pasión

It's 4 in the morning and I'm running down the Gran Via towards Hotel Alberto Aguilera with my friend Sarah (the Danish woman seated beside me in the preceding post).

In Plaza de España, three homeless teenagers taunt her with obscenities- she screams Spanish epithets at them in return.

"Ay dios mio," I laugh, looking behind us. "You'll have us both mugged."

Just a couple of hours earlier, we had been staring at a sign on a building beside Sol & Sombra disco in Calle Manuel Fernandez Gonzalez: it said Rizal had been there, that much I understood.

"You need help with translation?" someone said behind us. He was a dark Spaniard, probably of Moroccan descent, who wore a suit and spoke English fluently. "It says Jose Rizal met his friends here to plan reforms for the Philippines... By the way, yo soy Enrique. I'm an economist and I need a drink. May I invite you both to come with me?"

Enrique took us to El Burladero, a bar where famous matadors like to hang out and celebrate their fights. It was literally a stone's throw from the very modern disco where we had been dancing with our friends.

In the back room of El Burladero, together with the matadors gazing out of posters on the walls, I watched Enrique teach Sarah how to dance the Spanish flamenco.

"Remember to always look your partner in the eye," said Enrique, "as if challenging him. 'You think you're better than me? You think so? Prove it!' It's a battle. The physical movements of flamenco should express the passion within you- in this sense, it is spiritual."

heritage

The topic of our conference was human security, a relatively new concept for understanding global wants and fears. Its advocates challenge traditional notions of national security by arguing that the proper subject for security should be the individual rather than the state. This world-view asserts that a people-centered approach to security is necessary for national, regional and global stability.

The sharing of different ideas on human security by Asians and Europeans was interesting, especially in the light of Balkin's theory of cultural software (I'm reading Florin's book- a free copy is here). Balkin writes about how information unites the ideas of culture, personhood and historical existence:

To be part of a culture, to be socialized or acculturated, is to possess a certain kind of information- cultural know-how. Cultures are populations of individuals with relatively similar kinds of information...

We are the bearers of this cultural information; indeed we are constituted by it. And its constitution of us is our constitution as historical beings. It is the source of our historical existence.

I call this cultural information cultural software... The different beliefs and worldviews that human beings possess are the product of the evolution of cultural information that is instantiated in human beings and helps make them the unique individuals that they are.

Whereas in the past, cultural information (or software) was usually limited geographically, to the places where people were born or where they lived, modern ways of networking and communicating allow the development of new cultures and even new identities.

I was thankful to Rizal and our other heroes for their sacrifices which enable me to enjoy freedoms that they dreamt of for us. A hundred years after their struggles in Madrid and Manila, a Filipino is seen as one of the most beautiful- La Reina de Corazones- in Spain and Latin America; a Philippine choir is the two-time awardee of the European Chorale Grand Prix; and Filipinos can face the world with greater confidence in our abilities, our history, and our cultural contributions to the patrimony of humankind.

Photo by Sungjin Kang (South Korea, AU-2).

threshold

I was surprised to receive my visa to go to Europe five days before the start of ASEFUAN's AGM. As an austerity measure, I try to travel by plane only once every year and I had just returned from the US. I saw "signs" pointing towards a continuation of my journey, however: dreams, photographs, an email message. Perhaps I wasn't following any external sign, I was only listening to the promptings of my heart.

I was already in undergrad the first time I thought of visiting Europe, when Anna mentioned that one of Jan's goals was to backpack in the Continent. It was the first time I heard the word "backpack" used as a verb. I was inspired and challenged by thousands of young men and women who travel overland in Europe every summer. So I read E.H. Gombrich's The Story of Art, cut pictures of bridges and gondoliers from travel magazines and- semi-consciously- prepared for the time when I too would see Europe on my own.

It was exam time.

Dose of Asia

Because of the many people going to the Rugby World Cup in Paris, I was on the waiting list of several airlines before finally getting a ticket from Korean Air. I arrived in Incheon Airport before dawn of September 1, ten hours before my connecting flight to Madrid. When I read brochures promoting a Transit Tour- one to six hours of visits to nearby sites- I decided to sign up for the tour of Yonggungsa Temple, where a revered 1,400 year old tree still stands.

At first, I couldn't get past Immigration because supposedly only US citizens with flights bound for the US could take the Transfer Tour without a visa. "But there's no such requirement in the brochure," I told one officer, "it says only the passport and flight ticket are required."

I wanted to see a bit more of Asia before going to Europe, to build up the fiber of my Asianness. I needed to use what Kidlat Tahimik calls the "indi-genius." I filled up another exit form and whispered a short prayer.

Three hours later, I was standing in the rain before Yonggungsa's fabled tree.

Magnification

I arrived in Spain a day too early and didn't have a hotel reservation.

"You can stay in my place," said James, an acoustics engineer who had been sitting in front of me on the plane. "I'm renting an apartment near Plaza de Espana."

The following day, after a breakfast of churros con chocolate, we visited El Escorial, built by Felipe II, after whom the Philippines was named. We entered the crypt where he and his wife Isabela- together with almost all the Spanish monarchs from Charles I to Alfonso XIII- are buried. I thought, wouldn't it be nice if Spain could give her sister the Philippines one of her castles as a sign of partnership and friendship?

Here's my friend in the fortress-monastery's garden:


I liked Spain because it reminded me of home: kumusta in Spanish is simply "como esta;" the buildings have design elements that are similar to those found in Intramuros and Ermita; the Catholic churches display many paintings of saints and dying martyrs; and the pace of life is languorous and sybaritic. The best word I can think of to describe its culture is hyper-Filipino: imagine magnifying a walk in Intramuros four or five times. You would see that Madrid looks similar, except it has bigger plazas, more statues, and wider rivers of people ambling in the streets in the late afternoon and early evening.

I even developed a hypothesis as to how "Filipino time" came to be, since Spanish time appears to be yet another magnification. Many Spaniards, for example, have lunch between 1 and 4 PM, tiny meals called tapas from 5 to 8 PM, and a light dinner at 9:30 or 10 PM. I saw the sensibility behind such a daily rhythm however and was able to embrace it, as if I'd practiced the tapeo all my life.

l'identité

The first time I traveled outside the country was in September 1999 when I went to Beijing for the second Asia-Europe Foundation Summer School. Back then, the summer school was just an experiment to see how young people from 25 countries in Asia and Europe could promote understanding between the two regions. Since then, the program has been institutionalized and renamed the Asia-Europe University. There are currently 38 countries represented in our alumni network.

Even if the Spanish monarchy made the Philippines its home for 300 years, in contrast to American powers who stayed for only 50 years, I wasn't really aware of the European influence in our country's lifeways, perhaps because it permeates their deepest levels: the Catholic religion, food, aesthetic values.

From 6th to 7th grade, I had great difficulty learning French in ISM, because I thought the only "logical" system of signifiers was American English- my mind couldn't comprehend, for example, how nouns for objects, like people, had "genders" (la chaise or the chair is feminine, while le stylo or the pen is masculine). Now that I am studying Spanish and Italian, which like French are Romance languages, I find that there is beauty and logic beneath foreign expressions, if only one is patient enough to listen and try to understand them.

That trip to Beijing opened my eyes to the Asian aspect of my identity, what I had in common with other peoples in Asia. Next week will be the launch of the Asia-Europe Society that seeks to form a new community and possibly a new identity: an Asian-European one.

The above picture shows me with my AU-2 classmates- pioneers all in this great experiment- on top of the Great Wall of China.

love letters to a school

Before Justin and Alexa returned to the US, I showed them this box of letters their mom and I wrote to each other from 7th to 12th grade. I told them that they could choose one letter to bring with them back to California: the rest I would keep and someday destroy. I blanched when the two chose a "Mission S.F." letter, the second letter ever sent to me by Trish and probably the most valuable missive in the box.

Even before there was Second Life, Trish and I had an alternative universe that allowed us to comfortably navigate the treacherous social waters of middle school. I was the new kid on the block and Trish initially didn't want her barkada to know that we were friends: "Mission S.F." ostensibly meant "Mission San Francisco," but it really was a code for "Mission Secret Friends."

We even had secret identities: Trish was "Grant Mitchell," I was "Renée Beauchamp," and my mission was to capture for her the heart of "Elaine Brooks," who some of Trish's friends derisively called "the Farmhand."

Also in the box were notes from our friends from Pisay (or PSci). In 9th grade, Trish and I were part of the high school choir that performed in Philippine Science High School.

While we were singing a dreamy rendition of "I'll Take Manhattan," our demure girl found herself looking into the eyes of a mestizo boy from Pisay. After the concert, he must have observed my closeness to Trish, since he handed me a business card with his phone number: his name was Peter. When I was still studying in UPIS, I had wanted to go to Pisay myself- in fact, I had taken the ISM exams in order to practice for the Philippine Science exams, not knowing that I would become an IS Filipino Scholar. I encouraged the relationship until young love bloomed and Trish and Peter- officially, if not truthfully- became each other's first girlfriend/ boyfriend.

I reminisced about those days of mini-golf and three to four hour long telephone conversations some more when I read a post in Howie's blog on Pisay, Auraeus Solito's new movie. I missed it when it was shown in UP and I plan to go on a date with myself and catch it in Glorietta this week.

bahag economics

I just finished reading Chris Anderson's The Long Tail. I picked it up after hearing about how Google CEO Eric Schmidt described his company's mission as "serving the long tail." The thesis of the book, in the words of Wikipedia, is that the Internet has made it possible for "products that are in low demand or have low sales volume [to] collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough."

In yesterday's Jescom workshop on film, Nick Deocampo stressed the need for Pinoy film makers to focus on the distribution of works, echoing a theme in the book. The Long Tail, Anderson says,

is the culmination of a string of business innovations that date back more than a century- advancements in the ways we make, find, distribute, and sell goods. Think about all the non-Internet elements that enable, for instance, an Amazon purchase: FedEx, standard ISBN numbers, credit cards, relational databases, even bar codes.

It took decades for these innovations to emerge and evolve. What the Internet has done is allow businesses to weave together those types of improvements in a way that amplifies their power and extends their reach. In other words, the Web simply unified the elements of a supply-chain revolution that had been brewing for decades.

Indeed the true roots of the Long Tail and unlimited shelf space go back to the late nineteenth century and the first giant centralized warehouses- cavernous buildings erected on industrial lots near the junctions of railway lines in the American Midwest, starting in Chicago. Under their immese steel roofs, the era of massive choice and availability arose on towers of wooden pallets, built with the bulk purchasing afforded by then-new mass production. Railway cars delivered this new variety on a network of iron tracks that were transforming the country's economy and culture.

Among the innovations that paved the way for the Long Tail were:

• the 1897 Wish Book of Sears and Roebuck, "786 pages of everything under the sun at prices that can hardly be believed," made possible by volume buying, railroads and the post office, and later rural free delivery and parcel post;
  
• the supermarket, which first appeared in 1930 and proliferated in the 1950s and 1960s- it "helped create the Middle Class. Its low prices freed up substantial funds for families to spend on cars, homes, education and other needs and amenities of life;"
• toll-free 800 numbers, which enabled an increasingly affluent suburban generation of the 1970s to shop from the home using credit cards
• the Internet, which enabled the rise of e-commerce by "offering a catalog to everyone- with no printing and no mailing required."

In the Philippines, we see the Long Tail (what I also call the Long Bahag) in the sunrise industries of online schools (the Long Bahag of education) and global sharing or outsourcing (the Long Bahag of services).

One movement that seeks to ensure that the Philippines benefits from the Long Tail is the online signature campaign for Paypal to expand its services in the Philippines. Paypal is an e-commerce business that allows payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. Show your support here.

lady justice

One of the things that seems to work in the US is the legal system. For a lawyer practicing in a society that is still undergoing a transition from a "rule of men (sic)" into a "rule of law," it was consoling to hear that this wasn't always so. A little over a century ago, for example, immigration officials in New York State were notorious for taking bribes from immigrants.

Last week, I found out about the Supreme Court decision dismissing a judge from the service for her gross insubordination and gross misconduct. I actually have personal knowledge of this judge and her "collection agent's" unusual practices: come to think of it, their actions or solicitations probably wouldn't have been unusual had they not been made blatantly.

A former Supreme Court colleague told me that Chief Justice Puno is cracking down on corrupt judges. While the problem appears to be systemic and its resolution would entail a lot of adjustment on the part of lawyers and parties who benefit from the status quo, this is a good start. We have to think beyond the short-term- of what would benefit our country and, ultimately, ourselves and our children in the long run.

I found this letter of Jose Diokno to his son Chel while researching in the UP Law Library last week- it was as if the late Senator were speaking to me directly, answering questions I've had for some time. He wrote,

Increasingly, as you grow older, the values that you have learned from us, your parents, and from your Christian faith, will be called into question- by you or by others. Why be honest when it pays to be dishonest? Why be fair to others when they are unfair to you? Why fight for others when they won't fight for you- or even for themselves? Why think for yourself when it is easier to let others think for you? Why lead when it is less troublesome to obey? Why have principles when others don't- and they often get away with it? Why be good when it seems so much more pleasant to be bad?

The answer, I think, is in what life means to you. If life means having a good time, money, fame, power, security, then you don't need principles; all you need are techniques. In fact, it's better not to have principles; they would just get in your way. On the other hand, if life means more than those things, if happiness counts more than a good time, developing your talents more than developing wealth, respect more than fame, right more than power, and peace of soul more than security; if death doesn't end life but transforms it; then you must be true to yourself and to your God, and to love and truth, good and beauty, and justice and freedom, that are His other names and that He has made part of our human nature.

You will have to decide for yourself, Chel, which of those things life means to you. Neither I nor anyone else can decide this for you. But perhaps this will help you decide: That even those who know they do wrong feel compelled to convince others- and eventually themselves- that they are doing right. So the man of greed often gives generously to charity; the megalomaniac poses as a messiah; the coward hides his fear under the mask of being realistic; and the guilty wash away their guilt, like Pilate, by washing their hands with the excuse that "it isn't my choice" or "it isn't my job" or "I can't do anything about it."