Friday, December 06, 2024
11:49 AM |
Last Class of the Semester
Still recuperating, but I got up to attend my last full class of the semester. Slowly and surely ticking off my last classes before the semestral break. Critical Writing Workshop, done! Fiction Workshop, done! Playwriting Workshop, done! Asian Literature, done! And finally done with Literature and Cultural Studies [which I'm just subbing for]. Now to rest.
Labels: health, life, silliman, teaching
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, December 04, 2024
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 216.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, December 01, 2024
9:00 AM |
A Second Homecoming for Elsa Martinez Coscolluela
She is one of the best writers I know—although when you mention that to her, Elsa Victoria Martinez Coscolluela would demur. Once I remember her referring to her brother, the late David Martinez, as the better writer in the family. Granted, he was also a Palanca winner—he did the astonishing double whammy in 1997 by winning the Palanca first prizes for both the short story and poetry. But I think Ma’am Elsie is in a class of her own, and I will always be her grateful reader.
Admittedly, I first knew about her from two things. First, in high school, I came upon her short story “After This, Our Exile,” which won third prize at the 1972 Palanca Awards. I did not exactly know the import of her name yet, but I remember being blown away by the story’s instinctive feel for hacienda life in Negros, able to look beyond the gloss and see the rot behind the glitter of sugar. Second, when I knew more about her upon entering college at Silliman University, I learned that she was in fact crowned Miss Silliman in 1964—and I was quite astonished to realize one can actually be a great writer and also be a campus beauty queen. [Alas, when you’re younger, you tend to pigeonhole people into specifics. I later learned beauty queen writers were actually not uncommon. The equally great Dumaguete writer Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas was crowned Miss Negros Oriental in 1970. There’s also Jacqueline Veloso-Antonio who was Miss Dumaguete in 1985 and Miss Negros Oriental in 1987—and while she would not really call herself a writer, she is in fact a fascinating essayist, usually writing about local culture and heritage.]
Ma’am Elsie is still a beauty after all these years, and I have always taken to her as a kind of long-distance mentor. We chat often on Messenger, and the last time I was in Bacolod early this year, she went out of her way to take me out to dinner. I find this personal relationship with her very humbling. It is an honor to be friends with one of Silliman’s greatest writers.
The thing about Ma’am Elsie is that she is prolific. She writes poetry. She writes essays. She writes short stories. And she writes plays of various kinds—theatrical ones, of course, but also ones written for television and film. In the late 1960s until the 1980s, she was so prolific in her literary output that eventually she was elevated to the Palanca Hall of Fame in 1996—for the feat of having won five first prizes. Which is not something very easy to do. [For the record, she has won a total of 24 Palanca Awards.]
I love her plays. Her subject is so varied, but she returns often to the Negros of her childhood—which is in Dumaguete; and her adulthood—which is in Bacolod. That she is considered one of the foremost writers of both Negrense capitals means she has the pulse of Negros in her writings. And thus she is able to write truthfully about the place, and about us.
The thing about her plays, however, is that they’re seldom performed, if ever, even if they have won awards. The recurring joke about winning the Palanca for the play is that, after the awards ceremony, these plays find home not on the stage but in the drawer. But not for lack of trying by these playwrights; who wouldn’t want to have their plays staged? The simple reason is this: theatrical productions of local plays are very rare—unless you’re Nick Joaquin, Rene O. Villanueva, Nicolas Pichay, Floy Quintos, or Rody Vera, or, of late, Vincent de Jesus, Carlo Vergara, Dustin Celestino, Joshua Lim So, Guelan Varela-Luarca, or Eljay Castro Deldoc. You will notice a preponderance of Manila writers. The seeming exception seems to be Glenn Sevilla Mas from Iloilo, but he does work and live in Manila. Even in regional theater, play selections tend to favor Manila writers. How many times have we seen Marcelo Agana Jr.’s New Yorker in Tondo in Dumaguete? Or F. Sionil Jose’s Progress in Cebu? Too many times. They’re classics, of course—but their constant rotation in terms of local production seems to come at the expense of local writers.
One of Ma’am Elsie’s most famous plays is In My Father’s House, which won the Palanca in 1980. This is a Dumaguete play, based on the lives of her father and uncle who lived through World War II in Dumaguete, and who suffered tragically during the Japanese Occupation of the Oriental Negrense town. [Dumaguete would only become a city in 1948.] After the play won the Palanca, it was performed everywhere—at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in Manila and at the University of the Philippines-Diliman in Quezon City; in Singapore; in L.A.; even in Tokyo. But it was never staged in Dumaguete. Here it was, a quintessential Dumaguete play, but never performed in Dumaguete itself.
That is until 2013, when the Silliman University Culture and Arts Council took the chance of bringing it back home, under the direction of Amiel Leonardia. I was part of that cast at the Luce Auditorium, and we were honored to be part of that history in the making.
And that’s the thing. There are so many playwrights from Silliman and/or Negros Oriental. We have Ricaredo Demetillo, Bobby Flores Villasis, Linda Faigao-Hall, Rosario Cruz Lucero, Roberto Ponteñila Jr., Lemuel Torrevillas, Alfred Yuson, Leoncio Deriada, Edilberto K. Tiempo, Luna Griño-Inocian, Dessa Quesada-Palm, Rolin Migyel Obina, and many others. Ang among the younger set, we have Beryl Andrea Delicana, Earnest Hope Tinambacan, Karla Longjas, Junsly Kitay, Michael Aaron Gomez, Benjie Kitay, and Jireh Catacutan. Their plays keep winning plaudits everywhere—but they remain unstaged.
Which is why last year, Dessa and I took the initiative to start staging Palanca-winning plays by local writers, to be directed by our student directors at the Speech and Theater Department of Silliman University as part of their senior thesis productions. We thought this would give their works a chance to come alive. We started with the Palanca-winning one-act plays by Bobby Flores Villasis last year. This year, we have continued this project with the Palanca-winning one-act plays by Elsa Martinez Coscolluela. Staging In My Father’s House in 2013 was her homecoming to Dumaguete; this play festival should serve as the second one.
Last November 28, we finally raised the curtain on the first playdate of the Elsa Martinez Coscolluela Play Festival at the Woodward Blackbox Theatre at Silliman University. We knew the endeavor is partly to honor our beloved Dumaguete [and Bacolod] playwright, but we also were aware that the project is still essentially a laboratory for Silliman’s theatre students. We were going to watch student-directed plays, not professionally staged ones—and for that, we knew it will mostly be a hit or miss affair depending on the strengths of the student director involved. [You take these things with a grain of salt, always hoping for the best.]
Which is really to say: I was awed by what I saw of the Set A plays that night—with Bret Bonnie Ybañez directing Japayukisan, the opening play, and Francis Esguerra directing Blood Spoor, the final play for opening night.
Mr. Ybañez took the melodrama of a young woman arriving home from abroad to attend her father’s funeral and keeping fiercely the secret that she works as a Japayuki [or nightclub entertainer] in Japan, and staged the play with surprising restraint and subtlety. [Even with a delicious catfight involved!] Even with a forlorn scene of having closure with an old boyfriend! [This scene actually made me tear up.]
What made the production work was that Mr. Ybañez knew how to get to the interiority of the story; he also knew that good casting for our protagonist would be enough to telegraph the emotional core of the story. Mass Communication student Joriz Angel Palermo as Mayang the Japayuki truly gets to the heart of her character so well: we commiserated with her when she grappled with her secret; we ached for her when she confronted her sister and mother about having to support her family while her siblings got the privilege of going to school on her dime while she stripped away her dignity in a mob-controlled bar in Japan; and we rooted for her when she was tearing the hair out of a nosy “family friend.” When she is later confronted by her ex-boyfriend to get to the heart of their breakup, we finally comprehend where she is coming from and the extent to which she has arrived at a hard-earned worldly wisdom: “We don’t always get what we want. Plans miscarry, feelings change, dreams die—.” Heady stuff, and yet I like that at the end of it, the two characters choose to be kind to each other, to say goodbye in tacit understanding of their parting. Powerful stuff.
Mr. Esguerra, on the other hand, has the luckier hand in directing a material that invites the epic and the atmospheric. But he also shows that he knows what exactly to do with every beat of the story: he begins the play with bird sound in complete darkness, then with the actors coming in from the direction of the audience, screaming incoherent pain in that darkness—until suddenly, a shaft of stage light shows us a woman on centerstage cradling a dying, bloodied girl. Then we get a sense of the other characters in the melee, all looking bloody, and then we understand that this is a community of Mindanao lumad, their homes having been randomly attacked by the military. There is much wailing, and recrimination, and later on, some quiet moments when the characters ponder their fate with each other. And then all of that gets embraced with some uncanny use of supernatural elements—fog and chanting and blinking lights do the trick—which are somehow tied up with the age-old beliefs and rituals of the hurting tribe. It is a very serious play, but it works. It is also very bloody and deadly, although all the violence occurs off-stage. I quite liked it. I admired how Esguerra knew how to pace the material, how to block, how to use music effectively, and how to detonate the drama with eerie silence. I like that he has a good sense of stage spectacle, which is rarely achieved by most student directors.
As of this publication, Set A [Japayukisan and Blood Spoor] would have finished their two-day run. You can still, however, catch Set B [First Fruits and Late Journey Home] on December 2 and 3, and Set C [The Captive Word] on December 6 and 7. The first two plays were more than the worth of the measly P200 ticket. If you are in Dumaguete, do yourself a favor and catch the remainder of the festival. This is truly a celebration of Dumaguete’s literary heritage.
This year, Dumaguete City is the official Philippine endorsee to become a UNESCO City of Literature in 2025, and it deserves that distinction truly. Doing this kind of theatre festival, of putting life to the literary works of our local literary artists, is very much a part of that effort.
Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, negros, philippine history, philippine literature, silliman, theatre, writers
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Saturday, November 30, 2024
I was no longer feeling human by day’s end yesterday. Was just so exhausted from work, and probably should have heeded the call to take a cat nap in the early afternoon. But there was work to do, and less energy to do them. The s.o. swooped in around 6 PM, took me to a good Chinese dinner at Dayo, and — best of all — assented to my sudden hankering for a foot massage. Dear God, I needed that foot massage. It gave me all the energy I needed to finish the to-do’s for the day.
Labels: life, love
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, November 27, 2024
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 215.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, November 22, 2024
Anyone who knows me well enough knows where to find me in Dumaguete. In this corner of The Bricks Hotel [ IG: @thebrickshotel ] where I read, write, relax, do my work outside of the classroom. This is my current comfort zone in Dumaguete. The coffee is just there for the asking, and the staff are people I’ve known for some years now. I like that even when it’s a hot day, you can bank on the constant breeze coming in from the Bohol Sea. I like that there’s a view of the Rizal Boulevard whenever I want it. I like that I see the sea. I need that: I’m an island boy, and I need the sea.Labels: life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 214.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Tuesday, November 19, 2024
9:24 PM |
Copycat by Idwardo
Often, when I go and see exhibitions in town, I turn off the pesky part of my brain that allows voices uttering art theory, and art history, and art techniques, and just feel around the gallery and be drawn to the one object that I cannot shake. In the Arté Café Gallery [ IG: @artegalleryph ] exhibit, PREKARYATSII, now showing at the Arts and Design Collective Dumaguete [ IG: @adcdumaguete ], this happens to be “Copycat,” a work in acrylic by Cebu artist Idwardo. There’s something vaguely cinematic about it, like a piece of color film stripped to its basic Technicolor separations, which render the subject — a young man in an Asian squat staring straight at the viewer — both mysterious and compelling, rendered as he is in rainbow basics. That his “copies” in the other colors show different facets of himself — one faceless and the other grotesquely masked — also lend to this mystery, signifying some subtext of horror. There’s an interactive quality to the art as well: when you take the invitation to scan the QR code beside it, your cellphone screen immediately becomes a camera that has settings making each figure pop out more prominently. It’s quite a nice addendum to the exercise, but I like the tripartite nature of the painting itself: our selves in three iterations, guises of who we are, staring straight at life [or the viewer] with a somber, even steely gaze. I wonder what he thinks of me, this young man in a squat in three colors. I wonder why he stares so.Labels: art, art and culture, dumaguete, gallries, painting
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, November 17, 2024
9:00 AM |
The Dumaguete Inato as Life
This is, admittedly, a generalization—and many exceptions abound! But the following are things non-Dumagueteños—especially poor Manila people who come to our city bound by the rules of engagement they have been doing in the metropolis for years and who think their praxis is universal—should learn about doing events in our beloved city of infinite mysteries:
[1] No one will answer your emails. The best way to get in touch with anyone in Dumaguete with a high degree of responsiveness, is through Messenger. [Not even Viber!] It helps, of course, that you have a well-connected point-person who can gather everyone else in your group chat.
[2] Dumagueteños live dangerously by doing everything last minute. Because if we plan too much ahead, things will not usually happen.
[3] Dumaguete is such a small city, but we rarely see each other. This has to be noted, especially if you expect us to always be under each other’s beck and call, because everyone is “five minutes away.”
[4] Don’t fret about only having three people register for your events through your officials channels, and you’re scared about nobody showing up. A good audience, always seemingly out of nowhere, will arrive on the very day itself. Same with ticket sales. Everyone buys tickets to events on the day itself.
And finally: [5] The event will almost always go well, nonetheless.
This is just how things go in Dumaguete.
I’ve come to this conclusion because it has happened twice, at least for me, this year. We will not mention the events very specifically, just to protect the identifies of all involved, but the first one—a matter of national importance—occurred sometime midyear. The person in charge who hailed from a major national office in the capital was emailing everyone concerned in Dumaguete for at least two months. They had questions, they needed to coordinate. We were supposed to meet earlier, but our schedules did not coincide—and it took some time for both of us to finally “meet” online. They continued emailing everyone in the interim—except me—but no one was answering back, except for one or two. [I do get the need the need to email. It’s official, especially if you are using the office-assigned email address. It’s also for paper trail. I get that, and I get why they were continuing to do so.] They would also try to call people—but no one was answering. Three weeks before the event, I finally messaged them in Messenger [I got their account from someone else involved in the project]. We connected. I told them I knew everyone they needed in the team and that Messenger would be faster for everyone to contribute their share of the work—and I promised to gather them all via the app. And then we all finally converged, and everyone started replying, and the project started. And the event was a resounding success.
A few months later, another national event was to take place in Dumaguete. The same deal: the people from the national office tried to email everyone. Tried to even email the hotels they intended to stay in, and the restaurants they intended to hold officials banquets in. Again, no responses via email. They finally chose a different venue for the event—because the first venue was not answering back, via email. I met the organizers for the first time in person a day before the event. They told me they were not sure anyone would show up, because nobody was answering their invitation emails. They budgeted for 70 people, but only three registered so far. I told them people would just show on the day itself, and not to worry. I also told them I’d invite people I knew—via Messenger—as soon as I could. The next day, people indeed showed up. And more people showed up on the second day. And the event was a resounding success.
I think back to one other event that happened in Dumaguete a few years ago. A theatrical company wanted to do a leg of a play they were touring around the country in Dumaguete. Their very efficient creative team came all the way from Manila, doing everything the Manila way. It was very instructional, and some of the things they did were things us locals actually learned from. But I remember one particular demand they wanted to accomplish in Dumaguete: they wanted a press conference in a mall. And we were like: “Umm, no one really does press conferences for cultural shows in Dumaguete, unless it’s a beauty pageant.” The press would probably not show up, except for campus journalists. And even if they did, we were not sure they would even see the show to write about it. True enough, the press conference that eventually happened was a disaster. But the show itself was somewhat well-received by the locals. It ran for about a week.
The lesson I guess is that every place has its own culture with which to do things, and it pays to be aware of these specificities—or at least have someone local and knowledgeable who can guide you through the intricacies. Best practices in Manila are not necessarily best practices in Dumaguete. Seasoned businessmen know this. The way you make a deal in New York is not the way you make a deal in Tokyo, or Shanghai, or Kuala Lumpur. There are cultural barriers at play—and one tiny mistake in misreading will lead to disappointment, and no deal.
I posted a short version of this essay on Facebook and the response has been tremendous. I thought there would be people who would negate everything I said—“Dumaguete Pride,” and all that—but to my astonishment, most of the responses only underlined what I said as something true of the community. Gaba-an Youth Lead’s Dennis Caballero said: “Tinuod gud ni!” DTI’s Anton Gabila said: “True! Especially the second one. On the last hour of the previous day, mapuno ra gyud mga sign-up forms.” Bun Yeng Ngan, who runs a successful events company in Manila but is from Dumaguete, said: “You’re telling me! After 31 years as an organizer of corporate events, sa Dumaguete ra jud ko bilib! Ikatawa na lang para dili ka ma-pikon. Nothing personal. It is what it is! I love Dumaguete.” The National Book Development Board’s Bethel Samson Delatado said: “I experienced the [no email response] one, hehehe.” Travel diva Angelo Villanueva said: “Trulalooooo!” Lawyer Golda Benjamin said: “No one answers emails. OMG. So true!” Playwright Lendz Barinque said: “The first and the second used to frustrate me so much, until I just gave in. And que sera, sera.” Back Pack Solutions’ Ernest Acar said: “I had to let go of the usual conventions of what event preparation should be when I moved back here. Makapasmo, pero lingaw. Haha.”
But why don’t we answer emails? I have a feeling this has something to do with the formality we have come to associate with this kind of correspondence. And Dumaguete as a place is far from a bastion of the formal. We are relentlessly informal. I sometimes teach wearing tsinelas and shorts, and no one will bat an eyelash. Messenger is very informal, like the Sunday tabo-an we love in Valencia. [The best way to do emails in Dumaguete? Email the secretaries. And then call them to tell them that you sent an email.]
Why do we do everything last minute? I think this is a remnant of the way Dumaguete used to be: the smallness of the place allowed us to do so many things in a given day. Unlike Manila, where life is so hectic and the region so huge and the traffic so relentless, you are trained to do only one thing a day, and two if you have superpowers. In Dumaguete, we can do five, seven, ten things in succession in a day—and so it is easier to put things together in less time. And we forget the immediacy of events if we plan it ahead with too much time to plan and execute. Dumaguete loves immediacy. Which is why it is easier to do “instant fairs,” “pop-up events,” and the like here. Plan things too much and people will dilly-dally more. Plan it one minute before, and people will show up. I remember someone telling me that fifteen years or so ago, many Dumagueteños would only begin to proceed to the airport to catch the flight they are scheduled on when they can already hear the airplane landing. That is the heart of the Dumaguete “last-minute.”
Why don’t we see each other often, even if Dumaguete is so small? I have no idea.
Why do we just show up for things, and why do we buy tickets last minute? Because that’s just us. Because we are doing so many things in a typical Dumaguete day, the only commitment we can make to events is not to register—there’s no time for registration!—but to just show up. I once organized a screening for Lav Diaz’s five-hour film, Norte: The End of History, at Robinsons Movieworld in 2013. You would think a five-hour film would be daunting for an ordinary Dumagueteño. Nope. You would think the slow ticket sales at the start concerned me. Nope. By the morning of screening day, we sold out every ticket. And there were clamors for more.
Like some of the responses above, this way of doing things is not for everyone, not even some Dumagueteños themselves. Vida Tusoy commented: “As an inveterate planner, this will trigger my anxiety.” The truth is, even the “culprits” themselves know this anxiety first hand, and after every successful event, a lot would commiserate among themselves: “Let’s plan better next time”—which means: “Let’s email each other and answer back,” “Let’s not do things last minute,” “Let’s make sure we have proper audience development,” etc. Honorable wishful thinking really, because the next year, the same things still happen.
There’s a whiff of “unprofessionalism” that we can be accused of concerning all these, of course. Bun Yeng Ngan and theatre artist Belen Calingacion did not mince words and called the attitude “inato gihapon diay”—in other words, a “small town” attitude to life. But I think “inato”—which is really best translated as “doing things our own way”—is not really about having a “small town” attitude; it is about steadfastly doing it “our own way,” because time and again, these ways have really proven more effective than the textbook-prescribed “professional way.”
I think that’s really the heart of the Dumagueteño: we have always stubbornly done things our way all throughout our history, and the best things about Dumaguete living have really been the product of that stubbornness. Like the “inasal,” as demonstrated by our Occidental Negrense siblings; it’s chicken grilled in a very particular way that makes it “inasal” in Bacolod, but did we do the same thing in Dumaguete? Nope. We grilled chicken marinated in milk, and the taste was, and is, remarkably different. We called it “inato.” Thus Jo’s Chicken Inato—the epitome of Dumaguete grilled chicken fare—was born.
This “inato” attitude was what made our elites of yore build their mansions along the old Marina—no other elites in major towns in the Philippines did that, having their mansions face the sea. The result? The Rizal Boulevard.
This “inato” attitude keeps us from being too outlandish and preening with our accomplishments—but take a look at all the accomplished Dumagueteños who have ever lived. We have two National Artists [three if you count one heavily identified with Cebu]. And two National Scientists. Since 2017, I have featured weekly on the Dumaguete City Tourism Facebook page at least one prominent Dumagueteño or Oriental Negrense who have done much for their profession or for their community, and a lot of them are actually world-renowned. It is already 2024, and my list has not been exhausted yet.
This “inato” attitude is what keeps everything we do distinctly Dumagueteño. At the first Dumaguete Literary Festival we did last April, we made the “inato” our motif. We had vans to ferry guests, but our official transport was the tricycle. Most literary festivals in the country are held in malls; we purposely held ours in an old heritage house. Most literary festivals in the country would also quietly proscribe a formality in dress by participants; we advised our guests and participants to come in wearing tsinelas and shorts. And it worked!
So I’m not exactly sure I’d call everything we do as “inato” the way it’s connoted—a shaming negative. We’re just “chill” this way. Every place has a rhythm which works for it. This is the Dumaguete rhythm for the most part, and it works.
[Photo by Alan Kirit Jr.]
Labels: culture, dumaguete, life, negros
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, November 15, 2024
10:00 PM |
La Boheme at Silliman
I love the fact that in Dumaguete, I can tell myself: “I want to end this busy week by watching opera.” And watch I did, straight from my last class of the day.
In the photo, that’s Rodolfo and Mimi in this barebones production of Puccini’s La Boheme at Silliman University’s Claire Isabel McGill Luce Auditorium, presented by the Cultural Center of the Philippines and featuring the performers from Viva Voce Voice Lab. The entire opera was staged, but it was not a full-fledged production — there was no orchestra [only a piano] and there were no elaborate costumes — but all there was were performance, gusto, and the beauty of the human voice. Often, that’s enough.
The show was packaged as an educational outreach program, to teach contemporary Filipino audiences about what opera is all about, and to make a traditionally daunting art form be accessible to those who have only heard about what opera is like and are too intimidated to watch any. Hence, the helpful introduction by artistic director Camille Lopez Molina before the show began [she was very funny]. Hence, the simplicity of the staging. Hence, the supertitles projected on screen that directly translated the Italian lyrics the performers were singing.
Truth to tell, this was my first opera, and although it was done in this format, I was grateful for what it was — because everyone in the audience truly enjoyed the musical spectacle onstage: an audience of mostly students awww’d at the lighting quick romance between the two leads, arrrgh’d at the seeming red-flagness of Rodolfo when he wanted to break up with Mimi, and ohhhh’d at Mimi’s final demise.
[Molina also explained that the company specifically sought out a performance at the Luce because this was Viva Voce’s experiment with raw voice projection, no amplification, in a suitable theater: the Luce remains the only theater in the country with the best acoustics.]
I can readily tell when a Luce audience is appreciative [and Dumaguete is notoriously hard to please], and tonight was one for the books.
At the end, I also realized that this show signaled the end of the pandemic for me. At least culturally speaking. The last show I watched at the Luce before lockdown started in 2020 was Rent, the Jonathan Larson musical that borrows heavily from La Boheme. Four year later, I am watching the OG material on the same stage. My pandemic has been properly bookended.
P.S. It’s now funny to me that when I listened to opera before, the Italian lyrics and the melodic voice made me think they were singing of very important pronouncements. Now I know that they’re just singing of the most mundane things, like: “I left a pink bonnet underneath your pillow. Please pack it for me.”Labels: art and culture, cultural affairs committee, cultural center of the philippines, dumaguete, life, music, opera, silliman
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, November 13, 2024
9:08 PM |
The Dumaguete Chill
Things non-Dumagueteños should learn about doing events in the city:
[1] No one will answer your emails. The best way to get in touch with anyone is through Messenger. [Not even Viber!]
[2] We live by doing everything last minute. If we plan too much ahead, things will not happen.
[3] It’s a small city but we rarely see each other.
[4] Don’t fret about only having three people register through your officials channels, and you’re scared about nobody showing up. A good audience, seemingly out of nowhere, will arrive on the very day itself. Same with ticket sales. Everyone buys tickets on the day itself.
[5] The event will almost always go well, nonetheless.
This is just how things go in Dumaguete.
Labels: dumaguete, life, people
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 213.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Monday, November 11, 2024
5:48 PM |
Things Take Time
Things take time. Just came from my fiction workshop, where we tackled the second draft of their first short story required in class. Call me satisfied! Admittedly, my rhythm for teaching workshop was kinda off when I came back to teaching last year, because I had to relearn everything again, especially the process, after three pandemic years of not doing it. But it does come back, slowly. Today I’m satisfied.Labels: education, fiction, life, school, teaching, workshops
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
11:29 AM |
Two Worlds in My Head
My brain off Ritalin and on Ritalin is so different. It’s like living two existences. One is vaguely foggy, but it has always been the existence you know. Your normal. The other is clarity, and it’s like someone putting on glasses for the first time and seeing the world that’s sharp and colorful you had no idea.Labels: adhd, life, mental health
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
10:59 AM |
Gym Goddesses of Music
I maintain a playlist on Spotify that I totally love. And which I constantly play, especially if I want to feel energetic for the day’s slate of work. It’s called “Gym Goddesses of Music,” because this was my cardio soundtrack. I don’t go to gym anymore, but I still listen to this playlist religiously. It has Madonna in it, and Robyn, and Sia, Icona Pop and Charlie XCX, Sophie Ellis Bextor, etc. [And also Beck, for some reason, hahaha.] My fave: Sandra Bernhard’s cover of “You Make Me Feel” by Sylvester.Labels: life, music
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, November 10, 2024
9:00 AM |
A Walk to Taclobo
Calle San Jose Extension in Taclobo in the early evening of Friday surprisingly buzzes with the lightest traffic, and somehow I find it easy to walk, with my usual pace, the street’s length [until Bag-ong Dalan, that is, which is really an old road that has been officially named Ciriaco Espina Street—and yet for some reason is still being called by locals everywhere with that unofficial, and terribly untrue, moniker]. I like my pace, like someone in a hurry to get somewhere. But it’s a loose kind of hurry, and I’ve always walked fast especially when alone. Perhaps I like the feel of the breeze that I conjure with my speed. And I like the feel of the little sweat I accumulate in the effort—and then I quickly realize that it has been a while since I’ve really walked. Because I’m breathless, and walking is effort for someone out-of-shape a year out of the pandemic.
I’m here in Taclobo to visit the significant other who’s very sick.
I opted to walk all the way to Taclobo from The Bricks Hotel along the Rizal Boulevard, where I had been all afternoon doing an assortment of work [and one informal workshop]. I did not plan to walk, but traffic in the major thoroughfares of Dumaguere was, as usual, horrendous. And while I bid my time by the sidewalk hoping to be able to flag down a tricycle, I instantly knew while I did a good bit of waiting that I would not be able to get a ride.
But I had to get to Taclobo to visit the significant other who’s very sick. I know environmental factors are at play in his surging fever and a terrible bout of coughing—other people in his household are sick as well—but I knew this illness is stressed-induced as well. He’s been battling stress and anxiety at work for a few weeks now. It’s all very sad, to be honest.
“You’re walking all the way from the Boulevard to Taclobo?” the significant other texts me.
“I think I need the exercise,” I reply.
But, really, it is the traffic that has prompted the need to walk. Traffic has been terrible in Dumaguete lately. Once, after work, I mused briefly about going to CityMall to catch a movie. But a thought suddenly came to me: “Nah, the traffic along the National Highway will be terrible.” And I realized then that that was the first time ever in my life as a Dumagueteño that this notion of “traffic” has prevented me from going elsewhere in the city. We used to make this jokey claim: “Everywhere in Dumaguete is just ten minutes away.” Is that still true today? Not too long ago, I once had an engagement at 58 EJ Blanco Drive, where the Arts and Design Collective of Dumaguete is headquartered, and I had started off from my apartment in Tubod, which is really just five minute ride away. With the significant other driving me in his car, we soon found ourselves caught in Hibbard Avenue traffic—and it actually took us 45 minutes to finally arrive at our destination. By then, the event was practically over. [I’m sorry, Geraldine Solon, for missing the bulk of your book launch! I blame traffic.]
I have casually asked around for the reasons of this sudden surge in Dumaguete traffic. The usual answer I get is the “broken, and old, traffic infrastructure”—which is really just how people describe the narrow city streets and the forbidding lack of parking. But I counter that with this observation: that old infrastructure has always been there, and we’ve had bad traffic before—but why only now does bad traffic in Dumaguete really underscore an unequalled badness? What is different today? The tricycles? The number of tricycles in the city has remained constant over the years. The cars? Perhaps the cars. Maybe many people bought cars during the pandemic—prices were slashed so low then—but quarantine somehow mitigated their presence on city streets. Only now, in our “post”-pandemic world, with quarantines now a fading memory, have all these cars suddenly converged on Dumaguete’s roads, choking them for hours on end. I’ve asked around: “How many car dealerships are there in Dumaguete?” Nobody could give me the exact answer, but someone said ten. Is that true? Why do we have so many car sellers in our city? And can these car sellers give me some statistics about how many cars they sold during the pandemic?
I’m told: “I don’t think they’ll give you their sales numbers.”
“But I can try,” I’d reply.
“Nah.”
“Do you think LTO can help?”
We broke into laughter with the ridiculous idea of LTO helping.
But I have to get to Taclobo to visit the significant other who’s very sick. He’s worried about being sick, and being away from work. He’s under pressure enough to fret. He has a raging fever, and godawful coughing—and I seethe that he is being reduced to this ball of pity and sadness and illness. Really seethe.
I seethe sometimes, too, when I go home to Tubod after my classes at Silliman, and find the way to be the ultimate pedestrian maze. I usually take a short tricycle ride to get to and from work, but these days, the constantly terrible traffic along Hibbard Avenue has made me walk more often. It’s a short distance anyway. And I’ve come to like stopping by Kohi to grab a cup of cappuccino or latte. That stretch of Hibbard Avenue until the crossing of Gothong Avenue [popularly called the Lo-oc Bypass Road] and Venancio Aldecoa Jr. Drive [popularly called Laguna] is traffic hell, an unrelenting carmaggedon. And it’s not just the cars on the road, it’s also the cars usurping the sidewalks for parking. There are no sidewalks anymore along the Silliman University stretch of Hibbard Avenue. So pedestrians like me actually walk on the actual street itself, because that’s the only available space to move forward. Sometimes I pray I do not get sideswept by a reckless vehicle from walking down the actual street. Then again, hahaha, all the vehicles on the road are moving like molasses.
I like walking anyway, especially as much-needed exercise to my very sedentary lifestyle. To be honest, I’d probably walk a lot more if Dumaguete wasn’t hot and humid.
But now, it is the early evening of Friday, and it is cool, and I have a sick beloved to visit in Taclobo.
Along the way, I am able to visit some of my favorite shops, like Dudley’s, and I buy some foodstuff—the Japanese muffin is to die for, and the Hokkaido bread is a staple—which I’m usually not able to when I’m riding a car. That only underlines what urban studies have been saying: foot traffic, not motor traffic, is what brings people to shops. Let’s encourage more people to walk for the economy’s sake!
But I wish Dumaguete was more walkable.
I wish there were more trees to shade sidewalks so that we can walk even under the hot Dumaguete sun.
I wish there were more suitable parking in Dumaguete.
I wish Dumaguete drivers were not lunatics. [A lot of them are.]
I wish we didn’t know that when traffic enforces are on hand, traffic actually gets worse.
I wish some workable system of public transport can be devised, so that people with cars do not have to use their cars anymore. [I can’t blame people from buying cars, especially if they live in the outskirts of the city—or live in the neighboring towns. But do they really have to buy humongous cars? If I were a powerful entity with convincing powers, I’d force everyone to buy small cars, like a Picanto, which is perfect for Dumaguete’s roads. My significant other drives a Picanto. He’s smart that way.]
I arrive at the significant other’s home in Taclobo and the feel of his skin is like touching lava. He moans a “hello.” I commiserate, I baby, I watch over him. I also tell him he should go to the ER to get a medical certificate. For the folks at work. He nods. His mom makes me eat dinner they’ve Grab-ed over from Don Roberto’s. I eat and we talk about the latest episode of Survivor. We all hate Andy. Alas he’s half-Filipino, but he’s so stupid.
Later, his mom drives me home.
Labels: dumaguete, life, love, traffic
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Thursday, November 07, 2024
2:08 AM |
In Hindsight
In 2017, while working on a project for a grant, the external HD which contained ALL my research materials disappeared. Like a year of research lost, just like that. That led me to a spiral, and some terrible complications later, which I've never divulged until now. And until now, I have no idea where that HD went. Sayang talaga, all the materials I gathered. They were irreplaceable. I survived that spiral and the complications that came with it, but that event taught me a lot about myself, and what I can do. [This memory is courtesy of Luna Griño-Inocian, who just asked me to send her some of my archival material for a project. I managed to send her some, but a lot of what I had are simply gone.]Labels: life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, November 06, 2024
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 212.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Monday, November 04, 2024
I finally received my copy of Isagani R. Cruz's new novel, So Heaven! Thank you, Milflores Publishing [ IG: @milfloresbooks ]! I was asked to give this a blurb, and I don't know how I found the time to read this, but I did, if not because going over the first novel by an acclaimed Filipino writer was such a privilege. And this is such an unusual novel, too! Congratulations, Sir Gani!
You can order this book on the Milflores website.Labels: books, fiction, novels, philippine literature, publishing, writers
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, November 03, 2024
Tonight, we celebrated Dessa Quesada-Palm's 60th birthday, in a lovely dinner and program with her friends of a lifetime at Essencia — and it was, to be honest, one of the most meaningful birthday celebrations I have ever come to witness. By the end of it, I was teary-eyed [and I never usually get teary-eyed at birthdays]. In occasions such as this, it's usual to have birthday greetings and speeches dedicated to the celebrator, but in the hands of a consummate theater artist like Dessa, each speech came at suitable intervals in a perfectly directed biographical narrative [with a good Powerpoint show to guide everyone]. And each speech was given by a perfectly handpicked friend or family representing an aspect or a major episode in Dessa's fruitful life — from her days as a member of the Quesada household [speech by sister Mae Quesada-Medina], from her life with PETA [speech by film director Avic Ilagan], from her days studying in New York [speech by composer Lerrick Santos], from early days in Dumaguete doing theatre workshops with the Divinity School [speech by Jean Cuanan-Nalam], from her almost two decades of mentoring YATTA [speech by Mellard Chiong Manogura], and from her love life [speech by her husband Colby Palm], interspersed with a monologue from Dessa's play Rape Buzz performed by Mayumi Maghuyop, improv comedy from the YATTA OGs Hope Tinambacan, Junsly Kitay, and Nikki Cimafranca, and music with the Quiz Family Singers, and the trio of Sharon Dadang-Rafols, Jean Nalam, and Dessa herself. At the end, she considered everyone in attendance and how each one has come to mean something significant in her life [it is at this point that I would finally break down and cry], and ended the evening with a song that she uses as her answer to the question: “What makes a meaningful life?”
Mother, you make 60 look fabulous. You have touched so many lives, and thank you for making Dumaguete your home, and the base of your theatrical gifts.
Labels: birthday, friends, people, theatre
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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