Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
9:30 AM |
Seeing Richard Brody Typing on an External Keyboard
I’m watching Marshall Curry’s documentary, The New Yorker at 100, and I see film critic Richard Brody working on an external keyboard because his MacAir keyboard has stopped working. I felt this, hahaha.
Many of us were complicit, perhaps without our knowing it, in the grand project of perfuming the reputation of the Marcoses after they were allowed to come back to the country. They played the long game, insinuating themselves into the public's consciousness, slowly crafting a story of redemption that would have eventual fruition years and years later. What a fantastic gameplan, and we were hoodwinked!
Case in point: this 23 April 2003 issue of Flip Magazine, a publication edited by novelist Jessica Zafra. This was 19 years ago, around the time [according to a report by The Washington Post] that the Marcoses laid the grand plan on how they could stage a comeback, which would involve winning the hearts and souls of Filipinos through media, and revising history in the process.
Adam David shared this photo on Instagram yesterday. In that same post, Jessica gave this response: “That was a mistake. We thought we could do profiles of people who by all rights should be tearing each other’s throats out, but were actually cordial [at least in public] and were all in Congress at the same time, sometimes on the same side of an issue. If you read Roby Alampay’s interview with Imee Marcos you will see that it is a real interview in which he asks her questions which society magazines do not touch. About the time her mother’s plane had left Rome airport and she had it turn around because she forgot to buy cheese. (She confirmed it). And her mother’s shopping sprees and enormous entourage. (So cool, she said.) Her human rights cases, the abuses of power. She answered everything. The piece is heavy on irony, and she knew it and participated anyway. The funny haha cover is a terrible mistake. As editor my mistake was in treating her like a regular human being. Lourd de Veyra did the interview with Satur Ocampo. I did the interview with my former publisher and mentor, who at the time was closer to me than my parents. I ended our friendship in 2016, in the last column I ever wrote. Flip Magazine died shortly afterwards, not that it’s any consolation.”
The soft onslaught continued over the years, with all kinds of magazines and TV shows featuring many “gilded age stories [of the] Marcoses,” as CNN Philippines’ Don Jaucian observed. We swooned over Borgy Manotoc as a heartthrob. We marveled at Imee’s Philippine Tatler cover. We giggled over Imelda’s cameo in the film Mariquina. We were subconsciously taught to “move on” when Kris Aquino interviewed Bongbong on TV in 1995 — because if Kris could move on, why couldn’t we? Most. Likely. All. Part. Of. The. Game. Plan. We allowed this for almost 20 years or even more, thinking it was all harmless. Now it has bitten us in the ass: we learn too late that soft power is tremendous power — and lifestyle sections of newspapers are never not political. Their ruthless effectiveness lies in the sheen of their being seemingly benign. The Marcoses already knew this at the height of their powers in the two decades of their rule — they used the arts to perfume their stench, and even until now we have apologists who use these totems of cultural patronage as signs of a “golden age.”
Jessica Zafra’s admission — that her mistake was in treating [a member of the Marcos family] “like a regular human being” — is telling. This, I think, was the heart of the gameplan. To turn their story around as the poster children of massive thievery [according to the Guinness Book of World Records] to that of being regular human beings, just like you and me, who also hurt, who also make mistakes, and who implore you to not treat them like the shadows of their ancestors. [Bongbong’s recent words.] But they are not regular human beings. They have billions [of our money] at their disposal to finance a long game to hoodwink us. The redemption story they want you to buy has been cleverly baked for you, with all of our help [knowingly or unknowingly] — and you ate it up.
Many of us are so ready to blame the masa for being “bobo” for voting the way they did this year. But, as Biboy S. Hernandez would like to remind us, the elites were the first to welcome them home, and the middle class fawned all over them. It’s so easy to be complicit pala, we realize too late.
1:05 PM |
The Cataloguer of Deceit on Strange Horizons
Aaaaand IT’S FINALLY OUT! My new speculative fiction piece set in Hinirang, “The Cataloguer of Deceit,” is finally out on Strange Horizons! The magazine is one of the best and most sought-after sites for speculative fiction out there, and so hard to get into. I was jumping for joy and out of astonishment when they accepted my story last year!
Jingle was a cultural force in the Philippines, a publishing phenomenon that also spawned some of our best musicians [Eraserheads!] and writers [Juaniyo Arcellana and Eric Gamalinda and Ricky de Ungria and Lualhati Bautista!] and artists [DengCoy Miel and Roxlee!]. It was also subversively political despite the censorious Martial Law years. To honor the memory of Gilbert Guillermo, founder and editor-in-chief of the famed chordbook and magazine, the filmmakers of the full-length documentary, JINGLE LANG ANG PAHINA, will make the movie available for free viewing on Vimeo from July 22 to 23.
[85th of 100]. I never thought of including documentaries in this list, because that felt like another list deserving of its own spotlight. Truth to tell, my favorite documentaries number beyond a hundred, and I actually do have a stronger preference for non-fiction. I thought that including this tradition of cinema in this list might eclipse narrative film altogether -- but nearing the tail-end of this endeavour, I've realized what a taxing, if also rewarding, exercise this has been, and I'm not sure I have the wherewithal to do the same for documentary films. And so I am placed in the most excruciating of positions: to choose just one favorite among the many. I could go the classic route and choose Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat or Nanook of the North or Man With a Movie Camera. Or I could go for the iconic and choose Grey Gardens or Woodstock or Salesman or the Up Series. Or I could go to the poetic and choose Baraka or Nostalgia for the Light or Microcosmos or Aquarela or Last and First Men or Honeyland. Or I could go for the strange and choose The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On or Gates of Heaven or Catfish. Or I could go for the historical and choose Last Days of Vietnam or The Act of Killing or The Kingmaker or Batas Militar or The Missing Picture or Night & Fog or Shoah. Or I could go for the scientific and choose A Brief History of Time or Aliens of the Deep. Or I could go for personal chronicles of uncommon or disrupted lives and choose As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty or Sunday Beauty Queen or Capturing the Friedmans or Stories We Tell or Three Identical Strangers. Or I could go for hero-making biographies such as Citizen Jane: Battle for the City or RBG or I Am Not Your Negro. Or I could go for the observational and choose At Berkeley or Ex Libris: The New York Public Library. Or I could go for the controversial and go for Olympia or Mondo Cane or The Thin Blue Line or Roger & Me or Deliver Us From Evil or Jesus Camp or An Inconvenient Truth or Waltz With Bashir or Hail, Satan? or The Terrorists or The Aristocrats or The Cove or Super Size Me. Or I could go for the delightful and choose Spellbound or Wordplay or Kedi or March of the Penguins. Or I could go for the suspenseful and choose Free Solo. Or I could go for the intellectual and choose Derrida or Public Speaking or Regarding Susan Sontag. I love films about gay concerns, and I could choose The Celluloid Closet or Paris is Burning or Before Stonewall or The Times of Harvey Milk or Tickled or The Case Against 8. I love films about artists in pursuit of their craft, and I could easily go for Jiro Dreams of Sushi or Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse or City of Gold or Exit Through the Gift Shop or Style Wars or Helvetica or De Palma or Everything is Copy: Nora Ephron, Scripted and Unscripted or Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold or What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael or Waking Sleeping Beauty or Seymour: An Introduction or Cutie and the Boxer or Hitchcock/Truffaut or The Price of Everything or Shirkers or Unzipped or Madonna: Truth or Dare or Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry or Spielberg or Six by Sondheim or Ballet 422 or Pina or Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel or Jodorowky's Dune or Man on Wire or Becoming Mike Nichols or The Kid Stays in the Picture or Mori: The Artists Habitat or Bill Cunningham New York or The First Monday in May or Finding Vivian Maier or The Decline of Western Civilization or The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness or Tim's Vermeer or Faces, Places or Filmworker or Crumb. Do you see what I mean? It's an impossibility, so I'll choose something that I've found myself perpetually delighted by even in repetition -- and if you've noticed, I have a particular weakness for documentaries about artistry and creatives. And I've chosen the 2009 documentary by R.J. Cutler about the making of Vogue Magazine's heftiest, and most sought after, monthly issue. I love the film because it is ostensibly a work documentary following American Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour -- clearly her personal response to The Devil Wears Prada, the fictional expose, in book and subsequent film adaptation, that dared bear her alleged workplace toxicity. But in following their subject around as she goes through the grind of finishing the most demanding issue of the year, the film finds itself becoming a treatise about staying true to one's artistic vision under the heels of pedestrian and commercial concerns. It makes that turn when it discovers editor Grace Coddington, the perfect foil to Wintour and her struggles to juggle the demands of the bottomline, editing just enough of the artistry to populate the meager page counts with, and staying right ahead or on top of the cutting edge of fashion's many dicta. It is clearly not an enviable job, and I can understand the icy stance Wintour puts on, perhaps as shield to the hard editorial decisions she has to make. But this also makes out Coddington as the free-spirit art director, always fighting for more pages for her truly remarkable fashion photos, and always trying to subvert the fashion world's expectations. [On hearing that Wintour has ordered the pot belly of the film's cameraman -- who was used as minor subject in one of the magazine's approved photo shoots -- be airbrushed, Coddington quickly calls the art department for it to refrain from doing so. "We need this to be realistic," she tells the camera.] That push and pull between Wintour and Coddington is all the more interesting because it is not really antagonistic, but more of a strange kind of complementary. As Coddington would confess to the camera: "She knows how to push me, and I know how to push her." The film also has a special allure for me because it is also a story of journalism -- magazine-making is a very special niche -- and it has allowed me a sobering look into the hard work of creating those glossy pages. It informs me above all that the primary qualification of a good editor is really singular vision-keeping. I once worked for an editor who was too timid, and lacked a strong editorial voice: her way of managing her staff was to take in everyone's suggestions and ideas without really processing if they worked together. The resulting publication was a terrible hodgepodge that defied description. This film taught me the fine balance between editorial firmness and artistic flight. What's the film?
With Graphic Magazine retrenching its editorial staff and virtually suspending literary publication, where will Filipino writers publish their pieces now? I'm not talking about literary journals. Is Sunday Times still accepting works? I'm sad that my generation of writers may have been the last one to enjoy having a pick of Free Press, Graphic, Sunday Inquirer Magazine, Story Philippines, Pen & Ink, Sunday Times Magazine, Panorama, HomeLife, Esquire Philippines, Rogue. Wala na halos tanan.
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'"
My short story, “Compartments,” is part of the Love and Sex [February 2017] issue of Esquire Philippines Magazine! It’s going to be part of my forthcoming collection of erotica Don't Tell Anyone, published by Anvil. In the meantime, read this and see me bare ... my soul.
Truth to tell, it felt different, seeing this short story finally in print, on the pages of something other than just ephemeral text on my computer screen. I began writing “Compartments” sometime in 2010 after the biggest and most overwhelming heartbreak of my life. I needed to soothe my ache via the only thing I knew could help me: fiction. I wrote one scene — but I couldn’t go beyond that, and so it remained unfinished for a long, long time. But the story was there, in one of the folders in my laptop, at the back of my head. Rumurumbo sa utak, so they say. I knew how the story was going to end, but I had no idea exactly how to accomplish the middle — despite the fact that I knew already every single detail the story should possess. It was a difficult story to write, not because the words were not forthcoming, but because I felt I wasn’t ready to write it down for good and subsequently confront an intimate period from my immediate past.
In 2014, four years later, I finally managed to write it all down in white heat, over the course of a summer day. (The only other person I confided to about my project around that time was, of all people, the poet Ricardo de Ungria.) It was finally finished. Still, it remained unpublished, because who in this country would publish erotica?
And then Esquire’s Kristine Fonacier emailed me late last year, and then also Sarge Lacuesta. They wrote separately, didn’t know the other one was emailing me. Did I have erotica they could include for their Love and Sex issue of the magazine? Of course I do! I wrote back. And here it is, finally.
I read the story again last night — and all the pain came back, this time with the wistfulness of surrender, the balm of time, and the comfortable remove of fictionalizing. I have published many, many stories before, in books and in magazines, but this is the first time in a long, long while that I have ever felt a certain satisfaction over having something in print.
12:01 AM |
The Ups and Downs (and Ups Again) of Gay Magazines in the Philippines [UPDATED]
"You can't be close-minded in this world, it's 2016," declares actor/model Tommy Esguerra, the cover boy of the latest issue -- for June, and the fifth for the new rag -- of Team Magazine, the Philippines preeminent and currently its only gay magazine. In what the magazine dubs as its Youth Issue, Team proclaims Esguerra as the prom date we all deserve, leading as he does "the pack of young straights who fight for love and sock it to bigots." In the same issue, there are articles and spreads and mentions of Bretman Rock, Pepe Diokno, and "flashbacks on youth from Boy Abunda, the King of Talk." It makes me all smile. I like the stark minimalism of the cover, and I like the hip vibe of the magazine over all -- and then it quickly reminds me that there has been a run of these magazines in the country since the late 1990s, and they never seem to last.
Magazines are important cultural signifiers and cultural arbiters/caterers. As a reflection of specific cultural communities with special interests -- feminism has Ms., avant-garde art has Interview, surfing has Tracks and Surfer and various others, bridezillas have Brides, alternative rock-and-roll had Ray Gun -- they become chroniclers of a particular scene, and when they are around just enough to impact culture, they become bibles of lifestyles. Magazines are the easy maps to navigate a certain life, fulfilling in the way of instant gratification our wishes for a certain type of knowledge. They are the colour-photograph, typography-laden fulfilment of our fantasies, the cheap way to obtain our aspirations -- all available for newsstand price and ready for the taking in the palms (or reading grips) of our hands. Today, they come in all forms: e-zines in online form, and plain zines for those private publications we make (and sell) as shrines to our passions.
Gayness as lifestyle quickly demanded a magazine. In the U.S., The Advocate was established in 1967 and is the oldest and largest LGBT publication in that country, and today it is the only surviving one of its kind that was founded before the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City. There has since been others like Pink (a quarterly launched in 1990), Out Magazine (founded 1992, and now with the highest circulation of any LGBT monthly publication in the United States), Next Magazine, (launched in New York in 1993), Compete (launched in 2006 for LGBT athletes), OMG! (launched 2009), and a bunch of smaller national and regional periodicals. Other countries have their own successful counterparts: Australia (DNA and Q), Canada (Perceptions and Fugues), Brazil (G, now defunct), India (Bombay Dost), Japan (Barazoku, Badi, G-men, and Samson), Singapore (Element), Germany (Blu), Italy (Pride), Mexico (Ohm and Anal -- yes), The Netherlands (Butt), Spain (Shangay), Turkey (Kaos GL), and United Kingdom (Attitude, Bent, Pride Life, and Diva).
In the Philippines, our history of putting out gay magazines have been quite spotty. The granddaddy of them all wasn't even conceived as a gay magazine. Chika-Chika was a showbiz rag in the mid-1990s that had an unmistakable gay slant -- and often featured minor celebrities in various modes of undress. It was of course a huge success, especially among the "parlor gays" -- but a success ghettoised into a niche, nobody really took it seriously. In 1999, Valentino came into the picture.
In his short history of gay magazines in the Philippines Michael Kho Lim wrote of Valentino's inception:
[It] was the brainchild of business tycoon Ignacio B. Gimenez or more popularly known as IBG in the business sector because of his brokerage firm, IBG Securities. IBG is not gay nor is he a gay advocate. He is just simply an entrepreneur. His first publishing venture was Buy and Sell, the free ads paper, which took five years to break-even. Even though it did not give him good immediate returns, he took pride in being the first one in Asia to produce such a publication and enjoyed the glory of being recognized as the innovative entrepreneur.
With the success of Buy and Sell, IBG threw parties from time to time exclusively for the press and media people to strengthen his public relations. It was in one of those parties -- the Christmas Party of 1998 -- when he met showbiz reporter Jobert Sucaldito who was involved then with Chika-Chika. Both the writer and the entrepreneur enjoyed a nice conversation, particularly because Sucaldito was able to share with IBG the business success of Chika-Chika.
With the peso sign flashing in IBG’s eyes, he called for a management committee meeting quickly. Seeing the market demand and the absence of a product to an existing and available market, IBG thought that an unpretentious gay magazine would be a hit.
Copycats followed right from the very beginning. After only its second issue, almost all Valentino's editorial staff absconded to make a rival magazine, Male View. To counter the competition, Valentino's publisher went for its own spin-offs. Gigolo was launched in 1999, five years after Ladlad was published, this time catering for an audience (the C/D market) with a supposed taste for the "hairier" models, and more lascivious features -- plus a penchant for showbiz Chika-Chika was known for.
Another sister publication, Ohm also came out in 1999. Under editor Carmelo Roxas, Ohm for its first issue had a cover story on model Derrick Hibaler, a centerfold article on mountaineer Abel Serrano, an article on Joy (then a popular gay club), a profile on fashion designer Joji Lloren (where they never mentioned his surname), a short confessional about coming out by someone named Boxie from Davao City, flash fiction by Javier Villanueva, an article on vanity, and an article on the seven habits of promiscuity. (Interesting.) Immediately it made a splash: it dared do distribution out in the open, and landed in newsstands everywhere. And it was not easy to ignore: at 11x14.5 inches, it was a huge magazine, and the P70 price tag was quite a sum then. And it must have taxed closeted gay men who might have wanted to buy a copy but couldn't -- for the sheer problem of size. (Not all gay men, alas, are size queens.) Ohm lasted two issues.
Cover Boy was also launched in 1999, with a racier content, but it stopped publication after ten issues, with many insiders saying it had become "too daring."
Only Gigolo and Valentino remained. And while Valentino was unflinching in its goal to cater to the gay taste "without any pretensions," it balked at the pornographic, preferring the suggestive instead. This was where competitors tried to fill the gap, more and more magazines showing skin, there was an absolute saturation of it by the time the early 2000s came around. Kho writes: "What made Valentino flourish was that no other gay magazine existed before it. It was something new. I believe that the gay market was ready for the magazine when it was introduced. In fact, the market was just waiting for it... Valentino died a natural death since other magazines took the risk to go beyond the legal aspects of publishing and created a new underground market and economy. In other words, the competitors sold more skin... Valentino eventually died because of market saturation. There were already too many gay magazines that were mushrooming on street corners, offering the same thing. Innovation lost its glory. Skin reached its saturation point. The market died."
With the death of the mass-market magazines, however, came the "gay glossies," more expensive publications catering to gay men from the A/B market. Rice!, first published in 2001 under the creative direction of photographer Raymond Lontoc (with Butch Franco as editor), was a highbrow attempt at a journal -- mixing photography and literature in a heady mix, and was published in digest form. It lasted four issues.
L Magazine was published in 2004, but had a very short run. Icon Magazine had the longest run, and thus far, was the most successful of them all. It came out in October 2004 under editor Richie Villarin, with a tempting Rafael Rossell on the cover, and lasted until February 2006 with a bunch of Brazilian models in a huddle on the cover -- and then it disappeared without any explanation. Generation Pink soon followed in 2006, but folded up after five issues. Outrage Magazine appeared in 2007, with print issues appearing consistently, until it decided to keep -- following the worldwide downturn in magazine publishing -- a mostly online presence, coming up with a print counterpart now and then. (It's latest print issue is from June 2016.) Ketchup Magazine also appeared in 2008, published intermittently -- and still retains an active social media presence.
Meanwhile, the first lesbian magazine in the country was Echoes, which came out in 2001. It lasted three issues. My Femme Magazine appeared in 2009, but never made it to a second issue.
One interesting note of observance, however: most of these magazines think they are "the only" or "the first" gay or lesbian magazine in the country, signalling a significant lack of knowledge of gay and lesbian magazine publishing in the country.
Team Magazine, under editor Paolo Lorenzana, thus comes to us with us of expectations and a long memory of disappointments. It has a more than modest mission: it aims to "tackle how gay Filipino men relate [to] their identity, from fuckups to fantasies, to where to go for music you can actually dance to. We may not have proper rights in our country but we’re claiming some authority by getting our words and ideas on paper. And though we lack public places to convene, an open publication (and wide-open digital space) is a good place to start." Very bold, and I like it. It sounds like a call to battle.
But will it last? CNN Philippines' Don Jaucian has just written of its existence as a fledgling publication: "It’s hard out there for a gay mag. It’s problematic enough that the print industry is struggling to find a steadier footing. But as you flip through Team, currently the only gay men’s magazine in the country, you’ll wonder where the advertisers are — brands who have proclaimed themselves as allies of the LGBTQ community." But Jaucian continues with a note of hope: "But five issues in, Team has braved the CMYK-waters of print in these tumultuous times and gained confidence as a quarterly publication held up by its loyal following. Issues are available in major bookstores in Manila, and celebrities, like John Lloyd Cruz, have appeared on the magazine’s cover."
And I can believe it has legs.
For one thing, they're doing it differently. A study of the covers past and Team's present reveal a change of tact, for example: gone are the naked bodies of impossibly handsome young men from those older magazines -- and in place are hipsterish (Instagram-ish?) images of beautiful people sans the crude temptation of sex. (Perhaps sex doesn't sell anymore?) Set in a minimalist tone, it has the whiff of the cool and contemporary -- and a promise of timelessness and universality. That can only be a good thing. Lorenzana has a command of the articles, all clue'd in culturally, and doesn't set off gayness as something boxed in and alienating. He tells CNN pointblank: "Our issues are different for sure — I think there’s a need to unify faith with faggotry. In the Philippines, I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface in making being “out” look as appealing as it does in places like the U.S., for example. We’re still dealing with a caricatured view of gay men. Gay relationships need to go mainstream a little more, and so a lot of our content will still explore the normalcy of this in order to make our readers more comfortable..."
Normalcy as aesthetic, as gay magazine philosophy. That can work.
Here's wishing Team Magazine all the pink luck in the world.
11:53 PM |
Jaden Smith, Judith Butler, and the Performance of Gender
New York Magazine has a wonderful article -- a cover story, no less -- about icon Judith Butler and her biggest contribution to queer theory: the concept of performativity in gender. What does gender performativity mean? Nobody is born one gender or the other, says the philosopher: "We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman" [The Big Think]. The New York Magazine article considers the real-life impact and embodiment of Butler's idea of gender, starting off with Jaden Smith and Caitlyn Jenner, and then to this...
The impulse to reexamine assumptions has had practical consequences — gender-neutral college dorms and high-school bathrooms — and cultural ripples. Writers like Jill Soloway (creator of TV’s Transparent) and Maggie Nelson (author of the queer-family memoir The Argonauts) have found human drama in gender’s mutability. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed offers an illustrated list showing “What People Say to Gender Nonbinary People vs. the Subtext We Often Hear,” and Rookie presents the recent comic “My Gender Is Weird.” Here’s Teen Vogue on another photo of Jaden Smith in a skirt suit: “The midi skirt set sends up a poignant rejection of heteronormativity.” What sage could have predicted that heteronormativity would eventually make its way into the vocabulary of teen magazines and shareable web content? Only, perhaps, the queer theorist Judith Butler.
In that Big Think interview, Butler explained further her idea:
It’s one thing to say that gender is performed and that is a little different from saying gender is performative. When we say gender is performed we usually mean that we’ve taken on a role or we’re acting in some way and that our acting or our role playing is crucial to the gender that we are and the gender that we present to the world. To say that gender is performative is a little different because for something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.
I was walking down the street in Berkeley when I first arrived several years ago and a young woman who was I think in high school leaned out of her window and she yelled, “Are you a lesbian?”, and she was looking to harass me or maybe she was just freaked out or she thought I looked like I probably was one or wanted to know and I thought to myself well I could feel harassed or stigmatized, but instead I just turned around and I said yes I am and that really shocked her.
We act as if that being of a man or that being of a women is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us, but actually it’s a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start. I know it’s controversial, but that's my claim.
Think about how difficult it is for sissy boys or how difficult it is for tomboys to function socially without being bullied or without being teased or without sometimes suffering threats of violence or without their parents intervening to say maybe you need a psychiatrist or why can’t you be normal. So there are institutional powers like psychiatric normalization and there are informal kinds of practices like bullying which try to keep us in our gendered place.
I think there is a real question for me about how such gender norms get established and policed and what the best way is to disrupt them and to overcome the police function. It’s my view that gender is culturally formed, but it’s also a domain of agency or freedom and that it is most important to resist the violence that is imposed by ideal gender norms, especially against those who are gender different, who are nonconforming in their gender presentation.
As to be expected, the massacre at a gay club in Orlando dominates the most recent Time Magazine cover -- and does so in a very touching and sombre way: the names of all the victims in a list, grey-scaled, pouring over like a lamentation on a jet-black background. It is a memorial in the guise of a magazine cover, and it reminds me of similar designs such as the Maya Lin's Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., a dark-grey slab that becomes a massive centerpiece of emotion with the seemingly-endless sea of names listed and wrapped around it.
The cover story can be found here, and the article title itself is a plea: "Why did they die?"
In retrospect, the magazine has gone over considerable ground in covering LGBTQ issues quite a few times in its history, some good, some bad...
... and almost always in stories that detail a cultural war involving tolerance (in the army, among the conservative class, among teenagers...), sometimes a coverage of disease ravaging a community, and sometimes notes of triumph in the fight for equality. Gay men and women, many of them, have graced the cover of Time, of course -- they are not included here -- but the cover stories almost always center around their achievements, and never about their sexuality -- unless you're Ellen DeGeneres.
All of these have come a long way from the very first Time cover that focused on gayness. In 1966, the magazine broke new ground with a cover story titled "The Homosexual in America." It was an ugly coverage. In trying to define homosexuality, the article runs lines like: "Beset by inner conflicts, the homosexual is unsure of his position in society, ambivalent about his attitudes and identity—but he gains a certain amount of security through the fact that society is equally ambivalent about him." That's the cover below.
The Stonewall Riots -- the iconic turning point in the history of the gay rights movement -- never made it to the cover of Time when it exploded in the summer of 1969. Four months later, in 31 October 1969, an article in Time did run, and it read: "The life of a homosexual is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste -- and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness."
Oh dear God.
Times -- and the tone in Time -- have certainly changed.
In his essay, "Gay Lit 101," scholar and poet J. Neil C. Garcia posits that there two kinds of gay literature: the [1] self-conscious one and the [2] unconscious one. The first form, according to him, is easy enough to tell. These are literary works that are explicitly about gay subject matters, usually written by gay authors, and are written for a largely gay audience. The books of David Leavitt and the literary works that pepper the groundbreaking Ladlad anthologies (edited by Garcia and Danton Remoto) are great examples of this form. He writes: "... [T]hese literary texts frontally -- and sometimes even, obscenely -- tackle questions of gayness, they qualify as a kind of self-conscious homosexual production..."
The second form, however, according to Garcia is more problematic, but for me also the most interesting. Of what makes up subconscious gay literature, Garcia writes:
The absence of patent homoeroticism in a male-authored text does not imply that such a text cannot be read as an example of homosocial (that is to say, most probably homosexual) writing. There are stories that were written by such early-twentieth-century gay writers as Henry James and E.M. Forster ... that treat the intimacy of men in largely metaphorical terms. And of course, the ubiquitous ménages à trois in the literature of the period lends itself to a homosocial reading as well: the rivalry of two men for the same beloved woman is actually a product of a detour of their proscribed desire for each other. Lover A desires Woman C, less because of her own intrinsic attributes than because he imagines Lover B to be desiring her as well.
And then there are those stories where one male character exhibits hatred for another male character, a hatred that is both unmotivated and underexplained. I am thinking of a particular story (“You May Safely Gaze,” by James Purdy) in which a man dwells on his dislike for two of his officemates, an obsession that he openly (albeit unselfconsciously) relates to another co-worker over lunch. And certainly, after some time, the lunch partner turns suspicious (and so does the reader) of what his friend actually feels about these officemates, since he seems rather fixated on them, and has obviously been paying them—including their well-built bodies—a little too much finicky attention
Stories of male friendship -- like that David and Jonathan in the Bible -- can justly be read as metaphors with a homoerotic subtext. And ménages à trois stories -- like Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley and D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love -- clearly cackle with the unspoken desire between the competing men, a mechanism of repression elaborated in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire and Epistemology of the Closet.
And sometimes, a non-gay story or narrative spouts off sublimated signals that gay men and women clearly understand to be codes for further queer reading -- even if these stories and narratives do not readily make it obvious. Popular culture is replete with examples: Spongebob Squarepants, Batman and Robin, Bert and Ernie in Sesame Street. The last example has found such gay resonance, to the chagrin of its copyright owners, that when The New Yorker celebrated the Supreme Court's historic rulings on gay marriage in 2013, the magazine opted for this now iconic cover:
In other words, anything can be read in a gay way -- but the reading has to have legs. The best example of this is Disney's Mulan. Don't gasp too hard. Of course it is not a gay movie -- and I'm sure Disney did not intend it to be read in a gay way. But reading alas flies beyond the intentions of the original makers of the narratives; it is completely in the province of the reader. And in Mulan, the sapphic reading is manifested strongly in the figure of the titular character who comes off as tomboyish right from the get-go. When the honor of the family demands that her father must go to war for the emperor, Mulan leaps at the chance to replace her ageing father -- by pretending to be a boy and volunteering for the army.
The gender fix is not enough to justify a queer reading, however; for me, what clinches and justifies the reading is the song Mulan sings after making a complete fiasco of her presentation in the Chinese equivalent of a debutante's ball. She had been made up, gowned, and elaborately prettified to assume the social expectations of being "lady-like," and when she botches that, she runs away to her refuge, and by her lonesome, she sings "Reflection."
Take a look at the song's lyrics, and note the pregnant lines:
Look at me, I will never pass for a perfect bride, or a perfect daughter.
Can it be,
I'm not meant to play this part? Now I see, that if I were truly to be myself, I would break my family's heart.
Who is that girl I see, staring straight back at me? Why is my reflection someone I don't know? Somehow I cannot hide
Who I am, though I've tried. When will my reflection show, who I am, inside?
How I pray, that a time will come,
I can free myself, from their expectations
On that day, I'll discover someway to be myself,
and to make my family proud.
They want a docile lamb, No one knows who I am. Must there be a secret me, I'm forced to hide?
Must I pretend that I am someone else for all time?
When will my reflection show, who I am inside?
When will my reflection show, who I am inside?
And then, in the very next sequence, she transforms into a "boy."
And I can only imagine how many closeted lesbians or trans men saw this film and felt a stirring deep within themselves, and said: "That's me. That's my story. I'm Mulan -- but Mulan as the embodiment of my secret self, the one I have to hide deep inside."
Sometimes, however, the gay subtext in a piece of popular culture comes about because of restrictions that prohibit express gayness in the material. And so the creator instead subsumes the gayness into codes, something perfectly hidden that a heterosexual audience will never be able to read (unless they are clued in), but a homosexual one can readily see and lap up.
The best example of this (and also the best example of Garcia's last contention of subconscious gay literature -- e.g., "where one male character exhibits hatred for another male character, a hatred that is both unmotivated and underexplained") is William Wyler's Ben-Hur, the 1959 Biblical epic starring Charlton Heston as the title character and Stephen Boyd as Messala, Ben-Hur's erstwhile best friend turned nemesis. The gay subtext of the film is explained by novelist Gore Vidal, one of Ben-Hur's screenwriters, in the fantastic documentary The Celluloid Closet (1995), directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Here's the clip of that full revelation:
Garcia ends his essay with this caveat and plea: "Who isn’t gay, then? While I do not wish to claim that the homo/hetero distinction has suddenly turned false in every way, I hope that the testimony of the different literatures we take up in class renders our easy conceptions of our own—as well as of other people’s—sexualities somewhat too simple to be true. Sexual desires are rather complex realities that all at once straddle both choice and accident, nature and nurture; they are also extremely malleable human attributes that have the potential to vary from culture to culture, and from history to history. Moreover, despite the fact that these stories may be gay (because they discuss conscious and/or unconscious gay experiences), they nonetheless talk about things that are never so different from the experiences of non-gay readers that they cannot be understood from just anyone’s own unique perspective. The primary motive of the subject may therefore be summarized as one of negotiating the tricky crossovers between sameness and difference. Every time my students are able to identify with a gay character’s joys or tragedies, I am quick to remind them this character’s specific situation and therefore his undeniable difference. When a particularly raunchy or violent story drives a painful wedge between the 'aberrant' character’s life and my student’s own sheltered lives, I make a plea for sameness in the name of the universally human feelings of loss, suffering, and love."
1:43 AM |
Everything Taken Together Has the Weight of Heaven
Grab the June 6 issue of Philippines Graphic Magazine! It has my story "Everything Taken Together Has the Weight of Heaven" in it. Here's an excerpt...
I have often imagined meeting Alicia again, the woman Angelico swore would love him for the rest of his life. As if that meant anything. It has been years—all that past coalescing in my head into a kind of gelatinous thought, something thick and forbidding—and I can’t exactly remember the circumstances of the last time I’d seen her or talked to her. When I force myself to have a bit of recollection, my mind plays tricks on me, shifting details around like sand. I allow it.
Sometimes I recall a scene at a restaurant, the one down the block from where the university’s main portals stand, after a particularly uneventful school day, the lights dim to approximate intimacy, the food forgotten. Sometimes I recall the interiors of a car, littered with student papers and misplaced ballpens, something speeding along a highway at nighttime, the destination a blur. Often I recall Angelico’s apartment—spare in its decoration but stacked with ubiquitous shelves heavy with books—and Alicia sitting still in my favorite spot of Angelico’s small sofa, looking at me with so much desperation and so much want, I remember how impossible it was to say no to her.
Alicia and her dark, abundant hair.
Alicia and her dark, luminous eyes.
Alicia and her lips, and the way she makes such a subtle ceremony in biting them.
It is easy to believe that there is a grammar known only to her, with which she deploys the power of body language to get what she wants. She makes small gestures fraught with meaning, and you find yourself drawn to her.
Alicia and her brilliant eyes that see through you.
I cringe at the sudden fix of memory. For a moment, I forget where I am exactly, were it not for the book my hands are gripping, its title burning against my skin; and were it not for the sight of so many other books around me. When I take a deep breath, I find myself drowning in the smell of breaking down lignin, old glue and old pulp and a dash of vanilla in the mix. One can only wish for a better death, I think. I am in a secondhand bookstore, and outside, along Access Road, a hint of a cold spell delaying what passes for the ravages of summer in Baguio.
“That book is good.” Someone is talking to me, in a voice that is meant to sound helpful.
I look up—and the girl in the pixie cut, behind the cashier, smiles. She looks at me with some bemusement, perhaps sensing that I was a perfect stranger in the city, my face registering the bewilderment of visitors. She is standing up, carrying a hefty number of books, and on her black sweatshirt, peeking at the top of the volumes in her arms, is a glimpse of a screaming Kurt Cobain printed in a silvery sheen.
“Excuse me?” I say.
“That book you have in your hand. I read that in college,” she says.
“This one?” I hastily return the book to the cluttered pile in the Sale—50% Off bin near the cashier.
“Yes, that one,” the girl with the pixie cut says. “Everything Taken Together Has the Weight of Heaven and Other Stories. A mouthful, no? But a good one, and a sentimental read, too—but I liked it. Too bad the author didn’t write more after that collection got published.”
I hear myself laugh. “Maybe the author found he had nothing more to say,” I tell her.
“Well, that’s too bad if that’s true,” she says. “Are you planning to buy it? It’s on sale. That copy has been with us for four years now.”
“Is that so,” I smile. “But I have a copy back home.”
She looks at me, and gives me a small nod.
“The thing is, I wrote it,” I finally tell her.
“You are Adrian Gomez?” The girl stands back. She gently puts down the books she is carrying on the counter, then leans forward, and looks at me with an intense sort of amusement. I feel like a specimen, and she the microscope. I wither in her gaze, and I can do nothing more except playfully shrug away the confession I’ve made.
“I am Adrian Gomez.”
I smile as sheepishly as I can, more for her benefit.
“I have a mind to get hold of that copy myself right now and have you sign it,” she smiles back.
“I’ll buy it for you.”
“You will?”
“It’s not everyday somebody tells me they liked my writing.”
She laughs, and tells me her name is Padma.
“But what have you done lately?” Padma asks, while I scribble some dedication on the bare page that says, ‘To A., with love and affection.’ I cross that and write the girl’s name instead. I scribble some empty phrase about the magic of reading. And I find that there is a flourish to the way I am signing my name—ghosts of what I once was, perhaps. So I give a short and muted laugh to keep the phantom at bay.
“I don’t really write fiction anymore. I write textbooks. It pays better. Science stuff. Physics, for the most part, for high school kids. Gravity, stars, black holes.”
“You’re kidding me,” she says.
“I have a whole book series on scientists, chapbooks really. Galileo, Edison, Rizal, Einstein, Curie…”
It is the truth. But I look at her—and I see that she is someone, like so many others, who needs comfortable lies. I look around the bookstore, and I can see that she believes in all these, this temple of literature, this worship of writers, this malignancy of beautiful words.
“What have I done lately…” I start slowly. Then I go for the enigmatic, brandishing my answer with a little smile: “I have done nothing, except live.”
She considers that. “I don’t know what that means,” she shakes her head, smiling. “But thank you.” She looks sincere.
I hand her the book with the exact amount it required, and she receives it in a gesture equal to supplication—and my heart breaks all over again.
“I don’t know what I mean, either,” I tell her.
But I do know what I meant.
In my scattered, unreliable memories, that kind of gesture—and the look of want, combined with desperation, that accompanies it—has been a constant in my occasional conjuring up of my memories of Alicia. That is the only abiding truth about her I have gained from those years I have chosen to forget. For the most part, anyway. In my truest moments, I have surrendered to the realization that nobody really forgets anything. There is only the sheen of denial, smooth as the lies we tell ourselves in order to survive.
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.
In Edna Zapanta-Manlapaz and Marjorie Evasco's interview with Edith Lopez Tiempo ["Poetry as the Rhythm of Violets" in The Edith Tiempo Reader], they asked whether there was some writerly competition between her and husband Edilberto K. Tiempo. Mom Edith replied:
Luckily for us, we resolved that problem early on. Years ago, when the two of us hadn’t yet knocked our hard corners together, we were optimistic enough to think we could write together. So we collaborated on a story. He wrote part of it, I wrote part of it. When it was finished, we looked at it. I started to say things, you know, and he started to say things too. I said, okay, I’ll change whatever it was, But he would not change his. So finally I said, well then, I would keep mine. He crumpled the paper and threw it in the wastebasket. Then he said, "This is the last time I’ll collaborate with an unreasonable woman." And true enough, we later collaborated on textbooks, but never again on a creative work. He did his and I did mine. But since we needed a pair of eyes other than our own, we made an agreement. We would each say our piece about each other’s work but we would reserve the right to refuse the advice.
I think this is that collaborative story, "Don't Break the Illusion," published in 1947 in The Sunday Times.
1:17 AM |
Get a Copy of Rogue Magazine's 8th Anniversary Issue! I Have a Story There.
The July 2015 issue of Rogue Magazine is coming out this weekend, with a flash fiction piece I've written commissioned by them for the start of their Election 2016 coverage, "The Republic of 2022: Grace Poe, Mar Roxas, Jejomar Binay, and Rodrigo Duterte in a Dystopian Future." (Sounds ominous and interesting.)
Articles include "The Unraveling of Isabelle Daza," "The Promiscuous Lives of the Last Playboys: An Unauthorized Portfolio," "The Mystery of the Pink Panthers & the $20 Million Cannes Jewel Heist," "The Secret History of Social Climbing in the Philippines," "Kicking & Scheming: An Exclusive with FIFA's Embattled President Sepp Blatter," "How to Build a Billion-peso Election War Chest," "The Roumeliotes Affair of Imelda Marcos," plus Helmut Newton's Lost Polaroids, Harper Lee on her controversial To Kill a Mockingbird sequel, Go Set a Watchman, and more in the magazine's 8th Anniversary Issue, a special collector's edition. Actress Isabelle Daza, photographed by Mark Nicdao, is on the cover.
The first product from the white heat of writing I had a few weeks ago! (Actually, it's the second of four, but who's counting? This is the first one that got published.) Here's a short story titled "Letters From Everywhere Else," seeing print in the 25 May 2015 issue of Philippines Graphic Magazine. I intend for this to be the opening story of Where You Are is Not Here, the first of two collections I'm currently finishing right now. Thanks to Graphic editors Alma Anonas-Carpio and Joel Pablo Salud for making this happen. Here's an excerpt:
Where am I ?
Elan Frenkel began his first letter to him. Mateo looked at the handwriting, small and hurried and imprecise in its scrawl, which threatened to go over the edges of the blue stationery like a defiance of boundaries.
This is the simplest, most difficult question possible. Easily, I’m in Hong Kong. That’s geography. I haven’t written for a while—I felt incompetent to do so. I’m studying Judaism here, not nearly as often as I should have—but it is a must, if I want to stay here, for free, in this Jewish man’s far-flung hostel. I cannot believe any wandering Jew can get free food and shelter here, for just a bit of spirituality. I can do spirituality if I have to; a backpacker on a shoestring sometimes cannot have a choice. It was either prayers, or cleaning dishes in some Chinaman’s kitchen. And what will that get me? A fleabag tourist trap in the middle of nowhere, with rotten food. Better prayers and meditation instead of soap suds. It has been a long time since I prayed, not since I was a kid in Tel Aviv. During the Gulf War, Saddam’s bomb blew my friend’s face wide open, and for a while, I didn’t know if there really was a God. Judaism is a way of life, I suppose, and I’m so distracted by this world which perpetually feels to be on the fringe of my fingers, never actually touching, writing strokes in the air with a falling feather.
The Philippines seems like the best I’ve had so far. I should return, yet I’m still on my way to China, stalled. I could just go, by myself, across the border, but being a vagabond no longer appeals to me. I haven’t managed to settle the inner turmoil yet. Perhaps I can make you understand now that I was more than rambling when we had those nights in Dumaguete, drinking in the stars with cheap beer. Which reminds me, I left my Lonely Planet guidebook in your place; it is brown with use, but I thought you might want it. I could no longer carry it around; I began to see the world much too simply as neat categorizations of ‘places to go, places to stay.’ It was too easy; sometimes, the point of traveling is in getting lost. Maybe things are changing, possibly I can recognize that in hindsight. And I appreciate you writing, though it seems to me behind those sometimes extravagant vocabulary, something altogether simpler lies.
I’m ridiculously lonely at times, much more with this state of separation from the world. I am tempted to say that life does no good. Which is just so common: nebbish talk. I talk, eat, shit, wake up in the morning, and as part of the course, pray to God, thanking him for the miracle of my resurrection daily from the dead. Yet I feel no miracle, no God; my words disperse in a space of four walls.
Nevertheless the quest goes on, I’m planning to buy a handicam and shoot the upcoming seminary here in a couple weeks, also a salad of Israeli backpackers, orthodox and cabalistic Jews swarming the earth. It was Passover a few days ago—3,300 years since the exodus from Egypt. I have only a lifetime, and by mistake I want it now. The quest is life.
To marrows,
Elan
This came two weeks after Elan had left Dumaguete. Had left him, and Mateo had not really expected to hear from Elan all too soon after leaving, and so the letter—which looked like it had gone on a long and difficult journey, its edges tattered and crumpled—came as a complete surprise. Or at least he pretended it was: there was comfort in the denial of anticipation. Two weeks, he thought, and there was still enough of April yet to reconsider and be appropriately nostalgic of the madness of those very short three days near the end of last March.
He never wrote back. Not yet. Mateo didn’t know what to write Elan about. Certainly nothing about quests or unused guidebooks or the difficulties of being on the road to somewhere else and not here. But he kept reading it, and reading it—the letter itself folded snugly in the pages of his journal, where he kept it to remind him of certain beautiful things.
Grab your copy of the latest issue of Philippines Graphic now!
Sunday Inquirer Magazine is ending its long, illustrious run -- and I'm sad because this rag was a huge part in my growing up years. I remember its comics section by Jess Abrera fondly, and the amazing longform stories by Lorna Kalaw Tirol, Ceres Doyo, and Constantino Tejero, whose series on censorship in Philippine movies was the lynchpin source for my research paper on the subject in high school, and later on in college. Then there was the long-running annual series on Palanca winners by Ruel De Vera, perhaps the only magazine at that time to take Filipino writers seriously. (Yep, it was that kind of magazine.) This was the publication we aspired to write for when I was a Mass Communication student in Silliman University, and the first time my byline saw print in its pages was in 1999, right after I graduated, and thanks largely to one of its editors Alya. Honasan, who I met backstage at the Luce Auditorium where she was performing in Floy Quintos' And St. Louis Loves Dem Filipinos where we quickly established rapport over some astonishment. I would consider that my first break in national publication -- which just goes to show opportunity happens when you allow it to happen. Here's Ruey with his message regarding SIM's last issue: "Thank you for believing that there is still a place in the Philippine publishing landscape for the lovely longform story. It has been a privilege to tell these stories for you. There will never be anything like the Sunday Inquirer Magazine—and that’s really the way it should be. Accept no substitutes."
8:08 PM |
A Lot of Things Can Happen in Ten Years.
I leafed through it at first with the detachment of somebody just biding his time. It was there, and my meal was still cooking. I was waiting, and this issue of Vanity Fair was on the magazine stand. It had Tom Cruise on the cover, his hair long, his pose relaxed but studiedly masculine, as if to say, "I am the biggest star of them all, and here you are, picking up this magazine because of me." I did not. I've always liked Vanity Fair, and if it were Adrien Brody on the cover, I'd still pick it up. I glanced at the date. June 2000. I whistled, smiled a bit. How long ago this was. Ten years? A lot of things can happen in ten years. Heck, a lot of things can happen in a year -- and I began to look closely at that. This magazine was a time machine, you can say. Or a snapshot of a moment in popular culture, a little more than a year before things really changed and transformed us all. This issue came out fifteen months before those planes swooped down and flattened the towers -- and changed the world forever. What was I doing in June 2000? Probably starting to get into Graduate School, inching my way into a career in teaching, even as I plotted my way out of my first job as editor of this local newspaper. The plans for the Silliman University centennial celebrations were underway, and Dumaguete was still a quiet town. I looked inside. The pictures inside the pages looked quaint, brushed by some form of innocence in all its brashness and celebration of the commercial and the small. The people in it looked too happy, or too deliriously drugged out. Oblivious. There is an ad with the Sex and the City girls coming off its first season -- all of them still looking buxom and young -- daring us: "Are you ready for more?" In the Hollywood pages, the Vanity Fair post-Oscar party was riddled with pictures of faces that were celebrated as new -- but are now considered vintage, long-gone couplings -- Salma and Edward, Tom and Nicole. (Kidman, apparently, was in Australia filming Moulin Rouge.) Clasping her Oscar, Angeline Jolie is dressed as Morticia Adams, with no hint of the luster that would soon make her the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. The ads for luxury goods come and go, lackluster in appeal, but one ad struck me: Lucky Strikes, and its tag line: "It's Toasted." (Years later, Mad Men would recreate the coining of that line.) The waitress brought me my food, and I began eating, and I turned the pages some more. In one piece, Lance Armstrong chronicles his battle with cancer, and in another, Hillary Clinton takes on Rudy Guiliani. Cameron Crowe interviews Cruise for the issue, and begins with an anecdote about Cruise reading out loud over the phone the lines of Lester Bangs from a movie Crowe is set to direct -- something still called Untitled. (Almost Famous was still a dream.) In the interview, Cruise reflects on the strange reception towards Stanley Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut. (Kubrick just recently died, his last film a misunderstood masterpiece.) In another story, Helen Gurley Brown gushes about her new book I'm Wild Again, and answers questions about plastic surgery on enhancing the labia. "Does it give girls better orgasm?" she asks. On one editorial fashion spread, Jennifer Lopez, glammed up in a series of scenes, still looks like she is still unscrubbed Jenny from the block -- with none of the incandescence of her American Idol future. (In 2000, there was no American Idol.) So many things. Ten years ago. I finished my food, closed the magazine, and went home.
GQ's Alex Pappademas goes into speculative mode in his great profile on Winona Ryder, answering this question: What if the actress never got arrested for shoplifting and never took those pills?
Imagine a parallel universe where there is not this Winona-shaped hole in recent cool-movie history. She'd have been one of the Dylans in Todd Haynes's I'm Not There, for sure. Maybe the object of Jim Carrey's amnesia in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. She could have been a Tenenbaum.* Maybe even a Cullen.
* Yes, Wes Anderson shot The Royal Tenenbaums before her arrest. But let's say, in this parallel universe, Winona doesn't drop out of Godfather III, which creates a butterfly-effect ripple across the space-time continuum: Sofia Coppola doesn't replace her, which means Sofia Coppola's performance isn't eviscerated by the press, which means she continues to act instead of pursuing a career behind the camera, and the adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides's novel The Virgin Suicides falls to a fresh-off-Rushmore Wes Anderson, delaying Tenenbaums by two years. Winona plays Margot, obviously. During the film's opening weekend, syndicated radio personality Glenn Beck is mauled by a tiger.
I miss Winona Ryder. That girl had subtlety. Take note of her May Welland in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence: so sweet and caring ... and manipulative. Please bring her back, Hollywood.
9:30 AM |
Seeing Richard Brody Typing on an External Keyboard
I leafed through it at first with the detachment of somebody just biding his time. It was there, and my meal was still cooking. I was waiting, and this issue of Vanity Fair was on the magazine stand. It had Tom Cruise on the cover, his hair long, his pose relaxed but studiedly masculine, as if to say, "I am the biggest star of them all, and here you are, picking up this magazine because of me." I did not. I've always liked Vanity Fair, and if it were Adrien Brody on the cover, I'd still pick it up. I glanced at the date. June 2000. I whistled, smiled a bit. How long ago this was. Ten years? A lot of things can happen in ten years. Heck, a lot of things can happen in a year -- and I began to look closely at that. This magazine was a time machine, you can say. Or a snapshot of a moment in popular culture, a little more than a year before things really changed and transformed us all. This issue came out fifteen months before those planes swooped down and flattened the towers -- and changed the world forever. What was I doing in June 2000? Probably starting to get into Graduate School, inching my way into a career in teaching, even as I plotted my way out of my first job as editor of this local newspaper. The plans for the Silliman University centennial celebrations were underway, and Dumaguete was still a quiet town. I looked inside. The pictures inside the pages looked quaint, brushed by some form of innocence in all its brashness and celebration of the commercial and the small. The people in it looked too happy, or too deliriously drugged out. Oblivious. There is an ad with the Sex and the City girls coming off its first season -- all of them still looking buxom and young -- daring us: "Are you ready for more?" In the Hollywood pages, the Vanity Fair post-Oscar party was riddled with pictures of faces that were celebrated as new -- but are now considered vintage, long-gone couplings -- Salma and Edward, Tom and Nicole. (Kidman, apparently, was in Australia filming Moulin Rouge.) Clasping her Oscar, Angeline Jolie is dressed as Morticia Adams, with no hint of the luster that would soon make her the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. The ads for luxury goods come and go, lackluster in appeal, but one ad struck me: Lucky Strikes, and its tag line: "It's Toasted." (Years later, Mad Men would recreate the coining of that line.) The waitress brought me my food, and I began eating, and I turned the pages some more. In one piece, Lance Armstrong chronicles his battle with cancer, and in another, Hillary Clinton takes on Rudy Guiliani. Cameron Crowe interviews Cruise for the issue, and begins with an anecdote about Cruise reading out loud over the phone the lines of Lester Bangs from a movie Crowe is set to direct -- something still called Untitled. (Almost Famous was still a dream.) In the interview, Cruise reflects on the strange reception towards Stanley Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut. (Kubrick just recently died, his last film a misunderstood masterpiece.) In another story, Helen Gurley Brown gushes about her new book I'm Wild Again, and answers questions about plastic surgery on enhancing the labia. "Does it give girls better orgasm?" she asks. On one editorial fashion spread, Jennifer Lopez, glammed up in a series of scenes, still looks like she is still unscrubbed Jenny from the block -- with none of the incandescence of her American Idol future. (In 2000, there was no American Idol.) So many things. Ten years ago. I finished my food, closed the magazine, and went home.