A slice of Larry Alcala

His passing away was conveyed to me by another good friend and classmate, Araceli Dans, by phone, in Paris. I felt a stinging shock, as if something was blocking my breath, a gasping for air. I cannot convey the emotional invasion that grabbed me in a swirling of images that I suppose happens to people about to drown. I felt nostalgia gripping my senses, making me ask myself: How much did I deserve his fidelity and unfailing friendship for over half a century? It seems that I lack what it takes to digest the passing away of an exceptionally close chum. His smiling presence would cheer me up whenever, wherever I would think of him in endless combinations and layers of camaraderie. Try as I may, I cannot think of a moment in our relationship which was disappointing.

I witnessed the gentlemanly way Larry Alcala handled unpleasant situations he was confronted with in the daily problems of his life. One very traumatic experience with a supposedly good friend really shook him till the end. He honored me with all kinds of details about the lamentable business transaction where he was fleeced, treated in a shabby way. His opinion about that person was certainly a good warning for us... and I was careful from then on. That same person later on figured in deals and double-deals, and Larry was right all the time. But he always behaved in the most gentlemanly way possible towards this person.

In private he felt disdain and distrust for such a mediocre way of life. We had long conversations about the hypocritical ways used by this person to ensnare future victims with the promise of grand images. We certainly had a good laugh over the pretention and Machiavellian manipulation used by this type of person.

But Larry Alcala was no fool. He was simply the perfect example of the true gentleman. If my dictionary is right it says that a "gentleman" is a man of the highest honor, courtesy, morality and, in Larry’s case, artistic qualities. Nobody could agree more than me with that definition. Life allowed me to see the gentleman that Larry was. He went on thinking that behaving decently was the natural thing to do.

We all know that in Greece the Stoics thought and taught that duty was the only thing that mattered and that if a person was virtuous and did his duty, virtue would be its own reward, and everyone was responsible for the whole universe. We agreed that only the "top" people were: Stoics, like the Confucians in China, combined with Christian virtues. His moral standards were very high, as high as the quality of his conversation and his artistic conversation.

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He was a modest man but totally aware of what satirical art had to offer in terms of greatness and as a catharsis, highly useful in disinfecting the wounds of corruption, pretentiousness, vanity and opportunism. He truly detested the power-grabbers; but the worst he would do was chide them. On he went with his merry punches, making us crumble like cookies under the spell of a thoroughly good man. You could not help loving the guy and it sickens me to think that some friend had taken advantage of him.

Larry, despite his mild treatment of serious matters, could dish out searing comments on those who pretend to be, none too decently, "birds of prayer" while acting like "birds of prey." Touché!

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My first encounter with Larry was in 1946 via "the Guerrillero," one of the best pen-and-ink drawings I had ever seen, being shown at the UP School of Fine Arts on Taft Avenue. I was totally conquered by the artist’s mastery of a medium I coveted and envied so much. To this day I have it in my memory classified as a most important encounter. Little did I know that the author was to become a life-long intimate friend, although the first face-to-face encounters did not augur well for I apparently did not react too diplomatically about contribution for some project in the school. He was no doubt very patient with me even as I added insult to injury by constantly mangling and mingling his name with the name of Adrian Amorsolo, son of Dean Fernando Amorsolo. Later on, both of them became my very good friends.

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His equanimity showed grandly even if he did not get summa cum laude grades in UP which he no doubt deserved. One of our professors had the well-meaning sexist courtesy to grade all the girls, all of them, the top grade of 1.0 and all the boys, all of us, the considerably lower grade of 1.5. Larry just accepted the major blow and did not complain about this unfair practice. As for the grants and scholarships, it was a major disaster, but we all knew who the real winner was and in my heart he will always be the one.

I mention this matter of summa cum laude which he never got for I had this pain in my gut that surged when he was not chosen for the National Artist Award.

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If there is a stigma about cartooning then allow me to add that there have been a lot of magnificent world figures in all the arts that went in and out of this rich lode of wit and humor this past century. Call them cartoonists if you wish, but you will be forced to recognize the eternal lure of the satirists and my dictionary says quite clearly that wit is a mode of expression intended to arouse amused interest or evoke laughter, while humor implies an ability to use remarks showing verbal facility or ingenuity and swift perception of the incogruous, the comical, the absurd in human life with keen insight, sympathetic understanding and without bitterness. How very much like Larry!

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What wonderful echoes we will get knocking on sacred doors like Shakespeare’s Falstaff; Cervantes’ Don Quixote and his lesser known but just as great Novelas Ejemplares; Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels; Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; Moliere’s comedies; Beaumarchais’ Barber of Seville; the verbal stilettos of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. Juvenal’s satires in Roman times; Garcia Lorca’s Don Perlimplin and Brecht’s Puntila. In painting alone we have a stunning list of most important figures like Hogarth, Goya, Velasquez, Rembrandt Jacques Callot, Brueghel and all the Dutch genre painters; Belgians like Magrite, Ensor, Permeke; elements of Van Gogh; Munch; some parts of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel; profiles by Leonardo da Vinci; Picasso and Miró; Leger, Grozs, Rouault, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin... specially Daumier; Pompeiian fresco murals and ancient Greek terra-cota vases and dishes; antique Roman mural decorations; the marvelous Japanese drawings and prints by Hokusai, Hiroshigue; and so many anonymous medieval artists humorously commenting on life as it happened. The Naif painters like Rousseau (who was greatly admired by Picasso.) In opera alone are the biting comments of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni (the opera of operas), Cosi Fan Tutte and The Abduction in the Seraglio plus from The Marriage of Figaro.

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In the movies we have the devastating Buñuel, Charlie Chaplin, Becker, Von Sternberg, Robert Altman, Woody Allen, Jean Renoir, Lang, etc., etc., an endless list riding along with Larry’s pursuit and idiom. He’s in perfectly good company! Undeniably! Humorous wit is as highly a respectable endeavor as any other form of imaginary creation, period.

The name Larry Alcala should be written in letters of gold somewhere – for he managed to paraphrase Newton’s Principia "From the phenomena of emothious, to investigate the forces of human nature, and then from the forces to demonstrate other phenomena"... us!