Video stolen wholesale from www.stephaniesyjuco.com. Double-click to play.
hildhood is a distant country for everyone, a place of proverbial and metaphorical nostalgia. Most of us learn in adolescence that something is not right about ourselves, and we drive those things we found it so easy to be underground.
Artists especially have to spend their apprenticeship fighting their way back to childhood insights and personality quirks merely to find an authentic voice---to ground themselves in who they actually are and to dissipate the clouds of who they are taught to be. This is why autobiography is so essential and ubiquitous among learning artists. This is not news.
So when a child starts out to be someone--starts to learn a language, a way of dressing and thinking and behaving, a way of making noise in the world--and then has to change all of those things to continue growing up in a new culture ... well, it causes a quiet cataclysm. Idiom becomes stunted, often, and the child becomes a person permanently chasing after the right language to use to say, "I am."
I spent the year most children spend collecting complete sentences speaking my own language, an idiosyncratic mixture of English and Cantonese that drew vocabulary, grammar, and tones from each in an unusual pattern. When I left off and emerged speaking English, the Cantonese faded away. Well into adulthood, whenever I heard someone speaking Cantonese in public, a ghost self emerged, a sort of presence behind my left shoulder, that understood what was being said, and was connected to me, but could only communicate to me a sense of fading rightness in the sounds of the language.
It's like a parallel universe. When your childhood in one culture is broken off, the person that child would have become in that culture is broken off. But that no-longer-possible-person remains with you as an echo of yourself you can either choose to ignore, or attempt to build a sound-box around, to see if they have something interesting to say. If you choose--as I have--to chase after that echo, you'll never be satisfied, or triumphant, in boxing that voice. You're chasing a nostalgia for an alternate universe, depicting a world that your audience will never be able to see, and perhaps never realizes is there to be seen.
And then, of course, as adults we see the exotiphilia, or fetish for tribalism, or lust for otherness, that strangers will ground in the cultures we left behind. We don't fit into these visions, but even in the most egregious expressions we see small corners of the alternate universe. And we're angry and sad and speechless that someone else could appropriate the little nests of our echoes to say something that annihilates them.
This is how I'm reading Stephanie Syjuco'sBody Double pieces. She composed them before we went to Manila, but I first saw one of these on someone's laptop in The Living Room while we were there, and all our talk, and thinking, about distance and culture of origin wove itself into my reading. I got to see a display of three of these pieces at the opening of Mills Art Museum's show We Interrupt Your Program tonight.
Each piece in the video triptych shows excerpts from a Hollywood Vietnam war movie filmed in the Philippines. Stephanie muted the sound and put black boxes over the images that turned the Philippine landscape into Vietnam. What's left is small glimpse of jungle or hills or skies or rainfall--the sorts of small moments and images brought back, Proust-like, when we smell rain or foliage, or eat something we haven't eaten since we were children.
The monolithic blank forms interrupting the landscape are nothing so
simple as Western brute technology or political iron-fisting, or even
colonization. At the risk of interpreting one-for-one: the hard, black boxes are maybe memory loss, or maybe just the places that never got filled in. Or the big, ugly swaths of the here-and-now we have to cover up to let the echoes gain some volume. Stephanie said tonight, looking at her own work up on the wall, that it was an exercise in minimalism. I think it an attempt to contain lushness in minimalism, something resounding loudly in Woff's new piece (yes, I will blog about it).
It's a typical youtube homemade video of a song describing the conflict between Magellan and Lapu Lapu. It ends with Magellan asking for a doctor and telling his mama "don't you cry."
Now, wouldn't you want to die trying to bring Christianity to the Philippines ... or something ... and then being immortalized in a song like this? (Does anybody know who this singer is?)
NEXT!
Also, this history student made this video summary of the Galleon Trade for class. Love the music! Don't love the way history is taught: so that it leaches all the human idiosyncracy out of the stories and makes them a catalogue of dead numbers and dry anecdotes.
oday I paid a visit to Galleon Trade captain Jenifer Wofford's home studio. More will be posted soon about La Woff, but there was one strangely lovely story that came out today that needs to be on this blog.
Apparently, in the spring of 2000, a southern Philippine Islamic terrorist group staged a mass kidnapping from a beach resort on Sipadan. The hostages were held for ransom for months, while the kidnappers dragged them around the jungle ahead of the Philippine authorities and added to their number with further kidnappings.
But in July 2000, one of the newly added hostages, a German woman with a complex of medical conditions that made her captivity a matter of life and death--even if her captors had not been capable of beheading her--became a minor local cause celebré, being the cause of a defingerization.
A freelance script writer named Leah Cabullo, who was on Jolo island, where the hostages had been taken, along with a passel of journalists, decided one night to
cut off a piece of her left middle finger and use her blood to write a letter appealing to Islamic extremists to free an ailing German woman among 40 hostages held in a southern Philippine jungle.
... Cabullo, a Manila-based freelance writer in her 30s, refused to leave her rented room at a retreat house in downtown Jolo and spoke with other journalists covering the 80-day standoff through a window. Blood was scattered at the lobby outside her room.
"I cut my finger as a sign of deep sincerity," she said.
The letter appealed for the release of 56-year-old German housewife Renate Wallert, ... who suffers from hypertension, a chronic anxiety disorder and other ailments.
Rosa Banagudos, a caretaker at the retreat house, said Cabullo was rushed to the Sulu provincial hospital for treatment after the bizarre act. The detached portion of the left middle finger was placed in a bottle filled with alcohol.
"I was still sleeping when I heard her scream," Banagudos said. "I rushed to her room and saw her hand bloodied. I didn't see what she used to cut her finger."
According to a friend of Cabullo, the severed portion of the finger would be sent to Robot and Susukan with the appeal letter, written in blood on white linen paper. The offering would be delivered by a courier sometime on Tuesday.
Note: "Robot" was the nickname of the terrorist commander. Delicious, no?
There's not much else to be found about this story on the internet, in any language. I even checked the Filipino Google, but no dice. Not even any follow-ups, although you'd think that the press would fall all over themselves to find out if it worked.
And the funny thing is, according to Woff, it did work. All the stuff I found chez interwebs about the hostage crisis never mentioned Cabullo as a reason, but Renate Wallert was released less than two weeks after Cabullo's sacrifice. This article attributes that to payment of a ransom, but her husband and son remained with the kidnappers until a month later (for the husband), and nearly two months later (for the son). It's not clear how much ransom money played a part in the men's releases.
This article from Asia Week has only confusion to report about Renate Wallert's release:
The 85th day dawned with the release of the first Westerner, ailing German Renate Wallert. The Europeans say neither they nor Libya agreed at the time to pay a ransom for Wallert. In the Philippine and German press, it was reported that $1 million was paid. Sources allege Aventajado raised $1 million through local businessmen and sent Dragon to make the payment. They also allege Aventajado asked Germany for a refund, but that officials refused. Aventajado denies all of the above: "That is not true."
The article doesn't mention Cabullo.
Well can I believe that Cabullo got Renate released ... and well, too, can I understand Woff's fascination with the story--which prompted her to center her installation Kandingan around a drawing of the only photograph she could find of Leah Cabullo ... holding up her maimed hand.
There's something inside that wants an extreme act like this to be able to affect people. I'd just call someone like Cabullo crazy to the creepyth degree. But then, if you're dealing with Islamic fundamentalist kidnapping beheaders--who risk their lives and international relations for arbitrarily chosen ransom sums, and then waste statesmen's time bickering over how to divvy up the take--how do you prove your sincerity, really, truly?
None of this stuff--terrorism, kidnappings, beheadings--is really capable of shocking anyone anymore. It's too commonplace and understandable ... or else too commonplace and permanently beyond understanding. What's shocking is that a civilian figured out how to speak terrorese from the point of view of the powerless. It seems crazy, but it also seems like she was the only who got through--or cared to get through.
Between a crazywoman and a transported, orgasmic Saint Theresa-type, Cabullo wants to strike me as the latter. Catholic redemptions are not far from the imagination when thinking about weird Filipino phenomena, for obvious reasons. Something wants there to be the closest thing we have in real life to magical realism: some kind of inspired, gritty communication, some kind of understanding-beyond-understanding, to exist in fanatical jungles and distant motherlands.
How strange and beautiful and creepy such things are. I wonder what she's doing now. I hope she hasn't been declared mentally incompetent.
nce upon a time, before art was professionalized (insofar as people are willing to pay artists, that is to say) folks stayed at home a lot and made art themselves.
Every middle class home had a piano, every working class one a fiddle, or a jew's harp. Young ladies drew each other for sport. Young men drooped from the forks of tree branches shouting, "Beauty!" Jigs were danced, and danced well, on homemade wooden heels, family theatricals taught children the fine art of crying at will, a blank wall was excuse enough for interpretive dance, and if you were lovely enough, your hair golden enough--or raven, depending on which side of the world you jigged on--your hands small and finely tuned enough to turn faces on tiny grains of rice, why then fantastical creatures of green and blue--or with wings and teeth, or scales--would do your chores, freeing up your time to make art for the Pure Joy of it.
Then came the silver age of art, when the family was no longer a haven of show tune singalongs and refrigerator-magnet galleries. Then, the youth wandered out into the scary forest and, in amongst the wolves, false breadcrumb trails, and predatory lifestyle party organizers, might be drawn by the faint, but pure, glow of the community arts nonprofit. There, our hero/ine passed a comfortable night, or three, before being drawn back out into the realm of worldly temptation.
"Look!" the reptilian tempter would cry, "look at the sophistication of yon milieu! Look at the bumpkinness of the cottage in whose doorway you stand! Whose bread is made of finer flour? Whose advocacy is going to further your career? Come hither, and rule the kingdom for your fifteen minutes!" And away the dazzled youth would go, drawn inevitably, inexorably away from the last likeness of home and family.
After the Fall, callow youths never stop to wonder if the Artyrs who kept the hearth while they were testing the jungle tread are still there, are doing okay, have suffered from neglect or abandonment.
No, this is not the Manalos' sad story, but mine ... sort of ... well, not really. Kind of. Okay, yeah, a little bit. I'm projecting, is what I'm saying.
I'll be the first to say that I found Manila a little ... challenging. More on that later (hint: small pedicabs and intestinal disorders ... okay, maybe not so much more on that later). So, after making some phone calls and getting some directions, I stumbled one day late in my Manila visit into the cool haven of the Manalos' flower and gift shop, Blue Gayuma. I just thought I was going to get a nice visit with old friends, but it ended up being a debrief on the last eight years of my life.
You see, I met the Manalos in the last millenium, while I was program manager at Asian American arts org Kearny Street Workshop, and they were running Bindlestiff Studio, a black box theater in San Francisco's SOMA district, that Allan and Joyce Juan Manalo had transformed into the "premier" Fil Am performance venue in SF. As fellow arts organizers from the same community, we all knew and respected each other, but were too busy sacrificing ourselves on the altars of "vision" and "community-building" to have time for each other. I came to their events and chatted, they came to ours, and chatted, we shared resources now and again (mostly them letting us use their space).
Allan giving a tour of Bindlestiff in 2000, the "epicenter of Filipino performing arts," a black box theater located on San Francisco's South of Market Skid Row. This is a lovely picture of a brief turn-of-the millenium era in Fil Am arts. Funny glimpses of many the personalities that stocked (and still do, some of them) the Bay Area's Fil Am performance scene.
You'd see Allan performing here and there, either solo stand-up comedy, or with his sketch comedy group Tongue in a Mood. You didn't see Joyce so much ... unless you bought a ticket to see a show. She preferred to stay in the background, running Bindlestiff and theater group Teatro Ng Tanan with consistent self-effacement.
Come to think of it, they were both pretty self-effacing, out there doing their thing, certainly, but doing it out of love, and happy to use their own sweat to promote unknown artists -- to make the young and the marginalized into stars for a night or two. The problem with being self-effacing is that it's a rare person who will promote you when you efface yourself ... and if you happen to be the designated drivers, well you might just not get much notice at all.
Also, nonprofit Artyrs live a pretty marginal existence to begin with: no health insurance, constantly putting your own minimal salary back into bottles of two-buck Chuck to feed the small but hungry egos of the artists you're serving ... it's a silver age for those who pass through your warm cottage, but they're not the ones who have to roam the forest, rain or shine, gathering firewood.
On top of that, the real estate politics of San Francisco are insane. Bindlestiff lost its longtime space in the Plaza Hotel for a few years while the city redevelopment agency spruced the SRO up. But from the beginning of negotiations the city started backing out of promises made, and it looks like now Bindlestiff--no longer run by the Manalos--will have to meet unrealistic financial goals to be allowed to return to its home.
For a variety of reasons, about four years ago the Manalos--as usual, quietly--left the States and returned to Manila, where Joyce grew up but where Allan, born and raised in the States, had only visited. And there they are today.
It might seem like being cast out into the dark forest, but Joyce and Allan are no Hansel and Gretel. We spent hours one night gossiping and bitching about the Bay Area Asian American arts scene, and I caught them up on four years of meltdowns they had missed. But when I visited them at Blue Gayuma, and later their house just down the street, it was clear that they'd found their way straight back home--and straight back into that nonexistent golden age where families made art at home for their own pleasure.
Joyce is beading and making jewelry, which she sells at Blue Gayuma. She's also making pottery, which is displayed at the store. Her brother, a set designer, makes small wooden theater sets/altars. (I'll post some pictures of these as soon as I retrieve them from the external hard drive they disappeared into.)
But the most delicious surprise of the Manalo/Juan family was Joyce's mother, Levi Juan.
Each subsequent flag she played more with materials, adding hand-made worry-dolls to the suns, or little mirrors into a sort of plaid pattern, or encrusting the edges so thick with multicolored beads that you want to put the whole thing in your mouth.
On one flag, tiny yellow beads collect around the edges of the sun-shapes, making the piece look like the artist was working on it in the middle of a storm of pollen. On another one, a monsoon of brown bead-chains rains down the top of the flag upon an angel of fertility. She reminds me, in both technique and exuberance, of the extraordinary vitality of artist Aminah Robinson (whose work online photographs don't nearly do justice to, and has to be seen to be believed).
It would be easy enough to call this a Jeepney aesthetic ... and it would be largely true: a folk art, unironically declaring its affiliations, and drawing in colorful scraps of plastic materials and popular culture to redraw, over and over, a standard utilitarian form. But I'm still not sure what it means to call something jeepneyesque, jeepneyfied, jeepneyized. I don't know what exactly it means for the jeepneys, much less for unpretentious "folk" art.
It doesn't seem, this work, to be about meldings of pop culture and traditional culture, or turning the weapons of war into street art, or any of those clever things I and others say about jeepneys. It doesn't seem to be about much more than joy in materials, profusion, and a delight in color and texture.
Which is why this was my favorite art in Manila: the unexpected, the purely joyful, the unapologetically, unmodifiedly Filipino, the domestic, the folk, the personal-fulfillment, the unblaring, the unadvertised, unframed, and unpresented ... art.
(The details you see sprinkled throughout this post are details of the flags. Click here for a flickr photo set of all five flags she showed me, including views of the whole flags. The pictures suck, because I took them, please excuse.)
rink wine, in an effort to make yourself "sleepy" (i.e. drunk.)
It won't make you sleepy.
So posting will have to start again later this week, once I've gotten over my own idiocy and settled back into my dayjob. Yes, I'm back in the Bay Area.
In the meantime, please enjoy the send off filmmaker Romeo Candido gave us in the last days of our Philippine sojourn. If you're attentive, you can catch a flash of me sitting in chair at the beginning:
And here's a more formal version of the same song:
Independent of this whole Philippines trip, one of our number was sent a link to this vid of Filipino inmates in Cebu doing "Thriller" in their prison yard.
Words nearly fail me. Nearly. (Do words ever really fail me?)
Context: Sunday night after the final Galleon Trade event at The Living Room, the Galleon Traders scared off the remainder of the audience and had an iTunes dance night. At one point, someone put "Thriller" on, someone else got the original "Thriller" video off of YouTube and projected it on the wall, and Carlos showed us his Michael Jackson moves (excellent).
We thought we were so clever ... until today. This video is so quintessentially Filipino--as I understand it, from this trip--that I can hardly explain it. American prisoners do angry, heartfelt spoken word ... or they study law. Filipino prisoners do group choreography to "Thriller". Awesome.
For 250 years, from 1565 until 1815, Spanish galleons laden with the riches of the Orient--silks, porcelain, and spices--sailed annually from Manila in the Philippines bound for Acapulco on the west coast of Mexico.
his is why I could never be a historian. I like to read history, but sentences like this throw me entirely off of reading and into my imagination. (And that was only the second sentence of this short piece.) Annual trans-Pacific trade expeditions! Did they have a firm sailing date? Probably within a few weeks, depending on weather. But they must have needed to sail at the same season every year to get the right winds and currents.
Imagine! The entire trading community of that region of southeast Asia must have been galvanized by that deadline. Imagine the overland caravans that grew to time their arrival in Malaysia, or various ports along the Thai, Cambodian, and Vietnamese shores. Imagine the Chinese customs inspectors all up and down the coast, taking their pound of flesh, and then having their palms greased. Probably flotillas set off from as far away as the Indian subcontinent to sail around the Malay peninsula and Indonesia to get to the galleons in Manila.
There were no wristwatches back then; people understood the fluctuations of seasons and time was different. Were deadlines different? Or were there nervous litter riders with portable travel-sun-dials checking the time of day everytime they stopped to water the horses?
Imagine the fat or thin merchants (from Chengdu? Kabul? Teheran?), sweating in their caravans. Imagine one sees a team of brigands descend upon him: would he have been more fearful of them killing him and taking his goods, or of them delaying him enough that he would just miss the flotilla? And would there have been merchants worth holding up the flotilla for? Agents charged with bringing in the entire shipment of a particular dye, for example, that you could only get in a mountainous region of central Asia?
Or did they wait for no man, no one caravan or trader? Was it all about the marketplaces, where the agents of the crown--living in comfort in Spanish style villas near enough, but not too near, the port--fluently and mutually insulted middlemen to collect any number of small contributions to an overall shipment of, say, tea? Were there auctions? Warehouse visits? Were there the equivalent of tradeshows, where merchants set up booths with samples of their best wares, to entice buyers to come to their warehouses and contract for bulk?
Was there somebody who yelled at his inferiors when the deadline was surpassed? Or was the deadline always met?
Did it just happen when it happened? Did tradesmen, arriving a day, week, or month after the flotilla left, just shrug their shoulders and get lodgings for a year, selling off their wares bit by bit to small-time merchants until the galleon trade buyers started getting interested again?
Was it chaotic or well-organized? Was it organized at all, or did they just trust to enterprise, greed, serendipity, or just the fact that trade never stops and a flotilla can go whenever it pleases, full-loaded with whatever? Did they receive goods throughout the year and house them until the flotilla went? I can't imagine that deadlines did not act, as deadlines do, as a sort of grain of sand in the oyster, accreting the lovely substance around itself and leaving the other surfaces only lightly layered with pearl.
But Wikipedia says that they sailed "once or twice" in a year, which, if I had read that first, would not have tripped my fancy quite so much. This is why I can't be a historian.
the galleon trade edition is embedded reportage from the front lines of the 2-3-year art campaign Galleon Trade in Philippines, California, and Mexico.
This blog will follow the artists on their wanderings throughout the life of the project. More than that, it will follow thoughts directly and indirectly inspired by the project and its implications: speculating, inspecting, researching, commenting, commentating, and jumping to conclusions. It will be more focused than usual, but it will be very atlas(t)y.
hildhood is a distant country for everyone, a place of proverbial and metaphorical nostalgia. Most of us learn in adolescence that something is not right about ourselves, and we drive those things we found it so easy to be underground. 
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