Category Archives: music

Qwertyman No. 28: Catching Fluffy

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Qwertyman for Monday, February 13, 2023

(Disclaimer: Our story today has nothing to do with the recent capture and deportation of the Japanese criminal mastermind known as “Luffy,” for which we congratulate our brave and vigilant law enforcers, although I have to admit to being inspired by that diabolically fearsome alias.)

HIS PHONE rang at the worst possible time. The chief of the Metropolitan Investigation Division was just about to reach the climax of his story—the ladies around him all open-mouthed and wide-eyed in anticipation—when the Tiktok “Moonlight” song, which he had been using as his ringtone, broke the spell, instantly sending some of the girls into their habitual gyrations.

“Chief!” exclaimed Melanie, his special girl in the club, “I didn’t know you liked that song! You’re so cool! Come, let’s dance!” She took his free hand and tried to drag him to the dancefloor, but he resisted. It was unusual for Chief Tiny (short for “Agustin”) to resist Melanie’s persuasions, but she could see from his look that this was something serious.

Chief Tiny had spotted the name on the call—Bungi, his lead investigator—and he knew that Bungi knew not to call him at this hour for any reason less than to report the mysterious sighting of a bearded man walking on the waters of Manila Bay. If this was just to tell him that his wife was at the station looking for him again, for which Bungi was supposed to have had a dozen excuses at his disposal, why, he was going to make sure Bungi was demoted to jail guard in charge of sanitation. Tiny was especially annoyed because he had been trying to impress the girls with his story of how he had found and captured Don Waldo—the country’s most notorious drug and gambling lord, compadre to this senator and that congressman, master of a reputed harem of 100 women, and ruthless widow-maker dozens of times over. Tiny had geo-located him through the Facebook feeds of his then girlfriend, the previous year’s Ms. Matabungkay, and had negotiated his peaceful surrender, much to everyone’s relief. Of course, he wasn’t going to tell them that Don Waldo posted bail one hour after he was arrested, and that the two men had exchanged winks at the station after the media photographers had had their fill. It was all part of his standard MO: catch the bad guy, work out a deal, and let him off the hook on some technicality. 

“Boss,” said Bungi in a whisper over the phone, “we found him—Fluffy.”

“Fluffy!” Tiny screamed with all his 250 pounds, jolting everyone. “Are you sure it’s him, the Fluffy, ourFluffy?”

“Yes, sir. Of course they call him ‘Fruffy’ in Japanese, but I saw him myself—absolutely no doubt he’s our man.”

As Chief Tiny continued to chat with his caller, Melanie shrank back into her seat beside the chief, trying to catch as much of the conversation as she could while collecting her own thoughts. She knew this man called “Fluffy”—personally, professionally, biblically, in all kinds of ways. When the chief wasn’t around, Fluffy took his place in her private quarters, in a condo overlooking the Pasig River, from the other side of which she had triumphantly risen. Initially there had been a language problem—his vocabulary would have been considered coarse even in Japan—but what they needed to communicate did not require too many hand-signs. What didn’t need explaining was his nickname, made obvious by the two clumps of steel-woolly hair on his head, like a poodle.

From his Pinoy bodyguard, Melanie learned that Fluffy ran an extensive Japanese mafia in the Philippines, which controlled the distribution of everything from fake Japanese car parts, Ebisu dolls, Voltes V figurines, and ramen noodles. They competed with an equally vicious Korean mafia engaged in pushing fake Korean car parts, BTS coffee mugs, CLOY T-shirts, and kimchi, as well as a Chinese mafia flooding the market with fake American, European, and everyone-else’s car parts, imported galunggong, POGO workers, and tikoy. Sometimes the rivalry got too hot and blood was spilled on Manila’s streets, giving Chief Tiny unnecessary headaches that required a few hours with Melanie to cure. But now Melanie herself felt the onset of a massive migraine: if her two patrons found out about the other and their common interest, then all hell would break loose.

“Sorry, girls, but I have to go,” Chief Tiny announced, getting to his feet. “I have to catch a master criminal.” With that, he gave Melanie a quick hug, and hurried off.

Melanie had to think fast. Chief Tiny made her feel protected—not only when he encircled her in his ham-like arms, but more importantly when she or her friends ran into trouble or needed a big favor like a police escort for a relative’s funeral. Fluffy was strange but sweet, gifting her with exotic desserts like green tea cookies and mochi; she was scared but also thrilled by his insistence that she take on his tattoos. Whom would she choose? She thought of sending Chief Tiny an anonymous text message telling him where Fluffy was, but then they already knew that. She thought of sending Fluffy another message to tell him that Chief Tiny was on his way to get him, but if he ran away then that would only prolong her own predicament. She decided to let fate take its course and to stick by whoever survived. Meanwhile, she wasn’t going to waste her time, and moved on to the next cubicle to make the acquaintance of a Korean gentleman who reminded her of that oppa Gong Yoo.

Two hours later, Melanie and her new partner were happily warbling BTS’ “Butter” on the videoke: “Smooth like butter, like a criminal undercover / Gon’ pop like trouble breaking into your heart like that, ooh!”Suddenly she heard two all-too-familiar voices from the other side.

“You’re very hard to catch, Mr. Fluffy! You’re very good!”

“No, Mr. Tiny, you’re better because you caught me, haha!”

“Next time, don’t hide under the table, haha! That’s the first place we look!”

“Thank you for not shooting me, haha!”

“How can we be friends if I shoot you, haha! Now, let’s have a good time—I will introduce you to my very pretty girlfriend!”

“You also have a very pretty girlfriend, also here? Me, too! But my girlfriend is prettier, haha!”

The Korean gentleman in the next cubicle was perplexed. “Melanie! Where you go? Why you hiding under the table?”

(Photo from bbc.com)

Penman No. 447: A Tertulia and Tinio

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Penman for Sunday, February 5, 2023

WE CELEBRATE National Arts Month in February in the Philippines, but it came a little early for me this year, in a January packed full of memorable cultural events that reminded me of how much we’ve missed during the long pandemic. 

First off was a trip to Bacolod for a preview of the celebrated theater director Anton Juan’s new film, Amon Banwa Sa Lawud (Our Island of the Mangrove Moons). I’d known, of course, of Anton’s stellar work in theater for many decades now, but this was the first foray of his into cinema that I was aware of, and I—and the select audience that attended the preview at the Negros Museum’s Cinematheque—was not disappointed. 

Set and shot in the island-community of Subac in the city of Sagay, and based loosely on Thornton Wilder’s seminal play “Our Town,” the film chronicles the lives of villagers whose fortunes are inextricably wedded to the sea. Isolated from many of society’s most basic comforts, they survive through hard work, faith, and ambition, despite the many threats they face—among them, roving bands of pirates and, not too subtly suggested by a floating buoy, Chinese vessels encroaching on their fishing grounds. 

Shot in ten days with a mostly amateur cast, the film is a tribute to Pinoy industry and courage, and also of the sense of community that seems to have frayed for our people on a national scale. I remarked after the screening that most of us have lost touch with our maritime culture—the sea hardly figures in our literature, for example, except as a romantic backdrop—despite the fact that ours is a country of many islands like Subac. Anton’s film offers hope—but also delivers a stern warning about the dangers hovering on our national horizon. Kudos to the Erehwon Center for the Arts and to its founder Raffy Benitez, among other producers and sponsors, for making this film possible.

The second event that my wife Beng and I were privileged to attend was a musical tertulia at the historic Acosta-Pastor ancestral home in Batangas City, hosted by everyone’s musical tito, Atty. Tony “Tunying” Pastor. Every year, during the city’s fiesta, Ka Tunying sponsors a performance of renowned artists at his family’s home, which is a living museum of sorts, with a full-sized caruaje greeting visitors on the first floor.

This year, thanks to an invitation from the writer-curator Marian Pastor Roces, we were treated to a special program presented by the famed soprano Rachelle Gerodias, her tenor husband Byeong In Park, and tenor Nohmer Nival, fresh from their performances in last December’s “Turandot.” As was his wont, Ka Tunying—a music graduate from UP—joined the trio on the piano, and even sang gamely along. 

The repertoire comprised crowd pleasers like “Mutya ng Pasig” and “Nessun Dorma,” and the audience responded warmly, with more spontaneity than they could have shown at the CCP or some such venue. Somehow, the classics felt right at home in the 140-year-old house, which had resonated with music for decades, whose bright wooden floors had welcomed generations of guests eager for a day of revelry and good food (which was served downstairs, after the mini-concert). 

Most fascinating, however, was an evening we spent in Manila late in January with an old friend, the tenor and businessman Francisco “Frankie” Aseniero. In his other life as a bright young economist, Frankie had been our boss at the National Economic and Development Authority in the 1970s, where NEDA Director-General Gerry Sicat perhaps unwittingly nurtured a corps of writers and artists in his staff, including the late playwright Bienvenido “Boy” Noriega. 

When we met Frankie again recently to welcome home another officemate, the prizewinning Filipino-Canadian poet Patty Rivera, I asked him about his music, as he now spends most of his days as a gentleman-farmer in Dipolog, where his family has roots. (One grandfather was a student of Rizal, while another was a Swedish-American Thomasite—but that’s another long story.) He has concertized all over the world, was active with the UP Concert Chorus and the Madrigal Singers, and at one point had to choose between music and economics for further studies. He took the pragmatic option and joined NEDA, but never really let go of his singing.

One very interesting thing I learned during that chat with Frankie was how, back in the 1970s, he sang and recorded Filipino translations of classical and popular operatic pieces by the late Rolando Tinio. “We would be having lunch, and Rolando would just write his translation over the score on the table, and it would be perfect,” recalled Frankie’s wife Nenette. Tinio, of course, was a genius, for which he was rightfully named a National Artist, albeit a difficult person for some others to deal with (there’s an explosive episode recounted by the film director Mike de Leon in his two-volume memoir Last Look Back about an encounter with Tinio at the 1978 Metro Manila Film Festival). I had the privilege of having one of my plays directed by Tinio at the CCP as a young playwright, but thankfully escaped the edge of his scathing derision. At any rate, I was enamored of his Filipino translations for Celeste Legaspi in the mid-1970s—it’s an album I’ll never tire of listening to, especially the soaring “Langit Mo, Ulap Mo” (Michel Legrand’s “Summer Me, Winter Me”)—and learning that he also translated operatic and Broadway pieces intrigued me.

Frankie obliged by inviting us to his home for a soiree and a personal concert, featuring such popular favorites as “Yakap Mo’y Aking Napangarap” (“I Have Dreamed” from “The King and I”), “Wari Ko’y Di Ko Kaya ang Mag-isa” (“Stranger in Paradise” from”Kismet”), and “Ganiyan ang Aking Giliw” (“And This Is My Beloved” from “Kismet”). We had a good laugh over “Laging Nag-iiba Pusong Babae,” better known as “Donna e Mobile” from “Rigoletto.”

I can only wish that Frankie (and other Filipino singers) would make a studio recording of these Tinio translations for commercial release. It’s hidden treasure I was lucky to stumble on, but it deserves to be heard and enjoyed by many millions more.

Penman No. 446: Our Oldies

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Penman for Sunday, January 1, 2023

IT’s BAD enough to be out of touch with the present, so it must be worse to be out of touch with the past—or at least, someone else’s past. 

Nothing reminded me more starkly of the great divides that exist between generations than last month’s Eraserheads reunion concert, hailed by its attendees as nothing less than the Second Coming. “A spectacle unto itself. It was like mix-mashing the Super Bowl’s half-time show and a rock concert. Except it went one better as it was also like one four-hour-long karaoke set,” wrote reviewer Rick Olivares in the Inquirer. “The four-hour, three-part show was filled with nothing but singing our hearts out, jumping for joy, and all the while taking in the fact that yes—this is the Eraserheads, and we are ever so lucky to hear them live again,” gushed Nikka Olivares on GMA-7. 

What struck me was how so many of my younger friends—writers, artists, and teachers now in their 40s and 50s—posted pictures of themselves waving their concert tickets like some generational badge of honor. And indeed it was, if the reported crowd of 75,000 that drove out to the reunion was to be believed. It was a paean to the 1990s and to Generation X, to 486-DX PCs and clunky cellphones, to mixtapes and dressing down, to self-reliance and partying on. (Hold it—why is this so familiar? Now I know why I should know—our daughter Demi, born 1974, is a card-carrying Gen-X’er. “I caught up with the Eraserheads in UP,” she told me from California, “and I used to watch them at the UP Fair at the Sunken Garden!”)

I’ll take my former students’ word for it and believe that the Eraserheads were the best Pinoy band of their time, and that their songs captured the heartbeat of their generation. I’m sure that there’s a thesis or dissertation to be written there somewhere, if it hasn’t been done already—a project that will go far beyond melody and rhythm to dissect the E-heads’ contributions to political and social commentary (not much fun, but academia is the land of the morose). 

For Demi’s mom Beng and me, however, much of that remains a mystery, because it all begins with the music, which somehow went past us. “Do we know any of their songs?” Beng asked me. “Well, yes, one of them,” I answered, “the one that goes ‘Magkahawak ang ating kamay at walang kamalay-malay….’” And I went on to hum the tune for her, and she remembered. “I think its title is ‘Ang Huling El Bimbo,’” I added helpfully. Totally geriatric dialogue, but there we were, trying to figure out a context for that snippet of a song. Of course we knew the original El Bimbo dance, where your conjoined arms opened like a fan, but that was about it. We were lost in this strange territory.

That reminded me of that time, maybe thirty years ago or more, when drove Demi to school in our VW, and turned the radio on. Demi asked if she could change the station, because she wanted to hear some “oldies.” Oh, great, I thought, finally, my daughter’s wising up to the classics—maybe to some Sinatra? And then she played Earth, Wind, and Fire. “Do you remember, the 21st night of September…” (I remembered another September 21!)

So, all right, my oldies aren’t your oldies, and we respond to music on different wavelengths. There’s nothing that unites us more than music—think Christmas carols, church hymns, fight songs, and national anthems—and also nothing that divides us more than music.

I suppose we Boomers can be typecast as Beatles fans, and that won’t be unfair, as it was de rigueur for teenagers of the ‘60s to know the Beatles songs by heart if not to play them on a Lumanog guitar, with the aid of a chord book. But to be even fairer, I don’t think our taste in music could be pegged to any one band or genre. The fact is, we were incredibly eclectic, and liked everything from crooners like Tony Bennett, folk singers like Joni Mitchell, and bossa-nova masters like Antonio Carlos Jobim to rock bands like Queen, divas like Barbra Streisand, and disco kings like VST & Co. And let’s not forget the birth of OPM at the first Metro Pop festivals, with the Circus Band and the New Minstrels.

Life was a big jukebox, and you had a song and a singer for certain moods and certain days. (That probably explains the Beatles’ popularity—they could go from soulful ballads like “Michelle” and “She’s Leaving Home” to barnburners like “Rock ‘N Roll Music” and “She Loves You.”) Feeling, more than idea, was key to a song’s full enjoyment, and much of that feeling was generated by the melody and arrangement. 

Bottom line, a song had to be singable. (The master of singability for me was Burt Bacharach.) For a while back there, we might have put on snooty airs and publicly disdained cheesy acts like ABBA—only to embrace them and warble along at their revival. Danceability was another important factor. The shift from the ‘70s to the ‘80s was the golden age of disco, spurred on by “Saturday Night Fever.” (Miserably, my dancing skills never went beyond the jerk and the boogaloo, so doing the hustle with Beng remains on the bucket list.)

I guess this all means we have a lot of “reunion concerts” to look forward to—the only problem being, most of the singers we’d like to hear have croaked their last. The last one Beng and I attended, a few years ago at the Araneta Coliseum, was that of the Zombies (yes, they were big, cool, and British). Instead of 75,000 screaming fans, ours was a crowd of several hundred white-haired, well-behaved seniors, happily humming along to “The Way I Feel Inside” and “She’s Not There.” Maybe we forgot the lyrics here and there, but hey, we were feeling groovy, as we might have said back in 1969. So, kids, here’s to the next Eraserheads reunion, sometime in 2042. 

Hindsight 14: Weaponizing the Youth

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Hindsight for Monday, April 18, 2022

ONE OF the most troubling episodes of the war now raging in Ukraine happened a couple of weeks ago not in Kyiv or the eastern region—where ghastly atrocities have taken place—but in Penza, a city in western Russia. A 55-year-old teacher named Irina Gen was arrested after a student reportedly taped her remarks criticizing the Russian invasion; the student’s parents got the tape, and turned it in to the authorities, who went after Ms. Gen. She now faces up to ten years in prison for violating the newly minted law against “spreading fake news” about Russia. Earlier, in the city of Korsakov, students also filmed their English teacher Marina Dubrova, 57, for denouncing the war; she was arrested, fined, and disciplined.

That the Russian state is punishing its critics is nothing new. It’s reprehensible, but you expect nothing less from the place and the party that invented the gulag, that frozen desert of concentration camps where millions suffered and died over decades of political strife and repression, mainly under Joseph Stalin. 

What I found particularly alarming was the role of students as informants, a virtual extension of the secret police that are the staple of repressive societies. This, too, is nothing new. Throughout modern history, despots have drawn on their nations’ youth to lend a semblance of energy and idealism to their authoritarianism, ensure a steady stream of cadres, and at worst, provide ample cannon fodder.

In Russia, the Komsomol rose up in 1918 to prepare people between 14 and 28 for membership in the Communist Party. Four years later, the Young Pioneers took in members between 9 and 14, and just to make sure no one who could walk and talk was left out, the Little Octobrists were organized in 1923 for the 7-9 crowd. 

The Hitler Youth was preceded and prepared for by youth organizations that formed around themes like religion and traditional politics, and it was easy to reorient them toward Nazism. An all-male organization matched by the League of German Girls, the Hitler Youth focused on sports, military training, and political indoctrination, but they soon had to go far beyond marching in the streets and smashing Jewish storefronts. Running short of men, the Germans set up a division composed of Hitler Youth members 17 years and under, the 12th SS-Panzer Division Hitlerjugend. It went into battle for the first time on D-Day in June 1944; after a month, it had lost 60 percent of its strength to death and injury.

Chairman Mao relied on China’s teenage cadres—the Red Guards—to unleash the Cultural Revolution in 1966 against the so-called “Four Olds” (old customs, culture, habits, and ideas, which came to be personified in elderly scholars and teachers who were beaten to death or sent off to prison camps for “re-education”). 

Under Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s martial law, the Kabataang Barangay was created by Presidential Decree 684 in 1975 to give the Filipino youth “a definite role and affording them ample opportunity to express their views.” That sounds innocuous enough, and indeed the KB would go on to engage in skills training, sports, sanitation, food production, crime prevention, and disaster relief, among other civic concerns, under the leadership of presidential daughter Imee. 

At the same time it was clearly designed to offset leftist youth organizations like the Kabataang Makabayan and the Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan by drawing on the same membership pool and diverting their energies elsewhere—more specifically, into becoming the bearers and defenders of the New Society’s notions. (Full disclosure: I was an SDK member, but my younger siblings were KB.)

I would never have thought that the “Duterte Youth” meant something else, but it does; evidently, it’s just shorthand for “Duty to Energize the Republic through the Enlightenment of the Youth Sectoral Party-list Organization.” Organized in 2016 to support the Davao mayor’s presidential campaign and later his policies as President, the Duterte Youth have affected quasi-military black uniforms and fist salutes. Its leader, Ronald Cardema, reportedly brushed off comparisons with the Hitler Youth by pointing out that the Germans had no patent on the “youth” name, which he was therefore free to use. (Uhmm… okay.)

Adjudged too old to represent the youth in Congress (his wife Ducielle took over his slot), Cardema was appointed to head the National Youth Commission instead, from which perch he then directed “all pro-government youth leaders of our country… to report to the National Youth Commission all government scholars who are known in your area as anti-government youth leaders allied with the leftist CPP-NPA-NDF.”

I acknowledge how Pollyannish it would be to expect young people and even children to be shielded from the harsh and often cruel realities of today’s world. The war in Ukraine, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the pandemic are just the latest iterations of conflicts and crises that have turned 12-year-old boys into executioners in Sierra Leone and child miners in Bolivia, Madagascar, and, yes, the Philippines. 

Their enlistment in political causes—of whatever orientation—is another form of maltreatment or abuse for which we have yet no name, but few governments or anti-government rebels will let them be. Their minds are soft and malleable, their fears obvious and manipulable, their rewards simple and cheap. With the right incentives and punishments, it can be easier to turn them into monsters or machines than to safeguard their innocence. They can be weaponized.

I’ve mentioned this in another column, but there’s a scene in the classic movie Cabaret, set in the Nazi period, where a handsome and bright-faced boy in a brown uniform begins to sing what seems to be an uplifting song about “the sun on the meadow.” But as it progresses we realize that it’s a fascist anthem which is picked up by ordinary folk with chilling alacrity. Watch this on Youtube (“Tomorrow Belongs to Me”) and then look at your son or nephew, or the children playing across the street. If you want, you could vote to have them marching and singing a similar tune in a couple of years.

(Photo from Rappler.com)

Penman No. 435: A Dying Swan at Midnight

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Penman for Sunday, February 6, 2022

YOU’VE BEEN reading about some of my book-buying adventures and the most unlikely places I’ve found some of my most valuable books—like a 1551 book of English essays under a lamppost in Cubao, a signed first edition of Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart at Jollibee on Commonwealth Avenue, and an 1868 two-volume facsimile of Don Quixote at a McDonald’s on that same road.

Now here’s an incredible story that happened to me one night a couple of weeks ago—very late that night, just as I was about to go to bed. Beng had just finished another episode of another interminable K-drama, and I was too sleepy to switch to my own program (typically some violent crime show, which gives me a good night’s sleep). And then as I always do, I checked my messages on my laptop before moving from the La-Z-Boy to the bed, and I saw something that instantly woke me up again.

Let’s backtrack a few days earlier to another idle moment when I was poking around the usual FB sites for garage-sale and Japan-surplus flotsam and jetsam—the “antique” Coke trays (probably China-made), the Ambassador furniture sets, the bobblehead figurines, the wooden fruit bowls, etc. And then I came across a rack of paintings being sold for just P1,000 each—most of them quite awful and not even worth the price, even to a bottom-feeder like me.

But then I spotted a painting that had rather intriguing lines and colors, one that was clearly different in theme and treatment from the nipa huts and carabaos that populated the other canvases. 

In the foreground was a young woman in a white dress—a dancer immediately came to my mind—set against what first seemed to me a backdrop of the sea, a huge curling wave threatening to envelop her. But there was another element, aside from the strange shape of the “water”, that didn’t make sense: an orange something near the woman’s face.

And then it all snapped into place: the background figure was a swan with one wing outstretched and the other practically smothering the woman, and the orange thing was its beak. What sprang to my mind was Leda and the Swan, the old Greek myth that has been one of art and literature’s most reinterpreted and most referenced stories (where Zeus, in the guise of a swan, rapes or seduces Leda, and has two children by her). 

This could not have been done by a naif painter; it took some education and sophistication to take on a subject like that, and to represent it with both grace and power. This painting could not have been a recent work; its strokes and colors belonged to another age. It felt old, in a good way. I thought that it had to be decades old, possibly even pre-war.

I immediately messaged the seller to reserve the painting for me. For P1,000, it was a no-brainer. Usually the seller would respond within minutes, and we would do the GCash and Lalamove song-and-dance within the hour. But the day passed with no response. I messaged him again that night, and next morning I still heard nothing back. Another day passed; I had saved the picture of the painting on my phone and returned to it now and then, stewing inside, increasingly annoyed by the seller’s silence.

And then I got the message: did I want it? Of course, I messaged back quickly. It will cost you P1,000, he said. Sure, I said, give me your GCash number. I hope you can book it for pickup now, he said, because I’m leaving very early tomorrow morning—unless you want to get it in the afternoon. No, no, I said—I’ll book it right now. It was 11:30 pm, and Beng was sound asleep. 

And so it happened that just past midnight, a Lalamove rider roared up to my gate to deliver the painting, which I examined immediately. It had been very badly framed, with ragged edges of the painted canvas hanging over the back. Since the edges had been pulled over, I could find no signature. Still it was every bit as powerful as I had thought it to be, the colors laid on in a thick impasto. 

So the mystery was, who painted it, and when? I posted it on FB the next morning, and immediately the writers and artists in my group identified it with Leda and the Swan. I felt vindicated. And then my Toronto-based friend, the poet Patty Rivera (whose husband Joe also paints), posted a link to a story from South Africa, where a painting by a Russian-born artist named Vladimir Tretchikoff was up for auction. It was titled “The Dying Swan,” from the ballet by Mikhail Fokine; Tretchikoff had even persuaded the great ballerina Alicia Markova to pose for him in 1949, when he began the work (one of two he gave that title).

So my midnight acquisition was a copy done by a local painter in the 1950s, possibly by an amateur or even a student. Was I disappointed? How could I be, especially for the price I paid? Tretchikoff’s original was clearly much finer and more radiant; but my rougher copy, in Patty’s words, showed more “torment and despair.” When Beng restores this and we have it reframed, it will have its own life and energy, and the swan will die, over and over again, which means it never will.

Penman No. 424: The Analog Revival

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Penman for Monday, September 27, 2021

TWO YEARS ago, just before the Covid pandemic turned the world upside down, another and much less noticed reversal took place. Ending a 33-year trend, vinyl records outsold CDs—1.24 million records toting up $224 million in global sales, according to Music Times. You’d think that grandparents the world over had launched a conspiracy to buy out the remaining stock of Mantovani, The Lettermen, and the Ray Conniff Singers, but no—70 percent of the buyers were millennials under 35.

Audiophile Eric Teel says that “Music lovers have long treated vinyl with a kind of mysticism, using terminology like ‘warmth’ to describe a special intangible quality that some say eludes digital recording technology. Getting the most out of a vinyl record requires more effort than the simple huff of warm breath and a wipe on the t-shirt that many of us (shouldn’t, but do) give a CD to wipe off fingerprints before sticking it in a player.” In other words, there’s the sound, and there’s the ritual of choosing, cleaning, and playing the record—all before putting one’s feet up on a stool and sipping coffee.

Even earlier, in 2014, someone named Alex Lenkei wrote an essay on medium.com about another kind of hole he had fallen into—manual typewriters. Explaining why he found his way back to typewriters in the age of the Internet, Alex said:

“Like people, no two typewriters are the same. Each one feels distinctly different and has a different history of grade school assignments, covert love letters, prose and poetry, government propaganda, and wartime memos. The coldness of the keys under your fingers feels like the only truth in the world and the smell of metal and grease when you dig your nose into the typebars, the cavity of the machine, feels like the home of a serious writer.

“A typewriter is a miraculous tool for disconnecting in a time when we are all constantly connected to our smartphones or tablets. When I’m sitting down at a computer, I don’t know what I’m going to do next; I can get distracted very easily. In today’s increasingly connected world, production and focus in writing are being sacrificed for Facebook updates, tweets, and blog posts. There are a thousand distractions. But with a typewriter, I know I’m writing.”

The third analog instrument that’s made a comeback is—you guessed it—the fountain pen. According to the Washington Post, “In the 1990s, high-end, limited-edition pens took off…. The recession of 2008 dried up the ink on those for a while. The current fountain pen revival, penfolk agree, has been driven by an unlikely group: millennials. Yes, a generation that wasn’t taught cursive and whose members do most of their writing on a keyboard or smartphone screen has breathed new life into the old-fashioned fountain pen.

“’There’s less writing now, but when they do write, they want a good experience….’ That means premium pen, nice paper, unusual ink—stuff that looks good on Instagram…. A lot of the pens are used for keeping something called a dot journal or a bullet journal, which is basically a fancy to-do list.”

It’s obvious from these testimonials what’s been happening, aside from the fact of genuine oldtimers like me hanging on to their tools and toys: a whole new generation has reached far into the past for a new experience unavailable in the digital world—something tactile, something hands-on, something requiring more personal investment than a keystroke or tapping on “Play.” 

That’s nowhere more evident than in our local pen fanciers group, Fountain Pen Network-Philippines (fpn-p.org), which since its establishment in 2008 now counts over 11,000 members online. I’d say at least 70 percent of active members are below 40. The group’s original focus was fountain pen collecting, especially vintage pens, and old guys like me were happy just to ogle our pen-filled boxes and occasionally write some lines with black or blue-black Quink.

Our newest and younger members are clearly more excited by swatching colorful inks that shimmer and sheen, by learning calligraphy and journaling, and by just getting together as a community to enjoy a newfound passion. In other words, it’s not so much the object but the experience that matters most, asserting oneself in a digitized universe.

I also help moderate the Filipino Typewriter Collectors group on FB, and we’ve passed more than 1,000 members in less than a year. As with pens, most of our members are young, artistically inclined, expressive, and fascinated by using old tech to do 21st-century tasks. Again, I’m the crusty hardware guy who appreciates the machines as artifacts (having written books with them ages ago), while our newbies can still be thrilled by the clatter of keys on a platen and by the words they can form on a blank sheet of paper.

I grew up with vinyl, but came relatively late to the collecting party. We have a small, private Viber group that exchanges tips on where to find certain LPs cheap. We’re not learned enough to consider ourselves audiophiles fussing over “curve” and “coloration”; we just want to relive our youth by listening to the Beatles, Brasil ’66, and Marianne Faithfull. What’s surprising is, we have some teenage members who are discovering this music for the first time on vinyl, and liking it. Suddenly, their lolos and titos are cool again. There’s hope for the future yet!

Penman No. 418: Hello, Goodbye

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Penman for Monday, July 5, 2021

YESTERDAY, JULY 4, marked the 55th anniversary of the controversial visit of the Beatles to the Philippines in July 1966. 

I was 12, in transition between grade school at La Salle Green Hills and the Philippine Science High School, when the Beatles came to Manila. I can still remember that day, the 4th of July, quite clearly. We were living in Pasig, and my mom and I took a bus to Quiapo, from where we were going to take a jeepney to go to the Rizal Coliseum. She was going to take me to see the Beatles, perhaps as a treat for having made it to the PSHS, a school for smart kids. I certainly felt smart. I knew all the Beatle songs by heart. We didn’t have a record player, but I listened to them on the radio, and sometimes on our neighbor’s TV, when they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. We didn’t have tickets, but I was sure we could buy them at the gate. 

We got off at Quiapo, in front of a new theater that had just opened: the Cinerama, which boasted something called “Sensurround,” guaranteed to make you feel an earthquake in your seat. The theater’s inaugural offering was a war movie titled “The Battle of the Bulge.” My mom stopped on the sidewalk, looking up at the marquee. “Let’s watch this instead,” she said. And so we did, and so I missed seeing the Beatles; you could say that I almost saw them standing there.

I was in grief, although to be fair to my mom, the movie was fun, full of tanks and military mayhem.

Not long after came the news that the Beatles were being chased out of the airport by an angry mob, and the story I got was that they had failed to show up at Malacañang for what would have been a command performance. I could imagine Bongbong—three years younger and a few grades behind me at La Salle—standing forlorn on an empty stage, waiting for the stars that never came. I felt torn between sympathy for him and my allegiance to the Fab Four. I thought that the rude send-off was too much, but I also couldn’t understand why the Beatles couldn’t have swung by the Palace and sang a song or two. How hard was that? 

Today, more than 50 years later, I think I can understand that ambivalence. In 1966, Ferdinand Marcos was very much the good guy—heck, he was the guest of honor at our graduation in La Salle! (Incidentally, the sons of his presidential opponents—Diosdado Macapagal and Raul Manglapus—were also in the same school.) He had just assumed the presidency, and still exuded the charisma of a winner. While a private impresario had brought the Beatles over, they were—in some fuzzy official sense—guests of the Republic, hosted by no less than the President of the Philippines. They were ambassadors of goodwill, of the Republic of Liverpool or wherever they came from, and it would have been a normal courtesy to pay a visit to Malacañang for some polite chit-chat and indulge their hosts with a song or two. 

John could have leaned over to ask the young Bongbong, “What’s your favorite song of ours?” while Imelda looked on with a glowing smile, and Bongbong could have shyly answered, after some prodding, “She loves you ye-ye-ye….” Whereupon John would have winked at Paul, who would have protested “But John, we didn’t bring any instruments with us,” leading Papa Ferdinand to pull a curtain aside to show a full array of Gibson and Rickenbacker guitars and Ludwig drums. And that would have led to one, two songs, the obligatory encore, with Imelda and Ferdie launching into an impromptu dance, and cheers and laughter all around, culminating in a Rajah Sikatuna award or some such for the quartet.

But of course none of that happened. The Palace invitation went unanswered, the catered leche flan cooled and curdled, and the tapping of Ferdie’s and Imelda’s fingers on their hardwood armrests telegraphed disbelief, then irritation, then anger. A dejected Bongbong might then have muttered, “I like the Rolling Stones more, anyway….” Ferdie would have whispered a few words to an aide; Imelda would have stood up, and with a wave of a hand ordered all the dish covers and warmers shut—“Serve it to the dogs!”—and retired in a huff to a drawing room. Meanwhile the Palace aide would have gone down to the Beatles fans gathered at the gates below, and ordered them to go home: “They’re not coming. They snubbed the President!… Who do they think they are?”

“More popular than Jesus,” of course, John had said in an interview with a London newspaper just four months earlier, commenting on the general decline of faith in modern life more than anything else, but now was a perfect time to lift that out of context and expose the Beatles as heathen ingrates. Southern Baptists burned their records and the Ku Klux Klan picketed their US concerts. Some Pinoys chased them to their plane—as many others wept, just to make that clear; to them, the Beatles were certainly more popular than Marcos.

Penman No. 414: Full of Foolish Song

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Penman for Monday, May 24, 2021

AMID THE lifting gloom of the pandemic—“lifting” perhaps for those of us who’ve had at least their first vaccine shots—a blast of sunshine came into our lives two weeks ago. We had been busy marshalling our limited resources and those of our network of senior titos and titas in aid of community pantries, anti-Covid measures, and sundry causes and charities, not expecting anything back but smiles and good vibes. And then a friend popped up in our driveway with a surprise gift that made my day.

I’d been friends with Jim (let’s call him that) for 50 years, since we met in UP and became student activists in the same organization. We were actually batchmates in grade school, but it was in our work for the anti-Marcos resistance that we grew closer, tooling around in his white Renault to this and that exploit. After EDSA, Jim served in the government, and when he left, he established a private art-related company that became hugely successful and is now a leader in its field.

For all that and more, Jim announced that he had drawn up a short list of guy-friends whom he was gifting with a very special surprise—a package comprising a turntable, an amplifier, and a pair of speakers. “Just a starter set,” he said apologetically, but as far as I was concerned it was a little bit of heaven—Sixties heaven, to be more specific.

I have to confess that I’m no audiophile, despite my proclivity for vintage fountain pens, typewriters, old watches, antiquarian books, and generally anything older than me. I have everything in the house—my mini-museum—from a 1905 Hammond typewriter and a ship captain’s navigational guidebook that traveled the world in the 1700s to boxes of pens from the 1920s, pocket watches that clocked railroad traffic a century ago, and a red rotary telephone—but not a turntable.

It’s not that I don’t like music, or vinyl records and turntables in particular. I grew up playing 45s and 78s (33s weren’t that plentiful then) in our big cabinet-like player that had glowing tubes in the back. Not having TV until I reached high school (for that we stuck our snotty faces into a neighbor’s window), I became quite adept at playing records, mesmerized by the sight of them stacked and dropping on the platter, and by the tonearm finding its way to the first groove. Hiss, hiss, pop, pop—and then a trumpet blast or a guitar riff, and off you went to dreamland, an adult kind of place you couldn’t fully understand as a kid, but which sounded like fun—full of stardust, cherry pink and apple blossom white, love letters in the sand, swallows in Capistrano, amore, and teenage señoritas.

Despite those happy associations, I never bought a record player even if I could, maybe because I knew it was going to be a very deep and expensive rabbit hole (I should’ve told myself that about pens and typewriters). I’d seen friends whose houses and cars had been taken over by hyper-expensive sound systems, and whose vocabularies now sprouted words like “attenuator,” “circum-aural,” “impedance,” and “sibilant,” and I just couldn’t get into that—I was into music, not sound. When cassette tapes, CDs, Walkmans, and iPods followed, I gladly went along, content to enjoy my favorite tracks on earphones.

But Jim’s gift, so thoughtfully given, was too nice to refuse, and I have to admit to a flutter of excitement about reconnecting with my childhood through a technology that requires a bit more deliberation than skimming through a digital playlist with your thumb. At our age, approaching our seventies, the notion of sitting on your favorite chair with your feet up, glass of wine in hand, and being enveloped in a cloud of happy sound (say, Chet Baker crooning “I’ve Never Been in Love Before”) is an appealing one indeed—“full of foolish song,” as Chet put it.

I hadn’t played a record in over half a century, so I had to be taught the basics all over again. I’m deathly certain I’m going to break something one of these days, but that will be part of the re-education. Most days I’ll still probably be using my earphones with iTunes, but with the speakers in Jim’s array, I can’t say how long that will last. Jim also presented me with some starter LPs, knowing what I liked: Dionne Warwick, Astrud Gilberto, and a choice between the Byrds and America. (So what do you think I chose? Any true-blue ‘60s guy will choose the Byrds, of course!) 

What else did I want, Jim asked. Oh boy. Off the top of my head—Spiral Starecase, Chet Baker, Sergio Mendes and Brasil 66, Eumir Deodato, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Simon and Garfunkel, any and all Sinatra, the original Broadway “Hair,” my favorite Broadway musicals (“South Pacific,” “West Side Story,” “The King and I”—sorry, boys and girls, no “Rent” or “Hamilton” there), and any album with the songs that just won’t go out of my head: “Dein ist mein ganzes Herz,” “Amapola,” “Non ti scordar di me,” and “Sabor a mi.”

And no, this won’t be a new addiction. I just don’t have the space. I’m sure of it. Truly. I swear. 

Penman No. 413: My YouTube Playlist

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Penman for Monday, May 10, 2021

WITH A lockdown stretching well into its second year, I came to the crushing conclusion some time ago that I had practically exhausted everything I wanted to watch on Netflix, at least until Season 5 of “The Crown” and Season 3 of “New Amsterdam” show up. I’ve even signed up with other streaming services like Curiosity Stream (a great trove of fascinating documentaries, for a small fee) and Tubi (free, but basically B-movies with stars you never heard of). But even there, as with Netflix, I’m close to hitting “Watch it again.”

That’s when I rediscovered YouTube, which had been there all along—it was founded in 2005—but which I’d always looked upon as a depository for mostly juvenile and silly or funny videos. Five years ago, I uploaded a video I took of the aftermath of the Faculty Center fire in UP, but most often, I’ve gone to YouTube with our apu-apuhan Buboy to find his favorite Mr. Bean or Spiderman cartoons. (A digital native, this tyke can’t even read yet, but knows his way around buttons and icons; “Tatay, press X!” he’d tell me.)

It’s estimated that 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube per minute. Its stock of 800 million videos gets 1 billion views per day. That’s an awful lot of things to watch, and we’d have died of old age before we finished exploring even 1 percent of this platform. 

My fascination with YouTube began when I discovered that Beng and I could watch hours and hours of Broadway musicals and old movies on it. I guess that’s what old folks like us think of as “entertainment,” especially in these dreadful times—a singalong marathon that ends with an uplifting tune like “Somewhere” or “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” (Think of it as 1950s TikTok, only 360 times longer.) I also realized that YouTube’s a good place to exorcise your worst fears—such as when I had to have my gall bladder taken out; watching the whole procedure first on YouTube calmed me down. 

But certainly there have to be more pleasant subjects than a cholecystectomy to enjoy on your big TV. Over the past few months of YouTubing, I’ve settled on a few favorites—my YouTube playlist, shall we say—that fill up my bedtime hours while I’m working on my laptop, until I actually shut my eyes around midnight. In no particular order, they are:

1. Crime and punishment. It’s a horrible truth, but few things are more absorbing than why people go bad—very bad. Real-crime and forensics shows indulge our curiosity about evil and its discovery—which, let’s admit, can be strangely satisfying. (A Pinoy version of “Unsolved Mysteries” can go on forever.)

2. Mudlarking. Beng and I have had this longstanding fantasy of foraging for coins, bottles, and Churchill’s pen on the banks of the Thames, but a plethora of mudlarking channels will do for now. (We’d probably die of sepsis if we did that on the Pasig.)

3. Car restoration. This includes barn finds, car auctions, junkyards, and the perennial question: “Will it run again after 50 years in the mud?” I’m convinced that in some old bodega on some southern island, a dusty Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost or Bugatti Atalante lies waiting—if it hasn’t been converted to a jeep yet.

4. Antiquing. I could spend another year in lockdown just watching “Antiques Roadshow” and “Salvage Hunters,” guessing at the prices of lamps, vases, oil cans, and trinkets. So far, I haven’t spotted any “Weapons of Moroland” or oversize spoons and forks.

5. Art forgeries. Repeat these names after me: John Myatt, Tom Keating, Han van Meegeren, Elmyr de Hory, and Walter Beltracchi. You may never have heard of them before, but you won’t forget them once you see what they were able to do, which is what we all secretly dream of: fool the experts. 

6. Military excavations. Must be the boy in me that can’t help gawking at helmets, medals, machine guns, ammunition belts, and yes, human skulls and bones coming out of the mud in some corner of Latvia or Poland. War is terrible—and mesmerizing.

7. Royalty. Q: We all know they’re flawed human beings and probably an unhappier lot than us—so why do we keep following the travails of the royals? A: Because we want to be sure they’re flawed human beings and probably an unhappier lot than us.

8. Gemstones. Seeing all those fist-sized opals and emeralds makes me want to rush out to our backyard with a shovel, but all we ever get there is dog and chicken poo. 

9. Old Manila. You can feast on many videos showing Manila at its prewar prime and in the postwar ‘50s—with clean, wide streets, graceful architecture, and well-dressed, well-behaved people—and weep.

10. Abandoned houses. They call it “urban archeology,” presumably a semi-legal form of housebreaking, as long as you don’t take anything but pictures. Beng and I are always astounded by what people leave behind—knowing that if our akyat-bahay experts went through the place, they’d leave it clean as a whistle.

Penman No. 405: A Serenade of Crickets

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Penman for Monday, January 18, 2021

EVERY MORNING, I wake up to the sound of hundreds if not thousands of crickets chirping in my ears. I will hear them for the rest of the day—every second of every minute of every hour—until I fall asleep. There is practically no escape—not earplugs, not even the “white noise” prescribed by websites, unless it (or some music) is played at intolerably high volume. Pressing my palms against my ears merely adds a percussive instrument to the orchestra, the thump-thump-thump of my beating heart.

We live on the UP campus in Diliman, in the shade of towering mango trees. For some time I simply assumed that there were, indeed, choirs of crickets up in those branches, making love or at least just making noise, as crickets are supposed to do. And then one day I undertook a foolish experiment—foolish, because what hadn’t been a problem suddenly became one. I went to a place where I was totally sure no crickets would be found, or no external sounds would get through—and I still heard the same relentless hum. It was in me, with me, wherever, whenever.

A small voice in me says I should be panicking and screaming. I remember an old horror movie I saw on TV as a boy, where an insect—which I would later learn was an “earwig”—crawls into a man’s ear and stays there, deep in his ear canal, and burrows into his brain, until it turns him into a raving lunatic. A doctor performs a delicate operation and—much to the man’s relief—takes the wriggler out. At that point, the doctor holds up the dead insect in his pincers, and gravely announces that “It’s a female—and it seems to have laid its eggs.” The patient screams, and screams.

There have been times, these past many months under lockdown, when I’ve felt that way, as if some dark fluid monster had insinuated itself into my brain, my body, and indeed my spirit. I emerged from sleep drowning in a huge flood compounded of fear, sorrow, and regret over everything in general and nothing in particular. The mere mention of another friend’s death or intubation sent my imagination spinning, asking questions for which I had no answers, like “What will be worse—passage into a black void with no consciousness whatsoever, or into immortality, forever aware of every little thing in the universe, and also forever alone?” I knew what people would be telling me—have faith in a heaven, in angels, in the enveloping welcome of a blinding grace, and as a good Christian schoolboy I found comfort in those pastel promises of deliverance. But it was hard to believe anything in the state I found myself in, where even familiar walls and ceilings seemed inescapably malignant. 

It probably didn’t help that as the long lockdown began, I resolved to use the time to catch up on a heavy backlog of writing jobs going back years, and against all odds managed to complete the drafts of five book projects within five months in a dizzying frenzy. I felt superhuman, until I woke up one morning feeling all hollowed out.

Before long, I realized and had to admit that I was going through bouts of anxiety and its flipside, depression. This came as a huge surprise to someone who had prided himself on his wakefulness and presence of mind. In my last job before retirement as my university’s VP for Public Affairs, I had been constantly on call to the media and to the community at large, explaining our policies and positions with what I hoped was clarity and composure. Suddenly all that coolness vanished; I felt uncertain, tentative, unmoored.

A call to a psychiatrist-friend led me back on the slow road to wellness; I’m still on it, managing from day to day with a combination of medication, exercise, prayer, and time for nothing but nothing (ie, Netflix, fountain pens, old books, and typewriters). Beng and I dream idly of our next adventures in faraway places—St. Petersburg, before the Covid curtain fell. I find it relaxing to watch an hour-long YouTube video on “codicology,” the archaeology of old books, as well as another on the recovery and restoration of a 1937 Bugatti Atalante. I am nourishing my sense of wonderment again, finding reassurance in a remembered past to which we all hope to belong.

The only downside to my recovery has been this case of tinnitus, this constant ringing in my ears, listed as a rare side effect of my antidepressant. I recall from my graduate studies that the ancients posed a theory about the “Music of the Spheres,” supposedly the harmonious hum produced by the movement of celestial bodies in space, imperceptible to the human ear. Fancifully I imagine that perhaps I had broken through some dimensional barrier and was hearing this orbital buzz.

But a serenade of crickets seems just about right, and may be a tolerable price to pay for a patch of sanity. Turning 67 last week, I thought of all the books I have yet to write in the time I have left, and for which I have to stay sensible and alert. The crickets remind me there is time, and no need to hurry toward that inevitable infinitude of absolute silence just ahead.