Bring On the Empty Orchestras

Though the word karaoke (literally "empty orchestra") is Japanese, and a drummer named Daisuke Inoue is generally credited with its invention, it was a Filipino who patented a machine which he called Minus One, which Filipino musical performers carried with them throughout Asia. Although the Japanese disputed it, Roberto Del Rosario was granted a patent for his karaoke machine in 1983. So, when the first time machine is invented and we are at last allowed to travel back in time, remember that it is Mr. Rosario, and not Inoue, who should be shot in the cradle.

Until that eventuality, karaoke will remain immensely popular here in the Philippines. For Filipinos, the object of karaoke is not to sing well, although they enjoy good singing as much as anyone else. Once anyone gets his hands on a microphone and performs the usual sound test by saying "hello hello", the object of karaoke is to sing one's heart out. If it often sounds like screaming to an unaccustomed listener, it is only because of all the force of pent-up emotion, electrically amplified to several decibels above eardrum-splitting, that has no other outlet.

And so, what you hear when a Filipino picks up the microphone is a week's - or a lifetime's - worth of forbearance, unexpressed feelings, and swallowed replies, all coming out in the words and approximated music of some platitudinous popular song. The singer might not hit a single note squarely, but if his heart is in his throat, as it will be when the tuba or Red Horse or ginebra kicks in, you will not hear as much passion in La Scala, the Paris Opera and The Met rolled into one overloaded karaoke player.

Keeping Up With the Joneses

When I was a boy in the early 1960s, color TV was the latest thing, but my family only had a black & white set. We were living in an upper-lower-middle income neighborhood in Albany, Georgia on Waddell Avenue, and my mother could not keep me at home in the evenings because I was watching color TV in a neighbor's house. I didn't realize it, but I was causing my mother embarrassment for not possessing the latest appliance. My father said it was because she had "a champagne appetite on a beer income." So, in classic keeping up with the Joneses fashion, my mother thought she had no other choice but to buy a color TV. As I grew up, I saw her make many more such "choices" - without knowing that, living as we did always on the frontier of prosperity, there were really no choices in the matter.

Here in my Philippine barangay, there is a shack just across a small clearing in front of my house that sits at an odd angle not five feet away from the side of a cinder block house with the words Sanosa's Family in large white letters on the front wall. From the size and the look of this shack, one could easily mistake it for a tool shed. Except that five people call this shack home - a young couple, Serena and Roque, and their three children, ages six months to eight years.

Until last March the shack was made of grass. Now only the grass roof remains and the walls have changed into cinder block and wood, with windows and a sturdy door. In May a television arrived, to sit on a small table, the only furniture the one-room house will allow. The family sleeps on a mat on the dirt floor. At the end of July, electricity was connected to the shack. And a few days later a karaoke player was a finishing touch.

Serena, does nothing but care for the children, cook and clean. Roque makes everything possible - the shack, the electricity, the TV and karaoke - by pedalling a pedicab for five pesos a ride around the port town five kilometers away.

To discover what started all this hard work and sacrifice for these incremental home improvements, one would have to go back a year, when the shack was grass, and when the Sanosa household made their unhappiness at its proximity to their more imposing home with a garden and a gate. This unhappiness would bubble abruptly to the surface and confrontations occurred. When I first witnessed one I was astonished. Whenever there are such shouting matches in the barangay, people gather around at a safe distance to watch. Three Sanosa sisters, imperious in their mid teens, would stand in front of Serena'a house and scream at her, that she was poor and that her house was an eyesore. Serena would look at them with bewilderment and rage until she would shout back at them "Yes! We are poor! But we are not proud!" The Sanosa daughters, not comprehending her noble words, simply laughed at her. At nights, I could hear Serena crying to her husband, behind her closed grass door.

Thanks to the windfall of a few thousand pesos, a modest lotto jackpot, the Sanosas spent every centavo acquiring a dependably loud karaoke player and a large TV, paid for in installments. And they would play music loudly late into the night, with Serena's husband and children trying to sleep five feet away in their shack. So I was not altogether surprised, and even heartened, to see the recent improvements to Serena's household. That is until I discovered the true reason for them. As incredible as it may sound, last year Serena and her husband started to save money just so they could prove the Sanosas wrong. I don't believe the Sanosas themselves are even aware of it. Their cruel words to Serena had a lasting effect that they could not have foreseen. And every one of the additions to Serena's house came about as a consequence of her family subsisting on a diet of nothing but dried fish and rice. Every day, week in and week out. Some believe it is because Serena doesn't know how to cook anything else.

Now there is loud karaoke emanating from the shack in front of the Sanosa house until late in the night. The Sanosa's have fallen on meagre times. Their electricity has been shut off three times because they haven't been able to pay their bill on time. And their TV was repossessed because they couldn't pay the installments.

Serena must have been gratified, but she didn't show it. How much longer this sad contest will go on depends on the endurance of Roque's legs, the limits of a pedicab's range and how much greater their appetite for noise-making appliances becomes on their dried fish and rice income. But like everyone else in the world, subject to the same demands of consumerism, they too may be without much of a choice any more.

Two Cheers for Democracy

I wouldn't dream of butting in on the Filipinos' period of mourning for Cory Aquino. As an outsider in this country, after sixteen years of visiting and two years of living here, I am not a disinterested observer of its history. Too many foreign residents, especially those conducting business, have the attitude that as long as there is a minimum of stability and at least some semblance of order, it doesn't matter how the country is run. Other expats, finding comfort in their detachment from events, see the chaotic struggle of the forces of liberalism and an almost feudal despotism - the opposing legacies of four hundred years of Spanish and American colonialism - diverting. I, however, feel somehow involved with what is happening, and what has happened, here.



First, and above all, Cory Aquino had incredible courage, and not just morally or spiritually. The source of her physical courage was probably her hatred for her husband's murderers and her determination to chase them out of power and, if possible, into prison. She showed that courage again in her last days.



Unlike other great Asian woman leaders, like Indira Gandhi, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Benazir Bhutto, who all followed their fathers into politics, she followed her husband, and only after his own political mission was cut short. But like them (except of course for Indira), she became a symbol and an instrument of peace and freedom.



If I am dubious of her "icon of democracy" tag, it is only because "People Power" is not the shining example of democratic rule that everyone here thinks it is. It was a revolution - mob rule, whether the mob, in this case, happened to be right or not. But it was the Philippine Army that made her election to president in 1985-86 possible. The current president understood this better than anyone.


Deep down, her motives on assuming power may not have been noble. So many of her reforms had vengeance written all over them.


Unlike the current woman in the presidential palace, she had a genial, confident relationship with her public. And their love for her has been pouring out again since the announcement of her cancer. She was fallible, but she never pretended to be an expert, again unlike the current president.


As Stanley Karnow pointed out in his history of the Philippines, In Our Image, she put back in power the oligarchs whom Marcos had kicked out, and of which her own family was a part. But "in fairness" (a popular expression among Filipinos), they were the only ones around after she cleaned house who knew anything about running the country.


She was admired and respected internationally, which cannot be said of any Philippine president since.


She honored her murdered husband in many ways, not least for his having lived up to - and died for - his famous words.*


It took a "change of heart" to convince President Reagan to stop his support of Ferdinand Marcos and accept the results of the 1985 "Snap Election" (the election was in November '85 and the results were announced February '86), to Reagan's - and America's - shame.

Despite all of these quibblings, it was as much for what she represented as what she actually accomplished that she has gone down in history. What she represented was hope - for real democracy in the Philippines.

*Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino is on the Philippine 500 peso bill, with his words, "The Filipino is worth dying for" on the right hand side. I have often wondered at this famous quote because it doesn't sound the least bit exceptional. Nobody would think of saying that "The Italian is worth dying for", or the Egyptian or the Japanese. Everyone would think such statements were self-evident and didn't warrant stating. But it is only because Aquino's words are not self-evident that they were considered remarkable, even revolutionary - because Ferdinand Marcos was convinced, and tried to convince his followers, that the Filipino was not worth dying for. It was finally Aquino that made the words true. I wonder how many others in the Philippine government really believe in them?

Tropical Depression

For Americans, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was a national disaster whose reverberations one can still detect in some of the unlikeliest places across the country. The scale of the physical destruction was daunting enough, with shoddy levees failing in New Orleans, putting the Ninth Ward of the city under so much water that the few residents who wouldn't, or couldn't, evacuate had to clamber onto their rooftops to escape it. The natural disaster was accompanied by human blunders, like the plodding response of FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), which exacerbated the damage and the suffering, and called into question the philosophy of a federal government that refused to accept responsibility when nobody else would.


On the morning of June 20, 2008, the passenger ferry Princess of the Stars sailed out of Manila bound for Cebu on what was expected to be just another routine trip. Such ferries sail back and forth between the Philippine islands carrying passengers who cannot reach Manila by bus. On the ferry there is leisure to walk the decks, take in the scenery of passing islands and islets and the placid tropical sea. Except that on the morning of June 20, Typhoon Frank was bearing down on eastern Samar on a course that would place the Princess of the Stars directly in its path. The ship capsized in relatively shallow waters just off the island of Romblon.

Tropical cyclones (called typhoons rather than hurricanes here in Asia) the size of Katrina are rare, but the effects of much smaller cyclones wreak havoc in the Philippines on such a routine basis that it makes one wonder why governments aren't toppled and radical reforms implemented as a result. That fact that nothing happens is just another sad commentary on the fatalism of the Filipino and his failure to understand what government is supposed to do for him, not to mention the cynicism and indifference of those in power.

I was living in the Philippine central Visayas region a year ago when typhoon Frank struck. The power failed in the entire region at about 10 AM on June 20, and it wasn't restored to my remote barangay until the afternoon of the 29th. I didn't hear about the ferry disaster until I managed to go online and check my email, when I learned how worried my sister was that I may have been one of the passengers aboard the Princess of the Stars.

Some of the worst maritime disasters in history have occurred in the Philippines. If you look at the latest list of the top ten for the last twenty years (1), the Dona Paz disaster heads the list, with 4,375 casualties. The Princess of the Stars would rank 6th on the list, with 694 casualties.(2) Whomever it was who decided that it should sail (the captain, who was one of the casualties, was held liable by the official inquiry), there was clearly no oversight authority to stop her. To have been so utterly oblivious of such an enormous storm, or to have accepted the risk of sailing straight into its maw with 862 people aboard shows, if nothing else, a total disregard for the rules of seafaring. Of course, it emerged upon inspection that the wreck was carrying an undisclosed cargo: ten metric tons of the pesticide endosulfan. It suggested a possible reason for the ship's sailing in such haste.

For a race of islanders, Filipinos have a strange, suspicious and mistrustful relationship with the sea. Only a minority, apparently, can swim. There are frequent "accidental" downings reported in the news, such as when poor children scale the walls around a private pool and are discovered floating face down the next morning. Growing up so close to an ocean as warm as bathwater would've been a dream for me as a boy, but I never see Filipino children swimming, except when they are involved in some capacity with fishing. Watching children play where I live, within a few hundred yards of the Pacific Ocean, they might just as well be in Kansas.


How I managed to maintain my sanity during those nine days without power and no contact with the world beyond my occluded horizon would, now that a year has passed, require an act of imagination. I spent the daylight hours reading and writing, and the dark nights defending my house against invading vermin while here was no light to scare them away. The darkness also emboldened some of my more desperate neighbors to try and get their hands on the stacks of cash that they were all told we foreigners have lying around the house. And there were nights when, my doors barricaded with furniture, I slept uneasily. Then there was the night, with a piece of my bathroom (called a CR or "comfort room" here) roof missing - the piece right over the toilet - and rain coming down, when I had to open an umbrella to stay dry while I did my business.

But I will never forget the elation I felt when I saw the light bulb over my sala first flicker with life and then shine brightly at about 4:30 PM on the ninth day. It was like emerging from a long escape tunnel beyond the wire, with the unmistakable smell of freedom in the air. But then the first thing the neighbors decided to do was crank up their karaoke microphones and engage in the socialized screaming that has become such a ubiquitous tradition here. I wonder, if they had the chance, how many of the lost on the Princess of the Stars would be doing the same?


(1) See http://jaggerkieth.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/the-world’s-10-worst-maritime-disasters-in-the-last-20-years/
(2) The official numbers are : 751 passengers, 111 crew, with 57 survivors.

Cock-a-Doodle-Don't

“Silence, rooster. In the name of the Idea of your Genus, nature commands that you be quiet!”
-St. Augustine, Socrates' Rooster

In an interview with Dick Cavett in the 1970s, Len Deighton, historian and author of the Harry Palmer series of spy stories,* was asked why he refused to own a telephone. He explained that he would rather not have a bell in his house that anyone with spare change could ring.** In the Philippines, they need neither bells nor coins to pervade the country with what is easily the most common, and commonly annoying, noise that can be heard from just before dawn until dusk - and now and then in the middle of the night - in every city and province, every poor barangay and even some of the most exclusive subdivisions. Thanks to the Philippine national sport, the noise is made by the tandang, the male manok in Tagalog, or the common rooster. This concerted but cacophonous daily routine, like John Cage at his worst (or worse, his best), is an assault on unaccustomed ears. Amazingly, however, Filipinos don't even seem to notice it. Inured to the noise by a lifetime of exposure, it is no more noticeable to them than the sound of waves to a fisherman or hammers to a carpenter.

One of the simplest but most direct examples of this forbearance is the sheer number of roosters that Filipino men seem to spend half their time feeding, grooming, and pampering. While hens and their chicks range freely throughout the rural barangays, the cocks are tethered and cooped - separately of course. They are objects of pride to their owners, and in my barangay just about every household owns at least one. They attract mates by crowing. And as anyone who has ever lived on a farm can tell you, they don't just crow at dawn.

From my own observation, a well-developed cock can crow every ten to fifteen seconds, and it will go on crowing as long as any other rooster within earshot crows back. At dusk, like most other birds, they sleep. But their sleep is often interrupted by the false dawn of an electric light, and, like the old saying, "when one dog barks at a shadow, five more make it into a reality," one cock will crow at a spark of light and five more turn it into the dawn. (Chickens, you may have guessed by now, are rather stupid animals.)

On Saturdays and Sundays, the Bulang takes place at a koral (that's right, from the Spanish "corral") or alad, where the care and attention the birds have enjoyed all their short lives pays off. The matches themselves are typical of all such contests, with competitors paired off by their owners, who ante up a winning pot. And there is a great deal of side-betting among the spectators. All that's left is for the cocks to fulfill their function and eviscerate one another. But there will always be plenty more from whence they came. As much as I am against such barbarity in principle, the thought of all those beaks being shut forever one after another - Death in the Afternoon Filipino style - gives me unspeakable pleasure.


*Of course, he was called just Palmer in the stories. He got the name Harry only when Michael Caine played him in the movies.
**Today, of course, people put that bell into their pockets without a thought.

Children's Games

Reading some passages from Moritz Thomsen's Living Poor more critically, I can see differences between the people living in Rio Verde, Ecuador, and those living here in my Philippine barangay, that have tempered and solidified both my understanding of poverty and of Thomsen's Peace Corps experience. He wrote that he "began to be aware that in the town there was scarcely a moment when a baby's crying didn't fill the air. . . . Like a revelation, I suddenly realized that these screams were the screams of human beings learning about poverty. They were learning about sickness and about hunger; they were learning in a hard school what they could expect from life, learning to accept their destiny and the futility of revolting against it. They were being twisted and maimed. They were being turned from normal human beings into The Poor." After growing somewhat inured to the sound of screaming children here, I am more convinced that screaming is what children do - it's their only means of communicating anything. I hear laughter, too, and screams of pleasure from children as young as two and as old as ten. But there is sometimes an occasional forced note, as if they were trying too hard to have fun.

My experience of poverty here has been more varied than Thomsen's. The Peace Corps would never send a volunteer to my barangay. It simply isn't that far gone for such assistance. Thomsen wrote about the children of Rio Verde: "After the age of six they are ready for life, and as for being poor, they know all about it; there isn't a thing they don't know. There are no more tears. They play quietly, gravely in the dirt before their houses, and there is something terrible in their eyes, a kind of blindness."

Part of the sadness of childhood, for the children that I see every day, is how they notice what life has done to their mothers and - when they are still around - their fathers, and how they begin to realize that the same life is waiting for them as well. But there is still time for them to be children.

Watching poor children play is a revelation, not of the desperate shortage of toys, but of how necessity is the mother of invention. For all those Americans who contribute to the U.S. Marine Corps' annual Toys for Tots campaign, I would like them to see how these children create games out of nothing, out of thin air, out of cupped hands, out of rubber bands, aluminum cans, whatever they can lay their hands on. I have watched them find a flat surface, dirt, cement or stone, place an object like a scrap of paper or plastic in front of them, cup their hands together, palms down, and slap the ground beside the object so that the displaced air blows it a few inches away from them. The children gather in groups of two or three and slap the ground in unison to see who can move the object the farthest. The sound of their hands slapping the ground can be heard from twenty or thirty yards away.

Or they will put stones inside an aluminum can and make it into a percussive instrument. Making noise becomes a game. But seeing how rusted the cans are, and the jagged edges of their open lids, I wonder sometimes if the object of their play is to see which of them will contract tetanus first. Some children have actual toys, like hula hoops, plastic guns that make clicking noises when you squeeze the trigger, and toy trucks. But since there are too few to go around, and since these children always play in groups, the toys are soon broken or abandoned.

Around the age of ten, something happens to the children. They are halfway between childhood and adulthood, and they pause, as if on a brink. They grow more serious, more aloof from the others, less spontaneously joyous, but also less prone to tears or cries. If they are boys, they play basketball or work more with their fathers, fishing or chopping firewood. Their play becomes rougher, more violent. But mostly they act as if nothing in the world could possibly relieve their boredom. They have lost the faculty of discovering wonder all around them. It is painful to watch.

But if they are girls, they will spend more time with their mothers and sisters, cleaning, cooking and washing clothes. There is always work for women to do here. And you will never see them with a doll. What use are they when there are real babies that need to be fed and washed and loved everywhere you look? And unless the girls are lucky enough to find something else to occupy them like school or a job as a maid in the city, they too will be having babies soon enough - as soon as some boy, who cannot even afford a condom, in a country that should be airlifting them to these provinces by the millions, can overcome their fear and fill their ears with lies and their minds with fantasies of love. The worst thing about it is that every girl knows there really isn't much of a choice.

But their childhood is still there, and will always be something so much more for them than what it was for some of us from more privileged circumstances (even if it may not have felt so privileged when we were living it) - a time of heedless days, of endless play, and games that are never so serious that the rules cannot be changed so that even the losers can sometimes win.

Pacman

The day of the Manny Pacquiao-Ricky Hatton fight in Las Vegas was actually the following day, last Sunday, here in the Philippines. I somehow knew that Pacquiao would win, without having followed any of the particulars of the fight, without knowing how either of the fighters had trained to make the Light Welterweight limit of 140lbs. I knew that Hatton had a following of fans, many of whom had some all the way from Manchester, England to watch the fight. But Hatton couldn't possibly have behind him the honor of his nation and all the prayers of his race. Hatton couldn't have had every Englishman glued to his TV set, assembled in arenas, movie theaters, gyms, bars, and in every neighborhood assembly hall just to cheer him on.


The Philippine National Police announced that the national crime rate was at absolute zero for several hours before, during, and after the fight. There were two fatal heart attacks during the fight, but it can be said with some confidence that both men died happy.


Manny Pacquiao won the fight not because he was the "pound for pound" greatest fighter in the world, or because he was the better trained or better coached fighter, or because, as he himself said so humbly and beautifully after the fight, that he landed a lucky punch. Pacquiao won because of everything and everyone that was behind him - an almost cosmic force emanating not just from his motherland but from everywhere Filipinos are living and working all over the world. Knowing and feeling this force made me feel sorry for Ricky Hatton when he was knocked down by Pacquiao twice in the first round and when he was lying on his back on the canvas at the end of the second round, convulsing after Pacquiao's "lucky" knockout punch. Hatton felt the force behind Pacquiao's left fist, and he is probably feeling it still.


Years from now when the fight is remembered, people will ask if I was there to see it with my own eyes. "Yes," I can proudly say. "I was in the Philippines."

Chip On Their Shoulder

As the recent experience with Hong Kong columnist Chip Tsao demonstrated, Filipinos are hyper-sensitive to criticism. Requests have been made through official channels that Mr. Tsao be blacklisted for life by Philippine Immigration for calling the Philippines a "nation of servants." Honestly, when I saw the first news report on this story, I thought Mr. Tsao was a Filipino journalist who had aroused the ire of the Chinese government in Beijing for referring to the 1.3 billion Chinese people's service to their own Communist "masters."

Coincidentally, a friend in far away Nevada asked me if I was aware of how offensive some of my prior comments on this blog might be construed by Filipinos. I told her that the only Filipinos who should be offended by what I write are either politicians and/or celebrities. In which case they could, as Liberace once put it, "cry all the way to the bank."* I also made it clear to her, as I hope it is clear to the readers of this blog, that when I express disgust or dismay at some of the inequities that divide the Philippine people or the living conditions or the injustices that I see them endure not every once in awhile but every day and everywhere I look, I am doing so because I am convinced that those inequities, living conditions, and injustices are completely unnecessary and unacceptable from my particular perspective as a citizen of a nation that is certainly not without its own faults - not the least of which were its forty-seven year forcible occupation of the Philippines and its economic and military assistance to certain well-known tyrants when it suited their own vaunted national security interests.

Unlike mine, Mr. Tsao's comments were aimed indiscriminately at the Filipino race, and his subsequent apologies were utterly unconvincing. If I were to apologize, which I won't, while I was at it I might as well apologize to the Swedes, the Irish, and the Chinese - not to mention my very own fellow Americans, upon whom I have heaped gigaloads of abuse.


*This famous quote is nearly always misquoted as "laugh all the way to the bank." Liberace was asked how he reacted to the hostile criticism of his piano playing.

Powerless

One of the more agreeable constants of my abbreviated life here in the Philippines has been my electric fan.* It is not just the coolness it provides on which I have become dependent. At night its constant hum drowns out the incidental noises of the barangay I have been living in these past several months - dogs who think they are fulfilling their function by barking at shadows, the occasional trundle of buses on the highway some distance from my house, or roosters momentarily confusing a shining light bulb with the morning sun. Because the quiet is so deep here in the sticks, these little noises are enough to wake me. But my electric fan neutralizes them all.

Sometimes, however, I am deprived of this coolness and hum by what the locals call, in English, a brownout - an unannounced interruption of electrical power. A brownout is technically defined as a "scheduled" blackout. But scheduled or not, the distinction is quite meaningless if one has not heard the announcement of the power outtage, which is made on this particular island either on the local radio station or on a loudspeaker mounted on a truck owned by the power cooperative and driven around the port city, informing the lucky few who happen to be in town to hear it of the impending blackout.

This is by no means a local phenomenon. It is a problem that is endemic to the entire country, from the heart of Metro Manila to the farthest atoll. These brownouts can last anywhere from a few minutes to several hours. The shorter brownouts are spent rummaging for batteries and candles, and for the deck of cards that is customarily used to help while away the brownout. During the longer brownouts, one watches helplessly as the refigerator defrosts of its own volition and as perishables slowly perish. And if one has not fully charged one's cellphone, texts and calls will have to kept to a minimum to spare the battery.

There are some who are unaffected by brownouts either because they somehow manage to live without electricity (there are some in my own barangay) or because they have gone to the trouble of acquiring generators. Resort hotels, restaurants and clubs all ensure that tourists, in whose countries brownouts simply do not exist, should never notice the interruption of power. The ordinary Filipino, sans generator, is not so lucky.

The president and CEO of Meralco, which powers Manila, promised in TV ads last Christmas fewer brownouts in 2009. His promise was worth about as much as a smile from a whore. I live a considerable distance from Manila and I have been assured by another expat who has lived here for several years that the power supply is actually rather more dependable here than in many other parts of the archipelago. And yet there were eight brownouts in January and so far this month there have been eleven. One would think that the electric cooperative is bracing itself for the upcoming typhoon season. In fact, these untimely and exasperating brownouts are a kind of dry run, designed to give the residents of this island an ominous foretaste of the powerlessness to come. And global warming, whether one believes in it or not, is promising a rising sea level and more numerous and fiercer tropical cyclones in the future.


*Incidentally manufactured by a company called Mitsuno.

National Children's Day: A Modest Proposal

Friday, October 17, was National Children's Day here in the Philippines. So ubiquitous and inescapable are children in this country, you would think after a stroll down just about any street in any city or town that every day was Children's Day. But on this particular day the kiddies were particularly prominent, cluttering the markets, running wild among the dry goods stands, and wailing uncontrollably in the internet cafe I frequent every time I come to town.



Instead of pandering to these poor people with insuperable problems for the stupid misfortune of having more children than they can possibly account for, the Philippine goverment should declare a National Family Planning Month. They would first have to re-educate the population - for whom the number of children has always been a desperate and foolish measure of bounty - that as long as there are births in such numbers, not only are women enslaved but the ranks of the unemployed will continue to expand, crime will flourish prodigiously, and politicians, faced with so many consequential social ills that simply cannot be fixed, will have a whopping excuse to continue their habitual misappropriation of funds - a problem that exists even at the highest levels of government and which goes unpunished even when proven.

Behind my kitchen is a one room shack that houses nine people. The mother is obviously - to anyone with ears - suffering from some mental imbalance. In the mornings, when her seven children, with their seven empty stomachs, are clamoring for their breakfast, she screams at them. She screams the word hoy! most of the time just to get their attention. But she can sometimes he heard - it's impossible not to hear her - screaming in Visayan dialect gosto ko mamatay!, which simply means I want to die! During the day she often has to go searching for a stray child, and her screams of hoy! are heard throughout the barangay, from the highway on down the hill to the sea. But the evenings are the worst, when her children have to be told that there is nothing for them to eat. The older children, perhaps inured to going to bed hungry, take it stoically. But the youngest can be heard crying well into the night. Occasionally one of them, the slow eldest daughter, will cry out hysterically in the night, and the mother will just shout her down, leaving the child wimpering sporadically until she falls asleep. The only thing that muffles all this terrible noise coming from next door is the constant whirr of my electric fan.

So There I Was

I've been using this blog as a pseudo-diary, so I may as well admit the latest event in my life at mid-way. I have transported myself from Alaska to the Philippines in an attempt to "retire early". As my earlier entry "Hallelujah I'm a Bum" attested, I have always held the workaday world in enmity. Given the Plutocracy into which I was born, the choices were actually severely few and my chances of success haphazard.

Needless to say, I failed to succeed by the standards of my own world. I never saw the necessity of any of the wondrous things that it held out as some kind of promise. "Job Security" was nothing more than a guarantor of safe slavery until you are ready for Social Security, which "promise" is being slowly eroded by a rabid government in control of 40% of the world's largest economy.

I brought one of many books with me. Moritz Thomsen's Living Poor can at least give me the consolation that at least I am not living in an Ecuadoran jungle. Cheers.

Happy Days Are There Again

Several years ago I submitted the following piece to Senses of Cinema for them to include in their festival report section. Fiona Villella [sp?], then editor-in-chief of the e-zine politely turned it down. I present it here, just for the hell of it.


Happy Days are There Again


Ten years after the second most powerful volcanic eruption of the 20th-century buried it under as much as four meters of pumice, ash, and a cement-like mixture called lahar, Angeles City, Philippines announced its resurrection to what it hoped would be a world audience in the unlikely form of an international film festival.


Optimistically called the "Golden Phoenix," the grand prize was never awarded, since the festival ended prematurely with the armed robbery of the box office receipts and the gilded trophy itself. The chronically underpaid Philippine police have yet to trace a lead.


No matter. The purpose of the festival was to assure foreign investors that Angeles City, contrary to popular belief, is back on the map, awaiting recognition as central Luzon's premier tourist attraction. That wait may be longer than city developers expect, but it won't deter Angeleans from pretending that the dark days following the desertion of the United States armed forces from Clark Air Base are finally over. The sun shines as brightly and as relentlessly as ever on the dusty outpost, a rest stop on the highway from Manila to Baguio, and it seems to be just as good a reason as any to celebrate - something Filipinos seem to have an endless capacity for.


Home to a motley collection of expats from Australia, America and Europe, Angeles is easily the unlikeliest place you'd expect to find a resort - even a nebulous one like this. But, for better or worse, the expats are the backbone of this revival - the ones who hung on to their property during the first bleak months after Mt Pinatubo so overwhelmingly devalued it, as well as those who bought up the property when it was worthless, somehow believing that one day there would be a whopping return on their investments.


No one could have foreseen such a turn of events - not just the inevitable revival of Angeles City as the commercial hub for Pampanga province, something Filipinos could handle by themselves; but the return of the girlie bars which once skirted Clark Air base, a phenomenon unintentionally abetted by Mayor Lim's crackdown on the trade in Manila. But the clientele of the bars has aged considerably since the U.S. Air Force unceremoniously flew away to more hospitable bases in Guam and Okinawa. Balibago, the Angeles suburb in which most of the bars are situated, resembles more than ever a retirement community with girls.


The bar girls seem to be at least as likely as bar owners to seek a haven in Angeles. The hundreds of bars which once lined Magsaysay Drive in Olongapo and the dozens more which lit up Manila in a somewhat garish light have long since closed for an interminable off season, leaving thousands of women, many of them not so young any more, to seek gainful employment elsewhere. For most of them, as for so many Filipinos, such employment is nonexistent. Some of the girls could have done worse, surely, than follow the bar owners to Angeles.



But girlie bars weren't supposed to be the main attraction in Angeles last March. The event organizers promised as "The Last Ever Angeles City International Film Festival" advertised an impressive list of world famous celebrity attendees: Jackie Chan, Sylvester Stallone, and Gerard Depardieu. Only later, when these megastars were conspicuous in their absence, was it explained that they had merely been sent invitations. They were otherwise not obligated to attend. And if that weren't disappointing enough (I'd actually looked forward to meeting Depardieu), even the handful of Filipino celebrities who could presumably have been counted on to show up either just popped in to say "hi" or excused themselves with prior commitments.


Such are the vagaries of this somewhat insular country, which always seems more than a little oblivious of what's good for it. Despite this show of national and international disinterest, the festival was kicked off with the world premier of Little Shaolin, Part 5, which had to change venues due to a momentary (three hour) blackout (which Filipinos, optimistically as ever, call a "brownout"). And a Lifetime Achievement Award was given to an American director from Hollywood's Golden Age who looked as if he'd been disinterred for the occasion. No one I spoke to had ever heard of him, and the old man was gracious - or cantankerous - enough to discount the significance of the event with a self-effacing and uproarious speech.


Most of the other screenings, I soon discovered, were of what are known hereabouts as "bold" movies - X-rated even in the absence of a rating system. And when a "Miss Phoenix" beauty contest climaxed with the contestants shedding their bikini tops - the winner, naked except for her crown and a smile, having given the male judges the most stimulating lap dance - I realized that I was far from Cannes, and even farther from the other City of Angels - L.A.


By the time the thieves struck, terrorizing the poor ticket girls with their automatic weapons, just about everyone had seen quite enough. Stealing the Golden Phoenix was probably an afterthought when only a few thousand pesos turned up in the theater's safe. But it was a sorry consolation prize, since it had nothing gold about it except a thin coat of paint. The thieves, bunglers of an already bungled event, would probably have taken little pleasure in the knowledge that they had spared us the last days of this dubious festival. The only objections came from some disgruntled residents who were obliged to clean up the considerable mess a week early, without further assurances that they were to paid for their labors.


With the remaining days on my return ticket, I had just enough time to take a sentimental journey, carefully retracing the steps of a prior visit, reacquainting myself with old companions, and once again learning to forgive this place its little absurdities. Mount Pinatubo, still very much an active volcano, can do little more to Angeles than it already has, except maybe enrich the soil for the local sugar cane growers with its occasional effluences of ash or force the bar owners to hire otherwise indigent men and women to sweep the ash off their doorsteps. They've all learned in the last four years, as I learned in just three weeks, that there are worse things than volcanic eruptions. There are film festivals.

Dahan Dahan

I was in Thailand for my birthday in 1993. In my hotel, I saw a music video on tv on a Hong Kong-based channel. It was by a Philippine artist named Viktoria, "Dahan Dahan," sung entirely in Tagalog, a language with which I was only just becoming acquainted.

Later that same year I was in the Philippines, and I saw the video again, and I went out and bought the tape. Some of the lines from the song "Dahan Dahan" stay with me: "Di kita iiwan" (I'll love you forever) and "Puso ko ibibigay sa iyo" (I give you my heart). But the title, which means step by step or gradually, became a sort of title for a great love affair that began at about the time I bought the tape, and hasn't as yet ended. When I told the girl that as long as I lived "Dahan Dahan" would be "our song," a serious, almost frightened look came over her face.

I recently found the video on You Tube. Here it is.