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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

Email: icasocot(at)gmail.com

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Tuesday, October 25, 2011

entry arrow12:03 PM | Postcard From the Quagmire

I don’t remember much of the past two or three weeks, except that it was a busy time, and I was under much stress trying to crunch out the grades for my classes in the college term that just ended. It is always a time shrouded in conjectures, missed connections, sweat, and desperate silences; one comes out of it like a patient from a coma would. Of course, many teachers will tell you that they love their job with the passion of a martyr but that the only thing excruciating about it is the grading period.

What can I say? It is a kind of hell no sane person will wish on anyone. The lack of sleep, the endless punching of the calculator keys, the attention to detail demanded, the will to withstand (with humor, if that can be conjured) the student papers that swim in muddled thinking, and even more muddled grammar. (That is, if one does not die seething from the obvious and clumsy borrowings from the Internet. The blatant display of intellectual dishonesty can shrivel the hardiest spirit. Copy-pasting 101, and all that.)

All I remember now of that recent time is feeling like a disembodied thing, a specter almost. I felt myself outside my own body, although I also felt, at the same time, the compounded pains of stress that afflict the physical—the aching back, the bloodshot eyes, the headachy brain, the acidic stomach from too much coffee ingested.

Which is why I still cannot understand how I was able to finish Albert Camus’ The Stranger in one go at the height of one stressful morning. I was already grinding away for close to twelve hours overnight, and outside my window I could see the daylight hours seeping into the quiet of my apartment. I was tired. The work was still unfinished.

And on my way to bed hoping to catch some shut-eye, I felt my hands going over my bookshelves and I felt myself taking out Camus’ book. I felt myself noting that it was a slim book. Something fell out of its pages. I found myself looking at an old boat ticket—transit from Tagbilaran to Dumaguete—from 1999. I found myself sleepily musing over the fact that the last time I tried reading this book was more than a decade ago.

Tired, narcoleptic, I climbed into bed with that volume in hand, and proceeded to read the strange story of a curiously detached man in French Algeria, who fails to feel anything for a newly dead mother, and finally fails to comprehend the justice meted him for what seems like a senseless act of a murder that he has committed. He goes through each day like one dispossessed of care would: detached from all sort of emotional wrangling except the logic of the action required of him at the present. This is supposed to be our hero—an existential one, of course, someone who finally rails against a world who misunderstands him.

Which was also a kind of uncanny serendipity because there were two other instances last week where the word “existential” suddenly just sprang up around me: first, during dinner with an older friend, who took to rationalizing facts in his personal life to his embrace of “existentialism”; and second, during accidental coffee time with a former student who started off with a philosophical rant about how existentialism and relativism are virtually meaningless.

(Was it also serendipity that I would also be reading another book at the same time—The Fundamentals of Play, Caitlin Macy’s Generation X/ Whit Stillman-ish retread of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—where the existential hero proclaims an affinity with Camus’ detached protagonist? Was it also serendipity that I would also be reading still another book at the same time, which is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, his first novel, where the young protagonist is an egoist much in the same vein as the hero of the two other books, only more dapper, a bright young thing from the gilded 1920s? Why am I reading several books at the same time that seem to inform each other in ways I did not foresee? What is the universe telling me? And the universe answered right back: “You are reading too many books when you should be asleep.”)

It was around noontime when I finally put Camus’ tome down, finished. I don’t know how I managed it, or why I even did it. I was quite dog-tired by then, and spent the rest of the day sleeping like the very spectacle of anesthesia. I didn’t dream. Not even of Algerian sands and sensational murders and French prisons and detached young men of strange persuasions. Perhaps, and only perhaps, I only managed to think of one man in my life of similar detachment as Camus’s protagonist. And how sad it all suddenly seemed, but also how heroic in ways only a few can understand.

But one could not care less anymore. One only cared for sleeping, for real, with what hours were left. And then one wakes up.

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Friday, October 14, 2011

entry arrow9:51 PM | Boys During the War



The thing about playing catch-up with old films is that you have more than just a suspicion that everything has always been said about them, and that any utterance from your part is at best an echo with a more contemporary ring to it. But still an echo. The weight of an immense tradition of opinion is an immense one.

What else can I say about Louis Malle's Au Revoir les Enfants [1987] and Lacombe Lucien [1974] that have not already been said? Critics such as Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert have given us thorough evaluations of these films.

And so I am left only to share my personal experience with them. I only stumbled onto these titles the past few nights, in my aimless excursion through my library of films -- most of which remain unseen, given the demands adult life has on one's hours. I've done Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales earlier in the week, and so I thought it best to follow that up with some of Malle's films. I remember planning to watch Au Revoir and Lacombe a few years ago, promising to do so "as soon as time permitted."

Ah, the lies we tell ourselves.

Yesterday, during an unplanned lull, I knew I had no such time to spare at all, and so I promptly pressed the play button of the DVD player. And thank God for such impulsiveness, because these two films absolutely proved devastating for me. At the end of Au Revoir, I surprised myself by breaking into tears -- something I have not done since ... what? Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies [1988]? I knew I had to find it within myself the reason why the films touched me so.



Although filmmed more than a decade apart from each other, these two titles seem like twin bills in Malle's filmmography involving childhood and the loss of innocence during the Second World War. Lacombe, for me, was more a disturbing psychological study of the banality of evil, and the film gave me a rise in the way it was calculated to do -- its subtle scenes involving Lucien's gradual fall to evil and the expressionless banality he seems to project in his comprehension (or miscomprehension?) of the process proved to me more chilling than any horror film. Kael has written once that the film was all about the actor Pierre Blaise's face -- inscrutable, like a blank slate that contains an undefinable malevolence. That the film -- about a young French boy who unwittingly becomes a collaborator in Nazi-occupied France -- also manages to make us see Lucien's humanity is, I think, a triumph in Malle's skills as one of cinema's giants.

But Au Revoir, also a film about how the war can rob children of their innocence, is something a little different. It is not sentimental or melodramatic. It is just a well-observed tale about two boys who come to a tentative friendship in a boarding school ran by priests, chronicling the heedless joys and tumbles of boyhood, until war's ugly head comes crashing in and it is slowly revealed that one of the two friends have a secret that needed urgent keeping. How wrenching this film is. How gloriously poignant and subtle about its dealings with betrayal, with heroism, with the loss of innocence and the beginnings of immortal sadness. But I think I teared up because the film dared to present to us that betrayal often comes easy for all of us, even with the best of people, given a context that systematically dehumanizes us. There are no saints in this film -- not even the priest whose fiery homily about doing the utmost to save those who are less fortunate ends with a devastating scene where he withholds a boy's communion simply because the boy is not Catholic, even if the act can in fact help preserve him and keep his secret. But the film does not condemn, at least not by much. Anybody who will not come to tears at the end of Au Revoir -- with that final farewell, with that deadpan voice-over narration by Malle himself, and with that long, steady shot of Julien's face as the last of his innocence comes crumbling down -- has to go ahead and grow a heart. Ebert once wrote that at the end of one screening of the film, Malle broke down and said to him, "This film is my story. Now it is told at last." And you can indeed feel the personal heartstrings in this wonderful film, so intense it is it can hold you breathless and bothered.

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entry arrow2:11 PM | The Name of Hunger

There is no need for sunsets
When that wavering light, red and dark,
Spins webs tactile like sorrow,
A name for your own darkening hours.

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Thursday, October 06, 2011

entry arrow6:02 PM | In Celebration of Round Pegs in Square Holes



As I write this, the news is pouring in and tributes are flying everywhere about the passing of Steve Jobs, the co-founder and visionary behind Apple. It wasn’t exactly news that surprised many of us. We had known of his battle with pancreatic cancer for the longest time, and the evidence of the ravages that the illness wrought could be seen in Mr. Job’s gaunt, emaciated look of late. A few months ago, he stepped down as CEO of Apple. And we knew the day would soon come. And it did. But it didn’t make it any less painful.

Truth to tell, I am myself surprised by the level of grief I have found myself indulging in. I have never been an ardent Steve Jobs fan—my friend JB Lim is, and aside from the fact that he owns virtually every gadget Apple has produced of late (JB also used to be the man behind the Genius Bar of Dumaguete’s iStore), he goes around his every day life in signature black wardrobe inspired by the man.

But I am always, always saddened when visionaries and people of distinguished talent pass away, and most often in the prime of their lives. Because these people contribute so much to the world, and yet they die too soon, I think. Pero si Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile—the architect of the Martial Law and a powerful lawmaker whose latest antics in the Senate (the masturbation brouhaha, for example) could be grounds for speculation on his verging towards senile dementia—bakit buhay pa? Of course, Billy Idol once said that “the good die young,” and such may be the irony of life, which I cannot be bothered with trying to understand.

I must admit there was a profound sadness in the way I greeted my day when I woke to this news this morning. Perhaps no one can understand this level of grief unless one has been touched by the kind of technological lifestyle Apple has given to hipsters, creatives, and forward-thinking people this past decade. For many of us, there is a demarcation between a certain past and then the moment when the magic of Apple’s humanized technology touched us. Once you go Mac, so they say, you can’t go back. I write this article, for example, on a MacBook while listening to a movie score by Michael Giacchino for a Pixar film from my iPod. Mac, Pixar, and the iPod. That’s three instances, all at once, with which Jobs can lay claim to an influence on the way I live.

And yet beyond all these marks of influence, it is Mr. Job’s template of having forged unlikely success in a culture of low-minded thinking that captures my imagination. A hipster to the core—his enduring philosophy advises us to “stay hungry, [and to] stay foolish,” something he got from The Whole Earth Catalog from the hippie culture of the 1960s—his success can be traced to a singular drive to strip everything down to a marriage of technology and design informed by taste, which he knew could not be gleaned from the overpowering marketing notion that the consumer is king. From the New York Times tribute to him, John Markoff writes: “When asked what market research went into the iPad, Mr. Jobs replied: ‘None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.’”

And to this, I say, Thank you very much. This is something that ABS-CBN and other panderers of the quick-profit philosophy of common taste can learn, if they want to stay relevant in the long run. The antithesis to Steve Jobs would be this masa culture awash in Willie Revillame, the Transformers movies, the Kardashians and reality TV shows of their ilk, FoxNews, the Twilight novels, StarCinema’s No Other Woman, and others of their kind, which follow undying formula and get rewarded by the masa for the comfortable conformity they champion—but do not push human civilization any further at all. Why do you think StarCinema gives us the same kind of movies every single time? Because every single frame has been market-researched to death, destined to give what the consumer wants, and all for profit.

What change the world are often people with vision and drive. These are people who don’t follow rules, who could care less for the status quo, who are often unpopular. Or if not unpopular, these are people who rock the boat and send shivers down the spine of people who only have eyes for the bottom-line. I am reminded of Oprah Winfrey when she decided to chuck the template of daytime talk popularized by Phil Donahue back in the day. These are shows, not unlike Jerry Springer’s, glorifying in trashy topics, which does bring in eyeballs and the eventual ratings and dollars. But no, Oprah said; she wanted to do a show that specialized in “elevating the human spirit”—and that must have made the television moneymen cringe then. Who profits from goody-goody daytime television? But guess who has the last laugh.

Of all things that I want to remember most about Steve Jobs, it is this quote: “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Think about this. Men and women who have broken the rules have shaped world history. Give me a conformist or a rule-follower who has impacted history, and you will most likely draw a blank. Jesus? He angered the religious authorities of his day, which led to his crucifixion. Gandhi? His unquiet revolution of “passive resistance” molded a nation, and cost him his life. Mother Teresa? She abandoned first world comfort to take care of India’s unwanted—not a career shift anybody “practical” would wish for anybody.

Today we live in a world that forces—or even shames us—to conform, to abide by the strict rules, to surrender to hierarchy instead of merit, to give up the pursuit of creative thinking in favor of “the practical.” I get reprimanded for eschewing these reminders all the time; sometimes they even call this “arrogance.” But I don’t mind. I know who I am.

It takes guts to be a Steve Jobs. But if you have the guts, and you have the courage to follow the promise of your potential, you can change the world in your own small ways. Mr. Jobs said it best: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Farewell, Mr. Jobs. And thank you very much.

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Friday, September 30, 2011

entry arrow1:31 AM | The Long Goodbye



François Ozon's Le Temps Qui Reste [Time to Leave, 2005] is a beautiful film about learning to accept life even as one learns to accept certain death. In it, Melville Poupaud delivers a bravura performance -- which goes from cocky to douchebaggy to affected to frail but triumphant -- as a gay photographer who discovers he has terminal cancer, refuses chemotherapy, quits his job, and proceeds to alienate his family and dump his lover. And then somehow, from the unquiet emotional dreck he puts himself in, he finds his humanity. I make it sound melodramatic. It's not. This is an Ozon film after all, and this prolific fimmaker has never ever been melodramatic. He could be sly and perverted and comedic, but never melodramatic, not even in the fantastic Swimming Pool [2003]. But this is an Ozon film that seems most straitlaced and emotionally raw, even as it tries to haul in the sentimentality with a restraint that shows. Nevertheless. That last sequence on the beach as Poupaid's Romain sees the sunset for the last time is a masterwork of empathy. A painful film to watch, but oh so beautiful.

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Thursday, September 29, 2011

entry arrow10:51 PM | The Dangers of Comfort, The Theater of Dinner Conversation

And I don’t mean the pedestrian gossip that slakes over our dinner tables most of these days—although that, too, has its own perverted pleasures. The thrill of finding frail humanity among our kind. Schadenfreude as drama.

“Did you know so-and-so and so-and-so got together over the weekend?”

“Seriously? But what about so-and-so? Aren’t they living together?”

“Well, a little birdie told me that so-and-so has done this-and-that.”

“Oh. Em. Gee.”

Not that.

What I mean is dinner conversation of the illuminating kind—not about politics or religion, those two deadly bores. But about the place of humanity in the scheme of the universe, in philosophy—leavened, of course, by anecdotes from personal experience. Imagine a conversation about art, a painting or sculpture or what-not a friend of yours have seen in a museum which has touched him, which has given him fodder for thought. Imagine that friend as an impresario of talk. Over a three-course meal, pushed by the sweet intoxication of red wine, you hear him give a dramatic musing of what he has seen. You are both surrounded by kindred spirits, and the talk becomes organic, more philosophical, a little bit tipsy from the wine. There are affirmations, counter-arguments, jokes and laughter, more illuminating anecdotes. You leave that dinner table knowing you have learned a little bit more about the nature of humanity. You become, at least for a few hours during and after that dinner, a better human being—because you have partaken of a strange communion, a mix of food and words and friends.

I find myself in rare instances of this in Dumaguete. When the chance presents itself—usually in the delightful company of Dessa Quesada-Palm, Arlene Delloso-Uypitching, Esther Windler, Cecilia Hoffman, Annabelle Lee-Adriano, Laurie Raymundo, Margaret Helen Udarbe, Betty McCann, Moses Joshua Atega, Patrick Chua, Myrish Antonio-Cadapan, Jacqueline Veloso-Antonio, Leo Mamicpic, Ben Malayang III and his wife Gladys, Myrna Pena-Reyes, Tata and Simon Stack, John Stevenson, and assorted artists/friends from Manila and elsewhere who would join us—I grab it, and I prepare for a night of scintillating talk, knowing it is good for the soul, and for the mind.



I thought as much when I saw the filmed dinner conversation between André Gregory and Wallace Shawn, playing versions of themselves in Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André [1981]. This film, hailed as a unique cinematic experiment and is considered one of the best films to come out of the 1980s, is ripe with witticism, philosophical musings, and provocative thoughts, but this one strain of dialogue between the two struck me the most:

ANDRE: I mean, if you don't have that electric blanket, and your apartment is cold, and you need to put on another blanket or go into the closet and pile up coats on top of the blanket you have, well then you know it's cold. And that sets up a link of things: you have compassion for the p-- ... well, is the person next to you cold? Are there other people in the world who are cold? What a cold night! I like the cold, my God, I never realized, I don't want a blanket, it's fun being cold, I can snuggle up against you even more because it's cold! All sorts of things occur to you. Turn on that electric blanket and it's like taking a tranquilizer, it's like being lobotomized by watching television. I think you enter the dream world again. I mean, what does it do to us, Wally, living in an environment where something as massive as the seasons or winter or cold don't in any way affect us? I mean, we're animals after all. I mean, what does that mean? I think that means that instead of living under the sun and the moon and the sky and the stars we're living in a fantasy world of our own making.

WALLY: Yeah, but I mean, I would never give up my electric blanket, André. I mean, because New York is cold in the winter, I mean, our apartment is cold. It's a difficult environment! I mean, our lives are tough enough as it is, I'm not looking for ways to get rid of the few things that provide relief and comfort, I mean, on the contrary! I'm looking for more comfort, because the world is very abrasive, I mean, I'm trying to protect myself, because really there are these abrasive beatings to be avoided everywhere you look.

ANDRE: Yeah, but Wally, don't you see that comfort can be dangerous? I mean, you like to be comfortable and I like to be comfortable, too. But comfort can lull you into a dangerous tranquility. I mean, my mother knew a woman, Lady Hatfield, who was one of the richest women in the world, and she died of starvation because all she would eat was chicken. I mean, she just liked chicken, Wally, and that was all she would eat, and actually, her body was starving but she didn't know it 'cause she was quite happy eating her chicken and so, she finally died! See, I honestly believe that we're all like Lady Hatfield now, we're having a lovely, comfortable time with our electric blankets and our chicken, and meanwhile we're starving because we're so cut off from contact with reality that we're not getting any real sustenance. 'Cause we don't see the world. We don't see ourselves. We don't see how our actions affect other people.

[The transcript of the film can be read here.]


End scene.

The dangers of comfort. That made me take pause. Because I have been thinking about this for some days now. And there it was, the whole notion of it, discussed at length in one of the best films of all time. And I have just stumbled on it, like the “omens” they talk about in the film. Is this film my own form of Wally’s fortune cookie?

A few days ago, I posted this status update in my Facebook wall: “I don’t know what the Universe is trying to tell me these days, but I’m willing to listen.” The things is, I have been out-of-sorts lately, bombarded by tiny problems with magnificent wings which I can’t talk about to anybody, trying to make sense out of ... something. I had no idea what was bothering me, but I have been feeling odd. Strangely sad, feeling blue. And so I popped in this film like I have always promised myself I would. And I’m glad I did.

And what a beautiful film it is. When it ended, I just stared and stared off into space as the end titles rolled over Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, and I was thinking about the things they were talking about: theater, domesticity, the imprisonment of comfort, how life must be lived when one realizes how we have forgotten to connect... I think this is one film one should watch when one turns 36 (Wallace’s age when this was made). I’m 36 now, and I love the film because I feel it now, more thoroughly, because of having have lived. Because the questions it asks are things I have come to know through all those years. I wouldn’t have gotten this film when I was 21.

Amy Taubin in the Criterion website captures exactly what I felt upon finishing: “And then the dinner is over. Nothing is concluded—not for Wally or André, and certainly not for the audience. But on the way home, Wally is surprised to find that something has changed in the way he attends to the city as he sees it from the taxi window. And that slight shift in consciousness is what André ... would have applauded. And we might do the same as the image fades to black.”

The film finally reminds me that I need to have dinner with my good people again. Because you need these little events of gab to go beyond the vapidity of everyday life, the drone of television, the mindless cares of zombies around you. A dinner conversation is a small strike against the electric blanket of life. It is rare when the right talk chemistry sparks, and so when it happens, one has to be of mind to cherish it.

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Thursday, September 22, 2011

entry arrow2:16 AM | The Threshold of Age

I have a thirtysomething's fear of growing old: the threshold is coming nearer, yet one still feels incredibly young in a body increasingly betraying itself. Old men have the pleasure of having succumbed to age. Young men have the bliss of ignorance, that exquisite blind faith that old age can never happen to them. The man in his thirties, alas, lives in a constant state of terror and denial.

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Thursday, September 15, 2011

entry arrow5:59 PM | Charming Devils

You know what they say about experience, right? That you learn from it? If that is the case, I'd be foolish then not to learn from this realization: charming people -- incredibly polite, outwardly gentle -- are the spawns of the devil. I still hope to find myself in the wrong here, but I'm talking from experience. How many times have I been surprised to find that the many charming people I've come to know are, in private, capable of unfathomable nastiness that borders almost on evil? There's this one guy I used to know who's quite lovable, he charms the hell out of you with such careless pa-cuteness. In private, however, I know him as someone who can carry hours of hateful litany about every person he knows, his paranoia deep, his neurosis almost psychotic. And then he goes out the door brightening like the very sunshine itself. I know many others, seemingly harmless, always soft-spoken, even polite to a fault -- and then you discover in them that wellspring of darkness.

What's up with that?

Then again, let's consider the long list of people who have been described as charismatic, they mesmerize you in their presence: Charles Manson. Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. Muamar Gaddafi. Adolf Hitler. Lucifer.

Fear charming people. They seduce your soul, in order to eat it.

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Tuesday, September 13, 2011

entry arrow7:46 PM | I Know That Man

I still feel for that man who mourned. Looking at him, from this distance defined by time, I can see that his heart was so big. So big, I understand why he felt it needed filling. I can understand why he thought he had found the very thing to fill it -- there was lightness, there was laughter, there were the silly promises of kisses, all things we mistake for love. I understand the dark days, where they come from. I understand the swift belief in madness: it was the only available kind of logic. Or so it seemed. I understand. And I understand the mourning, most of all. He mourned for the longest time, that man I see. I can come closer now, see how he deflected all that with rehearsed nonchalance; he wanted the world to know nothing; and so it knew nothing. But his eyes. Look at his eyes. There's a language there that's a cross between deadness and a scream. I see him. Somehow I know though that he knew I'd be here, my own eyes keen on retrospection, a little more grounded, removed beyond mere increments from knowledge of pain. How do I know? Because I look at him now, and he stares straight at me with that tiny dark glow of knowledge. He does not "see" me of course, not from behind that glaze of what should be falling tears -- oh, but he would not cry, that man, not that common drama. Everything surged beneath, all quiet rage, that searching hollowness that screamed, those unanswered questions streaming through his head that began with "Why?" and ended only with echoes, that bitter prayer that demanded a definition of love and loving and was answered only with a certainty of loss. I know that man. But I do not pity him. He would weather all that, I know. I know.

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entry arrow2:00 AM | Confounding Fables



Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s สัตว์ประหลาด [Tropical Malady, 2004] divided audiences when it premiered in Cannes more than half a decade ago — and understandably so. It is a confounding experience. The film is the story of two characters (a soldier and a country boy) who inhabit two different worlds and two different storylines in the same film, each one starkly different from the other in narrative and tone — and yet we are asked to regard both halves as organic to each other. And yet one can make the argument for the film’s simplicity. The first half is a simple love story about two men in coy courtship, and the second half is a simple fable about a soldier lost in the forest, placed under a spell by a shape-shifting shaman. And then you, the viewer, read what you can of it. A poetic Rorschach test done in cinematic form, if you ask me. I am not bothered by my confoundment, my logical reach for “What does it all mean?” In its depiction of rural Thai life, in its rumination of a brewing love, in its love affair with fable, in its unspooling of quiet tension in a dark forest tinged with magic, I find enough to be happy about, meaning be damned.

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entry arrow1:55 AM | An Accidental John Waters Freak Show, Without John Waters' Wit



Australian director Ed Aldridge’s Tan Lines [2007] is just the kind of ineptness in filmmaking that gets under your skin simply because this is just the type of film you want to root for but it does every single infuriating thing to shake your very faith in cinema. It is, in other words, a subtly hateful, confused mess of a film that does not know whether it wants to be a surfer film, an angst-ridden coming-of-age film, a gay love story, a social commentary on small lives barely hanging on, a psychedelic fantasia with strange animated sequences of Catholic saints talking, or a John Waters film filled with unbearable, out-of-place grotesques. Don’t take all that in. To understand this kind of confoundment is unworthy of any effort. And yet, at its core, Tan Lines is a simple story about a gangly teenage boy named Midget Hollows (played with deadpan coyness mingled with naivete by a winning Jack Baxter, who alas cannot save this film) who lives in a seaside Australian town and dreams of getting out, to “see the world and shit.” He has reasons to. He is poor and lives in a cramped apartment and shares the same bed with his mother (always seen sleeping, covered with a blanket, with only her long manicured nails to signal there’s life under that slothfulness). His best friend and the rest of their friends are content with an endless cycle of nothingness, surfing, longboarding, and partying. And then Cass, his best friend’s older brother, arrives — a gay boy who ran away from home four years ago. Midget soon finds himself attracted to Cass — but don’t let this development fool you into thinking this will be a film about self-discovery, forbidden love, growing up, or the triumph of friendship through acceptance. It is none of that. It meanders instead into strange anecdotes about freaky adults — there’s a sinister older woman with a penchant for formal tea parties complete with a session of cunnilingus for her niece; there’s a band of elderly couples playing a kind of drunken stripping game after midnight in public; there’s an older female duo out for regular morning exercise complete with conversations running the gamut of sexual hijinks… The whole film seems an indictment against adulthood, and yet it is not heroic of the young either: the older folk are crazy, but the young are aimless zombies with zero ambition, and if they’re not, they’re wont to indulge in manipulation or violence. And yet one continues to root for a semblance of logic, or humanity, in this film — and that may be because beholding Mr. Baxter in such a waste of a role can’t seem possible. But in the end, he is truly wasted, and one ultimately has to throw up one’s hands and proclaim the entire film unwatchable. The acting of the entire supporting cast is worse than horrendous, the script is written on soiled tissue paper, the editing is non-existent, the cinematography is atrocious, the direction is aimless. A similar story, minus the freak show, can be found in Jonah Markowitz’s Shelter [2007]. Forget this one, and find redemption in that one instead.

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Sunday, September 11, 2011

entry arrow10:59 PM | Serious People.



Emoting with SPIT Manila. Because we can.

From left, clockwise. Diomar Abrio, Ian Rosales Casocot, Hallona Ember, Linwell Bongcasan, Earnest Hope Tinambacan, Maliksi Zaragoza, Dingdong Rosales, Hendri Go, Dessa Quesada-Palm, Ariel Diccion, Gabe Mercado, Happy Ferraren, Kenneth Keng, Akong Bongcaras, and Aryn Cristobal.

[Claire Isabel McGill Luce Auditorium, 10 September 2011. Photo by Darrell Bryan Rosales.]

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entry arrow9:38 PM | A Quick Appraisal of a City on the Verge



The thing about Dumaguete is this: it is so small that all kinds of drama here collide. The personal and the grand spectacles of the world play out before your eyes, each touching the other in the way of a caress. Last Monday, for example, was it only by chance that I decided to have dinner at the new digs of El Amigo—the pesto steak is to die for, by the way—and while the great Filipino poetesses Merlie Alunan and Myrna Peña-Reyes were in the next table spending a quiet evening together with some friends (oh, to be a fly on the wall for that conversation), I had to spend time with two beautiful young friends—former students, actually—dealing with the matters of their romance, about which they have come to me for some advice? (I have no idea why young people come to me for love advice. Is it because I am a veteran from that endless battle?)

And it came to me, slowly at first, that this was how Dumaguete plays out its dramas. The small and the grand converge—the simmering quiet of our city streets is a sweet deception. All the world’s a stage, and its name is Dumaguete. The Palanca-winning poet Mikael Co, visiting Dumaguete over the weekend, said as much. Which was why he felt the need to come back after having been a summer writing fellow here years ago. “I tried to book a flight for Mom Edith’s funeral,” he said, “but it was impossible to get a single plane seat.” All the world’s coming to Dumaguete a lot these days, it seems. That Monday, for lunch, we both had joined Philippine Star columnist and poet Krip Yuson who came to visit the grave of the National Artist for Literature, and with him were the Singaporean writer Kirpal Singh and Dumaguete’s first daughter of literature, Rowena Tiempo-Torrevillas. Over the spare ribs and the maya-maya, our conversations mingled and stirred right onto the walls of KRI, kissing the newly-mounted paintings of Hersley Ven Casero.

Later, I would get a message to join Presidential Spokesperson Edwin Lacierda for a media get-together on Tuesday night at Casablanca. There I would meet, for the first time, Manuel L. Quezon III—a longtime online friend. “Let’s have dinner tomorrow,” Manolo tells me. I said yes: “I know just a perfect place.” Of course, his Wednesday would be busy—the President of the Philippines was coming after all, and they were part of the advance party. I would shake President Noynoy Aquino’s hand the very next day during his onsite inspection of the Sy Family’s IT Park near St. Paul’s, on that lot which used to have the haunted Circular House, now gone. (Ah, the horror stories that have been subsequently razed by that very act of disappearance.) While waiting for his helicopter to land in the nearby airport, we went crazy over Ritchie Armogenia’s brownies, and we pondered the coming change in the landscape of this part of town.

And it came to me that Dumaguete is slowly changing before our very eyes. The landscape, the cityscape is changing—and we have been merrily blind to its subtle evolutions, surprised only once in a while by the sight of a shiny new building where once a dilapidated sari-sari store stood. “It’s changing, you just don’t know that it is,” Manolo told me the next night after dinner, while we strolled the Boulevard and I was giving him a quick historical tour of Dumaguete essentials—Silliman Hall, the sugar houses, why there were concrete nuns on the Boulevard, the significance of the palm trees and the acacia trees growing on the Boulevard’s grassy island. I pointed out the spots where the houses that Rizal stayed in once stood. I invoked the old tale of where we got the nickname of “city of gentle people,” although I was quick to point out it’s all hearsay. “There are no historical records of Rizal ever uttering this impression of the place,” I say.

And it came to me that I love this city after all—even with its smallness, with all its pettiness and pain, its generous memory of heartbreaks, the knowledge that the place can be a comfortable prison. But it is one-of-a-kind, and very much so. The other day, I wrote on my Facebook wall: “Welcome to Dumaguete. Where the country’s best writers gather every May for the National Writers Workshop, and the country’s best singers and songwriters gather every November for the Elements Singing and Songwriting Camp. I’m very proud of this city. (And once we get the planned annual film festival going...) Imagine the cultural possibilities. I do hope City Hall recognizes what untapped potential this cultural gold mine has in the long term...” More than fifty people immediately responded with a “like”—an avalanche of agreement over this blessing of a place.

The sociologist Lorna Peña-Reyes Makil tells me: "When we first came to Dumaguete in 1950, we felt we had found home. Twenty years later, in Honolulu for graduate studies, my heart longed for home. And from 1980 to 2002 during my sojourn in Manila, I dreamed of always coming back. Friends could not understand this—until they visited me these past years and were captivated. [But] yes, the rapid change we have now is overwhelming."

Here’s my former student Julienne Fortuna and her own take about the place on her own Facebook wall, with a very recent post: “I need to visit Dumaguete. I need to get away from the chaotic jungle that is Metro Manila and immerse myself in the simple and laidback Dumaguete life. I can already imagine myself walking around Silliman, eating in Neva’s or Habhaban, riding on former crushes’ motorcycles, snorkeling in Apo Island, and hanging out with friends at the Boulevard. After all, I’m one proud transplanted Dumagueteno.”

And then former Weekly Sillimanian editor-in-chief Camille Celeste Go replied: “We’ve come a long way from hating Dumaguete because of how boring it is (compared to Davao), to loving it beyond words. I miss Duma-life too.” Then Julienne
posts this rejoinder: “It’s funny how we non-Dumaguetenos initially hated Dumaguete for, well, being the small city that it is. I’m sure most—if not all—of us complained to our parents about sending us there to study instead of Manila or Cebu. But after living there for four years or more, we’ve just grown to appreciate it for what it is and we all found it difficult to leave. I cried so hard about leaving twice: after graduation and when I decided not to enroll in SU Law. The irony gyud. Haaay, Dumaguete and its charm. Guidagit jud ‘tang tanan.”

Manolo, too, told me: “I’m coming back.” And later, over text before his flight back to Manila: “I’m sad to be going!”

And there you go. Gui-dagit.



[Photos by Hersley Ven Casero]

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entry arrow7:46 PM | Where Were You Ten Years Ago Today?



It's true what they say. You never forget where you were when you know your life first changed. Late afternoon of September 11, 2011. Halfway around the world, morning just started. It was a beautiful day. It promised to be a beautiful night. I had just come back from an early dinner with some friends, among them Patrick Chua and Moses Joshua Atega. We were still in a hangover from the monthlong centennial celebrations of Silliman University, and only two days ago, we had just bid farewell to my brother Rey, who was bound back to the United States after spending August at home. That late afternoon, we all went to Cafe Tropini, the bar in Why Not? that would soon become an extension of Le Chalet. We proceeded to order beer. Everybody, we soon noted, was watching the television with profound eagerness, perhaps even excitement -- that avalanche of ambiguous feelings one feels when confronted with the unbelievable.

"What's happening?" one of us asked.

A Caucasian guy drinking beer answered: "The goddamn Twin Towers. A plane just hit one of them."

Another Caucasian guy, drunk and dismissive, answered him, "The goddamn Twin Towers are in San Francisco. This is the World Trade Center."

We didn't care for their exchange. We just looked at the images that flashed before us, and I knew the world has changed. And suddenly, I could not fathom what exactly was in store for all of us in the coming decade. What would change?

Everything changed.

We hurried home.

* * *

I remember visiting Ground Zero in New York last November. I was on my own, going around on foot in lower Manhattan, eager to see what I could of the city before flying back home to the Philippines. I decided to go to Ground Zero.

From the observatory, I could see the grounds in a furor of so much activity. In the midst of the heavy construction machinery, one couldn't help but think, "So much life lost." And for those who witnessed the horror, our own lives over a decade were inevitably reconfigured. Who didn't change? Nobody.

We are all children of 9/11.

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Monday, August 29, 2011

entry arrow8:27 PM | Remembering Mom Edith

I have always wondered why people called National Artist for Literature Dr. Edith Lopez Tiempo “Mom Edith,” always with this measure of intimate familiarity that seems reserved for someone who is more than just a mentor. I was 20 years old when I first met her. I was a campus writer who wrote for the student paper in Silliman University—where she had taught for many years—and in 2000, I was told to apply for the National Writers Workshop.

I was told this was the oldest writing workshop in Asia, founded by her and her husband, the late Dr. Edilberto K. Tiempo. I was also told that this workshop has produced many of the best writers in contemporary Philippine literature. When I went in that fateful Monday in the Dragon Room of the College Assurance Plan building in May 2000, I saw them all around that Mount Olympus at the center of the workshop room—Gemino H. Abad, Alfred Yuson, Marjorie Evasco, Susan Lara, DM Reyes, the late Ophelia Dimalanta, Anthony Tan, Jaime An Lim, Ernesto Superal Yee, Cesar Ruiz Aquino, Bobby Villasis—and they all looked … normal. They were inexplicably down-to-earth, these gods of literature. They made it easy for me, the intimidated initiate, with my first brush with the highest literary circle of the Philippines.

But Mom Edith was special. She was affectionate, but she was also exactling. She took my juvenile short stories I submitted for that workshop—two of them of controversial graphic nature only a young man with the predictable fetish for shock can write—and she critiqued them with the fine comb and gusto of the best formalist, the standards of the most demanding teacher, and the compassion of a mother. I think she knew that I was—that we were—there to learn, and so, like all the greatest teachers in the world, she poured all knowledge of writing magic she could give and made it sound clear, reachable, if exacting. I first became a better writer because of her. If writing is my life, then I owe much of that life to her. She led the way, she opened the door further, she made writing matter. And often, when you visit her in her house in Montemar, she gives all that with an extra measure of tender loving, complete with mango ice cream and cake.

How then can you not call someone like that “Mom”?

Years later, I too would be publishing my own works. Since 2000, I’ve always made it a point to go to her office in CAP, and later on in her house in Sibulan, where we would sit together for hours—just the two of us—and she would tell me her stories of her girlhood in Nueva Vizcaya, her short stint as a movie actress for Sampaguita Pictures, her fateful correspondence and then courtship with the man from Leyte, her move to Dumaguete, her stay in the hills of Valencia during the Second World War, her stories of Iowa, her children’s stories which she hoped would in the future be compiled into a book. I found all these fascinating, and she delighted in the telling. I must have seemed to have hungered for more, and she must have known this, because later on, in her scrawled dedication to me in her book An Edith Tiempo Reader, she wrote: “For Ian, who likes to hear stories, not just to write them! Mom E.”

And besides the usual care for creative writing, what I have also learned from her is to never forget the people in your life. She never forgot anyone—even in her later years. Anyone could come up to her and say, expecting non-recognition: “Mom, do you remember me? I’m so-and-so. I was in the [place any year here] workshop.” And she would brighten up and say, “Welcome home, son!” or “Welcome back, my dearest!”—and then proceed to recite a line or two of your own poetry, or an image she remembered from your story. She was that amazing.

Years later, when I too would have my turn of going to Iowa as a writer, I almost thought of it as coming home. It was where she blossomed as a writer, and my own sojourn there seemed like a perfect salute to her dedication to us all.

Last Sunday, when I received the call that she was being revived in the emergency room of the Silliman Medical Center, I dropped whatever it was I was doing—and rushed, like a crazed man, to her side. I was five minutes too late. She was gone. But as I helped cover her body with the hospital sheet and brushed back her hair and held her hand which was still warm, I grieved.

All of Philippine literature grieved with me—and we have been grieving many days now. Because it is such deep pain to lose a mother. As a former fellow of the workshop posted only last Monday in our Facebook page: “We have been orphaned.” And that was the simplest truth. We have been orphaned of someone who kept deep faith in our being writers, who knew each one of us and each one of our names like we were always her children.

Goodbye, Mom Edith. All that you were—your fantastic life and your deepest measure of love—are things which you ran and breathlessly handed over to us, your children. And for that, we give our heartfelt thanks.

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Tuesday, August 09, 2011

entry arrow12:49 PM | A Frightful Day

The world is scary today. The stock markets are plunging, the riots are breaking out, the Catholibans are beating their chests in small victories, and Imelda Marcos has become the ultimate arbiter for what's "good and beautiful." Is it safe to go outside?

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Friday, July 29, 2011

entry arrow11:52 AM | Abandoned Rooms



There are rooms in our houses that we shutter away for some reason. We lock the doors, we forget these spaces exist. And then comes a time -- some point in a future without definition -- when something in you feels a small need to reclaim them, and you do so little by little. Each small act becomes absolution: you open the door, and in that inch of space you make, you let the light and the air in. You go in. You remember the ghosts that live in these rooms, but they don't touch you anymore. You sweep away the cobwebs when you can, when you're ready.

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Monday, July 25, 2011

entry arrow12:06 AM | Haven is a Coffee Place

Part 4 of a series on Dumaguete food

There is a painted poster somewhere near the north entrance of Café Antonio that makes me smile every time I go there for my almost daily caffeine fix. There’s a coffee cup, and a swirling caption says: “Given enough coffee, I can rule the world.”

I always grin like there’s no tomorrow when I see it—because it smacks to me as a kind of hyperbolic truth, give or take a few palpitations. (Coffee rules! and all that. The caffeine freaks among us, and there are legions, can attest to this.) But the theme of world domination is not something you get as a given when you’re around the comforts of Café Antonio. This is a place I come to often, to relax, to feel or to imagine the increasing stress of Dumaguete life fade away. It is a haven.

There is something about the place that speaks to me. That it borrows its charms on the general architectural motif of its building, The Spanish Heritage, does not take away anything from it: in fact, if you ask me about it, the café itself has become the building’s heart. Is it the rustic mix of brick and wood? The carefully placed Spanish-inspired finish, with the gilded edges and the baroque tone? Is it the displays of scooters and musical instruments scattered about? In the air-conditioned confines—separated with walls of glass from the al fresco veranda with its colored-glass windows, its Tifanny-inspired overheard lamps, and its wooden swings—the round tables with their wrought-iron chairs are always filled with a mix of the city’s people—the occasional office folk on their lunch break, the casual Caucasian tourist looking for a quiet place to read a book, the city’s photographers who seem to find in this café an excuse for a headquarters, and the hordes of laptop-armed students deep into their books. It can get crowded sometimes, this place—but when it is quiet it becomes a cocoon. When I think of Café Antonio, I think of a good combination of café latte or fraps and also deep comfort, a refuge. This is where I go to when I want to hide from the world without really hiding from it.









One can’t help but marvel at the change of fortunes for this café, which opened many years ago and struggled for a while to find footing in what was then a largely nonexistent café culture in Dumaguete. There were constant menu changes over the years that reflected a kind of confusion in the kitchen. Then the coffee-and-cigarette crowd (which is the café society—the vocal, usually artistic types who would give the retort, “What? No cigarette over my brewed barako? Are you nuts?”) shunned it for so long for its insistence on banning smoking from the premises. It was, and still is, a beautiful place to come to now and then, but places do develop a magical pull, resistant to formula or earnest effort, that guarantees regular foot traffic and word-of-mouth patronage. For the longest time, it didn’t have that.

And then something happened. Café Antonio, for some reason, suddenly became cool.









What happened? I don’t know much about this café and its efforts at evolution (I’ve started coming back to it only the past year or so), but one can bet on the efforts of the two brothers who run the place, Rochris and Rayvin Piñero, two young men who seem to have the pulse on what the city and its coffee people want—and increasingly a feel for what the rest of everyone else wants. It takes perseverance, one can guess. And also a sense for just making people happy. As Rochris once told me, “Café Antonio is about good food and good coffee, and building relationships. Food should make us happy, feel happy.”

The idea of a café sprang from something a family friend, Dixon Peralta, was mulling over. “He offered the opportunity to start a coffee shop business in the city,” Rochris said. “We started out as a coffee shop, and only that—but eventually we decided to evolve into a coffee shop and restaurant.” And increasingly, it is the food of the place that has people coming back. Among its bestsellers—and what now constitute the signature dishes of Café Antonio—are the grilled pork ribs glazed in hickory sauce, the Cheezy Pork—strips of meat rendered in cheese cream sauce, and herb-marinated lamb steak. And then there is Jamaican grilled pork chop, tenderly marinated in herbs and spices. I can swear by the Jamaican chops: it is meat that overwhelms with a distinct herby flavor, earthy and spicy at the same time. What you now have is a whole new experiment in food, all of the entrees given certain explosive twists—the onion soup with bread and cheese, the garlic shrimp salad, the seafood paella, the grilled squid, the pasta marinara, the pesto pasta with tomato sauce, the pimiento basilica, the carbonara, and the tantalizingly sinful French toast with the caramelized banana (the mango slivers hidden in the bread was a touch of genius). The Fricadel burger with mushroom, one must say, is an experience.









The new menu is courtesy of Chef Eugene Gueverra from Cebu who whisked in, and stayed with the Piñeros for the entire month of April this year, and concocted a definitive change in the menu, and standardized the café’s process. “It was difficult because I am not a chef nor was I trained anywhere,” Rochris said. “Balancing finances and creating a product and service that satisfies the customer is a challenge.”





And then there are the Music Nights, randomly scheduled but increasingly popular. The streams of the café’s now-devoted patrons go through its glass doors unceasingly due in some part to an experiment in music the brothers have hatched. “We love music,” Rochris said, “and Music Night basically started out as an open mic night. And then slowly the members of what now constitutes our regular band got to know each other, with our regular singers Sela Saga, Alex Quilantang, and Reicha Piñero. Our plan is to make café Antonio a haven for aspiring artist, and to provide an avenue in which they could express themselves.”



Music Night is a monthly jamming among its young regulars, which started with a very successful The Beatles Night that had everybody singing “Hey, Jude” by the end. And then it continued on with some other themed nights, including the Apo Hiking Society Night, complete with Buboy Garovillo in the audience. (A Dumagueteño, Mr. Garovillo quickly obliged with everybody’s fevered expectations by singing one song with the band.)

That night, after the APO songs have been played and sung, it was time once more for open mic—and then somebody sang a fevered rendition of “Quando, Quando, Quando,” and transfixed us all with this discovery of a new voice—alluring, confident, graceful. Who was he? But it didn’t matter. He took the song and made it his own, above our familiar memories of Frank Sinatra and Michael Buble. We all turned to him, and knew this was it: how talent can be so divine it can turn any place into a sudden venue for worship. And so, on my own or with a bunch of people all singing, Café Antonio has become what it has become: a place of such comfort, anybody here can burst out into song.


All photography by Urich Calumpang

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Saturday, July 16, 2011

entry arrow7:55 PM | All That Longing



The Thais know something about longing. They capture it well on film. The mad surging, the illusion of nobility in denial, the perfect -- if short-lived -- happiness of catching a glance, a smile, or a touch from the beloved. Which is to say I have finally managed to catch Puttipong Pormsaka Na-Sakonnakorn and Wasin Pokpong's สิ่งเล็กเล็ก ที่เรียกว่า..รัก [A Little Thing Called Love, 2010] ... egged on by the sheer popularity of the film among girls (and women) around me who are normally of the even-keeled sort but have been reduced to hysterics by the Tagalog-dubbed version of this film which aired in a network TV station a few months back.

Watching it, I understand the passion of the fans. It is certainly not a perfect film -- everywhere in its narrative, we encounter awkward bumps telling of a inferior acting or directorial or writing choice -- but the film wears its charm lightly and with frank resoluteness, it is hard not to like it. Heck, it is hard not to fall in love with it. Heck, it is hard not to feel the painful longing of Nam (played by Pimchanok Leuwisetpaiboon, who is the spitting image of Kim Chiu, without the malnourished look) as she gazes into the eyes of Shone (played by Mario Maurer), her object of desire, someone she has fallen for since the beginning of high school and has remained somehow removed from her efforts, this despite the frantic tips she gets from a booklet that promises nine sure-fire methods gleaned from cultures all over the world to get the man of her dreams. [And in that regard, we completely agree with her obsession: Mario Maurer has it in spades, and is perhaps this generation's Asian answer to Alain Delon.]

Truth be told, this is the StarCinema romcom I have always wanted to watch, if only Cathy Garcia-Molina or Olivia Lamasan had enough imagination to get away from the gutter thinking of assembly-line cinema and actually strive enough to create something whimsical like this, or at least to put an original spin on the same old formula. (There is a reason why Jessica Zafra insists that all StarCinema romantic comedies are all virtual remakes of Notting Hill, that 1999 Roger Michell film starring Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts.) Consider that the film is essentially told from one point-of-view, that of Nam's, and her teenage desires are what drives the film and its heart -- and yet what proves wrenching is the twist in the end that subverts our own idea of who actually does all that work in longing, something reminiscent of the kissing film clips near the end of the original version of Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso [1988]. The revelation had naked emotional power that had me reeling. But also like that beloved Italian film, this Thai romance also ends with a coda that goes on too long, made of course to give our protagonists their happily ever after -- but feels too calculated to be truthful. (Consider the sudden swell of music at the end of Shone's final sentence.)

But nonetheless. This is a film that knows very well the music of every lovelorn person's heart. It speaks gently of that unbearable, sweet longing -- and if only for that, it is very much welcome to enter the hidden pantheon of our guilty film favorites.

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Friday, July 15, 2011

entry arrow8:22 PM | The Gusto of Presko

Part 2 of a series on Dumaguete food


Nobody remembers—except perhaps those who have a penchant for nostalgia and have seen Dumaguete evolve over the years—that Lab-as used to be a “floating” restaurant. And not in the spot where it is now. A few meters away, in fact, where Barefoot Bistro is presently. The old al fresco ensemble of coco lumber and wood and nipa, with a running veranda belted around it to set the rustic tone, sat on a man-made pond, a moat really, which was seeded with fish, oyster, and crab. The effect was both visual delight, and source of fresh catch that can directly to the nearby grill and on to the plate of hungry gourmet.

It has been more than twenty years since Lab-as (the Cebuano word for “fresh catch,” or more tellingly, a “freshness of flavor”) was founded on that old spot in 1988. “Back then,” writes Vicente Fuentes of his family’s lasting contribution to Dumaguete’s culinary culture, “the vogue in the dining fare in and around [the city] was either … Chinese or Spanish … with a sprinkling of European and native dishes in some resorts and restaurants… It was thus a bold step for Lab-as to venture into seafood, in a location that was even regarded as a ‘no-no’ in business practice. [We are] situated quite a distance away from the heart of [town], where the convenience of walk-in customers—like shoppers and businessmen of the downtown commercial district—was a built-in come-on.”

The spot, near the crossroads of Escaño Boulevard and Flores Avenue, overlooking Tañon Strait, was—at least in the late 1980s—a kind of no man’s land in Dumaguete: it bordered the shanties of nearby Lo-oc, and at night, it turned into a desert of quiet darkness. It existed in a metaphorical version of the doldrums, the way places in a small city can be, unmeasured by actual standards of distance. Things have changed since then, with Escaño becoming the city’s current throbbing heart of all things you could call the night life. Lab-as might as well be the germ of that transformation. Without the Fuenteses, would life stir in Flores Avenue the way it does now? Probably not.

It was a gamble—and it paid off handsomely. And yet it was a risk that was also founded on one sure thing: there was, and still is, a visionary sumptuousness in Lab-as’ fare. They had food—fresh, delectable—you had to keep coming back to. It was worthy of repeated word-of-mouth appraisals—and it is exactly that kind of enthusiastic response from diners over all these years that has sustained the restaurant. And yet, in the beginning, all that Mr. Fuentes wanted was to create something new for Dumaguete, to offer something new for its collective palate. He writes: “We tried to ride the growing tide in health consciousness sweeping the country, to veer away from food rich in cholesterol and animal fats. We conceived of an idea of freshness in seafood, [not only as a healthy alternative but also as something truly appetizing and satisfying.] When seafood, like grilled fish or steamed crabs or oysters and prawns, are eaten al mano—or kamayan style—the satisfaction is doubled.”

Consider the bestsellers in this restaurant.

There’s the talaba, always a succulent experience, which comes in cheese, basil, garlic, or sibuyas dahon. Taken with wasabi, each bite becomes a whole buffet in one swallow. “We prepare them raw with kalamansi or sinamak na suka,” says Vicente’s son Sande, who is Lab-as’ current conjurer, or at least an ambassador, of culinary witchcraft. “They live off from our aqua tanks to purge them before we serve them to customers. They are grilled and then steamed with sinamak, which is native coconut vinegar with garlic ginger, sili, and peppercorns. And then we have them baked with garlic basil and cheese.” The secret to the delectability is that they try to keep the oysters alive—“and it is a challenge now to get big plump ones,” admits Sande, “because Bais is also now supplying restaurants in Cebu and San Carlos.”



You go next with the crispy shrimp, seasoned in kalamansi, salt, pepper, and garlic and then dusted with corn starch; the whole ensemble is then deep-fried quickly, so that the shrimps’ shell becomes crispy but the juiciness of the meat remains, locked in. It comes served—all in delectable crunchiness—with bagoong, tomato, and sibuyas, and the whole thing is best eaten from head to tail, each bite dipped in sinamak with crushed sili.



The halaan or punao clear soup is a favorite starter among diners. The dish primarily consists of fresh clams sautéed in garlic and ginger. Added to the mix are onions, tomatoes, and atsal or red pepper in a clear soup, which is topped with sili espada and sibuyas dahon before it is served. It becomes for many an instant taste of home, something comforting and “makakalma.” Paired with grilled seafood, it becomes almost a complete meal, and also becomes a great match for Filipino guilt-inducing cholesterol-laden favorites like crispy pata or grilled pork belly; the halaan clear soup perfectly counters the oil of these dishes.



The fat chili crabs—sautéed with onions, garlic, and a generous helping of milled pepper, and then served with a dash of tomato sauce (plus Lab-as’ secret hot sauce formula) and a serving of garlic rice—is an invitation to finger licking. It is another one of Lab-as’ favorites. “We keep the crabs alive, ready for the cooking,” says Sande, “and then we have them steamed, then deep fried with a lot of garlic and guinataan....”



There are three grilled dishes in the Lab-as menu that I keep coming back to. The first is the panga of the blue marlin or malasugi, always grilled to perfection, the tenderness of the meat mingling with a smoky flavor that is arresting. The flavors are subtle, bursting only in the back of your tongue.



The second is the sinuglaw, which is my ready favorite in the menu. It is essentially a Dumagueteño version of binakhaw: fresh tangigue cut into cubes, mixed with slices of onions, ginger, and atsal, and then with biasing (a relative of kaffir lime, fresh from Camiguin) thrown in with a measure of fresh coconut milk (“No mayonnaise, please,” Sande says), native coco suka and salt, finally topped with sibuyas dahon and some crushed sili. The final ingredient is sugbang baboy or pork chop hot off the grill, the meat succulently chopped and layered on top of the binakhaw. The contrast in taste and color is a feast for the senses.



Finally, there is the popular Dumaguete Express—Lab-as’ take on the Bicol Express, but something that is inspired by the cuisine of Camiguin—complete with slivered flesh of botong, fish, squid, and shrimp, cooked in coconut milk with malunggay, ginger, and onion, and then topped with lechon kawali. “It is a complete meal,” says Sande, “and it has somehow become a favorite of backpackers…”



That mention of backpackers is testament to Lab-as’ growing popularity, not just among locals, but among traveling gourmets from all over the country, and even the world. Many food critics have proclaimed Lab-as’ menu as something that has perfected a taste for the native—which is enviable because it is a menu arrived at only with the strength of one man’s culinary philosophy. Vicente Fuentes was not a chef, just a food enthusiast who knew what “freshness” was all about. “What we have,” Sande says, “are our trusted kusineras—our manangs who have been with us through the years. We have two chief cooks, Manang Carmen and Manang Tasing, who have been loyal to us since 1988. It is quite a team we have, with five other cooks and what we call as the ‘talaba boys’ and the ‘grill boys.’”

What Lab-as has is a menu that may stick to classic favorites, their quality consistent and unchanging, but is also something that evolves over time with inspiration taken from travels, including surfing and diving, that the Fuentes family does, as well as with their unceasing food trips in karinderias in Bohol, Siargao, and Camiguin. What inspires them in these jaunts across the islands trickles down to variations in the menu, with perhaps a new dish or two to keep the culinary adventure going. And so we keep coming back to Lab-as—and one soon realizes that the beauty of Lab-as food is that it is basically the most basic of home-cooking, but taken to a level that approaches sumptuousness, the detail rich, the taste made more distinct and tantalizing.

It is hard work. “Most important in our menus is a consideration of consistent quality and the availability of seafood, like our tuna panga and belly,” Sande says. “I’m very happy, as of the moment, with their quality. Our supplier exports to Europe. They’re local, too, straight from the seas off Bayawan and Sta. Catalina. There is less travel time when I get my stock of lapu-lapu, maya-maya, and others. Presko gyud.”

Presko. That singular word. Twenty years later, it is a culinary philosophy that has proven to be of the lasting kind. [To be continued...]


[Photography by Greg Morales. Food styling by Arlene Delloso-Uypitching. Coordinated by Moses Joshua Atega. Thanks to Sande Fuentes for the food adventure...]

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