Dangwa

A rainy day isn’t the best time to visit the place, but if you’ve never heard of Dangwa – the flower market in Sampaloc – you cannot yet consider yourself a real “Manilenyo”. It is home to over fifty flower vendors, and a haven to the diverse daily crowd of visitors looking for the cheapest blooms to fit the occasion.

I’d be foolish to suppose myself a connoisseur in floral affairs, but when my friend, an event organizer, declared that the weekday night wouldn’t be complete without a trip to the brightest spot in Dos Castillas' most famous market, I had to oblige. And so should you.

Bring a camera if you wish (the colors will simply astound you), and take the liberty of posing beside remarkably cheap chrysanthemums, the price of which you may still haggle with the vendor. To my knowledge, all the shops are open 24-7. If you’re running on a really tight budget for those imported tulips, a trip to Dangwa is also your best bet. Dangwa’s flowers are, by nature, completely the opposite of today’s gasoline: there’s always a great supply; it’s affordable even in high demand; and the pricing won’t make you think twice.

For a guy like me, Dangwa comes in handy during the most sudden of dates. Indeed, it's the ultimate florists' corner, the romantics' favorite pit stop, that smells of La Trinidad, Davao, Cotabato, Thailand, Holland, and Ecuador; of the petals and twigs and pleasantnesses of elsewhere. But what makes Dangwa truly unique is that it represents what Manila is all about: creativity, color, cut-price commodities, and cherished traditions. Oh, and of course, the familiar chatter of Pinoy customers asking for “tawad, tawad po, wala bang tawad?”

Thank You, Iloilo

Iloilo City is a gritty city, particularly downtown. To me, it looks like certain parts of old Manila, the parts where I don’t usually go, like Escolta in Santa Cruz or Carriedo, where the dear old fountain is. While on a three-day, two night stay in the capital of the Western Visayan province of the same name, as I was taking an afternoon walk along the streets and sidestepping shards of beer bottles on an abandoned lot, the absurd thought occurred to me that if I were to live in this city, if I were to fit in here and survive for a long period of time or at least look like I’d be able to, I’d probably have to get myself a tattoo, try my best to look like a scoundrel.

Maybe it's not that absurd, for Iloilo seems to be that kind of place. Not that there isn’t anything beautiful that awaits visitors to the city –because, mind you, there’s plenty– but as I explored its downtown area on foot, the sun shining hard on its roads and, at best, only the mildest breeze stirring in the afternoon heat, there wasn’t much else that struck me harder and more profoundly than did its general - what? Artlessness? Lack of urbanity? And I have seen Philippine provinces with weather more agreeable and tropical than this one – sidewalks less littered, too. Cigarette butts decorated the pavements. Dogs strayed, ugly dogs. Faded tarpaulin posters, most of them from the last elections, covered the cracked walls of broken-down buildings. In front of one such building on Calle Real, I saw vendors selling fake Rolexes and blocking the entrance to a local pharmacy. Jeepneys, taxis, tricycles, and pedicabs staggered in all directions, heedless of jaywalking pedestrians and traffic lights on roads which, surprisingly wide though they were, looked nevertheless to be in surgery. At Plaza Libertad, a public park five minutes from the hotel where I was staying, a statue of Rizal stood almost irrelevantly, a marble monument of one of the great Filipino artists ignored by shirtless, brown-skinned boys playing basketball and crying foul in Ilonggo. I wondered if the churchgoers inside nearby Iglesia de San Jose de Placer could hear the fun they were having, what fun, shooting hoops to the soundtrack of spoken sermons and holy hymns, and with a view of one of those Spanish-era structures dilapidating in a way that texture photographers would find accidentally beautiful, along with Iloilo’s other ruins, churches, temples, bell towers, art deco stones, ancestral houses, government offices, and heritage buildings.

As soon as the young men finished a pick-up game, they resumed another. I took pictures; I took notes. They probably played basketball here until it was lights out, and perhaps days here weren’t done until after the closing hours of Plaza Libertad.

To tell you the truth, I had expected differently. But what? I can’t say for certain. When, from the gleaming Iloilo International Airport, I jumped into a taxi, I immediately noticed that the driver had not turned on his meter. He instead proposed a fixed fare, “four hundred pesos, sir,” revealing that he had a family of four to feed and that yesterday’s bread wouldn’t have been enough. Naturally, being from Manila, I didn’t budge.

“I didn’t know I was at home,” I remarked, not without the dripping sarcasm of suburban collar-poppers. “Manong, turn on the meter, please.”

His face was creased with lifelines and his mouth wouldn’t shut; he seemed just of the kind of swindling Filipino taxi drivers to which I am particularly averse. Passionately, he continued to argue. “I’ve been waiting five hours to get a passenger. Five hours! Since seven in the morning!”

“How’s that my fault?” I replied. “If you think you’re getting such a raw deal then change your job.”

It was later that afternoon, after no more than five minutes in my suffocating room at the City Corporate Inn on Rizal Street, that I headed out to walk. Walking, after all, is my greatest equalizer – or should I say tranquilizer?; it calms me down and keeps me from being irrational; and, since any ride would be too fast, a walk has also proven many times to be my richest source of material for writing (that is, if I am writing at all). How else can I describe Life but with the impressive memory of this papery-lipped old man sun-drying his fish out on the asphalt road in the middle of a March afternoon, howling his last price per kilo in a pleading vernacular that I can perhaps never politely condescend myself to understand, but at the sound of which I felt at once blessed and broken? And what else can I say about Love but that it occurred before me as a split-second kiss planted tenderly on the whitener-whitened cheek of a nursing student’s beloved in a jeep that was rumbling and heaving its way to who knew where – might it have been to the woefully commercial Robinson’s Place or the woefully kept University of Iloilo? And how else can I capture Loneliness than by saying it was what I felt at the sight of a middle-aged woman in Jollibee, by herself, all by her damned motherly self, auburn-dyed hair, tinted glasses, pearl earrings, a very 80s print skirt, velvet fingernails, and a faltering appetite, fiddling with and poking her seventy-nine-peso Chicken Joy as though she was performing a poultry autopsy? I would have come nearer as a friendly stranger and struck up a conversation, so that the world would seem to her less unkind, but no sooner than when I closed my book (My Name is Red) and stood up to do that did I notice that there were quiet tears that filled her eyes.

I was determined to avoid fast-food chains the next day and thus ended up breakfasting in Ted’s. If there’s anything, after all, for which Iloilo is nationally famous, it's Batchoy. Rumor has it that it was originally conceived by Chinese immigrants in the provincial district of La Paz. Somewhat like the city, the dish looked to me like a thoughtless muddle – of miki noodles, pieces of meat, and abused bits of garlic, pepper, leeks and pork cracklings, all deposited in a bowl of spiteful-looking broth.

Of course, it was good. I even slurped my soup.

Cicerone: Attractions Philippines in Rizal and Manila

The middle of last week was highlighted by a day-long immersion trip at the municipality of Angono in the province of Rizal, the so-called art capital of the Philippines, where scattered were a motley assortment of unheralded visual artistry and heritage sites. We drove to the modish Thunderbird Resorts for a photo shoot, but were more taken by the hotel’s convenient proximity to what no one stuck in Manila might ever discover: a breathtaking view of the lake, beside which were quiet –almost mute– fishing villages; the Petroglyphs Site Museum, where in 1965, National Artist Carlos “Botong” Fransisco stumbled upon a cave with Neolithic (3000 BC) engravings and which is now considered by UNESCO as one of the most endangered sites in the world (very Indiana Jones, archaeologically speaking); and imaginative figure painter Nemesio Miranda’s folkloric Arthouse.

Touring the artist’s atelier and visual gallery, we learned that the place was also a venue for workshops, competitions, and exhibits – legitimizing its moniker as the town’s “School for the Arts”. Then we dined in the evening at the Nemiranda Art Café Grill and Restaurant.

Before the weekend, I struck a brief yet very agreeable E-mail correspondence with Manila’s ultimate cicerone, Carlos Celdran. I asked him where I could find the “best little boutique bookseller” in Manila –the La Solidaridad, that is– because I was planning on spending the whole of Saturday acquiring a few good titles I was never able to unearth in any Powerbooks branch or ‘leading bookstore’. He gladly gave me the directions.

“But since you’re going to be in Manila anyway,” Carlos added, “go to Intramuros and check out the third floor of The Silahis Center (an emporium of arts, crafts, and antiques), where you’ll find Tradewinds Bookstore: great for Filipiniana stuff, and they have no idea how much anything costs.”

He was right. And I was more than thankful. I inserted Tradewinds in my itinerary, and it was where I first went, purchasing three very rare English-language books for a mere one hundred pesos: Lina Flor’s handwritten collection of light, humorous verses, Dilettante (it sells for thirty US dollars in online shops); Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero’s 4 Latest Plays; and a 1976 Regal Publishing copy of Boyhood in Monsoon Country by Maximo Ramos, considered the Dean of Philippine Lower Mythology. If I had had more in my wallet, it would have been a crazy spree. Still, with bigger change than expected, I bought a wooden “wet-and-wear” bracelet and a souvenir shirt with Philippine jeepneys on it. I felt like a tourist, and the feeling may have been accurate. I lingered about the cobblestone streets and quaint Spanish-era influences of the walled fortress long after I had finished two bottles of Sparkle –perhaps an hour just smoking and watching– and then finally stepped into a taxi on my way to the La Solidaridad.

The obscure bookstore, which was a stone’s throw from Robinson’s Galleria mall and located at the corner of Padre Faura and Adriatico streets, was better than advertised. That’s because it has never been advertised at all. The books were indeed expensive, although not more than what they should cost. I spent the rest of the afternoon in the maddened adventure of scouring the shelves, despite the realization that I was going to miss the grand Dunlop anniversary in Manila Hotel for which I wrote a painstaking script. But I only cared about that a little bit. A pretty curly-haired Caucasian, maybe an exchange student, joined me as she hunted for a couple of Penguin classics. We kept on sidestepping each other, muttering half-politely, "Oops, excuse me!" and "Oops, sorry!"

By the entrance, I noticed a magazine stand that displayed almost all of this year’s issues of The New Yorker, which cost 216 pesos each and which I believe will never, I mean never, be found elsewhere in the country. I didn’t get one due to financial constraints (next time, though!), but I did step out of the shop carrying three more titles: Lawrence’s Apocalypse; J. Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time; and a fresh copy of Sir Dean Francis Alfar’s Salamanca, which was awarded the 2005 Palanca Grand Prize for the Novel. There went my salary. For the next several weeks, I have therefore decided to be even less sociable than before. I will be uncompromisingly “booked”.

Thunderbird Resorts in Angono, Rizal.

A beautifully-lit evening.

Botong Fransisco's discovery: Neolithic carvings.

Nemesio Miranda's Arthouse.

Plaza Ibarra.

Intramuros, one of the most famous attractions in the Philippines.

The walled fortress.

Citizen Ed

Behind the green gate of an unassuming studio in a Makati side street, a small group of workers are welding pieces of what are shaping to be some avant-garde objets d'art. Beside them are blueprints, damp from the rainy mist of a cloudy afternoon, offering a peek at what the finished products would look like. Even on paper the pieces look intricate, remarkably detailed, and creative in a way that can only come from a gifted mind. “E.C.”, reads the signature on the sketches, betraying the identity of the self-effacing man responsible for all this.

It is almost impossible not to notice the art of Eduardo Castrillo, wherever and howsoever one finds it. Having taken the Philippine culture scene by storm forty years ago, the sculptor / jewelry designer has since produced an amalgam of works that are at once international, monumental, and social. His “Heritage of Cebu” at the Parian Park, more than one of the many truly important attractions in the Philippines, stands as a metaphor that speaks volumes of his contribution to the artistic development of the country: a world-class concept in contemporary art; a masterful (and massive) expression of creativity; and a glimpse of national history before the Filipinos' gaze.

Recently, Castrillo celebrated his history and his career in a series of exhibits which - in much the same prevailing manner as his works are located – ran at the UST Museum, Cultural Center of the Philippines, The Yuchengco Museum, and Choice Gallery Expressions at Jupiter Street. “It's a time to show what I've done in the past and an opportunity to show the transition I've underwent,” Castrillo explains at one of his shows. Even so, as he marked four decades of a celebrated career, this 1966 recipient of the Republic Cultural Heritage Award is quick to dismiss the notion that his temperament has significantly changed. “The controversies are still there,” he says with a smile. “The angst is still there. And the overpowering creativity remains.”

True enough, Castrillo can be found these days keeping himself busy as ever. Apart from diligently working on his various jewelry collections, Ed is continuously making and designing concepts to channel an intense drive to create. In fact, he is planning an 11-hectare theme park meant to become as a one-stop shop of all creations, a visual arts educational museum with replicas of famous works as the “Mona Lisa” or “Guernica”.

The park concept is one that obviously requires plenty of time, space, and finance (not to mention painstaking government relations and tedious international research). But if there is one man who continuously garners success by overstepping the limits imposed by rationality, convention and politics, Castrillo is that man. 

Despite never having received formal art education (he majored in advertising in UST but maintains having carried on his studies idly), Ed has continued to impress - nay, astound - art critics, collectors, peers, designers and students. With the valiance, variety and vision of his work, sometimes even the well-studied scholar faces the dilemma of which category to ascribe it.

“Critics often have trouble categorizing my work because most of them are apprehensive of movement,” Ed notes. It must be noted, though, that this is no trouble for him, because he believes that “for an artist to be progressive, one must not conform. After all, my goal is to bring change and steer inspiration, to create a new path of artwork in the Philippines.

“It's for the country to have the proper heritage it deserves.”

Among those which he has bequeathed to the sculptural landscape are the “Martyrdom of Dr. Jose P. Rizal” in Luneta, “Bonifacio Shrine” at Manila City Hall, “Our Lady of Remedios Shrine” fronting the Malate Parish, “The People's Power Monument” along EDSA, and “The Spirit of EDSA” at RCBC Building in Makati. But there is great injustice in being bound to mention only a few bullets in his chronology of work, for Castrillo is a multi-awarded, internationally-commissioned and widely-admired artist – the most progressive, perhaps, of our time.

More than bringing home the awards and carving for himself a guaranteed place in the annals of Philippine art history, Castrillo has also time and again served as “a Filipino prize-fighter” and “a citizen to humanity”. He explains that “I owe a great deal of expressing myself to God and country”, and it is this steady notion upon which Castrillo dutifully carries out his artistic vision. He is well-known for the practice of donating his public monuments for selected communities; as partners in the production of this art, these communities answer for the cost of materials and labor. To Ed, there are few things as imperative as the accessibility of art. “Although art has often been overshadowed by politics and the economy, therefore blurring our understanding and appreciation of it,” he remarks, “art should still address all, including the masses. If it has to be exclusive, it will be exclusive to the thinking man.”

As has been prevalent throughout his works, Ed always offers a realistic and penetrating insight into the life of our time and of our forefathers'. He is an acute observer of society, and will invent something to forge a lasting expression of what he has seen or experienced. (“If, for example, I am depicting a warrior, I should depict it in its own rage – in its own reality.”)

And it is in this light that, more than just noticing it, we begin to understand Castrillo's work. Here we are talking of an artist who has been all over the world with international shows; who may, from commissions abroad, earn more than enough for two lifetimes; yet who nevertheless chooses to toil in educating the Filipinos about the power and potential of one's own mode of art. This is why, after having rubbed elbows with prominent foreign designers, painters and artists, he proudly proclaims what he has learned: “That Filipinos are one with all of them,” Ed says unflinchingly. And this is why, in being asked to name an artist whom he most admires, Castrillo diplomatically refuses to acknowledge a single one.

“Of course, I admire a lot of artists for their talent and good touches,” Ed explains. “But with this gift, I am carrying something bigger than myself; I am carrying national pride. I must challenge the Picassos and the Michelangelos and the other artists of the world, because I believe that the brilliance of the mind doesn't have any racial boundaries.”

Indeed, there is for Castrillo no other hero than truth. As the rest of us look up (literally and otherwise) to his sculptures, we are reminded of a man who, in opening new avenues for his hero, has become one himself.

Anilao Art

Recently, my eager yet perfectly illegitimate representation of the sports magazine Action and Fitness brought me to Batangas – a four-hour ride and many nipa huts away from the city streets of Manila. (And certainly a site of a number of attractions in the Philippines!) As the unofficial photographer of the publication for the event "Caltex Coastal Cleanup" (it was International Coastal Cleanup Day), I’d been led to the lush but not lavish Aquaventure Reef Club Resort. My hotel room was called “Computer Room” for a reason outside that which has to do with computers, because it didn’t have anything remotely electronic outside of the mosquito killer laid out beside my bed.

Since I and the most of the media partners weren’t certified scuba divers, we all gathered to form the team that wouldn’t get to go underwater. We were assigned instead to pick up trash from the site’s rocky shores. And it is, I tell you, the most unbelievable thing in the world to be picking up trash from wet sand while the rest of the people dove to explore the beauty beneath the crashing aquamarine waters. I was part of the Juniors Team that was benevolently allowed to join the league of pros. I even discovered several gems: a stray racing shoe, a rubber pork chop, a hairy coconut husk, a message-less bottle that spoke volumes of how interesting the mission was for team paparazzi.

The night, of course, served as nothing less than an occasion for vindication, and for mingling alternately with tanned pretty Filipinas and free-flowing Jägermeister (“Achtung wild!”). Wearing my inappropriately foreign white floral exotic shorts (which would not have gone unnoticed in an otherwise sober atmosphere), I joined new friends and divers in coughing out a chorus of cheers and plumes of cigarette smoke.

Even though at the end of the day, I got no wetter than having a pack of Marlboro Lights soaked by a boat ride and inadvertently plummeting like a fool into a deep muddy puddle of garbage, sand and water (“for photography’s sake”, I shrugged the embarrassment off with artless nonchalance), I must say the experience was happier than the event itinerary suggested. I hadn’t been allowed to dive, but for the name of advocacy and all things aqua, I nevertheless had a splashing good time.