My very hot boarding room in Quezon City.
As a preface, I’d like to warn you that this post will most likely be incoherent, disordered. But such qualities correspond to the overall nature of my experience here in the Philippines since arriving a little over a week ago. It feels like it’s been twice that long. And at the same time, the days also feel much longer than back home in the States. Contradictory? I won’t argue against that.
Upon arrival, I implicitly greeted the country with visual and psychological shock. It took four hours for my apo (my grandfather), his driver, and his fourteen year-old helper to take me from the heart of Manila to the central region of the Pampanga province, where his compound sits near a lake. For four hours I was rubbernecking. For four hours I sat behind a pane of glass, protecting me from aggressive humid heat, as the air conditioner exhausted a cool breeze onto my unconditioned forehead. All while few-lane highways supported tailgating, mirror-to-mirror traffic anarchy.
Inside the kubo (rest house). Macabebe, Pampanga.
Facing out the window of the kubo towards the lake.
Fifteen hours ahead in time from home, my eyes cannot escape the frank coexistence of poverty, and structures built of material comforts. The passé American dream is plastered on billboards, several stories high, blocking the sun in all sorts of places within and without the city. As one secures their fist around a rail in front of a window on the LRT (Light Rail Transit), passing over Araneta Boulevard in Manila, bleak condominiums tower over residential compounds of porous concrete, which shadow tin roofs and “walls”. Vendors of all kinds line the streets, forming corridors in which people of assorted classes travel in dense columns. You will see rubble occupying once-vacant ground, like anthills gaining land on the sidewalk, where people most likely used to light a cigarette or set their dinner table. They appear in places around the area no more predictable than the city layout is – generally – to the foreigner. In fact, after having to navigate by myself, I find the only predictable thing about navigating the cityscape is that you will feel like a child looking for your parents in a dense, crude promenade.
Metro Manila covers a massive area, including Quezon City – the second city of my research focus. (Any observation I make is, of course, a general statement, for a comprehensive account for my experience would require much more than a concise blog post). Kevin Lynch would have nightmares over many aspects of the city, especially that of its overwhelming imageability. But at the same time, its frank qualities lend to great diversity in some respects. For instance, despite the chaotic atmosphere, the traveler will never run out of paths if he/she/they so desires to deviate. Jane Jacobs would perhaps praise this degree. The paths which allow pedestrians to sift through the city resemble a large dry brush loosely dragged through wet sand, several times at different angles. Given the anarchy of traffic, city roads make merely suggestive edges, in Lynch’s world.
But if one must get somewhere any considerable distance without risking heatstroke, that person must use transportation. The main public transportation options include the rail systems, jeepneys, motorized tricycles, private drivers, or taxis. “Jeepneys” and tricycles are by far the most characteristic of these. Having to visit very often the micro-city campus of the University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City to dig through their archives, I have to use jeepneys regularly. Usually, this consists of squeezing sticky shoulder-to-sticky shoulder, with the occasional passenger hanging their leg(s) outside of the entrances. Fares in this sardine-can situation are bucket-brigaded to the driver’s open palms. And although English is taught in schools, I am repeatedly ashamed to have not picked up by now how to appropriately indicate my desired stop; instead of grunting and pointing, or revealing the extent of my linguistic foreignness. Gratefully, the drivers are very forgiving.
UP Diliman Campus. April 13, 2015.
The UP Diliman campus has been, so far, the most culturally accommodating for me, as far as I have seen. But note that the following statements about it are strictly in comparison to the rest of the city, for you would be hardpressed to find an American level of material-comfortability throughout most of the country. Though UP Diliman is clearly a Southeast Asian school, it resembles an American clarity of design and accommodation – accessible cafes, “canteens” (cafeteria), and recreation areas.
On days I work in the Department of Ethnomusicology’s archival room in Abelardo Hall – the music college on campus – an aggregation of a variety of Western and Asian instruments breathe around the courtyard in open air. The walls grant them partial passage as I research. And there is rarely an extended rest. (note: keep updated for field recordings once I find an auxiliary cord). It is quite fitting with two important ideologies I have gathered of Jose Macéda’s musical thought: a centrality of colour of sound and of the emancipation of endless time.
To my understanding so far, “colour of sound” describes the distinct suggestive timbral qualities of a sound. It would be interesting to ask Macéda (if he were still alive) his thoughts on the colour of Metro Manila’s soundscape today. It is distinct, dominated by constant jeepneys and tricycles which evoke mucous-congested, mechanical boars. (again: keep updated for field recordings once I find an auxiliary cord). It is bluntly piercing, and I easily imagine myself being deployed onto the front lines of a World War Two front, when instead I am on my way to a convenient store. To illustrate in what sense “colour” might describe a particular soundscape, imagine panning between 100% this the type of soundscape I just described, and 100% that of a livestock farm... To make this easier, think of how you are able to perceive a shift from purple to blue. You may not immediately know exactly why, but you know intuitively the difference at the least. As for the meaning of “emancipation of endless time”: music that is unrestricted by temporal borders. Much like an imaginary city whose edges do not exist, and whose paths never end or begin.