The sun has yet to come out in Baguio for the month of July. It's the 16th already, 25th anniversary of the devastating earthquake that brought the city down to its knees in 1990.
Monsoon season in Baguio - time for afternoons by the fireplace, power interruptions, landslides and moldy clothes. We just moved to a new house - much smaller than the one we were staying in the last couple of years, but this feels more like home. We lost a huge yard, gained a fireplace. We can always plant in pots, but the fireplace, ahhh the fireplace. Mom & Pop closed down their grocery store, but kept the flower shop. They still sell firewood but there has been no deliveries the past couple of weeks. So we've had to make do with the dozens of boxes we've emptied trying to settle into this new house.
We've lived in practically all major areas of Baguio since we decided to settle here in 1996. Suello, Campo Sioco, QM, Gibraltar, Gen. Luna, Leonila Hill, Aurora Hill, Asin Road, Quezon Hill, Tacay Road, Mines View, Tam-awan, back to Asin and back to Mines View.
Once we were offered to squat on a parcel of land up Mt. Sto. Tomas. For P5,000 or so we could've built anywhere in a specific area. But we didn't want to free ourselves from rent that way. We could've probably made a killing the last few months at the height of the La Presa gold rush. Ah, well.
We've been here a few days, and only got a glimpse of the mountains of Ambuklao twice, very briefly when the fog cleared for a few minutes. Power went out for an hour or so earlier. It's back now, cable's out so I put the Godfather II on the DVD player for the nth time and let that serve as ambient sound while I try to get some work done.
We commemorate our 20th year together tomorrow, Rl and I. What a ride it has been! What's in store in the coming years? Would a house of our own finally be in the horizon? Who knows. In the meantime, we just want to clear enough space in front of the fireplace as it seems like the rain will go on for a few more days.
Thursday, July 16, 2015
Sunday, July 12, 2015
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
Thursday, June 4, 2015
In fairness to the MAPEH teachers
That may not have come across very well... my sentiments on MAPEH teachers taking over mentor posts in Baguio City National High School's Special Program for the Arts. As one commenter pointed out, they too underwent training on the subjects covered: Music, Arts, Physical Education, Health. But here's why I think it's not enough.
We are talking about students who have shown potential to become really good in either one of the different specializations, and if the idea is to hone, enhance, develop such talents, we need teachers who can provide way more than basic education in Music, or Arts in general, which is basically what MAPEH teachers are trained to provide.
If my car needs its oil changed, I can to basically any car repair shop, even a gasoline station, to have it done. The personnel there may know a bit about car engines, where the spark plugs are, where the air filter is, but they won't be able to take down that whole engine and work it from the inside out because they have neither the knowledge nor skill and most probably the tools to overhaul an engine. So if I need to enhance the performance of the engine itself, that would need a specialist. Someone who, on top of knowing how to change the oil, or the air filter, or the spark plugs, also studied the art and science of car engines, has a deeper understanding of how each piston, each spark plug, each moving part contributes to the over-all performance of an engine. Someone who knows how different one engine is from another, because each one is different, with different parts, different capabilities, knows that some engines run on diesel and some on gasoline, that some will do better on open highways at high speeds while others do better climbing hills.
The previous article did not mean to put MAPEH teachers down, I'm sure most if not all of them are good on the subject, but their training was meant not for a special program for theater, or visual arts, or dance, or media arts (by the way, MAPEH covers basically two fields of expertise: visual arts and music, and theater/media arts/dance aren't covered by the subject).
With this, I can only hope that the school would go out of their way to really equip the new teachers with the appropriate knowledge and skills to be able to really produce the country's future artists who can help each of us have a better understanding and appreciation of the world around us, and life in general.
We are talking about students who have shown potential to become really good in either one of the different specializations, and if the idea is to hone, enhance, develop such talents, we need teachers who can provide way more than basic education in Music, or Arts in general, which is basically what MAPEH teachers are trained to provide.
If my car needs its oil changed, I can to basically any car repair shop, even a gasoline station, to have it done. The personnel there may know a bit about car engines, where the spark plugs are, where the air filter is, but they won't be able to take down that whole engine and work it from the inside out because they have neither the knowledge nor skill and most probably the tools to overhaul an engine. So if I need to enhance the performance of the engine itself, that would need a specialist. Someone who, on top of knowing how to change the oil, or the air filter, or the spark plugs, also studied the art and science of car engines, has a deeper understanding of how each piston, each spark plug, each moving part contributes to the over-all performance of an engine. Someone who knows how different one engine is from another, because each one is different, with different parts, different capabilities, knows that some engines run on diesel and some on gasoline, that some will do better on open highways at high speeds while others do better climbing hills.
The previous article did not mean to put MAPEH teachers down, I'm sure most if not all of them are good on the subject, but their training was meant not for a special program for theater, or visual arts, or dance, or media arts (by the way, MAPEH covers basically two fields of expertise: visual arts and music, and theater/media arts/dance aren't covered by the subject).
With this, I can only hope that the school would go out of their way to really equip the new teachers with the appropriate knowledge and skills to be able to really produce the country's future artists who can help each of us have a better understanding and appreciation of the world around us, and life in general.
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
Bangsamoro Band-Aid Law (Or offering an ARMM and a Leg)
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Monday, May 25, 2015
Not-so-Special Program for the Arts
Some years ago, ca. early 2000's, every summer, I would get invited by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts to help facilitate a theater workshop for teachers from all over the country. They were members of the faculty of the Department of Education's Special Program for the Arts, and I would usually various classes on theater: Acting, Directing, Stage Management, Technical Direction, etc.
A lot of the teachers assigned to this special program were former P.E. teachers, and for some of the participants in that workshop with whom I continued to work with outside the workshop, it was inspiring to see them grow into their new tasks: help mold their students into the country's future artists and culture bearers. Such a program used to only be available at the Makiling High School for the Arts, and having the privilege of knowing some of the school's alumni: Raymond Red, Shamaine Centenera-Buencamino, Soliman Cruz, to name a few, I was really excited by the idea that the Department of Education has expanded the program to pilots schools all over the country.
When the opportunity for one of our children to be in the program at the Baguio City National High School (BCNHS) presented itself, we grabbed it. Our daughter has been taking ballet lessons and was really showing some potential. She took the written entrance examination and passed it, and the next couple of weeks were spent preparing her for the next step: a dance audition. She passed that too.
On her first year, as part of the first batch to be in the recently implemented K-12 program, much of their time was spent learning indigenous dances along with some traditional folk dances. Our daughter would come home excited to show us a new movement she learned and the story behind each step.
They got to experience performing infront of audiences too as their group would usually be invited to showcase a dance or two at various functions within and outside the school. I was already thinking of how much farther she can get in the field of the performing arts when she gets to college. I personally knew some of the first alumni of the BCNHS Special Program for the Arts and was immensely impressed by their talents. I worked with some of them when I had a brief stint as an artist-in-residence at the University of Baguio (2005-06) and they delivered like professionals in each of the productions we staged.
From the early to the mid-2000's, Baguio City National High School was already slowly evolving into one of the city's arts and culture destinations - then, they regularly staged exhibits, plays, dance and musical performances that showcased amazing young talents. But in recent years, that stopped.
A couple of months ago, some of these alumni, most of whom have pursued more lucrative careers in other fields yet maintained their interest in the arts, while others actually started careers in various institutions engaged in different fields of creative expression, invited me to do a talk for this year's graduating batch. They were particularly concerned about the last few batches' apparent disinterest in pursuing careers in the arts.They were simply uninspired.
A new person was has been installed to head the SPA program of the school and one of her first directives was to trim down the "specialization time," or the time the young artists spent working on their craft, from two hours per day to just an hour. As a theater artist myself, I can't imagine what can be accomplished within just an hour. For theater, warm up and vocalization exercises already take up to 15 minutes leaving only 35-40 minutes for rehearsals or acting exercises to allow for at least 5-10 minutes for the students to cool down and prepare to go to their respective academic classes. It's basically the same with dance. Clearly, the new head has no real experience nor knowledge about the performing arts, or perhaps even the arts in general.
And then we received information that all the current mentors/advisers of all the specializations - dance, theater, musical, literary, visual and media arts were being replaced, mostly by MAPEH teachers. The current mentors have undergone several workshops, training sessions under different institutions through the years, and now they will be replaced by Music, Arts, Physical Education and Health teachers most of whom received their education through textbooks. The reason for the replacement isn't clear, but I'm almost certain that politics isn't totally out of the equation here.
Given the above circumstances, we now believe that the program may just do more harm than good as far as the children's potential creative talents are concerned so we decided to pull our daughter out of the program.
A bureaucratic approach to the program is what's slowly killing it. With Master's Degrees and Ph.D.'s being a dime a dozen these days, people may be given such lofty positions in the government bureaucracy, including public schools, on the basis of their years in service (which do not necessarily translate to wisdom/knowledge or actual skills) and 100% attendance in their post-graduate studies.
Sayang, is the only word I can think of. The Baguio City National High School's Special Program for the Arts held so much promise. But right now, it's just not special anymore.
A lot of the teachers assigned to this special program were former P.E. teachers, and for some of the participants in that workshop with whom I continued to work with outside the workshop, it was inspiring to see them grow into their new tasks: help mold their students into the country's future artists and culture bearers. Such a program used to only be available at the Makiling High School for the Arts, and having the privilege of knowing some of the school's alumni: Raymond Red, Shamaine Centenera-Buencamino, Soliman Cruz, to name a few, I was really excited by the idea that the Department of Education has expanded the program to pilots schools all over the country.
When the opportunity for one of our children to be in the program at the Baguio City National High School (BCNHS) presented itself, we grabbed it. Our daughter has been taking ballet lessons and was really showing some potential. She took the written entrance examination and passed it, and the next couple of weeks were spent preparing her for the next step: a dance audition. She passed that too.
On her first year, as part of the first batch to be in the recently implemented K-12 program, much of their time was spent learning indigenous dances along with some traditional folk dances. Our daughter would come home excited to show us a new movement she learned and the story behind each step.
They got to experience performing infront of audiences too as their group would usually be invited to showcase a dance or two at various functions within and outside the school. I was already thinking of how much farther she can get in the field of the performing arts when she gets to college. I personally knew some of the first alumni of the BCNHS Special Program for the Arts and was immensely impressed by their talents. I worked with some of them when I had a brief stint as an artist-in-residence at the University of Baguio (2005-06) and they delivered like professionals in each of the productions we staged.
From the early to the mid-2000's, Baguio City National High School was already slowly evolving into one of the city's arts and culture destinations - then, they regularly staged exhibits, plays, dance and musical performances that showcased amazing young talents. But in recent years, that stopped.
A couple of months ago, some of these alumni, most of whom have pursued more lucrative careers in other fields yet maintained their interest in the arts, while others actually started careers in various institutions engaged in different fields of creative expression, invited me to do a talk for this year's graduating batch. They were particularly concerned about the last few batches' apparent disinterest in pursuing careers in the arts.They were simply uninspired.
A new person was has been installed to head the SPA program of the school and one of her first directives was to trim down the "specialization time," or the time the young artists spent working on their craft, from two hours per day to just an hour. As a theater artist myself, I can't imagine what can be accomplished within just an hour. For theater, warm up and vocalization exercises already take up to 15 minutes leaving only 35-40 minutes for rehearsals or acting exercises to allow for at least 5-10 minutes for the students to cool down and prepare to go to their respective academic classes. It's basically the same with dance. Clearly, the new head has no real experience nor knowledge about the performing arts, or perhaps even the arts in general.
And then we received information that all the current mentors/advisers of all the specializations - dance, theater, musical, literary, visual and media arts were being replaced, mostly by MAPEH teachers. The current mentors have undergone several workshops, training sessions under different institutions through the years, and now they will be replaced by Music, Arts, Physical Education and Health teachers most of whom received their education through textbooks. The reason for the replacement isn't clear, but I'm almost certain that politics isn't totally out of the equation here.
Given the above circumstances, we now believe that the program may just do more harm than good as far as the children's potential creative talents are concerned so we decided to pull our daughter out of the program.
A bureaucratic approach to the program is what's slowly killing it. With Master's Degrees and Ph.D.'s being a dime a dozen these days, people may be given such lofty positions in the government bureaucracy, including public schools, on the basis of their years in service (which do not necessarily translate to wisdom/knowledge or actual skills) and 100% attendance in their post-graduate studies.
Sayang, is the only word I can think of. The Baguio City National High School's Special Program for the Arts held so much promise. But right now, it's just not special anymore.
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
Baguio in the time of Domogan
‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ In Baguio today, it's more like - those who choose to ignore history cannot learn from it.
We inherited a beautiful city from those who came before us, we cannot, must not allow Domogan to hand over a decaying city to our children on behalf of our generation. Because that's what it all boils down to - we are turning over a dying, soul-less Baguio to our children.
Here's a portrait of today's Baguio: a tiny highland city a kilometer and a half or so above sea level with an estimated resident population of half a million with hardly enough resources to sustain such a huge population, its carrying capacity further burdened by tourists whose numbers can go as high as a million on occasion, water has been rationed since time immemorial where most households receive water only for a couple of hours once a week, a city facing a waste management crisis and its administrators are hardly doing anything substantial to address the problem, pollution levels are at an all time-high and continue to rise, crime is also on the rise and, perhaps with the exception of the few years under Japanese occupation, the quality of life of its residents are at an all-time low.
Fairly recent developments - City Hall approved and defended a mall's planned expansion which had almost two hundred trees, most of which are decades-old pine that served as one of the few remaining forest covers in the city's central business district, the Rose Garden at Burnham Park was "developed" which significantly reduced its natural space and replaced with concrete and a dancing fountain, the city's congressman caused the death of hundreds of pine trees in a forest reserve and the contamination of the areas water resources compromising the welfare of thousands of residents, and its aesthetically-challenged, shortsighted, unsentimental Mayor who has occupied various seats in the local government of Baguio for more than two decades is determined to trample on the historical value of two heritage sites: the Baguio City Hall (where they want to build a fence around it and concrete structures right in the tree-covered gardens that beautifully frame the government building) and the Melvin Jones Football Grounds (that the Mayor think nothing about digging up to erect a parking facility - his solution to the city's worsening traffic situation).
It is interesting to note that the current mayor, Mauricio Domogan, seem to be obsessed with parking facilities having figured prominently in the Jadewell on-street parking fiasco that caused his erstwhile political sidekick, Bernardo Vergara, the mayoralty but he was lucky enough to survive the backlash and still bagged the city's lone congressional seat in the 2004 elections).
Both the Baguio City Hall and Burnham Park where the football grounds eyed as the site for this parking facility is located are declared heritage sites - as such, any improvements, alterations, construction activity must go through and be approved by the National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP). Why?
I was fortunate enough to have been able to visit Paris, France as a young man, and I will never forget the experience. Perhaps it worked to my advantage that this was way before the advent of digital cameras, so I took in all of that Parisian visuals with my eyes and not through an lcd screen and saved all of it in my mind and not in some memory card, the reason why I can still vividly recall not only the images but the whole experience itself.
Paris has a soul, it is alive and the city speaks to you, it tells you her story with every cafe, building, park, boulevard and side street. All infrastructures in the city complemented the city's heritage, its feel, its soul. Two major structures built a century apart do jump out of the renaissance painting that is the Parisian skyline: the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre.
Mayor Domogan is not proposing to build an Eiffel Tower and a Louvre. Not at all.
At the City Hall grounds, he wants a fence that will serve as "protection" from vandals and is not meant to deny the public access to the grounds. A stage is also part of the this improvement design "to be used by performers..." Local advocacy groups have denounced the project. Mayor Domogan defended it saying that the construction project is not meant to deface a historical site and that this will, in fact, enhance its historical value.
Why am I not buying that? I just have to look at the "improvements" done at the Rose Graden in Burnham Park where parcels were cemented over reducing the area's natural space significantly and and how the place ended up with a "dancing fountain" but much less roses. I have just to look up at the mostly empty flyover at the Baguio General Hospital rotunda and the traffic jams right below it. I have not gotten over the hideous concrete pine tree at the top of Session Road (the construction of which was lauded by Domogan and its eventual removal by another mayor he denounced so vigorously). The man just can't be trusted with a backhoe and a cement mixer. Who knows what he's got up his sleeves this time.
Let's not forget his proposal to put up gates on top of the fences around the whole of Burnham Park.
At the Melvin Jones grounds, the proposal is multi-level underground parking facility, with shops and other commercial establishments on ground level, and a rooftop with artificial turf so "football may continue to be played." I first heard it from on of the horses' mouth, so to speak, soon after the 2010 elections when then congressman-elect Bernardo Vergara announced during the opening of a football tournament their (his and Domogan's) plan to construct an underground parking facility in the area.
Mayor Domogan refuses to acknowledge, and this sentiment is shared by much of the councilors who have either come out to support the ridiculous proposal or have said nothing at all about it, the area's historical value. He also doesn't see the aesthetic value of a wide open space surround by towering trees. He also ignores such an area's ecological value and what could happen if such a huge rainfall catch-basin, aquifer, carbon sink is cemented over. He just has to have his parking lot.
In the meantime, City Hall prohibits activities such as football and other similar sports to be played there as these result in the destruction of the lawn. No football in the football grounds, but yes to destroying it totally and building a parking building?
Baguio was much like Paris in a way before - it had a distinct character. Vestiges of both its colonial past and indigenous heritage against backdrop of pine forests. The city even had a distinct aroma. The cool climate is fast becoming Baguio's only tourism draw and that's why we need to come up with events such as Panagbenga to prop up the industry. Soon, as more cars ply the streets or get caught in traffic jams spewing carbon in the air, that cool climate might just go too for as early as now, we have been experiencing temperatures north of the thermometer that most Baguio folks never experienced before.
Paris has managed to keep its character while our current administrators seem to be doing all they can to destroy Baguio's. Session Road used to be a showcase of Baguio's colonial past - but not anymore, viewing the historic road from any angle today only offers a noisy collage of over-sized commercial billboards. They ignore the very laws that they are supposed to enforce to satisfy their conscience-less capitalist cohorts. Much noise was created about that new building on Session Road that violated the permit issued to its owners who built additional floors on top that exceeded that number of floors that those same owners originally applied for. After much noise? Nothing, it's business as usual.
There's very little left of what Baguio is all about, and Mayor Domogan is determined to erase all that. He's no urban planner, he's no engineer, he's no architect, he obviously doesn't have an artistic sensibility, or any eye for aesthetics, yet his administration has all been about infrastructure. Ugly infrastructure. He's a lawyer, but that doesn't even come into play when it comes to legally defending the city from abuses such as SM City Baguio's insistence on making the biggest commercial establishment in the city even bigger at the expense of the welfare of the people.
The city's heritage cannot and must not be ignored, and I'm not only talking about old buildings and parks here. I'm talking about all the past administrators of Baguio who made sure that the city progressed without sacrificing the city's heritage, its raison d'etre and most importantly the welfare of its citizens. That is a very important aspect of the city's history, and Domogan must ignore that, must learn from that.
We inherited a beautiful city from those who came before us, we cannot, must not allow Domogan to hand over a decaying city to our children on behalf of our generation. Because that's what it all boils down to - we are turning over a dying, soul-less Baguio to our children.
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