Sunday, September 07, 2025

9:00 AM | The Art of Failing in Dumaguete

Just because you are a popular franchise does not immediately entail you will be successful in Dumaguete. This is a lesson many chains—restaurants and cafés included—trying to make headway into the curious Dumaguete market have failed to learn, sometimes spectacularly, like a plate of overcooked pasta sent back to the kitchen. Dumaguete is not a blank canvas awaiting corporate paint. It is, rather, a living ecosystem, a town with its own rhythms, rituals, and hunger. To ignore these is to serve up failure on a sizzling plate.

I have seen it again and again: shiny new franchises opening with fanfare—balloons, ribbon-cuttings, a social media blitz promising the capital’s taste now available “in the provinces.” They attract the first-week crowd [or the first three-month crowd], the curious, and the selfie-hungry. And then the lights dim, the tables thin out, and one day you pass by and notice the signage has been quietly taken down, as though the restaurant had ghosted the city. What happened? The answer is usually simple: they didn’t know Dumaguete.

Take, for instance, the ridiculous phenomenon of restaurants taking last orders at 8:45 PM. Eight forty-five! As though Dumaguete were a city of children tucked in by nine. “Sorry, we’re closed na, last orders at 8:45 PM,” the waitress at the newly-opened Bigby’s over at Filinvest Mall told us last Friday night, when we wandered in for a late dinner after watching a play. Fine, if that’s how you operate. Our recourse: Sans Rival in the same mall, which opens till late at night—and is, if you noticed, a Dumaguete brand.

This is Dumaguete—a town that dines out, or goes to cafés, at nine. Always at nine. I don’t know why that is the case, but at 9 PM, people always trickle in. I’ll be working at a café like Bo’s, and then at 9 PM sharp, I look up and I see people trickle in. [This was especially true in the pre-pandemic.] If Manila eats at six and Cebu at seven, Dumaguete is unapologetically nocturnal. This is why Why Not?, even if it has become frightfully expensive these days, will always be special in our Dumagueteño hearts—because it opens as late as 2 AM. This is why places like Café Estacion or Hemmingway are popular, because they close at midnight. The day here is long and slow, and no one is in a rush to eat dinner early. Students are still hanging out at cafés past eight, professors are only just stirring from naps, doctors and lawyers are closing up their clinics, and suddenly everyone decides they are hungry—at 9 PM. To close the kitchen before the town is even ready to eat is not just bad business, it is cultural malpractice.

Is this because most of these franchises have decision-makers who are not really Dumaguete-based? And thus unable to really fathom the way we have contoured our lives in this city?

You see this happen during Founders Day—which is really two weeks in late August when the city essentially explodes in a celebration that is all about Silliman University. The city does get very busy—but it is a busyness that should be read in a careful way, or else something you do will turn out to be a fiasco.

Let’s say you are a new restaurant trying to make a splash, so you schedule your big opening or your big promo or some ill-timed “wine night” right smack in the middle of Founders Day. Rookie mistake. Founders Day is Dumaguete’s Mardi Gras, its Coachella, its everything rolled into fifteen chaotic days of parades, alumni parties, high school reunions, art exhibits, food fairs, concerts, etc. Everyone is busy. Everyone already has an itinerary. Nobody has time for your corporate stunt, least of all at your restaurant. If you are not part of the Founders Day constellation—if you have not embedded yourself in the alumni circuit, the Hibalag booths, the local pub crawls—then you are invisible. You simply do not stage an event during Founders Day. You join Founders Day, or you wait until September.

This is why local knowledge is everything. This city has its seasons, its rhythms, its secret codes. You have to know when the cicadas scream at noon, when the pedicab drivers converge at the corner of Silliman Avenue or Miciano Drive, when the professors decamp to Café Mamia after department meetings, when the doctors sneak to Casablanca for after-hours gin. You cannot run Dumaguete from a Manila spreadsheet, or Manila blueprint, no matter how many “trend reports” you paid for. Management must be local. Hire people who live here, who breathe the air and know when it smells of rain, who understand that a brownout can shut down an entire day’s business [unless you have generators], that a funeral in one barangay can drain the traffic of customers for hours. Hire people who know who eats and spends where, and why.

Dumaguete is not just any city. It is a university town, a place of endless transience and permanence locked in dance. Students come and go, professors linger, retirees settle, tourists drift in and out. The lifeblood of the city is conversation, not consumption. People don’t just eat here to fill their bellies; they eat to talk, to linger, to stretch out an evening into midnight over plates of Manang Siony’s tocino or bowls of pochero.

And Dumaguete has a nose for authenticity: it can sniff out corporate calculation from a mile away. What endures here are the places that feel true. Jo’s Chicken Inato, born here, not imported. Sans Rival, a dynasty of silvanas, with a legacy as rich as its buttercream. Neva’s, growing from humble beginnings in Puerto Princesa into an institution of Dumaguete pizza and pasta nights. Lab-as, still the definition of Dumaguete seafood, and longtime definer of Dumaguete night outs—although its legendary Reggae Wednesday has definitely seen better days. Even the humble tempurahan carts at the Pantawan in the Rizal Boulevard command more loyalty than a thousand franchises combined, because they belong to the city, they smell of sea breeze and memory. [And locals know they’re not really “tempura,” either.” We just call it ”tempura,” just because. It’s a local thing.]

So when a franchise comes in with its rigid hours, its Manila-style promos, its tone-deaf events, Dumaguete shrugs. Or worse, Dumaguete resists. Because here, loyalty is earned by listening, not imposing. You cannot bully Dumaguete into your business model. You have to court it, woo it, seduce it with understanding.

Once upon a time, National Bookstore opened a branch at Portal West, and was an instant success. Then, a few short years later, it transferred to Robinsons in what many locals has since considered to be a lamebrained corporate move—thinking that mall traffic was better than organic traffic in the heart of Dumaguete. Now, that bookstore is gone.

Once upon a time, Chapters Café opened here and thought it get by with its Instagram aesthetics inspired by books—not knowing that Dumagueteños are notoriously picky with its food. The bland menu was a quick turn-off, and the city—home of Asia’s oldest creative writing workshop, and home of many legendary writers—fled from its inauthentic book theme. [Do you remember those books they made displays of in their walls? Terrible books. Books you could in bulk get from a warehouse sale.] Now, that cafe is gone and is unremembered.

We just went to a new restaurant fronted by Manila celebrities, by the way.

Yikes.

Plastic cups for drinks? Yikes.

Bad plating? Yikes.

Unmemorable food? Yikes. [This is the worst offense. In a city bursting at the seams with many restaurants, you cannot, simply cannot, be unmemorable with your food.]

But the lines are still long since it’s new.

I’ll give it a year.

The irony is that Dumaguete is generous. But only if you play by its rhythms. Given that, the city will reward you with loyalty that can span years. But first, you will have to surrender the arrogance of thinking your brand name is enough. It is not. Not here. Here, you must prove yourself at nine o’clock sharp, during Founders Day, with locals at the helm. Otherwise, you will be just another forgotten franchise sign gathering dust in the city’s short memory, replaced by the next curious experiment. And Dumaguete will go on, unbothered, still dining at nine, still laughing into the night over plates that taste of home.

Labels: culture, dumaguete, life

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Sunday, July 27, 2025

9:00 AM | In Defense of Fictional Mess

Some time ago, it was Rory Gilmore. For the past three years or so, it has been Carrie Bradshaw. The cycle goes on, and there are fresh targets now and then being pilloried in the dark recessed of TikTok, X, and YouTube: Meredith Grey, or Olivia Pope, or—let’s be honest—any woman in fiction who dared to be messy, to be layered, to be human.

I think we have reached the era of the Digital Inquisition, where every fictional woman is put on trial, their sins collected like receipts and tallied on social media, their worthiness as characters weighed against an impossible moral scale.

Exhibit A: Rory slept with a married man.

Exhibit B: Carrie was selfish and inconsiderate to her friends.

And on and on.

The tone is always gleeful, smug, as though someone has finally solved the puzzle of why this character is problematic—and therefore must be thrown into the pit.

What is this need to reduce women characters to lists of their failures, stripped of context and complexity? It’s like watching someone read Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and saying, “Well, she shouldn’t have had an affair then.” You’d be laughed out of any serious literature class. And yet this same behavior is considered incisive cultural criticism on the internet.

I’ve seen this happen over and over again, and it feels eerily familiar. It’s not that different from the small-town tsismis we all know: the kind of gossip that isn’t content with shades of grey but demands black and white, saints and sinners. That neighbor who used to be so polite? Oh, didn’t you hear? She once left her child alone in the car for five minutes to run into Mercury Drug. Terrible mother. Cancelled. This is the same energy, just with a glossier filter and a wider audience.

I often wonder what we want when we consume fiction these days. We say we want complex characters—flawed, human, real—but the moment they exhibit the very messiness that makes them interesting, we slap a label on them and throw them away.

“Toxic.”

“Narcissist.”

“Red flag.”

Words that once had precise meanings now just serve as aesthetic judgments in character assassination posts.

And I can’t help but notice that this happens disproportionately to women characters. When Walter White spirals into murder and meth and monstrosity, we call him a tragic antihero. When Don Draper sleeps his way through Manhattan with the emotional intelligence of a bar of soap, we study him. We analyze. We marvel at the storytelling. But when Carrie Bradshaw does something dumb—like, say, leave Aidan for Mr. Big—we call her irredeemable. Not misguided. Not emotionally stunted. Just irredeemable.

What is that if not misogyny dressed up as media literacy?

There’s an emptiness in this impulse. A refusal to sit with discomfort. Maybe we’re so used to curating perfection online—every tweet polished, every selfie filtered—that we can no longer tolerate messiness in others, even fictional ones. It’s a kind of hyper-morality that isn’t interested in redemption, or growth, or contradiction. It just wants to assign blame and move on. Like a moral accountant tallying sins in a spreadsheet.

But where’s the pleasure in perfection?

Honestly, what is the point of watching a character who does everything right? Who never slips up, never makes a bad decision, never says something selfish, never hurts someone by accident or on purpose? That’s not a character. That’s a cardboard cutout in a Sunday School pamphlet.

Real stories live in the mess. In the contradictions. In the quiet failures and loud mistakes. In the long arc of someone who doesn’t get it right the first time, or even the fifth. This is where we see ourselves. Because let’s be honest: no one on this planet fits the checklist of moral purity. You? Me? That girl from Gen Z with the infographic on “Why Rory Gilmore is Actually a Monster”? None of us. And yet we demand from our fiction what we cannot live up to in our own lives.

I think often about what it means to be a reader, a viewer, an audience in this moment. And maybe it means learning to sit with the uncomfortable. To look at Carrie Bradshaw and say, “God, she’s insufferable,” but also, “Wow, she’s real.” To recognize in Rory Gilmore the fragile dreams of girlhood curdling into something selfish and still feel a pang of heartbreak, not righteousness.

Stories are meant to disturb us sometimes. Characters are meant to disappoint us. That’s the contract. That’s what makes them stay with us long after the screen fades to black or the book closes.

So no, I will not hate these characters because a Twitter thread told me to. I will not participate in this flattening of fiction into a moral binary where we root for saints and burn the rest. I will, instead, keep loving the difficult women [and men] of the screen and page, because they are reflections of our most human selves.

And if that makes me a bad feminist, then so be it. At least I still know how to read.

Labels: art and culture, culture, fiction, life

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Saturday, March 22, 2025

10:04 AM | Watching TV

This always happens to me with subsequent seasons of a TV show I like after the first one gets me hooked [e.g., Game of Thrones, Severance, etc.]. As I watch the rest of the next seasons, my ADHD brain can no longer quite follow the twists and turns, and the myriad new characters. So what do I do? I read recaps of each episode [usually in Vulture] to have them explain to me what exactly is going on. I’ve made my peace with this. It’s a life.

Labels: adhd, culture, life, mental health, television

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Sunday, March 02, 2025

9:00 AM | Prometheus the Pirate

Aside from the basic utilities—electricity, water, internet, and mobile phone—one cannot live without, I have some subscriptions I pay monthly or annually: [1] Netflix, [2] Disney+, [3] WOW Present Plus—intermittently, [4] an Adobe Suite containing Photoshop and InDesign, [5] the New York Times, [6] Letterbxd, [7] Spotify, [8] WordPress, and [9] GoDaddy. You can say that, more or less, I do pay for the things I think need to stay alive and informed in this increasing consumerist world.

But I am also a pirate, mostly of movies, and I make such admission without regret or self-recrimination. As of the moment, I have 14 external hard drives that contain—as of this writing—16,727 movies of all sorts [short films, experimental films, and documentaries included], but not counting TV shows or filmed plays. [I used to do the same for music, but I have done away with that, now relying mostly on Spotify for that need.] This movie library evolved because I do teach Film at the university, and must have certain films at my disposal when needed. It’s also really because I am an avid cineaste. This library has also shifted platforms over time. In the 1990s, I used to collect titles in VHS, often spending godawful amount of time recording things off TV via my trusty VCR. These were my college days, and I used to look forward to the Holy Week, because I could then record the classic Filipino films ABS-CBN used to air over at Pinoy Blockbuster Channel, their movie channel on SkyCable. This was how I was introduced to inaccessible titles such as Kisapmata and Himala and Ganito Kami Noon, Paano Kayo Ngayon? and Oro Plata Mata—titles you could never rent at your local VideoCity, and titles I only read about but never got to see.



I stopped collecting VHS tapes because of the sheer issue of lack of space that eventually happened. Then I shifted to DVDs. But then I began to notice that the silver plating that held the digital information eventually faded away—leaving only the useless plastic discs behind, and I realized I was hoarding material that faded. So finally I shifted to torrents. Torrents gave me sizable library without the inconvenience of physical storage—with the only concern being the care of these hard drives, which can be easily damaged. I once dropped one such hard drive, and erased 2 TBs worth of television shows.

It’s a painstakingly assembled collection, and a worthy effort. Last year, during the birth centenary of Eddie Romero, a couple of film archivists came to Dumaguete to participate in the celebration, and in their talks at Silliman University, they held out something to the audience that most archivists actually believe: piracy is good, especially for archiving purposes. Pirates are the modern Prometheus.

I think about Prometheus often—the god who, out of defiance and compassion, stole fire from Olympus and gave it to humanity. He did not ask for permission. He did not wait for the gods to share fire and all that it entailed. He simply acted, knowing that the gift he brought down would mean the difference between darkness and light, between mere existence and civilization. And for that act of piracy, he was punished for eternity.

Piracy, I believe, has always been this way. It is Promethean. It is a defiant act of preservation against forces that would rather keep the fire for themselves, letting the rest of us grope in the cold. In an era where digital media vanishes as quickly as it appears, where books go out of print, where films are unceremoniously scrubbed from streaming platforms, and where video games disappear behind a wall of corporate bureaucracy, piracy stands as a quiet, radical form of conservation.

It is no secret among archivists and media conservationists that they rely on piracy to do their work. When HBO Max (or whatever it calls itself now) removes shows from its platform as if they never existed, who ensures their survival? Pirates. When film reels decay, when early television broadcasts are wiped, when companies refuse to re-release or even acknowledge the existence of old video games, who steps in? Pirates.

If not for piracy, the first seasons of Doctor Who—253 episodes in total—would have vanished. Every early master videotape of the program was destroyed by the BBC, which thought that TV shows were at best ephemeral products, and were not worth storing. But these episodes eventually survived, often only in audio form, recorded off-air by fans at home.

If not for piracy, the audio of the TV broadcast of Dragon Ball Z might have been lost because of corporate mishandling. The audio of subsequent airings of the TV show sounds terrible and muffled, because it was in mono, and because Toei decided to use cheap audio tapes and not the actual recording. But pirates recorded the first airing of the show in Japan, and kept them on tape, and soon uploaded online the crystal-clear audio of the first broadcast—and the difference is night and day. The Mr. Potato Head Show was also considered lost for many years, until members of the Lost Media Wiki found all the episodes of the series online. As of 2016, the series in its entirety has resurfaced.

If not for piracy, the pioneering works of French filmmaker Georges Méliès would have vanished. In 1923, when he was facing financial ruin and his studio was taken over by Pathé, Méliès burned his films in a fit of frustration, destroying many of his film negatives stored at his Montreuil studio. Luckily for us, many of his films were duplicated by early movie pirates—which is why we still have a good number of his films with us today, including the great early sci-fi Trip to the Moon (1902).

If not for piracy, F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) would have disappeared. It was plagiarized by the filmmakers from Bram Stoker’s famous book, Dracula, changing only a few details to create their own version. Sued successfully by Stoker’s widow, the filmmakers were ordered to destroy every single copy of the film—and they did. But pirates had already stored away their own duplicates, which is why this great silent German Expressionist vampire film is still with us today.

I actually call piracy—especially in its manifestation as an archiving effort by regular people—to be an act of cultural hoarding. The best example of such cultural hoarder is Marion Stokes, an American access television producer and businesswoman, who hoarded and archived hundreds of thousands of hours of television news footage spanning 35 years, from 1977 until her death in 2012—shows that these television networks never archived. Her effort started in 1979 with the Iranian Hostage Crisis, and soon she amassed an archive of 70,000 tapes of news reports, operating nine properties and three storage units to keep them all. Why did she do this? In Recorder, the 2019 documentary made on her life, Stokes’ son says she was fascinated by “how media reflects society to itself”—and, according to Brooklynn Shively from Establishing Shot of Indiana University, “not only was [Stokes] motivated to record primary news cycles for decades through this fascination, but that she also felt a responsibility to create this personal archive for fear that history would be erased.” She pirated to preserve vanishing news.

The frustrating irony is that the industry that fights piracy the hardest is often the one that fails to preserve its own art. Video games, once released, are often abandoned—trapped behind expired licenses, outdated hardware, and corporate neglect. If anyone wanted to play The Amazing Spider-Man from 2012, there is actually no legal way for me to do so. The game, once sold in stores, is now a ghost, a relic of commerce rather than art. If I were to find a second-hand disc, its downloadable content—pieces of the game that were meant to complete the experience—is gone forever. How can we claim that piracy is theft when, in reality, it is often the only way to save these works from oblivion?

I do not dismiss the concerns of artists whose livelihoods depend on their work being purchased. I understand the impulse to defend intellectual property, to insist that piracy undermines the value of creativity. I am also a creative, a writer and artist, and I do would like to be compensated properly for my intellectual property.

But I also believe that piracy is, at its core, a service issue. If something is available, easily accessible, and fairly priced, people will pay for it. The resurgence of vinyl records, the success of digital bookstores, and the proliferation of streaming platforms all prove that people will support art when it is within reach. But when that reach is restricted, when entire swathes of culture are locked behind artificial barriers, when access is denied simply because a company decides it is no longer profitable—so what choice do we have?

This is not about entitlement. This is about history. The Iliad and Odyssey survive today in written form, but the rest of the so-called Epic Cycle—a collection of Ancient Greek epic poems including the Cypria, the Aethiopis, the Iliupersis, the Nostoi, and the Telegony—are now lost to time. We do treat the written word with reverence, yet we fail to afford the same to digital media, which now consists most of our contemporary outputs. Super Mario 64, the Mona Lisa of video games, exists today not because of corporate preservation but because of cultural hoarding. Most of the early Internet is now gone, except as ghosts in the Internet Wayback Machine. I once moderated the largest collection of everything Philippine literature in a website called A Survey of Philippine Literature in the early 2000s. I hosted it on Geocities. And when that platform was scrubbed in 2009, so did my website—and all the important archive of Philippine literature I placed in it. On 31 January 2024, CNN Philippines quietly signed-off—and with that, their website, which contained hundreds of important news and feature articles that were important to the culture, also disappeared.

Nothing digital in official channels survive—trust me.

Let me end with two stories. When Leonardo da Vinci painted The Last Supper between 1494 and 1498, he did the work in a process that would not keep, and in conditions that were not conducive to the painting’s survival. For example, the wall the famous fresco was painted on was at the back of a busy kitchen, which allowed for moisture to seep through and slowly destroy the painting. Soon, the paint began to peel. Within twenty years, the painting needed restoration. How did restorers know how to bring it back to its original imagery? This was only made possible because copies of the fresco by Leonardo’s students—such as that by Giampietrino—existed, so everyone knew how the original looked like, and Giampietrino’s copy has come to be a great aid in The Last Supper’s constant restoration efforts over the centuries.

I once saved a short story by a writer friend of mine—not only because it had won a Palanca, but also because I happened to love it very much and had included it in one of the anthologies I had edited before. But this was also because I like hoarding pieces of Philippine literature in my hard drive, where you can see them catalogued according to genre, and arranged alphabetically by authors’ surnames. I have tons of poems, short stories, plays, essays, and even novels by Filipino writers in my archive. Now this friend of mine wanted to expand that short story into a novel—but to her horror, she found she no longer had any copy of her original. And so, when she needed it, when she thought it was gone forever, I was able to give it back to her. This, too, is piracy. But this, too, is preservation.

Going back to Prometheus, I think of piracy not as the theft of fire but actually its keeping. It is not an act of destruction, but an act of care. I want to believe that someone, somewhere, many years from now, will still be able to play Super Mario 64 and marvel at the strange, brilliant excess of a civilization that once was. If that means we have to steal fire from the gods for that game to still be around, then so be it.

Labels: archiving, culture, life, media, piracy

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Sunday, November 17, 2024

9:00 AM | The Dumaguete Inato as Life

This is, admittedly, a generalization—and many exceptions abound! But the following are things non-Dumagueteños—especially poor Manila people who come to our city bound by the rules of engagement they have been doing in the metropolis for years and who think their praxis is universal—should learn about doing events in our beloved city of infinite mysteries:

[1] No one will answer your emails. The best way to get in touch with anyone in Dumaguete with a high degree of responsiveness, is through Messenger. [Not even Viber!] It helps, of course, that you have a well-connected point-person who can gather everyone else in your group chat.

[2] Dumagueteños live dangerously by doing everything last minute. Because if we plan too much ahead, things will not usually happen.

[3] Dumaguete is such a small city, but we rarely see each other. This has to be noted, especially if you expect us to always be under each other’s beck and call, because everyone is “five minutes away.”

[4] Don’t fret about only having three people register for your events through your officials channels, and you’re scared about nobody showing up. A good audience, always seemingly out of nowhere, will arrive on the very day itself. Same with ticket sales. Everyone buys tickets to events on the day itself.

And finally: [5] The event will almost always go well, nonetheless.

This is just how things go in Dumaguete.

I’ve come to this conclusion because it has happened twice, at least for me, this year. We will not mention the events very specifically, just to protect the identifies of all involved, but the first one—a matter of national importance—occurred sometime midyear. The person in charge who hailed from a major national office in the capital was emailing everyone concerned in Dumaguete for at least two months. They had questions, they needed to coordinate. We were supposed to meet earlier, but our schedules did not coincide—and it took some time for both of us to finally “meet” online. They continued emailing everyone in the interim—except me—but no one was answering back, except for one or two. [I do get the need the need to email. It’s official, especially if you are using the office-assigned email address. It’s also for paper trail. I get that, and I get why they were continuing to do so.] They would also try to call people—but no one was answering. Three weeks before the event, I finally messaged them in Messenger [I got their account from someone else involved in the project]. We connected. I told them I knew everyone they needed in the team and that Messenger would be faster for everyone to contribute their share of the work—and I promised to gather them all via the app. And then we all finally converged, and everyone started replying, and the project started. And the event was a resounding success.

A few months later, another national event was to take place in Dumaguete. The same deal: the people from the national office tried to email everyone. Tried to even email the hotels they intended to stay in, and the restaurants they intended to hold officials banquets in. Again, no responses via email. They finally chose a different venue for the event—because the first venue was not answering back, via email. I met the organizers for the first time in person a day before the event. They told me they were not sure anyone would show up, because nobody was answering their invitation emails. They budgeted for 70 people, but only three registered so far. I told them people would just show on the day itself, and not to worry. I also told them I’d invite people I knew—via Messenger—as soon as I could. The next day, people indeed showed up. And more people showed up on the second day. And the event was a resounding success.

I think back to one other event that happened in Dumaguete a few years ago. A theatrical company wanted to do a leg of a play they were touring around the country in Dumaguete. Their very efficient creative team came all the way from Manila, doing everything the Manila way. It was very instructional, and some of the things they did were things us locals actually learned from. But I remember one particular demand they wanted to accomplish in Dumaguete: they wanted a press conference in a mall. And we were like: “Umm, no one really does press conferences for cultural shows in Dumaguete, unless it’s a beauty pageant.” The press would probably not show up, except for campus journalists. And even if they did, we were not sure they would even see the show to write about it. True enough, the press conference that eventually happened was a disaster. But the show itself was somewhat well-received by the locals. It ran for about a week.

The lesson I guess is that every place has its own culture with which to do things, and it pays to be aware of these specificities—or at least have someone local and knowledgeable who can guide you through the intricacies. Best practices in Manila are not necessarily best practices in Dumaguete. Seasoned businessmen know this. The way you make a deal in New York is not the way you make a deal in Tokyo, or Shanghai, or Kuala Lumpur. There are cultural barriers at play—and one tiny mistake in misreading will lead to disappointment, and no deal.

I posted a short version of this essay on Facebook and the response has been tremendous. I thought there would be people who would negate everything I said—“Dumaguete Pride,” and all that—but to my astonishment, most of the responses only underlined what I said as something true of the community. Gaba-an Youth Lead’s Dennis Caballero said: “Tinuod gud ni!” DTI’s Anton Gabila said: “True! Especially the second one. On the last hour of the previous day, mapuno ra gyud mga sign-up forms.” Bun Yeng Ngan, who runs a successful events company in Manila but is from Dumaguete, said: “You’re telling me! After 31 years as an organizer of corporate events, sa Dumaguete ra jud ko bilib! Ikatawa na lang para dili ka ma-pikon. Nothing personal. It is what it is! I love Dumaguete.” The National Book Development Board’s Bethel Samson Delatado said: “I experienced the [no email response] one, hehehe.” Travel diva Angelo Villanueva said: “Trulalooooo!” Lawyer Golda Benjamin said: “No one answers emails. OMG. So true!” Playwright Lendz Barinque said: “The first and the second used to frustrate me so much, until I just gave in. And que sera, sera.” Back Pack Solutions’ Ernest Acar said: “I had to let go of the usual conventions of what event preparation should be when I moved back here. Makapasmo, pero lingaw. Haha.”

But why don’t we answer emails? I have a feeling this has something to do with the formality we have come to associate with this kind of correspondence. And Dumaguete as a place is far from a bastion of the formal. We are relentlessly informal. I sometimes teach wearing tsinelas and shorts, and no one will bat an eyelash. Messenger is very informal, like the Sunday tabo-an we love in Valencia. [The best way to do emails in Dumaguete? Email the secretaries. And then call them to tell them that you sent an email.]

Why do we do everything last minute? I think this is a remnant of the way Dumaguete used to be: the smallness of the place allowed us to do so many things in a given day. Unlike Manila, where life is so hectic and the region so huge and the traffic so relentless, you are trained to do only one thing a day, and two if you have superpowers. In Dumaguete, we can do five, seven, ten things in succession in a day—and so it is easier to put things together in less time. And we forget the immediacy of events if we plan it ahead with too much time to plan and execute. Dumaguete loves immediacy. Which is why it is easier to do “instant fairs,” “pop-up events,” and the like here. Plan things too much and people will dilly-dally more. Plan it one minute before, and people will show up. I remember someone telling me that fifteen years or so ago, many Dumagueteños would only begin to proceed to the airport to catch the flight they are scheduled on when they can already hear the airplane landing. That is the heart of the Dumaguete “last-minute.”

Why don’t we see each other often, even if Dumaguete is so small? I have no idea.

Why do we just show up for things, and why do we buy tickets last minute? Because that’s just us. Because we are doing so many things in a typical Dumaguete day, the only commitment we can make to events is not to register—there’s no time for registration!—but to just show up. I once organized a screening for Lav Diaz’s five-hour film, Norte: The End of History, at Robinsons Movieworld in 2013. You would think a five-hour film would be daunting for an ordinary Dumagueteño. Nope. You would think the slow ticket sales at the start concerned me. Nope. By the morning of screening day, we sold out every ticket. And there were clamors for more.

Like some of the responses above, this way of doing things is not for everyone, not even some Dumagueteños themselves. Vida Tusoy commented: “As an inveterate planner, this will trigger my anxiety.” The truth is, even the “culprits” themselves know this anxiety first hand, and after every successful event, a lot would commiserate among themselves: “Let’s plan better next time”—which means: “Let’s email each other and answer back,” “Let’s not do things last minute,” “Let’s make sure we have proper audience development,” etc. Honorable wishful thinking really, because the next year, the same things still happen.

There’s a whiff of “unprofessionalism” that we can be accused of concerning all these, of course. Bun Yeng Ngan and theatre artist Belen Calingacion did not mince words and called the attitude “inato gihapon diay”—in other words, a “small town” attitude to life. But I think “inato”—which is really best translated as “doing things our own way”—is not really about having a “small town” attitude; it is about steadfastly doing it “our own way,” because time and again, these ways have really proven more effective than the textbook-prescribed “professional way.”

I think that’s really the heart of the Dumagueteño: we have always stubbornly done things our way all throughout our history, and the best things about Dumaguete living have really been the product of that stubbornness. Like the “inasal,” as demonstrated by our Occidental Negrense siblings; it’s chicken grilled in a very particular way that makes it “inasal” in Bacolod, but did we do the same thing in Dumaguete? Nope. We grilled chicken marinated in milk, and the taste was, and is, remarkably different. We called it “inato.” Thus Jo’s Chicken Inato—the epitome of Dumaguete grilled chicken fare—was born.

This “inato” attitude was what made our elites of yore build their mansions along the old Marina—no other elites in major towns in the Philippines did that, having their mansions face the sea. The result? The Rizal Boulevard.

This “inato” attitude keeps us from being too outlandish and preening with our accomplishments—but take a look at all the accomplished Dumagueteños who have ever lived. We have two National Artists [three if you count one heavily identified with Cebu]. And two National Scientists. Since 2017, I have featured weekly on the Dumaguete City Tourism Facebook page at least one prominent Dumagueteño or Oriental Negrense who have done much for their profession or for their community, and a lot of them are actually world-renowned. It is already 2024, and my list has not been exhausted yet.

This “inato” attitude is what keeps everything we do distinctly Dumagueteño. At the first Dumaguete Literary Festival we did last April, we made the “inato” our motif. We had vans to ferry guests, but our official transport was the tricycle. Most literary festivals in the country are held in malls; we purposely held ours in an old heritage house. Most literary festivals in the country would also quietly proscribe a formality in dress by participants; we advised our guests and participants to come in wearing tsinelas and shorts. And it worked!

So I’m not exactly sure I’d call everything we do as “inato” the way it’s connoted—a shaming negative. We’re just “chill” this way. Every place has a rhythm which works for it. This is the Dumaguete rhythm for the most part, and it works.

[Photo by Alan Kirit Jr.]

Labels: culture, dumaguete, life, negros

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Saturday, March 25, 2023

7:00 AM | “F*ckboy Consumers”

Scene: Caña at The Bricks Hotel along Rizal Avenue, Dumaguete, Thursday, 3 PM. A table overladen with laptops and work stuff, and cups of coffee. A conversation.

“I heard there’s a new coffeeshop opening in front of your apartment.”

“It’s not really a coffeeshop, we found out last night. It’s actually more of a milk tea place—but they do serve coffee. I mean they have to. The word ‘bean’ is part of their name. People would expect it to be a coffee place, not a milk tea place.”

“There are too many milk tea places in Dumaguete, to be frank about it.”

“I’ve only liked one or two of them, to be honest. But Renz is a big milk tea fan, although he denies it.”

“Wasn’t that spot where the, umm, new milk tea is now… wasn’t that a fruit stand?”

“It was! I loved its name. Rizalicious Fruit Stand. It tickled me to death. Can you imagine taking Rizal’s name and making it delicious? It’s absolutely sacrilegious and bonkers, I love it. But it’s gone now. I was frustrated about that for a while, because it became my landmark for Grab Food drivers.”

“I wonder why they moved out.”

“I’m not really sure—but I was riding a tricycle the other day and the passengers in it had some chika. Apparently the lot owners increased the rent? I’m not sure about that. But that’s what I heard.”

“These days, you have to be careful keeping a business. Everything’s so expensive now. Rent is expensive. Onions are expensive.”

“Can you imagine for a while we were talking about how expensive onions were in the Philippines? That people were actually trying to smuggle them in international flights? What crazy times we live in.”

“I’m worried about _____, though. Its original branch in ______ is no longer around. But it’s new branch along _____ is still thriving.”

“We ate there last night.”

“I think he’s just consolidating his businesses right now. Let go of branches that are no longer working.”

“But it was such a pandemic hit!”

“It was!”

“I remember trying to get their food in the early months it opened in 2021—and we couldn’t! The lines were so long, and by the time we got to the stall, all their food items were gone.”

“That was fun.”

“It was, kinda. We had to go back there at least four times before we could finally get our orders in. But it was worth it. That ______ is to die for. It was delicious.”

“I have no recollection anymore how much I ate there.”

“Oh, it was a lot for me. And then I stayed away for a bit because it was already a bit too much. But later, when we got a craving for ______, we’d be there in a minute.”

“And now that original spot is gone.”

“Gone.”

“I went past it the other night—the spot is so dark now, and it was all so festive before. I loved how they played music like mad.”

“Now it’s gone. Except for their second branch along _______. Thank God it’s still there. Because I still get my ______ cravings. I don’t understand though. It was so popular during the pandemic!”

“But that’s how Dumaguete runs. It runs on f*ckboy consumerism.”

“F*ckboy what? What do you mean?”

“Haven’t you noticed? Whenever new places open in Dumaguete, locals throng to it like mad, for months even. But once the novelty is over, we avoid them like the plague. That’s what f*ckboys do. They’re always, like, into you—and then when they get their fill, sayonara.”

“Oh yeah. I remember Chapters Café.”

“Yup, that café is popular in Dipolog, and franchisers thought they could make it work in Dumaguete. And it did, for a while. It was so Instagrammable with its quaint design using popular literary characters—and people went there to Instagram being there. And then suddenly nobody came.”

“The food was horrible! And I hated how they used books as receipt and cash holders. It was so disrespectful.”

“I’ve noticed we generally hate franchises. We do like things that are local.”

“Must be why Harbor City didn’t work.”

“The dimsum wasn’t worth the Dumaguete taste. I also remember how people swarmed to Max’s.”

“I still love Max’s! But yeah, it’s quiet most days. I love the chicken though. And their other stuff. How come we still patronize Mooon Café and Café Racer? Aren’t they Cebu franchises?”

“Because Rey remade them to cater to Dumaguete sensibilities. Mooon Café in Cebu is not exactly the same as Mooon Café in Dumaguete, not really. Same with Café Racer. Totally different vibes. You have to get into the elusive Dumaguete vibe to cater to Dumaguete taste.”

“I have a former student once—he now works at a major Manila corporation—he posted in Facebook some years ago that the only way to know you’re really a success is to succeed in Dumaguete. Because we are notoriously picky, so when we pick you, you are an absolute winner.”

“Dumaguete as the litmus test for the rest of the Philippines?”

“I get that. I get f*ckboy consumerism, I guess. We do tend to swarm in the very beginning—and we do tend to easily let go.”

“Unless we really, really love the food or service.”

“Unless they really catch our vibe.”

“Unless they really get us.”

Labels: business, culture, dumaguete

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Thursday, March 23, 2023

9:24 PM | Accidental Art History

My essays on the arts in Dumaguete during the pandemic are becoming longer, and longer, and longer. But I don’t really care. This wasn’t my purpose when I stumbled into this series last year, but it has somehow become not just a work of cultural criticism, it has moved on to become a very specific art history: chronicling how artists in a small Philippine city dealt with three years of the pandemic. I know there are some who think, “Too long!” but you know what? Kebs, these essays are not for you. Anyway, I’m done with visual arts [8 essays in all!], done with theatre, done with dance, done with music. Next up: cinema and literary arts, and then an epilogue.

Labels: art, art and culture, criticism, culture, dumaguete, history, life

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Saturday, February 18, 2023

4:54 PM | The Famous Pinoy Commercial Calendar

Growing up, I found this kind of oversized commercial calendar ugly ... but apparently so many people have great affection for this style, which has been in circulation for decades. A confession: this aversion was certainly the terrible snob in my younger self. For one, I hated that it was so blatantly commercial, with a store’s name emblazoned on every page. My brother Edwin, who lives in Switzerland, also used to send us beautiful wall calendars with picturesque Swiss views with the pages bound by some nicely designed springs, and I preferred those compared to this gargantuan calendar that always seemed to be too big for any wall it was set on. They usually ended up on a kitchen wall. It also didn’t help that I seem to have a hardwired trait of ignoring calendars, and even until now I have difficulty determining dates. [Case in point: I used to design posters for the Silliman University Culture and Arts Council, and I remember tasking one fellow member to always check the dates I put in on the posters because I always got them wrong. I have “calendar blindness.” So, yes: calendars and me don’t mesh well together.]

I was shocked, and amused, to find out that other people actually love this calendar. But I also understand. It’s frills-free, and reminds you of each date, in your face, with their humongous type. My mum-in-law and the s.o. are in pieces at the end of each year looking for stores who give these away for free. This calendar disappears pretty fast every year.

Dumaguete-based Pakistani farmer/poet Mohammed Malik noted to me: “This year is my first time using it and I find it a very compelling design. Extremely functional.” It's the functionality of the design its fans point out the most, conveniently summed by Cebu writer Janet Villa: “My Mama loved those calendars, Ian. Kay dako ug letra, red ang Sunday, and then naay phases of the moon [Mama was superstitious] plus naay high and low tides [important if living near the beach].”

Almost everyone tells me that the inclusion of tidal information was very important to them, or to their family members.

Sanda Fuentes, whose family owns Lab-as Restaurant, says: “My mom uses this too for the tidal info which is very essential to the fishpond operations.” Which Siaton poet Grace Monte de Ramos affirms: “I love this calendar because it has the tides, ebb and high and the time, in addition to the phases of the moon.” Another writer, Andrea Teran, says the tidal information was important to families who love going to the beach. “Tidal info for when to go to the beach,” she says. But there’s more: “My dad would write utang on it, too.” The calendar was huge enough for family to tack on reminders on it.

Plus there’s the added factor that it’s cheap. This calendar is usually given away for free, by suki nga mga tindahan, and even larger retail stores like SM. Sanda says: “I still recall waiting on Nijosa to hand us their calendars when we did our December shopping.” Janet further reveals: “Unya libre pa jud gikan sa hardware nga suki ni Mama, or gikan sa Aboitiz. And it's on cheap paper so Mama didn't cringe at writing on it or crossing out dates.”

This calendar is such a fixture in Filipino households that many who have migrated have taken this to be a token for that longing for home. Poet James Neish, who now lives in Canada, affirms this: “Reminds me of home for sure.” This nostalgia has pushed another friend to be creative about it: “A couple of years ago,” Dean Visitacion tells me, “I printed my own calendar na ingon ani format. Pawala kamingaw ug tambal sa homesickness.”

Who started or designed this calendar? Googling doesn’t bring me any relevant information. I’d love to know!

Labels: calendars, culture, life

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Sunday, May 08, 2022

6:58 PM | Rectifying Complaceny

Complacency.

Our biggest failure of the past three decades has been complacency. After we make the country pink tomorrow, let’s make sure we’re going to rectify the silence and the idleness we resorted to for years, simply because we thought no one could possibly forget the evils of the Marcos regime. All along, without our knowing, they laid the extensivee groundwork that has made people susceptible to historical revisionism.

Let’s take a closer look at our school curricula, our history books, our teachers. Let’s make good and interesting movies and TV shows about the Martial Law. [Eto dapat!] Let’s remake the TV newsroom and strip it of its entertainment “Marc Logan” mould, and make the news matter again. [All stations are required by law to have news anyway if they want to be granted a franchise. They don’t have to be patently commercial.] Let’s write more books and more comics. Let’s amp up our YouTube and TikTok creations. And let’s take the newest platform that will come and make sure they are not inundated by Marcos propaganda.

This election is our wake up call.

Labels: culture, life, Marcos, politics

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Sunday, July 18, 2021

7:53 PM | Notes on a Growing City, Part 3: Development and What We Know

It’s important to listen. Development [and everything else] in a community falls flat on its face when “listening” does not occur and when the culture of the place is not taken in due consideration.

I will try to illustrate this crucial element of culture with two examples.

It’s important to note that management for most of the divisions of Robinsons Dumaguete [the grocery, the movie theaters, etc.] remains elsewhere—Bacolod, in particular. They hired locals to man the most immediate areas of supervision, but major decisions were executed somewhere else. [This includes what movies got shown on the three screens they had!] Still, when Rob opened, we welcomed its presence in our midst—like an oddball suddenly marking its arrival in a community that regarded it with a mixture of bemusement and a desire to see a “mall” [how cute!] become successful in the context of Dumaguete.

I remember walking in on opening day—and was gutted with an immense and immediate sense of disappointment, which I later learned was shared by so many other people. This is it? we all shook our heads. Mao ra ni sya? The cavernous two-story space was just a simple L-shaped thing—usa ka tuyok, humana na. That alone did not bode well for Dumagueteños from the start; we felt insulted and patronized by a langyaw’s underwhelming offering. Coming from three centuries of Spanish neglect in favor of Cebu, Iloilo, and Bacolod, we were [and still are] nursing a grudge. In a previous installment of this series, I discussed the notorious pickiness of Dumaguete people—and the mall was a disappointment in that regard right from the get-go. But still, local businesses were game enough to welcome it, opening satellite stalls and branches inside the mall, essentially replicating the business landscape of the city in the microcosm of the new shopping place. (Within a year, most would close down those branches.)

And contrary to popular belief, the mall did not displace local businesses—the city itself in its smallness was already a kind of a strip mall, and certainly more accessible, and “not far.” This proved consequential for some stores: National Bookstore had a thriving branch in Portal West along Silliman Avenue—but abandoned it in favor of a spot in Robinsons. Foot traffic dropped.

What does this say about the Dumagueteño? That we love our “downtown”—and our thriving concept of it lies within the space of the Spanish colonial tradition of “encircle and protect,” which was naming the streets surrounding and threading through the poblacion after saints [e.g. Calle Santa Cecilia (old name of Silliman Avenue), Calle San Jose, Calle San Juan, Calle Sta. Catalina, and Calle Sta. Rosa] and after Spanish rulers and personalities [e.g. Calle Alfonso XIII (old name of Perdices Street), Calle Maria Christina, Calle Colon (old name of Cong. Lorenzo G. Teves Street), Calle Cervantes (old name of Mayor Joe Pro Teves Street), and Calle Real (old name of the national highway now known as Veterans Avenue and Mayor Ramon Pastor Teves Street)—although some streets retained their original descriptive names [e.g. Calle Marina (old name of Rizal Avenue)]. Beyond this space of “encircle and protect” are the “nether regions” of Dumaguete—which is why, even until the 2000s, many places like Bantayan, Daro, Piapi, Motong, Calindagan, Banilad, Pulangtubig, and many others remained in the minds of many locals as being “too far.” Certainly, Robinsons Place in Calindagan was “too far.”

But the parking story is even more representative about “development without listening or taking note of local culture.” A few days after Robinsonsplace opened, management banned motorcycles from their parking lots, insisting that these were reserved only for four-wheeled vehicles, with the thinking that “motorcycle parking was messy.”

The mall management asked people with motorcycles to park along the street or in nearby empty lots—which was a complete misreading of Dumaguete culture. Dumaguete, at least at that time, meant motorcycles. For many years, we were even given the moniker of “Motorcycle Capital of the Philippines.” The ill-advised mall policy was an inconvenience for a population that went around in motorcycles, and not cars. So while the mall parking lot remained mostly empty, the byways of nearby streets were choked with motorcycle parking. And then, several weeks later, the foot traffic in the new mall dropped precipitously—and management scrambled to address this, one of which was to reverse their earlier policy of banning motorcycles from their parking lots.

“By then,” biologist Richard Pavia remembered, “people were already fed up—and realized Rob was not the ‘mall of malls’ that it was promised. It was also too far from the city center, and was in reality an ‘epithelial mall’—meaning it occupies a large area, but the stores are only along the inner periphery. In my honest opinion, going to the mall was not worth the trip. Their parking policy already showed they did not do their research on Dumaguete culture.”


There was also the case of Frontrow Entertainment bringing the controversial play M Butterfly to Dumaguete in 2019. By and large, it was a successful staging in terms of enthusiastic public response—but it was the first time a theatre company dared put on a production that lasted for several days in succession on a Dumaguete stage, including matinees. Considering the capacity of the Luce Auditorium, the ambitious staging required patronage [e.g., ticket sales] that had to go beyond Silliman University, which co-sponsored it, and even beyond Dumaguete—possibly enticing audiences from the nearby towns and even the nearby provinces.

This required marketing of such precision.

And the production’s marketing staff, flown in from Manila, did their work—but mostly patterned their techniques on how things were done in bigger cities, like Manila or Cebu, one of which was holding a press conference.

Dumaguete locals who do events know this by heart: press conferences do not really work in Dumaguete. They only work in two specific contexts: beauty pageants and politicians making revelations about a policy or a controversy; and sometimes a restaurant opening—but even this is not a guarantee that something will be written about it for print or broadcast. When a press conference was scheduled for the M Butterfly cast and creative staff in Robinsons a day or two before the premiere of the play, nobody came. “But we contacted the media ourselves!” the marketing staff told us. And I remember thinking: If only you asked us if this was feasible.

Another case of langyaw who do not do their research on Dumaguete culture.


In the proper categorization of heritage items, this type of culture is what we call “secret knowledge” which is under the category of “intangible culture.” Intangible culture is defined by the UNESCO as the practice, representation, expression, knowledge, or skill consisting of nonphysical intellectual wealth. This includes local languages, folk beliefs and superstitions, festivals, rituals, songs and musical compositions, dances, local technologies, local sports and games, literary arts, culinary arts, local jokes, local healing arts, and of course, secret knowledge.

What is “secret knowledge”? It is difficult to define, but perfectly easy to demonstrate. It’s essentially the knowledge of the practical variety that is shared by many in a cultural community that everyone subscribes to and believes in, without it being properly defined or delineated in studies or books. These are things “we just know,” and pass on to the next generation through sheer osmosis.

In Dumaguete, for example, we “just know” that we demand our goods to be cheap but without sacrificing high quality. A dish in a restaurant that costs more than P150 is already “very expensive.” [KRI famously built a thriving restaurant culture by starting off with all the dishes in its menu not costing more than P99. When chef Ritchie Armogenia was asked by visitors from Manila why he priced his dishes so low, he answered: “You don’t know Dumaguete.”]

Other things:

We “just know” that Bantayan is “far,” and the barangays traversed by Larena Drive are “bukid na man na.”

We “just know” that if you’re downtown and you want to catch a tricycle going to Piapi, you will have to flag one down at the corner of Union Drug, if you come from Lee Super Plaza, or at the corner near Jo’s Chicken Inato, if you come from Portal West.

We “just know” that when we tell tricycle drivers we want to go to Orchids or Bricks or Golden Rule, they know exactly where we want to go, even if these are currently non-existent landmarks.

We “just know” that pedicabs and tricycles are one and the same—although they’re really not. [A pedicab is technically something you “pedal,” like a put-put—but we don’t really care.]

We “just know” that the remedy for fevers is Mirinda Tru-Orange with raw egg thrown in for good measure.

We “just know” that “L” differentiates us from the Binisaya of more powerful centers of culture in the region, especially Cebu—and we relish that “L” in our pronunciation of things.

We “just know” that restaurants along the Rizal Boulevard are for tourists and expats, and if you want the real Dumaguete deal, you had to go restaurants somewhere else visitors would not know about—like Qyosko, or Hayahay [although this one is increasingly becoming known], or Manang Siony’s.

We “just know” there is a huge community of expats in our midst, which we tend to ignore—and are surprised when our visitors are themselves “surprised” to see “so many foreigners” in Dumaguete.

We “just know” that when it comes to doing things, it can be a fine balance of pleasing the four major universities in town. [“Pang-Silliman ra man na,” “Pang-Foundation ra man na,” etc.—and the loyalties can run deep, and can even spill over to strange contentiousness.]

We “just know” that even though Siquijor is a completely separate province, it’s still part of our landscape of what “home” means—even among Siquijodnons themselves.

There are so many other kinds of secret knowledge only people who have stayed in Dumaguete for years and years would come to know in all their strange nuances.

But above all, we “just know” that central to our identity as Dumagueteños is the easy access to both sea and mountain. Straddled between Bohol Sea to the east and Cuernos de Negros to the west, Dumaguete worships the icons of both: the Rizal Boulevard is our temple to the sea [and the frame to our idea of sunrise], and our regular hikes to Mount Talinis is our pilgrimage to the mountain gods. To attempt to destroy both, even in small ways, is a stake through the very heart of what “we know” about being Dumagueteño.

When the Philippine National Oil Company [PNOC, now the Energy Development Corporation or EDC] attempted to encroach in 2003 on the natural bounty of the Lake Balinsasayao Natural Park—which is essentially the colorful front door of Cuernos de Negros—for the reason of “geothermal exploration,” which required cutting more than half of the area’s forest cover, we rose in arms and protested, and we won.

We already protested an earlier attempt at reclamation by the Philippine Port Authority of the sea off the Rizal Boulevard in 2007—and we also won. Now that another, and more pervasive, reclamation project is underway, there’s no denying the vehemence of the opposition. It’s essentially sacrilege, and this partly explains the anger towards the plan.

In our hearts, this “Smart City” reclamation is perfectly anti-Dumaguete, given what we know about ourselves and our community. This is an unsolicited proposal from another langyaw which somehow gained traction among the powers that be, and this feels very much like an invasion into the heart of ourselves.

I shall continue this essay in another installment.

Labels: culture, dumaguete, environment, issues, small town living

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Thursday, October 22, 2020

6:06 AM | Good Breakfast

My breakfast. Puto maya, tapol, and tsokolate from the vendor at the corner of Hibbard Avenue and EJ Blanco Drive. Which do you prefer? Puto maya or tapol?

Labels: culture, dumaguete, food, heritage

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Thursday, June 25, 2020

8:38 AM | San Juan!

Maayong Adlaw ni San Juan, Dumaguete! All our traditional St. John’s Day festivities have been prohibaaited because of the pandemic, so stay home and be safe! Or if you have to get out, don’t get wet!

Labels: coronavirus, culture, dumaguete, festivals, life

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Sunday, November 05, 2017

8:00 AM | Chasing Heritage

When Prudencio B. Sirilan passed away last October 18, he was 69 years old—and he would have passed on very quietly, remembered as loving father to his family and mentor to many, were it not for a quick notice that the Dumaguete City Tourism Office thought of posting in his remembrance on the day he died. Absent that, I suspect there would have been not much else, although it must be said that he was indeed a beloved figure. Perhaps his being an artist would be recalled by some friends, and the rest of Dumaguete would have moved on quickly, the way it usually does, comfortably ignorant of its history, of its shapers, of its heritage.

Prodi was the consummate cultural worker, and he had given so much of his life to the cultural development of Dumaguete City—and it is only right that we should remember him well. He was one of the original organizers of the city’s Sandurot Festival, conceptualizing the first ceremony in 1988 as a festival that would tell the story of Dumaguete and its people. That alone compels proper appreciation. It felt almost fitting—if we could say that—that he would choose to leave us at the height of this year’s iteration of the Buglasan, another festival he helped shape.

Today, Dumagueteños of course are familiar with Sandurot and Buglasan, but little remembrance is spared the inspired men and women who conceived of them. The truth may be that what they have created became bigger than them—as it should—which ensures an institution that belongs ultimately to local culture and tradition and not to specific names of people.

But I would have liked a memorial of some sort to carve in historical permanence their contributions to very specific heritage work. Thus far, however, Dumaguete as a city has no museums yet to showcase its culture and history, and there is almost an absence of research work and conservation efforts to properly showcase its heritage.

In 2012, when I was editing and putting together Handulanataw, the history of art of culture in Silliman University, that lack made itself profoundly apparent to me, and I finally confessed three years later of that frustration: “One of the things that constantly made my heart break was getting told that the art pieces and book collections and papers of cultural pioneers we were researching on were gone or were scattered to the proverbial wind: photographs destroyed by flood water, paintings burned and lost or stolen, papers eaten by termites, books relegated to dusty corners of stockrooms where they were being eaten by god-knows-what and pooped on by rats. I found old books owned by Albert Faurot that way. I asked for the manuscripts of one local playwright who had died many years back and was told by the family: ‘We burned them. We thought they were just trash.’ And Sendong, of course, destroyed many, many old photographs.”

I continued that confession with this observation: “I have to wonder how come no plucky young local historian is doing some initiative in scanning the old photographs of old families here in Negros Oriental? How come we don’t have a museum that would showcase the works of Jose Laspiñas and Francisco Verano, before they’re eaten away by more termites and neglect? How come no local theatre groups are producing the plays of Bobby Flores Villasis, Amiel Leonardia, Elsa Coscolluela, Ephraim Bejar, and Roberto J. Pontenila Jr.? How come we don’t make concerts of the music of Zoe Lopez and the collected Visayan folk songs of Priscilla Magdamo-Abraham?”

Of late, the digital absence of much of Dumaguete’s history and culture leaves a gaping maw that provides a sad answer to this revision of a popular existential question: “If you google something, and you come up with nothing, does it even exist?”

To test that, I googled “Jose Pro Teves,” Dumaguete’s longest-serving mayor, a politician beloved by generations of Dumagueteños, and instrumental in shaping much of the social infrastructure of this city. The hits in Google gave the most rudimentary returns, nothing at all substantial. I could get his birthdate, but the Internet did not even know when he died.



Everybody also knows about the campanario, the Dumaguete bell tower that has become the city’s enduring icon. But what about Don Jose Manuel Fernandez de Septien, the parish priest who was instrumental in building the Dumaguete convento and the original watchtowers, and Don Juan Felix de la Encarnacion, the parish priest who built the present campanario upon the ruins of one of Father Septien’s watchtowers? We don’t have pictures of them, and we don’t know much about them—although Father Roman Sagun, our indefatigable researcher of local parish history, does try to give what history he could find about them.

Things of late have been changing, of course. In 2017, after years and years of protracted planning and wishful thinking, we have finally created the City Heritage Council, under Dr. Earl Jude Cleope, and the City Art and Culture Council—and they definitely have their work cut out for them, because there is so much to do and so little time to accomplish what needs to be done now, and Dumaguete is in that crucial transition phase in its development where much of its heritage is in the brink of disappearing.

This is why I have decided to shift the focus of this column to local heritage matters, to give voice to what must be done in Dumaguete, and to ensure that our remembrance can become more concrete.

It’s the only way we can give honor to Prodi and to others like him who have toiled for years to give us what we now know—and take for granted—as the unique Dumaguete experience of being the “city of gentle people,” and the “cultural center of the south.”

Labels: art and culture, culture, dumaguete, heritage, history, negros

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Wednesday, May 17, 2017

6:54 PM | Responses to Alex Tizon

Yesterday, The Atlantic published the late Alex Tizon's long-form essay about Lola, the domestic help his family kept for decades. It was a compelling, controversial essay bannered by the title, "My Family's Slave." It provoked a fiery response, first a wave of heartbreak and admiration, and second a wave of recrimination, such as this. I gathered together my own response and that of my friends' from our Facebook posts, to provide some of the many facets of the unfolding arguments...



I actually do have an issue about making "art" out of the misery of other people. But I also know it's not as simple as that. Years and years ago, a well-meaning Korean photographer put up an exhibit of his works in Dumaguete. His subject was the people of the city's slums: photos and photos of people mired in such miserable circumstances, but in scenes made so beautiful through the photographic devices of angling, composing, contrasting. It didn't sit well with me, and I had to tell him, "You can't just snap scenes of poor people's lives and make them the unwitting participant for your art!" He didn't know what to say to me. And I didn't exactly know what troubled me about his works. Did he do something wrong? If not, why did I find his beautiful photos distasteful?

Years later, my discomfort finally found some form of expression when I discovered the musical Rent. In a scene where Mark films a couple of homeless people in New York for his documentary, one of them turns to him with such anger, and barks:

Who the f*ck do you think you are?
I don't need any goddamn help
From some bleeding heart cameraman
My life's not for you to
Make a name for yourself on!

"My life's not for you to make a name for yourself on." Was this the root of my discomfort? But I knew it was also not as simple as that. Do artists have to surrender the privilege -- and it is a privilege -- of depicting the pain of others in their works? But what is socially relevant artistry except being a vessel to express this very pain? Can artists speak for those who are silenced, and are without voice? But as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak famously asked in a pathbreaking essay, "Can the subaltern speak?" And the answer is no. So does volunteering to be their voice a service to them, or a disservice? If it's a service, can it truly be authentic? And if it's a disservice, should their being mute become something we have to learn to accept?

Can Alex Tizon write about Lola?


Kate Osias:

I think he never tried to frame it as Lola's story. Rather, he framed it as his family's story, with the victim/protagonist being Lola. In your previous experience, the Korean photographer had nothing to do with the people in the slums, except take their picture. In Rent, the same. But Alex Tizon was writing about his experience -- his guilt, his shame, his love, his not so subtle begging for forgiveness -- and the readers all become, to some extent, his priest. Like a last confession, the story has monstrous elements, but with Alex's craft, he was able to make the monstrous beautiful as well. While people can disagree whether he was a compassionate / good character himself, I'm glad that this story got told. And I think, in the end, the world will be better for reading it, if only because it shows a complex issue, which then forces us to see the world in shades of gray.


Dean Francis Alfar:

And so the conversations triggered by Alex Tizon's article continue, and one of the interesting ones asks the question: Can Alex write about Lola?

The question exists because there is an angle that he has exploited Lola, valorizing his situation (a redemption arc spanning the course of powerless-to-affect-change-vs-mom to taking Lola in/attempting to empower her), taking over her narrative, and thus painting himself in a heroic light.

To me, yes he can write about her. Because he's actually writing about himself. A memoirist looks back and engages in self-reflection, as the memoir by nature is selfish, self-observing, and limited in perspective. It is flawed, and ultimately colored by memory, introspection, and personal analysis of people met, things that happened, and how the memoirist felt/feels or was/is affected -- personal truths. Life with Lola -- growing up with her, how her plight affected him, changed him, made him guilty and ashamed, how he loved her -- was Alex's story as well. And he can write it.

How we receive his text is another thing.


Louie Jon A. Sánchez:

Prose is pristine, but I really don't know. The subject of the Alex Tizon article is not something to be celebrated at all. God bless the souls of Mr. Tizon and Lola, but the essay is a great misuse of art. It's being considered perfect Maalaala Mo Kaya material is nothing but reification of migrant suffering and domestic abuse. It also reified everything totally wrong about this culture of domestic help. Its self-orientalizing gaze was whitewashed by its compelling confessio n-- but what for? I read from the FB page of Mr. Tizon's daughter that the author thought he was born to write this story. My God, bless his soul! And bless the soul of the nanny who is still being abused after her death by way of this narrative being peddled as a familial and cultural laundry drying. It was painful to read, and so were the praises. As a student of Teleseryes, I wanted to puke.


James Neish:

It's the job of artists to reflect and discuss the world around them and the world inside of themselves. It is also the job of artists to deal with reactions to their work. Not all artists are equally skilled at either. If the work is moving and provokes thought, conversation, and action, then it's already successful. Tizon did good work. Lola's work on Tizon's family was even better. Lola wasn't mute. She spoke through Tizon. She set the tone of Tizon's work. In part, Alex Tizon was one of her creations, a man she raised and influenced to become her voice. There is no disservice here, just a beautiful flow of creative energy, now manifesting even more ripples of inspiration.


Vicente Rafael:

It helps to get some historical perspective on the debate. For starters, "slavery" is not the same everywhere at all times. A lot of the comments tend to conflate Alex Tizon's family with white slave masters, Lola with black slaves, and their household with the antebellum slave plantation. Once you've made these alignments, it's easy to condemn Alex as insufficiently repentant, and the narrative as obscene and self-serving.

But that's not the case. Servants may be enslaved but are not slaves in the way it meant prior to the Civil War in the US. And while there is a history of slavery in the Philippines, it was flexible and contingent, whereby the slave was never merely chattel, but could become part of the family, albeit a lowly and exploited member. Power relations between masters and slaves were mediated not just by the imperatives of the market place and by ideologies of race. In Alex's narrative (and in everyday experience of Filipinos who grew up with servants), they are also materialized in affective ties of pity (awa), reciprocal indebtedness (utang na loob), shame (hiya) that hold together as much as they pull apart the master to and from the servant. (Thus the kinship term, "Lola", grandmother, used to refer to Eudocia. Not a "slave name" as others have said, but a term of endearment even as she was often humiliated and abused).

These affective ties in turn provide the servant a kind of moral leverage that she can use to hold the master accountable or account for her own status and acquiescence. And Catholicism, which has its own discourse about the universal enslavement of humans to God, provides a kind of ideological referent for reproducing and sustaining relations of inequality -- but also calling those on top to account for their treatment of those below.

It is this moral economy that pervades Alex's account and sometimes can come across as condescending, or politically naive. But it also opens up spaces for Lola to act and speak, however attenuated and elliptical. While her story may not be as fully fleshed out as, for example Americans may be used to reading in slave narratives -- hers' is not the narrative of Mary Prince or Harriet Jacobs, after all -- she is not entirely silent. Indeed, she speaks throughout the narrative not only through the author's voice but beyond and around it, even exceeding it.

Here, then, is part of what is so compelling, at least for me, about this story: that despite the history of her oppressive domestication, Lola remains, in the end, undomesticated. There is always something about her that is held back in reserve, unavailable for exploitation much less comprehension on the author's part (and the readers', too). He probes into her past, for example, and she retreats, her reticence a kind of resistance to his aggressive curiosity. She is not merely disempowered, but radiates a certain power that makes the family dependent upon her. Her labor is exploited, but not exhausted. She remains singular, even in death. Especially in death, as the author is taken aback by the grief that her return elicits among her relatives. That collective grief exposes his own limits, the lie underneath his philanthropy, the impossibility of reparation. His guilt, if that's how you want to think about it, does little to shore up his authority as the author of this text, or as the benevolent master who did right by his slave.


Ken Ishikawa:

Honestly, keeping a maid is abominable if you have no intentions of weaning them off poverty and making sure their work is progressively rewarded as your own household's achievements track upwards. That is only fair since you are able to achieve the things you achieve because they free you of the mundanities of housework. You must let them study if they want to and learn new skills so they can find the kind of work that fulfills their potentials. People should also think about it in our own paradigm.

How much jobs do we generate in these islands? What kind of jobs would our housekeepers have if we don't provide them employment? I heard that even Karl Marx had maids. What is totally wrong is if you don't use your lot in life to emancipate another person. We are all economic slaves, one way or the other. Even if you're in an upper rung, the system expects you to produce efficiently just like everyone else.


Clinton Palanca:

There are some seamier, nastier sides to our society, apart from the obvious — the proclivity to ride around at night and blow the brains out of anyone remotely connected with drug use — that need to be moved out of the shadows and into the light; that we need to talk about; that we need to do something about.

Alex Tizon wrote a moving and beautiful and finely wrought piece not just about bondage and servitude, but about migration and his relationship with this woman, which was ultimately a story of love. We barely had a chance to let the searing beauty of the prose linger into the air before the fingers of moral rectitude came wagging their way in.

They said in literature class: the author is dead. In this case, the author is literally dead. Let him be. Let the family be. The literary form of the personal confessional is in a headlong collision with the Age of Ignorance and the internet, and the story and its truths are being buried under the self-righteousness and battle-cries and taking of sides.

This memoir only scratches the surface of that which we don't talk about in the Philippines. These are things that are horrific beyond comprehension while being at the same time tempered by love, compassion, fortitude, sacrifice, redemption. The snarling, brutal reaction to Mr Tizon's revelations will only push these deeper into the shadows.


Other Links:

Roger Moran at Scout: "Non-Filipinos need to chill out a bit over Alex Tizon’s essay."

Therene Reyes at Quartz: "Filipinos are defending Alex Tizon from Western backlash to his story 'My Family’s Slave'"

Marck Ronald Rimorin: "Some Notes on Westjacking"

Labels: culture, life, magazines

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Monday, May 02, 2016

1:09 AM | A Meditation on Small Towns, Technology, and Memory Among the Rye

I just read this amusing and thoughtful account of a man trying to find out whether technology has changed his isolated North Dakota hometown. (Also, Catcher in the Rye.) I love particularly how it begins by sizing up the very smallness of the town. Rex Sorgatz writes:

"... [H]ere, on the great plains of Dakota, where I lived until the day I turned 18, stands a halfling of a town called Napoleon, a name so imperial that it can only be interpreted as a sarcastic joke to anyone who visits its restful streets. Descriptions of Napoleon resemble a listless thesaurus recitation of the word remote, so I often resort to numbers to illustrate its lilliputian properties: zero stop lights, two bars, three gas stations, and four churches. The downtown of Napoleon stretches one block — one hardware store, one restaurant, one three-lane grocery store, one drugstore, and one bank."

Read the rest of this wonderfully written article over at Backchannel.



Photos by Andrew Spear

Labels: culture, life, small town living, technology, web and tech

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Sunday, October 04, 2015

7:48 AM | The Trust of Public Spaces

I was reading this fascinating article in The Atlantic Monthly where writer Selena Hoy muses over a cultural observation: that Japanese kids—often as young as six years old—are such a common sight on Japanese mass transit, and posits that “even in big cities like Tokyo, small children take the subway and run errands by themselves, [and the] reason has a lot to do with group dynamics.”

Hoy continues: “It’s a common sight on Japanese mass transit: Children troop through train cars, singly or in small groups, looking for seats. They wear knee socks, polished patent-leather shoes, and plaid jumpers, with wide-brimmed hats fastened under the chin and train passes pinned to their backpacks. The kids are as young as 6 or 7, on their way to and from school, and there is nary a guardian in sight. A popular television show called Hajimete no Otsukai, or My First Errand, features children as young as two or three being sent out to do a task for their family. As they tentatively make their way to the greengrocer or bakery, their progress is secretly filmed by a camera crew. The show has been running for more than 25 years.”

I think this still bears some resemblance to small town life in the Philippines. I can still remember my own childhood in Dumaguete where I was sent to do various errands (mostly having to do with buying stuff from the local sari-sari store) by my parents and a whole barracks full of elder brothers—five of them, in fact. But I think it is a slowly disappearing part of family culture among Filipinos, with our increasing urbanization and the plethora of maids we have around to do our bidding.

I think of the bigger cities we have in the Philippines, something comparable to Tokyo, and I admit to a kind of unease. Because to be honest, I’ve always felt safer in Tokyo in a way I can never feel safe in Manila, for example. I’ve lived in Tokyo in my early 20s and this barest fact about life in that Japanese city has always been apparent to me. Even with the problem of language (and the fact that Tokyo is a megalopolis), I know I can go from point A to point B without too much trouble. In Manila, even when I take a taxi, my guard is up, waaaay up, it is quite stressful—and I can only conclude with this question: Will I ever feel safe navigating around my own country’s capital? The answer seems to be, given the realities. What’s up with that?

Hoy explains why the opposite seems to be the fact of life in Japan: “Taking responsibility for shared spaces means that [Japanese] children have pride of ownership and understand in a concrete way the consequences of making a mess, since they’ll have to clean it up themselves. This ethic extends to public space more broadly (one reason Japanese streets are generally so clean). A child out in public knows he can rely on the group to help in an emergency.”

Perhaps that’s what’s lacking with Filipinos in the Philippines [and I make that as a clear distinction, because we’re totally different creatures abroad]: we don’t take responsibility for our shared public spaces. And there are many instances of this neglect.

We use our sidewalks as garbage bins. (There are no actual garbage bins, for one thing.) We don’t make it a point to keep to the right in public escalators, to give space for those who may be in a hurry. We barely line up for anything, preferring to cluster around and using palakasan as key to facilitate things. We leave the tables in the restaurants we frequent with remains of meals that resemble a sty. We snarl our traffic with devil-may-care driving selfishness. And we make excuses for these by justifying to ourselves that others are not following rules—so why should we?

There are even bigger instances of our misuse of public spaces. We build ugly infrastructure and buildings without any thought to whether the immediate community needs it. (That overpass near Silliman High School is a glaring example). Or whether it blends well with the environment. (That strange rectangular contraption cum billboard along the Rizal Boulevard near the tempurahan which is apparently meant to invite the framing of photos of passing tourists—as if it’s a perfectly good idea for anyone to want to do that). We also consistently elect public officials who sleepwalk over issues of the public good (like public transit).

And lastly, we treat our public parks and monuments like afterthoughts. We have been luckier in this respect in Dumaguete—but elsewhere, it has been a glaring problem. The artist Paulo Alcarazen once posted on Facebook a series of photos of the monument along Roxas Boulevard in Manila dedicated to our OFWs. Each photo in a set of three was taken within a few years of each other. Taken all at once, the series presents a sad study in devolution and heartbreak: the monument over time becomes surrounded by suspicious development, with the greenery that initially surrounded it over time becoming an ugly sea of concrete. And the statues comprising the monument themselves have become compromised. The original monument consisted of five figures in bronze—a mother, an elder daughter, a younger son, and their dog in a gesture of excited welcome to a returning OFW father. But over the years, some of the figures have totally disappeared (perhaps shanghaied by bakal boys), and what has remained of the monument now is just the figures of the mother and the daughter, both sans limbs.



There is a famous explication about public safety that is popularly called the “broken windows theory.” It is a criminological theory of the norm-setting and signaling effect of urban disorder and vandalism as markers for crime and anti-social behavior. In that theory, a hypothetical community where the buildings have perpetually neglected broken windows is said to invite a rise in criminality and anti-social behavior in that community.

And we have so many “broken windows” in Dumaguete.

The trash on our streets.

The chaos of our traffic.

The devaluation of our public parks.

The uneven sidewalks running along our city streets.

And we keep complaining why our city is no longer the “city of gentle people” of yore? Why there are unsolved killings in our midst? Why our youths turn to drugs? Why there is a pervasive lack of public love for our local heritage?

Responsibility for public spaces and public safety. Everything connects.

Labels: art and culture, cleanliness, culture, issues, life, magazines, manila, public safety, sculpture, tokyo, urban planning

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