Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, February 27, 2006



THE LAST time I was down in Puerto Princesa, on Valentine's Day, a huge moon hovered above the ocean, the same swollen disk that may have lit up the sky over Pasig or Penang, driving poets to flights of fancy and lovers to seek the shadows. (I was, alas, alone.)

But whether the gibbous moon at night or the sun silvering the water at break of dawn, every gesture or element of nature in Puerto Princesa seems invested with majesty or preciousness. I joined thousands of young students planting trees in a mangrove forest that morning, and came to understand that to visit Puerto Princesa is to set foot on a long green carpet that leads, one way or another, to an encounter with nature. And we mean “nature” not just in terms of lush forests, speckless waters, and brilliant skies—which the city and the province do have in abundance—but also nature in terms of one’s innermost self, one’s long-lost connections to the bare essentials of body, mind, and spirit.

In Puerto, to live is not simply to survive no matter what; it is to survive and to help others survive as well. Whether we are speaking here of Puerto’s residents, of bearcats and peacocks, of tribespeople in the mountains, of sandaled tourists and expats, of crocodiles and cave-dwelling bats, or of Vietnamese refugees—in Puerto, they all live and thrive together. There is space for all who know how to use and to respect that space, and the other person’s or creature’s space.

It is a large city—indeed, the country’s largest in terms of sheer land area, at 2,539 square kilometers—with a small-town heart. Not too many people actually live in Puerto Princesa—some 160,000 as of the 2000 census, accounting for the lowest population density in the country—but those who do go there tend to stay there, or at least to return, over and over again.

Like any other Philippine city, Puerto Princesa is modernizing, and will continue to adapt itself to the demands and realities of the 21st century. New buildings are sprouting along the stretch of its main street, Rizal Avenue; tricycles and SUVs—with the pickup seeming to be the carriage of choice—hog the highway. Development can’t and won’t be held back. As with nearly any other place on the planet, people and their needs take primacy in planning. But the difference lies in the pervasive awareness among Puerto’s leaders and citizens that balancing their needs with Nature’s is the city’s best path to the future. While Puerto Princesa can never be returned to its pure, primeval past, it can choose—as it has chosen—to embrace nature as its lifelong partner and equal on the journey to growth.

Because of these attractions, Puerto Princesa receives a constant stream of visitors: government and international officials eager to learn from Puerto’s experience, backpacking Europeans and Americans, NGO coordinators and workers, journalists, and fortuneseekers. “We don’t have volcanoes or calamities here,” says Edward S. Hagedorn, the irrepressible mayor of Puerto Princesa. “Knock on wood!” he adds quickly. There’s lots of wood in Puerto Princesa to knock on, but you come to understand that this happy situation, ironically enough, is as much man-made as it is nature’s gift.

Environmentalism has been good business, and business has been getting better with the rise in tourist traffic. Tourist arrivals—mostly domestic—have picked up significantly over the past 15 years, with less than 8,000 visitors recorded in 1991 and nearly 135,000 in 2005 (almost 14,000 of this latter figure came from abroad). The mayor values visitors, both for economic reasons and for the chance to show them how tourism can be welcomed without damaging the environment and the local culture.

But Hagedorn won’t be unnecessarily rushed by the advantages of tourism if it means cutting corners or compromising the very rules and principles that made the city a tourist attraction in the first place. He wants the city to put its best foot forward, to leave the visitor with the firm impression of a city that knows what it’s doing and what it wants. “It got to the point,” Hagedorn says, “that I had to issue a press release discouraging more tourists from coming in before we were adequately prepared.”

The tourists come for such special reasons as the Feast of the Forest in June, and the Fluvial Parade for the Virgin on December 8; or they can come for a day’s business, or a weekend’s break from the urban routine. They come by plane— Puerto Princesa is served by Philippine Airlines (which also flies in planes straight from Seoul, to serve the growing number of Korean tourists), Cebu Pacific, Air Philippines, and SEA Air—and by boat, with three ships arriving weekly, including the Superferry, which disgorges 1,200 passengers a week following a 24-hour voyage from Manila, 580 kilometers to the northeast. Chartered flights also leave Manila daily for El Nido, Taytay, and Busuanga in Northern Palawan.

Given the surge in tourist traffic, the city has been putting up more hotels and inns, catering to a wide range of budgets. At the upper end would be Dos Palmas Resort in Arreceffi Island, featuring 50 rooms, ten of them on houses built right above the water. The object of an unusual assault by Abu Sayyaf terrorists in 2002, the resort has largely recovered, thanks to a Marine detachment now permanently posted on the island, and to the place’s own irresistible charm, which brings in regular boatloads of Korean, Filipino, and other tourists. Also upscale but located in the city are Legend Hotel on Malvar Street with its 103 rooms, and the Asturias Hotel on South National Highway with 58 rooms. But rooms in smaller one-story structures such as Casalinda—apparently the lodging of choice of artists, writers, and movie stars because of its homey friendliness—are a steal at around P500 a night, when available.

Big hotel chains have coveted the beachfront along Honda Bay, but Mayor Hagedorn—exercising prudence on behalf of the general scenery—has enforced a policy limiting all such new structures to no more than three stories. (Similarly, Hagedorn has wisely restricted access to the Underground River—a Unesco World Heritage Site which the city now manages—to 100 visitors a day.)

They’ll keep coming, but Mayor Hagedorn knows that Puerto Princesa’s growth has to be carefully planned and properly paced to avoid the usual traps into which many other presumptive Edens—Bali’s Denpasar, for example, and even Boracay, with its unrestricted sprawl of commercial establishments almost right up to the waterline—have fallen. It’s refreshing even for the incorrigible libertine to discover that Puerto has no red-light district. Seriously. There are, however, first-rate hangouts such as the Hangar for live bands, the Backyard for acoustic music, and Kinabuchs right on the main road, where Puerto’s young set relaxes over billiards and beer.

There’s no doubt that much of Puerto Princesa’s resurgence can be credited to the vision and the energy of Edward S. Hagedorn, the city’s gung-ho mayor and unlikely savior.

With his well-combed pompadour, mestizo looks, and neat moustache, Hagedorn looks like a cross between Erap Estrada and Gringo Honasan. The resemblance goes beyond the physical, and the key lies in the movement of these men from the fringe to the center, in their mutation from outcast to power player.

For a man once feared as a teenage toughie, gambling lord, logger, and survivor of at least two assassination attempts, the two-time mayor of Puerto Princesa, Palawan, can be surprisingly gentle and charming. He speaks with an easy smile and a quiet, slightly raspy voice, the golden pin of a Christian dove bright on the collar of his gray bush jacket. He knows that the past hangs on his shoulders—it is something he has the honesty and the good PR sense not to deny—but he speaks much more enthusiastically about Puerto Princesa’s future, and its own transformation from sleepy island town to a global model for ecotourism, as acknowledged by no less than the United Nations.

Hagedorn appreciates the irony of his situation, and attributes his conversion to a religious faith that he now applies with a fanatic’s fervor to his job. Mayor since 1988, Hagedorn drove his former partners in crime out of the city, set down clear and strict environmentalist policies, especially those having to do with illegal logging, illegal fishing, and waste disposal. Today most of the land within Puerto has been reforested; a “Baywatch” program patrols the water; and a cigarette butt on the open street is about as common as hen’s teeth.

Things haven’t gone Hagedorn’s way all the time, however. When his third term as mayor expired in 2001, he ran for the governorship, but lost. A successful recall petition against the incumbent mayor of Puerto Princesa reopened the door to Hagedorn, who ran for his old job and won it; the Supreme Court declared his victory valid, and he plunged back to work with gusto. But even his brief fall from power resulted in his worst nightmare—the loss of thousands of trees, and the resurgence of dynamite fishing, squatting, and illegal logging. It was a sobering reminder to Hagedorn about the need for reforms to take root more deeply in people’s minds and hearts—and to keep politics and the politicians off the environment. If there’s anyone who can do it, he can—but only with the help of the people he’ll be leaving behind.

Penman for Monday, February 20, 2006



OF ALL THE little skills that go into crafting a fine piece of prose, I most admire a writer’s way of turning out a supple sentence—one that, no matter how short, can seem to go on forever, and, no matter how long, you never want to end.

As the line is poetry’s basic unit, the sentence is the breath of prose. The mastery of the sentence is the writer’s truest hallmark. At the heart of every sentence is a subject and a predicate, and mastery means never losing track of them, and knowing how to put things between one and the other without sacrificing clarity or sense, where every new word can carry its own weight and is an enhancement of the whole.

Now and then I run across a sentence whose beauty—sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle—holds me breathless. Fiction is, of course, replete with such marvels, such memorable lines that resonate well beyond the novels or stories that gave rise to them. These lines often occur at the very beginning or at the very end of things.

There’s that famous opening paragraph—actually one long sentence—of Nick Joaquin’s “May Day Eve,” too long to be reproduced here but peerless in its command of material and mood. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ending to The Great Gatsby lingers long after the book, so accurately and so poignantly does it capture what we cannot resist: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Rather more effusive is Kerima Polotan’s ending to “The Virgin,” where Miss Mijares yields to a man’s touch: “I must get away, she thought wildly, but he had moved and brushed against her, and where his touch had fallen, her flesh leaped, and she recalled how his hands had looked that first day, lain tenderly on the edge of her desk and about the wooden bird (that had looked like a moving, shining dove) and she turned to him with her ruffles wet and wilted, in the dark she turned to him.” The repetition of “she turned to him” emphasizes the action, is the action.

Bobbie Ann Mason begins her story “Shiloh” with a line that’s been called one of American fiction’s most startling, because of its unexpected twist at the end, which turns out to be emblematic of the important reversals of roles that will happen in the story: “Leroy Moffitt’s wife, Norma Jean, is working on her pectorals.” It’s unusually brief, especially for an opening line (though no briefer than “Call me Ishmael”), but it’s invested with potentially explosive power—especially considering that “Leroy” is king (le roi) and “Norma Jean” can’t but recall Marilyn Monroe, the quintessential sex goddess, whose real name it was.

In truth, however, a great sentence shouldn’t even have to make you think or work like that; it should just feel right, or feel significant, for some reason you have yet to divine but can safely assume for the time being.

Some of the sharpest prose can be found not in fiction, but in non-fiction—in the personal essay, the editorial, the political speech (well, much of that’s fiction), the journal entry.

In his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), Thomas de Quincey described what he called his “oriental dreams” thus: “I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.” Writing on the crest of Romanticism, de Quincey may have indulged in the fashionably exotic, but the best writers will always find some wonder in the backyard.

In his musings on “Death in the Open” (in the book The Lives of a Cell), biologist Lewis Thomas observes that “All of the life of the earth dies, all of the time, in the same volume as the new life that dazzles us each morning, each spring. All we see of this is the odd stump, the fly struggling on the porch floor of the summer house in October, the fragment on the highway. I have lived all my life with an embarrassment of squirrels in my backyard, and they are all over the place, all year long, and I have never seen, anywhere, a dead squirrel.”

A few days ago, I was reading Objects of Desire—a book on the American antiques trade by a journalist-historian named Thatcher Freund. It was this sentence that caught my eye and urged me to write this essay: “Decorators tend to see objects in the context of a room, while the eyes of a collector always fall on a single object.” It’s a perfect example of rhetorical balance and contrast—but more to the point, it makes terrific sense.

Obviously, you cannot have a good sentence without a worthwhile thought or insight. The sentence merely shapes the thought in the best way possible, playing with sound as much as sense. The way sentences sound—whether they use short Anglo-Saxon derivatives (like “bleed”) or long Latinate constructions (like “exsanguinate”)—can color our reception and understanding of them.

Long sentences can sound leisurely, knowledgeable, authoritative. The best of them can get drawn out to near infinity like a fine filament, a spider’s handiwork, without breaking.

In her story “Lines,” Lakambini Sitoy writes: “It’s discovering infinitesimal variations in a multitude, a paradox of flavors and textures, like the salmon and capers in that sandwich I once had at The Pen, at once tart and yielding, oozing pleasure onto your tongue.” And note the way the cadence of this sentence from “Self with Dog” by Angelo Lacuesta keeps shifting, but with good reason: “To restore his calm Jorge reminds himself that he is speaking to a middleman, a mercenary, someone who can easily read quick excitement and naïve contemplation, and convert such muddled feelings into passion, even obsession.”

This long sentence from a 1962 speech on “Duty, Honor, Country” (the “they” which is its subject) is made even more remarkable by the fact that it was spoken by a military man, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, from whom one might normally expect terse commands: “They give you a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, an appetite for adventure over love of ease.” (Note the way “appetite for adventure” contrasts syllabically with “love of ease.”)

But sometimes it’s the short line that says as much, if not more. In a triumphal visit to a homeland still under Communist rule in 1983, Pope John Paul II exhorted his countrymen to find value in their suffering: “We do not want a Poland which costs us nothing.” Sitoy ends her story with an all-encompassing “That’s all we look for basically, a little joy.” In her prizewinning “Foggy Makes Me Sad,” Socorro Villanueva describes a couple in Baguio, forced to sit together after an argument, with sure economy and precision: “Mama and Papa were staring blankly at the blur of trees and grass, their faces stiff, their breaths steaming.” Such efficiency is the painterly skill of capturing a condition, an image, or an action with a few deft strokes.

Given a range of options, you can’t go wrong saying and describing things as artlessly as you can—an art in itself—as Villanueva again does in the same story: “Everywhere I looked was the sight of mist descending, of things fading away into nothing, and I panicked at the thought that I would never be found.” (Note the heaviness and finality of the N and D sounds.)

Sentence-making can, of course, be full of pitfalls, not all of them grammatical. Sometimes we mistake lyricism for beauty, overloading a sentence with palpably dazzling images and musical words. Sentences can be too pretty in themselves. Good sentences don’t exist in isolation; they’re good because they blend well with everything else around them, even while maintaining a slightly higher profile. Long or short, they will often juxtapose the concrete with the abstract, or possess elements that produce internal reflections and internal echoes. In my own fiction, there must be two or three sentences I’ve been very happy to have written. One of them comes at the very beginning of a short story titled “Heartland.” I can remember writing this sentence in the early ‘80s with a Bic ballpoint pen on yellow legal pad paper, not knowing why I was writing it this way but feeling that it would set the tone for the story yet to follow. It went: “The dawn broke weakly, like a soldier of a defeated army rising at reveille, for nothing.” My satisfaction hardly gives the sentence merit, but how often can we please ourselves with subjects, predicates, objects, and appositives?

When imagination, insight, precision, and flair come together, then we can have sentences like those E. B. White wrote, in “The Ring of Time,” one of the great discoveries of my freshman year, ages ago:

“The circus comes as close to being the world in a microcosm as anything I know; in a way, it puts all the rest of show business in the shade. Its magic is universal and complex. Out of its wild disorder comes order; from its rank smell rises the good aroma of courage and daring; out of its preliminary shabbiness comes the final splendor. And buried in the familiar boast of its advance agents lies the modesty of most of its people. For me the circus is at its best before it has been put together. It is at its best at certain moments when it comes to a point, as though a burning glass, in the activity and destiny of a single performer out of so many.

“Under the bright lights of the finished show, a performer need only reflect the electric candle power that is directed upon him; but in the dark and dirty old training rings and in the makeshift cages, whatever light is generated, whatever excitement, whatever beauty, must come from original sources—from internal fires of professional hunger and delight, from the exuberance and gravity of youth. It is the difference between planetary light and the combustion of stars.”

Penman for Monday, February 13, 2006



DIALOGUE IS one of the most difficult things to do in fiction, more so in Filipino fiction in English, because of the obvious differences between the way we speak in real life and the way our characters speak on the page.

But before we get into the nuances of the situation, what’s dialogue for, in the first place?

Writers employ dialogue—what the characters say to each other, in an exchange of lines—to add another dimension to those characters as well as to convey information that can move the story forward. In other words, characters don’t just say things because the author can’t think of anything else for them to do, or because the author can’t think of anything else to do. The use of dialogue—where, when, how, between whom, and for how long—is a deliberate authorial decision. As an author, you have to know when to make your characters speak for themselves, and why.

The basic idea behind effective dialogue is that what we say and how we say it tells other people something about who and what we are—whether or not we mean to project that impression. So authors use dialogue as a means of character development, of fleshing out the character beyond our surface of knowledge of him or her.

We can be told that a character is 37, in law school, comes from a small town in Surigao, had entered and then left the seminary earlier, and is hoping to meet the right girl and start a family before turning 40—all of which details are important and helpful in making up our minds whether to sympathize with him or not—but somehow we feel that we can’t really know a person unless and until we’ve heard him speak.

Even the most casual speech says something about the speaker. In John Updike’s “A&P”, three girls dressed (or undressed) for the beach come into a grocery store in a conservative town. Their unexpected entrance provokes a range of responses: “Oh, Daddy, I feel so faint!” from one young man, and “Girls, this isn’t the beach” from the much older, stuck-up store manager.

More emphatically, Miss Mijares in Kerima Polotan’s “The Virgin” uses not just speech but language to create an impression on her seemingly hapless addressee, a carpenter looking for a job:

“Since you are not starving yet,” she said, speaking in English now, wanting to put him in his place, “you will not mind working in our woodcraft section, three times a week at two-fifty to four a day, depending on your skill and the foreman’s discretion, for two or three months after which there might be a call from outside we may hold for you.”

To this the man simply replies: “Thank you.”

People speak in different ways: some use long, elaborate sentences, others curt monotonal phrases; sometimes we use one and sometimes the other, depending on our moods. Those moods can be suggested through dialogue, and it is a test of one’s acuity as a reader as much as of the author’s craft for those moods and attitudes to emerge through the veneer of words. A moment of flirtation is caught by this snippet of repartee from Paz Marquez Benitez’s 1925 story “Dead Stars”, an exchange made even more poignant by the mutual awareness of its transience:

“Mystery—” she answered lightly, “that is so brief—”

“Not in some,” he added quickly, “not in you.”

“You have known me a few weeks; so the mystery.”

“I could study you all my life and still will find it.”

“So long?”

“I should like to.”

Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”—the story I most often use to illustrate masterful technique (and which, interestingly enough, was published just two years after “Dead Stars”)—is almost 80 percent dialogue, and the near-absence of speech tags (those “he said, she said” indicators of who said what) doesn’t make it any easier to palpate a complex dramatic situation from so seemingly simple a conversation. Hemingway sets up quick exchanges like the following—using the plainest words, but endowing them with deep, unspoken meanings:

“We can have everything.”

“No, we can’t.”

“We can have the whole world.”

“No, we can’t.”

“We can go everywhere.”

“No, we can’t. It isn’t ours any more.”

“It’s ours.”

“No, it isn’t. And once they take it away, you never get it back.”

In a sense, the art of dialogue is the art of saying just enough, and always leaving something for the reader to fathom, without being too arty or contrived about it. Good dialogue never says too much. Dialogue is the worst place for sheer exposition, the kind of information overload that anxious or incapable writers inflict on their readers, such as when two characters bump into each other in a less than reputable bar and say:

“Oh, hi, Frankie, fancy meeting you here! What’s a successful man like you with an accounting and a law degree and a plum job as the CEO of one of the country’s biggest corporations—not to mention a pretty wife and such lovely children—doing in a place like this?”

“Well, Joey, I didn’t expect to see you here, either, you fat, balding, gout-ridden fifty-two-year old! Aren’t you supposed to be enlightening the young as a professor of humanities instead of pawing these rice farmers’ daughters? What was that you said when we were both undergraduates and members of the Libertarian Society? Ah, ‘The exploitation of poverty is worse than poverty itself!’”

As this same example shows, gratuitous speechifying is another sign of bad dialogue, and it happens when a writer can’t resist grabbing the microphone from his or her character and spewing out some atrociously philosophical line. Again, remember: fiction operates best through indirection—by treating and representing human experience obliquely but concretely, rather than through frontal encounters with grand abstractions like “love”, “justice”, and “freedom”, although all of them may be at the heart of the story’s concerns. The writer needs no mouthpiece character; the story itself, as a whole, is the writer’s mouthpiece.


Now, to the peculiarities of our situation as Filipino writers of dialogue in English. Generally speaking, we don’t and really can’t complain when a Japanese character says (as one does in “The Handstand” by Ogawa Mimei, translated by Ivan Morris), “A good job? Hell, there’s no such thing as a good job! It’s all a lot of sweat! If anyone thinks it’s fun making a living, he’s crazy.” We accept the statement unquestioningly, knowing that it’s foreign material to begin with, only translated into English. We don’t flinch when we watch a local English production of, say, “The Cherry Orchard” by Anton Chekhov, knowing that these are Russian characters played by Filipino actors speaking in translation.

It’s much more difficult to suspend our disbelief when it comes to dealing with Filipino characters in Filipino stories speaking in English—probably and precisely because we do speak some English some of the time, but not all the time, and certainly not flawlessly all of the time. In other words, it’s hard to tell whether Filipino dialogue in English is meant to be taken literally or as something translated from, presumably, Filipino or some other local language. Paradoxically, the pretense of realism fails at the very point when the characters begin speaking “real” or “correct” English.

It isn’t too much of a problem when the characters are middle-class Filipinos (as they predictably are in most of our stories) who normally speak in English, albeit in an English heavily inflected with local words and local usage. The gap between language and the reality it supposedly represents becomes most disconcertingly obvious when poor, unschooled, or even illiterate characters begin holding forth in impeccable English.

On the other hand, why the heck not? A Filipino master like the late NVM Gonzalez took this particular bull by the horns and had a character like the midwife Tia Orang in “Children of the Ash-Covered Loam” say “Do you know what happened to his wife as well? The woman was with child, and when she was about to deliver, the misfortune came. No child came forth, but when the labor was done, there were leeches and nothing else!”

Artificial? Of course. But by drawing attention to the artifice, Gonzalez habituates us to it, relaxes us, and—in an important political decision—invests his lowly characters with a nobility and integrity of expression, liberating them from the banality and inarticulateness that have marked stereotypical representations of the poor.

For his part, the late Freddie Salanga did away with quotation marks altogether, on the premise that nothing his Filipino characters ever said could have been a direct quotation, anyway.

My own solution—a not entirely successful one—has been to make my characters speak as plainly as possible, only when they need to, and almost always to suggest something more than what they’re saying. I also try to prime my readers for the inevitable dialogue with long descriptive passages, just to get them used to the fact that this is a Filipino sensibility finding a voice in English.

It’s interesting in this respect to recall the astounding claim that NVM once made (recalled for us by Gani Cruz) that what he was really doing was to “write in Tagalog—using English words.” That’s the artistic challenge—and the artistic opportunity—we have to face in producing sharp, credible, and memorable dialogue.

Penman for Monday, February 6, 2006



AFTER DROWNING you in 21st century gimmicks and gizmos all January, I’m going to take you down Memory Lane this week, realizing that three separate items I’d noted down all have something to do with taking a long, leisurely leap to the past. I know, I know—nostalgia’s a cheap emotion, an easy fix for today’s disquiets and tomorrow’s uncertainties, and it’s about as close to enlightenment as a witticism is to wisdom. But what the heck, I’m sure most of you will agree that we deserve a break, any break, from the present, such as it is.

For a few hours a couple of weekends ago, the average age in Cubao in and around the Araneta Coliseum must have been no lower than 40—and that, only because many people pushing 55 had dragged their kids along to give them a glimpse into what their own vanished youth was like.

The immediate reason for this virtual seminar of seniors was the concert of the Lettermen—the “Backstreet Boys of the ‘60s”, by their own admission. Only one of the three original Lettermen (Tony Butala, Mike Barnett, and Talmadge Russell, who got together in 1958) remains—that’s Tony Butala, now accompanied by Donovan Tea, who came onboard in 1984, and Mark Preston, who joined up the same day as Donovan but who spent a few years outside the group before returning just this month.

(No, I didn’t go through my adult life knowing all these intimate details about three guys with falsetto voices and big, gelled hair. There’s actually a Lettermen website at www.thelettermen.com where you can get the whole history of exactly who the Lettermen were, exactly when. While you’re at it, you can join the New Millennium Lettermen Society Fan Club and get an 8” x 10” autographed picture you can put next to your mom’s.)

I’m sure that our kids could write prizewinning essays about why the Lettermen are decidedly uncool in these days of Eminem. But you know what? That particular Saturday evening, there must have been 15,000 of us semi-arthritic baby boomers who didn’t care. Depending on which corner of the crowd you were looking at, it felt like a CMLI convention in 1969, or a Welcome Rotonda rally in 1971. It would’ve been perfect if I’d come in my purple oversized “Amboy” shirt, my slinkiest pants, white cotton socks, and Hush Puppies (an outfit that readers like Auggie Surtida and Peewee Leynes—who, predictably, was there—can surely relate to). We’d flocked to the Big Dome (I got towed along by Beng and her UPHS ’67 barkada) to relive high-school, pang-swit staples like “Warm,” “Put Your Head on My Shoulder,” and “Shangri-La”; but I suspect the girls remembered the misty romance and the boys something a little more concrete.

It may be a mystery to many why a song like “The Seventh Dawn”—which made hardly a ripple on the music scene anywhere else—could be almost an anthem to Filipinos, its iconic status confirmed by the fact that it was the penultimate song on the program (just before “Dahil Sa Iyo” and the encore pieces, “MacArthur’s Park”, “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, and “I Believe”). But a good time was had by all, thanks to the trio’s superb showmanship and our own fevered memories. The show ended with the velvet darkness spangled by a thousand points of light (a.k.a. cellphones) swaying in the kind of “Kumbaya”-inspired arc that would make my rocker-friend Fidel (who might similarly wax nostalgic over Metallica) positively gag.

But again, did we care? The Lettermen brought us back to a time when songs could be sung—not just by your lonesome, but with your shing-a-ling-loving posse, in three-part harmony.



LAST SATURDAY afternoon, a very unusual march would have taken place around the Academic Oval in UP Diliman. (I’m uncertain, as of this writing, if I can be there as I dearly wish to.) The march was to mark the 35th anniversary of the Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan (SDK)—which, along with the Kabataang Makabayan (KM), figured prominently in the First Quarter Storm as something the military routinely denounced as a “communist front organization.” Some ex-SDK members will soon be coming out with a commemorative book, to which I contributed the following memoir:

I joined the SDK almost as soon as I entered UP in 1970, through what I later realized was the normal recruitment route—first, membership in the more innocuous Nationalist Corps, then integration into SDK itself. Rightly or wrongly (wrongly, as it turned out), SDK appealed to me as being somehow just as militant but groovier, to use a word from that time, than the fire-breathing, roughshod KM.

A lot of the people I knew and idolized were with SDK—Gary Olivar, Tony Tagamolila, Mario Taguiwalo, Rey Vea—writers and editors all of whom I, a couple of years their junior, wanted to follow. Some members were also fraternity brothers in Alpha Sigma—Benny Tiamzon and Joey Calderon, most notably. I felt I was in the best company; these guys (and some very nice gals) couldn’t possible go wrong. I was small fry then (and remained small fry), too young to be in on the big discussions, but it impressed me to overhear people like Vic David and Titus de Borja chat about the “18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte.” I was good only for Mao and the Five Golden Rays.

I remember a blur of HQs—Scout Castor, Arayat, an apartment near Sulo Hotel—but our favorite hangout was the “Trialogue,” a small room at the far left end of Vinzons Hall. At this time my family lived very close by—we were squatters on Old Balara—but I liked spending time at the Trialogue, watching Willie Tañedo draw figures for flyers and streamers (I recall being entranced—with horror and fascination—by Willie’s depiction of Francis Sontillano’s splattered brain).

I fancied myself a propagandist and had had some training in theater with PETA, so I signed up for what was then Dulaang Sadeka as soon as it was formed, and even joined a chorus that performed a piece from Brecht—can’t remember now which one it was, exactly—in whiteface at the ALEC. This was even before Gintong Silahis emerged as SDK’s cultural arm, and even before Brecht had to be set aside for being too bourgeois in favor of more overt Peking-Opera-style tableaus.

It was exhilarating to be in as many rallies and demos as possible, to be right there in the thick of the Diliman Commune, to march with a thousand others from Los Baños to Manila, to actually carry a small Beretta in a hollowed-out Bible, Godfather-style, for Tony Tagamolila at the CEGP conference (not that I would have known what to do with it; I’d never fired a shot in my life, and still never have).

There were, of course, deaths and betrayals to contend with, especially as martial law approached and took over the landscape. The bloated face and mutilated body of my tocayo Butch Landrito has stayed with me all these years, and the last time I counted all the people I personally knew who died in the FQS, I came up with 21, and certainly there were more, too many more. There was this one time, early during martial law, when I found myself in a UG house with people who’ve all passed on—Tony Hilario (with his trademark way of holding a cigarette between the tip of his fingers), journalist Henry Romero (technically a desaparecido), and Jack Peña (ever the Ilonggo, railing against imperiali-sum and the o-well price hike). Ironically, I may have been saved by being arrested in January 1973 and spending the next seven months in Fort Bonifacio.

And so I live on, we live on, as the articulate survivors, a little yellow star imprinted in some imperishable corner of our graying minds.



MY RECENT mention of photographer Ben Razon and his Malate restaurant hangout, the Oarhouse (I know; it rhymes with, uhm, “dormouse”), provoked this reverie from another regular reader, Freddie Santos:

Hi, Mr. D! Kung hei fat choy! You mentioned Oarhouse. Aaahhhh, at least in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, this was my Macworld. Situated a door away from Hobbit House, this was the place to be when you couldn't afford Cafe Adriatico.

Given that, most Repertory Theater people could be found there on any given weeknight (we performed weekends), and the main reasons were:

1. Carrie (the original co-owner) who was always, always, always happy to see you... which was really nice after a night of Zeneida Amador [I’m sure Freddie means that in the fondest way—BD];

2. Jan10, the bartender, so named because that was his birthday;

3. Eggplant lasagna, yummy, cheap and weird because ‘til that time, we were only familiar with pasta layers;

4. The artists—people like Oscar Salita and Ibarra, who hung out there to gab about heart and art;

5. And most importantly, bumper pool!!! This was one of only two in existence in the country (how would I know that? I don't but it sounds so good when said that way). In all my years of going there, there was but one tournament held. We all signed up. I won. For one night in my life, beating the more experienced Salita, I was Paul Newman.

Carrie and her dear American husband had to move to the States and sold the place to Jun Medina. His son took over the bar and a new treat was added to the menu, callos. Por dios, por santo, que rico!

I’m not sure who owns it now but I hope that when you go, you will still find vestiges of a Malate that was not so out and out as it is now but bohemian enough to harbor and hide lost thoughts in an artistic storm.

Many thanks as ever, Freddie, for your own callos-flavored memories.