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Here’s my first piece for a cultural studies column appearing every Thursday beginning 29 April 2010 on the Opinion Page of the Manila Standard-Today. Thank you to MST Opinion Editor Ms. Adelle Chua for giving me this chance, for believing in me.

POP GOES THE WORLD By Jenny Ortuoste for Manila Standard-Today,  29 April 2010, Thursday

Here Lies Myth

Natalie Merchant. Tori Amos. Cyndi Lauper. Kate Pierson of B-52s fame. Our very own Charmaine Clamor. These and other artists have lent their voices to a unique project- “Here Lies Love”, a two-CD rock opera on the life of Imelda Marcos.

Cover

The genius behind this ground-breaking work is himself one of a kind – David Byrne. He was prime mover of the ’80s new wave band Talking Heads; composer of the main theme from the film “The Last Emperor”, in which wailing violin evokes the haunted soul of a China long vanished; and, with ex-Roxy Music producer Brian Eno, creator of the singular album “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today”, a blend of electronic and gospel.

David Byrne (Net)

In collaboration with deejay and big beat musician Norman Cook (aka Fatboy Slim of the electronic dance hit “Weapon of Choice”), Byrne expresses in 22 songs his own take on the mythos of Imelda.

Fatboy Slim (Net)

The narrative of Imelda was evolved by her and those around her, conflated by succeeding events, until she became a creature bigger than life and entered world awareness. In one of his blog posts, Byrne tells of his visit to the Philippines in December 2005. He hoped “to catch and absorb some whiff of the Philippine ethos, sensibility, and awareness, by osmosis and conversation.”

In visits to Malacañang, Ilocos, and Leyte, he sees paintings of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos depicted as “the ur-couple of the Philippines…the strong man and the beautiful woman”; Imelda as a “nurturing goddess”. Byrne is no naïve worshipper at the altar; he is aware of how much of her image was a deliberate manipulation. A chapel in Tacloban dedicated to the Santo Niño is “really, a shrine dedicated to herself,” he observes.

In a recent interview in Financial Times, Byrne relates his fascination in Imelda grew from reading that she “loved going to clubs like Studio 54 and had a floor of her New York townhouse turned into a disco.” Here was a person of power who created her “own little bubble world…I wanted to delve into what makes this person tick, what drives them, how they can be in such deep denial about some of the things they’ve done.”

The album follows Imelda from her girlhood until she fled the country during the People Power revolution, juxtaposed with the life of her yaya Estrella Cumpas. The 3,000 pairs of shoes are not mentioned. Six music videos are part of the project, using news and archival footage of a young and dazzling Imelda in her butterfly-sleeved ternos descending from airplanes, smiling graciously, charming world leaders.

The album is a treasure box of gems. Much of the lyrics are taken from Imelda’s own words. In “The Rose of Tacloban”, Martha Wainwright asks “what lies beyond tomorrow…?” Cyndi Lauper’s breathy vocals delight in “Eleven Days”. Charmaine Clamor is smokey in “Walk Like a Woman”, Kate Pierson’s distinctive voice engages in “The Whole Man”.  Disco, funk, and electronic dance energize; crank the volume high enough, you forget the subject and become immersed in the music.

Singer and songwriter Binky Lampano says “Here Lies Love” can’t be compared to Byrne’s other works. “Musically we are dealing here with other elements altogether. There are no ‘Talking Heads’ components. As a work, it’s a worthy project. The man went out of his way to come to our country to do his homework.”

As a historical artifact, the album is a keepsake. Advertising executive Leigh Reyes bought the digital edition as soon as it was released. An admirer of Byrne’s work, she says it is “strange to watch (footage of) a fuzzy black-and-white Marcos with a pensive dance track”.

And Byrne’s choice of Imelda as a subject? “She’s a global character,” says Lampano. “It’s not like Byrne went out of his way to look for her. She’s part of the world’s common currency as half of the ‘Conjugal Disco-tatorship’”.

Love her or hate her, Imelda and all that she is part of world culture. In the same way Filipinos have taken Western pop music and made it our own, with, for instance, insurgents in Mindanao call two opposing forces “The Monkees” and “The Beatles”, the world picks and chooses from our narratives to inform creative expression.

Thereby is mythos -  story – continually created, added on to, until boundaries blur, and art becomes a commonality. Here, indeed, in the music and the inspiration, lies love.

*****

The column title is that of an ’80s hit song by Men Without Hats. Lyrics go like this: “Johnny played guitar, Jenny played bass/ Name of the band is ‘The Human Race’/Everybody, tell me, have you heard?/ Pop goes the world.” and so on for more stanzas, where Jenny plays keyboard and Johnny drums, they have kids, they get into movies, they get their pictures in the magazines,  and so on.

In other words, Johnny and Jenny live a life within media, producing content for media, which is distributed to the world. The song’s narrative fits smack into what I want to explore in this column – culture, as created by artists, musicians, and other content providers, selected and filtered by the news media through agenda-setting processes, and distributed through a channel with global reach – the Internet.

Culture, as seen through the lenses of postmodernity and social constructionism, in many instances can no longer be strictly defined as “high” or “low” – the boundaries are blurred, and the Internet has the effect of making the homogenizing process much faster – in fact, so fast that we see it taking place before our very eyes. Via semiotics, we also see how incidents, people, places, etc. may become symbols or signs for concepts that already exist in the different national cultures, or may be appropriated to give meaning to new concepts that have entered consciousness through media consumption.

Yet this does not mean that culture around the world will become one bland mass, like a bowl of oatmeal. Each country’s unique cultural vision will still inform the content produced in that milieu, or provide inspiration to artists from elsewhere. It is the appreciation of the varied types of content that contribute to the creation of a global culture through media.

In this column I will look at what’s trending in world news, perform textual and content analyses as appropriate,  deconstruct concepts, and give insights into why this subject matter is relevant or irrelevant to Filipinos. In other words, the column deals with cultural studies informed by a multi-disciplinary viewpoint (anthropology, sociology, communication, media studies, psychology, etc.). It’s a social scientist’s way of bringing awareness of how global culture is becoming Filipino culture as well as vice versa (as in the way Imelda Marcos and Manny Pacquiao are now part of the world mythos).

Pop Goes the World – everything in the world will be popular eventually. ***

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On the Coastal road to Naic, Cavite, last Saturday, I saw these funky passenger transport vehicles in Imus, Cavite. They were smaller than a bus but larger than a jeepney, and as flamboyantly decorated with folk art. Let us call them “beeps”.

Beeps have the characteristic artwork common to jeeps – the “title” on the signage above the windshield; the names of the owner and his family painted all over the vehicle; and colorful motifs.

The design on the back of this beep reminds me of Hawaiian quilt appliques.

This artwork shows Mickey Mouse as a cruise director – implying, perhaps, that this beep is your own cruise ship to your destination.

The backs of beeps, like taxicabs, often bear the names of the owner’s wife and children and some motif that has special meaning for them. The splashguard at the bottom will often have either the name of a patron saint or some quotation.

This beep’s rear splashguard bears a quote about love. Filipinos are, in general, a romantic folk. Why the matching prawns? No idea. I saw several beeps with the prawns.

The airbrushed art on this beep is eye-catching. Note the color-coordinated passersby. Photography is a serendipitous activity.

Motifs from popular culture are often used. This is an anime-decorated beep. The side panel shows characters from “Kingdom Hearts”.

The bishop’s miter and crook are also common motifs for Cavite beep artwork. The back art of this one – a  guardian angel watching over two children crossing a log footbridge – is beautifully and painstakingly rendered.

Since beeps have more surface area than jeeps, there is more scope for folk artists to let their creativity run free in creating large designs. This kind of art work, executed on a moving canvas, reaches a wider audience than if it were just hung on the wall.

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Before email and text messaging, people kept in touch through letters. Penpals waited months to hear from correspondents around the world. When the letters finally arrived, they were opened like little treasures. The stamps were carefully inspected, as were the handwriting (or typewriting, but this was seldom), envelopes, and stationery. Relatives abroad sent missives scrawled on thin aeropost paper that folded over to make its own envelopes. Everyone was a handwriting expert and puzzle decoder, the skill gained from deciphering the chicken tracks sketched by friends and family.

The advances in technology have nearly killed off letter-writing. True, it is now more convenient than ever to communicate with people, yet there is a touch of soul and heart missing in the disturbed electrons that dance across a computer or mobile phone screen.

Interior decoratrix and lifestyle guru Alexandra Stoddard attempts to reverse this trend by waxing lyrical about the art of letter-writing in her book Gift of a Letter (1991).

She tells of her love of stationery, fountain pens, and sealing wax – interests I share – and how she uses these objects to pen handwritten notes to connect to people in an intimate and special way.

She makes clear, though, that you don’t need fancy pens or paper to drop your friends a line. What is important is sending something tangible – a piece of yourself that they can read over and over again, and tuck away in a box to read again later. Telephone conversations and text messages do serve the purpose of keeping people in touch, yet these methods of communication are ephemeral. They travel over the ether and vanish, leaving you with a dim memory of someone’s voice or a shared sentence or two.

Among the things I keep in my “memory box” are letters from my aunt, Araceli “Cely” Ortuoste, our clan matriarch. Her letters share stories about her parents and grandparents whom I never met.  When I visited her in her home in California some years ago, she told me the same stories. Yet the details of our conversations are forgotten; the letters, though, will always be there to remind me. My mother sends greeting cards from the Bay Area; her hand cramps and it’s difficult for her to curl her fingers around a pen, yet she manages to scribble a line or two in inks of different colors. I run my hands over the ridges on the paper and feel her with me, although it has been seven years since we last saw each other.

A letter shows that you cared enough to exert the effort of picking up a pen, writing a few lines with your recipient in mind, and mailing it. Use whatever’s at hand. A stray pentel and a page torn from a notebook are materials enough.

If you don’t like writing, why not send a little gift? A UK-based friend, Annie Merginio-Murgatroyd, mailed Ty Beanie Babies for my daughters; I sent her a signed mini-quilt. No words need be shared; the mere act of sending something that can be touched speaks volumes.

Vita is brevis. Let’s not take anyone or anything for granted. Think of the people you hold dear, and send them a little bit of your heart.

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Whenever I’m asked, “What are you reading now?”, I’m sometimes hard pressed to answer. I do read one book at time, but there’s always a stack or two of volumes beside my bed,  some of which I’ve read, the others newly acquired and next in line for reading.

My tastes are eclectic. There are marketing and business books, holdovers from my MBA days – Marketing Gurus, all the Franklin Covey books. Lately I’m into memoirs – Matthew Polly’s hilarious American Shaolin, A. J. Jacob’s tongue-in-cheek The Year of Living Biblically, Laura Shaine Cunningham’s poignant and brave A Place in the Country.

Near the top, where I can easily reach them, are the latest thoroughbred catalogues from Australia’s Magic Millions and Keeneland in Kentucky. Keeneland’s November 2008 sale catalogues are the more interesting. It is a set of eight thick books, the information on weanlings and other bloodstock printed on thin paper. I open to the Index to Sires and roll their names in my mouth like candy – Cryptoclearance, Langfuhr, Star de Naskra.

Somewhere in those stacks are the latest edition of Strunk and White, my style manual ever since it was introduced to me in my freshman English class at the University of the Philippines; a Dummies guide to Adobe InDesign for print publication layouting; and three volumes of the Plaridel journal, the academic publication of the UP College of Mass Communication.

And at the bottom of the shorter pile is Julie Morgenstern’s Organizing from the Inside-Out – probably not the best place for it to be, if I want it to be of any help.

Any house I live in will be filled with books. It’s almost a psychological given; a house is not a home for me unless there are many books in it, spilling from shelves, stacked against the wall, piled on the coffee table.

My love for books stems from childhood. My mother raised me on science fiction and fantasy. This is a woman who kept her Lord of the Rings trilogy on the shelf below the TV set in her room, while all the other books were kept in the living room. This was back in the early ’80s, before fantasy became fashionable and when all of Tolkien’s books were out of print. Her copies, which she bought as a teenager at Lopue’s and China Rose in Bacolod City, were printed in the ’60s, before “acid-free” was heard of, and the pages were yellowed and crumbled at a touch. The spines were battered and mended many times with tape, which had also discolored to a color like weak tea.

In the tall wicker bookshelves in the sala she kept cookbooks. One of them was a ’50s hardbound Betty Crocker cookbook from her nanny who migrated to the United States. I have it now, and treat it as an heirloom. Others were cookbooks from the ’70s; those were filled with recipes for fondue, which seemed to me to be highly impractical since you needed a fondue burner.

That didn’t faze my mother. She improvised with a miniature saucepan on the stove. We gathered in the kitchen, dipping cubes of Kraft cheddar cheese in beaten egg, then breadcrumbs, then plunging them in hot oil till toasty brown.

Also on the shelves were my stepfather’s encyclopedias and his mother’s collection of children’s “two-in-one” hardbound classics. For instance, one side was Grimm’s Fairy Tales; flip the book and you got Hans Christian Andersen’s stories. My mother also had a good collection of adult classics – Aldous Huxley, Jonathan Swift, Charles Dickens, the Brontes. I wore out Bullfinch’s Mythology, though I later lost that particular copy.

My mother also possessed nearly all the Edgar Rice Burroughs books – my favorites being the Tarzan series (no, there wasn’t a “Cheeta” in the books) and the Mars series. The latter starred skimpily-clad Martian princess Dejah Thoris, who was constantly being saved by her husband, the manly Earthling John Carter, from predatory villains and robots controlled by evil scientists.

Fanart depiction of Barsoom (Mars); in the center, Dejah Thoris and John Carter face a myriad perils

Conan Doyle’s “Sherlock Holmes” stories were also well-represented. H. Rider Haggard and his endless yarns of hunter Allan Quatermain’s adventures in lost cities in Africa? Check. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells classics? Yes, there too, as well as L. Frank Baum’s “Oz” books, many of them with the original John R. Neill art nouveau illustrations.

Neill’s drawings of Ozma’s hair – confined at the forehead by a thin diadem, tresses curling in whiplash tendrils – and her gauzy draperies, floating cloudlike around her slim body – captured my young imagination, representing an aesthetic that was otherworldly and unreachable. To this day, it is one of my favorite genres of art.

A Neill watercolor of Dorothy, Glinda, and Ozma of Oz.

Knowing of my insatiable – and indiscriminate – appetite for books, my mother kept those she felt inappropriate for my age in her closet, which we children never opened. When I was in college, she brought the books down, the ban lifted. One of them was Stephen King’s Dark Forces, a collection of horror and SF works by various writers. My mother probably didn’t object to the storylines but rather to King’s salty language.

In any case, it was just more grist for my mill, along with her more spinechilling H. P. Lovecraft books. The cover of one was horrifying - a worm snaked through the empty eye-socket of a half-decayed skull which bore clumps of matted hair and rodent-like teeth. I averted my eyes from that awful artwork whenever I opened that book to read about the Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep.

At the mere thought of that macabre painting, an involuntary shudder shakes my frame as chills riff up and down my spine. Uncannily, this is my exact same reaction when my eyes or fingers travel over the few old college mathematics and physics textbooks unexpurgated from my shelves. Cthulhu ftaghn!

My father was yet another heavy reader, but his tastes ran more to W. Somerset Maugham, John O’ Hara, Norman Mailer, Sholom Aleichem, Truman Capote, biographies. Pops lived in California for five years in the ’80s, and while there wrote me excitedly when he began Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,  Dee Brown’s novel on native American history. He wasn’t into science fiction; the most that he got into that genre was Ray Bradbury – I Sing the Body Electric, Something Wicked This Way Comes.

I usually finish what I start. The exception is one book that I bought at a secondhand bookstall in Morayta in the late ’80s, set aside because its dense language put me to sleep although its ideas were interesting; a paradox in its rules of engagement. It was Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 work Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. This groundbreaking book had a profound impact on mass communication and media studies. As a mass comm major, I felt duty bound to read it. It’s one of the books by my bed. Sometimes I feel I keep it around not so much because I plan to finish reading it, but as a talisman to keep me focused on the particular discipline that is my life’s work.

Let me see – it’s in the taller stack, under the used copy of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast that I found a couple of years ago at Booksale for P45. It’s the second in the “Titus Groan” trilogy. I got the first book in the late ’80s, also at Morayta, deep in the University Belt in the heart of Manila. I’m still looking to complete the set. Perhaps twenty years from now, in another serendipitous moment, I’ll stumble upon a copy of Titus Alone and I will add it, yet another block in the tower of books by my bed.

People come into my house, find piles of books stacked chest-high against the walls and two- or three-deep in bookcases, and ask, “Have you read all those?” The answer is, yes, except for that darn McLuhan.

And often, “Why do you like reading so much?” and at that I am rendered inarticulate. It is difficult to explain to people who do not read, who do not relish the sensation of eyes tracking words across a page to be immersed in a story, momentarily losing touch of reality.

My own habit of reading is a result of childhood influence and a desire to escape. I lose myself in forests of words and in thickets of concepts, drown in rivers of language, wander through time and space. The volumes by my bed embody different worlds where I may go freely, through the simple expedient of cracking open a book and reading.

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My teenage daughter Alex and I took a trip to Escolta last Friday to pick up my new glasses from Vision Line there. We didn’t go straight to the shop, though; I took Alex around to see a little bit of old Manila.

The Filipino-Chinese Friendship Arch at the bottom of Jones Bridge on Quintin Paredes Street is the gateway to the Binondo area.

The left side of Binondo Church. Also known as the Minor Basilica of San Lorenzo Ruiz, it was built in 1596 and is one of the oldest Roman Catholic places of worship in the country.

The church facade. Much damage was wrought through the years by fire and other natural disasters; of the original architecture, only the octagonal bell tower remains.

A kalesa driver and his pony wait for passengers in front of the church

Alex and I took the kalesa to Escolta; on the way, we shared the road with a tricycle (motorcycle + sidecar), a jeepney, and a new Honda CRV (in front of the horse). Here, old forms of transport move beside the new, and both get you to your destination, although the kalesa imparts an air of antiquity, romance, and novelty.

Our destination – Vision Line Optical beside Luis Store, the fountain pen place

On the banks of the Pasig River, across the Manila Central Post Office, young boys dive into the water to cool – and show – off.

Alex poses on Jones Bridge, with the MCPO building in the background.

On our way home, we passed the ruins of the old Santo Tomas University. The oldest extant university in the country, it was founded by Dominican friars in 1611. The school moved from this site to its much bigger present campus in Sampaloc, Manila, in 1927.

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This painting is a prime example from of my favorite movements, Art Nouveau, which I first enjoyed through the illustrations of John R. Neill, who did for the early editions of the Oz books.  Art Nouveau was popular from the 1890s till around 1912.

This is “Dance” (1898) by the progenitor of this art form – Alphonse Marie Mucha. He used it mostly for commercial purposes such as product advertising and theater posters, the latter for the great actress Sarah Bernhardt.

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In 2002 I was in LA and a friend of mine, Marian Domoje, took me to the Getty Museum. It was an utterly beautiful place. I could have stayed there the entire day, wandering the quiet, well-lit halls, admiring the paintings and photographs, sculpture and antique furniture.

In one of the halls I chanced upon this work. It was hung close to the entrance and reached almost floor-to-ceiling. This and all other photos I have seen do the original work no justice. Up close, it is breathtaking. Each brushstroke is pure genius.

“Spring”,  Lawrence Alma-Tadema

I like my art “traditional realist”. Abstract and modern leave me cold – those splotches of color? Ik could do as well, if not better. It requires genuine drawing and painting skills to create works that live and breathe, that are like windows you could step through to enter another world, the artist’s world that he created from his own imagination.

Immerse yourself in art and visit worlds of wonder. You’d be doing your soul a favor.

See more of Alma-Tadema’s works and those of other realist painters at www.artrenewal.org

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