I second the motion!

Ang Sarsuwela ay isang dulang may kantahan at sayawan, na mayroong isa hanggang limang kabanata, at nagpapakita ng mga sitwasyon ng Pilipino na may kinalaman sa mga kwento ng pag-ibig at kontemporaryong isyu. Ito rin ay tinatawag na zarzuela, sarsuela, dulang inawitan, dulang hinonihan, drama-lirico at operetta. (WikiFilipino)

Found this article (below) by Amelia Lapena-Bonifacio in Inquirer's Lifestyle pages yesterday. I think Lola Amel's proposal that they make the Metropolitan Theater a Zarzuela Theater and Museum is a very good idea! This way, we can bring back the theater form for today's audiences. After all, wasn't the zarzuela festival in UP last February successful?

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Why not a Met Zarzuela Theater and Museum?
By Amelia Lapena-Bonifacio

MANILA, Philippines – As a follow-up to your news item on the rehabilitation of the Metropolitan Theater, I suggest that the Met be renamed the Metropolitan Zarzuela Theater and Museum. This would make the Met more unique and meaningful because it would honor a theater genre which was used by our forefathers in their struggle for independence—the only theater in the long history of dramatic art that used theater so cleverly and strategically in the fight for freedom of Asia’s first republic.

The first floor of the theater could be lined with glass cases that would exhibit manuscripts and musical sheets, books, letters, costumes, props, sets, etc. I am sure families keeping these items across the land would be only too happy to donate them (permanently or periodically) for the exhibit.

...

I hope my suggestion will be taken seriously so that our school children could be properly educated about a very important phase of our theater history and about theatrical events unique only to the Philippines. And as the Japanese and tourists go to the Noh Theatres and Kabuki theaters of Japan, Filipinos and tourists would go to the Metropolitan Zarzuela Theater and Museum in order to watch zarzuela and see the exhibits of zarzuela items and of, I hope, a surviving zarzuela telon or set.

For the money and labor still to be spent, we may as well work for a meaningful Metropolitan Theater—set apart from all existing theaters in the country and the whole world!

Read the whole article here.

On the ship to America

Around a century ago, the place to be for impoverished Europeans was America. And so many of them sold all their belongings to buy tickets to board the ship that would take them there--never mind that stepping on the ship didn't equate to living in America eventually.

Ellis Island in New York was the gateway--which explains why the famed Statue of Liberty turned out to be such an icon. Once you see Lady Liberty, you know you're in America--and if you were one of those going to America for a better life, imagine what the statue would have meant to you.

Which brings to mind one unforgettable movie I saw a few months ago. It's called The Legend of 1900. It's a film directed by Giuseppe Tornatore (the film genius behind Cinema Paradiso!). In the film, a genius pianist called 1900 (played by Tim Roth) was born in a ship--one of those that brought Europeans to the States--and practically lived his whole life on the ship, while it went back and forth across the ocean. He didn't have a birth certificate and no records at all--no citizenship, no IDs, none of those tax things we work to submit on time every April...which is why the movie is called a "Legend."


So here was a guy who, in the midst of all that rush and urgency to get from point A to point B, was staying where he was. He stepped out of the ship once, but he went back in not 30 minutes on stable ground. And all his friends, who knew so well he'd make it big in America (because he's a genius pianist), were just shocked.

In one of the last scenes, 1900 tells his best friend Max why he stepped right back in for another voyage the very day he decided to finally leave the ship. 1900 tries to describe the ENORMITY of it all:

Take piano: keys begin, keys end. You know there are 88 of them. Nobody can tell you any different. They are not infinite. You're infinite... And on those keys, the music that you can make... is infinite. I like that. That I can live by...

You rolled out in front of me a keyboard of millions of keys, millions and billions of keys that never end. And that's the truth Max, that they never end. That keyboard is infinite... and if that keyboard is infinite, then on that keyboard there is no music you can play. You're sitting on the wrong bench... That is God's piano.

Christ, did you... did you see the streets, just the streets? There were thousands of them! Then how you do it down there, how do you choose just one... one woman, one house, one landscape to look at, one way to die...? Land? Land is a ship too big for me, it's a woman too beautiful, it's a voyage too long, perfume too strong... [quotes from imdb.com]

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Too...emo, perhaps? But true enough, in life, there are so many choices people can make. To choose the right one, one needs some sort of limitation--a way to discriminate bad choices from good. Whether it's morality or religion, discipline or just simple rules, guides simplify our life by narrowing our choices.

Country music in Cubao

One thing I notice about jeepneys that travel the Cubao-Rosario route is that all of them have custom-built sound systems with stereos that could make the normal street noise mute by overpowering. You could feel the music shaking the whole metal box of a vehicle; it makes it hard to tell whether your heartbeat is getting louder or it's just the drum beats, uh, beating.

Usually, the jeepneys are tuned in to Love Radio 90.7, which is ideally not the station to listen to FULL BLAST! if you should listen to it at all. There are those annoying dance mixes made with children's play songs, movie quips, DJ quips and beauty contest blunders. (Yes, they play those over the radio too.)

Anyway, because of these jeepneys, you can guess how much noisier traveling along Aurora Boulevard could be in the Cubao area. It's a my-radio-is-louder road war--no driver even cares about how slow the traffic gets. This is another way of saying you're not only compelled to sit through Saging Lang Ang May Puso (Only Bananas Have a Heart), you're also left with no choice but to listen to the whole dance mix word for word.

In this way, I must say I was luckier yesterday when I caught a jeepney that wasn't tuned in to Love, even if it was playing country music. I have nothing against country music; all I thought was how odd it was to hear country in the middle of comedy-dance-music-playing Cubao. Because of the obligatory amplified to the mega-decibel music, I heard every word of every country song (and I think they were all from a Kenny Rogers CD). This is the first time I heard the song The Last Ten Years (Superman), which I think is a song dedicated to Christopher Reeve:

The Last Ten Years (Superman)

Oh, the last ten years, it's been quite trip
Over thirty-six-hundred spins around without a cosmic slip
But within the realm of our atmosphere
We're 'bout as out of whack as we've ever been in a million years
We watched the Y2K scare in a panic
An' we watched as time proved Nostrodamus wrong
An' we watched as Mother Nature shook the planet
An' cellular replaced the telephone
We lost Charlie Brown, Ray Charles an' Johnny Cash
We even lost Superman, mhm.

Well, the last ten years, look at the hills we've climbed
The best golfer's black, the best rapper's white an' it's about damn time
But we best beware, there's a brand new fight, you see
An' I hate to say we might be our own worst enemy
We watched Oklahoma sifting through the damage
An' we watched a US President get caught
We watched shareholders watch their savings vanish
We all cried when we watched those towers fall
We lost Minnie Pearl, Ron Reagan and Sam Ahan
We even lost Superman, mhm.

Expensive gas an' free downloads
The dot-com boom, an' reality shows
What's gonna happen next is anybody's guess
Satellite radio and hybrid cars
Hand-held computers an' a trip to Mars
It's all become a part of who we are
In the last ten years.

In the last ten years
We lost George Harrison, John Paul and June Carter-Cash
Hell, we even lost Superman
Gonna miss you. Chris...

It's not a bad song--it's full of heart. It's very American, with references to what has been loved and idolized in the years past. But the message of the song is universal. By showing what has happened, the song (indirectly) tells the listener that though "What's gonna happen next is anybody's guess," ultimately, we decide what we become.

Ang di tumingin sa pinanggalingan
Di makararating sa paroroonan.
-Filipino proverb

Here's a sign that nobody reads anymore

I've never seen both movies for Around the world in 80 days, which is a shame, but looking around the Net, I figured that the movies are popular enough they don't need my patronage. Here's what Jackie Chan had to say in an interview for IGN:

"I'd never seen the book. I'd only seen the movie. Years ago. At that time, just wow... It's a great movie. And after that, [I] just forgot it. But in my mind, Around the World in 80 Days, no matter when you see the balloon, you just think about Around the World in 80 Days."

The first movie must've been great--it did win an Oscar--but I kept wondering, what balloon? Did I miss something in the book? The last time I read it was October of last year, so it's either the balloon configured so little in the book or it was not there at all.

If you think about it, there are so many things more interesting in the book than the idea of a balloon. It was perfect timing also for me to read the book back then: I was on a trip across the US, which I haven't done since the 90s. I can't help marvel at how fast we travel nowadays: planes cut travel time significantly short. In the book, Phileas Fogg and Passepartout travel in trains, ships, pulled sleds, fishing boats...even on elephants! It's an adventure story specially suited for the period it was written for. If you're sensitive enough, you'll notice the author's (for lack of better word) biases--or as academics would call it, "Orientalism"--by the time they get to India, Hong Kong, Japan...and even the US had a certain face.

The bet and the coincidence of Fogg's hasty "escape" with a big robbery in a bank added a challenge to the already difficult 80-day trip around the world. The detective Fix is such a seriously determined character, it makes him amusing--especially since we're all aware that Fogg is innocent. This can say something about the human nature as well--people stop at nothing more often when they know they're going to get something in return.

It's not only nonfiction books that teach; fiction can tell you a lot about a period in time--if it's fantasy fiction, you can read between the lines and discover a way of thought. (Wasn't Lord of the Rings written during WWII?) Though fiction gives imaginary happenings, places, and people, the themes, ideas, and lessons it imparts are as true as history itself--inevitably subjective, but true nonetheless.

Scrapbook-books

Been interested in one of these -Ology books since they came out with the Wizardology, Dragonology and Piratology ones (and right on time too--they appeared just when the Potter craze and Pirates of the Caribbean craze hit the theaters), but I never really got my hands on one until my uncle offered to buy it for me. We chose Egyptology because my sister's name is Isis, so obviously, Egypt it is.

This is probably the truest "science" among the lot, considering it's about actual history and archeological findings. What I liked about it is it's scrapbook-style layout. It reminded me of one of those activities I would do in high school; ones requiring us to make a full-blown fashion magazine using science concepts as articles, or those Balagtas-related literary terms presented in a medical pamphlet format.

This book is actually a fact book meticulously rearranged to follow a narrative about a woman amateur explorer on the lookout for Osiris' lost tomb. Emily Sands, the "author" of the scrapbook, travels with her co-explorers around Egypt. She compiles bits and pieces of their trip, from "actual" drawings of the marketplaces, modes of travel and small problems that arose during their journey, to "actual" letters she sent and received, tokens and boardgame instructions. She also writes down everything she learned from scholars and experts she met along the way.

No ending spoilers here, though. The book is a fun, relaxing read. It's really good to give to kids who have short attention spans, enjoy art and history. Though the last is probably not too important; the book might just be the missing piece to spark an interest in history, for all we know. I used to fail all my history classes, but, for someone who hated dates and funny names, I had quite a number of Egypt-related books listed in my grade school library card.