The Wily Filipino

Five Answers.

I think the questions were too difficult, as not many people wrote answers. Well, here they are, but you'd have to wade through my various digressions:

1. This California-based lite jazz pianist dedicated one of his compositions on a 1985 album to Ninoy Aquino. Who is he?

I was initially tempted to write a long answer about how, in the eighties (the last time I was really familiar with the Philippines), the Filipino music scene has always been interestingly divergent from the American Top 40, despite what the Apo Hiking Society sings in "American Junk;" and this would have meandered into a discussion of the odd absence of hiphop from Pinoy radio airwaves, despite its seeming centrality to Filipino American youth culture; and CityLite 88.3's spearheading of the entire lite jazz scene, making a (yuppie) household name of Jim Chappell, who is virtually unknown in the United States, and who is probably eternally grateful to all those Manilenos who pestered Odyssey and SM into releasing his hard-to-find albums, with which I would have argued that such yuppie trappings was somehow culturally "necessary" for a disillusioned middle class (in the '80s) to differentiate itself from everyone else, considering that so many of the so-called professional and lower classes had gone overseas at that point, and that the kind of "sophistication" that jazz, in its various forms, connoted, was an important marker of Filipino upper middle-class consumption, and that this could also be seen if one analyzes the content of ads featured on an aggressively "A-market" radio station like CityLite as compared with, say, a more "downscale" 93.9 WKC, and that this would have been all still tied up with the glamor of English which still seems to be the only language used on FM radio, making Jeremiah Junior's voice and accent the default template by which all DJs are reckoned, and such that even a Tagalog ad on Citylite would sound jarring, considering that even the tracks from Filipino artists which Citylite would play in the early days would also be in English, with the exception of some stuff like Labuyo's classic "Tuloy Pa Rin Ako;" and 99.5 RT's valiant defense of the New Wave, when they played such willfully obscure singles like "C.R.E.E.P." by the Fall, "Chamber of Hellos" by Wire Train and the gorgeous "More to Lose" by Seona Dancing, and how RT fell into ignominy by switching to a godawful Top 40 format, despite the fact that their spearheading of the New Wave was instrumental in getting jeepney radios to play music from China Crisis and the Cure, and even my junior-senior high school prom's theme was "Feels Like Heaven" by the Fiction Factory, which goes to show how triumphant New Wave's entry was into the provinces; and the inexplicable success of Mike Francis and Fra Lippo Lippi, acts which are, once again, almost completely unknown in the United States, the anonymity of which is evident in sporadic postings on the soc.culture.filipino and rec.music.filipino newsgroups asking where to find their albums in the U.S.; and how, in many cases, the Philippines has anticipated many trends, since the ridiculous "Macarena" was poisoning Filipino airwaves at least a year before it hit the U.S., and how Everything But The Girl was already huge in the Philippines long before "Missing" came out; and that most of the time the Philippines may be really taking its cultural cues from Europe, filtered through Hongkong and Taiwan, with this reflected in the Giordano and Pink Soda shops all over Manila malls; and I would have wrapped it all up by asking whether anyone remembered such "hits" as "My Heart Keeps Beating" by Blind Date, or whether anyone knew why someone bothered to release singles like "See My Dreams Around," "Swiss Boy," "Hypnotized," "6 to 8," "Sahara Nights," and the makabagbag-damdaming "Body Dancer." But I digress. The question refers to "Hymn for Aquino," found on the David Benoit album "This Side Up."

2. In another Marcos-era rumor, the president allegedly had the borders of a province redrawn so that its shape would look like his profile. What was this province?

You folks haven't taken a look at a Philippine map lately, have you? The "correct" answer is Kalinga-Apayao, two subprovinces joined together in 1966, I think. Check it out: that swath of Bryclreemed hair shares borders with Cagayan Province. By the way, the rumor isn't true. But then again the regime lied about a lot of stuff.

3. Aside from their showbiz backgrounds, what do Rogelio de la Rosa and Eddie Ilarde have in common?

They were also both senators -- just in case one thinks that Loren Legarda, Noli de Castro, Tito Sotto, Ramon Revilla, Bobby Jaworski, and Freddie Webb were fairly recent anomalies in Philippine politics. And now Jinggoy Estrada, Pilar Pilapil, Bong Revilla, Jay Sonza, Lito Lapid and Jamby Madrigal are following suit. Yay.

4. Six people were killed here in January 1970; seventeen years later, in January 1987, thirteen people also lost their lives in the same location. What place is being referred to?

Ferdinand Marcos and Cory Aquino may be different presidents, but the murder of students and farmers at Mendiola Bridge haunts both their regimes.

5. In this controversial 1989 film, actor Daniel Fernando goes to Manila to do two things: to look for a job, and to look for his sister, played by Princess Punzalan, whom he unexpectedly discovers working at a brothel. What job does he end up getting?

He was employed as a macho dancer, in the film of the same name. Not the best Lino Brocka film, though, because it's ultimately derivative at heart, and Brocka has a better eye for political repression. But amidst the cheesy saxophone music in the background, the many lovingly-filmed soap-and-shower scenes between Fernando and Alan Paule have a kind of gaudy but erotic transcendence, and it's where the film shines. The film ends in tragedy, of course, but it stands firm in its belief of the power of redemptive luv.

Posted by the wily filipino at January 18, 2004 12:18 PM