Esquire 05/2017 Megan Young by Rinzon

M AY 2 0 1 7 / VO LU M E 6 / N O. 7

TA B L E O F

KILLER QUEEN

CONTENTS

Megan Young is a Woman We Love. p. 56

MaHB ART One of Art Fair 2017’s most interesting new faces talks feces and menstrual matters. p. 17

MaHB SEX Think twice—maybe three times—before hitting send on that p. 20

MaHB BOOKS Infuse a little art into your bookshelf with these essential reads. p. 22

MaHB CARS The new Porsche 918 Boxster is a bold leap forward for a car with a storied heritage.

MaHB SPACE Philux allows you to create the perfect piece of furniture, by letting you mix and match the details. p. 26

E S Q U I R E / M AY 2 0 1 7

PHOTOGRAPH BY EDRIC CHEN

p. 24

M AY 2 0 1 7 / VO LU M E 6 / N O. 7

TA B L E O F

PARADISE CITY

CONTENTS

Five years after the indigenous people of Casiguran, Aurora marched to Manila to protest the construction of an economic zone on their soil, the struggle continues. p. 64

STYLE Extra large bags, made-forspace watches, and a high tech hair dryer for your summer adventure. p. 29

NOTES & ESSAYS Travels in time and space, with Micaela Benedicto, Leloy Claudio, and Jason Quibilan. p. 37

LEARN TO FLY Reflections on the most powerful piece of paper you will ever own: your passport.

SHOT THROUGH THE HEART Carsten Stormer, Carlo Gabuco, Veejay Villafranca, Edwin Tuyay, and Francisco Guerrero get together to discuss photojournalism in a post-truth world. p. 48

E S Q U I R E / M AY 2 0 1 7

PHOTOGRAPH BY JILSON TIU

p. 46

M AY 2 0 1 7 / VO LU M E 6 / N O. 7

TA B L E O F

THE BODY DOES NOT LIE

CONTENTS

Ballet Philippines’ former artistic director Paul Alexander Morales wears this season’s loose and easy shapes. p. 88

YESTERDAYS One of Generation X’s remaining souls takes a page from her book of memories. p. 76

VENICE AFTER DARK Raymond Ang gets lost with artist David Medalla at the Venice Biennale.

WHAT I’VE LEARNED Sculptor Agnes Arellano on death, defiance, and sacred sexuality. p. 86

THIS WAY OUT Selling the Philippines, one failed slogan at a time. p. 100

E S Q U I R E / M AY 2 0 1 7

PHOTOGRAPH BY ARTU NEPOMUCENO

p. 80

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M AY 2 0 1 7 / VO LU M E 6 / N O. 7

A NOTE FROM THE

T R AV E L A N D T R U T H THE IRONY OF TRAVEL is that it’s an activity that teaches us to live in the moment, to fully inhabit the present—but it is also something we experience with the expectation of reliving it in the past, as memory. We travel so we can explore, rest, enjoy; but modern travel is also about documentation, so that we can invent the story and share it. Travel can be an opportunity for us to re-examine our relationship with the present and with the past, with truth and with memory. Our travel issue takes us to all sorts of places, and through all sorts of memories. Audrey N. Carpio takes us on the trail of the old grunge gods (“Yesterdays,” p.76) and touches on our insistence on holding on to ephemeral things, like music and our youth. Christopher Puhm takes a cruise from Singapore to Vietnam and to Hong Kong (“Indochine Reverie,” p. 72), leaping

from moment to moment, and dealing with expectation after expectation. Kara Ortiga talks about the Casiguran of her grandmother’s memories, and about the Casiguran that is struggling with very real issues with progress (“Paradise Waits,” p. 64). Raymond Ang’s trip with David Medalla is a trip inside autobiographical memory as much as a night out in Venice (“Persistence of Memory,” p. 80). The theme of memory and documentation runs strongly in another feature that I’d like to focus attention on for a bit. A couple of months ago, we called up some of our friends—who, as it happens, are also some of the country’s top photojournalists. The conversation, which we recorded and which we transcribe in “The Shooters” (p. 48), was part panel interview, part self-examination, and part therapy. Their work is stressful enough, as you might imagine, but in today’s deeply disturbing post-truth world, there are additional stressors that we would never have dreamt up just a few years ago: the accusations of fakery, of bribery, and the general dismissiveness toward evidence, common sense, and basic decency. We held these things dear, but we also took them for granted; and now we’re all finding out that the truth is not as impervious to corruption as we thought. One of our panelists, Carsten Stormer (who produced the recent documentary “When a President Says, ‘I’ll Kill You’” for the New York Times) raised the idea of our own complicity in creating a society that cannot recognize the complexity of truth and cannot deal with the responsibility of being active consumers of news. It’s a long read, as these roundtable discussions have to be, but it’s an important one. In this age of social media, all of us flirt with the dual roles of producer and consumer, but perhaps we need to be more prepared to take on both roles. There needs to be more education, perhaps. There needs to be more reflection, certainly. —KRISTINE FONACIER

W H AT W E ’ R E E XC I T E D A B O U T

Raymond Ang’s story on artist David Medalla is accompanied by art by Sasha Martinez that is based on photos by MM Yu. So meta. (p. 80) 12

E S Q U I R E / M AY 2 0 1 7

A proudly nerdy look at the watch that has been to the moon. (p.34)

Megan Young, Woman We Love, shot in a Venue That Scares Us a Bit. (p. 56)

P O R T R A I T BY R E N N E L L SA LU M B R E ; M A K E U P BY J OA N T E OT I C O ; H A I R BY M AY V E C A N A M O

THE EDITOR

M AY 2 0 1 7 / VO LU M E 6 / N O. 7

E D I TO R- I N - C H I E F

KRISTINE FONACIER

Managing Editor

Patricia Barcelon

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CONTRIBUTORS Writers

Raymond Ang, Micaela Benedicto, Paul John Caña, Clinton Palanca, Ana P. Santos, Marbbie Tagabucba

Photographers

Edric Chen, Paul del Rosario, Fruhlein Econar, Carlo Gabuco, Francisco Guerrero, Artu Nepomuceno, Joseph Pascual, Jason Quibilian, Carsten Stormer, Jilson Tiu, Gutsy Tuason, Edwin Tuyay, Veejay Villafranca

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Spain

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Nguyen Thanh Nhan

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Megan Young photographed exclusively for Esquire Philippines by Edric Chen; styled by Ria Casco; with grooming by Muriel Vega Perez for Clinique, assisted by Jeff de Guzman and Lalai Glendro.

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M AY 2 0 1 7 / VO LU M E 6 / N O. 7

CONTRIBUTORS EDRIC CHEN is a photographer split

between Los Angeles and Metro Manila. He shot this issue’s cover: Megan Young, in a nondescript location that could be either of those places. Edric had a brief encounter with a rather large rodent during that shoot, which he described as “intense.” R EC E N T T R AV E L E X P E R I E N C E : Los Angeles last November. I went on a tour of seedy old motels where sketchy characters usually took my personal information as I forked over some cash. WO U L D L I K E TO V I S I T: The United Kingdom. I see it as a land of opportunity. CA N’ T L E AV E TOW N W I T H O U T: My toiletry kit. It’s become a habit, even if someone pays for me to stay in a ﬁve-star hotel. I just ﬁnished assembling a travel-sized coffee kit, complete with a hand grinder and scale. That’s the next thing I won’t leave town without.

JOSEPH PASCUAL is a portrait photographer and

sometimes-writer whose photos, essays, and photo essays have been featured in some of the country’s top magazines. For this issue, Joseph took portraits of one of Art Fair Philippines’ most controversial new artists, in her own surreal abode. R EC E N T T R AV E L E X P E R I E N C E : I last ﬂew out to Italy, to shoot a wedding in Rome. My now-friends got married in a castle, and we almost died in it because it was so cold. R EC O M M E N DS : Roscioli, an excellent restaurant in Rome. Sit by the bar and ask for Anna. CA N’ T L E AV E TOW N W I T H O U T: A sense of urgency, and the courage to ask literally anyone where the bathroom is.

ANA P. SANTOS is a writer and public health journalist who specializes in reproductive health rights and HIV/AIDS, as well as gender politics. Her work has been published in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, IRIN News, Rappler, The Atlantic, Deutsche Welle–Germany, and the Guardian, among others. WAS R EC E N T LY I N : Doha, giving journalism classes at Northwestern University Qatar, with colleagues from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. WO U L D L I K E TO V I S I T: Berlin. My kid and I always have some kind of theme for our annual vacation. This year, it’s World History in Berlin and Amsterdam. CA N’ T L E AV E TOW N W I T H O U T: A book, though I almost always end up just catching up on sleep. A book, and sunblock!

is an editorial and commercial photographer who has shot for Condé Nast Traveller, Monocle, and GRID. Paco has also taken several photos for Esquire, including our Pia Wurtzbach and Leni Robredo covers, but this month, he served as a moderator in our roundtable of the country’s foremost photojournalists. R EC E N T T R AV E L E X P E R I E N C E :

Sailing in the Aranui cargo ship to the Marqueesin islands of Tahiti. R EC O M M E N DS : Hawker stalls in Singapore, 7-Eleven onigiri in Tokyo, tapas in Seville. CA N’ T L E AV E TOW N W I T H O U T:

My cameras. I can never go anywhere without my cameras.

E S Q U I R E / M AY 2 0 1 7

PAUL JOHN CAÑA A is the managing editor of Entrepreneur Entrepreneur.com.ph com and a music columnist for GMA News Online. He’s also a co-founder of Libreto.org, an online collective of writers and artists. For this issue, PJ wrote about the Porsche 918 Boxster, a bold new step for the German automaker. R EC E N T T R AV E L E X P E R I E N C E : Last year, when I went to Europe and drove the all-new Audi A4 all over the country. I took a side trip to Strasbourg, France, met up with a friend in Berlin, visited the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart, watched Damien Rice in Leipzig, walked around Prague, and visited a few cities in Germany’s Romantic Road. R EC O M M E N DS : 328 Katong Laksa along East Coast Road in Singapore. They serve arguably the best laksa in town. I ﬁnished my bowl in record time. CA N’ T L E AV E TOW N W I T H O U T: A book. I try to catch up on my reading during the long wait times at the airport and on the plane.

I L LU ST R AT I O N S BY L E E C AC E S

FRANCISCO GUERRERO

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MAN AT HIS BEST MAY 2017

The Exhibitionist THE ART SCENE MAKES ROOM FOR PROVOCATEUR MARIA JEONA ZOLETA.

By KARA ORTIGA Photographs by JOSEPH PASCUAL called her young daughter to leave the booth. The little girl, around six or seven years old, refused to exit the galleryâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;perhaps half-curious or half-amused that her mother was so panicked about getting her out. The mother was panicked for a reason: The little girl had her eyes glued to the screen of a laptop on display as part of a special exhibit at the Art Fair Philippines; and the reel, playing on loop, was a video shot from the point of view of a girl masturbating. The clip was overlaid on another video clip of a blonde hottie. A FRANTIC MOTHER

CONTINUED

M AY 2 0 1 7 / E S Q U I R E

MAN AT HIS BEST

___ A R T

The booth was that of 28-year-old artist Maria Jeona Zoleta, one of the artists chosen to put up a special exhibit for the esteemed event. Her unapologetically provocative work was meant to instigate clamor and shock and confusion, especially with urbanite mothers lugging around their clueless daughters to art shows. On Instagram, Jeona goes by the moniker @explodingassholes; her posts are eerily cryptic and forcefully so. She will take a video of a clump of blood gushing down her arm—her menstruation—a recurring medium in her work. As a teenager, she says, she used to stick her soiled napkins on the walls of the house, and because they had stayed up for so long, ﬂ ies had began to swarm around them, and worms began to take life. The nature of her work is irksome and deranged, and rightfully so because the artist behind the canvas

E S Q U I R E / M AY 2 0 1 7

is an eccentric in the truest sense of the word. A self-ascribed “baliw,” a title she would use often to describe herself and the people around her: her dad, a conservative engineer; her tita who raised her like her own daughter; the town crazy she met in Baler who became her friend. “Baliw ‘yun eh,” she would say matter-of-factly, and even though your perspective is shrewd with doubt, you kind of believe everything that comes out of her mouth. Her home feels like something out of a Harry Potter book: winding stairways, construction half-done, there are holes for doors without the doors, or holes in doors. Her bedroom is a bodega of relics she has collected since childhood: tear sheets from fashion magazines and Polaroid snapshots of her friends half-naked. There are laser ray lights and ten pairs of slippers and an assortment of fabric of all kind, and dildos... When you go for a piss in her bathroom, she’ll say, “I’m sorry there’s a hole in the door, it’s from the time I threw a bottle of beer [at] my ex,” and you have to politely respond to these kinds of jarring exchanges with her. “Ah,” you muster in panic. But Jeona is an artist in a sense that maybe we’ve forgotten artists can afford to be, and her very presence in the art scene must be acknowledged. There’s the art of the hyperrealists, there’s art that’ll sell for millions, there’s art on the socio-political, and there’s art that looks good with your couch. The creation of art—it’s the only profession after all that allows this kind of attitude, promotes it, even. And perhaps, amidst all this, it’s nice to squeeze in art like Jeona’s—deranged and whimsical and self-serving for the heck of it. Whether people will understand it or not, at least, there’s ﬁnally room for it in the art market.

JEONA IS AN ARTIST IN A SENSE THAT MAYBE WE’VE FORGOTTEN ARTISTS CAN AFFORD TO BE.

MAN AT HIS BEST

___ S E X

Privates Message

WHAT WOMEN REALLY THINK OF PENIS PORTRAITURE

By ANA P. SANTOS Artwork by TOKWA PEÑAFLORIDA

formula of proper ambience, venue and lighting do for a dick pic? I rounded up some of my women friends— dick pic regulars, I’ll call them—to answer this question: when it comes to dick pics, what are the rules? Jan, a 28-year-old researcher, gets dick pics from guys she casually chats with on online dating sites. “Some guys think they are bestowing great blessing to us girls by sending photos of their magniﬁcent cocks. I can tell you they are not as magniﬁcent as these boys think. I think it’s quite juvenile to think that dick pics are effective pick up lines but it’s really just meh.”

interested in the way a penis looks. It’s not that aesthetically appealing, and we’re turned on by other things. I dated a very ﬁt and handsome guy once who would send me pictures of his face and torso and those were a bigger turn-on. RULE #1 Consent is required. If shoving your schlong into someone’s face isn’t a practice IRL (in real life), don’t do it to someone’s inbox.

“It’s not a very pleasing experience to open a messaging app to ﬁnd...tadah, penis!” says Bea, a communications consultant. She offers some leeway to those who need to be converted to dick pic, if not fans... well, acceptors. “If she doesn’t ask for it ﬁrst, at least be malambing and considerate and mature as you attempt to build up their enthusiasm. You aren’t supposed to force your dick onto anyone, virtually or IRL. RULE #2 Leave something to the imagination. Take it from Carmela. “Women aren’t as visual as men, so while you may be turned on by a photo of breasts, we’re a little more complicated to arouse.” RULE #3 Assuming you have secured consent, dick pics may be a welcome sight, but terms and conditions apply.

“It’s hot when a guy shows that he is sexually attracted to you when there’s already a certain level of trust between you,” says Jan. “It’s hot when you can trust each other enough to be sexually open. It’s another level of communication and intimacy,” says Jan. RULE #4 Put some effort into it.

NORMALLY,

WITH

THE

PROPER

ambience, in a conducive venue, and with proper lighting, I like a man with his pants down. Normally. Getting a dick pic over on Twitter made me re-think my position on this matter. I held the virtual penis in my hand and was genuinely puzzled. I felt embarrassed—on his behalf. Here is a man who took the trouble of taking off his pants, wanking junior to attention and standing in front of a mirror to take a dick-selﬁe. He’s got balls, but unfortunately, not an eye for details. He overlooked the need to take off his socks to streamline the view. Not that it would redeem the overall aesthetic of the photo, but hey, you went through all that effort but fell short. If the purpose is marketing and selling yourself, what would the old-fashioned

E S Q U I R E / M AY 2 0 1 7

Carmela gives out some tough love: “It’s a rare dude who knows how to take a good picture. Seriously. A picture of a ﬂoating penis does nothing for me, and I know lots of women who will say the same.” She says there is little excuse for a shabby dick pic. “Maybe get a little more creative. Ditch the fromthe-top angle and be a little artistic in your photography/composition. If you’re fortunate enough to have that ‘V’ on the abdomen that we lovingly call ‘sex cuts,’ include that. Or send a full nude with your face cropped out. Be inventive.” RULE #5 Beware the age of consent. Plus, the Internet never forgets.

Marimar, a 23-year-old academic who also gets her stock of dick pics classiﬁes them into two categories: solicited and unsolicited. “If it is unsolicited, I feel violated. It’s like he’s slapping his dick in my face out of nowhere. If it is solicited, I am delighted. I have cajoled a couple of ex-boyfriends to send me dick pics.” Unsolicited dick pics gross out Carmela, a 29-year-old writer. “I’ve never actually asked for dick pics because I’m not interested in them. I don’t speak for all women when I say this, but most women aren’t exactly

I have two words for you: Anthony Weiner. The American congressman made headlines when he was caught sending dick pics to a minor on two separate occasions. So that thing about age, “accidentally” sending your dick pic to a minor is a felony in many parts of the world. The digital world is both temporal and permanent. The Internet never forgets. Be aware that including your face in a dick pic may not be a good idea—it may be online for a very long time. And it won’t make for a good throwback picture.

MAN AT HIS BEST

___ B O O K S

4 New York in Photobooks

Nice Spreads

Edited by Horacio Fernández Cool concept: Take the best spreads from rare photo books of N. Y. C. to offer an informal, nontouristy look at what the world’s greatest city was like before we had the constant intimacy of Snapchat and Instagram.

FROM PUNK ARTISTS TO NAKED ANGELS: FIVE ART BOOKS THAT WILL LEND RANGE AND VISION TO YOUR LIBRARY.

By JULIA BLACK

5 Specimens of Chromatic Wood Type, Borders, &c.

Edited by Esther K. Smith To typography diehards, finding an original copy of this book of 19thcentury woodblock typefaces was like finding an original Gutenberg Bible. You can handle this reproduction without wearing white gloves.

1 A Pen of All Work By Raymond Pettibon You might know Pettibon best for his ’80s punk albums— he created the Black Flag logo—but this career-spanning catalog shows that his illustrations are really gritty critiques of the American 21st century.

All books available at National Bookstore.

2 Madonna: Nudes + By Martin H. M. Schreiber In 1979, a quiet 21-yearold named Madonna Ciccone modeled for a photography class. Four years later, she was a star. And today, you can own never-before-seen photos from that legendary session.

By Vincent Peters Peters’s black-andwhite celebrity portraits borrow imagery from classical sculpture and impressionist painting— meaning Victoria’s Secret Angels dressed in nothing but light and shadow.

E S Q U I R E / M AY 2 0 1 7

5 PHOTOGRAPH BY JEFFREY WESTBROOK

3 Personal

MAN AT HIS BEST

___ C A R S

Classic Roadster

PORSCHE’S 718 BOXSTER GETS APPRECIATIVE NODS FROM AN IMMIGRATION OFFICER.

By PAUL JOHN CAÑA

E S Q U I R E / M AY 2 0 1 7

WE WERE DRIVING AROUND SINGAPORE in the all-new Porsche 718 Boxster when we missed a turn and ended up on the road going to the border with Malaysia. We hadn’t planned on leaving the country, so we didn’t bring our passports. “No problem,” our Porsche contact said over the phone when we advised him of the situation. “There should be a U-turn there somewhere when you get to the checkpoint. Just tell them you’re test-driving the new Boxster.” And so we had our story prepared as we pulled into one of the immigration lanes. We expected the security personnel to wave us back through the gates after we told them of our predicament. When the official asked for our passports, we sheepishly told him that we didn’t have them, but would they take our Philippine-issued driver’s license instead? Mr. Official behind the window was nice enough when he asked us to step out of the car and walk with him to an office. Was something the matter, we inquired. “No we just need to check something.” A second immigration agent inside the airconditioned office looked like he was fresh out of university with his slicked-back hair and glasses. He politely asked if we had a scanned copy of our passports on our phones. Luckily, we did, and presented it to him. “That’s a nice car you’re driving,” he said. “Maybe later I can take a picture with it.”

The whole experience wasn’t exactly a scare, but that’s when we knew we were out of the woods. “Sure, you’re most welcome,” we said, as Mr. Immigration Agent handed our phones back to us and told us to follow a uniformed sentry who was going to guide us through a series of gates back towards the Singapore side of the border. “Well, we asked for an experience with the Boxster,” I told my colleague as we ﬁnally rolled past the last gate and cruised along the highway. “We certainly got it.” The little episode was thoroughly unexpected, but it proved to be a highlight of my little jaunt through the Lion City onboard Porsche’s new 718 Boxster S. The idea was a free and easy couple of days driving through the highways and back roads of Singapore to get a feel of the German marque’s newest iteration of its mid-engine sports car. Supercars are a dime a dozen in Singapore, but it probably speaks to the uniqueness and inherent good looks of the 718 Boxster that even a Singaporean border patrol agent couldn’t help but express admiration for it. The test unit wasn’t even in a loud, stare-at-me color like yellow or red. Instead it was in an elegant grayish blue that blended in quite nicely with the steel-and-glass skyscrapers of the city’s familiar skyline. Home during the drive was in Sentosa, where many of the city state’s wealthiest residents live. The Singaporean government makes it especially hard—and incredibly expensive—for residents to own cars, but that hasn’t stopped people from driving their sports cars

and luxury sedans around. Still, the 718 Boxster drew appreciative glances from passersby and pedestrians when I drove it around the resort island. The 718 as a model isn’t new. It made its debut in the late 1950s as a race car with a a four-cylinder boxer engine. The 2017 model is a tip of the hat to those days, with significant upgrades, naturally. It’s powered by a turbocharged flat four-cylinder engine, which might seem like Porsche backtracked a bit after the sixcylinder version that was introduced in the late 1990s. But a loss of power is the last thing drivers should worry about with the 718. I suppose that was the main purpose of the drive: to demonstrate the muscle and flexibility of this “entrylevel” Porsche. After a leisurely drive in the tree-lined avenues of Sentosa, the Boxster showed me what she’s got in Singapore’s highways. With the hardtop down, I stepped on the accelerator and immediately felt the jerk of the engine as I zoomed straight ahead. Turbo lag simply does not exist. The test unit was the 718 Boxster S version with 2.5-liter engine and 350 horsepower. My colleague and I took turns behind the wheel, joyriding through the immaculate streets of Singapore’s financial district, the shopping mecca of Orchard Road, and through the back roads near Woodlands. We followed an itinerary preset in the car’s GPS that took us pretty much all around the entire island. We stopped for lunch at The Nest at the Laguna Golf and Country Club. Afterwards, we resumed the drive toward Old Airport Road, where we pushed the car as hard as we dared. Porsche claims the 718 can do zero to 100 kph in 4.7 seconds, although it felt much quicker when other cars appear as nothing more than a blur on your side and on your rearview mirror. At day’s end we made our way back to Sentosa. The Porsche folks were kind enough to give us the option of more time with the car, which I took advantage of. Exposed to the rays of the setting sun, I maneuvered the Boxster through the tight twists and turns of the roads in Sentosa Island, passing through Resorts World and several luxury homes and hotels. The danger with these kinds of drives is how easy it is to lose sight of reality; to get used to the idea of driving a sports car worth several times more than your regular, run-of-the-mill fourwheeler. But with the Porsche 718 Boxster, inhabiting the fantasy, even for just a few hours, is worth it. Of course, if you’ve got the means, there’s no reason you can’t turn that fantasy into reality.

M AY 2 0 1 7 / E S Q U I R E

MAN AT HIS BEST

___ S P A C E

Personal Taste

THE PERFECT PIECE OF FURNITURE HAS ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT.

By CLIFFORD OLANDAY

AS YOU LIKE IT Philux’s Embla Chair (left) makes a quiet statement under the hands of Erwan Heussaff. For their versions of the Sutter Commode, Jessica Kienle Maxwell turns to Cubism (topmost), while Stephanie Kienle Gonzalez employs modern Filipino elements.

IT WOULD BE EASY TO JUST CHOOSE

the perfect chair, the one adorned by a crumpled throw, surrounded by a posse of equally sublime furniture, arranged on the well-lit corner of the showroom ﬂoor. What would be better is to take that perfect chair and make it yours. That’s what furniture company Philux wants you to do. Take its chair and ﬁddle around with it. Maybe you subscribe to the “less is more”

E S Q U I R E / M AY 2 0 1 7

movement of Mies de Van der Rohe and opt for a tweak like a dark textured fabric on a blonde wood chair. Or maybe you follow Robert Venturi, who rebelled against minimalism, by proclaiming, “less is bore,” and go balls to the wall, covering an entire chair with a watercolor of your likeness surrounded by a wreath of appliqués. The personal and hand-done is in the DNA of Philux. It started out as mom-and-pop

operation with just two carpenters making rattan furniture in the backyard of the Kienle matriach’s home and then, for over three decades, built a reputation as the source for classic furniture in good old wood. When Kienle daughters Stephanie and Jessica took more active roles in the company, in business development and design, respectively, it ventured into more daring concepts such as Philux Fix, their collaboration with celebrity friends (Erwan Heussaff likes it simple, while Heart Evangelista paints, by the way) that is meant to encourage you to tinker with their stuff. The customization service is limited to a menu of wood, wood ﬁnish, fabrics, and accents applied to the bones of existing styles, but even if you are bound by these parameters, the results are diverse. Observe each sister’s take on a chest of drawers. Stephanie’s is decorated by webby rattan and brass bamboo pulls, while Jessica’s is a composition of wood pieces in zigzag shapes. When you take time to put the details together, a piece of furniture becomes perfectly yours. philux.ph

When you’ve already secured your wealth, it’s time to secure your health.

HEALTH However way you look at it: health is wealth. So common sense dictates that you should prioritize health, which really is your number one asset. While you cannot stop the wear and tear of your body as you pursue your dreams, there is a way to safeguard your future so you don’t lose everything you’ve worked for. Global Health Access is a worldwide comprehensive health insurance plan that keeps you battleready for anything that might threaten your well-being. Being ten steps ahead of any unexpected illness is your best bet to a long and fulfilling life. PEACE OF MIND Let’s face it: human life is fragile. It pays to knowingly give yourself the best chance of survival while you are at your strongest, so you can prepare for the time you are no longer at the peak of health. Signing up for AXA Philippines’ Global Health Access means that you don’t have to be strapped with limited options in healthcare because you will have access to extensive medical care anywhere around the world for up to Php150M in annual coverage. Additionally, you have the option of settling medical expenses via cashless transactions within AXA’s global network of hospitals. Best of all, you can choose the specialist who would oversee your care. With Global Health Access, you can sleep better at night knowing that you’re covered. This is one smart move that separates the men from the boys; the achievers from the average Juans.

INTANGIBLE ESSENTIALS FOR THE MAN WHO HAS EVERYTHING THE IMPORTANT THINGS IN LIFE ARE INTANGIBLE

man with a plan is one who, more often than not, walks on the sunnier side of the street, no matter how bumpy the path. It’s actually no surprise that men who live each day in such a zealous manner get to tick off more

to-do’s from their multi-categorical list. For the man who thinks ahead, having the capacity to prepare for the worst scenarios, all the while carrying a positive outlook and steely resolve to implement an infallible strategy requires faith, diligence, but above all, common sense. After all, who doesn’t want to have a contingency plan in case life suddenly plucks you from your routine, and throws unbelievably reckless curveballs? On the other hand, it takes a huge amount of courage to admit this to yourself, especially if you happen to be that guy who hasn’t considered adopting the “man with a plan” approach yet. How can you better protect, preserve, and cherish everything you’ve worked so very hard for if it hasn’t even occurred to you to safeguard yourself? However, if you still feel that “carefree” and “devil-may-care” are solid qualities that best fit your unique style, you might want to think again.

TIME Time is a fleeting commodity that’s wasted on the young. More often than not, the folly of youth makes us think that we’re infallible. Still, you don’t need to wait until it’s too late. Global Health Access offers round-the-clock professional support for any health and medical query you may have, and a global concierge that can help in flight and travel arrangements for treatments, hospital transfers, and other schedule organization aids in between. There’s always time to choose the option that will give you the best healthcare. After all, you deserve no less.

With AXA’s Global Health Access, secure your health with the best healthcare anywhere in the world.

Learn more about Global Health Access via the AXA customer service hotline at (02) 5815-AXA (292), talk to an AXA Financial Partner at any AXA, Metrobank, or PSBank branch nationwide, or visit www.axa.com.ph for more details.

AGENDA

THE PROPER PHONE FOR THE PROPER MAN If a design- and style-conscious man and a car enthusiast came together to design a phone, they’d come up with the Hyundai Aero Plus. The smartphone delivers on both aesthetic value and performance capabilities. Taking its cue from a luxury car’s silhouette, the Hyundai Aero Plus has a 5.5” full HD curved screen made with in-plane switching (IPS) LCD technology, giving text and images unprecedented clarity and vibrance. It’s equipped with a 21MP rear camera and 8MP front facing wide angle camera, providing crisp and sharp photos–a feature that today’s highly-social Filipino male will love given their fondness for capturing share-worthy moments. The phone’s aluminum unibody gives it a strong, masculine appearance, making it ideal for style-conscious males who appreciate a sophisticated yet sturdy design. To know more about Hyundai mobile, check out www.hyundaimobile.com.ph.

STUNNING VISION The latest eyewear collection from French fashion house agnès b. draws its distinctive personality from its founder’s unique sense of individual style, hoping to encourage others to ask: Who am I? What inspires me?

The wayfarers for men are made bold by classic metal studs on the frame’s front with the signature agnès b. logo and lizard inlets at the temple, representing the brand’s unique outlook on French fashion.

With its side-shield design and the agnès b. logo on ultra slim metal temples, some pieces present a strong profile in style and personality to highlight the best facial features. All these iconic styles include titanium nose pads for a superior fit.

agnès b. is available at select Ideal Vision Center branches. For more information, visit www. idealvisioncenter.com.ph. Like and follow Ideal Vision Center on Facebook and Instagram for all updates.

KEEP IT EASY Bearded or shaven, a shirt in black or white, rubber shoes or leather shoes—looking good doesn’t have to be complicated. And it’s these simple choices that make your life easier, because the day can get busy real fast. The less effort you need, the sooner you can get things done. Bruno’s released a new kind of hair wax that lets you take the barbershop experience home, all while keeping things simple. No fuss. No nonsense. Just a straight up wax

that holds all day and washes off without any trouble. Bruno’s Hairwax comes in Active and Classic. Just two choices, so you can keep your hair steady while keeping your life easy. Available at Bruno’s Barbers and select Watsons outlets. For more information, visit www.brunosbarbers.com or go to www.facebook.com/pg/brunosbarbers.

05.2017

S T Y L E I T FO L LOWS

A super-sized bag that can accommodate a week’s worth of clothing, shoes, toys—and maybe an imaginary travel buddy—is never a crazy idea when it’s made of polycarbonate material that is light, strong, and stylish. Luggage (P79,990) by Tumi, Greenbelt 5

XXL

Monster- sized bags are for extra-large adventures. P H OTO G R A P H S BY PAU L D E L R O SA R I O S T Y L I N G B Y C L I F F O R D O L A N D AY A R T D I R E C T I O N BY PAU L V I L L A R I B A P R O P S B Y W I L L A R M AT E O O F S A L A D D AY

M AY 2 0 1 7 / E S Q U I R E

ST Y L E

D E S C E N DA N TS O F T H E SU N

A collapsible tote that puffs up into a jumbo bucket becomes home to the many things you need for a perfect day at the beach. Tote, towel, and swim shorts by HermĂ¨s, Greenbelt 3

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PAWS O N T H I S

Your very cosmopolitan adventure requires beautiful things that work. This duffel, adorned by panels of intrecciato weaving, transforms into a go-anywhere wheelie with a pull of a hidden handle. Bag (P142,500) by Bottega Veneta, Greenbelt 4

M AY 2 0 1 7 / E S Q U I R E

ST Y L E

B U R D E N O F T H E B E AST

It doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t matter that this bag is larger than your bratty two-year-old. For the ascent to the summit, nothing beats a jumbo backpack that will carry the load. Backpack (P14,990) by Columbia, Greenbelt 5

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Own Your Style. Esquire congratulates Cosmopolitan and its squad of Cosmo Girls as they celebrate 20 years of being fun, fearless females!

ST Y L E

To the Moon and Back The watch that has spent time on that huge hunk of cheese i n s p a c e t u r n s s i x t y.

B Y C L I F F O R D O L A N D AY

1 9 59 F I RST O M EGA I N S PAC E Even before the moon landing, Walter Schirra wore the second Speedmaster model on the Sigma 7 mission of the Mercury program in 1962. Observe the change of hand style from broad arrows to Alpha and lollipop.

A FA N TA S T I C J O U R N E Y E A R N E D T H E O M E GA

Speedmaster a spot in the pantheon of Greatest Watches Ever. In 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin arrived on the surface of the moon, becoming the first men to set foot upon the dusty rock. On their wrists were Speedmasters, the only watch that NASA approved for the historic journey. From that moment, the chronograph has been linked to celestial voyages, having been the model worn on many other moon missions, and then some. This year, the Speedy turns sixty. That’s six decades of exploration marked by rare editions, prototypes, and tribute models. Most of them riffed off the theme of the moon, while others were fine examples of crazy good design and innovation, which is what really counts for you, a man who will not journey to space anytime soon. Beyond its lunar connection, the Speedmaster reached iconic status because of its design, a combination of twisted lugs, tachymeter scale, domed glass, and baton hands, all of which results in something distinctive yet timeless. Here, a few of Speedy’s greatest hits, from the the first Speedmaster in 1957 to its new race-inspired model from this year.

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1 9 6 5 M O O N WATC H This is the first watch to be worn on the moon and the model that has served on the most lunar missions. It’s also the first Speedmaster with an asymmetrical case.

1 9 57 B ROA D A R ROW The wide arrows gave the first Speedmaster a distinct look. This is also the first chronograph wristwatch with its tachymeter scale on the bezel, a feature that makes it easier for race drivers to record time.

1 9 6 9 C O M M E M O R AT I V E EDITION It’s only fitting that the watch that celebrates Omega’s space exploits be the first hewn from 18K gold. The burgundy bezel is also a rare detail.

1 987 S P E E D M AST E R AU TO M AT I C This was the first Speedmaster that combined an automatic movement with a Moonwatch case. The extremely rare model is called the Holy Grail by watch collectors.

1 973 S P E E D M AST E R 1 2 5 This watch, which celebrates 125 years of Omega, was also the world’s first automatic chronograph to receive an official Chronometer Certification. Fun fact: In 1978, Russian cosmonaut Vladimir Dzhanibekov wore this when he spent 145 days and 16 hours in space.

1 979 A L AS K A I V A dozen pieces of this made-forspace quartz prototype was sent to NASA for testing, but they chose not to use it.

1 98 3 B I C O LO R The first two-tone model was made with a steel case and a golden dial, silvered subdials, and a bracelet of steel and 14K gold. The exact number produced is unknown, but very few are known to still exist.

2 0 0 8 A L AS K A P ROJ ECT Limited to 1,970 pieces, this strange watch combined a standard Speedmaster, modified dial and hands, and an outer anodized aluminium thermal shield. The design allowed it to withstand extreme temperatures in lunar or spatial atmospheres, ranging from -148°C to +260°C.

2 0 1 6 M O O N P H AS E The image of the moon on this watch is so detailed, you can zoom in to see an astronaut’s footprint. The blue timepiece also reaches the highest standards of precision and performance as approved by the Swiss Federal Institute of Meteorology.

1 99 2 S K E L E TO N The handcrafted edition, with a skeletonized design, was limited to just fifty pieces.

1998 X-33 The X-33, or the Mars Watch, was designed for the possibility of landing on the Red Planet. Though it’s yet to reach its destination, this was worn on NASA’s space shuttles and the Russia MIR Space Station.

2 0 1 7 S P E E D M AST E R AU TO M AT I C On its sixtieth anniversary, the Speedmaster highlights its motor racing heritage with a minutetrack style that first appeared on a 1968 model.

M AY 2 0 1 7 / E S Q U I R E

G RO O M I N G

Mane Attraction

The Dyson Supersonic is one beautiful p i e c e o f s m a r t t e c h n o l o g y. B Y P AT R I C I A B A R C E L O N P H OTO G R A P H BY PAU L D E L R O SA R I O SO VERY MANY PRODUCTS CLAIM TO BE A GAME

changer in their ﬁeld but very few actually deserve the accolade. The Dyson Supersonic hairdryer is one product that has been tooting its own horn ever since it debuted last year, and with good reason: This blow dryer is unlike anything else available in the market. Let’s start with the design: It’s a sleek piece of sculptural art. Gray, with a splash of futuristic fuchsia, it is lighter than most salon-grade dryers. Bladeless, it has the same sophisticated vibe as other popular Dyson home products, such as their electric fans. Unboxing this baby is a pleasure on its own. Don’t be surprised if you spend a few minutes admiring the packaging, where every piece has a dedicated compartment in the box.

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But aside from good looks, it is one technologically advanced piece of machinery. The heart of the machine, the Dyson digital motor V9 is not much larger than a one peso coin, and yet it can achieve insane amounts of airflow, spinning at 110,000 rpm. It’s intelligent. The V9 is the ﬁrst Dyson digital motor to use “sensorless” design: The controlling electronics carefully monitor the electric current traveling through the motor and determine when to switch the digital pulses which keep the motor spinning. Because of this, your usual 10-minute morning blow dry routine condenses to five. The Supersonic comes with three attachments—two for smoothing, and a

diffuser—that magnetically stick to the body of the dryer for easy access and handling. It is also the quietest hair dryer you’ll ever own. At the Supersonic launch in Bangkok recently, a good dozen of these hair dryers were going at full blast in the middle of a cocktail party and we barely heard anything above a small hum. The true genius, however, as with all Dyson products, lies in the technology. Dyson spared no expense in research and development—spending four years and 50 million pounds—which included a state-ofthe-art Hair Laboratory where they tested all 600 prototypes of the Supersonic on a total of 1,010 miles of human hair, covering seven different hair types from around the world. This hair dryer is so innovative that there are over 250 patents pending, 16 of which are for the accompanying attachments alone. Some conventional hair dryers can reach very high heat temperatures, especially when held close to your head. This can cause extreme heat damage to your hair. The Supersonic has something called intelligent heat control, helping to ensure hair isn’t exposed to excessive temperatures. A glass bead thermistor measures the temperature 20 times a second and transmits this data to the microprocessor, which intelligently controls the patented double-stacked heating element. In a nutshell: Bye-bye frizz and hello sleek salon shine! But, I’m a man, you say. What possible use could a man have for such a fancy hair dryer? That’s what I asked renowned Thai hairstylist, Kong, during the launch in Bangkok. Kong, with a small grin, declares, “Because if you have this in your bathroom, your wife or girlfriend will never leave you.” Can’t argue with that.

N OTE S&E S SAYS ESQUIR E | M AY 2017

M I CA E LA B E NE D I CT O

SARG E LAC UESTA

JASO N Q UIBILAN

“ FO UR EP I S O DES, T O KYO”

“L AT I T U D E S I C K N E S S”

“S I L E N T E C H OE S”

IN TIME AND SPACE

N OTE S &E S SAYS E SQU I R E | M AY 2 017

FOUR EPISODES, TOKYO MICAELA BENEDICTO In Tokyo, in an alley, I say to no one, I have new stories, Luis, and old ones I failed to tell you, that you will never know. O N M Y F IF T H NI G HT, I W ENT TO A V I NYL BA R W H E R E

the last man who sat next to me reprimanded me for smoking, after I had been sitting quietly beside him discovering the genius of Yukihiro Takahashi and Yellow Magic Orchestra. The man kept it all inside for a whole hour, then started yelling at me in Japanese. The people behind the bar were kind and reassuring, but I was so drunk I cried. Another night, I got refused at another place for being alone. The man at the door told me he couldn’t admit “just one.” So I went to a closet bar in an alley I had been to twice before, where the owner tended the bar himself, where a man randomly passed out sweet potato cakes, where I met a guy whose sister sold keyboards to Ryuichi Sakamoto, where an Australian girl who liked dream pop had a photo on her phone with Matt Preston from Masterchef, where an Italian man told me about a lake in Hakone, where a Japanese man in a business suit told everyone he used to be a “gangster” when he was 16, where a youthful surfer surprised everyone when the bar owner told us he was actually 39, where everyone got even more shocked and applauded and kanpai-ed when I admitted I was the same age. I ran and caught the last train, grabbed a mystery meat stick from 7-Eleven while a Japanese version of “Daydream Believer” played in the background.

THE RE IS AN O L D MAN I N A HAT W HO I S S O M E T H I NG

of a V.I.P. at the bar. He always comes accompanied by a small entourage. They say he owns the whole alley but I can’t tell if they’re joking. Once in a while he would let slip an English phrase in a shocking 1950s American drawl, like, What the hell are you talking about? or something. The rest of his speech is not in this accent. Last night he asked me what I did and I said I was an architect. He said, I’m an architect. Show me your work. So I showed him photos on my phone of two of my house projects. He said, Beautiful, like Le Corbusier. He got his phone and showed me his, the standout being a building with three visible columns and what looked like layers of waves cascading on the facade. He said, Now you’ve seen Tokyo, you must try something new, maybe something softer, maybe with color. He then asked, What do you think about when you design? So we borrowed a pen and some bar receipts, where I drew a diagram of the Z House idea and he sketched a map showing the location of the building with waves. I asked what his name was and he said, Oh, I’m not famous. I made him write it though, there on the back of the receipt, and his name—I kid not—was Mic.

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T H E S H I O D O M E STAT I O N WA S U N L IKE OT HERS IN

Tokyo; it was vast and deserted. The columns tapered and my footsteps echoed against reﬂective surfaces. I went to this district to look for the Nakagin Capsule Tower, but upon emerging from the underground, I found myself lost in a high-tech part of the city with isolated skyscrapers and a maze of construction barriers dissecting the highways. There were people in suits and I approached a few of them, but they were either unfamiliar with the old structure or uncertain of how to get there on foot. Midway down the wrong path, I saw a middle-aged man in a black T-shirt and glasses, and I had a feeling he knew. Yes, the one with the concrete boxes, he said, and motioned for me to follow him. We climbed a long ﬂight of stairs to a surreal network of elevated walkways, and suddenly a string section started playing and I couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

The effect of this bizarre soundtrack began to manifest itself in the 15 minutes we were up on the bridge, and to my astonishment, I began to develop romantic feelings for the navigator, perhaps because there was nothing else up there but the tops of buildings, and someone with a little screen silently walking with me in the sky, helping me ﬁnd something. Finally we descended a ﬂight of stairs into the street, and the sight of the concrete cubes in the distance snapped me back to reality. There, I pointed. Bye, he said.

IN ANO T HE R TI ME AND P LACE, LU I S SA I D T O M E ,

Nobody really knows what goes on in a relationship except the two people involved in it. He said this more than once, in instances where a couple we knew went through something we could only wonder about. I long to tell him, I am the only person in the world who knows what really happened between

us, because you are no longer here. I am the only one left that bears this knowledge. I am the astronaut in that ghost town in that old Twilight Zone episode, answering a ringing phone with no one on the other end. I am the lone character in Ray Bradbury’s Mars, after the last rocket to Earth had left. In Tokyo, in an alley, I say to no one, I have new stories, Luis, and old ones I failed to tell you, that you will never know. There are a number of these alleys, long and narrow and dark around the neon signs, and in these tunnels away from the crowds I am alone again with our story, the story no one knows but me, divided in segments and tucked away in what I imagine to be small districts in my subconscious, the details of our time kept in closet-sized places by canals and laneways, waiting for me to arrive so that they can reappear. Micaela Benedicto Architect and musician

M AY 2 0 1 7 / E S Q U I R E

N OTE S &E S SAYS E SQU I R E | M AY 2 017

E S Q U I R E / M AY 2 0 1 7

LATITUDE SICKNESS SARGE LACUESTA At Hawthornden, we have an obscene amount of time. So have the many others who have occupied it. There are collections of bird eggs in the drawers and long passages in the guest book. BLOOD SPURTS AS SOON AS I COLLAPSE ON MY CASTLE

bed. It’s coming from my nose, but I’m aching all over. It must be all the traveling—there were two planes, two trains, a bus and a taxi. “Many a battle was fought here,” my cabbie said as we turned into the long driveway that afternoon. It could also be from anger—the train ride cost as much as a domestic plane ride back home. There is also the draught that creeps under the door and the cold front it creates as it meets the electric wave from my bedside heater. I’ve come prepared with Vicks and asthma inhalers and with what few hundred pounds I could gather in the looming shadow of the financial crisis, but not for this. Over our welcome dinner a few hours earlier, a fellow resident called it “latitude sickness.” She is obviously a failed, self-important fictionist like I have warned myself I would be. At dinner I am also warned, by our administrator and the castle staff, about the badgers that are fond of roaming the castle grounds. I certainly know of the verb, and have seen the animal illustrated and photographed, but I have never encountered the real thing. I think they are too common to be placed in zoos. “They can rip chucks of flesh right out of you,” Richard the admin announces. Having already lost a good amount of blood through my nose, I have decided to arm myself. I will never roam the glen (again, something I’ve seen illustrated and photographed many times, but here it is, almost too much of it) without a walking stick, with which to whip such critters’ backs, and maybe a camera, with which I can capture them in mid-flight, or God forbid, mid-fight. Relative obscurity and its existence in recent decades as a writers’ retreat has allowed Hawthornden Castle to endure eight centuries. Here, in the middle of Lasswade, Scotland, foxes throw growls to distract us from their cubs’ paths, rabbits flip-flop out of reach, midges sting and nettles nettle, and the river Esk, on a low churn, winds through an idle, semipopulated wild. There’s no Internet, no television. On certain days, a milky blue fog lays a ghostly haze on the windows and plunges us back into the dark ages. This is as close to how it was, we figure, and it’s really as close as I want to be. But there are some mornings that are so clear that we see, in the distance, draft horses grazing the backs of rapeseedyellowed hills, and it’s swell enough for me to shake my head over the fact that it was my writing that brought me here. But there’s also the fact that up here, the farthest I have been, I have only my writing. I’ve left my business and my domestic issues, and with them, the kind of pressure that somehow allows me to think clearly: On weekdays I have 14 hours to do business and two or three hours to worry about it. On odd days I squeeze in meetings at the University Press, where I am a consultant. To save travel time from my Quezon City

M AY 2 0 1 7 / E S Q U I R E

N OTE S &E S SAYS E SQU I R E | M AY 2 017

home, I sleep in my office, under my desk, three nights a week. The balance is left for writing, or thinking about what I wish I could write. At Hawthornden, we have an obscene amount of time. So have the many others who have occupied it. There are collections of bird eggs in the drawers and long passages in the guest book—Zadie Smith’s consists of several pages of longhand (“She looked like she really knew what she was doing,” one of the staff says). Upon their advice a fellow resident and I take a “wee walk” to historic Roslyn Chapel. Two hours later, at the end of a good wheezy trudge, and nursing an unfathomable pain in my short legs, I find myself looking for Knights Templar and looking up at the Green Men. From the top of the steel cage that keeps Roslyn Chapel well preserved, we squint at the castle, hidden by a forelock of forest, cutting a fairytale figure in the glen. Between us, we share college degrees, a master’s in art history, and a doctorate in literary criticism. My contribution to this pool of knowledge is exactly one college degree. But I am the one who recognizes that thought, coming slow and clear in the crisp air: “Hey, we can see our house from here!” Night in, night out, we withdraw to the castle’s drawing room, in the well-lit after-hours of the Scottish spring, to unwind from what is presumed to be a whole day’s work, and discuss the next day’s mission, to be spent again in silence and over food quietly placed at our doors. The badgering begins here, in the form of machine-gun discussions on everybody from Adorno and Benjamin to Sir Walter Scott. Night in, night out, my body, unkempt, overweight, and undereducated, desperately seeks something to cling to. I remember nothing from college, and besides, it was a biology degree. The only other degrees I had were the third-degree interrogations—to

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borrow a term from the Knights Templar—I endured at the writers’ workshops I attended, where people announced that my poetry was “almost professional.” But as I said, I endured. Maybe it was in my genes. My father himself had quit his job as an investment banker to become a screenwriter. And in a writer’s language, to endure means to drop everything that makes practical sense in the world and stick to what you’re going to die for, and of. A week after I quit medical school I found myself working at an advertising agency. That turned into a ﬁve-year stretch of working for big multinational agencies. During that period, while everyone was thinking I was writing copy, I typed out stories on our group secretary’s computer and diligently sent out, via company messenger, to the Philippines Free Press and the Philippines Graphic. Whenever a story of mine was published, “my heart leapt” and I “danced for joy”—such was the extent of my elation, and of the bad writing I suspected myself to have written. I thought it was just punishment for all the subtle whoring I had been doing at my day job (“How does it feel to be selling your soul?” a poet once asked me. I had no comeback.) At Hawthornden I feel like I am being punished by having nothing to write. Our medieval work schedule is, weirdly, full of distractions. There’s Bonny Rigg, a town I love for its quiet and quaintness, and the fact that it is ten minutes closer to Edinburgh. I also like to spend a lot of time in the Bonny Rigg library, where my visit to the Internet terminal always coincides with the session of a boy with Down syndrome. He reads aloud slowly as he types—I’m too polite to ﬁgure out to whom—and leaves the library when he’s done sending out the e-mail. I’m not too polite, however, to follow him out the library one day, and I am surprised to see him walking the street unaccompanied and catch the bus to Edinburgh.

The Scottish capital is 30 minutes away by the number 39 and the number 77. In the center of Edinburgh, a column of cold air keeps Princes Street in icy temper and I walk down to the Royal Mile in gusts of ragged, visible breath. There is also a secret day trip to Glasgow, squeezed between the communal breakfast and dinner. Scotland’s largest city is an hour away by train, and in the economy car I find myself with a crowd of Scottish football fans and their German counterparts. In Glasgow I am met at the Queen Street station by a novelist friend, a Glasgow native. When I called him earlier from Edinburgh he assured me, “Don’t worry, I’ll find you.” He takes me for coffee at the Center for Contemporary Art, after we tour its galleries and offices. In one gallery a mannequin dressed up like a mummy is lying on the floor, emitting moans and groans from a speaker in its chest. Over coffee, my friend proudly shows me a Greek translation of his book and asks me about the progress of my newest collection. No, nothing to report, I tell him. I find myself warming to the thought of returning to the castle, with its rustling treetops, its cawing crows, its nest of writers. Our communal dinner is waiting. On the train back to Edinburgh I find myself in the middle of the tension after the football match. Alcohol is prohibited on trains but as soon as the doors close all bets are off. I don’t know who won, but I certainly am aware who has the most chances of losing something. My only defense is to hide

behind the covers of a book I have just bought—Benjamin’s Illuminations. I read it as if my life depended on it. I get to the castle hours after dinner. But I feel alive and energetic and unwilling to return. I remember the sheet of paper in the drawer, describing two scenic walks around the castle. They call them the Castle Walk and the Lady Walk. The choice is clear. I consider myself adventurous but I am also a realist—that’s why I have a day job. The Lady Walk begins with a dip off the side of the Castle and continues on a winding path past caves, alongside streams, under fallen timber, and through unfamiliar vegetation. The landscape is incredible and the air is full of the sounds of leaves and wildlife and the smell of vegetation and pollen. My breaths are deepened by the long strides and the contemplative sighs, but as my lungs draw in the pollenrich air, within minutes it ceases to be a walk and becomes a hike for humanity. I turn into a hacking, gasping creature, crawling on my elbows and knees. I have no camera, no walking stick. I’ve left my inhaler in my room. As I lie languishing, I can hear cars and trucks speed on the highway less than a hundred meters away, just over the glen. Not far away are my room and its siege of quiet, just behind the door painted with a long list of writers’ names to which mine would be added, living or dead. Sarge Lacuesta Writer, editor-at-large at Esquire Philippines

M AY 2 0 1 7 / E S Q U I R E

P H OTO S C U R AT E D BY N A N A B U X A N I

N OTE S&E S SAYS ESQUIR E |M AY 2017

INJAP IS BEST KNOWN FOR BEING THE MAN BEHIND MANG INASAL , ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL FILIPINO BRANDS RANDS IN MODERN BUSINESS USINNESS HISTORY.

Life Principles by Injap Sia

With a foreword by Jollibee Foods Corp. founder and chairman, Tony Tan Caktiong

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TO T R AV E L WITHOUT LET OR H I N D R A N C E REFLECTIONS ON ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL PIECES OF PAPER YOU’LL EVER OWN

By Clinton Art by Lala THE FIRST PHILIPPINE PASSPORT WAS ISSUED DURING THE WAR

years by Claro M. Recto, then the Minister of Foreign Affairs, to Jose Vargas, ambassador to Japan, and was marked with the serial number “1”. Since then, the passport has shrunk from the size of a small hardbound Bible to the international standard size, and is now a burgundy booklet bristling with security features and an RF-accessible microchip on the last page. Seventy-four years after that ﬁrst issue, the Philippine passport currently ranks 76th in the annual Visa Restriction Index published by Henley and Partners. This is a fairly poor ranking among the 104 passports surveyed out of 196 countries—the survey leaves out many of the smaller countries and territories, including the Vatican (the Pope does have a

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PALANCA GALLARDO diplomatic passport from the Holy See, in case you’re wondering, but chooses to travel as an Argentinian citizen). Traveling the world looks very different to someone holding a German passport—currently the most powerful passport—to a Philippine passport holder, though we don’t have it as bad as Afghanistan, which currently holds the bottom slot. This means that for us, travel is rarely a spontaneous pursuit; by January, most travelers planning a summer break are beginning the nervewracking activity of compiling and photocopying documents and ﬁlling out long and pointless forms. Have you ever engaged in terrorism? Have you ever trafﬁcked arms or nuclear weapons? List every trip you have ever taken in the last ten years. (One consulate required “proof of birth”;

05 17 apparently the fact that I was standing there in front of them was not proof enough.) And all of that is for one country’s consular section, which will hold your passport hostage until they issue the visa, after which you move on to the next—if they have a consulate in the Philippines. These days you can apply for a visa to Botswana by posting your passport to Japan, but I applied from South Africa, and spent a fortnight lurching from one vineyard to another in the wine country until I received a call from the embassy that my passport had been stamped with the appropriate visa. The origins of the passport are usually traced to the documents issued by sovereigns that ensured “right of safe passage” when traveling through foreign territories: it was, in essence, a letter from my king to your king saying that he vouched for me, and also if anything happens to him you’re going to hear about it. The real passport as we know it was invented during the First World War, when Europe was already connected by rail but borders were porous and people moved about freely. Its purpose was, as it is today, to stop spies from crossing into home territory. By its nature it was meant to impede, rather than expediate, travel, and in that capacity it continues the tradition today, more than ever. Most of traveling is not spent atop mountain peaks or in eating at fancy restaurants or luxuriating in bubble baths, but waiting; and much of this waiting will be behind border control desks. The rationale behind visas is that they provide security from terrorism and are a means to screen against illegal immigrants. While these are valid concerns, the requirement (or lack thereof ) for visas also not-so-subtly rewards citizens of rich countries and penalizes, often in an unnecessarily humiliating way, citizens of countries that the world considers less desirable. Anyone who has queued in the sun outside the U.S. Embassy on Roxas Boulevard will understand this. The French embassy in London seemed to take an almost sadistic pleasure in seeing the long line of African, Chinese, and Filipino applicants huddling in the cold on the pavement outside the consulate in Kensington, almost as if it were an exhibit to show all the passers-by how much suffering we were willing to endure in order to enter their great and glorious republique. Now the inhumane has been exchanged for the predatory: VFS, a company to which many consulates have outsourced the primary stages of visa processing, will give you comfy chairs, a soothing beverage, and happily take your money for “premium services.” The process is all the more irksome because the evidence that visas can protect against terrorism remains unconvincing. All that onerous collation of bank statements and employment records doesn’t feel like it would deter terrorists, and it doesn’t, really. Although it provides an initial screening by tapping into various databases, this could equally well be done at the border. Airlines, hotels, and other private entities are also opting into the Interpol’s I-Checkit programme, which immediately flags travel documents connected to terrorists, child sex offenders, or international criminal organizations, as well as those which have been reported as lost or stolen. The majority of the questions on a visa application form are actually screening for illegal immigration: what they are trying to find out is whether after taking in the sights, trying the local restaurants, and buying souvenirs, you will get on that plane and go back home. The best way of establishing this, unfortunately, is by checking your finances. Countries like the U.S., the UK, and those in the Schengen area of Europe are highly attractive to Filipinos (and other poor countries’ migrants), so they are keen to establish that you have a job that pays well and that you will return to that job, or that you are independently wealthy and there’s no reason for you to go underground and become a dishwasher in Chinatown. It also means that those who get visas are the kind tourists that most countries like: the rich ones who will spend money they earned in their home countries to infuse the local economy with cash. Taking a “gap year” after high school and before university to backpack around the world during a formative moment in their lives is a privilege of youngsters from rich countries—and children of rich parents in poor countries. On the other hand, however, we have to come to terms with the fact that the Philippine passport is regarded with suspicion for a reason. Our record with regard to illegal immigration has

not exactly been spotless. We habitually flout the rule about not working on a tourist visa: getting paid to do some modelling, selling artwork, receiving renumeration for anything at all, including banging bongo drums in the subway for coins, counts as work. We live in a time when walls are going up rather than coming down, and this applies not just to refugees and migrants but to tourists as well. In times of prosperity, countries, like businesses, tend to merge and consolidate; and in times of recession they split up. The heady years of the late 20th century saw the reunification of Germany; in 1995 the implementation of the Schengen agreement which made travelling to Europe much, much easier; and in 1999 the euro supplanted most of the EU member states’ currencies. Times of crisis tend to result in balkanization, with the Balkans prior to the First World War being an excellent example as well as being the etymology of the term. While the U.S., the UK, Canada, the EU countries, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan will continue to share data, Britain’s exit from the EU and United States president Trump’s push for stricter border controls will mean that the plight of the Filipino traveller to these countries will only get worse. At the time of writing, the U.S. border policy is in a state of chaos, with legitimate travelers and legal residents being turned away at the airport. The push against terrorism and radicalization also means that travel to Iran, Pakistan, Somalia, and other countries associated with Islamic terrorists will make getting a visa more difficult—and you can be refused entry at the discretion of the border control officer even if you have a valid visa. This applies not just to the U.S., where you will be automatically be taken aside for secondary screning, but to most first-world countries who are on edge. There is so much pride and amour-propre involved on our side in applying to travel, and so much paranoia and chest-thumping on the part of countries THERE IS SO requiring them. Yet most of the nail-biting M U C H PRIDE AND suspense and copious paperwork required to AMOUR-PROPRE issue a visa are ultimately unnecessary. While there is a need to control illegal immigration I N VO LV E D O N and flag terrorists, countries lose out on billions OUR SIDE IN every year because potential tourists are put off needlessly daunting forms and bureaucracy. APPLYING TO A nice middle ground between throwing open TRAVEL, Y E T borders altogether and torturing would-be M OST O F T H E visitors with twenty-page forms is the visaupon-arrival (basically the same as a more NAIL-BITING intensive screening at the airport, except SUSPENSE that they get to collect money), or an online AND COPIOUS application beforehand, which is being implemented by countries like India and PAPERWORK Taiwan and Turkey. A quick internet search will R EQ U I R E D TO throw up a list of countries for which Filipinos don’t need a visa. Mongolia, for instance, is I S S U E A V I SA a highly underrated destination—and their A R E ULTIMATELY economy could use the cash. Filipinos travel UNNECESSAR UNNECESSARY. to Morocco, Brazil, and Kenya more than other neighboring countries that insist on a visa requirement. Rather than prostrating ourselves before the consulates of countries that make traveling harder than it already is, we should bring the not-inconsiderable revenue of our tourist income to countries which are more welcoming. Just as the transformative effects of travel remain in your soul long after you have returned home, the difficulties of travel begin even before you start packing your bags. Part of the self-discovery of traveling is finding out what you will travel as; and for most of us, it means traveling with the much-maligned maroon passport that marks us as Filipino. If taking pride in it is too much of a stretch, then learning to accept its limitations and enjoy where it can take you is the next best thing. M AY 2 0 1 7 / E S Q U I R E

T H E

S H O O T E R S 05 17

THEY’RE THE UNSEEN MEN BEHIND SOME OF THE MOST MEMORABLE, THE MOST HAUNTING, THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL PHOTOS IN MEDIA TODAY. WE TALK TO THE COUNTRY’S TOP PHOTOJOURNALISTS ABOUT LIFE AND WORK IN THE POST-TRUTH WORLD. MODERATED BY

Francisco GUERRERO Fruhlein ECONAR

ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHS (ROUNDTABLE) BY

visual artist.

CA RST E N STO R M E R : But you’re not a visual

artist anymore. GA B U C O : I know! I still can’t consider myself a photojournalist, but I’m doing this to document the ongoing war on drugs. I want to see the effects, what it’s doing to the society, the community, the families of those who have been affected by it. That’s what I’m trying to explore as of the moment. EDWIN TUYAY: My name is Edwin Tuyay. I’m an old man already. I used to be a pornographer (laughs). I did a lot of shoots for FHM, 13 years at AsiaWeek magazine of course, as a staff photographer. Then I retired. Freelance—I still shoot freelance. I shoot everything. VEEJAY VILLAFRANCA: I’m Veejay Villafranca, photographer. Freelance now for about eight years. Staff photographer before for the Philippines Graphic, covering news. And then I focused on different issues, personal projects that I started, [which I do] until today. S TO R M E R : Carsten Stormer; I’m a German journalist, a senior correspondent for a German news agency. I’m a writer and a ﬁlmmaker, and I’ve been living in the Philippines for nine years and been extremely busy for the last seven. G U E R R E R O : Okay, I’m going to go back to what Carlo said: ‘I’m a visual artist, and I don’t call myself a photojournalist.’ Why do you define yourself as not a photojournalist, even though your work could be considered photojournalism? GA B U C O : Because I’m not trained as a

photojournalist. I love photography. I’ve been doing photography since I was in college. My paintings are inspired by photography. I just want to be out there. I cannot be in my studio, working on paintings, I’d be stuck there for weeks. I don’t see everything happening outside; I want to see everything move forward in front of my eyes. For me, it’s curiosity, I guess. G U E R R E R O : Does it go back to that idea of witnessing? Or is that too much of a clichéd idea? S TO R M E R : I think that’s what journalism is about. It doesn’t matter if it’s photojournalism—I think [the mission of] journalism in general is to be accurate and truthful. You can be biased to a certain extent, as long as you’re truthful and not faking anything. GUERRERO: What’s the difference, though? What’s the difference between biased and truthful? Because I think a lot of people can’t make that distinction. If you’re biased, it can’t be the truth. STO R M E R : Look at the situation of the Philippines at the moment. I think everyone covers the drug war. I think everyone agrees that no one is against ﬁghting drugs. But a lot of people disagree on how it’s executed. And you can be against killing, but still be journalistically unbiased at the same time—personally have a clear stance that killing is the wrong answer. VILL AFRANCA: Photojournalism in the Philippines is fairly young compared to other countries. It was in the last maybe ten, 15 years that it’s started to shape up, and it started 50

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to have its own identity, if I may say. What also I think is not discussed much nowadays is how photographs—especially news photographs—tell stories. It’s supposed to give the viewers a hint of, or the basic facts of what’s happening on the ground. And it’s usually up to the viewers to decide on what they want to believe. It depends on [the viewer’s] personal biases as well. But also, [the work is] supposed to spark debate or a discussion. That’s the role of photography in this kind of setting. Especially when the drug war pictures started to be published, everyone was saying [the photographs were] biased, that they were staged, [that the photographer] has political inclinations. Yes and no, but generally, a photograph is supposed to tell you what’s happening on the ground, no matter how it is framed, published, or printed. GU ERRE RO: Whether the reader likes it or not, this happened last night. VILL AFRANCA: And also that’s one part of photojournalism that’s still strong now—I mean, that’s supposed to be strengthened: it’s two disciplines fused together: journalism and photography. STORMER: I don’t think there’s a difference. You have to have the same principles and standards whether you’re a photographer or a writer. G U E R R E RO : Maybe Veejay is speaking to the skill set—knowing how to use the tools, the camera instead of the pen. T U YAY: The setting now is very different from ten years ago. We are very—ano ba tawag d’un—polarized. VILL AFRANCA: Super polarized. STORMER: Not only in the Philippines. Globally. T U YAY: Globally. Even Europe, right? So three days ago, I shared this photo by Linus Escandor [who photographed a story on extrajudicial killings for CNN International]. I know the photographer, I know the writer. Then one Duterte supporter told me, lectured me, that ‘you should distinguish which is fake or not.’ You know what I did? I didn’t make any fuss. I just blocked him and removed his comment. GUERRERO: I mean, it must be hard for someone who’s been practicing photojournalism for so long, for someone to come around and say… T U YAY: Oo, lelecturan mo ako? (laughs) VILL AFRANCA: But I guess there didn’t use to be discussion. There’s no platform for people to react to the images, and to question their integrity. T U YAY: There was no social networking then.

G U E R R E R O : C a r l o, yo u ’ve b e e n ve r y a c t i ve r e c e n t l y w i t h t h e ext ra j u d i c i a l killing coverage. As a photographer, have you been accused of faking a photograph? GABUCO: Not yet. But I’m curious and bothered

at the same time—every night you show pictures of killings and this and this… and still they say it’s fake news, it’s biased. G UE RRE RO: Well, to play devil’s advocate, the World Press Photo competition, which is the mecca of photojournalism, has found [fake photographs] within prize categories. How does one defend photojournalism? GABUCO: What I’m saying kasi sa EJK, it’s not just me on the scene. Carsten’s there. Linus is there. Dondi [Tawatao] is there. A lot of photographers are there, to see the same subject, but just different angles. So how can you fake that? How is that not true? So that still bothers me. STO R M E R : I wish we were paid so much that we would actually be able to stage a fake! (laughs) GA B U C O : It’s frustrating, [but I think] it’s our responsibility. If people don’t believe you, it’s still your responsibility as the image-maker. Maybe you didn’t present it right, or maybe you did something…I cannot speak for everyone, because I’m not trained to do this—I’m just there. I just see it. STORMER: I think we’re living in a time, globally, where the importance of journalism can’t be underestimated. It shows how important it is for journalists to be there and report, and despite all the opposition of these people claiming that they are fake news, that photographers stage [photos]. Unfortunately, it does happen to a very, very minor extent. But I’ve hardly seen more integrity in journalism than here. It’s quite incredible. G U E R R E RO : So you’re saying that the general Philippine press—media, photographers, writers, TV journalists— has stepped up. S TO R M E R : I don’t know so much about TV journalism. But I know writers here, and I know photographers. It’s very hard to fake news. Like what Carlo said, we’re not the only ones there. There are dozens of people there, local and international. So if someone comes up with a fake story, there would be a lot of opposition from other people who would be at the same spot and can say “it’s not true, this is what happened.” GUERRERO: If I could speak, for example, again to the fake awarded stories: people do raise their hands and say no. He got caught. S TO R M E R : It comes from the industry—it comes from photographers saying this guy has fake news. G U E R R E RO : We’re policing ourselves. I don’t think people realize how much of an accusation it is to come up to a photojournalist and say “Oh, you faked that, that’s fake news.” That really hits the core. STO R M E R : Oh absolutely. It hurts my integrity. If someone is faking a story, it falls back on my reputation as well. I would be the ﬁrst one to say that, if I knew about someone faking a story, I would be the ﬁrst one to speak up. GUERRERO: Which, I guess is hard for people to believe, they think we’re all protecting each other. Which isn’t the case.

P R E V I O U E P A G E : ( C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P L E F T ) P H O T O G R A P H S B Y C A R S T E N S T O R M E R , E D W I N T U Y A Y, C A R LO GA B U C O, V E E J AY V I L L A F R A N C A S P E C I A L T H A N KS TO F R E D ’S R E VO LU C I O N , C U B AO X

F R A N C I S C O G U E R R E R O : Introductions first. Who are you, what do you do? CARLO GABUCO: I’m Carlo Gabuco, I’m a

CARSTEN STORMER is a German journalist living in the Philippines. His most recent works include a documentary for The New York Times entitled “When a President Says I’ll Kill You,” of which he was co-producer. Among the works he has previously published in Esquire Philippines are photos of war-torn Aleppo.

STO R M E R : No, why would I protect someone who’s hurting my livelihood? T U YAY: You remember that picture of Raffy Lerma? The “Pieta”? No less than the president accused Lerma of staging it. STO R M E R : With hundreds of witnesses? Using drones and everything. T U YAY: You know this advertising guy Dennis Garcia? He was a composer—a member of Hotdog, top advertising guy. He’s the one who told the public that the photographers staged it. You know, sanay siya sa advertising, eh. So he thought that, because of the lights, that it was staged. He didn’t know that the lights there were coming from the TV crew, from the vehicles. VILLAFRANCA: Maybe if that happened predigital, it might be harder to come up with the same image, because of technology. But now all the digital cameras—you can shoot 10,000 ISO. It will blow out the same. Siguro ’yung idea of misrepresentation or fakery, d’un nanggagaling, because of the technical aspect. T U YAY: That’s why I answered Dennis. [I said] Bullshit, this is not advertising. GA B U C O : Actually that’s the danger nga every

night, when we go out. There’s this seductive light, this seductive feeling—I know it’s wrong to say this, but everything is just… the lights, the corpse... GUE RRE RO: It’s dramatic. STORME R: Very dramatic. GUERRERO: That’s the strength of the work. It’s a dramatic situation with dramatic light. TUYAY: With your high-end camera nowadays, even the mirrorless camera... VILL AFRANCA: Even just a hint of light. GA B U C O : Even with your iPhone, you can capture that. GUERRERO: But I think the questioning of, let’s take a photograph, who’s taking the photograph is also because of that phrase, “everybody’s a photographer.” Everybody has taken their selfies, everyone has taken a picture of something and then Instagram-filtered it or warped their wide waist. Everybody feels capable of faking an image. So they also think, well, why not these professionals with all the tools in the world? Now, how do we fight against it? How do we keep the integrity and say, this is what we do, this is the reality—you might not like the reality that we’re photographing, but this is what’s happening.

VILL AFRANCA: There are several ways, I think.

Engaging them would be one, but that takes a lot of time. I mean we hardly have any time already for ourselves. You go to the comments section and, damn! That’s a black hole right there! STORME R: You can’t discuss with those people. They are resistant to facts and arguments. You can’t. GUERRERO: Maybe we want to bring it to the dayto-day too: I mean I read a lot of these comments on Raffy’s photographs. I think people believe that you just show up, get out of the cab, go click-click and get back in the car, and you’re done. But what’s the day like? VILLAFRANCA: It depends. Like me, I work on

long-term projects. For example, my project on the gangs of Baseco. This was pre-EJK, and they were already in that scenario. They were trying to get out of drugs, poverty, all that. I committed to it, at ﬁrst as a personal project and as a school project. But then afterwards it snowballed into something like a real-world project. GUERRERO: Again, I’m trying to stress the fact that you don’t just show up take a picture and you’re gone. M AY 2 0 1 7 / E S Q U I R E

VEEJAY VILLAFRANCA began as a staff photographer for the Philippine Graphic, before becoming a freelancer. He is the recipient of the 2008 Ian Parry Grant for his work in Baseco.

V I L L A F R A N C A : Ah, no. [In the beginning]

I hardly took any pictures. I took pictures of Baseco. Baseco is like our photographer’s go-to place for several issues—poverty, environment, organ-selling and all that. And then I met these people. But it took me four, five months before I could talk to them. When I was able to actually talk to the guys, then that started my dialogue with them. I would go there just to hang out with them. And yeah, it took me around two years before I could come up with the edit that I felt comfortable with. G U E R R E R O : Wait, this is something again that I think that people aren’t aware of: that you actually build a relationship with your subjects in the course of your work. You interview, you talk to people, you’re taking photographs of someone’s home. There’s a relationship there—or a rapport, more than a relationship. T U YAY: That’s one of the requirements of photojournalism. You have to engage your subjects. STO R M E R : And it takes time, I mean, you’re entering people’s lives. They are opening up to you. T U YAY: It’s hard to penetrate. V I LL A F R A N CA: Basically you’re uninvited, eh. 52

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T U YAY: Yeah, especially when a family is mourning and then you barge in? ‘How do you feel, ma’am?’ STORMER: I think that was the main difference between sincere journalism and for example, TV. And you see it here a lot when someone gets killed and they’re still at the crime scene, they’re horriﬁed that they lost their relatives, and suddenly they have bright lights in their face and someone goes, ‘How do you feel?’ GUERRERO: But this is the negative perception of the mainstream media: microphone shoved in your face. STORMER: I really disagree with this kind of behavior, because I think it’s wrong. We take pictures from behind or stay in the back. Or I would go back the next day or several days after, introduce myself, maybe come back again, and then sit down with them, when they’re not like in the worst moment of their lives to ask silly random questions like, ‘How do you feel? I’m Carsten, by the way.’ VILLAFRANCA: That’s actually the part of the job that

hardly gets [attention]… you know, nobody notices that. Because you bear the brunt of this responsibility. And I think—going back to your question, how do

we engage these people about fakery—they don’t understand the responsibility that comes along with the job. Everyone will leave, all the news crew will fade out, but then [there are some photojournalists who stay with the story]. Recently, one of the main guys that I photographed messaged me, ‘Hey, I’m in Baseco, you might want to meet.’ I went there, you know, just to keep in touch with them. [I’d been keeping in touch with them] for the longest time— it’s been ten years since I did that project, in 2007— so there is constant communication. The people that I’ve photographed, say, after Yolanda or after several other typhoons, it’s the same: Sometimes they’d text, like, ‘Sir, wala kaming pang gatas,’ or ‘Nasira ‘yung bahay ko,’ or ‘My daughter or my son is in the hospital.’ How do you respond? You can only do so much. TUYAY: You know, I envy these three guys, because they have these long-term projects. All my pictures were from assignments. GUERRERO: But still, that sense of responsibility— nand’un rin, regardless of the duration. TUYAY: Yeah, it’s part of the training. You have to engage, start a relationship, just like what Veejay was saying: you have to come back.

CARLO GABUCO recently won a Magnum Foundation grant for his project entitled “Less Than Human,” which chronicles President Duterte’s drug war through the eyes of affected children.

GUERRERO: But you know the engagement can happen over months, years, or minutes. It’s about intensity of engagement rather than duration. Would that be a fair statement? S TO R M E R : Sometimes you’re lucky and you have weeks or even months to uncover something. That really depends on you. You have to be able to empathize quickly and establish the trust very quickly and be able to enter people’s lives. You’re breaking in someone’s life, and you have to make them understand that you are not exploiting them but you actually want to tell what happened to them.

GU E R R E RO : I’m sure some of you worked in the Yolanda area. I was doing a workshop about what’s it like on the field, and I asked: Imagine that your house just got flooded, four of your family members have just died, and all of a sudden four photographers show up to your house. What do you do? Do you speak? It sort of brings it back home, because their bravery and their courage to share these stories is also something, I think, that’s overlooked. A lot of people think that, oh, it’s in their self-interest.

Is it really, or is that part of the relationship now? [These people are] probably at the worst days of their lives and they’re trying to tell this story of what happened to them. GA B U C O : I think for me—I’ve realized this

recently—there’s this moment, like what Carsten was trying to say, this moment, you’re in front of a grieving wife or a mother, you have to give them a moment to process everything and settle in. And you have to give yourself that moment to [process] how you’re going to present it, how you’re going to treat it, how you talk to them, everything. If you’re building that relationship, it’s not just them that needs to settle in. It’s you as well—as the start, as the voice, as the conduit. Again, it comes down to responsibility. STORMER: You’re giving them a voice. And they are willing to take that opportunity. And that comes with enormous responsibility. You’re responsible to the people you’re covering, but also to your readers and viewers, to do the best of your abilities, to report accurately. G U E R R E R O : How have these past months affected you professionally or personally?

Like it or not, as journalists, we’re used to photographing something that’s happening to somebody else. But this, this is our home. We live here. This is our backyard. How has it affected you on a day-to-day basis? How has it affected your work? VILLAFRANCA: I skipped the whole drug war

thing, but generally covering news or issues is quite taxing at some point. Whether you have a family or not, professionally, since the jobs or assignments [are] also getting scarce, add that to the fact that foreign journalists and photographers are coming in. I take it day by day, as long as I find ways to continue my work. STORMER: I just don’t like people ending up dead at my doorstep. I really find it offensive. I find it rather scary that there is a huge consent in the population that it’s all right that so many people get killed. I think everyone can agree that fighting drugs is a good thing; it’s a necessary thing. Drugs are an evil menace to society [but] I find it very worrying that due process is abhorred. GUERRERO: Especially for Carsten: You fly around the world. I mean, is there a bit more importance or urgency to your work when you work locally? M AY 2 0 1 7 / E S Q U I R E

EDWIN TUYAY is an accomplished news and editorial photograper who has covered ares of conflict, including the Spratly islands. His most well-known recent work is a portrait of President Duterte for Asian Dragon Magazine, which was also used by TIME Magazine

STO R M E R : It’s not really a factor. It becomes more important because it is your home, yes. But the importance—I work a lot in the Middle East, I ﬁnd it as important when this is happening at home. So yeah, I ﬁnd it frightening. TUYAY: Well, everything will sink in. The trauma,

you will experience, of course, during the shoot. [But] you’re blind, you don’t hear anything, you just keep on doing your job. But when you come home to your family, that’s the time when everything will sink in. And you’ll be worried, what if somebody, one of my friends next door will end up dead tomorrow morning? That’s scary.

STO R M E R : I’m very careful because I’m not a

local. I live here, I’m very happy to live here, but I’ve been living here for nine years, and there’s a reason. I’ve never experienced that level of fear within people. I think this is a shocking development within the society. If someone had told me a year ago that Filipinos are capable of accepting many people ending up dead, I would’ve said no way. V I L L A F R A N CA : I was sitting with Carlo two days ago—we were having coffee, then he got a 54

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call from his network of the nightcrawlers—the guys that cover EJKs—that there was a raid right across my house. Well, my house is in a compound, but opposite it is a marginalized community, a settlement. And the PDEA guys did a raid there, 20 people got arrested. And that area’s been on my radar. I want to do something in that area, but I cannot, because it’s too close. The proximity is very close to my house. If I go inside and ask around, and I go back, they see me enter my compound, they would be like, ‘That guy is an intel.’ STO R M E R : I think this is one of the reasons why there is so much indifference at the moment: Because it doesn’t hit home for most people. Killings happen at night—not even that far away— but they happen at night, and when people wake up, the body is gone. It’s cleared. And it mostly happens in poor areas. It doesn’t happen in Dasmariñas Village. It doesn’t happen in Forbes Park. So people who could make a difference, they are not affected. G U E R R E R O : But isn’t that the job of the photograph? Isn’t that its job to say look, it’s right here. This is it. This happened last night while you were asleep.

TUYAY: It doesn’t affect people anymore. STO R M E R : I disagree. I think what the local

journalists have achieved here with the drug war, I think without the photographers, the local photographers, this story would not have been that big, would not reach international news. Because of the quality and dedication of local journalists, the story has become so big. Now foreign journalists know about what’s going on. It’s like, why do people go to places like Payatas, Caloocan, Navotas? You don’t go to have fun. GABUCO: I try to avoid working in Mandaluyong [where I live], but something’s always going on in Mandaluyong. Like there was this one time, I was doing a follow-up interview with this family near my house. It was a Monday, and Mondays are usually busy—usually a lot of killings happen on a Monday. I was doing an interview, then after that, I was planning to go to Manila Police District. I was doing an interview, I was wrapping up, then there’s this woman who approached me. She just said she saw a riding-in-tandem, wearing masks. They were all sure [that they] were the killers. Minutes after, a boy approached us, said someone got shot. I ran there. And yeah, there’s

this guy, tricycle driver, his brain was splattered on the street. So many people there. There were witnesses. There are things that you cannot really avoid, but it’s scary whenever you go home at night. It scared the shit out of me. Like, Veejay—I was with Veejay the other day, I was telling him, always check your six. GUERRERO: We don’t live in the safest country for journalists. A radio talk show journalist was killed in the province, and nobody really cares. It definitely speaks to the efficacy of the medium that so many people are against [our work] ; so many people are calling out, ‘No, it’s fake, it’s fake.’ It definitely is hitting home. If it didn’t, people wouldn’t even care. STO R M E R : Thing is, I understand where it

comes from. People are fed up with the status quo in the Philippines. People don’t want to live in poverty, in corruption, in chaos anymore. So I think that’s what marched Duterte to power. So I understand where it comes from. GA B U C O : Basically, fear corrupts everything. STO R M E R : And, you know I’m not a Duterte supporter, I wouldn’t be if I was Filipino. But I think this guy actually genuinely wants to change your country. I think he’s very much mistaken about how he wants to achieve it. But when it comes to threats to journalists—I don’t think this administration would threaten journalists or have journalists killed. But who knows? There are people within the administration, within the police, or within drug syndicates who are certainly not happy with the amount of attention this is getting. And that’s scary. T U YAY: That’s quite scary, yeah… from the syndicates. Mahirap ‘yun pag ikaw na-target. Just like what happened in Colombia, and Mexico. STORMER: By these so-called vigilantes. There are no vigilantes here. But there are assassins. V I L L A F R A N CA: There’s one photojournalist who was killed in the line of duty [in 2004]. His name is Gene Boyd Lumawag. He was actually the son of the president’s photographer. He was based in Davao, and had been covering Mindanao a lot. They went to Jolo with MindaNews—one of the biggest, most credible news outlets in Mindanao. And he was just shooting a sunset on the Jolo pier and he was shot at the back of his head. TUYAY: Very young, at the age of 26. GUERRERO: What are you working on now? What’s the next story that you’re working on that needs to be told? S TO R M E R : I think the challenge for Filipino

journalists is to keep the story in the news. I ﬁnd it already very much incredible that it has been breaking news for so long, internationally and locally. I think the biggest challenge is to keep it in the news. GA B U C O : During Martial Law, we didn’t have any solid photo books. That’s why now there are so many revisionists, apologists. This didn’t happen, where are the photographs? V I L L A F R A N CA: There are, actually. Pero they

hardly circulated.

GA B U C O : You need to have solid publication,

books, to prove that it did happen, that we went through this. TUYAY: Next week I’ll embark [on] a project for the Japan International Cooperation Agency, all

over Philippines. To pay the rent (laughs). I’m just waiting for an assignment. [It’s] funny that you mentioned Yolanda, I didn’t get any assignment from that incident. All they want is, ‘Can you do video?’ I realize I need to learn multimedia. V I L L A F R A N CA: I’m working on the climate refugee book. It’s supposed to be out this year. So I’ve been at that issue, that story for like six, seven years now. There’s so many stories after. One reason why I kept going at it is just the science of it actually [drives away] the people…That became a challenge for me. That and also I’ve been trying to work with other photographers on trying to establish baseline information about Philippine photography in general. This is, I think, my way of—not naman combating fake news—but to establish what photojournalism really is in the Philippines. Because from the time of Sir Edwin and even the guys before that, [photojournalists] kept working, through the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s. And then a lot of them, their archives have been on the shelf. Sonny Yabao, Alex Baluyut, Derek Soriano… GUERRERO: Photography is a very popular thing to pick up as a hobby. I think the younger generation needs to realize that, if you want to do this professionally, you have to make a living—but with ethics. You can’t be a practitioner and not have any ethics. The next step is, are people going to pay for your photos? VILLAFRANCA: I kind of changed track with how I

run my own personal workﬂow. I hardly rely on the waiting assignments. So I pitch, and since I work on long-term projects, because I want this project to be envisioned, to come into fruition. So I approach possible funders, grants. I pitched consistently after I went freelance in 2006 or 2007. Every day ‘yan, pre-social media. TUYAY: What was the result? VILLAFRANCA: Ah, wala—99 percent [of the time], hardly anyone answers. STORMER: But that one percent pays the bills. VILLAFRANCA: Sometimes it did! STORMER: As long as you don’t compromise your work ethics. Like, I would never take an assignment for advertising. I wouldn’t compromise my integrity for money. But then again, I’m very, very lucky. I’m a trained writer, but I do mostly ﬁlms now, because it funds my writing. I don’t rely on the payments anymore for the stories. VILLAFRANCA: I think with photographers now, the business model should be questioned—or not questioned, but challenged. STORMER: And I think that’s where fake news comes from. You’re kind of staging stories. If you get paid 500 euros for a story where you work on a month or two months, it doesn’t make sense. You have to come up with something. Some people might think ‘Oh, I’m going to come up with something just to pay the bills.’ Quality does require funding. That’s as simple as it gets. You want to have quality journalism, you have to pay for that. And that goes for the editors, that goes as well for the readers—you can’t expect free news, and…well, we don’t work for free. It’s our livelihood. My kid wants to eat, my kid wants to go to school. This is my job. I have to get paid. GUERRERO: Edwin, you’ve gone from staff to freelance. TUYAY: It’s hard being a freelancer. But I do a lot of stuff, corporate, wedding, (laughs), the works. So right now, I hardly work on any hard news. GUERRERO: And yet your portrait of Duterte was a cover.

TUYAY: Yeah, Time magazine bought it for one

time use.

GUERRERO: But that was stock, you shot it

before, you weren’t on assignment.

TUYAY: Yeah, I told them that it was an old

photo. Still, they asked me to view. Then they liked that particular shot. They asked me to convert it to black and white. The rate was $1,500. I asked the editor, “Why that low?” Because they used to pay me $2,000 for a cover. Even Newsweek, they pay $2,000. They told me because subscriptions are going down. GUERRERO: You said quality costs money, but my question then is: Who’s asking for quality anymore? STORMER: By ‘quality,’ I mean truthful journalism. Not only getting the truth out; it’s really the truth in a journalistic kind of way. It has to be well-written, it has to be wellphotographed. It takes a lot of time to get the access. You have to pay a lot of people, you have to pay the fixers, the driver, the car, whatever. I just did a film in [Iran] and just to do the film cost the company 20,000 euros. GUERRERO: I might overstep my boundaries over here, but I’ve heard of stories of journalists selling out: writing politically biased news reports, because they have to pay for the bills. You know, people are handed envelopes, saying hey look, you’re getting paid five pesos per word—I have no idea what their rate is—but if you write it this way, here’s an envelope, just write it. TUYAY: Worldwide naman ’yan, eh. GUERRERO: I mean if you pay your journalists well, they might end up being uncorrupt. VILLAFRANCA: I think there are political biases also, and their lineages, and personal biases would make them switch—of course the money. STORMER: Well, why do you become a journalist in the first place? It’s like, you’re an idealist. You certainly don’t go into journalism to get rich. It’s a privilege to see history unfold in front of your eyes. It’s a real privilege. But you don’t choose to for the money. GUERRERO: I think with privilege comes responsibility. I think we’ve all been in situations where—I have been in situations where I don’t take a photograph, because I know that that’s not ethically correct to do that. STORMER: I have an example. I was working in Mindanao, in 2008, I think. And there were five kids who had been killed by the Philippine Army. It was an accident, but I had the pictures. I decided not to show it in the Philippines, because I knew either side, whether it’s MILF or the Philippine Army, would use it for... VILLAFRANCA: Propaganda. STORMER: So I decided not show them. VILLAFRANCA: I think it’s still personal. It’s the choice of the author. Either you’re a print journalist or a photographer. There goes integrity. Going back to your earlier question: how do you keep these things, how do we combat these fake news and all that? Keep your integrity intact, keep doing what you do, cover either the drug war, climate change, keep doing editorial assignments, it’s your work that will define it. STORMER: And with that comes success. VILLAFRANCA: Hopefully, success. GUERRERO: With luck. TUYAY: It’s a long journey, but... STORMER: With a little bit of luck, if you produce quality work with integrity, you will be successful.

M AY 2 0 1 7 / E S Q U I R E

T O M O R R O W, THE WORLD

PHILIPPINESâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; FIRST MISS WORLD , AND JUST MONTHS AFTER YOUNG STILL SEEMS RELUCTANT TO SETTLE INTO HER STARDOM. HOT ON THE TRAIL OF BIG OPPORTUNITIES, NEW EXPERIENCES, AND THE PERFECT CUP OF COFFEE , THE ACTRESS LOOKS TO OTHER ENDS OF THE EARTH, READY, IF SHE MUST, TO START FROM SCRATCH. FOUR YEARS SINCE HER REIGN AS THE

HER MOST RECENT TURN ON PRIMETIME TELEVISION, MEGAN

Miguel ESCOBAR

PHOTOGRAPHS BY

Edric CHEN

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I N F R O N T O F T H I S O L D, OV E R G R OW N H O M E ,

in the middle of a plot of land that can’t be placed. Its bricks, windows, and ironwork vaguely suggest that the house was built in the early 20th century, but age and a few other oddities—like this goddamn hawk—have obscured anything else that might situate it. Various species of chickens, including a silkie that bears an amusing resemblance to Andy Warhol, roam free under hanging laundry and bougainvillea in bloom; while upstairs is an emptied art gallery joined to three bedrooms with creaky floors and suspicious mirrors. This place is so curious and so thoroughly unfamiliar that it’s almost exotic—as if it were some remote tropical idyll just a few dozen meters from the sea. At the very least, that’s what we’re determined to believe it is. But it isn’t, and I meet Megan Young here, in an old house on a narrow street in Pasay City, and this is all just an elaborate exercise in make-believe. In fact, if not for the punishing Metro Manila heat and the familiar smell of sizzling Bart Burgers wafting from a nearby Burger Machine, it might have actually been conceivable that we were elsewhere. In reality, this house is a bar—a dive, even by local standards—and while it does have a bizarre charm about it, it’s the last place you would expect to find Miss World 2013 walking around in various states of undress. But here she is, Megan Young in “practically nothing,” as she puts it; and from the right angle, with an ample leap of the imagination, it isn’t terribly difficult to mistake this place for somewhere more romantic, if not, at least, more real. It’s a mistake you could very easily make, a mistake you’d want to make, a mistake that’s made even easier and more tempting because she’s right here, in front of you. Easier, because despite the down-home congeniality that she lets on with an unrestrained smile and her big, hazel eyes, Megan’s Filipino-American beauty is still decidedly out of place, and far too uncommon for these parts. More tempting, because her bare, olive skin glistening under the warm summer sun deserves a better backdrop.

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actually was elsewhere, in New York, almost half the world away from here, where the weather was a different kind of punishing. “It was too cold,” she says, telling me that while she would have wanted to see more of the city, she was mostly stuck in her hotel this time. “I didn’t even get to go around for coffee.” Megan loves coffee. She even took barista workshops, and can now brew coffee by hand. She loves coffee enough that she considers it one of her main reasons for traveling: to taste

and experience all the different types and ﬂavors from different corners of the world. She tells me that she only got to visit one café during her last trip to New York—a shop on Broome Street called Happy Bones—and that she’d like to explore others in the area next time, when she isn’t there on business. This last trip, however, was indeed for business. She ﬂew in to ink a contract with Innovative Artists, an American talent agency that, as all the local celebrity news outlets were keen to mention, also happens to have represented the likes of Jim Parsons (Sheldon, from The Big Bang Theory), Ashley Greene (Alice, from Twilight) and Amanda Seyfried. The whole thing was framed as Megan’s big

B I K I N I T O P, E A R R I N G S A N D N E C K L A C E F R O M F O R E V E R 2 1 ; S K I R T F R O M H & M . P R E V I O U S PAG E : E A R R I N G S F R O M M A N G O. OPPOSITE: BODYSUIT FROM TOPSHOP; EARRINGS FROM FOREVER 21.

THERE’S A HAWK LEASHED TO A STONE PERCH

So today, if mistakenly, I am elsewhere, and she is elsewhere—even if we’re really just here, with Warhol the silkie chicken.

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shot at Hollywood, and while the thought of seeing her take roles beﬁtting her talent is enough to hope that it were, she doesn’t like to call it that. “I really don’t say ‘Hollywood’ or whatever,” she says, not quite as a matter of modesty, more as an insistence on disentitlement. “I don’t want to put myself in that position na I’m expecting something. I told the agency, ‘Expect me to really work my ass off.’” She begins to punctuate her sentences with a series of subtle, but forceful gestures. “‘If you think that just because I’m known in my country or whatnot, and I have recognition for winning Miss World or whatever… To me, those are great achievements, but I wanna push forward, and I’m willing to work from the ground up.’” She seems particular about keeping her feet on the ground this way, even if at this point, she’s earned the right to have her head in the clouds. “A title is a title, but it doesn’t deﬁne you.”

Somewhere in between all that, she won a much more prestigious competition, too: Miss World 2013, making her the ﬁrst and only Filipino contestant to take home the crown. It was a risk, she says, because the undertaking would coincide with a crucial part of her acting career. “Do I actually go for it?” she recalls asking herself around the time that the pageant auditions were starting. “Or do I try to ask for something more stable, which was work? Do I want to play safe—or do I just go for this, because it’s screaming in my face right now, and I’m not even sure. So I went for the risk.” Now a title may just be a title, even in a country that takes beauty pageants very seriously, but winning Miss World would also play a more important role for her personally, ﬂying her off to different countries on trips that she says would provide her with a good perspective of the world. “It really made me realize that this

food and I travel for coffee. Other people travel for tourist spots or historical places or architecture, but me, I travel for food and coffee.” We bid the hawk and the chickens farewell as we leave this bizarre place when we get to talking about Chef’s Table, a Netflix show that she’s currently obsessed with. Megan tells me, with an earnest longing, that she’s determined to eat at any of the restaurants featured on the show. “I really want to go to the one in Sweden,” she says, referring to Fäviken, a remote Scandinavian restaurant tucked away in an otherwise untouched 20,000-acre reserve. But first, she’d like to hit the one closest to home: Gaggan, a restaurant in Bangkok that serves progressive Indian cuisine, where she might just go on a whim one of these days. “I just want to take a weekend trip. Like, if there’s a cheap flight, I would go to Bangkok just to eat at Gaggan.”

T H I S N E XT B I G ST E P I N M E GA N ’S CA R E E R

is the mindset that I need for each trip that I have: I’m not just going there because I’m Miss World, I’m going there because there’s a purpose. What am I going to learn that I can bring back here?” Far as she wanders elsewhere—and she has wandered far, being that she was Miss World and is now a bona ﬁ de, jetsetting TV star—Megan still concerns herself with what she can bring home.

She proffers another recommendation, from a sojourn in Japan: Katsudonya Zuicho, in Shibuya, Tokyo. “It’s an eight-seater. Small lang. But people really line up for it. When you go there, they ask you small, medium or large, because all they serve is katsudon, and that’s just the rice quantity they’re asking for.” She swears by it, even if it had to be her last meal. “I would get a medium,” she says, before pausing. “You know what, fuck it, I’d get a large. Dude, it’s the best.” Right about then—or maybe after a few more impassioned oral restaurant reviews, I can’t recall—Megan yells, “Oh my god, mangga!” I look to my right and see a kiosk peddling mangga’t bagoong by the side of the street, so we pull over. Then, just as she’s just about to alight from the car, she realizes that she won’t likely make it out without drawing a commotion, so she asks if I could fetch her some instead. I oblige and return with half a green mango, two spoonfuls of bagoong, and a strange sense of fulﬁ llment that I don’t normally get from buying street food.

follows a long and successful run in local show business, starting with a top-six ﬁnish on GMA’s Starstruck in 2004, when she was 14 years old. Two years and a few minor roles thereafter, she would make the jump to ABS-CBN, where she would join the celebrity edition of Pinoy Big Brother, and star in a soap alongside John Lloyd Cruz. Megan would also snag a few roles on TV5, before moving back to GMA in 2015 to play the title role in the network’s second adaptation of hit Mexicanovela Marimar. But her most recent lap in the spotlight was for GMA’s Alyas Robin Hood—“the Arrow show,” she half-jokes—of which the most famous scene, with almost one million views on YouTube, involves Megan in a red two-piece swimsuit reminiscent of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, facing off with Andrea Torres in the time-honored teleserye tradition of girl-on-girl eyebrowraising and shade-throwing. Suffice to say that by many accounts, Megan won that showdown. 60

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T H E S E DAYS, I T’S U SUA L LY A F U L L STO M AC H .

“When I go to these places, the number one thing I do is pig out,” says Megan, telling me that her appreciation for coffee had begotten a greater appreciation for food, and an appetite that leads the way whenever she’s abroad. It’s surprising, if a little unfair, because her hourglass curves don’t show it in the least. Obviously, it’s because she works out (quite religiously, as all 1.5 million of her Instagram followers know), so she rightfully allows herself a few gastronomic indulgences. “I travel for

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THERE IS AN ABANDON WITH WHICH

Megan Young makes her decisions, whether it’s in choosing the large rice bowl over the medium, or in stopping the car to buy mangga at a random street corner, or in thrusting herself into the paces of beauty pageantry and an international career. But it’s not reckless or indifferent—if anything, it’s out of conﬁdence, with the kind of security and self-assuredness that can only come from a woman who’s gone places by taking risks. It’s not that she doesn’t care about consequences, or that she isn’t afraid of failure or disappointment—it’s that she’s ready for them, and she knows that the right leaps of faith are worth taking. A little extra rice would be worth it. The mangga was worth it. A shot at a Hollywood movie would be worth it. It’s an intrepid approach to life—one that brought her where she is today, and will likely take her even farther. “I’m going back to the States in July and August,” she says. “For my… ‘new journey.’” Megan hesitates to call it that, but she does anyway, acknowledging that whatever comes of her new forays, she’d at least be richer for the experience, and it would be a journey no less. “We’ll see. Wala pa naman set in stone. I just want to see what’s out there.” So this summer, Megan Young will be elsewhere, on the lookout for anything good that comes her way. She’ll be away on business or pleasure or both, eating good food and sipping good coffee. She’ll be meeting people, shaking hands, knocking on doors à lá La La Land. But she won’t forget to leave part of herself here. “Some people would be like, ‘It’s such a tough industry, why are you leaving your life here? You’re so good here!’ Thing is, I’m not leaving my life here. I’m not giving up work here. It’s just, while I’m on break, I’m also doing something else. And if opportunity happens to knock on my door, then I will grab it by the balls.”

PRODUCED BY KARA ORTIGA STYLING RIA CASCO SHOOT DIRECTION PAUL VILLARIBA MAKEUP MURIEL VEGA PEREZ HAIR JEFF DE GUZMAN AND LALAY GLENDRO SHOT ON LOCATION AT 888 VIBERS

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05 17

PA R A D I S E WA I T S

K a r a ORTIGA

PHOTOGRAPHS BY

Jilson TIU

IN 2012, ALL OF 124 FROM

INDIGENOUS PEOPLE ,

FISHERFOLK AND FARMERS

CASIGURAN MARCHED 370 KM TO MANILA . THE TRIP SPANNED OVER 17 DAYS TO PROTEST THE INTRUSION OF AN ECOZONE CLAIMING THEIR ANCESTRAL LAND. FIVE YEARS LATER, WE REVISIT THIS PACIFIC TOWN AND THE WATERS THREATENED BY CLASHING VIEWS ON DEVELOPMENT.

MY GRANDMOTHER’S STORIES OF HER PROVINCE, C A S I G U R A N , A R E H A Z Y. A S P U N K Y, C H U R C H - G O I N G OCTOGENARIAN, SHE REMEMBERS THE REGION WHERE SHE WAS BORN AND RAISED WITH FONDNESS, BUT WITH FEW CONCRETE MEMORIES. This is the place she ﬂed at 11 years old, during World War II, after her father, a successful town trader, was tortured by a Makapili (a Filipino ally for the Japanese), and their home was turned into a garrison. Fearing for their lives, they ran away to Manila, taking the route by sea, hopping on a small banca with her family and none of their belongings, until they reached Baler, where a jeepney took them to the city. At that time, roads to Casiguran were impossible (until recently, they were still unpaved and difﬁcult). 66

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My grandmother will not lay her hands on beef—living largely on carabao meat during the war had turned the taste of the viand bitter. She is the type of woman who still enjoys rural places, like a farm, and, instead of sitting inside the modern cement houses built for example by its hacienderos, she will go to the back kitchen to chat with the local wives who tend to its ﬁelds, and ask them for the day’s gossip. She still has the habit of picking food off other people’s plates with her bare hands, a habit that my father, raised in postwar Manila, ﬁnds atypical.

As the sun rose over the mountains on the horizon on the road to Casiguran, it cast toward the sky the most beautiful sunrise I swear I have ever seen. I admit: this is a sentiment that I seem to feel about every sunrise. But the candescent pink, orange, and purple hovering above us was undeniably stunning in its neon haze, and even more surreal because when I looked back at the road behind us, now far away from Manila, the full moon was still aglow—both celestial bodies just amicably sitting side by side. I would tell my companions later on at a highway carinderia beside an empty rice paddy, “Did you know that you could see both the sun and the moon in the same sky,” and they would nod with knowing, sleepy eyes. In 2012, about 124 people from Casiguran, including indigenous people, ﬁsherfolk, and farmers, staged a memorable pilgrimage that would take them from the province 370 km to Manila. By car, the journey is already a grueling eight hours if you’re blessed with impeccable

At the peninsula of San Ildefonso, there are natural tidal pools, endless coconut groves, and quiet villages resided by the Dumagat. But the APECO threatens and claims 12,000 hectares of its land.

road conditions, so one can only imagine the arduous path by foot. They were protesting the building of a government project called APECO, or the Aurora Paciﬁc Economic Zone, which boasted of constructing water cottages, hotels, a navy cost, a pier, and a naval base, all over 12,923 hectares of virgin land. An APECO investor’s video will remark of Casiguran’s 25 meter deep harbor—apt to accommodate large ships for shipments, they say. In return, they promised progress and development to its original inhabitants, Agta and Dumagat tribes, who have lived and thrived here for years.

CASIGURAN IS A SOMNOLENT COASTAL TOWN—

remote and kept secret by those who have been fortunate to make it this far. Away from the hungry eyes of travel bloggers looking for their next dose of #vitaminsea, it is a haven for people tolerant enough to deal with its frenetic nature (mostly treasure hunters searching for lost

gold in sunken ships). The place is no stranger to hardships, its location makes it a constant target of typhoons and flooding; the roads are rough and unpredictable; and accommodations are not for the finicky. But see, I feel that it is a place that, if waited on patiently enough, unfurls a paradise—one which is callous, and if approached heedlessly could even be quite harmful. But perhaps it is in this paradox where you can also find its charm. We have insisted on staying in Casapsapan Beach, 20 minutes away from the bayan. “There is no water there, or cellphone signal, or electricity,” says our worried tour guide. But I didn’t come eight hours from Manila for signal or electricity, I came for the beach, and Casapsapan has its way of seducing you. Initially, any city-dweller would be alarmed—there is nothing here but the sand and the water... literally. The entire stretch of the beach, two kilometers long, is all yours: creamy fine granules, unadulterated, uninhabited, with calm shallow waters during the day, perfect for a swim. The beach faces the

open Pacific Ocean, and if you look at the map, you can trace Casapsapan Bay along the edge of the Philippines. Instead of tourists, you share this sanctuary with the Agta, who live nearby and fish in its water for daily sustenance. The sun is beating down on us heavily when we make a stopover at Sitio Paraiso, a cluster of homes by the road, surrounded by dry grasslands. Alisa, one of the Agta women who joined the march in 2012, meets us here. Her neck is draped in manek, or colorful beads, their people’s way of beautifying, and she excuses herself as she indulges in her merienda, the mama or betel that locals in this region chew on. “’Pag wala kasi kaming merienda sa bundok, ito kinakain namin, nabubusog na rin kami,” she says in a soggy, maternal tone, unwrapping a gawed leaf. She recalls that the march to Manila was so difficult that by the time they had reached Baler, her slippers were worn thin. Larry, an Agta living in the neighboring Sitio Dipontian, also narrates the same M AY 2 0 1 7 / E S Q U I R E

hardships—that initially, he was struck with fever from the shock of the journey, but that they pursued it for 17 days because they were passionate about the cause. They also talk about the support they would receive along the way, strangers handing over pieces of bread, or passengers in jeepneys offering money. Their schedule was stringent: a 4 A.M. wake-up call, breakfast, a little bit of exercise, and then a 20-30 km walk per day. But the Agta were unwavering in their protest: they are afraid of the changes brought about by the so-called development being imposed upon their land, especially because no one even talked to them about it. Larry’s home can only be accessed by traversing a long, narrow path. His neighborhood is buried farther away from the main road, nuzzled in between lush mountains, safeguarded by a forest. To get here, you must cross the Pasaruboy river, which runs 10 km long. When the stream becomes too high, you have to be rafted over by the locals. When we first chanced upon Larry, he was resting in a hammock just by the river (which we crossed on foot, water thigh-high). “Who are you looking for?” he asked. “A man named Larry,” we say. “Do you know him?” He pauses. “He must be there,” he says, still staring at us quizzically. And then he wonders, “What do you want from Larry?” Our guide, a local, tells him in Casiguranin, the local dialect, that we just want to ask him about his experiences during the 2012 march. The man pauses, and then he admits. “Okay, let us go. I am Larry.” The people here act intriguing in this manner, and their humor is bleak and laconic. I reckon that during instances like this, they just want to be left alone. Larry walks us through his secluded village, generally tranquil except for the roaring laughter of the children. He tells us that he joined the march because he was worried about the future of his kin. “Paano ‘yung mga anak ko, saan sila titira? Eh, ‘yung alam nilang hanapbuhay ay sa dagat, sa bundok,” he says. During the summer, he says, they harvest crops from the mountain, and make money from selling them at the market. They also culture orchids as a means to sustain themselves, and then for food, they hunt and they fish. When APECO comes into the picture, what will happen to the nature on which they thrive, he asks. Alisa also shares the same concern. She remembers that when they had finally reached Manila after the march, and they were allowed to walk around, she cried at the sight of the poor of the city. “‘Nung nakita ko ‘yung mga pulubi, 68

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doon na ako umiyak. Kasi…maganda na pala ang bahay namin, kahit ganito lang ang bahay namin,” she says gesturing to where we are seated: a makeshift home out of logs, with coconut branches for a roof. “Hindi ako natutulog sa lupa. Doon ako umiyak talaga sa karamihan namin, kasi sabi ko, kapag sasakupin kami ng APECO—mga matataas na tao, mayayaman—sariling bayan namin, magiging katulong kami—ayaw ko. Doon ako lumuluha kasi para makakain ‘yung tao doon naglilimos sila. Pero para sa amin, hindi namin ginagawa ‘yun. Ayaw namin ‘yung nakikihingi. Sariling kayod para kumain. Walang binibili dito sa amin: libre ang isda, libre ang kahoy, libre ang tubig. Samantala sa Manila bawat kilos mo may pera.”

if the waters are calm enough to allow it: majestic rock formations, underwater caves, a Pawikan nesting site. There are stories from locals of sightings of whale sharks and dolphins—all undocumented by Instagram— but its audience, the very people who tend to the waters, will attest to its truth. This coast, the entire San Ildefonso peninsula, makes up the 12,000 hectares of the land that APECO seeks to claim, including the very waters that surround the pensinsula, including the very place where we had our morning swim.

That night, we slept curled up in our kubo in Casapsapan with the windows wide open, allowing the sound of the sea crashing and the howling wind of the Paciﬁc Ocean to taunt us to slumber. In the morning, we would buy our breakfast from a man on a motorcycle selling fresh pan de sal, two pesos apiece. And even before the sun rises we are already perched on a boat to San Ildefonso.

come from a place of understandable trepidation: the behemoth structure is intrusive and threatens the lifestyles and food sources of the people who live there. It displaces families, and tramples on natural resources. Rice fields were already cemented over to create room for an air strip (until today, this air stip is still unused by commercial airlines), and mangroves where the people once took their carabaos to have also been paved over. A small fishing community was forced to relocate to make way for a gutter. On top of this, there are the questionable legal implications (ancestral land is protected by the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act, and must only be claimed upon free, prior, and informed consent of the Indigenous People, of which they claim didn’t happen)—all this on top of the glaring fact that the project itself is riddled with controversy. It’s not that the locals are averse to progress—but that they can’t see where the progress lies for them in an ecozone. “Siguro nga sa una oo, maganda ang [gusto] nila—kaunlaran ang sinasabi…” says Alisa. “Pero kaninong kaunlaran? Ang karamihan dito sa amin, iilan lang dito ang nakapag-aral. Tulad ko, hindi ako nakapag-aral. Ano mangyayari sa akin, magiging katulong ako nila? Ay naku—ayaw ko iyan. ‘Di bale na. Tama na yung kumakain ako ng araw-araw ng tatlong beses—ayaw ko ng maraming pera. Tahimik ang lugar namin, malawak ang bundok namin.” After 17 days in that consequential December, the people who left their homes in protest would finally reach Manila. They were going to get to meet the then-President and voice out their case, but it seemed that he had already made up his mind. “Hindi ako ang nagsugod nitong APECO. Hindi ko proyekto ‘tong APECO na kailangan mangyari ‘to, hindi. Gusto ko lang po magkaroon kayo ng pagkakataon,” says former President Noynoy Aquino. To which Victor, a Dumagat chief from

THOSE WHO DECRY THE ECOZONE PROJECT

SAN ILDEFONSO IS A STUNNING PENINSULA about an hour away by boat from the town. A kolongkolong, their local tricycle, takes us through the coast: we’re met by endless coco groves, viridian rice paddies, and scattered villages in every part of the land. School kids are walking on the same road with their backpacks, offering a smile to unfamiliar faces. And fi nally, after a few minutes, to our left, another iridescent beach. At the end of the beach, some jagged rocks cordon off a portion of the sea, and we wait for the sun to signal low-tide so that we can take a dip in its waters: a natural intertidal pool that the locals have called Tibu—our own nook in the sea. On the other end, a fisherman is tending to his daily catch—for this morning it is about a dozen baby lobsters. When we come back to our hut for lunch, we find that the fisherman has given us one crustacean for free, and the local guides have boiled it into a soup. You don’t just get free lobster in Manila. In its simplicity, and literally fresh from the water, it is tender and buttery and a delight to devour. “Do you want some buko,” they will offer, and my reflexes, respond, “how much?” They chuckle, there’s no price. One of the kids are willing to climb the tree and get some. And suddenly, we are sipping fresh coconuts. Even futher down San Ildefonso, more natural wonders are waiting to be discovered

Sitio Dipontian, a transporting village between mountains, is accessible only by crossing the Pasaruboy river. This community is about 20 minutes away from the bayan (middle photo).

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The Agta, a nomadic people who hunt and fish for food , are the original inhabitants of Casiguran since pre-colonial times. Because of its location, this town gets VIP seats to the sunrise.

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San Ildefonso, answered back, “Tungkol po sa hanap ng katutubo, sa kaunlaran po, eh sang-ayon kami sa kaunlaran. Pero ‘yung kaunlaran po na tinutukoy mo, iba po d’un sa kaunlaran sa amin. Ang kaunlaran po para sa amin ay mapayaman po naming ang kabundukan at karagatan. ‘Yun po ang gusto naming mangyari.”

TODAY, THERE HAS YET TO BE SUBSTANTIAL

development on the initial APECO constructions in Casiguran. The buildings and the airstrip were damaged by a typhoon, and the budget for the project is dwindling, having been severely cut down to less than P50 million from its initial P300 million budget in 2008. According to The National Economic and Development Authority, by 2014, P905 million had already been given by the government for this project. But neither we nor the local community have seen signs of the progress it has been touting to benefit plenty. In the meantime, Casiguran waits. The issue has begun to cause hostile political division with some villages (opposing tribe leaders have

spoken in support of APECO, and other families have reportedly sold their land). But for people like Larry and Alisa, they stand their ground. The decision of APECO’s constitutionality waits to be decided upon by the Supreme Court. The villagers go back to their routines, and a larger part of the land in dispute remains in tact. A week after my visit, my grandmother heads to Casiguran herself. Where she finds the stamina to sit through eight hours of bumpy roads, I am not certain—but her ties to her hometown shows in the gleam of her eyes, when she rambles about its beauty for the umpteenth time. “Is it as you remember it as an 11-year-old girl?” I ask. She retorts, “No, back then, it was so much bigger, it is not the congested town you see today.” And then she adds ruefully… “Or maybe, everything just looked grander to me when I was 11.” She smiles pensively, and I can only hope that in the future, the mystical beauty of Casiguran, revealed slowly through vicious expedition, will always stay the same for me too—at least like it captures magically in a girl’s distant memory.

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I N D OC H I NE R EV E R I E A b o a r d t h e M A I D E N V OYA G E o f t h e f i r s t - e v e r ASIAN LUXURY CRUISE LINER, CHRISTOPHER PUHM encounters the FEVER DREAM that is

the VIETNAMESE COASTLINE .

A r t b y Wa r r e n E S P E J O

DAY O N E SO LONG, SINGAP ORE

The tiny tugboat strains hard, fighting for every inch it gains. In tow the gigantic Genting Dream, emerging slowly, aft first, from its northern German shipyard in Papenburg, its birthplace and temporary home. Hundreds of spectators await the sight of small tugs pulling and pushing to position the 150,000-ton ship for the start of its long journey up the narrow Ems river, through windswept East Frisian islands, and into the cold North Sea. The vessel wasn’t commissioned to cruise the rough Atlantic, or even the temperate waters of the Mediterranean. Instead, it enters the Strait of Gibraltar, passing quickly through the Mediterranean Sea, the beautiful, if troubled, coasts of Europe and North Africa soon in its rearview. Leaving behind the Old World, the cruise liner navigates the Suez Canal and crosses the wide expanse of the Indian Ocean to call upon Singapore, the starting point of this maritime marvel’s maiden voyage. A lanky teenage boy enters my viewfinder. He slowly and carefully baits his hook and deliberates over where to cast the line, indifferent to the vessel’s 19 decks towering high above us, or to my attempt at taking a decent picture. Lowering my camera, I instead decide to board the ship early. The check-in process is a breeze and within minutes I’m approaching the gangway, with a steward standing at attention. I show him my boarding pass and he nods approvingly. Permission to board ship granted. All around me, passengers are beginning to stream onto the lower decks. The four-year-old explorer in me insists on pushing past the first wave of guests, perfectly content with finding plush lounge chairs or the nearest bar. Litup slot machines and black banks of baccarat screens line my path. Kiosk attendants are opening up shop. Bartenders smile at me, anticipating their first order. Skipping past a few like-minded travelers on the way up, I’m the first to make it to deck 19. I take in the sheer size of the ship, dwarfing everything around it. Below me the sun deck and pool, orange lounge chairs lined up, waterslides wrapped around giant stacks. In the distance, a rigid glass wall of skyscrapers stands guard over the city state. DAY T WO AT S E A , A N E N D L E S S S U N N Y S K Y

A boat followed us out of the harbor last night as we departed Singapore, but this morning there’s no company in sight. No container ships ambling along, ﬁshing trawlers pulling nets, or sail boats cutting through the waves.

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Nothing but the tranquil waters off the Malaysian coast and the clear blue sky above. The wake created by the ship fades slowly in the distance. On its surface, the sea has no memory. Servet knew from an early age what he wanted to do with his life. While touring me around the ship, he tells me about his hometown, the coastal city of Antalya in Turkey. There, thousands make their living with work in the many hotels and all-inclusive resorts lining its sandy beaches, and for a time he was one of them, but serving Russian tourists shots of vodka before breakfast and managing rowdy buffet-goers eventually took its toll. He tried his luck on German ships for a few years, ﬁrst cruising up and down rivers, then across the globe. But the future is in Asia, and he left Europe on the Genting Dream, one of many Europeans working on every deck. Do I have a wife and children, he asks, the thought of a family of his own clearly on his mind. But it’s hard to maintain lasting relationships with fellow crew, as most are over before contracts end. Back in Antalya, the 29-year-old’s siblings have started families of their own. They wonder where his path will lead him. Looking out the window reminds me that we’re at sea. The waters are calm. Tomorrow, we’ll reach Vietnam.

South Korea. A sign announces a new subway to be built in cooperation with Japan. No longer here are the old navy headquarters built by the French colonial government 140 years ago; its barracks along the Saigon River are prime real estate, and Vietnam is looking to build. The Ho Chi Minh I want to explore isn’t the one being constructed on the outskirts, it’s the old city at the center. There are a few interesting sights—the colonial-era cathedral and post office, and the grand reunification palace—but it isn’t an obvious charmer like Hanoi, Vietnam’s cool, cultural capital. Skipping the bustling main market and its grabby vendors, I instead amble around the surrounding streets and let myself be surprised. The city’s most charming cafes are hidden behind unassuming souvenir shops and down narrow passageways. Their owners don’t give up their secrets easily. I’m lucky the city is willing to share a particularly delicious one on this scorching hot afternoon. Up several flights of stairs, fenced in by rusty, corrugated iron bars, I happen upon a trendy café overlooking a bustling street. No sign advertising its location, just a hunch. I have enough time to finish the best iced condensed milk coffee I’ve ever had before I need to catch my ride back to the port.

DAY T H R E E

DAY F O U R

YO U C A N ’ T M I S S S A I G O N

LOOKING FOR LOVE IN NHA TRANG

Mist covers the mangrove islands in Cam Ranh Bay, and my balcony is wet from the morning rain. The sun rises slowly over a hazy, thickly forested peak as we pass fishing boats and small freighters sitting motionless in the bay, the only sound a low rumbling and metallic squeaking coming from below as we turn to enter an inlet. On a ship, time seems to move slower. I let go of my first instinct to rush and get ready to disembark, the leisurely speed at which we’re navigating the bay telling me that there’s no need. Breakfast is at one of the upper decks overlooking the coastline; a welcome committee lining up along a red carpet awaits us as we step foot onto land. It looks like Ho Chi Minh City is catching up. The city-bound highway takes us past rice paddies and auto repair shops, reminding me of trips to the province, if not for the constant buzz of motorcycles and the occasional Buddhist temple. After an hour-and-a-half, and without a warning, we enter the capital. Farmland suddenly gives way to rubble and bulldozers, and sheds are replaced first by expensive condo towers, then gated villas and then even more towers, financed with the help of eager foreign investors from Singapore and

Not a single soul is on the promenade deck early in the morning. No water sloshing down the steep water slides; no jets bubbling up the hot tubs; the orange sun loungers untouched. The pool water gently splashes against the edges, mimicking the ocean’s current. On this calm, hot day off Vietnam’s coast, it’s the only sign of movement. I take a stroll on the wooden walkway wrapped around the deck’s restaurants and bars, and peer through the windows. Slender waitresses in traditional red and gold cheongsam dresses ﬂit past private dining rooms, screened off from the main banquet area. After an exploratory tour of the ship’s bars last night, a traditional dim sum breakfast looks the most inviting. Just then, a few decks below, a tender boat is slowly lowered into the water and leaves for the harbor. Soon, more will follow, bringing us ashore. The hills and beaches of Nha Trang are waiting. Russian and Western European tourists have made the sandy beach their refuge from a cold autumn back home, claiming the best beach chairs for themselves for long, lazy days of tanning and dipping in the water. My tan can wait, and instead I navigate through a steady stream of motorbikes to procure a

fresh coconut in one of the nearby beachfront stores. At the corner, a group of middle-aged local men sits idly on the curb next to their motorbikes. Noticing me, one of them gets up to greet me with a big grin, and I expect a pitch for a bike rental. He unleashes a ﬂurry of blunt gestures upon me, one more unsavory and hilarious than the next. Willing women, whose skills and features he describes in manic motions, are waiting nearby to perform said gestures, for a small fee. Laughing, he continues to proposition me as I escape into a silk embroidery shop around the corner. In the quiet courtyard, a young man on a guitar plays songs of longing and sorrow. A young lady, sitting in a window, puts thought into every stitch of her artwork. Nestled high up in an old, leafy tree, a treehouse looks down on us all. Why he chose to wait this long, I’ll never understand. Outside a temple not far from the beach, our guide tells us the story of an old G.I. searching for his Vietnamese girlfriend. Forty years he waited before returning to Nha Trang, where he was stationed in an airbase during the war. Never married and without a family of his own, he only now returned to her old village, our guide as his translator. They did ﬁnd her house eventually, but she cautioned against him knocking on her door without warning. The guide went inside alone, introducing herself, and told her of the American standing outside. She didn’t want to see him. Too much time had passed, and there were things he didn’t know. His guide came back alone, and said that the husband, a jealous man, was with her inside. The man understood and left without ever seeing his former lover. But, she was scared the villagers would be suspicious of him, and the reason for his visit. No one would ever know she was a spy for the Americans—not even the American waiting outside. DAY F I V E D E M O N S I N T H E M O U N TA I N S O F DA N A N G

This morning, the sea gently reminds us of its presence. The sheer size of the ship creates the illusion of that we’re staying at a sprawling resort complex on ﬁrm ground. The nightly shows, the lounge singers, the casino—all part of the ruse. To marvel at the ocean’s magniﬁcence or to completely ignore its existence is a conscious choice. But every sunrise, pulling back the heavy curtain reveals a new scenery: an unknown, far-off coastline, a trail of ships left in our wake, a welcoming natural harbor. Facing the vast, empty expanse while running on a treadmill, the ocean provides the tiniest of hints at its potential energy.

LOOKING OUT OVER T H E WAT E R , T H E R E A R E S PA R K L E S D A N C I N G O N T H E WAV E S FROM HERE TO THE HORIZON. THE SEA IS P E R F E C T LY C A L M A G A I N O N T H E L A S T D AY O F O U R J O U R N E Y.

Gone are the calm waters off the Malaysian coast; the minute but constant shifts in balance make it feel like a zero gravity run on a space station overlooking the steel grey ocean surface of a planet much harsher than our own. I adjust my stride accordingly. The instructor brings me back to earth with advice on how to work off last night’s laksa. I try out the water rower next, focusing on the horizon with every pull while a ﬂywheel spins water in a steady rhythm around the machine’s round glass tank. Dancing dragons greet us at the port as we disembark in Da Nang in the afternoon. Spanning the length of the bridge, a steel dragon guides our entrance into the city, and brings us closer to Am Phu Cave in the Marble Mountains. Along the beach road are miles of ambitious resort projects, and miles more still under construction. Da Nang has long exhausted its supply of white marble for artisans to craft immaculate Buddha statues, so it is building its own Riviera instead. Soon after the long stretch of resorts ends, we

arrive at the cave, a curious interpretation of the Buddhist idea of hell. Hands sticking out of the murky water underneath the short bridge warn visitors not to enter the domelike cave, pitch black if not for an illuminated Buddha sitting deep in the cavern. Narrow passages lead down to displays of doom: poor souls devoured by monsters, chained to wooden poles, held hostage by demons. But, there’s also another dome leading to heaven—a steep, slippery staircase cut roughly into the rock. I climb to a plateau and see a small opening high up, its light shining down on the altar in front of me. Ascending to heaven isn’t easy; my shirt clings to my skin from the near claustrophobic humidity. I hesitate and decide to head back down. Everyone else has already left. DAY SIX SAYING GOODBYE TO THE DREAM

A stiff northeasterly wind blows across the pool deck on a sunny afternoon in the middle of the South China Sea. The coast of Vietnam is long out of sight and the sea is all there is around us. Goosebumps boost me up several flights of stairs past the abandoned mountain climbing wall and the ropes course, its obstacles swaying in the wind. Friendly attendants greet me on the way. From the top, the waterslides look even steeper, with an almost vertical drop and quick turns making up for a lack of horizontal space. I take the plunge and drop straight down the tube. A clear segment suddenly appears in a curve and for a split-second it feels like it will drop me straight into sea, but it doesn’t. I let the other slides give me a good bounce-around as well, and then soak in the hot tub until I’m boiled to perfection. Looking out over the water, there are sparkles dancing on the waves from here to the horizon. The sea is perfectly calm again on the last day of our journey. Tomorrow, in the early morning hours, a hazy Kowloon Bay will await the arrival of the Genting Dream. The cruise liner will pass between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon at a meandering pace, the city’s highrises, gently sloping hills and mountains still covered in fog. Disembarking the ship, passengers will slowly stream into a cavernous arrival hall, suitcases lined up and waiting for their owners. Hong Kong, too, will wake up to a sunny, new day as men and women glide down escalators from their apartments in the midlevels, shopkeepers and servers shuffle onto busy subways on their way to open stores and restaurants, and tourists line up for the tram’s first trip to Victoria Peak. The Genting Dream will leave at night. The port of Guangzhou calls and another journey begins.

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Y E S T E R D 05 17

A Y S

BUST OUT YOUR FLANNEL,KIDS. WE’RE GOING TO PARTY LIKE IT’S 1991.

AUDREY N. CARPIO Photographs by G U T S Y T U A S O N By

how

much is nostalgia worth? It certainly is a big business, with an entire adult generation missing what life was like before we were all glued to our devices. This year and last, I traveled abroad to witness two monumental bands reunite after two decades. The crowds at both concerts were thoroughly non-millennial, and there was feeling of camaraderie in acknowledging that though we titas and titos had more adulty things to do than stand in a sweaty crowd for several hours, we were not too dead-in-thesoul to relive our youthful illusions for just a night. Our once-favorite musicians are aging, and it behooves us to pay tribute to the glory years they’ve given us, the soundtracks to our coming-of-age. A semi-scientiﬁc study, based on Spotify user information and their playlists, has confirmed what many Gen Xers have

Ever since the ‘90s turned 20, those who have lived through it have been waxing nostalgic for these far superior times (bias admitted). Teenagers today have taken up the trend in its outward manifestations: dyed hair and chokers, Doc Martens and ﬂannel, slip dresses over tees—but without the music that came hand-in-hand with the fashion, it’s just another day at Forever21. When Chris Cornell announced that Temple of the Dog would be reuniting for an eight-show tour in 2016, you can imagine my inner 15-year-old fangirl ugly crying at the news. Temple of the Dog was a one-off superband that existed solely as a tribute to Andy Wood, a Seattle rocker who died of a heroin overdose when he was 24. His band, Mother Love Bone, was just about to release their debut album. After his death, members of MLB got together with members

this would bode for our concert on the 11th. Getting into the spirit of things, I wore a band tee, with the Grim Reaper dressed in the rags of the American ﬂag, as a form of protest. The hubby started to queue in the afternoon while I took a nap at the hotel and Ubered it to the venue at the latest possible hour. In line, we stared for a few minutes at a guy whom we thought looked familiar. He turned out to be Brian, this dude we met also in line at a Pearl Jam show in Montana in 2012. He had told us he’d been to over 100 PJ shows in his life, and even went into debt because of his obsessive tour following. Of course he’d be here. In the crowd, we saw dads with sons, moms with daughters wearing matching band T-shirts. We heard gossip about Xana la Fuente, Andy Wood’s former girlfriend turned grunge-era blogger, who slammed the Temple reunion as a mere money grab. We saw ﬂannel

C O M I N G O F A G E I N T H E ‘ 9 0 S M E A N T T H AT W E W E R E M O R E E M O T I O N A L LY R E C E P T I V E T O T H E M U S I C O F T H E T I M E .

W I T H O U T T H E I N T E R N E T T O G E T L O S T I N , W E S P E N T H O U R S G E T T I N G S P U N O U T I N O U R R O O M S , S I M P LY L I S T E N I N G suspected: We don’t care about new music. In the study, teenagers were found to listen almost exclusively to pop hits, but as they enter their 20s, they start branching out, exploring indie music and other under-the-radar artists. As they hit their mid-30s, however, taste appears to level off, and whatever is currently charting is of little interest. In fact, listeners return to the music that was once popular when they were younger. At this age, many users also trade in new tunage for nursery music and lullabies, an indication that they’ve procreated and ceded creative control over their once selfdeﬁning playlists (the wildly popular lullaby renditions of albums from U2, Bob Marley, and Nirvana, however, bridge this gap). The median age when we ofﬁcially become old fogies is 33. That’s when we start lamenting that “they sure don’t make music like they used to!” ironically sounding like our parents whom we derided for never getting over Paul Anka or Barbra Streisand.

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of Soundgarden and future members of Pearl Jam and released the self-titled album Temple of the Dog in 1991, ten emotional, hardrocking songs that evoked the ’70s/’80s-style ﬂamboyance of MLB, while preluding the self-aware grunge sound that was about to explode. If those names mean nothing to you, you were probably listening to Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men, or were still in diapers, or were my parents. Tickets to all Temple Of The Dog shows were sold out in ﬁve minutes. Fortunately, my husband, a member of the Pearl Jam club (he’s 49 and even more musically entrenched) won a draw to purchase tickets to the San Francisco show. So off to the U.S. we went, landing in San Francisco the evening America went over to the dark side: November 8, 2016. We turned on the TV just when the votes were swinging toward Donald Trump. As nationwide protests started to foment in the next few days, I wondered what, if anything,

shirts in every imaginable variation. What I didn’t see were many Asian faces, which boggled my mind, considering we were in San Francisco. I know many Filipinos back home were heavily into alternative rock; outside of that, was the whole grunge scene a predominantly white movement? Chris Cornell at 52 is what every maturing rocker should aspire to be (ahem, Axl Rose). His vocals have aged like wine and I bet he still ﬁts into his Louder Than Love jeans. You couldn’t tell that the band had not been performing these songs together for years—25 years, to be exact. With limited original material, they played several songs from Mother Love Bone and ended with a “self-indulgent” encore set of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Cure, and Black Sabbath covers. Cornell reminisced about Andy Wood, whom he was roommates with before his death, and steered clear of anything current or political, which makes sense, as it would have taken away from the tribute that was the

nature of the TOTD project. For a few hours on a cool November night, we were brought back in time to the early ’90s, an era now mythologized in our minds, watching a band that doesn’t exactly exist. “We wanted to do the one thing we never got to do—play shows and see what it feels like to be the band that we walked away from 25 years ago,” Cornell has said prior to the tour. Matt Cameron, drummer for both Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, had hopes that Andy Wood’s contribution to the Seattle scene will be remembered. “He wasn’t a footnote in our history,” he told the New York Times. “He was a real big inﬂuence for us all.” Another huge band in the early ’90s, one that was almost the antithesis of grunge, was Guns N Roses. A look at Billboard’s top 100 hits at the end of 1992 reveal “November Rain” in the 17th spot, and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” at number 32. This was

knees knees. He gained weight, as many recovering addicts tend to. The image of Fat Axl was hilarious enough to be forever immortalized as a meme, one that he unsuccessfully tried to have taken down. However, by now enough time has passed for fans to welcome Axl Rose back into their lives. The Not in this Lifetime reunion tour, which began last June, ﬂogged a lineup as close to the classic one as one will ever get. For me, the nearest show was last February in Singapore, a city that doesn’t exactly scream “welcome to the jungle,” but perhaps more beﬁtting for a group that was once called the most dangerous band in the world, since the most dangerous thing Axl can do now is break his foot. Which is what he did at the start of the tour. With Duff McKagen and Slash back in the ring, the tour reportedly grossed

right? Axl still snakedanced and bounced around on stage with the joie de vivre of a 24-year-old. He looked genuinely happy, even grateful, to be performing all the way out there and have everyone karaoke along (especially when his voice didn’t hold up to the demands of the track, which happened often enough). They doled out the hits, and there were plenty of instrumental breaks, like Slash and bassist Richard Fortun’s “Wish You Were Here” duel, for Axl to take a breather. Axl rejoined them on a grand piano for an instrumental “Layla”, and you knew it was the aww sheeit moment when he segued into “November Rain” with its impossible-to-forget piano opening. Slash shredded his solos like the guitar legend he is, and whatever animosity the two built over the intervening 23 years since they were last on stage together seemed forgotten.

WE WERE WALKING AROUND LIKE OPEN WOUNDS, DEALING WITH THE FALLOUT FROM MANY FIRST EXPERIENCES.

T O C D S . T H I S D O E S N ’ T M E A N T H A T T O D A Y ’ S M U S I C S U C K S …T H A T H A R D . I T J U S T D O E S N ’ T R E G I S T E R T H E S A M E W A Y. a conflicting year for me as a listener, as I had just emerged from the warm cocoon of teenybop pop. I remember my cousin and I would pore over hidden symbols in Use Your Illusion’s cover art, knowing that my mom would immediately burn my cassettes had she felt any whiff of deviancy. Axl Rose was at peak I-am-a-golden-sex-god, with increasingly bombastic stage performances and overly long music videos (remember the nearly 10-minute mini-film where dolphins save Axl Rose from drowning and Slash rises out of the ocean? Good times.) But compared to Nirvana, who burst on the scene with a sound so raw and immediate, even childlike, and the angsty cynicism any teen can relate to, GNR were starting to feel bloated and ridiculous. Though they never officially disbanded, the original lineup dissolved sometime in 1996 due to—you name it—drugs, egos, irreconcilable differences. Axl Rose became a sad joke. He lost his voice, after years of screeching and rasping on his shanananana

$116.8 million in its first two months across North America. Ticket prices were deemed outrageous, with VIP packages going up to $1,500. But hey, their fans can afford it now. We’re under no pretense that it’s 1987 and we’re in a seedy Los Angeles bar watching some young band with a lot of swagger trying to make it big. We don’t expect groupies to hound the boys backstage, drugs to be consumed in massive amounts, or obscure demonic rituals to be performed (although wouldn’t it be nice?) Just please don’t play anything from Chinese Democracy. They played three songs from Chinese Democracy, effectively serving as bathroom breaks. To be confronted with Slightly Chubby Axl in the flesh was still jarring at first—he looked like some crazy redneck Grampaw playing dress up in younger Axl’s red bandana, cowboy boots, plaid shirt tied around the waist, and jeans so shredded they should have been called The Spaghetti Incident. But you get over it—live and let die,

Coming of age in the ’90s meant that we were more emotionally receptive to the music of the time. We were walking around like open wounds, dealing with the fallout from many first experiences. Without the internet to get lost in, we spent hours getting spun out in our rooms, simply listening to CDs. This doesn’t mean that today’s music sucks…that hard. It just doesn’t register the same way. Whatever EDM/post-folk/Kanyefied Bon Iver hybrid we find on Starbucks compilations do not resonate with our grizzled souls. I’m in a pretty steady stage of my life (a.k.a. the tita zone), so I don’t feel the need to constantly seek out new bands that speak to me—but I will fl y thousands of miles to seek out the ones that already have. I’ve settled down. I’ve returned to my old loves, because they were there for me when fuccboi music like The Chainsmokers thankfully weren’t. The commitment is in waiting for the right time. All we need is just a little patience.

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05 17

P E R S I S T E N C E For the last five decades, the internationally acclaimed Filipino artist David Medalla has been around the world and back as a legend in his own time, creating a cult-like following in his wake. This true pioneer of Philippine art takes us through the Ve n i c e o f h i s yo u t h , t e l l i n g tales of art, sex, growing up in Ermita, and why he thinks the Cultural Center of the Philippines is a â&#x20AC;&#x153;d u m b â&#x20AC;? m i s t a k e .

Raymond ANG

ART BY

Sasha MARTINEZ

O F

M E M O R Y

V E N I C E I S P U N I S H I N G I N A U G U S T. AT T H E V E R Y P E A K O F S U M M E R , W I T H W E AT H E R T H AT C A N O N LY B E D E S C R I B E D A S S W E LT E R I N G, T H E C I T Y O F C A N A L S T E N D S T O L I V E U P T O T H AT M O N I K E R —W I T H O D D S M E L L S FA M O U S LY C AT C H I N G Y O U B Y S U R P R I S E AT D I F F E R E N T P O I N T S , A N D A SURPLUS OF TOURISTS FLOCKING AROUND THE CITY’S MOST STORIED SIGHTS. THE M O S T S T R I K I N G, T H O U G H , I S T H E A B S E N C E O F L O C A L S —V E N E T I A N S G E N E R A L LY AV O I D T H E I R C I T Y ’ S M O S T C R O W D E D S E A S O N B Y G O I N G O N H O L I D A Y. V E N I C E I N A U G U S T I S A F LOAT I N G D I S N E Y L A N D, A R E A L L I F E “ I T’S A S M A L L WO R L D” R I D E W H E R E TO U R I STS HAVE DISPLACED THE LOCALS. Not that I knew any of that. On assignment for a local broadsheet to cover the 56th Venice Art Biennale, my version of Venice in August was a beautiful, sweaty dream. The whole world had come there to see the best in the visual arts from 53 countries, and while visitors had generally taken over the city, Venice still had enough room for stumbling onto a hundredyear-old trattoria on a quiet street and enjoying pasta al nero di seppia while watching the sun go down on one of the lagoons. It was my ﬁrst time at the Venice Biennale and, covering the Philippines’ return to one of the world’s most prestigious platforms for art after 51 years (championed by Senator Loren Legarda), it was a magical experience. How I gained perspective about Venice in August is about how I found David Medalla, a few hours before his performance at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, at the end of the vaporetto I found myself on. “None of my friends are in Venice during the summer,” David Medalla tells me. “There are no locals. It’s all tourists… You need to experience this in winter when no one’s here.” I had come to the Venice Biennale to cover “Pangarap sa Panglao (Dream in Panglao),” a performance of the artist David Medalla in collaboration with Adam Nankervis, artist and longtime Medalla collaborator, and a collateral event of the Philippine Pavilion at the 56th Venice Art Biennale. The so-called father of Philippine kinetic art, Medalla is one of the few truly internationally-renowned Filipino artists. His body of work has been noted enough that some of the world’s most formidable art institutions— from the Tate Modern in London to the National Gallery in Singapore—have acquired his work. He has won his share of international distinctions and he commands a cult-like following among the international art scene. It only makes sense that in the country’s historic return to the Biennale, it would tap someone of his stature.

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“The Philippine Pavilion, titled Tie A String Around the World, rests on an argument on world-making and the formation of empires,” curator Patrick Flores said in 2015, about the country’s return to Venice. Finding the thread that ties Manuel Conde’s 1950 film Gengis Khan with a new installation by Jose Tence Ruiz and a multi-channel video by Manny Montelibano on the Philippines’ dispute over parts of the West Philippine Sea being claimed by China, Tie A String is about the saga of empires and the resistance against them. Medalla’s own “Panglao”, which touches on Pigafetta’s voyage around the world, “further inflects the argument of the Pavilion,” Flores noted. But right now, on the vaporetto, a different world is on Medalla’s mind, perhaps the world on the unwieldy bag he’s carrying, a suitcase with a print of an old world map on it, which he bought a few days ago when he lost all his luggage while traveling. When I ask if he needs help carrying the bag, the consummate man of the world says, “Oh, but I carry a bag so people think I’m a tourist.” It was a few hours before he was due for his performance in the garden. I left my hotel early to explore the city by myself, and to find the garden with time to spare. I was surprised to find the 77-year-old Medalla on the vaporetto by himself, determined to wander around the city that’s been host to so many of his youthful misadventures without his companions. “Come on, Raymond. I’ll show you Venice.”

SHOWING UP TO THINGS IN SURPRISING ways is something I should have expected from David Medalla. Just the day before, an hour and a half before the second leg of his “Pangarap sa Panglao” performance was slated to begin at the Palazzo Mora, the artist was nowhere to be found. Nankervis had called to say he lost

Medalla on the walk to the Palazzo and that the 77-year-old artist is in physical pain. “It’s his back,” Nankervis tells me later. “He never lets on but I know him and I know when he’s in pain.” “Is he going to make it?” I asked no one in particular. “Your guess is as good as mine,” Flores admitted. “I’m not sure what time David will get here.” But true enough, as the second floor of the Palazzo Mora filled with people—some from the local Philippine groups, including Ambassador Ding Nolasco; others, members of the European art scene who came to Venice just to see David Medalla—the artist was suddenly present. Whatever pain he had seemed to disappear. He gamely walked around the room to meet his adoring public, including a videographer from Rome who showed him a book she made of one of his performances, and an artist from Florence who came to Venice because he “hadn’t seen him in ten years.” For the Palazzo Moro performance, Medalla wanted some audience participation. The contingent from the Philippines—including myself—wore masks and went in front to help the artist sing the Filipino folk song “Sitsiritsit Alibangbang” for the multi-cultural audience. Later, he asked us to dance. It ended with him asking us to bite each other’s hand, with Nankervis projecting a video, while he and Medalla proceeded to tie different colored strings around a little plastic globe. Minutes after the performance, Medalla sat down on one of the couches, rounded up several people he knew from different worlds and asked us to talk to each other. “You have a lot to talk about,” he motioned. Pain or no pain, we were in David Medalla’s world and David Medalla, apparently, is nothing if not a gracious host. That back pain wasn’t the fi rst snag the “Pangarap sa Panglao” had to contend with. On the way to Venice, Medalla’s bag was lost; and

so, for six days, he had to wear the same outﬁt over and over again. Worse than the loss of his wardrobe were the objects that he was supposed to use for the performance. Suddenly, he had nothing to use for his collateral event. But in true Medalla fashion, he handled the setback with aplomb. “Everything he was using for the performance was there in the bag but his concepts are so strong that it doesn’t matter,” Riya Lopez, the head of the Philippine Art Venice Biennale’s Coordinating Committee told me. “It works with whatever is available.” As we got off the water taxi, he motioned to a refreshment stand. “May buko!” he said. “How beautiful.” Two days ago, Medalla and Nankervis were reading dialogue between Antonio Pigafetta of Vicenza and a young boy as part of the performance. “Mr. Pigafetta, where did you get the coconut?” the boy asked. Holding

an opened coconut to his face, Medalla says, “Take my picture—it will be very beautiful!” Venice is a city that holds a lot of memories for David Medalla. And so the performance for the Philippine Pavilion and especially the leg of “Pangarap sa Panglao” was a kind of homecoming for him. “I was friends with Pegeen,” he says, referring to Peggy Guggenheim’s daughter. “I stayed there a long time ago. I slept in that room in the middle of the place.” “And there,” he says, pointing to a shuttered window on a house at the river bank, “I’ve had sex there,” erupting in a mischievous laugh. Crossing a bridge and going deeper into the city, we go further away from the crowds of the Piazza San Marco and ﬁnd a place to sit at in a courtyard that would be empty if not for young boys playing football.

“ S O M E T I M E S , W E A L T H I S B Y C H A N C E ,” he says, “Sometimes, you’re born into it. And sometimes, you acquire it.” For his part, David Medalla was born into it. He was born in a house on the corner of TM Kalaw and Mabini on March 23, 1938. His family lived in Ermita, and, by all accounts, enjoyed a fairly comfortable life. After his grandfather’s house in Ermita was bombed during the war, only two things survived, he says: the bathtub, which was imported from San Francisco, and the library, which his family had started in the 19th century “so it had all the books.” Medalla, along with his brothers, took to the books. “The interesting thing about it is our parish priest was of Catalan Franciscan order,” he says, as a means of explaining his ﬁrst brush with art. “And after communion, he’d give us what he’d call stampita

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and they were reproductions of the life of St. Francis of Assisi…. At the same time, my sister took me to an exhibit of Chinese art. It was a touring exhibition of UNESCO, reproductions of great masterpieces of Chinese art. I loved both, so I had that balance.” According to Medalla, his father was a “non-believer” who made them read the writings of Darwin, while his mother was “very passionate” and took them to church on Sundays. “They agreed to disagree—which is a very good marriage.” Early on, the young David Medalla had distinguished himself as a sort of child genius. At nine years old, he gained some renown for being able to translate Shakespeare into Filipino. “I think I did the entire Romeo & Juliet and most of Hamlet,” he says. And at 12, as the prestigious Columbia University in New York decided to celebrate its 100 years by inviting 100 gifted young people from all over the world, he was picked as the Philippine representative. “The president was General Dwight Eisenhower,” he says. “He was a governor of the Philippines. He decided that there should be more globalization.” The Ermita that Medalla grew up in was full of art. “There was the so-called Mabini School,” he says. Later, after returning from his studies abroad, a young Medalla would set up a small cafe called Cave d’Angely, which became a hangout for the city’s creative set, hosting poetry readings and becoming a place where beauty queens, newspapermen, and artists all rubbed elbows. “Ermita was, of course, destroyed during the war—which is a pity. But it was destroyed even more by a family that moved most people from Ermita to Forbes Park,” he says, referring to the Zobel-Ayalas. At the time of this conversation, Medalla was about to do a show in the 1335 Mabini gallery in Manila, as a tribute to his Ermita youth. “As kids, we would have a barkada and we would get into ﬁghts,” he says. “On the street where we were was a very famous [boxing gym] by Flash Elorde. It was on Mabini and he was a friend of my mother’s… So my father talked to Flash and said, ‘Let’s teach the kids how to do boxing.’ So we

all had to learn how to box [from Flash Elorde].” Every year, there was a festival in Ermita, which hosted a balagtasan, a beauty pageant, as well as a boxing match. “The person I was to box was one of the Guerrero boys,” he says. “[I was paired with] Boris, who I thought had a strange name… But he was very handsome and we really liked each other, as friends.” The boxing match was slated for ﬁve o’ clock in the afternoon, around sunset. Earlier in the day of the match, Medalla’s sister was showing him art books. David, look at this. That’s Apollo, she had told him. How come he has no arm? the young boy asked. Because the statue was destroyed—but don’t you think he’s very beautiful? she replied. “And then she read a poem to me and my two brothers by John Keats, called ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’” Medalla says now; it’s the poem that contains the line, “Beauty is truth, truth, beauty/ That is all/ Ye know on earth/ and all ye need to know.” Medalla continues: “And I asked her, ‘Beauty depends on what you like, right? What about truth?’ She said, ‘Truth is your experience of something. If you do something to someone, that’s truth of the tactile. If you eat something, that’s the truth of taste.’” That afternoon, as the young David Medalla was about to knock out Boris with a punch, he noticed the sunset of Manila Bay behind him, drenching his face in golden sunlight. “He looked so beautiful,” Medalla says. “And I thought, ‘Oh, I must not punch him.’ So I held my hand about an inch away from his face.” His father, brothers, and cousins all shouted in unison, “Buntalin mo na!” But he refused and was subsequently awarded with a black eye. A few days later, Boris visited him at his home and asked why he didn’t punch him. “I looked at him and by then, he didn’t look beautiful anymore,” Medalla says. “There was no sunset. I should’ve told him, ‘’Di ka naman maganda, eh!’ But you happened to be that moment in time.” 1335 Mabini’s Birgit Zimmermann had reached out to Medalla about the show and he responded by saying he’d love to, but with theme

“SO MANY PEOPLE ARE GOING HUNGRY! THIS IS HOW T H E Y M A K E M O N E Y. T H E A R T M A R K E T I S J U S T A B O U T S I G N AT U R E S… I ’ M N OT I N T E R E ST E D I N M Y N A M E . I ’ M I N T E R E S T E D I N M Y A R T. E V E N W H E N I W A S A B O Y, I N E V E R S T R U G G L E D . T H E F E R N A N D O Z O B E L S B O U G H T M Y A R T. I H A V E S O M U C H R E S P E C T F O R T H E S T R U G G L I N G A R T I S T S .” 84

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“Buntalan sa Ermita.” “When I received the email, I said, I want to do a punch-up with the schools that are fairly well off in Manila—La Salle, Ateneo, those with money… The idea is, during December, we have misa de gallo, simbang gabi,” he says. “My idea is the kids come out and they put on cloaks and it’s got to be very beautiful. And then they punch the darkness, the darkness ‘yung binubuntal nila, not each other.”

“ H E N E V E R A L I E N A T E S T H E P E O P L E ,” Jose Tence Ruiz says about Medalla. “He likes them to be part of the community—that’s what I love about him. He’s like a super genius pero feel niya mga tao. Hindi siya parang isolated… He’s like our version of Jose Rizal.” David Medalla has been a citizen of the world since he was 12 years old but he never forgot where he came from. That’s why even in his late 70s, at a point in his career where he enjoys considerable status all over the world, he still makes it a point to go home to Manila— and he never misses a chance to wax euphoric about the country he came from. “You can’t ignore what’s happening in your own garden,” he says, talking about a gallery in Ukraine that avoided featuring Ukrainian artists, but also maybe his love for the Philippines. “That’s arrogant and silly.” And when asked by a Filipino journalist if Filipinos have a sense of culture, he retorts: “Yes, I love halo-halo—that’s beautiful. I don’t believe in purism. That’s an illusion.” He extends the same openness and support to the next generations of Filipino artists. Pio Abad, a young Filipino artist who himself is establishing his name on the international scene and is also based in London, attests to this. “Once, when I was at the Royal Academy, he came for lunch,” Abad says. “He stayed for five hours.” With almost eight decades of a very well-lived life under his belt, David Medalla is the quintessential raconteur—everybody has a favorite David Medalla story. “There’s this story of when he was running Signals in Soho,” Abad says. “He hosted the first exhibition by this Japanese female artist who at that time was staying with him. And during the opening, he introduced her to a musician from Liverpool… And so he claims that he introduced John to Yoko Ono. And you’re like, wait, hang on, hang on,” Abad says, laughing. “Maganda ‘yung build-up, walang pangalan.” Presenting Medalla’s performance at the Palazzo Moro, Dr. Patrick Flores shared a story about the artist rallying against the Marcoses during the Cultural Center of the Philippines opening in 1969. “A blitzkrieg demonstration,” Flores said. During the historic opening of the CCP, Medalla found a way in and unveiled a sign that read, “A bas la mystification.” Down with

mystiﬁcation. Ronald and Nancy Reagan were the guests of honor and today, Medalla says, in a way of explaining, “it’s an ugly building.” “Purita Ledesma and a few people wanted the cultural center between Diliman and Loyola Heights—that would’ve been much better. But what they did—Lindy Locsin, Imelda—they destroyed Manila Bay. They put a big square of concrete,” Medalla says. “Even then, when it was new, you needed a car to get there. How many people have cars? How many people have chauffeurs? It’s completely dumb. I get so annoyed with it because a little bit of thinking would’ve made it so nice. Up in Quezon City? It would be so nice. It would have schools around. It would have been so accessible. “You have to be objective. Sometimes, I make a work of art and if I didn’t think it’s that good, I’ll redo it. Rethink, rethink. That sort of thing is supposed to stand the test of time, not an hour-long performance.”

I N T H E M I D D L E O F O U R C O N V E R SAT I O N , the alarm on my phone suddenly rings. If we didn’t leave now, we were going to be late for his performance. As we made our way to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, brisk-walking as briskly as a 77-year-old with back pain could, David Medalla suddenly stopped, making his way to a wall and looking up, suddenly transfixed with the sky. “Look at that, Raymond, banana leaves! Did Pigafetta bring banana leaves to Venice too?” He starts posing beside the wall, under the banana leaves. “Take my picture. It will be very beautiful.” We were late for the performance. By the time we arrived, members of Senator Legarda’s office were already very worried. “Where did you guys go?” I didn’t know what to say. How do I explain the banana leaves? Thankfully, the performance started. “This performance is dedicated to the Filipino people, Peggy, and Pegeen Guggenheim,” Medalla says. And then they made a “P” out of a butterfly catcher and a string of flowers. Nankervis, in costume, starts flapping his “wings,” wearing a red bag on his head, and a shiny orange jacket. Medalla, meanwhile, was wearing a cloth mask on his face. And before we knew it, we were all under a piece of cloth—the whole crowd had turned into a caterpillar. Riya Lopez began to sing a Filipino folk song and the crowd began to dance and float around like butterflies. Later, I asked one of the young Venetians who joined the performance if she enjoyed it. “Yes,” she says, “I became a butterfly.”

I L E F T V E N I C E A N D M Y F E W DAYS W I T H David Medalla with a couple of favorite stories of my own. On our last afternoon together, over hot

chocolate at Caffè Florian, the 17th-century cafe said to be a favorite of Ernest Hemingway, one of the members of the Philippine contingent presented Medalla with certiﬁcates from the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, hoping to have three paintings authenticated. Without really looking at the photos, he starts signing the certiﬁcates and Nankervis starts telling him off, “David, you know that’s not real!” Medalla, for only the second time during the trip, suddenly snaps: “So many people are going hungry, Adam! This is how they make money. The art market is just about signatures… I’m not interested in my name. I’m interested in my art.” Later, after he calms down, he explains to us, “Even when I was a boy, I never struggled. The Fernando Zobels bought my art. I have so much respect for the struggling artists.” On our stroll through Venice, just the two

of us, I ask him about the idea of art as a career, about competition and the ruthless nature of an art world obsessed with prices. “I’ve never been competitive,” he says. “If I see something beautiful, I’m really humbled. You can’t say you’re going to make another. All you can do is be humbled… And if its bad, you just think ‘Well, I’m glad I didn’t waste my time doing that.’” I look back on that trip to Venice as a sort of dream. How else to describe an experience that seemed to exist in the hereand-there, but also in Ermita in the ’40s, in the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1969, in a boxing match against the Manila Bay sunset, in a performance in Peggy Guggenheim’s garden? A few weeks later, David Medalla and I started an email correspondence. “Please send the photograph you took of the banana tree in Venice to my address below,” he wrote. M AY 2 0 1 7 / E S Q U I R E

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W H AT I ’ V E L E A R N E D

Agnes Arellano 67, SCULPTOR

I N T E RV I E W BY K A R A O RT I GA P H OTO G R A P H BY JASO N Q U I B I L A N

“Risk” is when you’re not sure, but you go ahead. I’ve risked

being ridiculed and being not believed, being laughed at, risked going against convention… but it makes me more deﬁant.

When I was six years old, God was something to be feared. We

little corner in the churchyard with a beautiful Virgin statue, we wanted to offer ﬂowers but he was so nasty, he drove us away from there. Bawal ba ‘yun? Little things like that made me resentful.

had a huge crucifix at home, and my sister would genuflect every night. There were a lot of powerful images, and I remember feeling very vulnerable and small. But now, after all the learning and experience, I realize that God is inside you, you have to draw it out. And I’ve spent years researching on the sacred feminine—so the “goddess” is very much there. And in a time like this, of war and of killing, you just have to turn to a more benevolent, compassionate being to seek solace.

When I lost my virginity I couldn’t keep going back to the Church and be a hypocrite. And how can it be a sin? That

If somebody from the spirit world appeared to me and talked to me, I still fear that. Even though I pray every day, and I

I remember as a girl, I really resented the parish priest because my friend and I wanted to offer flowers to the Virgin . It was a

always haunted me until my adulthood, and it’s still here with me today, this guilt, this fear of sex. But all those trips seeing other cultures, and seeing that sex is the most sacred thing, not the most bastos—all those things gave me courage.

think of my parents every day, because they died very tragically in a ﬁre with my sister, so I still talk to them. But if they appeared to me face-to-face, I would be so scared.

I found out the danger of sex is: not knowing what you’re getting into. I also found out that it’s the most sacred thing,

I light incense for the smoke and smell, a candle for the light, and I ring the bells for the sound. And I just talk to my parents and my sister—they’re like my guide into that world.

the act of creation. In Khajuraho, those erotic temples, they make the yantras, all these sacred diagrams with the copulating couples, they make it face south—which is where Yama, the god of death, resides—because it’s the only force potent enough to counter death. Parang, sacred sexuality is one of my advocacies, to tell people, hey you know, it is a very powerful thing. And if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll get into trouble.

Prayer is like unlocking the portal to the spiritual realm, so

If I could choose my last meal, it would be red rice, poached egg, paksiw na isda, and kamatis with wansoy and patis. Too much chatter annoys me. Sometimes people talk and

they’re not conscious anymore that they’re talking. Spare me from your loud thinking, because I really make an effort to listen.

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THE BODY DOES NOT LIE Ballet Philippines former artistic director PAUL MOR A LES shows us how a man moves with easy g race in the brave new era of loose silhouettes.

Ph o t o g ra p h s b y ARTU NEPOMUCENO S t yl i n g b y C LI F FO R D O L A N DAY Art direction PAU L V I LL A R I B A

04. 17

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PERCHED ATOP A BARRE inside the near-empty Ballet Philippines practice room, Paul Morales appears light as a feather. He’s telling a story—the former artistic director of the country’s flagship dance company explains the path he chose with a smile: “I thought I could escape politics.” Morales is that proverbial prodigal son. He hails from a Davaoeño clan known for their political influence, beginning with his great-grandfather Anastacio Campo, the city’s provincial commander during World War II, up to his mother, Maria Virginia Morales, who authored a book about these wartime exploits, among other relevant historical texts. His father, Horacio “Boy” Morales, was a young technocrat of the Marcos regime, but went underground and joined the National Democratic Front. He

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was arrested and tortured while under military detention, freed after the EDSA revolution, and then appointed as Secretary of the Department of Agrarian Reform in 1998. The younger Morales, in the meantime, found his calling by way of Old Hollywood: Bob Fosse’s semiautobiographical All That Jazz; The Red Shoes, a drama about an aspiring ballerina torn between two loves; and Singin’ in the Rain with Debbie Reynolds, Gene Kelly, and Donald O’Connor. Old Filipino movies, notably those that star Nida Blanca, who spoke body language with a native proficiency. He points out, “It was a time when film had more choreography, when all movement is related and advantageous for an artistic purpose.” He entered the University of the Philippines to earn a political science degree, but he already loved dance

STYLE

The new shape begins below: As trousers loosen up, jackets become fuller. Suit by Givenchy, Greenbelt 4

in its entirety: the body, the mastery of technique, rhythmically moving to music, using any given space. “When I first saw a big open space, my mom said I jumped around as if it was a stage,” he recalls. “During the most diff icult parts of my life, I always found dance to be a solace.” Two years later, he shifted to theater. In a class production of Hair, he was unable to fight the urge to move his body. It led to his first involvement with Ballet Philippines as a scholar. With their help, he became a scholar in Advanced Dance Theater Performance at the Laban Theater in London. Backstage work led him to establish Dulaang Talyer upon his return home in 1994. In 2008, he directed and independently released Concreto, a film based on his family’s wartime stories where their love of music blossomed. It was in 2009 that he went full circle.

Morales’ Ballet Philippines was a combination of his interests. By juxtaposing choreography (wherein he encouraged artistry among dancers through collaboration) with videography, from its modernist set to promotions, he added dynamism. In Swan Lake, unobtrusive moving scenery simply imbued a sense of place and time, while some were more intrinsic to the production. But politics was inescapable; in the art world, it was a sneakier creature. It was there among the country’s ballet companies, but no longer, as the top three— Ballet Philippines, Philippine Ballet Theatre, and Ballet Manila—united for a dance festival, complete with Morales’ selfie with Ballet Manila’s Lisa Macuja Elizalde. Social media, which Morales used to draw a diverse audience, was his

secondary source of frustration, the free-for-all space overtaken by keyboard predators hungry for morsels of half-truths. Where does dance stand amid all this? “Every piece of art is either for or against the status quo,” he says. Ballet Philippines’ direct contributions last year were a gala destigmatizing HIV and a twin bill of Simoun and Crisostomo Ibarra. Then there was Swan Lake, a classic fairytale ballet in every sense of the word that satisfied the unrelenting human search for love and purity. “Even that has its purpose,” he muses. “We can hope to inspire. After the shows, kids jump about because it gives them a different sense of the possibility of the body,” he adds. “We try to showcase diversity on

the stage. I’ve been chided for having dancers with different sizes but dance companies are really communities. Here, we practice tolerance, respect, diversity.” “The thing about the body,” he says, “is it doesn’t lie. Have you ever seen a fake dance? In a posttruth world, dance is a bastion of that truth.” Now, the practice room is silent save for the hum of ambient electronica. The smoke machine creates a cloud that dissipates moments later into a fog, rendering Morales’ lithe body as no more than a silhouette to the naked eye, a tongue that flicks and twists, speaking the thesis of his nonliterary art where the choreography of words are not. What is he trying to say? He holds onto the barre, supine, taking his time, and dismounts into a pirouette. —Marbbie Tagabucba

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The floating structures of the Cultural Center of the Philippines reflect styleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s movement toward generous shapes. Things appear big but never feel heavy. Jacket and pants by HermĂ¨s, Greenbelt 3

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STYLE

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STYLE

Sweater and shorts, by HermĂ¨s, Greenbelt 3; bag by Givenchy, Greenbelt 4

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No need to supersize your wardrobe. The spirit of the shift lies in easiness. T-shirt and pants by HermĂ¨s, Greenbelt 3

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The upside to sizing up is unfettered movement. Sweater, tank top, pants, and sneakers by Givenchy, Greenbelt 4

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STYLE

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DANCERS

DENISE PARUNGAO SARAH ALEJANDRO KATRENE SAN MIGUEL MONICA GANA HAIR AND MAKEUP

MURIEL VEGA PEREZ HAIR AND M A K E U P ASSISTANT

JIM JOSEPH STYLING A S S I S TA N T

MIGUEL ESCOBAR PRODUCTION A S S I S TA N T

EDNALYN MAGNAYE P H O T O A S S I S TA N T

IGNACIO GADOR Pocket square (around neck) by HermÃ¨s, Greenbelt 3

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T H I S WAY O U T

TOURIST TRAP

Artist JP Cuison envisions the Philippine pp tourism ad campaigns p g that never made it.

In the Philippines,

CIGARETTES ARE CHEAP! BOOZE IS CHEAP! THERE IS A CASINO ON EVERY CORNER! The Philippines is a paradise---

FOR YOUR VICE!

The Filipinos are known all over the world for being the most hospitable race you can ever imagine.

We treat you like family. That's why our caregivers are sought-after everywhere. Be our guest! Let us wait on your hand and foot all day, every day!

Tourists from First-World countries want a different kind of experience.

Something challenging. Something out of their comfort zone. This is exactly what a third world country like the Philippines can give them! Can they survive... a hike on Smokey Mountain? Can they make it through a night in a "hotel " in the slums? Can they walk unscathed in a snatcher-infested barangay? Can they swallow the exotic pagpag ?

Tourists will never see the world the same way again!