Date:	2007-11-27 00:39
Subject:	The Post-Gaiman Post
Security:	Public
Mood:	sleepy

Date:	2007-08-21 23:04
Subject:	Miss Fatso Spills Venom
Security:	Public
Mood:	annoyed

I know I've been remiss in my blogging (and bloghopping) when I seem to have missed out on the many raging controversies in "Philippine blogosphere" -- God, how I hate that term. It must be the strange weather we're having lately, but everybody seems particularly irritated. And some for good reason. There's, of course, Gibbs ranting about the growing cliques and their sense of entitlement in the local blogging world (which made me think: I've been blogging since 2003, and I kinda miss the innocence of those days. Today, it's all about Awards this, and GoogleAds that, it all makes your head spin.) But there's something else I have missed out on...



This is vile Malu Fernandez and her matapobre mouth, probably the most hated woman in Philippine blogging today. (In her Friendster account, she describes herself as a "super bitch but with a heart of gold .... hahaha sometimes i'm not what I seem to be oooh thats a double edged sword...") She writes a social column in People Asia Magazine, and thinks she has the wit of Libby Gelman-Wexler when in all actuality she has the talent and the dimness of a Paris Hilton on a bad day. And she looks like a runaway lechon dressed up in fake designer clothes to boot. What she has done is approach Tim Yap notoriety of pa-sosyal viciousness without even the whiff of flair Tim has. See the offending instance via Tingog.com here and here, and see the debate in Manolo's blog here, and countless other blogs too many to even begin to consider and link. Better yet, I'm posting the pages of the notorious article below (click to enlarge):



Read her article and feel your blood pressure rise. But what really riled me up -- and prompted me to post this -- is her devil-may-care response to the blogging barrage:

As I type this, I’d like you to know that it’s not about whining, complaining and bitching but just stating the facts. Just recently, I wrote a funny article in my magazine column and my friends thought it was hilarious. It was humorous and quite tongue-in-cheek, or at least I thought so, until the magazine got a few e-mails from people who didn’t get the meaning of my acerbic wit. The bottom line was just that I had offended the reader’s socioeconomic background. If any of these people actually read anything thicker then a magazine they would find it very funny. Most people don’t get the fact that they need bitches like me to shake up their world, otherwise their lives would be boring and mediocre. I obviously write for the a certain target audience and if what I write offends you, just stop reading.

Date:	2007-08-19 11:14
Subject:	A Palanca
Security:	Public
Mood:	happy

In an interview once with The New York Times, Danny Boyle, one of my favorite film directors (he did Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, The Beach, Millions, and Sunshine) remarked about life after having scaled the first pinnacle of success: "Everything after the first one is business. There's something about that innocence and joy when you just don't quite know what you're doing." I feel that way somehow about winning my first Palanca, albeit a Second Place finish for the short story in English, in 2002. It brought me what may be the greatest burst of joy in my entire life: I had never jumped so high, smiled so much, or wahooed in an endless orgy of abandon. I felt that I had won the entire universe in the biggest lottery there was. But after that first win, everything else -- even the subsequent winnings -- becomes an exercise in proving the first one was never a fluke to begin with. You still laugh out loud and jump for joy, but they all seem to pale to that first time.

And having said all that, yes, I won my third Palanca Award this year. Third prize, short story for children in English, for "The Last Days of Magic." Yey! (That story will be part of the new PEN Anthology edited by Vicente Garcia Groyon III, coming out soon.)

[Dean is running a list of the new Palanca winners this year. Dean, by the way, won Second Prize for the same category I have. Go, LitCritters!]

Date:	2007-03-10 13:57
Subject:	The Secret Poetry
Security:	Public
Mood:	loved
Music:	My Secret Love by Mandy Moore

In the morning, even the blackest coffee brewed from the heavy air cannot equal the spread and kick by which this wakefulness comes -- a sudden sure surrender also becomes an awakening. This is the story of how you and I once met the night I flung all else to the grave hardness of days. I must have told you in the strange rush confessional of meeting and knowing how nothing holds now, not the skirmish of things undone, and of love wasted to the shrill demands of so many small fears. You took my lips instead and granted me what glimpse of days your tongue on mine showed: here is a new quickening that arrests my own sleep, and my hands -- with the trembling of secret freeing knowledge -- slowly hold out to the sweet graces of finally knowing what this heart must, or should, beat for.

[inspired by bulletproof vest]

This is the gayest thing I've ever done in this blog. But who cares. I'm also doing this on a dare. And like what BV said, it's fun.

10. Patrick Wilson
actor



The first time he enters the frame in Mike Nichols' adaptation of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, you will want to convert to Mormonism forever. If a missionary like him does appear in your doorstep.

9. Ian Lawless
model



Most of us only got the PG version of his Lacoste commercial, and so there were only hints of what he had to, umm, offer. (Find the uncensored version here.) But he made nudity look like a wholesome thing, you just want to hug the man. (Yes, it's that smile in the end that does you in. Bastard.)

8. Sacha Baron Cohen
actor/comedian



He is odious as Borat, or Ali G. But when he does appear as himself, he is strangely composed, and gentlemanly. And his villainous French race car driver in Talladega Nights was inexplicably sexy. Must have been the accent.

7. Barack Obama
U.S. senator



He's the black JFK, embodying a fine balance of charisma, intellect, and a wise handle of issues. So he's not that experienced in politics. I'd still vote for him any day of the week.

6. Tom Ford
fashion designer



The eyes! The eyes! And the fabulous cut on those clothes! Even with all that fashionista air, he exudes a musky machismo that overwhelms.

5. Reynaldo Gianecchini
model



This guy is said to be the most beautiful man in the face of the earth. I wholeheartedly agree. I mean, wouldn't you?

4. Joseph Cooper Ramo
Time Magazine senior editor



That intense look. Those intelligent articles. It's impossible not to like the man. He makes brainy sound pervertedly sexual.

3. Jonathan Bennett
actor



I hate Lindsay Lohan. But I completely empathize with her character in Mean Girls. I mean, I'd fail math, too, to get the guy.

2. Jude Law
actor



He has an odd look that is at once mesmerizing and dangerous. And he simply smolders, right from the very beginning when we first noticed him coming up from the surf in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Venus would be jealous.

1. Joel Stein
columnist/pop culture commentator



What can I say? He's got that puppy look that blends well with his nerdy, but I'm-cooler-than-you persona. Plus, I'm always a sucker for writers.

And maybe also... Ethan Hawke.



Because he was in Reality Bites and Before Sunset, two wise movies that mirrored my own realities and delusions. And he wrote two novels, which I liked.

Where are the Filipinos? I don't know. There sure are a lot of eye-candies around, but nobody to really go "oowww" for. Oh, wait, there's Jun Lana. And Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala and Raffy Ruiz and Ronnie Salvacion, too. And that ABS-CBN reporter from Baguio or somewhere. And that's really it.

Next up: women, just to explore my heterosexual side.

I kinda disappeared from this blog midweek last week. Truth is, I was busy with preparations for the Tiempo Tribute this coming Friday, and there are endless things to do since I just got the job of organizing it roughly a week ago, and so I am juggling a thousand things, fervently hoping nothing falls within my being able to catch it. And then Mark's cousin Jeffrey breezed in from Manila around Thursday, which required that typical "babysitting" tour around the city, checking out the local restaurants, going to Forest Camp, etc.

We just got back from a great weekend down south of Negros, in Antulang, somewhere in Siaton town -- thanks to good friends Annabelle Lee and Edo Adriano who've been trying to get us to their resort forever. Here's a shot of the place...


A sunrise, with photo taken from the infinity pool

This was the place where Alfred Vargas had that famous photo shoot for his nude and barely there picture coffeetable book, together with photography genius Ronnie Salvacion. Last weekend proved that stars could align, and Mark, Jeff, and I were off to this beautiful secret spot. Early Sunday morning, Mark and I woke up early to catch the sunrise, and to restage some of the shots Ronnie did for X-Ray with Alfred -- not quite successfully (who am I to out-shoot Ronnie?), since I had with me a broken digital camera that kept turning off. Still, we got some good shots, and called the exercise a small success. I will be writing about this trip within the week.

Right now, I'm easing into my week, with a sad acknowledgment that weekend's "play" has ended, and "work" is just beginning. And there are many, many things to accomplish.

Here are some pictures I took of Mark in Antulang, with Michael Ocampo's broken camera...

Date:	2007-01-15 20:11
Subject:	Small Town Pageants, Piggish Politicians, a Flat Tire, and a Fire in the City
Security:	Public
Mood:	tired

There were dark things to herald the beginning of the week, and when we did return to Dumaguete City, we were met by fire, and a flat tire. Somehow, everything summed up to an adventure, and in the end, that's what all that matters. Positive thinking helps, my mother always intoned. She is a wise woman. If I never heeded that advise, I would have gone mad last weekend.

Sunday morning, Mark and I -- together with his mom Glenda -- started on our three-hour trip (two hours if one drove like mad) to faraway Jimalalud, Mark's father's hometown. Jimalalud, if you have to know, is a backwater town where nothing much ever happens and where there is largely nothing to see, except a coastline facing Cebu undistinguished by its rockiness. But it's a clean town, and something about it makes me tremble in memory of my childhood in Bayawan. I had longed for an out-of-town trip since the year started, and this one promised buckets of possibilities: besides the ease of having Mark's relations around to make the visit more comfortable, it was also the town fiesta. I was thinking of lechon, lots of it, all the way to northern Oriental Negros, daydreaming away the furious rush of mountains and sugar canes and coastal beaches from our car window.

Mark was to host the annual town fiesta beauty pageant, and his mom and I we were there to cheer him on. Or more precisely: to be the support we somehow knew he would never have from the small-town organizing committee where the insularity and boondock-ness of the place contrived to make any effort a Kafkian experience. And it was.

Shall I tell you about the lack of definite accommodations accorded a visitor? Or the convoluted flood of changes for the show's program that occurred every second of the last minute? But these were the good parts of the Jimalalud nightmare. The bad parts: One, starting a program (scheduled to begin at 9 p.m.) at around 11:30 p.m. instead. Imagine the wearying wait.

"Why can't we start now?" someone asked.

"We can't. [Pompous Politician Running for Office] is not yet here. We have to wait. She has a speech in the progam," was the reply.

(Yes, my dear people... in small-town Negrense pageants, it is typical for shameless politicians to hog the spotlight. Last night, I counted five self-serving political speeches scattered throughout the entire program -- there was one before the coronation, and another after the coronation. It was rumored that a high city official supposedly gave instructions to close the entrance, so that no one could leave before the top brass had their say.)

"Why can't we go ahead on time, and accommodate [Pompous Politician Running for Office] when she comes?" someone suggested.

"We can't. We have to wait," was the reply.

We waited. In between the waiting, we got conflicting news, each one coming in the heels of the other: [Pompous Politician Running for Office] is not coming anymore. No, [Pompous Politician Running for Office] is coming. No, [Pompous Politician Running for Office] has sent a message she won't be here. Wait, [Pompous Politician Running for Office] is coming for sure. In the end, we started without [Pompous Politician Running for Office]. (She arrived very late.) That was near midnight, and I was about ready to commit hara-kiri. All around me, the contestants milled about with their bakla make-up artists and coaches. Their faces ranged from the grotesque in kabuki make-up, to the transcendent. (One girl was particularly beautiful ... until she opened her mouth, and had absolutely nothing to say.)

Two, in the middle of the show, somewhere near the 1 a.m. mark, it started drizzling. The comedy of the contestants' answers in heinous English could not even stop the dark skies from raining down on the circusy spectacle. Mark however soldiered on.

But in hindsight, I can even say I enjoyed the show despite its glaring flaws, and mind-numbing wait. At least it was a spectacle, no matter how minor it was. What was not enjoyable was seeing the parade of politicians -- the vice-mayor, the mayor, the governor, the congressman, the congressman's wife now running for his old post -- use the stage to jumpstart their election campaign for the year. It was an orgy of shamelessness that only convinced me how dirty local politics was.

What amused me, however, was seeing how the whole circus of a town beauty pageant become the local community's chance to out-do one another in a race for Warholian fame, each one determined to get their 15-minutes of "mention" despite the uselessness of the whole endeavor. People clamored to have their names read out loud as sponsors and "acknowledgeables." (Mark had to read a list that went on for more than two pages.) People clamored to be called upon as "presenters" of awards for winning candidates. One fat woman -- a major sponsor -- barged in, and demanded to be part of the Board of Judges, just like that. And of course, there were the shameless politicians in their smug Cebuano, patting each other's backs and announcing to the world how wonderful they all were.

The whole circus ended a few minutes before 4 a.m., and we went back to the organizing committee chairwoman's house with our spirits like paper fed through a shredder. Around 9 o'clock, with the sun having burst through the rain in a minor miracle, we settled in our car with dreams of reaching the civilizing air of Dumaguete in record time.

The towns rushed by in our effort to come home fast. Jimalalud, Tayasan, Ayungon, Bindoy, Manjuyod, Bais, Tanjay, San Jose, and Amlan flew by. In Sibulan, one town away from Dumaguete, we had a flat tire. Ma'am Glenda, feisty as always, took charge, immediately setting out for a mechanic to change our tires. (Mark and I just looked at each other, complicit in our common ignorance of car maintenance and repair. How un-butch we were, not that we cared.) That flat tire took a while to fix -- but it became an instant fascinating study of the craft of vulcanizing: in a mechanic's shop, I watched transfixed as the able-bodied but sweaty and dirty young man went about his process of fixing the holes in our car's inner tube. There were too many holes, he finally said, and Mark ended up buying a whole new tube.

That episode could have been the stuff of more headaches. But we were finally home in Dumaguete, and in that very moment, that was what mattered most. Soon, inside the car once again, we passed by the charred remains of Body and Sole Massage Parlor, Marjorie's Boutique, and Rosante Bar and Restaurant (all right at the intersection of Alfonso Trese Street* and Silliman Avenue) which went up in flames the previous night while we were gone.

I took note of my excited indifference: in Dumaguete, after all, no place ever progresses to something better until it has been burned to the ground. What will this new corner become when it springs from the ashes? A Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf branch? With parking? We can only hope.

On that note of strange hopes for better urban planning, I must confess there are a list of Dumaguete blocks and building I'd like to see go up in flames... But I don't want to be accused an arsonist, so my lips are sealed.


*I have promised to never ever call this street by its modern name

Last night, when the New Year came around, I marveled about how things seem to fall into place when you least expect them to. There had been so many reasons for moping away the last days of the old year: less than a week before New Year's Eve, in the middle of frantic considerations for entertaining holiday guests, the car suddenly wouldn't start -- it needed new batteries; then my phone would not ring; my digital camera would not shoot properly, even with new batteries; my deadlines loomed like Damocles's sword; and the Internet broke down from the sheer weight of moving earth and brought a digitized world to its knees.

It was too easy to panic and curse.

In the days going into the battleground of Christmas cheer, I waded through the filth of my apartment, all housekeeping duties neglected because of demands on time and parties to attend. My bedroom was a sea of glitter and dirt: there were shreds of gift wrapping and red Christmas ribbons lying about, all of them marked with a sense of guilt that what gifts I had bought were simply not enough. Will Mother like the orange blouse I bought for her? And the necklace? Will my friends appreciate the DVDs I bought for them? Did I still have a chance to even brave a maddening crowd to get my own cake from one of the patisseries in town, or was everything too late?

It takes strange courage to look beyond the immediate awfulness of things during Christmas time, and just settle for a kind of inner quiet. That attitude, I think, colored my entire run of the holiday season. I had no intention to succumb to the madness. It was enough, so I thought, to already feel my age: at 31, it has become more acute this painful knowledge that Christmas is meant for kids, really. I have spent the past five years barreling into the season with fervent intentions to catch the so-called "Christmas spirit," haunted of course by ever-glowing memories of Christmasses past when I was also a kid, and December always seemed a Wonderland. I had many techniques to capture that spirit: one was inundating myself with Christmas carols blaring out of my stereo; another was to watch Christmas movies that never failed to move me even after repeated viewings. But this time around, the effort felt forced. I decided to give myself a break, and grow up.

It has taken a mere baby to give me that courage. Mark has a beautiful niece named Dewey who is all of four years; her grandmother and assorted relatives and ninangs and ninongs have taken to showering her with gifts from dolls to clothes to (believe it) make-up kits for tykes like her. I can still see the sparkle of joy in those four-year-old eyes as she beheld the world to be a gigantic place bursting with gifts. For her, this is the life: there are lighted up fir trees with tinsels and golden balls, there are never-ending feasts, and on two midnights, there is the strange revelry among adults who suddenly pop fireworks and gobble cakes and lechons and fried chicken and macaroni salad and bihon and ice cream, all to the soundtrack of karaoke music in the air. For a child, Christmas and New Year are strange times when all ordinary things -- like sleeping by bedtime, like eating squarely to quiet doldrums on appointed times every day -- are suspended. To a child, all of these must be magical.

Our unspoken tragedy as adults may be that we long to continue this childlike wonderment of Christmas things, even when age and circumstance (and consciousness) no longer permit it. By the time we turn to knowing grown-ups, Santa is dead, and Christmas now becomes a shared conspiracy among adults.

It has not depressed me, this realization.

So on New Year's Eve, in the afternoon leading to it, Mark and I went to have an hour-long massage at Urban Nirvana, which was a lovely time except for the sudden shrill of out-of-tune vocalists welcoming their Sunday at the adjacent Maranatha church. (I almost gave up on Christianity right then and there.) Then we watched George Miller's Happy Feet and wanted, for a short while, to be tap-dancing penguins. Then, when night approached, we quietly visited Mother and brought her a bottle of mudshake. The alcohol made us merry. Then Mark and I proceeded to his mother's place, where we ate to our fill, and surged through the first morning of 2007 crying to a sudden viewing of Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies. Then we all slept.

I woke up in the early morning promising not to make any resolutions. Cruising the quiet Dumaguete streets on the first day of January, everything in the world seemed heavy with life and promise. Everything seemed new, and capable of rebirth. Then I had my early morning walk. Then I had had my breakfast of crisp bacon and brewed coffee. Then I had my music.

Suddenly, outside, the drunken and drug-addicted neighbor -- perhaps because he had been waken too early in the new year -- started his usual tantrums, scaring away the vestiges of the morning silence with his screams and taunts thrown at no one in particular.

That sketched in for me the very truth about life, something we scarcely acknowledge with every passing season: that while many of us hope for the better especially in the New Year, some things do change, but some things do remain the same.

Date:	2006-03-18 19:28
Subject:	Ask Away.
Security:	Public
Mood:	calm
Music:	Al Otro Lado del Rio by Gustavo Santaollala / Jorge Drexler

Ask me a question about one of or each of the following...

1. Friends
2. Sex
3. Movies
4. Drugs
5. Love
6. Other (open-ended)

... no matter how rude, sexual, or confidential ... just ask it. Then post this in your journal and see what questions you get asked.

[meme (slightly changed) swiped from moki]

Date:	2006-03-15 10:05
Subject:	Rosario and Jomike
Security:	Public
Mood:	happy
Music:	Hit the Road Jack by Ray Charles

Anybody who can create something delightful like this ...



... must be a genius.

Congratulations to Jomike Tejido (see his Mikrokosmos) for winning Honorable Mention in the PBBY-Alcala Prize for illustrating "Rosario and the Stories." Nakakatuwa.

I was reading the story again last night, just to remind myself of what I did to come up with something like that ... and I really want to do something like "Rosario" again. Pero, it's hard. Children's storywriting is very hard. But let's see.

Date:	2006-02-24 22:35
Subject:	How a Friday Night Ends
Security:	Public
Mood:	sad
Music:	This Used to Be My Playground by Madonna

For M.

They have just declared a state of emergency for a nation on the brink. But the noise is too far, so much distance to pull in this small city too ensconced in its private hells to care so much how everything else seems to go to pieces. Instead, outside, I see the traffic policemen stage a coup of the street corners below. It's nighttime, around 10 in the evening, and the question becomes: how much of our small lives can go on without licences to drive? I confess myself a pedestrian now, and nothing else matters. The line of sad motorcycles parked by the wayside grows by the minute, all of them metallic contraptions suddenly made mute, unmenacing. They almost look like cute puppies you want to crush with your heel. There is no change at all in the air, just a nippiness to the weather because of the rushing rain, now gone, of the late afternoon. Now, there is only the steam from the asphalt rising in the air to claim my nostrils. I wish that was the only assault my senses can have: there's this heart, for example -- mine, if you have to know -- and it's broken, like the country, like the motorcycles piled near, like the night suddenly left by the intimacy of rain. There are states of emergencies for the heart. When it suddenly loses love, for example. When it suddenly knows the descending pain of having only memories of him to take you through the rainless night. In the steam of things, I descend to sleeplessness, and hope that somewhere under the same stupid night, he will decide not to cry, he will decide to only sleep. We had decided on goodbye, and like all old lovers suddenly faced with broken tomorrows, it's a promise we must keep, it's a promise we must keep.

Goodbye, Mark. I will always love you.

Date:	2006-02-22 08:13
Subject:	I Mean, Seriously
Security:	Public
Mood:	exanimate
Music:	Pare Ko by Eraserheads

criosdan does not know, or remember, what "jerjer" means.

Date:	2006-02-19 08:32
Subject:	The Bronx Pizza Man
Security:	Public
Mood:	chipper
Music:	Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, K. 550

I always knew he could cook, and cook with certain flair we both call "masabor" -- that delicate Cuyonon word one reserves for what is delicious, tasty. Once upon our college days, Quddus Ronnie Timbancaya Padilla -- when he was all of 17-years-old -- would cook the meals in our constant get-togethers, Tessa Magdamo would fret around like a beloved mother hen, Bing Valbuena would come in and expect things like a drill sergeant, and Ana Borja would grill the fish, or make binakhaw, Davao-style. I, on the other hand, would buy the bottle of Coke, already clueless in the ways of the kitchen but nevertheless one to quickly point judgment (as now) for dishes done well. Those were our remembered moments when we were all young, and still had the world ahead to conquer. All these almost ten years ago, which makes me feel suddenly old.

Date:	2005-12-17 14:17
Subject:	The Secret Lives of Butterflies
Security:	Public
Mood:	sleepy
Music:	Hang Up by Madonna

The grand narrative one ultimately gets, while viewing the artworks and reading the literary pieces that make up "Kabakaba Ba Ka?", may be this: What can life be like for the butterfly before and after the fact of the cocoon?

Blossoming metaphors abound in this Cebuano paean to difference. Contemplating on that story of metamorphosis -- which pushes further the archetype of living in and out of "the closet" -- one also gets the impression that a nuanced gay and lesbian sensibility, as represented in the works of local artists and writers, have finally come of age in the heart of Southern Philippines.

The eclectic exhibit is foremost a collection of "stories" from the lives of young men and women who just happen to be gay. This, in a time when so much about what Filipinos think of sexuality have indeed changed, and yet so much has also remained the same. Between the cultural phenomena of parlor queens to Ladlad to Roderick Paulate in drag to Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros, what else is there to examine about the gay reality of the Philippines?

It turns out, plenty. The rest of the country -- that region Manila people invariably call "probinsya" -- has yet to map out its peculiar sexual landscape. "Kabakaba" very well seems to be the answer to that lack. Beyond that, the exhibit can also be seen as an exercise in posing a challenge about forging together a potent identity which does not exactly sit well in the relatively conservative atmosphere of the world outside of Manila.

The exhibit's title in Cebuano asks the viewer, "Are you a butterfly?" -- engaging anyone to weigh this comparison between metamorphosis and the "coming out" experience of gay men and women. It is also a play on the Tagalog question, "Kakaba ka ba?" which invites consideration of the works as testaments to the bravado of the artists, whose participation indeed marks them, hopefully for the better.

In the long run, this is an exhibit that people will talk about from now on as the thing "that got the ball rolling."

"Kabakaba Ba Ka?" features the works of some of Cebu's -- and Davao's and Dumaguete's -- young artists and writers, among them L. Lacambra Ypil, Russ Ligtas, Ian Rosales Casocot, John Bengan, Ronald Villavelez, Zara Smith, Anna Carla Gonzalez, Ella Melendez, Mitzi Sabanal, Liyo DeNorte, Louise de la Cruz, Clee Andro Villasor, Hali Marmol, Angelica Cabais, Sunshyn Alerre, Chastity Manuel, and Shem Garcia -- all of whom readily answered the call of artist-poet James Iain Neish to band together, to "come out" in a groundbreaking exhibit, and to present the world with a view of local gay life not exactly visible to the ordinary Visayan.

Davao-based fictionist John Bengan writes of the experience: "'Kabakaba Ba Ka?' [poses] a question for an audience which has yet to learn about the diversity of the queer population and sample gay pride. Imagining a sense of community among gay people in the city, 'Kabakaba Ba Ka?' reveals the presence of gay artists, their varied concerns and understanding of the queer persona, allowing the subject dimension from a first person perspective."

That perspective is what distinguishes "Kabakaba" from the common run of art exhibits in Cebu City, which are mostly shows by students, feminists, activists with a social realist grind, or middle-aged men who take biblical verses as titles for portraits, landscapes, and still-life's. This may be the first time that Metro Cebu has gathered together queer artists to address gay topics and issues in an exhibit.

What we see in "Kabakaba" are illuminating depictions of Southern gay life all drawn from the personal lives of the artists themselves, relating their own gay experience to illuminate -- but at the same proposing that these are individual stories not meant to speak for the entire gay community of Cebu, or Davao, or Dumaguete. Bengan writes that "each artist asserts, 'this is my story,' and leaves it at that," with the hope that what is realized is that a gay man or woman's life is really no different from anyone else's.

"What we want to say in this exhibit is that, whether you're gay or straight, all of us share a common humanity despite the varieties of lives," says James Iain Neish.

That variety in the stories of gay lives takes spotlight in the form of dances by Russ Ligtas and Liyo DeNorte, as well as poems and short prose works by Bengan, Casocot, Villavelez, and Gonzalez who offers a Bisaya poem "Rape," inspired by a protest poem written by a lesbian friend, and Ypil who comes up with a clever, and funny, poem in Cebuano titled "Bayot."

Beyond words and performances, the paintings, sculptures, and photographs also detail the nuances of queer lives. Sometimes that can mean what is socially serious -- as in the mask metaphors in Mitzi Sabanal's works, and the mixed media cacophony of Ligtas's paintings. In "Thrown," for example, Ligtas presents the queer body naked and vulnerable to what society "throws" at him, that what may be left finally is a heart exposed and teetering on disconnection.


Russ Ligtas's Thrown

Sometimes those nuances can mean what is simply homoerotic -- as in the photographs of Villasor, who essays in a series called Anonymen, the tension and carnal strangeness of bodies in search of intimacy. In "Tension, Irony," for example, the play of blue jeans and white light on the brown half-naked bodies of Villasor's subjects captures exactly the trepidation in these encounters. That we don't see any of the subjects' faces also implies the identities as being that of the rest of us.


Clee Andro Villasor's Tension, Irony

This haphazard quest for connection is taken further in Neish's series of scratched photographs, detailing ordinary public places suddenly rendered private in the flush of acts unbridled with desire. The ordinary corridors of "In the Archway," receiving rooms of "In the Lobby," and skylines of "On the Rooftop" become home for the need to connect, in careful etchings rendered as if like phantoms, it makes you ask if all of these remain a fantasia for those who long for such embraces.


James Iain Neish's In the Archway

"Art," F. Sionil Jose once famously wrote, "does not develop in a vacuum; the first artist is responsible not just to his art but to society as well." In "Kabakaba," art may be said to have served that function of commenting, and illuminating, on queer lives.

James Neish says of the exhibit: "People saw it happen, people will remember it happened, and this will be a beginning of something: queer voices speaking about queer things fearlessly. It was a completely positive and blissful experience. I wish I could've taken it all in. For me, the biggest pay-off was seeing the faces of my fellow queer people light up when they looked at the pieces. Larry [Ypil] said that 'art and the truth won,' and the thing that scares and thrills me most is that I can't deny that he might actually be right."

"Kabakaba Ba Ka?" opened to much local acclaim last October 26 at Kahayag Cafe in Cebu City. The exhibit will run through December 2005 in Mooon Cafe at 42 Emilio Osmena Street, in Guadalupe, Cebu City, and then in January 2006 at the University of the Philippines in the Visayas Cebu College, at the Little Gallery in Gorordo Avenue, Lahug, Cebu City.

Date:	2005-08-11 20:53
Subject:	Strictly for Sillimanians Only
Security:	Public
Mood:	blah
Music:	The Opening Theme from "Desperate Housewives"

( I know you Sillimanians out there want to be in the know. )

Date:	2005-07-12 06:33
Subject:	Off With Their Heads!
Security:	Public
Mood:	exhausted
Music:	Theme From Out of Africa by John Barry

Any economist will tell you that the simplest way to measure the fiscal health of a nation is to measure the size of its middle class. Is it growing? Is it even existent? That is why I shall take the risk of being damned an elitista -- but what the hey, I am -- and express doubt about such typical Filipino pre-occupation with masa. Reading this in Sassy Lawyer's blog made me cringe, and made me take a deep breath, because it says all the things many of us wants to say, but can't. I'm still not that angry, and I definitely do not want a fascist state, but the whole rant still makes me take pause. Is there a Filipino middle-class ba? I once read somewhere that the problem with the Philippines is that its middle-class lives abroad, leaving only the very elite and the very poor scrambling and in constant war for power, like cockroaches in a dungheap.

Ay naku, will there be any solution to all of our problems?

GMA reeks like bad B.O. Noli looks eternally stupid, like a troglodyte who doesn't know where he is supposed to be. Cory should just shut up, and discipline her daughter first for being such a public slut. The bishops should be forced to only say their masses and stop treating the Philippines like a proverbial theocracy. And that goes the same for all those stupid evangelists with political ambitions. Susan Roces exasperates me with her posturing, and for mistaking a widow's lament for leadership potential. The whole of the opposition stinks to high heaven with its crew of pikon political gangsters and their abilities for shrewd machinations just to grab power. (Pimentel is a sad shell of the great man he once was. Erap should die from heart attack already. Tatad, who loves the Lord so much as he professes, should be taken away by the Lord soon.) All the Cabinet secretaries are liars. And those who resigned and called for GMA to resign are not heroes at all but opportunists.

And I hate all the people I see rallying on TV because I am sure more than half of them voted for GMA anyway.

Oh, what a circus. There's a word for all of these: Kakistocracy. Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens. Add that to your vocabulary, and draw the Filipino.

I did miss LJ-land. But there's no sense in hiding anymore. My life is my life, right? Right. From here on, everything's locked...

Date:	2005-05-07 10:24
Subject:	In Praise of Mothers
Security:	Public
Mood:	hungry
Music:	The Velveteen Rabbit by George Winston

[Something for Mother's Day...]

Once each week, after I wake up from the utter, bright sunniness of most Sunday mornings, I make way for the one ritual that governs a life kept busy with the weight of bachelorhood and the demands of a semi-workaholic existence: I visit my mother who lives a few blocks up north from my apartment in Tubod.

We have lunch together -- sometimes with chicken curry, which is my favorite, and sometimes with Korean barbecue. Sometimes, she prepares salad made from fern leaves and marinated in coconut milk. We talk like giddy airheads about the celebrities we see on the television, gossip about Piolo Pascual, and such and such. Sometimes we scan through old pictures and rummage through a wealth of memories. She remembers her childhood in Bayawan well, and she remembers, too, the travails of her early adult life. Her stories have become the stuff of my very own fiction.

My visits are something I have surprisingly found myself looking forward to doing every week. Perhaps, I tell myself, it is a sign of years slowly edging off the brackets of youth. I am almost 30. In the gravity of adulthood, mothers become strange sources of comfort. We share the same birthday -- August 17 -- and this adds to this connection between us, knowing that we are yoked not just by flesh and blood, but also by the reckoning of our stars.

She lives in our house somewhere in Piapi, bordering Silliman Village, in a huge compound the parameters of which used to be lined with trees. (Now only the coconut trees are left, but devoid of their fruit, because my brother has complained to the neighbors that the falling coconuts are wrecking havoc on our property.) It's a big house, two-storeys in all, and something she shares with my 80-year old lola, mother's aunt, who had raised her and my Auntie Fannie when they were girls growing up in the backwaters of old Bayawan.

The house has a veranda, and overlooks a garden Mother grew from the sheer effort of her hands; it is still something she waters every morning, after breakfast and prayers. On Sundays when I am there, her morning gives way to preparing something delicious for lunch for her youngest son (me); she waters the garden only when she comes home in the afternoon (while I'm in the back veranda snoozing in the bamboo divan under the late sun), after she visits and prays over the sick in the local provincial hospital -- something she has been doing every Sunday since as far back as I can remember. This should make her a saint, but then again, she is also given to her fits of passive aggression (an artform and negotiating tactic perfected by the shrewdest of Filipino mothers, I think) -- which is something that makes her more human, and indeed, more lovable, because imperfect.

And yet it is only now that I appreciate my mother more. Adulthood gives you that ability, I guess. Now that I have grown up and "flown the nest," so to speak, it is so much easier to see her as being more than just the provider for the most basic of needs. I have known her all my life as the woman who fought so many battles just to provide six growing boys three square meals every day. She has always been somebody who fought her way out of all certain obsolescence. She has lived a very rich life. If only for that, I am already grateful for having known her. That I call her "mom" is a privilege.

When she was a young woman, she felt trapped by the narrow certainties of small town life. Bayawan in the 1940s did not exactly give any local girl the chance to become so much more, except perhaps the life of a housewife, or something completely banal (not that I'm saying a housewife's life is necessarily banal.)

She wanted to become a nurse. She wanted to live in the Big City.

While everybody else around her told her how "immoral" and "evil" the big city was, and how she would probably become lost in metropolitan quagmire, she only smiled back and fought to live her dream ... by first making tira-tira, the local version of coconut candy.

And selling them tirelessly, by the skin of her teeth.

She sold enough coconut candies, and saved enough money to gain her passage to Cebu where, with higher education still impossible for a woman of humble means, she apprenticed herself to a beautician, and learned the trade so well she became a very good one, and eventually opened her own shop later on in Bayawan, when she had already married my father, and both were running our hacienda's sugar produce down South.

There is a picture I keep on my bureau, of her from those Cebu days. The studio portrait is in sepia, depicting a young, beautiful woman with an engaging smile, hair perfectly done in the style of those days, makeup mute and simple, but evenly accentuating what made her stand out: her clear eyes, almost almond-shaped, and her lips teased with rouge just right, she looked almost pouty. She has the palms of her hands pressed together, and she presses her right cheek against that, head tilted a bit upward to welcome the studio light, which makes her cheekbones prominent. "A movie star pose!" I used to tell her.

That photograph, displayed in the photographer's studio for days on end, earned her many marriage proposals -- one from a Muslim businessman who wanted to make her drink a lumay, to whisk her away to his home in Mindanao. She escaped that possibility in her life, but still found her way to Mindanao, in Butuan, where she opened her own beauty shop in a building owned by a man who would soon be her husband and my father.

It wasn't always an easy life. She had wealth, yes -- and for a time, in the heady days of the 1970s when sugar made people kings and queens of excess and affluence in Negros Oriental, she was the perfect embodiment of the local Southern socialite. She was part of a gilded age, preserved only in old photographs kept in kabans and torn photo albums. And when the price of sugar crashed, so did our fortunes -- and my mother was left to fend for a growing family: she sold baye-baye (a Bayawan delicacy -- a cake made of coconut and sticky rice), she sold homemade peanut butter, she sold Avon, she sold everything. Once, selling baye-baye door-to-door, she got sunstroke, and fell face-first on the sidewalk. "The one thought that made me get up, and made me alive," she would later admit to me, "was the fact that I needed to put food on the dinner table." We also have pictures of those hard years: the beautiful, young girl of the old sepia picture now gone, all disappeared into a sunburned, wrinkled middle-aged woman with a toothy smile.

Despite insurmountable hardship, she saw all her sons graduate from Silliman University. In turn, and perhaps even for her, we all tried to make names for ourselves, or at least seek our fortunes for her sake, to turn back the hands of fate, so to speak. And how fortunes have changed! We still speak of things turning out as they have now as if they are borne out of miracles.

"And they are indeed miracles," mother usually insists. We do not disagree with her. Her eyes gleam with the wisdom of so much experience.

In the end, I know the virtues of beautiful strength and perseverance because of Mother: she is the living example of both. These are perhaps her greatest legacy. And her influence.

In time, as I go about my life finding "older" friends for their promise of maturity and reliable sense of persevering spirit, I have found mostly older women who are, not surprisingly, the very reflections of my own mother. Most of them are also mothers -- and women whose lives have touched me, and made my own more interesting.

There's my mentor Ceres Pioquinto who believed in me when even I didn't believe in myself. She is wit and ferocious will personified. Under her tutelage, I flowered. Now, she is Germany, and I miss her tight, but always reassuring guidance. Sometimes I feel my life as an academic is all a mess just because she is not there to tell me what to do.

There's Susan Vista-Suarez, music's magic friend, who inspires because she makes a talent from rising to greatness even after every fall.

There's Marjorie Evasco, Susan Lara, and Mom Edith Tiempo, whose selfless regard for young writers have made them "literary mothers." I, and so many others following their paths, hold their mentorship dearly, for all time.

There's Margie Udarbe-Alvarez, who possesses such an uncanny sense of self -- and with all of that packaged in with so much formidable intelligence. And she knows how to make killer pot roast. Perfection!

There's Ma'am Betty Abregana, whose sheer iron will and example still inspires so many, even after she left Silliman after helping steer the university down the superior path for a good number of years.

There's Laurie Hutchison-Raymundo who inspires me with her unflagging energy. She is the Energizer Bunny, really. She shares my love for Monty Python, and makes the most technical marine biology anecdote sound like a humor-laden episode from The Twilight Zone. She taught me a lot about the theater, and a lot more about reading people.

And then there are the best sisters-in-law in the world, Daisy Relatado-Casocot and Efeb Bustamante-Casocot, both amazing women, my brothers Dennis and Rocky are luckier to have them in their lives. There're also Lily Caballes (my best friend Gideon's mother, and one of my mom's closest friends), my best lady friends Jacqueline Pinero-Torres and Kristyn Maslog-Levis, Jocelyn de la Cruz, Myrish Cadapan-Antonio, Glenda Ramira-Fabillar, Juliet Padernal, Danah Fortunato, Irma Faith Pal, Rosario Maxino-Baseleres, Jackie Veloso-Antonio, Arlene Delloso-Uypitching, Batchiba Lacdo-o, Dessa Quesada-Palm, Cecilia Hoffman, Esther Windler, Andrea Soluta, Kitty Taniguchi, Sherro Lee Lagrimas, among so many other women I've known all my life, all of them strong, and each a testament of formidable spirit.

Thanks for the inspiration.

Happy Mother's Day to all you mothers in the world.

Date:	2005-04-25 12:38
Subject:	The Look of Silence
Security:	Public
Mood:	blank
Music:	Silence

Nothing to see here. Move along...