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
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, December 25, 2024
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 219. Merry Christmas!
Labels: christmas, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, December 20, 2024
3:38 PM |
St. Luigi Patron Saint of Health Care as Human Right
Labels: health, human rights, humor, murder, people
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, December 18, 2024
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 218.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 217.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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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Wednesday, December 04, 2024
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 216.
Labels: poetry
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Sunday, December 01, 2024
9:00 AM |
A Second Homecoming for Elsa Martinez Coscolluela
She is one of the best writers I know—although when you mention that to her, Elsa Victoria Martinez Coscolluela would demur. Once I remember her referring to her brother, the late David Martinez, as the better writer in the family. Granted, he was also a Palanca winner—he did the astonishing double whammy in 1997 by winning the Palanca first prizes for both the short story and poetry. But I think Ma’am Elsie is in a class of her own, and I will always be her grateful reader.
Admittedly, I first knew about her from two things. First, in high school, I came upon her short story “After This, Our Exile,” which won third prize at the 1972 Palanca Awards. I did not exactly know the import of her name yet, but I remember being blown away by the story’s instinctive feel for hacienda life in Negros, able to look beyond the gloss and see the rot behind the glitter of sugar. Second, when I knew more about her upon entering college at Silliman University, I learned that she was in fact crowned Miss Silliman in 1964—and I was quite astonished to realize one can actually be a great writer and also be a campus beauty queen. [Alas, when you’re younger, you tend to pigeonhole people into specifics. I later learned beauty queen writers were actually not uncommon. The equally great Dumaguete writer Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas was crowned Miss Negros Oriental in 1970. There’s also Jacqueline Veloso-Antonio who was Miss Dumaguete in 1985 and Miss Negros Oriental in 1987—and while she would not really call herself a writer, she is in fact a fascinating essayist, usually writing about local culture and heritage.]
Ma’am Elsie is still a beauty after all these years, and I have always taken to her as a kind of long-distance mentor. We chat often on Messenger, and the last time I was in Bacolod early this year, she went out of her way to take me out to dinner. I find this personal relationship with her very humbling. It is an honor to be friends with one of Silliman’s greatest writers.
The thing about Ma’am Elsie is that she is prolific. She writes poetry. She writes essays. She writes short stories. And she writes plays of various kinds—theatrical ones, of course, but also ones written for television and film. In the late 1960s until the 1980s, she was so prolific in her literary output that eventually she was elevated to the Palanca Hall of Fame in 1996—for the feat of having won five first prizes. Which is not something very easy to do. [For the record, she has won a total of 24 Palanca Awards.]
I love her plays. Her subject is so varied, but she returns often to the Negros of her childhood—which is in Dumaguete; and her adulthood—which is in Bacolod. That she is considered one of the foremost writers of both Negrense capitals means she has the pulse of Negros in her writings. And thus she is able to write truthfully about the place, and about us.
The thing about her plays, however, is that they’re seldom performed, if ever, even if they have won awards. The recurring joke about winning the Palanca for the play is that, after the awards ceremony, these plays find home not on the stage but in the drawer. But not for lack of trying by these playwrights; who wouldn’t want to have their plays staged? The simple reason is this: theatrical productions of local plays are very rare—unless you’re Nick Joaquin, Rene O. Villanueva, Nicolas Pichay, Floy Quintos, or Rody Vera, or, of late, Vincent de Jesus, Carlo Vergara, Dustin Celestino, Joshua Lim So, Guelan Varela-Luarca, or Eljay Castro Deldoc. You will notice a preponderance of Manila writers. The seeming exception seems to be Glenn Sevilla Mas from Iloilo, but he does work and live in Manila. Even in regional theater, play selections tend to favor Manila writers. How many times have we seen Marcelo Agana Jr.’s New Yorker in Tondo in Dumaguete? Or F. Sionil Jose’s Progress in Cebu? Too many times. They’re classics, of course—but their constant rotation in terms of local production seems to come at the expense of local writers.
One of Ma’am Elsie’s most famous plays is In My Father’s House, which won the Palanca in 1980. This is a Dumaguete play, based on the lives of her father and uncle who lived through World War II in Dumaguete, and who suffered tragically during the Japanese Occupation of the Oriental Negrense town. [Dumaguete would only become a city in 1948.] After the play won the Palanca, it was performed everywhere—at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in Manila and at the University of the Philippines-Diliman in Quezon City; in Singapore; in L.A.; even in Tokyo. But it was never staged in Dumaguete. Here it was, a quintessential Dumaguete play, but never performed in Dumaguete itself.
That is until 2013, when the Silliman University Culture and Arts Council took the chance of bringing it back home, under the direction of Amiel Leonardia. I was part of that cast at the Luce Auditorium, and we were honored to be part of that history in the making.
And that’s the thing. There are so many playwrights from Silliman and/or Negros Oriental. We have Ricaredo Demetillo, Bobby Flores Villasis, Linda Faigao-Hall, Rosario Cruz Lucero, Roberto Ponteñila Jr., Lemuel Torrevillas, Alfred Yuson, Leoncio Deriada, Edilberto K. Tiempo, Luna Griño-Inocian, Dessa Quesada-Palm, Rolin Migyel Obina, and many others. Ang among the younger set, we have Beryl Andrea Delicana, Earnest Hope Tinambacan, Karla Longjas, Junsly Kitay, Michael Aaron Gomez, Benjie Kitay, and Jireh Catacutan. Their plays keep winning plaudits everywhere—but they remain unstaged.
Which is why last year, Dessa and I took the initiative to start staging Palanca-winning plays by local writers, to be directed by our student directors at the Speech and Theater Department of Silliman University as part of their senior thesis productions. We thought this would give their works a chance to come alive. We started with the Palanca-winning one-act plays by Bobby Flores Villasis last year. This year, we have continued this project with the Palanca-winning one-act plays by Elsa Martinez Coscolluela. Staging In My Father’s House in 2013 was her homecoming to Dumaguete; this play festival should serve as the second one.
Last November 28, we finally raised the curtain on the first playdate of the Elsa Martinez Coscolluela Play Festival at the Woodward Blackbox Theatre at Silliman University. We knew the endeavor is partly to honor our beloved Dumaguete [and Bacolod] playwright, but we also were aware that the project is still essentially a laboratory for Silliman’s theatre students. We were going to watch student-directed plays, not professionally staged ones—and for that, we knew it will mostly be a hit or miss affair depending on the strengths of the student director involved. [You take these things with a grain of salt, always hoping for the best.]
Which is really to say: I was awed by what I saw of the Set A plays that night—with Bret Bonnie Ybañez directing Japayukisan, the opening play, and Francis Esguerra directing Blood Spoor, the final play for opening night.
Mr. Ybañez took the melodrama of a young woman arriving home from abroad to attend her father’s funeral and keeping fiercely the secret that she works as a Japayuki [or nightclub entertainer] in Japan, and staged the play with surprising restraint and subtlety. [Even with a delicious catfight involved!] Even with a forlorn scene of having closure with an old boyfriend! [This scene actually made me tear up.]
What made the production work was that Mr. Ybañez knew how to get to the interiority of the story; he also knew that good casting for our protagonist would be enough to telegraph the emotional core of the story. Mass Communication student Joriz Angel Palermo as Mayang the Japayuki truly gets to the heart of her character so well: we commiserated with her when she grappled with her secret; we ached for her when she confronted her sister and mother about having to support her family while her siblings got the privilege of going to school on her dime while she stripped away her dignity in a mob-controlled bar in Japan; and we rooted for her when she was tearing the hair out of a nosy “family friend.” When she is later confronted by her ex-boyfriend to get to the heart of their breakup, we finally comprehend where she is coming from and the extent to which she has arrived at a hard-earned worldly wisdom: “We don’t always get what we want. Plans miscarry, feelings change, dreams die—.” Heady stuff, and yet I like that at the end of it, the two characters choose to be kind to each other, to say goodbye in tacit understanding of their parting. Powerful stuff.
Mr. Esguerra, on the other hand, has the luckier hand in directing a material that invites the epic and the atmospheric. But he also shows that he knows what exactly to do with every beat of the story: he begins the play with bird sound in complete darkness, then with the actors coming in from the direction of the audience, screaming incoherent pain in that darkness—until suddenly, a shaft of stage light shows us a woman on centerstage cradling a dying, bloodied girl. Then we get a sense of the other characters in the melee, all looking bloody, and then we understand that this is a community of Mindanao lumad, their homes having been randomly attacked by the military. There is much wailing, and recrimination, and later on, some quiet moments when the characters ponder their fate with each other. And then all of that gets embraced with some uncanny use of supernatural elements—fog and chanting and blinking lights do the trick—which are somehow tied up with the age-old beliefs and rituals of the hurting tribe. It is a very serious play, but it works. It is also very bloody and deadly, although all the violence occurs off-stage. I quite liked it. I admired how Esguerra knew how to pace the material, how to block, how to use music effectively, and how to detonate the drama with eerie silence. I like that he has a good sense of stage spectacle, which is rarely achieved by most student directors.
As of this publication, Set A [Japayukisan and Blood Spoor] would have finished their two-day run. You can still, however, catch Set B [First Fruits and Late Journey Home] on December 2 and 3, and Set C [The Captive Word] on December 6 and 7. The first two plays were more than the worth of the measly P200 ticket. If you are in Dumaguete, do yourself a favor and catch the remainder of the festival. This is truly a celebration of Dumaguete’s literary heritage.
This year, Dumaguete City is the official Philippine endorsee to become a UNESCO City of Literature in 2025, and it deserves that distinction truly. Doing this kind of theatre festival, of putting life to the literary works of our local literary artists, is very much a part of that effort.
Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, negros, philippine history, philippine literature, silliman, theatre, writers
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