Now/here no/where woman

Good ole fashioned cut-and-paste therapy

2011-11-12T19:18:00.001+08:00

Much better than the vapid Wyeth models they put on the pregnancy notebooks

that doctors hand out to patients.

I want to read this: Muslim Superhero Comics

2011-10-06T12:44:00.000+08:00

"The 99" is a comics series about a group of Islamic superheroes that embody the 99 attributes of Allah. Author Naif Al-Matuwa created the series as a symbol of toleration. The series' biggest critics are not Islamic clerics, but conservative Americans. The more they protest it's appearance on the American comics market, the more I want to read it! Anybody have a copy?

Fish Tail

2011-10-05T14:40:00.004+08:00

A fish tail addresses my favorite Tito, who loves to cook:

“I see you have fine knives here. Quite a kitchen you’ve got, sir, quite a kitchen. And those scissors – so strong! If I were you, I’d use them to cut off that ponytail. Doesn’t it bother you, the way it swings around while you move from pot to pot, seasoning, stirring, and tasting? A ponytail is not like a fish tail, sir. A man or a woman is perfectly fine without one but a fish without a tail is a dead fish and I don’t say that just because I wound up here with a dead fish – my dead fish, that is to say. Sniff.

“Imagine a fish swimming in the sea without its tail. It wouldn’t even be swimming. It would be flapping about gracelessly, towards a slow and painful death. Can’t imagine what that’s like? Well I can tell you sir, it’s a far uglier sight than a splintered sailboat in rough waters. And to fish, a sailboat is an ugly thing to begin with, but not as ugly as boats with engines. Not only are boats with engines monstrous, they are loud and noxious, and they spell death across the reefs.

“As I was saying sir, I am indispensable to a fish, even when the fish is going into a pot and I won’t fit with it. Don’t you have a bigger pot, sir? I mean, this is truly an impressive kitchen. Surely you have a pot into which you could have cooked my fish whole, with me still attached to it? No?

“But I have to give you this, sir: you did not cut off my fish’s head. We have heard this is done in other kitchens, because people cannot look their food in the eye. So I suppose I forgive you for cutting me off and dispensing with me. I forgive you and your ponytail, sir, for the ocean teaches us to be gracious when faced with indignity.”

A Brief, Writerly Rant Wrought from Years of Accumulated Indignation

2011-06-25T13:06:00.002+08:00

One of the perils of freelance writing is that by the time the editors (well-meaning, I'm sure) are done bending your words to their needs, you may no longer recognize what you wrote; you may not even wish to have your name attached to the transmogrified piece of crap (which, admittedly, may not have been so great in the first place), and to make things worse, you get paid peanuts for it.

Sigh. Although I try, cultivating a stance of gratitude -- for getting published, for bylines, for getting paid at all -- sometimes feels disgustingly close to martyrdom, which was never my cup of tea. Let them do what they want with my body and soul? No effing way. And yet, more often than not, I relent. I don't even know whether I can choose otherwise.

This hack is now accepting suggestions for a nom de guerre. This could be fun. And yes, this is war.

Bread of Life

2011-06-23T13:19:00.001+08:00

Home-baked bread fresh out of the oven never fails to arouse my maternal instincts. It takes all my self-control to keep from snatching up a warm loaf of bread, cradling it like a baby in my arms, resting my cheek against its delicious-smelling skin, and inhaling deeply. This never fails to disgust people who want to eat the bread. I want to first love the bread and then eat it. So I'm weird that way, but these moments of consummated food-love are a little bit of heaven on earth.

November Light in May

2011-05-28T19:19:00.001+08:00

"9.8.2031/12:30 pm/66℉ read the signboard at Chunzom.

Beep!!! The alarm on the gate rang as the bus passed by the laser lights."

So begins the short story Yellow Behind the Numbers, which is quite possibly the first ever piece of Bhutanese science fiction by Sippy Das. The story appears in the book November Light, an anthology of creative writing "produced by the 2010 cohort of students on the course English 202 module ('Creative Writing: Fiction and Non-Fiction') at the Royal Thimph College, Bhutan."

What is remarkable about this collection is that "English 202" is the first, and so far the only, university-level creative writing course in Bhutan. And so to read November Light is to look into the psyche of young Bhutanese minds that are discovering “the joys of creative expression – reading, writing, being read – as a way of making meaning,” as put by their young professor, Dr. Nitasha Kaul, a Kashmiri woman who has done extensive research on the history and politics of Bhutan. Her novel Residue was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize.

Reading November Light is also like tilting the camera at an odd angle and looking at a snapshot of Bhutan taken sideways. Typically, written pieces on Bhutan tend to gush about Gross National Happiness (with good reason), her natural beauty (also with good reason), and Buddhist spirituality (thus the GNH). Nitasha writes in her introduction about how these young authors have grown up in these so-called ‘exotic’ surroundings and instead turned their attention to themes that matter to them and that are part of their everyday lives: new media, love of country, romantic love, the first day of menstruation, archery, friendship, families, betrayal and personal memories.

Ugyen, one of the editors spoke about the creative writing class in Mountain Echoes. He joked that when the class began, they all wrote about love. Later on, they experimented in free form writing and they still wrote about love. Much later in the course, they learned “that there are many things in this world that we can write about.”

Sippy said with confidence, “Now I will never stop writing. Only if I die will I stop writing. And I will die if I can’t write anymore.”

Palden, another editor declared cheekily, “I am immortal. When I die, people will read my work… I hope!”

Ubbog, the young Cordillera writers group was very much on my mind throughout the session. I couldn’t help but draw the parallels between the late nights and hard work that they put into the first, handmade issue of the Ubbog literary journal, and what these Bhutanese students did to bring their work into November Light. I could very easily imagine any of the members of Ubbog playing the pivotal role of creative writing teacher for young people across the Cordilleras, much the same way Nitasha has done with English 202 in the Royal Thimphu College. I got carried away and began to imagine a flurry of emails and exchanges in creative letter writing between Ubbog, Nitasha, and the editors of November Light. It’s not entirely impossible. Who knows what might come of an encounter between the spring of youthful writing in the Philippine Cordilleras, and the Himalayan light of a young Bhutanese November?

A Taste of Home

2011-05-24T10:11:00.000+08:00

After lunch, three authors who have written extensively about food sat down together onstage to talk about food and their books on food.

The moderator was Mita Kapur who launched her book The F-Word in Lit Out Loud, the first Manila International Literary Festival held last year. Her literary agency Siyahi is the principal organizer of Mountain Echoes.

Kunzang Choden spoke of the food of Bumthang, Central Bhutan. In her book, Chili and Cheese: Food and Society in Bhutan, she combines the history and culture of Bhutan with traditional recipes and her own experience of growing up in Bumthang. She told of how, when she was a child, she would go into the blue pine forests with her family and friends where they would cut off the bark of the trees and eat the white, jelly-like sap just underneath the bark. She said it was sweet, like sugar.

Nowadays the government has prohibited collecting the sap because stripping the bark kills the trees so this "taste of home" remains simply a memory for Kunzang and a story for younger Bhutanese. Aside from memories, Kunzang also spoke of how different food used to come with seasons and with stories of the places they came from. She said that "as an old woman" (many in the room disagreed with her on her being "old"), she couldn't help but feel nostalgia for the days when you waited for summer to eat apples, or when eating a strip of dried meat in the winter "you could almost taste the sun."

Pushpesh Pant's position was that, "A taste of home is more than just cuisine. A taste of home is about a whole milieu," which, he said, includes memories of failed dishes because mother and father quarreled while mother was cooking, or memories of special dishes prepared with ingredients brought by cousins visiting from other regions in India. For him, however, when talking about food and a taste of home, "home" was not just one place and "taste" was not just about food. He spoke of an upbringing and a life that brought him to live and eat in many parts of India and the world and how all those places that certain ingredients came from became part of home when put together into one dish. He also said that for him taste is like a DNA we inherit from our families, but also it is about proscriptions, prescriptions, social class, sex, and rebellion.

Buddhist Peace Recipes and Hindu Soul Recipes, two cookbooks by Pushpesh Pant. Coming soon to Mt Cloud Bookshop.

Listening to these authors talk about food with such passion, I thought how lucky I am to come from a family and to be with a man for whom eating together is a simple yet important act of love. It makes the food we share taste better, no matter how ordinary it might be.

A Room in Your Heart

2011-05-23T21:16:00.000+08:00

When we were in Paro I picked up a book in the hotel lobby to read in our room.

In the introduction, Kunzang Choden wrote:

"In the Bhutanese tradition, stories, fables, and legends are not told but are unraveled (shigai in Bumthangka) and released (tangshi in Dzongkha)... It means that storytelling is a continuous process (unraveling) and to be released stories must be alive and vibrant."

The folktales of Bhutan, like folktales from anywhere in the world, are full of mischief, foolishness, wisdom, kindness, magic, spirits, animals, and village folk. I enjoyed reading the stories in Kunzang Choden's collection and was excited to see that she would be launching two children's books at the Mountain Echoes Literary Festival. I fervently hoped that I would be able to meet her and bring back some of her books for Mt Cloud Bookshop.

On the first day of the festival, we entered the venue which was almost packed and looked around for seats. A Bhutanese woman offered Nanay a seat next to hers and she introduced herself with a warm smile, "I'm Kunzang."

None other than the author of Folktales of Bhutan! When we told her about how we found her book and our wish to meet her she laughed and said, "This is the way it was meant to be." Not "It was meant to be," but "This is the way it was meant to be." For some reason I can't quite put my finger on, much less explain, the two phrases are very different.

So anyway, she was the first friend we made at the lit fest. When she read her new story books to the audience of young and old, I got goosebumps of happiness. Being read to is such a pleasure.

In this book, Kunzang weaves a heartwarming story around the Bhutanese saying,

"There will always be room in your home, as long as there is room in your heart."

Aunty Mouse showers kindness on a village orphan and a rich girl decides she should get her dues too. And she does.

The fact that Kunzang was reading stories from the world of Bhutan, a world not known to many people, was no barrier to enjoying and understanding the stories.

Anita Roy, editor for Young Zubaan books and publisher of Kunzang's new books, pointed out that:

"The books that really travel are the ones that have a sense of place; books that invite you in and make you feel, 'Yes I can step into that world'."

Tiger Tales

2011-05-23T00:00:00.003+08:00

I have never heard someone speak about any living creature with as much passion as Valmik Thapar when he speaks about tigers. You can see for yourself below. Listening to him at the Mountain Echoes Literary Festival I got the feeling that he could be speaking about something as mundane as plastic forks and he still would have held his audience in rapt attention.

The full show can be seen here. The host, Sunil Sethi, was also present at the literary festival. His literary tv show, Just Books, is a great success in India. He recently launched a book on the tv interviews he has had with well known authors.

Valmik Thapar first saw a tiger in the wild in Ranthambore, "where tigers live in the ruins of ancient palaces." Since then he has dedicated his life to the conservation of the tiger in India. He stated earnestly (and angrily) that while Bhutan has Gross National Happiness India is experiencing the effects of Gross National Horrors, especially in terms of the decline of forests and the slaughter of wildlife, thanks to the work of "the buffoons in power." Sounds familiar.

He praised Bhutan for still having 70% of its forest cover. The Constitution of Bhutan states that at least 60% of the land should remain under forest cover. The Philippines has, what? 10%? Maybe less?

When a young Bhutanese man in the audience asked him what Bhutan should do to protect the tigers that live in their forests, Valmik said, "Keep your wildlife invisible."

As the discussion became more and more impassioned, Valmik had to qualify his stance:

"Human rights activists hate me. They think I hate people. I love people! I originally graduated from sociology!"

Well. I graduated from anthropology and I love tigers. In my childhood I used to fantasize about befriending tigers and walking with them through the jungle. Once I touched a tiger in a park in Thailand. It was stunningly beautiful in a very intimidating way, even if it was in chains. I would love to see a healthy tiger in the wild some day.

Myth and Memory

2011-05-22T01:03:00.001+08:00

In the second panel of the Mountain Echoes Literary Festival here in Thimphu, Devdutt Pattanaik and Tshering Tashi discussed how myth and belief continue to be an important part of our so-called modern (post-modern or postmodern, if you prefer) lives.

Devdutt Pattanaik is the Chief Belief Officer of the Future Group. Yes, believe me, that's his title. He has written several books on Indian mythology, including an illustrated retelling of the Mahabharata. spoke of the differences between believing you have only one life to live, and believing that this is just one of many lives you have lived and will live. "When you believe in rebirth, you don't have a sense of urgency. Things will happen... eventually."

Tshering Tashi writes for the Bhutanese, government-owned, English newspaper, Kuensel and is the co-author of Bold Bhutan Beckons. He spoke of how myths and magic are not only part of Bhutan's history, but also of everyday life.

Treasures of the Thunder Dragon

2011-05-22T00:19:00.003+08:00

Her Majesty, the Queen Mother, Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck was the first speaker of the 2011 Mountain Echoes Literary Festival. Her session was held this morning, in conversation with the Indian ambassador to Bhutan, Pavan Varma, himself a writer.

He began by asking her why she undertook a 17-day journey across Bhutan on foot, which she later wrote about in Treasures of the Thunder Dragon, her second book. She replied by explaining that her children had left to study abroad when she was in her early 40's(!) and so she had a lot of time on her hands.

"I thought it was necessary -- very necessary -- to experience the everyday life of the communities."

So she carried her own load of personal belongings and accompanied by a small party of companions, she set off on this journey. She decided that they would not bring any tents because they would seek shelter with the people wherever they found themselves. Once, she said, they sheltered under a tree. Each day she walked for 8 to 10 hours.

"I couldn't be away from My Majesty for too long so I had to walk far and very fast."

Her Majesty was struck by the daily hardships endured by her people, but also by the sense of contentment that they had. To this the ambassador remarked:

"It is said that virtue is a lack of opportunity. Contentment too is a lack of opportunity."

He asked Her Majesty to speak her thoughts on contentment, Gross National Happiness, and the rapid changes taking place in Bhutan. The ambassador's mobile phone rang! He was very embarrassed and apologized to the Queen Mother as he fumbled for his phone in his pocket.

"Is it important?" she asked sincerely with a smile.

"Change is the only thing that is permanent," she said, in response to Pavan Varna's remarks on globalization and Bhutan. "We have to take care that the young people are mindful of their being Bhutanese. They have to take the best of the future, but they have to keep their identity. Striking a balance will be difficult. The middle way would be best."

Pavan Varna asked, "Are the Bhutanese ready?"

Her Majesty replied, beaming, "Yes! Because we love ourselves and we love our land."

She continued, "The whole world is looking to Bhutan because of the precept of Gross National Happiness given to us by our great king [the Fourth King], the handsomest king in the world -- until now! But we have to be careful because if it's over-marketed, people are going to be disappointed."

She spoke a little about journeys, finding one's self, also conquering one's self, and transformation. Her parting words for the small audience were, "If we conquer our selves, we conquer the world."

Not once during her time in the conference were there any cordons, security checks, or protocols. Only one. When she entered the room, we all rose to our feet. When she left the stage to sit in the audience on a chair covered in silks especially for her, we all stood up. Both times she graciously smiled and asked everybody to take their seats with a gesture of her hands, a small nod, and one word, "Please."

Church

2011-04-24T22:41:00.004+08:00

When most people go to worship or meditate in the churches, mosques, temples, or zendos of their choice in order to address their God in heaven or the God within, I get on my bicycle and venture out on a long ride with a circle of loved and trusted friends.

Good friends, good laughs, beautiful Yabnong and Ugo trails, great ride.

It may seem like we're having too much fun swooping down a heavenly single track trail; we may appear to be overly obsessed with proving a macho point by pedaling hard up a steep climb; or, as often happens, we come across as just plain idiotic and irreverent when we're clowning around during rest stops.

But when we cycle far enough away from our daily lives I believe we are gifted, in one moment of pedaling, with a flash of oneness with the world at large. I feel completely present in one place, in that time, in my body, in that one revolution of the pedals. When that happens, I remember how small I am in the grand scheme of things.

A dot on two wheels in life's tiny deaths and great rebirths.

Bicycling through the mountains is like putting oneself in the great palm of God's hand.

Yup. Even when our aspirations are as base as an ice cold beer at the end of the trail.

Beating the Blues

2011-03-21T12:09:00.001+08:00

I have a five-step plan for beating the blues out of this drab Monday that is stretched out before me like an old, dusty, stinky, worn-out carpet.

Step 1. Coffee
Step 2. Writing.
Step 3. Hot shower.
Step 4. Get the errands out of the way. (Sigh. I hate this part, but I must.)
Step 5. Go and be alone with a book somewhere I won't have to talk to anybody. Today's pick is Nomad's Hotel by Cees Nooteboom, who writes: "A way is away." Indeed.

Now I shall get on with Step 3 and warily watch life get in the way of my plans.

Lit Out Loud

2010-11-21T11:07:00.001+08:00

We only got to attend the last day of Lit Out Loud, the Manila International Literary Festival. I give you my favorite sound bites from a fine day of being literally starstruck!

"Fame is a mask that eats the face behind it." -- Vikas Swarup, author of Q&A, said this to a fawning fan who asked him what it was like to be famous. Tarush!

"Let's mess about in the kitchen. We'll come up with something." -- spoken by Mita Kapur, author of the newly published F-Word, which is about -- you guessed it: Food.

"Writing from Asia is very, very HOT," said David Parker, chairman of the board of the Man Asian Literary Prize.

Got that? We are HOT.

"Do what you want to" -- I want to bike.

2010-11-17T21:45:00.004+08:00

Monday Cruising

2010-11-15T18:12:00.013+08:00

Mountain biking isn't always about getting a workout, biting through technical trail sections, ripping down gnarly slopes, upping the ante, and getting that unrivaled adrenaline rush. (Although most of the time it is!) Sometimes, the pleasures of mountain biking are as uncomplicated as cycling slowly through Baguio's quiet, unpolluted streets lined with old and empty houses, finding your way to a roadside carinderia that serves delicious Malaysian dishes at just a little more than carinderia prices, and stopping for a hearty lunch. And then you cycle -- still full and slow -- to the nearest trail and wend your way through the roots, mud, and rocks like you have all the time in the world to pedal and appreciate the way the afternoon light is wafting through the trees and throwing shafts of gold and dappled shadows on everything.

Yup, you got it folks, this is yet another unabashed declaration of my love for saddle time.

Sagada Loves

2010-11-05T21:54:00.001+08:00

1. Good friends, warm hugs, hearty laughter.

2. Hearty meals.

3. Fresh air.

4. Biting cold.

5. Mountains, mountains, mountains.

6. Elders.

7. Pinikpikan with tapuy.

8. The comfort of ritual.

9. Aged etag.

10. Beautiful pottery.

11. Croissants and sour dough bread.

12. The best-tasting ripe tomatoes ever.

13. Wild mushrooms.

14. Wild berries.

15. Wild rides.

So Proud of Mt Cloud!

2010-10-17T23:24:00.000+08:00

"The first-timer may find the space narrow, but it is everything an ideal bookstore should be: glass windows that allow plenty of light in, quiet, no crowds (except on opening day), books not wrapped in plastic so they can be readily perused."

Thank you, Brookside Baby, for the wonderful article. Some day I'm going to go visit La Terrasse. And I just hope that Julie's place will always have enough buchi for me, in spite of the deluge of new customers that will surely make their way to the bakery!

The blues. They come and go but this song is forever.

2010-10-14T16:58:00.002+08:00

"Anyone's who's ever had a dream, anyone who's ever played a part, anyone who's ever been lonely, and anyone who's ever split apart..."

Sweet Jane, Cowboy Junkies cover.

Conquered

2010-10-14T13:44:00.003+08:00

Why do people insist on making claims to having conquered this or that mountain?

When you get out there, the most you can claim to conquer are your own limitations and fears. You are nothing to the mountain.

Go conquer your ego instead. Try it. It's tougher than taking a hike or a bike.

Mondo Marcos

2010-10-12T16:22:00.008+08:00

Last week Mt Cloud Bookshop was honored with a visit from Mrs. Cecile Afable, doyenne of local media and one of the notorious yet well-loved Three Witches of Baguio.

She recounted how, in the mid-sixties she opened the Ato Bookshop and Art Gallery on the ground floor of Insular Life Building, on Session Road. The Ato had a wide collection of Filipiniana. There was a weaving loom to one side and two weavers would come in and do their work in the shop. The Ato also carried prison art. She wrote in the Mt Cloud guestbook: "The books were confiscated by the soldiers of Marcos so we closed..."

Mabuhay kayo, Auntie Cecile!

Tomorrow, Oct. 13, at 6PM, Mt Cloud Bookshop is proud to be hosting the book launching of MONDO MARCOS: Writings on Martial Law and Marcos Babies/Mga Panulat sa Batas Militar at ng Marcos Babies, edited by Frank Cimatu and Roland Tolentino. With the presence of Frank Cimatu and a number of the authors who contributed poetry and prose to the English and Filipino volumes, this is bound to be another unforgettable evening in the shop... Abangan!

Berm, baby, berm!

2010-10-04T10:57:00.000+08:00

We has a new playground! Yesssss!

Amateur berm attack.

Pro berm attack.

My guardian demonyos get high!

Racing to get down before the rain comes in from the neighboring mountain.

My Superman after a day in the playground. Even if we've been together for years, I still think he's so handsome!

Another view on Carlos' coup de theatre

2010-10-03T18:39:00.000+08:00

From Karlo Altomonte:

"... some of those inside the Manila Cathedral that day were simply to pray, get closer to God. Perhaps one or two were praying for forgiveness, for the soul of a departed loved one, for salvation. Not everyone inside that church that day were either pro or anti-RH bill, some of them perhaps don’t care about it at all, so I will play the party pooper and stand by my opinion that while the cause is a very worthy one, there are other ways."

Damaso!

2010-10-01T13:44:00.002+08:00

I just love firebrands who will stick their necks out for what they believe in, and who do it with style and a large dose of imagination too. Some people talk too much but do nothing, while others simply can't see past their own noses. I, for one, am obsessed with this 2-week old zit on my nose that just refuses to shrivel up and die.

In his advocacy for reproductive health in the Philippines, a country held hostage in the dark ages by the Church, Carlos Celdran takes things a big step further and says it like it is.

Out of the Blue

2010-10-01T13:25:00.004+08:00

This morning at a meeting in Star Cafe on post-calamity early recovery with a Benguet municipal mayor, a UNDP documentation and community journalism maven, and some people who expertly flow back and forth across the bounds of governance and civil society, somebody passed me a book of love poems.

Feigning absorption in the discussion on disaster risk reduction I held the book under the table and opened it to a random page.

Wrestling

Our oneness is the wrestlers', fierce and close,
   Thrusting and thrust;
One life in dual effort for one prize, --
   We fight, and must;
For soul with soul does battle evermore
   Till love be trust.

Our distance is love's severance; sense divides,
   Each is but each;
Never the very hidden spirit of thee
   My life doth reach;
Twain! since love athwart the gulf that needs
   Kisses and speech.

Ah! wrestle closelier! we draw nearer so
   Than any bliss
Can bring twain souls who would be whole and one,
   Too near to kiss:
To be one thought, one voice before we die, --
   Wrestle for this.

   -- Louisa S. Bevington (1845 - ?)

With one ear still tuned in to the meeting, I thought to myself, Yup, that's the essence of community work right there. Love. And Wrestling.

It's been a year since Ketsana/Ondoy and Parma/Pepeng. Where are we at now?

In the works!

2010-07-24T13:24:00.007+08:00

mt cloud bookshop
(click here! click here!)

Dream construction ongoing. Soon to come true!

(Photos by Marta Lovina. Website construction by Jason Herbolario.)

Even my widgets are tuned in to my movements

2010-07-23T13:25:00.004+08:00

It's no coincidence this turned up on my AnthroDaily widget. Obviously, the spirit of Margaret Mead is with me and knows where I'm headed.

(Image from the Asian Ethnographic Collection, Division of Anthropology, at the American Museum of Natural History)

What not biking feels like

2010-07-21T21:00:00.004+08:00

Every month for about a week or ten days I'm prevented from biking by my female biological... erhm, functions. I used to subscribe to the point of view that having your period shouldn't stop you from doing whatever it is you want but as I've added years to my as yet relatively short life, I've found that it gets harder and harder to push my physical limits when my body's already working overtime dealing with hormones and blood and guts and all that naturally inevitable stuff.

Given that pre-menstrual stress and post-menstrual stress are bad enough for us girls and the people around us, can you imagine what it's like for me and the people who must bear with me, not being able to bike only because I have my period? And to have the deprivation compounded by hormonal mood swings? It makes me grumpier than I already am. Oscar the effing Grouch has nothing on me when I'm ride-deprived.

It's like the third day after you've quit smoking, when the initial feeling of triumph has faded and all you want is your little nicotine fix.

It's like fasting sans spiritual enlightenment. Flying down a bumpy, muddy, rocky, mountain road and being one with your bicycle, the universe, and everything IS spiritual enlightenment, dammit.

It's dark and heavy, like doom and gloom.

It's worse, far worse, than a mosquito bite in that one spot on your back that you can't reach.

It feels oppressive and leads to paranoid imaginings that the whole world is conspiring to keep you off your bicycle with work, the weather, and genetics.

Not biking for days on end simply makes me miserable.

To all my sisters of the knobby wheel out there, if your body can hack riding (or running, or swimming, or rock climbing, or whatever sport gives you happiness) even when you've got your period, DO IT! Don't let a little blood (or a bunch of menstrual myths) stop you.

Star Cafe's Litson Rice

2010-07-20T22:41:00.000+08:00

Stellar, to say the least.

Bicycle Myth-breaker: Women don't know what bicycle-love is.

2010-07-20T22:30:00.001+08:00

(Photo by Baguio Biker Girl Liza Maraan, Thanks, Liza!)

At long last, we got an all-girls' bike ride going in Baguio! Wheee! This has been my dream for YEARS! We started out in a group of four and struck out for Shilan, which is one of my most-favorite riding routes for its variety of terrain and because it's one of the easiest, least threatening places to hone one's off-road riding skills. Soon there will be more and more women with knobby wheels playing dirty on our mountain roads and trails. Mwahahahaaa! Go grrrls! No doubt the biker boys will be pleased to see more girls out there, but if these strong women were to be any more fond of their bicycles than they already are, I think some men might be worried.

Downhill Race Virgin No More

2010-07-08T16:24:00.093+08:00

I don't consider myself a biker that races. If I remember correctly I've only ever joined 2 mountain bike races in this life, and my third mtb race was also my first downhill race, thanks to the needling and precise coaching of my brothers Behind Bars (at Aky's bikeshop). It all began with an 'innocent' visit to the tracks skillfully built by Team ULAW in Cruz, La Trinidad. For the boys this was going to be the first of a series of practice visits prior to The Flow DH Party on July 3, 2010. For me, it was just going to be play...

"FLOW" is the purrfect word to describe the tracks at Cruz... (If you see these, "...", it means words have failed me and I've floated off into a biking reverie...). Lovely smooth berms, big jumps (which I skipped of course), tight switchbacks... enough roots to shake you up a bit, no rocky threats, one tricky off-camber slope that was as slippery as a wet bar of soap, and a wonderful wonderful wonderful 2-foot drop to flat near the finish, all on a hill blanketed by pine trees, ferns, runo, and grass... My Manong John Frank calls this place sacred spot and you can sense why when the fog rolls in, or when the wind blows, or even when the rain comes at you in sheets at the top of the hill. Sigh... I want to go back there some day.

Some of my guardian demonyos on the hill in Cruz.
The others are lurking somewhere in the fog soup.

I love my guardian demonyos to bits!

I had no illusions about completing the track, much less joining the race, but one taste of a small slice of the tracks and I was hooked... And my guardian demonyos, those bad influences that started it all, kept upping the ante by talking me through the most technical bits in great detail. They described where my tires might skid a bit, how I should react to that (ignore), what position my feet should be in (pedals even on the berms, or right foot up on the off-camber turn), what line to follow (down to the precise points my front tire should run over), where to look (ahead, obviously), which way to lean, when to pedal, whether to go faster or slower, don't forget elbows out, and they stood right by the tracks every attempt I made, which made me feel really secure... and WOW the way we all ROARED and laughed and whooped it up when I passed another section! Wheeeeee! That kind of natural high is the best ever... I don't think I learned as much about technical riding skills in my 18 years of mountain biking as I did the three days I went to Cruz with the boys and I will be forever grateful for that.

On race day during practice I had a bad spill that knocked the air out of me on the off-camber slope. I hate that feeling of not being able to breathe. I'm not sure how long it lasted but it was scary enough that I hesitated and jumped off my bike the next time I approached the treacherous turn. I didn't get to try doing a complete run until my first race run so I was shocked at how tired I was before I was even halfway through the track. I had to stop somewhere after the switchbacks to catch my breath and I dismounted and walked down the off-camber slope and had to step aside to let a speeding biker get past me. It took me 6 minutes and 12 seconds -- thrice as much as the best of them hahaha! I was the slowest biker, but I was also the happiest, I think!

So that was my first and maybe, just maybe, not my last downhill race experience.

The tango is hot. So is football.

2010-05-27T21:03:00.000+08:00

Pop ethnography of Dutch PhD "Promoties" 2

2010-05-17T03:48:00.001+08:00

POSTSCRIPT to Pop Ethnography of Dutch PhD Promoties 1:

According to one of my more knowledgeable and senior informants, in the past the paranimfs really did go to defenses armed, to protect the promovendus from attacks from outraged professors. This was way back in the 17th century, when "science was very important" and a defense could last for days. My over-active imagination went into overdrive: perhaps some of these 17th century defenses ended in duels! But that's pure speculation and not based on any anecdotal -- much less empirical, evidence. It was very possible for a defendant/promovendus to black out from exhaustion and the paranimf was then allowed to continue to defend the thesis on behalf of the out-cold promovendus. (As expected, the younger members of this society are no longer aware of the origins of certain elements of the ritual. For them, these elements have become, simply, "The way it has always been done.")

Pop ethnography of Dutch PhD "Promoties" 1

2010-05-13T03:59:00.003+08:00

As an anthrogeek I've decided to approach next week's "promotie" (an esoteric dissertation defense ritual practiced in academic circles in the Netherlands) as participant-observation taken to the extreme and to do some research prior to the event.

Apparently, a promovendus (one who would be promoted), is supposed to have two paranimfs. What are paranimfs? I googled paranimfs and found only Dutch information, the most accessible being Wikipedia of course. (Disclaimer: I know. Wikipedia is not the most reliable of sources of information.) I copy-pasted the whole text on paranimfs into babelfish and the translation that came up is priceless so here it is verbatim: (Disclaimer: I know. Yahoo Babelfish is not the best tool for language translation, but the babelfish on the other hand... Oh never mind.)

Image source: Leiden University

The promovendus is generally accompanied by two paratrooper nymphs. The original meaning of paratrooper nymph is bride nobleman or bride little girl. In the past to graduate or goes up also was seen as closing a marriage with the university, therefore possible there the declaration of the use lies take along paratrooper nymphs at promotion. Furthermore it is a typical Dutch tradition. Paratrooper nymphs have nowadays especially a ceremonial function, although they are not meant initially to defend the test book in the case the promovendus here itself able is (for example by an accident or sickness), or when the promovendus wants keep back-loop-home for answering a question. Hundreds of years suffered, then academic disputations at a promotion still once high savages blaze up and the minds awfully hot could touch, paratrooper nymphs served as lijfelijke guards. It was very judicious let accompany you as a promovendus by a pair potige guys. In practice current academic, where it reaches but seldom a hand, is the paratrooper nymph frequently a family member, friend (in) or a studiegenoot of the promovendus, and has not inevitably knowledge of matter of the subject of the test book. It therefore an honorary job is, such as testifying at a marriage. One is, however, considered go in the same formal style dressed as the promovendus.

So I'm getting married. To the University. And I'll be assisted by two paratrooper nymph bridesmaids. Whoa.

When, did you say?

2010-04-24T11:47:00.002+08:00

"You can build a way of life on postponement."

-- Robert Corrimer,
The Moustache.

Reposting because I need to be reminded

2010-04-18T14:52:00.001+08:00

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

by MARY OLIVER

Tough Years

How many times have you said to yourself
or thought out loud,
It's been a tough year?

Tis not the years that are hard on us, my love.
For the years themselves are weathered
devotees; they are seasons come around

again and again only to see
that nothing was learned
and that we love them

less and less.
One would have to be tough indeed
to be a year.

by PADMAPANI L. PEREZ

Random Diss Excerpt #15

2010-04-17T17:26:00.003+08:00

Image credit: http://journalism.missouri.edu/alumni/larre-johnson-71.html

Yes, I have a question.
Could I have some bacon with that please?

For Mothers and Daughters

2010-03-20T22:29:00.002+08:00

The Ride

2010-03-15T23:30:00.000+08:00

Oh wow

(: for several reasons :)

Baguio Green Ride coming soon! Watch this space for details.

Haiiiyaaaaaah!

2010-03-15T23:17:00.003+08:00

This feels familiar. Eep.

Yo La Tengo on La Blogotheque

2010-03-15T23:14:00.001+08:00

"... I just hope and pray that I'll find a way to say, Can I dance with you?..."

Yo La tengo - A Take Away Show - Part 1 from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

Patricia Evangelista Does it Again

2010-03-15T20:42:00.002+08:00

THIS IS A CONDOM AD

"If an individual chooses to abstain, chooses to have sex before marriage, chooses to be promiscuous, chooses not to have children when married, chooses natural methods, chooses to have threesomes at high noon with a jumbo pack of condoms and a hot pink leather, he/she has that right. It’s called a democracy. Judge him/her for it, if you will, but the government cannot. A ban on sexual intercourse has yet to be included in the Constitution."

The rest of the piece is brilliant too.

My Breasts...

2010-03-08T10:22:00.001+08:00

... are flat. They barely fill the bikinis I like to wear. And if you came to this post hoping to find something titillating, you are about to be disappointed further. Another fact about me and my breasts is that I try, as much as possible, to keep them free from bra-bondage. Given that there's nothing much there needing support, I don't really see the point.

I wonder about our skewed notions of immodesty. Is going au naturel beneath the shirt and not wearing a bra more immodest than faking larger breast size and forcing the cleavage issue with underwiring and padded bras? (Unfortunately, the only kind of bra you can find in this country that doesn't have painful underwiring or extra padding is the trainer or the sports bra. What does that tell you?) This question of im/modesty reminds me of the legendary Laurie Anderson's Smoke Rings, in which she asks, Que es mas macho? Pineapple o knife?... Que es mas macho? Lightbulb o schoolbus?... Que es mas macho? Iceberg or volcano? Anyway, you catch my drift.

I grew up in a home where tales of bra-burning were told around the dinner table. As a toddler I played at the feet of fierce women, imbibing the lessons they had learned about enjoying womanly freedom. Even though I could not yet fully understand their meaning, I could tell how important a story was by the way my mother's eyes shone, or the way my titas' sentences were punctuated with wild laughter

My great grandmother was a Filipina suffragist. I believe that to a certain extent the liberties I enjoy today are thanks to her. No matter that the kind of feminism she advocated stemmed directly from a Western conception of women's equality, I am proud of how she blazed a trail for Filipina women in more ways than just the campaign, and how she lived her life as a mother and a widow after World War II. The home of my childhood was built by her in 1963.

However, I never was and never will be comfortable in a terno and butterfly sleeves, so I'm not sure that my lola-sa-tuhod would approve of my rejection of the bra and many of the feminine conventions of her time. So I look, too, for audacious grandmothers and aunties, amongst the women of the Cordilleras who bared their breasts in protest against the military development complex. I had heard their stories before and I am eternally grateful to Melisa Casumbal-Salazar for bringing these stories back into my life through her ongoing research on corporeal protest, gender, the body, and concepts of the political in the Cordillera.

Theirs are stories of human barricades with mothers and grandmothers at the front line, baring their breasts and removing their tapis to protect their homeland, taunting engineers and militiamen representing mining companies and dams, saying, "Before you mine, mine me." Or, "See where you came from." This act is a shaming and a curse on the men for it brings ill consequences to the gazer. It is taboo for a man to gaze at a woman of his mother's age. Melisa met and interviewed these women and they repeatedly told her that "women can use their mouths as spears," and that all they could fight with was their bodies.

They said: "We are life. We give life."

To me, this too is the most important thing about my breasts -- not their size, nor what containers I choose to keep them in. I am proud that with them I have breastfed a wondergirl who is now fast becoming her own wonderwoman -- and what a beautiful person she is!

For the most part however, I don't give a boob about cup-size.

OK GO

2010-03-07T00:27:00.001+08:00

I know this is going to seem silly but things like this fill me with inexplicable happiness -- which is the simplest and bestest kind of happiness there is.

Baguio Calligraphy Book Launching

2010-03-01T08:25:00.004+08:00

A collection of poetry and fiction from the Cordillera's premier city.

Please join us for the book launching on March 7, 2010, at 4PM in National Bookstore, SM City, Baguio. There will be readings, music, merienda, and laughter.

The anthology, a project of the Baguio Writers Group, is edited by Francis C. Macansantos and Luchie B. Maranan with an introduction by Cirilo F. Bautista. It is published by Anvil Publishing Inc.

The contributing writers are: Tita Lacambra Ayala, Janice Bagawi, Desiree Caluza, Jennifer Patricia A. Carino, Frank Cimatu, Jhoanna Lyn Cruz, Merci Javier Dulawan, Ralph Semino Galan, Rommel de Guzman, Luisa A. Igloria, Edgar B. Maranan, Babeth Lolarga, Junley Lazaga, Monica Macansantos, Priscilla Supnet Macansantos, Baboo Mondonedo, Chinee Palatino, Corazon Patricio, Padmapani L. Perez, Solana Perez, Rachel Pitlongay, Scott Magkachi Saboy and Roger "Rishab" Tibon.

The book is P375 and will be sold at 10% less during the launch.

Sab-atan II's Litson Rice

2010-03-01T08:24:00.000+08:00

A litson rice review with the discerning Dawgs.

Walt Whitman and Umberto Fiori Agree

2010-02-27T14:20:00.001+08:00

Walt Whitman wrote:

I AM THE POET

I am the poet of reality
I say the earth is not an echo
Nor man an apparition;
But that all the things seen are real,
The witness and albic dawn of things equally real
I have split the earth and the hard coal and rocks and the solid bed of the sea
And went down to reconnoitre there a long time,
And bring back a report,
And I understand that those are positive and dense every one
And that what thhey seem to the child they are
[And that the world is not joke,
Nor any part of it a sham].

(A poem Whitman didn't complete. Taken from Ceslaw Milosz's anthology, A Book of Luminous Things)

Umberto Fiori wrote:

CHIN

If someone in the street
shouts at me "What was that you said?".
stops the motorbike, gets off, takes a run at me,
grabs me by the collar --
it means that words
when somebody says them
don't just drop into the void:
somewhere, somebody hears them.

And people see me: I'm not just stared through.
I'm not alone, if my head-butts
find a chin. If the face is sore
and the teeth have a taste of blood
then it's true: there is a place
where we all are present.

And that is where every second
I wait, expecting you.

(trans. Alistair Elliot, in Oxford Poetry, Summer Issue, 1999)

Nightswimming

2010-02-25T22:30:00.000+08:00

John Frank Sabado: Ecowarrior

2010-02-23T12:59:00.010+08:00

Standing before the larger-than-life, hyper-detailed work of John Frank Sabado, one cannot help but wonder: Where lies the source of Sabado’s phantasmagoric imagery? The answer throbs quietly in the loving arms of this earth. The roots of Sabado’s work lie in the simple story of a boy growing up in a forest that shrank as the boy’s world expanded.

Sabado was born into the lifeworld of the Lepanto logging concession in Mankayan, Benguet. There his Ilocano parents worked to support and educate their children. As a boy he spent his days going to the river, fetching water, catching eels, hunting for mushrooms, gathering firewood. To him these chores were not work. They were no different than the mock wars that he and his playmates would wage in the forest. There were many dangers lying in wait for adventurous little boys living in a logging concession but no harm ever befell Sabado and his friends. This was deep play in the arms of Nature, whom Sabado describes with a wide grin as "the best nanny ever."

If he wasn’t playing in the forest or by the river with his friends, Sabado could be found among the grownups. There was one mambunong, or ritual priestess, Lola Aganis, who was particularly fond of him. She would take him under her wing at the cañaos or ritual celebrations, and often passed by his house to leave sweet potatoes just for him. To this day, Sabado misses her joyful smile and being enveloped in her embrace. He remembers the scent of burning pine wood and smoke from the hearth that lingered on her skin. Through the elders and his playmates, Sabado learned how to speak Kankana-ey and absorbed the Kankana-ey way of life.

This idyllic existence ended when he left to attend high school in Baguio City. Whenever he returned for visits in the summer holidays he saw how Mankayan was being transformed irrevocably. The realization struck him forcefully: the forest he loved was being steadily destroyed.

Sabado’s experience of the transformation of Mankayan is a microcosm of the history of the Philippine Cordilleran environment – indeed, it is roughly the history of the world. For centuries humans have tilled and toiled on this earth for the well-being of our societies and, in the recent history of our species, to feed the free market's insatiable appetite for economic gain. But in the visions of Sabado, this quest for wealth visits itself upon the earth as torture.

"Mother Nature is crying... But we can no longer return to the way things were. We can no longer go back to square one. A lot more will have to be sacrificed before healing can take place. The solution will be extreme, frightening. Imagine the peak of modernization exploding... I'm not rejecting modernization. We're just not using it the right way. We're losing the old ways. They're no longer embedded in our hearts. But this is it. This is our culture now... The aftermath, the healing, will take centuries. The least we can do is to begin an eco-revival so we can hold the destruction at bay for a little bit longer. It will help somehow... I want to be radical for Mother Nature."

In his late teenage years, Sabado stopped school and would disappear for weeks at a time into a cave in the hills above the La Trinidad valley. He called this cave his Sacred Place. He would bring food, books, paper, pens, and candles that he lit on a natural rock altar inside the cave. For him this was a period of self-discovery. Through sketching, writing notes, and keeping his solitude he searched deeply for himself and for his purpose. New routes and ideas opened up to him through his fellow artists and mentors and in his serendipitous encounters with Escher and Dali in books and magazines. In the precision and symmetry of Sabado’s work are shades of their influence as well as evidence of the artist’s own deep awareness of Nature’s sacred geometry.

Through the painstaking work that goes into each of his paintings, Sabado says he searches for a part of him that is still missing. He considers art -- indeed, the act of making art -- as the tool that continually shapes him into the person he is becoming. The process has been and will continue to be a long one. Sometimes Sabado crosses over into a space where no one can reach him. His peers have said that when this happens, it’s as though the John Frank they know is not there and in his place is some one – or some thing – forceful and hostile. When this happens he looks on the world with a hard glint in his eye. Sometimes he retreats into his work and out of a shame he says he inflicts upon himself, he will not see anyone or speak to anyone until he is satisfied with his painting.

In his dreams, Sabado can speak and understand all the languages of the Philippine Cordillera. He converses with the souls of the ancestors. Even Lola Aganis is there, still watching over him and teaching him things. In his waking hours he paints the messages and visions they give to him within the small available spaces of his home. His ability to turn out pieces that are larger than life from such a small working space must have some connection to the days he spent in the Sacred Place and expanded his spiritual horizons from within its womb.

The notes and drawings he made and the dreams he dreamt in the Sacred Place are only just beginning to appear in his new work. In one of his recurring dreams, Sabado is walking, following an Ecowarrior, a powerful being whose body incorporates cultural elements from all over the Philippine Cordillera, signifying for Sabado a need for unity among peoples. The mind of the Ecowarrior is speaking in the mind of Sabado. Sabado listens intently. They walk in silence like this for a long time and then the Ecowarrior suddenly disappears. Sabado searches for the warrior but he is nowhere to be seen. He looks down at his own body and realizes that he has become the Ecowarrior, wearing a gas mask – the universal symbol of our times for the threat of poison in the air.

Sabado calls on us to awaken the Ecowarriors within our selves. Now is the time to reclaim and harness the power of our homegrown cultures, to fight against the poisoning of Mother Nature, and to protect the well-being of humans on this one and only earth.

Happy New Year!

2010-02-14T07:17:00.001+08:00

Santiago Bose Remix

2010-02-12T14:44:00.006+08:00

Christ the Locksmith's Lament

When a key is lost
you come to me

for I can pick any lock,
open even the chambers of your heart.

But once I throw the doors wide
you slam them shut again,

bolt them quickly from the inside
with heavy beams.

I am left on the outside listening
to the echoes of closed entries,

knowing you believe I cannot be trusted
not to enter unbidden.

© Padmapani L. Perez, 2010

THE EXHIBIT RUNS UNTIL MARCH 31, 2010. Read all about it at here, at Snippets from the Manila Art Scene, and here, in Ystyle.

Ayuyang's Litson Rice

2010-02-11T22:43:00.004+08:00

How does the lechon rice at Ayuyang Bar and Feliz Restaurant rate on the two seestars' and Fritson's snout system?

Bored on the 4th of July til 15th of March

2010-02-11T12:31:00.001+08:00

(Un)Made by Walking
(wrote this for the catalogue of Kaw's Bored on the 4th of July one man show
in the Ateneo Art Gallery)

Kawayan de Guia arrived at the Omi International Arts Center in Ghent, New York spent from the journey from the Philippines, out of sync and empty-handed. The hosts at Omi drove him to Houston, the closest town from the Arts Center, to buy some materials for the work he would be doing as one of 30 artists from all over the world participating in a three week residency. They took him to Walmart.

Within five minutes of being in Walmart Kawayan was assailed by a wave of panic. In that inexplicable moment of terror, Kawayan decided that he should return to Walmart at his own pace, and on his own terms, to understand the way he felt about being there. On America’s Independence Day (Kawayan calls it, “America’s day to shine”) he set out at dawn and walked alone for six hours across 30 kilometers of Route 66 through a landscape he describes as, “Eerily empty. Forgotten.” On this walk, he met only one person, who spoke to him from his car. Nobody was walking, or cycling. Every one was contained within cars, GM trucks, their houses, their buildings, and looked out at the world from inside those interiors. Bored on the Fourth of July is the outcome of that walk.

For Kawayan, walking is a way of ingesting the world and digesting that which cannot yet be fully known. For him, it is only at the end of the walk that one comes to realize in one’s being the residue of the sensations gathered in that time of movement through space; movement defined by the point of departure, arrival at the chosen destination, and the route in between. But everything else about the art of walking, or walking art, is defined by what the artist chooses to attend to in the landscape, thereby reshaping the world through bipedal movement and an attentiveness to the landscape that can only be given when moving at human speed. The art is in the process, unfolding the way a road undulates from the point upon which one stands, and takes a step.

A Line Made by Walking by Richard Long
Image source: National Galleries of Scotland

In her history of walking, Rebecca Solnit points to the 1960’s as the time when the gesture of art became primary, the product of the gesture secondary, the latter being “a mere souvenir of that gesture which was now its subject.” Richard Long’s “A Line Made by Walking” (1967) is an early example of exactly that. It was a straight line in a grass field made by the artist walking back and forth but going nowhere. Long’s idea of making sculptures by walking is a reflection of the way in which the landscape is shaped by our movements and the effluence of our products, as well as by the actions of all beings and elements in that landscape. Long records or documents his work in maps, textworks, and a combination of photographs and text. He considers these pieces as “distillations of experience” that “feed the imagination."

Similarly, the French artist Sophie Calle also works with a combination of movements involving walking, or following and being followed, and photographs. In her 1981 work entitled “La Filature” (The Shadow), Calle asked her mother to hire a detective to follow and photograph her as she went about her daily life in Paris. Calle knew the detective would be tracking her, but she did not know when he would be there. She also wrote down what she did and photographed what she saw each day. Her photographs and written itineraries and those of the detective’s were incorporated into an exhibit. La Filature and Calle’s other work evoke how an urban landscape is filled with encounters and interactions, as well as surveillance, curiosity, suspicion, and fictions of our own making.
(Photo from La Filature. Image source: DARE.)

Closer to home, Kawayan’s walks may be traced to the movements of other Baguio–based artists such as Rene Aquitania who walked from Baguio to Manila shortly after Edsa 1 in 1986, picking up things he found along the highway and placing these in a kariton he was pushing upon which he had painted the words “Art for Peace”. Arduous pilgrimages draw blood from the devoted and Aquitania arrived at the Cultural Center of the Philippines with his hands and feet bleeding. Upon his arrival he unloaded his collection of things from the road and slept on the kariton. On this walk, this lakaran, Aquitania expressed his protest against the violence of war. Thus movement is the message, is protest, is walking.

Aside from belonging to this lineage of walking artists, Kawayan’s walks must also be linked to walking as part of everyday life in the Philippine Cordillera; walking as tradition, walking as essential, and not just as protest or pilgrimage. Before roads snaked through these mountains, people walked from the highlands to the lowlands to trade pigs, cloth, gold, tobacco, and other produce for salt, sugar and other prized commodities. Before cell phones and texting, messages were delivered on foot and face to face. Walking was and continues to be a vital form of making physical contact with the land and with people, and a quietly spiritual way of keeping those connections alive.

In 2006, Kawayan walked from Baguio City to Kibungan, Benguet on a search for the monkeys that disappeared when the forests were destroyed. The monkeys were the fiction upon which the two day walk unfolded, but the purpose of the fiction was to connect with the people that lived on the land and who were witnesses to the way that landscape had changed over time. In 2002, in Japan, Kawayan walked out in anger from an art event in which he felt separated from his peers. He walked 100 kilometers in a day and a half, from Fukuoka to Kitakyushu, Japan, stopping only twice, and walking through the night. It was winter then. In 2000, Aquitania and Kawayan walked together from Baguio to Sagada over a four day period, a journey after Erap’s impeachment that paralleled Aquitania’s Art for Peace and at the same time tightened the two artists’ friendship further.

In the juxtaposition of photographs and text that make up Bored on the Fourth of July, we are given the residue, the non-perishable goods, of Kawayan’s walk through one of America’s thousand capillaries and his grappling with the sense of being chained in by chain stores. The act of returning to Walmart on foot became a way of reapproaching the destination slowly. He wanted to experience the gradual transition from farmland to the urban center, to confront once again the shock of being surrounded by the evidence of America’s insatiable hunger and the people’s drive to consume material possessions. Kawayan’s moment of panic was a moment of realization.

Photo by Kawayan de Guia, from Bored...

"It was me realizing I was in America. I was waking up in Walmart… Whether they like it or not [the people there] have no choice but to go to Walmart… They’re trapped by the system."

In two sets of images and text, Kawayan puts forward a critique and a commentary on the human propensity to consume, which he witnessed in America and rediscovered on his return home. It is a propensity, a hollow greed, that America projects on the world. In Kawayan’s eyes, the present human condition is unwell but thriving on the new drug that is shopping. The acts of buying and possessing have become people’s primary sources of fleeting, mass-produced moments of happiness and artificial healing.

The first set of images are photographs Kawayan took during his walk. Superimposed on these photographs of landscapes, buildings, and found objects, are well-rehearsed taglines of the big shots of the corporate world, the beacons of our everyday lives. The text superimposed on the photographs alludes to the the way America projects its culture of consumption and material affluence upon the world. The second set of images depicts people standing with their eyes closed in the aisles of supermarkets and shopping malls or in the tight spaces of small, local business establishments. These images speak of the human condition anywhere and everywhere. We are surrounded by products that we are driven to consume. Even here, at home, Walmart breathes down on us, and we buy, and we buy, and we buy.

"People can have everything they want and still be unhappy. It’s spiritual poverty. We’re so attached to things and things control us. We have to look within."

We may look within, or walk blindly through this world, not knowing who our neighbors are, nor what ails us. The false contentment of material possessions is so pervasive that we take it for granted, much the way we fail to see that in walking we are perpetually saving ourselves from falling flat on our faces.

Pine and Bamboo, Bamboo and Pine

2010-02-08T22:29:00.002+08:00

The first on-the-spot water media painting competition to mark the Ibaloi Centennial. Scheduled on Feb. 20, Saturday, starting as early as 8:30 and ending promptly at 4 p.m., the event at 308 Piraso Road, Tam-awan, Pinsao Proper, Baguio City, is sponsored by the Baguio Aquarelle Society and the Cordillera News Agency. Their aim is to raise awareness of the Cordillera's precious natural heritage, trees and the indigenous people's culture being the most prominent. The title of the contest was inspired by a nature poem by Basho, a Japanese poet. More details? Click!

Front Page News

2010-02-02T21:25:00.014+08:00

This is the f***ing front page of the effing Philippine Star?

Lactum's advertising hacks had this to say about mothers and revolutions in the "headline story":

"A small effort makes a small impact. Mothers can easily participate in the Nourishment Revolution by serving three balanced meals a day and a glass of Lactum to their children. Discreetly, as they mix the milk solution, mothers are incorporated into the movement through every revolution the spoon makes. With more mothers participating in the Lactum Nourishment Revolution, they can help Pinoy children achieve proper nourishment and moms can be 100% panatag."

DISGUSTING. Where's the real news?

Arundhati Roy had this to say about selling headlines in The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire (2004):

"There's been a delicious debate in the Indian press of late. A prominent English daily announced that it would sell space on page three (its gossip section) to anyone who was willing to pay to be featured. (The inference is that the rest of the news in the paper is in some way unsponsored, unsullied, 'pure news.') The announcement provoked a series of responses -- most of them outraged -- that the proud tradition of impartial journalism could sink to such depths. Personally, I was delighted. For a major, mainstream newspaper to introduce the notion of 'paid for' news is a giant step forward in the project of educating a largely credulous public about how the mass media operates. Once the idea of 'paid for' news has been mooted, once it's been ushered through the portals of popular imagination, it won't be hard for people to work out that if gossip columns in newspapers can be auctioned, why not the rest of the column space? After all, in this age, of the 'market' when everything's up for sale -- rivers, forests, freedom, democracy, and justice -- what's special about news? Sponsored News -- what a delectable idea! 'This report is brought to you by...' There could be a state-regulated sliding scale for rates (headlines, page one, page two, sports section, and so on). Or on second thought we could leave that to be regulated by the 'free market' -- as it is now. Why change a winning formula?"

Buy your news here!

I'm a GIRL! You can't stop me.

2010-02-02T11:59:00.003+08:00

I am an emotional creature. I LOVE!

Open Page

2010-01-31T11:54:00.023+08:00

2009 rode roughshod over a lot of people. I had a miscarriage in January 2009 and with that baby, who waved at me in the ultrasound with ten fingers and ten toes and a face I could almost recognize, I buried a dream. Even so, I had imagined a seed was planted in that grave and that it would sprout from the earth, grow into a towering tree of love, and spread it's shade above us. Months later I was desperately drowning my sorrow in all the wrong waters. I found myself at the dead-end of a wonderful relationship that had lasted eight and a half years. Hundreds of people were left reeling from the aftermath of Ondoy and Pepeng. I didn't get the giant tree of love I wanted but in it's place a beautiful, lush, disorderly garden was thriving and teeming with untamed life, and death, and life. I only had to see it for what it was.

Also last year, my family mourned the death of a grand aunt whose love for all of us was greater than the sum of all parts of the clan, and whose parting words of advice were, "Enjoy life."

So I began 2010 by wishing my friends hundreds of little heavens and the gift of sight to see and know them in every small instance. Honing this gift of discernment is turning out to be harder than I expected. To get better at it I'm registering, as much as I can, all the little moments of recognition, when I know I am standing in a little bit of heaven on earth. Here is one such moment.

The other day one of my sukis in the market gave -- yes, GAVE! -- me these two delicious pieces of tinapa. She sells chicken but early last year she diversified and she and her husband began making their own tinapa. When I said I wanted to buy only one piece she put two in the bag and said she was just giving them both to me. She thrust the fish into my basket and waved me away as I protested. I thanked her profusely and walked through the rest of my market route with a big smile plastered on my face. She's one of the reasons I still love our good old market more than I could ever care for the new, antiseptic supermarket chains sprouting all over Baguio.

It's amazing how such a simple gift and brief exchange can outweigh a whole year's misery -- that is, if one has learned how to let go of misery. I'm still learning.

Conspiracy Theory

2010-01-27T12:06:00.001+08:00

11°

2010-01-27T08:39:00.006+08:00

It's so cold this morning my fingers feel stiff and clumsy as I type and my penmanship sucks more than usual. This is one of those mornings that brims with scintillating dreams that ripple up against the dam of frustrations of a peripatetic who is only here, still. So I retreat into a decade-old memory of sitting on a platform in Canterbury on a bright winter morning, waiting for the train to London to come in, shivering and writing an old-fashioned pen-on-paper letter to some one I love(d) and telling him how strange it was to struggle to move the pen across the page. It was important to me, in that white sunshine, to understand this cold, to feel it completely without giving into it. So I wrote to him about it with my fingers freezing inside my gloves. Looking at the scrawled lines I wondered whether he would be able to read what I had written, and also what I had not written -- of the lasting warmth and moments of heat I wished to pass between us. Now I understand that the letters we wrote to each other were not the same letters that arrived on our separate doorsteps.

Ay, basta!

2010-01-19T14:27:00.004+08:00

I'm back!!! With a vengeance! Rrrawwwrr!

To Do List 1

2009-12-05T12:43:00.003+08:00

Tidy up room.
Tidy up closet.
Tidy up desk.
Tidy up floor around desk.
Tidy up floor around closet.
Tidy up clutter on bed.
Tidy up clutter in mind.

Random Diss Excerpt #14

2009-11-11T11:12:00.004+08:00

READING ADVISORY: Lots of big words meant to justify my comparison of two seemingly unrelated fieldsites (and a sharp, sideward elbow-jab aimed at the positivist tendencies that continue to thrive in some anthropology departments).

WARNING TO WOULD-BE PLAGIARISTS:
Embedded in this excerpt is a curse upon your privates.

At first glance the proposed comparison of the case studies presented here appears to violate at least one traditional tenet of comparative studies in general: “that the items compared must share certain fundamental traits” (Nader 1994: 87). Nader (ibid) refers to this as “the notion of controlled comparison,” based upon anthropology’s early conformity to the canons of positivist science that include the identification of and control over discrete variables in stable laboratory settings or, as might be the case with human society, in bounded, static, homogenous communities. The comparative approach of this study has been questioned repeatedly on the following terms: the invalidity of making generalizations on the basis of a single case study per country, the lack of representativeness of Baun Bango and Tawangan for the Indonesian and Philippine contexts respectively, the absence of measurable key variables in both case studies, and the vast differences between the two nation-states.

I argue that drawing connections between Baun Bango and Tawangan is a plausible – perhaps even imperative – exercise that can produce new insights through the juxtaposition of different locales so as to explore what “mutually critical commentary they make upon each other” (Marcus 1998: 52-53). The comparative parts of this dissertation perform this very juxtaposition following Marcus’ (1998) methodological discussions on multi-sited ethnography and Nader’s (1994) suggestions on the need to cultivate and nurture the comparative consciousness in anthropology.

This study is multi-sited in two ways: firstly, there are two separate fieldsites that are central to the entire research project, and secondly, there is more than one interface or field of social interaction pertinent to the research questions posed above. The comparisons I present here are not mere abstractions or artificial connections. They are dependent on firsthand ethnographic work and on-the-ground documentation of “processes that cross-cut time frames and spatial zones in quite uncontrollable ways…” (Marcus 1998: 73) – namely, processes of negotiating and implementing discourses, policies, and practices on environmental conservation and indigenous peoples’ rights. As was discussed above, the dynamics of environmental issues and the way different actors apprehend them is a process that crosses boundaries and timescapes, and which also intersects with identity and everyday life. The key actors themselves physically as well as intellectually cross boundaries constantly and participate in several timescapes, landscapes, and social interfaces.

While it certainly can be said that the discourses of environmental conservation and indigenous peoples’ rights are not equally applied to or replicated in each case study, my comparisons emerge from putting questions to the emergent contours and relationships of these two topics in “complexly connected real-world sites of investigation” (ibid: 86). As the comparative chapters of this dissertation will show, the juxtaposition of case studies herein consists of seeing the increasingly global discourses of environmentalism and indigenous peoples’ rights as integral parts of parallel local-yet-fluid situations.

Hiber Nation

2009-11-09T10:35:00.003+08:00

I am temporarily in deep dissertation space. Blogging will resume when I discover a way out the blackhole through sheer mind-power.

SHHHHHHH!

Katas ng Jeepney

2009-10-22T16:20:00.001+08:00

Under the blinking sacred heart of Jesus, shoulder to shoulder and knee to knee, everybody sits placidly in the jeepney, former vehicle of war converted by Pinoy genius into a medium for mass transport, articulating function and frivolity the way only the Filipino can. Today’s dispatcher in the paradahan ng bayan is the artist Kawayan de Guia, who swears that riding the jeepney through the maze-like state of the nation eventually leads to an inexplicable sensation of being stuck in a bygone era. And the music! Oh the music! The April Boys back to back with Curtis Mayfield, by turns wrenching and soothing the passengers’ collective broken hearts. Alaskado! There’s no getting off because up ahead is a sign that says no loading and unloading and around the corner is a fat cop with Ray-Bans just waiting for ‘small change’ to fall into his itching palms. The elusive Filipino psyche is out for a joy ride in these musical pieces, these gilded jeepney/paintings and jukebox/jeepneys resurrected from the garage of a Baguio motel on Asin Road.

A large number of jukeboxes made it to Baguio in the 1970’s, entering the country tax-free through the Clark and Subic American military bases. Kawayan first learned about the existence of a platoon of decaying jukeboxes from the community of woodcarvers on Asin Road. The woodcarvers told him that collecting the coins from the jukeboxes around the city was one of the first jobs they had when they moved to Baguio from Ifugao. They would carry kilos of coins in their pasiking – their handwoven backpacks – to the former jukebox kingpin of the City of Pines, the late father of one Mr. Alison Takay. Mr. Takay the Son retired the jukeboxes when karaoke broke into the scene in the late 1990’s. He’s now one of the town’s many videoke bigwigs and he was only too happy to sell six of his ailing jukeboxes to the artist.

When Kawayan acquired the jukeboxes he wasn’t sure whether he was starting down the road to nowhere, whether he could get them to work again. The artist was struck by how the jukeboxes resemble jeepneys. Both are kitschy – a mix of smooth and classy chrome and crude pastiche. Both machines had American beginnings and took on a life of their own in the Philippines after World War II. Both are shrines to the psyche, receptacles for the soulful unburdening of a people. Both are vessels of memories, dreams, and emotions. The anitos of Asin Road must’ve sung in the artist’s ear, Don’t think twice it’s alright, and he took them on, and the jukeboxes weighed and preyed on his mind at eighty to a hundred kilos apiece since that fateful day in January 2009.

Traveling via word of mouth Kawayan found his way to the jukebox shaman, Mr. Roger Berdun, who had been making a living repairing jukeboxes in Angeles, Pampanga since 1966. Mr. Berdun travelled to Baguio and as soon as he laid his hands on the machines, he knew what would get them working again. He spent many days lovingly dismantling the relics, cleaning every part, rebuilding the machines, and coaxing music from their purring bellies. Five out of six of the jukeboxes were succesfully revived, their former weight cut in half so that the artist could fit them into new, trippy jeepney-like bodies.

Alongside the rejuvenation the relic machines, Kawayan blew up familiar yet marginally known record covers, painting in elements that blended pop culture with strange images drawn from the Filipino psyche. Framed like the back of a jeepney, each painting was given a mudguard etched with words of wisdom taken off the streets. These mudguard sayings could be read as fortunes or koans, possibly signifying the true nature of things, epiphanies unexpectedly revealing themselves in the wake of roaring diesel engines and thick clouds of exhaust smoke.

The processes of reviving the jukeboxes and creating hybrid machines and paintings are part of the artist’s questing exploration of Filipino consciousness – filled as it is with pop songs, tearful drama, the sweat of the common man, the blood of religious icons, the writing on the mudguards, the sacred rubbing elbows with the profane. Lilindol muna bago puputok. Amen.

Life and Death in Miniature

2009-10-05T10:07:00.001+08:00

Lest I forget, life goes on.

Reading Lessons

2009-10-03T23:03:00.002+08:00

The tips of Manang Cielo's slender fingers are cracked from all the work she does growing things. Wedged into the thin cracks of her fingertips there is always earth.

Her home is surrounded by bamboo, pine trees, magnolia trees, and coffee planted by her parents and before them, her grandparents. Everything grows in wild profusion. There are always green shoots of one thing or another pushing through the perenially moist soil and, if you look closely, insects and worms of all colors and sizes bustle about everywhere. Plants and fallen leaves cover almost every inch of ground, except for in a wide circle swept daily around the old house, whose wooden floors are always shiny.

Manang Cielo no longer bothers to go downtown. "There's no reason for me to go there," she says with disdain and a dismissive wave of her hand. "There" is just a ten-minute jeepney ride from where she lives on one of Baguio's hills. She says she sees enough of what's out "there" on tv, reads about it in the newspapers that her sister brings home. She doesn't like what she sees, thinks the ways of "people nowadays" are mostly to blame for the sad state of our city. She doesn't like seeing people much either.

She prefers to stay in the forest her family made where, she tells me, she can see the clouds coming up to Baguio from the western lowlands veer towards her home, because that is where the air is cool, thanks to the trees. This family lot looks anything but cultivated but many hours are spent tending the land, clearing pathways for water, keeping the springs clean, planting more trees on slopes where the soil is coming loose. Once I asked her whether she was going to transplant the coffee seedlings springing up densely in one place and she said it was better to let things grow where they sprouted. Having plants in various stages of growth stand together in one spot helps to guide rainwater into the soil and keep it there.

Their trees harbor so many birds. I wish I were a birder so I could identify them when I spend time in Manang Cielo's place. I guess the birds stay because it's one of the few remaining places in the city for them to live. But Manang Cielo laments that there isn't enough food for them on her family's land. Sometimes she finds the dead bodies of birds on the ground and she says when she picks them up they are almost weightless.

After a particularly strong typhoon last year I went to see her and she looked distraught. Many trees and branches had cracked during the storm. "Much as it pains me, we had to cut some of them down."

I told her about how, on my way to her place in a strong downpour I noticed that the rainwater was orange-red running down Bokawkan, Session Road, sections of Trancoville and Leonard Wood Road. Manang Cielo said that was definitely a sign of erosion. It interested her that I noticed this in sections of Baguio that are overbuilt and heavily cemented. She said that when the rainwater runs down their hill it is always clear, or light brown in some places, but never darkens to red or more threatening shades of mud-brown. Ironically, further down from where she lives, the water does run red.

When disaster strikes and there are landslides or mudslides around the city and in other parts of the country she rails at the news, her voice shaking with frustration, "Why can't people learn? They should have known this could happen. The causes are right before their eyes! Can't they see?"

Manang Cielo is teaching me how to see.

The view from not so far away...

2009-09-30T20:59:00.013+08:00

Or, What We Have Forgotten...

There is a way of thinking about the world around us that has become so persistent that we take it for granted. We think of nature or the environment as something out there, as being about trees, wild animals, mountains, pristine lakes and oceans. We think of ourselves, humans, as being above nature because we are rational, calculating, and conniving. We think of our cities as being separate from nature. We think of our technologies as management tools that we can use to control nature. We speak of Ondoy as a natural disaster.

It's time to change our habits of thinking.

Ondoy, the natural disaster, is gone from our country. That particular typhoon is over but we are still in the throes of a social disaster created by nature and humans both. The possible human causes for this social disaster include, among other things, excessive waste generation and improper waste disposal, lack of foresight in the zonation of our cities, our contributions to greenhouse emissions, and not knowing how or refusing to read the landscape for what it is. The landscape is the visible, congealed aspect of human and non-human forces transforming space over time. The effluents of our technologies and the products of our actions do not stay in some bounded and defined, human, socio-cultural space. They leak out of our homes, our offices, schools and industries and become part of the environment, some of them eventually posing threats to our own health and well-being.

Even when we think we are not touching nature or are ourselves untouched by nature, we are in fact altering nature. Anthropologist Barbara Adam, who wrote about the links between humans, the environment and invisible hazards, says it all: "Every in/action counts and is non-retractable." The environment is not pristine nature somewhere over the rainbow. The environment is here and we are in it. The environment is a work in progress and it is made by many hands and innumerable actions over time -- time that stretches several millenia before today, and time that will stretch on even after we're gone. To say that we can think 100 years ahead is to say that we are shortsighted. Our politicians, our putative leaders, are stuck thinking in six-year cycles. Our government was totally unprepared for the aftermath of Ondoy and much of it was due to a lack of foresight. The victims of Ondoy who are still on their rooftops, those who have lost their homes, and those who have lost their loved ones -- they suffer and we suffer with them not just because of a natural disaster but because environmental disasters are also social disasters.

We cannot go on believing that we thrive separately from nature and that nature is pristine and untouched by human effluence. Nature is more than just a pleasant vacation spot for those so inclined to spend their holidays in "The Great Outdoors." We cannot continue to think that climbing the world's highest mountains, or that our most sophisticated technologies symbolize man conquering nature. Such foolish arrogance is untenable. We are inextricably intertwined with nature. In 1972 the anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote that "advanced technology ties us in even more closely with the habitat we both make and inhabit... having more impact upon it we in turn cause it to have more impact on us." He knew then what we must remember now. And now, "How are we to live?"

Because copying down poems over and over is a form of prayer

2009-09-30T15:40:00.005+08:00

A PRAYER THAT WILL BE ANSWERED

by Anna Kamienska

Lord let me suffer much
and then die

Let me walk through silence
and leave nothing behind not even fear

Make the world continue
let the ocean kiss the sand just as before

Let the grass stay green
so that the frogs can hide in it

so that someone can bury his face in it
and sob out his love

Make the day rise brightly
as if there were no more pain

And let my poem stand clear as a windowpane
bumped by a bumblebee's head

(Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. From A Book of Luminous Things by Ceslaw Milosz.)

This makes me wonder

2009-09-30T14:44:00.007+08:00

I've been thinking about... why Manila wasn't prepared...

When a 1977 government study saw the possibility of this happening.

I've been wondering about... how we might get our acts together in the face of all this...

... when the administration's allies are busy undermining the government (that's us, the people, that they're undermining).

I've been awed by the outpouring of love and the amazing resilience among Filipinos and our creativity in times of crisis. I respect and am grateful for those that have turned to prayer, and yet I ask myself, is prayer enough?

Although it was no soft rain and pain hangs in the air around us...

2009-09-30T14:17:00.005+08:00

OF RAIN AND AIR

All day I have been closed up
inside rooms, speaking of trivial
matters. Now at last I have come out
into the night, myself a center

of darkness.
Beneath the clouds the low sky glows
with scattered light. I can hardly think
this is happening. Here in this bright absence

of day, I feel myself opening out
with contentment.
All around me the soft rain is whispering
of thousands of feet of air
invisible above us.

BY WAYNE DODD, from A Book of Luminous Things edited by Ceslaw Milosz

Going Bananas

2009-09-17T11:08:00.004+08:00

I have two questions.

1) If you by these Dole Cavendish bananas in 7-11...

are you buying into the use of poison rain in corporate banana plantations in Mindanao?

"In May 2009, the Department of Health released its study (“Health and Environmental Assessment of Sitio Camocaan, Hagonoy, Davao del Sur”) which showed that residents exposed to the spray were found to have pesticide traces in their blood. Air and soil outside plantation boundaries were also found to be contaminated. The study recommended banning aerial spraying and a shift to organic methods...

"'We are not bananas. We are not pests.' This is the cry of communities near banana plantations in Mindanao who have to suffer the adverse effects of regular toxic aerial spraying. Imagine yourself sipping coffee under the open sky when suddenly something lands in your cup. Imagine yourself a child on your way to school and getting sprayed with pesticides. Farmers working on their small farms and people doing their daily chores are among those who suffer indirect hits and have to run for cover when airplanes unleash pesticides on vast banana plantations. While they are not the intended targets, there is no way they can avoid getting hit by the airplanes’ toxic load...

"People who live with constant spraying complain of respiratory and skin ailments... Fruit trees and farm animals have died. Malunggay trees have withered...

"MAAS [Mamamayan Ayaw sa Aerial Spraying] said that the tridemorph and chlorothalonil fungicides used in the Philippines are banned in other countries...

"Davao City is not the only place in Mindanao that has to put up with aerial spraying. Davao City’s feisty Mayor Rodrigo Duterte is a vocal anti-aerial spraying advocate and the city government has passed an ordinance against it. But the Philippine Banana Growers and Exporters Association (PBGEA) challenged the ordinance in court...

"The petitioners got a favorable decision but PBGEA elevated the case to the Court of Appeals. Meanwhile, aerial spraying continues...
"In the Philippines, exporters of Cavendish bananas use the aerial spraying method to kill the Sigatoka fungus. Aerial bombardment hits not just the intended targets but human and non-humans as well that happen to be within the range of the toxic drift, which reaches 3.2 kms. on the average."
-- From the Sept. 10, 2009 column of Ma. Ceres Doyo

And 2) why buy a bland, P12 Dole Cavendish Banana Single (that insults your capacity for intelligent choice)

when you can buy native bananas of different textures and wonderful tastes at P1.50 to P3 each in the market?

Don't be deceived by appearances. This is the good stuff!

Cathy's Litson Rice

2009-09-09T09:18:00.003+08:00

How does the lechon rice of Cathy's Fastfood fare on the two seesters' and Fritson's scale of pig snouts?

Click here to find out!

Today's Mood

2009-09-07T11:39:00.004+08:00

It's September but it feels like August.

I wish (6)

2009-09-05T16:30:00.003+08:00

... I could have a french bulldog. Because they are so cute in such an endearingly ugly way, just looking at them fills my heart with joy and laughter.

Centennial Front Pages

2009-09-01T22:00:00.009+08:00

The top halves of a few local papers on the newstands on
September 1, 2009.

The Market on Baguio's Centennial Day

2009-09-01T21:21:00.003+08:00

City officials promised that the reconstruction of the burned areas of the Baguio Public Market would be completed and inaugurated in time for the city's centennial celebration. Enough said.

My sukis and friends and I greeted each other, "Happy Baguio Day!" and we just had to laugh at the irony of it all.

Science clichés abound in social science too

2009-08-31T11:54:00.011+08:00

Here. Read all about annoying clichés in the natural sciences.

In my dissertation I am guilty of "shedding light" on the messy complexities that get tangled up in each other when nature conservation and indigenous peoples' rights meet. I am pleased to note that I didn't call for any "paradigm shifts" but I probably said as much, given that there are countless "missing links" in the interactions between agents of conservation and indigenous communities. The former are searching for the "holy grail" of indigenous peoples living in harmony with nature and the latter just want a "silver bullet" with which to shoot the conservationists and other bossy werewolves in the head.

Araw ng mga Bayani

2009-08-31T11:19:00.004+08:00

Today I want to remember Pinay heroines.

Image credit: by Francsico Coching, seen at komikero komiks

Gabriela Silang, who taught me that women could be warriors, and who has had a fierce grip on my imagination from wild childhood days when I would ride whooping through the rain, bareback on a galloping horse, thinking of what it might've been like to be waving a bolo in one hand, charging into enemy ranks.

Image taken from kapuso online

Corazon Aquino, who taught me another way of being a woman and a warrior, and who made history at a time when I was just beginning to learn what it meant to be a woman, and to be Pinay.

Hmmmm, wala bang heroine dyan na may asawa? Hmmmm.

I. WANT. ONE.

2009-08-31T10:53:00.004+08:00

A NERD BOYFRIEND.

Check out these fine specimens.

More diversions on nerdboyfriend.com. Thank you, Miss Mika O.

Today is International Day of the Disappeared

2009-08-30T18:34:00.000+08:00

To disappear is to cease to be visible.

To disappear is to cease to exist or be in use.

To disappear is to be lost or impossible to find.

To disappear is to be taken and kept against your will.

To disappear is to go missing or be killed.

To reappear.

What does it take?

Armadillo in the rain

2009-08-28T18:46:00.016+08:00

This evening's rain is my friend. Tonight I am an armadillo and the rain and I are talking. The rain tells me it will keep me safe tonight. The sound of the rain shuts out the rest of the world and I like it this way. I am not hungry. I can stay where I am. Something heavy rustles outside my den. Quickly I curl up into a tight, armored ball, but the rain says,

"SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. It's nothing."

Image credit: http://www.atmos.washington.edu/2001Q2/211/groupC/biosphere.html

The Baguio We Know

2009-08-18T20:00:00.010+08:00

Please join us for the launching of a volume of essays written by
authors who have lived and loved in Baguio.

Edited by Grace Celeste T. Subido.

The Baguio We Know

September 2, 2009 at 6PM
National Bookstore, SM Baguio

"Today, with the emergence of new and concededly more titillating, tourist destinations, many will admit that Baguio has "fallen from grace" from its once lofty position as "Summer Capital of the Philippines." However, perhaps more than anything, this collection of works reveals the Baguio that is so much more than the handmaiden to tourism that some falsely believe is the answer to this city's ultimate salvation.

"This collection of works provides a glimpse into that view from within of a place forged in consciousness that transcends boundaries of time and space."

-- FROM THE INTRODUCTION

The Contributors

Cecile Afable

Pia Arboleda

Arnold Molina Azurin

Tita Lacambra-Ayala

Nonnette C. Bennett

Karla P. Delgado

Merci Javier-Dulawan

Priscilla Supnet Macansantos

Martin Masadao

Baboo Mondoñedo

Padmapani L. Perez

Dinggot Conde-Prieto

Scott Magkachi Saboy

Enrico Miguel Subido

Rolando B. Tolentino

Anna Christie V. Torres

(The book paper edition will sell for P395. The newsprint edition will sell at P225. Both editions will be sold at 10% less during the book launch!)

Right Thoughts, Right Actions

2009-08-09T10:59:00.003+08:00

After our nation's outpouring of love for Cory, what next? What next? What next?

Ipat Luna's wonderfully simple suggestion.

I'd like to give this The Finger

2009-08-08T21:59:00.006+08:00

Image source: The Daily Dose by Manuel L. Quezon III

11 bottles of $510 champagne. Macapal-Arroyo must have been celebrating something. Some victory, perhaps, after her visit with Obama? What would that be, I wonder? Did she clinch yet another dirty deal at our expense? What does she have in store for us next?

Image source: The Daily Dose by Manuel L. Quezon III

A $20,000 dinner. Shameless. Oh please give me the strength to hold back all the cuss words piling up on my tongue!

Read more At Midfield.

The Middle Finger and I, six-years old and up

2009-08-08T10:47:00.011+08:00

Seeing my irate nanay raise her middle finger at a jeepney that had just barely shaved past us and left us gagging in a cloud of black poison, the six-year old in me sensed that this was a powerful gesture. I asked her what it meant. Nanay must have realized that she had let slip the veil of propriety that mothers are expected to wear.

"It's a curse," she said perfunctorily, and taking my hand she walked briskly down the street as if to usher me away from the spot of my almost-awakening to something adult.

I was delighted to learn something new and magical. From then on I went about surreptitiously giving the finger to condescending adults (always have loathed them), channeling all my childish indignation through my middle finger. I firmly believed that henceforth these unwitting adults were doomed to live unhappy grownup lives. (Pero redundant pala ang curse ko.)

I can't remember when or how I finally learned what the middle finger signified. But I think that by the time it hit me it simply made sense, so much so that the rebellious adolescent in me was thrilled when Teddy Locsin appeared on the front pages of the national papers in 1987, caught in mid-stride giving the finger to the press. Here was an important grownup after my own teenage heart! The striking image is forever etched in my mind. And it moves me that the same man who made that gesture can speak of knighthood and chivalry when serving his sovereign and working for democracy.

Here. His eulogy for our beloved Cory Aquino.

Throughout thirteen years of martial law, until I laid eyes on her again, I never thought that I would ever see the end of it. Least of all that my father would survive it. I am not much given to prayer or pious reflection but when I could set aside my anger, I prayed my father would see democracy again.

Late one afternoon, in San Francisco, I got a call. It was from Cory Aquino, for whom I had written one speech after her husband’s assassination. She said she had accepted Marcos’s challenge in a Snap Presidential Election. I put down the phone, and packed my bags, and reported to her at the Cojuangco Building.

I knew then she was the answer to my prayers. What I did not notice was that the closer we came to victory, which is to say the farther the prospect receded that the Marcos regime would survive, the less I felt the anger inside me. As each day passed, bringing me closer to the day I could get even, the less I felt the need for it as I spent more time with the woman who alone could make it possible.

I did not notice, but I was no longer looking back in anger, or looking forward even, to victory and vindication. Only now do I see. I had lived with my anger so long, only for the day to come when it no longer mattered to me. The only thing that counted was that I was living every day to the fullest, bringing out the best in me—for someone else. A dream I hadn’t had since I was a boy, feeding on stories of chivalry, had been achieved. I was serving a woman who was every inch a sovereign, all the more for scorning the slightest pretension to the role.

I did not realize it, even when I was already in the Palace, by the side of the President—among all her advisers, I like to think, the one who loved her most.

It never again occurred to me that I had scores to settle. And not until today, that I had passed up every chance to get even.

From the moment I came in from the airport and reported for duty, and she gave me in return the same smile she gave me on her deathbed, I never noticed… Not when I was with her in the campaign when she corrected me for not looking at the people I was waving at… Nor when I was with her in the presidential limousine looking intently, for her benefit, at the crowds at whom I waved… I never noticed anything. Except that I was with the only person that I would ever want to be with.

I certainly never noticed that I had left my anger behind. I don’t know how it happened. Except that Cory Aquino ennobled everyone who came near her. I have tried to say it publicly but never could finish. If you saw me as I felt myself to be, anyone would fall in love with me. I saw myself in that hospital room, a knight at the bedside of his dying sovereign, on the eve of a new Crusade, oblivious to the weight of the armor on his shoulders for the weight of the grief in his heart.

And because she always doubted my ability to be good for very long… Indeed, when my wife told Ballsy that I prayed the rosary at Lourdes for her mother’s recovery, Cory said, “Teddy Boy prayed the rosary? A miracle! I feel better already.” Because she doubted my capacity for self-reformation, she made it effortless for me by being herself. I did not notice that I was doing right by serving a woman who never did wrong. I am not sure how to take this moral self-discovery. It is so unlike myself. But if it will bring me before her again, I am happy.

Sniff, sniff. Please pass the tissue.

For the record, I think that the finger that will matter for 2010 is the index, marked with indelible ink.

S-21

2009-08-01T21:52:00.008+08:00

Excerpts from a journal entry written January 9, 2008, Phnom Penh:

"We knew we had reached Toul Sleng when we saw barbed wire fences around the corner. When we entered the gate the hairs on my nape and arms stood on end. The air in that place is heavy with agony, anger, grief, and depravity.

"We first went to Building A, where interrogations were carried out. The rooms had iron beds and shackles on them and worst of all, photos of torture victims that had died on the beds. One room still had blood stains on the ceiling. It was difficult to breathe. I didn't know whether I wanted to cry or vomit. By the 5th room at the end of the hall, my knees weakened and I had to sit down. (Pan) was blurry-eyed and red-nosed... I had to send a text (home), to connect myself to love. I'm crying now as I write this.

"After a few moments we entered Building B. The first row of rooms contained photos taken by the Khmer Rouge of all the detainees that were brought to S-21 for interrogation and extermination. The most difficult of all to take in were the panels holding photos of children. Some of them were just toddlers. Any one of them could be my child, I felt. They were all frowning. The photos of women also pained me. Most haunting of all was a photo of a woman staring right into me with glassy, pleading eyes holding her baby in her lap.

"At one point in Building B I stood still between opposite walls of photos of detainees. I felt their stares boring through me and I felt compelled to carry them in my heart forever. I closed my eyes and tried to be still for a moment before walking on.

"In Building C we walked through the brick cells for individual confinement. In the first and second room, the oppressive air was overwhelming. I had to gulp down my gag reflex and keep my tears in check...

"... It's 1:30 in the morning. I can't sleep. There was another photo of a woman and standing beside her was her child. Maybe two or three years old. The child's face was grimacing and drenched with tears. I could almost hear the child's anguished, frightened cries.

"One of the prisoners was an artist. He was kept alive to paint scenes of torture that took place in S-21. I was reminded of people I know who were tortured in the Martial Law years, who said that when they met Cambodian torture victims in a human rights gathering, they felt like their own traumatic experiences were nothing by comparison. [I remembered tagging along with the Task Force Detainees and visiting Corazon Balweg and other political detainees in Camp Dangwa and listening to their stories of torture. I was ten or eleven years old at the time.]

"S-21 was done by people to their own people. Any one is capable of doing this but few are capable of surviving it with their inner core intact. S-21 could happen to any one, in any scale. It's frightening to think of what people can do to each other and how it could even become easy to do these things, how it could even seem right. Two things come to mind. First, do not pride yourself in resisting temptations you've never had. If one were to find oneself in a position to commit or permit acts such as those committed in S-21, would one be able to turn away from it? Would I? Would my loved ones and respected ones turn down such power? And secondly, if one were to find oneself on the receiving end of these atrocities, would one have the inner strength to keep one's spirit intact? Would my loved ones be able to find peace within, in the midst of such pain and suffering and violence? Would I? ..."

I resurrect this memory because of my admiration for Melissa Roxas, whose spirit is clearly unbroken. I resurrect this memory because of my indignation over James Balao's forced disappearance. His family and friends have been searching, hoping, and waiting for 320 days. May Melissa's and James' family's quest for justice bear fruit. It seems to me that when so-called government leaders have no regard for the people they are meant to serve, it's those that DO care and DO serve that are unjustly prosecuted. I used to think that we were lucky that the Philippines has never had a genocide on the scale of Cambodia's. But as I wrote after my visit to S-21, it's not a question of scale. That it happens at all is wrong, whether it's done to one person, a thousand, or millions. I resurrect this memory...

I wish (5)

2009-07-31T23:22:00.003+08:00

... that I could pile my bike, my dogs, and the Artist-in-Residence into the pickup and just drive into the mountains for a weekend of sleeping under the stars and eating with our hands, our backs leaning against tall pine trees whistling in the wind, the dogs lying contentedly at our feet. But first, I need a pickup truck.

"Pay the writer"

2009-07-31T23:14:00.004+08:00

I absolutely love this video of Harlan Ellison ranting about monetary compensation for writers' work!!! I have Cor to thank for finding and sharing this gem!

This brings me back to my own thoughts (not half as rabid, but ok, kinda rabid) and dilemmas about writing for free. I have more to say about this. Real soon!

Dense Valley

2009-07-31T23:01:00.001+08:00

Image credit: Why, Mika Oshima of course!

"Some day, I'm going to write stories and my best friend Mika is going to illustrate them."

I feel brave enough to say that now that Carlo J. Caparas is National Artist for Visual Art and Film. (Ooh and next time let me tell you about my digital fantasies too.) Comics illustrator Gerry Alanguilan has a very straightforward opinion on why the award is undeserved, here and here. National Artist for Visual Art, Bencab had scathing yet sensible things to say about it too.

I've been holding to my comic(s) fantasy for years but I haven't yet written a single story. I'm still saying I'd love to try my hand at short fiction almost everyday, like it's a mantra of some sort. (That is to say, I'm still trying to get over the fear of making the attempt.)

But anyway, I'm so happy that Mika is turning her comic(s) dreams into reality. She's churning them out in Dense Valley. Yey, Mika!

Gov. Padaca and the Task Force

2009-07-31T22:59:00.003+08:00

In this time of unfettered political disillusionment, it's good to remember that there are people in government like Grace Padaca and the members of her anti illegal logging Task Force. A heroine and heroes of the Sierra Madre forest.

This page requires a higher version browser
For the latest Philippine news stories and videos, visit GMANews.TV

Where the Wild Things Are

2009-07-31T22:50:00.006+08:00

Image credit: Amazon.com

I've always said that Baguio is Where the Wild Things Are. My friends and I, we're all a bunch of monsters out for a good time.

Image credit: Amazon.com

I grew up loving Maurice Sendak's book, and now I am waiting, waiting, waiting for the movie by Spike Jonze.

Watch the trailer here.

I wish I had a Max outfit when I was a kid. (And I shouldn't have to tell you that I don't mean the chicken.)

My Kind of Conversion

2009-07-31T22:38:00.004+08:00

Corneille Ewango is a former poacher who is now an eloquent hero of the Congo forest (even though he says his English is bad).

Random Diss Excerpt #13

2009-07-31T22:31:00.002+08:00

READING ADVISORY: Rather righteous sounding stuff on the Ngaju Dayak livelihood repertoire and conservationists' limitied view of "alternative livelihood".

The parallels and connections drawn between the environmental history of Southeast Borneo and the contemporary livelihood repertoire of the Ngaju of Baun Bango show that the importance and prevalence of various sources of income and sustenance have continually shifted over time. These shifts occurred – and continue to occur – through people’s interactions with physical and temporal aspects of the environment and the decisions they make in the context of these interactions. The relative ease of physical access to both resources and markets leads people to choose less risky enterprises. Decisions on ‘harvesting’ particular resources from the forests and rivers depend on the seasons as well as on the actual means by which these resources can be reached and transported out to buyers. For example, at the time headhunting was prevalent, rattan was abundant in the forest and there was a demand for it, but it was not considered a worthwhile endeavor. Logging in the 21st century is difficult, physically demanding work but risk is reduced by the fact that the loggers find buyers for their timber before they cut the trees.

People also keep an eye on the demand for particular products, and the rise and fall of prices. They are aware of how local labor can be affected by changes on the global market. The Ngaju of Baun Bango factor these in when deciding to invest time, energy, and capital into a livelihood option at a particular season. As one informant pointed out, “If people continue to buy, we will continue to sell. It’s the same with our other sources of livelihood in the forest. No one buys damar or rubber anymore, so we have stopped gathering damar.”

The fact that there is a wide array of choices available in the environment of the Ngaju of Baun Bango is a key aspect of the livelihood shifts over time. Knapen (2001: 387) argues that in Southeast Borneo people have been “most successful in making a living” in places where many possibilities are found close by, especially where there is more than one fertile ecological zone. For the residents of Baun Bango locally available resources such as the lakes, rivers, tributaries, land, and now trees embody as well as contain the affordances out of which they can build their lives. The ability to perceive and harness diverse affordances in the environment and so to diversify livelihood serve to reduce risk. Therefore, although the Ngaju of Baun Bango tend to be ambivalent about the supposed backwardness of their forms of work, their ways of interacting with the environment definitely carry advantages for them and so they maintain locally-generated rules – some of them traditionally-based – for determining access to resources.

While it appears that this has been taken into consideration in the choice of an alternative that has already proven to be locally viable, the embededness of rattan within a wide, interwoven range of options has been overlooked. Instead, it is being isolated in development plans as the alternative livelihood of the future. Conversely the “typical Dayak way” of working in several livelihood options at once is believed to be counter-productive. However, the point is, taking a deeper and longer view of the element of time shows us that the Ngaju of Baun Bango have always maintained alternative livelihoods. These options have sustained them, and continue to sustain them through economic, political, and ecological instability.

Announcing a New Blog!

2009-07-28T21:50:00.003+08:00

Litson Rice Atbp!
Featuring Fritson the multilingual pig.
Yeeey!

Walking the Waking Journey

2009-07-20T13:55:00.002+08:00

Escape after midnight

2009-07-04T00:44:00.006+08:00

It's after midnight and I've just stepped back inside from having a delicious shot of Laphroaig Quarter Cask at a soothing concert of unseen crickets conducted, it seemed, by a bat that whirred softly back and forth through the trees across the way.

The humans I live with are asleep. The dogs are asleep. The cat is asleep. The squatter mice in the ceiling are asleep. It's just me, the crickets, the bats, and now Madeleine Peyroux awake, blurring ever so slowly into tomorrow, our edges fuzzied by the effort of being yesterday.

My body is still but my mind is near hysterical, feeling blindly along the walls, looking for an exit that might suddenly open unto Rembrandt's Nightwatch in the Rijksmuseum, or the display of shrunken heads in the Pitt Rivers. Why my mind wants me to be there, I do not know. It's time to put these waking dreams to sleep.

My life companion...

2009-06-30T11:37:00.005+08:00

... is my Mac and I am so relieved that we are on speaking terms again. It's been a long time since I've spoken with The Mac or my books. I used to do it all the time, especially when I had eureka moments, then I would exchange a few happy phrases and whoops of delight with the tools of my trade. People around me find it disturbing when I do this because they think I'm speaking to them but I'm barely even aware they're there. So this is a good sign for the coming writing days, that I have resumed the conviviality of the long hours The Mac and I spend together.

Me, typing on The Mac: Logging canals are private property of the persons who invested in having them built. The trees that the canals lead to also become the property of the investor. However, once the trees have been cleared, the land around the canal reverts to tanah kosong, land that belongs to no one or, literally, zero land...

The Mac makes clicking, typing sounds, and whirrs every so softly, almost like a cat purring.

Me, shouting out loud to The Mac: GROUND ZERO! That's what the forest looks like after its been logged over!

If it could, I bet The Mac would have laughed along with me, although really, the disappearance of forests is no laughing matter.

Random Diss Excerpt #12

2009-06-27T13:36:00.002+08:00

READING ADVISORY: Straight up ethnographic writing on hunting. Yawn.

Historically, hunting was an important part of Dayak life in the area of Southeast Borneo (Knapen 2001: 311). There are very few hunters left in Kamipang as most people have converted to Islam and may not touch or eat the meat of wild pig, which is the game that is common to the area. The hunters of Baun Bango are Protestants and/or adherents of Hindu Kaharingan. Hunters reported that there is no shortage of wild boar, because they reproduce quickly. It is rare however to find deer. At the time of fieldwork, male members of Christian and Hindu Kaharingan households hunted occasionally. They would hunt alone, or in twos, accompanied by up to four dogs that chase the pigs to the river where the hunter waits on a boat and spears it.

When the hunters set out traps, they must give offerings of eggs and cigarettes to the guardian spirits in the forest. This rite is called ngariaw. According to the hunters the offering serves both to ask permission from the guardian spirits, as well as to summon the wild pigs to the trap. As shall be discussed further below, the ngariaw is also performed for the extraction of other resources from the forest.

When a boar is caught it is brought back to Baun Bango where it is washed and cleaned on the batang (the landing raft that each household has along the river) of the hunter. Word of the catch soon spreads through the village and people come to wait for the meat to be cut into different portions. The meat is sold very cheaply, at Rp.10,000 per kilogram. The hunters usually limit themselves to one pig a week in order to be able to dispose of the meat. The excess meat is salted and air-dried or smoked. Excess meat is taken upriver to Petak Bahandang, or Kasongan where there are allegedly many Christians and Hindu Kaharanging that buy meat from them. Sometimes a hunter will take as much as one pikul (100 kilograms) upriver and dispose of it in Kasongan. Although the men of Baun Bango may opt to engage in hunting throughout the year, wild pigs are most plentiful when trees in the forest and around the villages bear fruit such as durian, in the months of November and December.

The hunters of Baun Bango are often called upon through amateur radios to hunt down boars that have been raiding ladang in other villages. Thus there are no specific territories or boundaries for hunting. Baun Bango villagers boast that their hunters are famed for their skills throughout the Kamipang sub-district.

Back in the classroom

2009-06-19T09:42:00.009+08:00

I have said this many times before and I'll say it again now: I have a love-hate relationship with anthropology (which I have been studying since 1992) and academia (which I have been wandering in and out of professionally for the past eight years). The root of the "hate" part is this queasy feeling I get whenever I'm doing anthropology or writing academic articles. It comes with this persistent voice in my head that says: "I should be doing something more useful."

The root of the "love" part is more difficult to explain, which is why it holds such sway over me.

Yesterday was my first day back in the classroom as a lecturer. (The first time was when I taught Introduction to Sociology and Anthropology at the Arneo for a semester in 2001.)

Academia, it's not quite as glamorous as it looks but...

This semester I will be teaching SDS 265, a seminar on community-environment relations, to a wonderful group of graduate students taking up their Masters in Social Development Studies at U.P. Baguio. They are wonderful because they come from diverse backgrounds, different ranges of experience in development and environmental work, and most important of all, they have high expectations.

One cannot or SHOULD NOT teach and feel unsure of what one is doing in the classroom, I think. So I was lucky to stumble across this quote on antropologi.info and go into class bearing this in mind:

"The term public intellectual presumes that during the rest of the academic work we're doing something else, that we're private intellectuals. The point is that we are communicating to the public. We are teaching or we are writing...

The role of the intellectual doesn't stop when you walk into the lecture room. It starts there."

Spoken by Richard Jenkins at a symposium in memory of Marianne Gullestad, a Norwegian anthropologist who is remembered for consistently sending short versions of her scientific articles to local and national newspapers, and who is credited for making "most people in Norway know what anthropology is or have a better understanding of it than in many other countries."

As I write this I realize that it is quite a conceit to think of one's self as an intellectual and take that too seriously (cue in embarrassed laughter here), public or otherwise. But then again, it's also quite a responsibility. Which will it be, for me?

I'm looking forward to finding some answers (and more questions, inevitably) this semester.

Why the recent Isabela busts are so important

2009-06-11T08:02:00.006+08:00

In most of the case studies I've read on illegal logging here in the Philippines and in Indonesia when the law decides to crack down on the criminals, it's the logger in the forest working to put food on his/her family's table that bears the brunt of "legal" action and bad press. I place "legal" in quotation marks because the actions taken in raids are often arbitrary, do not follow due process, and are mainly for show or for the purpose of threatening laborers in the forest. For example, confiscated chainsaws are bought back from the police when the furor has died down and then it's business as usual. Or, police and military receive regular payments from illegal logging operations so that they turn a blind eye but when a high-ranking official comes around they go through the motions of a raid and then the high-ranking official leaves (probably with something in his/her pocket, too) and then it's business as usual. My host families along the Katingan River, in Central Kalimantan jokingly referred to the latter as "musim razzia", or the season of raids -- it rolls around every year.

Meanwhile, the capitalist who finances the operation continues to live in the comfort of his/her spacious house built on the profits of felled forests and the labors of poor families alienated from their usual sources of subsistence and livelihood. Sometimes, the financier may conveniently disappear for a while, only to return to his/her airconditioned office -- in many instances, a government office -- and then it's back to business as usual.

This is of course a simplified, generalised account of what takes place. Nevertheless it tells us why the recent search warrants and the arrest served by Isabela Governor Grace Padaca and her task force against two of the province's big-time loggers are phenomenal. First, the busts struck at the business-side of the logging operations, meaning they went after the financiers who initiate the illegal operations in the first place, and who make a killing from it. This shows the sincerity and determination of the task force to address the problem at its roots within their local jurisdiciton. (Illegal logging is also rooted in international trade. Along the Katingan river loggers will tell you, "We wouldn't cut the trees and sell them if people in Europe weren't buying them.") Second, the raids followed due process as can be gathered from Ipat Luna's account, complete with investigations, warrants, and confiscation of lumber. Again, this demonstrates the seriousness of the task force. All too often illegal logging cases get dismissed because due process was not followed.

The good news from Isabela has been lost in all the bad news (what's new) but we can still spread the word ourselves, demand the same of our officials in our own localities, or as Ipat Luna asks, write emails showing appreciation for what Gov. Padaca and the task force are doing:

"Thanks for posting!! Please also send your messages directly to the email of the campaign at save_nsierramadre at yahoo dot com as we compile them for her and she reads them out to the task force members when they have a meeting. Without much media coverage, they really do take solace in your messages."

If you're interested you can download free pdfs of case studies on logging in Indonesia, here on the Center for International Forestry Research website. (You can even download entire books. Hurray for shared resources!) This paper by Anne Casson was a real eye-opener for me.