Among contemporary Filipino writers, Rosario Cruz Lucero has the most acute sense of place, which manifests in her use of biography, geography and ethnography. The power to spatialize the phantasmagoric realities of the Philippines in all its disturbing glory is most evident in her new book La India or Island of the Disappeared.

Published by the University of the Philippines (U.P.) Press, the collection of short stories revisits her native Negros—a Negros peopled by a disparate array of characters, spanning 400 years of the island’s history. Her characters occupy a nebula of larger-than-life historicized stories replete with oppression, tactical collaboration, recalcitrant resistance, opportunism, and enduring hope.

In reading Lucero, one must examine how social spatialization—the imagining and the production of physical space—matters in the creation of everyday life and the national imaginary.

In the story “Povedano the Mapmaker,” she writes of the 16^th century Spanish mapmaker who first drew the island: “Diego Lope Povedano, the mapmaker, was shedding copious tears, which were making the outlines of Negros island run into the sea and join with the Batanes islands at the topmost tip of the archipelago (p. 2).” This spatial inauguration—the cartographic imagining of her island—foreshadows the social and geographical mapping of Negros in the series of events depicted in the collection.

In the story “The Courtship of Estrella”, Gregorio, one of the would-be suitors of Estrella, the only hacienda-owning native in Negros in the story, experienced a reversal of colonial hierarchies as a kind of geographic disorientation. Estrella was on the balcony looking down on Gregorio and his Spanish comrades, while they were in the dirty courtyard, exposed to the elements. Lucero describes the scene from Gregorio’s purview:

It was a moment of sudden clarity for him. The reversal of order in this hacienda – the Spaniards squatting on the ground while the indios towered over them, and the switching of master’s and servant’s doors – all of a sudden it seemed to cure him of his chronic sense of disorientation. Here it didn’t matter what was up or down, front or back, left, right or center […] (p. 66).

In her stories, Lucero probes into her own reservoir of personal experiences.  Her appreciation of the island’s history and landscape and her acute ear for the humorous and scandalous among the Negros elite and common tawos allow us to grasp what is left unsaid and will never be said about the island’s history. Her fiction constitutes a radical re-imagining of Philippine history where myths of a bygone era and the cyclical massacres of the oppressed continue to haunt the landscape of her province. More importantly, her Negros serves as an analogue for the nation as a whole. The division of the Philippines into territorial fiefdoms of Spanish conquistadores and religious orders mirrors how Negros was subdivided into encomiendas by visiting Spanish marauders. She narrates:

Don Miguel the conquistador took a glance at Povedanos’ map and decided there was ample land to be distributed among not just 10, nor even 11, but 17 encomenderos in fact….  (p. 2).

The partitioning of the island into many geographical domains by different people, all belonging to the conquistador elite, resonates with stories of land disputes across the archipelago. Those who manage the political and economic affairs of the country own the land. It happened in the Negros of the Povedano years and continues to happen in a Philippines with many Ampatuans.

Lucero emphasizes people and their subjugated histories—the stories and the bodies that disappear in an island like Negros. But in evoking the island’s tumultuous history, it is not just the travails of its people and the pluralities of narratives that are highlighted but the island itself. The bodies of the disappeared are inscribed on the contours of the island, written on its body.

Lucero’s fiction forces us to re-imagine and historicize Negros’s towns and cities, its mountains and streets, and the fields where sugarcanes grow, nourished by the sweat and blood of farm workers. In this passage, she examines the relationship between historical narratives and the evolution of the city:

In 1992, when most of the forests on the island have disappeared, the boulder is removed to make way for the diversionary road and bridge that will decongest downtown traffic. The board of local officials, agreeing on the importance of local history, resolves that the road will be named Calle Hormigas, after the first graffito ever found on the island. All other side streets to branch out of this main road will be named after insects.

There is some discussion over the inclusion of reprehensible insects like mosquitoes, bees, wasps, and cockroaches.

“But all insects are reprehensible, including ants,” one remarks.

“Butterflies are pleasant enough,” another retorts.

“What about scorpions?” someone asks earnestly.

Finally the board resolves to table the matter because there are other items on the agenda and time is short.

When the diversionary road is completed and the ribbon cut, it is named Dna. Dicang Ave., after the mayor’s great grandmother, who has come down in history as the ruling hand of the island’s richest, hence, most powerful, clan. All other side streets hence would be named after each member of her clan, including her great grandson, the governor.

By Dante Carlos

Lucero grew up in the grandeur (and poverty) of a Negros long gone—a Negros of school classmates vacationing in Spain while she made the most of the summer at home with her accountant father who worked on the spread sheets of hacienda owners (her father was the accountant of some of Negros’s leading land-owning families). As fiction is and will always be also about the writer, Lucero writes about the lives of the people she knew well or, maybe, heard about from her numerous travels in the island. When other stories are now available for hearing, fighting back against the dominant discursive narration of those in power has a chance of winning.

Unlike any other writer or Philippine academic, Lucero does not just poke into the dusty archives of remote conventos or pry into the lumang bauls of land-owning families. She travels and visits the most unlikely places in Negros to hear new stories and learn new chismis from the people she meets while eating in a roadside cafeteria or visiting a far-flung mountain colony of an indigenous community.

Lucero does ethnography. She spends days and weeks observing people’s lives. She talks to them and asks questions. It is no wonder that her stories capture the cinematic grandeur of a town plaza (and its grotesque colonial use), or the fantastic allure of women saints in a church famous for the absence of macho saints. In every church, she seeks out the most incongruous details and spins tales so marvelous and yet so convincing that you would have thought she was there when colonial friars first ordered the churches built. With a wealth of experience and knowledge that mere archival research cannot provide, Lucero documents the rich texture of life in Negros. We see its streets, its mountains, and the grand reception rooms of its colonial-era mansions. She makes us understand how Negros was made.

Negros is Lucero’s metonym for the Philippines. Its history is our history. She might just be talking about Negros but she writes most lucidly, disturbingly, charmingly, and lovingly of our past, of those who never made it to the pages of Philippine history books. There are stories to be told and we should all have the courage to uncover them. As Lucero explains, “this was the kind of thing that was happening all the time at that period in this nation’s history but is not the important stuff of which history books are made.

Nelson Turgo hails from a small fishing community in Mauban, Quezon. He has studied at the University of the Philippines Diliman and Cardiff University, Wales, UK. 

FORD Madox Ford opens his novel, The Good Soldier, about the infidelity of a perfect English couple, with the now most famous first line of any novel: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” (Although David Copperfield’s “I am born” is strong competition.) Critics hailed it as the best French novel written in English. I think Liz Jensen just snatched that dolorous honor with her newest novel, The Uninvited. It is also a near perfect piece of prose. I say “near” because it is possible I may stumble on a better one but I cannot imagine how.

The writing is clean. It achieves a startling clarity, in the course, unraveling the most obscure and impenetrable theme, creating the appropriate indefinable dread. This is the sudden outbreak across the globe of children killing their parents, with kitchen knives, nail guns, or anything else that comes easily to hand for kids, such as the top of a long stairs from which they can push their parents down. Then there are parents claiming to have swallowed the spirits of malignant children who drive them to sabotage industries vital to the world economy and take their own lives afterward in the most gruesome fashion.

A management consultancy firm sends its best troubleshooter, a behavioral scientist gifted with autism to investigate the first case. His condition allows him to observe crowd behavior from the outside and spot the minutest detail in any situation, not missing a single one. Indeed, he has the gift of swiftly sizing up a situation, making instant connections and establishing illuminating associations between disparate events, even the most emotionally charged because it takes some time for him to react emotionally to anything.

But he has one overwhelming emotion that never wanes but only grows when deprived of its object. He has an overwhelming caring love for his former girlfriend’s young son who displays the same symptoms of social withdrawal and isolation. The boy is equally drawn to him, even after he and his girlfriend part, until the day the boy attacks his mother.

I woke up at four in the morning after a short and fitful sleep. I tweeted friends that damn if a horror story had made it impossible for me to sleep. It had taken me two days to get almost to the end of what is really a short novel, which I bought at National Bookstore largely for the stark beauty of the binding, the elegance of the layout, the tastefulness of the font, and the high quality of the paper, which is so rarely used for books today. The English publisher is Bloomsbury.

I relished every sentence and never skipped a line. Not that you could because every sentence counts.  There is no fat to trim in the writing. By six in the morning I was coming to the end so I had to put down the book. Later in the day I read the remaining pages even more slowly, lingering over paragraphs, hesitant to get to the obvious end of it all.

It is not a horror story after all; rather is it the saddest I have read. But to get that reaction you would have to make the effort—which is small given the author’s talent—to get in the shoes of the autistic hero who, as I said, can instantly grasp everything yet he is incapable of seeing what it all means. It comes to him only at what is literally the end of the world yet also possibly the start of a better one.

His first reaction was the right one, in a way, that “hungry ghosts,” such as those the Chinese appease in the Ghost Month, are taking possession of children and pushing adults to destroy themselves. These are souls of the dead who have departed an evil world and the souls of those yet to be born into it and dread the prospect. But he keeps that thought in the back of his mind and tries to find a scientific explanation for the bizarre and soon pandemic occurrences.

This book also requires you to have cared for a child not your own but as if it was your own, and who is suddenly snatched from you or, in this case, suddenly withdraws into a world you cannot share with it, ever.

Without those two conditions you remain uninvited to enter this novel, which I shall put in the same bookshelf as other prized volumes, beside a signed edition of Finnegan’s Wake instead of in another library in another place where I keep thrillers and light pieces on demographics, logic, political economy and history because this is so much more than any of that.

Teddy Locsin, Jr. is a veteran journalist, publisher, lawyer, and politician, and is currently the segment host of The World Tonight’s “TEDitorial.” These days, his brain is most easily picked on Twitter: @teddyboylocsin.

By Gabrielle Lamontagne B.

{1} Their name is synonymous with music. In Manila’s Sampaloc district in the mid-nineteenth century, the Buenaventuras were famous musicians. Camilo Buenaventura was a musician and singer in the local church. His sons Camilito and Cosme served as musico mayor (chief musician) of Spanish infantry regiments in the colony. Music brought Cosme to Cambodia in1869 as one of the Filipino musicians who formed the nucleus of the royal band in the court of Norodom I. A nineteenth-century account describes a grand performance of these musicians on the occasion of the visit to Cambodia of the Spanish ship Marques del Duero in 1879.1

{2} In the late nineteenth-century, another Buenaventura, Lucino Buenaventura (1848–1923), was cornetin solista of the famed Banda del Regimiento Peninsular de Artilleria in Intramuros. He became its musico mayor around 1888. He is said to have hailed from Lucban (Quezon) andhad settled in Baliwag (Bulacan) after his marriage to a local girl.2 Like the other Buenventuras, he was highly skilled in his art. To be a bandmaster in the Spanish Army required the candidate to pass a government competitive examination and Lucino had the choicest of postings, in Intramuros, the nerve center of Spanish colonial power.

It was the heyday of brass bands (banda). These bands flourished under the auspices of Church and State because they served a need as adjunct of the army and for the many ceremonials and festivities of the church (processions, patronal feasts, and such rites as funerals). The army bands were the most prestigious bands of the day.

{3} Yet, when the anti-Spanish revolution broke out, Lucino joined the Katipunan. He organized Banda Baliwag, a brass band that marched with the revolutionaries to battle, inspiring them with patriotic and martial airs. What bands like Lucino’s did for the Spanish army they now performed for fellow-Filipinos, building morale in the liberated areas and accompanying troops to the battlefield. There is no detailed information, however, on theactions Lucino and his band participated in.

An insurgent account of a battle in Lian, Batangas, in mid-October 1896 creates this vivid image of an unnamed band:

… The brass band continued playing lively music throughout the enemy attack; when the firing subsided somewhat, the musicians relaxed by lying flat on their backs. Still they continued playing and those with big instruments, like the bass drum and the bass horn, played with their instruments on their bellies. Thus relaxed, they played even more loudly than before. But when the enemy’s bullets began flying low over the ground, the musicians took to their heels and fled for their lives.3

To stir patriotic sentiments, bands did not only play martial tunes but music like the kundiman, a plaintive, melancholic Tagalog love song that, while addressed to a woman, easily translated into a deep, diffuse lament for home, family, and the native land. The most famous example is “Jocelynang Baliwag,” which has been called “the kundiman of the revolution.” The work of an unknown composer, it has been attributed by some to Lucino Buenaventura, and one version of its lyrics is said to have been penned by Isabelo de los Reyes, a friend of Lucino.4

{4} After the United States “pacified” the islands, Banda Baliwag continued to play. As towns prospered in the turn to the twentieth century, bands were organized under the patronage of local leaders and propertied families (who sponsored the musical instruments and uniforms). A banda was needed for civic festivities and theatrical performances, and the presence of a band conferred status on a town and its patrons and fostered community pride and cohesion.5

When Lucino died in 1922, leadership of the band — rechristened Banda Buenaventura — passed to his son Feliciano Buenaventura (1898–1976), a pianist, conductor, and composer. The band thrived, winning inband competitions, performing in various parts of the country, and, with the advent of a modern music industry, even doing sound recordings.

Another son, Federico, played the trumpet and later became band leader of the Selangor State Band in Malaysia, where he died in 1935.

As a boy, Antonino dreamed of becoming a conductor of the famous American-led Philippine Constabulary Band, which was organized in 1902and went on to gain fame in the country and abroad. In 1937, he joined the military and, with the rank of captain, became an instructor and conductor of the Philippine Constabulary Band. “My first love was the band,” he said,“ and it was in the military that this love was fulfilled and blossomed.”6

He was prolific and naturally gifted. It was said that he could set even a laundry list to music. Most of his compositions were institutional and commissioned pieces — marches and parade music for the army (like “America, We Stand Beside You,” a march for mixed chorus and band composed in 1941), institutional hymns for schools, clubs and organizations, and compositions for civic occasions (such as “Philippines Triumphant” for the first anniversary of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1936).

By Delfina Utomo

By Delfina Utomo

{6} After the Japanese occupied the country, Antonino was conscripted to conduct the Japanese-sponsored New Philippines Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra was organized after the Manila Symphony Orchestra refused to take an active role in the musical program of the occupation government. The MSO conductor, Herbert Zipper, was arrested and most of the orchestra’s members eventually joined the NPSO.

Artists and intellectuals struggled with the role they should play in a time of enemy occupation. There were those who believed that music mustcontinue to be heard, that the band must play on. The Japanese actively encouraged performances of European classical, Filipino indigenous, and Japanese music, in the spirit of “high” culture and “Asianism.” “Propaganda” music was also commissioned for civic, morale-building purposes under the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. There were many occasions and incentives for musical work. It was a good time for musicians.7

Practically all the leading musicians participated in the musical life of the period, some more enthusiastically than others. Felipe de Leon was among the most active. He set to music the winning lyrics in a Japanese sponsored contest for a song that would best express the spirit of the new order. Premiered in a special concert at the Metropolitan Theater on 20 December 1942, “Awit sa Paglikha ng Bagong Pilipinas” (Song for the Creation of the New Philippines) virtually replaced the Philippine National Anthem (which, even in a reworded version, was not encouraged). De Leon was optimistic about a nativist revival under the Japanese. “With the outbreak of the Greater East Asia War,” he said, “the Filipinos have, at last, awakened from their lethargy.” “A general racial reawakening is in the fore.”8

De Leon also composed “Dai-Atiw ng Kalibapi” (Kalibapi March), the official march of the pro-Japanese Kalibapi organization. Its lyrics were so “unabashedly pro-Japanese” that a group of writers meeting secretly, after determining it was Kalibapi head and Tagalog poet Benigno Ramos who penned the lyrics, passed a resolution denouncing him “a scoundrel and a traitor and threatened him, in absentia, with liquidation when the ‘appropriate time comes’.”9

One imagines it was not easy for Antonino Buenaventura to assume as conductor of the New Philippines Symphony Orchestra. He conducted the orchestra in the inaugural ceremonies of the Japanese “puppet republic” in front of the Legislative Building in Manila on 14 October 1943. Here the orchestra played Japanese Etenraku music, music traditionally played at the Japanese Imperial Court.

Antonino shortly relinquished the orchestra’s directorship and withdrew to the relative quiet of San Pablo in Laguna, his wife’s home town, where he ran a music school. But he remained active in Manila’s musical scene, composing such pieces as “Bagong Pagsilang Symphonic Poem for Chorus and Orchestra” (1943) and “Rhapsodietta on Manobo Themes”(1943).

{7} In 1945, after the Americans returned, Antonino reorganized the Philippine Constabulary Band, now called Philippine Army Band. For the inauguration of Philippine Independence in 1946, Antonino composed a symphonic piece for orchestra, “Youth,” and for the Independence Day celebration of 1949 “Ode to the Republic.” He built the band as “one of the finest military bands in the world” and was its commanding officer and conductor until 1961.

His music was praised for keeping the “nationalist tradition” alive and capturing “the Filipino Soul.” He used ethnic materials in his orchestral works and compositions for Philippine folk dances, and insisted that music should be rooted in the rhythms of local life. Stimulation came from the “musical nationalism” that has been an almost constant current in local music history — promoted in the American period of nation-building (as in the work of Antonino’s mentors in the U.P. Conservatory of Music), and in the “Asianizing” of local culture encouraged during Japanese rule (as shown in the works of Buenaventura, de Leon, and Antonio Molina).

In 1988, Antonino Buenaventura was declared a National Artist of thePhilippines.10

It is quite remarkable how the story of one family can encapsulate a century of musical history.

{8} How does one trace the relationship between music and politics? What happens to music through the many changing contexts in which it is created and performed? What (as Theodor Adorno asks) is its “truth-value”?11

Master musician Daniel Barenboim writes: “The power of music lies in its ability to speak to all aspects of the human being — the animal, the emotional, the intellectual, and the spiritual.” “Music teaches us,” he says, “that everything is connected.”12 By this same measure, music and politics cannot be dissociated.

Investigating the politics of the musical act is extremely difficult, if by “act” we mean all the acts from composition to reception that make music exist. To think of music in this way means that we are not dealing with asingle agent, situation, or moment in time.

This does not mean that no one is responsible. There is clearly a moral weight, even political judgment, to be assigned to sounding parade music for Spanish troops, playing battle tunes for insurgents on their way to battle, composing hymns to U.S. rule, or performing Japanese imperial music at the inauguration of an occupation government.

Yet, the judgment to be made is not easy, particularly in those cases where the variables we need to attend to are not always clear or available— the text or score, its structure and content, and (more difficult in the absence of sound recordings) the performance itself, and then its effects.

What does it mean that, with whatever deliberation or intent, melodic motifs and passages from the Philippine National Anthem are woven —by a reversion of melody or some other technical move — into such pro-Japanese compositions as Felipe de Leon’s “Awit sa Paglikha ng Bagong Pilipinas” and “Dai-Atiw ng Kalibapi”?13

Barenboim says: “Music is neither moral nor immoral. It is our reaction to it that makes it one or the other in our minds.”14 This after he has cited such examples of abuse as Wagner’s music being played as Jews were sent to the gas chambers. I am not entirely convinced.

Is “musical nationalism” a self-evident good even when it is produced under the patronage of an occupation government or a local dictatorship? Does music create that private space in which one can preserve one’s autonomy and keep one’s freedom alive, or does it nourish instead a quietist acceptance of things as they are? Does the turn towards “ancient musical roots” signify an accumulation of power for the future, or a withdrawal from an inconvenient present?

While music may not be about the making of explicit statements, it creates a “meaningful” experience. What is the trajectory and truth of this experience? A musician composes and performs sounds to create tensions, play with dispositions and oppositions, build anticipations and undermine them, open up spaces of uncertainty, release emotions and thoughts. Why, and to what ends?

A musical masterpiece, Barenboim says, is a “conception of the world [that] cannot be described — because were it possible to describe it in words, the music would be unnecessary.” “But,” he adds, “the fact that itis indescribable doesn’t mean it has no meaning.”15 There may indeed be something futile about describing music, but — knowing how powerfully music shapes our consciousness — describe it we must.

Below, watch Michael Dadap and Florante Aguilar play “Jocelynang Baliwag.” Taken from the film, Harana by Florante Aguilar and Benito Bautista:

1Gabriel Beato Francisco, Casaysayan nang Bayan nang Sampaloc (Manila: Imprenta de Santa Cruz, 1890), 82–83. Also see Francisco’s “Ang mga Pilipinong Nagsidayo sa Kotsintsina,” Sa Labas ng Tahanan at sa Lilim ng Ibang Langit (Maynila: Limb. ng “La Vanguardia” at “Taliba,” 1916).

2On the Buenaventuras of Baliwag: Rolando E. Villacorte, Baliwag: Then and Now [Baliwag: The Author, 1970], 207–11; Helen F. Samson, Contemporary Filipino Composers (Quezon City: Manlapaz Publishing Company, 1976), 37–48.

3Santiago V. Alvarez, The Katipunan and the Revolution: Memoirs of a General, trans. P.C.S. Malay (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1992), 59.

4See Villacorte, Baliwag, 174–77; Felipe Padilla de Leon, “Poetry, Music and Social Consciousness,” Philippine Studies, 17:2 (April 1969), 266–82.

5Felipe P. de Leon, “Banda Uno, Banda Dos,” Filipino Heritage, ed. A.R. Roces(Manila: Lahing Pilipino, 1977–1978), VIII:2213–17; Gilbert E. Macarandang, “Banda San Francisco de Malabon Grande” Isang Historikal na Pag-aaral sa Pangmartsang Banda sa Panahon ng Kastila,” GSEAS Graduate Journal (De La Salle–Dasmariñas), 11:1 (2006), 119–41.

6See Ma. Beatriz Lourdes Buenaventura Salipsip, The Life and Music of Col. Antonino R. Buenaventura (Mandaluyong City: Lourdes B. Salipsip, 2004).

7For an excellent essay on music during the Japanese occupation: Ramon P. Santos, “Nationalism in Philippine Music During the Japanese Occupation: Art or Propaganda?”, Panahon ng Hapon: Sining sa Digmaan, Digmaan sa Sining, ed. G.V. Barte (Manila: Sentrong Pangkultura ng Pilipinas, 1992), 93–106.

8Felipe P. de Leon, “A New Note in Philippine Music,” Philippine Review, II:2 (April 1944), 38.

9Teodoro A. Agoncillo, The Fateful Years: Japan’s Adventure in the Philippines, 1941–45 (Quezon City: R.P. Garcia Publishing, 1965), II:618–19, 622–25.

10See Artista ng Bayan: Antonino R. Buenaventura & Lucrecia Reyes Urtula (Manila: Cultural Center of the Philippines, 1988), 5–23.

11See Robert W. Witkin, Adorno on Music (London: Routledge, 1998). Adorno looks for “truth-value” in the homology between music and society, analyzing the work’s structure and internal relations to determine how it acts on the subject’s condition.

12Daniel Barenboim, Everything is Connected: The Power of Music (London: Phoenix, 2009), 134.

13Agoncillo, Fateful Years, 624; Santos, “Nationalism in Philippine Music,” 101–02.

14Barenboim, Everything is Connected, 119.

15Daniel Barenboim & Edward W. Said, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, ed. A. Guzelimian (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), x.

Anak Araw, a flim directed by Gym Lumbera, 2012

Colossal, a film directed by Whammy Alcarazen, 2012

Jungle Love, a film directed by Sherad Anthony Sanchez, 2012

Judging by the box office returns and the consistent profitability of the Metro Manila Film Festival—a film festival that brands itself as a showcase of escapist cinema—Filipinos tend to veer towards a cinema of entertainment. Ours is a country partly raised by Hollywood and dramatic bombast through television dramas, so it’s only logical that the majority of our celluloid dreams are ones that recount low-grade fantasies, comedy bar fun, and recycled soap opera plots. In 2012, five of the top-grossing films in the country were summer blockbusters (The Avengers, Breaking Dawn Part 2, and The Amazing Spider-Man), an MMFF Vice Ganda comedy (Sisterakas), and a “kabit” movie (The Mistress). The rest of the top 20 reads like the previous summer’s box office list with a few local films tossed in for variety.

But as the MMFF plows on as a moneymaking venture, film festivals like Cinemalaya and Cinema One Originals act as grant-giving bodies to films with little or no monetary returns in sight. These are small “independent” films with limited week-long screenings. Even if you’re a star-studded vehicle from a known director (say Jose Javier Reyes’s Mga Mumunting Lihim which starred Judy Ann Santos, Iza Calzado, Agot Isidro, and Janice De Belen), your future outside the festival circuit is uncertain: it’s either you push for self-distribution or wait for an invitation from international film festivals. Other than rare exceptions like Ang Babae sa Septic Tank or Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (both Cinemalaya films), chances are, festival films will remain inside the film festival.

For the past few years, the country’s two prominent independent film festivals have taken on personae of their own. While Cinemalaya positions itself as our local version of Sundance, Cinema One Originals tends to dabble with experimental filmmaking. In last year’s competition, we saw a film that was shot with a lo-fi camera (Pam Miras’s Pascalina, which was awarded the Best Film), a black and white film that resists narrative (Gym Lumbera’s Anak Araw), and a contemplative take on death and waiting (Dwein Baltazar’s Mamay Umeng).

But “experimental” and “neo-narrative” don’t always have to mean boring long takes, epic running times, static shots, and messes that don’t make sense. It’s films like these that remind us of cinema’s capability to carve different perspectives, ones that aren’t easily eroded by momentary pleasures and comedic sleights of hand. Here are three recent experimental films, all of which have been lauded by critics and opened to screenings that seemed more like private exhibitions.

Jungle Love: Sex and Trees

Still from Sherad Sanchez’s Jungle Love

Jungle Love opens in darkness, with only a few shafts of light peering, demanding to be let through the walls. As the house’s inhabitant opens the door and windows, much of its contents are still hidden in the dark, with only disembodied voices signaling life and activity. Jungle Love operates in a kind of haze, toying with the distinction between reality and eroticized dreams. But Sanchez is smart enough not to fall into the trap of taking his subject too seriously. This is a film that parses sexual terrains as a form of sexual healing and release; a probable minefield of expositions, but Sanchez resists the temptation to dive into the deep end. Instead, he gives us a guidebook for the forest of our primal instincts.

What’s interesting about the people running through Jungle Love is that they look more like imprints of restless souls, trapped within the jungle’s playground: a woman seeks the forest’s refuge after being rejected by her lover, taking his child with her only to discover that it has disappeared after she leaves it alone for a couple of seconds; a writer, her partner, and their guide find themselves lost in search for a lost tribe, while playing sexual games; and a group of army cadets wander aimlessly until one of them is lured by a forest spirit. These characters trek up and down the jungle like pioneers conquering the untamed countries of their bodies until they become masses of energies that sustain the jungle’s life force.

Sanchez makes use of the landscape to sculpt his grim fairy tale. Gnarled roots, gnawing caves, and rattling trees nudge these poor souls into the heart of erotic darkness and back, doomed to repeat the cycle of rejection, isolation, and freedom, whatever form it may present itself. Jungle Love posits the hold of nature in our worldly desires. Rough, animalistic sex isn’t an aberration; it’s a byway into the strange realms of our subconscious and beyond.

Anak Araw: Object Lessons

Still from Gym Lumbera’s Anak Araw

Gym Lumbera’s take on colonial identity and language seems to play patintero with our notions of history. Here, a rundown chalkboard, lined by Western equivalents of the alphabet (‘A’ is for ‘Apple’, ‘B’ is for ‘Ball’, etc.—our earliest introduction to the English), and a Tagalog-English dictionary serve as maps to the inroads of our language that we’ve never bothered to explore. Lumbera comes up with a means to deal with the eccentricities of the past and the present without the heavy-handed requirements of a textbook lecture.

In one of the screenings of the film, Class Picture, Lumbera’s short “photographic film” with Timmy Harn, precedes Anak Araw. Both films depict the building and rebuilding of memories: Anak Araw through the dissolution of language and Class Picture through photographic fragments. Lumbera is a filmmaker who uses a polarized method of romance to flesh out his ideals.

Anak Araw mainly works through distortion. Confused townspeople mimic a goat call while aimlessly following a parade band, the titular albino bleats and walks on four limbs, and an idyllic mountainside is disrupted by an eruption of a funnel of microbes. But these things aren’t often what they appear to be. What we are seeing is a land lost in time—a land in transition.

What echoes in Anak Araw’s reverie is its end note: Nat King Cole’s rendition of “Dahil Sa’yo”, which plays with a long take of an undertaker driving a hearse, lip-synching to the song beside a seemingly lifeless passenger.  Cole’s version is a sweet display of our mother tongue’s disfigurement and at the same time, a jab at the cultural woes of the prevailing powers of the 70s. Coming from a trip to the Philippines, Cole sings the serenade with words that might sound alien at first (“Dah-heel sah-yooee/Nah-is kowng ma-bu-hoyh”), softening the vowels and bending every syllable to fit his Western tongue. But the music sweeps through his shortcomings; the aching plea pouring through every note and warbled words.

And then, Lumbera bookends the film with a six-minute rumble of a boat desperately trying to start, set against a black screen. Now you really know he’s teasing you.

Shot on 16mm and 35mm film, Anak Araw playfully revels in its own randomness without being too trite or indulgent. It also helps that the film is an extension of Lumbera’s charming personality. All quirks aside, Anak Araw is like Lumbera approaching you with an anecdote (or a joke, more likely) on colonial illusion: he dresses it up with his sense of humor and unleashes the punch line at the right time. It might seem like harmless at first but you find yourself thinking about it long after he’s dropped the bomb. “Ang deep, pare.”

Colossal: The Myth of Man in Electronica

Whammy Alcazaren’s Colossal

Six minutes of darkness open Colossal accompanied by a clash of electronic pulses and the clanging of some faraway bell. From here on, Alcazaren establishes the depths that he is willing to mine. Youthful ambition burns bright in Colossal, but to pigeonhole Alcazaren in the pitfalls of his age doesn’t do his film justice, however flawed it may be.

Colossal is languorous trip into the dunes of age-old myths, longing, and memory. Wide empty spaces give way to a city in its adolescent years, brimming with hope and promise; dreams radiate from the shelter of the jungle, shuttling through the constellations and the cold, dark of space. All this imagery, at once grand and nebulous, shape the narrative’s progression, with the occasional pop song beckoning us back down to our feet.

‘Oh, how I love you in the evenings/When we are sleeping/We are sleeping/Oh we are sleeping,” the narrator utters by way of Interpol. He summons Celine Dion, the Righteous Brothers, and The Bangles (or maybe Atomic Kitten) among others as a means to draw out our sense of history and its capability to birth revolutions. It’s in these neat little tricks of pop cultural evocations that Alcazaren strings together his greatest view of the universe; a patch of space where isolation breeds enlightenment, even if it means the only thing you have with you is a compilation of top 40 hits from the 80s and 90s.

But it’s in Colossal’s verse where we encounter the resistance. Words, no matter how well they might comingle with each other, form an impenetrable barrier when juxtaposed with such arresting imagery. It doesn’t help that the narration (in Bisaya) clashes with the English subtitles, which act mostly like flashcards hinting at the grand themes of the film, fluttering in and out of our consciousness as we travel along with Alcazaren. And as his central character comes back down to the earth, we settle with him, we crawl back into our bodies like the grizzled phantoms that we are.

Like any great piece of cinema, films that share the experimental strain of Jungle Love, Anak Araw, and Colossal beckon us to listen closer to the hum of the world we live in. Their haphazard sense of narrative and visuals might not share the idea of cinema that we have gotten used to, but the stories that these films deploy expose the chaotic logic that we grapple to sift through in our daily lives.

Don Jaucian is the founder of the film blog Pelikula Tumblr and a contributing editor for The Philippine Star’s Supreme. He’s reviewed films for publications such as Rogue and Status where he has also profiled filmmakers and actors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Olivier Assayas and Jim Sturgess.

Still Take You Home by Zean Cabangis

I accepted the man’s service without question, as if he had been standing at the doorway of the Olongapo office building waiting only for me. As if I knew he would head into the downpour, open his umbrella, hold the tenuous shelter of it over my head, and walk at my pace, getting wet himself. I accepted his workwithout a “Salamat po.” I was second to worst in my class of Filipino American would-be Tagalog speakers that July, and, in 2007, at age 23, I was still too embarrassed to try.

As I waited for the rest of my Fil-Am classmates, my Tagalog teacher Susan Quimpo approached me, holding her own umbrella.

“Did you notice that he held the umbrella only for you?” she murmured.

Then—as people of the Philippines are inclined to do, when a situation seems too absurd in its wrongness to repair—she laughed.

My classmates and I sounded the same: Fil-Ams managing our emotional confusion with loud inside jokes about our two months together in Manila. But they were brown and they were damp. I was pale and I was dry.

The man was not holding the umbrella above me. He was holding the umbrella above my whiteness. He was holding it like a flag for everything he assumed my whiteness represented: my wealth, my station in life—higher than his—and my deserving extra service.

This worship of whiteness is not a phenomenon unique to the Philippines. But that day in Olongapo, I felt a surge of shame.

Of course, whether I felt guilty or not, I was still dry.

 

Before moving to the Philippines, I had no idea how closely my class would be identified with my face. In America, my face had been merely diverting, a prompt for racial guessing-games that always made me shudder. “Mexican! Polish! Sephardic!” “You kinda look Spanish and Oriental at the same time. What is that?” Or my face had been an inspiration for the saying of strange, murky compliments that made me shudder more. “I wish I had your nice, smooth, Asian skin.” “You’re so lucky your nose isn’t too—well, you know.”

In Manila, my ambiguous whiteness was no longer ambiguous. It was simply whiteness.

Thanks to my face, and the strength of the dollars I had, I was top one-percenting for the first time in my life. I lived, overtly, the troubling inventory Peggy McIntosh outlines in “White Privilege: Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack:”

 Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.

I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.

Perhaps, in Manila, I lived a variation of McIntosh’s theme: Moving Under The Invisible Umbrella.

Last August, I spent only forty pesos at an upscale cafe in Greenbelt mall to wait out a cloudburst. I used the café’s Wi-Fi for hours, while servers impatiently thrust menus at more-melanined customers who had dared sit for too long.

I wandered onto a fenced-in, exclusive university campus for the sole reason that it was a nice walk, and I wanted to be there. The guard smiled and tipped his hat to me. He did not require me to sign his security book.

In a live, crowded theater, I crossed a restricted area to use the much less crowded staff restroom. Four guards said nothing.

As I slowly learned my motherland’s arithmetic of identity—repeated in countries once brutalized by white rulers around the world—I realized what members of the service sector assumed of me: English speaker + pale face + black hair = A foreigner. Or a mestiza. She looks like the rulers—Spanish, or American. She and her family must have some authority—perhaps political authority. She merits extra courtesy.

As I spent more time in the Philippines in the late 2000s, developing my understanding of the society my mother left in 1979, I tried to reconcile what I saw with the reality I came from. My mother was the second-to-youngest child of seven. The last home she shared with her family was a small apartment that flooded regularly. She was a scholar at Ateneo de Manila University, always explained to me as the Harvard of the Philippines. Her classmates’ easy, entitled affluence depressed her. We lived in a wealthy California suburb because my mother was always conscious of the necessity to perform wealth. And we ate bread from the Wonderbread surplus store. We never, ever threw away expired meat.

But the education my parents guaranteed me, in a wealthier country that once controlled the Philippines garnered me grants and scholarships—advantages of travel that few middle-to-lower-class scholars in the Philippines will ever see.

My favorite karinderya serves scrambled eggs and rice for twenty pesos. My presence amuses and annoys the guards and drivers who were never granted scholarships to study me in my birth country. As my Tagalog improved, I began to understand their objections. Didn’t I have a more sosyal place to eat as a foreigner? What was I playing at, treading into their space?

 

I occasionally see my relatives in Tandang Sora, a long but narrow street with many working-class neighborhoods. My cousins often think about strategies to become Overseas Filipino Workers. It isn’t their first choice to leave. But they have no other escape from the criminally small wages given them. Last summer they were developing their own small karinderya.

I always consider their position against mine. It is an uneasy comparison. Had my mother not been a scholar—had her own, elder sister not married an American, and petitioned for her to join them in California—had my mother not found my father, a U.S. Naval officer who made her laugh—I too might be starting a karinderya,  finding strategies to go abroad.

Whenever I visit Tandang Sora, I always bring dessert—a box of donuts, or a bag of cookies, or ice cream. My cousins always feed me: sopas, afritada, fried chicken, tilapia stuffed with garlic and tomatoes, which they know to be my favorite. They joke about my Italian side when spaghetti is on the table. They feed me well.

 

“They Won’t Even Have a Clue” by Zean Cabangis

Of course, none of the economic struggles that once haunted my family approach the reality of the kalesa driver, who winces when he tells me about his wages, as he plies the avenues of Malate. He is allowed to take home only twenty pesos of each 100-peso ride. The rest he owes to the owner of his kalesa. It’s perfectly legal. He does not say the rest, but I can perceive it: he can go to no one for fair wages.

Or my cab driver who dozes off at a stoplight—who apologizes when I nudge him—since it’s the twenty-third hour of his twenty-four-hour shift. How often will he get the chance to sheepishly say, “Extra charge, ma’am,” for a cross-Quezon City ride?

Or the server who looks at me in terror when we realize she brought the wrong order. Who will stop her boss from automatically deducting the two hundred pesos from her own small paycheck? Who can she look to, besides me, and the narrative of wealth my pale face projects, to momentarily assist her with a generous tip?

When I find shrewd charges added to my bills, I argue as briefly as my Tagalog-in-progress will allow. My Filipino friends say I should argue, for the principle of it. The workers are likely being dramatic, performing their desperation. My friends say they get cheated too as Filipinas.

In the end I call the overcharges my “dayuhan tax.” My foreigner tariff. The extra cost I owe for the postcolonial privileges of my face. As long as the population remains economically stranded, I suspect my American whiteness continues to be a kind of cheating in the modern Philippines.

 

Besides the dauyhan tax I joke about, there are other subtler, more personal taxes intrinsic to my pallid appearance. No one in the Philippines will ever immediately believe I am Filipina, no matter how strongly and how affectionately I choose the country. My Tagalog will take years to reach everyday, pun-level proficiency. My mother chose not to teach me and my two younger brothers Tagalog, for fear that our Italian American father would feel excluded. My brothers feel no connection at all to her home country. I alone return regularly.

Sometimes, expats of Western countries who hear my California accent and see my pale face assume they’ve found a friendly audience for their Philippines frustrations. I’ll hear their complaints coming—Corruption! Traffic! Terrible customer service!—and I will say, stiffly, “My mother was from here.” Sometimes it gives the expats pause. Sometimes it doesn’t.

I do not know when I will deserve to say, “I am from here.” My language difficulties and my face still prevent me access to that statement. But I often hear that I am lucky. I may not belong to a ruling family, but I look and sound like I do.

On some days I don’t know what to do with all this, when I leave the room I rent in Quezon City. On some weekends I grow so tired and confused, I don’t leave. I stay in and watch the subtitles on the local music video channel, Myx, to try and gain a little more Tagalog. I harbor dreams of using my white mestiza privilege to become a VJ, until I hear how fast and natural the VJs’ Tagalog is.

I catch a commercial for a whitening soap. I see a soap opera ad with an actress in the indigenous equivalent of blackface. I watch a cell phone commercial pandering to the longings of Overseas Filipino Workers. None of it is terribly surprising. All of it makes a certain kind of sense.

I turn the television off.

 

One night, a new friend invites me to a party in Forbes Park. I know the neighborhood’s name as code, the way I know certain last names as code: upper-est class, highest security, a servant for each family member, etc.

A private gate guards the house. It reminds me of the palatial, forbidding, buttery mansions I used to pass on drives through Malibu in Southern California with an ex-girlfriend who knew where celebrities lived. The young man hosting the party here in Forbes Park is connected, in a way I don’t immediately grasp, to a political family.

Inside the house, a fog machine distorts the regal dark. A DJ’s bass line shakes my skeleton. A man dressed like a pirate urges us to drink. Small, oval-shaped rainbows glow intensely at a slick, temporary bar. Servers call me “Ma’am!” and gesture toward the rainbows. I realize they’re drinks. I pick one up. It illuminates my hand. My rainbow shot is very, very sweet.

Outside, serious-faced cooks grill hamburgers. I grew up knowing never to spurn free food, so I stand in line for one. I watch more and more young Manileños arrive. They are, I realize, all part of the ruling classes somehow, or they have befriended members of the ruling classes. Many of them—though not all—are as white as I am, or more white.

I see a mechanical bull.

“What?” a Filipina friend mocks me later, when I describe the bull and the bass line and the sweet rainbow and the Malibu-celebrity-style house and the free burger that was really very delicious. “Were you just judging it the whole time?”

I flinch. But I fail to explain to her that the same thought occurred to me at the party, too.

Why, I argued to myself, should I judge this? Why should I worry about my complicity in racial hierarchies and class hierarchies and family entrenchments that were constructed long before I ever arrived in my motherland? Why not imagine, for just one night, that I am part of a powerful family? Why not just laugh?

So I drink another rainbow. I get photographed. I exchange business cards. I memorize new names. I watch the whipping hair of socialites who ride the now-bucking bull. In the small hours of the night, I feel glad I am able to enjoy myself.

When I finally exit the gate, I am surprised to find another, more muted party—party in the most utilitarian sense of the word.

These are the drivers and bodyguards, waiting for the members of the Philippine elite inside. They smoke and murmur to each other and check their cell phones. Their own families are waiting for them at homes far from Forbes Park.

I have no easy explanation for my feelings about this moment. The workers would not welcome, and do not deserve, my pity. But as I move mere footsteps from the company of the sovereigns to the company of their servants, I feel the uncertainty and shame that blur so often in me here. In the Philippines, I can get past the gate.

For a chance at the social mobility I perform effortlessly, many Filipinos, waiting forever, unprotected, outside barred mansions, will leave. They will hope for work in a place—Europe, or my birth country—that helped create and enforce the intractable inequity forcing their displacement today.

When I cease imagining the difference of those lives—when I choose dismissal over compassion and self-examination and criticism, to make my own path in the country feel less unnatural than it is—

How do I make space in myself for everyone on both sides of the gate? Protected and unprotected? I don’t know.

 

I have a troubled relationship with umbrellas. They are daily necessities in Manila, where the weather can alter by the hour with the intensity of an erratic god. But I always lose umbrellas. Or I break them. It always surprises me when umbrellas break. I never expect them to be as fragile as they are.

Once, when the wind blew the trees horizontal in the business district of Ortigas, I paused in the lobby of an office tower, drenched. More and more passersby, each of their umbrellas brutalized and useless, joined me. The guards let us all stay. Most of us were waiting to walk to the MRT train. Over the next hour, we watched power lines whip and taxis forge defiantly forward and rain slash into the streets’ now-surging floodwaters. We were all, for a brief moment, equally halted, equally soaked.

Then one guard noticed me.

“Taxi, ma’am?” he asked. “Taxi?”

He smiled, offering to go out into the rain for me. I smiled back, and told him no.

 

Laurel Fantauzzo was a 2011 Fulbright Scholar to the Philippines. She’s currently an Arts Fellow at the University of Iowa Master of Fine Arts in Nonfiction program. She has written for Lapham’s Quarterly, Grantland, The FilAm, Associated Press, New York Magazine online, and GMA News.

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With thanks to Tessa Winkelmann, PhD Candidate in History at the University of Illinois.

By Zhou Jiajun

Globalization is a process that “disintegrates” the national economy and “reintegrates” parts of it at the global level in accordance with the dynamics of global capital.  The increasing lack of coherence among local agriculture, industry, and services has been paralleled by the Philippines’ assuming three key roles in the global division of labor: as an assembler of electronic chips for export; a site for the transfer of Business Processing Activities (BPOs) from the developed countries; and as an exporter of skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled labor.

For all intents and purposes, the most dynamic sector of the economy is labor export.  While government authorities are loath to acknowledge this, and there is only perfunctory acknowledgment of its role in the economy in the medium-term development plans, the reality is that it is labor export, with the billions of dollars it brings in to support the consumption of families of overseas workers, that keeps the economy afloat.

Labor Export and Neoliberalism

This country is one of the great labor exporters of the world. Some 11 percent of its total population and 22 percent its working age population are now migrant workers in other countries.   With remittances now totaling some $20 billion a year, the Philippines places fourth as a recipient of remittances, after China, India, and Mexico.

The country’s role as a labor exporter cannot be divorced from the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism.  The labor export program began in the mid-seventies as a temporary program under the Marcos dictatorship, with a relatively small number of workers involved—some 50,000.  The ballooning of the program to encompass some 9 million workers owes much to the devastation of the economy and jobs by the structural adjustment policies imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund beginning in 1980, trade liberalization under the World Trade Organization, and the prioritization of debt repayment by the post-Marcos governments in national economic policy since 1986.

Structural adjustment resulted in deindustrialization and the loss of so many manufacturing jobs; trade liberalization pushed so many peasants out of agriculture, a great number directly to overseas employment; and prioritization of debt repayments robbed government of resources for capital expenditures that could act as an engine of economic growth since some 20 to 40 per cent of the budget was allocated yearly to servicing the debt.  In the role that structural adjustment and trade liberalization played in creating pressures for labor migration, the experience of the Philippines parallels that of Mexico, another key labor-exporting country.

The dynamics of the labor export phenomenon, however, cannot be understood solely in terms of the impact of neoliberal structural adjustment.  It is intimately related to the accelerated process of globalization, or the integration of production and markets, since the 1980s.

The freer flow of commodities and capital has been one of the features of the contemporary process of globalization.  Unlike in the earlier phase of globalization in the 19^th century, however, the freer flow of commodities and capital has not been accompanied by a freer movement of labor globally in the current phase of globalization.  After all, the centers of the global economy—both the old sites of accumulation like Europe and the United States and the dynamic new sites like the Gulf states—have imposed ever-tighter restrictions on migration from poorer countries. Yet the demand for cheap labor in the richer parts of the world continues to grow, even as more and more people in developing countries seek to escape conditions of economic stagnation and poverty that are often the result of the same dynamics of a system of global capitalism that have created prosperity in the developed world.

The Middle East as Labor Destination

The number of migrants worldwide grew from 36 million in 1991 to around 191 million in 2005.  The aggregate numbers do not, however, begin to tell the critical role that migrant labor plays in the prosperous economies. For instance, the booming economies in the Persian Gulf and Saudi peninsula are relatively lightly populated in terms of their local Arab population, but they host a substantial number of foreign migrant workers, many of whom come from South Asia and Southeast Asia.  Indeed, foreign migrant workers are a disproportionate part of the populations of the Persian Gulf states— ranging from 25 percent in Saudi Arabia to 66 percent in Kuwait, to over 90 percent in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

This gap between increasing demand and restricted supply has created an explosive situation, one that has been filled by a global system of trafficking in human beings that can in many respects be compared to the slave trade of the 16^th century.

Labor export is big business, having spawned a host of parasitic institutions that now have a vested interest in maintaining and expanding it.  The transnational labor export network includes labor recruiters, government agencies and officials, labor smugglers, and big corporate service providers like the US multinational service provider Aramark.  What is actually happening is the expansion of a system of labor trafficking that is just as big and as profitable as sex trafficking and the drug trade.  The spread of free wage labor has often been associated with the expansion of capitalism.  But what is currently occurring is the expansion and institutionalization of a system of unfree labor under contemporary neoliberal capitalism, a process not unlike the expansion of slave labor and repressed labor in the early phase of global capitalist expansion in the 16^th century.

This expansive system that creates, maintains, and expands unfree labor is best illustrated in the case of the Middle East, now the main destination of OFWs

As Atiya Ahmad writes,

With the booming of the Gulf states’ petrodollar-driven economies from the early 1970s onwards, a vast and consolidated assemblage of government policies, social and political institutions, and public discourse developed to manage and police the region’s foreign resident population. Anchored by the kefala or sponsorship and guarantorship system, this assemblage both constructs and disciplines foreign residents into ‘temporary labor migrants.’

This elite-promoted construction of migrant identity promotes an internalization of the migrants’ role as social subordinates and an emasculation of their status as political agents.  They are expected to remain and so far have largely behaved as non-participants in the politics of their so-called host societies, even these societies are swept by the winds of political change.

In 2009, some 64 per cent of the more than one million Filipino workers that went abroad went to the Middle East.  Most of these workers were women and the biggest occupational category was household service workers or maids.

Labor Trafficking

In its effort to curb this free market in virtual slavery or to prevent workers from going into countries where their physical security would be in great danger like Afghanistan or Iraq, the Philippine government requires government-issued permits for workers to be able to leave or it has imposed deployment bans to some countries.  However, labor recruiters, which are often in cahoots not only with Middle East employers but also with the US Defense Department and US private contractors, have found ways of getting around these regulations.

There have developed clandestine networks to smuggle workers from the Southern Philippines to destinations in the Middle East.  From interviews with domestic workers in Damascus, we were able to construct the following clandestine route:  people told of being smuggled out of the Southern Philippine city of Zamboanga by small boat to the Malaysian state of Sabah.  From there they were transported in the hold of a bigger boat going to Singapore, where they were then offloaded and brought by land transport to a site near Kuala Lumpur.  In Kuala Lumpur they were forced to work for their subsistence for six weeks.  It was only after two months that they were finally transported by plane from Kuala Lumpur to Dubai, then to Damascus, where they found themselves in the midst of a civil war!

With such illegal transnational human smuggling networks in operation, it is not surprising that of the nine thousand domestic workers in Syria, the Embassy estimated that 90 per cent were there illegally, that is they had no valid exit papers from the Philippines.  Among other things, this has made locating them and contacting them very difficult after Manila issued orders to the Embassy last January to evacuate all Filipino workers in Syria.

The situation is similar in Afghanistan and Iraq.  For much the same reason, we do not have an accurate figure of how many Filipinos have been illegally recruited to be service workers in the US bases by the Pentagon and US military contractors, but 10,000 is probably a conservative number.   In the case of Afghanistan, the collusion between illegal labor traffickers, the US government, and US private contractors poses a gargantuan challenge to the weak Philippine state.

Intersection of Labor and Sex Trafficking

The predominance of women among the workers being trafficked to the Middle East has created a situation rife with sexual abuse, and a system whereby labor trafficking and sexual trafficking are increasingly intersecting.  Here is an excerpt from a report of the House Committee on Overseas Workers following the visit of some members to Saudi Arabia in January 2011:

Rape is the ever-present specter that haunts Filipino domestic workers in Saudi Arabia. …Rape and sexual abuse is more frequent than the raw Embassy statistics reveal, probably coming to 15 to 20 per cent of cases reported for domestics in distress. If one takes these indicators as roughly representative of unreported cases of abuse of domestic workers throughout the kingdom, then one cannot but come to the conclusion that rape and sexual abuse is common.

One can go further and say that there is a strong element of sex trafficking in the trafficking of Filipino women into the Middle East given the expectation, especially in many Gulf households, that providing sex to the master of the household is seen as part of the domestic worker’s tasks.

In sum, the creation of the labor-export economy in countries like the Philippines stemmed greatly from the impact of structural adjustment, trade liberalization, and the prioritization of debt repayment, policies that led to industrialization, the erosion of local agriculture, and the gutting of state investment, disabling it as an engine of growth.  Moreover, the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism have led to the creation of a global system of labor trafficking, reinforcing the insight of Immanuel Wallerstein that the development of capitalist relations of production does not, in many cases, displace but reinforce or promote the spread of unfree labor.  This includes not only new centers of capital accumulation like the Middle East but also old centers like the United States.

Walden Bello represents Akbayan in the House of Representatives where he is Chairman of the Committee of Overseas Workers’ Affairs.

By Miko Reverza

In the aftermath of last year’s storm that almost flooded my room, I lost the stand of my teeny LED monitor. Since MacGyver taught me ingenuity, my TV is currently sandwiched between two ancient encyclopedia volumes. I rarely open my TV and rarely does it open up to me. The only time I do open it is during sexless Saturday nights for German “Kuya Germs” Moreno’s Master Showman: Walang Tulugan—a two-hour late night variety show encased in a perpetual 90s carbonite casing.

The internet owns me—a member of Generation Y, the first generation to grow up online. The TV exists, but my computer is the only real thing, and file-sharing applications are akin to God’s manna. Nowadays, I dictate my own TV-watching schedule. I don’t wait a week after the original telecast and not a single subliminal advertising gimmick passes through my eyes—everything is just Claire Danes and the infinite terrorist threats that constantly endanger America.

With the instant gratification of the internet, kids my age (technically adults) no longer find the need to press their remotes because a click of a mouse is all it takes. I am, however, just one part of a much larger demographic, one that still thrives on teledramas, talk shows, and the news. To me, local television is a dormant beast rendered immobile by tradition, repetition, and showbiz asphyxiation.

A Confession: I Work for Television

To be honest, I stopped watching television when I started working for it. I didn’t plan to work for TV, but the job fell on my lap. At a time when the only viable career choices available were becoming a call center agent or an English instructor for Koreans, I took the dumb route and worked for the largest network in the country for a staggering 10,000 pesos a month. Minus tax.

And health insurance.

The job was simple: make commercials for the network’s shows. It wasn’t Mad Men; concepts were neither highbrow nor sensible. I curated concert highlights, announcements, odd contests for obscure K-pop acts, celebrity greetings, and sad promos where I made boring people seem more interesting than they were. I did nothing to revolutionize television and even got censored for making a young actor suck a lollipop—an act deemed “suggestive” because the actor was plagued by gay rumors.

I eventually got bored with celebrities and decided to venture into the mundane world of BPOs. After a few months of normalcy, I was offered to write for a weekly supplement of a local publication where I now (sometimes) skewer celebrities and make fun of their popularity. I guess sarcasm goes a long way because I eventually ended up writing for a 15-minute late night talk show.

Remember when I said that working for television just fell on my lap? It fell hard and strong. It’s not that I hate it. I spent 13 internet-less years before I first heard the cringe-inducing sound of a modem connecting to ISP Bonanza. Before that, it was all TV. I remember feeling Mara’s pain whenever Clara went Bad Girls Club on her. My ideal friends were made to resemble the hodgepodge of characters from T.G.I.S., Gimik, G-mik, and C.L.I.C.K. It still baffles me why Selina died in Mula Sa Puso: The Movie, but continued to wreak havoc in her television incarnation.  As I grew up, local television slowly drifted away from my life and I eventually traded Pangako Sa ‘Yo for Game of Thrones.

Like celebrities who refuse to see their movies, I avoid local TV. It’s also because I have access to pretty much anything thanks to the internet. Like the Suez Canal, which opened up numerous trading routes for the West, the internet gave us The OC, Veronica Mars, Lost, and Battlestar Gallactica.

Television in the US is in a golden age, churning out the greatest shows by continually pushing the limits of the medium. Or sometimes they just feature a lot of sex. HBO is rife with shows with the 3 Bs: boobs, buns, and bush. And yet Philippine TV has its own charms. For example, Anne Curtis has been facing scrutiny over the immodesty of her birthday gown. Three years ago, her nipples made their public debut due to a wardrobe malfunction in Boracay. Yes, we’ve seen her nipples before, so maybe a sexy slit on her dress can pass off as a little less controversial.

The Rhythms of Pinoy TV

Local television is made to fit the rhythms of Pinoy life, which is why you get similar programming patterns. Morning shows are genetically modified to cause chaos in the morning and pander to sleepy students anxiously waiting for a class suspension and their frenzied moms. The mid-morning is reserved for syndicated cartoons and anime reruns. In the 90s, this slot was dominated by local educational shows that promoted creativity, science-based learning, and English speaking—now, kids are getting tagalized trash.

By noon, people are too fixated on their lunch breaks to care. Which is why noontime shows exist. Easily digestible entertainment pairs well with piping hot sinigang. Afternoon is siesta time; it’s also the time when moms and yayas get their “me” time before the kids come back from school. It’s the time for afternoon soaps or films on TV.

Primetime kicks off with the news, because we need grim news about massacres and scandals with dinner like adobo needs toyo. The real primetime is dominated by 30-minute teleseryes. Stories can range from intense sibling rivalry caused by being exchanged at birth to fantasy tales about mermaids and demons. Anyone who says Filipino television isn’t creative should take a fucking look at ABS-CBN’s Kokey. Or Kampanerang Kuba, which allowed Anne Curtis to become a media darling by playing a hunchback. Or Mulawin, with its cutting-edge green screen technology.

After the local and foreign dramas, the night winds down with a news and public affairs program or the occasional comedy—vestiges of 90s sitcoms that poked fun at the lives of the masa. Trends arrive in waves and fade away quickly, until they wash up in the shores of basic cable replay channels.

The Emancipation of TV

Local television is based on centralized power. Programs are controlled by big networks, and we’re all expected to keep our eyes glued to our screens.

In an ideal Philippines, media should be used to emancipate the masses. The audience should choose what they want to see. Instead of dumbing things down, producers should assume that their viewers are transmitters of messages rather than mere receivers.

So why is local TV the way it is? It’s because of what the masa have been made to expect. Chismis and showbiz glamor keep people glued to the tube. And since there is a lack of public cable programming (even if a huge chunk of the middle class has access to cable), the alternative is watching foreign shows.

My millennial peers often complain that local television doesn’t appeal to them. They dub my job  “shitty,” “unintentionally hilarious,” or “borderline camp.” But we are not the masa, and our interests and tastes can’t dictate cultural norms.

Still, I think it’s valid to call for smarter TV writing. I’m fairly new to the game, but I try my best. When people like Lena Dunham or Louis CK are noticed for being different voices, I get excited and think about the possibilities for local television. There are ways to circumvent the pitfalls of repetition by turning to our own culture. Instead of remaking teleseryes, we can create new series based on our literature. An HBO-like adaptation of Noli Me Tangere that airs once a week would be a towering achievement. Or why not remake Abangan ang Susunod na Kabanata by turning it into a multi-camera family mockumentary a la Arrested Development? There are ways to give the masa smart programming without taking them out of their comfort zones.

Pitch Imperfect

Breaking into TV is nerve-wracking. The ratings game dictates much of my contract—not that I signed one. But our team is rife with ideas even if the need to appeal to an audience drives us up the wall. I heard we were picked up for a second season, which means there is more work to be done—more work than researching about #ArtistaTweets.

A friend of mine who was tired of making art films for the foreign market wants to transition into TV. A network executive is asking him to pitch a few ideas for their new line of programming. While sitting in a bar, I asked him what kind of show he had in mind. The words “mainstream” and “masa” were tossed around, which shocked me since my friend is an international festival darling. Over a few beers, we talked about crafting a show that would appeal to the public, while maintaining artistic integrity. As we spoke, we were interrupted by a text from a friend in London asking me to write him in as a character in our show.

In a way, his sentiment echoes what most Filipinos want: to see a reflection of themselves represented for them. At a time when facts are only delivered through news and public affairs programs, perhaps creating a niche of Pinoy content that is neither fantastical nor overtly dramatic can create small waves in television. But that may be wishful thinking. If all else fails, there’s always Master Showman.

Shinji Manlangit just told you a story about himself. He can also be found hidden in end credits and slapping tambourines for the bands The Strangeness and Don’t Bogart the Can, Man. For more information, tweet @JunellHernando. 

Let’s see if these two approaches worked.

The book opens with its full, unsubtle subtitle prominently displayed on page three:

Professor Dr. Nur P. Misuari, Moro National Liberation Front Founding Leader and Central Committee Chairman, United Nations Peace Awardee, Nobel Peace Laureate Nominee, Aurora Quezon Peace Awardee, Supreme Datu or Leader of the Bangsa Moro Highlander Tribal Communities Throughout Mindanao, Royal Datu of the Sultanate of Sulu; and Datu Seri Panglima Darajat Kinabalu (State of Sabah, Malaysia), Ph.D. Honoris Causa in Humanities and International Relations, signatory to the 1976 Tripoli Agreement, the Jeddah Peace Accord and the Jakarta-Manila Final Peace Agreement of September 2, 1996

It’s as if Stern is confronting the disbelieving reader: Now, which other Filipino leader has the same lengthy resume, aber?

Stern knows his audience. Even though he may secretly wish it were a broader public, he is realistic enough to pitch to two types of smaller audiences. The first are the professoriate, the literati, politicos, and career executives—that segment of the Filipino population concerned with academic degrees and professional accolades. These are the types whose office walls are littered with awards, certificates, and diplomas that scream, “Hey you, I am smart!” To them, Misuari is a kindred soul. They’re the kind who would be impressed by the Chairman’s credentials. They drink from the same well of vanity that Misuari does.

Stern’s principal audience, however, is not Filipino. It is American—and a specific kind of American to boot: policy wonks operating inside Washington DC’s Beltway, many with grandiose claims of being “area and country experts,” often based on brief stints in an Ivy League school of governance, the State Department, USAID, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, or multinational corporations with investments in Asia. The message that Stern, a medical doctor by training, wants to impart to them is that although Misuari has been marginalized politically, he is still a presence among the Moros and in Philippine and international politics. Just look at his credentials!

But if these credentials are the foundation of Misuari’s eminence, then that foundation is fragile as there isn’t much substance behind the titles. Misuari was indeed an academic, having taught at the University of the Philippines before going underground when martial law was declared. But he was an instructor, the lowest full-time teaching position given by the State University, not a professor as Stern claims. Neither is Misuari a Doctor, in the sense of having received the highest degree a university can grant a student. His PhD is an honoris causa—a title given to respected guests of the academe. And we do not even know where his came from.

The title, “Supreme Datu or Leader of the Bangsa Moro Highlander Tribal Communities Throughout Mindanao [sic!],” is even more unbelievable as no one has ever united the lumad and the Moros, even today. Sabah and Kuala Lumpur will probably just snort at being told that Misuari has been conferred (by whom?) the highest state title accorded a ruler. Finally, very little is known about the Aurora Quezon Peace Awards (the only other recipient was Cory Aquino), while the United Nations Peace Awards is just one of many the international body hands out to various recipients (in 2013, the honorees were 357 Bangladeshi policemen who were part of the peacekeeping force in the Ivory Coast). And anyone can be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

The biggest problem with writing about failed revolutionaries, however, is dealing with the disappointments and defeats. History has an uncanny way of shattering the myth of invincibility that Stern weaves around the Chairman.

Misuari assumed unchallenged leadership of the MNLF in 1971, after fending off the ambitious Rashid Lucman. Then, with a steady supply of everything from guns to toilet paper courtesy of Libya and Malaysia, he led the Bangsamoro Army in pushing back the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) in Cotabato, Jolo and the countryside of Central Mindanao. The tide turned when Taiwanese-supplied bullets (Stern claims Marcos “succeeded in bullying Taiwan into selling badly needed ammunition” but does not explain why) and American heavy weapons enabled AFP tanks to smash MNLF formations and Navy ships to blast MNLF positions in Jolo, burning the entire town in the process.

Misuari’s control over the MNLF command began to slip during this period, when the organization was adjusting to the AFP’s improved capacities. In the meantime, even as Libya welcomed the next batch of MNLF fighters for training in antitank warfare, Muammar Khaddafi and the Organization of Islamic Conference had warmed up to Marcos’s diplomatic overtures. Before long, Misuari’s patrons in the Islamic world were pressuring him to sit down and negotiate with his opponents. After successfully ousting Mustapha, Kuala Lumpur also began reducing its support for the MNLF, closing training camps and making it more difficult for resources (guns, mostly) to be coursed through North Borneo. Indonesia joined in by hosting Misuari, who was then told by President Suharto to consider autonomy instead of separatism.

In the war zones, Marcos split the MNLF leadership by offering government posts to commanders in order to lure them out of the battlefield. Many accepted, including Commander Sali Wali, one of the original seven founders of the organization; the brothers Hussin and Tupay Loong from the Loong family of Jolo; Abdul Hamid Lucman, the MNLF’s legal adviser; and Abulkhayr Alonto, vice-chairman of the MNLF central committee. Misuari would eventually lose control of central Mindanao, when Hashim Salamat—disappointed by the Chairman’s decision to accept autonomy and suspicious of Tausug domination of the organization— gathered his fellow Maguindanaoans to establish the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). The organizational hemorrhage continued well into the 1980s—the biggest defection being that of Basilan Revolutionary Committee head Gerry Salapuddin, who surrendered together with 1,442 fighters in 1983.

Misuari did very little to stem the corrosion that was gnawing the movement from within. He was hurt by the many acts of disloyalty and resentful of their perpetrators. This is where Stern tries to spin failure into something else. He claims that even as the organization was falling apart, Misuari never wavered in his commitment to Moro independence. Yet the Chairman eventually did make his own compromises, acquiescing to Libyan, OIC, and Malaysian advice to sit down with government peace panels, signing a peace agreement in 1976 and again in 1996. President Fidel Ramos amply rewarded Misuari by getting him “elected” governor of the Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao. Then it became his turn to be accused by some of his followers of selling out. Stern does not see these as signs of weakness but as minor roadblocks that only strengthened Misuari’s resolve.

So just how intense was this devotion to the cause? Here, in Misuari’s own words, is a normal day for the Chairman (note the Nixonian style of referring to himself in the third person):

“They don’t understand… that Nur Misuari goes to bed only after two o’clock in the morning and he is among the first human beings to wake up early in the morning for his prayers. And throughout the day seldom do I take a nap or any relaxation at all. I always devote my time to the service of God, to the service of my people, and to the service of the MNLF” (p. 132).

There are, however, other angles from which Stern’s portrait can be viewed. True, Misuari convinced Maranaos, Maguindanaos and Tausugs—from both the elites and the masses—to fight. But littered all over the book are demonstrations of the Chairman’s perceptible naiveté, a trait he shares with some grand revolutionaries. Like Vladimir Illich, Misuari thought all those who joined the revolution were good people with nothing but the popular interest in mind. The comrades who betrayed him in the early years of the war, Hashim Salamat and the Council of 15 that ousted him from the chairman’s seat, may have done him ill, but in his mind, in the end, their goodness will still prevail (Stalin ended up turning Lenin’s socialist dream into a brutal nightmare. Misuari’s fate was less brutal—he was simply elevated to Chairman emeritus divested of his power.)

Countless times in the text, we see Misuari conned into agreeing to something without considering the consequences: the OIC, Libya and Malaysia telling him to accept autonomy, the Fidel Ramos bribe of the ARMM governor position, the Council of 15’s demand that they send their own representatives to OIC meetings. As one reads through the book, one begins to doubt how much influence Misuari ever had on the people he led, his patrons abroad, and even those in the government who sympathized with him.

Yet, it is these glimpses of political innocence that prevent us from being completely disappointed with this book. Stern’s sappy portrait of his friend (who also happens to be his wife’s boss) does allow for some nice little gems to emerge (Misuari appointed Stern’s Tausug wife, Yolanda, MNLF ambassador to the Americas “because of her influence and sophistication”! There is a menacing portrait of the ambasadora wielding a kris in the photo section—this to the delight of Orientalists who see yet another confirmation of the “Moro’s ferocity” by one of their own).

Unlike Jose Ma. Sison, the great helmsman of local communists, whose class origin was of the haciendas, Misuari grew up poor in Jolo (the chapter on his childhood is one of the better ones in the book). He was the quintessential small-town kid who made good. He lived and continues to live a simple life. He is also an incurable romantic, pursuing Desdemona, his late first wife, from the time he saw her as a blossoming teenager in Jolo. A family man, the Chairman is attentive to the needs of his wives (despite being closely watched by three guards “with martial arts training,” he still manages to have another child with second wife, Tarhata!). And in his senior years he has become quite cantankerous (“Irritable after years of imprisonment, Misuari sometimes waved off arguments presented by men trying to explain another point of view”). There is indeed something quite endearing about the man, after all.

Like all hagiographies, however, the book has very little to say about the movement that engulfed the country in its second conventional war, which eroded the institutional ramparts of the Marcos dictatorship. There is only a slight mention of the “first 100” MNLF guerillas sent to Malaysia and Libya, Malaysia’s military aid to the MNLF, the armed deals involving Misuari, Tun Mustapha and the arms dealer Adnan Khassogi. These are all marginal notes, anecdotes that spice up the grand saga that is Misuari’s life.

Stern concludes by reiterating that age has not snuffed out the revolutionary fire in Misuari’s heart. But he issues a qualification: The Chairman now “wants his legacy to be peace.” In their path-breaking book Under the Crescent Moon, the journalists Marites Vitug and Glenda Gloria have a slightly different and more believable explanation for this mood swing: the MNLF’s Chairman emeritus was “simply tired of it all [and] saw the peace process as the only way to retire gracefully from the battlefield.”

Even here, the Chairman’s standing remains tenuous. If things end up well with the current negotiations, it may well be the MILF, Mohagher Iqbal and Murad Ibrahim who will have a better claim to that legacy. With these stories of failures, manipulations, compromises, splits, and capitulation laid out unwittingly by Tom Stern, Nur Misauri and the MNLF may just end up as mere prefaces to this larger story, little valued inside the Washington D.C., Beltway and ignored by Filipino and Muslim readers.

Excerpt:

Daydreaming Separation

“The government is so dishonest, so sincere. They suppress information so that no one knows what is going on. It means government manipulates behind the scenes. It is very difficult to deal with a government that acts like that. How is it possible for them to deliver? The backlash of failure might be that all of Mindanao, Muslim and Christian alike, might seek independence from Manila. A meeting took place at the Royal Mandarin Hotel which included Mayor Rodrigo Duterte of Davao, one of the most powerful men in Mindanao. The meeting declared desire for a Mindanao Independent Republic. Once the current Lady President is out, many may raise their flags. Robert (sic!) ‘Chavit’ Singson wants an independent Ilocano Republic; [Juan Ponce] Enrile wants an independent Cordillera Republic; many leaders in Cebu and Leyte want an Independent Visayas Republic. I told them, ‘No problem, we can work together.’ And they answered, ‘Then we will remove our money from Manila and open our Central Bank in Cebu.’” (Nur Misuari, in Nur Misuari: An Authorized Biography, p. 150)

By Thomas Hawk

On November 7, 2010, FM radio station NU 107 made its final broadcast to a mournful fan base. It was an end of an era whose peak coincided with, or perhaps was responsible for, the Pinoy alternative music explosion of the early 1990s. NU 107 was leaving behind a legacy forever tied to a golden age in OPM—a legacy that a generation continues to hold dear and mythologize.

For those of us who are part of that generation, we experienced two layers of sadness. On the surface was a collective grief over the loss of something that had been a huge part of our lives— a grief shared by the DJs, the listeners, and even the musical artists that achieved popularity through the station. It was a moving farewell, marked by the songs we used to love and the voices of DJs who came back to say goodbye. It took us back to a specific time in our music-listening lives. We felt a nostalgic comfort that eased our indignation over the seemingly unfair dissolution of a Pinoy music institution. The more we listened to their retrospective playlists that featured “Thank You” by The Pale Fountains, “Na Naman” by Color it Red, and anything by the Eraserheads, the more our indignation was tempered by the other sadness lurking underneath.

Our reminiscing eventually brought us to the sadder, less obvious truth: NU 107 hadn’t been relevant in years. Most of us who tuned in to that final broadcast tuned in for the first time in months, if not years. We weren’t really sad because it was an end of an era; the era ended a long time ago. We were sad because its funeral had come too late.

 Pioneers of a  new revolution

A few months later, NU 107 made its unofficial comeback, and it fell way under the radar, way outside the radio dial, and far beyond the public consciousness. Dig Radio, an internet radio service specializing in modern rock was launched by live streaming website Pinoytuner on February the following year, inheriting some familiar names off of NU 107’s roster—Joystick Jay, Trish, and Francis Brew—and even its programming format. Those distinct “noo one-oh-seven” and “the home of new rock” breakers were nowhere to be heard, but the familiar voices and songs made it a passable facsimile of the defunct radio station.

A year later, Radio Republic followed suit, with former NU 107 station manager Ron Titular as its Chief Operating Officer, personally hand-picked by visionaries Twinky Lagdameo and Ryan Cayabyab of 7101 Music Nation, a musical collective of veteran musicians and songwriters aiming to cultivate Original Pinoy Music from the grassroots. Unlike Dig Radio and Pinoytuner as a whole, Radio Republic exists solely as a vehicle designed to support, promote, and foster Original Pinoy Music. It plays only OPM. It features new local albums, samples a few cuts, and tells people where to buy them. It goes by a mantra that mirrors its noble and ambitious thrust:

“Join the movement. Start the revolution.
Radio Republic. This is OPM.”

There are absolutely no precedents for what Radio Republic and Pinoytuner are doing to champion OPM. Both combine the basic radio format of NU 107, with a live performance tradition that stretches back to the days of ABC 5’s Music Bureau, MYX’s Halo-Halo, and its current incarnation MYX Live, with music reviews and features that channel Western hipster bibles Pitchfork and Stereogum. Their method is thorough and all-encompassing; their tools are modern, and their aim is admirable.

Yet, as of this writing, they remain insignificant in Philippine pop culture, and in almost every way, even more irrelevant than NU 107 was in its dying years.

Status quo 1, Revolution 0.

 OPM: dead or alive

“FM radio is dead” is a tempting statement to make for a middle class music fan whose tastes skew towards modern rock. After all, claiming the death of anything these days is a surefire way to create a meme. But FM radio has been thriving in recent years; masa radio stations like Love Radio, Yes FM, and Barangay LS have long captured the imagination of the FX-driving, FX-riding, sari-sari-store-tending public. You hear these stations everywhere, as they have attained a ubiquity that can only be equaled by billboards and the whir of motorcycles.

So why is OPM “dead”? Or at least: why did that assertion even gain enough legs to warrant a protracted debate?

The latter is the more interesting question, since it leads to a more important point: we cared about that debate because we made it up—“we”, meaning the middle to upper classes. We’re the only ones who care about whether OPM is dead or alive, deteriorating or improving, truly “Pinoy” or westernized. While we’re busy arguing about these things, the masa are busy not caring to an inversely proportional degree as they sing along to Bryan Termulo and Angeline Quinto. Our concern is strictly one-way. Among the two major social classes, we are the ones who care about our music being liked by the other class.

The last time they liked “our” music, NU 107 was still at its peak—the time when a band called the Eraserheads broke out with two straight singles that transcended class lines: “Ligaya” then “Pare Ko.” These songs were first heard on an upstart radio station called LA 105, which at the time, was only known to a handful of underground scenesters, until they were picked up by NU 107 and DWLS FM (then known as “Campus Radio”). Soon enough, the Eraserheads were everywhere. Their rise to fame had a Nirvana-like effect on the Pinoy music industry: suddenly, radio stations were playing Pinoy rock, record labels were signing underground bands left and right, if not manufacturing ones from thin air (i.e., Rivermaya).

It was a sea change for a musical landscape that was heretofore dominated by 80s-style power ballads. The larger implication, of course, was that OPM finally cut across class divisions— it appealed to the chongs of gated exclusive villages, the punks of college campuses and urban neighborhoods, and the jeepney drivers who listened to Barry Manilow and Scorpion.

So why don’t we have that now? What happened to OPM? The answer to this question is far simpler: nothing happened to OPM; it’s alive and well.

But everything happened to radio.

 Tama Na Ang Drama

For a solid three to four week stretch at the end of last year, both Radio Republic and Dig Radio featured the same album aggressively, giving it the full promotional treatment that only these two websites could give. The album, Tama na ang Drama by Ang Bandang Shirley, was a curious choice, considering that Up Dharma Down’s newly-released “Capacities”—an album armed with years of anticipation and a Paul-Buchanan-guest-vocals PR juiciness—never achieved the same headline status. This is pure conjecture, of course, but the reason may be that Ang Bandang Shirley is a living, breathing rebuttal to the “OPM is dead/irrelevant/inaccessible” argument. To an agenda-based vehicle like Radio Republic, this means everything.

Ang Bandang Shirley, at their best, sounds like an evolved progeny of the Eraserheads—the next step at perfecting a sound and sensibility carried on by Sugarfree in the aughts. They marry the indie pop preciousness of Buzz Nights-era bands like Soft Pillow Kisses with the accessibility of the same 80s-style OPM ballads that used to dominate Pinoy radio. In fact, some of their songs (“Patintero/Habulan/Larong Kalye”, “Di Na Babalik”, “Sa Madaling Salita” come to mind) are more polished than any Eraserheads song, while teeming with the same local references and colloquialisms. When they sing “patintero, sa tapat ng bahay niyo tayo maglalaro, kung saan nahahati ang daan ng mga linyang nagtuturo na kahit laro ay mayroon ding hangganan” they elicit the same chills of homegrown familiarity reminiscent of “field trip sa may pagawaan ng lapis ay katulad ng buhay natin – isang mahabang pila, mabagal, at walang katuturan.”

OPM is perhaps in better shape now than it’s ever been in its history. Ang Bandang Shirley is just the tip of an iceberg that is loaded with great music that will forever be submerged and frozen in waters inaccessible to the masa. But accessible bands like Ang Bandang Shirley do exist and the people behind Radio Republic and Dig Radio know this, which is why they’re doing everything in their power to promote and support this brand of Pinoy Pop which seems destined for mass relevance. Unfortunately, what Ang Bandang Shirley needs is radio. And perhaps a time machine that will take them back to 1992.

Nothing like the Eraserheads circa Ultraelectromagneticpop will ever happen again in our musical landscape that has been forever changed by digital media and the internet. What we have now is an industry limbo that exists between the real-life comfort of piracy in the third world and a risk-averse radio/recording industry that has become even more concerned with the bottom line, forcing a local music scene to cling to the social class that can afford to exist in this limbo. Majority of Pinoys have stopped paying for music, so the task of sustaining it has fallen on the ones who have pockets deep enough to keep buying guitars, drum sets, drum machines, and music editing equipment without the help of lucrative record deals. The result is a social gap between the music listeners and the music makers that has become increasingly hard to ignore. It is a gap that Radio Republic, Pinoytuner, and Dig Radio are trying their damnedest to bridge.

It’s ironic that the Pinoy band scene is now wider, more diverse, and more in step with its western influences than ever before—a development that can easily be attributed to the internet and digital media technology. We don’t have to rely on radio stations anymore to tell us what’s out there; modern technology has opened us up to a world previously shrouded by FM radio and local record distributors. Not only has our access to pop music knowledge multiplied exponentially, so has our access to the musical products themselves. In the 80s, you could’ve only read about a band like The Replacements in a photocopied fanzine you got from some drunken punk sitting outside Mayric’s. Today you can download videos and entire albums of a band like Yuck without even leaving your room.

The internet’s effect on music is as promising as it is confusing. But a band scene abandoned by a bleeding recording industry has had no choice but to seek the internet for refuge. Internet radio may not be as powerful as FM radio was in the 90s, but it’s all they’ve got. It’s one of the few mouthpieces left for a scene that has shrunk to a mutual admiration society, which, because of its complete divorce from old business structures, has been all the better for it. When you take away the prospect of rock stardom, all you are left with is an enterprise that puts music first. And it’s a formula that has historically led to great music.

But the fact that we’re experiencing an unacknowledged golden age of OPM is not ironic; it makes complete sense. There’s a reason that the pre-Nirvana 80s underground movement in America produced the best post-punk music and not 90s alternative; an environment that has little to no commercial rewards will always be more conducive to risks and, consequently, greatness. And greatness sometimes has a way of emerging one way or another. No one thought Sonic Youth would ever sign to a major label in 1986. No one imagined the Eraserheads would be bigger than Francis Magalona in 1990. But they had radio and it homogenized the revolution. Now bands have live streaming websites. And torrent sites. And YouTube. And social media. And music blogs. Ad infinitum.

It’s hard to predict where and how the revolution will come in a cultural environment that fragments into infinitesimal digital and cyber pieces. Pinoytuner, Dig Radio, and Radio Republic are not just competing against FM radio for relevance, they’re competing against an entire universe of new listening habits and music consumption. A revolution is happening, only it isn’t the one they’re hoping for. It’s a revolution that’s keeping them irrelevant, while making their playlists exceedingly sublime.

Alex Almario has won a Nick Joaquin Literary Award for his fiction; his reality, though, is a lot more mundane as a Junior Creative Director in his day job and a writer of essays in his own blog, Colonial Mental, where he reflects on pop culture and why it matters.

By Rieb Schlager

Palakasan is a two-sided coin. One can view it as athletes trying to best each other in a sport, bringing out man’s most admirable qualities: skill, determination, humility in victory, and graciousness after defeat. However, when London 2012 ended, our smallest-ever contingent of 11 athletes in 8 sports came home empty-handed. The finger-pointing began, with sports officials and politicians blaming the lack of financial support and the power struggles at the highest levels of the sports authorities.i

Contrast this with our most popular teams today: Smart-Gilas and the Azkals. Although their leaderships were once embroiled in disputes, they have since reformed, and are now widely supported by fans and financiers, win or lose. Thus, begs the question of whether our other teams have a thing or two to learn from our national basketball and football teams.

Jaemark Tordecilla’s, talk on the Future of Philippine Sports during TEDxDiliman, delivered a couple of weeks after the London Olympics, holds relevance. Tordecilla, the author of the Philippine sports blog, FireQuinito, and managing director of sports website, InterAKTV, points out that the future of Philippine sports lies beyond government. He argues that, in returning to the pinnacle of world sports, authorities can take a page from basketball.

Financial muscle
Tordecilla starts his exposition by focusing on the oft-cited reason for our failure in the international arena: the lack of government funding. He puts into perspective the country’s sports budget, mentioning that Manny Pacquiao’s earnings from a single fight is already equivalent to—or greater than—the total allocation for sports.

Indeed, Philippine funding in sports is dwarfed by our neighbour and rival at the Southeast Asian (SEA) Games, Thailand. In 2012 alone, the Thai government allocated THB3.062 billion (P3.9 billion) for the Sport Authority of Thailandii, compared to the P178 million received by the Philippine Sports Commission (PSC) last yeariii, excluding remittances from PAGCOR and other sources.

Resulting from such massive investment in sport over the years, Thailand was overall SEA Games Champion in 2007 and 2009, and finished 2^nd in 2005 and 2011. The Philippines, on the other hand, has slid from being champions in 2005 to either 5th or 6th in the three succeeding SEA Games.iv

Olympolitik and the Philippines
Is economic strength the main determinant of sporting success? Tordecilla’s talk puts forward this thesis. He cited Manny Pangilinan’s (MVP) support for Gilas and the Azkals which led both teams to sustainability. His other champion teams bear the same mark: San Beda, Ateneo, Talk n Text, NLEX, and Loyola-Meralco.

However, Zaki Laïdi’s essay, Olympolitikv, regards financial muscle only as a piece in the four factors that influence Olympic power. He argues that Olympic success is not only determined by economic status but also by population size, sports traditions, and sports policy. He states that the factors should not be taken separately in explaining a country’s Olympic success.

People power
The population argument, on the surface, appears reasonable. After all, top calibre athletes are easier to find in a big pool compared to a small puddle. However, several empirical cases interrogate this assumption. Laïdi cites India’s Olympic failure despite a bursting population and Australia’s success even with a modest populace.

The sporting context of Southeast Asia presents a similar case. The Philippines’ population of 95 million does not translate to performance in regional sporting events. Smaller populations with the exception of Indonesia, including Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, all returned from London with medals. Also, though Vietnam did not win a medal in London, they, along with the four aforementioned nations, consistently trump the Philippines in the SEA Games and Asian Games. Indeed, the relationship between population power and sporting success merits further investigation.

Myths and traditions
The importance of sporting traditions is more resonant in the Philippine case. Philippine sports traditions mostly revolve around the country’s obsession with basketball, even with Filipinos’ generally short physical statures. Tordecilla discusses how a particular basketball game led to the entrenchment of a PBA team’s fanbase for generations to come, as well as the Filipino love for the athletic underdog. Tordecilla narrates the historic 1985 PBA game between Northern Consolidated Cement (NCC)—then the powerhouse all-amateur Philippine national team—and the Robert Jaworski-led Ginebra. With NCC taking an early big lead, the Gin Kings were dealt a blow when Jaworski’s lip got busted due to a wayward elbow. To the shock of the 10,000 people at Ultra, the skipper was rushed to Medical City for treatment, only to return in the 4th quarter to lead Ginebra to a comeback victory. Although the 1985 season ended with NCC being crowned as champions, Ginebra and Jaworski proved that one need not win a trophy to be considered a winner—indeed a message for fans and sports officials alike. Tordecilla further posits that this was the start of Ginebra’s “never-say-die” reputation. A compelling narrative, if not heroic mythmaking out of underdogs, has been a crucial component in constructing a sporting tradition of basketball in the Philippines.

Though one cannot deny the influence of American colonization to the Philippines’ addiction to the sport, it seems more socially-constructed through such historical accounts. In fact, Tordecilla further states that the Filipino love for basketball was gradually reinforced throughout the decades preceding the 1985 game, a point shared in a column by Rafe Bartholomew, author of “Pacific Rims.” Tordecilla refers to the championship performances of Philippine teams against much taller and more athletic competition in international tournaments in the 50s and 60s, as well as the epic rivalry between Toyota and Crispa in the early days of the PBA. Batholomew, meanwhile, narrates how the sport has become part of Filipino culture and daily life since its introduction by the Americans.vi Such may explain why baseball and American football do not enjoy such widespread public support in the Philippines, despite being well-entrenched in American sporting traditions.

In addition to Tordecilla’s point, there are other home-grown sporting traditions. Former PSC Chairman Philip Juico shared in a column how Far Eastern University’s boxing squad helped secure a silver in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.vii Icons such as Nonito Donaire, and Efren Reyes also further embed an already strong tradition in boxing and billiards. Laïdi mentions that traditions can be created, and this is seen in the increasing popularity of Chieffy Caligdong and the UAAP’s volleybelles that hopefully would pave the way for new traditions.

Personal palakasan
Thus remains the area of sports policy, which may be the most important factor in cultivating sporting traditions, and consequently sporting success. Indeed, having a properly formulated, long-term, and stakeholder-supported policy can enable a country to harness the potential provided by its population, institutionalize sport traditions, and ensure that limited budgets are productively utilized.

At present, it is unfortunate that accountability issues continue to plague Philippine sports, preventing the implementation of a sports development strategy. Sports, becomes a palakasan of personal interests—its power to unify and empower through friendly competition is corrupted and lost.

Such turf wars is an affront not only to the athletes, but also to the larger public who, despite limited involvement as fans, are stakeholders and constituents, since they are represented by these people in the sporting arena. Suffice it to say, the power struggles are unsportsmanlike and undemocratic.  After all, the principles of inclusive participation, deferment of individual gain for the good of the whole and utmost respect for rules are as much elements of sports as they are for democracy.

One can take as an example the 2005 suspension of the Philippines from all international basketball competitions due to a long-brewing leadership row within the now-dissolved Basketball Association of the Philippines. The crisis was only resolved in 2007 when all stakeholders got together and formed a new national federation—the Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas (SBP).viii Building on the momentum, the SBP institutionalized the country’s basketball program from the grassroots, all the way to the national team, culminating in the Philippines gaining 4th place in the 2011 FIBA Asia Championships, winning the 2012 William Jones Cup, as well as the bid to host the 2013 FIBA Asia Championship—the first time since 1973. In a show of unity for the 2013 tourney, Rain or Shine—current adversary of the MVP group’s Talk n Text in the PBA All-Filipino Cup Finals—has pledged to lend any of its players to the national team.ix It remains to be seen, however, whether the teams connected to the San Miguel group (SMC) would also commit theirs, since it has been hinted that SMC management has been prohibiting its players from joining the MVP-backed Smart-Gilas.x

How then to fix Philippine sports? Tordecilla suggests that we learn from basketball, seeing that the four factors that Laïdi mentions are already present in the system: sufficient funding, a wide base of talent, a strong tradition, and a clear policy implemented by competent officials. Using basketball as benchmark, the road to a good national sports program requires a solid playbook, and a prepared bench.

Playbook for success
A good plan is crucial. As such, the 2011-2016 Philippine Sports Roadmap is very much welcome.xi The roadmap focuses on ten sports with the most potential to yield positive results: boxing, taekwondo, athletics, swimming, wushu, archery, wrestling, bowling, weightlifting, and billiards. Still, the plan encompasses only a single presidential term. Contrast this with Singapore’s Vision 2030, which promotes sports among the youth, employees, competitive athletes, and senior citizens.xii

An argument can be made that national sports policy can be meaningfully connected to the Aquino administration’s national policy on public-private partnerships (PPP). Since PPPs have already been used for health and education facilities, and soon for heritage site restoration, the ten focus sports can profit from a well-designed PPP package. However, discretion must still be exercised in soliciting private sector support for athletic projects, as illustrated by the much-criticized commercialization of the Olympics.xiii At the local level, the collegiate leagues also serve as a caution, as every basket, timeout, crowd reaction, or any on- or off-court movement for that matter, is attached to a corporate sponsor.

The sixth man
Excellent leadership and a clear program would not be worth anything if there is no pipeline of talent to foster. As such, essential to ensuring the sustainability of a sports program are institutions such as the Philippine Sports Institute, the UP College of Human Kinetics, and the proposed Philippine High School for Sports. Thus, it is beneficial that their capacities as research and educational institutions be further improved. Sports medicine and sports psychology should also be promoted as viable careers, as the number of athletic professionals aside from coaches is quite few.

Ultimately, local competitions from the bottom, all the way to the collegiate and professional ranks, should be institutionalized and strengthened. Physical education programs, the Palarong Pambansa, and the Philippine Collegiate Champions League—expanded outside of basketball—present opportunities for growth. At the professional level, the rise of the United Football League and the opening of the Premier Volleyball League are welcome developments.

This is also where Tordecilla’s point on individual involvement comes into play. As a mediaman, Tordecilla advocates the stories of lesser-known athletes so they may be given government and corporate sponsor attention. He thus calls on sports fans to share sports stories as well. He gives the example of Joneza Mae Sistutuedo who broke records in the Palarong Pambansa running barefoot, and the story of Rudy del Rosario and Jeepney Football Club, who, through social media coverage, were able to get sponsors to send the Philippine team to the Homeless World Cup.

Sports for development
It may be said that contrasting the Philippines with more affluent countries is illogical, given prosperity and size disparities. Indeed, if statistics were consulted, the most successful sporting nations have historically been the wealthiest. Nevertheless, success remains possible even with economic difficulties, as evidenced by the African nations and even Afghanistan since Beijing 2008. Sports, ultimately, is about transcending the limitations brought about by physical statures, economic barriers, and political and religious beliefs.

In the palaksan for limited public funds, it is understandable for government to focus on the more “practical” concerns of national economic development. However, the country seems to be missing out on another crucial element. Broadly speaking, when a national sports project is initiated, managed well, and treated as a key component of a strategy to improve lives, the inevitable by-product is a strong sense of national pride and identity. This intense affinity to the notion of nationhood can in turn provide the literal and figurative capital needed to work on the so-called “more pressing problems.”

As such, the unifying power of sports cannot be brushed aside. Absent effective efforts to instil discipline, love for country, and respect, sports development is probably the least-divisive option. At the micro level, one can look at the runs promoting an advocacy, soldiers teaching football in conflict-areas, bikers refurbishing a remote highland school, or surfers conducting relief ops in flood-stricken places to see sport’s unifying power. Imagine the effects if such civic spirit can be utilized on a larger scale towards nation-building or safeguarding institutions.
The challenge, of course, is how to get our gameplan together, both in the private and public spheres. After all, when the final buzzer sounds, an end to the palakasan is what everyone wants.

Paolo Monteiro is casual player of basketball and Ultimate, and a self-described semi-diehard sports fan. He supports Talk n’ Text, Arsenal FC, the Ateneo Blue and Lady Eagles, and, except during the Battle of Katipunan, the UP Fighting Maroons.

i Analyses of the problems of Philippines sports are available from the following articles: Natashya Gutierrez, “The problem with Philippine sports,” Rappler, 16 August 2012, internet document http://www.rappler.com/sports/10591-the-problem-with-philippine-sports; Inquirer Sports Staff, “Anatomy of a debacle,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, 8 January 2012, internet document, http://sports.inquirer.net/31135/anatomy-of-a-debacle

ii Thailand Bureau of the Budget, “Thailand’s budget in brief fiscal year 2012”, internet document, https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bb.go.th%2FbbhomeEng%2Fbudget_in_brief%2Fbudget_in_brief_2012.pdf

iii Department of Budget and Management, “General Appropriations Act Fiscal Year 2012”, internet document, https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dbm.gov.ph%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2FGAA%2FGAA2012%2FOEO%2FAB.pdf

iv The medal counts for all SEA Games are available in the microsites on the Olympic Council of Asia website, accessible at: http://www.ocasia.org/game/GamesL1.aspx?SYCXGjC0df+J2ChZBk5tvA==

v Zaki Laïdi, “Olympolitik,” Project Syndicate, 13 August 2012, internet document, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/olympolitik-by-zaki-laidi

vi Rafe Bartholomew, “The State of Philippine Basketball,” Slam.ph, 1 June 2010, internet document, http://www.slamonline.com/online/other-ballers/international/2010/06/the-state-of-philippine-basketball/

vii Philip Juico, “Philippine sports traditions,” The Philippine STAR, 19 September 2012, internet document, http://www.philstar.com/sports/2012-09-19/850616/philippine-sports-traditions

viii “Caging groups merge to get FIBA ban on RP lifted,” GMANews.TV, 5 February 2007, internet document, http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/29423/sports/caging-groups-merge-to-get-fiba-ban-on-rp-lifted

ix “Rain or Shine reiterates readiness to lend players to national team for FIBA Asia,” InterAKTV, 11 January 2013, internet document, http://www.interaksyon.com/interaktv/rain-or-shine-reiterates-readiness-to-lend-players-to-national-team-for-fiba-asia

x “MVP ready to lobby other PBA owners to allow players to join SMART-Gilas,” InterAKTV, 11 January 2013, internet document, http://www.interaksyon.com/interaktv/mvp-ready-to-lobby-other-pba-owners-to-allow-players-to-join-smart-gilas

xi Benigno Aquino III, Speech during the opening of the Palarong Pambansa 2012, 7 May 2012

xii About Vision 2030, internet document, http://www.vision2030.sg/about-vision-2030/

xii Vanessa Barford, “The great Olympics sponsorship bandwagon,” BBC News Magazine, 13 July 2012, internet document, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18182541