Back in Print

Up to this point in my time in the Philippines, I think you can consider this story from Seattle Weekly to be my magnum opus on the PBA and imports. It's about "Mr. Everything" Rosell Ellis, winner of the PBA's Best Import award last conference and the man who's about 40 percent responsible for Alaska's 2007 Fiesta Conference title (that's a pretty large share when you think of all the other guys on the team and the coaching staff). Ellis is a great storyteller and he's had a very impressive overseas career, which has also led him to some hilarious situations around the world. I hope people enjoy reading about him as much as I enjoyed spending time with him.

You Tube Highlights

I have about an hour to blow before playing basketball -- I try to arrive at the Barangay around 10:30 a.m., when it's officially too hot for any sane individual to be running and jumping, juking and jiving, etc. -- and that's not enough time to do any real writing, so here I am!

Although I have no demographic information about the Manilla V. audience, only a few hints from comments left by readers (most of which I suspect are Pessoa-like heteronyms created by my father), I'm pretty sure that most of you are Americans or non-Filipinos. That may be changing slightly, but how many Pinoys really need to read about basketball and life in the Philippines? So, in the name of exposing the world at large to some of the finest examples of local culture, I figured a little tour of Philippines-related YouTube videos would be instructive.

The country has enjoyed a bump in Internet popularity in recent months, mostly thanks to some zany YouTube videos that caught the eye of millions of people online and eventually garnered international media attention.

The valedictorian of this group are the dancing prisoners from the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center. They do these giant, North Korean Mass Game-style synchronized dances of songs like "YMCA," the Black Eyed Peas' "Bebot" and my favorite, an innuendo-laced Tagalog song called "Jumbo Hot Dog" by the Masculados. Of course, their most famous performance is a near exact reproduction of the dance moves in Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video, which has been viewed more than 9 million times. I'm going to embed a medley they performed in front of the Cebu provincial Capitol in August. Once you view one of their videos YouTube will throw up links to all the others with hardly any prodding. It's impressive and hilarious stuff, but one or two videos is enough for most viewers.



Then there's the Weng Weng Rap! Who was Weng Weng? Thanks to Andrew Leavold, an Australian documentary filmmaker who has devoted years to researching the 2-foot-9 actor's life (keep up the good fight, bro. You're not the only one obsessed with the minutiae of Philippine culture!) and who has also written this ridiculously thorough biography of Weng Weng on IMDB, we know that Weng Weng starred in a handful of spy/action spoof films, two of which are available through Netflix. The obvious and sole gimmick of these films is that the shortest lead actor in the history of film was out there kicking ass and taking names. My favorite piece of Weng Weng trivia is this wickedly ironic tidbit: His first hit, "For Yu'r Height Only," was the only film from Imelda Marcos' uber-notorious 1981 Manila International Film Festival to be picked up for major distribution. Instead of showcasing the best of Philippine talent and culture, Imelda exported a freak show, which, in some ways seems appropriate. Weng Weng, who died in 1992, has been reborn on the popular YouTube video "Weng Weng Rap," which was recently highlighted by Will Ferrell on Funny or Die. I think we can all agree that the "tiny human being" line takes the cake.



Let's keep the Little People theme going and look at another clip, "Bayot Basketball," which points the spotlight at an exhibition game that has taken the Visayas by storm over the past few years, Aksyon Radyo Cebu's Unano-Bading Showdown. The game pits midgets (unano) against gays ("bading" in Tagalog and "bayot" in Visaya) in a choreographed, Harlem Globetrotters-style game. I have been to this game, and let me say, as a fan of lowbrow entertainment, this stretched me to my limits. I heard from Peace Corps Volunteers in Cebu that this video was shot by an American friend of a PCV who was vacationing in the Philippines. That explains the goofy commentary and intertitles, which just drip with mean-spirited superiority complex. Then again, foreigners can live here for years and never know better, so I won't make too many excuses for the videographer. It might be hard for some to watch, but there's no point in denying the footage exists, so here it is.



We have time for one more: Bakekang. Americans who watch Ugly Better may have some understanding of the Telenovela, but that show is really novela-lite. Multiply the love triangles by 10, square the tear-filled reaction shots and remove any sense of responsible broadcasting, and you have the straight dope. I would need a crack team of intellectuals, including Henry Louis Gates, Toni Morrison, UP Anthropologist Michael Tan and Cornel West to parse the multi-layered racism and post-colonial decay in this clip, but man, the acting is FANTASTIC.

Five-figure discount

Oh snap! I went to bed last night, woke up and saw that this Web site has had more than 10,000 hits since May 2007! Sarap-buhay naman! How sweet it is. I especially want to thank my father, who I'm guessing is personally responsible for about 8,000 of those hits. You make me look good, pops!

NBA names

Remember my post about PBA names from a couple weeks ago? They're compiling a list of great NBA names over at Seattle Weekly. I had to nominate Priest Lauderdale. How could my favorite 7-4 man-mammoth get overlooked like that? I think this means we need to do a list of PBA import names soon. Watch out Cisco Oliver and Pig Miller, I'm coming for you.

Opening up the vault

I'm busy writing some other stuff but don't want to completely neglect the blog, as I often do. I came across this short essay about Philippine basketball's eternal conundrum: Why are Filipinos so devoted to basketball? I mention some of the oft-repeated theories, but basically conclude that there's no definitive answer, they're all true in varying degrees. On top of that, there's something else. You can feel it, like invisible glue that holds it all together, but for the time being it eludes description, and you just leave it for what it is: basketball is a part of Filipinos' lives in a way that's different from any other nationality.


Basketball and Culture (inspired, in part, by Nick Joaquin's History and Culture)

Ask a Filipino why he eats menudo and he’ll probably look at you funny. What do you mean, “why?” It’s a part of his culture. Filipinos have been eating it for generations. There’s nothing to question.

Ask why he plays basketball and you’ll get the same look. After months of searching for the answer to why Filipinos love the sport so much, I’ve become convinced that the lack of a precise explanation is the best indicator of how deeply basketball is ingrained in Philippine culture.

The question is as much a riddle to the elder statesmen of the local game as it is to me. Their responses range from zen-like koans to complete surrender. “Somehow, basketball caught the eye of the Filipino,” said Mauricio “Moying” Martelino, a former commissioner of the Philippine Basketball League and one-time secretary general of the Asian Basketball Confederation. “Why, for heaven’s sake, even I cannot understand it.”

Commissioner Jun, Rest in Peace.

Emilio “Jun” Bernardino, who served nine years as commissioner of the PBA before assuming his current post atop the NCAA, offered this vague maxim: “Filipinos took to basketball like a fish takes to water.”

While the origins of the hypnotic spell basketball has cast upon the Philippines are hard to grasp, certain events in history have surely helped boost the game’s popularity.

For decades, the country was among the world’s best basketball-playing nations. The first Philippine Olympic team in 1936 placed fifth, but lost only one game in the tournament to the gold-medalist United States. When the Philippine team returned from the 1954 world championships in Brazil with a bronze medal, team captain Caloy Loyzaga told the Philippine Free Press that the team was “lionized at the airport and given a rousing welcome which I will never forget to my dying day.”

The immense pride Filipinos took from their basketball team pushed the sport to greater heights. “Winners will always generate followers – not only spectator followers but player followers,” Martelino said. “And we kept winning and winning.”

Although Americans introduced basketball through the public schools in 1911, the Philippine game is more than post-colonial imitation. The Filipino novelist and cultural critic Nick Joaquin called colonial influences tools, which Filipinos would internalize and use in their own ways long after foreign rule had ceased. “Ultimately, it seems, every invader fades into whatever tool he may have brought along,” writes Joaquin in his essay “Culture as History.”

Scenes like this aren't going anywhere.

Americans may have brought basketball to the Philippines, but Filipinos have made it their own. The sport is a tool, in Joaquin’s sense of the word. It has become a part of the Philippine identity, something Filipinos living all over the country share. It has become, irreversibly, a part of local culture.

This fact, however, doesn’t stop critics from complaining that basketball’s role in society is too large. They say the nation has long since fallen from its perch as one of the powers in international basketball, so Filipinos should drop the round, orange balls and pick up pool cues, boxing gloves and badminton rackets instead. These critics might as well argue that French cuisine is healthier and more delicious than Filipino food and encourage people to trade in their sinigang for seafood bisque, to fork over their sisig for a plate of steak frites. It will never happen.

Basketball is intertwined with the lives of generations of Filipinos, and its role in local culture can’t easily be extinguished. Joaquin wrote the following paragraph about aspects of Spanish cuisine that were absorbed into Philippine culture. But if you substitute the word “basketball” each time Joaquin mentions “adobo and pan de sal,” the paragraph still makes perfect sense:

“If you tell the Pinoy-on-the-street that adobo and pan de sal are but a thin veneer of Westernization, the removal of which will reveal the “true” Filipino … , the Pinoy may retort that, as far as he is concerned, adobo and pan de sal are as Filipino as his very own guts; and indeed one could travel the world and nowhere find … anything quite like Philippine adobo and pan de sal.”

Lost in Translation

In the latest chapter of the Philippines' never-ending brouhaha over extrajudicial killings and disappearances, UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston delivered his final report on the killings, blaming the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police for most of the dastardly deeds. This is not news -- his preliminary report said the same exact thing and it's what just about everyone assumes -- but rather another opportunity for posturing on all sides, with leftist groups trumpeting their cause, the military proclaiming innocence and the Arroyo administration feigning ignorance while promising justice. But, amidst the thick miasma of self-righteousness, you occasionally get a gem like this quote from opposition Senator Francis "Chiz" Escudero in today's Inquirer:

"Many of the extrajudicial killings that happened there were just five kilometers away from the nearest police or military camp. The modus operandi is always the same: the perpetrator wore a bonnet, was on board a motorcycle, and used a .45-caliber pistol. And until now, not one suspect has been arrested. In these circumstances, I am not surprised that the findings point in the direction of the Philippine National Police (PNP), if not the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP),” Escudero said in Filipino.

When you see that bonnet -- start running. 'Cause when you see that bonnet -- I'm coming.

Come again, Chiz? Little Bo Peep is out here in Sorsogon riding on fools! Capping Communists left and right and her bonnet ain't even shift an inch. I would love to hear Escudero's quote in its original Tagalog form to see what word the Inquirer translated to "bonnet." Father Leo English, the author of one of the best English/Tagalog dictionaries on the market, tells me that there is a word, "bonete," taken from Spanish, but it's hard to imagine Escudero really describing a bonnet-wearing assassin. The more common Spanish loan word for hat in Tagalog is "sombrero," which also brings silly images to the not-so-worldly, raised on Looney Toons American mind. Maybe if the AFP changes its story and blames the killings on Yosemite Sam, Alston and the United Nations will buy it.

PBA Home-cooking

It's hard to find people involved with the PBA who have a lot of confidence in the league's referees. Cynicism is the rule, and the officiating is as much a running joke for PBA insiders and observers as are the league's wacky mascots, lethargic cheerdancers and corporate-sponsored team names. Players and coaches enter games with a mindset that at-best, the refs will blow obvious calls. At worst, they fear the refs will totally screw them. Even when this happens, the one-sided calls are common enough that members of the losing side just shake their head and move on. It takes some truly shameless refereeing situation to provoke an emotional reaction, and that's what happened last week at the end of the Purefoods Tender Juicy Giants' 87-86 win over the Alaska Aces.

Purefoods came into the game with a 7-1 record, the best in the league. Alaska, champions of the most recent import conference, were 4-3, but both teams expected a hard-fought game. Purefoods is one of the three San Miguel Corporation-owned jewels in the PBA's crown. The team, along with Barangay Ginebra and the San Miguel Beermen/Magnolia Beverage Masters, are among the league's oldest franchises and its most popular. When teams from outside the San Mig empire play one of them, they expect the balance of the calls to go against them. The refs were doing a surprisingly good job until the final seven seconds of last Wednesday's game. Alaska benched league MVP Willie Miller for arriving late and got off to a slow start. They fell behind by as much as 19 points but were able to claw back in the third and fourth quarters to take a late lead. Up 86-85 in the final minute, they needed one defensive stop to hand Purefoods its second loss. That's when the refs' worked their magic.



Here's what you're watching in the last 6.9 seconds of the game. After a Kerby Raymundo missed jumper, Alaska Center Sonny Thoss and Purefoods guard Brandon Cablay got tied up with the loose ball and the refs called a jump ball. Alaska must have felt pretty confident with the 6-7 Thoss jumping against 6-footer Cablay. It's possible that the tension of the moment affected the referee, because his first toss sailed about five feet to the side of both players. Thoss never came close to the ball and Cablay reached out and caught it. Boom -- that should be a game-clinching violation. If one of the jump ball participants catches the rock, then his team forfeits possession. Well, that would be an anti-climactic ending to a pretty exciting game, so the referees took a cue from the playground and called a do-over because of the bad toss. That's nice enough for pick-up games at the Loyola Heights barangay covered court, but at the country's highest level of professional basketball, it's embarrassing. The second toss was equally bad, yet, presumably because Thoss tapped it out of bounds and the possession stayed with Purefoods, the officials let the game continue. Now, with less than 6 seconds to play, Purefoods inbounded the ball from beneath the basket. Kerby Raymundo received the ball on the baseline and took one dribble towards Alaska defenders Thoss and John Ferriols. He had nowhere to go, so he jumped in the air, double-pumped the ball, looked to pass, saw no one, and landed. There's really no room for interpretation with this call -- it's a travel. No one knocked the ball out of Raymundo's control or tied him up in the air. He just jumped up and came down. When he landed, with about 1.5 seconds left, everyone stopped for a split second, anticipating a whistle. None came. Like someone who stumbles and does a quick hop-step to play off his goof, Raymundo acted like nothing happened and quickly shoveled the ball to Romel Adducul against the suddenly passive defense. Adducul dropped in a lay-up at the buzzer, the refs counted the shot, and Purefoods ran off the court in a hurry.

Alaska's players looked stunned like the members of the 1972 U.S. Olympic team that got jobbed in the final seconds of the final match against the Soviet Union. The coaches, on the other hand, stormed over to the officials' table and started raising hell. Head Coach Tim Cone was loudly berating Perry Martinez, head of the PBA's technical committee at half-court and assistant coach Bong Hawkins reared back like he was going to break a clipboard over one of the refs heads WWE-style, then caught himself and slammed the board to the floor. Cone followed Martinez and the refs into the tunnel and kept cursing them in front of sportswriters and TV cameras for five more minutes. His furor peaked when Martinez promised to review the call, like that meant something, and Cone shot back: "What the fuck is that gonna do? They're still 8-1 and we're 4-4."

The word for this kind of fixing is "luto," the Tagalog root for words related to cooking. Like "they cooked the books," but instead they cooked the game. Later that night, I bumped into Alaska players Poch Juinio, JunJun Cabatu, Willie Miller and Jeff Cariaso at Metrowalk, and they couldn't stop talking about the game. They blamed themselves for falling behind early, but mostly decried the refs' hostile takeover of the endgame. Poch kept saying how the game was "mahirap makalimutan" -- hard to forget.

What made the greatest impact on me was how upset the players were over the game. PBA players have a reputation of being motivated mostly by money; the characterization has some truth to it, although, by and large, the players are not the greedy hoops mercenaries they're sometimes depicted as. Yes, they play for money, but they also play to win, and that kind of loss smarts in a way that money can't sweeten. On top of that, players like Juinio and Cariaso have been in the league for more than a decade and Miller is a two-time MVP; cooked games and horrible officiating are nothing new to them. Their dejected response to this game shows just how bad the refereeing was.

Even Purefoods knew the win was a gift. I heard rumors of a handful of their players admitting that Raymundo's move was an obvious travel, and Coach Ryan Gregorio's sheepish comments to the press about the last play are pure comedy:

“I was closing my eyes and I was praying. Honestly, I didn’t see the play. I thought my prayers were answered with that last shot."

You know something is fishy when a head coach won't take credit for the game-winning play.

Bad Santa

A kind shopkeeper at a sari-sari store on Xavierville Avenue gave me this poster, which needs little analysis. A couple observations. For all the fans of the old Upright Citizens Brigade show on Comedy Central, remember the Santa Liqueur sketch? It was funny because the idea of Santa giving his special liqueur out was totally outrageous. Well, apparently not in Manila, where Santa arrives in his red tricycle, handing out tagay shots of Tanduay rhum. Please note the frightening intensity in Santa's eyes in this poster. He's staring at you with a hypnotic, glazed look that says, "Drink this rum or I'll shove a lump of coal up your ass." He reminds me of the evil portrait of Vigo the Carpathian in Ghostbusters II. I guess that makes me his lackey, Janosz.

Great Names in Philippine Basketball

Filipinos' penchant for bestowing playful names to their children is a well-trodden subject for foreign writers, probably because it's an easy target for witticism and ridicule. To some extent, this is warranted; some names -- Ketchup and Cherry Pie come to mind -- are truly unfortunate. But there's also a cross-cultural mismatch in play. Syllables that sound normal and more or less attractive to Philippine ears don't ring as sweetly on Western ears (and, I presume, Japanese, Indian and Kenyan ears). These are the Buboys, Biboys, JunJuns, Nonoys and their brethren. The British writer Matthew Sutherland called these monikers "doorbell names" for their onomatopoeic qualities in a pair of articles that are constantly making the E-mail forward rounds in Manila. Laughing at the doorbell names hints at foreigners' attitudes of cultural superiority, but being silly isn't a crime. I'm aware that the nickname "Bong" just means "junior," but it still makes me giggle.

So, for my foreign readers who aren't treated to daily coverage of Philippine basketball and the Pinoys who don't bother following the sport, I'd like to run down some of the PBA's great names.

1. Tagalog names. Aris Dimaunahan of the Coca Cola Tigers is my hands down favorite name in the league. His surname, which means "can't get ahead of," could not be more fitting for a speedy guard. I remember watching him strip Willie Miller in the backcourt during a game last conference and seeing Aris look back at Miller as if he were saying "Dimaunahan!" he scooted ahead for an uncontested lay-up. Don Dulay, a Fil-Am rookie point guard on the Welcoat Dragons, also has a colorful name. "Dulay" means climbing around trees, from branch to branch, to pick fruits and collect birds' nests. Dulay, at 5-5, is one of the shortest players in the league, but he's quick and crafty as fuck and finishes well against the big players. It's easy to imagine his forays to the hoop as him skittering through the trees before flipping the ball past the lumbering big men's attempts to block his shot. On a related note, I met a taxi driver named Lyle Katakutan -- Lyle "Fear" -- in Cebu City last weekend, and if his son makes it to the league, he will catapult to the top of this list.

Racela, a member of Ateneo's 1988 championship squad, watching his college team take on La Salle in the first game of the 2007 semifinals.

2. Holiday names. The granddaddy of this category is Olsen Racela, the San Miguel-turned Magnolia stalwart (the San Miguel Beermen recently changed their name to the Magnolia Beverage Masters). The heady playmaker and ball-hawker extraordinaire Racela was born on All Saints' Day, hence the phonetic equivalent "Olsen." His brother Nash, an assistant coach in the league, was born on National Heroes Day. The third Racela boy wasn't born on a holiday so he was named Wally for "walang okasyon," Tagalog for "no occasion." The Barangay Ginebra Gin-Kings have a three-point specialist named Sunday Salvacion. I don't think translation is required for this overcooked Catholic name. Of all the plays in basketball, however, the three-point shot might be the best visual metaphor for the leap of faith, and Sunday's prayers are answered about 40 percent of the time.

3. The Greeks. To my knowledge, the only Fil-Greek of note is WWE superstar Bautista. There are, however a couple Greek gods and demigods playing for Welcoat. Neither comes close to living up to his namesake. Start with Jercules Tangkay, pronounced "Hercules." He was a hero in the minor league, the PBL, but hasn't cracked one of the PBA's worst rotations on the Dragons. Still, he's worth keeping around for comedic reasons like Nutty Professor memories ("Hercules! Hercules!") and the onanistic potential of pronouncing his name with a hard "J." Not far from Jercules on the Welcoat bench, you can often find Adonis Santa Maria, who wins the ironic name award for being one of the ugliest mofos in the whole PBA. It's like he's got Johnny Bench's catcher's mitt for a face. Needless to say, this Adonis doesn't have a cult of women burning incense for him; he does, however, have about four gay fans who shriek like banshees and wave a banner embroidered with Santa Maria's name when he scores.

4. Revenge of the Nerds. For me, these are funnier than the doorbell names. A lot of Filipinos have names that are extremely dorky by American standards, and I'm always tickled to see someone named Nelbert Omolon throwing down a tip dunk for Santa Lucia, or Kerby Raymundo dropping double-doubles for Purefoods, or Chester Tolomia banging threes on Coke.

Raymundo showing the Chinese that Kerby ain't no punk name.

5. Doorbell names. The PBA has its share of these. They are far more numerous than the other types I've discussed and include many of the best players in the league. Here is a brief list: Donbel Belano, Mac-Mac Cardona, Ren-Ren Ritualo, DonDon Hontiveros and Jondan Salvador.

6. The Best of the Rest. I can't fit these guys into a category, but I dig their names. Lordy Tugade on Magnolia -- I'm not sure about the religious connection with his name, but it's a good bet. His teammate Samigue Eman, whose father works for San Miguel corporation, and whose name is a contraction of "San Miguel." Eman was actually drafted by the San Miguel Beermen; it was match made in heaven until they renamed themselves to promote Magnolia's new line of health teas. Jimwell Torion -- this shabu-loving Tasmanian devil of a guard is currently out of the league, but watching reckless karate chopping defense and shameless ball-hogging was absolutely hilarious. He is sorely missed. Homer Se -- the definitive butcher, he will probably name his son Laimbeer. Topex Robinson -- I have no clue what the deal with his name is.

Finally, a disclaimer for anyone who might feel compelled to comment on the fact that almost all of these players' first names are nicknames. I know that. Olsen Racela's given name, for example, is Rodericko Cesar Escueta Racela, and many of the players mentioned here have similar Spanish-style compound names. I'm glad they use the fabulous nicknames instead.

Metro Manila's Worst Mass Transit Station

I'm a little too proud of how much I commute. I was raised in a New York State of Mind, except unlike Nas, mine didn't really include "gimme a nine and I'll defeat foes." For me, it was more like, "don't waste what precious little money you have on cabs." And that's where it started. Anyone taking a taxi was an affront to the Protestant Ethic: skip the quick fix, put off instant gratification for greater rewards down the road.

My crew can't go for that. No can do.

So I walked and rode trains and buses everywhere. I had an hour-long commute each way to school, starting when I was 12 years old until I graduated high school. In New York, that's pretty standard behavior, and it falls well within the bounds of reason. The Subway covers most of the city and they're often faster than rip-off taxis. My choice to commute in Manila, however, would be harder to peg using an economist's rational actor measurement stick. Commuting is still cheaper, but both forms of transportation are inexpensive enough to fall below my threshold of even noticing how much I'm coming out of pocket for. A long trip from my Katipunan stomping grounds to the Adidas gym in Fort Bonifacio, for example, would cost about 150 pesos in a taxi. The four-leg commute would cost 12 pesos for a tricycle to the Katipunan train station, 12 for the train ride to Cubao, 12 for the second train ride to Ayala station and 10 or 20 pesos from there to get to Adidas, depending on if I wanted to wait for the cheaper Fort Bus or speed things up by riding on the back of a motorcycle. All in all, that's 46 or 56 pesos. In dollars, that's almost $4 for a taxi versus about $1.25 to commute. Unless it's rush hour, the cab will take 30 minutes and the longer route 75-90 minutes. If you were to ask me in a survey, is an hour of my life worth $2.25, I would say yes. But if the cost of saving that hour means breaking a lifelong vow to avoid cabs unless it's past 2 a.m. and I'm somewhere between half-drunk and off my rocker, then it's out of the question. Creating arbitrary rules to live by seems like a prerequisite for manhood, and the no-cab code is one of mine.

The silver lining in my irrational cirrus is that I know my way around. I can recite the stops on Metro Manila's three train lines from memory, and I've "gone down" -- the Engalog diction for getting off the train, which comes from the direct translation of the Tagalog verb bumaba, which is used for getting off vehicles -- at most of the stations in the system. I'm familiar with a lot of jeepney lines, but knowing the entire network comprehensively would require a lifetime. And I know the ins and outs of the EDSA bus racket -- the trick here is memorizing the over- and underpasses at main junctions so you don't go sailing above or below your stop.

But, coming from the Subway-dominated world of New York, I'm a train man at heart, which brings me to the focus of this entry: which train stop on any of the three lines has the most disturbing beggars chilling in the stairwells. You can't bear living in the Philippines -- or several other developing nations, I'd imagine -- without developing a hardness to scenes of gut-wrenching poverty. That doesn't mean you stop caring, but if you cried over every barefoot kid with scabs all over his arms and legs, every wrinkled blind guy knocking on car windows for change and every family living in a shack of corrugated metal, your tear ducts would dry up in a week. Almost every train station has a handful of kids working the stairs or the overpass, all adorable, friendly and showing varying signs of undernourishment and worm-infection, and all trying to get some change from the passersby. In Chicago, these kids would be a humanitarian crisis. Here, they're an everyday thang.

This guy's pretty bad, but nothing compared to big head boy.

It takes something truly gruesome to break the seasoned commuter's forcefield of indifference. You won't find that on the newest LRT line, which runs along Aurora Boulevard between Marikina City and Manila proper. It's based on a Japanese model, which means a lot of cleanliness, a lot of guards and no scruffy homeless people in the stations. So, even though the line passes by the sleaziest corners of Cubao and its terminal station in Manila is situated between a shantytown the size of three football fields, the Manila City Jail and a street, Recto, which is known for bargain basement tattoo parlors with dirty needles, economy-class cathouses with dirty prostitutes and streetside document forgers who can cook up any diploma under the sun, the train stations are oases from whatever madness lurks outside. A betting man would look for the rough stuff along the original LRT, which cuts a North-South path through the heart of Manila. It's the oldest of the three train lines, as well as the dirtiest (although there are a few new trains running these days), the least reliable and the only line (I'm pretty sure) to have been successfully bombed, in 2000. While choosing the poorest major city in Metro Manila is sort of like picking the worst athlete at the Special Olympics, Manila proper takes the cake for the density of its squalor. Up here in Quezon City, the really brutal slums are on the outskirts -- Near the Payatas dump site, sprinkled around Commonwealth and in the QC/Caloocan wastelands of Bagong Silang and Tala -- so the lower poor live farther from the train lines.

But in my experience, distance and population density don't have anything to do with it. Some of the saddest sights I've come across anywhere in the country are at the Ortigas MRT stop, set in a relatively sanitized area along EDSA, with the malls, office parks, hotels and condominiums of Ortigas Center on the West and an empty no-man's land between San Juan and Mandaluyong City on the right. Ortigas is probably the second-most expensive place in the country after Makati City. Yet their train station has three regulars who are so hard to look that instead of attracting alms-givers, they make people speed up and look away. The first two are disabled children. There's a boy who sits on his mother's lap in the stairwell whose head is about four times bigger than a normal human head. He's quiet and well-behaved to the point that you wonder if he's even conscious, and his body just flops around in him mother's lap while she struggles to support his head, which looks like it will snap off if she doesn't hold it in place. Often occupying the same stairwell is another eerily quiet child, this one a girl who has a deformed eye. She doesn't open the eye, but there's a tennis ball-sized protuberance bulging under her eyelid and she wears a grim, Frankenstein-like expression at all times. I dread disembarking at Ortigas because I know I'm going to see these kids. When you look at them, a lump forms immediately in your throat and you have to look away -- their desperation is so bare and their situation so hopeless that you just want to get away from it as fast as possible.

Adam Sandler might say: "I'm crazy dead man! Give me pesos!"

And, around the corner from their stairwell, splayed out in the middle of the overpass, is dead guy. By the time you've passed through the gallery of pediatric horrors, the sight of dead guy is almost a welcome change. He is a relatively healthy adult male (he could probably use a shower, but he's doing all right) who lays face down in the middle of the pedestrian overpass with a cup in one hand. He doesn't move. He doesn't speak. He plays dead. You might even believe he was dead if he didn't hold the cup so perfectly upright. Honestly, by the time I make it to dead guy, I'm in desperate need of a laugh, and thinking of dead guy's gambit usually supplies it. Why would passersby choose to give change to a rotting corpse in the train station? What's the logic of pretending to be dead so people will give you money? Well, it might be this: After I rush through the children of Chernobyl stairwell and dead guy makes me chuckle, I'm grateful enough for his diversion that I end up giving him the change that I didn't give to big head boy or big eye girl. In essence, dead guy steals from the kids. Ugh. No more change for him.

Readers, those of you who know Metro Manila, what do you think? Which station has the most depressing pulubi?

Ateneo/La Salle: Where the cream of Philippine society comes to curdle

Here's my story from The New York Times about the biggest rivalry in Philippine sports -- the men's basketball rivalry between Ateneo de Manila and De La Salle universities. Now that the official story is published, I'll come back in a few days with some of the DVD exclusives. Photo by Nono Felipe.

Basketball Ninjas

What makes ninjas so deadly? They're silent, and at night, dressed in their cute black jumpsuits, they're nearly invisible. You don't know what's coming until ninja stars are making mincemeat of you.

What's this have to do with basketball, or the Philippines? Well, after a couple years of playing in public playgrounds and dirt courts here, I must have been stripped from behind almost a hundred times. Part of that has to do with the blasé attitude towards protecting the ball in these games. Turnovers and points tend to accumulate in unison, and so, after grabbing a rebound, instead of bringing the ball to my chin, stabbing the air with my elbows and pivoting until I find a safe outlet pass, I might do something like start dribbling through a crowd of three or four defenders, and while I feel pretty confident against these guys, sooner or later you get stripped.

But there's another reason. Basketball ninjas. One of the biggest clichés in Philippine basketball is the footwear, or lack thereof, on children, teenagers and grown men who play on street corner hoops, barangay playgrounds and provincial dirt courts. They sprint, leap, jab-step and jump-stop in flip-flops and bare feet. Flip-flops, with their onomatopoeic name, have a recognizable pitter-patter. Bare feet, on the other hand, are practically silent. Hence the basketball ninja.

Don't you know bad boys move in silence?

In basketball, as in life, people use perceptual cues to construct an image of the world around them, including the parts that they can't see. On defense, you see the ball at all times, but you plant a forearm on your man so you know where he is. You stick your hands out and feel for cutters along the baseline, you turn around and box out a man with your arms and back; you watch for the ball to come off the rim while you feel your man. You also hear your man. You hear his steps coming from behind when he crashes the board or cuts behind you in a zone. When you're handling the ball, you hear players coming from behind to snatch your dribble.

Well, an opponent without shoes gives you no auditory clues. You listen for him, hear nothing, and assume you're safe to put the ball on the floor and begin your move. And that's when the basketball ninjas strike. You can't hear them coming, but they're there, and if you take your eyes off them, they'll sneak right behind you and wait for a chance to pick your pocket. If you're a first-world chump like me and 95 percent of the basketball you've played has been against players wearing nice, squeaky sneakers, you're going to lose the ball sometimes.

Now, I don't think I need to explain how wearing shoes is ultimately a huge advantage for a basketball player, but instead of the standard, mildly paternalistic musing about Filipinos' quaint passion for basketball, which is so great that they play without socks and sneakers, why don't we also consider one of the few advantages a barefoot basketball player has over his Nike-clad opponents.

Back with a vengeance ... and a video!

Friends! Long time no see. I've got big plans for Manila Vanilla, which I probably will never follow through on, so let's start off nice and relaxed with a video. This isn't just a video; it's also a contest. Since many of the people who bother reading this Web site know me personally, I challenge you to find me in this commercial for Anchor Beer. I shot it last February and only now discovered it online. It was filmed in Manila by world-class commercial director and wanker Franco Marinelli, but it was intended for TV audiences in Taiwan and Thailand, where the appetite for advertisements starring average-looking Caucasians is apparently just as voracious as it is here in the Philippines. If I can rouse up the nerve to revisit my hideous memories from the day I spent at this shoot, I will write more about it. For now, however, watch the commercial and try to spot me, then leave a comment with your answer! Maybe I'll give out prizes. But be warned: This commercial is chock full of white assholes, and singling me out will be no cakewalk. It will be like the infamous "Waldo World" spread in the final Where's Waldo? book.

Xavierville and Environs

Here at Manila Vanilla, we pride ourselves in being on the cutting edge of multimedia technology. That's why we're a whole two years behind on getting hooked up with Google Earth, which allows you to look at satellite images of just about any place in the world and interact with the images in neat ways.

Click on this image to see the full size tour of my immediate surroundings in Loyola Heights, Quezon City. My stomping grounds extend beyond this three-block radius, but these are some of the vital parts of my life in the area near my house inside the Xavierville subdivision.

• Rafe's House -- This spacious townhouse comes with a downstairs kitchen, well-stocked with cockroaches, two bedrooms, two semi-functioning bathrooms, and two glory holes.
  
  
• Kuya Mike's Tindahan -- The cheapest sari sari store on Rosa Alvero Street. When the others charge 38 pesos for a 1.5-liter bottle of Coke Light, Mike's will only ask 36. The low, low prices draw a splendid crowd of frugal "tambays" -- basically loiterers in English -- who sit on tiny plastic chairs and pass around a blue plastic cup of beer. The characters change, but the cup remains. Shouts to Noy, Ping and Jhun, who taught me to open bottles in my teeth here, and Chairman Effren Gallardo of the Loyola Pansol Toda tricycle drivers association, who has dropped science on me several times on Kuya Mike's stoop.
  
  
• Meat Shop -- Anyone who would rather spend a night navel gazing in a Makati lounge than pounding 29-peso bottles of Red Horse and listening to the unpredictable soundtrack (your chances of hearing Zhane and Ghost Town DJs are excellent) and watching late-night tricycle races at the Meat Shop is a fool. Where I learned to love sisig.
  
  
• Squatters! -- Does this rectangular area look like a mess from the bird's eye view? You should see it at ground level. Just follow the cramped little alley off Esteban Abada street and behold squalor like you've never seen before. Unless you're Filipino, that is, and you've seen it on a daily basis for most of your life. Despite having little in terms of worldly possessions, the folks back here have a seemingly endless supply of friendliness (perhaps it's linked to my own seemingly endless supply of five peso coins and hand-me-down basketball shorts). Many of Katipunan's most beloved street children live back here, including my Dream Team: Angelica, Allan, Jeffrey, Sandra and Marvin.

• Clubhouse Basketball Court -- The Xavierville Phase II/III shared clubhouse. A great place to play with pompous 17-year-olds and toothless, 57-year-old house helpers and drivers. And when the Koreans show up, it's over.
  

Australia gets a taste of Barth

Even though I didn't get to thrill Australians with my "You call that a knife?" routine, I consider the interview a success.

Rafe Barth returns! Luckily, this time the interviewer gets my name right. Also, he's interviewing me about a topic much more dear to me than Philippine elections -- Philippine basketball. This ten minute podcast aired on Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio National, which is like NPR Down Under. The interview -- on a show called Sports Factor -- was recorded, so I wasn't able to piss off a nation of listeners by making repeated Paul Hogan references, but I still had a great time talking to host Mick O'Regan. We touched on the general popularity of basketball in the Philippines; the roller coaster lifestyle of PBA imports, which swings from being called "idol" in the street and choosing from a pu-pu platter of Pinays on a near nightly basis to being called a "lemon" by coaches after poor shooting nights and replaced after a two-game losing streak; the "sporting tariff" on imports' heights, as Mick calls it; the roving bands of transvestite and old lady fans who serve as unofficial cheerleading squads for several PBA teams; and the PBA's coddling of its parent corporations, which includes naming teams after consumer goods like the hot dog-inspired Purefoods Tender Juicy Giants. I'm the second interview on the program, after O'Regan speaks with the founder of the Compton Cricket Club.

PBA Video

It occurred to me that several readers of this blog have never seen a moment of PBA basketball, and it's time for me to change that. Unfortunately, I had my Eureka moment while watching a game between the Purefoods Tender Juicy Giants and the Welcoat Dragons -- a half-decent team and an awful one, respectively. In the NBA, this match-up would be equivalent to something along the lines of the Seattle Supersonics versus the Memphis Grizzlies, with a little more star power. That power comes from Purefoods guard James Yap, the PBA's reigning MVP, who is also the reigning husband of Kris Aquino (former President Corazon Aquino's daughter, actress, television host and product endorser extraordinaire), the country's most famous personality along with Manny Pacquiao. James and Kris had a well-publicized spat earlier this year, when a receptionist at a skin clinic revealed that when James went to the salon for his facials, it may have had a double-meaning. But Kris and James settled it in the best possible way -- on a nationally televised interview -- and are now happily raising their absurdly named newborn son, Baby James Yap. Yap scores a couple buckets during this sequence. Welcoat has Alex Compton, an American-born, honorary Filipino who I wrote about for the Madison, Wisc., Isthmus. The PBA playoffs are about to begin, so I'll do my best to film some more interesting action, but for now, this is all you get.

To Shrink a Player

Here is an article of mine that the online magazine Slate.com published this week. The crack copy editors there called it The Incredible Shrinking Basketball Players, which I like a lot. If you'd rather listen to a podcast than read the article, suit yourself.

Head of the Class

This Engrish will never be topped. Blogger messed up my attempt to post this photo with the previous post, probably because the program could sense that this title deserved a post all to itself. I present you with the valedictorian of the Engrish crass of 2007: These Policeses Fear to Bleed.

Engrish for Dummies

Engrish never gets old. I considered describing these pirated DVD titles for you, but why bother when I can bring you that raw uncut? Behold, the finest in Engrish 8-in-1 and 12-in-1 DVD titles. Click on the images to get up close and personal with the DVD packages.

The Boxing Champion Strives for Hegemony Plan: Hmm, I remember learning about hegemonic powers my freshman year in college. We were reading Emmanuel Wallerstein's theories on the cyclical rises and falls of hegemonic powers. I remember the Dutch, the Venetians, the British Empire and the United States of America, but somehow Professor Derluguian forgot to mention the greatest hegemon the world has ever seen: Ong-Bak, the Thai warrior. This DVD sets the record straight.

Surprisingly the Soldier: The real surprise will come when I watch this disk's fourth film, "In China they Eat Dogs."

Global Fashionable Film: I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on "The Constant Gardener" and "Donnie Brasco." I'll even throw in "The Game," which had a lot of buzz and was filmed before Michael Douglas' skin came to resemble that of the California Raisins. But "The General's Daughter" and "U-Turn" were never fashionable in any corner of the globe.

Impetuosity Killer Gunfight Series: What better film to grace to cover of this series than the film that created the impetuous killer gunfight genre, "Babel?"

Pushing the Envelope -- PBA Mascots

The PBA is a marketing tool, and it has been one since the league's inception in 1975. PBA commissioners have never denied this. In an October 1980 interview in Atlas Sports Weekly, Commish Leo Prieto said the league was all about entertainment and providing an advertising platform for the franchises' other products. If the league's TV ratings went down or fans lost interest, Prieto predicted that the "money being used by these companies to maintain PBA teams will perhaps be channeled to other forms of advertising."

It sounds strange for the commissioner to refer to his professional basketball league as just another form of advertising, but that's what the PBA is, and that's a big part of why Philippine tycoons fight for the right to own franchises. For some businesses, PBA exposure can mean an huge bump in market share.

Twenty-seven years after Prieto's comments, the league is still going strong, probably because it has never forgotten its duty to its sponsors. The most obvious examples come from teams named after beer, hot dogs and cell phone plans, but the PBA's marketing mission is carried out all the way down the line, from TV ad tie-ins for league sponsors, to the music played during time outs to the mascots who traipse around the arena.

Mr. Softy and Casino Ethyl Alcohol get acquainted at halfcourt of the Ynares Center.

The mascots provide a glimpse of just how determined the league is to push its sponsors' products. Not only do individual teams have mascots -- the Alaska milk franchise sports a guy in a cow suit, Red Bull brings a walking energy drink with an evil grin and Welcoat outfits some poor soul in a giant paint can -- but even businesses that don't own PBA franchises can pay the league for the right to parade a mascot around PBA arenas.

Typically, sports mascots have some human qualities. Some are already people, like Spartans and Celtics. Others are animals -- wildcats or cougars that are easily anthropomorphized. Whether man or beast, they all tend to look cute in furry costumes. Well, PBA mascots are anything but typical. The league will turn any product into a mascot. Last conference, they dressed someone as a cheese-filled waffle on behalf of Waffle Time, a chain of snack stands that sells waffle sticks stuffed with cheese and hot dogs at light rail stations in Metro Manila. The X-treme Magic Sing Mic, a karaoke superhero with a microphone head, has been a mainstay at games for the past two years.

Hey kids, wave to the rubbing alcohol!

Many in the current crop, however, have no human qualities whatsoever. There's something eerie and jarring about watching a bottle of Casino Ethyl Alcohol sprout legs and wink at you. Welcoat's person-in-a-paint can is notable for being partially blind. It needs to be led through the Araneta Coliseum aisles by a seeing-eye person. Finally, it's hard to imagine anything more disturbing than the Omega Painkiller liniment bottle's immensely popular rapid fire pelvic thrusting. This salve is notorious for its role in college basketball teams' hazing rituals, where rookies are forced to apply generous amounts of the numbing agent to their balls. Thinking of this makes watching the mascot do the humpty dance in front of delighted toddlers even more upsetting.

But you know what? As long as it sells liniment, it's fine with the PBA. Enjoy the riveting footage of Omega man shaking whatever's inside his khaki safari shorts.

Great Texts, Vol. 3

Take this clean, stylized image of barbecue sticks in a jar of spiced vinegar. Nice, right? Now imagine these sticks holding hacked-up tubes of intestine, whole chicken heads from the neck up, and some unidentified brown knobs. Imagine them on a tray, covered with a clear plastic tarp, with little ants scampering all over the place. That's what Katrina is working with.

Each time I get a great text, I think to myself, "no text will ever top this." And then the next day I get a better one. Well, this may in fact be the ultimate Great Text. It comes from Katrina, a charming young woman who sells barbecue most afternoons on a street corner in my neighborhood. She doesn't sell that wussy barbecue of marinated chunks of pork/beef/chicken on a stick. She cooks that hard stuff -- pork intestines (isaw), chicken heads (helmet, ulo, leeg), pork ears (tenga), and other miniature impaled organs that I'm still not sure about. If you look closely, you can see tiny ants running around on the sticks before she throws them on the grill, after which they burn up pretty quick. Anyway, I stop and chat with her most days when I'm walking by, and once in a while he texts me. I remember when I put my number into her phone that the keys were really jammed and hard to use. That might explain some of this text, and yes, her English is limited so she probably doesn't spell wonderfully even without the technological handicap, but the errors are so fortuitous in this case, a divine -- or demonic -- hand seems to have had a part in it. One day, I checked my phone and saw that I received this text: "HELL GOD APURTINO TO U." Translation: "Hello, good afternoon to you."

Who is Rafe Barth?

Great things about my man on the street interview about the elections on ABS-CBN's cable news shows today.

1. My alter ego Rafe Barth, whose body language suggests certain developmental disabilities.
2. Being called "Rafe Barth" on television.
3. Rocking the billowing McSorley's white tee for all to see. I have done more to promote New York's oldest bar in Southeast Asia than any other living or dead man, woman or child. We're still waiting, however, for one of the potential customers I've introduce to McSorley's to actually travel to New York and visit the bar. One step at a time.
4. Barth's nervous semi-lisp and tendency to speak through his teeth when trying to appear thoughtful.
5. The hand on the stomach and the impromptu lunging in some of the set-up shots.
6. Of course, Senate President Manny Villar, who is always, as his ads say, sipag at tiyaga.
   

Courts of Public Opinion

The national elections are a week away, so I thought I'd dust off this old story I wrote on spec about the issue of politicians using public funds to build basketball courts. It seems like a nice way to post something topical and make it look like I'm back on the grind here at Manila Vanilla, when you could just as easily argue that I'm a lazy bum who's recycling content. Touché.

Likewise, there are two sides to the basketball court issue. There's no disputing the fact that people make use of basketball courts -- for drying rice, holding community events, shelter from the elements and, of course, hoops. In the same breath, there's something very peculiar, especially to Western eyes, to see elected officials pouring money into glass backboards when millions of Filipinos struggle to feed themselves on a few bucks a day. When a family living out of a wheelbarrow rolls by the barangay covered court, it's hard not to wonder if government money could do more for that family than put up a hoop.

The municipal court in Laoag, Ilocos Norte, is pretty dang nice. Pretty reasonable, considering it's a provincial capital. The court is also housed within the City Hall complex. A nice touch, in case the mayor feels like getting some run after taking his merienda.

So, without further ado, here's the recycled story. I actually think it's pretty good, but without a strong news peg or local angle to pin on the article, I couldn't sell it to any U.S. publications. Maybe with the elections coming up I can rework it and fatten my pockets. I'll set it off in a dignified, dark blue typeface to match the piece's serious, newspaperman voice.

Tucked behind a layer of trees, maybe 20 yards from the sweet corn vendors and blaring traffic of Katipunan Avenue, is the Loyola Heights public basketball court. A pavilion-style roof protects players from regular deluges of rain and shades the court from the searing midday sun. Overhead lights allow games to stretch past midnight. The court is furnished with fiberglass backboards and spring-loaded breakaway rims built to withstand powerful slam dunks. And, painted on a wall in white, capital letters over a sky-blue background, are the names of the local politicians who helped secure the funds to build the court.

Less than a ten-minute walk from the court, naked children bathe in the brownish-green, trash-filled water of Diliman Creek. Out on Katipunan, squatters from nearby shantytowns scavenge for food thrown away by local restaurants and cafes.

Scenes of devastating poverty are on display throughout the Philippines, yet somehow, lavish basketball courts are never far from the beehive-like settlements of sheet metal and cinder block shacks piled one on top of another. With more than 30 million Filipinos living in poverty, fiberglass backboards and breakaway rims seem like the kind of largesse only Imelda Marcos could cook up.

Basketball is a national obsession in the Philippines. People’s passion for the sport is evident in their ability to use almost anything to play it – hoods of cars become backboards, coconut trees morph into stanchions and bent wires serve as rims. From NBA logos pasted on the sides of jeepneys to provincial fishermen who wear Indiana Pacers jerseys on the open sea, visual references to basketball clutter the nation. Street corner games in Manila spill into the road, forcing motorists to find detours or wait for a dead ball.

Aren't basketball courts useful? After they go to shit from neglect, your goats can graze on them, as we see here in Laoag's SK Sports Center.

Philippine politicians, aware of their constituents’ roundball fervor, have found ways to parlay the sport’s broad appeal into electoral success. They build courts and sponsor local tournaments to win votes. The public officials responsible for constructing the courts call them essential, multi-purpose centers of community life, while critics argue that erecting hoops equates to cynical exploitation of Filipinos’ love for the game.

If basketball is indeed an opiate for the masses, then no politician has drugged more Filipinos than Freddie Webb, a former senator whose successful candidacy in 1992 was due largely to fame he earned as a guard in the Philippine Basketball Association in the 1970s. “I have the most number of gymnasiums built in the Philippines,” Webb said, estimating that he helped construct more than 120. “I don’t think anyone else has even built 40.”

Webb used his pork barrel – annual discretionary funds each senator receives for development projects – to pepper the archipelago with covered courts and hardwood gyms, with budgets ranging from 2-to-6 million Philippine Pesos – when Webb was in office, between $80,000 and $240,000 – each. Webb’s quest to furnish the nation with top-knotch basketball courts had its origin in his youth. “Every day I’d come home from school, I’d look up at the sky and talk to God,” Webb explained. He would say: “God, please don’t let it rain, because I want to play basketball.”

Basketball courts are worthy investments because they give communities an enormous boost in esteem and instill disciplined, healthy lifestyles in children, according to Webb. In addition, courts are used for more than just basketball games. Farmers dry rice on the flat surfaces and they serve as stages for amateur singing contests, beauty pageants and town hall meetings.

Other government officials and political observers reject Webb’s argument. Constructing courts and sponsoring tournaments are just a means of buying votes, according to Aries Arugay, professor of political science at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. “The politician merely wants it so he can put his name on it and he can collect brownie points,” Arugay said.

The ploy works because Filipinos expect little from a government that consistently fails to provide them with basic needs, added Arugay. “Filipinos are easy to please,” he said. “If they feel any government presence, they appreciate it.”

Academics aren’t the only people who criticize public spending on basketball. Fellow athletes-turned-politicians and members of Webb’s senate staff have also repudiated the practice.

“It’s always a waste,” said Luis Varela, a popular PBA player from the 1970s who now serves as vice-mayor of Caloocan City in Metro Manila. “There are so many things that people need. Things like medicine and school buildings; that’s more important.”

Instead of basketball, the government should sponsor income-generating projects like microfinance lending and food cooperatives, according to Jean Franco, Webb’s former press secretary. The most egregious misuse of public funds comes from politicians constructing courts in communities that already have them, she added. “Sometimes you can see basketball courts right next to each other or just a few meters apart,” Franco said. “It’s not rational.”

Webb admits the political advantages of constructing gymnasiums, but insists their value is multiplied by the numerous ways communities benefit from them. “There’s nothing wrong with playing the electoral game,” he says. “What matters is to achieve that construction, because if you put up this gym, there will be less people that will get sick, less people in the hospital and less people you have to buy medicine for, because they’re fit and they’re less likely to use drugs.”

Councilor Franz, ever the family man, endorsing Nestle Milo products with his son.

Politicians can serve hard-to-reach constituents through basketball, according to Quezon City councilman and former professional player Franz Pumaren. He can’t improve lighting or roads in his district’s squatter communities because it would recognize the squatters’ right to live on land they don’t legally own, Pumaren said.

Instead, he sponsors an annual tournament, the Pumaren Cup, which holds its final game at the Araneta Coliseum, the arena that hosted the Thrilla in Manila boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in 1975 and the local answer to Madison Square Garden. The tournament is “not sufficient to address the whole problem of certain areas,” Pumaren said, but it allows people to “forget about their current situation.” And, for the finalists who get to play in the Big Dome, he added, “it’s a dream come true.”

The Return! Alex Compton Story

I've been shamed into posting again. I've been pretty busy lately, but I'll try to get my act together and keep this blog alive. As a warm up, read this story I wrote for the Madison, Wisc., Isthmus about Alex Compton, the Philippines' third most-beloved white man, after Paul Anka and myself. In this tryptych, we see a still of Alex from one of his legendary CoffeMate commercials, a shot of him playing for Madison West HS during their 1992 state championship run, and a photo from his days as a men's undergarment spokesmodel in the Philippines.

Jumpman

A photo this wonderful needs no caption. Taken by Marielle Nadal this morning on the South Superhighway.

Footprints

Images like these make me downright mushy. They're a common sight at basketball courts all over the Philippines. The grassy area around the perimeter of a cement court becomes a graveyard for sneakers' soles. People use a pair until the rubber bottom peels off. Then it gets kicked to the side of the court and lingers there, partly as a memento of all the hard fouls and fast breaks it survived, and partly as a send-off into oblivion where the grass slowly grows over the remains. If you were a basketball shoe, isn't this how you'd want to live and die -- on the feet of someone who treasured you so much that he wore you until you literally fell to pieces, then finding eternal rest with front row seats to the game that was your raison d'être?

I try not to get carried away like this often. It's pretty likely my rhapsodic basketball musing is all fantasy. People wear their shoes until the point of near-disintegration because they're expensive. They leave them behind at the court because no one in their right mind goes around picking up old rubber soles (or taking pictures of them). But for an outsider, one who doesn't understand everything Filipino but who shares Filipinos' love for basketball, images like this -- the footprints, the homemade backboard nailed to a coconut tree, the dust cloud that follows every dribble on a dirt court -- are some of the most beautiful sights in the country.

Great Texts, Vol. 2

Wow. I feel extremely fortunate. Great texts are a rare thing, but just a day after I put up the inaugural "Great Texts" post, I got another fabulous text. And I say "fabulous" for a reason.

This comes from my agent, Clyde Babao, of Icon International Modeling Agency. I'm going to glaze over just how ridiculous that statement is, and I'd appreciate it if my readers, whoever they are, would do the same. Clyde set me up for a foreign beer commercial, for some brand called Encar. I'm an extra, but the money is pretty good and really easy. Besides, who could say no to being on television, even if it's in Tajikistan or the autonomous region of Nagorno-Karabakh, or wherever this beer is sold. (Companies from Europe and elsewhere in Asia film commercials in the Philippines because it's cheaper than doing it on native soil. Chumps like me, who will "work" for $140 a day or less, enable this.)

So here's Clyde's text, telling me what kind of clothes I need to bring to the shoot: "For rafael. Bring party outfit, fabulous outfit. all light or white or silver color. Pls txt bk. Call time for shoot to follow."

This is one Little Rascal that Bill Cosby can't stop you from seeing.

Hmm. A fabulous, silver party outfit. That's tough. I left all my Hammer pants in New York. Ditto for my white seersuckers. And when I go out partying, the look I go for is not shiny and fabulous. It's more -- dare I say it? -- heterosexual. So what's Clyde gonna get? A pair of jeans and a white, knock-off Hollister polo shirt with horizontal brown stripes. I bought it at Greenhills for $3, and the label says Hollinger, and to me, that's fabulous. I'll also be rolling in there with a Little Rascals-style black eye, which I picked up from an errant elbow in a basketball game a few nights ago. Totally fab.

Newsbreak Postscript

I want to thank Glenda Gloria, managing editor at Newsbreak, for weighing in on the publication's future, online and hopefully in print. You can read her comment, from an earlier post, here.

I should also add that while I put more than 1500 words into doomsday predictions for Newsbreak's new direction, I have admired the publication since I arrived in the Philippines a year ago and started reading it, and I felt honored to have contributed a couple stories to it in late 2006. In this case, I hope Newsbreak survives and my fire and brimstone prophecies are proved wrong.

Great Texts, Vol. 1

It's no secret that text messaging is quite popular in the Philippines. In fact, that may be the understatement of the year. I go through a couple hundred texts a week, and I'm probably somewhere around the median. At one peso per text for most pre-paid deals, that's too expensive for a lot of people, but there are also millions of folks who are constantly working on two or three cell phones. I'm at the point where I rant and curse when somebody who could be texting me calls instead. The numbers on my phone's rubber key pad have all worn off, except for 9 and the pound sign, from what must be approaching 20,000 text messages. As far as texting goes, I've gone native.

I just can't quit you, Nokia.

Every now and then, I receive a great text message. What nominates an SMS for the pantheon? The possibilities are endless, but some common examples might be garbled English, extremely creative Taglish abbreviations, "good morning" texts peppered with rabid Christian dogma and texts that are so crazy that they're indescribable. I intend to record the best of them here.

Text #1: The inaugural great text is a doozy. It comes from a textmate, Weng, who is in her early 20s and lives in Boracay, where she works at a beach resort. Textmates are people who you don't really know well, but you exchange text niceties with them anyway. There is often some romantic subtext to it, and textmates definitely try to flirt, although it's just for fun and it seems rare, although not unheard of, for textmates to become real-life couples. Because I'm a big white guy, I have a disturbingly large rolodex of textmates that spans the country. It's goofy and embarrassing, but if someone wants to send small-talk text messages with me, I usually return the favor.

So here's Weng's text: "Bz! As of nw, we r preparng 4 the chinese nw year. lumipat km ng bhouse. im wd my daughter nicol. she s 3 yr old jst ths jan. surprise!"

Translation: "I've been busy. We're preparing for Chinese New Years. We moved to a different boarding house. I'm with my daughter Nicole. She just turned three years old in January. Surprise!"

That "surprise" had me rolling. Weng has been my textmate for a few months, and I've had to ignore some very awkward texts referring to me as "SWEET LAZY HUNK." I knew a bit about her, but she held onto this special surprise for a while.

The Cockhouse. Anything less would be uncivilized.

Text #2: From Alex, a Korean volunteer in Laoag, Ilocos Norte. We met when I visited Laoag in December and spent a strange evening together at a local watering hole called the "Cockhouse," which was more wholesome than it sounds, although not the kind of place where you'd bring your Bible study group.

The next morning I received this text: "good am. Pleased to see guys. :) this is Alex de korean volunteer, and let's get to be bond again someday. Take care!"

Engrish never gets old. I've gotten to be bond with a lot of great people here in the Philippines, but Alex was special.

Newsbroken: What will become of Newsbreak?

NOTE: This discussion rages on at this blog. No need to duplicate it on both sites.

There once was a little magazine here in the Philippines called Newsbreak. Now, it's a little Web site. I wrote a couple stories for the magazine, but I don't think I'll bother now that it's Web-only. I know someone who interns there. Here's what she wrote in her blog about the move from print to online:

"Six years after publishing its first issue, Newsbreak has radically reformed, becoming a web-based operation and ceasing its fortnightly publication. The major factors driving this transformation were Newsbreak’s financial constraints, and its desire for independent ownership. Thus, when Newsbreak’s primary backer opted to cease funding the magazines, the editors and writers at Newsbreak decided the magazine should make the jump to independent ownership. By doing so, they could ensure continued full editorial independence – a rarity here in the Philippines because it is businessmen who have the means to own publications, and the same businessmen always have their hands in at least half a dozen other businesses as well. No certainty exists that someone would have opted to buy Newsbreak, thus providing it the necessary funds to continue its fortnightly publication, but by making the decision to be independently insured, Newsbreak all but ensured the realization of its lingering financial troubles. It is a testament to the necessary sacrifices made in the name of independent journalism."

The once proud pages of Newsbreak.

And then: "Surprisingly, at least for me, everybody appears in relatively high spirits. Newsbreak has existed with financial difficulties for the last six years, and so the fact the it finally closed its print publication did not surprise anyone. One photographer told me that he anticipated the publication’s closure two years prior.

In terms of losses, the photographers and in-house artist were let go with Newsbreak’s move to the Internet. Everybody else stayed, and none of the writers appear to consider moving to another publication given the magazine's bi-monthly closure. That fact alone strikes me as symbolic of the familial atmosphere and relations within Newsbreak. Newsbreak employs only four full-time writers, and all of the writers are as dedicated to Newsbreak as the editors. Many of the reporters and editors have known and worked together for more than a decade, specifically at a newspaper called the Manila Times. That paper also underwent major upheaval, the result being that reporters and editors quit in mass. Thus, as one Newsbreak reporter told me, what they are facing now is “nothing new.”

With that said, however, I think the transition from a print medium to the Internet (alone) required great flexibility on the part of the Newsbreak staff. In particular, the editors grew up in a world without Internet and where they valued seeing their material in hard copy. But everybody ultimately accepted that Newsbreak did not have the financial means to publish bi-monthly, and so it needed to find a new medium and format if it was going to continue to exist. Everybody at the office is very excited about Newsbreak’s new website, and dedicated to ensuring that Newsbreak maintains its journalistic output. Moreover, Newsbreak considers itself a multi-faceted center - part of its new identity - opposed to just an on-line publication. As such, it will produce long reports on different aspects of the government and hold academic forums on a variety of topics. Ultimately, I am not sure how the center will evolve, and I don’t think the folks at Newsbreak know either. But they have an idea, they are dedicated to the Newsbreak and its associated, newly minted center, and perhaps most important for the future, they have a better business sense that when they started six years ago."

Here's what I have to say:

"If I'm curt with you it's because time is a factor."

Aww, damn. Here comes the Grinch. I doubt this will do much to improve my public image in the Fulbright community, but, to quote Harvey Keitel's character, The Wolf, from Pulp Fiction, "Let's not start sucking each other's dicks just yet."

What I mean to say is that Newsbreak's switch to a Web-only format should not be viewed as a positive development. In the publishing business, when a magazine's pages get thinner, the margins smaller and the paper of poorer quality, the end is near. I noticed this happening with Newsbreak sometime in early 2006, and by moving online they are taking a step closer to becoming irrelevant.

Journalism may be a noble endeavor and a vital part of a working democracy, but it is not primarily those things. It's a business. For the most part, it's been that way since Gutenberg. For news to matter, it has to reach an audience. For it to really matter, it needs to reach a wide audience. And because publications contain important news and reach wide audiences, they can make money through advertising.

From what I've heard, Newsbreak's funding came in a novel manner -- mostly grants, not much advertising. This insulated the magazine from meddlesome, agenda-toting owners, but it also insulated Newsbreak from the bottom-line realities of the media business and it probably insulated them from readers as well. Because Newsbreak didn't rely on circulation-driven advertising for funding, it was free to print what its editors wanted, not what readers wanted. Ideally, the two would intersect; unfortunately, they often don't. In fact, it seems that there's an almost inverse relationship between what a media professor might call good or important journalism and what people want to read. The reporting inside Newsbreak probably benefited from the private-funding model, as did whoever Newsbreak's readers were. But a publication that isn't beholden to an audience is antithetical to its main function -- reaching the public.

For all their flaws, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the Philippine Star, the Cebu Sun-Star, Tagalog tabloids and news programs like 24 Oras, Saksi and TV Patrol are more vital organs of Philippine journalism than Newsbreak because they inform the masses. With its increasingly limited audience, Newsbreak is becoming journalism's answer to the tree in the old Zen koan: "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

Until Newsbreak went online, this argument was purely academic. When the magazine was still on newsstands, it may not have had a wide readership, but its limited audience mattered. The move to the Internet could mean the end of Newsbreak as an important publication in the Philippines. Newsbreak's audience, already small, will surely shrink on the Web. While the college-educated professionals and public policy types who probably made up most of Newsbreak's print readership certainly have access to the Internet, what will draw them to Newsbreak's Web site? There isn't much evidence out there to indicate that the Philippine audience consumes much news online, and many of those who do probably visit foreign news sources that are hard to find here -- the BBC, The New York Times, The Guardian. The Internet media landscape is a lot closer to a Walter Lippman-esque pluralism than television or print, and in a sea of so many voices, what will draw the online audience to Newsbreak?

Usually, when a publication rolls out a new product, like a Web site, it spends nearly as much money promoting it as it does developing the site. I haven't seen any attempt by Newsbreak to market its new format, unless you count an editorial that announced the change in the magazine's final print issue. That's not enough, and if they're counting on word of mouth to draw people to the site, they are insane. Again, it seems like the journalists at Newsbreak don't care about reaching an audience; they only care about their work, which is very, very good, but journalism doesn't and shouldn't exist in a vacuum.

While I believe Newsbreak's overall impact will suffer from moving to the Web, I can see it remaining relevant as a provider of stories for mainstream news organizations. As long as the journalists at Newsbreak continue turning out good work, and there's no reason to think that they won't, reporters for bigger newspapers and television shows will visit the site to find investigative stories and angles that their organizations may have missed. Then, the mainstream journalists will rework the stories, the public will get the information they need and hopefully Newsbreak will get some of the credit. But since nothing Newsbreak does seems to indicate that its staff even cares about having readers, let alone receiving credit for their reporting, perhaps serving as background catalysts for breaking important news will be enough satisfy them.

I am sad to say so, but no matter how you spin it, no matter how high you keep your spirits, the move to the Web seems like a death knell for Newsbreak as an important Philippine news source.