gifts of light and grace

IF YOU CAN'T win me over with a night-long Walpurgisnacht of who-the-hell-cares conversation over a crate of ice-cold San Miguel pale pilsen, the next best thing if you're in the mood for gift-giving are books, books, books. So damn easy to please, yours truly.

Come on, let me boast what I recently acquired for which I thank God the dictionary has a word called gratitude:




* A Book of Luminous Things. Edited by Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel laureate for Literature, this international anthology of poetry is a gift from my wife Arlaine. This book does live up to its title, truly a collection of brightness. Milosz states in his introduction that the purpose of this personal and eclectic collection is to present poetry that is "short, clear, readable, and...realistic, that is, loyal toward reality and attempting to describe it as concisely as possible."

Indeed, the poems in this collection have a clarity and immediacy that would appeal to even the most poetry-averse reader. Most of the selections are from classical Chinese and 20th-century American and European (primarily Eastern European, Scandinavian, and French) poets. The poems are grouped by intriguing headings ("The Moment," "The Secret of a Thing," "A Woman's Skin"), and Milosz has written brief prefaces to many of them, creating an unusual sense of dialogue between editor and reader.

"My intention," says Milosz, "is not so much to defend poetry...but rather, to remind readers that for some very good reasons it may be of importance today." This refreshing and wise anthology is recommended for all collections

Milosz's introduction is passionate and enlivening as he guides readers toward his vision of poems as forms of enchantment. A review succinctly sums up Milosz's magic in this volume of inflamed voices: "He deepens and extends the readers' understanding of his poetics and the poems he has so lovingly chosen. There are plenty of American poets here, quite a few Chinese poets, and a diverse scattering of Europeans, but place of origin isn't as significant, ultimately, as place of arrival: a poem that speaks to everyone in every land."


* Grace (Eventually). The latest collection of essays by Anne Lamott, this book is a present from my friend Cathy Viado Bradly. Lamott's topics may sound boringly profound--the world, community, the family, the human heart--but she perks it up with the pitch-perfect humor of her wisdom as she tackles "the missteps, detours, and roadblocks in her walk of faith."

Consider her tongue-in-cheek testimony: "I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kind of things. Also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace's arrival. But no, it's clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in the silence, in the dark."

Consider, too, the chorus of praise for her writing:

"She's funny and she tells the truth, and truth and laughter are two things we need more of." (New York Times Book Review). "Lamott writes essays that are howlingly funny mini-sermons, reminding us of what's important in life... her quirky, funny perspective are nothing short of a salve for tired souls." (Los Angeles Times Book Review). "A cause for celebration...nothing short of miraculous." (The New Yorker).

"Anne Lamott is a walking proof that a person can be both reverent and irreverent in the same lifetime. Sometimes even in the same breath." (San Fransisco Chronicle). "A ferociously smart, droll, and original writer... transcendently lovely. (Entertainment Weekly)

Enough said.

wherever, whatever

APART FROM the heart, home will always be where the gut is. And purgatory is everywhere, yes. Here's a reprint of my recent opinion column in Sun.Star Cebu (12 June 2007) :

Besides the chicken that crossed the road

Easy goes the green light for envy en route to any American city. It’s all it takes, hands down, to feel a sudden surge of empathy for stray dogs. Go ask any Third World drifter driving himself headlong into the dead-end of undue comparison.

Consider the commercial of a fast-food joint cranking up the condescending tone of a balikbayan matron. Sweating and fanning away the frustration off her face, she hissed at all the signals of the doggone state of our streets: “Walang ganyan sa States!”

Wringing that woman’s neck, however, may yet entail squeezing dry the threadbare fabric of one’s nationalistic streak.

For one preferring “a government run like hell by Filipinos,” our major thoroughfares are metaphors for a future that renders horoscopes way far better reading fare than op-ed columns.

What a relief, therefore, to run into Anne Lamott’s latest book of essays—
Grace (Eventually)—and to be reassured that the geography of what goes bad or wrong is our common ground. Regardless of race, yes.

“Nowhere is better than anywhere else,” writes Lammot.

Angels may fear to tread through the traffic anywhere in our country’s asphalt jungles, but even the world’s most affluent nation is neither a breeze through the boulevard.

Hardly a minute goes in New York at night, swear some expat friends, without emergency sirens blaring by. In Los Angeles, where road rage is rampant down the freeway, an unidentified man stalking the sidewalk has been caught on video cam lugging a baseball bat and swinging it down his victims’ head at random.

And here comes, where I’m helpless at waxing touristy at the camera-worthy pace of suburbia, this swerve of sobering news: A 16-year-old woman out from the mall was whisked off on the way to her car in the parking lot, her dead body found in a wooded area in the neighboring state three days after she was reported missing.

Reading all that, who wouldn’t rather scoot away into the tracks of Paris Hilton or veer off where Ruffa and Yilmaz exchange a flurry of toxic fumes?

Better yet, scratch one’s head at the sidelines while Cebu’s movers and shakers merrily rouse up sparks around and smack at each other as if they were inside bump cars in a children’s arcade.

Doesn’t the smash-up between the Capitol of Cebu and City Hall hit any Bisdak, displaced or not, as if—lucky us—we don’t have to bother anymore about global warming, the war in Iraq, and terrorism? Isn’t that entertaining enough to sideswipe us away from other pressing concerns like the lack of urban planning, the garbage-filled and flood-prone streets, the invasion of squatters in the sidewalks?

Oh, well, thank God for gawk-worthy dollops of distraction. Ignorance is bliss, right?

Where there’s mayhem in the streets to go with the caravan of political circus, sneaking online for nostalgic peeks at the homefront would be a chronic compulsion. As if it would be where I might stumble on the cure for cancer soon.

Of her city, Kerima Polotan notes the impossibility of getting intimate with it without the cocktail of “love and repulsion and sorrow.”

That, for all we know, is what the mayor imbibes in full measure while he looms large enough for both the affection of those who vote for him and the aversion of everyone else.

That, too, might explain why, even if it’s where her pet peeve holds sway, it’s no sweat for the island’s lady governor to swear, hand to her heart: “I love Cebu City!”

Come on, with all that drama worthy of a YouTube spot soon, my birthplace might as well be the center of the universe.

for my childten to sing and dance with

God bless Luther Vandross for this lovely song. Happy Father's day to all the sons, brothers, and husbands who dream of siring a better world someday.

consciousness like continents

TO RECLAIM SPACE is to reassert one's place, according to poet Mary Oliver, "in the family of things." After a month of taking a detour from my comfort zone into the uncertainty of an alien landscape, what a relief to return where mind and heart limbers up in the light of the familiar: a chance to continue touching base with my place of origin and pivot for return, at least through my regular op-ed corner in Sun.Star Cebu.

Published last June 12, here's a reprint of my first column after a month-long absence in the spell of readjustments en route to retracing the tracks of my byline:

Sheltering under the same sky

It does sound like a broken record, but “to find one’s place under the sun” is here to stay. Indeed, it’s enough of a record-breaking feat to steer clear and weather away the burning temptation of a cliché. Or the cold comfort of familiarity.

True, strangeness becomes me where the pastures are not only greener but also wider. But here in the city of Topeka, the capital of Kansas, there’s no trite notion I find easy to engage in and try to dispel than displacement.

But now that the age of dotcom renders distance just a click away from the computer keyboard, nothing else make me feel at home than harping on variations on a theme.

Connectedness, for instance.

Reckon how reverie veers away like ripples in a pebble-stirred lake, concentric from where consciousness sprawls out between the navel of the Philippine archipelago and the heartland of America.

Where I’m aiming to keep alienation at bay, waves of familiarity are also up my neck with a recent online report just enough to strike a sensitive chord to this true-blooded Cebuano who, despite shrinking in the shadow of toxic fumes from news at the homefront, can stand tall about its guitars and singers.

According to a Yahoo dispatch, more than 1,680 guitarists gather in Kansas to tune up and take part in setting a Guinness world record for the most people playing the same song—Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water—simultaneously.

Never mind the smoke of politics in Cebu hot in the heels of the elections on top of the water-logged news to flush one’s summer thoughts down the drain: overflowing creeks and sewers, flash floods in the streets and mudslides in the mountains.

Nothing new under the sun, right? Then again, just when summer in Kansas rouses a riot of colors and fragrance from its galaxy of gardens, something of a novelty nudges my nose not to smell what the flies revel in Taboan as I sniff stardust out of Mayor Tomas Osmeña’s seemingly spaced-out scheme.

Never mind if the mayor doesn’t have the heart to prop up a school building in Lahug as long as he has the lungs to whoop out a wizardry: To carve out a river right in the middle of the city’s clogged roads.

Come on, the Yellow Brick Road may be a universe away from Cebu, but it smacks of magic for the mayor to conjure “street rivers” where traffic and floating rats render it cool to hitch a ride on a witch’s broom above it all. Quick, go notify the authorities at Guinness!

In the face of formidable odds, any Cebuano worth his pride of Lapu-Lapu’s legend is no stranger to the struggle of holding his ground. As if conquest were a congenital blessing, if not a birthright.

Like water, there’s no stopping back the Bisdak’s knack for survival. Or his free-flowing instinct for finding a way out of dire straits.

And for the throng out to find a foothold to the future in alien shores, uncanny as well how they might feel no farther than the plight of Cebu City’s squatters to keep their heads above water as the tides of progress sweep the metro like a Kansan tornado.

A relocation site is up in the pipeline, assures Mayor Tomas Osmeña, who plans to pave a road from the SRP to Poblacion Pardo, where he will build a “new barangay” of squatters uprooted from various parts of the city. (No, slum dwellers won’t be cast away like garbage under the bridge because they are potential voters, remember?)

Strangeness is a state of mind, indeed. And like the brain-like formation of clouds, the sky stays—wherever we go and raise our stakes—always overhead. That, at least, can never be relocated.

leavetaking, and the love of friends

"IN THE DEW of little things, the heart finds its morning." And I, born once upon a high noon in August under a lion's sign, roar amen.

We'll meet again--all of you in whom I have taken root--in yet another sunrise soon...

* * *

IT'S BEEN A MONTH since I left the country and settled (temporarily, I hope) with my family in the heartland of America. Ah, the sweet sorrow of departure and the thrill of a new adventure! And, yes, the geyser of goodwill and the grace of friendship that I've been blessed with all along! It had been a whirl of beer binges and videoke, reunions with friends long missed, and poetry dedicated to me like a talisman for tracing my way back home soon (Thank you, dear ole' Temistokles Adlawan). Plus a toast from two kindred spirits whose beautiful minds and hearts will always be cherished. Read on, here's a reprint of two opinion columns from Mayette Q. Tabada and Ana Escalante-Neri:


Xman Redux
by MAYETTE Q. TABADA, Sun.Star Cebu, 13 May 2007

CHEAPSKATE that I am, the first thing I bought when I had something left over from my salary was this mobile phone. Inexpensive and simple, the new phone fit me, down to the longish time it took to unlock and the limited memory of my ancient SIM card.

As far as coexistence anxieties went, this new phone and I settled down in no time, except for a few days ago, when this infernal gadget went crazy.

Fumbling with the keypad, I panicked every time the phone tone indicated an incoming message. Each time, I feared the worst: my younger son finally swallowed his older brother and was regurgitating him out, with the pieces in odd order.

Every time, it was this and that writer asking if Myke was gone, had gone, was really, really gone.

Texting is really ideal only for thumbs that fly over the keypad and eviscerate nimbly the rules of English writing. It is not for technophobes that feel they have to use the shift key every time to begin a sentence with a capital letter; or leave a space after punctuations (two if a period).

Also, texting is just too bloody for explaining to the young, the heartbroken, the dreamers that the mentor they wrote for, imitated, drank with—heck, loved—had, as of 3 PM last Friday, taken off for an 18-hour flight with his two young sons and a pocket full of finger puppets to go home to his beloved Arlaine.

Thanks to Myke, my editor-on-leave, I discovered a facet of the phone I thought I knew: push the buttons too quickly and this unremarkable piece of plastic will rear its spirit and refuse to execute a command.

Toxic, my editor would have said, nodding his bangs sagely while smiling roguishly.

Yeah, everything’s toxic alright, Xman. Some just use the poison to make poetry.

I first worked with Myke U. Obenieta in 2000. Our group of writers and photographers were prowling in the firecracker-making countryside of Babag, Lapu-Lapu to catch children and minors assembling in the illegal trade.

It was my first special report but my heart was not in it. Why punish the victims? For Myke, his interest was not to expose and investigate; he wanted to listen to the stories woven by those small, nimble fingers before an accidental spark sent them flying all over the countryside.

In the exacting world of journalism, Myke and I felt, more often than not, like mutants. In the backyards of Babag, we took to calling each other Xman, or “X-Man,” if according to Myke, as he was more straitlaced about grammar than I.

Over the years, in the newsroom or during coverage, we bumped into each other desultorily. I knew him better though as one of the most graceful editors to light up a classroom or a young writer’s dreams.

Some students stumble into writing because, caught between the devil and professors who believe in “publish or perish,” they have nowhere to go but into the roiling waters of the publishing world.

But the ones that grow into their craft have, hovering over their pens, not just Muses but angst-ministering angels and nurturing mutants. Until he finally made good on his travel plans last Friday, the Xman did not assign writers as go off with them on rambling, irreverent, offbeat, funny explorations of language, the movies, drinking, poetry, parenting, loving and other digressions that inexplicably fed the Craft.

For those unable to believe he has left, let me comfort you with Epictetus.

It’s not only because quoting some long-dead Greek confers the proper gravitas on leave-takings. The fellow is in one of the books left behind in the normal clutter of my editor’s desk.

This, as well as an oil-and-pastel painting of a ballet dancer, the communities of writers woven around his four scrupulously updated blogs, and the unfinished series of despedidas requiring at least half-a-year to complete, are portents that Myke has just stepped out and will, one afternoon, pop up to declare to us, day-shift stiffs: “Hi, beautiful people!”

* * *

Leavetaking

by ANA ESCALANTE-NERI, Sun.Star Weekend Magazine, 25 April 2007

IT IS HARD to write about someone who has left, but even harder to write for someone just about to leave when you imagine you could still venture the hope that they would stay. Offer a final argument against their departure. The ache is keener when you see what spaces remain occupied—his mess on his desk, blunt-tipped pencils in a mug, he on that chair where he’s sat in the lifetime of eight years—while knowing that a mere few, few days would empty all that.

There are only five days left, to be exact, before my Weekend editor Mr. Myke Obenieta leaves with his two boys for Kansas to join his wife Arlaine.

I am tempted to send him, in lieu of this column, something incoherent (uh, not that my columns aren’t) with twice the usual character requirement.

Or maybe I could be dramatic and turn in a blank page, tell him that would be enough to explain the great void we would all feel in his absence. Sniff, sniff. Choke, sob.

Or I could do the corny but heartfelt thing and write about his being more than an editor, but an occasional beer buddy, too, for whom I’ve offered to foot the bill only to find out when it was time to pay that I had not enough cash in my wallet—the only time we managed to laugh about not getting paid enough writing.

A mentor, he was, as well, paneling in the two regional writing workshops I attended where he was the easiest of the bunch to forgive despite all his insulting comments on my poems….naw. He did no such thing. If anything, he’s been best at giving encouragement and good advice, literary or otherwise.

Perhaps what I can do is give some of that back, casual good advice, from one traveler to another?

Myke. Stuff your suitcase with the usual chicharon, otap, rosquillos, dried mangoes, pastillas, danggit. Our kababayans in the States are heartsick for those. They won’t mind your charging them quadruple their original price. Use profit from sales to tide you over until you find rich relatives to mooch money from during the first few months of your stay.

On the plane, when your two little men start to become a handful, think tranquilizer. Not for them, silly. For you. There should be at least three hundred other passengers on board anyway to keep an eye on them.

When you get there, don’t stop yourself from constantly calculating exchange rates. That way, you won’t have the heart to spend on anything, especially the little luxuries you never needed anyway when you were here. So when you come back home to Cebu, to us, to me, your favorite columnist, you could feel free to bore us with your stateside tales in an unnatural American accent if only because you’ve saved so much dolyares and could afford to buy us beer. If you spring for more than a couple, we might even pretend to be interested.

The important thing is coming home, at some point. Hopefully before the new Weekend editor recommends to fire me due to an attitude problem. A catty treatment from me. Uh, wait. Sorry to have to break it to you here, but I believe that position has been offered to me. Great news, right? You’re guaranteed a job when you return, and I get the chance to pay you back for all your kindness by offering you a tiny 300-worder space-filler under my editorship.

Meantime, ayo-ayo, Bai. Do enjoy your new adventure and give our regards to our fellow-poet Arlaine.

Wait, wait, a final thing. Don’t bring large bottles of toiletry in your hand-carry.

And your desk. Maybe don’t clear it.

Or clear it.

Or don’t.

who deserves the evil eye?

HARD TO FACE a problem, indeed, when the problem is a politician's face in a prohibited campaign poster. In Cebu, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) might as well be seeing ghosts while rolling its eyeballs at the election litter all over.

Hair-raising, thus groans my recent column in the opinion page of Sun.Star Cebu (17 April 2007 issue) :

Zooming in on zombies


Horror wears a happy face. Worse, it’s sticking its tongue out at the Commission on Elections, leaving it dazed in the dark and in dire need of a sixth sense.

“There’s evidence all over, but no suspects in sight.” Thus declares the headline in one of this paper’s reports last Sunday.

About the abomination of campaign posters placed illegally, the report would have been more terrific (if not terrifying) to the tune of spine-crunching sound effects worthy of a whodunit.

Who’s giving Comelec a black eye? Who’s winking at the voters now besieged with photogenic attempts at peek-a-boo?

How to determine who really placed the posters is Comelec’s nightmare. “It’s difficult because a rival camp can paste the other’s posters illegally,” explains a Comelec officer.

Would there be a ghost of a chance for Comelec to exorcise the omnipresence of prohibited posters stuck on trees, along the streets and main thoroughfares, on bridges, public structures or buildings, electric posts or wires, schools, and shrines?

Are graveyards not included? There might be campaign posters stuck somewhere there, too. Not on someone else’s tombstone, hopefully.

Meanwhile, some candidates smile.

It’s a wonderful world, indeed, where the Comelec is facing a blank wall while searching for witnesses who’d dare look the devil in the eye.

Unless somebody complains and comes out in open “against those who place posters outside designated areas,” Comelec might as well be blind, deaf, and mute. No way it can prosecute, unless it gets lucky and catches someone flouting its regulations red-handed.

Mean and whiling away the leeway of the law, some candidates can only flaunt a prelude to their proclivity for sidestepping the line between right and wrong soon after they’re voted into power.

Dead malice, anyone?

In the face of these delinquent candidates with their helter-skelter hunger to be the apple of the electorate’s eyes, any voter worth his jaundice is pretty justified to see skulls and crossed bones instead.

Or, better yet, be imaginative enough to behold the errant posters as if Oscar Wilde were back from the graves with updated variations on The Picture of Dorian Gray. (In that novel, darkness was made visible in the image of the protagonist whose corruption left its hideous marks in his portrait.)

As much as we yearn to see politicians in a new light, sorry, there’s just no blinking away the enduring ubiquity of blight.

Bless, therefore, some vandals that voters ought to shake hands with. There’s beauty and grace in graffiti, yes, when these designers of disfigure would render an animated mural of clowns and circus freaks out of the faces from those posters. The more offensive, the better. Enough, yes, for Dracula’s laughter.

making no sense, making me smile

ONE WOULD SUPPOSE, considering the constant grimace about successive grim topics such as politics and the forthcoming elections in this blog, that it's a fashion style to wear my wrinkles on my forehead.

So when it seems like the remains of my hair and my cowlick are scraping on cobwebs and puncturing my thought balloons, it's such a relief to just shake the stress away with odds and ends of humor scoured along the way.

If the bottles are shaking after pounding your fist on the table to make a point in the face of your beer buddies, hereunder are handy quotables to quell the dissonance of reason and rigmarole in this election season when it looks like there's a conspiracy to make fools out of all of us. These hand-me-down quips, come to think of it, would be fine for grinning and bearing it all:


I was born intelligent; education ruined me.

***

Practice makes perfect, but nobody's perfect. So why practice?

***
Since light travels faster than sound, people appear bright until you hear them speak.

***

The more you learn, the more you know, The more you know, the more you forget.The more you forget, the less you know. So why learn?


(And, hey, wouldn't it be cool if after seeing shirts emblazoned with a candidate's callus-fortified face, all of us thirsting and hungry for honest-to-goodness elections would witness our piss-worthy politicians wearing that shirt up there instead of the kagalanggalang (kuno) Barong Tagalong and Amerikana suits if ever--God forbid--they'd be voted again and souse themselves once more in the froth of power?)

banishing the boars

NO LESS THAN divine guidance. That's devoutly to be wished for us voters while many politicians go hell-bent to sweep us off our feet with their devil-may-care compulsion for the nation's cruxifixion. Here's my Lenten-themed column in the opinion page of Sun.Star Cebu (3 April 2007):


In the face of the faithless

When God granted free will to us Filipinos, did it seem like casting pearls before swine? Not if the outcome of the forthcoming elections, hopefully, wouldn’t again leave us heaving a sigh of whine until we’re fit to be tied, skewered, and roasted.

Now that not a few politicians impel us into pigging out on the slop of their self-aggrandizement, Lent does come in the nick of time to nudge us off the beaten track of the politically cynical and clueless.

In this year of the Fire Pig, will the elections—God forbid!—again leave us blood-curdled and curled over the coals?

Then again, no scenario is ever outlandish where the craven and the clowns take turn hogging our attention, unsettling enough to scare even our guardian angels to take absence without leave.

Sacred, our right of suffrage. But suffering fools gladly has been like a religion to us as we take the extra mile of masochism. Preferably on bended knees, yes. As if we’re out to prove—as if we don’t have a surplus of comic relief—that we are a nation of martyrs.

Consider and weep over how we continue to bear the cross brusquely hewn in the hands of self-styled redeemers.

Lest we lapse into the twilight zone of inertia once more, which is all some candidates need for us to fry in our own fat till we crackle under our skin, it’s about time we seize the day of our own deliverance. And that may be the closest thing we have to redemption by way of repentance.

Or else, there’s more hell to pay. So exhorts those who hold the candle in the face, crusted with callus, of our candidates.

Indeed, some priests have pushed their sphere of influence far into the fray of politics. A Catholic priest in Zamboanga City has resigned from the priesthood to run for mayor, and another man of the cloth is also seeking to be governor of Pampanga.

If we must burn, it better come from the fire in our belly along with the belief or leap of faith that we could still make an effing difference.

Thus the Cebu-based Dilaab Foundation (“a volunteer-driven movement for a transformed Filipino nation through heroic Christian citizenship”) sparks up its plug for us to take charge with its decision-making guide. Yes, so that we’d vote with the visionary light of LASER (Lifestyle, Action, Support, Election conduct, Reputation) and zap to zero the chances of undesirable or “anti-life” candidates with ill-gotten wealth and campaign money sourced from illegal drugs.

Also recently, Manila Archbishop Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales urged voters to choose for “green candidates” as the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) released the “Ten Commandments for Responsible Voting.”

Hopefully, this will influence the electorate on “what to ask and look for from candidates in terms of environmental record and platform.”

It’s about time we save ourselves. And spare the next balloting time from the usual suspects who want us to swallow the staleness of politics microwaved with this advertising adage: “Sell the sizzle, not the steak.”

way through the wilderness

IT'S A WILD, wild world. That's true, at least, in this kingdom where politicians reign.

Here's something to ponder--uttered by Lucy, the youngest of the four children in the magical but evil-plagued world in C.S. Lewis’ Prince Caspian (the 2nd book of The Chronicles of Narnia)--especially now that the most craven of candidates come to us like the proverbial sheeps in wolves' clothing:

“Wouldn't it be dreadful if someday in our own world, at home, men started going wild inside, like the animals here, and still looked like men, so that you’d never know which were which?”

gospel truth beyond the garbage

ALL IT TAKES for a hellish experience in the heat of the Lenten season is to shiver through the spine while listening to the litter in the air stirred up by the elocution contest among election-starved candidates. Hear how they hope for us to believe their words were holy writ. That's the crux of my column in the opinion page of Sun.Star Cebu (27 March 2007):

Of politics and penitence

Even the devil knows how to quote the Bible, and so it’s not really farfetched for some politicians to wax penitential in the heat of Lent. You bet, religious frenzy would be a fashionable excuse for self-anointed saviors to wear holiness like oil in their hair.

Donning sackcloth and ash, as hypocrites in biblical times used to do, would be a tad unphotogenic for those born to be vainglorious. Aber, can you cite any candidate who doesn’t take the extra mile, with hell’s bells ringing up the road to popularity, just to stay high profile?

In the name of fame and fortune, yes, doing a Faust wouldn’t be futile.

Because they’ve got the flair for fizzing up their spit in the face of an audience, it’s likely they’d even give an arm in exchange for the chance to flail their hands to high heavens for the traditional staging of the Siete Palabras.

Or, if the less voluble of them would opt out of that public display of piety, there’s no fuss as long as it’s never overlooked and ought to be put on record that all that oratory comes courtesy of his generosity, thank you.

Then again, I wouldn’t mind, if their knack for sheer showmanship—preferably with full media coverage— would compel them to whip their backs with a stingray’s tail while walking on their knees under a spitfire sky. Cool, if the self-flagellant would also invite the voters to vent off their loathing and join in the lynching.

Hateful, I confess. Utterly un-Christian if we reckon our Catechism teacher in kindergarten who taught us “to love our enemies” even if she couldn’t stop herself from pinching us in the nape for not listening.

How to look at our politicians in a new light? That, whoa, is no less uphill than retracing the skull-littered path to Golgotha.

Instead of seeing any vote-starved pervert with a pyromaniac’s glower, the Dilaab Foundation ("a volunteer-driven, Church-based movement for a transformed Filipino nation through heroic Christian citizenship”) has offered a suggestion to “challenge the notion that elections are useless because many candidates have dubious motives in running for office.”

Instigated by Fr. Carmelo Diola, the foundation has urged the public not to vote for undesirable candidates by using a decision-making guide called LASER (Lifestyle. Action. Support. Election conduct. Reputation.) Beware of “anti-life” candidates with unexplained wealth or with campaign machinery oiled with money from illegal drugs by beaming up your LASER vision.

Or if you’re still rolling your eyeballs, thank God for this scrap of humor:

“An old couple had a son who was still living with them. They were a little worried owing to their son’s lack of career plans. Thus they decided to do a small test.

They took a wad of money, a Bible and a bottle of whiskey, and put these on the dining table. Then they hid, pretending they were not at home.

If the son took the money, he would be a businessman, if he took the Bible, he would be a priest; but if he took the bottle of whiskey, he would be a drunk.

In the nearby closet and peeping through the keyhole, they saw their son arrive at last. He read the note they had left him. He took the money, looked at it against the light, and slid it in his pocket. But after that, he took the Bible, flicked through it, and took it. Finally he grabbed the bottle, opened it, and took an appreciative whiff to check the quality. Then he left for his room, carrying all three items.

The father slapped his forehead and said, “Darn, it’s even worse than I could ever have imagined. Our son is going to be a politician!”

what it takes to be a man

CULLED FROM Soul On Ice, Eldrige Cleaver's autobiography:

"For being a man is the continuing battle of one's life, and one loses a bit of manhood with every stale compromise to the authority of any power in which one does not believe."-- Norman Mailer





"Song and dance are, perhaps, only a little less old than man himself. It is with his music and dance, the recreation through art of the rhythms suggested by and implicit in the tempo of his life and cultural environment, that man purges his soul of the tensions of daily strife and maintains his harmony in the universe.

In the increasingly mechanized, automated world--a cold, bodiless world of wheels, smooth plastic surfaces, tubes, pushbuttons, transistors, computers, jet propulsion, rockets to the moon, atomic energy--man's need for the affirmation of his biology has become that much more intense. He feels need for a clear definition of where his body ends and the machine begins..."

power center

SOME GIRLS grow up ballsy, and become feminists. Which is fair enough in a world unduly and long ruled by chauvinists with ants in the pants about growing up.

Then again, when world domination sounds too macho out of the mouth of bra-burners--at the risk of transmogrifying themselves into bare-knuckle parodies or cracked mirror images of the "enemy"--it's such a relief when power struggle spawned by age-old inequality along gender lines gets straightened out loud and clear. Like this spunky and innocent certainty about that hole which has caused many a mighty man's downfall throughout history: "With this I'm going to control your LIFE!"

Other than victimization, vagina also alliterates well with victory.

That's downright the naked truth, or so agree lovers of Eve's daughters. And even without getting an earful of Ensler's many-splendoured monologues about that hallowed magnet of man's fascination, obsession and sometimes abuse, the message is simply easier to ascertain than finding the fabled G-spot: Whether you like it or not, we all--whether tyrant or wimp--came out of it!

Thumbs up, therefore, to the celebration of Women's Month.

blazing big

IN A LITTLE WHILE the pageantry of this year's Oscars Awards will be history. But before the drum roll starts for the winners, I'm sticking my neck out for my preference (up yours, Roger Ebert!) among the Best Picture contenders.

True, Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel is literally a towering achievement. All the accolades heaped on it so far are as unassailable as the sun rising at the East; the audacity of its scope is matched only by the subtlety and immediacy of its insight on the continental drift of despair rippling out of the most intimate instances of miscommunication and alienation.

Up on my feet, no problem, if Iñarritu's epic would win the Best Film. But I'll be howling out of my ears while trotting hot off my shoes if the spotlight would loom large and zoom in on Little Miss Sunshine.

Like summer on the side of nightmare, this film directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris zigzags seamlessly around heartbreak and hilarity, reeling on its dark theme--the bumpy ride to happiness and the horror of dreams hitting deadends--with its steadfast engine of intelligence and empathy.

It tracks the cross-country journey on a dilapidated minibus of "a family on the verge of a breakdown." But, aiee, how it veers off the viewers into borders of madness, failure, pain, love, and laughter with such detours of delight.


*** The ceremony just ended. The Departed won. Ok lang, at least Martin Scorcese won at last. If it's any consolation, Little Miss Sunshine took the trophy for Best Original Screenplay (by Michael Arndt) on top of the Best Supporting Actor award to Alan Arkin.

a toast to a televisionary

BEEN GOING over the top with my insomnia lately, and living up to the heights of flight such witching hours can offer: an invitation to be vigilant, to empty one’s attention out for a journey into the depths of discovery.

Never thought I could stay riveted in front of the television with a monk’s devotion, an autistic’s focus and clarity, or a marathoner’s energy. Not until I got the DVD of the transcendent HBO production, “Six Feet Under,” containing the entire five seasons created by Alan Ball (writer of the critically-acclaimed “American Beauty”).

As long as I soaked up transfixed to its visionary concoction about a family who runs a funeral home—where the messed-up lives of the main and minor characters feel like second skin even as they hover like music and dance around despair and the inevitability of death--why bother about workaday schedules gone awry?

All that jazz about the human condition, with its bottomless cocktail of horror and humor, are here attuned to higher frequencies of omniscience. In my book, this series is the closest to ransacking a library for a crash course on the meaning of our mortality.

How downright affirmative to have been addicted!

so what else is new?

THERE'S NOTHING like elections, more so in the Philippines, to brew a mixed-up slop of hope and cynicism. Nothing like the campaigns, too, to make eyeballs roll as we become witness to a circus of political antics that unravel like a rerun of a primetime slapstick. With your indulgence, here's a reprint of my column in the opinion page of today's issue of Sun.Star Cebu:


Here We Go Again

AS far as fad goes, foot massage is up for a peak season. Beware of varicose veins like forks of lightning burning down the soles on the heels of fancy footwork en route to the razzle-dazzle for the May polls.

Bite your toenails, yes. Or, hide. Legs will be pulled, and there’ll be a riot among those out to take all the voters for a ride. Been there, done that. So goes the chorus of the candidates and the electorate: Let us try again. Until we succeed, sigh.

Really, how far have we gone with the wind of politicians since elections were invented? Talk about democratic exercise, and those flexing up lip service about public interest have often succeeded in buffing up the sphincters and putting up more layers of callus in their faces.

Then again, aren’t most of our politicians merely mirroring who we are as we end up with our feet in our mouths after stomping and swearing of the sanctity of our right to vote?

How long do we allow ourselves to wallow before finding the so-called way to Damascus? How ready are we to take the high road beyond the same old tricks?

Of those running for any of the 17,000 positions in the national and local levels, who are out to keep us running in circles? Or, who among them can inspire us to go beyond the boredom of cynicism? So far, ho-hum.

Last Sinulog, for instance, we saw a few prospective senatorial candidates gracelessly getting in sync with the piety of the festival. There’s a time for everything, we’re told. But the timing simply sucks, period.

Here at the homefront, we hear of local bets flaunting their generosity, doling out PhilHealth cards to the needy as if such act of charity would be a dog-bites-man phenomenon outside the election season.

It’s refreshingly startling, therefore, when a candidate makes no bones about it. “It is not misconstrued,” replied Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña when told that his plan to give out 35,000 PhilHealth cards might be seen as a form of politicking. “It is what it is.”

At the risk of running on empty, any candidate is expected to put the best foot forward. Where have we been all along if we thought otherwise?

And if we voters have what it takes to search for a brain, a heart, and courage—not only from the candidates but also from ourselves—might as well brace for the bumps down the Yellow Brick Road. Wising up, as Dorothy and her friend realized in the end, meant finding out the wizard was just, well, pulling their legs. But, after all their ordeal, what a kick of a reality check!