"...Frankenstein explains the city's visual style as well as its strength and resilience...Improvisation and cheerfully making do characterize the Filipino attitude toward poverty.
That poverty may be ubiquitous, but so is the energy. Teeming, corrugated-iron slums surround decaying Art Deco mansions. Lush bougainvilleas peek from behind high stone walls trimmed with barbed wire. Chapels hear confession in the middle of decadent shopping malls, and hand-painted billboards advertising movies like Brazen Women overlook vendors touting T-shirts that read JESUS OF NAZARETH. At stoplights, peddlers tap on your window proffering newspapers and Marlboro Reds, while children wave garish feather dusters and delicate lace handkerchiefs. And wherever you go, there is music, in the endless strips of "videoke" lounges, pouring forth from bars and clubs, and in the broken strains of a busker's ukulele. "
Thus Lara Day describes Manila in her article "The Bold and the Beautiful"*, featured in the May 7 issue of Time Magazine (Asia).
The article evokes mixed emotions for me. Pride, in having Manila featured somewhere. Sadness, disagreement, and yet in some parts, a rapid nodding of the head in concurrence, especially to that part regarding videoke. Heck, you can be in the middle of the remotest barrio in the country and still hear someone singing videoke. But still. The article describes Manila as hard to categorize -- there's no such thing as distinctly "Filipino", unlike Bangkok that has its temples, or Mumbai with its saris and spices. Instead, we have a Manila that is a mix of everything -- Frankenstein as the author describes it. Colorful, bold, but Frankenstein. And the beauty, as the author sees it, is not from that mish-mash of culture, nor from its people, but in the little things she struggles to see.
* Read the full article here.
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