ONE balmy May day eve, the Ayala Museum took another brave, forward-moving step towards transforming its space from the usual tasteful but sterile showcase for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, into an organic institution for the live (music), the open (mic) and the free exchange of ideas known as Grade School for Yuppies ?Show and Tell.?
Real art is una cosa mentale ? a mental object, not eye candy nor status symbol ? according to the ever hip Renaissance Man, Leonardo Da Vinci. Consider that in the context of the continuing and occasionally fractious discourse that is the Filipino Art Scene, and remember last year?s National Artist Awards controversy.
Hold that thought, as the prompt for this Ayala Museum event was: Because We Should Never Forget, that... The rest was up to the sharer, or more appropriately, the oversharer. The prompt sets the structure. Sharers have 10 minutes. For the first Grade School for Yuppies at Black Soup Café in incipiently bohemian Barangay Central in Quezon City, the prompt was My first time to...
Most memorable was Uro de la Cruz?s sharing about shooting a Pinoy kung fu B movie in Hawaii. Somehow he included piquant details about patis and sukang paombong that you would rather not know.
The mostly twenty-somethings of the New Slang Collective who are behind Grade School for Yuppies unabashedly, though hopefully and with tongue firmly in cheek, seek to elevate oversharing into an art form. One hundred eighty degrees from the Jejemon, the New Slang Collective actually takes Strunk & White?s ?The Elements of Style? and Zinsser?s ?On Writing Well? seriously. Oversharing should be done with eloquence, taste and tact, and on their website (http://new-slang.com or email because@new-slang.com), one is urged to stay within 1,200 words.
The latest oversharing at this Ayala Museum ?Show and Tell? occasionally verged on tendentious over-earnestness. The prompt ?Because we should never forget? usually meant remembering something that?s morally uplifting, or historically and culturally edifying such as?
? the Seven Steps to Forgiveness, despite the disturbing realization that her father confessor was pruriently interested in her pubescent sexuality (from sharer Babeth Lolarga);
? striving for an eco-ethical lifestyle (Reese Fernandez of the internationally acclaimed social enterprise Rags 2 Riches);
? one?s ethnic origins, Ibaloi in this case (Carlo Cleto being very educational);
? how the masochistic distortion of memory threatens one?s creative adulthood (Nice Buenaventura, a gifted graphic artist);
? acknowledging our parents despite our shared conflicted past (Ryan Sumo who notes that he ?may be slow but he?s not stupid?) or because we are now parents too (Owel Alvero who can?t get over the wonder that is his infant son);
? a reading of ?Kuwento ng Tatlong Pusa,? which has been rejected by all children?s book publishers (JP Cuison);
? premiering excerpts from personal studio projects ?Patience, Dear Juggernaut? (Wincy Ong) and ?Hana and Gabi? (Mikey Amistoso).
At the close of a sober presentation laden with powerpoint quotes from Dostoevsky and other great dead white male writers, Aissa Ereneta of Synergia asked, ?Masusunog ka ba sa impyerno kung nagsuot ka ng condom? (Will you burn in hell if you wore a condom?)? which turned out to be the subject for a video competition. You can learn more about that on www.mulatpinoy.ph.
Filmmaker, rock impresario and Us: 2; Evil: 0 (Zero) band vocalist Quark Henares made the most quintessentially yuppie presentation. He reminded his peers, the audience of mostly twenty-somethings about the music of their early childhood or even their conception: Yacht Rock, a sub-genre of ?80s adult contemporary. Watch those early MTV?s Yacht Rock exemplars Hall & Oates, Michael McDonald, Huey Lewis and the News bursting with padded shoulders and tsunami-waved hair. Yacht Rock was the soundtrack for champagne wishes and caviar dreams which genuine yuppiedom aspired to.
There?s also a hint of down and dirty beneath the designer glitz and sheen. Yacht Rock sings not only about winning a woman?s heart but also about making her scream ? that?s why it uses a lot of saxophones. To reinforce this Show and Tell, Quark did a fetching rendition of typical Yacht Rock dancing.
An amusing anachronism of Grade School for Yuppies is not just that these twentysomethings have adopted a term that is a throwback to the Eighties, but that most would not even pass for yuppies, at least not in their present state. Neo-Hippies or Bo-Bo?s (Bourgeois Bohemians) is a closer fit. The odd assortment behind Explotar, a self-published magazine is a case in point. The Explotar writers-artists-publishers are proud to be hobos at heart. Still they wanted to make some money while remaining anti-profit. Between selling drugs or making a magazine, they illogically but uprightly chose the latter and the result is Explotar.
An essay on Filipino culture in the 1970?s Manila Paper, which might be a spiritual forbear of Explotar, mused upon ?Our Heritage of Smallness.? Many of our best known Pinoy brands take pride in being the smallest: volcano (Taal); fish (sinarapan or tabios); primate (tarsier) ? you get it. Explotar must be Filipino publishing?s smallest magazine. Its illustrated pages are the size of business cards ? the cheapest way to reproduce decent graphics on good paper stock. Each of the three issues (P60 per copy) comes with a few muzzy photocopied pages of prose or poetry. Binding or stapling is eschewed. Each issue comes in a 4? x 6? brown envelope, so you can actually share Explotar with your friends as tingi (piecemeal).
Explotar?s Joey Alvero refers to his older brother and fellow oversharer, Owel, as his ?Zooey Deschanel,? (from Cameron Crowe?s film ?Almost Famous?) and quotes: ?Some day, we will be cool.? During this Grade School for Yuppies Show and Tell, the Ayala Museum liked what they saw and agreed to sell Explotar in their Museum Shop. Now how cool is that? ?
