Passing through Pasadena

An art critic from New York snootily describes Los Angeles as "twelve suburbs in search of a city." Our old LA-based pal Mario Baluyot, a former journalist, will have none of that condescending tone. Always he is quick to point out there is a thriving cultural life in California beyond the twin examples of gargantuan kitsch: Disneyland and Universal Studios.

He designates himself our "taxi driver" during our stay in the West Coast, keeping a running commentary about how colonies of writers and other artists have made his sunny state their home.

He drives us from our temporary base, Torrance City in South Cal, to northern San Francisco via the ultra-scenic Pacific Coast Highway (ahhh, lush forests, yellow green meadows, pastures, soaring cliffs overlooking roaring ocean waves). 

Bakery in Solvang with Scandinavian touch 

and two strictly budget tourists

With Mario Baluyot at Pierre Lafond in Santa Barbara , 

said to be one of Oprah's favorite dining spots

We make stops along the way in Santa Barbara, the little Scandinavia called Solvang, San Simeon (renowned for the Hearst Castle), Big Sur (where I shriek like a teenager when I spot the Henry Miller Library) and Carmel by the Sea.

 Pool at the Hearst Castle

Pinoy tourist at the Castle

During a quick stopover in Carmel by the Sea 

there was just a few seconds to take this snapshot of Mario

A few days before we fly home, Mario picks us up in Torrance again for a day trip to Pasadena. We pass through a narrow, by LA standards, four-lane freeway, the very first in California and built in the 1940s. On the right, past a wire fence, stand preserved Victorian houses that make up Heritage Square. 

Too early for the opening hour of Norton Simon Museum on West Colorado Blvd., we walk under the shade of blooming jacarandas to the nearest Pinkberry store for its famed silken yogurt.

Just a few years old, Pinkberry has been a sensation in downtown LA when an enterprising Korean woman, Hyekyung Hwang, set it up for the health-and-flavor conscious. Served like soft-serve ice cream in a cup, the yogurt "with a distinct pouty peak" is best topped with fresh fruits like blackberries, kiwi, strawberries, mangoes and blueberries—choose any three—if you are, like us, trying to keep your blood sugar to a normal level. Otherwise, go to town with chocolate chips, marshmallows and the whole armada of sweet, crinkly tidbits.

Named after the American industrialist behind such firms as Hunt Foods, Canada Dry Corp., Max Factor and Avis rent-a-car company, the Norton Simon Museum houses his collection of Old Masters, modern art and sculptures from India and Southeast Asia. The architecture is unprepossessing; it doesn't take your breath away the way better known art showcases do. And therein lies its charm. 

While one needs repeated visits to take in what bigger museums like the Getty Center and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have to offer, Norton Simon with just its main and lower levels allows for an unhurried yet comprehensive tour.

 Rodin's "The Burghers of Calais"

The Rodin bronzes are like sentries along the entrance walk. His cast of "The Burghers of Calais," the art history books teach us, commemorates the six heroic leaders of Calais, France, who offered themselves up for execution to spare their city from the onslaught of the invading English. Their lives were later spared when the English queen told her husband it would be bad for her unborn child if these men were killed.

But the sculptural works that appeal to me most are those of Aristide Maillol, also a Frenchman. The life-size ones are installed in the Sculpture Garden among such trees and plants as Lily of the Nile, Corsican Hellebore, Flax Lily, Lemon-scented Gum (a type of eucalyptus and yes, it does smell citrusy), Goodwin Creek Lavender and Tulip Tree. 

Maillol's women are generously endowed (I definitely identify with that!), graceful and balanced despite their uncomfortable poses.

Trying to get close to Maillol's "Air"

Googled information on the artist yields this information: "What is it about Maillol's work that prompts museums to pay over a million dollars for one of his prized, large sculptures? Moreover, why is his name virtually unknown by the general public? The answer to the paradox lies in the dichotomy inherent in the artworks themselves. His works are heroic, yet subdued; masterful, yet crude, classical, yet primitive, elevated, yet humble; obvious, yet profound; harmonious, yet disturbing. Such contrasts as these can only be portrayed in the work of a great artist…Why Maillol is not more widely known is perhaps a testament to how thoroughly his work has filled a void we today take for granted. A void where the simple, classical abstraction of the human form can communicate epic poems from a place of immortal stillness. Our contemporary frenzy today can no more comprehend a Maillol than the patient growth of a tree. Maillol is a sage that awaits the next chosen." 

I decide to skip walls full of Renaissance works when I espy the Spaniard Baroque painter's Francisco de Zurbaran's "Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose," an oil dated 1633. I sit before it entranced, and cannot help but agree with the experts who consider this piece one of the most perfectly composed and executed still life paintings.

Because she is a woman painting at a period (1600s) when there were few women painters, Louise Moillon's "Still Life with Cherries, Strawberries and Gooseberries" is worth a second, even third, look. The exhibit card notes that her works "embraced a different aesthetic—quieter, most contemplative and satisfying in their own right."

 Degas's "Little Dancer"

Edgard Degas's "Little Dancer," the only sculpture he exhibited in his lifetime, stands bemused in a roomful of 19^th-century art. Greeted with hostility when it was first publicly unveiled, the piece is a portrait of the dance student Marie von Goethem. Why the brouhaha over it? Degas not only used a wax model but also put on it an actual silk bodice, a gauze tutu, cloth slippers and a satin ribbon for the pony tail.

The Mexican Diego Rivera is represented with his huge "The Flower Vendor," a.k.a. "Girl with Lilies," a 1941 oil.

 Van Gogh's "Portrait of a Peasant"

This is also the museum where one nods at, tip one's invisible cap to the Oriental-inspired women of Matisse whether they're sprawling languorously on a couch or dancing with tambourine in hand. 

Van Gogh's peasant stares back at the viewer in full dignity, the colors of his hat, suit, face as bright as the day the Dutch Post-impressionist painted them.

The Asian stones and deities like the sandstone torso of Buddha Shakyamuni from Thailand (approximately 7^th-8^th century) make me wonder if there are any more of them left in situ.

But that seems to be the way of the visual arts these days, whether antiquities from our own continent or art of this new century. One must know their whereabouts. God/goddess willing, one is fortunate to have a guide like Mario to help track them down.--Elizabeth Lolarga

A version of this was first  published in Ti Similla, a newsletter of the University of the Philippines Baguio, 2008.

Photos by Mario Baluyot , Rolly Fernandez and Babeth Lolarga

Gilda Cordero Fernando as Life Coach

Gilda Cordero Fernando. The Last Full Moon: Lessons on My Life. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press and GCF Books. 2005. 250pp.

Sylvia Mendez Ventura. A Literary Journey with Gilda Cordero Fernando. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press. 2005. 174pp.

Was he being cantankerous or issuing a left-handed compliment when the Grand Ole Man of Letters Nick Joaquin once said of Gilda Cordero Fernando: "We have no other writer capable of such sublime nonsense?"

We have reason to object for the woman is far from flighty, superficial and wispy. Talk of woman of substance, of Mother Earth and sexy septuagenarian all in one! Every writer, male or female, looks up to her for her accomplishments as fiction writer, essayist, editor, publisher, theater producer, fashionista, art patron, painter and what her best pal Mariel Francisco describes as "national cultural visionary…an outstanding voice in the expression of the evolving Filipino world view."

Heck! Fernando should've been named National Artist for Literature (or even Multi-media if the authorities ever put up such a category) years ago if not for the corrosive power struggles that mark the, ahem, sublime world of arts and culture.

Now in the autumn of her life, still garbed in avant-garde threads sewn by who's ever hot in the couture world, seen by literary scholar and friend Ventura as "keep(ing) old age at bay by moisturizing her unblemished skin, exorcising the demons of arthritis, hanging out with young adults, and, above all, keeping passion alive," Fernando, 75 this year, gifts us with a compendium of life lessons earned the hard, soul-cleaning way.

Critic Ventura zeroes in on the three central themes that inform Fernando's creative non-fiction (including Ladies' Lunch and Other Ways to Wholeness and A Spiritual Pillow Book, jointly authored, by the way, with Francisco): "her hostility toward her mother, her unequivocal love for her father, and the bewildering state of her marriage."

Not too long ago, writer Bobbie Malay said she still had to read a Filipino woman writer deal honestly with her relationship with her mother, raw emotions and all, not sweetness and light, the way the Frenchwoman Simone de Beauvoir did with her mother. Not too long after that, along came Fernando, and in this she breaks new ground for hasn't Francisco called her an "active door opener," a synonym for trailblazer?

In the third chapter of her memoirs , "The Soap Opera," Fernando uses a no-holds-barred language to describe a violent quarrel between her parents where she witnesses "my father standing on the stair landing, the top of his silk pajamas in shreds and my mother trying to claw off the trousers. Through a big tear on a pants leg, a bit of his penis was showing."

As an only child for 13 years before her sister Tess was born in the wartime, Fernando saw her Mama's upheavals, the hurling of things on the floor at the height of unreasonable anger. Once she threw a bottle of Mercurochrome and a splinter lodged in her daughter's wrist. To this day Fernando bears the scar.

During those pre-Bantay Bata years, the young Gilda, who was spanked with a slipper and almost strangled (with no intention to kill though), was pained to see how the outbursts, quick though they may have been to dissipate, hurt and annoyed those who heard the terrible words. No dirty word though, the author would grant her mother that. When the girl entered her teens, the mother guarded her more fiercely. "She made me guilty, like I were some lascivious child who would run off with the first guy I met."

The worst was the effect on the child's self-esteem. "My mother," Fernando writes, "made me feel that I was the worst person that ever got seeded on this earth…After a while, no matter how hard she beat her devil child, I didn't feel anything. That's why I understand it when the political prisoners say that beatings don't hurt anymore after a while. You get immune."

In her adulthood, Fernando confronted her aged mother about those beatings, and the woman denied everything. The author rues, "It was as if the God upstairs had given me a mother with so many gifts and talents and said, But you're not about to get them for free! You have to learn every lesson laid before you."

As her maturity deepened along with her well of compassion, Fernando realizes that her Mama, who lost her own mother at age five, also had a self-esteem problem to the point that she thought Gilda "wasn't a good-looking baby. It took a while to convince her that I looked fine…My mother's low self-esteem couldn't convince her that she deserved a pretty child." Fernando adds sympathetically, "But how could I blame her for faulty parenting when she barely had a mama herself?"

Fernando hauls out her honed skills in food description in recreating the dishes that came from her mother's kitchen, a strong point of this older woman with whom Gilda had a lifelong battle. "She liked serving fancy stuff—an incomparable lengua, a capon stuffed with sotanghon and chestnuts, a big fish bathed in mayonnaise and garnished with separate bands of minced carrots, hard-boiled eggs, and sugar beets…Sometimes there was wintermelon soup which was rich chicken broth in a big oiled kundol which stood on its end in a magnificent bowl."

Ventura notes that Fernando's "food essays transcend the usual articles on gourmet feasts served in gated subdivisions and patrician restaurants; they also portray the lifeways of the common folk, their beliefs, superstitions, customs, and culinary procedures which may be old-fashioned but pleasing enough to the palate." (See Philippine Food and Life as an example. Fernando considers it her "best book.")

The critic asks Fernando "if she ever drools while writing her essays on succulent food, and her answer is 'Never, pagod na pagod ako.' But her exhaustion never betrays itself, so smooth and effortless is her style."

Back to Consuelo Luna Cordero, Fernando's mother whose influence is far-reaching in her sense of style and grooming. There is a precious chapter on "Mother's beauty secrets that I learned (and unlearned)" wherein the young Gilda is dolled up in Shirley Temple minis that had her pulling down the hem of her dress to hide her panties.

All the way to her 70s when she was producing the theater extravaganza Luna: An Aswang Romance, Fernando still had an axe to grind against her mother. "Not coincidentally," she writes, "my mother's family name is Luna. To me the aswang in the play represents all the things I had not liked about my mother. We were forever quarreling. She had lots of energy which I felt she drew from anger and nervousness. It was like aswang energy. She did not draw from a higher source and her unbridled nervous energy consumed her as it almost consumed me…My black chick was obviously the residual resentment against my mother."

As the production drew close to its premiere, Fernando, in the privacy of her home, dances and flings her arms to the moon, saying, "Mother, forgive me." At 70 she realizes that she also had her share of blame in their "sorry relationship. I had always felt that she was the older one, the parent, and should know better…But now the tables were turned. I realized that even in her intransigence my mother, too, had suffered. And for the first time in my life I felt free of any baggage!" The reader identifies with the closure finally reached.

As for being the apple of her father's eye, Fernando has nothing but good memories of Dr. Narciso Cordero who helped her with her arithmetic and later her algebra, geomety, physics and trigonometry, who read the entire Les Miserables by Victor Hugo while she had a bout of flu, who taught her how to bike during the Japanese Occupation when there was no gas, who softly played a makeshift flute-recorder as she drifted to sleep.

The writer observes how opposite as night and day her parents were: "A cautious man, my daddy descended the stairs on cat feet, one step at a time, holding on to the banister; mama nimbly negotiated the stairs in high-heeled shoes. My father saved money; my mother spent it. He was an indefatigable string-saver, pencil-stub hoarder and soap-paster; my mother blew the money saved on fondue casseroles and imported pink and blue cigarettes…My mother liked to cook; my father disliked to eat. If papa could take his food intravenously, he would be a much happier man."

This is Fernando at her best talking, not hiding behind the screen of fiction. As Ventura notes, "Gilda made a smart decision when she chose to give up fiction for creative non-fiction in the hope that she would attract a wider audience. Her readership expanded, indeed, and she harvested more prestigious awards than she did for her short stories….The fiction-writing instinct has, however, remained embedded in her psyche and has added sparkle to her essays."

Ventura describes Fernando's style as fusing "the methods of traditional exposition (facts, truths, theories) with the forms of creative non-fiction (narration, description, figurative language) in a style marked by vigor, color, and grace."

For choosing writing as her main line, Fernando is grateful to a wartime teacher, a Maryknoll nun stationed in Malabon where Gilda's family fled. She writes, "In every person's life there is someone, usually a teacher, who blazes a path to one's professional life. Sister Maria del Rey did that for me. She had been a Pittsburgh reporter before she became a nun and could certainly practice what she preached. She taught us how to observe things around us and how to describe them in great detail in writing."

While their class was required to write daily themes, by the end of the schoolyear, it was only the young Gilda who persisted on writing till the task "had become a loving, one-to-one tutorial between Sister del Rey and me."

The other person with a lifelong, still continuing influence on Fernando's life is her choice of a mate, Marcelo, whom she described in his youth as "unobstrusive…refined and sophisticated. I was impressed that he subscribed to the New Yorker magazine whose articles I adored. He was intelligent though not particularly sociable, a strong silent type with some mysterious underground current." But most of all she liked the fact that "he never made me feel insecure. I knew that he would take care of me forever and ever."

Although the chemistry that drew them was electric (pun intended; Marcelo Fernando rose to become a corporate executive at Meralco), the marriage went through decades of strife and adjustments. Fernando quips, "Some friends claimed that their marriages were made in heaven; ours seemed more like it was made in a barbecue pit."

One of the sore points that Fernando saw was her husband "both liked my being a writer and hated it because it was the star on top of the litany of interests that we did not share." Furthermore, "more than any man, woman, or child, my husband considered my writing his rival. And maybe so, because it was my passion. I could pour into a piece of paper all my anguish, my fantasies, and my secret desires. I could create a dwelling place, a holy of holies that no one could enter."

The modus vivendi they arrive at is: "I would attend all his Meralco parties and all the birthdays of his relatives but he would never go to any of mine. And he promised to keep supporting me in style all my life. I kinda felt shortchanged there but then how could you win, he's a lawyer."

Any writer, especially a perennially insolvent one, would agree wholeheartedly to such terms. They remain the secret of the couple's more than 50 years of togetherness. "If we shut a door between us, it was only a physical door, to create the space within that is the real sustenance."

In "Private Spaces," Fernando elucidates this idea further. After years of trying to create her own physical space away from the husband's snoring, nighttime reading lamp and TV watching, she finds that she can "create a room of your own within. Meditation could create that space. So could solitary biking, or running, or swimming, or slow dancing, or playing the piano, or painting, or being absorbed in work you love."

She hints on how she learns to forgive Marcelo's indiscretions and "I found I had landed at home. I finally accepted my partner's love the way it was, and had always been, warts and all, with no conditions, realizing at last that the only private space is being at peace with yourself and the one you love."

She once asked her husband what in their life he liked the most. His answer: "That we learned not to get in each other's way." In poetic terms it means: "Giving each other lots of room to grow." The formula works, whether with heterosexual couples wedded in the 1950s like the Fernandos or homosexual pairings in this era.

The essay "Welcome to the grace years" provides other pointers for couples who think their partnerships are falling apart. In one of her epiphanies, Fernando enters her husband's room to find why she had loved him all these years. "…(O)n the shelves were all shapes and sizes of tapes, batteries, scissors, glue, stacks of coin, strings, magnets, clips, pencils, ballpens, post-it, envelopes…I could rely on him—not just for pens and things—but for everything! Advice on an investment, a trip, a gift, the right word, the right wine, the name of a foreign dish…He grounded me and I felt safe with him. He was my Rock of Gibraltar. Never mind if rocks don't fly or kiss and aren't so sociable. Providing is caring, it is love, and how often that is taken for granted."

In "All about happiness," Fernando hazards a scenario where she and Marcelo are always together "maybe in the next lifetime…But for now let him be just him, and me, me. Twin hearts only when we choose to be." Truly a fairy tale for the millennium.

Ventura's conclusion is Fernando is able to "make senior citizenship look and sound funny. As funny as the weird women in her paintings, swathed in wild colors, frizzy hair askew, pouting, grimacing, pursing their lips, piercing you with witchy eyes, gazing tenderly at a crescent moon."

Columnist Alfred A. Yuson's gripe over Fernando's book is that it sounds like "a sort of swan song, ironically enough from the Grace Kelly of Philippine literature." On hearing of this, Fernando, holding a glass of red wine, shook her head and laughed , "But Grace Kelly is the Ice Queen. I'm the hotsie patootsie of my generation!"
___________________

This review by Elizabeth Lolarga was first published in Ti Similla, academic newsletter of the University of the Philippines Baguio and in Frank Cimatu's blog, www.unholyhours.blogspot.com back in 2004 or 2005 (blogger with short-term memory loss forgets exact date so what else is new?). Photo of Gilda from her Facebook fan page