Wednesday, June 07, 2023
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 138.
Labels: poetry, Pride, queer
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Tuesday, June 06, 2023
11:41 PM |
The Sissies in Dolphy's Wake
I’m finally able to watch [a very bad copy of] Mars S. Torres’ Jack and Jill [1954], the first significantly queer Filipino film, which catapulted Dolphy to stardom playing sissy roles, but when viewed through the contemporary lens unfortunately suffers by centering heterosexuality as the sneering norm, and by being the epitome of the retrograde sexual politics common at the time. I’m currently studying how this depiction of Gorio/Glory paved the way to the sissy superstardom of Herbert Bautista [briefly, in the 1980s remake of Jack and Jill], Joey de Leon [Barbi!], and Roderick Paulate [Petrang Kabayo!], all of them straight men who made their showbiz fortunes by tackling stereotypical sissy roles; and finally, Vice Ganda, who, whether you like her or not, actually reversed that trend of straight male comedians doing drag by being an actual gay actor doing gay roles.
It also strikes me that the OG Jack and Jill was the proto-Parasite: two poor siblings, a tomboy and a gay man, get into the employ and graces of a well-off family, the first by pretending to be a cis male chauffeur, and the second by pretending to be a cis female ripe for adoption. Crazy movie.
Labels: film, philippine cinema, Pride, queer, sissy
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Labels: AI, art, artists, issues
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Monday, June 05, 2023
5:39 PM |
Where I Am...
I think
Where You Are is Not Here: Stories will be my last gay fiction collection for the foreseeable future. Because I don’t know what else I can say about the Pinoy gay condition from the very specific world that my fiction inhabits. This book, which contains my Palanca-winning piece “Ceferina in Apartment 2G,” attempts to be a collection of diasporic gay fiction, situating Pinoy gay stories not tethered geographically to the homeland — and it has been a challenging adventure because of that. I started this book in 2010, but I have about five more stories to complete, and when that happens, this book is done. [This is just a prospective cover, btw.]
Labels: books, queer, writing
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Saturday, June 03, 2023
7:24 AM |
In Dumaguete, The Arts Flourish Part 14: Art in the Post-Pandemic—An Epilogue
In Shelter Gallery over in Tabuctubig, just as the month of May was easing into fruition, I stumbled on a show that was exhibiting works of such vitality, such strong presences, and such mindful meaningfulness that the apt response from any art lover might as well be worship. I’m not kidding.
The show is titled Matinabangon, and it opened last May 12 [and closes on June 16], and is meant to be a showcase of contemporary visual artistry from the other side of Negros Island, represented here by Occidental artists Charlie Co, Ann Gaurana, Barry Cervantes, Elwah Gonzales, HR Campos, Janrey Llegue, Jay R. Delleva, Jovito Hecita, Jun Jun Montelibano, Karl Arnaiz, RA Tijing, and Vincent Sarnate, all from by Bacolod’s Orange Project. Talk about Bacolod artists coming to the Dumaguete art scene, and meaning business. They came blazing.
The first painting that drew me in was “Tryst at the Creek,” by Jun Jun Montelibano, which haunted me even days after seeing it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Was it the painting’s storytelling quality? Was it the simplicity of the composition that’s disturbed somewhat by the uncanny? Was it the fairy tale-like take of a young girl in white, holding flowers, wading in ankle-deep creek water, meeting a freak from some unholy mishmash of that monster rabbit from Donnie Darko and a plague doctor from the Middle Ages—which somehow affirms a nightmare I can never tell my therapist about? And yet the painting is also a picture of loveliness. It is also frightening. Both all at once.
It was the key piece of art that provided me the way to look at and appreciate the other works in the collection—an exhibit of such eclectic curation that also somehow made this show come off as an unintended boast, but certainly a well-deserved one. The show seems to say, “This is what we do in Bacolod, Dumaguete.” A dare.
And what is it that they do?
One can begin with Charlie Co, the godfather of Bacolod visual arts, who knocks off timid artistry that coasts along with having nothing to say by giving us “Anger,” a work in acrylic on canvas which is worthy of its title: it depicts primarily what looks like a brutalized man who sneers in contortions of anger and pain as he is paraded around—like a crucified Christ—in an unholy procession, held aloft by a menacing mass of people in strange yellow masks. It invites religious and political readings, maybe even the sociological—but the point is the poignant pain dramatized by the man’s face, his eyes fixed on the viewer like a rebuke. The work unsettles, by design of course, and with this, an artistic gauntlet has been thrown.
But the exhibit is not all like this work by Co. The show contains multitudes of styles: from classical representational pieces like Karl Arnaiz’s “Mother and Child,” a work in charcoal on paper that recalls familiar Renaissance figures, and Ann Gaurana’s “Consenting Vulnerability,” a work in oil featuring a female nude, with flowers, on an oblong-shaped canvas—with the woman’s face turned away from us like a knowing rebuke to the male gaze; to the wild surreal contortions and even pop-art inventions of RA Tijing’s “Carnis,” a work in oil which features a two-headed beast in a forest, with some canines popping out of its blue skin, pausing before a feast of red meat, and Barry Cervantes’ “God Bless the Ammunition,” a work in acrylic that also takes the figure of the Christ, this time dressed as the hood ornament of some futuristic rocket ride, driven by a figure in protective gear with a skull for a face, through a landscape that’s clearly an environmental dystopia. Both paintings are ripe for endless interpretations. Also in this latter mode, you have Janrey Llegue’s “Taga Uma” [acrylic and modeling paste on canvas] that takes whatever pro-vegan messaging in Tijing’s work and makes it more horrifically tactile; and Elwah Gonzales’ “Maayo Na Lang ang Sobra Sang sa Kulang” [acrylic on canvas], which is portrait of a woman with a heart for a body, with what looks like sheets of water coming out of the ventricles—a commentary on love? Who knows.
In between these styles, you have Jovito Hecita’s “Pollination to Rot,” a work in mixed media on a round canvas featuring an assemblage of fallen leaves in autumn-rich hue, which on closer inspection is really the color of death, made more precise by the carcasses half-concealed in their midst: the bones of a bird and the decaying body of a rat peeking out from under the leaves, both of which make up the lower angles of a triangle with an actual clock ticking above, its frame yellow as the leaves, and its numberless existence making us mindful about the eventual mortality we all have to face. This is death personified by a painting.
Heady stuff indeed—which probably explains why I found myself attracted to the more whimsical pieces in the collection, like HR Campos’ “Abi Ko Friendly Ka” [mixed media on canvas], which features an orange beast that looks like a dragon—or a menacing caterpillar; or Jay R Delleva’s “Swallowed” [acrylic in canvas], which is very much in the mode of Margaret Keane but taken to a higher conceit with a merry mix of John James Audobon nestlings and William Morris florals; and especially Vincent Sarnate’s exquisitely sculpted mixed media works “Pugad,” “Aratiles,” and “Last Leaf,” which all take the narrative of the botanical mania of plantitas and infuses the figure of the potted plant with the darling nightmare of baby faces growing from the same soil.
I realized right then and there that what attracted me to this show, like Montelibano’s haunting work, was the pieces’ ability to thread nightmare and whimsy in the same breathing space—some more-in-your face or more infused with social messaging than the others. The variety, and the conceit, works. That they’re all done with such boldness of composition and theme adds to the success of the exhibit.
The aim of the show, riffing off the Visayan word of the title which means “to help, support, and assist,” is to represent thematically the raison d’etre of Orange Project and Shelter Gallery together—which is that both are artist-run galleries that “share the same vision to provide nurturing spaces for artists and their communities,” which is “rooted in the mission to provide a multidisciplinary platform for the people and by the people,” thus making matinabangon not just a show title but also a descriptive for the “art eco-system” that both galleries try to be “sustainable” in. All of these are in the statement introducing the show.
That word “sustainable” feels like a wound—because this is the last show you can see at Shelter Gallery before it closes after June 16, when its lease at the venue it occupies finally runs out, and with no clear future for another venue to transfer to in sight.
“This is why I wanted to have this show with Bacolod artists,” Shelter’s main mover Faye Mandi tells me. “I wanted to close the gallery with a blast—featuring very powerful works by fellow artists from the other side of our island. People who share the same vision as I do, who can underline what I’ve been trying to do since opening Shelter.”
It has been a year and six months since Shelter Gallery opened, with its inaugural show featuring Ms. Mandi and Hersley-Ven Casero in a collaborative exhibit—something that propelled them both to loftier reaches as working artists, going as far as maintaining undeniable presences in national art events such as Visayas Art Fair in Cebu and Art Fair Philippines in Manila.
In the interim, Shelter played host to 15 exhibits, including Fast Times [March 2022], Training Wheels [April 2022], At the Moment [May 2022], Pakigbisog sa Kailaloman [June 2022], Jia You [July 2022], Intention [August 2022], Surface Tension [September 2022], Every Day is a Sorrowful Mystery [October 2022], Windows of Perception [October-November 2023], Pagsibol ng Punla [December 2022], Layaw [January 2023], Sonden [February 2023], Ichi-go Ichi-e [March 2023], and Hue [April 2023]—plus two or three one-off events that combined the visual with theatre arts and literary arts. Many of these shows were group exhibitions, but Shelter Gallery managed to put out solo exhibitions, a considerable number of them first-time solo exhibitors, for artists like Rey Labarento, Mikoo Cataylo, Eli Wong, Vanessa Gaston, Chanel Pepino, Trina Montenegro, and Juan Macias.
Ms. Mandi assures me this is not the end of Shelter. That they’re actively scouting venues for relocation, and that the gallery might take another form—but still very much within the range of her vision of “providing nurturing spaces for artists and their communities.” In the meantime, she is eager to go back to her painting—something she has missed since she became busy being a gallery maven.
* * *
But, in the end, as I put this fifteen-part series to a finish, a part of me wonders whether this magnificent resurgence of Dumaguete arts—certainly a COVID-19 miracle—is very much a protracted phenomenon enabled by a pandemic hunger for culture. Imagine a community hankering to make and display art in the first two years of the pandemic, bursting with so many possibilities in 2022, and now reckoning with the wane of that pandemic wave in 2023.
One notes, for instance, the unheralded demise of Dakong Balay Gallery as exhibition space, now reportedly taken over by a franchise coffee shop wanting more space. But the venue started it all with its initial showcase of Hersley-Ven Casero’s paintings in January 2021—snowballing to the establishment of Shelter Gallery in January 2022, and MUGNA Gallery in June 2022, and in that bright environment also ignited the local productions of other arts, from music to theatre, from literature to film, from dance to photography. It became home to artists wanting a home for their art, and home for art lovers wanting to see local art in a pandemic time that didn’t seem to end.
Is the wave over? we can ask. A corollary question becomes: Is art sustainable in a city that may not have all that it has to really appreciate artists in its midst? Because I asked a local gallerist this question once, not too long ago: “Do locals buy art?” The response: “They do—but most cannot go beyond P50,000.”
I still am willing to believe that the pandemic wave of artistic resurgence in Dumaguete is not a fluke—but that it is going through a much-needed reconfiguration given post-pandemic realities. But there are lessons to learn from the past three years:
First, that while institutions like Silliman University and Foundation University remain critical to art production in Dumaguete [which remains very much a “university town”]—and this is simply because both have the infrastructure, and the budget, and the history of art-making at their disposal—the pandemic art wave also taught us we can actually make art even when important cultural institutions like these are closed down. At the height of the pandemic, we didn’t have the Luce or Woodward or Sinco Hall for our theatrical and cultural productions—but we found unlikely venues to stage our plays and cultural shows. We didn’t have their galleries to exhibit our paintings in, but kindred souls found a way to remedy that—and we actually had more galleries during the pandemic than before the pandemic. True, both institutions have also been instrumental in finding ways to bring culture to people via working Internet platforms—this is especially true for Silliman’s Culture and Arts Council—but that instance of independence from them was actually exhilarating, as if we were given a new paradigm for doing art, and finding that it works, even when wonky.
Second, artists will make art—even with a pandemic raging. And their common hunger can ignite community. The pandemic art wave was mostly sustained by young artists who had no care for the quarrels of their elders, and who only wanted a space to exhibit, and a space to commune among themselves. Our young artists made the pandemic art wave happen—and may their hunger remain unabated.
Third, Dumaguete is truly hungry for culture and the arts. I can see that every time a new exhibit, or a new concert, or a new play opens. And I could see that for real when I spent a day at Pinspired Philippines, which occupies the main lobby of Dakong Balay, and which for the longest time provided the entry point to the gallery at the second floor. It astonished me that there was a considerable stream of people coming in, asking if there was an exhibit upstairs. It was more than a trickle. It wasn’t exactly a flood—but the constant stream of patronage was astonishing for me. People will look for art.
When the National Museum at the Dumaguete Presidencia finally opened in late November 2022, it provided me another way to mark this local hunger for culture. According to one of its staff, the average number of visitors coming to the museum daily is around 80 people—but it can reach as high as 250 on very busy days, which apparently seems to happen more often these days. That’s an astonishing number, given the smallness of the museum—and they also get a lot of repeat visitors, people who are hungry to learn more about the geographic and biological diversity of Negros Island, about archeological riches of Dumaguete and its vicinity, and about the beautiful architectural heritage we have on this island as well as in Siquijor.
Our challenge now is to learn from the pandemic as well as from the pre-pandemic, and find ways to consolidate our strengths from both eras in managing local art and culture—to make the post-pandemic a more sustainable time for artists and the people who support them, and to make art that matters to the community, and to foster a deep cultural environment that will sate the hunger of a city that, in fact, yearns for it.
The arts in Dumaguete indeed flourished during the pandemic, miraculously. That success shouldn’t just be a pandemic story.
Labels: art, art and culture, bacolod, dumaguete, negros, painting, pandemic
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Friday, June 02, 2023
7:00 AM |
Pride Books!
HAPPY PRIDE! Get my book
DON'T TELL ANYONE: LITERARY SMUT and these other fine titles from Anvil Publishing to get a whole range of the Pinoy queer experience! You can get it from Shopee through this
link.
Labels: books, philippine literature, Pride, queer
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Thursday, June 01, 2023
7:00 PM |
Denniz Captures the Dumaguete Night
Among all local street photographers, the best one to capture the Dumaguete nighttime is
Denniz Futalan [ IG: @dennizfutalan7 ]. This is just one of his snapshots; he has others, and it is my dream to curate a show of his night photos one of these days.
Labels: dumaguete, photography
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The s.o. wanted to try
Mogo, the new Korean grocery in Tinago where you can cook your own instant hot ramen. So here we are. It’s cute.
Labels: dumaguete, food, korean, life, love
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Wednesday, May 31, 2023
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 137.
Labels: poetry
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Tuesday, May 30, 2023
That took weeks! That took many caffeinated days and sleepless nights, endless commiserations and occasional pleasures. It took all of me to get that kind of concentration, but it helped to shut out the world! And here we go. I'm done. I'm done, I'm done, I'm done. I'm done! Now to go back to real life...
Labels: life, work, writing
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Sunday, May 28, 2023
9:41 PM |
Glances and Languid Life
Wong Kar-Wai's
In the Mood for Love (2000).
Labels: film
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Wednesday, May 24, 2023
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 136.
Labels: poetry
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I was getting a haircut today at the barber’s, and I began to appreciate the fact that even at my age my hair was still quite thick. I had no idea I had hair issues until around late December 2020. I just went through COVID-19 [and these were the days before vaccines were a reality]. After recuperation, I felt fine, but deep inside I knew life was changing in a fundamental way I could not even articulate. I began to go through so much psychological distress that I began to lose my hair. I found hair everywhere, in clumps, on my bed, on the floor, in the bathroom. I seriously thought I was going bald by all the hair I was shedding. This went on for months until Renz finally convinced me to seek therapy in May 2021. It was such a huge help, and the hair loss soon stopped.
Labels: life, pandemic, psychology
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Tuesday, May 23, 2023
9:00 PM |
Trying Out Solbar
Trying out the new food dive,
Solbar [ IG: @solbarph ], along EJ Blanco Drive. Tried out the Hainanese chicken at their Hawkers B Singaporean stall [not that good, chicken too dry, and the sauces were bland, and it was strange to eat it with basmati rice instead of jasmine], the chicken souvlaki at their Souvlaki Greek food stall [this was a really good choice], and a regular bratwurst with caramelized onions and sauerkraut at their Brathaus stall [too salty]. We like the open-air vibe, and it’s genuinely relaxing. The staff was very accommodating. Will give the food another go next time.
Labels: dumaguete, food
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Wednesday, May 17, 2023
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 135.
Labels: poetry
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Monday, May 15, 2023
We spent our tenth anniversary last May 14 at
The Henry Resort Dumaguete [ IG: @thehenry.dumaguete ], and it was a much-needed escape from the world while we contemplated all the years we've been together. Thank you, The Henry, for the beautiful night!
Labels: life, love
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Saturday, May 13, 2023
8:00 PM |
Tryst at the Creek
This painting by Junjun Montelibano, “Tryst at the Creek,” now on display in the Matinabangon exhibit at Shelter Gallery [ IG: @shelterph ], haunts me. I can’t stop thinking about it. Is it the storytelling quality? Is it the simplicity of the composition that’s disturbed somewhat by the uncanny? Is it the fairy tale-like take of a young girl in white holding flowers, wading in ankle-deep creek water, meeting a freak from some unholy mishmash of that monster rabbit from Donnie Darko and a plague doctor from the Middle Ages — which somehow affirms a nightmare I can never tell my therapist about? And yet it’s also lovely. And frightening. All at once.
Labels: art, art and culture, negros, painting
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Wednesday, May 10, 2023
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 134.
Labels: poetry
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Friday, May 05, 2023
6:21 PM |
At the 2023 Nick Joaquin Literary Awards
I’m back in Dumaguete after a brief visit to Manila, and everything still feels surreal. And wonderful. All at the same time. I know why. Please permit me in this space to celebrate a win. Because there are four reasons why winning the Nick Joaquin Literary Award means so much to me.
First: When I was in freshman year high school and barely knew anything about writing [or Philippine literature for that matter], I discovered Nick Joaquin’s iconic short story “May Day Eve” bundled in one of those mimeographed handouts my older brothers who were in college would regularly bring home and scatter around the house. [That’s also how I discovered Edilberto Tiempo and Edith Tiempo — and I read and loved their works without quite knowing who they were.] Joaquin’s style in “May Day Eve” astonished me, and made me see the possibilities of a simple story made more astonishing because of the underlying craft involved. I remember telling myself, “So, you can actually write a story like this...,” and I remember attempting to write a story exactly like it, with all the twists and turns of time and the human heart. In retrospect, that attempt to copy Joaquin was a foolhardy idea — my juvenile story was predictably bad — but if beginning to write is all about mimicking your idols until you find your own voice, then with my choice of Nick Joaquin, I was certainly off to a good start.
Second: When I began writing and publishing my stories for real in the early 2000s, Nick Joaquin was still literary editor of Philippines Graphic — and I was loath to actually send in stories to this magazine because I was afraid I would not pass muster. [Philippines Free Press published my first short story instead, not counting all the early attempts in Silliman periodicals.] But after a while, I gained enough courage to send in something, and I submitted “Cruising,” a story about a Shakespeare-spouting rent boy in Dumaguete. And then later the news came: Nick Joaquin had died. I thought I lost my chance at being edited [and selected for publication] by the master. It turned out he had accepted it indeed for publication weeks before he died, and I was glad to know that the writer that made me want to write in the first place had a chance to read my fiction and deemed it worthy enough for publication. Winning the NJLA thus feels for me like a kind of coming full circle. Nick Joaquin has always been the supreme inspiration for my writing — and my Philippine Literature students also know that I teach “May Day Eve” with such gusto, endlessly marveling at its inventiveness.
Third: When I continued to read more Filipino works over the years to augment what I taught, to understand where I come from, and to gain more insight to help my own attempts at the craft, there were particular stories that I resonated with, which informed my style and what I wanted to say in my work. Jose Y. Dalisay Jr.’s “In the Garden” was instructive for its magnificent handling of horror, as we witness a teacher in a mountain school struggle to protect his students from the incursions of malevolent soldiers. Susan S. Lara’s “The Reprieve” is a masterclass of emotional restraint even if the story plumbs the chaos in the mind of an old patriarch whose infirmities has brought new indignities. These stories, among a few others, became my paragon. But I also read poetry to better my own fiction, so there’s Marra PL. Lanot, whose poems about women defining and defying their circumstances were instructive in their cutting insights and tantalizing because they were always unafraid to explore all manners of questions and provocations. [Her essays are also wonderful.] I have devoured all their collections, and have been mentored by them in real life, which is a privilege. That they would turn out to be the judges for this year's NJLA feels humbling; I will always be their student.
And fourth: When I began teaching creative writing for real at Silliman University, one of my greatest joys was founding a writing club in Dumaguete in the late 2000s called LitCritters Dumaguete. A bunch of former students came up to me and asked to be mentored in story writing, so I created the group for them. We met every Saturday, reading and discussing at least three stories to see how they work [or not work], and for every fourth Saturday, we wrote our own stories to be workshopped by all. We were very serious, and those kids competed with each other so hard to come up with fantastic stories. [As a moderator, I was not exempt from also writing my own stuff, to be workshopped by everyone. Those years truly were some of the most productive years in my life as a fictionist.] One of these kids was F Jordan Carnice. And this year, he wins the Poet of the Year Award at the NJLA. So winning with him feels just right for his former teacher!
There are so many people to thank—foremost of all, Philippines Graphic Magazine for continuing this tradition of honoring literature, especially in a time when magazines like it are becoming rarities. So many people also sent me their greetings in the past few days, and I appreciate every word. At this stage of my life, I recognize the importance of gratitude above all. And then there’s Renz, for always knowing what’s best for me and for making me go to Manila [despite my initial plans not to attend the awards program].
Congratulations to the other winners, Criselda Yabes and Richard Giye! Congratulations to all the other finalists!
And thank you to my mother Ceferina, whose life I love to set to fiction. She was the inspiration for this winning work, and deserves all the attention.Labels: awards, friends, nick joaquin, philippine literature, philippines graphic, writers
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Wednesday, May 03, 2023
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 133.
Labels: poetry
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