atlas(t): galleon trade edition

things to do in panama city

've been looking around since I got to Panama, but the internet has failed me: I haven't been able to find any blog posts telling me what to do in Panama City.

So in the interests of public service--I is a good netizen--here's a wrap-up of what I've been doing in Panama City since I got here: the good, the bad, the don't-bother, and the WTF? (I'm probably going to be too lazy to give you links to these resources, though, so deal with it. XO.)

To wit:

• Decameron Resort: this is a Pacific-side beach resort about an hour and half's drive west (i.e. up the isthmus towards North America) from Panama City. If you're spending any time in Panama, do go to the beach! Remember, this is an isthmus with beachfront on both the Caribbean and the Pacific. I can't find anything wrong with that scenario.

Decameron is decent, if resorty. The rooms are tile-floored and very clean, the restaurants aren't any good, but the food is abundant, self-serve, and included in the price, and the beaches are spectacular, very clean, very comfortable, and not at all crowded (by my Californian estimation; my Panamanian cousin found the place very crowded.) There are palm-frond shade structures on the high-tide line every few feet or so, with lounge chairs, a swimming pool that runs the length of the 2K-long beach, which draws off the kiddies and parents, leaving the beach to the less shrieky patrons, bars every 500 feet serving fruity drinks (also included in the price), a beach massage cabana, plus horseback-riding, jet-skiing, sailing, etc. etc. etc.

Did I mention that because of low season (it's rainy season so we got a storm every afternoon) we paid $110 per night, everything included (except the activities)? Insane. This is really relaxing and very silly, but so worth it if you need a vacay.

• Panama Viejo: the ruins of the old Spanish city. I didn't go with my family so I didn't get the run-down on what's what here. If you like ruins, these are majestic. But go with a tour guide, because otherwise, you'll go, look, and then want to go home again.

• Casco Viejo: not to be confused with Panama Viejo, this is the old town, not ruins, still functional. Apparently, it looks like Havana, and is the part that's being heavily, outrageously reconditioned and gentrified. Naturally, the streets are a warren and it's hard to find your way around, but there are a lot of sights here, so take a day or two for this part of town. And bring your camera.
  
  • The Presidential Palace is here, administrative center and intended residence of the president ('though the sitting prez doesn't live here). We got to tour because my cousin knows someone, but most people don't get to. It's pretty cool, if you get a chance, and if you don't, swing by anyway to stick your head in the gate. The place is called the Heron Palace--because of a couple of historical herons given as gifts--and it's guarded, they tell us though I'm not sure if they're there as guards or decoration, by a couple of humongous, live grey herons. Worth seeing but don't poke at them. They peck.
  • Cultural Institute is the government agency for managing museums and such. They have a small gallery of Panamanian art in a repurposed jailhouse, but it was between exhibitions when we swung by, so we didn't get to see it.
  • There's shaved ice in the courtyard in front of the Cultural Institute. Get the limon flavor with condensed milk and malt. Yummy!
  • The State Theater is here and I wasn't terribly impressed. It's decorated, like all state theaters. If you get a chance to see a performance here, though, go. Apparently, they do folk art performances and such. In fact, we saw part of a rehearsal of one here.
  • Church of the Golden Altar. Big tourist destination. As with everything, only go if you have a tour guide who can really explain what you're looking at. We didn't so all I did was take some pictures of an ornate altar that meant little to me.
  • Museum of the Inter-oceanic Canal is a terrific museum. You'll need two hours here at least. However, it's all in Spanish so if you don't speak it, and you don't have enough Latin, French, and native intelligence to figure stuff out, bring a tour guide or leave it alone. This is probably the closest Panama has to a museum of history.
  • I couldn't find the Museum of Religious Art! Most people simply didn't know where it was, and the directions I got from people who supposedly did, were bad. If you really want to see this, ask a proper tour guide.
  • Shopping: there are curio and crafts shops here. These are a bit more upscale than elsewhere, and more expensive, but you can still bargain, and if you want really good quality stuff, go here. I'm really glad I did because this was the only area I was able to find the really beautiful baskets, the high-quality version of the cheap-ass baskets you see everywhere and go to yourself, "Why would anyone buy stuff like that?"
  • Eating: there are a lot of restaurants around here to have lunch, catering to visitors. It's easy to find something decent to eat here so plan on having lunch.

• ETA Mi Pueblito: this is a weird sort of amusement park, where an early 20th Century Afroantillean village is simulated. It was open today, but just barely. I don't know if there are normally supposed to be people wandering around acting like villagers, but it was deserted today. I got there just in time for it to rain like crazy, trapping me in one of the buildings. There are crafts shops there, but nothing very good. I also only went to part of it. I couldn't make it across the street in the rain to the other part. Not recommended, unless you can find out that there's more to the experience than this. Maybe don't go on a Monday afternoon during rainy season.

• Mercado de Buhonerias Y Artesanias: this place is a warren of small kiosks selling traditional crafts and souvenirs. These are the cheap versions, so don't expect very high quality stuff. But this is where you buy gifts for friends. I'd recommend you buy the molas here, the colorful cloth patterns sewn out of several layers of cotton, leather sandals, framed butterflies (if you like that sort of thing) and shirts and purses. There are also a lot of really cheap and tacky souvenir-type stuff, if you like that.

Come prepared to bargain. This stuff isn't worth much so decide what you want to pay for it and work up to that. Don't budge off of your price. If you do your job right, they'll get more than the stuff is worth and you'll pay less than you expected to. Everybody wins. Maybe bring along a native to bargain for you, if you can.

This a somewhat sketchy area, so take a taxi and have the taxi wait for you while you're there. Give yourself an hour or two and don't go on a Sunday, since most of the kiosks are closed then. Also, don't bring a wallet and be sure any purses or bags you bring have nothing valuable in them. Bring your cash in a pocket that buttons or put it in your jeans hip pocket where you can keep track of it. This place is close and crowded and full of pick-pockets, although, again, if you go on a Sunday, you'll be unmolested.

• Diablo Rosso: a hipster contemporary art gallery, cafe, and DIY clothing 'n' stuff shop. I posted about it here. If you want to connect to the young and cosmo, this might be the place to do it. In the San Francisco neighborhood.

• Calle Uruguay: my young cousin took me there during the day when there was nothing going on, but this is the nightlife capital. Along two or three square blocks there are more nightclubs than you can shake a booty at. I didn't go there the night my cousins went out (too tired), but you can find live and canned music. Just get in a taxi and tell them where you want to go. They all know it.

• Gaucho's: also on Calle Uruguay, it's the only really good restaurant I ate at in Panama City. Argentinian cuisine, fantastic steaks and very good Panamanian ceviche. A little pricey, but worth it.

• Radisson Decapolis Spa: apparently the only good spa in the city. I'm going for a massage with my cousin today. I'll report back later. ETA: fabulous. It's small, but really nice and relaxing. Get the deep tissue massage, though, because I got the "relaxing" Swedish and it was, well, relaxing, but they didn't dig into the knots. Give yourself a package deal (around $130 for a massage and facial or wrap, which includes sauna, steam room, whirlpool) and bring a bathing suit so you can go outside to the pool afterwards (inside is nekkid).

• Amador Causeway: a causeway built to connect several small islands out in Panama Bay and to serve as a breakwater at the head of the Canal so that the Canal opening doesn't ever need to be dredged. There's a restaurant out there called Mi Ranchito, which isn't fantastic, but has the best view, ever. Do lunch there. Then, in future years, you can visit the Frank Gehry-designed Museum of Biodiversity, which is still under construction right now. Also a good place to take a walk ... early in the morning or late at night.

• Partial Transit of the Panama Canal: this trip takes most of the day and I'd really only recommend it for people who are fascinated by the canal, and/or who have really fun company to go with. You take a bus from the causeway about 40 minutes up to a launch, ride down the canal through the Pedro Miguel lock, Lake Gatun, and the Miraflores Locks, and then finish up back where you started on the causeway. It's expensive (about $100), and rather boring, and very crowded. There's a lot of waiting around--waiting for the bus to take off, waiting for the boat to take off, waiting at the locks--and a lot of the canal is not very interesting to look at: just an unbroken wall of jungle. Also, the locks are much more interesting to observe from land, except for the going up and down inside the locks part. You get on the bus at 9 or 9:30 and get back to the causeway around 3:30.

If you don't want to do this--and I wouldn't recommend it to most people--I'd definitely recommend driving to the Miraflores Locks on land, and spending half a day there. There's a good, and comprehensive, museum at the locks in English and Spanish, where you can easily kill an hour or two. There's also a restaurant there that overlooks one set of locks, and you can get great pictures and video of the way the locks work and the ships that go through them. I'd recommend going in the morning, viewing the museum, having lunch there, and then taking your pics of the locks. This is really all you need of the canal.

If you really want to get on the canal, I'd recommend getting a group of people together--through a travel agent, maybe?--and renting a private trip through the canal with a tour guide, if possible.

• Canal Zone: again, get a tour guide or a taxi driver and drive up to the canal zone area near the city. Not a lot of USians have been to an actual US colony, so here's your chance (assuming you aren't so politically situated that you think the entire country is a US colony. There's an argument to be made for that). I was surprised how much the place looked like the Presidio in San Francisco, although I suppose I shouldn't have been. You don't need to spend much time there, just drive through and get a glimpse of what US imperialism looks like. There's also a school there where some Panamanian students staged a protest in 1964, insisting on raising a Panamanian flag alongside the US flag. They started a riot that lasted several days and spread throughout the Zone, and four people were killed, but it was a milestone along the way to true Panamanian self-determination.

• Day Trips: talk to travel agents and tour guides about these. I didn't do any day trips but there's a rainforest about 45 minutes away where you can fly through the canopy and see monkeys and toucans. There's also an Indian tribe on the Chagres River you can canoe to who show you around their village.

Cross-posted at atlas(t).

diablo rosso

oday was going to be Art Day number one, the idea being that I would go to the Museum of Contemporary Art, get grounded in what's what in Panamanian Art Now, and then ask the attendants where to go for good galleries.

Well, that got shot to Hell instantly. My cousin Ligia came to pick me and my folks up and we drove down there only to find that the Museum was closed for installation. I'd looked it up on the web but the site had no English version and the last exhibition listed ended on July 20. I figured they simply hadn't updated it yet and there would be something along on July 21 to fill the gap. Right?

Wrong. Turns out, the big Panama art museum takes over two weeks to install a show: the next exhibition opens the day I leave.

No problem; Ligia took us over to the Panamanian Cultural Institute, which has a gallery of Panamanian artists on the first floor ... which was also closed for installation of a show that is to open after we leave. WTF? Did they declare a no-art week and not tell us?

Poor Ligia told me she's not big on art, but she valiantly took me (after dropping my drooping folks off) to find the only two galleries she could think of. The first was an upscale couch art place. I found it interesting to see how Panamanian couch art runs heavily along the surrealist/harlequin/Picasso-cubist line. I tried to express this in non-art-fuck terms, and probably failed. Then the second one she couldn't find at all.

Finally, in desperation, she took me to a little place she suddenly thought of that she seemed to imagine wouldn't appeal to me. (She was apologetic the whole time we were there.) At last, we were hitting the mark, though.

This was Diablo Rosso (whose website also doesn't list exhibitions, and whose myspace page is even more useless), a contraction of every pre-gentrification, hipster/artist/DIY maker storefront-cum-hangout-cum-party-we-space I've gotten comfortable in, in my last young adulthood or so. Yeah, the world is scary and cultural capital is a universal currency.

It's a (or part of a) free-standing building with a very apparent graffiti mural along the driveway wall (apparent because--as I realized in that moment--there's no graffiti in Panama, at least, that I've seen so far). Inside there's a store with three rooms, selling the usual DIY lifestyle fare: t-shirts, purses, curios. These, of course, have a Panamanian twist, especially the purses woven out of what would have formerly been gum-pack-wrappers, but are now maps, tickets, cigarette packets, etc. Very ironic third world. I like that a lot.

Behind the store is a cafe/gallery (with no one manning the counter) featuring the work of one Jonathan Harker, who turns out later to have represented Panama in the 200? Venice Biennale. Okay, here we are, I thought. I bought some of his postcards.

It's the usual place, folks. There's one in every minor cosmopolis. Now I know where to go the next time I come to Panama and need art tips. If there are any art tips to be had. Perhaps I'd better go back later this visit, although they already pointed me to another gallery called Mateo Sariel on 74th in San Francisco neighborhood, which I will try to find later.

my impression of panama so far

t's been exciting and fun-filled, but we've been literally run off our feet (today's photo download yielded a high proportion of pics of family members sitting down wherever they got the chance), so I've gotten no time to post so far. I will do so soon.

The photo above is representative of the view of half of my days, speeding by spectacular scenery in an SUV.

Why does no one visit Panama? It's amazing.

i'm in panama!

ook familiar?

No, it's not a jeepney, and I didn't take the picture myself. This, above, is a pitcher of a painted Panama bus. I was wondering, before I arrived last night, if I really should post about my Panama trip on atlas(t): Galleon Trade, but one gander at the buses in Panama City laid my concerns to rest. This trip belongs on this blog.

Aside from the jeepney-esque buses, the close (but no ceegar) latitude of Panama City to Manila (Panama is souther, but less stifling hot), the history as a Spanish colony and then, in the 20th century, as an American colony, and its importance on a major trade route (in Panama, that last clause is an understatement), I say, aside from all that, I'm making this trip at exactly the same time I made the Manila trip last year. So there.

The trip is actually the perfect expression of travel, trade, and hybridity: it's a family reunion. My (Chinese) mother's oldest brother lives here, as do his two oldest daughters and their assorted kin. His daughters, my first cousins, are fourth generation Panamanian Chinese (my grandfather was, if you count back, second generation). But my mom was actually born and raised in Hong Kong. As I was just telling someone the other night, scratch any overseas Chinese family (or Filipino family) and you'll find that they haven't migrated just once, or to just one place, or in just one direction, or definitively, ever.

I arrived in Panama City last night, as I said, after a long day of nothing much at all. Today we were supposed to go yum cha (Chinese dim sum brunch) with the relatives, but somewho that got squashed so we "just" had a Chinese seafood banquet lunch instead, for, like, four hours. Got a quick drive through the city, and then had another meal at my cousin's house, complete with a gourmet coffee tasting (of coffee from Panama) and then ... what else? ... karaoke.

Tomorrow we're off to a resort in the rain forest. Onna beach. Envy me.

Don't worry, there will be art in all of this, by hook or by crook. And I will be taking pitchers of the buses. And I have some stuff coming up about the canal. Oh yes, the canal. Boo ya.

my entertainment blog!

i all!

I haven't posted here in donkey's years, although I have a couple of posts long overdue. I had an exchange between me an Christine Wong Yap ready to post and then lost it when the wireless at the cafe I was at shut off. It was about an hour's worth of work to clean up and I haven't had the heart to do it again.

But also, the Galleon Trade topic area has sputtered to a temporary halt for me. It's not that the artists have stopped making art, but that the cohesiveness of the group of artists has fray a little bit in my mind (only in my mind!). We're all back to our normal lives, it's been a year since we went to Manila, and the integrity of the topic has dissipated for me.

Also, I started blogging about art for KQED in January and that has absorbed a lot of my art blogging impulse.

I think when the Bay Area portion of Galleon Trade happens, there will be a flurry of posts. But it will be temporary. I think this blog will only survive, if it does, as an intermittent stream.

But also, I have a new, paid, blog called EnterBrainment, which is my usual meandering take, but this time on pop trash. It's a featured blog on a new, innovative blogging site called PNN or Personal News Network. The innovation sounds simple: the software is designed to allow bloggers to lay out their blogs like newspapers. But the result is a very different set of possibilities for blogging: more Huffington Post than Daily Kos.

Anyway, please check out the new blog and keep an eye out for my post with Christine. It's coming, I swear.

i is a bad blogger, part fifty-three

o real post today, just sticking my head in to explain why I haven't posted about Woff's show yet. (Running through February 23 at Southern Exposure Gallery in San Francisco, so get out there!)

I am currently--as in, right now, I just took a break from it to write this post--revising an article on Woff to appear in the next issue of Hyphen magazine. Not the Hybrid Issue that was just released this weekend, but the next one, due out in a few months, which is "spaces" themed, whatever that means.

As I was telling Herself, trying to write an article and a substantial blog post, both different, about the same subject, is like trying to give birth to fraternal twins at the same time, or trying to get a fat guy and a wide girl through the same doorway. Basically, we're gonna have to rethink that strategy.

Also, I just went all official 'n' shit as a blogger at the KQED arts and culture site. (For those of you scratching heads, KQED is the San Francisco NPR affiliate, one of those public radio hubs that originates a lot of programming, and a major contract employer of local artists and writers. So I'm very happy about that.

So this week I think I'll finally manage to get those puppies through the aperture, both. Well, we'll see. Stay tuned.

stephanie syjuco and body double

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's Body 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).

new years and artistic processes

have a great many excuses, reasons, circumstances, 'n' such to present for being essentially non-blogging on this blog in the past few months. But the main reason is simple: depression.

Not that I've been completely nonfunctional. It's been a mild depression, brought on by shortening days, a mild health-related problem, and, perhaps most importantly, the seeming near-total suspension of my creative faculties in 2007. Crappy year.

At the end of this year someone, I think it was Jaime, told me that if you don't feed the beast it starts to feed on you, and it seems to be true. But there was also, with regard to my performance on this blog, some discomfort from a few of the Galleon Traders in response to my post about how the Galleon Trade Manila events were less about the artwork than about the artists themselves.

I see how this post could easily be read as being dismissive of the artists' work, although that was not my intention. Still less was it my intention to cause distress to the artists. Although it's always been clear to me in the abstract why "embedded reportage" leads to ethically compromising conflicts of interest, this is my first visceral experience with it. I'm simultaneously writing critically about artwork, and turning my critical eye on my friends. When the beast is busy eating your heart out, this kind of internal conflict can freeze you. And it did.

A few things have contributed to my release from freeze in the past week or so. The first was the turn of the year, which is powerfully symbolic, symbolically operative, and coincidentally happens a week or so after the winter solstice so that the symbolism and seasonal rhythm can work together to give you a full-on catharsis.The second was my doctor figuring out my mild health-related problem, but the less said about that the less boring.

The third was, strangely enough, that the Irish film Once got to the top of my netflix queue. No others of my friends felt the same way about this flick that I did, but when you're coming out of a depression and creative freeze, a movie about an artist who has come to the end of a long stretch of dark-night-of-the-souling and is jumped into the next level through the friendship of a fellow artist is just exactly what you need to see. The scenes where the two musicians play and sing together were ecstatically blissful for me, because their release felt like my release.

That's enough, clearly. But then the year turns and everyone gets energized in January again and Things Start Happening. In the past week I've stood before, and in one case, within, the artwork of distant geniuses, community sprites, and friends (sometimes all three at once), and it has been electrifying.

Last weekend the National Book Critics Circle was in San Francisco to acknowledge the existence of the provinces and announce the fina-list for their award. Thursday and Friday I went to three literary panels therefore. I might post about these over on my personal blog, but I won't here.

That same night (Friday) I went to Trader Woff's opening at Southern Exposure Gallery, a show I helped install, along with a number of other friends (in fact, helping get that show up was part of its process, and mine here).

Saturday I took one of my last chances to see Mike Arcega's installation at the De Young Museum, and also took in the Louise Nevelson show while I was there. Other De Younginess ensued.

Later that night I saw There Will Be Blood with Jaime, and trust me, there will be blog on how bad that flick was.

And Sunday afternoon, I took in the annual Day of the Kings concert of Coro Hispano with Robynn.

Yes, each of those is a future post, to which I will link here when they are complete. I called this post something about "artistic processes" because my blogging--my record-keeping of and spur to my critical practice--is string and parcel with my creative writing. My practice is integrated and revving up my critical function is the first step towards outright making shit up again. And vice very much versa, of course. So this is my declaration: as of January 15, 2008, Clairica is open for business.

A Serving of Love

ere's a brief clip from Robynn Takayama's RJ Lozada's newly released documentary, A Serving of Love, about the recently passed community leader Bill Sorro. My friend Robynn Takayama was intrinsic to the project as well. Check out the website for more clips and information about Bill.

(cross-posted at SeeLight.)

manalo juan

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.

Last year was the fiftieth anniversary of Filipino independence. In the run up to the celebrations, Mrs. Juan decided to mark the occasion by sewing a Philippine flag, her crafty way of expressing her patriotism. She decorated it with appliqué, buttons, and beads. It was yummy enough, both in the making and in the finishing, to prompt her to do it again. And again. And again. And yet again.

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.)