One of the great things I experienced growing up in the 1970s was that I got to see a lot of old Filipino movies in the afternoons through TV channels GMA-7 and RPN-9.  For me, it was a daily trip back in time for  I was able to see a lot of classic Filipino actors and actresses in their prime.  One of them was Dolphy and I counted his old movies among my all-time favorites. 

The above clip is from a 1953 movie called “Sa Isang Sulyap Mo, Tita”, released by an old Filipino movie studio called Sampaguita Pictures.  The clip shows why I believe Dolphy ranks as truly one of our greatest and most talented screen artists.  His old movies showed a man who was not only a gifted comedian and actor but also a great dancer.   At the height of his career, few could match the grace and fluidity of movement he showed on the dance floor.  Dancing with him in the video clip are fellow comedians Aruray and the late Teroy De Guzman.  Though the latter two became known to younger generations of Filipino moviegoers for playing supporting roles in comedy films, like Dolphy, they perfected their acting, singing and dancing skills in places like the Manila Grand Opera House years before they broke into the movies.

The clip above also reminded me of one of my favorite Dolphy dance sequences and it involved the late Nida Blanca, another great actress and dancer.  In a 1967 movie the title of which I unfortunately could not recall, Dolphy’s broken-hearted character drank himself to sleep after having a nasty argument with his sweetheart played by Nida Blanca.  As his character fell into a deep sleep, the movie transitioned to a dream sequence where Dolphy met Nida’s character at the Luneta (Rizal Park) one lovely evening.  The dance they subsequently performed (with the instrumental version of “Hey There” playing in the background) show why they rank among the best, if not the best, dancers in Filipino movies.

I’m starting to see a good number of old Filipino movies show up on YouTube.  A very good number of them date back to the 1940s and 1950s.  Kudos to the individuals who are posting them on YouTube for by doing so, they’re helping reintroduce Filipino acting legends and old movies to younger generations of Filipinos who never got to see such performances.  It’s unfortunate that the passage of time has left some lasting damage to the video and audio qualities of those films.  However, in spite of those imperfections, I just hope that the youth will take the time and effort to watch those clips and if they do, I hope that they develop a deeper appreciation for the accomplishments of previous generations of Filipino movie artists.

It just goes to show how deeply embedded the culture of corruption has grown in Philippine life.  If corruption is so widespread that even former PMA graduates are no longer immune to them, then who in government is left for us to trust?  No wonder that the average Filipino remains so pessimistic about the country’s future even when presented with very good economic data.  Virtually every government institution has been tainted with corruption, even the Supreme Court.

Being in the military is like being in a fraternity.  To get ahead, one must conform to the culture.  Unfortunately, that culture has grown to become so corrupt too.  To be able to rise to the very top, it has become almost impossible for an individual to avoid getting involved in the corruption there.  It’s hard to walk through a rainstorm without getting wet.

I am no longer sure if I’ll ever see the day when corrupt big-time Filipino politicians and government officials are herded off to jail to serve serious jail times.  I am highly doubtful of that ever happening.  Whenever I talk to Filipino friends about the situation in the Philippines, one thing always frustrates me.  To a person, they all long for that PURE and HONEST politician who will rise and change the Philippines for all of us.  And yet, I haven’t heard any of them say that they’ve ever paid the right amount of tax to the Philippine government.  They won’t even commit themselves to doing  it.  They all try to rationalize their distorted view by saying “Why should I bother paying the correct amount of taxes when the government will steal the money anyway?”  Guess what?  Tax evasion is corruption as well.  By denying the government the funds it needs to properly operate, a tax evader helps grow and worsen the country’s culture of corruption.  Meaningful change has to come from somewhere and it has to come from within us. 

We ought to stop wishing for a corruption-free Philippines if we’re not willing to be corruption-free ourselves.

The clip above is from a 1939 Filipino movie called “Tunay na Ina” (“Real Mother”) and the two artists you see on the clip are the film’s lead stars:  Rudy Concepcion (1912-1940) and Rosario Moreno (1916-1945).  Both were popular stars of the time and were famous for both their acting and singing talents.

The clip also brought back memories of my dear grandmother.  This month will mark the 41st death anniversary of my dear “Nanay”, my paternal grandmother.  I was a few months shy of my 4th birthday when she passed away on February 15, 1970 from stomach cancer.  At the time, my parents and I lived in a three-unit apartment-style dwelling in Manila that a late uncle had built in 1967 for his own family and for my grandmother and his siblings.  My uncle and his family lived in one unit, my parents and I lived in the middle unit, while my grandmother and my unmarried uncles and aunts lived in the third.

My parents both worked during my first three years and thus, they left me in the care of Nanay and a relative named May, my father’s second cousin.  Needless to say that I ended up spending a lot of time with my grandmother and became close to her.  I remember my Nanay singing me some lullabies to get me to sleep at night and once I had fallen asleep, my father would come to my Nanay’s room to pick me up and take me back to our apartment.

Two memories stand out from the time my grandmother passed away.  The first one was at the Metropolitan Hospital in downtown Manila.  I remember my parents, my uncles and aunts, and some cousins standing around a hospital bed.  My grandmother was on the bed with her eyes closed.  She looked to me as if she was asleep.  But what I found different was that almost everyone around the bed was crying.  My mother was crying while my father looked quietly at my grandmother.  As a child, that was my first encounter with the passing of a loved one.

I don’t remember much from her wake except that we had it at home.  She was buried at our family plot at Manila’s North Cemetery.  I remember the moment when her casket was being interred.  I didn’t know what exactly was going on.  I was simply too young to understand what Death was and thus at that moment, it never occurred to me that I will no longer see her.

My grandmother was born on July 24, 1910 in the town of Angono, Rizal.  She was quite a pretty, fair complexioned lass judging from the ONE picture our family has of her that was taken when she was in her early teens.   She attended the same high school in Manila as my grandfather and they were married sometime in late 1925 or early 1926 when she was all of 15, and he was 16.

Typical of the women of her time, she settled into the life of a housewife to raise 12 children while my grandfather handled (or mishandled) the family business.  Though they stayed together, life with my grandfather must have been tough for her.  My grandfather, typical of the attitudes of men of his time, ruled the home and his word was law.  He handled the family business but also mishandled it through his vices namely, women and gambling.  My grandmother was quite subservient to her husband and had to silently suffer through all that.

The decade of the 1930s was a period of feast and famine for the family.  The decade started off with my grandfather growing a business that my great grandmother helped him start.  He operated a gas station and eventually grew the business to four gas stations by the middle part of the decade.  The family enjoyed a certain degree of prosperity which was evident from the family pictures taken from that time.  The family owned cars at a time when very few Filipino families could even afford one.  I was told that my grandfather and his brothers even socialized regularly with people who came from prominent families.  The family enjoyed a prosperous life until about 1938 or 1939.  As was mentioned earlier, my grandfather had his vices and his failure to control them eventually led to the loss of all gas stations by the end of the decade.  It is a material loss that our family has never fully recovered from to this day.

By the time my father (he was the 8th of 12 children) was born in 1939, life had become quite hard for the family.  The war years (1941-1945) didn’t help with the family’s struggles either.  Though he tried to go back into business, my grandfather got sick along the way and was never able to recover what he had lost.  He eventually passed away in 1957 at the relatively young age of 48.  His passing left my grandmother with the difficult job of raising a large family.

Unlike his older siblings, my father had to work from a very young age in order to help support the family.  The loss of the family business actually became a blessing in the end because the tough years strengthened the love and bond among my father’s siblings.  A couple of my uncles helped support all their younger siblings through college.  In the decades that followed, they also helped send a number of their nephews and nieces to college.  Though the brood of 12 is now down to just six, the surviving siblings remain very supportive of each other.

My grandmother’s life attained a certain level of comfort in the 1960s, a decade that turned out to be the last of her life.  By then, a number of her sons were gainfully employed and were earning enough to adequately support the rest of the family.  She now had several grandchildren to happily deal with.  I count myself fortunate for being born in that decade because it gave me a few years to feel and enjoy her love and affection.

Now a few more words about the video clip.

The song “Buhat” was penned by Miguel “Mike” Velarde, Jr., the same composer who wrote “Dahil Sa Iyo“.  The song enjoyed a revival and wide popularity during the mid-1970s when another great Filipino singer, Rico J. Puno, recorded a version of it.

As for the movie’s two lead actors, both suffered sad and untimely deaths.  Rudy Concepcion died from peptic ulcers in 1940, the year after the movie above was released.  He was only 28 at the time of his death.  He came from a gifted family in Manila and a close relative, Roberto Concepcion (1903-1987), served with distinction as a champion of civil and individual liberties when he served as Chief Justice of the Philippine Supreme Court from 1966 to 1973.

The movie’s lead actress, Rosario Moreno died in the last days of the Second World War in Manila in 1945 at the age of 29.  She died when her house in Sampaloc, Manila took a direct hit from a Japanese bombing.

Biographical information on Mr. Concepcion and Ms. Moreno courtesy of Video48.

Thanks, Mr. Furnier.

The travelogue was produced by Pan Am (short for Pan American Airways), the leading American airline back in those days.  The video shows how short the jeepneys were at the time, the sights around Manila (specifically Escolta area around Jones Bridge and the Pasig River), the Philippine Military Academy in Baguio City, the Pagsanjan Falls, the Manila Hotel swimming pool, and Taal Volcano among others .  Enjoy.

Merry Christmas and a Blessed New Year!

On Tuesday, the US will hold national elections to elect senators, representatives, governors, and a host of other state and local officials.  It is not going to be an ordinary election because two years after Barack Obama was elected President, his party, the Democratic Party, is facing the prospect of losing its majority in the House of Representatives, losing a majority of state governorships in the country, and losing a number of long-held seats in the US Senate.

Barack Obama’s party will suffer big losses on Tuesday because of Barack Obama.

He had promised to be a different kind of politician, one who promised to be a healing President.  Well, no such healing has occurred and we haven’t gotten a different kind of politician.  To make a long story short, his actions in the last 20 months has let a lot of people down, especially those who voted for him.  He has become a very unpopular and divisive leader.  In his push to get some of his major programs passed into law, he pretty much let his Democratic allies in Congress to run roughshod over the opposition.  Instead of extending a hand of cooperation to the opposition, something he promised during his presidential campaign that he would do, he has shown a propensity for refusing to see the logic and benefit in some of their proposals.  If a person tried to dispute or criticize his proposals, that person was immediately demonized by his allies within his party and the media.  He and/or his supporters have resorted to labeling citizens who are against his ideas either as “enemies” or “racists”.

His approval rating was in the high 70s at the time of his inauguration as President.  No surprise then that those ratings have since plunged to the low 40s/high 30s.  It is a remarkable downward turn in fortune for a President who was elected in 2008 based on his promise of bringing “hope and change” to the country’s politics.

I haven’t written anything about him since his inauguration in January of last year.  I felt at the time that he deserved a chance to prove to the people how his ideas would benefit the country.  However, like many voters here, I will be voting against his party on Tuesday.  I have been disappointed in his moves and in his policies.  He clings to the misguided notion that in order to provide jobs and other economic benefits to the middle class and to the poor, that higher taxes be imposed on the wealthy people who provide jobs and economic opportunities to them.  A Filipino friend, a disappointed Obama voter, questioned how Obama can claim to be for the middle class and the poor when his tax and economic policies will certainly harm the companies and businesses that employ them.  The guy doesn’t have a real appreciation for economic realities because he has never run a business in his life.

I didn’t vote for him in 2008 because his resume at the time was practically a blank piece of paper.  If he wasn’t running for political office, he was community organizing.  Not a single line item on his resume showed any exposure to business.  Even though the guy gave damn good speeches, I felt that his credentials, or lack thereof, failed to convince me that he was ready for the office that he was seeking.  It’s a very good thing that a lot of Americans are now ready to show him on Tuesday that they won’t be fooled again.

I apologize for the long absence and the following little story explains why. 

The past couple of months have been quite tough for me from a professional standpoint.  The man I used to directly report to, Joe, took a new job in a different department.  Another guy, Mike, took his place.  Joe and I joined the company at around the same time a little over five years ago.  We’ve been on many projects together and have grown to become very good friends.  An opportunity in another department opened up earlier this year and Joe ended up taking that job.  Mike was then promoted to fill his spot.

Mike and I are good friends too.  However, unlike Joe and myself, Mike does not possess the depth of technical knowledge required to perform the job.  Thus, what I have been doing the past four months  is to serve as Mike’s consultant on technical matters on top of my usual role of managing our various projects.  Mike’s a very good guy as far as people skills are concerned.  What he lacks in technical skills he more than makes up for with his interpersonal skills.  We get along pretty well and I think our relationship would have worked out in the long run.  However, about a couple of months ago, something came up.

In one of our department head’s meetings, one of our directors, Tim, had mentioned to all managers present in the meeting that there was a job opportunity in one of our company’s divisions.  One thing I admire about my bosses in my department is that they have made it a policy and guiding principle never to stand in the way of an employee’s advancement.  Fred, our department head, has always been pushing his people to make themselves better and to assess and/or grab an opportunity whenever one should arise.  In this particular case, the opportunity that arose was for a leadership position in one of our Corporation’s divisions. 

I didn’t pay much attention to it when Tim had announced it at our management meeting.  But he called me into his office a few days later to ask me to give the job opportunity some thought.  The thought that raced to my head was “Are they trying to get rid of me?”  I’m quite a conservative guy when it comes to assessing my self-worth.  My distorted sense of humility often makes me downplay my contributions to a project or to a team.   Such humility sometimes works for me but it also sometimes works to my detriment.  The downside to humility is that I’ve been passed over for a promotion and it had inadvertently created a misimpression about my abilities.  Over the years, I’ve learned to become more assertive of my contributions and decisions that had benefited the team.  It’s still a mental battle since we Filipinos have been ingrained for centuries to value humility.  But I now firmly believe that we all may be overdoing it to our collective detriment.

Anyway, Tim advised me that given my knowledge and experience, he felt that I had a very good chance of landing the job.  Plus, he said that landing the job would be quite a boost to my professional credentials.  Thus, I decided to give it a shot and submitted myself for an interview. 

The process took weeks but to make a long story short, I ended up getting the job.  Thus, in a couple of weeks, I will be leaving the department that has served as my professional home for the past five years.  My feelings are mixed because even though I’m excited about the challenges, knowledge and experience the new job will bring, I am also sad for leaving a place where I’ve gained the trust and friendship of many people.  But such is life.  “You win some, you lose some,” as one saying goes.  In addition, and more importantly, there will be times when we have to go to places where our skills and help are badly needed.  Aside from my technical knowledge, what boosted my stock in the eyes of my superiors was my capacity for hard work.  In our department, it was routine for me to handle three or four major projects at any given time compared to two projects for the other managers.  I had followed an advice my first boss in the Philippines gave me more than 20 years ago.  His words were “I do not only put a premium on intelligence.  I also put a premium on a person’s capacity for hard work.”  Words that sound old school today but I must say that they have served me well over the years. 

The road ahead is going to be tough.  I am leaving the comfort and stability of a job in Corporate headquarters in order to help one of our divisions get back on its feet.  The environment I will be in will be much different from where I am today.  In my old job, I reviewed and critiqued division operations while in my new one, I will be in-charge of the operations.  I felt that I’ve done enough backseat driving that it’s now time for me to take the wheel and drive my new group in the direction it needs to go.  A majority of the people I will be leading in my new job won’t possess the same level of credentials and knowledge as the ones I am managing now.  But that is the one big reason why I should go there.  They need mentoring and help in order to make sure that their jobs are performed in the appropriate manner; very important in the industry I’m in where one mistake could lead to heavy government fines and possible loss of significant government business. 

In closing, I don’t know how much blogging I will be able to do in the days and months ahead given the demands of my new job.  There’s a lot for me to study and learn.  Even if I don’t get to visit your blogs as often as I did in the past, I wish you all well.

Wherever you are right now, Uncle, I want you to know you’re deeply missed.