Only the Lonely

#173: Lonesome in SF, yet more mail art, Amerasians, Anna Banana, Street art in Manila, Brazil, and Sand City, Daly City's Mobile DJs, The Motels, and a "Wish You Were Here" Flashmob

Dec 17, 2024

THEN & NOW

A “Bomb Cyclone” hit, and we were without electric power for over 24 hours. Thus, issue #173 arrives on your doorstep a couple days late.

Last night, I discovered a letter that filled in a couple more details about Mom’s arrival in San Francisco. First, I should preface all this to note that my mother was not a shrinking violet. She tended to be proactive in most things; after all, she ran her own beauty shop in Manila. It was she who requested that my father arrange to have his cousin Paul (who arrived with his wife Pilar) meet her at the pier:

If you will not be able to meet me, just tell your cousin then, Mr. Laput to meet me at the port upon my arrival in Frisco. . . Darling, I hope it won’t bother your cousin so much . . . just tell him I’ll be wearing my green coat you bought me, with white shoes and white gloves if it’s cold.

She ended the letter by requesting that Dad send her some extra cash.

Dad was hoping to arrive back in San Francisco by mid-November, but his letters suggest that there was a lot of confusion about the schedule, and their departure from Pusan, Korea kept changing, much to the frustration of the crew. They were now worried that they wouldn’t arrive until December.

There are some pieces of the story missing from this period, since I’m still organizing the letters, and I suspect that some of the December ‘50 and January ‘51 missives are in another box. However, I have reason to believe that Dad finally made it to San Francisco sometime in January. Why? I was born in October.

By early March, Mom had started sending Dad typewritten letters. From these I learned that she was attending secretarial school and learning how to type. I also learned that she was finding it difficult to adjust to the cold weather,1 and, for some reason, she was cooking breakfast for Ingo, Dad’s kababayan,2 who also lived in the hotel, and who would later become one of my three godfathers. Perhaps he was paying her for this service; the extra cash would’ve been welcome, for Dad had borrowed money to pay for her passage to the U.S., and they were now on a tight budget. Mom was learning that life in the U.S. was not as easy as the American schools in the Philippines had promised.

In typing class, she had met and befriended another pinay named Betty, who would later become one of my three godmothers. Mom and Betty often had lunch or dinner together after class, or would go to the movies. In one letter, I was surprised that Mom mentioned attending a screening of The Snakepit, starring Olivia de Havilland, a film that figured strongly in a dream that I had about my grandmother.

The word “lonesome” occurred frequently in the 1950-51 letters that Mom wrote to Dad. Clearly, the bustling Chinatown neighborhood and new friends were not enough to prevent her from feeling homesick for both her family in the Philippines and her husband who was always away at sea.

But the big news was Mom’s mention of a missed period and symptoms of what could only have been “morning sickness.”

Folded in among the letters, I found a brochure from The Predictor Corporation for an “automatic device” called “The Forecaster,” which was touted as “the most fool-proof system of planned birth spacing known to medical science.” Developed by Hermann Knaus and Kyusaku Ogino, it was a form of birth control sanctioned by the Catholic Church.

There was something almost mystical and oracular in the names of the corporation and product, certainly a marketing strategy. Whatever my parents’ use of the Forecaster—to delay, prevent, or plan—nature took its own course.

I can only imagine how scary it would’ve been for Mom to be living in and learning the ways of a foreign country while dealing with the upcoming pregnancy. The Filipino impulse towards extended families certainly became helpful at this time. My father’s relatives and kababayan in both Mindanao and the U.S. had reached out to Mom, through letters of introduction, well before she had purchased her tickets to sail to the U.S.

Nevertheless, she knew these people only through their letters before she arrived. After moving to San Francisco, I’m sure what she missed the most was the familiarity of a close-knit family: her mother, brothers, a sister in whom she could confide her innermost fears, and many cousins, uncles, and aunties. There was also the familiarity of neighborhoods and neighbors she knew well, of stores, churches, schools, hospitals, and family doctors. While many neighborhoods were demolished during the bombing of Manila, and over 100,000 people died, there was still that sense of shared experience and a family that had miraculously managed to stay intact through a world war.

And yet, love, immigration, and a “promising” American future outweighed it all.

In the meantime, Dad was feeling more obligated than ever to both earn and save more money. His frequent letters to Mom revealed his concern about their economic situation. He began taking on seafaring jobs that paid bonuses, working on hospital ships—such as the USS Repose and USNS Mercy— that cared for troops fighting in the Korean war, and military ships traveling to and from the Marshall Islands for the nuclear testing projects during the early- to mid-1950s.

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ART

The art that I’ve been receiving from IUOMA artists has been fascinating. Recently, I received an invitation from Juan Petry to take part in a “social sculpture” or “social dada,” which I (along with a number of other artists) can then mail to a certain person at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

Receiving all this correspondance3 art has been a kind of “immersion” learning process in an art practice that has its roots and influences in Dada, Oulipo, Pop Art, and Fluxus—but it also seems to be a wide-ranging and tricksterish art movement that I’ll probably never know in depth. So I’m just starting at a little corner and sort of nibbling on that.

There are a few aspects of mail (or correspondence) art that I gravitate towards, and they are:

art that, at its basis, is about community, gifting, and sharing (as opposed to purely transactional and monetary)
art as play and even choreography and “dance” (Ray Johnson’s “correspondance”)4
art that is subversive and anti-elitist, operating (mostly) outside mainstream art institutions
art that recycles (dependent mostly on what’s at hand) and lets go
art that anyone can do, and does not require a lot of expense (as in framing, gallery costs, promotional costs, membership fees, etc.)
art as both relational and flexible, beginning one-on-one, but potentially expansive; similarly, it can be utterly simple, or quite complex

RABBIT HOLE

I’ve mentioned previously that multiple wars shaped my family. My mother was educated on an American military base, and absorbed many American ideas—especially during her elementary school years. But American military bases have a very long and complicated relationship with the Philippines. Prof. Pido discusses Amerasians and U.S. Militarism:

Ray Johnson was the primary representative of mail art during the mid- to late-twentieth century. Anna Banana was another important mail artist. Here she discusses the aspects of mail art that she enjoys, and her reaction to File Magazine and counter-creation of Vile Magazine.

Manila street artists talk about their art work in a trailer for Manileños, by the Filipino Street Art Project):

Herbert Baglione’s street and land art in Brazil:

Sand City’s West End murals are well known in the area where I live. If you visit Monterey County, stop by there sometime—the art is amazing. A morning walk through Sand City by Linda’s Intuitive images:

SOUNDINGS

“The joke is that every Filipino family must have a DJ within two degrees of separation” —Ken Anolin (DJ KenFused). “How Daly City's Filipino Mobile DJ Scene Changed Hip Hop Forever” | KQED Arts:
Remember “Only the Lonely”5 by the Motels?

In the Netherlands, a flashmob rendering of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here”6 stirs up memories and emotions:

Eulipion Outpost

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