Humble and honest, gifted and good

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to revisit Davao, where I hadn’t been for quite some time, thanks to the Book Caravan sponsored by the University of the Philippines Press. Poet Jimmy Abad, fictionist Jun Cruz Reyes, UP Press director Jing Hidalgo, and I were accompanied on the flight by UP Mindanao chancellor Ricky De Ungria, himself a poet of the first order.

We were there to do readings, but I was very curious to find out just what UP Mindanao looked like and how a guy like Ricky – who once sang with a rock band called Finnegans Wake and with whom I’ve chugged many an early-morning beer in Ermita – could be so compelled to undertake such a radical lifestyle change.

Riding up to the UP campus on the city outskirts, I began to understand why. This was a new frontier for all those who, like Ricky, have committed themselves to taming the wilderness on the horizon and in the mind. Established in 1995, the UP’s newest campus sits on 204 hectares of land about 45 minutes from Davao’s city center – at least 10 of those minutes on a dirt path that the campus’ 900 students have nicknamed Abortion Road for good reason. (The transport mode of choice is the habal-habal – the back seat of a motorcycle – yup, a regular two-wheeler.)

The campus is decidedly and even literally a work in progress; the main building is a startlingly modern structure in the midst of all that upturned earth and deep-rooted greenery, but it awaits a proper roof, pending the requisite funds. Still, the roughness speaks of a can-do, will-do mentality that pervades the community – an awareness of the newness and the temporary limitations of things and yet also the drive to move forward and to make the best of a tough situation.

UP Mindanao may have a lot yet to prove and a long way to go, but it has every good reason to be where it is: One of every four Filipinos lives in Mindanao, and UP as a whole takes up a full third of the education sector’s budget; surely, Mindanao deserves some of those resources. Mindanao’s unique endowments and opportunities – as well as its age-old problems and inadequacies – also militate for academic programs focused on bioscience, food science, agribusiness, computer science, and conflict resolution.

Only its second chancellor to date, De Ungria is resolved to recruit the kind of first-rate teaching staff and to raise the kind of seed money the new campus needs to make a difference. Attractive incentive packages are available to qualified faculty. Student morale is high. President Arroyo, herself a Mindanaoan, loves the idea of a UP Mindanao and has promised to help.

But our poet-friend knows that he has his work cut out for him; we envy him his commitment, and wish him all the best.

Elsewhere, Davao bustled with irrepressible vitality, day and night; if Manila has its Eastwood and Greenbelt districts, Davao has Matina Town Square and The Venue, great places both for good food, cold beer, and a survey of the local menagerie. Of the many new shops along the highway, one caught my eye (as it certainly would have that of modern composer Philip Glass): Philip’s Glass and Aluminum Sales.

When we got back to Manila, I had to watch every pomelo and its brother tumble out onto the baggage claim carousel before my luggage appeared; a cock crowed, as though in protest, in its cardboard box. It had seen fresher and more invigorating climes – and, that weekend, so had I.

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I get fits of anxiety and depression when I’m kept away for too long from a computer hooked to the Internet, and it didn’t take a day for me to start investigating how wired Davao was when we were there. I began, of course, with our hotel – the well-appointed and reasonably-priced Casa Leticia just across the street from the more opulent Apo View – reasonable, I should qualify, in everything but their Internet charge, which ran at P180/hour. Maybe that wasn’t much if you didn’t feel like braving Davao’s afternoon drizzle and unfamiliar streets, but I did, and quickly found myself on a street dotted by small Internet cafés packed to the rafters with truant schoolkids playing Counterstrike. One seemed promisingly empty and I understood why when I looked more closely at the hand-lettered sign on the door: WE ARE CLOSE, NOW RENOVATION. So I hopped, skipped, and jumped a few more blocks until I found a place whose most appealing feature was its ridiculously cheap rate of P15/hour, enhanced by the absence of screaming youngsters.

The clientele here was decidedly different – older and predominantly female, indeed nurses or nursing students as far as I could tell from their uniforms. Each one faced her computer monitor with stoic concentration; hardly anyone was smiling. No raucous shoot-’em-up games were being played here, and from a distance I discerned the telltale screen of an on-line chatroom, the short ribbons of hurried text and furtive flirtations. I got the only vacant machine and sat down to my e-mail and my regular trawlings of Mac hardware sites and user forums.

The woman next to me was as still and as quiet as a rock, with only the murmur of her fingers on the keyboard animating her space. I fell deep into a forum thread devoted to the new 12-inch and 17-inch PowerBooks announced by Apple boss Steve Jobs at the latest Macworld Expo in San Francisco, but now and then I looked to my left and began, unintentionally, to notice and to mind her business. The website she was visiting was www.matchmaker.com, and I realized, of course, that I was snooping on an on-line courtship. My fingers began slowing down at my own keyboard; the anodized aluminum finish and the enhanced wireless range of the new Apple laptops were compelling subjects to the geek in me, but the questions they raised were nothing compared to those posed by my seatmate’s faceless correspondent: "Puwede ka bang ligawan?"

I didn’t have to look at the answer, which I suppose was moot, considering that this lady was dipping into her lunch money to find love on-line.

A more provocative question was: "Describe yourself." For that she paused, took stock of herself for a few seconds, and then typed with the bravery and directness of those with nothing to lose: "Humble and honest." I thought that she might have added "homely," but that would have been a bit too humble and a bit too honest. I silently wished her well, and returned to my less perilous and soul-searching pursuits.

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I’m not a professional art critic and certainly can’t pretend to be one, but I’ve maintained an active interest in the Philippine art scene since the early ’70s – when, in one of my many previous incarnations, I worked as a printmaker in Ermita, earning little more than P50 apiece for etchings that framers used to fill the void in their wares. That’s really another story, but that experience introduced me to a score of fine people who even then had already made names for themselves as top-rank artists, Bencab and Tiny Nuyda among them. Later on I would meet some more of these artists on trips to Baguio (the late Santi Bose, and also the late Robert Villanueva) and on the Thursday lunches hosted by writer Johnny Gatbonton at the West Ave. office rented out to him by his pal, painter Mauro Malang Santos.

The artist’s life is a hard one, fraught with economic insecurity and both physical and psychic suffering. For every class of, say, a dozen hopeful fine arts students, you’d be lucky to get two or three with the talent and the perseverance to still be painting and painting well 20 years onward. (The same thing’s true for creative writers, not incidentally, where one outstanding student in 50 seems more to be the norm.)

I’m always amazed when an artist manifests both talent and industry – talent, I suppose, is self-explanatory if infinitely complex, but industry we can take to be compounded of discipline, perseverance, and business acumen, or a sense of one’s self-worth and the will to achieve it. One such maestro has been Malang – touted to be among the leading candidates this year for a National Artist award, which, as a friend and admirer, I hope he finally gets.

The man has most certainly paid his dues, as one of this country’s most prolific and brilliant painters, and someone who moved up the ranks from an early career as a newspaper cartoonist to a fatherly figure around whom younger artists cluster and draw inspiration from. While he first made his mark by elevating the lowly barong-barong to iconic status, Malang moved on to other phases and themes, most notably his square-shouldered women. He stands among our boldest and finest colorists. You know a Malang when you see one, and you’ll want a Malang when you see one.

Despite these, Malang seems to have suffered from the studied silence of an influential sector of the artistic academy; a recent critical survey of major figures in contemporary Philippine art had nothing at all, good or bad, to say about his work. It isn’t too difficult to figure out why Malang might hold little appeal for the Left: His is a largely happy art, devoid of the anguish of his friend Ang Kiukok or the cerebral poise of, say, Arturo Luz. Which is not to say Malang’s work has neither thought nor feeling – they’re there, but they just happen to be unfashionably pleasant and exuberant, indeed the oft-forgotten other side of the poor Pinoy. ("Can I help it," he told Johnny Gatbonton, "if I had a happy childhood?")

Critic Cid Reyes perhaps summed up Malang’s artistic achievement best: "Malang’s sensibility is unique in Philippine art. It is safe to say that Malang is the synthesis of Filipino painters whose art, in itself, is born out of a synthesis of various styles and movements. He has forged out of this welter of influences an art uniquely his own, a pictorial drama of wit, elegance, craftsmanship, and candor that can provide the source and root of a new Philippine tradition. His art posits no radical aesthetics or problematic dilemma; what he offers us instead, is an amplitude of feeling and exhilaration embodied in works at once controlled and free-wheeling, an art no longer for decorators’ salons, but truly and significantly an art for the museum."

On top of all these, I admire Malang for his decency, his irrepressible good cheer, the discipline and deliberation with which he has managed his artistic career, the leadership he has provided the Saturday Group of Artists, and the generosity with which he has shared his art and his blessings with others. There’s nothing in the rules that says a National Artist has to be a nice guy aside from being a master craftsman and visionary, but there’s nothing, either, that disqualifies the gifted and the good.

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.