THIS YEAR'S UP Writers Workshop started auspiciously enough, albeit in a somewhat unusual way. National Artist and workshop director Virgilio Almario and I took the two front seats on the bus going up to Baguio last Easter Sunday, forcing us to watch whatever the bus driver fed into the DVD player.
This, for me, is always a moment of great anticipation: you half-expect an action epic featuring Jet Li or Jean-Claude van Damme, something to stir the stale, refrigerated air with throaty yelps and roundhouse kicks.
As it turned out, our first DVD was what the business calls a “romantic comedy” — a Pinoy confection titled A Very Special Love, starring John Lloyd Cruz and Sarah Geronimo, an overbearing-boss-meets-adoring-secretary story. It became, in effect, our first workshop subject, with Rio and I agreeing that it was very well scripted and acted, with Sarah demonstrating a fine comedic talent.
But when the movie ended somewhere in Pampanga and we hankered for the obligatory provincial-bus action film, the conductor pulled out a disc that he claimed to be the recent car-racing flick The Fast and the Furious 4. It was fast and furious, all right, but it was something else titled Bikini Girls from the Lost Planet — featuring actresses with no surnames like “Syren” and accompanied by spooky theremin music. I was just thinking that any movie whose first line of dialogue was “Hey, baby, how ya doin’?” had to be worthy of a workshop, when the lead actor began gorging on Syren’s cleavage, and National Artist and workshop director Rio regretfully ordered the tape stopped, mandated by his lofty position to maintain wholesomeness in our entertainment fare, at least for the time being.
“Wholesome,” indeed, would be the last word you would use to describe the literature being produced by our best young writers today, as the week-long workshop established. If that’s a disturbing thought — well, it’s meant to disturb. Just to make it clear, the workshop fellows themselves were as flush with schoolboy and schoolgirl charm as you can imagine (maybe with one or two deliberate exceptions), but their work, on the whole, displayed a fine cutting edge, eager to challenge what came before them.
Next week, I’ll give you a more detailed report on what these concerns were; for a quick preview, I’ll just mention the words tunay na lalake, ineffable, cultural fidelity, spec fic, secret-sharing, and akology, engaging concepts all. For now, as director of the UP Institute of Creative Writing that ran the workshop, let me thank our sponsors and friends: the National Commission on Culture and the Arts; the Chancellor of UP Diliman, Gerry Cao (the very first Diliman chancellor to actually sit in on a workshop session); the Baguio Writers Group, who hosted us for an evening of beer and poetry at Vocas on Session Road; William Aquino, the ever-affable and generous manager of the AIM Igorot Lodge, the perfect nook for intensive workshops of this kind; UP Baguio chancellor Precy Macansantos and our colleagues at Benguet State University, where I gave a talk on the short story; writer and bookman Del Tolentino, whose home every writer dreams of owning; and painter BenCab, for the kind favors described below.
THE WORKSHOP fellows and panelists were welcomed to Baguio with a special lunch laid out by painter and National Artist Benedicto Cabrera — or BenCab, as most people know him — long a friend of writers and of the workshop. His friends among the local tribespeople offered a cañao in his honor — it also happened to be his birthday just a few days earlier — and many other friends from Manila came up to share the moment with him, including publisher Karina Bolasco, historian Ambeth Ocampo, printmaker Pandy Aviado, and poet Rayvi Sunico.
After the kamayan lunch, Ben took us on a private tour of the new museum that he had just opened (Km. 6, Asin Road, Baguio City), and what a breathtaking showcase it was of some of the best works of Philippine art and of northern highland culture. The ultramodern building is, in itself, an impressive piece of sculpture in glass and black rock, nestled on a hillside commanding a view of a valley flecked by gardens. The museum has various rooms devoted to contemporary art, Philippine masters, erotica, Bencab’s own work, and his incomparable collection of native wood sculpture and furniture.
BenCab’s resounding success on both aesthetic and commercial planes has been certainly well deserved, for someone who worked his way up from magazine illustration to the creator of iconic images such as his scavenger Sabel, who now lends her name to the museum’s coffee shop.
I kidded Rio and another National Artist for Literature who was with us, Bien Lumbera, about not yet having a museum in their name. We all laughed about it, knowing that we writers may have all the words in the world at our disposal, but that it’s the painters whose inarticulateness we often deride who can make from one afternoon’s painting what a lifetime of 10 novels won’t. That’s life, and that’s art!
SOMETIMES I think that the writers’ workshop is really just an excuse for us to go up to Baguio and to indulge ourselves in what workshop oldtimers have come to consider the ultimate Baguio treat: listening to the fabulously good singing group named On Call, composed of arranger and pianist Dr. Dennis Flores, and vocalists Jett Acmor, Mari Laoyan, and Danny Imson.
We’ve followed this group for many years now, from Pilgrims Café on Session Road to its reincarnation on Leonard Wood and then to the Manor at John Hay and now in Forest House on Loakan Road, where they sing every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday. Their Broadway and OPM medleys are better than any aperitif or dessert, and this time around we got a special treat in the form of a kundiman medley that would’ve melted any dalagang bukid’s heart.
We keep hoping that they’ll have a stint in Manila or put out a CD we can listen to at leisure. They’re the kind of group that you can listen to for hours without tiring of their music — indeed, the couple of nights we listened to them, the same people were at the other table, camp followers just like us (our group included National Artists Bien Lumbera and Virgilio Almario, whose presence On Call kindly acknowledged).
