The Wily Filipino

Your New Favorite Song.

There isn't another album much like Comus's extraordinary First Utterance, and perhaps one should be thankful. While still deeply rooted in the wyrdfolk vein, First Utterance -- the title alone evokes magical incantations, or an initial quickening of the Logos -- is positively unearthly. With songs about hanging, rape, murder, the execution of Christians -- and, ultimately, the deep, dark woods -- Comus's 1971 album is an unsettling listen.

The first song off the album, "Diana," isn't really the best track; that honor goes to "Drip Drip" which is too long to be uploaded here. (That song also has the distinction of having one of its lines, "My arms your hearse," borrowed by the prog-metal band Opeth for one of its album titles.)

"Diana" chronicles a mad pursuit through a forest ("Lust he follows virtue close / Through the steaming woodlands / His darkened blood through bulging veins" the song begins); the near-hysteric quality of the vocals, the bizarre bongo drum break, and the overall tinge of psychedelic instrumentation make it one of the quintessential wyrdfolk tracks. (It is also famously covered by Current 93 on the Horsey album; David Tibet's declaimed vocals aren't as creepy as Comus's, but the cover version features a fantastic relentlessly looped violin.) The singers entreat the pursued Diana to "kick [her] feet up," but the virgin goddess, chased by lust (who "bares his teeth and whines"), can't be coming to a good end here: "Mud burns his eyes but desire burns his mind / Fear in her eyes as the forest grins..."

Hear it (4.17 mb).

Busy.

Haven't posted in a while -- spent a slew of very late nights grading papers and exams, hopped on a plane, visited Niagara Falls with my folks, entered the Cave of the Winds with Happy and Clarissa, pretended it was a scene from The Perfect Storm, attended a mini-IRRI reunion, graduated (I may still inflict you readers with a photo in a future post), saw an amazing view of Manhattan as the plane descended into Newark, returned home to SF to more late papers. My folks will be here for a week, so no posts for now. But soon: more mp3s, a poetry blurb, answers to the (unanswered) quiz.

Why Was This Picture Taken?

Why was this picture taken? It's the first question, perhaps, that comes to mind after the question "who are these people?" These are dead Filipino "insurgents" killed in the Philippine-American war; I have no more information on why or how they were killed, or who they were and who killed them. (The original is apparently at the Missouri Historical Society archives, which I hope to visit in July -- the scan above was made from a photograph I purchased on eBay.)

There is little dignity or repose in this photograph; limbs are twisted together, forming a stark white contrast between the clods of earth on the left and the tangled grass on the right. A bare foot dangles over another man's head.

But why was this picture taken? Was it for strategic reasons? Was it for later use as propaganda? What did one get out of it? Was it part of a military archive, as evidence of a particular troop's activity for the day? Or was it meant for commercial purposes? Images like the above -- either reproduced in stereoviews and in monographs -- were already widely available as early as 1899. Along with photographs of such quaint Philippine sights as carabaos, local women, nipa huts and the streets of Manila, one could similarly see, with seemingly little dissonance, images of soldiers killed in trenches.

Unlike paintings, photographs could be made available to a mass audience -- through reproduction from negatives, and the invention of halftone plates in 1880. By 1897 speed presses could print photographs in books, magazines, and most especially, newspapers. It was this quality of reproducibility, as Benjamin wrote, that effected a radical shift in the conception of the work of art. The artwork was no longer a unique object, but was now a commodity that could be duplicated and circulated.

The pinnacle of this commodification (at least before film) was the postcard. Gradually losing its primary use as an epistolary medium, the postcard's image, instead of the writing space on the back, became more important. Whether it was actually sent or simply kept for a collection, the postcard was dominated by the image; in a sense, the postcard was the nearest one could come to the commerce of pure image. As David Prochaska writes, about Algeria: "These images were not made to be viewed aesthetically, but to be bought and sold, as capitalist commodities produced in a colonial context..."

The image above is not a postcard; indeed, I am not entirely sure what it was used for. (I cannot identify the coat-of-arms -- fleur-de-lis on one half, lion rampant on another -- but I suspect it has to do with the military unit associated with the photograph.) What makes it particularly chilling are the decorative lacy twirls that run along the border -- a macabre attempt, it seems, to render the photograph suitable for framing.

Was it, perhaps, a souvenir? The tourist souvenir relies on the capacity of the photograph to provide evidence: proof that the photographer (or the photographed) was there. Look, we're in Disneyland! Look, he's riding the bike with no hands! Look at all the fun we're having! A souvenir is intimately incorporated within -- perhaps even proceeding from -- the sphere of the personal. Possessing a photograph entails the ownership of a possessed and objectified (and perhaps eroticized as well) subject specifically meant to evoke memories of the same possessed and objectified colony. The Philippines, in effect, was also symbolically possessed through the purchase of images. The Filipino subject, decontextualized and objectified, was reduced to a replicable (and replicated), commodified image.

It is the act of symbolic possession of the subject, ensuing from actual physical possession of the photograph, which gives the commodification of the image its disturbing quality. Perhaps this accounts more for the talismanic properties of photographs: the ability to solely possess, the capacity to direct an unlimited gaze at the subject/object.

But in what capacity does the photograph above serve as a souvenir? Who framed it? Was it hung on a wall? Was it displayed prominently? Was it tucked into a scrapbook? Was it ever for sale? Who bought it? How many copies were sold? Was it looked at often? Was it placed at the bottom of a drawer? Why was the picture taken?

Why were the pictures taken? What did one get out of them? Were they souvenirs? Were they proof of all the fun they were having? Why are they giving the thumbs-up sign? Why were they e-mailing these pictures to each other? Why were the pictures installed as screensavers on the interrogation room laptops? Why are they smiling?

See Spot Run. Run, Spot, Run.

Another shining example of the moronic shills that populate the Bush administration -- here's Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, having a little difficulty explaining the decapitated bodies of children as "a high-risk meeting of high-level, anti-coalition forces:"

"There may have been some kind of celebration," Kimmitt said. "Bad people have celebrations, too. Bad people have parties, too, and it may have been what was seen as some kind of celebration ... may have been just a meeting in the middle of the desert by some people conducting criminal or terrorist activities."

And good people, I assume, sodomize bad people with chemical lights.

Five Questions.

Because I don't feel like writing about music or politics tonight -- and because I'm testing out the bulletin board after I killed my comments option -- I'm pulling out something from my archives. I've already started a topic; let me know, people, whether it works. (Registration is painless.)

1. In the early '80s, Tetchie Agbayani created a furor when she posed nude for Playboy. The layout was composed of photos of her on a beach accompanied by the usual hokey captions -- but these captions were not written in English. In which language were they written?

2. What animal is depicted on a Jack and Jill Chiz Curls package?

3. 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?

4. What did the cast members of Palibhasa Lalaki do at the end of every episode?

5. For what store did Rod Navarro and two dwarves make advertisements?

Looking at "Wars of Conquest."

The iconic image of the Philippine-American War -- I'm posting it above because there's something hinky with Jim's java applet -- is of the massacre of Bud Dajo, where 900 Muslim men, women and children were killed in a mountain crater. The photograph was subsequently published by the Boston-based Anti-Imperialist League in a pamphlet, of which 3,000 copies were made and distributed to the press. (When Moorfield Storey, the first president of the NAACP, writes, "The spirit which slaughters brown men in Jolo is the spirit which lynches black men in the South," I'm reminded of Luc Sante's recent op-ed piece in the New York Times where he compares the Abu Ghraib photographs -- in particular, those dazzling smiles -- as similar to postcards of lynchings and the happy block party underneath.)

The photograph of Bud Dajo -- with American soldiers posed in victory over the corpses of the enemy -- and the image of Lynndie England dragging an Iraqi prisoner with a leash around his neck both raise similar questions: why were the photographs taken at all? Was it, as the privates now allege, part of a tactical program of interrogation? Or were the images meant to be incorporated into an official (or unofficial) government archive, a shadow archive of humiliation and homicide?

(One of the crucial differences is in this process of incorporation. The increased portability -- and most important, the novelty of the equivalences of the visual field of the camera and the viewer -- and the ideological function of the photograph in the visual possession / colonization of the Philippines are clearly contextually different. But the images are a nice bookend to the American empire -- one taken at its violent birth, the other at its similarly blood-soaked twilight.)

Barthes, following Benjamin, has famously written about the aura of the photograph and how, through the chemical process, "radiations" from the body of the photographed "ultimately touch" the viewer. But unlike Barthes' notion of the "punctum," the crucial, piercing part here is the sociohistorical conditions -- and their uncanny similarities -- upon which both photographs were produced.

In a superb series of essays, the Reverend Mykeru writes about all the hand-wringing on outrage -- and rank idiots being "more outraged by the outrage" -- and writes: "it's simply amazing that people are treating these incidents as if they are something new, as if ground is being broken with brutal photographic records of a brutal war."

Flashback to W.E.B. DuBois, who wrote that the photograph of the massacre was:

...the most illuminating thing I have ever seen. I want especially to have it framed and put upon the walls of my recitation room to impress upon the students what wars and especially Wars of Conquest really mean.

It's what war really means, but Bush and his sheep don't really get it.

Here's Storey again:

When a man is lynched the community which tolerates the offence suffers more than the victim. When we honor brutality in our army we brutalize ourselves. Our colleges have failed if they have not taught a better civilization than this, our churches have failed if this is their Christianity.

These Moros were robbers, it is said. Alas, what are we? We who went as their allies and friends, who made a treaty with them to be kept while it suited our convenience and then repudiated, and who now have robbed them of their country, their freedom and finally of their lives. Have they ever injured us that we invade their little island and kill them in their homes? "They do not know how to govern themselves." That is our excuse, and how do we govern them? We have shown them how little we regard our agreements, and when they "stir up a dangerous state of affairs" we exterminate them. Thus we teach the Filipinos what American civilization means.

And you'll no doubt be reminded of another leader doing a "superb job" after reading Roosevelt's letter of commendation to the commanding officer after the massacre:

I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brave feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag.

Misc.

I've been hit with a few dozen pieces of comment spam -- very sneaky stuff this time, all clearly meant to foil mt-blacklist -- and some rather nasty comments, which you may or may not hear about from another blogger. I've tried turning off the comments, which hasn't always worked.

Completely swamped today with grading, and the onslaught doesn't let up even after next week when I get about a hundred short papers. I was planning to write a little post about Comus's "Diana" (the next "Your New Favorite Song") but didn't have the energy.

Anyhow -- hopefully I'm not just opening the floodgates to more spammers or worse, hackers -- I've opened up a bulletin board. It may end up being a dry run for one of my classes in the fall, as an alternative to having them all write blogs, but for now it's open (I think) to the public, i.e., you, dear readers. (You'll have to register to post, though.) I don't expect much traffic anyway.

(I wrote "I think" because I'm still fiddling with permissions -- is it so obvious now that I'm procrastinating with grading? But I was grading finals till 1 a.m. last night, so I deserve a break before I correct another batch tonight.)

Your New Favorite Song.

One thing you wouldn't get from my listening profile on Audioscrobbler -- as you can see, it makes me look like a total Guided By Voices obsessive -- is the fact that only a few years ago I was a huge fan of John Zorn, Morton Feldman, Keiji Haino, Current 93, Coil... All bands / musicians / composers with big discographies and all, but none of which even show up on my list.

I also used to be a big fan of wyrdfolk, whatever that really means; I've always thought of it as dark, generally pagan-themed (or Christ-haunted), deep-woods inflected, guitar strumming. In general this has been expanded, I think, to include psych and prog elements here and there, as well as more "trad-folk;" thus, in a different light, artists as diverse as Devendra Banhart, Steeleye Span, the Carter Family, Linda Perhacs, Will Oldham, Vashti Bunyan, Ghost and Donovan would qualify. While principally English, think of Harry Smith's "old, weird America" and you'll know what I mean. (Yes, I know it's Greil Marcus' description of The Basement Tapes.)

The ultimate wyrdfolk album, in my opinion, would be Comus's First Utterance; if pressed for only a few more, I would name Paul Giovanni's soundtrack for The Wicker Man (though the killer opening track is missing from the U.S. version), The Incredible String Band's The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, C.O.B.'s Moyshe McStiff and the Tartan Lancers of the Sacred Heart, Stone Angel's Stone Angel, and perhaps, from a different time period, Current 93's Earth Covers Earth and Ghost's Lamarabirabi.

Which brings me to today's mp3 download, one of my favorite songs ever and, in my opinion, one of the quintessential "wyrdfolk" tracks: Trees' "The Garden of Jane Delawney," the title track of their 1970 debut album. (Their follow-up album, On the Shore, is the more solid work, however, complete with a creepy Hipgnosis cover.)

I have no idea what the song's about -- there are references to "a fire [that] will consume your hair," eyes turning to glass, the tears of the willow "drown[ing] you as you sleep," a "bloodfilled stream" -- but the song conjures, at least for me, an aura of quiet, overpowering, supernatural dread.

Hear it (5.93 mb).

[Update: The lyrics to the song -- apparently it's been covered by some goth-folk band named All About Eve.

And a bonus hay(na)ku, inspired by a comment on the song on the Bruton Town mailing list:

Like
a ghost
passing through you]

Musical Superlatives.

I'm in the mood for superlatives today. Three, to be exact:

The best music-related blog: largehearted boy.

The best mp3 blog: Copy, Right?

And (right now, anyway, because I'm feeling oddly euphoric and mushy) the greatest song ever (5.23 mb -- thanks again to Kid Carlomagno):

I could be discontent and chase the rainbow's end
I might win much more but lose all that is mine
I could be a lot but I know I'm not
I'm content just with the riches that you bring
I might shoot to win and commit the sin
Of wanting more than I've already got
I could run away but I'd rather stay
In the warmth of your smile lighting up my day
(the one that makes me say)

'Cause you're the best thing that ever happened to me or my world
You're the best thing that ever happened -- so don't go away

I might be a king and steal my people's things
But I don't go for that power crazy way
All that I could rule but I don't check for fools
All that I need is to be left to live my way
(so listen to what I say)

I could chase around for nothing to be found
But why look for something that is never there
I may get it wrong sometimes but I'll come back in style
For I realise your love means more than anything
(the song that makes me sing)

Cannon Fodder.

I have a confession to make: I kind of wanted to feel sorry for Lynndie England. The journalists who wrote about her could barely disguise the politely-coded references: Trailer. West Virginia. Sheep farm. Night shift on a chicken processing plant. By the time a British legislator started referring to England and her colleagues, including Sabrina Harman ("former assistant manager at a Papa John's restaurant"), as "smirking jezebels from the Appalachians" -- not to mention "The Lynndie England Song" with its references to incest and "bootshine," posted by an "Anna" as a comment on my blog -- well, I'm surprised the New York Times didn't just up and call her "white trash."

For every soldier set to make a professional career out of the military, there's another, probably many more, who joined -- well, just to get out of a backwater town like Fort Ashby, West Virginia. Or, like some of my students, just to be able to finish college. Or, one suspects, because Burger King wasn't hiring that day and they just wanted to get a decent job that paid a little over minimum wage.

This should in no way be read as a defense of England's actions; my previous posts should make that clear. But it merely underlines the U.S. Army's reliance on the working class, regardless of race (yes, I know about those DOD statistics on military casualties) to fight a war to protect the freedom of the bellicose brood of chickenhawks in the Bush administration, i.e., people who bent over backwards to get themselves out of military service. Nothing like sending out the poor folks to do the dirty work.

England and her fellow torturers -- and dammit, everyone else around them (Tony Taguba didn't call it "systemic" for nothing) -- should be punished. (I can't see how pulling a naked prisoner by the neck with a leash could be "at the wrong place at the wrong time," not to mention her obvious glee. You can't stage that smile.) But the outrage concerning the photographs of the tortured should not be allowed to eclipse the fact that civilians and soldiers -- Americans and Iraqis and the other members of this ragtag coalition of the willing -- are dead, and that the Bush administration should be held responsible as well.

So yes, I think I feel a little ounce -- just a tad -- of sympathy for Lynndie England. She must, of course, face the full consequences of her actions; "I was only following orders" wasn't acceptable at Nuremberg, and it similarly isn't acceptable here. But I can't help feeling that she is something of a scapegoat as well, and the real war criminals get to retire on a Texan ranch.

A Gift of the Eighties.

Just a week or so ago, I wrote about '80s "new wave," including a post on Seona Dancing, where, as you can read, someone offered (in jest, I thought) to send me a burned CD.

And today at the office, to my complete surprise, came a package from Rockland, IL of not one, but two CDs, chock-full of about 220-plus mp3s! The 3 O'Clock's "On Paper!" The Blow Monkeys! Identity Crisis' "Imagining October!" Flesh For Lulu! Propaganda! The Colourfield! All Sports Band's "Opposites Do Attract!" The Care! Friends Again's "State of Art!" I'm in total '80s heaven.

So Kid CarloMagno, whoever you are (is this a Steely Dan reference?), whatever your e-mail address may be (the one you provided bounced back -- interested in some mp3s?), whatever it is I did to deserve this: thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

So I'm giving back a little something to all of you readers -- well, at least Barb, who was looking for this before -- from Kid CarloMagno, a fantastic '80s song, whose religious symbolism seemed to escape me back then: The Icicle Works' "Birds Fly (Whisper to a Scream)." (The proper British title, by the way, and not the other way around as it was released in the U.S.)

Hear it. (3.44 mb)

Your New Favorite Song.

This has been sitting on my server for a while, and it's time I posted a link to it. I know very little about the singer Bic Runga, except that she's from New Zealand, she's part Chinese and part Maori, and one of her earlier songs ended up on the American Pie soundtrack. (I can't imagine it fit very well with the movie.) Her 2003 album Beautiful Collision is full of smoky, sharply-written, bittersweet pop songs, anchored by Runga's creamy vocals. "Creamy" sounds a little rude, except that it describes the soft caress of her voice quite well.

The song featured here, "The Be All and End All," is not representative of the album. It's a country song, for starters, but the arrangement gives her lyrics -- on that sweet, scary moment before the plunge -- a slightly ironic edge:

Flogging a rocking horse, getting nowhere
We are a pair to behold
You like a funeral me like a fair
Nobody cares for the show

But the real beauty of the song comes toward the end, after the earlier, gentle tussle of indecision, when the verse-chorus-verse structure shifts to a bridge:

I've had love come to nothing before
But it's all right, it's all right
I've welcomed it in and I've shown it the door
But it's all right, it's all right

And then the song simply ends, on that graceful note of both lyrical and structural hesitation (or surrender?), with Neil Finn's piano playing an entirely new melody.

Hear it. (3.2 mb)

Even More Online Music Geekness!

And I thought I already had all the cool plugins, but here's one more: while you're playing music on Winamp or iTunes (or my personal favorite, QCD), EvilLyrics automatically searches for the lyrics on the net and displays them in a separate window. Yes, it's completely dependent on your tracks being correctly tagged and all, and you're going to get empty windows for relative obscurities, but still -- this is awfully cool. Right now I'm listening to a Guided By Voices concert (a not very good one from Hamburg in 2003, where Pollard sounds completely wasted) and the lyrics to almost all the songs are updated in real-time. (Too bad it obviously won't have his little intros -- "Listen to The Ballad of Guided By Voices, kids!" -- before going into "Don't Stop Now.")

Pranks in Iraq.

The problem with Terrie England and people like her -- you read that right, not her daughter Lynndie, who has major problems of her own (check out this other stunner of a photo) -- is their amazing capacity for denial. Denial, arrogance, stupidity -- I can't tell which:

"She wanted to see the world and go to college," said Terrie England, whose T-shirt bore a design of heart-shaped American flags. "Now the government turned their back on her, and everything's a big joke."

...At most, the 372nd's alleged abuses of prisoners were "stupid, kid things -- pranks," Terrie England said, her voice growing bitter.

I suppose this is what passes for "pranks" in America.

"And what the [Iraqis] do to our men and women are just? The rules of the Geneva Convention, does that apply to everybody or just us?"

A great question, indeed: what did the Iraqis do to our men and women, exactly?

But it's unfair singling out one person -- I can't imagine that her daughter had anywhere better to go after Wal-Mart -- so: denial, arrogance, stupidity -- sounds much like the Bush administration to me. After all, "Iraq is free of rape rooms and torture chambers."

"Losing Moral High Ground."

From Major General Antonio Taguba's report:

6. (S) I find that the intentional abuse of detainees by military police personnel included the following acts:

a. (S) Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet;

b. (S) Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees;

c. (S) Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;

d. (S) Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time;

e. (S) Forcing naked male detainees to wear women's underwear;

f. (S) Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped;

g. (S) Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them;

h. (S) Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture;

i. (S) Writing "I am a Rapest" (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked;

j. (S) Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee's neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture;

k. (S) A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee;

l. (S) Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee;

m. (S) Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees.

Meanwhile, Rummy defends himself:

Adding to the Bush administration's discomfort is the dark history of the facility where the abuse took place.

It was inside the walls of Abu Ghraib prison that the former Iraqi regime is thought to have tortured and executed thousands of prisoners.

However Mr Rumsfeld was quick to reject any comparison between that period and what happened under American control.

"Equating the two, I think, is a fundamental misunderstanding of what took place," he said.

Amazing, though, how op-ed columnists in the US are now tripping all over themselves to use the phrase "losing moral high ground," as if there was any to lose in the first place. (Subsequent coverage keeps referring to reactions in "the Arab world" -- as if they're the only ones who should be indignant about this -- and therefore shifting focus onto the act of publishing the photographs, and not necessarily the acts depicted in the photographs themselves.) Hopefully followers of the right wing will be a little more quiet in their constant bleating about America's (God-given) gift of freedom and democracy to Iraq, but one doubts it.

I mean, Jesus, listen to Bush's often-quoted reaction:

I share a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated. Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people. That's not the way we do things in America. I didn't like it one bit.

George, when are you going to wake up and discover that you're really the bad guy?

Lit Panic.

I'm in a bit of a panic. Due to an unfortunate combination of events, I'm in the midst of preparing my syllabus for a Filipino American literature class in the fall. And I feel like I'm totally out of my element.

The reason I'm working on a syllabus almost half a year in advance is due to the financially beleaguered Cal State system, about which I've written before. Our department, in any case, is running out of photocopying money in June -- that's right, all faculty will have to shoulder its own photocopying expenses in the fall and the foreseeable future -- and so I'm taking advantage of some downtime before the papers and finals start coming in next week.

(The other reason has to do with the awful fact -- making xerox money the least of our problems -- that we're laying off our lecturers. I shouldn't say "we," but I'm complicit if I don't do something. The irony is that there's no money -- and the pittance offered is already an insult -- for the poet who's teaching the class this spring, and so it's cheaper to fire the real expert, and get me (since there are no other Filipino tenure-track faculty close enough to do this) to teach the class. Yes, this is screwed up.)

Part of my anxiety has to do with my predecessor, who's on maternity leave. The professor who usually teaches this class has created an extremely successful twice-a-year event, in combination with a website, zine and CD. I can't even come close to her level of success, so I won't try.

But the real reason, of course, is that my PhD is in Anthropology. My dissertation was an ethnographic study of the Filipino community in Daly City -- originally about homesickness and nostalgia, then mutating into transnationalism, and now, for the time being, about betrayal and belonging. This was itself a project quite removed from my master's thesis, Displaying Filipinos (see book on the right) on photography and colonialism in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century. The point here is that none of this, obviously, has to do with lit. I am not a lit person at all (and therefore my discomfort at somehow ending up being linked to on poetry blogs).

Which is funny because there was a point in my life when I was kind of a lit major. I emphatically say "kind of" because my undergraduate degree had little to do with how American universities conceive of "lit." It was in Communication Arts at the University of the Philippines at Los Banos -- though "agricultural school in a provincial town in the Philippines" doesn't quite capture the relatively cosmopolitan atmosphere of LB. But my ComArts degree turned out to prepare me quite well -- well, for something: a little drama here, some radio broadcasting there, a good chunk of communication theory, enough units in sociology to count as a minor, a few units in journalism, and finally, "lit." (Not necessarily lit theory, mind you, as this was mostly staid but illuminating New Criticism; I would get a bit of theory later when I would take MA classes in comp lit at UP Diliman.) But unlike my classmates who did the practicum (they had all the fun interning at newspapers and TV and radio stations), I churned out a rather moralistic, but exhaustively researched, undergraduate thesis on the works of F. Sionil Jose.

So when I arrived at Cornell to do my M.A. in Southeast Asian Studies, I was fully prepared to do "lit;" I even remember being introduced to people with "This is Sunny, he's going to work on Filipino lit." But then came that fateful day when I picked up a bound book of Philippine postcards from the early 1900s; I knew then that I had to write on the photographs. And I forgot all about lit. (I think the original plan was to work on Dogeaters and Great Philippine Jungle Energy Cafe, but it's all a distant memory now.)

But now lit has been dragged back into my life, or vice versa; I may be qualified to read it, but certainly not to teach it. Anyhow, I'm working late nights figuring out what to assign for the class. I'm definitely not anti-theory, but the kind of students who take AAS 336 would, I think, detest it. Funny how the last comp lit class I ever took was all about theory, with little about literature per se; I look up at my bookshelf right now and I see dusty copies of Dissemination and Course in General Linguistics (okay, I open that up twice a year) and S/Z and On Deconstruction. (Actually, I may seem harsh, but it was a fun class; I got to see a whole slew of guests performing, as it were, for the grad students, including Laura Mulvey discussing Madonna's video for "Open Your Heart.")

I was hoping to stay away from the Dynamic Duo of Carlos and Jessica (DDCJ), but I find them inescapable. While DDCJ resistance may be futile, I'm at least hoping to shake up the syllabus a little bit by including a film and a hiphop CD. (Now if I could get the students to go to a gallery while listening to Eileen's poems, that would be awesome.) I'm also thinking of anchoring the bigger works specifically in the Bay Area, so Eileen and Barbara and NVM Gonzalez and Brian Roley -- okay, American Son isn't set in the Bay Area, but the man lives here now -- and Al Robles and Jaime Jacinto are all in here. (And I'm willing to count J from DDCJ as BA, even though she's totally NY, but she won't leave room for a couple other books of poetry I'm hoping to squeeze in before my students cry tito. And of course I'd happily count Zack Linmark as a Bay Area writer, though I had such problems teaching Rolling the R's last semester -- not because of the sliced narrative, or the pidgin, or the sexual content, but because the students just couldn't get Scott Baio.)

Well, enough for now; the next time you'll hear about this is when I set up a collaborative blog for the class. (For inspiration, Kasey Mohammad has a class blog on zombies, but somehow I remember it as being more of a team blog before. Maybe I'm imagining links to students on the right side?) Anyway, my fingers are crossed -- it depends on how connected to the net my students will be in the fall, especially after rumors that SF State will start charging for e-mail next year in an attempt to generate revenue.

The Greatest Pinoy Pop Singles.

Back in the day when I first discovered the joys of html, I had folks vote on the "greatest Pinoy pop singles of all time," and they're listed here. (I finally shut it down a few years ago, when I had no time to tabulate the votes anymore.)

I had wanted people to write in, with longer comments, about why they chose a particular song, but no one ever did. (Some people spammed my mailbox with dozens of votes for Side A -- come on, folks, it's just an online poll.) Well, neither did I; I've written about "Magasin" by the Eraserheads before, but not about my absolute favorite, "Alapaap." (In case you're wondering, Rey-An Fuentes and Tillie Moreno's "Umagang Kay Ganda" and the Apo Hiking Society's "Mahirap Magmahal Nang Syota Nang Iba" are my other two favorites.)

Here's the top 20, taken from everyone who bothered to vote:

1. Freddie Aguilar: "Anak"
2. Side A: "Forevermore"
3. Eraserheads: "Alapaap"
4. Eraserheads: "Pare Ko"
5. Martin Nievera: "You Are My Song"
6. Eraserheads: "Ang Huling El Bimbo"
7. Gary Valenciano: "Sana Maulit Muli"
8. Eraserheads: "Ligaya"
9. Rivermaya: "214"
10. Rachel Alejandro: "Paalam Na"
11. Eraserheads: "Minsan"
12. Juan de la Cruz Band: "Himig Natin"
13. Rivermaya: "Himala"
14. Eraserheads: "With a Smile"
15. Dina Bonnevie: "Bakit Ba Ganyan"
16. Hotdog: "Manila"
17. True Faith: "Perfect"
18. Asin: "Masdan Mo Ang Kapaligiran"
19. Sharon Cuneta: "Ikaw"
20. Mike Hanopol: "Laki sa Layaw"

It's actually a decent mix (except for that Side A song) of old and relatively new, with different styles (folk, pop, big torch ballad, scuzzy 70's rock). But the topics are all over the place; in order, they're guilt, love, getting high, frustrated love, love, frustrated love, dying love, love, love, dying love, friendship, nationalism, frustrated love, love, puppy love, Manila, love, the environment, love, and... a kind of companion piece to "Anak." (In a sense it's all about love: love for a city, love for a country, love for drugs...)

There's no arguing with the choice of Freddie Aguilar's song; it was a massive hit all over Asia when it came out. It possessed all the right elements: it was easy to sing, Aguilar had a great voice, it had syrupy strings, it was weepy, it was about mothers. And while it didn't have the immediacy of a pop song about love, it still whacked you upside the head with guilt. (Though in my opinion his version of "Bayan Ko" is the ultimate Freddie single for sheer lump-in-the-throat goodness.)