Friday, August 08, 2025
9:52 PM |
The Pianist as Pinoy
There is a word in music that feels like an apt description for the way pianist Horacio Nuguid plays: “cantabile”—which means the smooth quality of making the instrument sing. This was the thought that stayed with me through Sound Scapes, his piano recital of rare and resplendent works from the Filipino classical repertoire, which unfolded simply and beautifully on the Claire Isabel McGill Luce Auditorium stage last 6 August 2025—a respite we didn’t think we needed in the middle of the week. In an age where music-making often feels like a gladiatorial sport—faster, louder, more technically dazzling—Nuguid sat before the instrument with the calm assurance of someone who had nothing to prove. And in that unhurried humility, there was magic.
Nuguid is no stranger to the world’s stages. Trained at the University of Santo Tomas, he would later take his craft to the University of Northern Iowa and to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His career has taken him from solo recitals to orchestral collaborations in the Philippines, Mexico, and the United States, and into close musical partnerships with distinguished singers and instrumentalists.
As artistic director of the Rochester Chamber Music Society, he has carved out a space for music-making that is both intimate and expansive. Honors have followed—among them the Ardee Award for outstanding artist in Rochester—and so has a commitment to teaching: master classes across continents, decades of shaping young pianists at the Young Artist World Piano Festival in Minnesota, and mentorship at the Philippine High School for the Arts. Recently, he has taken on the role of co-artistic director at the Bethel University Summer Piano Academy, continuing the work of nurturing the next generation, even as he brings the voices of our past composers back into the light.
It is with that pedigree that Nuguid makes his debut in Dumaguete, on the Luce stage. The program of Sound Scapes was itself an act of reclamation, designed that way by the pianist. According to him, in the Philippines, so much of our music’s history lies in dust and disappearance—scores lost to war, to neglect, to the indifference of cultural gatekeepers. Nuguid has made it his mission to retrieve these works from obscurity, curating and publishing an anthology—Philippine Piano Pieces (2023)—that has suddenly opened a long-closed window into our pianistic past. Sound Scapes at the Luce was the living and breathing embodiment of that project: nine pieces by nine Filipino composers, spanning decades, styles, and sensibilities, each given a voice on this night in Dumaguete. He proceeded through the program like a lecturer, introducing the importance of each piece at the podium, and then sitting down before the grand piano to demonstrate the wonderfully musicality he had just described.
From the very first notes of “Caricias (Danza)” by Juan de Saliagun Hernandez (1881–1945), who was known as a composer of dances, marches, and music for theatrical performances, it was clear that Nuguid was not merely reproducing what was on the score. His left hand, rich with warm bass resonance, grounded the dance’s rhythm; his right hand let the melody float in the air with limpid clarity. The contrast was a quiet marvel—you could almost “see” the separation of musical notes, and yet they conversed so naturally.
“Poeme” by Carmencita Arambulo (1938–2023) was another personal highlight for me. The 1957 piece is, like what it subtitle claims, “a song without words,” which Nuguid rendered with a tenderness that felt almost private, like overhearing someone’s cherished memory. He let the melody breathe, resisting the temptation to rush. At his age—seasoned, yes, with perhaps the occasional elasticity in tempo—there was no need for metronomic precision. Instead, there was the deeper rhythm of someone shaping a phrase to match the heartbeat of this beautiful song.
“Okaka (Theme and Variations)” by Rodolfo Cornejo (1909–1991) was the program’s playful centerpiece, an intricate work that tested the pianist’s dexterity and interpretive range. Nuguid navigated its shifting moods with ease, from the almost childlike charm of the theme to the more dramatic, harmonically adventurous variations. And then there was “Bontok Ili” by Rosendo Santos Jr. (1922–1994), a piece steeped in indigenous echoes, where Nuguid’s left-hand ostinatos—a continually repeated musical phrase or rhythm—pulsed like ritual drumbeats while the right hand spun modal melodies like threads of smoke.
One of the evening’s most quietly moving moments, at least for me, was “Meditacion (Nocturno)” by Filemon Sotto (1872–1966). Here, Nuguid leaned into the music’s meditative intent, letting each chord shimmer and fade, as if allowing the audience to listen not only to the sound but also to the silence that followed. In contrast, “Tarantelle No. 2” by Lucino Sacramento (1908–1984), which the composer wrote for a NAMCYA competition in 1978, burst forth with kinetic energy—and though Nuguid’s tempo was, by necessity, tempered, the rhythmic drive and the joy in the playing were intact.
When Nuguid arrived at “Kundiman” by Felipe Padilla de Leon (1912–1992), the recital shifted into something unmistakably Filipino. The bittersweet lyricism, the gentle swells of emotion… Nuguid played it as though telling a love story across generations. Nuguid’s rendition of “Malikmata” by Antonio Molina (1894–1980) shimmered with impressionistic colors, like a heavy dream one tries to recall in the morning light, unsettling but also bemusing. And finally, “Mayon (Fantasia de Concierto)” by Francisco Buencamino Sr. (1883–1952) closed the concert with a sense of Pinoy grandeur, its elevated folksiness made beautiful with Nuguid weaving together the virtuosity and lyricism that mark the best of our piano literature.
What struck me most, across all these works, was the utter lack of pretension in Nuguid’s playing. Nuguid did not play to impress. He played because this music deserved to be heard again. He played because these scores—many of them once teetering on the edge of oblivion—still had beauty to give. He played because, quite simply, he loved them. And we, listening, were made to love them too.
There were no flamboyant gestures, no exaggerated rubatos meant to elicit gasps. Even the occasional unevenness in tempo seemed part of the music’s lived-in honesty. In an era obsessed with perfection, this was a concert that embraced humanity—its frailty, yes, but also its capacity for grace.
By the final applause—and I was really surprised by the gusto of the audience after many years of watching piano recitals eliciting only tepid responses—I realized what Sound Scapes truly was: not just a recital, but an act of cultural memory. Nuguid had taken us on a journey through our own musical heritage, dusting off forgotten pages and giving them breath again. And as we filed out of the Luce, it felt less like leaving a performance and more like emerging from a long, nourishing conversation, one where every melody had been clear, every note had mattered, and the silences between them had spoken volumes.
Truth to tell, I was not really aware of Philippine piano music much until last Wednesday night. What the concert taught me is that it is a most curious and beautiful thing, a garden of melodies where Spanish-European grace, American verve, and the deep earthiness of our own indigenous rhythms mingle in unexpected bloom. (Forgive the flowery metaphor!) But apparently, like many gardens in our history, much of it has been left untended, its flowers hidden from view. The tragedy is partly logistical: pianists have simply not had access to the printed scores. The few that made it into print—often through the composer’s own efforts—have long since slipped out of circulation, their surviving copies asleep in library archives, or kept as delicate heirlooms, or ravaged by World War II, a fraught period when untold manuscripts and printed scores vanished in the fire and rubble.
But Nuguid’s work tells us that this story does not end in loss. In recent years, there has been a gathering tide of interest in finding these scattered notes, in piecing together a legacy nearly lost. And in August 2023, Nuguid stepped into this story with something remarkable: a published anthology of twenty-five piano pieces by sixteen Filipino composers, each work lovingly rescued, critically edited, and annotated for a new generation. The book and the concert are both an act of scholarship and an act of devotion.
You can listen to most of these piece in Horacio Nuguid’s YouTube channel. The concert was sponsored by the Silliman University Culture and Arts Council. Thanks to Dr. Elizabeth Susan Vista-Suarez for explaining the technicalities of the piano-playing for me.
Labels: art and culture, classical music, dumaguete, luce, music, philippine culture, pianists, silliman
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Tuesday, June 25, 2024
9:48 PM |
'Ladlad': 30 Years of Unfurling the Cape and Paving the Way
Finally, it’s out! My essay on the 30-year legacy of Ladlad, the pathbreaking anthology of Philippine gay writing by J. Neil C. Garcia and Danton Remoto, now out on Spot.ph. An excerpt:
In 1994, I was nineteen, a twink lost in the world the way only someone who came of age in the 1990s could be. I had no idea I was a twink—that was queer nomenclature I would only come to know in my worldly thirties and the world had evolved enough to have specific names for what used to be an identity no one talked about in polite circles. I had no idea either what to make of the surging tempests I had inside of me as I braved the hormones of adolescence and took in, without a map, the hazy landscape of desire you could not deny a young man at the beginning of his prime.
This was three years before Ellen DeGeneres famously came out on American television via her eponymous sitcom and unleashed a cultural touchstone for what Oscar Wilde used to describe, a hundred years before, as “the love that [dared] not speak its name.” [Actually, it was his lover Lord Alfred Douglas who penned this line in a poem, but the phrase was used in Wilde’s gross indecency trial which would decisively blanket in silence all manner of things gay, until cracks appeared in 1969 because of the Stonewall Riot.] This was four years before Will & Grace would grace our television screens and pave the way for mainstream acceptance of characters who just happened not to be heterosexual. In the Philippines, the show was carried by Studio 23, a UHF channel that largely escaped conservative notice simply because it was a smaller station and catered to a niche audience.
In the Philippines, at least in popular culture, to be gay was defined largely by the movies—and for about 50 years since Nemesio E. Caravana toyed ever so lightly with the notion of queer attraction in Kaaway ng Babae (1948), to be gay for the Filipino was to live out a phase awaiting eventual heterosexual conversion, such as in Tony Cayado’s Kaming Mga Talyada (1962). Or to wallow in guilt and ennui (and camp), such as in Danny Zialcita’s suite of queerness in Si Malakas, Si Maganda, at Si Mahinhin (1980), Mahinhin vs. Mahinhin (1981), T-Bird at Ako (1982), and Lalakwe (1985). Or to identify with Dolphy’s definitive caricature of the sissy in Jack and Jill (1954), which would generate decades-long copycats in many movies starring Roderick Paulate, Joey de Leon, and Herbert Bautista. In 1994, Paulate famously played twins separated at birth in Maryo J. de los Reyes’ Bala at Lipstick, where one twin is a tough guy and the other an enterprising shrill running a beauty parlor.
The year also saw Mel Chionglo release Midnight Dancers, a spiritual sequel to Lino Brocka’s Macho Dancer (1988), which also largely defined the Filipino gay experience as one that is seen largely through the eyes of (an often straight) male stripper. The early 1990s were not a good time to find complex gay representation in Filipino pop culture.
I was a budding cineaste then and definitely heard of Chionglo’s film—which came to me in bootleg VHS through God knows what source. (Perhaps a neighborhood video store?) I must have played that movie a hundred times on the family VCR, always discreetly and in the dark cloak of night—hoping my Born Again mother would not rouse from her sleep and catch me.
It was with the same delicious trepidation that I would come across a copy of the first Ladlad, which described itself in its subtitle, and in such an arrestingly forward manner, as an “anthology of Philippine gay writing.” There was no mistaking it for anything other than what it declared itself to be. The simplicity of that admission would create such an upheaval that thirty years later it would be difficult to ignore the fact that for many gay people in the Philippines, the publication of this book could very well be our own version of the brick thrown at Stonewall Inn.
Read the rest at the link. Happy Pride, everyone!
Labels: books, film, life, memories, philippine cinema, philippine culture, philippine literature, queer, writers, writing
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Tuesday, April 02, 2024
Most countries have standardized naming conventions [some even have regulations controlling the creation of names, like Japan]. But the Philippines is something else, no? Certainly, we have standard names that spring from local, or Spanish, or American derivations — but a quick look at contemporary name lists is always a revelation. It's mostly a postmodern mishmash of everything, including pop culture and random letters, and intentional misspellings of standard names. Kemyruth Jimenez? Nicki Minaj Montes? Xyzy Gomia? Elijah Yllys Garcia? Xybelle Flores? Maningning or Irene or Epefania could never. What's the strangest name of a Pinoy you know?
Labels: names, philippine culture
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Tuesday, April 04, 2023
7:36 PM |
Sandwiches from Such Nice Iliganon Boys
We are reminded of what Ige Ramos says he gives as a rejoinder whenever he’s asked the million-peso question: “What is Filipino food?” For him, the better question is: “How does food become Filipino?”—a reframing of the story of food and of culinary culture that takes note of history, of practice, of borrowing and blending that characterize much what we understand to be “local food.”
Taking note of that and taking it into our local context, we thus confront the question: “How does food become Dumaguetnon?”
An answer lies in sandwiches, and it takes the form of two men: Jan Barga and Keith Fresnido.
Both are friends, have known each other since they were mere boys, and both come from Iligan City in Northern Mindanao. Because of some strange twist of fate, both have come to call Dumaguete home. And remarkably enough, both have carried over from their old hometown a particular food culture that they have tried to introduce to the Dumaguete food scene: sandwiches.
Mr. Barga did it first. He has been a resident of Dumaguete since his college days at Silliman University, where he graduated with a degree in entrepreneurship. While rotating between Iligan, Cebu, and Dumaguete after graduation, he has made the latter more of his base while pursuing graduate studies at Silliman, and at the same time—because his other love is music—taking part in the organization [and management] of the Belltower Project, the community of musicians and bands in Dumaguete. Food has always been a fascination for him, even joining some of his friends in putting up a tocinohan in Dumaguete in 2015. [He was the hot sauce guy of the enterprise.]
During the pandemic, he whiled away his time in Dumaguete doing real estate online for an American company, and it was in the high doldrum days of the lockdown that he decided to put up a sandwich shop. He called it Pan-Q—a perfect name for the business, and for the circumstances it was born in: “Pan” means bread, and “Q” is a stand-in for barbecue, but you can also read “pan” as an abbreviation of the pandemic. It was an immediate hit.
Pan-Q started off as a mobile cart frequently seen on Hibbard Avenue [in Tugas, just a few meters before the crossing to Amigo Subdivision], and it served delicious hotdog buns that could be loaded with a choice of meat, from pork tocino to beef franks to chicken hotdog on skewers—which customers could mix and match, to make a perfectly rendered barbecue sandwich. Part of the appeal was the concoction Mr. Barga made of the sauce—a delectable mayonnaise blend that unified all of the flavors of the sandwich, topped with a slaw made of cabbage, tomato, and onions.
When it opened in mid-2021, we could not even put in our orders because their inventory regularly emptied out even way before closing time. Because the sandwich was customizable, affordable, and delicious, Pan-Q became a hit. The line in front of the mobile cart became longer—but the idle time was made more bearable with the local music Mr. Barga piped in, and made more entertaining with customers watching his staff singing and swaying to the sound as they prepared your sandwich, for take out or for dine-in.
Pan-Q soon opened a branch in Cebu, and also a branch along Escano Drive to a bamboo bungalow beside Mang Kaloy’s Fried Rice that seated more people, partnering with Kape Mystica which provided tea and coffee to customers. Along with the customizable sandwiches came a solid menu, now with rice meals paired with their meats and a savory saucy condiment of some kind, to be dipped with the barbecued meats. [Perhaps it is palapa?] But it’s a flavorful oil dip with green onions and fried flaked dilis. Whatever it is, it tastes delectable.
Pan-Q is where we go to when we need to have our tocino fix in Dumaguete.
Then there’s Keith Fresnido and Apas—Dine and Deli by Hitik. Mr. Fresnido had always wanted to open his own sandwich shop for so long—but not just any sandwich shop: he wanted each and every ingredient to be of the utmost quality, whether that’s sourcing authentic sauerkraut from local distributors to curing his own meats and baking his own bread. With Apas, he is making this wish come true—but it came about because of some challenging circumstances.
Mr. Fresnido worked as a chef in Tagaytay, but when Taal erupted in January of 2020, he was forced to flee back to Iligan together with his wife Marla. And then the pandemic struck. For livelihood, he decided to set up a stall outside his house and sold sandwiches. It was a huge hit for sandwich-hungry Iliganons. But there was another opportunity opening up for the couple: Marla took a job to manage a luxury hotel in Dumaguete, and they decided to start anew here—with Mr. Fresnido working as chef for another hotel. That stint, however, made him impatient to realize his dream once more of having his own sandwich shop, inspired by two sandwich shops in New York and in Charleston, South Carolina he loved. And thus, Apas was born—the name taken from the Bisaya meaning “catch up”—but also to mean having “a food system that is resilient to keep up with the changing times, and having a safe space where everyone is welcome to savor delicious food that will surely make one say, ‘Apas ko diha!’” It is also a playful take on “pass,” that space of time when food is inspected by the chef before it is presented to diners. They opened the doors to Apas along EJ Blanco Street last December 2022.
Despite the challenges, Mr. Fresnido says that the work of running Apas has been fulfilling because of the opportunity to expose customers to new flavors. Apas’s menu leans on a Western palate using ingredients sourced locally, but Mr. Fresnido is keen on having the opportunity to not only expose locals to new flavors but to also offer comfort to the expats and the visitors looking for a taste of home.
Apas offers sandwiches that tackle incredible flavor. The beef pastrami sandwich features Mr. Fresnido’s own cured beef pastrami, complemented with sauerkraut and mustard for that sour, bitter, and spicy kick. The ultimate picnic sandwich pairs locally-cured ham and bacon together for an unbeatable flavor punch, balanced by roasted bell peppers and cheese. Mr. Fresnido tosses his hat into the chicken sandwich ring with his own take on the classic, having an apple slaw set his sandwich apart from the rest.
Besides the sandwiches, he also gives extra care and attention to his flatbreads. They’re called pinsas—or Romanian-style pizzas—but Mr. Fresnido refers to them on the menu as “flatbreads” so his customers immediately understand what they’re seeing when ordering off the menu. However one calls them, they’re delicious, whether one chooses the cheese, the pepperoni, or the other items off the special menu.
On our last visit, we ordered two flatbreads that caught our fancy. The mushroom flatbread is painted with a smooth cream parmesan sauce, with shredded cheddar and mozzarella scattered on its surface. It is topped with fresh oyster and shimeji mushrooms and drizzled with a mild garlic and chili oil. Savor takes over the palate, whether from the cheese, the mushroom, the bread or the oil.
The other flatbread is called, interestingly, “S.A.N.I.B.”
Mr. Fresnido admits the acronym stands for “Such a Nice Iliganon Boy,” a call back to his roots with fondness and whimsy. The sandwich echoes what Mr. Fresnido knows to be a framework of an archetypal Iliganon breakfast: a rich salty meat, eggs, and a king among condiments: palapa. Palapa perfumes the palate with herbaceous notes of ginger and kicks it with a hit of chili. The characteristic ingredient that makes palapa stand out from all its other ingredients is the sebujing: a fragrant spice somewhat like the birth child of garlic and onion under the guise of a “scallion” in most ingredients’ lists on the palapa jar labels. [According to Mr. Fresnido, a “scallion” is much easier to understand.] To us, the Iliganons are right to keep the sebujing—this delicious jewel—under this guise and have it all to themselves. The palapa plays its part on the S.A.N.I.B. flatbread, with the shredded cheddar and mozzarella cheese substituting for the richness that the eggs offer. Ham would be the savory lead on this hit, with the garlic chili oil as a featured character.
After the balls of dough are stretched and flattened, Mr. Fresnido adorns the flatbreads with their respective toppings before placing them in the industrial oven, baking them in minutes. The dough and the cheeses bubble and brown until the cheese melts and the dough becomes bread. Pockets of air expand the matrix of dough bolstered by the proteins in the flour, accessible only by slicing the bread, exposing the cathedrals of carb for the eyes to eat.
Although flatbreads and sandwiches are not traditionally Iliganon, neither is Mr. Fresnido, really. He was born in Manila and lived there until he was five years old when his Iliganon parents brought the family over to Iligan to live. His childhood and adolescence were spent there before he returned to Manila to pursue a degree in culinary arts at the International School of Hospitality and Management. One would presume that these periods of time away from Iligan would take away from Mr. Fresnido’s experience of the city—missing out swaths of his life from his hometown—but being away built on his experience, not take away from it. As logistically as possible, Keith features Iliganon products like palapa and Iliganon beer in Apas, alongside the worldly flavors he stands with.
So are the “elevated sandwiches” of Mr. Fresnido and Mr. Barga Dumaguete food? Of course they are. That has always been the nature of Dumaguete anyway: we celebrate this churn of incoming cultures as our “paghimamat,” embracing all influences until we make them our own, marked in the distinctive air that’s Dumaguetnon. Mr. Fresnido and Mr. Barga are the instruments of doing that. Both offer their Iliganon food culture up for Dumaguetnons to experience. Their sandwiches become Dumaguetnon because their makers live here. These dishes are enjoyed by the people who live here. Although the flavor and method of cooking is Iliganon, the enjoyment transcends geographical boundaries, and now is suited to fit with the values and the palates of Dumaguetnons.
Written with Renz Torres
Labels: dumaguete, food, iligan, philippine culture, sandwiches
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, March 24, 2023
11:31 PM |
The Experience Economy and Other Things We Learned From the Culinary Heritage Workshop with Ige Ramos
When it comes to food, how much is our money’s worth? We had dinner at this new restaurant a few nights ago. [Writing this comes with the best effort at concealment. Our mantra has always been this: if we don’t like a Dumaguete restaurant’s fare, we’ll try our very best to resist the temptation to write a review—even though bad reviews are so tempting to do. Because we’d rather champion what we love, to be honest.] In any case, this restaurant was something we had not tried before. Ian always felt a strange kind of resistance whenever we passed by it, but he soon changed his mind, and we got ourselves a table—and we ordered a chicken dish for Ian, and a pork dish for Renz. Neither dish was filling or tasty.
And the service left a lot to be desired—even if the staff tried their hardest to be polite.
And we were eaten by mosquitoes.
And when we got the bill, we were floored to see the sum of a thousand pesos for bad dinner.
Where did it all go wrong?
Mostly, the food. We run by a simple philosophy in our culinary adventures: the food should be good, and better if it comes with an experience we can cherish later. Because that’s the thing that makes us come back, right? Sure, we can excuse the worst of atmosphere, and the rudest of staff, and the deadliest of mosquitoes, and even the steepiest of prices—but the food must be good, and also commensurate to the price tag it comes with. What’s worse than a meal bereft of flavor and soul is a meal that doesn’t justify its exorbitant bill, that falls short of the value attached to it.
The end of pandemic lockdown is upon us, whether we like it or not, and it’s mostly back to business as usual, but now we have a race for patronage with pre-pandemic restaurants and pandemic-era ones [and there’s a lot of them!]. Given the inflation, some of these are bound to bite the dust—but we think the ones that will survive are those that are unstinting in their quality, mindful of their pricing, aware of the value of experience, and also solicitous of the local palate. That last element is the hardest one to pin down because it involves a knowledge of the local food heritage, and a respect for it. We have a friend who recently bristled at a foreigner’s suggestion that our tablea was “unrefined chocolate,” with too much of a “burnt” taste: “I don’t get why he would denigrate our local tablea as ‘unrefined’—that’s exactly how we want our tablea to taste like. And why dismiss ‘burnt’ as a taste marker? Filipinos love a ‘burnt’ taste. That’s how we enjoy our grilled pork fat and everything else!”
Last March 18, a Saturday, we had the opportunity to place all these in context with culture and entrepreneurship, in a day-long workshop and lecture by one of the country’s leading voices in culinary heritage and cultural entrepreneurship, Ige Ramos, at 58 EJ Blanco.
Ige came with an invite from Slow Food Dumaguete/Negros Oriental organizers [in particular, Bea Misa-Crisostomo of Ritual] and the workshop was a jampacked event—perhaps with its participants enticed by Ige’s resume. A book designer, food writer, and visual artist, he runs IRDS/Republic of Taste Food Network, a platform for his publishing, book design, and independent research projects in edible design, comparative gastronomy, food history, anthropology, and public policy. He has designed some of the most important and influential food-themed books and cookbooks in the country, including Simply Delicious, Panaderia: Philippine Bread, Biscuit, and Bakery Traditions, The Governor-General’s Kitchen: Philippine Culinary Vignettes and Period Recipes, 1521-1935, Philippine Cookery: From Heart to Platter, Kulinarya: A Guidebook to Philippine Cuisine, Salu-salo: A Celebration of Philippine Culinary Treasures,¬¬ The Aristocrat Stories: Since 1936, Linamnam: Eating One’s Way Around the Philippines, and The Ultimate Filipino Adobo: Stories Through the Ages. On his own, he has written and published Lasa ng Republika: Dila at Bandila—Ang Paghahanap sa Pambansang Panlasa ng Filipinas, Republic of Taste: The Untold Stories of Cavite Cuisine, and Appetite for Freedom: The Recipes of Maria Y. Orosa with Essays on Her Life and Work. He also calls himself a cultural entrepreneur, which he defines as someone who is “a cultural change agent and resourceful visionary who organizes cultural, financial, social, and human capital, to generate revenue from a cultural activity that benefits a community.” It is in that capacity that he undertook the Dumaguete workshop—which he also did in Bayawan and Bacolod soon after. He considers being a cultural entrepreneur as a kind of “activism,” because it “valorizes the local as the new premium in the experience economy.”
This is where we first marveled at the workshop—because most of us in attendance were doing exactly what the concept entailed, but now we had a word for it. In terms of culinary culture, experience economy means “giving or ascribing value or validity to something [e.g., by raising or fixing the price or value of a commodity],” particularly that which “belongs or relates to a particular place,” and declaring them as “premium” or of superior quality, and therefore should command a higher price. Ige explains: “In the twenty-first century, designing and selling experiences [have] eclipsed the manufacture of physical things. An experience stirs emotions and generates memories. It embraces dramatic action, sensory engagement, and temporal interaction with users. During an experience, users create meanings and associations that become more important than the event itself. The experience economy has changed the way commercial companies design and deliver products. The experience economy has also changed how schools, hospitals, museums, and other organizations provide services to communities.”
You can give a literary tour of Dumaguete places, for example, highlighting spots that appear in Philippine literature—and end it with a sale of local books. [You give consumers an experience of literature come alive.] You can take people to the coffee shop in Baslay, Dauin—and sell coffee made from beans cultivated by local Baslay farmers. [You give consumers the experience of locally produced coffee unavailable elsewhere.] Experience is the key. This is how musicians make money now in the age of Spotify: they go on concert tours, maximizing that experience of live music by selling merchandise [including albums] on the side.
Ige cites Don Norman’s Three Layers of User Experience, where we start with the visceral [“The colors of that homemade ice cream look beautiful”] and the behavioral [“That homemade ice cream actually tastes good!”], and proceeding to a future reflective stage [“I enjoyed eating that homemade ice cream, and I’d like to try it again”]. The rise of the experience economy also entails going from mere commodity to hyper-local/full-bodied experience, employing more design features that makes it more expensive—because the experiential entails providing a memorable event.
Take coffee, for instance: you start with the basic commodity—the beans—which comes cheap for the most part. You take it higher, and it becomes a basic product, like Kopiko—packaged instant coffee for daily use. You take it even higher, and you get service coffee, like the one from 7-11—no frills coffee from a convenience store. You take it even higher, and you get Starbucks—which gives you ambience, and wifi, and air-conditioning. The highest level of the experiential is to turn coffee into a hyper-local experience—serving it in a way that cannot be replicated elsewhere, and promising some singularity, like a unique culture or location. The challenge of course is for cultural entrepreneurs to put a premium to their efforts—but at the same time still make it accessible to the locals, and also not short-change the producers of the basic commodity [like the farmers of coffee beans].
Ige gave specific examples of experience economies he found successful—which include tourism in Faeroe Island, Denmark [where you pay to just unwind with locals as they go about their daily tasks], tourism in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia [were you pay to stay in a farmer’s hut in the middle of a rice field, and participate in local customs and rituals], and a homestay he undertook in Basey, Samar [where you pay to stay with local families and eat the food they prepare for their daily meals].
From his own efforts, he cited doing a DIY tour in 2016 called “Sampalan ng Side View Mirror sa CaviteX,” a project he did on Facebook where he posted pictures of local food vendors that could be found along CaviteX [a series of highways in Cavite], giving specific descriptions of what they could offer, and pinning their locations for people to find. It was a huge success, with many people liking the posts and taking on the tour on their own, and sampling the food stuff that the vendors offered. It was so successful that he soon got contacted by Cavitex officials themselves—who commissioned him to do an official food tour for them. What came about was “Viaje Feliz x Lasa ng Republika,” which attempted to connect local gastronomic and cultural communities of Cavite via CaviteX, something he accomplished by taking on a two-week study of the project, identifying the problem [how to promote the local culture, gastronomy, history and traditions of the smaller coastal towns of Cavite], the threats, the weaknesses, the strengths, and the opportunities it entailed. Having identified the factors, he managed to design a culinary event that was also a huge success—and was followed by two more culinary showcases for Cavite.
On the challenges of Philippine gastronomy, he began by doing away with the question of “What is Filipino food?” and opted instead with a better question: “How does food become Filipino”—taking note of how much of our culinary culture is really a mixture of many influences, making it difficult to ascertain what is “pure” Filipino. “There is no such thing as ‘pure’ anyway,” he said.
Still, Ige insisted that we continually look at food through the lens of cultural glasses—following the philosophy of Franz Boas—but in his research, he could not find a proper framework to distill his findings, so he made his own theoretical framework instead, which mixes the lens of ingredient, geography, ethnicity, and technology, leading to combined lenses of terroir, community, trade, and culinary, and leading further to various lenses involving space. [It’s all too complicated to include here, but it was an interesting development of succeeding Venn diagrams.] Part of this is looking at the usual markers for taste—sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami, as well as spiciness, astringency, and oleogustus [pertaining to fat as a medium that carries flavor]—but also knowing that Filipinos have taste markers that cannot be defined by these things, including the specificities of raw fish, of coconut water, of green fruit, of patis with calamansi and sili, of alagaw, of palapa, of pork fat, of pig’s blood, of balut water, of rendered oil from chicken skin, of bagoong, of batwan, of mabolo, of katmon, of bile, of annatto.
Ige also talked about how hard it is to put a “standard” to Filipino food. Like the adobo. Most people think that the adobo comes with bay leaf, with black pepper corns, and with soy sauce, and that all these should be part of the “standard adobo,” but in his studies, he found out that the oldest recipes for adobo do not even call for these things. They are recent additions to the dish!
He ended with the insight that a good sense of local gastronomy involves the following things: valuing the palengke or tianggue as public space and cultural hub; valuing the carinderia as a gastronomic ecosystem of taste, trust, and tradition; valuing nature as being definitive of our food culture, and the source of our traditional and heirloom ingredients; valuing our living food heritage tools, technology, and infrastructure [which may be disappearing fast because of “progress” and politics—citing for example the Philippine salt law, which has wrecked havoc on traditional salt-making in the country]; valuing living food heritage methods; valuing farm-to-plate eating as a culture of sustainability; and valuing cooks as repository of heirloom ingredients and knowledge.
How do we preserve all these?
By documenting our heritage food in cookbooks, even in rudimentary ways.
By saving our food heritage and culinary traditions as much as we can.
And by telling our food heritage stories.
What was most enriching about the workshop was the chance to convene with like-minded individuals, friends and strangers alike, with whom we shared a similar vision of culinary heritage. We were cooks, and divers, and writers, and entrepreneurs, and teachers, and chefs, and socialites—all supportive of a future that enriches the way we relate to each other and the way we relate to food. We learned that not every meal should revolutionize our taste buds, and food shouldn’t be a luxury unattainable to a majority. At the very least, a meal should be filling and nutritious at any price point. What’s terrible about the hellscape we call the present world is that a statement like that feels rebellious when it should be the standard we aspire to.
The workshop with Ige was punctuated with a simple smattering of merienda food sprawled all over a tiny kitchen island table. We had bilao lined with banana leaves serving biko with ginger and calamansi, budbod with muscovado, and linuyang rolled in pinipig and dessicated coconut. We paired these delectable offers with water, coffee, and sweet tuba. All the food were sourced from within Negros Oriental and made by local cooks and chefs. Everything was delicious.
A final thought with regards sustainability: a great meal can come from any origin, any upbringing. If paying for it means our farmers, fisherfolk, grocers, butchers, bakers, and cooks get to eat their next meal, wouldn’t that make what we eat a little bit better?
[Written with Renz Torres]
Labels: culinary heritage, food, gastronomy, philippine culture
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, March 05, 2023
9:00 AM |
The Eternal Calendar
[Expanded from the
original essay]
Growing up, I always found this particular commercial calendar unavoidable. It was [and still is] ubiquitous in many Filipino homes - and you probably know what I'm talking about: this oversized calendar printed on cheap-seeming white paper, with the dates in grids and emblazoned in large impactful [and often blue] typefaces, the Sundays always in red, the phases of the moon marked out on the leftover grids, and the holidays sometimes printed on the dates themselves or relegated to a special list somewhere at the bottom of the sheet. Upon closer inspection, you will find daily information of the tide timetables - marking out the very specific times for high tide and low tide. In some versions, you will find reminders when to pay your taxes. In other versions, you will find various saint names attached to days that celebrate their feasts. A typical calendar set comes with twelve sheets, one devoted to each month of the year, and all fastened together at the top with a long metallic bar that serves as a clip - and at the end of each month my mother used to relish tearing off each sheet neatly along that metal bar, marking her time in a dramatic manner, each tear an instance of beginning anew.
I've always found this particular calendar ugly - an aversion that was certainly emblematic of the terrible snob that was my younger self, but for completely anti-capitalist reasons [or so I tell myself]: this calendar was always so blatantly commercial, with a store's name and information plastered prominently on the upper half of every page. "Lee Super Plaza!" it screamed. "Cang's!" "Yan Yan Commercial!" "FortuneMart!" The commercialism felt like an assault, and I must have begrudged this calendar for that quality.
But there was also another reason. My brother Edwin, who lives in Switzerland, also used to send us beautiful wall calendars with picturesque Swiss views, and with the pages bound by some nicely designed springs. The dates were smaller and the holidays marked were foreign - but the pictures were lovely. Snowcapped alps! Green valleys filled with flowers! Crystal-clear lakes! What's not to love? I preferred these compared to that common gargantuan calendar that always seemed to be too big for any wall it was set on. [In my house, it usually ended up on a kitchen wall.] It also didn't help that I seem to have a hardwired trait of ignoring the very existence [and essence] of calendars, and even until now I have a strange 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.]
But that's just me. [And apparently some other people — fictionist Raissa Rivera Falgui and poet Mila D. Aguilar — agree with me about this calendar's "ugliness"!]
Still, so many people have great affection for this calendar style, which has been in circulation for decades. I discovered this when I witnessed my boyfriend and his mother become frantic one December because all their suki stores had already ran out of inventory of these calendars, which were usually given away to customers. Apparently, this kind of calendar disappears pretty fast every year. Their earnest search for this type of calendar puzzled me, which led me to realize that so many other people actually love this calendar. I was shocked, and amused.
But I also totally understood. When it comes down to it, this calendar is frills-free, and reminds you of each date, in your face, with their humongous type. And then all the other information stored in it basically makes this type of calendar an almanac for regular Filipinos. Dumaguete-based Pakistani farmer/poet Mohammed Malik tells me: "This year is my first time using it and I find it a very compelling design. [It's] extremely functional." It's the functionality of the design that its fans point out the most, conveniently summed by 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]."
The size of the dates is important for many people. "You can see everything from afar," theater actor and singer Hope Tinambacan says, which novelist Jose Y. Dalisay Jr. echoes: "I've always liked this because it does one thing and does it well: the big numbers are great for seniors like me."
Businesswoman and memoirist Erlinda Panlilio tells me: "I love, and look for, calendars like this because it contains phases of the moon, which guide superstitious people like me on when to embark on a new venture or sign a contract - that is, when the moon is waxing and not waning, and preferably when it's full!"
Poet and essayist Marra PL Lanot loves the functionality, which govern the minutiae of her life: "The phases of the moon guide me as to when to cut my nails, when to cut my hair, and when to plant flowers, trees, etc. The practice was religiously followed by our ancestors who tilled the fields and who didn't have calendars then."
Theater actor and teacher Ludendorffo Decenteceo tells me: "My parents loved this calendar because the numbers were so to-your-face - no 'ifs' or 'buts.' You just cancel the days that have gone by, and you also write notes on it, especially in an era before Post-it notes. I love the moon phases and the tide information - a guide to when to start a project. It's very practical."
Almost everyone tells me that the inclusion of tidal information is 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 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." Eldawn Catalan tells me: "I love this calendar so much! [It] reminds me of my grandmother who would track the tides and do something different with her plants [which later on my mom adopted]."
Lawyer Golda Benjamin says the tidal information was important to families who love going to the beach: "I don't like going to the beach when it is low tide kay layhan man ko maglangoy-langoy. But now that we have a toddler, we go pag-low tide because it is safer for her. And we pick beaches with long coastline, like along Praia, so our daughter can run around pag-kapoy na sya mag-swim."
But there's more! Writer Andrea Teran points out one specific utility: "My dad would write utang on it, too!" The calendar was huge enough for families to tack on reminders on it, which another writer Eunice Barbara Novio affirms: "Sa likod nyan ay listahan ng utang at ng mga umutang. Ganyan ang kalendaryo na gusto ni Nanay. Malalaki ang numero."
There's also the utility of being able to keep track with assorted things.
Nest Zamora Lucas tells me: "Yung lola ko minarkahan ang mga araw kung kailan nagsimulang lumandi, at nakasta, o nabulog ng barako ang mga inahing baboy at kung kailan sila expected na magbuntis at manganak."
My high school classmate Jeremiah Tagle also tells me: "Ang moon phase will also remind you when to expect higher price of fresh fish at the wet market. Mahal inig bulanon!" [This also makes the calendar useful to local fishermen.]
And Mark Anthony Salvador tells me: "Isinusulat ni Mama sa ganitong kalendaryo namin ang petsa kung kailan binili ang LPG. Pag naubos ang laman ng tangke, sasabihin niya kung tumagal man lang ba ito nang isang buwan."
Then there's the added factor that it's practically cheap, usually given away for free by suki nga mga tindahan, and even larger retail stores like SM. Sanda Fuentes says: "I still recall waiting on Nijosa to hand us their calendars when we did our December shopping," and writer Susan Lara says: "We used to get ours from our bakery." Janet Villa 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."
To which playwright Liza C. Magtoto adds: "And it makes for a beautiful gift wrapper."
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 and comics artist James Neish, who now lives in Canada, affirms this: "Reminds me of home for sure." My former student Lurlyn Mae Carmona, who now lives in the U.S., had a visceral reaction when she saw my post about this calendar on Facebook: "As an immigrant who has not been home in a long time, this made me extremely nostalgic and homesick. This reminds me of Saturday afternoons sitting around the kitchen table - my lola writing down reminders for the next week on this calendar's pages as I sat eating the delicious lunch she had prepared that day. Some things are purely no frills, but hold so much meaning unrealized until it's brought back from old memory."
This sense of 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? I wanted to know. What I could cull from what research I did seemed to point to an American origin - with a significant cultural transfer to China, which then spread to many countries in Southeast Asia.
The commercial calendar was essentially an Anglo-American invention, and began as an advertising gimmick introduced by the capitalist West - principally companies that sold, manufactured, and processed tobacco, medicine, cosmetics, textile, and oil. According to Francesco Bertelli, in his essay on the history of calendar design: "The late 18th century and across the second industrial revolution advertising calendars will become a popular vehicle to spread the brand identity in people households. Hotels, gas stations, banks, small or big brands all will be offering complimentary calendars as a mean to boost their presence." As early as the 1900s, stores and commercial establishments in America began producing a calendar of this particular design - with monthly sheets, dates in grids, large prints, and added details such as historic events and moon phases - for the purpose of gifting to regular patrons.
The practice of commercial calendars spread to China in the 1920s, although these Chinese calendars were more inclined towards the artistic, with pictures of local scenes and beautiful women being the predominant design element. According to Leo Oufan Lee in his essay "The Cultural Construction of Modernity in Urban Shanghai: Some Preliminary Explorations" [from Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond, edited by Wen-hsin Yeh]: "As early as the second decade of the twentieth century, the American Tobacco Company (Yingmei yancao gongsi) had introduced offset lithographic printing, formed its own advertising department, and set up an art school for the sole purpose of training commercial artists. But its domination was soon challenged by native Chinese entrepreneurs, in particular Huang Chujiu, the owner of the Great Eastern Dispensary and the Great World Amusement Building, who spotted the artistic talent of a Hangzhou painter, Zheng Man-tuo, and promoted him. Thus calendar posters painted by Zheng and his disciples became most sought-after items, thereby establishing a new tradition of commercial art that combined traditional Chinese painting techniques with modern design (sometimes framed with art deco patterns) and utility. In the 1920s and early 1930s, the calendar poster reached a peak of popularity."
The more austere [and popular] version of the commercial calendar also popped up in China, and found its way to many countries in Asia, including Thailand and the Philippines, where they were given as giveaways by mostly Chinese-owned businesses in those countries. And if you are sharp enough, you can get glimpses of these calendars in decades-old artifacts of local popular culture. According to film archivist Teddy O. Co: "I saw this kind of calendar in the 1953 film Dyesebel."
This calendar soon became customized, with the design and textual elements [tidal information, phases of the moon, tax information, and holidays, etc.] becoming proprietary information by a cabal of printers who come up each year with premade calendars where the customization is limited to the top ad space. The ad space depends on the size of the calendar, with the client companies being given the option of having the same top image in every sheet or a different image in every sheet.
According to Cindie Cheng, the daughter of a former printing press owner: "There are only three printing presses [in the Philippines] that print only that - as in, just that, the whole year round. Other printing presses like ours then buy these pages around June for us to print our customers' info, after which, we gather, then bind, then pack them into individual rolls."
Of course, this is not the only well-known commercial calendar in the Philippines. Other companies have evolved with specific calendars whose design elements are immediately recognizable as belonging to that corporation. For example, Fortune Tobacco became well-known for calendars using religious iconography. Ginebra San Miguel became known for calendars featuring their "calendar girls." White Castle Whiskey was also known for their calendar girls - but specifically women astride white horses.
But the financial crunch of the current times has also impacted this calendar's ubiquity - which might be why calendars as store giveaways are becoming a rarity. Visual artist and cultural worker Oliver Phil Quingco II tells me: "Most businesses, especially banks, give this away every Christmas and New Year to their clientele and account holders. Alas, it seems that with financial challenges these days, this has been replaced by smaller desk calendars. Now we have miniature pocket calendars. Only a handful of Chinese-owned businesses still retain this gift-giving tradition of wall calendars."
That increasing rarity has made people already nostalgic for this kind of calendar. My friend Jacki Demuynck notes: "To my future manito/manita, mao ni i-gift nako please, ha." Playwright Alvin I. Dacanay confesses: "I value this calendar type's usefulness. Last year, I went out of my way to go to Sta. Cruz, Manila to buy a few along the sidewalk on Avenida Rizal." My friend Wilma Famoso also notes: "Sometimes we take for granted the 'usual' in our lives, like this calendar, until they gradually fade. Sana whoever designs and prints this calendar will continue to do so."
The poet Joey Baquiran gives me the best ending: "Walang ibang calendar for me, except [this] version. Walang kuwenta yung iba."
Labels: calendars, philippine culture
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Saturday, March 04, 2023
3:02 AM |
Nico and Ige
Nico is Nicolas Astarie, chocolatier.
The event was a chocolate tasting, held at Dakong Balay along Rizal Avenue on a February Sunday just right before Valentines Day—and it felt right, more or less, for the upcoming occasion. Which must be why, when we came to be part of the second batch of tasters being organized by Mr. Astarie and Pinspired Philippines, the participants turned out to be mostly couples, all eager to share a later afternoon round of locally made chocolate in each other’s company, tasting a variety of flavors Mr. Astarie was developing for his locally made brand of chocolate, aptly called NicoCacao. What’s a better metaphor, after all, for love than blended cacao?
Love was the air we were breathing, but the subject was still chocolate, something Mr. Astarie was particularly eager to share his expertise about. He began by telling us that chocolate, like wine, has complex flavors, which is rarely acknowledged—and he should know since he’s a transplanted Frenchman who comes from wine country. He went on to give us the most salient information about the cacao plant and the fruit from whose pods we harvest cacao beans, the basic ingredient of chocolate. He gave us the various kinds of cacao—primarily forastero, criollo, trinitario, and nacional, of which the first one is the most dominant. He gave us its history—primarily centered around Central and South American cultures, and how these beans were later transported to be cultivated in specific countries around the world, notably in Ghana and the Ivory Coast in Africa. He talked about the specific history of cacao cultivation in the Philippines—out of which we have derived our heritage of sikwate and tablea. He went on to talk about chocolate production in general, and then his own journey into chocolate-making, with the goal of making Negros Oriental chocolate one of the best in the Philippines if not the world.
But this was also an interest that came about to him almost accidentally, although Mr. Astarie had always loved chocolates. The pandemic was partly to blame. He had come to Dumaguete for a job as a diving instructor in a Dauin resort, just right before the entire world locked down. He was actually about to leave Negros Oriental for another job at a Malapascua resort when the pandemic happened.
In the pandemic doldrums that followed, he came across local cacao and was so impressed by their quality, he began hatching an idea—a crazy one: he resolved to make European-style chocolate using local produce, and thus NicoCacao was born. In the process, he also found himself able to help struggling local farmers who needed assistance—and needed a market—for the cacao plants they were cultivating, often to distressing results before. “Cacao is a community, not a commodity,” he stressed—and insisted that NicoCacao is inherently a social enterprise that aids local agricultural practice. Today, he uses cacao primarily produced in Mabinay, as well as in Amlan, with plans to also use harvest from La Castellana in Negros Occidental. He does his processing in Valencia town, where he lives. [Pinspired Philippines, based in Dumaguete, has provided the packaging.] His goal is to make his chocolate uniquely Negros, in a process that’s a straight line from tree to bar.
Alongside him in this chocolate journey is his partner Cathey Macatigue, a Davaoena with Dumaguete roots who manages the business, and puts the limits to Nico’s tendency to play around forever with his experiments with coming up with new added flavors for his chocolates.
The tasting involved savoring three varieties of NicoCacao’s chocolate, which they are currently marketing: 80% cacao [what you would consider as “dark chocolate”], 70% cacao, and 60% cacao. “Anything less than 50%,” Mr. Astarie says, “is no longer real chocolate.” Paired with red wine, everything was perfect.
And then the surprise: a tasting of three flavor varieties he had been experimenting on right now—chocolate with calamansi, chocolate with sili, and our favorite, chocolate with asin tibuok! He was looking for the most local of flavors to infuse into NicoCacao, and the three seemed like the best possible varieties to go beyond just the usual. And with his asin tibuok flavor, there was also the added pleasure of imbibing a disappearing tradition of salt-making, a Boholano heritage that is now considered a world cultural treasure. [Bea Misa of Ritual Dumaguete describes asin tibuok this way: “[It is] salt from Albuquerque, Bohol, [which is] on the brink of extinction, made using a very labor-intensive, pre-Hispanic method of production that coincided with the rice harvest. Traditionally, once the salt pots were made, saltmakers would batter them for sacks of rice. Coconut husks are soaked for three months in saltwater pools by the mangrove. These husks are burnt in a highly controlled manner. The ashes are placed in large filters. More seawater is poured through the ashes, leaching the salt to make a very highly concentrated brine. Specially made clay pots are placed over a wood fire. The concentrated brine is poured continuously for eight hours into the bubbling pots. The saltmaker keeps a close eye on evaporation, as the pots will crack if not filled. The result is a smoky orb of salt that weighs roughly a kilo. The asin tibook may be cracked and grated (traditionally, pieces were dipped into soup and rinsed before storing). The salt is slightly sweet and smoky.”]
Once its in your mouth, the dark chocolate with asin tibuok makes you taste the salt right away—but its saltiness doesn’t assault you; rather it mixes well with the chocolate. Our second favorite, the dark chocolate with sili, radiates heat very slowly and strikes your tongue swiftly when the chili flake hits your tongue.
“Take the piece of chocolate on your tongue and let the warmth of your palate melt the square,” Mr. Astarie reminded us in the very beginning. “This is the right way to eat chocolate.” [A sudden realization: we’ve been eating chocolate the wrong way all these years!] “This is to slowly introduce the different flavor profiles in the chocolate to your tongue, and maximize the complexity of the cacao.”
You can get his NicoCacao chocolate bars at Pinspired Philippines, at Ritual Dumaguete at 58 EJ Blanco Studios, and at Salaya Beach Houses in Dauin.
* * *
Ige is Guillermo Ramos, book designer, magazine editor, and food historian.
The event that will feature him in Dumaguete this coming March 18, Saturday starting at 9 AM at 58 EJ Blanco Studios, is a culture and gastronomy mapping workshop for cultural workers, entrepreneurs, and food culture enthusiasts. It is being organized by Ritual Dumaguete.
We’ve known Ige for sometime now—although we’ve never met. But we know him to be a truly outstanding designer and writer whose books include Dila at Bandila: The Search for the National Palate of the Philippines and Appetite for Freedom: The Recipes of Maria Y. Orosa.
One of his recent works is Republic of Taste: The Untold Stories of Cavite Cuisine, for which the historian Ambeth Ocampo has noted: “Cavite is usually studied through historical or written records that document the establishment of towns, the highs and lows of population and demography, the catalog of revolts and revolution that figure in the birth of nation. It is even possible to see its heroes and its villains. Ige Ramos has chosen to trace Cavite’s past through its food and the process found a history rooted in its food: how geography determined the products of the land, and how waterways explained physical mobility and transfer of Chinese, Spanish, Mexican, American, and Japanese influences over the centuries that gave shape, color and taste to their food.”
It is in that spirit of historical/culinary reckoning that Ige will share with Dumaguete his experience of mapping the gastronomic heritage of his native Cavite—”visiting markets, interviewing people, documenting and sharing both common and little-known ingredients, shining light on fascinating historical facts and anecdotes that gave birth to their cuisine.” He will also share practical tips and possible applications for the knowledge and network you might gather in the future, as well as point out the textures in our own backyard!
Registration fee is PhP 500, which includes snacks. [Student rate is PhP 300.] To register for the workshop or to get more information, please email ritualdumaguete@gmail.com or text 0917-824-5701.
Labels: dumaguete, food, history, philippine culture, writers
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Tuesday, November 01, 2022
End of a great musical era. RIP, Danny Javier. APO was a vital part of OPM, was its engine actually. But what I love was that they represented the country so well, demographically speaking. Jim was Luzon, Buboy was Visayas [from Dumaguete, actually], and Danny was Mindanao.
Labels: music, obituary, opm, philippine culture, singers
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Thursday, September 22, 2022
9:00 AM |
A Remembrance of a Dumaguete Filmmaker
Last September 22, we celebrated the 98th birth anniversary of a Dumaguete filmmaker who was acclaimed and well-awarded in his prime, and produced many great works that contributed considerably to Philippine cinema—but is sadly mostly forgotten now. Two weeks ago, a restoration of one of the films he scripted, the classic The Moises Padilla Story, was screened by the Film Development Council of the Philippines in Trinoma, Quezon City, which was part of the celebration of the Philippine Film Industry Month—and the organizers forgot to invite his family.
I am going to devote this space in remembrance of him.
In 28 August 1974, when Cesar Jalandoni Amigo received the Outstanding Sillimanian Award for Scriptwriting and TV/Film Production, he was riding a crest of recognition for a body work that, starting in 1949, had been consistently impressive, and straddled two creative worlds—that of literature and of cinema. His citation for that award begins: “[His] world is the world of film, some of them fiction, but in that world, Mr. Amigo is real. His contribution to the art and profession of filmmaking in the Philippines has been substantial and for this he has been amply awarded.”
Cesar Amigo [right] receives the 1974 Outstanding Sillimanian Award for Screenwriting and TV/Film Production from then University President Cicero Calderon and Board of Trustees Chair Josefa Ilano.
What is the sum of this contribution? In quick consideration, there are the thirty-three films to his credit—all of which he wrote or provided the story for, and four of which he also directed. There are the six FAMAS Awards for his screenplays. And then there are the stories themselves—always with a social bent, geared towards a deeper consideration of what he felt to be the vital issues of the day.
In 3 June 1973, when he received the Patnubay ng Kalinangan [Guardian of Culture] Award, an honor bestowed by the City of Manila, which is considered by many local artists to be one of the most prestigious and the most sought-after cultural award, the noted writer and civic leader Celso Al. Carunungan addressed the city’s Commission on Arts and Culture in testament of his friend:
“Cesar J. Amigo has used his talents not merely for self-aggrandizement, but also as weapons, however modest, in humanity’s fight against traditional enemies: communism and population explosion. In the mid-1950s, Amigo devoted almost two years of his life writing and directing anti-communist films in Vietnam and Cambodia. The early 1970s see him gradually switching from theatrical movies to film featurettes on family planning, which Cesar Amigo now produces and directs for the National Media Production Center, in collaboration with the Population Commission.”
Cesar Amigo at his typewriter. He was most comfortable working late at night.
He was the most lauded scripter of his day, and people could readily recognize his authorial signature in the films that he wrote—one could say he was the precursor, together with Clodualdo Del Mundo Sr., to the likes of Amado Lacuesta, Clodualdo Del Mundo Jr., Ricky Lee, Raquel Villavicencio, and Jun Lana, all of them celebrated screenwriters that came after him.
Cesar J. Amigo was born in Manila on 22 September 1924, but grew up and spent his formative years in Dumaguete City, Negros Oriental, where he had family. [He is related to the famed Amigo clan in Dumaguete.] He went to kindergarten at what was then Silliman Institute in 1929, proceeding to the primary grades at the same school in 1930. For his intermediate grades, he attended West Central School [now West City Elementary School], graduating in 1937. He attended Negros Oriental High School for his freshman and sophomore years [1937-1939], but transferred to Mindanao and studied at Cotabato High School, where he graduated in 1941. He returned to Dumaguete soon after to study Pre-Law at what was now Silliman University—where he was subsequently elected Vice President of the Silliman Literary Guild [already betraying his literary inclinations at age 17]—but his college education was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II.
When he returned to school in Dumaguete in 1945, right after the war, he shifted gears and this time pursued a degree in political science. He also became part of what was later called the Class of Reconstruction—the cohort of college students at Silliman University who witnessed the biggest social change and cultural development thus far. The war had disrupted their lives, and those who survived the Japanese occupation and its terrors came back to the classroom with a renewed vigor. They brought with them, according to Silliman University President Arthur Carson, an “enthusiasm and … sober maturity,” which then “brought stimulus and reward.”
What should be noted is that this returning group of students—particularly the Class of 1948 [to which Amigo belonged]—brought together at least two generations of young people into war-ravaged Silliman campus: those who had yet to experience college life but were now of age to begin higher studies, and those whose own tertiary matriculation was cut short. The former brought with them fresh vigor, and the latter returned more than ready to begin again—and this combination became a melting pot from which would come much of the creative ferment that cemented Silliman’s [and Dumaguete’s] contribution to the national culture. The next five years after 1945 became a period when student population more than doubled, despite the glaring challenges of post-war education, including the lack of classrooms and the lack of faculty to teach. Because of the massive enrolment that only became even more massive as with passing semester, certain liberties in completing courses were instituted, and the schedule between semesters was tightened. 1946, for example, is known as the year without a summer vacation, as students raced to complete their courses to accommodate incoming students. In 1947, three commencement ceremonies were held for seniors who were able to complete their requirements.
The title “Class of Reconstruction,” which was given to the Class of 1948, is the cohort that felt the joy and the challenges of post-war reconstruction and rehabilitation in campus the most. Swirling around Amigo and his classmates were many things in the local culture that were beginning to stir. In 1948, the Student Government came back to operation, publishing its Constitution in the September 18 issue of The Sillimanian. (The school paper itself resumed publication only in 1946.) Plans for the reviving of the yearbook, The Portal, was also underway. (Its first post-war publication would eventually be released in 1949, reprinting with permission Rafael Zulueta da Costa’s poem “Like the Molave” as a centerpiece to underline a popular post-war sentiment of strength after adversity.) Theatre made a dramatic comeback, with Gilbert and Sullivan musicals and Shakespeare plays being staged to popular reception on campus in the late 1940s on to the 1950s. In 1947, Edilberto K. Tiempo, a returning faculty member, was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop, followed the next year by his wife, Edith, who was also admitted into the same program. Campus publication flourished, with Rodrigo Feria at the helm.
And lastly, in 1948, the Sands and Coral was launched.
The first issue of the Sands and Coral was edited by Cesar Amigo and Aida Rivera (now Ford), under the guidance of Rodrigo Feria and Ricaredo Demetillo. This magazine would later make its mark as the preeminent literary publication of Silliman University. The folio caught the attention of national literary circles, was reviewed favorably in newspapers, and signaled Silliman’s growing importance in the contribution to the national literature, particularly that in English, which would be the main engine of the burgeoning Dumaguete literary culture in those years. Alongside Amigo and Rivera would be other Silliman writers who would soon win national accolades and see constant print in national publications—including Jose V. Montebon Jr., Eddie Romero, Kenneth Woods, Reuben Canoy, James Matheson, Edith Tiempo, Edilberto K. Tiempo, Graciano H. Arinday Jr., Ricardo Drilon, Leticia Dizon, David Quemada, and Ricaredo Demetillo. Many of these names would be part of a campus literary group who called themselves The Barbarians, Inc.
Among Amigo’s literary output as a Silliman student are several items published in the 1946 issue of the Sillimanian Magazine, including a poem [“Postlude”] and a short story [“Rain Without Meaning”]. After his editorial stint for Sands and Coral in 1948, he would contribute one more time to the folio, this time with a criticism piece titled “Ideals and the Man” for the 1951 issue edited by Reuben Canoy, Claro Ceniza, Honorio Ridad, and Lugum Uka. In this short piece, Amigo crystallized an abiding philosophy: “The man who considers his ideal as a thing apart from his actual being, a distant goal, makes a perilous mistake. For the ideal is forever enmeshed with the courses of our lives. It never leaves us. A man may indulge in gluttony, but invariably he will despise another glutton because the perception of it revolts his innate principles of abstinence, which is only a factor of a more complex Ideal. In this case, the ideal manifests itself in a physical reaction, as it does in the more superficial motions and opinions of a human being. / Let there be no mistaking it: no man can isolate himself from the Ideal. He may be unconscious of it; he may despise ideals. But there is not a single human being of a sane mind, however stupid or dissipated, who does not erect [consciously or unconsciously] a standard of behavior, a Principal Attitude. What is this standard? An Ideal.”
His son Bob would remember his literary inclinations: “Like most accomplished writers, [my father] was a voracious reader. For the most part of the day, he would soak himself in reading novels, the local dailies, Time and Newsweek, Reader’s Digest, and just about anything he could get his hands on—including spiritual books from almost any religious persuasion. To be sure, this was the foundation that made him the consummate writer that he was. It would seem that this love for the printed page was a passion he learned from his mother, Belen Jalandoni.”
He continued: “As a writer, he was most comfortable working late at night. I remember waking up in the wee hours of the morning hearing him pounding away on his typewriter. And when he was exhilarated about a story or screenplay that he was doing, I would hear him relate this to my mother, Ursula. Oh, how he loved telling her his stories. I suspect that she was the only audience who mattered most to him.”
Soon after graduating from college in 1949, Amigo would return to Manila, where he landed his first job—that of senior scriptwriter for Sampaguita Pictures, following the lead of Romero, who had begun writing screenplays for Gerardo de Leon, starting with Ang Maestra in 1941. [The two would have a long collaborative relationship in the coming decades.]
His stint at Sampaguita would last until 1951, whereupon he began working as a freelance scriptwriter. The gambit paid off, and his screenplay for Buhay Alamang [co-written with Romero] would finally be produced in 1952. The film would also net him his first award, the FAMAS for Best Screenplay. But the following years also saw him drop off from screenwriting altogether, and between 1953 and 1956, he turned to journalism, becoming a movie columnist for Sunday Times Magazine.
In 1956, he began working for the propaganda arm of the U.S. military, specifically as senior scriptwriter and documentary film director for the USIS-Saigon (Vietnam) and USIS-Pnom Penh (Cambodia). In this period, he would write and produce films with an anti-communist bent, notably with Saigon (1956), a film directed by De Leon and starring Leopoldo Salcedo, Ben Perez, Cristina Pacheco, and Khank Ngoc [a famous Vietnamese film actress and singer who would win Best Actress for Anh Sang Mien Nam (1955), a joint Vietnamese-Filipino production, at the Philippine Film Festival Award]. Saigon is a revenge melodrama about ill-starred Vietnamese lovers fleeing the Viet Cong from North Vietnam.
The stint with the U.S. military would last until 1957, and Amigo soon returned to the Philippines to write Ang Kamay ni Cain for De Leon, from a story by Clodualdo Del Mundo Sr. Soon, film assignments rolled in with more regularity, and the rest of the 1950s would see him write the screenplays for Sweethearts (1957), Bakya Mo Neneng (1957), Be My Love (1958), You’re My Everything (1958), Laban sa Lahat (1958), Hanggang sa Dulo ng Daigdig (1958), Rolling Rockers (1959), Eva Dragon (1959), and Hawaiian Boy (1959). Of this titles from this period of resurgence, he would be known most for Hanggang sa Dulo ng Daigdig—a crime film directed by De Leon, about an outlaw [played by Pancho Magalona] out for revenge—for which he would win once more the FAMAS Award for Best Screenplay. For that film, Reel News critic Francisco Villa would write: “[The film boasts of a] treatment at its most imaginative… and realism in its rawest and most stunning presentation.” Amigo’s reputation as a screenwriter was secured.
At the 1959 FAMAS Awards, where Cesar Amigo [left] won Best Screenplay for Hanggang sa Dulo ng Daidig. Its director, Gerardo de Leon [right] won Best Director.
In the 1960s, his screenwriting credits would include Escape to Paradise (1960), Sandakot na Alabok (1960), Kadenang Putik (1960), Sa Ibabaw ng Aking Bangkay (1960), Vengavito (1961), The Moises Padilla Story (1961), Halang ang Kaluluwa (1962) Labanan sa Balicuatro (1962), Falcon (1962), Sa Atin ang Daigdig (1963), Barilan sa Pugad Lawin (1963), Intramuros (1964), Blood is the Color of Night (1964), Magandang Bituin (1965), The Ravagers (1965), 7 Gabi sa Hong Kong (1966), The Passionate Strangers (1966), Gold Bikini (1967), Ang Limbas at ang Lawin (1967), Virgin of Kalatrava Island (1967), Brides of Blood (1968), and Igorota (1968)—a run of films that would exhibit Amigo’s wide-ranging capabilities in handling different genres, from film noir [The Passionate Strangers] to horror [Brides of Blood], from action-filled drama ripped from the headlines [The Moises Padilla Story] to war epics [Escape to Paradise], from historical melodrama [Igorota] to romantic comedies [Magandang Bituin], from musicals [7 Gabi sa Hong Kong] to spy capers [Gold Bikini]. He would also begin writing B-movies for Hollywood around this time, often in association with Eddie Romero, Gerardo De Leon, and Cirio Santiago.
He would also win the FAMAS for Best Screenplay for Kadenang Putik in 1961, and The Moises Padilla Story in 1962. The latter film [directed by De Leon]—about a real-life Occidental Negrense politician who becomes a martyr after a brutal election-related skirmish with a powerful provincial governor—has become an undisputed classic in the canon of Philippine cinema. This film, together with The Passionate Strangers [directed by Romero, and co-written by fellow Sillimanian Reuben Canoy]—which is set in Negros Oriental and is about an American factory owner who faces his demons as he confronts a labor strike and further muddles it with murder—completes Amigo’s duology on Negrense moral horrors.
In 1963, he would direct his first film, Sa Atin ang Daigdig, a story following six people “from the gutters” as they strive to seek success. [The movie’s press bills it as a film that “will startle you with its frankness and stir you for its truth.”] It became the Philippine entry to the prestigious Venice Film Festival—an honor that Amigo took in stride, proclaiming both the success of the production and its inclusion in Venice as “beginner’s luck.” He would also direct two more films in the 1960s—7 Gabi sa Hong Kong [a musical extravaganza starring Gloria Romero, Shirley Gorospe, and Juancho Gutierrez], and Wanted: Johnny L [an anti-crime anthology film he co-directed with De Leon and Romero].
Igorota—directed by Luis Nepomuceno in 1968—would also be a landmark film in Amigo’s screenwriting career, although contemporary critics would come to deride the film for being a “misguided” attempt by the Filipino film industry to crash the international market with its sensational tale of an Igorot maiden who falls in love with a man from the city in the lowlands—their union stirring cultural conflict that end in tragedy. The film would however win eight FAMAS Awards in 1969, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress [for Charito Solis, for whom this would become a milestone role]. Amigo would also serve as associate producer for the film.
The 1970s would herald a trickling down of Amigo’s screenwriting outputs, which would include The Hunted (1970), Pipo (1970), Ang Larawan ni Melissa (1972), The Pacific Connection (1974), Hindi Kami Damong Ligaw (1976), Babae … Sa Likod ng Salamin (1976), and his last film, Sa Dulo ng Kris (1977). The Hunted, which Amigo would also direct, is Nepomuceno’s follow-up to the success of Igorota, also starring Solis. The actress would return for a final engagement with Amigo as director in Babae … Sa Likod ng Salamin, the first film produced by Reuben Canoy. It is a psychological melodrama about a woman with dual personalities—that of a faithful wife by day, and a seductive mistress by night. “I’ve always had a soft heart for Cesar. [He is mild-mannered, soft-spoken, and intelligent director.] Besides, he is really good,” Solis would speak of Amigo in Crispina Martinez-Belen’s Celebrity World column for Manila Bulletin.
In 1972, he would win Best Director and Best Screenplay for Ang Larawan ni Melissa at the Quezon City Film Festival.
In 1977, he would direct Sa Dulo ng Kris, an expansive tale set in contemporary Mindanao detailing the challenges that people from the South regularly faced [including the conflict between Muslim natives and Christian settlers], which was produced by Canoy and starred Joseph Estrada and Vic Vargas. It would prove to be his final film, earning him his last nominations for Best Director and Best Story at the FAMAS.
Sometime in the early 1980s, Amigo returned to journalism full-time, becoming managing editor of The Evening Post. From 1983 to 1986, he also became a regular writer for The Manila Paper, which Reuben Canoy published and edited, putting out a column called “Bench Warming with W. Somerset Moghum.” [W. Somerset Moghum, his pen name, was derived from W. Somerset Maugham. Moghum is a twist of his nickname Mogoy—which only relatives and close friends from Silliman would call him.]
His wife Ursula also would pass away in 1982 at age 52, and he started to develop a love for cooking—perhaps to fill his late wife’s role in the family, as she was known among their friends for her culinary expertise.
In the twilight of his life, he would also return to his literary [and Sillimanian] roots, and help produce Abby R. Jacobs’ wartime memoir We Did Not Surrender in 1986. [Jacobs was an American missionary who taught at Silliman University, and was in Dumaguete when World War II broke out. Together with other American teachers, she evacuated to the hills and mountains of Negros to hide from the Japanese occupying forces, and where they bravely assisted the resistance movement. She taught at Silliman until 1953, and was one of Amigo’s mentors in his student days.]
He later became editor of HOY!, a monthly magazine, in 1987. The April 1987 issue of the magazine would be his last work, as he was diagnosed with colon cancer towards the end of April. He immediately had surgery in May, but the surgery was only a solution to ease his last days. He passed away on June 5 in his house in Mariposa, Quezon City, surrounded by family.
Cesar Amigo with wife Ursula and their family.
His eldest daughter Marika would remember his passion for his work, and his devotion to his family: “Papa’s passion for film was evident with every line he wrote and every frame he shot. But what his patrons would never know was that the only thing this decorated filmmaker loved more than his craft was his family. And his countless home movies and family photographs prove that. The glitz and glam of the limelight never fazed him. His life at home was his priority and he made sure that we all felt the same way. Our dinner table was always bursting with excitement, as each of us would eagerly tell each other of our day. Our guests would even point out that dinners at the Amigo house would always run long because everyone had so many stories to tell. But no one told stories quite like Papa. His eccentricities and his cinematic narration were uniquely his.
“His love for film poured into these conversations, too. This dinner table was where we would unleash our inner movie critic and conduct lengthy discussions on the films we just saw. Film was not just in our blood; it was part of our soul. Papa made sure that the very art form we loved would bring us closer to our loved ones.
“And as the years went by, this has not changed. The Amigo table still has the longest dinners that are chock full of stories we eagerly tell each other sprinkled with unabashed critiques of the latest box office hits. Papa’s love for family was infectious, so much so that we became each other’s closest friends. And although he did not get the chance to meet most of his grandchildren, they share that very same closeness my siblings and I share. Their dinner tables ring of enthusiastic storytelling and meticulous movie critiques too!
“As a daughter that still misses her father, I’m grateful that Papa’s passions are still immortalized for the world to see. His award-winning films, and most of all, his influence in his family for generations to come.”
His second-born, Bob—or Bebop, would remember his tenacity regarding film production, insisting always on the paramount importance of story, but also not at the expense of the bottom-line: “As a film director, [my father] believed that the storyline was the centerpiece. But he did not indulge his creative senses in stories that his audience could not relate to. He understood the balance of doing a film that told a good narrative and returned a profit to his producers’ investment at the box- office. To this end, he did not believe in wasting raw footages that merely ended up on the cutting room’s floor. Thus, during production, he meticulously crafted every detail of his shot with the purpose of cutting down on outtakes.
“’Economy of words,’ he once told me, ‘is a skill that every writer should develop.’ I cannot help thinking that many today could benefit from his wisdom—particularly in an age when almost anybody can fancy himself a writer by merely putting out his work on the internet. Cesar J. Amigo belonged to an era of writers whose pen was golden.”
We get the same sense of Amigo as writer from son Ike, the fifth in the brood: “I did not have the opportunity to watch many of my father’s movies, because his prolific writing days were on its tail-end when I was old enough to go to the movie house. However, it’s not hard to see why he was a good scriptwriter. The stories that he’d tell us on the dinner table were always interesting—from how he won over my mother in marriage, to why he lost two fingers on his left hand, to his experiences in Saigon that closely resembled the adventures of Indiana Jones, even though that character wasn’t invented yet. That’s why I looked forward to our time on the dinner table, because it was a guaranteed front-row seat to my father’s next storytelling adventure.”
From Gigi, his fourth-born, we get a sense of Amigo as a man with many facets, including an inherent quirkiness—and further explanation for those two missing fingers: “[My father] was quite the character. He was funny and quirky and a great storyteller. He had a way with words, which is no surprise since he was a writer. But growing up in Dumaguete, his main language was English and Bisaya. His weakness was Tagalog. So what did he do? He invented some Tagalog words. These words seemed so real to us that it was only when I started school that I learned from classmates that I’m using made-up Tagalog words nobody understood. For example, ‘tudoy,’ which apparently was not Tagalog for ‘toe’! He gave funny names to our pets as well, like our dog A-shit, our goldfish Quasimodo, and a pair of carp he named Mr. and Mrs. Carruthers. Even the clueless mailman was baptized as Mr. Estonactok.
“But what everyone who ever met him would probably remember was that he always wore a two-fingered black glove on his left hand. This glove covered two fingers cut in half. Papa had a lot of versions on how he lost his fingers. Some stories were funny, while others were outrageous. But the best story was the real one. He accidentally cut them off with an electric saw mishap while attempting to build a bookshelf! He rushed himself to a nearby clinic just as it was locking up for the night. Papa knocked on the door with his bleeding hand and a beautiful woman opened the door to let him in. And that was how he met the love of his life, my mother. That is a story worth telling through the ages.”
From the youngest, Cesar Jr.—or Jun—we get a sense of a carrying on of that passion for filmmaking: “Pursuing a career in film or production was never a dream of mine. Sure, I was proud to be a film director’s son, and of course I loved movies growing up. But the thought of following in Papa’s footsteps never crossed my mind. Still, Papa had such a unique and impactful personality that it’s almost impossible not to be influenced by him. Seeing him a few times in action on a film set and having those endless discussions about movies during mealtimes gave my siblings and me an appreciation for film production, and depth of cinematic perspective far beyond others our age. So it doesn’t come as a surprise that four of his six children eventually ended up in production at one point or another, myself included. Papa’s been gone for awhile now but his legacy continues on… even to his grandchildren.”
My thanks to the Amigo family, especially Marika Amigo Bulahan, for their assistance in the writing of this article, as well as for the many photos they sent of their father and his work.Labels: directors, dumaguete, film, philippine cinema, philippine culture, philippine literature, silliman, writers
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Thursday, May 12, 2022
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.
We allowed 2022 to happen a long time ago.
Labels: magazines, Marcos, media, philippine culture, politics
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
GO TO OLDER POSTS
