Category Archives: Fun

Qwertyman No. 106: For Our National Peace of Mind

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Qwertyman for Monday, August 12, 2024

FOR A country starved for heroes, Carlos Yulo’s double-gold performance at the Olympics provided a sumptuous feast—a bacchanalian one, to use probably the newest and most notorious word in many people’s vocabulary. In one YouTube replay after another, we marveled at his seemingly magical flips and tumbles, and our eyes welled with tears when the Philippine anthem played over the stadium’s loudspeakers.

The euphoria effectively drowned out the previous week’s near-manic howls over the controversial Dionysian tableau of the opening ceremonies and the chorus proclaiming Paris as the most evil and corrupt city on the planet. Suddenly Paris acquired a golden halo; Yulo was beatified on social media as the exemplar of perseverance and tough-mindedness, and rightly so. His feat—sterling victories achieved despite overwhelming odds—was unprecedented and not likely to be equaled by another non-hyphenated Pinoy anytime soon.

But no sooner had Filipinos united in that moment of jubilation than they, almost by instinct, found cause to divide once again, this time over one’s choice of villainess in poor Caloy’s life: the bitter mother or the sexy girlfriend, behind either one of whom platoons of supporters rallied. Team Nanay exalted motherhood and filial piety above all else; Team GF cheered for the pursuit of happiness. Who will get to the podium remains to be seen.

I’m sure Caloy Yulo isn’t alone in his predicament. An assiduous journalist just has to comb through the life stories of all the 400+ gold medalists in the Paris Olympics to discover that 87.93 percent of them have problems with mothers, fathers, girlfriends, boyfriends, siblings, in-laws, best friends, neighbors, and pets. (For these, I would look most closely into places like Uzbekistan, Uganda, and, yes, Italy, where families seem to be big and noisy.) Statistically speaking, there has to be a champion shotputter or a synchronized swimmer somewhere whose miserable mama hates his shapely squeeze. (I’ve even heard someone posit over breakfast coffee that maybe EJ Obiena needed a mother/girlfriend problem to clear the bar at 6.0 meters.)

The big difference is that no one goes to town with family dramas quite like us Pinoys, especially Pinoys with social-media accounts normally given to showing off what they just ate or their OOTD. To show, at least once in a while, that there’s actually a thinking and feeling person behind the avatar (and online, feeling equals thinking), we post a strong opinion—never mind that it’s the millionth repost of someone else’s meme. We find it important—nay, obligatory—to take sides on vital issues (that do not include PISA scores, ICC probes, or jeepney modernization). We have to decide if the mother or the girlfriend is at fault; our national peace of mind depends on it. Never mind what Caloy Yulo himself thinks—this is bigger than him (like most things are).

And this is just the beginning, although it’s inextricably tied in with the next big question that 115 million Filipinos have to grapple with: what should Caloy do with all his money? (I don’t even want to think about whether he should go into showbiz or politics next—my friend Ige Ramos’ post on those prospects was probably the sanest of the past week, and one Caloy would do well to heed.)

In addition to all the lifetime supplies of ramen, litson manok, and colonoscopies that come with being a Pinoy Olympic laureate, will it be too much to offer Caloy Yulo a lifetime supply of peace? It costs nothing but our willful silence.

Seriously now, silence is a virtue, and withholding opinion can be as valuable and as helpful as giving one. It doesn’t mean you’re dumb or uncaring. On the contrary, it might mean that you know enough to understand that staying out of the fray and keeping your thoughts to yourself is the more sensible if not kinder option. But we Pinoys, the reigning world usisero and pakialamero champions, have never been known for excessive self-restraint, which manifests only when the neighbor’s wife is being beaten senseless by her husband (“Wala tayong kinalaman diyan”) or when witnesses are called to testify to their boss’ or their congressman’s misdeeds.

Sadly, social media has empowered everyone from nitwits to geniuses (and of course, everyone thinks of himself or herself as a genius, especially the nitwit) to hold forth on every conceivable subject, even and especially if the issue at hand is none of one’s bloody business. 

I say that with the ironic awareness that we opinion writers do pretty much the same thing, with some sort of official license; we even get paid for it. Indeed we may even be the ultimate pakialamero, poking our noses into all manner of secrets and scandals, particularly the government variety (or maybe not me, because I don’t hobnob with politicians or their secretaries, and so am useless when it comes to the saucy stuff). But the difference is that having to write 1,000 words instead of a ten-word tweet, we actually have to stop to think about how we feel, to contextualize, and perhaps even to decide that we have nothing truly important or useful or even amusing to say about the matter, and so should move on to something else.

At least Caloy can rest assured that given the nature of the beast, this tempest will blow over soon. (Is anyone still posting about the Last Supper? That’s so last-week!) And before too long, he can rightfully enjoy the pommel horse in his P32-million condo. Wait—it does have a pommel horse, right? If not, it should! What do you think?

(Photo from rappler.com)

Penman No. 465: Back to the Nineties

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Penman for Sunday, August 11, 2024

AMONG THIS year’s most interesting new books is one that’s neither a novel nor a political exposé, but a musical chronicle of a decade that many Filipinos now look back on with a certain nostalgia, albeit for different reasons—the 1990s.

Say “the Nineties,” and a range of responses will come to mind depending on how old you were then. For today’s seniors, the core of it was likely FVR’s infectious optimism over “Philippines 2000,” the relative stability we had gained after the anti-Cory coups and in anticipation of our centennial in 1998. For those younger but old enough to drink beer, it was the age of the Eraserheads, Clubb Dredd, the ‘70s Bistro, and Mayric’s, an explosion of OPM like we had seen back in the 1970s but with a harder and sharper edge.

It’s that latter scenario—set against the context of our transition from Cory to FVR to Erap—that’s captured in Susan Claire Agbayani’s landmark Tugtugan Pamorningan: The Philippine Music Scene 1990-1999 (University of the Philippines Press, 2024, part of the Philippine Writers Series of the UP Institute of Creative Writing). An indefatigable cultural journalist, publicist, and sometime concert producer (and also, I must proudly admit, my former student), Claire was among the very few writers who could have undertaken this job (Eric Caruncho, Jessica Zafra, and Pocholo Concepcion, all of whom she cites, would have been the others). 

Comprehensively, the book’s chapters cover bars and concerts, the music scene, personality profiles, duos and trios, pop/jazz/R&B/show bands, alternative/rock bands, the Eraserheads (yes, a chapter all to their own), Mr. and Mss. Saigon, and visiting acts, rounded out by a gallery of period pics.

As a compilation of pieces from Claire’s reportage at that time, the book revives not only the music but also the issues besetting the industry then, such as Sen. Tito Sotto’s wanting to ban the Eraserheads song “Alapaap” for supposedly promoting drug abuse. Priceless vignettes abound, such as that of Basil Valdez singing “Ama Namin” to composer George Canseco’s wife over the phone, three days before she died, and of Ely Buendia telling Nonoy Zuñiga that he had won a singing competition in school with the latter’s “Doon Lang.” We learn about Humanities teacher and all-around performer Edru Abraham’s Lebanese ancestry and how it connects him to world music.

The best scenes, I think, are the saddest ones, such as this piece on a jazz diva:

“She goes around greeting the waiters, then the manager. At last, she sits on a stool, and croons ‘Left Alone,’ the song after which the bar was named. She closes her eyes, closed them more tightly as a couple walks out in the middle of her song. The waiters laugh loudly in the background, occupied with their own concerns. Those who remain inside the bar talk not in whispers. No, they don’t know her. They don’t know Annie Brazil.”

But ultimately it’s the music, the sheer variety and vitality of it, that surges through, so innate to the Filipino and so necessary. If there were an Olympics for music, we’d make the podium in all the categories, and Tugtugan Pamorningan reminds us why. As the title implies, it’s a nightlong festival for us when the music starts. But like night itself, even the Nineties came to an end, with the 2000s bringing in MP3, iTunes, and Spotify, and somehow the smoky, small-bar intimacy that the previous decade connoted gave way to Taylor Swift mega-concerts that people actually flew out to instead of taking a taxi.

I contributed an afterword to the book, so here’s a bit more of what I had to say:

I was a bit too old by the time the ‘90s came along to experience it in the way Claire has so capably and faithfully chronicled in this book, but still young enough to imbibe its energy and its excesses. I was 36 in 1990, finishing my PhD in the States, and when I returned to Manila the following year after five years of being away, I found a radically different scene from the one I’d left just after EDSA. I had a lot to adjust to, and somehow San Miguel beer and the city’s new nightlife seemed to ease those pains, at least until the next morning. 

That was how, despite being too old to know the Eraserheads and their music, I managed to stumble once or twice into Club Dredd, Mayrics, the ‘70s Bistro, and a few other meccas mentioned here, but mostly just out of curiosity. I guess I was looking for something else, and found it on Timog Avenue with my partners-in-crime Charlson Ong and Arnold Azurin, finishing up with some coffee or a beer for the road at Sam’s Diner on Quezon Avenue at 3 am. I wasn’t even a Penguin person—I never thought of myself as being hip or cool—and I preferred hanging out with journos after work in that kebab place on Timog.

That was my life as a barfly—which was also how my newspaper column got that title—and its soundtrack consisted of Basia, Bryan Adams, and “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” I wasn’t much into bands—no one could beat the Beatles—and OPM for me meant APO and Louie Ocampo, whose songs were singable and could make me smile, which I needed a lot. It was a wild time, when I was smoking and drinking and messing around town in my white VW, courting disaster, until one day I found my way home and decided to stay there forever.

That makes the ‘90s sound like some kind of inferno, but now that I think about it, it was the last gasp of innocence before the 2000s and everything we associate with it—9/11, GMA and Erap, the Internet, the iPod, social media, K-pop, tokhang, Trump, the pandemic, the Marcos restoration, and AI—came in. There was a simple-mindedness even to our vices then; truth was truth, fake was fake, and it was easy to tell one from the other. It was rough and raw in many ways—even our 14.4K modems screeched like cats in heat when they connected—but we still got wide-eyed about the possibility of extra-terrestial menace in The X-Files, and we may even have believed that FVR’s “Philippines 2000” was going to be a better place even as we got worried sick over what Y2K would bring, so there remained a tender spot of credulity in us.

That’s all gone now, like Jacqui Magno’s voice, replaced by CGIs, deep fakes, and other synthetics produced by FaceMagic and ChatGPT. 

I can’t honestly say that I miss the ‘90s, and I feel much relieved to have survived them, but there’d be a huge hole in my life—and in the nation’s—if they didn’t happen. What’s in that hole is what’s in the music Claire writes about—and the music often gets it better than even we writers can.

Qwertyman No. 105: Pronouns and Parodies

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Qwertyman for Monday, August 5, 2024

SOME DAYS, I swear, when I open my Facebook feed, I’m met by a flood of vexatious opinion certain to trigger my worst reflexes. Much as I’m tempted to respond, I rarely do, knowing that FB comments don’t really soften hearts and minds, but only make them harder. Also, I’m not the witty sort with one-liners that will go viral; my thoughts and words like to ramble and even lose their way, but at least you know it’s not AI or the “Forward” button at work.

Two topics did get me worked up a bit last week, and I’m going to use this column to write the kind of longish social-media comment no one will read. You’ll recognize both issues instantly if you haven’t been living under a rock.

The first was that picture of a seated gay “personality” (I’m never quite sure how persons become “personalities”) lecturing a waiter standing at parade-rest, reportedly for two hours, on gender sensitivity, all because he called her “Sir.” 

There’s a part of me that understands how and why that happened. Some will call this silly wokeness, but in UP, we take our students’ preferred pronouns and names seriously as a sign of respect for the person. 

But what I also know is, when I teach, I stand and my students sit. That’s not to emphasize my authority, but so they can relax, listen, and hopefully imbibe what I’m telling them. I realize that the lady said she invited the waiter to sit down, but I also understand why he declined. Staff don’t sit for a chummy chat with customers. And imagine this: if I (an old man, dirty or not) were the customer and I felt poorly served by a female employee, and I asked her to sit at my table for two hours while I educated her on the finer points of etiquette, would or should she oblige? And I hate listening to or giving long lectures. If I can’t get something across in twenty minutes max, then I’m a lousy teacher.

There’s politics which can be good and right—and people who may not be. Some of the most politically savvy people I’ve met have also been, as some would say, that part of you where the sun don’t shine. 

The other hot topic, of course, was the “Last Supper” tableau at the opening ceremonies of the Olympics in Paris, which allegedly mocked the Lord and Christianity itself by replacing Jesus and his apostles at the long table with a raft of drag queens and other presumably degenerate characters. 

I never saw so many Christians and especially Catholics (some of them my good friends) come out of the woodwork to profess their outrage at what they took to be willful sacrilege. And predictably, like wolves sniffing out red meat, many more friends from the other side piled on the “offendees” with mini-treatises on Bacchus and bacchanals, pagan elements in Christian ritual, art criticism, the French mentality and sensibility, and such other topics worthy of dissertations.

Now, as I’ve often confessed in this column (maybe losing five readers and FB friends every time I bring it up; in this context, maybe more), I’m not much of a churchgoer, and have continuing issues with the religion I was born into—and with all of organized religion for that matter, despite growing up in Catholic school. I prefer to pray on my own. I have nothing against people who stay in the fold, go to Mass regularly, post daily proverbs on Viber, and believe in the Bible as the one and only true source of, well, the truth. If their faith keeps them whole and happy—and I can see in many cases that it does—then well and good. Some may be hypocrites, but I’m sure many or most aren’t—and there are hypocrites as well (and worse) among apostates like me.

But back to Paris. What I’m not going to say is, “You shouldn’t have been offended.” If you were, you were. Even if you later changed your mind after listening to all the learned explanations (to some, I’m sure, excuses), the fact is, you saw something you didn’t like. (I just have to wonder—how many people responded directly to the tableau itself, and how many were nudged into seeing it and later objecting by another post screaming, “Hey, you have to see this! Look what they’ve done to Jesus!”? It works the same way on the right and on the left: a meme cascades swiftly down the Internet, and people react viscerally even before they can think.) 

Sure, the “Last Supper” is only a painting by one Leonardo da Vinci, that smart Italian fellow who also imagined flying machines, tanks, and other wonderful contraptions—so why not Jesus’ last meal? (I don’t think there’s an exact record in any of the four Gospels about how the scene was blocked for thirteen characters, except that Christ very likely sat in the middle for better reach, and certainly nobody knows who sat next to whom and leaned over whom. Some depictions down the centuries don’t even use a straight table but an inverted U, or have everyone reclining on mats and pillows, or sitting in a circle.) But even images and objects have symbolic meaning and power, so it’s easy to get hopping mad if someone, say, spits on a painting of your grandmother, or turns it into an unflattering cartoon. 

I do share the consternation over why a hyper-expensive and PR-conscious global enterprise like the Olympics would risk alienating half of France and a third of the world (presuming all Christians took umbrage at the Blue Guy) by—according to the charge sheet—deliberately, premeditatedly, and maliciously mounting a patently anti-Christian production for the whole planet to see. I know the French eat strange things like sheep testicles and have a law requiring skimpy trunks and head caps (yes, even if you’re bald) in public pools, but really now, mock the Last Supper? Sacré Dieu! (Or, excuse me, let’s use the milder sacré bleu!)

Given all of that, my only question is, where was all the outrage when that President was joking about raping captive nuns and cursing the Pope? And speaking of the Renaissance and the power of representation, remember that Pieta-like photograph of a grieving mother cradling her murdered son at the height of that same President’s tokhang campaign, that President who called Catholic bishops “gay SOBs”? Where was all the righteousness? But maybe we’re just getting started. There’ll be FB accounts I’ll be checking in on, the next time something wildly repulsive happens.

(Image from arnoldzwicky.org–Please condemn him. not me!)

Penman No. 464: A Fantasy Memoir

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Penman for Sunday, July 7, 2024

THE AUTHOR calls his book a “fantasy memoir,” and if it’s a genre you’re not familiar with, you wouldn’t be alone. Or maybe that’s just because you’re a dour and straight septuagenarian like me who doesn’t go out too much, watches true-crime shows to relax, and presses his pants and shines his shoes because, well, that’s the way it should be. I later googled the term, just to see what’s out there, and much to my surprise, it does exist—a genre defined by “imagination, escapism, and dreams,” with the stipulation that these fantasies, or products of the mind, are just as valid as memory in recreating one’s life.

Thankfully, from the cover onward, Michael Gil Magnaye’s La Vie en Pose makes it purpose clear to the most casual and non-literary of readers: to have fun—while raising some very serious questions on the side about who and what we are (or pretend to be), what poses we ourselves assume, consciously or not, in our everyday lives, and how our identities are constructed by something so simple as what we wear.

La Vie en Pose is one of those rare books one can truly call “inspired,” resulting from the kind of half-crazy “What if?” lightbulb moment that strikes you over your tenth bottle of beer at 3 in the morning. Unlike many such flashes, this one stayed with Gil, took firmer shape, and turned into a virtual obsession—a first book to be completed by his 60th birthday, not just any book, not one of dry prose between the covers, but one certain to make a personal statement for the ages.

Magnaye, who works as an advisor to an international NGO, describes the book as “a fantasy memoir told in a hundred photographs of the author in costume, striking a pose around the world. Designed and photographed over a decade, these vignettes depict media celebrities, politicians, literary characters and wholly fictitious figures drawn from Magnaye’s fertile imagination. The collection offers satirical, often hilarious commentary on noteworthy personalities in pop culture, politics and history, from Game of Thrones to Bridgerton, from Jackie Onassis to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”

Divided into eight chapters and edited by the celebrated Fil-Am writer Marivi Soliven, the book takes Gil around the world (none of this is AI—the photography took many years and plane flights to complete), posing in various locales and contexts, often in costume, to mimic or to pay homage to familiar figures and situations. The pop-culture setups will likely elicit the most laughs and smiles—Tina Turner, Maria von Trapp, and of course Barbie all get their comeuppance—and the UP Oblation poses (thankfully just backsides) show the malayong lupain that our iskolars ng bayan have reached (Gil studied and taught Humanities in UP before going to Stanford for his master’s). The levity aside, he strikes thoughtful, almost architectural, poses against spare backdrops. He draws his husband Roy, a normally reticent software engineer, into take-offs on couples (Ari and Jackie, Ennis and Jack). The effect is both riotous and reflective, a visual essay on how pop and political culture have overwhelmed us, but also how we have appropriated and domesticated them for our own purposes, if only to say, “Hey, I can be as good that!”

The poet and queer theorist J. Neil Garcia explains it better in this note he posted online about the 30thanniversary of the landmark Ladlad anthology he co-edited with Danton Remoto: “Queer creativity is itself an integral component of the equality message, and not simply a means to an end. Since the freedom of the imagination is perhaps where all freedom begins, it is clear that giving the queer artist the power or the ability to create their own texts and art works needs to be seen as a vital objective of the equality movement, one of whose primary interests must be in securing this imaginative and/or cognitive ability above all. Hence, we need to insist on the truth that queer creativity isn’t simply a tool to promote the equality message and other activist agendas; rather, queer creativity itself is part of the agenda—is part of the equality message itself (and so, queer creativity is not just a means to an end; quite crucially, as the best evidence and enactment we have of individual and collective agency, even against the harshest of odds, it is an end, in itself).”

For Gil—whom I was friends with back when he still had a girlfriend and confronting his sexuality—the book is more than a personal celebration (he launched it in UP last June 23 to mark his 60th birthday); it’s also an assertion of his rights as a queer (the preferred term these days to “gay”) person—and by extension, of all other LGBTQ+ people as well—to express themselves creatively. In his introduction, he notes that “This book is born at a fraught moment in gender politics. Some states in the US have passed legislation that attacks transgender youth for their chosen wardrobe or preferred pronouns. A drag artist in the Philippines has been jailed for performing an irreverent dance interpretation of a Catholic hymn. Such adverse events would seem to suggest that cross-dressing is an act of subversion. I would argue that cross-dressing and mimicry are strategies that drag queens, drag kings, non-binary performers, and gender benders employ to resist, challenge, navigate, and extricate themselves from systems imposed by traditional constructs. And it’s a lot of fun.”

La Vie en Pose most surely is. Copies might still be available at the UP Center for Women’s and Gender Studies.

Penman No. 461: A Parisian Interlude

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Penman for Sunday, April 7, 2024

WHY IS it that just when you think you’ve begun to figure out a foreign city’s transport system, it’s time to come home? That happened again barely two weeks ago when my wife Beng and I flew to France for some speaking engagements in Paris and Le Havre. We were there for work, not tourism, and more work waited for us as well back home, so we couldn’t stay for as long as we would have wanted to. We’d been to Paris three times before and had done the obligatory Louvre and Eiffel Tower visits, but it almost seems criminal not to linger and loiter around such a beautiful city.

We were there at the invitation of SciencesPo, France’s leading social sciences university, for a series of talks on Philippine literature and art. Along with France-based writer Criselda Yabes, I gave a reading as well at the Philippine embassy in Paris at the behest of our most gracious ambassador, Mme. Junever “Jones” Mahilum-West, an avid amateur painter and supporter of Philippine culture. Our host at SciencesPo, Dr. Pauline Couteau, also arranged some events for us at their campus in Le Havre and sponsored a special screening of Lino Brocka’s classic “Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag” at the Entrepot Theater in Paris.

It was a hectic week that left these footloose septuagenarians exhausted but exhilarated at the same time, warmed up in France’s unseasonably chilly weather (often falling below 10C) by the enthusiasm of our new friends, both French and fellow Filipinos. 

Again, however, we had a sweet problem to deal with even before we flew to Paris: with such little time left on our schedule for more casual diversions, what places or experiences would we put on top of our list for our relaxation and amusement, given Paris’ almost inexhaustible offerings of wonder and delight?

Anthony Bourdain, bless his soul, famously advised short-term visitors to Paris not to make a mad dash to try and see everything all at once, but to just relax, have coffee, imbibe the neighborhood culture, stay in bed (and for those able and inclined, make love). Beng and I recalled, with both fondness and regret, how we had first seen Paris a quarter-century earlier from the back of a bus on a 99-pound budget tour from our base then in Norwich, England. The bus went by the city’s landmarks so fast that Beng missed Rodin because she was in the on-board restroom then. Subsequent visits afforded us a bit more time to see the Mona Lisa (of course) and to go up the Eiffel Tower (of course) but our happiest memories came, as Bourdain suggested, from just walking in the city gardens and along the Seine.

This time, we decided to do just two things with our limited free time: visit one museum, and hit the flea markets. This follows a pattern that Beng and I have observed over decades of traveling together, from Amsterdam, Barcelona, and London to New York, Tokyo, and Shanghai. The museums capture and preserve the glory of the past, and if you’re lucky, rather than pay for made-in-China miniatures at the museum gift shop, you can find some genuine article from that past in the flea market. 

Our choice of museum was easy: Paris has dozens of fantastic museums—and you’ll never, ever finish the entire Louvre in one visit—but the great one we’d never been to was the Musée d’Orsay, the former train station that’s become France’s cathedral of Impressionism. Finally, this time, in the few hours we had just before boarding the train to Le Havre, we managed to step into the Musée d’Orsay, and what a divine experience e that was, to find room after room filled by the masterworks of Renoir, Monet, Manet, Seurat, Degas, Redon, Courbet, and so on, like walking into a book of pictures. 

Understandably, hundreds of other people had the same idea, so the best time to visit may have been after 6 pm—the museum closes at 9:45—when admission rates are also cheaper. Not a few friends have remarked that they found the Musée d’Orsay much better than the Louvre, perhaps because of its relative compactness and its delivery of proven crowd-pleasers in its collection.

Our flea-market sorties proved just as wondrous, with the additional thrill of unpredictability, as each table will be different from the one before it and you need a quick, trained eye to spot the jewel in the junkyard. As flea-market addicts from decades back when we used to scour the yard sales and antique barns of the American Midwest for things we could drag home, Beng and I have developed a routine of scan-and-scrutinize, looking for our respective grails (old fountain pens for me, old bottles and costume jewelry for her).

We were lucky to be billeted near our first flea market, the one at Porte de Vanves, which has about a hundred dealers strung along a large city block selling all manner of goodies from 18th-century books and Christofle silverware to walking sticks and paintings. I searched in vain for that lost Juan Luna and that stray copy of the Fili (which Rizal finished in Paris), but the flea-market gods blessed me instead with an early 1900s “safety” fountain pen sheathed in gold, perfect in every way, lying all by its lonesome on a table of bric-a-brac. “Combien, madame?” I asked in my schoolboy French, my throat dry with anticipation. “Cinquante euros,” she said; it was easily worth five times that, but I gathered up all my courage and countered, “Quarante?” “Okay,” she said, “A quick “Merci!” and 40 euros later, I was a happy boy with a new toy—what could be a better memento of this short trip than a gorgeous century-old pen with the word “Paris” on its 18-carat nib?

Of course, this luck was not to be repeated on our visit to the big flea market of St. Ouen in Clignancourt—reputedly the largest of its kind in the world—a few hours before boarding the plane back for home, but we rewarded our labors with a late lunch in a Chinese restaurant. After a week of French cuisine, immersed in the grandeur of French art and culture, huge platefuls of Cantonese fried rice sounded just about right. It was as if we were being told, “You’ve had your Parisian interlude and your souvenirs, it’s time to go home.” Au revoir!

Qwertyman No. 87: A French Sojourn

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Qwertyman for Monday, April 1, 2024

MY WIFE Beng and I were in France last week to give a series of lectures at the invitation of the Paris Institute of Political Studies, better known as SciencesPo. They don’t formally observe Holy Week in France (nor, for that matter, do many Filipinos to whom it’s simply come to mean “long weekend”). So we thought that it was the best time to come over and share some of our insights into Philippine literature, art, and politics with young French students as well as our countrymen in Paris, for whom I and fellow writer Cris Yabes, who’s based in France, gave a special reading at the Philippine embassy.

For those who’ve never heard of it—which won’t be too surprising given our Pinoy fixation on top American and British universities—SciencesPo (pronounced SEE-ansPO) is France’s leading university in the social sciences. It now has 14,000 students spread out over seven campuses across the country. Only 4,000 of those students are undergraduates; the rest are graduate students, including 350 taking their PhD. Unlike our universities, SciencesPo’s undergrads can finish in only three years, with their last year spent abroad. I was told that there are about 20 Filipino students currently enrolled at SciencesPo, and about half of its students come from overseas. As a public research university, SciencesPo is supported by the government through a private foundation, an arrangement that gives it a high degree of autonomy.

Founded in 1872, the university has served as the training ground for France’s political elite, producing five out of France’s eight presidents: Pompidou, Mitterand, Chirac, Hollande, and the incumbent Macron. Marcel Proust studied here for a year, and Christian Dior was a graduate.

With that kind of elite status comes criticism and controversy, and SciencesPo has had its share over the years. Nevertheless, it remains high on the list of desirable universities, especially for students with plans of joining the French civil service, after further studies at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration. (At Inalco, another Fremch university, we were surprised to find eight Filipino-French students studying Filipino for their degree under Prof. Elisabeth Luquin, who studied in UP and speaks Filipino like a local.)

Beng and I gave presentations on the Philippines at SciencePo’s main campus in Paris—a sprawling complex comprising ten buildings in some of Paris’ most precious real estate—and I had an additional three sessions in Le Havre, where SciencePo’s campus focuses on Asian studies. Wherever we went, we could see signs of intellectual and political ferment; like their predecessors at the Sorbonne whom we admired for their militancy 60 years ago, SciencesPo students have protested and rallied over many causes from domestic violence to Gaza.

To be fair, these concerns have occupied much of the rest of France as well. In a country where street protests are a time-honored tradition that have a real bearing on political outcomes, differences of opinion can run deep and long, and controversy stalks nearly every issue, from the wearing of religious headgear to the extension of the retirement age. To “liberté, egalité, fraternité,” we must now add “identité,” the subject of identity so central to political discourse in many countries today, especially those with large and strong immigrant populations like America and France.

“Over the last few years, France has been torn by culture wars—a shift that was less the effect of American concepts imported into French universities, as many on France’s right claim, than of the long-term decline, beginning in the early 1980s, of class politics and alternatives to capitalism. In a post-ideological France, class struggle has been displaced onto the terrain of identity,” noted sociologist Daniel Zamora in an article for Catalyst in 2021. “Despite Macron’s professed disdain for identity politics, his alternative can scarcely be construed as anti-identitarian. Building on what we have in common, Macron argued, meant finding an answer to the question, ‘What does it mean to be French?’”

Identity, at least, was not in question when Cris Yabes and I gave our reading at the Philippine embassy, thanks to the invitation of Ambassador Junever “Jones” Mahilum-West, one of the most amiable, gracious, and artistically inclined ambassadors I’ve ever met. (She was very game as well, happy to hoist an IPA beer with my wife Beng after our talks.) To a fairly sizeable group from the Filipino community in Paris, Cris and I read pieces that had to do with our foreign relations, particularly in my case with our diaspora, which my second novel Soledad’s Sister (which has been published in French by Mercure de France) dealt with. 

In the conversations that followed, I learned that there are around 26,000 documented Filipinos in France, with perhaps just as many existing belowground, most of them domestic helpers. One of them, Zita Cabais, was a victim of human trafficking more than two decades ago, having been enticed to come to Europe with the promise of a visa and a good job. Instead she was brought to Hungary, from where she was led on foot through Europe to finally reach France, whereupon her employer confiscated her passport, effectively holding her hostage. But unlike many other DH’s, Zita fought back, sued her employer, and succeeded. Since legalized, she now works for organizations devoted to fighting human trafficking. (The path to legalization is reportedly shorter in France, but knowing the French language is a prerequisite.)

One unexpected highlight of our visit was running into a group of Filipino seamen in our hotel in Le Havre, prior to my lecture. Beng and I had just come down for breakfast when we heard the familiar chatter of Filipinos at a nearby table. We came up to them and introduced ourselves, and we had a lively conversation during which they explained that they were still waiting for their ship to dock because of the bad weather. I’d met and chatted with seamen like them before in Hamburg and in Christchurch, among other places; as a writer and as a Filipino, I take it as a pleasant obligation.

Competition, they said, was driving them to accept shorter four-month stints at sea. “We barely break even, and it’s a tough life at sea, but we have no choice, since our families depend on us.” Part of my lecture that day was going to be about our Filipino notion of the hero as martyr, of Christ-like sacrifice for the common good. I suddenly realized that it was Good Friday. We had our smiling selfies taken, and they seemed proud to stand with UP professors, but it was Beng and I who felt honored to be there with them.

Penman No. 459: Spartan but Splendorous

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Penman for Sunday, February 11, 2024

WE OFTEN think of ecotourism in terms of swimming with whale sharks or encountering rare species of flora and fauna in some faraway forest. But not too far from Metro Manila lies a natural haven that will satisfy adventurers and conservationists alike—and the ecotourists who are both.

That haven is the Masungi Georeserve, a 3,000-hectare tract of largely reforested land marked by sharp karst or limestone shards jutting out into the sky amid bamboo groves, exotic orchids, and Benguet pine.

The unlikely remainder of an aborted housing project for DENR employees, Masungi now serves as home to hundreds of species, many of them rare and some even unique, such as the purple jade vine and the Masungi microsnail.

These sightings alone would be well worth the trip—a pleasant 30-kilometer drive from Quezon City through Masinag and Antipolo on the Marikina-Infanta or Marilaque Highway, on some of the country’s best and widest roads. (On the weekday morning we went there, it took us just a little over an hour from UP Diliman.) 

Masungi straddles the Sierra Madre boundary between Baras and Tanay, Rizal, much of which is occupied by the Upper Marikina Watershed, across the Kaliwa Watershed on the northern side. Its name comes from the Tagalog sungi, meaning sharp, a reference to the profusion of limestone outcrops looking like sharp teeth across the mountainous landscape.

The georeserve—now being managed by the Masungi Georeserve Foundation—wasn’t set up as any kind of pleasure park. Indeed “pleasure”—except the visual kind—was the last thing this septuagenarian thought of when he went up the steep trails to a vantage point that afforded a spectacular view of Laguna de Bay and the surrounding metropolis far below. Younger and fitter visitors, however, will surely find the challenge pleasurable and even exhilarating.

When the housing project with the DENR failed to materialize—the DENR couldn’t evict the squatters already there and the land, in truth, was simply too steep and inhospitable to permanent human habitation—engineer Ben Dumaliang and his Blue Star company (the housing project contractor) took it upon themselves to rehabilitate what land they could and regrow the forest that would have been lost forever. In 2015, Ben’s daughters established the Masungi Georeserve Foundation to oversee the place, and in 2017, the MGF entered into a contract with the DENR under then Sec. Gina Lopez for the georeserve’s replanting and conservation.

Masungi now features a Discovery Trail for hikers aged 13 and up that takes about three to four hours to complete, although it can be shortened depending on the hikers’ preference. The challenging trails feature hanging bridges, a giant spiderweb, rope walls, caves, and other points of interest (or maybe not, for acrophobes like me). Protective headgear is provided.

Typical reviews on Tripadvisor include comments like this one, from a Singaporean visitor: “Perfect day at Masungi Georeserve. The hike was well-organized and well-paced with sufficient rest stops. Our guide was knowledgeable and friendly, allowing us to take our time and helping to take our photos. You do need a certain level of fitness and daring to tackle the ropes, steps, and hanging bridges, but you will be rewarded with stunning views of the limestone karst formations. There are alternative paths to take for those who have a fear of heights but these detours may take longer. Best not to rush and go with people who won’t judge you if you feel like dropping out! Well done to the Foundation and for educating the public on biodiversity and sustainable tourism. Book ahead and pray for great weather.”

This one came from a repeat visitor, Ronald R: “Had the privilege of visiting Masungi Georeserve for the ninth time (six times on the Legacy Trail, thrice at side trails and once on the Discovery Trail) and every visit was a memorable learning and life-changing experience. All dedicated forest rangers are well versed in the changing landscape and diversity of flora and fauna. The experience differs depending on the weather. I prefer windy, cloudy weather when going up there. The Sierra Madre is more dramatic with rain clouds. Beyond the transformations, the team behind Masungi Georeserve is focused on restoring the lost and abused part of the Upper Marikina Watershed Area. Masungi Georeserve is a platform to make anyone fall in love with nature in a much deeper level. The Masungi Georeserve experience should be in every nature lover’s bucket list.”

Experienced rangers—most of them recruited from the local community, including indigenous Dumagats—serve as guides for these treks. To support the place’s upkeep—it gets no funding from the government—the georeserve charges guests P1,500 each on weekdays and P1,800 on weekends, covering the tour and simple but satisfying snacks (including a refreshingly minty tea made from the kayumanis, a native plant; a set lunch buffet is also available at the hilltop Silayan restaurant). The number of daily visitors is strictly controlled to minimize wear and tear to the area, and groups are kept manageably small. (For more helpful and detailed instructions, as well as photos of the various features along the trail, visit willflyforfood.com and look for “The Masungi Georeserve Survival Guide.”)

It’s a spartan but bracing experience, minus the spa, the massage, the gourmet menu, the uniformed attendants, and all the other amenities we associate with more genteel and patrician hideaways. This is nature in your face—but what a splendorous sight it is to behold, a painterly tableau of rock, tree, bird, and flower set against a radiant blue sky, 640 meters up and far removed from the smog and sludge of the metropolis. 

It’s sad and alarming that Masungi continues to be threatened by powerful landgrabbing syndicates as well as by the indifference if not hostility of the government people who should be supporting it, but that’s another story (check out my Qwertyman column last January 29, “Fighting Windmills at Masungi”). In the meanwhile, avail yourself of this chance to encounter nature like you never have before, and enjoy Masungi while it lasts.

Qwertyman No. 77: Taylor Swift 101

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Qwertyman for Monday, January 22, 2024

THERE WAS a lot of snickering around the local Internet a couple of weeks ago when the University of the Philippines announced that it was going to offer a course on the American megastar Taylor Swift. “Why???” seemed to be the most common hair-trigger response, expressing consternation over the need or rationale for such a course. “This is where your taxes go,” lamented another netizen.

The clear suggestion was that spending a semester—that’s 16 weeks—on a pop phenomenon like Taylor Swift was a grandiose and frivolous waste of teaching time and people’s money, scarce resources better allocated to studying worthier topics like, say, Gomburza, the South China Sea, endemic species, and sovereign wealth funds. (Not incidentally, all these other topics are already covered in other UP courses, so no one need worry that they’re being sacrificed for in-depth analyses of “Cruel Summer” or “You Need to Calm Down.”)

Before we go any further, I have to declare that I’m no Swiftie, as her adoring fans call themselves, and I had to look up and listen to those two titles I just mentioned. At my age, my idea of a diva I’d pay good money to listen to is Barbra Streisand, Laura Fygi, Lisa Ono, and Dionne Warwick, none of them below 60. I have to admit that the only Swift song I was aware of before she exploded into global stardom was “You Belong with Me,” which my then-teener niece Eia used to bounce her head to (an effect that, I’ve since discovered, many Swift pieces tend to induce). 

Still, my instinctive reaction to the announcement of the UP Swift course wasn’t “Why?” but what I suppose is the academic’s default of “Why not?” When I looked into how the course was going to be taught by its instructor—Cherish Aileen Brillon, a mass communications specialist who had previously published a paper on, among others, “Darna and Intellectual Property Rights”—I could see that this wasn’t going to be just party time for 15 kids listening through Taylor Swift’s ten albums (yes, I counted) over a semester, but serious study connecting material from the singer’s songs and of course from her life as a 21st century celebrity to our reception of her and whatever she represents, as Filipinos. 

The course—an elective under the BA Broadcast and Media Studies program of the Colle of Mass Communication—will focus on “the conception, construction, and the performance of Taylor Swift as a celebrity and how she can be used to explain our and, of course, media’s relationship with class, politics, gender, race, and fantasies of success and mobility…. Gender should be part of the discussion because Taylor is a woman operating in a highly patriarchal and misogynist entertainment industry,” Brillon told the STAR in an earlier interview. “Transnationality is also a large part of the discussion,” she added, defining the term as a “media-driven flow of goods, products and services from various nations” in this globalized age. “Celebrities have always been transnational anyway. The class will look into the transnationality of Taylor and how Filipinos are appropriating their relationships with celebrities.” 

If you know anything about what’s being taken up in universities worldwide today as media and cultural studies, that mouthful I quoted above is heavy-duty academic work of the kind I myself may not be too keen to undertake, but the results of which I’d be deeply interested to find out. And that because there’s nothing more pervasive and influential in our world today than the media, which includes the Internet, TV, radio, and newspapers, plus all the advertising, the tweets, the Facebook feeds, the Spotify music, and the Amazons, Lazadas, Shopees, and eBays you find in them. How the media draws our attention and often subliminally persuades us into buying certain products and ideas can’t be worthier of academic research and investigation. 

And it’s not as if this hasn’t been done before. New York University, Stanford, Arizona State University, the Berklee College of Music, Rice University, UC Berkeley, the University of Florida, the University of Delaware, and Brigham Young University are among the American universities offering Taylor Swift courses from different approaches ranging from the music itself to social psychology, marketing, and literature.

So, okay, they’re Americans—why us Filipinos? Because the singer has a huge Pinoy fan base, despite the slight that local Swifties felt when she left the Philippines out of her 2024 Southeast Asian “Eras” tour, for which well-heeled Pinoys then rushed online to book expensive ticket packages for her shows in Singapore. (She’s been here twice before, in 2011 and 2014.)

But never mind Taylor Swift. Back in 1995, scholars attending the first International Conference on Elvis Presley at the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture got academia “all shook up,” according to reports, with papers bearing titles like “A Revolutionary Sexual Personae: Elvis Presley and the Acquiescence of Black Rhythms,” which discussed sensuality and spirituality in Elvis’s acts.

And then, of course, there are all the college courses on Frank Sinatra at Suffolk University, and on the Beatles at MIT and Oxford, among many other places. At Carnegie Mellon University, flautist and Prof. Stephen Schultz alternates teaching 18th-century Baroque music with a class on the Beatles; guess which class attracts 200 students a semester.

I’m sure that, despite these precedents and rationales, there will remain many skeptics who’ll still believe that all this academic mumbo-jumbo is just an excuse for both professor and student to kill an hour and a half doing nothing but nodding their heads to pop tunes and chatting about which song’s lyrics were cooler. (Don’t be too surprised, but that’s also basically what happens when we discuss poetry and fiction, sans the rhythmic nodding.)

But then you could be talking about Taylor Swift and her songs—or you could be talking about how Adolf Hitler and his deadly message were packaged and sold to the German people, not to mention Donald Trump and other despots closer to our time and place. This is what media and cultural studies are ultimately about—the power of media and other cultural forces to shape our minds, our purchases, our votes, and therefore our history. 

Perhaps our students can even learn more from a semester of Taylor Swift, BTS, and Justin Bieber than the Shakespeare they’ll merely turn to AI to write papers on. Like I told one naysayer, “We keep studying history, religion, law, etc., and yet we seem to learn nothing—just look at how a former human rights lawyer suddenly justifies EJKs.” So there may yet be more to Taylor Swift 101 than meets the eye. As another Swift—Jonathan—put it, “Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.”

(Image from Sky News)

Penman No. 456: A Pocket of Peace and Quiet

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Penman for Sunday, November 5, 2023

ROXAS CITY, the capital of Capiz, is proud to declare itself the “Seafood Capital of the Philippines” as well, but I didn’t even know that when I booked a flight for me and my wife Beng last month to spend a few days in Roxas. I still had a few “super passes” I’d bought a bunch of from an airline promo last year and they were expiring soon, so as Beng and I are wont to do, we decided to pick a place on that airline’s list of destinations, one where we’d never been before. It would help that Beng was Ilongga, and having been married to her for almost 50 years, I could understand Hiligaynon, so getting around would be no problem. The “seafood capital” tag popped up when I googled “Roxas City” for ideas about where to go and what to do—that was the clincher for me, the scourge of crabs, shrimp, scallops, and all aquatic arthropods. 

An hour-long plane ride from Manila deposited us in Roxas City’s airport, which has the advantage of being a short tricycle ride away from downtown. 

For our “hotel,” I picked out, online, a place called the Olive Hostel, which proved to be an adventure on its own. At just over 1K a night with free breakfast and within walking distance of Western civilization, it seemed just right for Beng and me, who don’t insist on five-star luxury. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to live in a container, well, we found out. It literally was built out of steel containers piled on top of each other, with doors and windows cut out. But don’t get me wrong: it was all very capably and tastefully done, and as tiny as our quarters were, it was actually quite cozy; the bathrooms were immaculately clean and the wi-fi was strong. There was no TV, but we made up for that by watching Netflix on my laptop, perched on my tummy. (Beng and I are used to tiny hotels in HK, Japan, and Korea; I’m usually claustrophobic, but I don’t feel that with Beng beside me.) 

The Olive Hostel’s grounds were, by contrast, spacious and very well maintained, lovely especially in the evening. For those seeking more traditional lodgings, the President’s Inn downtown comes highly recommended. Among the city’s newest and most modern hotels, three—the Veronica, the Urban Manor, and the Islands—can be found in Pueblo de Panay township.

Roxas City has one of the prettiest and cleanest plazas I’ve seen around the country, small but the very picture of what a plaza has always been in our provincial imaginations, with City Hall, the church, and a park with a bandstand beside a river.

To one corner stands the Panublion Museum, a cleverly repurposed water tank that showcases highlights of Capiznon history and culture. Managed by its very capable director, Cheryl Anne del Rosario, Panublion features the personal memorabilia of the city’s favorite son, President Manuel A. Roxas, including the flag flown at the July 4, 1946 inaugural of Philippine postwar independence. (President Roxas’ ancestral home is not too far away and is open for public viewing, but was closed on the day we toured the city.)

The museum also showcases the tools and finery of the province’s and island’s indigenous peoples. Most captivating were the exhibits  featuring Capiz’s two female National Artists—Jovita Fuentes for Music and Daisy Avellana for Theater. Fuentes’ golden gown contrasted sharply with the suit of armor worn by Avellana as Joan of Arc. Entrance to the museum is free, but donations are welcome. 

On our first night we walked out to a neighborhood restaurant where the chicken inasal was P108 with unlimited rice and a surprisingly good fruit drink, plus lomi at P68. We had the obligatory seafood lunch in one of the many restaurants along Baybay (literally, the beach), but much more charming and restful was a similar lunch on a bamboo raft on the river at the Palina Greenbelt Ecopark, normally part of a lazy cruise (the tide was too low when we arrived for any cruising, but the scenery was enough to soothe the senses).

Roxas has no shortage of malls for the urban dweller. The usual suspects—SM, Gaisano, CityMall—line the main highway downtown. Its equivalent of Metro Manila’s BGC is the 670-hectare Pueblo de Panay township, a residential and commercial development project master-planned by a Singaporean company and offering the most modern facilities and amenities to Capiz’s and Panay’s rising middle class. 

A mutual friend—the peripatetic Susan Claire Agbayani—introduced us to Hariette Ong Banzon and her husband Peter, the couple behind the Pueblo, who invited us to dinner at Cafe Terraza, their hilltop restaurant offering a panoramic view of the city far below. But before dinner, Hariette made sure to bring us to see the project dearest to her heart and now one of the city’s—indeed the island’s—most remarkable landmarks: the 132-foot statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which Harriette commissioned following the miraculous cure of a relative. Hariette and Peter—incidentally both fellow PSHS alumni, so we had other memories to share—are people of faith and conscience, reflecting their values in their optimism about Roxas City’s prospects and the way they run their business.

For all the things we seek in this troubled world—a pocket of peace and quiet, good food, rejuvenation of body and soul, and friendly people—Roxas City has much to offer, and we can only give it our ultimate accolade: “We’ll be back!”

Qwertyman No. 67: Business with Culture in Iloilo

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Qwertyman for Monday, November 13, 2023

OVER THE past year, still eagerly emerging from our post-pandemic stupor, my wife Beng and I have been traveling up a storm, limiting ourselves to local destinations such as Bacolod, Virac, Davao, Roxas City, and Iloilo City. We chose these places because we’d never been there before—such as Virac and Roxas—or hadn’t visited for many years.

We were most impressed by the progress shown by Iloilo, whose transformation into a rapidly urbanizing metropolis I had begun to observe well before the pandemic. City and provincial officials, under the initial leadership and with the strong support of former Sen. Franklin Drilon, had managed to unite behind the key objectives of a continuing comprehensive development plan that has straddled several local and national administrations. 

All over the country, you hear about politicians achieving national prominence and power, even to the point of aspiring for the presidency—except that back in their home provinces, they did little or nothing for their constituents, and may even have lost the local vote to an outsider as a result. Drilon never ran for President—a job I think he would have performed excellently, if our voters were thinking rationally—but if he did then he could have counted on a near-solid Iloilo vote for never forgetting where he came from and ensuring Iloilo’s emergence as a model of city planning.

Any visitor to Iloilo cannot fail to be impressed by its dynamic growth, from the minute he or she steps off the plane in the city’s airport in Cabatuan, about 20 kilometers from downtown Iloilo. The long drive to the city down the wide, smooth highway is a virtual introduction to the city’s progress, with new malls, office buildings, car dealerships, hotels, construction depots, hospitals, and housing lining both sides of the road; new bridges and overpasses were rising here and there. A Grab car service just opened this year, our driver said, happy to be lifted by that rising economic tide.

The crown jewel of Iloilo’s renaissance is clearly the Iloilo River Esplanade, now stretching nine kilometers along both banks of the river in its expanded form. Designed by the celebrated architect Paulo Alcazaren, the Esplanade is what we Manileños want our Pasig riverbank to look like, in our dreams, but here in Iloilo, it’s been a reality for over a decade now. From early morning until after sunset, the Esplanade is filled with joggers, couples, families, and tourists who can also duck for a drink or a meal into one of the restaurants and cafes lining the walk. The river itself, once described as a septic tank into which the effluents of the city’s factories, slaughterhouse, and beer gardens drained, is clean and clear, fringed by a healthy belt of mangrove where we spotted egrets taking refuge. 

There’s a point of view that sees malls as the bane of urbanization and the death of small, artisanal businesses, and that’s been true in many places. It’s abundantly obvious that malls and mall culture have invaded Iloilo, with some negative consequences down the road. But so strong is local culture and tradition that it’s almost inconceivable that Iloilo will lose Tatoy’s, Breakthrough, Ted’s La Paz Batchoy, Panaderia de Molo, pancit molo, KBL, diwal, and all the other little things that make the city what it is. Indeed, instead of being pushed out, many of these institutions are now in the malls. At the plaza in front of Molo Cathedral, after a 3-km walk from our hotel via the Esplanade, we had breakfast of mini-bibingkas baked right before us the way they’d been done for decades.

It was a happy coincidence that, during our visit, UNESCO named Iloilo as the country’s first Creative City of Gastronomy, in recognition of its outstanding culinary culture and heritage. This was achieved by the city government under Mayor Jerry Treñas with the assistance of a team from UP Visayas’ College of Management that facilitated a workshop for the city’s food-industry leaders last May. Education remains one of the city’s strengths; its West Visayas State University College of Medicine is now one of the country’s top-ranked medical schools, aside from UPV’s commanding role in the region.

It was UPV Chancellor Clement Camposano who, after dinner in one of the many seafood restaurants that have cropped up in Leganes on the city’s outskirts, drove us around so we could appreciate the city by night. On our way to Molo, we passed through the new Megaworld/Festive Walk business district and were blown away by how smartly designed everything was; it was almost as if we were in Singapore or some such country. It was hard to believe that not too long ago, this was the old Iloilo airport in Mandurriao, and that the road we were traveling on had once been a runway. This is also where the Iloilo Convention Center is located, where the APEC 2015 summit was held (Drilon had negotiated the donation of the site from Andrew Tan, in exchange for the ICC’s being built there).

We returned to this place in the daytime to visit one of Iloilo’s most recent and also most impressive attractions: the Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art or Ilomoca, a three-story showcase of both local and national talent. Ilomoca’s establishment in the middle of one of Iloilo’s CBDs demonstrates what seems to be the local formula for sustainability, the merging of the modern with the traditional, of business with culture. You can best see this in the majestic Consing mansion in front of the Molo Cathedral, which was bought by SM but tastefully renovated and transformed into its Kultura shop. There’s no doubt that modernization is coming to Iloilo in a big way, but its leaders are smart enough to know that the city’s appeal lies in what it has built over the past two centuries, which no money can buy.

You’d think that Iloilo has gotten this far just because of political patronage from Manila, but Iloilo was one of the 15 provinces that went for Leni Robredo in 2022. The city’s former mayor, Jed Mabilog, was hounded out of office by threats of tokhang under the previous administration, but the city seems to have weathered the political storms under Treñas, returning to his old job under the National Unity Party. What this tells me is that good local governance matters, whatever may be happening elsewhere. 

Email me at jose@dalisay.ph and visit my blog at http://www.penmanila.ph.