Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, November 28, 2005



AS YOU read this, I’ll be on a plane to Kuala Lumpur, there to read a paper at a conference on “Politics and Literature” sponsored by Malaysia’s Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (its equivalent of our Institute of National Language, but with far broader powers and resources). I generally eschew highbrow literary seminars (as opposed to writers’ boozy get-togethers), not being conversant in the critic-speak that’s all the rage in English departments these days, but then I got to thinking, “Heck, if a working stiff of a writer like me can’t say something about politics and literature, who can and who will?” So here, below, is part of what I’ll be purveying to our curious neighbors:

In December 1958, almost 47 years ago, about a hundred of the leading writers of the Philippines went up to the resort city of Baguio in the northern highlands to attend a conference sponsored by the Philippine Center of International PEN. They mostly met among themselves—the event was, after all, billed as the National Writers Conference—but they were also visited and spoken to by an impressive array of guests that included the President of the Philippines, Mr. Carlos P. Garcia, himself a noted vernacular poet; the nationalist Senator Claro M. Recto, also a poet and a playwright in Spanish; the president of the University of the Philippines, Mr. Vicente G. Sinco; and a sprinkling of Caucasians from the American and British embassies. Also in attendance were notable politicians, businessmen, diplomats, academics, publishers, and at least one priest and one general of the army.

As far as I can tell, there had never been a writer’s conference of this magnitude in the Philippines before December 1958, when I was just about to turn five years old—and there has surely never been one since. And what could have brought all these literary luminaries together to the mountaintop? Nothing less than the same general subject that brings us here together today, in another Asian city, nearly six decades later: the vital, inescapable, and compelling but also troubled, thorny, and challenging relationship between literature and politics.

In that 1958 meeting, the subject fell under the rubric of the conference theme, “The Filipino Writer and National Growth.” In the course of dusting my office library during an idle moment a few weeks ago, I chanced upon the conference proceedings, compiled in a special issue (First Quarter, 1959) of the journal Comment—and it struck me, preparing for this conference with quite another beginning in mind, that it might as well have been 1958 all over again, given what I was dealing with. More than half a century after bringing the best of our literary minds to bear on literature and politics (not to mention two and a half millennia after Plato), we Filipino writers remain consumed by the subject, for good reasons both old and new.

Typical of the views expressed during that 1958 conference was that of the novelist Edilberto Tiempo: “A novelist and a pamphleteer belong to two different, irreconcilable categories. Literature, we must recognize, is not so directly concerned with finding answers to social problems that will be immediately embodied in action; and, furthermore, novelists and poets are not equipped to substitute for political or economic leaders. Their concern is not so much to act as recorders of life and events [but to] give them synthesis, to give them order and coherence…. The successful writer transcends the incidents of his time and becomes a sage and prophet…. Artistic revelation is his final responsibility to himself and his art.”

That sounds today like a fairly safe and sensible statement to make, but in 1958 it was merely the latest in a decades-old series of salvos and counter-salvos fired even before the Second World War by partisans of what, on the one hand, was called the “art for art’s sake” school of poet Jose Garcia Villa and, on the other, the “proletarian literature” bannered by Salvador P. Lopez. In the 1930s, Filipino writers had been torn by these adversarial positions, with Villa and Co. on the cutting edge of poetic modernism and Lopez and Co. harking back to a long tradition of revolutionary and subversive literature in the Philippines.

The critic Elmer Ordoñez, who was one of the editors of that Comment issue, would recall the sarcasm of one of Villa’s staunchest allies, the physician and short story writer Arturo B. Rotor, who had earlier written thus: “That no Filipino has shown a notable grasp of the events that now absorb the country’s attention indicates the extent to which he has failed in his art. No notable story, for example, has appeared thus far about the peasants in Central Luzon and their efforts to improve their living conditions. While the rest of the country are talking about the slums of Tondo, our poets still sing ecstatically about the sunset in Manila Bay. What then shall we think of these writers who debate so learnedly about rhythm and balance in prose and who do not even glance at the newspapers? What shall we say of them who will work for weeks over a single phrase, but who will not spend five minutes trying to understand what is social justice and why some peasants in Bulacan were caught stealing firewood from a rich landowner’s preserves?”

Dr. Rotor, who died in 1988, was absent from the Baguio conference so we cannot know for sure what he would have said to the likes of Dr. Tiempo (who, incidentally, neither believed in art for art’s sake, thinking that it lacked “high seriousness”), but we can guess. Indeed, if he were still alive today, he could be making the same caustic complaint about much of contemporary Philippine literature, especially in English—unless he were made to understand that our appreciation of issues like social justice has become rather more complex than dealing simply with land ownership or gainful employment. These continue to be major problems, for sure, but they have been compounded by such recent developments as the large-scale export of Filipino labor and its effects on the Filipino family, the globalization of economic and cultural modes and practices, and the growth of the digital divide within our societies.

How far have we Filipinos come in our experience of and thinking about literature and politics since 1958?

Politics and literature have had a long and uneasy relationship in the Philippines, where creative writers and journalists have been the bane of an almost unbroken succession of colonial rulers, despots, autocrats, and dictators. The country’s tortuous political history has given rise to many opportunities for direct engagement in political resistance by Filipino authors, from Francisco Balagtas’s anti-despotic Florante at Laura and Jose Rizal’s novels in the 1800s to the anti-imperialist playwrights of the early 1900s and the anti-Marcos propagandists of the 1980s onwards. Beneath the larger and more obvious national political issues, of course, have lurked the politics of gender, religion, region, and—most importantly in our experience—of class.

What is interesting for us today is how closely our political and poetic histories have often coincided. Our heroes were poets, and our poets were heroes. Our first great poet, Francisco Balagtas, published a long poem in 1830 titled Florante at Laura, a political allegory against despotism set in Albania, where a Christian prince condemned to death by a usurper is saved by a Muslim warrior.

The revolution against Spain in 1896 was instigated by men of letters, from privileged scholars such as Jose Rizal—who wrote a long lyrical poem, “My Last Farewell,” in his prison cell shortly before his execution, among many other works—to proletarian revolutionary Andres Bonifacio, who wrote a stirring poem about love for the Motherland. These poems continue to be recited and studied in schools.

During the American occupation, political theater—also conducted in verse and song—became the primary form of resistance. And while our literature in English has been largely personal and introspective, the period of political ferment in the 1960s and 1970s saw traditional poets in English exchanging T.S. Eliot for the kind of poetry associated with Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse Tung. One of our finest poets, Eman Lacaba, joined the communist guerrillas and was killed in combat in 1976.

For my generation of young writers in the 1970s, Eman Lacaba was the apotheosis of the writer as revolutionary—an ideal to which we passionately subscribed, seeing ourselves as the vanguard of what we called the Second Propaganda Movement after that of Jose Rizal and his comrades-in-exile in Barcelona in the 1880s. As his older brother Pete (himself one of our most talented and significant poets) recalls, Eman was a prototypical ‘60s hippie enamored of Rimbaud, marijuana, and other mindbenders. “His early poems were high complex, allusive, hermetic, obscure; we had, after all, nurtured our verse on objective correlatives and the seven levels of ambiguity. In the English and Tagalog poems that Eman wrote in Mindanao [where he had joined the New People’s Army], you can feel the tension created by his attempt to turn his back on his former style, and work for greater simplicity, directness, and clarity,” Pete notes. Perhaps more than his poetry, Eman Lacaba’s brutal death—shot through the mouth by an informer, after capture in the mountains—ensconced him in the pantheon of Filipino writer-heroes.

(To be continued)

Penman for Monday, November 21, 2005



FEW WRITERS turn me into a blushing fan; Gregorio C. Brillantes is one of them. The reasons for my admiration should be self-evident when you go over my piece below. Last Wednesday, Greg launched not just one but three new books at Balay Kalinaw in UP: Looking for Jose Rizal in Madrid (UP Press), The Cardinal’s Sins, the General’s Cross, the Martyr’s Testimony, and Other Affirmations (Ateneo de Manila University Press), and Chronicles of Interesting Times (Anvil). Like his papal namesake Gregory the Great, who wrote a massive 35-volume commentary on the Book of Job, Gregorio Brillantes emerges in these books as an untiring and unsparing chronicler of this time and of that place.

They’re collections of essays, reportage, and what today would be generally called “creative non-fiction.” Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what you call them: they’re all eminently readable (well, except for the ultrafine print of Chronicles), delectably urbane musings on everything from potholes on Mayon Street to cockroaches in Mexico—as well as, of course, weightier and meatier subjects, the usual suspects of politics, religion, and history, made unusual by his diligent, often playful, skepticism. And—ah, yes—those lyrical digressions, like windows in darkened rooms suddenly opening to seashores and temples.

A couple of weeks before the book launch, Greg called me to ask if I could speak at the event. I certainly could, and here’s what said:

I’m very happy to have this opportunity to say some very personal things about Gregorio Brillantes, who for many decades now has perplexed, distressed, and tormented me with the luminosity of his prose.

Going over the essays in his book Looking for Jose Rizal in Madrid, I felt positively sick in the stomach, and I’m sure that I’ll be thoroughly disgusted as well by the two other books we’re launching today when I come around to reading them, as I surely will. This, I told myself, this the prose I’ve always wanted to write, the attitude I’ve always wanted to assume, the voice I’ve always wanted to mimic.

As you can gather, I’m a charter member of the GBFC Ltd.—the Gregorio Brillantes Fans Club Limited (limited because you have to be a writer of prose yourself to qualify)—and when I get together with other members of the GBFC like the columnist and biographer Raul Rodrigo, it heartens me to learn that someone else shares my choice of favorite Brillantes story: “The Cries of Children on an April Afternoon in the Year 1957.”

No Filipino writer in English today writes prose more joyful and satisfying to read, and prose more carefully pondered and crafted, than Greg Brillantes. When he muses on travel from 35,000 feet, he says that: “To go away from your country is to fall in love with it: the perspective, and the tension, of distance enable you to view it, as if for the first time, in the wholeness of its being. A man taking leave of a house where the very walls seem to have absorbed the quality of the lives and the deaths in the familiar rooms—should he bring with him only the recollection of the broken mirror, the inadequacy of air and space, the capiz window with its missing panes? Rather the faces the imperfect mirror reflected; the voices within the walled space; the days and nights viewed through that window—perhaps also the trees with their roots deep in the soil where a boy might have once tried to dig a tunnel to the other side of the world.”

He accords his subjects a level seriousness they may not even deserve, but his awe must be earned by them.

He is not above remarking, as we would about Paris, that “The city is full of girls of all shapes and sizes and complexions”; after all, wherever he goes—whether to Kansas or Managua—he is still and always that young man from Tarlac, slightly guilty but trembling under the skin from some exquisite discovery, “coming home,” he writes, “after midnight from a dance, my father’s house dark and silent and seeming to hold its breath in the warm night.”

But let me leave the high-minded analysis to the professional critics and the dissertation writers. This message began as a personal diatribe, and a pained harangue it shall continue to be.

Many years ago, when I was around 24, I got a letter from Greg Brillantes, then the editor of the elegant and authoritative Manila Review. I had sent the publication two stories, the first of them grandiloquently titled “Hour of Defilement,” and the other “Spinster’s Evenings and Bachelor’s Nights.” He wrote me back to say that he had accepted the first story but had summarily changed its title, which he found too sophomoric, to “Nights by the Sea.” I was devastated—and deeply annoyed to know that he was right. Of the second story, he said that he had yet to read it, but that a story with that title couldn’t possibly be too bad, so he was taking it. That redeemed him in my estimation, and I’ve kept that letter to this day, tacked on the wall of my office above my desk.

Several years later, in the death throes of martial law and when he was editing the feisty National Midweek magazine, Mr. Brillantes annoyed me again. I had sent him a story which I thought was very appropriate to the times, a story titled “In the Garden.” In the manner of precocious and precious young authors, I was fairly sure he would like it, and had sent him the manuscript single-spaced, thinking that he would appreciate reading it as if it had already been printed. He did not. He sent it back to me, saying that the magazine required all submissions to be double-spaced. I retyped the whole bloody story—this was before a couple of keystrokes could do that on a computer—and sent him back the story, which he published.

I have six Palanca second prizes to my credit; at least two or three of those were the direct result of one Gregorio Brillantes coming in first. I kept dreaming, in my active years as a literary combatant, that the reverse would miraculously happen, but it never did.

Last year, Greg very kindly consented to speak before my graduate writing class. My students—some of whom are here today—were thrilled to pieces to have their work read and critiqued by the Great Gregorio. Greg promptly praised the very stories I had found some problems with, and nixed the stories I thought had merit. So let this be a forewarning to anyone thinking of inviting a literary lion to dinner—you will be that dinner, with your reputation for dessert.

Later, over beer, and seeking to redeem myself somewhat, I told Greg Brillantes about an incredible day when I wrote two stories. He then told me about an even more incredible day when he wrote three!

My friends, there’s a moral to this long story. If you can’t beat them, praise them, and I stand here in sullen worship of every writer’s writer, and every editor’s editor, Gregorio Brillantes.

LET ME acknowledge receipt of a new publication from friends down in Bicol—the maiden issue of Salugsog sa Sulog, published by oragonrepublic.com, a group of young Bikol writers intent on reviving what until recently was a robust regional literature threatened with extinction by the lack of publication venues. (Just to get this straight, “Bicol” refers to the region, and “Bikol” to the language.)

Edited by Jose Jason L. Chancoco, Salugsog is a slim but handsome volume that aims to fill that void. It’s too bad I can’t read Bikol (I’m Visayan), but I’ve been down there for several workshops and I know how talented and determined these writers are. I recognized the names of a couple of more established writers—Frank Peñones and Jun Balde—but even better was the preponderance of new, young writers in the publication. All the best to you and your gang, Jason, and I hope you can keep this up!

LASTLY, THERE'S a call for auditions from Tanghalang Pilipino for an upcoming production of Zsazsa Zaturnnah (Ze Muzikal). Don’t ask me what it is, because I don’t know (but your teenager might). I’m a member of the TP Board and I can believe it when I’m told that the show will be a surefire hit with the Pinoy audience—the title sounds funny, already.

The auditions will be held on November 29 and December 6 from 2 to 8 pm at the CCP. There’s a list of requirements (including “a comic rendition of a serious song”), so call the TP office at 832-3661 or 832-1125 locals 1620/1621 for details.

Penman for Monday, November 14, 2005



TO MAKE things more interesting, and knowing that I couldn’t cover everything in just two full days of touring, I took my recent visit to Nagoya as my own version of an “Extreme Challenge.” And the challenge I gave myself was to see how far I could get around as digitally as possible—using mainly information and software found on and downloaded from the Internet, including maps, subway routes, sightseeing stops, shopping tips, etc.

The first time I visited Japan in 1983, I knew little about the place itself beyond what I’d seen in the movies and read in sword-and-sushi romances like Shogun. I had no maps, no sightseeing itinerary (I was there to play in the World Amateur Championship of go, the ancient Japanese board game; I finished last, of course—but that’s another story), no sense of where and what Osaka was in relation to the galaxy. It was probably just as well; over-preparation can take too much of the fun and wonder out of a trip. Sometimes the last thing you want is a list of “must-see’s” and “must-do’s” when all you need is to march out into the sunshine with open eyes and ears.

But this time around, with two days to spare and a point to make, I deliberately set out to find what resources were available to the digital traveler, beyond what most of us already know about booking hotel and airline reservations online.

First, an inventory of our digital resources: the Internet, a laptop, a mobile phone, an iPod, a digital camera, and a PDA (a Palm, iPaq, XDA, or some such device—my phone and PDA are combined in the Treo 650). Let’s not forget all the chargers, batteries, cables, and flash-memory cards that come with the hardware; in my case, knowing I’d be out for only so many days, I just made sure to bring fully-charged spare batteries. (Speaking of iPods, here’s another tip for the digital traveler: if, like me, you’ve invested in high-end earphones or headphones for your iPod or mp3 player, keep them in your pocket or carry-on bag, and use them instead of the earphones the airlines hand out and sometimes charge for, as Contintental does, for $5 a pop; you do get to keep the earphones, but do you really need another one?).

I already knew where I was going to stay, but especially since I was arriving at night, I wanted to be sure how to get there from the airport, about an hour away. So the first thing I looked for through Google was the Chubu airport website, for a map of the terminal layout and links to train and bus connections to the city. Then I found the site of the Royal Park Inn Nagoya to get a good look at a picture of the hotel’s façade and to download a street map of the hotel’s location, indicating a walking route from the train and bus terminal.

To get to know as much as I could about Nagoya and establish my sightseeing priorities, I did another Google search for “Nagoya tourism.” Sure enough, dozens of sites came up—the best of them being the InfoGuide at www.japaninfoguides.com, which has maps and pictures of key areas, and fairly comprehensive visitor information. I downloaded maps of the city center and the subway network, later marking out with a pen where I wanted to go.

For those of us with those electronic diaries-cum-checkbooks called Personal Digital Assistants or PDAs, there’s a company called Wcities (http://www.wcities.com/cityguide.html) that puts out city guides and maps for both Palm and PocketPC platforms—thus its slogan, “the world in your handheld.” Not quite the whole world, yet; they did have a free city guide to Nagoya, but no maps at the moment.

There’s a couple of other Palm programs I’ve found very useful while traveling since the late 1990s: the freeware Currency (www.braunstein.de/pda/palm/currency/en/), which converts up to six user-selectable currencies simultaneously (and for which you can download daily foreign-exchange-rate updates), and the freeware Metro (www.freewarepalm.com/travel/metro.shtml), which maps out routes and itineraries for dozens of subway and metro rail systems around the world (yes, it has our MRT as well). After many calculations, it dawned on me that a yen was, duh, 50 centavos, a discovery that considerably simplified things.

But Metro proved to be a godsend in Nagoya. I’ve always believed that anyone who masters the subway (and holds a day pass) conquers the city, and the closed-circuit logic of subway networks takes much of the fear and figuring out of street-level meandering. (It helps that Japan is relatively crime-free; knowing where to go on the New York subway won’t make you feel any better about hanging out at midnight in certain stations.) With Metro—which is also regularly updated, and covers almost 250 cities around the world—you just need to punch in where you are (Sakae) and where you want to go (Osu-Kannon), and it’ll spit out “Shortest route: 2 stations, 1 connection, about 9 minutes; at Sakae, take Higashiyama, direction Takabata; connect at Fushimi; take Tsurumai, direction Akaike, get off at Osu-Kannon.”

Currency and Metro are free downloads for the Palm, but I over-invested in the BDicty Talking English-Japanese Dictionary Phrasebook for Palm OS from Beiks LLC (www.beiks.com). It didn’t come cheap at almost $20 (payable online), but paranoid me figured that I could end up spending a whole lot more if I couldn’t find the words for “Where’s the nearest 7-11, please? I’m too cheap to go to a real restaurant.” (As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. The convenience store was just across my hotel—followed by another one, and another one.)

My Treo 650 is a wonderful gadget that’s a quad-band phone, a Palm PDA, a still and video camera, an mp3 player, a file storage system, an Internet browser, an e-mail getter and sender, and a voice recorder all in one. The problem is, it doesn’t work as a phone in Japan. The cellular phone system in Japan uses different technologies—Personal Digital Cellular, CDMA, and WCDMA—none of them compatible with our GSM system and hardware (nor with each other, for that matter). Thankfully, my Globe plan allowed me to borrow (for free, but of course the user pays for all calls) a Japan-friendly phone, a Nokia 6650, for the duration of my trip. The candybar GSM/WCDMA 6650 isn’t the latest and greatest of cellphones, but it did the job of keeping me in touch by voice and text, passing me on to the Vodafone JP and NTT DoCoMo networks. I hadn’t used a Nokia in a while, so just to be safe, I downloaded a .pdf copy of the User’s Guide for the Nokia 6650 from the Nokia website before I left.

I’d expected Japan to be wireless and Internet heaven, but surprisingly it wasn’t, at least not in my little corner of Nagoya. As I noted last week, it could’ve been just because everyone had Internet access at home, in the office, and on his or her 3G (read: state-of-the-art) mobile phone. The Royal Park Inn’s lobby was a wi-fi hotspot, but you had to be signed on to the global Boingo network to use it, and I passed on the service. Instead, I sought out the local Apple Store not just for its wares, but also for the free Internet access that every Apple Store offers with every computer on display. The only hitch was that I couldn’t figure out how to produce the @ sign on the Japanese keyboard—until I copied the @ from the error message and pasted it onto the username box.

In my last hour on the night street in Nagoya I stumbled into Bic Camera on the other side of JR Central, and I’m glad I didn’t find it sooner, or my credit cards would have been all tapped out. It was, simply put, the biggest electronics emporium I’ve ever been to—maybe not quite like Tokyo’s fabled Akibahara (one of my few remaining Meccas)—but with five huge floors of electronic goodies, it was plenty to cover in sixty minutes.

In the end, all I got was a cheap neoprene slipcase for my laptop, a leather pouch for my digital camera, and a multipurpose lanyard for tiny gadgets yet to be acquired. I was lucky, in other words, to escape any major damage where those digits really count.

LAST WEEK'S piece on Nagoya provoked this inspired response from Freddie Santos:

I have dealt with the Japanese for many years, since I was an artistic consultant for Sony in the Philippines from 1986 to when Sony Japan bought it back ten years later. I have visited it many times, nearly each time lengthily, and with, thank God, other people footing the bill. They are an amazing people and it is, indeed, an awesome land.

I must disagree, though, with your comment about Japan being at the nexus of East and West. WE are that. You can tell the two elements apart and living together here.

Japan, I find, is the perfect “Weast.” They take an idea and then assume it entirely and the result is neither East nor West, it is Japanese. Nowhere in Europe, not even in London, does one see the styles worn by trendy Japanese.

Even mentally, I find that whether or not they admit it, Japanese see the world as Japan and everyone else. They join organizations because geographically, they should, but somehow I feel they feel they don't really need to.

They've Japanized baseball and spaghetti in a way we never have been able to and whatever Western element they may find interesting enough to try, they will work at it till it's theirs entirely. Any cold noodles served anywhere else?

Take the seeing-eye mechanism used for glass doors. It makes sense with glass doors and anywhere in the world, it's used for glass doors. Except in Japan. It's used for glass doors, bamboo panels, rice paper screens, and flower boxes.

Hong Kong and London tailors may be the masters of making suits, but only the Japanese will pad the shoulders to two-feet width—or have 80 percent of the business pedestrians wear it in gray. Did you ever see a brown suit on a Japanese street?

Argyle perfected socks but they've never manufactured it en masse featuring ten toes. In their wildest dreams, New Yorkers have never worn hair like the Japanese do—and, speaking of New York, for all its expertise in skyscrapers and its penchant for retaining European facades, what stood out as its simplest and most imposing skyscrapers? The World Trade Center, designed by Japanese, which, at its height, never looked Western, seven city blocks in Zen.

Only the Japanese will click a hundred shots of a single golf swing, show female breasts on any magazine but never pubic hair, design appalling sex orgies for video and then airbrush them, equate trains with bullets and have door greeters not just at the store front but at every door in the store.

What other country can be so devastated by war and then pay off every single one of its foreign debts within forty years after such destruction? Above all, Japan's commitment to quality is so encompassing that whether you pay 100 yen for a sweet roll in the subway or a thousand yen for a similar sweet roll in a resto, the taste is fabulous either way. Anywhere else, it's “you get what you pay for.” A land of no excuses.

There is so much to be learned from such a people, of which the greatest, I find, is the attitude of being un-awed by Western ways. For that matter, by Westerners. In that regard, Japan will never belong to any hemisphere. It belongs only, uniquely, to itself.

Penman for Monday, November 7, 2005



THAT'S RIGHT, and not just one, but eight Elvises, all of whom I met in Nagoya’s Central Park last week, in an unlikely highlight of another unlikely visit to a new city. New to this peripatetic penman, anyway: I’d been to Japan a couple of times, not counting stopovers devoted to a quick bowl of steaming udon at Narita and Kansai, but never yet to Nagoya—and why on earth should I? It’s a question that’s hounded Nagoya, something of a middle child between its two more popular siblings, Tokyo to the northeast and Osaka to the southwest, for which two end stops it serves as a fairly (or unfairly) undistinguished transit point.

But I had a free ticket to Nagoya earned from another job, and only so much time to spare from a rapidly vanishing sem break; so off I flew by JAL last Saturday to Nagoya’s new Central Japan International Airport—Chubu to the world at large—for just two full days of sightseeing. Call it parachute tourism, which is usually and increasingly all that most of us working stiffs can afford if ever, or can squeeze into our prepaid, preplanned conference schedules.

As I’ve said before, I love plane food, especially (or make that only) when I’m flying on Asian airlines. Knowing what a cheapskate I am when it comes to dining out on a foreign currency, the plane food’s likely going to be my best meal for days. While Western carriers have scaled down their culinary offerings to pathetic sandwiches and flaky croissants, you can always expect a steaming rice or noodle dish from a regional airline, guaranteeing a good burp to go with the in-flight movie. My excitement begins with the otsumami—the foil-wrapped nuts and rice crackers that I always find a way to get an extra packet of—and culminates in the short-grain kokuho rice that dignifies anything it comes with. JAL did not disappoint. Its 767 also had individual monitors in economy class, and between the food and the movies, the four hours to Nagoya sped by quickly.

Nagoya’s new airport opened just last February, in time for the prefecture’s big event—the Aichi Expo 2005, designed to showcase Central Japan’s strengths and attractions. Like most modern airports, it’s huge, filled with light, and surprisingly fuss-free, without any long queues at security, and no one asking you to take your belt off at the X-ray portal.

I took the Meitetsu train to Nagoya Station in the heart of the city, a 40-minute ride that cost Y1,200 in the reserved section. After that it was a short walk across the street to my hotel. The Royal Park Inn Nagoya markets itself as a business hotel, midway in price and creature comforts between the Ritz and a ryokan (a traditional Japanese inn with communal baths), and it does a great job of doing what a good business hotel should do: provide clean and comfortable (if smallish) rooms with a TV, a hotpot, a trouser presser, a heated, state-of-the-art toilet seat, ice and a vending machine in the hallway, and best of all, a hearty buffet breakfast.

Although I never got to try it, its lobby was a wireless hotspot, allowing you to access your e-mail or surf the Net from your wi-fi-enabled laptop with a credit card. (In this connection, I’m going to devote next week’s column to what I’ll call digital travel—letting your fingers do the walking on the keyboard to plan ahead as much as you can for traveling to a foreign city. I’ll discuss websites and software programs that’ll take much of the pain—but none of the excitement—out of global gallivanting.) Another advantage of the Royal Park Inn’s location was its being right next to three convenience stores—Japan, let’s not forget, is convenience-store and vending-machine heaven—enabling me to sample a mindboggling variety of ramen and rice crackers.

No one’s more finicky about the quality of their food than the Japanese, which practically guarantees that anything they serve you is bound to be good. The sights can only be half of the reason why you’d want to visit Japan. The other half we can subdivide between the food and the shopping (or, for most of us, make that the window-shopping). Since I’m no gourmet and didn’t try anything too exotic (read: anything beyond 300 yen), let me tell you instead about what I saw and how a couple of days in Nagoya might well be spent.

One of the first things I always look for in a new city is a map of the city itself and the transportation system—in this case, Nagoya’s extensive subway network. A walk back to the train station took me to an information counter which had just the thing I needed (for free, in English), including a listing of the city’s most interesting destinations and instructions on how to get there. To get around quickly and cheaply, nothing beats the subway, and in Nagoya you can buy a day pass for unlimited travel for 740 yen (about P350; figure one yen as almost 50 centavos).

It being a leisurely Sunday, I thought of going to the Atsuta Shrine, set in a park laced with centuries-old cypresses. But first, I had to scratch an itch, make a personal pilgrimage—to the Apple Store in Sakae, Nagoya’s shopping district. Next to Europe, Japan is Apple’s biggest customer outside the US, and the Sakae store was a carbon copy of Apple’s flagship store in Soho in New York, down to the glass staircase. I was there to gawk and to get in some free e-mail—it’s interesting how, despite or maybe because of its high-tech status, Japan didn’t have an Internet café at every streetcorner; in fact I never saw one in Nagoya, maybe because they had all the connections they needed at the office, at home, and on their 3G phones. Unable to afford anything in the Apple Store, I kept taking pictures of the goodies on display until the security guard—looking every inch more imposing than our police generals—shooed me away.

So off I went to the department stores for more masochism, to be awed by the quality of the goods on the one hand and depressed by their prices on the other. I have a yen (and that’s just about all I had, ha-ha) for jackets and blazers, the better to drape my prosperous tummy, and the only ones I could see had price tags of about Y50,000 on them—one or two too many zeroes for this ukay-ukay habitué. Matsuzakaya (remember when we had a Matsuzakaya here in Cubao in the ‘60s, above New Frontier grocery?) had a floor devoted to “promotions”—what to us are sales—but with the baseline prices so high to begin with, I knew I was going to do little more than look. I was attracted by a tan blazer—until I came closer and realized that it (and nearly all the other items on the floor) was emblazoned with a pocket patch of a familiar, long-eared face, suitably captioned: “Bugs Bunny—That cool-headed rabbit’s so funny!”

Miniskirts and knee-high boots are de rigueur these days for Japanese women below 30, preferably topped by something frilly or furry. It isn’t even mix and match, but mix and no-match, although the in-your-face eclecticism soon acquires a numbing uniformity of its own. As a country caught more tightly in the nexus between East and West than us (I sometimes wonder if we ever had an East), Japan can stun, intrigue, and charm the casual visitor with its stark—sometimes bizarre—contrasts. All along the shopping street of Otsu-dori, for example, “Stranger in Paradise” was being piped out onto the street in an unearthly, thereminesque soprano.


I found my way to the Atsuta Shrine, which houses one of Japan’s three imperial treasures, the Kusanagi (grasscutter) sword, Japan’s Excalibur. Though said to be a replica of the mythical weapon that slew an eight-headed snake, the massive sword has been in this shrine for over 1,300 years. I paid Y300 to view more swords in an adjacent museum; I’ve never fired a gun in my life, but I’m a big fan of weapons of individual destruction, and you can’t get more personal than a sword.

For all the menace suggested by all that ancient weaponry, the daily news was surprisingly placid. Poring through the English edition of the Yomiuri Shimbun over breakfast the next morning, I found that the national crime round-up for the previous day was highlighted by “Shots fired from air gun,” which was exactly just that—someone had tried shooting someone else in Kamagaya using an air rifle. Contrast that with “3 Christian schoolgirls beheaded in Indonesia.” (Thankfully, there was no news from the Philippines that morning.) A glance at the travel ads also established that a round-trip ticket to Los Angeles cost Y22,500; to Bangkok, Y29,800; to Manila, Y39,800.

My next stop was Nagoya Castle, originally built in 1612 by Tokugawa Iyeyasu. Much of the castle was rebuilt in 1959, the original having been almost completely destroyed by American bombers in 1945, but even the restored castle—which contains real period artifacts saved from the conflagration—is well worth the Y500 admission.

It was on my way to this rendezvous with feudal Japan that I ran into the eight pompadoured, black-leather-uniformed Elvises rocking and rolling in Central Park; I thought they might have been buskers, such as you run into in London’s Covent Garden or Tube stations, but I couldn’t see a collection plate anywhere.

If we have our Greenhills and Bangkok has its Chatuchak, then Nagoya has Osu-Kannon, which has a warren of shops under a covered walk selling everything from traditional sweets to cowboy leather to vintage watches. Osu-Kannon is famous for its temple—my original reason for getting off at that stop—but the sacred soon gives way to the secular when you follow the steady stream of people filing past the temple to the marketplace just beyond it. Here, finally, was Nagoya’s own ukay-ukay section (one store sold used clothes by the gram, a yen for every gram). Unfortunately (or otherwise), I proved too bulky for any of the merchandise on display.

No foreign sojourn is ever complete for me without a visit to the stationery shops, and Japan’s Maruzen proved a cornucopia of pens and papers—again, alas, well beyond my present reach; I took a last long and longing look at the lacquered maki-e Pilots and the breathtakingly exquisite, swordlike Waterman Sérénité pen, and let go.

It’s too bad I couldn’t find the time to visit the Sewerage Science Museum (I kid you not—there is one, and yes, the frustrated engineer in me is interested in what you might call gutter culture); I also missed the Toyota Auto Museum and the Noritake Garden, but I have a feeling I haven’t seen the last of Nagoya. As my hotel guidebook sagely advised the visiting gaijin, “If you see Godzilla, run.” Other than that, Nagoya should be taken step by leisurely step. My toes may be tender, but my smile sure is sweet. (And many thanks to the JAL staff in the Philippines—most especially to Salie, Pia, and Jina—for helping me out with the arrangements.)

Penman for Monday, October 31, 2005



YOU'D THINK that this grown man would have enough on his plate to have to worry about what after-market earphones to recommend to geeks wanting to boost their iPods or to explain to a new Mac user what “repairing disk permissions” means and why it’s good for routine maintenance. But no—seven nights a week, and even some mornings, I prowl three or four websites like a true Pinoy Big Brother seeking problems and questions like these to resolve for the digital masses as an unpaid, unsolicited call-center agent.

It’s a strange form of relaxation, but it gives me a kick like few other diversions. It’s called moderation—yes, as in wading into a schoolyard brawl and pulling the combatants apart by the collar, or sitting in a corner of the hall watching the glee club or debating society rehearse. You’ll sense a paternalistic streak there somewhere, but the paternalism is intentional and arguably even essential in the virtual society and the virtual families spawned by the Internet.

If NGOs have their “convenors,” then the Internet has its moderators—the overseers and traffic controllers of the hundreds of thousands of online forums and message boards that have cropped up on the World Wide Web. These e-groups have converged around every conceivable (and a few inconceivable) topic or interest; I’m signed up, for example, with Yahoogroups for my elementary-school class, my high school batch, my college fraternity, our local chapter of the English-Speaking Union, the Philippine Fulbright Scholars Association, a fountain pen collectors’ club, a political-affairs discussion group, several geek and techie groups (for Macs, PDAs, cars, etc.), and any number of school-based classroom groups. (I am and have never been a member of the Yahoogroups for female wrestling holds, midget sex, boots and tights, sugar daddies, and Selma Hayek’s feet—that’s right, folks—just her feet and nothing else.)

While most people who sign up for these e-groups are quite happy to remain “lurkers”—members you won’t hear a pipsqueak from until something comes up to bring them out of the woodwork—some others prove themselves willing and able to assume greater communal burdens, i.e., dispensing technical wisdom, defining and upholding community standards, smiting down troublemakers, spotting new trends, provoking and steering discussions of industry issues and gadget pros and cons.

It’s a life, I tell you—for some, a substitute life where it suddenly doesn’t matter what you do by day or how much you make or whether you look like Antonio Banderas or his dog; for as long as you have the know-how, the patience, and the time to deal with problems that often have more to do with human foibles and frailties than mechanical glitches.

Aside from the Yahoogroups I set up for my high school batch and my classes, I moderate for two geek groups: the Apple Macintosh freaks at the Philippine Macintosh Users Group (www.philmug.ph) and the iPodders at PodCentral (www.podcentral.ph). I also actively participate in the Mapalad Palm users forum at www.mapalad.org. I am, in fact, a little more than a regular mod; as “super moderator”, I get to do what all mods can do—move threads around, issue warnings, edit messages—and more, without having to worry about the hardcore programming that the site’s administrators or admins have to do.

This all sounds pretty routine if not downright boring, and most times it is; a mod’s life should be a quiet one, concerned with pushing little pieces of digital paper around. But now and then we come across some miscreants who make our lives more animated than it should be. Like I noted a couple of columns ago, it’s amazing what people will do or say online, under the cloak of anonymity and with the security of distance, that they will never dare do in public.

These people are what, in Webspeak, are called trolls and flamebaiters, semi-professional nuisances whose mission in life seems to be the aggravation of other lives.

A troll, says that wonderful Web resource Wikipedia, “is a person who posts inflammatory messages on the Internet, such as on online discussion forums, to disrupt the discussion or to upset its participants. The word, or its variant, ‘trolling’, is also used to describe such messages or the act of posting them.” Such a person might invade a Mac or Palm forum, for example, and extol the virtues of the Windows platform—which is a fine thing purely for information or discussion purposes, but pushing for it too hard and too insistently to the point of provoking violent responses could be tantamount to trolling (or its cousin, flamebaiting, the inciting of riotously contrary passions among the faithful).

Let me share with you—especially those of you who may be moderating or thinking of moderating a forum—some of our guidelines (slightly revised below) for moderators at Philmug.ph. We just made these up—which means, they come from solid experience and years of having had to deal with some of the most clueless, annoying, and inconsiderate people online (as well as many—many more—of the smartest, sharpest, and most pleasant folks you could hope to meet in cyberspace). Thanks to Adel Gabot, Elbert Cuenca, and the rest of the Philmug gang for these ideas.

1. Let it all hang out, warts and all. Post deletion is the final solution. We can chastise people, advise them, correct them (with kindness, of course), but their posts are their property, their sacred ownership, and only they should be able to remove them. We should delete posts only if they are offensive, libelous, and malicious, and for other similar reasons. Seek a consensus among the other staff members before deleting a post, and properly inform the poster via e-mail or U2U if a post has been deleted, and for what reason. Deleting a thread with posted replies by other people is a whole magnitude more problematic.

[Let me interject that he question of “Who owns the posts?” is an interesting one—legally and even ideologically. It is, after all, the members and their contributions who give value to the forum—“value” meaning not simply the technical know-how that moderators (acting as senior geeks) usually dispense, but also the exchange of ideas itself, the creation of a virtual community. For practical purposes, it might help to separate the notion of “ownership” from “use”—meaning, you might own your post but I, the moderator, can still decide if it’s appropriate for the forum or not. Unpleasant and very un-Webbish as it sounds, I think most e-groups can’t be considered democracies communally owned; they’re usually started by one person or a few people who have the right to set the rules, and if you can’t abide by them, then feel free to step out and go elsewhere—or start your own group.—BD]

2. Kill with kindness. Don’t lose your cool. Be polite, level-headed, and sensible, even in the face of screaming, spluttering obnoxious-ness. If you lose it and fight back publicly, that reaction will remain for cyberspace posterity to be seen, viewed, and regretted forever. Be patient and polite—even and especially if the poster is asking for it, or baiting you into losing your composure. Give particular consideration to newbies; forgive them, for they know not what they do.

3. Watch out for each other's back. If there are things that slip past the radar of a mod in his or her designated area, take the initiative of telling that mod, or if that fails, work on it yourself. Mods must never quarrel with each other in public. We may have differences of opinion about how to handle situations, but they should be sorted out behind the scenes. Squabbling mods are all malicious members need to sow intrigue and weaken the organization.

4. Moderate actively. Establish your presence and authority in your forum. Monitor and steer the discussion to positive and productive threads. Discourage redundancy, flamebaiting, post padding, boorishness, and unhelpful remarks. Check your forum/s at least once a day.

To all these, I should add that the less you see me as a mod, the better. That means that things are chugging along just fine, and you can discuss the finer points of comparison between the iPod nano and the iPod shuffle without anyone chewing your ears off.

Penman for Monday, October 24, 2004



WHEN MY mom came home from what’s become an annual sabbatical with my sister Elaine in Virginia, I looked forward to two special pasalubongs—things I’d actually bought for myself online and for which I was using my Mom as my trusty courier. (Aren’t mothers great? The last time she helped me this way, she brought home an Apple PowerBook laptop—on her laptop, in her wheelchair.)

This time all I waited for were two CDs with rather rare contents, bought off eBay and Amazon on one of those late nights when I must’ve been trawling the digital shelves, just to keep awake while grading student papers. Like I’ve often said, a credit card and a mouse make a terrible combination; one click on the “Buy Now!” button is all it takes to transport you to financial perdition. If I reviewed all my online purchases, I’ll probably find that 90% of them were made at two in the morning, Manila time, when no one else can see what you’re doing and when impulse buying can feel like a flash of inspiration or a stroke of genius.

The first disc was a DVD titled “Pearl of the Orient”—and if that sounds like another Philippine tourism video, that’s just about what this is, except that it was originally made in 1955. It was a 22-minute promotional film for Coca-Cola Philippines, produced by Premiere Productions, digitally remastered by an American company called cdsave.com. As might be expected, it has scene after scene of Coke being made and people drinking Coke from Luzon to Mindanao, but what I enjoyed most—and what I bought it for—were the background shots of Manila from 50 years ago, places now either long gone or radically altered. Two young people drink Coke in front of UP Diliman’s Quezon Hall, on which the paint must still have been fresh; many others drink Coke around the pool in Balara (into whose heavily chlorinated water I would dip my baby feet not too long after)… you get the picture.

The other disc was a digitized recording of what, to a Broadway and Hollywood musical nut like me, has been a long-missing classic: Burt Bacharach’s score of the 1973 production of Lost Horizon, based on the James Hilton book that introduced Shangri-La, first made into a movie in 1937. I know, I know, if you were around in the early ‘70s, you probably thought it was a silly movie with an equally silly score (“Question me an answer bright and clear, I will answer with a question clear and bright!”); most American film critics thought as much. But I spent most of 1973 in martial-law prison, so Shangri-La must’ve seemed positively magical to me when I finally got to see it. It had a great cast, to begin with—Peter Finch, Liv Ullman, Michael York, and Olivia Hussey, among others. And there were all those songs I’ve been humming for 30 years—“The World Is a Circle,” “Living Together, Growing Together,” and the title song itself—but which I haven’t heard or played since my cassette copy of the soundtrack came unspooled in the early ‘80s, never to be replaced. Never, until Amazon.com came along, and yet another company that specializes in digitizing old cassettes.

I have no shame in confessing that I’m a Bacharach kind of guy (yes, I also like the Carpenters, ABBA, and everything by Michel Legrand); when I’m listening to music, the last thing I want to do is to be agitated, or worse, to think. I want well thought-out lyrics, but lyrics I can intuitively relate to without feeling like I was taking my comprehensive exams all over again. Bacharach does that—gives me a spring in my step, brings a wry smile to my sadness, gets me from Monday to Tuesday none the worse for wear.

When I flew off to Bangkok with Beng last week for some retail therapy in Chatuchak (more for Beng than for me; my indulgence took the form of three days of foot massages), the Lost Horizon soundtrack proved the perfect companion on my iPod nano, itself another late-night acquisition. If I were thinking like the cultural critic I sometimes have to pretend to be, I might have said that Shangri-La was the ultimate Orientalist confection if there ever was one, and that putting Bacharach on top of Shangri-La and then listening to him in stupa-strewn Bangkok was Orientalist overkill. Maybe it was, but I came out happily refreshed, prepared to re-enter sullen servitude if only to pay for my exotic escapades.

Ah, yes, the world is a circle.

THE ONLY book I stuffed into my backpack for last week’s jaunt to Bangkok was Noel Vera’s Critic After Dark: A Review of Philippine Cinema (Singapore: BigO Books, 2005). I’d had the book for months—with no less than acclaimed film director Lav Diaz delivering a copy to my house—and I’d promised myself to read it one blessedly free day, a day that just never came until last weekend.

Before he recently flew off with his family to North Carolina, I’d met Noel a couple of times, and he looked more to me like a Marine or a defensive lineman than a film critic—which only goes to show how rare and atypical real film critics are, that we haven’t typecast them in the way professors, priests, and policemen generate caricatures in our heads. There are, indeed, very few of Noel’s calling and caliber in our country (and now even he’s gone out of it, albeit in just a physical way); whether for lack of time, education, or integrity, many “reviewers” here are really little more than publicists (which is why I decline, as a matter of personal policy, to review books; call this a book report). Noel wasn’t even formally trained for film (heck, who is?)—he took up Legal Management in Ateneo, before doing an MBA at the University of Michigan in Dearborn and working as an officer of the Bank of the Philippine Islands.

But over the past decade or so, no one has written more knowledgeably, more consistently, and more passionately about Philippine cinema than Noel Vera. I know some people who share his passion and perhaps even his learning, but they don’t write, not nearly as well as he does. Noel doesn’t just live and breathe movies; he teaches them, teaches us about them, and brings the full armament of his considerable knowledge and his keenly refined preferences to bear on even the seemingly most insipid or inconsequential movie to turn it into a learning experience.

Here’s Noel on Mario O’Hara’s Babae sa Bubungang Lata (1999):

“Babae sa Bubungang Lata (Woman On A Tin Roof) isn’t about films so much as it is about the people who make them. Not the directors or producers or stars (as in Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ or Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night) but the little people on the fringe…. O’Hara works in the neo-realist tradition of Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini (a tradition Lino Brocka belonged to), but there’s also a touch of gothic in him. He stages much of his story inside the Manila North Cemetery, a vast landscape of tombs and crosses and silently weeping angels, where most of his characters—so poor they can’t afford a house—live. It’s a marvelous visual conceit, a brilliant coup de theatre: crawling among the mausoleums and monuments of famous dead presidents and statesmen, O’Hara’s little people struggle to survive.”

Vera isn’t just dropping names; he’s locating a work and its director within a certain tradition, to which every work is, in a sense, responsible, and from which every work must also depart. Vera makes us aware of the long continuum and context of filmic thought and practice behind every new project, big or small. No matter how un-serious a movie may be—and we seem to have an inordinate number of these wala-lang productions, hatched on a toilet bowl with a storyline that could fit on the back of a bus ticket—Vera does it the ultimate courtesy of taking it seriously, dispensing praise and damnation with equal gusto and perspicacity. To Vera, the point of a review isn’t to make or break a movie (wisely, because in this country, reviews don’t seem to matter at the till); the point is to understand it, and by doing so, to understand ourselves.

You can’t always agree with Noel’s judgments, which is a sign that he must be doing something right, to have such firm opinions and preferences we can argue with. (The last time I looked, he was an active protagonist in online film forums, where he was taking and giving as much fire as a GI in Iraq.) For example, he makes all the right references to George Orwell, Jose Rizal, shoot-‘em-up video games, and martial law when he discusses the otherwise brilliant Lav Diaz’s Hesus Rebolusyonaryo (2002), without saying what to me seemed all too obvious—that it was overwrought and in parts boring, though doubtlessly important.

The book isn’t just about the strengths and weaknesses of individual Filipino movies. As the title suggests, it’s a review of Philippine cinema as a whole, and Vera completes the picture by devoting useful and informative sections to film festivals, interviews with film personalities, reviews of plays, and Catholic films (e.g., movies about Christ). He has a very interesting list of the 13 most important Filipino films as of 2000 (his top three, in order: 1. Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos; 2. Insiang; 3. Kisapmata.) He takes a look across time periods and genres to discuss films about society, films about sex, films about Manila, and personal visions.

I do have a minor stylistic quibble: Vera (or his Singaporean editor) strangely chooses to italicize only Filipino titles—as in Init sa Magdamag—while leaving English titles in regular roman (such as The Kiss of the Spider Woman). Movies are movies in whatever language, and in my stylebook, their titles should all be italicized, the better to spot them on the page.

Noel’s been invited to the Rotterdam International Film Festival to talk about a small group of Filipino films that he’s written about. Whether we agree with his views and choices or not, we can only wish him well on his personal mission of sharing our filmic vision with the rest of the world.

Critic After Dark is available at Fully Booked, Powerplant Mall; the CCP Bookstore; Datelines Bookstore, Cubao; and Booktopia, Libis, QC. Go pick up a copy and let Noel know what you think at noelbotevera@aol.com.