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Genius and Garbage: A Testament
by Jessica Zafra

Venerando Palacios, the Mad Maestro, only made two kinds of movies. The first, works of insane and utter genius, inspired orgasms in asexual cinephiles and baffled moviegoers who tried to make sense of the non-linear narrative. The second united cinephiles and philistines who identified it as exploitative garbage. I have spent the last decade hunting down prints of his movies, and I agree.

I was seven or eight when I saw my first Palacios film, a sex-drama called Goddess of the Island. It is remembered largely as the film that popularized wet T-shirts in Philippine cinema. My parents, whose tastes were solidly middlebrow, snuck me into a screening marked “Strictly For Adults Only”. They wanted to see what all their friends were talking about. The bobbing brassiere-free breasts of the lead actress riding a horse on the beach while waves crashed on the shore repulsed me, as did the clean-shaven chest of the strapping actor who played her lover. I was more impressed at the chaos wrought in the tiny seaside village by those same breasts: the local maidens transformed into jealous hags, the wise healer into a salivating voyeur, the young parish priest chucking his vows. The wages of lust. So this was what my religion teachers were warning us about, that mythical ticket to hell.

Palacios’s next movie, Taxi Dancer, was a succes de scandale, our local version of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring or Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe. Set among the floozies, dreamers and derelicts of a dingy burlesque hall, its ten-minute climax featured the titular actress dancing while having a miscarriage. The guardians of public morality had conniptions, the critics went into ecstasies, and the censors gave it an X rating, ensuring that everyone would go to see it. Whether real or feigned there is nothing like outrage to draw audiences to the cinema. Or to motivate a kid to disobey the good advice of his elders and become a film archivist. Who worked in an ad agency, because the bills must be paid.

I did not see Taxi Dancer until I was in college, on pirate DVD. The muddy copy, the tinny soundtrack, and the filmmaker’s excesses could not conceal its brilliance. Philistines only saw a woman in a skimpy dress shaking her booty while blood and gore flowed down her legs. I saw life in all its messy glory, or at least I thought so. Often I can’t tell if I’m seeing what’s actually on the screen, or projecting an image from my head—assuming these are two separate things.

Of Palacios’s vast and unwieldy oeuvre, I had a particular fondness for Summer Rain, a romantic melodrama that I saw many times on TV as a child when I was supposed to be taking my afternoon siesta. It’s a Romeo and Juliet love story, though the lovers are not from feuding families, but the same one. First cousins. Oh the agony. Oh the guilt and hysterical passion. In the end the girl’s parents, upstanding bourgeois, take the girl away. The boy runs after the car, sometimes nearly catching it at a red light, sometimes almost losing it at a green light, but running and running while the credits roll all the way to the end. I had not seen Summer Rain in many years, and assumed there was no existing print of the film. But I remembered it in minute detail, down to the pink sandals the girl was wearing as she walked in the rain with tears streaming down her face. In all likelihood my memories bore no resemblance to the movie, but in the absence of a copy even on ancient Betamax, our memories of the movies we loved are all that remains of them.

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In 2010 Noel and I went to Siniloan, Laguna to interview Celso Ad Castillo for the Cinema One catalogue. It was wild. This story was inspired by that meeting. The plots of the movies in the story are exaggerated, weirder versions of Castillo’s movies.

Chair, get it? Thank you to the Ateneo for this honor.

The Department of English, School of Humanities, Ateneo de Manila University invite you to the Fr. Henry Lee Irwin, SJ Memorial Lecture on March 3, 2020, 5-6:30 p.m., at the Escaler Hall.

This year’s lecture is “Manananggal Terrorizes the Ateneo: Fiction vs. the Apocalypse” by author Jessica Zafra.

In the lead-up to her writing workshop at the Ateneo de Manila, Zafra talks about books in an age of mass distraction. She details her writing practice, recounts the true stories behind her fiction, and explains how writing is a survival skill.

Jessica Zafra is a fictionist and TV presenter, ex-columnist and talk radio host. Best known for the bestselling book series Twisted, she was the acerbic voice of a generation that grew up in the 1990s and the early 2000s. Aside from Twisted, her books include Manananggal Terrorizes Manila (1992), The 500 People You Meet in Hell (2006), The Stories So Far (2014), and Twisted Travels: Central Europe (2018). She has won three Palancas for her fiction and a National Book Award for Twisted. She continues to attract a large, somewhat emotional following.

Zafra is this year’s recipient of the Fr. Henry Lee Irwin, SJ Chair in Creative Writing. The chair was instituted by former students of Father Irwin in memory of his work as a professor of English, theater, and rhetoric at the Ateneo de Manila.

Copies of The Collected Stories of Jessica Zafra, published in 2019 by the Ateneo de Manila University Press, will be sold at the venue.

Admission is free. RSVP 8426-6001 (loc. 5310) or lsanchez@ateneo.edu.

On our way to Divisoria, my friend Tracy, Mother of Cats, took me to see her grandfather’s house on Arlegui Street in Quiapo. The house, built at the turn of the 20th century, sits like a time machine (a very elegant TARDIS) on a crowded street. “Crowded” as in “the Coco Martin TV series Ang Probinsyano is filmed at the back of the compound,” so the scene is one of organized chaos. In the main house, though, it is still the early 1900s.

The entresuelo, a room under the stairs. Look up the old term “mestizo de entresuelo.” In colonial times the illegitimate children of the house were confined to such quarters.

The massive wooden staircase polished to a high gloss leads to

the living room with its antique furniture and Art Deco accents.

Despite the hubbub outside it was so quiet you could almost hear the murmuring of the ghosts who lived there, imagine the old piano playing while the guests exchanged news. I kept hoping some of them would turn up in these photos.

A courting chair?

Tracy remembers Sunday lunches in the 1970s, when her grandmother still lived there. In the kitchen:

From the balcony, a view of the 21st century.

Our Bibliophibians book club selection for February is The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, a melancholy novel set on an island where things disappear and people are required to forget they ever existed. It’s science-fiction, or is it?

The next book club meeting is at 4pm on Saturday, Feb 29 at Tilde Cafe on Matilde Street in (Backwell) Poblacion, Makati. Everyone who reads the book is welcome.

They’ve run out of copies of The Memory Police at Fully Booked, but new stocks are arriving this week. Thank you, Fully Booked, for the quick response.