Two Old Churches in Pampanga

Last August I joined a group of friends on a day tour of Pampanga.  It's north of Manila, about a drive of an hour and a half.  We had a special ten-course lunch scheduled at Bale Dutung, but had the morning free to visit a couple of old  churches and take photos.

The San Guillermo Parish Church of Bacolor dates back to Spanish times.  After the original church (constructed in 1576) was destroyed in an earthquake, it was rebuilt in 1897.  In 1991 half the church was buried in lahar during the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo.  In one of the photos below you'll see that the arched windows on the sides of the church are now as low as the tops of the pews.

From Bacolor we traveled to Betis, Guagua - an old town famous for hand-carved furniture.  Built in the 18th century, the Parish Church of Santiago Apostol (St. James the Apostle) is known for its splendid retablo art.  Its facade is quite simple and relatively recent, but old carvings decorate the church door and selected pieces of the church's original wooden furniture.  The altar is rich with more carvings, gilt and saints.  But the showstopper is the church's ceiling, painted in the early 20th century.  We were requested by church staff not to use flash photography, to protect the artwork.

The lovely thing about these churches is that they're still working churches, serving loyal parish families throughout their town's history.  If you have a long weekend coming up, a map, a camera, and a sense of adventure, this sort of trip is immensely rewarding.

Waterman's Ideal No. 3 Set

Some Saturdays come with a happy surprise.  A package arrived for me last weekend!  A good friend from the US sent over a combined Christmas and birthday gift in the form of a vintage Waterman’s Ideal No. 3 set of fountain pen and matching propelling pencil!  It came complete with an original Waterman’s box, complete with paper insert of instructions on how to fill the pen and pencil correctly.

I could not stop staring.  The celluloid was beautiful!  The pen is pristine – the clip and lever are absolutely clean and shiny, the Waterman’s imprint on the barrel strong and easy to read.  There are no major use marks.  It’s been resacced, ready to fill and write with. The pencil still had its original eraser, and contained the right size lead!

When I removed the pen and pencil from the box I was delighted to discover a pencilled inscription: “Frank Jr. Christmas 1941 Annie Carrisa Edna John.”  I like to think this was a gift to Frank Jr. from his siblings.

The paper insert mentioned a patent date of 1932, so the date of manufacture could’ve been close.  (Later, my friend, a member of the Pen Collectors of America, discovered the very pen listed in a 1933 Waterman’s catalogue.  The beautiful silvery-grey swirls in a black matrix with random red flecks is a celluloid pattern simply called “Black Pearl”.)

 

The nib is a sweet 14k no. 2 flexible fine.  My friend tuned the flow to be able to write well under a light hand, and to be wet enough to handle flexing.  I haven’t really tried any sustained Copperplate-ish writing with it yet, but I feel it can certainly used that way.  (I’d say my Wahl and Swan pens have slightly softer flex nibs.) I did try a fancy capital W in my writing sample, however.

This pen and pencil set was acquired from an antique store sale.  Back in the 1933 people paid USD 3 to buy this fountain pen.  It might have been a bit more when it was given to Frank Jr. Vintage Waterman’s Ideal pens come from the time when the brand was still American and American-made – about 1884-1954. (Now owned by Newell Rubbermaid, today’s Waterman fountain pen brand is based in France.)

I have inked it with Cross Blue and intend to use it often – which is the best way to honor such a wonderful gift.  And the best way to start the New Year!

100 Years of Baguio City

A big thank you to mason28viz for posting this on Youtube. As a city, Baguio turned 100 years old this year.

My dad grew up in Baguio. In 2006 he and Baguio City High School Class of 1956 celebrated their 50th Golden Jubilee. He and his company were among the rescuers during the major earthquake that destroyed the historic Pines Hotel. We have a photo of him and his colleagues with then-President Fidel Ramos at Malacanang Palace.

I thought he might enjoy this video, as you all might :)

Online Filipiniana For All

While I was writing the earlier blog entry on what is worth saving, I remembered an announcement that Vibal Publishing made recently. Their excellent site, Filipiniana.net, indicates that they are in the process of digitizing as many primary sources - texts on the Philippines (its literature, culture, history, and related topics) - as they could, with the goal of providing FREE ACCESS to all researchers and interested individuals. This saves rare publications from the wear and tear of physical access.

One particular primary source of note is the 1907 publication "The Philippine Islands: 1493-1898" by Emma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robertson, known to many simply as Blair and Robertson. Here's another interesting description of the books. There is one actual full set at the University of the Philippines Main Library, the rest are with other universities, local historians or collectors. Our family's copies are the Cacho Hermanos facsimile reprints from the early 1970s which compressed the original 55 volumes into 19. These are considered rare because apparently the Cacho warehouse burned down shortly after the reprints were made. My mother bought ours from writer Alberto Florentino prior to his move to the US.

Filipiniana.net, as mentioned above, is putting together a "fully indexed and full searchable" full text collection for free. Jeroen Hellingman, however, is also digitizing his personal copies and putting them on the Project Gutenberg Philippines site. So far he has uploaded 25 out of the 55 volumes. This undertaking is HUGE, I have to admire that kind of passion and dedication. Other institutions are offering the digitized books for as much as USD 49 the set (exclusive of shipping).

The number of online academic Filipiniana sources is growing, and that's a good thing. Citing Wikipedia alone in one's paper just DOESN'T make the grade.

Open Doors

The Philippine Daily Inquirer taught me something new today - the Philippines gave visas to Jews escaping Nazi Germany in WWII. Read about it here. Kudos to our Filipino artist, Junyee, whose monument at the Holocaust Memorial Park in Tel Aviv I take my blog title from.

Here's the story of Ralph Preiss, who spent a part of his childhood in wartime Manila, by PDI's Volt Contreras.

When we were in college they never taught us this in Philippine History. Or maybe they did, we just didn't remember. Schindler's List wasn't a movie yet, so our consciousness of the Holocaust was limited to the diary of Anne Frank.

The lesson here is one of compassion - something everyone around the world is in need of these days, since we seem to be not at war with other nations, but with concepts. "War Against Terror." "War Against Global Warming." "War Against Poverty." "War Against Greed and Corruption." I guess they make good sound bites, but it's difficult to wrap one's head around it. The question of "when will it ever end?" worries us all.

The Open Door Policy was a good move on President Quezon's part. Times were simpler then, and it was easier to do things right in the name of humanity, that now seem pretty heroic in scale.

It's hard to feel compassion when you're faced with an abstract concept. It's easier when you think about fellow human beings, one at a time. To learn more, you might enjoy reading An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday Life by one of my personal heroes, the Dalai Lama. No, I'm not Buddhist, but there are things to learn from every major belief system if you also try to keep an open mind.

Philippine Pre-Colonial Gold

Photo: "Kinnari" (mystical half-bird, half-woman) gold vessel, Gold of Ancestors exhibit, Ayala Museum.

This is the reason why Spaniards went out to expand the limits of the known world in the 16th century. We all know the story from school, but it's a totally different experience when the gold is literally in your face. This is breathtaking.

The 4th floor of the The Ayala Museum permanently houses a mind-boggling exhibit of just over 1,000 pre-colonial gold artifacts that show our historical and cultural links to neighboring Southeast Asian cultures. Items on display range from jewelry, decorative detailing for clothing and weapons to badges of rank, ceremonial vessels, as well as funerary and religious accessories. Quietly collected for 25 years by the family of National Artist Leandro Locsin, the items are considered part of national patrimony and had been kept under wraps until the creation of a secure and appropriate exhibit location. The collection was finally exhibited publicly upon the construction of the new Ayala Museum in 2004. The exhibit is curated by premier art historian Dr. Florina H. Capistrano-Baker.

Jessica Zafra tells us more in Newsweek here. My favorite blogger Marketman, who was invited to the opening, has some lovely pictures and more food for thought (pun intended) here.

We went to see the exhibit last July 23 with my mother's friends UP Balik-Scientist Raul Suarez and his wife Pining. I was pleased to see a lot of students around; on their own, like most people, I don't think it would occur to them to drop by the Ayala Museum just for fun. This isn't something you hear about all the time on tv or the radio (I do however think it's a great date place for myself and TDM. I want him to see it with me.)

The entrance to the exhibit is designed to look like a temple door but it's outfitted like a bank vault security gate that opens every 30 minutes. When you see the gate slide down you get the feeling you've entered a time-travelling space ship. Some tourists tried to get out the way they came, but apparently the security is such that you can't get out the way you came in. You have to go where the end of the exhibit leads you, and there are sensors that slide another gate upwards to let you out from there. You can't get in from the outside that way, either. Which is great, because a collection this stunning and awe-inspiring can teach us a lot of things about who we are as a people. To lose that would be a tragedy.

We sat ourselves in front of a curved cinema screen where a well-produced video told the story of Philippine gold from the geological formation of the archipelago up to just before Spanish colonization. The photos from the Boxer Codex of Filipinos in native garb sporting gold earrings and other displays of wealth and rank were familiar from school readings. You could tell who the rich individuals were from their distended earlobes -- only those who could afford it wore earrings, and gold was naturally heavy. Walking around I could actually see a number of items I would love to wear, if only I didn't need a motorized wheelchair to transport myself around with while wearing them! (In the first place I don't know a lot of people who could even afford the motorized wheelchair.)

The crowning glory of this exhibit was a magnificent chain link halter for some chieftain that I think once held a ceremonial scabbard (the missing bit that connected to some torn-off gold wire where the halter ends at the hip). FOUR kilos of gold chain link. Four KILOS of fine, fine, FINE work.

The amount of detail in such artifacts reflects superb, painstaking craftsmanship of incredible sophistication. You'd appreciate this in the varied styles and techniques used -- gold foil, filigree, chain-linking, others. The jeweller-historian Ramon Villegas's Ginto: History Wrought in Gold could enlighten us further (we own a copy of his 1983 book Kayamanan: Philippine Jewelry Tradition). Wish I could afford one. New York-based Filipiniana blogger Pu-pu Platter shares beautiful photos on Flickr. I would dearly love for regular folks to enjoy the photographs of the collection on top of the intriguing story of the discovery, how the Locsins funded the archaeological dig and how they decided for it to be accessible to the ordinary Filipino in this way. It deserves its own National Geographic cover story.

Luckily for us folks with internet access, The Probe Team covered "The Surigao Treasure" and aired it just last June 8, 2008. There's a good (but short) article accompanying the documentary. It was shown a day later as ABS-CBN's Independence Day Special "Gintong Pamana", which I'm pleased to find on YouTube. I missed both showings, but thanks to online links, I got intrigued again and want to return to the Ayala Museum. Or read the bibliography suggested by Pu-pu Platter in his May 4th comment to Marketman's post. (Funny how, when you're not required to read something, finally reading it becomes so delicious because you're just plain CURIOUS.)

Then there's that gold foil document inscribed with ancient Tagalog/Sanskrit whose significance (at least to us) would approach that of the Rosetta Stone or the Dead Sea Scrolls. It tells of a wealthy man who owed a debt of 900gms worth of gold and thus became a slave because he couldn't repay his debt. What a great story -- that could be made into either a novel or a movie.

But my favorite piece of all is that golden vessel shaped into a Kinnari, a mystical bird-woman that Hindu-Southeast Asian culture refers to as the epitome of grace and beauty. Graceful and beautiful the artifact was, indeed. You can see the very delicate facial expression in the photo above, and the exquisite feather detailing around the vessel, which I imagine held perfumed oil. It is displayed as found, slightly squashed (gold being very soft it couldn't have kept its shape under soil), but that doesn't diminish its very fabulousness.

I'm going back. (You can come along, and see it for only Php 225 for the entrance ticket. Bring an id, because they ask for one. I know, it's the price of a restaurant entree. But it's a special, special exhibit. It's worth it. Make it a date. Impress your significant someone. Or teach yourself something new. Today's a great day to consider it.)