atlas(t): galleon trade edition

all eyes on the artists

y excuse for so far not really posting very much about art on this art-centered blog has been that I want to start with posts about artists, including their sound files, and I'm having trouble transferring their sound files. And this is true.

I've also been silent because I've been processing everything. Also true.

However, those are not the only reasons I've found it difficult to talk about the existing work.

Before I went to Manila, I did stop to consider if the work the artists were bringing was going to be big enough. Most of the Galleon Trade artists work relatively small in any case, and had deliberately chosen cheaply transportable work--Christine Wong Yap even going so far as to make her work out of standard sized shipping boxes. I somehow had it in my head that expanding horizons meant BIG galleries.

That turned out not to be the case. The galleries were, if anything, smaller even than typical storefront community spaces in the real-estate-starved Yay Area.

Despite all of that, the work was still too small. By this, I don't mean that I hold it in any disdain, or that, after moving into an international context, I suddenly saw the poverty of the artists' point of view. It was rather that the work was made by artists who hadn't been on the Galleon Trade trip yet. The work wasn't triangulated to three points. It worked in its context, and out of its context it became ... well, not trivial, but almost beside the point. (Two possible exceptions are Megan Wilson and Mike Arcega because they made their work while in Manila, but I'll talk about that in other posts.)

Because the trip, the exhibitions, weren't about the artwork actually, at all. It was about the artists themselves, about their waxing, their ebb, about their arc through Manila. The artwork they brought was by way of credentials, yes. It was their gauntlet thrown down, a bit. It was their conversation piece, the thing that got the kids in the neighborhood talking to them.

But also, it was--or it will be--a growing mark on their doorposts, against which everything they make subsquent to Manila will show significant growth ... significant expanse.

But hey, no pressure, right?

A concentrated gaze is to an artist like sunshine to anything vegetable. (Well, the artist has to be ready. I've noticed that really green artists experiencing their first public success are far more likely to be stopped in their tracks by the attention--by the combination of fear and ego--than to flourish under it. But more seasoned, yet still emerging, artists who have cut their teeth, filed them, and had some fillings put in as well, know how to use the energy-concentrate that attention offers them.)

Just as plants in a greenhouse grow faster and out of season, I'm expecting a more radical growth in Galleon Trade artists within a short period of time. Because they have just been placed in a greenhouse.

Observe the picture at the top of the page, the one with the artists in a row, half-surrounded by an attentive local crowd. I went through our trip photos looking for one of these to symbolize the artists' experience in Manila, only to discover that it wasn't symbolic at all. It was literal. I have dozens of such photos, because the artists were in tons of such situations. Of the six evenings of Galleon Trade events, three were about attention to the artists' work and three were about attention to the artists. There was an opening, followed by a panel discussion, followed by another opening, followed by an "artists grill" Q & A, followed by another panel discussion, followed by another opening, followed by another Q & A.

A full week of nothing to do but talk about yourself as an artist.

But all artists have similar--if not so concentrated--experiences like this if they push on through. What made this special was that these were mostly "minority" or "ethnic" artists who, regardless of their success level in the mainstream, were always conscious, or made to feel conscious, of their otherness. Additionally, many are "1.5s," those who immigrated as children and are therefore neither fully immigrants, nor fully second generation American-born. They are transnational, but in a way peculiar to 1.5s: their connection to their birth culture being that of child, even though they are now adults.

All Some of the Fil Am Galleon Trade artists had only ever visited the Philippines with their families before--as children, or as adults still stuck in a child's role. This trip was their introduction to their, or their family's, country of origin, not only in an adult role, but in their chosen profession as artists.

Visiting Manila for this cultural event was profound enough for those of us with no other connections there. But visiting Manila with this pile-up of passages was earth-shaking for the Fil-Am artists of our group. I expect there to be a pause. Then I expect there to be new work: very different, very rich new work.

Am I expecting too much?

No pressure.

birthdays and newspapers

Left to Right--Top: friend of Mike Arcega's, Mike Yap (Christine's husband), Camille Wofford, Christine Wong Yap, Dad Wofford, Mom Wofford, Jaime Cortez, Johanna Poethig; Center: artist friend whose name slides out of my head, Rick Silog, Mike Arcega (with flowers and balloon), Woff (with flowers and balloon), Emily Sevier; Front: Kenneth Loh, Stephanie Syjuco, Chris Brown, moi.

've finally begun writing posts again, but longer ones, so, while you're waiting for those, here's some stuffs.

The photo above is from Jenifer Wofford's and Mike Arcega's combined birthday party, held at Johanna Poethig's house in Oakland. Both were born on August 19, but a year apart. It's rather appropriate that our first gathering stateside since the trip was to honor these two, since Woff is clearly the head and heart of Galleon Trade, and Mike arguably its hands, being the artist who actually created a galleon long before the project was thought of.

Much basketball was played, and phallic balloons twisted.

As if the world was conspiring to think of our exploits, two articles followed our return. The first, from the Philippine Daily Inquirer, is simply reportage about Galleon Trade. Click on the image to get a high-res photo where you can read the text.

Relevant quote:

The term "brain drain" connected to their migrating parents is no longer applicable to these Fil-Ams. "Galleon Trade" proposes instead the use of the word "integration." It's amazing that the project took off despite the lack of government funding from both ends.

"Integration" being of a different form than the melting pot type. Too bad the article didn't go into it. Also too bad that they find grassroots community fundraising "amazing."

The other article, in the The Art Newspaper, is about the Manila underground arts scene, not about Galleon Trade. It lists a number of artists, curators, and art spaces we got to meet and hang out with and in while we were there. Have a quick gander, because some of those names will come up again.

argh

orry this is taking so long, but I'm having technical issues.

I downloaded all my recordings to a pc, and now I need to:

1. convert them to some sort of mac-friendly format
2. get them into my mac (email doesn't seem to be working. Maybe the files are too big.)
3. find an editing program to edit them down.

any suggestions?

my pinay name

o appropriate on so many levels.

My Pinoy Name is Claudia Ligaya Little Bit Quilong-quilong.
Take The Filipino Name Generator today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.

how not to defeat jetlag/spark

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:

how pirated dvds make the world a better place

o copyfighter I, but I've altered my stance on copyright and intellectual property in mass-produced media since last week.

It's not just because I got a $1 copy of The Bicycle Thief, either. I'm (somewhat) convinced now that third world pirating is the great cultural equalizer ... and actually makes it possible for art to have an impact on da masses, whoever they are.

Our artist hosts for the day, MM Yu and Poklong Ananding, took us to the Muslim area of Quiapo, near the mosque, to eat Halal chicken (mmmmmm) and we ran into Romeo Lee near the pirate DVD shops. Romeo, a regular there, helped us get some smokin' deals on a surprising selection of classics and experimental films.

Of course, the newest Hollywood crap was there, but so were Discover channel nature docs. In the shop depicted above, we ran into painter Manuel Ocampo, as well as Galleon Trader Christine Wong Yap, who was touristing with her family that day. Apparently, the pirate DVD stores are a scene, and people run into each other there because people hang out there.

The DVD shops we went to sat along a small, relatively untrafficked street (for Quiapo), bookended by the district's mosque. There were a lot of blue interior walls in this section of the city, beautiful, elaborate details in occasional corners (as above), and a sort of sober quietness that I would normally associate with being near a place of worship ... only in the Philippines, no such soberness accrues to the areas around churches (more on that in the Quiapo post). I also saw signs for a Muslim police force and volunteer fire crew (all firefighters are volunteer here, which sounds suicidal until you consider that we're in the tropics.)

Also, brief hijab-and-veil sightings at the Halal chicken restaurant, where a group of women sat upstairs in hijab, eating chicken. I didn't think anything of it (although I took a surreptitious picture) until they had finished. Then they put their veils back on and I felt that I had witnessed something intimate. (That's also why I'm not posting their picture here.)

All in all, though, a quiet section of Quiapo. Quiet, slightly exotic, with DVDs.

Later that day, when accompanying us around on our studio visits, Romeo buttonholed me and told me that the Muslim section of Quiapo used to be so scary he wouldn't go there. Shootings every week, nearly, between Muslims and Christians, tension tension.

Then, the pirated DVDs came in. People started braving the crazy-ethnics section of town to get cheap flicks, but that wasn't the deal. The deal was that everyone in that part of Quiapo suddenly had access to films: Hollywood, art films, kiddie flicks, documentaries. The shop owners watched movies incessantly, as did their neighbors. The cultural savvy of the entire neighborhood leapt upward. Suddenly, upper/middle class artistes like Romeo could talk about the great European masters with Quiapo shop owners because the latter had gotten in a series of BBC artist biopics. Christians and Muslims could argue about camera angles, rather than shoot each other. (Well, not really, but imagine!)

According to Romeo, everyone chilled the fuck out and the district became relatively safe.

"So art really does make the world a better place?" I asked. We laughed at that, but Romeo came back with an earnest "Yes."

Allan Manalo, whom I hung out with last night, concurred. He told me that the indigenous Filipino film and tv industries are outrageously bad and condescending. The level of the entertainments there offered were low, an expression of Philippine media's contempt of the Philippine "masses". The pirated DVDs, Al said, did a run-around the monolithic Philippine media and raised the bar, almost without the media's knowledge. Now the public demand for intelligent, high-production-values media entertainment is rising, along with the sophistication of the audience.

Which is why, clearly, upper class artists and intellectuals hang out around pirate DVD stores, but also why they can stoop to converse with shopkeepers.

The EFF and the like don't think of class war when they protest and sue test cases. American cyber-libertarianism is uniquely upper-middle class, a rebellion of the privileged individual against the corporate juggernaut. And, although its notions of philanthropy have altered since Borsook wrote the linked article a decade ago, not much else has changed.

As a result, lower-class consumers and potential consumers outside of the US are left out of all calculation. I'm sure digital libertarians would be happy to find that their efforts had positively impacted third world downtrodden, but that's not actually on anybody's agenda. This complicates my feelings on the matter because, just as I believe a successfully regulatory and servicing government needs its due, I also believe that private corporate entities providing needed (and/or culturally desirable) goods and services in a way that stimulates economies deserve their due as well. The fact that history has never seen such unmitigatedly benign corporate entities is occasionally beside the point.

The point is, I'm not knee-jerkedly against The Man, whoever he is. Let them get richer, as long as others don't get poorer as a direct result. Boy, that was a detour. Where was my point?

Oh. But then again, Filipino working class will never in their lifetimes be able to afford legit DVDs. Ever. And, of course, no one cares, because no one is worrying about selling to them anyway. So why not pirate? As in the Napster argument, it creates a market, from which everyone benefits ... and that is absolutely true. Also, as in the Starbucks argument,--where Starbucks, once they had gone into cities and set up a store opposite every indie coffeehouse and driven them out of business, then went into towns where there were no coffeehouses and created a market for them, so that indie coffeehouses began springing up opposite the local Starbucks--pirate DVDs create a market for sophisticated artflicks which stimulates local producers--i.e., local artists--to produce, or produce more, or produce in a manner that can supply this new demand.

Completely aside from the whole what-is-good-for-the-corporation-may-sometimes-be-good-for-us argument, pirating arts and entertainment products is good for the arts scene. Obviously.

But that the arts scene can chill out political tensions in a high tension neighborhood? That I hadn't foreseen, and I'm even more optimistic and bleeding heart about the potential of art than most.

(A small, barely related side-note: our student guide at the elite University of Santo Tomas, the president of her student literary society, was named Ayn, as in Ayn Rand. I'm just sayin'.)

cebu thriller

oly shit.

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.

wwii

verywhere I go in Manila, I'm reminded of World War Two and its aftereffects. I guess that's what happens when you live in a city whose very appearance, skyline, traffic flow ... the very quality of life inside and outside its buildings ... are defined by the thorough destruction that city experienced during a war.

... not to mention the country's constitutional regime, its political and social structure, its cultural obsessions, its naughtiness ... and the idiomatic American English people speak here ...

The building we're staying in, Sy-quia Apartments, is defined by the fact that it's one of the few art deco buildings to have survived the bombing in WWII. Outside, it's another corrugated-metal-awned dirtfest a la Manila. Inside, the floors are mahogany, the grilles are art deco, the ceilings are high.

The apartment I'm staying in, Chiqui Mabanta's, was featured in a number of design spreads (the left pic is mine, can you tell?) Downstairs in this building is the renowned, underground art salon and residency space The Living Room that is hosting the Galleon Trade artists for the duration of our stay. The building is full of artists and design types. It's typical of what I'm talking about: outside is ugly, shabby Manila. Inside is beautiful, historical, culturally updated Manila on mahogany floors.

WWII and history are hidden to American eyes in America because they are literally invisible. History is the hidden engine that has gotten us to where we are and most of us are just passengers anyway. WWII and history are hidden in Manila to American eyes because they are so obvious, and so huge, that we don't know how to see them.

Everywhere I go, everywhere: in the cabs, in the museums, along the park, to the bathroom, everywhere I go WWII is waiting. You can't see it in the photo above, but some of the magazines arrayed on the coffee table--as a design element--are of course vintage. What vintage? LIFE, ca. 1940 ...

... with its spread on the Atlantic fleets and the names of the ships! (Most of the ships are named after places by the way.)

Carlos Celdran explained in one of his tours that Manila was rightfully called "The Pearl of the Orient" before the war: modern, busy, the Asian city of firsts, beautiful architecture, varieties of wealth and enterprise ... the gateway to Asia in every sense.

Then the Americans bombed the shit out of it and this is what it looks like now:

Well, grain of salt. Colonialism effects a lot of comfort, because colonizers want all the comforts of home. And a great deal of the "beautiful" architecture of prewar Manila was European. The loss of soul Celdran tells us accompanied the loss of Intramuros, the old Spanish city center, was the loss of an old colonial center which had supplanted another colonial center, and was supplanted by yet another colonial center.

What the governor general giveth, the governor general bombeth away. It's the giving and the taking, the arrogance of building a pearl city in the Orient in your own image, and then destroying it again to suit your own agenda, wherein lies privilege. Lots and lots and lots of Filipinos lived here the whole time, wandering in and out of construction sites and rubble, incidental to the whole process. Does it sound ridiculous for them to object to the destruction of structures the building of which they never sanctioned in the first place? When do they get to say, "stop! This step was one step too far"?

I'm thinking a lot about privilege these days, types and expressions of privilege, and it seems to me that the biggest and most operative expression of privilege is the ability not to see it. It? The privilege, of course, and the effects, or lack of effects, that the operation of power has on that which belongs to the privileged. This is privilege on a massive, national scale, where a nation becomes involved in a world war, which, by virtue of that nation's power never touches its own land (with the exception of Hawai'i, of course.)

Everywhere else I've traveled in my life, WWII has left marks: physical, architectural marks, structural marks, and psychic marks. My mom wears a deep scar behind her shoulder blade where doctors cut into her lung when she was six to drain the fluid pneumonia had collected. Chung King was blockaded by the Japanese, so medicines couldn't get in and my mom had gotten sicker than necessary. They operated on her without anesthesia.

Everyone of my age group in Germany when I was there had a story from their parents' childhood, or grandparents' young adulthood about the war. It's only Americans whose stories from that era are during the war and not about it. For us, the war was Daddy going away for awhile--or forever--and not our lives interrupted, our houses bombed, our food supplies stopped, and rapine and disease raging through our neighborhoods. We didn't come out of the war with images of our babies tossed onto bayonets.

The result? Among other, more complex things: Manila is a centuries-old city where most of the buildings age out at less than sixty. There are a lot of such cities around the world, where the building materials start out shabby and temporary. This, far from a fresh start, is a constant, sore reminder of what was lost and a decade of national trauma.

And unlike in ancient times, when a place is razed now, the civilization does not simply cease to exist, its people and uses dispersed to the subtle graveyard of cultural syncretism. The global civilization it is part of goes on around it and it has to run to catch up. All late twentieth century urban ugliness is either reparing what WWII destroyed, or catching up to the progress that WWII brought into your neighborhood. It's a doubling effect: the trauma of war and the trauma of catching up; the load that everyone--but we Americans--has to carry.

galleon-tradey stuff

f you're wondering why I'm not posting on Galleon Trade happenings 'n' stuff, it's because most of the events have been accompanied by some sort of verbal barrage, which I caught on my digital recorder.

The stupid stupid salesman at Radio Shack, who sold it to me, told me it downloaded to Mac. It doesn't download to Mac. So I'll have to wait until I get home to download the stupid thing to my PC at work, and then transfer somehow to my Mac, and then edit.

Anyhoo, at some point, I'll be able to share images of art and artists along with sound clips of them essplaining their art! Woo hoo! I'll also have sound clips from Carlos Celdran's Intramuros tour/performance/history lesson (which is hands down the best tour and the best history lesson I've ever gotten, and the best way to kick off a stay in Manila), and from the artist talk Carlos is hosting tonight, which will close down the Galleon Trade festivities week, and send the artists packing.

That's right: tonight is the last event, at Carlos' Living Room salon, so if you're in Manila, check it out.

The story so far:

1. Tuesday was the opening at Mag:net The Fort cafe, with Rick Godinez and Enrique Chagoya (both absent) each contributing two pieces to a single wall in a Makati district mall cafe. There was also a sound performance involving nine artists each playing for nine minutes, each starting three minutes apart, and playing for a total of ninety minutes. It was about as coherent as you'd expect.


2. Wednesday afternoon was an artist's panel at the University of Santo Tomas, their venerable old institution. Galleon Trade organizer Jenifer Wofford, academics Lucy Burns (of US) and Lito Zulueta of and May Datuin (of PI), and artists Jaime Cortez and Megan Wilson all showed work and/or spoke, and there was a brief Q & A afterwards, followed by a reception.


3. Thursday was the opening at Green Papaya art projects, with Megan Wilson, Stephanie Syjuco, Michael Arcega, Reanne Estrada, Christine Wong Yap. It was a straightforward art opening, and apparently everyone went out afterwards (I went to bed).


4. Friday was another afternoon artists panel at Ateneo De Manila University, where Jenifer Wofford, academic Eric Reyes, Green Papaya curator Norberto Roldan, and artists Johanna Poethig and Stephanie Syjuco spoke. I missed this one.


5. Saturday (last night) was the final opening at Mag:net Katipunan with Rick Godinez (again), Julio Cesar Morales, Jaime Cortez, Johanna Poethig, and Eliza Barrios. A fun night. We broke open one of the two bottles of Patron and then went afterwards to the Shoe Expo art and commercial complex.


6. Sunday, tonight, will be the final event, with all of the remaining artists (Jaime left on Thursday) being grilled by Carlos.

Yes, I will be picking these apart in the coming days/weeks. But I'm not going to post on all of them. Like the Ship Launch auction and fundraiser party back in Oakland a few weeks ago, many of these events were fun to go to, but not to read about.

But if you want the event blow-by-blow, and pics to boot, check out Wofford's offeeshul Galleon Trade News blog.

girl, i wanna take you to a day spa

know that anyone paying attention, all three of you, will be expecting me to talk about cultural stuff and be all smart and show photos and shit, but today I'm gonna talk about a day spa.

(Don't worry, I'm not just gonna be nyah-nyahing about my pleasure cruise. There's some serious near the end.)

That's right, suckas! I'm on vacation and I spent five--count 'em, 5!--hours at a day spa yesterday night. Yee haw!

Megan, Reanne and I went to Sanctuario, day spa of day spas ... or maybe it's just ordinary here, I don't know, I have no basis for comparison. It opens at four in the afternoon and closes at three in the morning. We got a 3-hour "Beauty Pack", with mani/pedi, facial, scalp treatment, and mmmmassage. Did I say it took 5 hours?

I didn't bring my camera, but I wouldn't have been able to take pictures anyway. You get there, they make you strip and put everything in a locker, and then put you in a one-size-fits-all-except-claire sarong and top number. You shower (in the sarong-and-top number) and then go hang on the "wet floor", which as far as I can tell, is what they call the sauna/steam room/whirlpool/cold plunge facilities. Awesome. It all takes place around a stone-paved open air courtyard with two round whirlpools and a cold plunge with a row of high spouts producing strong cooling streams you can run your head under to really cool off.

I didn't get a really good look at the massage room because my head was under a towel and up in a higher number of heaven for the duration, but the massage was pretty vigorous and spectacular. Near the end, my blood sugar plummeted and I asked for juice. Got a mango shake that was pretty spectacular, too.

It was in the "beauty" part of the "Beauty Pack" that I started getting uncomfortable. See, they took the towel off my head, and I got to watch the proceedings (as long as I could stay awake, that is. I passed out several times.) The area for mani/pedi, facial, and scalp treatment was one largish room split up into tiny cubicles by wooden dividers. The cubicles were too small for me, but what really made them a problem was that each of us needed to be swarmed by two or three attendants at a time, and there just wasn't room for that. The mani/pedi took about two hours alone, so they tried to do both at once.

This brought me back to something we had been noticing earlier--namely the profusion of service attendants at every stop: restaurants, bars, every place had waaaaay too many people working there. And the funny thing was that, although, say, Aristocrat, would have around three servers per table, the service was no faster or better than if they had the American ratio of servers to served.

Labor is cheap here, but not, for all that, necessarily better. The restaurant servers--and the security men they have stationed at every air conditioned door--don't seem to be trained in anything other than being there for the look of it. At Aristocrat, it was the same few people taking all the orders and serving the food. The extraneous bused the tables and stood around.

At Sanctuario, lack of training wasn't an issue. Everything was reasonably well done, and some of it extremely so. But strange to say, there was such a profusion of workers that it actually felt like there weren't enough. Since everyone had to be swarmed by three attendants at once, there weren't enough attendants among the six serving us to handle the three of us. Hence, the five-hour spa treatment ... and a lot of waiting.

But most of all, as I sat there being poked and unguented and washed and preened, I felt more and more like I was in a sweatshop. After all, in photographs of sweatshops photographers tend to focus on the workers and their misery, but what we all ignore in this is the strange contrast between the miserable, cramped, sweating workers, and the products that emerge, shining and beautiful, from their third-world hands. Mostly, we don't get to see the products as objects with agency, but last night, I was the product of that sweatshop.

I'm not complaining. I didn't, actually, emerge from Sanctuario with even the slightest guilt wash. The attendants talked and laughed throughout, and looked healthy and well-rested and not overworked. I know how high their tips are because I paid them--and this is truly one of those disconnect moments when you give a three-dollar tip and wonder if you're giving too much, and realize that you probably are, and then realize that you don't have to care and everybody wins. Everybody really did win last night, and I'm glad: glad that I have the privilege to offer myself such things and glad that the people who served me benefited without (seeming to be) exploited.

But a clear thought emerged from this regarding the qualitative difference between service in the Philippines and service in the United States.

The Philippines, you see, is still a culture of servant and served. Not server as it is in the States. The difference is that in the servant culture, the servant does everything for you--you do nothing menial for yourself--and you have greater responsibilities towards them (you must house them, for example.) In the server economy we have in the States, everyone is served at one point or another, and most people are, at one point or another, servers. The lines aren't as hard, and the servers customarily refuse to offer certain kinds of service--or certain qualities of service.

Things I noticed:

1. The masseuses massage every part of you, except for the actual genitals, without blinking an eye.


2. The servants at our host's apartment are there to get you whatever you want from the kitchen, and are uncomfortable if you take your dirty glasses and plates into the kitchen for them. You aren't supposed to lift a finger.


3. The concept of the pedicab becomes clear while you're riding it: someone else uses the strength of their body to move your body through space.

No working class American of the service economy would put up with doing for you what you can easily do for yourself: rub your own butt, take your plate to the kitchen, walk down the street.

An American server is an independent contractor, paid by both employer (restaurant, for example) and customer (in tipping norms), and wouldn't put up with his/her living situation being determined by the employer, either.

But, lest I begin to sound too American boosterish, I have to acknowledge that the distance between rich and poor in the States is approaching that of the Philippines. The overall standard of living is higher, but the desperation becomes similar.