leon [Barbi!], and Roderick Paulate [Petrang Kabayo!], all of them straight men who made their showbiz fortunes by tackling stereotypical sissy roles; and finally, Vice Ganda, who, whether you like her or not, actually reversed that trend of straight male comedians doing drag by being an actual gay actor doing gay roles.
It also strikes me that the OG Jack and Jill was the proto-Parasite: two poor siblings, a tomboy and a gay man, get into the employ and graces of a well-off family, the first by pretending to be a cis male chauffeur, and the second by pretending to be a cis female ripe for adoption. Crazy movie.
Labels: film, philippine cinema, Pride, queer, sissy
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Labels: AI, art, artists, issues
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Monday, June 05, 2023
5:39 PM |
Where I Am...
I think
Where You Are is Not Here: Stories will be my last gay fiction collection for the foreseeable future. Because I don’t know what else I can say about the Pinoy gay condition from the very specific world that my fiction inhabits. This book, which contains my Palanca-winning piece “Ceferina in Apartment 2G,” attempts to be a collection of diasporic gay fiction, situating Pinoy gay stories not tethered geographically to the homeland — and it has been a challenging adventure because of that. I started this book in 2010, but I have about five more stories to complete, and when that happens, this book is done. [This is just a prospective cover, btw.]
Labels: books, queer, writing
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Saturday, June 03, 2023
7:24 AM |
In Dumaguete, The Arts Flourish Part 14: Art in the Post-Pandemic—An Epilogue
In Shelter Gallery over in Tabuctubig, just as the month of May was easing into fruition, I stumbled on a show that was exhibiting works of such vitality, such strong presences, and such mindful meaningfulness that the apt response from any art lover might as well be worship. I’m not kidding.
The show is titled Matinabangon, and it opened last May 12 [and closes on June 16], and is meant to be a showcase of contemporary visual artistry from the other side of Negros Island, represented here by Occidental artists Charlie Co, Ann Gaurana, Barry Cervantes, Elwah Gonzales, HR Campos, Janrey Llegue, Jay R. Delleva, Jovito Hecita, Jun Jun Montelibano, Karl Arnaiz, RA Tijing, and Vincent Sarnate, all from by Bacolod’s Orange Project. Talk about Bacolod artists coming to the Dumaguete art scene, and meaning business. They came blazing.
The first painting that drew me in was “Tryst at the Creek,” by Jun Jun Montelibano, which haunted me even days after seeing it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Was it the painting’s storytelling quality? Was it the simplicity of the composition that’s disturbed somewhat by the uncanny? Was it the fairy tale-like take of a young girl in white, holding flowers, wading in ankle-deep creek water, meeting a freak from some unholy mishmash of that monster rabbit from Donnie Darko and a plague doctor from the Middle Ages—which somehow affirms a nightmare I can never tell my therapist about? And yet the painting is also a picture of loveliness. It is also frightening. Both all at once.
It was the key piece of art that provided me the way to look at and appreciate the other works in the collection—an exhibit of such eclectic curation that also somehow made this show come off as an unintended boast, but certainly a well-deserved one. The show seems to say, “This is what we do in Bacolod, Dumaguete.” A dare.
And what is it that they do?
One can begin with Charlie Co, the godfather of Bacolod visual arts, who knocks off timid artistry that coasts along with having nothing to say by giving us “Anger,” a work in acrylic on canvas which is worthy of its title: it depicts primarily what looks like a brutalized man who sneers in contortions of anger and pain as he is paraded around—like a crucified Christ—in an unholy procession, held aloft by a menacing mass of people in strange yellow masks. It invites religious and political readings, maybe even the sociological—but the point is the poignant pain dramatized by the man’s face, his eyes fixed on the viewer like a rebuke. The work unsettles, by design of course, and with this, an artistic gauntlet has been thrown.
But the exhibit is not all like this work by Co. The show contains multitudes of styles: from classical representational pieces like Karl Arnaiz’s “Mother and Child,” a work in charcoal on paper that recalls familiar Renaissance figures, and Ann Gaurana’s “Consenting Vulnerability,” a work in oil featuring a female nude, with flowers, on an oblong-shaped canvas—with the woman’s face turned away from us like a knowing rebuke to the male gaze; to the wild surreal contortions and even pop-art inventions of RA Tijing’s “Carnis,” a work in oil which features a two-headed beast in a forest, with some canines popping out of its blue skin, pausing before a feast of red meat, and Barry Cervantes’ “God Bless the Ammunition,” a work in acrylic that also takes the figure of the Christ, this time dressed as the hood ornament of some futuristic rocket ride, driven by a figure in protective gear with a skull for a face, through a landscape that’s clearly an environmental dystopia. Both paintings are ripe for endless interpretations. Also in this latter mode, you have Janrey Llegue’s “Taga Uma” [acrylic and modeling paste on canvas] that takes whatever pro-vegan messaging in Tijing’s work and makes it more horrifically tactile; and Elwah Gonzales’ “Maayo Na Lang ang Sobra Sang sa Kulang” [acrylic on canvas], which is portrait of a woman with a heart for a body, with what looks like sheets of water coming out of the ventricles—a commentary on love? Who knows.
In between these styles, you have Jovito Hecita’s “Pollination to Rot,” a work in mixed media on a round canvas featuring an assemblage of fallen leaves in autumn-rich hue, which on closer inspection is really the color of death, made more precise by the carcasses half-concealed in their midst: the bones of a bird and the decaying body of a rat peeking out from under the leaves, both of which make up the lower angles of a triangle with an actual clock ticking above, its frame yellow as the leaves, and its numberless existence making us mindful about the eventual mortality we all have to face. This is death personified by a painting.
Heady stuff indeed—which probably explains why I found myself attracted to the more whimsical pieces in the collection, like HR Campos’ “Abi Ko Friendly Ka” [mixed media on canvas], which features an orange beast that looks like a dragon—or a menacing caterpillar; or Jay R Delleva’s “Swallowed” [acrylic in canvas], which is very much in the mode of Margaret Keane but taken to a higher conceit with a merry mix of John James Audobon nestlings and William Morris florals; and especially Vincent Sarnate’s exquisitely sculpted mixed media works “Pugad,” “Aratiles,” and “Last Leaf,” which all take the narrative of the botanical mania of plantitas and infuses the figure of the potted plant with the darling nightmare of baby faces growing from the same soil.
I realized right then and there that what attracted me to this show, like Montelibano’s haunting work, was the pieces’ ability to thread nightmare and whimsy in the same breathing space—some more-in-your face or more infused with social messaging than the others. The variety, and the conceit, works. That they’re all done with such boldness of composition and theme adds to the success of the exhibit.
The aim of the show, riffing off the Visayan word of the title which means “to help, support, and assist,” is to represent thematically the raison d’etre of Orange Project and Shelter Gallery together—which is that both are artist-run galleries that “share the same vision to provide nurturing spaces for artists and their communities,” which is “rooted in the mission to provide a multidisciplinary platform for the people and by the people,” thus making matinabangon not just a show title but also a descriptive for the “art eco-system” that both galleries try to be “sustainable” in. All of these are in the statement introducing the show.
That word “sustainable” feels like a wound—because this is the last show you can see at Shelter Gallery before it closes after June 16, when its lease at the venue it occupies finally runs out, and with no clear future for another venue to transfer to in sight.
“This is why I wanted to have this show with Bacolod artists,” Shelter’s main mover Faye Mandi tells me. “I wanted to close the gallery with a blast—featuring very powerful works by fellow artists from the other side of our island. People who share the same vision as I do, who can underline what I’ve been trying to do since opening Shelter.”
It has been a year and six months since Shelter Gallery opened, with its inaugural show featuring Ms. Mandi and Hersley-Ven Casero in a collaborative exhibit—something that propelled them both to loftier reaches as working artists, going as far as maintaining undeniable presences in national art events such as Visayas Art Fair in Cebu and Art Fair Philippines in Manila.
In the interim, Shelter played host to 15 exhibits, including Fast Times [March 2022], Training Wheels [April 2022], At the Moment [May 2022], Pakigbisog sa Kailaloman [June 2022], Jia You [July 2022], Intention [August 2022], Surface Tension [September 2022], Every Day is a Sorrowful Mystery [October 2022], Windows of Perception [October-November 2023], Pagsibol ng Punla [December 2022], Layaw [January 2023], Sonden [February 2023], Ichi-go Ichi-e [March 2023], and Hue [April 2023]—plus two or three one-off events that combined the visual with theatre arts and literary arts. Many of these shows were group exhibitions, but Shelter Gallery managed to put out solo exhibitions, a considerable number of them first-time solo exhibitors, for artists like Rey Labarento, Mikoo Cataylo, Eli Wong, Vanessa Gaston, Chanel Pepino, Trina Montenegro, and Juan Macias.
Ms. Mandi assures me this is not the end of Shelter. That they’re actively scouting venues for relocation, and that the gallery might take another form—but still very much within the range of her vision of “providing nurturing spaces for artists and their communities.” In the meantime, she is eager to go back to her painting—something she has missed since she became busy being a gallery maven.
* * *
But, in the end, as I put this fifteen-part series to a finish, a part of me wonders whether this magnificent resurgence of Dumaguete arts—certainly a COVID-19 miracle—is very much a protracted phenomenon enabled by a pandemic hunger for culture. Imagine a community hankering to make and display art in the first two years of the pandemic, bursting with so many possibilities in 2022, and now reckoning with the wane of that pandemic wave in 2023.
One notes, for instance, the unheralded demise of Dakong Balay Gallery as exhibition space, now reportedly taken over by a franchise coffee shop wanting more space. But the venue started it all with its initial showcase of Hersley-Ven Casero’s paintings in January 2021—snowballing to the establishment of Shelter Gallery in January 2022, and MUGNA Gallery in June 2022, and in that bright environment also ignited the local productions of other arts, from music to theatre, from literature to film, from dance to photography. It became home to artists wanting a home for their art, and home for art lovers wanting to see local art in a pandemic time that didn’t seem to end.
Is the wave over? we can ask. A corollary question becomes: Is art sustainable in a city that may not have all that it has to really appreciate artists in its midst? Because I asked a local gallerist this question once, not too long ago: “Do locals buy art?” The response: “They do—but most cannot go beyond P50,000.”
I still am willing to believe that the pandemic wave of artistic resurgence in Dumaguete is not a fluke—but that it is going through a much-needed reconfiguration given post-pandemic realities. But there are lessons to learn from the past three years:
First, that while institutions like Silliman University and Foundation University remain critical to art production in Dumaguete [which remains very much a “university town”]—and this is simply because both have the infrastructure, and the budget, and the history of art-making at their disposal—the pandemic art wave also taught us we can actually make art even when important cultural institutions like these are closed down. At the height of the pandemic, we didn’t have the Luce or Woodward or Sinco Hall for our theatrical and cultural productions—but we found unlikely venues to stage our plays and cultural shows. We didn’t have their galleries to exhibit our paintings in, but kindred souls found a way to remedy that—and we actually had more galleries during the pandemic than before the pandemic. True, both institutions have also been instrumental in finding ways to bring culture to people via working Internet platforms—this is especially true for Silliman’s Culture and Arts Council—but that instance of independence from them was actually exhilarating, as if we were given a new paradigm for doing art, and finding that it works, even when wonky.
Second, artists will make art—even with a pandemic raging. And their common hunger can ignite community. The pandemic art wave was mostly sustained by young artists who had no care for the quarrels of their elders, and who only wanted a space to exhibit, and a space to commune among themselves. Our young artists made the pandemic art wave happen—and may their hunger remain unabated.
Third, Dumaguete is truly hungry for culture and the arts. I can see that every time a new exhibit, or a new concert, or a new play opens. And I could see that for real when I spent a day at Pinspired Philippines, which occupies the main lobby of Dakong Balay, and which for the longest time provided the entry point to the gallery at the second floor. It astonished me that there was a considerable stream of people coming in, asking if there was an exhibit upstairs. It was more than a trickle. It wasn’t exactly a flood—but the constant stream of patronage was astonishing for me. People will look for art.
When the National Museum at the Dumaguete Presidencia finally opened in late November 2022, it provided me another way to mark this local hunger for culture. According to one of its staff, the average number of visitors coming to the museum daily is around 80 people—but it can reach as high as 250 on very busy days, which apparently seems to happen more often these days. That’s an astonishing number, given the smallness of the museum—and they also get a lot of repeat visitors, people who are hungry to learn more about the geographic and biological diversity of Negros Island, about archeological riches of Dumaguete and its vicinity, and about the beautiful architectural heritage we have on this island as well as in Siquijor.
Our challenge now is to learn from the pandemic as well as from the pre-pandemic, and find ways to consolidate our strengths from both eras in managing local art and culture—to make the post-pandemic a more sustainable time for artists and the people who support them, and to make art that matters to the community, and to foster a deep cultural environment that will sate the hunger of a city that, in fact, yearns for it.
The arts in Dumaguete indeed flourished during the pandemic, miraculously. That success shouldn’t just be a pandemic story.
Labels: art, art and culture, bacolod, dumaguete, negros, painting, pandemic
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Friday, June 02, 2023
7:00 AM |
Pride Books!
HAPPY PRIDE! Get my book
DON'T TELL ANYONE: LITERARY SMUT and these other fine titles from Anvil Publishing to get a whole range of the Pinoy queer experience! You can get it from Shopee through this
link.
Labels: books, philippine literature, Pride, queer
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Thursday, June 01, 2023
7:00 PM |
Denniz Captures the Dumaguete Night
Among all local street photographers, the best one to capture the Dumaguete nighttime is
Denniz Futalan [ IG: @dennizfutalan7 ]. This is just one of his snapshots; he has others, and it is my dream to curate a show of his night photos one of these days.
Labels: dumaguete, photography
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The s.o. wanted to try
Mogo, the new Korean grocery in Tinago where you can cook your own instant hot ramen. So here we are. It’s cute.
Labels: dumaguete, food, korean, life, love
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