(For this issue, I yield my column to writer-poet and Philippine Star columnist Jose Dalisay who wrote an introduction to ENCOUNTERS IN THE ARTS.
Pablo Tariman and I met relatively late in our lives, although our paths surely must have crossed many times over the decades, both of us having been immersed in the arts and journalism. When we finally did meet—over a series of delightful concerts to which he had invited me and my wife June—it felt, to me at least, that we had known each other for a very long time, not just by reputation, but out of a more basic affinity having to do with being island boys—he in Catanduanes and I in Romblon—who found our way into the corridors of Manila’s notoriously cliquish elites, he through his arts reportage, and I through my biographies of the rich and famous.
But as proud as I am of my biographical writing, which I endeavor to do with as much honesty as I can coax from myself and my subjects, there is something far more authentic and certainly far more pleasurable in Pablo’s work. He has had the uncommon privilege of not only watching many of the country’s and indeed the world’s finest artists in performance, but also of meeting and getting to know them backstage and off-stage, in venues and circumstances that often reveal more of the artist’s character than his or her public persona might suggest.
Unlike many journalists who see culture (and writing about it) as entertainment, Pablo never lets us forget that culture is serious business, the unforgivingly precise product of industry, discipline, and not a little talent.
That’s not to say that he doesn’t entertain—he does, in spades, with revelations that would make many a TV showbiz host blush—but he provides the larger context, the proscenium stage, as it were, within which plaints and pleasures can resonate with greater verve and volume.
Writing with sympathy and a confidant’s familiarity with the norms and excesses of the artistic life, he humanizes our cultural heroes as much as he admires and also deflates them. It may be a cliche at this point to even suggest that superstars are human, too, subject to the follies and foibles of the mortals who patronize them, but it’s a lesson that never seems to tire us, as if life were a performance on its own, the plot of which we already know but the nuances of which thrill us no end.
As an eyewitness to the greatness of Filipino artists on the international stage and international artists on the Filipino stage, only a Pablo Tariman can orchestrate such performances, bringing into each narrative a conductor’s scholarship, sensitivity, and attentiveness to detail. His book is a tour de force of cultural journalism, as close as we will ever get to a history of the contemporary performing arts in the Philippines. Its advantage over anything else that an academic or scholar might produce is its intimacy, the sweet but hard-earned fruit of its author’s lifelong passion and labors on behalf of a nearly unique advocacy.
Those who know Pablo know the agonizing sorrows he has had to go through, with the loss of his daughter
Kerima and then later her husband Erickson Acosta—both of them immensely gifted writers—in their heroic resistance to despotism. At a recent concert featuring the brilliant young violinist Jeanne Marquez, Pablo sat graciously smiling with his grandchildren Keya and Emmanuel as Jeanne played Massenet’s “Meditation” which Pablo had chosen to remember Kerima by.
At that moment, I think I understood what music has meant to Pablo and his life—not just as a subject for
reportage, but as the ultimate consolation in a world of excruciating pain.
All of Tariman’s encounters with artists are noteworthy, if not exceptional. Our collective encounter with him through this book is special.
He seems to believe that good music will save us; I will not disabuse him of that notion. — Jose Dalisay