Radio, the quintessential medium

Two major typhoons passed over the Philippines in the space of two months. The earlier one, locally codenamed "Milenyo," was the stronger one, depriving a wide swath of Philippine territory of power, telecommunications, and in some places, also water and transport services.

This column may have been written and published almost three decades ago, but what happened when "Milenyo" passed validates its timeliness.



"Impressions," TV Times, 12-18 November 1978

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This would not have been written had not the superstorm come and gone, an erratic howler with superstar ways, seemingly unable to make up her mind on how to appear, when to appear, and how best to appear. In a sense, this is my very personal way of paying tribute to a medium that, on most days, plays a lonely second fiddle to its more bombastic, more colorful, more sophisticated cousin. For on typhoon days, when life is pared down to its truest essentials, when existence comes to mean only survival, nothing fits into one's shaky grip better than the transistor radio.

When I was young--in high school and totally impressionable--there was only one permanent accessory on my study table in our old house: an even older radio. It was the kind that operated only on electric power, big and bulky, mahogany brown, with round knobs on a horizontal row at the lower third of its face. I would twist different knobs to get the volume, the station, and the frequency I wanted. Every day, I would do my homework to the tunes it wafted, soft and soothing. Outside the open windows, the sweet scent of the dama de noche would fill the air. My most constant memories of those years were of quiet nights spent listening to the sounds from that old radio: the early evening soap operas, like Dr. Ramon Selga, Salamat Po Duktor, Kapitan Kidlat, Prinsipe Amante; a little later in the evening, the romantic songs of Frank Sinatra, Joni James, and Nat King Cole; and much later, those subdued and flawless melodies from violins and pianos, romantic backdrops to readings of poems and letters sent to radio hosts like the late Joey Lardizabal.

College came, and my study table sprouted an addition: a typewriter, inherited from my sister and brother. But the radio also remained on the desktop. Only, this time, the radio had changed its look. Gone was the old set. It conked out in midterm and would not rise again, whatever the challenge from the neighborhood repairman. The new radio was a pocket transistor, complete with earphones, which my father had won for being a model gas station owner in the Mobil (or had he already switched to Esso by then?) network.

As I pounded term papers and short stories, poems and personal letters, on the grey and heavy Underwood, the new and portable radio worked tirelessly with me, spinning out music and news, music and news, and every now and then, special events coverages--of fires and typhoons, elections and campaigns, road accidents and deaths. By that time, DZHP--the old, CAT award-winning DZHP--had become my favorite station, the voices of its staffers grinding familiar grooves onto my memory bank.

Later, I was to work for this very station, more by chance than by design, with some of those very voices. The radio and TV news staff of DZHP and Channel 13 (the old Channel 13) was one unit, working out of a small, crummy hole smack on the second floor of the old and historic Herald Building on Muralla, Intramuros. From that hole, which really looked more like a continuous aquarium where the news fishes swam through floods and fires, elections and demonstrations, bombings and conventions, echoed a familiar stinger during those days: "Remember, you heard it first on D-Z-H-P!" From that hole, too, came many of the intrepid reporters and cameramen whose names and voices you still see or hear today, in some manner or other, on radio or television.

Then, television--not just the medium, but the industry itself--beckoned. And with my switch to television work, I shunted the pocket radio transistor--which, by that time, I had lost anyway--aside. The new toy was a more compelling and challenging master most days and nights, week or weekend.

Our old house had since been torn down, and I myself have moved to newer quarters and more isolated surroundings. But like a persistent memory, the typewriter and the radio still stand side by side on my study table. During the day, as I continue to pound mercilessly on the typewriter, the radio plays on: still music and news, music and news. Once night comes, it is television that, by my little girl's dictum, is switched on.

Yet, when the electricity goes off, as it did during the night of the typhoon, and the television set looks like a black mass against the greyish sky, and the winds lash against the dark landscape, howling and screaming with the terrifying fury of a woman scorned, we all turn to the radio, whatever the hour, carrying it with us to all corners of the dark house, our only civilized link with the rest of the frightened city.

It may be, after all, that radio is the quintessential medium. Because when all differences are levelled, when you are not even sure the newspaper will come in the morning, when it does not matter whether your television set is big or small, color or black-and-white, because it won't work anyway, it is radio that reminds you of your true humanity, of a very real sense of community.

In retrospect, it does not matter whether the broadcasters who had gone on nationwide alert for the duration of the typhoon coverage were doing a perfect job or lousing it up. It only matters that, in a time of deep national concern, radio is the only medium that can blend the many threads of different and separate persuasions into one integral consciousness.

And as everywhere in the city, the lights went out--and television, too--on the night of the typhoon, radio continued to do what it did best, what was most vital to the community and to society. The newspapers and television would bring it to us, too--later. At the very moment it was all happening, only radio could bring it all to us.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Welcome the new comedians!

When I wrote this welcoming piece more than two decades ago, the older comedians of Philippine cinema and television were getting just a mite too tired. Today, those "new" comedians who were the stars of Iskul Bukol are showing every sign of being just as tired.

Is there a new generation that has bravely taken up the flag of Philippine comedy? One mentions, unavoidably, Michael V., Ogie Alcasid, Janno Gibbs. These three, however, have already had a noticeably long exposure to television and their brand of comedy, while sometimes still managing to cough up laughs, has become too repetitive: Bumenta na, as they say in the local dialect.

It's time to look out for newer comedy and even newer comedians.


"Impressions," TV Times, 26 November-2 December 1978

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It is nice to watch Iskul Bukol because, for once, I see younger, newer faces doing comedy on Philippine television. And doing it very naturally.

Not that the curtain has gone down on the older comedians (Who doesn't speak in capital letters of PUGO, the dean of them all?), but that the younger comedians offer a promise and a hope that the older ones are now short of. Besides, the younger ones have verve enough for the performer and the viewer, plus a greater feel for the contemporary.

So, I discount Iskul Bukol's predictable storyline and tawdry script. I even close my eyes to the miscasting of the guest stars, who often cannot groove with the regular cast. I disregard the queasy feeling I get whenever Bibeth Orteza talks too much because, well, knowing Bibeth, that is what she has always done.

I forgive the loose hand that lets the dialogue go too much without direction, too often without zap. I keep my peace and wait for the flak to settle, even if sometimes it seems it never will, until I can see where all of it is leading me to.

May I remind scriptwriters and directors that, while they may have natural comedians in their hands and on their shows, they still need well-written scripts and well-planned plots. And that, for comedy to be more than funny and just a little memorable, it must have bite, send-ups and put-downs, parody and reverberation?

But I let all that go, because just to watch natural comedians making it after a great long time in television, and just to hope that they would bring to the medium a fine new madness, is enough reason to be forgiving.

All the rest can come--but only with care, faith, perseverance, and hard work.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Life on one level

"Impressions," TV Times, 19-25 November 1978

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Early though it comes in the night, Ilaw ng Tahanan was something I felt I had to catch last week. It seemed as good a time as any to do the continuing local dramas, those spin-offs from radio soap operas that have now invaded television.

And since, after one bout with the other local TV soap, I could not take its sickening melodrama again, I braced myself for an hour of Ilaw ng Tahanan. I tried to persuade myself: this could not possibly be much worse; it might even be better.

It was not very much better. But at least, for one whole hour of it last week, there was only a little of that pervading air of suffering and martyrdom that I simply could not abide in the other soap. Perla Bautista was supposed to be the ideal mother in the show, of course. And while it may not look believable that she would have children as old as both Rez Cortez and Charo Santos, she did manage to look comfortable and at ease in her role. Charo Santos was, well, Charo Santos, with the same brooding air that was her signature in Itim, the same intense melancholia. Gina Alajar had only a short stint in the episode that we watched, and Rez Cortez was gross enough to fit his role.

All around, it was hardly a memorable episode, just one in a continuing series. But it had one good thing going for it: its sequences were short, its scenes quite clipped. When you are watching a local melodrama, you thank your good fortune for the commercial break that slices the heaviness before it becomes unforgivably hilarious, for the change of scene that cuts the emotion before it starts dripping all over your bedsheet.

Luckily, too, that episode of Ilaw ng Tahanan had nothing offensively inane in it. I did not find myself feeling affronted by really stupid dialogue or really asinine action.

What I did not--and will never--like, though, is the impression that soap operas--all soap operas--convey, that dispiriting, persistent pulsebeat, almost an insistence that here, as we watch it, is the stuff of life--real life--unfolding before us, tugging at our heartstrings, distributing earthly wisdom with sonorous authority, grimly smothering us with the mantle of tragedy, the cloak of destruction, the crystal ball of Cassandra.

Please. What we see all the time in soap operas is not real life. It is too intense, lived too much on only one level, to be real life. In that one whole hour of Ilaw ng Tahanan, I never saw Charo Santos laugh, or even just smile, however reluctantly. Perla Bautista wore a perennial worried look. Gina Alajar's mother was angry and scathing in all her scenes.

Is this the infinite variety, the comic vitality, of life? Where are a few of those independent, quivering, unique, and truly interesting souls who, in the wealth of their emotional responses, make average human existence still the most absorbing subject of fiction? And where is that redeeming comic vision that leaves even the most heroic life and the most noble tragedy free of role-typing or categorizing? Where, indeed, is the complexity of contemporary life?

I guess we should not even pretend to look for them in a TV spin-off from a radio soap.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Filipino masters of comedy

As I was posting this column, it occurred to me that the leading actors of this short-lived comedy series have all departed from the scene: Pugo, Patsy, Jay Ilagan, and I believe, also Tange. They are four of the better Filipino actors, with acting portfolios very few of today's comedians/actors can approximate.

Students of Philippine cinema and television should attempt to find archived copies of this series, as well as of the earlier My Son, My Son. They will learn a lot about the golden age of Filipino comedy and will see why many critics mourn the deterioration of the genre.


"Impressions," TV Times, 2-8 July 1978

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Some people have the unusual gift of translating the life around them into such universal terms that their audience is often moved, through either laughter or tears, into a recognition that here--in microcosm--is the basic stuff of humanity. In the reality of their performances, these people stain the memory with the sheer weight of their sharp and sympathetic portrayals of the various ways in which ordinary, well-meaning people stumble into one sad mess after another.

Son of My Son falls short of such affecting universality, but it is an amusingly kinetic show, nevertheless. The subject here has grown from the original My Son, My Son family to embrace another and future family--still Pugo's, through his now-married son, portrayed by Jay Ilagan.

The family is, of course, a favorite formula in traditional situation comedies. And every week, Pugo and his screen family wiggle through some generally amusing, though not individually hilarious, scenes.

John & Marsha, the late celebrated family sitcom, used the same nucleus of the family. The difference is that the family as conceived in Son of My Son has adapted through the weeks, constricting or expanding as the episodes demand. The family in John & Marsha did not allow enough flexibility and space for growth. John & Marsha, if it had wanted to stay on the tube forever, would have had to discover new themes, new plots, new adventures, to balm the occasional boredom of its viewers. In the end, John & Marsha died because of its failure to balm such boredom. Son of My Son can escape this fate by simply extending its reach and growing in size, number, and, consequently, experience.

The staying power of Son of My Son duplicates the staying power of its lead actor--the durable, admirable, lovable Pugo. Here is that touchingly vulnerable bumpkin who perhaps epitomizes the Filipino comedian. Of course, the comic can be scurrilous, too, but I know of no other local comedian onscreen today who so consistently commands respect from the audience even when his comedy is sometimes tipped with coarseness. His is a mocking, at times graceless, wit that is both casual and lethal. But who faults him for that? Certainly not us, who can only bow before the experience and expertise that made him the dean of all local comedians. Besides, there is, in Pugo, that essential kinship with all other men who have marked many miles of their long life journeys with grouchily funny jabs at the rest of mankind, but who, at the end of each mile, are always humble enough to confess and apologize for their misdemeanors, however grouchily they may do so.

Ably playing the accompaniment to Pugo's melody are Patsy and Tange. Both are fast on the verbal draw and bracing in their characterizations. Jay Ilagan has been showing a little more feel for comedy after a little more time with the masters. The three, together with Pugo, lend Son of My Son a charmingly improvisational air that breathes freshness into what are often boringly familiar plots.

The rest of the cast may be adequate, but they appear to suffer from a very basic seriousness in their approach to their little roles. Too much seriousness can rob performers of that amused, detached eye, that spontaneity and lightness, that feel for comedy. Come to think of it, though, they do provide a contrast to the zany company of Pugo, Patsy, and Tange, making the three stand out even more in a genre where they are the acknowledged and unquestioned masters.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Other kinds of love has man

"Impressions," TV Times, 4-10 June 1978

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Having sustained a weekly cultural show with a decidedly limited appeal for more than nine (?) years, perhaps Armida Siguion-Reyna can now be excused for deciding to go into a popular format with a self-imposed limited topical range. Mga Kuwento ng Pag-ibig is, well, mga kuwento ng pag-ibig. In its narrowest sense, such a title can only mean one thing. Dare we hope, though, that Mga Kuwento ng Pag-ibig can still take a much broader view of its subject matter and move on from the merely sentimental to the substantial?

"Ang Kuwento ng Pag-ibig ni Emma Sanchez," which we caught last week on its replay, is a little story with a delightful comeuppance for the egocentric Filipino male. Emma Sanchez, a victim of sex-role stereotyping and society's double standard, is a middle-aged wife who suffers silently through her husband's countless liaisons. But not to be outdone herself, she has her fantasies and her dreams, even if she prefers to submerge them in dutiful loyalty to her husband and to her role.

She learns to keep herself to herself, too. She and her husband drift away from each other, their sexual and emotional vocabularies and rhythms becoming, in time, more disastrously different. But she is a thoroughbred in the old sense of the word. So she keeps her lips sealed against her own pain even as she accepts each blue-and-white artifact her husband gifts her with after his every dalliance.

In the end, she is forced to buy her own release from her emotional enslavement. And she does it with the same blue-and-white pattern her husband had himself established as a part of the marriage. In the process, she touches the very core of his manhood and, with one consequential move, gives him a glimpse into the depths of her enslavement, into the essence of her pain.

Had it not been with a blue-and-white and an orchid, Emma Sanchez would have bought her happiness nevertheless, with whatever other symbol of her receding marriage she could find. The difference between Emma Sanchez and other lovelorn TV heroines is that while all the latter may cry buckets of tears in abject humiliation and suffering, or lapse into unending hysteria, or stare silently into space in gutless self-pity or incipient madness, Emma Sanchez sat down to plan out her final and telling move with reason and logic. In this sense, she joins a sisterhood of contemporary women who, although with one foot still firmly set on the traditional and entrenched values of family and society, manage to make a personal statement about their life and themselves.

Emma Sanchez, in her own way and with her own weapons, liberated herself from the total enslavement to which Filipino society had in the past doomed wives like her, choosing to make of herself neither a martyr nor another man's mistress but a woman--intelligent, confident, self-possessed.

There is, of course, a grain of artificiality in the telling of this neat little story. By its very decision to go light--almost airy--on dialogue but heavy on the pauses, the "Emma Sanchez" episode deliberately chose to go down the stilted path. Even the camera's movements, except for those shots when the box wavers and the editing becomes patently uncertain, is carefully choreographed, like the emotions Emma Sanchez chose to hide beneath the modern trappings of her existence. Of course, those modern trappings, as in any production by Armida Siguion-Reyna, are opulent, rich, contrasting in color and magnitude with the deliberate atmosphere of repression that surrounds the tight little teleplay.

But after "Emma Sanchez," what? Shall Mga Kuwento ng Pag-ibig continue to limit itself to more stories like it? Or shall the series move on to bigger stories of love--not just between man and woman--but primarily between man and life. There are a million such stories out there--of passion, lust, joie de vivre, heroism, madness, fear, poverty, loyalty, rapture, rage, death--and all of them track back to the undeniable root: man's love for life.

Mga Kuwento ng Pag-ibig, we hope, will find its way to those roots.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Our kind of drama

"Impressions," TV Times, 26 March-1 April 1978

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"And when morning came, they saw him hanging by his neck from a branch of the tree beside his house. Under this tree, he used to play as a young boy. Now, he hangs from it, dead."

Does not the imagery grip you, enrage you, swirl your whole self dangerously close to the drain of true human anguish? Of such beginnings, or such endings, are our kind of stories made. And such was the ending of the episode "Ang Pagbabalik" on the Palanca Memorial Awards Theater.

Technically, the episode was better than most, though not best by any measurement. The studio sets were too contrived and quite stiff. The sequence showing the children playing their games under the tree was too long. It could have been cut shorter but flashed onscreen more often than once, like a wispy memory that had stayed and cut grooves in Ronaldo Valdez's mind, like the other images that came on, strong and pervasive, as he anguished through the essential questions of his problematic existence.

The story is what raises "Ang Pagbabalik" above the level of most local television dramas today: the story, and the sensibility that saw it not as a cliché from which the last drop of blood must be squeezed, but as a deeply personal and human experience, replete with dignity and pride.

By the turn of the century, if and when human life--as sci-fi writers would have us believe--is put into a straitjacket and all of man's physical needs are satisfied, our writers may have to write of life in the raw, of decisions made under overpowering pressure, of causes betrayed and friendships lost because the heart was weaker than the head, of utter loneliness and utter poverty, with a liberal dose of tears and gore. From such a perspective, stories like "Ang Pagbabalik" would already have become part of a faint and collective memory, without power and without impact.

But from the view of the now, when men are still fighting the earth, the seasons, injustice, and other men--desperately--when they are still dying bent over, when they have to be straightened out to fit into their coffins, or be buried without so much as a coffin, "Ang Pagbabalik" is a story that must be told dispassionately. Fortunately, and for this we must cite the teleplay, the drama was built on a surprisingly calm and spare narrative.

There is no undue outpouring of emotions and tears, no voices raised in wailing sorrow or uncontrollable anger. There is only the hungry, insistent cry of the baby--adding its own layer to the already thick layering of tension over tension. There is only the genuine loyalty of two women, their lips sealed against their own misgivings, adding weight to the personal crisis that the dissident, on his lightning trips home from the hills, must suffer. There is only the quiet agony of the dissident himself as he looks for clues to himself within himself, in the codes that govern his family and his group. And when finally, he loses his edge and breaks, he does so with hardly a sound, hardly a protest. It is left to his wife alone to shout the one last cry of pain and protest at the cruelty of life.

If we sound unusually overcome by "Ang Pagbabalik," it is because, for once, we got the kind of story we should have been getting all along from television. From other Palanca award-winners, we expect to get more than the charming, vacuous pap that most local television dramas give us. This is why we have, more than once in the past, called for a Palanca series.

"Ang Pagbabalik" justifies our faith in such a call.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Wounds of war

"Impressions," TV Times, 26 February-4 March 1978

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Over merienda of grilled Spanish bread and kesong puti, he--a mentor and friend--talked about those years that had robbed him and his friends of their boyhood and those missions that made them men even before they had ceased to be children. There was no sadness in his voice, only a grating regret. And a certain hardness when he spoke of the enemy, still as enemy. He told us of how his mother had suffered through Fort Santiago. And of how, at the age of 11, he had thought life was to end dismally, cruelly, at the point of a Japanese saber. He had learned, he said, how it was to feel the hand of fate pointing at him, ready to snuff out his quivering, frightened breath.

I listened, sad smiles on our faces. And in my mind's eye, I saw what could only have been similar scenes: dungeons and isolation, blood flowing down a man's pained face. My father, too, got caught in the war. Fortunately, he lived through incarceration at FEU and Muntinlupa, out of the war and into "peacetime" and fatherhood. But never a word did we hear about those years, about the cruelty and the agony that we, who never went through them, could only imagine.

That night, watching Fort Santiago by coincidence, the questions came, a flurry in a blizzard of emotions. Shall we balm the wounds of war? Or shall we intensify them? Frankly, I don't know. I can take Baa Baa Black Sheep and enjoy it for what it is--a funny, enjoyable rip-off from the annals of war, tales told with tongue in cheek and one eye in perpetual wink, in precise and deliberate untruthfulness to history.

But Fort Santiago is different. Here is war, bloody war, complete with that dark strain that tracks back to those painful true-story reminiscences of violence, deceit, death. Theoretically, the problem strikes hard at the core of the human person. In resurrecting the stories of bravery and heroism, do we not also resurrect the wounds of war--the inevitable and inescapable sorrow, the loss and the anguish, the hatred? And what about the bitterness of those who lost loved ones when faced with the sheer luck of those who did not? There is so much to life, must we squeeze every ounce of blood and pain, every week, from death? And what do we answer to the solemn pieties of nuns and priests who, every day, preach godly forgiveness, even as we watch, humanly unforgiving.

Once you've got this initial dislocation straightened out--if you can--then, it is easy to see the merits of a series like Fort Santiago. For one, there is certainly a wealth of material to draw from, as long as the writer fights the temptation to do stereotypes and perseveres enough to hunt out real stories of men and women who died in or lived through Fort Santiago. For another, there is already a built-in dramatic element in the very subject of the series, a realism that should impose its own rhythm on dramatizations of the different stories. A perceptive writer can build on this rhythm and produce realistic and absorbing teleplay. Then again, the dramatization of a true-to-life story affords a show with a third eye--a knowledgeable and concerned eye that could easily spot flaws in vision, characterization, and action. Besides, isn't it high time we thanked our stars for a series that saves us from the dripping syrup of love unrequited, love gone blind, love gone away, and love always and forever?

Of course, there is also the other side of the coin. With a concept like Fort Santiago, it is easy enough to fall into the temptation of treating the show only as a war series. In last week's episode, "Apat na Dalangin ng Isang Heneral," it was obvious that the temptation did come--and in some instances, overcame--the people behind the production. Thus those overused stock shots of war scenes, including those of the Death March. Compared to the lyricism of the scene showing men's booted feet marching singly on dry and parched earth, compared to the grip of the torture scene at Fort Santiago, the stock shots had the feel of a dismembered documentary suddenly cutting into the intensity of drama. Besides, how often can such scenes be used without tiring the viewer: "Here we go again..."?

A few questions. Did Filipino soldiers fighting a war really walk through Japanese-infested territory as if they were out marching at a political rally? Were their uniforms never soiled, though admittedly crumpled? Did they sleep out in the open, unprotected, in the glaring brightness of day, as if they were just waiting to be captured? Did they all look bright-eyed and oh-so-well-fed?

And a few comments. Perhaps at the end of the show, instead of asking the subject of the story how he liked the dramatization of his experience (which is really putting him in a spot; I'd like to hear one subject reply, with all the outrage he could muster, "I did not like it one bit," though that of course will never happen), he could be asked questions pertinent to the storyline and to his Fort Santiago experience. Perhaps whoever portrays the subject of the story--in this particular episode, Bert Leroy, Jr. portrayed the role of Gen. Efigenio Navarro--should be discouraged from affecting, with unusually distracting frequency, certain mannerisms of the real-life protagonist. Those who produced the show, as well as those who watched it, would know of what I speak.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Weight, not wit

"Impressions," TV Times, 8-14 October 1978

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I harbor quite ambivalent feelings toward Kaluskos Musmos that, in a sense, probably means it has distinct possibilities as a children's show. In fact, it is a children's show. It has the largest and cutest cast of children ever assembled for a local show: children acting, children hamming it up, children speaking major lines, children just being children. In this aspect, it is undeniably the only local children's show around.

Still, one must, I submit, distinguish between a children's television show and a television show produced for children. And it is here where my ambivalent feelings spring from. I have watched at least two episodes of Kaluskos Musmos in full. One had, for its major theme, the Maria Makiling legend; the other, the Olympic Games. In both, I applauded the appeal to the children's sense of imagination and fantasy, the conscious effort to instruct as painlessly as possible. I also liked the "Ay, Mali!" portion, which I consider particularly funny. And the theme song must be really catchy, or why should my two-and-a-half-year-old sing it as if she were to the melody born?

But much of the humor is still unadulterated corn, many of them recycled Gary Lising jokes I used to hear when I was still in school and very eager to attend those shows put up by students from the boys' school across the creek. Which is to admit I am that old. Which is also to admit that humor in local television, like local television itself, has hardly moved with the years. I have watched Gary Lising since his resurrection in the local entertainment scene. I have laughed heartily at some of his one-liners. But the humor in Kaluskos Musmos, especially in the Maria Makiling episode, often fell flat because it was too heavy, too forced. Perhaps keener attention to scripting and stricter processing of gas?

Then again, television for children must, I believe, contain one basic element: respect. Respect for the child. Respect for the child's world. If we must parody everything else, let us at least respect the figures and roles that give a child's world its own semblance of substance. At the risk of being labelled a traditional mother, I would like to see the teacher figure in Kaluskos Musmos given more authority and respect. As it is, she is weak and ineffectual, incapable of asserting authority, a discouraging and colorless personality, both funny and a little sad to watch. It is a cruel commentary on teachers, and I remember many of my own with affection and gratitude.

Part of my ambivalence toward Kaluskos Musmos may spring from the ambivalence within the show itself, reflecting the conflict between the adult irreverence of the show's production staff (and which I recognize and enjoy, irreverent soul that I am) and their adult responsibility to provide children with enjoyable instruction.

The show's production staff probably hopes their kind of humor will effectively bridge the conflict. Unfortunately, humor--when forced to do a job rather than flow freely--assumes more weight than wit.

Precisely what is happening to Kaluskos Musmos.

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Almost in pain, we watched Hilda Koronel's face writhe in awkward anticipation of the tears that had to be summoned. It was the only time we were to see her cry in that second and final part of her episode on Mga Kuwento ng Pag-ibig. But why, indeed, must Hilda Koronel's face--already so intense and pure in repose--be made to contort and shed tears when, without tears, with only a glance, she can already convey all the melancholy in the world?

It is not, perhaps, the fault of the people behind Mga Kuwento ng Pag-ibig. Somebody who writes scripts for TV dramas was in the office last week and he was telling us that Filipino televiewers want--in fact, demand--all the rituals to their sorrow, down to the last sigh, the last tear, the last scream, the last drop of blood, the last breath.

Is it really an essential part of the Filipino psyche--this lust for scooping out our actors' guts to the final spoonful? Do we really want madness pounded to absolute craziness, wound bleeding to death, wretchedness pulverized to complete nothingness? All in front of us, on the screen, visually? Do we really prefer overstatement to understatement, emotional largesse to artistic control? Would we really rather destroy the poetry and rhythm of a good script in order to feed our hunger for the sight of blood oozing out of everybody else's guts?

And why? Now, this should be a good subject for a rainy-day column.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Wanted: Many kinds of madness

"Impressions," TV Times, 6-12 November 1977

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Decapitated or intact, the stories on our local TV drama series are close kin to travesty. Their pretense of seriousness is often empty of either substance or depth, and empty stories are at best ignored. How much longer can we take this? That crude tone of fable through the fiction, never really honed, is beginning to rankle to the point of disbelief or, worse, disgust.

Here are the all-too-familiar themes: love, suffering, love, suffering, love, suffering. Were we not brought up on precisely that stuff, from the days of radio soap to the nights of TV sob? Witness the storylines I caught during two weeks of viewing local television dramas.

The daughter of a jeepney driver gets raped by the operator of the vehicle her father drives and, in the ensuing marriage, is unable to find real love and understanding from husband, father, or friend. A street-corner bum brings his mistress home to wife and baby; the wife suffers in silence until, goaded to the limit, she kills her husband. Orphans maltreated by the aunt under whose care they were left by their parents suffer quietly until concerned neighbors decide to take a hand.

The ongoing local soap offers the same formula. Will Luisa ever gain the affection of her mother-in-law, retain the love of her youthful husband, and find true happiness? Abangan! in next week's installment of TV's local tear-filled blahs.

The frequency with which these same themes--and the stories woven around them-- make it to the small screen is truly annoying. There must be other themes that make the world go round. There must be other basic relationships about which man and woman can agonize--if the Filipino must always and forever agonize. There must be other concerns to spice up even just one day in our lives, apart from the ubiquitous other woman and the simpering wife. Must we forever be fed with the pap of unrequited love, with crimes of passion, with extramarital affairs?

Every day, novels and short stories are being written and published all over the world about man, about what Saul Bellow, Nobel prizewinner for literature, described as "a kind of person, one who has lived through terrible strange things, and in whom there is an observable shrinkage of prejudices, a casting off of disappointing ideologies, an ability to live with many kinds of madness, an imminent desire for certain durable human goods--truth, for instance, or freedom, or wisdom."

This kind of person, formed by the unending cycle of universal crises that began with World War I, must surely reside too, even if only in a limited degree, in the Filipino. The Filipino psyche cannot remain chained to the primary concerns of a single insular existence, can surely aspire to that "diversity of existence" that springs, not only from his need for physical and emotional love, but even more extensively from his need for emotional, mental, and spiritual fulfillment. The Filipino, we are proud to think, has imagination and ambition enough to know prejudices and understand ideologies, to experience "many kinds of madness."

Surely, the world's literary treasures are open to Filipino scriptwriters to mine, to explore, to adapt to the Filipino setting. And is not the Filipino milieu itself rich with such materials, just waiting to be translated into scenarios for television dramas?

For a while, Lino Brocka had plans of tapping literary classics for occasional materials for his weekly dramatic series. Unfortunately, Lino Brocka Presents is no more. Katha, in the past, put on teleplays adapted from Palanca Prize-winning stories. But the series was unable to keep it up.

For a start, why don't producers think of a real honest-to-goodness Palanca series? If they have to use name stars to attract viewership, then do so. The important thing is to come up with dramatic stories that satisfy and last, stories that are veritable testimonies to the complexity of human experience, not to travesties of it.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Sadly erratic

"Impressions," TV Times, 6-12 August 1978

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To us, Katha was always erratic. The series simply could not sustain a desired level of quality. One time, it puts on a drama worthy of an award-winning series. At other times, it makes do with episodes forgettable for their mediocrity or unforgettable for their absurdity.

The episode featuring Joonee Gamboa fondling the game cock of his hopes, blowing cigarette smoke into its feathers, and educating Roderick Paulate in the finer aspects of cockfighting, while Lorli Villanueva tends the kitchen sink and dining table, stands out as a beautiful homage to natural, relaxed acting and engrossing storyline, both of which we do not see often on the small screen.

But much earlier--perhaps a whole year earlier--we watched Laurice Guillen suffer through a senseless role. Up to now, we still cannot forget nor forgive the stupidity of it all. A self-sufficient young woman able to support her family must certainly have amassed enough worldly wisdom to realize that no man is worth giving up one's freedom for, literally. Today's woman does not have to go to jail to avenge her humiliation in the hands of a man. There are more ways of making a man pay than by killing him.

We seem to remember one Katha(?) episode where Cherie Gil was sadly miscast. However much she tried to look like a true-blue lavandera, she was too unmistakably genteel, higher-born than her character, convent-school sprung, TV- and cinema-matured, to come across credibly as a half-educated child of the slums. The problem there was that role and performer did not jell. As a result, the story--for all its poignancy--failed to hit the gut.

So, tell me--a friend asks--what you think of the episode "Gabi Na...Nasaan si Junior?" last week on its replay. Plausible, though not developed well enough to be probable. It is hard for us to accept that the wife of a colonel, whether with the AFP or the INP, would be as naive as Perla Bautista was made out to be in the early part of the story, or as gullible as she was later.

Women in the armed forces community who are caught in the mahjong syndrome want to get caught in it; they are not lured into it from an earlier ignorance about its addicting qualities. Much has been written and even more must have been read about the mahjong quorum, in and out of the military, surely making the mahjong-addicted woman a well-known streotype. Now, tell me, is it then believable that the wife of a colonel would not know about mahjong?

Of course, that is neither here nor there--a contention open to query. Anybody who thinks a colonel's wife can believe that she plays mahjong day in and day out only to seek some diversion from her humdrum existence can go on thinking so. Everyone is entitled to his own delusions.

What we do not feel up to leaving open is the last scene: that should have been tightly edited. Dripping as it was with intense emotion, it should not have been allowed to dissipate into soppy sentiment. The super-imposed flashbacks of both father and mother weaken the impact of the scene. And by allowing Perla Bautista to continue her crying spell, the drama is lessened, spread over, thinned out. A scene must be choreographed according to a certain rhythm of movement, like poetry. One word more, one comma less--an extra sob, an added gesture--and the scene falls flat, the chains in the link between screen and viewer easing up, relaxing. The surfeit of anything--whether on stage, film, or TV--often produces a reaction in many viewers other than what a scene intends to draw. Have not a good many sob scenes elicited more guffaw than tears?

How would we have wanted that scene to end? Probably with Perla Bautista's first sob, followed by a freezing of the frame, music, and credits. Certainly not with her last tear. And we would have cut out the last spoken line--the title line, voiced by Ms. Bautista like the dawning line of madness. It is just too much.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Equal time for equal partners

This is an ideal that has never worked--not in the United States, and certainly not in the Philippines. The definition alone of "equal" will provoke a long and interesting discussion, even today.

As for the so-called "equal partners," there will always be partners more equal than others. Even in yesterday's communist countries, this reality was respected, at the same time that each partner tried everything in his power to dip the scale in his favor or, failing that, push the more equal out of the scene.

But never was the principle as frequently placed under the microscope as during the chaotic years of the Vietnam War. The emotions that exploded during the period made the dissection of "equal time"truly a very noisy, prolonged, and contentious one.

"Impressions," TV Times, 19-25 March 1978

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The air was electric with the heat of a summer night and the excitement of a brittle wait. The images that flickered from the small screen into our darkened room had neither the memorability of drama nor the vitality of history. It was the daily journalistic wrap-up on News Today, a spare and rather middling close to a spare and rather middling half hour of the day's news on television.

But the news was, after all, not the main event for the night, not the reason for our anxious and early drive home. The reason was to come after the newscast, in the special edition of Face the Nation, which must have fazed Metro Manila at least. It was to give them their first media sight in five years of a candidate running for the Interim Batasang Pambansa while in detention at Fort Bonifacio.

As it was, the 90-minute program, when it did come, was a smooth, competent television job. There was no technical brilliance in its production, nor was any expected. Television, in special instances, is often overcome by the sheer intensity of the situation in which it finds itself. Which reminds me of the particular political controversy US television confronted in 1970.

Sometime in January of that year, then US President Richard Nixon requested all four American networks for television prime time. He went on air at 9 p.m. EST, spoke for 10 minutes and, in full view of all Americans who happened to have their television sets on at the time, whatever the channel, vetoed a highly controversial bill that had passed an opposition-dominated US Congress.

In immediate response to the exercise of the presidential prerogative, congressional leaders hostile to the Nixon stand on the bill in question asked the networks for equal time to answer. They did not get that time.

In the course of his ill-starred administration, Nixon was to use the same prerogative--and prove himself to be very adept at it--many more times, most frequently during the height of the Vietnam War.

Congress, naturally, felt itself compelled to strike a balance somehow. In a statement entitled "Equal Time for Equal Partners," then US Senator William Fulbright wrote: "Unfortunately, Congress is at a great disadvantage in the war powers debate, as it is in discussing most issues, because the Executive has a near monopoly on effective access to the public attention. The President can command a national television audience to hear his views on controversial matters at prime time, on short notice, at whatever length he chooses, and at no expense to the federal government or to his party ... Communication is power and exclusive access to it is a dangerous unchecked power." Fulbright's recommendation was legislation that "might require the networks to provide broadcast time to the President whenever he wishes it and might give the same right to Congress."

Outside Congress, the American people were divided on the issue of "equal time." A professor at the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication, analyzing 103 hours and 44 minutes of ABC newscasts in 1969 and concentrating on 16 major news categories, found that: 1) news tending to support the administration viewpoint totaled 14 hours and 35 minutes; 2) news tending to take the opposite view totaled 9 hours and 35 minutes; and 3) neutral news totaled 13 hours and 37 minutes. Administration spokesmen enjoyed a 4-1 margin over the opposition as far as exposure of faces and words was concerned. Elmer Lower, president of ABC News, who had commissioned the study, admitted that "any sitting administration enjoys such an advantage."

Caught in the middle of it all, the networks presented alternate proposals. Don Hewitt, then executive producer of CBS's 60 Minutes, suggested that the president, except in emergency situations, should be telecast by a single network on a revolving basis. Equal time would then be given to opposing viewpoints immediately after, and automatically. The other networks would billboard the president's appearances but would offer alternate programming when he was on the air. Other proposals were received from the other networks, purporting to turn over air time for entities to use or misuse, increasing the time allotments for news and public affairs operations, or charging the Federal Communications Commission with full authority to decide the issue.

More than anything else, it was perhaps US Television which felt its character deeply challenged during that time. There was a president using the medium with great success and great impunity, a Congress exacting the same right, individual politicians expecting to get air time as long as they have money, the FCC trying hard to be fair above the Fairness Doctrine, and the American people demanding that the networks give them the reassurance that their journalistic functions were not susceptible to any inside or outside pressures--political, economic, or social.

Unfortunately, according to the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Survey of Broadcast Journalism, "the day-to-day performance of the networks and individual broadcasters has not always given this reassurance."

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Why can't local TV stations give us a good story?

"Impressions," TV Times, 12-18 March 1978

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Now a couple of years removed from active participation in the television industry (Author's note: This was written, as you can see above, in 1978. I left television work in 1976.), I could not help but listen with both sympathy and amusement as Ma-an Hontiveros, producer and co-host of Ms.Ellaneous, and Freddie Infante of Network Marketing Corp.talked eloquently and passionately about the problems of the industry. The three of us found ourselves sharing the front table at a seminar on the communication arts and chewing on the same morsel: the Philippine television industry.

The realities, the "givens" of the industry, it seems, have not changed, much less improved, in the two years since I left it. Freddie said it was all a question of "money" (though Channel 7, we understand, should be the last to complain about money these days). Ma-an sounded off with her usual persuasiveness on the problems of independent producers: low ratings, ultimatums from management to reformat or else, inadequate technical facilities, the desirability of government subsidy, the reluctance of advertisers, the need to compromise standards in order to stay on the air.

These were the old complaints and I heard them all long ago, from network executives who sanctimoniously lectured from their plush swivel chairs and from production assistants who sweated it out on all-night stands in studios and editing rooms.

Unfortunately, however much I may sympathize with them, many of the people in the industry will still have to answer for the poor content of local television. Not the form, sometimes not even the format. The content. I can excuse technical incompetence for a time as unavoidable while Filipino technologists take the time to learn their craft or buy their cameras. But I cannot excuse shallow plots and infantile storylines.

It certainly should not cost too much money--and the station's stockholders should not lose much, either--to look for young, new, fresh talents who write well, are less tired and more energetic. My main quarrel, after all, is still with the quality of the stories--rather than the quality of the technology--that are shoved through the TV tubes by writers who should probably be given a long vacation.

Why are our local dramas not only spineless but also stupid? Why can producers not choose for dramatization original storylines that deal with more than soupy and syrupy tales of love and longing? And if we cannot get original storylines, we shall surely not mind adaptations. The great storehouse of world literature exists precisely for us all to enjoy. Why shouldn't local television mine it? Besides, there is Philippine history. Television, if it will only take on the challenge, can make our country's history live and breathe for this generation through dramatizations that will truly touch the minds and hearts of Filipino televiewers.

To reason out that the mass audience will turn off when presented with a good story is judging the case before it has been tried. The viewers who really wait to watch Nora Aunor will watch Nora Aunor, whether the story is good or bad. So why not give them a good story?

What saddens me particularly is why, if producers like Armida Siguion-Reyna with her Aawitan Kita and Ma-an Hontiveros with her Ms.Ellaneous can apply intense dedication and enormous energies to their productions and come up, week after week, with shows that exhibit intelligent care and concern for the sensibilities of the viewing audience, we cannot seem to expect the same from all other producers who make a living from television. If the Palanca Memorial Awards Theater and Fort Santiago can decide to risk oblivion by coming up with a creditable monthly rather than pull in the gravy with a bad weekly, why should network managers not demand that all local dramatic productions exhibit at least narrative strength, or not be exhibited at all?

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Fresh comedy, absurd frugality

"Impressions," TV Times, 12-18 February 1978

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If you think every television sitcom to come after John & Marsha must necessarily be a cliché, you can think again. Here comes Pete Matipid, which is really two keys above the ill-starred Asiong Aksaya. Part of the reason is because Pete comes closest to all our departed ancestors' penny-pinching hearts. The other part? Because Pete seems so much more considerate of our tube-anesthetized nerves.

Both romantic and pragmatic, a disarming comic who lives more frugally than the most Ilocano of us all, the character of Pete offers both comedy and sock. You can hear the canned laughter all the way from the sound booth, but you can also feel the sharp point of the mockery all the way to the tips of your manicured nails. You can almost hear Pete warning you that they shall surely up the cost of a hand-and-foot job even at the crummiest beauty parlor, and that's not even counting the tip.

In this buoyant comedy, Pete comes out a true absurdity, his obsession excessive, stupid, laughable. I can do a whole paper on the contrast between content and form here, but that is another story. What I feel is a gurgle of amusement rising up in my snobbish soul when I see the parade of bottles filled with the odds and ends of existence stacked above and inside Pete's cabinets. That is, until it strikes me, a few minutes after, that indeed, here is an original, a character, if you wish, but a brave one. Holding on to his convictions, however absurd, he makes a statement with his every move. He knocks your windpipes off, then socks you right where you can feel it--your wallet and its dwindling contents.

Sometime or other, you would surely wish you can gather up the excesses and luxuries of your lifetyle like a carpet sweeper and recycle them as Pete Matipid does. Indeed, some of the fascination of the show comes from the fact that it does not dislocate you but situates you instead against your backdrop and adds a new depth--a possibility--to that backdrop. Within the givens of your existence, depending on your lifestyle, it is surely possible to find a million and one ways to adopt Pete Matipid's philosophy.

It is a challenge, anyway, whether you accept it or not. Give me 20 specific ways by which you can save a little tonight: electricity, food, water, time, energy, yourself. And don't dismiss it all as part hype, part junk, part propaganda. You might be losing out on a signature lifestyle. Besides, were not some fortunes built on junk and is not every fashionable hang-up once the subject of conscious and sustained propaganda? Brown sugar, anyone?

What is, of course, plain and obvious now even to those who have yet to feel the tug of a pervasive sensibility (and a necessary one these days, considering how expensive living can be) is that Chiquito is the born comedian.

As Pete Matipid, he is every inch a natural. Shorn of the song-and-dance routine and the oiled smoothness that make many of his movie performances absolute no-nos, Chiquito comes out as a refreshingly nutty TV character, an improvement over some of the medium's still embarrassingly self-conscious performers. Of course, the possibility is always there that, given the regimen of a weekly show, Chiquito's performance may fall into a tiresome pattern, sacrificing competence for expediency. We feel that he will not, however, until and unless everybody else in the production staff does--the script and story people especially and first. Did not John & Marsha reek of a similar disease before its timely, even delayed, demise?

This is perhaps where Pete Matipid also proves itself a mite more respectful of its audience. Please, NO scriptwriter with seemingly absolute rights to the series. Instead, why don't you--the viewer--contribute your own storyline? It may come out more expensive for the production's bottom line, but it's certainly more democratic. And more diverse and varied. Which may mean a more interesting series, less chance of falling back on the same tired storylines and the same tiring gags week after week. Let us hope so, anyway.

A series like Pete Matipid should not be allowed to die from sheer boredom. It should at least live to a ripe, full season.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

What do we expect from a comedy?

"Impressions," TV Times, 21-27 August 1977

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Naturally, one does not expect the hard and bitter stuff of life from comedy. Not the critical dilemmas, the profound human miseries, the apocalyptic visions, the tragic tales of love and despair. Certainly not soul-searching journeys through the severe landscapes of the heart and the mind.

But we do expect some things from comedy. A certain verve, a fullness of flavor, a flamboyance, a vitality, a robustness. Laughter welling from the deep innards of our beings like a gas strike--spontaneous, iridescent, sparkling. Humor tweaking us behind the ears and socking it to us where it hurts: in this case, our overgrown middle-class bellies.

Unlike tearjerkers, which can excusably plead that all is part of the human angst, comedies cannot allow too many disturbing notes of self-evident weariness to escape from their tight craftsmanship. Jokes must crackle with the crispness of new bank notes. Humor must strike the viewer like lightning before an unexpected storm. Irony--ah, but irony must always be present in comedy, or the comedy loses its sting--must be as skillfully dressed as the perfect bait.

Of performers in a comedy, we expect much. Overacting or deadpan, combative or reactive, a performer in a comedy show must be precise in his timing, fastidious in his intonation, and assured in his delivery.

While a performer in a serious dramatic play may confidently place the total value of his whole performance on the general emotional aura that he can cultivate around his role, the performer in a comedy show must ensure the impact of almost every scene in which he moves and almost every dialogue in which he participates. Otherwise, he loses his hold on the magic of memory and he becomes only one faceless player in a forgettable band.

After playing their roles week in and week out over television, the performers in the local comedy show Baltic & Co. cannot remain faceless, of course. Yet, why do most of them seem so forgettable? And why do most of their characterizations seem as stale as yesterday's pan de sal? We often get the distinct feeling, watching the show, that many of the performers have been pipelined by the talent machine straight into the TV screen, without logic or reason.

When a television performer fails, it is because his preparation is inadequate. Minimal talent, or complete lack of it. Asinine script, or again, the lack of a script. Most television comedy shows start with only a thin storyline and nothing else to leaven it. The result, inevitably, is a lumpy plot that drags along painfully like a bum leg.

The more experienced performers, to their credit, sometimes attempt to boost the sagging plot with a generous sprinkling of the day's accepted street-corner jokes and cliches. Unfortunately, such jokes and cliches--long-drawn-out and essentially humorless at times--only result in dull and boring sequences that lack teeth. Lacking teeth, comedy degenerates into tragedy--for the viewer, for the performer, for the show.

Or shall we excuse it all as comedy, Pinoy-style?

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Insulting procession of wifely woes

"Impressions," TV Times, 7-13 August 1977

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Three housewives. Each with a tale to tell. Who will tell it best? The stout wife with a philandering husband? The suffering mother whose daughter was defiled and insulted? The grieving widow whose husband died in some far-off province, far away from her?

A few years ago, a similar format reached radio listeners under the program title Reyna ng Vicks. Today, the format gets to TV viewers under the title Sapagka't Kami'y mga Misis Lamang .

Sapagka't, perhaps due to the sobriety of the times, is a quieter version of the earlier Reyna. There is hardly any needling of the storytellers. There is greater effort to lessen the tears, quicken the pace, lighten the mood. There is less appeal to the listener's lachrymal glands and more respect for the participants.

But will there ever be dignity in the public narration of a person's most intense and intimate experience? Will the wife and her philandering husband reach a higher level of understanding because the woman told all listening ears an hour before noon how she found out about her husband's wandering ways? Will the daughter who was defiled and insulted thank her mother for having made her an instant celebrity in her neighborhood and school? And will the husband return for a last, loving kiss from the grave because his widow showed how bereaved she was--over nationwide television?

If I sound cruel and unmoved by the procession of wifely woes, it is because I believe there is nothing dignified in narrating a supposedly deeply felt personal experience to an impersonal audience that is unknown and unquantifiable to the narrator. The effort, when seen over television, only appears amusing, sometimes even downright ridiculous.

Witness the reaction in one TV household which was forced to watch Sapagka't. The matriarch of the family was offended by the lack of discretion and "self-respect" of the participants. The young granddaughter spewed a barrage of insulting asides in equal pace with the storytellers' narratives. The maids were laughing their heads off over what were supposed to be other women's blood, sweat, and tears.

Surprised? Why should we be? There is a brittle barrier between the ridiculous and the sublime. And it is often the way we handle our vulnerability in the face of personal adversity that determines when that barrier will crack. In dogged tales of fortitude and martyrdom, there are great human lessons to be learned and unusual emotional depths to be plumbed. The people behind Sapagka't, if they wish the viewer to learn the lessons and plumb the depths, must think of a different way of presenting such tales on television.

I also suggest that they be more selective in the choice of stories and storytellers. Perhaps even think of a new title and a new format. After all, are there no other woes for women but philandering or dying husbands and wronged or abusive children? Do women feel no problems more serious than those which come to them in their roles as submissive wives and long-suffering mothers? Should a woman's other concerns and other relationships be shunted aside completely? Are women only extensions of their husbands and children?

And why must we allow the use of television to preserve the myth that women through the ages are born to suffer, whether they choose to or not? Is this not the ultimate insult to women and womanhood?

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

What is Filipino? What is not?

"Impressions," TV Times, 5-11 December 1977

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More than a decade ago, it was fashionable to talk in terms of a "Filipino identity." Social scientists and academicians put on pained expressions on their faces and babbled endlessly about how schizophrenic the Filipino people were, and how a nation in pursuit of growth must first locate its roots and limn its spirits.

Thus began a long, searching period in our history when to speak of anything nationally relevant was to trace an agonizingly long line all the way back to those routes and bridges that made Asia, ages before us, one whole big land mass.

The search, it seems, is never really over. Every aspect of human life is open to the question of what is truly and really Filipino. So, we come up with music a la Rico J., or lyrics by Tinio to music in the can, or the fetchingly quaint airs resurrected by Armida Siguion-Reyna from some old lola's musical baul, or the catchy new tunes with soulful lyrics that sell as theme music for today's cinematic output. And everybody asks: Which is Filipino, and which is put-on?

Or take Filipino cinema, with all its inadequacies, its failures, its pretensions, its imitations. How does one draw the line between what is native and what is natural, and does one really have to go back to (taking a much-abused example) the time when Rogelio de la Rosa romanced Carmen Rosales under the mango tree? Is it possible to get the obscurity and artiness out of Bernal's Nunal sa Tubig, marry it to the lucidity of Brocka's Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag and Cervantes's Sakada--and all other commendable qualities of other supposedly good cinematic efforts in the past two years or so--to distill the essence of the Filipino film?

And comedy. Filipino humor, if you please. Shall we look down our convent-bred noses at the loud, deliberately off-color, vociferously sexual jokes one hears out in the slums, or even in the stage shows out there in the provinces? But even standoffish, elegant England has its bawdy common joints where reigns supreme robust, earthy British humor. And we have not heard one Englishman disown both joints and humor.

Or shall we reject the American one-liner, simply because it is American, therefore strange, therefore un-Filipino? Shall we go down the social ladder, categorize the various forms and styles of Filipino humor, and consolidate them all into an amalgam that, when analyzed, can finally pass as the essence of what makes the Filipino laugh?

For an amalgam, it certainly will be. Anything that makes you laugh and/or cry, anything that you admire, treasure, loathe, detest, must draw from as wide a frame of reference as possible. A young nation, a dislocated culture, a colonized people (one must not escape history, only purify it) must necessarily open wide its doors and refine only after it has tried and experienced.

To be righteously exclusive at any one stage of development is to be suffocatingly jejune. It is also to die.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column