Blagador

Here you are, standing there.

2012-02-14T15:11:00.001+08:00

Molecules.

2012-02-11T10:59:00.000+08:00

Captions for photos that were never taken.

2012-02-06T12:28:00.000+08:00

Tuileries métro, February 2006. Me, channeling Steve Buscemi, sitting alone in a bench, waiting for the train.
Some bar in Iloilo City, January 2000. Me, sitting alone at a small table, nursing my third beer, smoking my nth cigarette, writing furiously, drunkenly, in a notebook, ignoring the strangers around me.
Aisle seat in the coach section of a KLM flight, the real-time flight tracker saying we are somewhere over the Himalayas, June 2006. Me, lit by a cone of light coming from a lamp overhead, reading a book whose cover I must’ve left deliberately exposed, for other people to see: Lydia Davis’s ‘The End Of The Story.’
Outside my aunt’s husband’s family’s house in Baguio City, the name of the street I now forget, April or May 1984, my first time in the city. Early morning, it’s not even light yet. Me bundled up in a thick blue-and-red knitted jacket (right), sitting next to an uncle (left), exactly who I forget now, holding a steaming mug of coffee. He shows me how he can make ‘smoke’ come out of his mouth just by breathing. Me, exhaling loudly, amazed that I can make mist come out of my mouth. Behind us is the roof, the only part of the house visible from the street, a steep isosceles triangle.
October 1986. An aunt’s red Ford Fiera, viewed from the front, in the middle of the street: to the right of the Fiera is a tall metal post, on top of which is a lamp emblazoned with the image of a yellow scallop; to the left is the Bocaue River, milky brown and heavily silted at this time of the year. Through the windshield, from left to right: riding shotgun are my cousins Dovie, a big smile on her face; and Rhea, her pigtails frozen in midbounce, her arms blurred by furious waving at the camera, and her mouth hanging open; Mang Nano, the driver, impassive, holding on to the steering wheel, looking ahead. Portions of various kids’ heads, mine included, visible from behind the headrest of the front seat, as we rush to get ourselves included in the photo. We are driving to church to bury my grandfather.
A classroom in a Catholic high school in Bocaue, Bulacan, sometime in 1992. Me standing in front of the class, delivering a biology report, talking about the difference between an ‘era’ and an ‘epoch’ in the context of geologic time. I’m pressing my forearms as close to my sides as possible, the better to hide the widening sweat stains—produced by my armpits—in my white school shirt. My face, shiny with more sweat, frozen in a grimace, unconcerned that my classmates think I’m a smart and nice guy, thinking only that geologic time or no, from now on I’ll be remembered as the guy with sweaty armpits.

English.

2012-01-10T23:30:00.000+08:00

‘Ever since you reminded me of your French past, you know, Ihave been listening with pricked ears. And yes, you are right: you speakEnglish, you probably think in English, you may even dream in English, yetEnglish is not your true language. I would even say that English is a disguisefor you, or a mask, part of your tortoiseshell armour. As you speak I can hearwords being selected, one after the other, from the word-box you carry aroundwith you, and slotted into place. That is not how a true native speaks, one whois born into the language.’

‘How does a native speak?’

‘From the heart. Words well up within and he sings them,sings along with them. So to speak.’

‘I see. Are you suggesting I return to French? Are yousuggesting I sing Frère Jacques?’

‘Don’t mock me, Paul. I said nothing about returning toFrench. You lost touch with French long ago. All I say is, you speak Englishlike a foreigner.’

‘I speak English like a foreigner because I am a foreigner. Iam a foreigner by nature and I have been a foreigner all my life. And I don’t seewhy I should apologise. If there were no foreigners there would be no natives.’

‘A foreigner by nature? No, that is not it, don’t put theblame on your nature. You have a perfectly good nature, if a littleunderdeveloped. No, the more I listen the more convinced I am that the key toyour character lies in your speech. You speak like a book. Once upon a time youwere a pale, well-behaved little boy—I can just see you—who took books tooseriously. And you still are.’

‘I still am what? Pale? Well-behaved? Underdeveloped?’

‘A little boy afraid of sounding funny when you open yourmouth.’

—From J. M. Coetzee’s ‘Slow Man.’

Songs for when you’re writing about mothers who wish one another’s babies were dead.

2011-12-23T20:12:00.000+08:00

A lot of songs from the past five years that I’ve been a fanof Said the Gramophone’s year-in-music lists, apparently: which is not to sayfollowing StG would drive mothers to want babies dead; I just need music that will keep my mind a tiny little bit off the fact that I’m writing about mothers wishing one another’s babies were dead.

Modest Mouse, ‘Dashboard.’
Los Campesinos, ‘You! Me! Dancing!’
Munk and James Murphy, ‘Kick Out The Chairs’ (Who Made Who Remix).
Shakira, ‘Loba.’
Major Lazer, ‘Pon de Floor.’
Micachu and the Shapes, ‘Golden Phone.’
Tune Yards, ‘Bizness.’
Kelis, ‘Acapella.’
The Vaccines, ‘If You Wanna.’

Revelation.

2011-12-18T20:56:00.001+08:00

Just finished watching Malick's ‘Tree Of Life.’ Part of me wants to absolutely hate it, to smoke the reclusive Malick out of whatever hole he's hiding in and beat him up, even if I’m the kind of guy who would rather crawl naked across a field of thorny makahiya than beat anybody up, but Malick’s longing for and despair over and even terror of a Creator who keeps His silence, who is really incomprehensible, perplexing, and if He deigns to answer our questions at all would do so only elliptically—and that existential pain is made all the more horrifying by his apprehension that it seems like nothing, at best infinitesimal, in the context of time, creation, the cosmos—is terribly, terribly real and honest that it super, super kills me. That a movie I would normally dismiss as nothing more than a pretentious, grandiloquent, and bombastic ‘statement’ movie makes me see how humble it actually is—and that it prevents me from using words like ‘miraculous,’ ‘transcendent,’ ‘great,’ and a ‘masterpiece’ to describe it—is comforting.

The end of the movie, where on this cosmic beach somewhere we are all walking in search of people we knew and loved, seems to hint at a kind of hope of restoration, but this hope seems tentative: perhaps this is how Malick wants God to respond to all his questions, but given God’s continued silence, Malick’s doubt, his anxiety, and his fear that there might not be any real hope, linger. I’m probably over-reading, so I should stop right here.

Because I’ve been reading a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, this movie reminded me of something from that book, Karl Barth’s concept of God as ‘wholly other’—there is no way of knowing Him, there is absolutely nothing we can do to know Him, except through revelation: that what we know of Him is not the result of our own strivings, but the result of His grace. This movie repeatedly asks God to reveal Himself, and speculates repeatedly as to where, how, and whether God has in fact revealed Himself.

Like an unspoken refrain the words Yahweh told Job echo all throughout the movie: ‘Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?’ That, Malick seems to be saying, is God revealing Himself, in words. And yet God reveals Himself also in nature, and Emmanuel Lubezki’s glorious photography of the natural world seems to gesture toward that.

These are very hasty thoughts, and I definitely haven’t covered all that I want to say. But the only word right now I’m thinking of while thinking of ‘The Tree Of Life’ is grace.

Here it is, here it goes.

2011-12-01T21:43:00.001+08:00

Second listen to Marit Larsen's ‘Spark,’ and I’m still teaching myself to like it. In other words: I don’t like it yet. It doesn’t have the Abbaesque craziness of some tracks from ‘Under the Surface,’ particularly my favorite Marit song, ‘Don’t Save Me.’ It doesn’t have the undislikable cuteness of the M2M-era ‘Don’t Say You Love Me.’ It doesn’t even have the loveliness (not this one) of my second-favorite Marit song, ‘If A Song Could Get Me You’ (see above). So, Marit: yes, please try rock and roll, a change-your-life-forever tune.

Un ballon rouge.

2011-12-01T09:10:00.001+08:00

My desktop this December. Tasks, movies, names of French streets, and a recipe for limoncello.

Whose idea of a good morning is it anyway?

2011-11-12T09:55:00.001+08:00

Or, some things that, according to that coffee commercial,should make my morning good, but don’t, or most likely never will.

Ngiti ni Berting.
Ngiyaw ni Muning.
Bulaklak ni Aling Pining.
Mantikang pumipisik.
Tambay sa kanto.
(Worst of all) Kapeng matamis.

She, him, and diaphoresis.

2011-11-03T22:17:00.000+08:00

So it’sa bit sad thatZooey and Ben have just called it quits. But can I just say that thesongs of Mr Gibbard present seductive opportunities for luxuriatingin misery?

ExhibitA: The Postal Service's ‘The District Sleeps Alone Tonight,’ withthe killer line, ‘And I am finally seeing why I am the one worthleaving.’

Tomorrow,you’ll find me wearing thick black eyeliner and gonad-squeezinglytight black pants and pointy black bangs, and you’ll think I’mpathetic, not because I’ve gone emo, but because I’ve gone emoseveral years too late.

Speakingof gonads, here is a screenshot of the first few lines of the song,as alleged by this lyrics site:

The Hamburglar’s colorful life of crime: A biography in aliases.

2011-10-17T09:14:00.000+08:00

Hamburjaywalker.
Hamburgunrunner.
Hamburbigamist.
Hamburapist.
Hamburmoneylaunderer.
Hambugger.
Hamburgloria Arroyo.*

* Hasty asterisk represents information that is unverified and/or coterminous with Hamburglary, and/or (more likely) reflective of blog owner’s unwillingness to get embroiled in any possible problem, the zero readership of this blog notwithstanding; must be preceded with a disclaiming ‘allegedly.’

The rest is literature.

2011-10-13T21:52:00.000+08:00

The lovely openingparagraph of Alejandro Zambra’s novella, ‘Bonsái’:

Al final ella muere y él se queda solo, aunque enrealidad se había quedado solo varios años antes de la muerte de ella, deEmilia. Pongamos que ella se llama o se llamaba Emilia y que él se llama, se llamabay se sigue llamando Julio. Julio y Emilia. Al final Emilia muere y Julio nomuere. El resto es literatura:

My inept attempt at translating it:

In the end she dies and hestays alone, but the truth was he had been alone several years before her—Emilia’s—death.Let us say she is called or was called Emilia, and he is called, was called, orcontinues to be called Julio. Julio and Emilia. In the end Emilia dies andJulio does not die. The rest is literature:

Yes, I’m slowly, slowlyreading the Zambra novella in the original Spanish by trying to translate itline by line; doing so proves only that my command of Spanish is severelylimited. But it’s a nice challenge, and anyway I don’t intend to let anybodyread the full translation when it gets done, if it gets done.

Raining out of a low sky.

2011-09-16T11:20:00.000+08:00

It’s been three years.

Your work has allowed me to carry on writing,even when, most of the time, it’s hard to shake off the feeling that I am justone of those crank-turners you once spoke about.

And here I’m risking sentimentality,melodrama, the rolled eyes, the nudged ribs, the ‘oh, how banal,’ becauseI don’t remember thanking you, even if only in my head, of course only in myhead, since I began reading your work.

So: Thank you.

Three things that made me happy this week.

2011-09-14T22:23:00.002+08:00

My story, ‘This Earthly Tent,’ appears in this week’s Philippines Free Press.
A photo of an actual tent is used to accompany the story.
On the page where the story appears, someone left this comment:

Grief as a blurb.

2011-09-09T10:22:00.000+08:00

Shocking.
It was devastating.
I am shattered.
I’m at a loss for words.
I’m beyond words.
What a loss.
I can’t believe it.

A dog and her number one fan.

2011-09-07T22:29:00.000+08:00

Just because.

Not to mention that cutesy photos of cutesy dogs can be used to manipulate people into thinking I’m such a compassionate, loving, sunshiny dude. (Which I didn’t not mention, so there’s no point in saying ‘not to mention’ at all.)

Rhymes from a marriage.

2011-08-25T09:57:00.001+08:00

The rain is falling and the dog is snoring
Debating who’s most evil—Goebbels, Hitler, or Göring?

On the laptop screen flashes a cooking Nigella
Or scenes from ‘Futurama,’ with Bender, Zoidberg, and Leela.

It’s eleven o’clock. Should we have breakfast or lunch?
Does ‘Edvard Munch’ rhyme with ‘lunch’? Nope, wrong hunch!

There’s soymilk in the fridge; carrots, leeks, and cucumber.
We’re too lazy to cook; does Good Burgers deliver?

Oh, it’s too early for burgers. D’you find instant noodles appealing?
It’s O.K., but we won’t be mistaken for MFK Fisher or Liebling.

But Saturdays are for lazing around, unwashed and unhygienic.
Let’s have Cheetos! Chock-full of MSG and acids citric and lactic.

Oh? Let’s hold off the chips until after one?
What do we eat, then, on this rainy not-yet-noon in Diliman?

I don’t know. Maybe we should just stay in bed.
You can check student papers. I can sing songs by Radiohead.

Should we laugh at the neighbor? It’s not fun anymore, eh?
Because it’s sucks to hear him sing Lisa Loeb’s ‘Stay’

For the, I don’t know, hundredth time. Oh, well. Oatmeal, maybe?
Our default breakfast food. Add ginger and scallions—instant congee!

And then we can go back to bed, sleep until nightfall.
Then we sleep again. Another weekend sa haybol.

Bow.

Photobomber Moran.

2011-08-12T08:52:00.007+08:00

(No plus points for those who get the allusion.)

In a previous lifetime my job involved chasing doctors and public-health officials and big-pharma people so I could write health and medical stories. The gig got me to do some traveling, both around the country and in some parts of the world, often on big pharma’s dime.

In other words, if you you’re looking for people to blame for the high cost of medicines in this country, you could look in my direction. But I suppose only for a bit. But still to blame, I know.

Anyway, part of the gig involved showing up at hospitals when administrators and corp comm people wished to show off their facilities, and sometimes even their doctors’ skills, so people like me could write about it. One of the cool things I did was hang out in surgical theaters, when there was ongoing surgery. I got to see two dudes undergo coronary artery bypass grafting. The whole shebang—I saw them have their chests pried open and then messed with a bit and then wired shut again.

I also saw some poor lady undergo hip replacement surgery. I e-mailed friends about it, and this is what I told them:

The entire experience made me think of that classic Sam Raimi movie ‘Evil Dead 2’ in terms of gore—all that’s missing are the trees uprooting themselves to maul some poor woman and same woman screaming like hell only to swallow a projectile-eyeball. You should’ve seen the doctor’s instruments--when I saw them laid out near the patient’s bed I thought they were constructing a highway instead of doing surgery. At least there were no derrick cranes or steamrollers around.

The photo above shows me (left; I’m the guy in green), age twenty-four in March 2003, photobombing the hip-replacement surgery.

Girl with an autosomal recessive phenotype.

2011-07-26T18:38:00.002+08:00

(Or, hypothetical Mendelian renderings of an oft-forged Vermeer. Also, imaginary DNA-savvy novels that Stieg Larsson should’ve had the chance to write.)

Girl with Attached Earlobes
Girl with Cleft Chin
Girl with Autosomal Recessive Polycystic Kidney Disease
Girl with Pronounced Albinism
Girl with Short Eyelashes
Girl with Autosomal Recessive Hyper-IgE Syndrome
Girl with Hitchhiker’s Thumb
Girl with Dry-Type Earwax

On some branch of all life's sumptuous branching complexity.

2011-07-21T12:55:00.002+08:00

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable—if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.

— David Foster Wallace, ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.’

As old as Jesus.

2011-07-20T15:36:00.005+08:00

As in: Tomorrow, I’ll be. (Yeah, I mean I’ll be over 2,000 years old or immortal or nonexistent or thirty-three, depending on your sectarian leanings.)

Why I came up with a mixtape, I don’t really know, but maybe you can just blame it on a sort of built-in mixtape-assembly urge that makes itself felt on certain occasions, and this happens to be one of those moments.

I don’t think there are any clear ‘inclusion criteria’—ha!—for this mixtape, although I suppose that’s not entirely true. After all, pretty much everything I post online is calculated to achieve an effect—the way I nonchalantly pass off stuff that’s easily Googleable as something I happen to pluck out from some vast well of knowledge lodged deep inside me, and then I knock myself a little by saying or doing something awkward or dorky, or poking fun at myself, or anticipating possible accusations of pretentiousness or pomposity or whatever by being the first to call myself pompous or pretentious or whatever.

I suppose the edict from the fiction-workshop magisterium applies here—characters, including the personae we create online, should be believable, sympathetic, three-dimensional.

Therefore, this mixtape: you may consider the track list ‘Exhibit A’ of this tendency to alternately puff up and then deflate my ego, which if you think about it is just a really sneaky disingenuous way to puff up my ego; sure there’s some hipsterishly quaint stuff there, but lookee, there’s ridiculously sappy stuff there too!

Which is not to say that all my calculated moves hit the mark; most of the time I don’t even know the equation I’m supposed to use for my calculations. Besides, who knows if this attempt at a three-dimensional character coheres or convinces?

Also, this self-aggrandizement/self-deprecation shtick requires an audience—is the audience even there? And if there is an audience at all, who knows if they’re just going to skip ahead to the track list below then look for a possible download link for the tracks? If there’s an audience at all, who’s to say that they didn’t just land here because the keyword they typed into some search engine sent them here, and in no way should their having stumbled on this site be mistaken for a genuine interest in what I have to say?

In the immortal words of Pauline Kael: ‘It comes on as self-mocking, but it has no self to mock.’

But it’s my birthday, isn’t it, and why I’m doing this to myself right now is the kind of question that might send therapists, professional or amateur, in an analytic frenzy.

So just move along and check the track list below—that is, if you haven’t already. I might even point you to a download link, if I’m convinced you aren’t just out to poop my party by issuing a DMCA takedown notice.

‘Bit Part,’ Lemonheads.
‘When I Grow up,’ Garbage.
‘I Turn My Camera on,’ Spoon.
‘To Be Alone with You,’ Sufjan Stevens.
‘To the Lighthouse,’ Patrick Wolf.
‘Un Rayo de Sol,’ Le Mans.
‘California Dreaming,’ Mamas and Papas.
‘Landslide,’ Smashing Pumpkins.
‘Nothing but the Sky,’ Ivy.
‘Such Great Heights,’ The Postal Service.
‘When I’m Thinking about You,’ The Sundays.
‘Since U Been Gone,’ Kelly Clarkson.
‘Street Lights,’ Kanye West.
‘Passing Afternoon,’ Iron and Wine.
‘All I Want,’ LCD Soundsystem.
‘Busby Berkeley Dreams,’ The Magnetic Fields.
‘1901,’ Phoenix.
‘Be My Baby,’ The Ronettes.
‘Come Here,’ Kath Bloom.
‘Heaven Tonight,’ Hole.
‘Black Star,’ Radiohead.
‘Most of the Time,’ Bob Dylan.
‘Show Me Love,’ Robyn.
‘Heartbeats,’ José González.
‘The Hounds of Love,’ The Futureheads.
‘Wait Forever,’ Gary V.
‘Isaiah 45:23,’ The Mountain Goats.
‘Till I Hear It from You,’ Gin Blossoms.
‘Disconnect the Dots,’ Of Montreal.
‘There Is No Ending,’ Arab Strap.
‘Blue Light,’ Bloc Party.
‘Must’ve Done Something Right,’ Relient K.
‘Something Good,’ Caetano Veloso.

An outtake.

2011-07-13T18:47:00.005+08:00

I’ve been trying to write this story for over two years; now that it’s almost finished, I’m posting a section of the story that I have decided to cut.

Easter 1968, Tübingen, Germany. It was supposed to be early spring, but it felt like it was still winter; then again any weather that required me to wear a jacket was der Winter. Truth was, the novelty of experiencing temperatures unknown to that part of the tropics where I came from had passed as early as the third day I’d seen snow, in early December; then it felt like it just kept on snowing, and the day just kept getting duller and shorter, and the night got blacker and longer, and the Christmas break drew on and on; and now, with winter not quite over, another two-week break, for Easter.

The last letter from Helen, dated early November, arrived in late January; I had no idea whether the letters I had been writing during the winter had finally wound up in Manila. What I recently received were Christmas cards from friends from church, relatives, ministry partners, and benefactors who had unquestioningly pooled together resources to send me here to study; all that I needed to do was to make clean copies of the drafts for each encouraging message, then seal the envelopes, then glue the stamps on, then send them to the postbox. Meanwhile the leaves of the old plane trees remained pale and embryonic, the water of the Neckar river specular and still. The charm of walking up and down the Platanenallee had also worn by now, with icy mud seeping into my boots.

I mostly stayed in my room, ignoring the book lying open on my lap, its pages unturned for hours; looking out whenever I noticed it was raining again.

I longed for the resumption of classes; I particularly looked forward to a class taught by the quiet Bavarian, a Catholic priest. He had started teaching here last year, the same year I came in, and since then his reputation just grew, his classrooms packing students, Catholic or Protestant. Catholic theology students talked about his role as a consultant at the Second Vatican Council, concluded just a few years ago; but I was most surprised by the fact that he was just a little over forty, and yet his hair had the dullness, the shimmerlessness of dirty late-winter snow.

But there was also grumbling about him: how for a man reputed to be a reformer, he rejected the program for social action and reform that some thinkers could see in the Gospel; how he refused the notion that Jesus was a revolutionary, preaching about the poor’s ownership of the kingdom of heaven. Jesus is the only Son of God, he stressed, and He ‘is eternally in God, is God Himself, and therefore is not a figure in which God appears, but rather the sole and irreplaceable God.’ A ‘Marxist’ interpretation of the Gospel was simply inexcusable. He pointed out the dangers of politicizing God’s message, because this new ideology diminished Jesus: ‘no longer … the Christ, but rather the embodiment of all the suffering and oppressed as their spokesman, who calls us to rise up, to change society.’

I steered clear of the fierce wave of Marxism most students at Tübingen were swimming in, almost in the same manner that, in Manila, I had stayed away from what I had thought was the hysteria of the intensifying student movement, giving rise to the formation of all those abbreviations that now signify close to nothing: KM; SDK.

Perhaps the mounting student protests at Tübingen, no doubt emboldened by similar, higher-profile protests in Berlin and Bonn as well as in other university towns, had upset the Bavarian theologian. Some months earlier I could still see him walking to and from the library, or the nearby bakery to get a Spritzkuchen. In the weeks leading to the Easter holiday, he could only be seen in the classroom, the place where the erosion of the Old World order was moving at a much slower pace than what went on in the streets.

I ached for the old lectures where he could speak about the articles of faith, in an orderly cascade of propositions that established the harmony of the world, without students challenging him on the relevance of the elegant unknotting of theological complexities when chaos and injustice abound, as if the professor belittled the importance of a Christian’s moral responsibility toward his neighbor, as if he never saw orthopraxis as a critical component of that same universal harmony. In one of these early lectures he could still speak freely about man’s ‘inextinguishable yearning for the infinite’—how ‘none of the answers attempted are sufficient. Only the God himself who became finite in order to open our finiteness and lead us to the breadth of his infiniteness responds to the question of our being. For this reason, the Christian faith finds man today too. Our task is to serve the faith with a humble spirit and the whole strength of our heart and understanding.’

The Church, in the eyes of the student movement, was irrelevant, notwithstanding the efforts at Vatican II; the world, sinful and fallen and broken as it was, was fragmenting, falling into that evil that a lot of pastors and theologians now grimly refer to as ‘our postmodern world.’

By the time school reopened, I received a letter saying that Helen had been participating in the student movement in Manila, and would only be sending mail occasionally; I learned about the assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke, the polarizing student leader from the Freie Universität Berlin, an idol for a lot of students at Tübingen, on Easter Sunday; I stopped attending the classes of the nervous Bavarian due to mounting rowdiness. The following year Herr Professor Pfarrer Ratzinger would move to Universität Regensburg.

He must be seeing clearly how the young people of Germany—of the world—were, in the words of the Evangelist, building a house without a foundation: he was sure a torrent was coming, and when it finally came, the house must face a shaking; then collapse, then destruction.

But what comes after destruction?

I’m so glad that I found someone to believe in again.

2011-06-02T09:52:00.001+08:00

On the other hand: This song, which I loved the first time I heard it, I still love.

You imitate the best and the rest you memorize.

2011-06-02T09:01:00.003+08:00

This song, so terrifying the first time I heard it, sometimes still scares me.

Procrastinations # 9.

2011-05-31T17:10:00.005+08:00

Catedral de la Santa Creu i Santa Eulàlia, Barcelona. Via Google Earth with Street View.

Three years in meals.

2011-05-15T14:14:00.001+08:00

Gougères, with roasted-red-pepper-and-cheese dip. Bruschettas with olive tapenade, tomato–basil pesto. Crudités with mango aioli, tzatziki. None of which you get to eat. The wedding cake: banana cupcakes with vanilla-sugar frosting, which—forgoing such distractions as sleep—you make yourselves, finishing eighty-odd cupcakes thirteen hours before the ceremony. You don’t get to taste those, either. Chilean Cab-Sauv and sparkly French demi-sec—the only things you get to enjoy.

When you’re too tired to cook: mash Spanish sardines (in oil) in a bowl; add some olive oil, calamansi juice, capers, dried tarragon, salt, pepper. Tip cooked spaghettini in bowl, toss with chopped flat-leaf parsley. Dinner.

Grudgingly separate yolks from whites, grate a wedge of Edam until your armpit hurts. Add other ingredients, most of which you don’t remember anymore. (Mostly stuff that shows your support to the dairy industry: milk, butter.) Do the requisite whisking and folding, then pour in an oven-safe vessel. Watch the thing as it rises. Panic, as you prepare a side salad of rocket and other greens. The urgency to begin lunch before the soufflé sinks. Start eating, then start grumbling as you realize that lunch, essentially, is cheese-flavored air. No one deserves to have only air for lunch. Promise never to make soufflé again.

A bag of Cheetos (jalapeño flavor) for dinner. Two bags of Clover chips (chili and cheese flavor) for dinner. When you’re feeling chef-like (i.e., willing to fire up the stove), a huge bowl of freshly cooked Besuto crackers (vegetable flavor, allegedly) for dinner.

One of you suddenly decides he wants to be an awesome bread baker. He sifts flour, prepares the yeast, mixes. He is a bit annoyed that he has to rest the dough overnight. He wakes the following morning and sees a huge doughy monster peeking from under a dishtowel, happily punches it down. Enthusiastically kneads. Overenthusiastically kneads. Cuts the dough in two, stretches them in separate baking pans. Adds olives and rosemary in one pan, adds roasted garlic in another. Waits for the bread to bake; marvels at the failure. No self-respecting foccaccia should be this tough.

When the weather gets too hot: cold soba with a bit of dashi, soy, sesame oil, sesame seeds; fried silken tofu; icy dashi in a bowl; cold seaweed salad.

When it’s too cold, pappa al pomodoro, made with months-old bread, basil, canned tomatoes; or minestrone, with shell macaroni, different kinds of mushrooms, chickpeas.

Crab shells and shrimp shells and oyster juice, turned into stock for risotto. The grandest case of connubial food poisoning, resulting in crawl-to-the-bathroom competitions, joint weight loss of about twelve kilos.

Birthday meals: one takes four hours to prepare, another about three hours. The first: lamb and spinach curry with homemade paneer; homemade yogurt; chocolate–peanut butter cheesecake. The second: risotto cooked in a broth made with shavings of cheese (including every last bit of mold that has grown on the cheese); chocolate lava cake.

And, speaking of risotto, that brilliant squash and sage risotto, from ‘The River Cottage Cookbook.’

Another birthday meal, the only party you throw at that beautiful house in Project 3, a month before you leave for Teachers’ Village. Different kinds of pizzas: anchovy, garlicky mushroom, grilled eggplant, with tomato–basil sauce. Alugbati lasagna. Potato salad with celery, apple, pear, bell pepper. Pajeon, with leeks and squid. Deconstructed sushi. Caramel popcorn. Vegan tablea cupcakes. And for the adventurous, cucumber, calamansi, and chili popsicles.

Vegan French onion soup. Haricots verts sautéed in butter and garlic. And, just to de-veganize everything again, thin slices of Spanish salchichas.

Meals you cook for family and friends who visit that house on Maginhawa. Roast free-range chicken (with mustard, garlic, and tarragon); ar-arosep, tomato, and red onion salad; another salad with homemade salted duck eggs; mango tart. Mushroom quiche with amazingly flaky crust. And, most recently, pasta primavera with roasted vegetables.

This summer, when the days are fever-hot and the evenings barely cool, you set a table on the driveway. You prepare black bean and black rice burritos, with Gouda, coriander, sautéed cabbage, homemade sour cream. You ignore the sweat that glues your shirt to your back. You take swigs from bottles of ice-cold San Mig Light (because there are no Cerveza Negras at Ministop).

What sometimes happens on weeks spent eating junk, eating out, or eating junk out: you discover the vegetables in the fridge turning into compost. You slice, dice, scrape off the rot; then you turn everything into fried rice.

Being diagnosed with severe anemia maybe disqualifies you from claiming ambivalence over the matter of having a child, because it doesn’t seem to allow you any choice on the matter, because it appears to claim already deciding the issue. There may not be children anywhere in your future. That ‘may not,’ like a disclaiming, noncommittal euphemism for ‘never.’ Still you start making changes in your diet—at least ten kinds of vegetables in a meal, some fish or seafood, the diminution of dairy consumption, the banishing of any traces of conventionally farmed, polished rice. There may be room for ambivalence again, there may be none, but there will be more meals, there will be more years, there will be the two of you, together.

The simplest way to preserve love.

2011-04-22T16:26:00.001+08:00

‘And yet,’ she said, ‘who would not wish, at times, to leave this place of poverty, to live where a street is not a corridor of want and filth and suffering? Of course I would like to change, to get away: I too.’

‘You would miss it, then.’

‘Yes. But that’s a way to go on loving—a place, or a person. To miss it. In fact, to go away, to put yourself in the state of missing, is sometimes the simplest way to preserve love.’

— Shirley Hazzard, ‘The Bay Of Noon’ (1970).

Christian slapstick, the early years.

2011-03-11T14:54:00.003+08:00

We’ve been discussing the Book of Acts in one of my Bible study groups, and more often than not, I’ve been finding a lot of things in it to giggle, if not laugh out loud about. Don’t get me wrong—I take my faith seriously. Even if I have a dirtier mouth than most Christians, and can be a nasty malicious bâtard, and am totally cool with the fact that I will attract the reaction, ‘Christian ka?!’ all the time, and all sorts of other things, I hold on to Christ’s eternal lordship and to justification by faith—with abandon, with ferocity, and, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot (and also Guns and Roses), with a little patience. I am a sinner and Christian; the reason I’m a Christian is that I’m a sinner, and only Christ can rescue me from this wretchedness. In the words of one who I think is among greatest writers to have walked the earth, the Apostle Paul: ‘For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that I do not; but what I hate, that do I.’

As I was saying, there have been a number of instances while reading the Book of Acts that I let out a sort of involuntary giggle, even a big-hearted laugh (but only when no one’s looking). Maybe because giggling is my default response to a wide swath of Pavlovian stimuli—seeing someone slip on the floor, seeing someone throwing a hissy fit, feeling nervous when facing an authority figure. It’s often inappropriate, this tendency to giggle.

And so imagine me, reading about the implementation of the Jerusalem-to-Judea-to-Samaria-to-the-ends-of-the-earth commission, the persecution of the early Christians, the neglect of Greek widows, and all of a sudden I burst into laughter. Consider:

Ananias and his wife Sapphira drop dead (Acts 5) after donating to the church proceeds from the sale of their property. It’s a horrifying story, really—but the mere fact of the couple dropping dead is a kind of darkly comedic moment that inspires nervous laughter.
Philip, on a desert road, runs alongside the Ethiopian eunuch’s chariot (Acts 8), and then asks the eunuch if he can understand what he is reading. Running alongside the chariot! Knowing what the eunuch is reading!
The Apostle Paul in Lystra (Acts 14) is stoned by an angry mob, dragged out of the city, and left for dead—only to get up again and return to the city. I could almost see Paul dusting off his cloak, wiping dried blood off his face, and then squaring his shoulders before entering Lystra’s gates.
And in Acts 20, Paul gathers Christians at Troas in an upper-story room. He talks and talks and talks, until midnight, and then a young man named Eutychus falls asleep, tumbles out of a window, and dies. Paul rushes down, and says, ‘Don’t worry guys, he’s alive’—whereupon Eutychus stands up, goes back to the room, and eats.

Of course, I’m looking at them with the eyes of a guy from the twenty-first century, his world view deeply informed by Saturday morning cartoons and old Tagalog comedies where people fall off from great heights, heavy objects fall on people’s heads, people get hit with big sticks, explosions blacken faces. And this tendency toward laughter may be seen as irreverence, bordering on blasphemy.

But these tiny comedic skits from the early years of inadvertent Christian slapstick fall away when taken in the context of the narrative arc of the Book of Acts—the journey from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria to the ends of the earth, reaching out to the Jews then the Greeks, in fulfillment of the Great Commission. There are miraculous signs and wonders along the way, and horrible stories of persecution, but there are also stories of people being human—petty squabbling, countless arguments, but also brotherhood and fellowship, moments of heroism.

What makes the Book of Acts ultimately moving for me is that in its stories, one can find a great sense of humanity, the kind sharpened by an apprehension of the presence of the Divine. It’s comforting to know that the people in Acts were also ordinary people, prone to sin, but made righteous by faith and by grace.

Summer is ready when you are.

2011-03-08T10:12:00.002+08:00

Yup, I like twinkly cutesy pop. And even though I should know better, I constantly end up liking hipsterishly self-conscious music groups that, with combined irony and sincerity, pay homage to certain music genres—Spectoresque all-girl pop, California surf pop, snot-nosed Gainsbourgian chanson, whatever.

In short, I just finished assembling the 2011 summer mixtape. (Why do I always come up with these ridiculous disclaimers?)

The original plan was to have the Breeders open this play list with ‘Saints,’ but after watching ‘Stand By Me’ last weekend—where Buddy Holly’s ‘Every Day’ was part of the soundtrack—I decided to make it track two instead. Because I’m probably one of the uncool few who actually liked Hole’s ‘Celebrity Skin’ album, I just had to include a song from it. And yeh, LCD Soundsystem’s ‘All I Want’ also needed to be included, since it’s one of my favorite songs from last year.

But you don’t really care about my mixtape-assembly methods, do you. (I know, it’s a mixtape; I’m not curating some big-deal exhibition.) So here’s the track list.

1. Buddy Holly, ‘Every Day.’
2. The Breeders, ‘Saints.’
3. Camera Obscura, ‘The Sweetest Thing.’
4. Hole, ‘Awful.’
5. The Chiffons, ‘One Fine Day.’
6. Toro y Moi, ‘Leave Everywhere.’
7. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, ‘Young Adult Friction.’
8. Les Très Bien Ensemble, ‘En Attendant Rascolnikov.’
9. Magic Kids, ‘Summer.’
10. Wavves, ‘King of the Beach.’
11. Band à Part, ‘No Sé Por Qué.’
12. LCD Soundsystem, ‘All I Want.’
13. Tennis, ‘Marathon.’

Then the building administrator said, ‘Ditch the crutch and climb.’

2011-02-24T12:57:00.004+08:00

I’ve been seeing this sign at the steel car park between 6750 and Rustan’s Makati, and I think there’s something sort of mean about it.

Of course, there’s an elevator very near the stairs, but there are no signs pointing to the elevator.

Besides, as per the Mozzhukhin experiment: ‘stairs’ plus ‘person in wheelchair’ equals what?

‘Muscles from Brussels,’ et al.: Action-star epithets for van Damme’s nonfamous friends.

2011-01-24T09:12:00.001+08:00

Cranium from Byzantium.
Pinkie from Helsinki.
Tendon from London.
Coccyx from Phoenix.
Esophagus from Damascus.
Knees from Nice.
Sole from Seoul.
Diaphragm from Amsterdam.
Lysosome from Rome.
Pancreas from Caracas.
Aorta from Jakarta.
Urethra from Canberra.
Neutrophil from Brazzaville.

Other things Bruno Mars may consider doing for ya.

2011-01-18T10:03:00.003+08:00

(Context: Man up and listen, if you could bear it, to Bruno Mars’s ‘Grenade’ here.)

Catch Guillain-Barré and recover from it by sheer willpower alone (although using crystals and spirulina and negative ions is permitted) for ya.
Swallow the still-running blades of a Cuisinart for ya.
Jump a porcupine and have babies with it for ya.
Do anything including a porcupine and have babies with it for ya.
Become a mime that performs only Ibsen for ya.
Disappear, get tons of plastic surgery, come back as a different artist, record a cover version of ‘Grenade,’ get accused of ripping off Bruno Mars, reveal that he’s the real Bruno Mars and provide proof for it, and tragically fail to convince people about it for ya.
Decide whether he wants to be a billionaire so f*cking bad more than he wants to catch a grenade et cet. for ya.
Release the unedited version of the song where the last line of the song is revealed to be, ‘But I won’t do that,’ for ya.
Do all the things he claimed he would do, for realz and livestreamed for his fans’ enjoyment, for ya.
Shut up for ya.

Girls and their quirks: The spam edition.

2010-12-30T13:54:00.001+08:00

Florine Margrett, who promised to teach me how to get ‘a biggerpenis’
Danyelle Renata, who wanted me to channel Hugh Laurie/House by selling me Vicodin
Nona Erna, who brought back memories of Celestina ‘Bubbles’ Sanchez when she promised to sell me cheap Ativan (as well as Xanax and Valium and Vicodin)
Moon Cherilyn, who spelled ‘high quality’ ‘High Qua1ity’
Twana Alane, who raved about ‘.PenisLong, used and recommended by Sex industry professionals’
Araceli Shannan, who flattered me with her presumption that I can afford ‘Rep1ica Ro1ex’
Louvenia Shaquana, who raved about the ‘ALL NIGHT staying power’ of the ‘Best Herbal Penis Pill’
Yuriko Star, who promised to ‘grow … smalldick,’ as if it were crop like corn or soy
Mozelle Chelsey, who insisted on interrogating an ontological mystery: ‘WHY buy original?’
The surnameless Jasmine, who vowed it was possible for me to ‘[hacer] dinero desde su casa’
Octavio Bautista, who isn’t a girl but wants to sell me fake watches that are ‘totalmente idéntica a la original’ (thankfully not making awkward allusions to primary sexual characteristics)

Towards Bethlehem.

2010-12-21T16:30:00.004+08:00

‘The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled.’

Commonplace reports of casual killings, yes; commonplace reports of misplaced children, yes; commonplace reports of abandoned homes, no; commonplace reports of vandals misspelling cusswords, not quite. A country of bankruptcy, yes; a country of public-auction announcements, no.

San Francisco, 1967, is not Metro Manila, 2010.

I am, at this moment in December 2010, coaxing Joan Didion’s ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ into generating all manner of ideas, situations, and observations that I can claim run parallel with my experience. Pretty easy to do, as Didion is absent, and she can’t argue back; I get to say, ‘What you’re saying is still so true, Ms Didion,’ and she can’t say, ‘That’s what you think’; she can’t even politely smile, and move away. I want to claim Didion’s 1960s is relevant to my 2010s; that her San Francisco has a profound connection with my Manila. I am conditioning myself to stay alert to the slightest flickering that can induce that shock of recognition. She was thirty-two when she wrote it. I am thirty-two.

I am on the train on the way home from work, in the farthest corner, where the air-conditioning doesn’t quite reach me, but neither do the rush-hour crowds blocking the doorways.

A gallery of kids, mostly runaways: bakers of macrobiotic bread, once-and-future dime-store attendants, followers of the Grateful Dead; shooting crystal, hitchhiking to score cheap peyote, hanging signs that say, ‘Do not disturb, ring, knock, or in any other way disturb. Love’ while dropping acid. All of them coming down, in various ways, from various trips.

Someone on the train, a man, is speaking a little too loudly, saying something about caroling. At least that is the only word I catch, busy as I am reading about an old woman of thirty-two being asked not to worry, because there are old hippies too.

Somewhere in the essay, this exchange: ‘ “I’m getting bored, just sitting around here.”

‘ “That’s what you call pre-acid uptight jitters.” ’

‘ “We wish you / a merry Christmas,” ’ the loud voice starts singing. ‘ “We wish you / a merry Christmas.”

‘Lahat sila nagka-caroling, natutuwa kami sa nagka-caroling. Anlaki nga ng binibigay namin, eh. “We wish you / a merry Christmas….” ’

I wait for a reply coming from a person to whom he should be saying all these. Somebody, anybody.

‘ “We wish you / a merry Christmas.” ’

I know everyone is looking, so I say in my head, ‘It’s opposite day today.’ I do not look, even if I seriously want to know what’s going on: I don’t want to be like them who rubberneck readily at car accidents, celebrity sightings, nervous breakdowns. Everyone is looking. Who is ‘everybody’? Like them. Who are ‘them’?

I go back to the book. ‘I ask what it is that is supposed to happen.

‘ “I don’t know,” he says. “Something. Anything.” ’

‘Just fax me, O.K.? Pwede kitang ihanap ng supplier na maganda ang ibibigay na presyo. Just fax me. Maganda siya, promise. Imported pa. Ay, dapat sosyal: ihm-pohr-tehd! Ihm-pohr-tehd! Ihm-pohr-tehd!’

He laughs loudly. ‘Hay, naku, natutuwa talaga ako sa mga nagka-caroling. “We wish you / a merry Christmas.” Ihm-pohr-tehd!’

The P.A. system doesn’t tell me where the train is now. I look up from my book. We are at Ortigas station, and I see him, and no one sits beside him, and the people standing near him keep a safe distance from him. An invisible velvet rope has emerged, keeping him in, keeping us out. He continues talking about suppliers, about caroling, about imported goods, ‘Fax me!’

That glimpse of a human face. I look away, unwilling to remember that face: I don’t have to remember, I don’t owe it to him to remember his face. But in my head I am already pinning backstories on him, as if he were a tailless cardboard donkey, I a blindfolded kid, and plausible narratives the missing tail. This is the form parlor games take on public transportation: Maybe he’s lost his job (administrative, something to do with procurement), and he’s come unhinged. Maybe he’s having a nervous breakdown, for whatever reason. Maybe it’s drug-related, and he’s hallucinating. Maybe it’s one big prank.

‘We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.’ Joan Didion has written that elsewhere, and remembering these words drowns out this book’s image of a toddler on a rocking horse, living with people barely out of their teens who alternately take LSD and marijuana.

But if we don’t look for the sermon, or the moral lesson, or if we resist the urge to interpret, what do we end up finding? Should we even question the presumption that we should ‘end up finding’ something here? Should I ditch the use of ‘we’?

The train doors open at Cubao, and I close my book. The man’s last words are ‘ “We wish you / a merry Christmas,” ’ and he gets off at the station. Two men take his seat. I scan the faces of the people around me, and I watch them watch the man walking out. Everybody seems to let out a deep breath, as if a long-musty room has finally been aired out. When the train doors close shut, I notice a few people starting to look around, searching for eyes that would willingly meet theirs, waiting for acknowledgment that we are all witnesses, we all share a common experience: we have the same story to tell, the same joke to pass around.

I look down at my feet, so I can keep myself in, so I can keep everyone out, so no one can reach me.

Excerpt from another work supposedly in progress, in danger of being edited out.

2010-12-06T09:36:00.003+08:00

Miracle stories, a template and recurring motifs. Imminent tragedy, a divine portent, magnificent rescue; water, buoyancy, a holy image.

An example. Days of rain and the biggest flood a town has known, and suddenly a table bearing the statuette of the Virgin floats along the flooded streets. The rain ends, the flood subsides: in joy the townsfolk are prompted to rename the town Santa Mesa, as if the flood were its real baptism.

Another example. Fisherfolk desperately trawling a river for fish, and inexplicably a statuette of the Virgin gets caught in the net. The fishermen decide to bring the statuette to a nearby church, but the Virgin communicates her refusal by weighing the boat down, keeping it from sailing forward. When they decide to go to another church, one already crowded with two patron saints, the sailing goes smoothly. San Pascual Baylon and Santa Clara are nudged gently aside to give the Nuestra Señora de Salambao some room. Now with a trinity of patrons, the town of Obando is blessed with fertility.

For Bocaue and the Holy Cross of Wawa, two stories. This: A woman saved from drowning by the miraculous appearance of a cross, to which she holds on until the waves carry her safely to the riverbank. And this: A massive drought, a fisherman finding a cross carried by waves, knocking gently against the roots of a mangrove. A chapel is built for the cross; the rains come.

In hoc signo vinces.

Monster in disguise.

2010-12-01T16:23:00.004+08:00

This is a screencap of my computer desktop, just because.

It should be apparent to you by now that I’m merely flooding this blog with random posts to promote an illusory vitality.

But whatever: That dog is just so purty. Posting her picture here makes me feel as if I were one of those showbiz moms forcing their kids to become television or movie or concert stars. (Now if only we could make this dog provide for our family’s needs.)

Then again, you know that old saw about books and covers—this one’s not a meek decorative lapdog. One of these days I’ll maybe post a medicolegal-report-ish thing detailing my dog-bite-related scars. Or maybe not.

Still Saturday.

2010-11-29T18:33:00.002+08:00

There is something a bit of a joke about looking forward to weekends, because the last thing weekends allow you is inactivity: household chores never accomplish themselves; office work declares territorial rights even on the dining table, the bed, the mind; nonconjugal relationships require rations of time. Every minute, every hour of Saturday feels less like a deepening weekend than a fast-approaching work week, as if it makes more sense to speak of a weekend that departs than a weekend that arrives. Still, you value the illusion of stillness that weekends give, especially on those rare Saturdays when you wake up with half of the day gone—the light that comes through the bedroom curtains is too harsh, the temperature inside the room has gone up, the dog is reminding you that you’re running late with her first meal, your own belly rumbles in expectation of its first full meal. There is something gratifying about enjoying that moment, that which allows you to refuse to acknowledge that you need to make the most of the weekend before it’s over. For you, this refusal to ‘make the most of the weekend’ is your own act of making the most of the weekend: you just lie in bed, facing the woman whom you constantly pray you’ll have an entire lifetime to spend weekends with, the woman who is calmly fighting to spend a few more minutes asleep, the woman whom you spend a few more minutes staring at. It’s still Saturday, after all, and at this moment, Saturday stands still.

Static and silence: Some thoughts on NU 107’s last broadcast.

2010-11-17T19:37:00.004+08:00

I didn’t listen to it, didn’t feel compelled to.

I stopped listening to NU 107 in the early 2000s, when I started working. That was the time I still had an ancient Sony Walkman, from where I listened repeatedly to (I’m sorry, I’m sorry) Scott Weiland’s Twelve Bar Blues and Cynthia Alexander’s Rippingyarns, on cassette, when they first came out; I also listened to the replay of ‘The Midnight Countdown,’ through static, as I went home to Bulacan from work.

The static never quite disappeared, was a constant presence, as if always in competition with the music.

There are other things I remember about NU, mostly stuff from college and the months after it. There were those months between college and my first job, when I earnestly believed I had it in me to become a writer so I holed myself up in my bedroom, furtively blowing Marlboro Lights smoke through an open window, tapping away at a hand-me-down Toshiba Satellite 100CS, and on the radio was a guy who introduced himself as Cousin Hoagy, playing the blues on a radio program called ‘The Crossroads.’ There were those times when I made an effort to wake up every Saturday-going-on-Sunday to listen to ‘The Midnight Countdown,’ through headphones. There was that period between 1998 and 1999 when I silently rooted for Athenaeum’s ‘Flat Tire’ to stay on ‘The Midnight Countdown’ for a year, even if it wasn’t a song I liked—I just thought it was sort of cool for a song to be on the countdown for a full year. There were those fleeting moments when I felt a vague loserish sentimental something every time I woke up on a weekend morning and the first song I heard on the radio was The Verve Pipe’s ‘The Freshmen.’ There were those days when a friend and I good-naturedly (I hoped, am still hoping, that it had come across as good-natured) ribbed another friend, whose college education was being paid for by NU 107, for being undeserving of the scholarship, since there was nothing remotely rawkerly about the music he listened to. There was that time in 1998 when this same friend and I showed up, unannounced, at NU to interview just about anybody willing to be interviewed for an article we were writing on Pinoy rock (a journalism class assignment), and it was Francis Reyes/Brew himself who welcomed us. And then there was that moment during the interview when we pretentiously mentioned how we’d believed Nirvana should be considered kilometer zero of the whole alternative rock explosion, and Francis Reyes/Brew gently corrected us that our compasses should point to the Eraserheads instead.

So, all these memories, all linked to music. The kind that triggers in me a fuzzy saudade-ish ‘Lookee where the time went’ feeling. If we were all Prousts, a song on the radio could be our madeleine.

And yet, and yet: But for that moment of sadness—the whole deal about the passing of time and the end of my late nineties, encased in that moment—upon learning about the end of NU, I just shrugged and said, ‘Hmm, OK.’

For most of the 2000s I had no idea exactly what music NU played, what it considered ‘rock’; I can’t even recall a moment when I voluntarily listened to any radio station at all. I never missed it, didn’t even bother to check what it had (or had not) evolved into. I took it as axiomatic that it would always be there, and all I really cared about was for it to be there.

And here is where you cue in the music from the bathroom scene in Psycho, as the villain of the story is revealed: why, it’s the Internet!

Of course, there’s something obvious about claiming that the Internet changed my music-listening habits; still, its obviousness doesn’t make it untrue. During those early years in the early 2000s when I was silently but smugly celebrating my newly acquired purchasing power (viz., I got a job), I spent a considerable portion of my salary, meager as it was, on music. Eventually I learned how to use information on the Internet to direct me to interesting musicians, whose albums I just had to have. And then, over time, I discovered that I could download, for free and during company time and using company resources, songs and albums, even entire careers’ worth of music, from various sites; you are handicapped only by your ability to feed the appropriate keywords to your search engine of choice. That the music industry called, still does, the likes of me a thief did not bother me; what was anxious-making was how I would always be found wanting when weighed on the scales of cool used by sites like Pitchfork or the late Stylus, because I’d never listened to people like M.I.A. or Autechre or Sleater Kinney or Brian Eno or even Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares. I’m sure there’s some hipsterish pop-psych explanation for the fact that I’d rather be called a thief than uncool at a time when there are more or less definite legal provisions on what makes one a thief, when there are shifting, unenforceable, nebulous standards for what makes one cool.

All of the above is just the long way of saying I stopped needing NU 107 to tell me what to listen to, because, with hundreds of hours of music saved in my iTunes, I can create my own play lists, put up my own version of a radio station with a fan base of one: I’ll always know the music being played is what I want to hear. I don’t need DJs to tell me the names of the artists or the songs. I don’t owe it to an artist to finish playing a track first before I move on to another.

So in many ways it feels a little wrong to mourn something whose death I was—partially, perhaps infinitesimally—responsible for.

Maybe it also has to do with what, in my head, makes one a genuine NU fan, and why I can’t claim I am one. In the 1980s I had absolutely no idea what NU was; as a grade school kid in the farmlands of Bulacan in the years after the EDSA Revolution, I had yet to come across the infinitive-plus-complement ‘to be cool,’ and had no understanding of its relevance to my well-being. If anyone told me singing along to Dingdong Avanzado’s ‘Tatlong Beinte-Singko’ or George Benson’s ‘Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love for You’ or Debbie Gibson’s ‘Lost in Your Eyes’ could ever be described as offensive, I simply wouldn’t understand it. When I entered high school and discovered a radio station called LA 105.9, ‘the Rock of the World,’ suddenly my idea of what music was, and could be, changed: here was music that didn’t need to speak about feeling like being lost in heaven when I’m lost in your eyes. Instead I felt like I could connect to songs that screeched about mulattoes and albinos, about whores who say my life’s a bore, about pictures all washed in black and tattooed everything. It didn’t matter that I had no clue what these strange angry smelly-looking Americans were talking about: deep in my gut I felt I understood. Over time I also cultivated a sense of superiority, generally baseless, toward people who still cared for songs that talked about dreamlovers coming to rescue me, about seeing the sign that opened up my eyes, about bringing that booty over here, over here.

During these years I’d earnestly wanted to be labeled Gen X-er too, even if I was born in the wrong year to make the cut-off. My awareness of NU 107 was at best marginal: It was only toward the end of the 1990s that NU became an important presence, especially on those long nights I spent writing a thesis I will forever be embarrassed by, or those long nights I spent writing pages and pages of fiction that have now mercifully disappeared.

But, again, discovering the Internet helped me question certain assumptions I’d thought were self-evident: what cool exactly was, and whether rock was de facto cool or de jure cool. Maybe I cared more about being thought of as cool than being thought of as a rock fan, or in nineties parlance (the word is so squirm-inducingly tacky that its use can only be redeemed by introducing it with a parenthetical disclaimer and then quarantining it in quotes), ‘rakista’; being a rock fan was my route to being thought of as cool.

Of course, why I was so preoccupied with being perceived cool is the question I should have been asking myself. Why spend horrifically long hours cultivating a cool image when nobody probably noticed anyway, when nobody probably saw any difference, when everybody probably saw right through the pretension? A douche who listens to Diplo or Justice is not undouched by the mere fact that he listens to Diplo or Justice. If this douche gets to the point when someone with intimidatingly solid cool cred asks him when he started to listen to Diplo or Justice, he’d better say it was before Piracy Funds Terrorism vol. 1 or the favela mixtapes (Diplo), or before the controversial Romain Gavras video for ‘Stress’ came out (Justice).

The point is, nobody will ever ask our poor douche any of these. Which is why my spending so much time aspiring to some edenic image of cool and my actually believing I can live up to it are sort of ridiculous.

Which leads me to my next point: that some of the most exciting, most pleasing music available now can not be strictly described as rock. Justice and LCD Soundsystem are straight-up dance music. Robyn and Jens Lekman and Marit Larsen belong to the brilliant wave of Scandinavian pop musicians. Caetano Veloso has been soldiering on for decades with his mixture of tropicália and pop and standards and psychedelic rock and flamenco and poetry and politics, and that doesn’t even quite capture his depth and range. And speaking of genre benders, there are artists like M.I.A. and Cornelius and Manu Chao. And we haven’t even scratched the surface. There’s something exhibitionistic and self-congratulatory about lists such as this one, not to mention social-climberish, so I’m stopping right here.

But back to November 2010, and the warrior-saint’s funeral that NU was given. A week or so after the news broke that NU was soon to sign off permanently, essaylets and status-messages and tweets of varying degrees of coherence and sincerity and hysteria began pouring in, many of them exhausting vocabularies usually reserved for weepy widows. And toward the appointed hour, my Facebook newsfeed and TweetDeck got flooded with more testimonials and memorials—as if all of a sudden everyone had become an NU fan.

I chose to ignore them, convinced as I was that NU’s last broadcast was merely the publicly pharaonic burial following a death that has long occurred.

Until one morning, when I idly clicked on a link to a YouTube video of the last few minutes of NU’s broadcast. Just Cris Hermossisima, a.k.a. Cris Cruise, surrounded by NU DJs and friends, smiling heroically as he recited the station I.D. I would’ve dismissed it as something that was bound to happen, a teeny footnote in the history of rock music, an art form that is now almost seventy years old. And yet that’s the thing that has made the difference: the realization that rock is almost seventy years old, and here in this brief video are some of its champions in the country. Now the illusion of eternal youth encouraged by listening to the ageless voices of these radio personalities has been broken by the sight of their faces and bodies, giving way to middle age. Streaming video killed the radio star, as it were. Of course I know they’re aging; I’ve seen them at the NU Rock Awards, I’ve seen their pictures in newspapers and magazines, I’ve seen them in blogs. But tied with the concrete fact of their aging is that I, too, am on my way to middle age: in eight years I’ll be forty. Eight years is a short time, just as the twenty-three years that NU spent on air is a short time.

I watched NU DJs and NU officials and their friends hug one another, while in the background played the Eraserheads’ ‘Ang Huling El Bimbo’—a song that, although ostensibly about the seventies, is really about the nineties, and during this moment many people consider epochal, was now closing the first decade of 2000. No other song defines the spirit of 1990s Pinoy rock, hell, Pinoy pop: back when the people I admired were older than me, and everyone who made it possible for me to admire them was also older than me. Now it seems as if everyone making exciting music and transforming the music industry (if it’s even valid to suggest that the music industry is a monolithic whole) is younger than me.

I didn’t finish watching the video, because I got the point, I knew what was to come, when ‘Ang Huling El Bimbo’ finally quotes the iconic bar from that disco song: just static, perhaps the same static that I remember had always threatened to swallow NU 107’s broadcasts. And it’s interesting how NU ended in static, when static was not the first word I’d use to describe what NU has left in its wake.

We didn’t start the modifiers: Miguel Syjuco reviews Dinaw Mengetsu’s ‘How To Read Air’ for The New York Times Book Review.

2010-10-12T16:38:00.002+08:00

Haga clic aquí para leer la reseña completa.

Adeptly using Yosef’s story to deepen the narrative
Beautifully written
Bruising anger
Deeply thought out
Embittering pattern
Emotionally feckless
Forceful debut
Freshly failed marriage
Frustrated dislocation
Indelible novel
Inexorable failure
Initially horrified
Initially thrives
Lifelong repetition of cause and effect
Persistently disappoints
Pithy portrayal of immensely different worlds colliding
Remarkably talented Mengetsu has successfully explored
Retaliates desperately
Skillful sensitivity
Thematically reminiscent of

Status-message envy.

2010-10-05T10:22:00.003+08:00

The one that doesn’t depend on stat-message writer’s mom or dad or daughter to be liked.

The one that talks about visiting touristy European cities every so often, as if getting a Schengen visa were no more difficult than getting a cold.

The one that talks about spending time with some really cool celebrity, that sends an insouciant shout-out to said really cool celebrity who turns out to be in stat-message writer’s friends list, that is liked by said really cool celebrity, that is reposted by said really cool celebrity to his or her own page, that is liked by fans of said really cool celebrity.

The one that is very clever but does not make the not very clever people in stat-message writer’s friends list feel like they’re being called not very clever, in fact flatters them into believing they’re very clever.

The one that isn’t really cool but is liked, for some reason, by at least two people with solid cool cred, and so is automatically promoted to cool status.

The one that, thankfully, isn’t liked by people stat-message writer doesn’t want his or her cool friends to know are his or her friends.

The one that, also thankfully, doesn’t attract lame comments from lame people stat-message writer just can’t bring himself or herself to unfriend, resulting from stat-message writer’s private personal fantasy about his or her incapacity to be mean.

The one that doesn’t have to quote from Wikiquote, or Lady Gaga, or a Lady Gaga quote in Wikiquote, to be liked.

The one that doesn’t ask you to join FarmVille or Mafia Wars or to take a quiz on what the initials of your name mean or what the moles on your face signify.

The one that doesn’t have ‘♥’ in it.

The one that casually uses a cool foreign language that isn’t originally English or Filipino then translated with the help of Google Translate or Babel Fish, and says something cool by default, whether in a cool foreign language or not.

The one that talks about you being part of ‘Glee,’ which then gets retracted by your manager (who gets threatened with being fired), but which is followed by leaked photos and audio clips and videos, which is followed by your official admission that you will, in fact, be on ‘Glee.’

(Which really happened on Twitter.)

The one that doesn’t throw stat-message writer in a good light but throws you in a good light, for all stat-message writer’s friends to see.

The one that says stat-message writer loves you, and his or her friends agree.

What is right.

2010-10-03T16:36:00.002+08:00

(From a work sort of in progress.)

A few words you need to keep reminding yourself sometimes mean something else. Derecho does not always mean going straight (recto), but going right; being right is not always being correct (correcto), but being good (bien); bien is not always good or right, grammarwise, when bueno or buena is good or right. The lapse into English, in these moments, to clear the confusion. The desire not to have to go or be right, but to go or be left instead: but the confusion sets in again because to go left is izquierdo, to be left is dejado, and dehado in Tagalog is to be the one nobody bets on.

Procrastinations # 8.

2010-09-27T07:08:00.001+08:00

Ayala Avenue, Makati City. Not via Google Earth with Street View.

Procrastinations # 7.

2010-09-26T15:18:00.003+08:00

Rue de l'Echaudé, 6ème arrondissement. Via Google Earth with Street View.

Procrastinations # 6.

2010-09-25T09:52:00.004+08:00

Prospect Street cor. College Street, Brown University, Providence. Via Google Earth with Street View.

Procrastinations # 5.

2010-09-24T07:54:00.004+08:00

Rue de Saussure, 17ème arrondissement.

Procrastinations # 4.

2010-09-23T07:43:00.004+08:00

Het Mauritshuis, Korte Vivierberg, Den Haag. Via Google Earth with Street View.

Procrastinations # 3.

2010-09-22T07:16:00.004+08:00

Benefit Street, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Via Google Earth with Street View.

Procrastinations # 2.

2010-09-21T07:45:00.005+08:00

Rue St-Lazare, 8ème arrondissement. Via Google Earth with Street View.

Procrastinations # 1.

2010-09-20T09:41:00.006+08:00

Rue de Presles and rue Henri Barbusse, Ville d'Aubervillers. Via Google Earth with Street View.

Adventures in multiple negatives.

2010-09-07T08:31:00.002+08:00

(From a work in progress.)

i.

I wouldn't have been readily defensive of my not having said I hadn't known her, except that I knew for a fact that the degree of defensiveness between not neglecting to say I didn't know her and not admitting to knowing her is, not inarguably, not unequal.

iii.

Never did I never say never.

v.

It was not so much that I didn't know nothing about it than that it wasn't not unknown to me.

The Mellow Touch bucket list.

2010-08-27T16:11:00.002+08:00

Find a girl, settle down, and if I want, I can marry.
But before that: Grow up, get down, put both feet on the ground.
Touch somebody's, uhm, body; I guess that would be nice.
Be a little bit wiser by putting it on, putting it on.
Fly high on the wings of love.
Stay awake to hear somebody breathing; watch somebody smile while he or she is sleeping.
Have that somebody fill up my senses, like a night in the forest.
Absolutely never get over somebody getting over me.
Lay a whisper on my pillow before leaving the winter on the ground.
Turn around.

Promises found in my Spam folder.

2010-08-06T21:10:00.002+08:00

Immaculada Mota says there’s a new position for me.
Quique Mojica says there’s a new opening.
Casimiro Collazo says there’s a career for me in a promising company.
Macaria Guajardo is saying the exact same thing.

Asdrubal Robledo wants me to start building a career immediately.
Nicodemo Pantoja wants me to build a career now.
Felipina Raya offers a good career with a reputable company.
Strack Sandhoff starts saying something, but stops with ‘how.’

Schefers Second says something about changing a good deal before marrying.
Erma Ammon, meanwhile, merely says, ‘Hello.’
Miguela Vaca speaks to Europeans about an excellent offering.
Cruzita Villalobos says I have a career to build: ‘Now go.’

Josh Alvarado’s and Shawn Brooks’s watches come at low prices.
Another spammer offering me a job is Ximen Corrales.

Recorreremos la ciudad como gotas de lluvia*: The rainy season dance music mix.

2010-07-28T09:19:00.003+08:00

First, the disclaimer: I don’t dance. If I did, it wouldn’t be a pretty sight. The closest to dancing that I do is bob my head up and down. It’s still an obscene sight.

Anyway: Even before finishing the Blagador all-cover summer mix,** I was already thinking of my rainy-season mix, which I wanted to be loud and brassy and bordering on annoying, with a few shamelessly syrupy tracks thrown in, which can also do some serious annoyance-button-pushing. And for a nondancer like me, I found it sort of micro-surprising that I’d ended up assembling a dance-music mix. (I had tried assembling a sad-bastard-music mix last year, with stuff from Red House Painters and Midlake and Iron and Wine and the second Le Mans album; it made me want to half-accidentally, half-deliberately tumble out of the walkway at the EDSA/P. Tuazon intersection, the one overlooking the underpass.)

And but so: this dance-music mix. The first song to make the list was Sleigh Bells’ ‘Tell ‘Em,’ from the monstrously good ‘Treats’ album. Then came Robyn’s ‘Dancing On My Own,’ which manages to be tacky and touching, ironic and earnest at the same time—probably my favorite song this year, so far. I was also surprised by Xtina’s ‘Elastic Love,’ primarily because Xtina (who has unsubtly weaponized her huge voice to keep people from thinking she’s just like her bubblegum-teen-pop coevals) allowed her voice to be almost completely dominated by multilayered techy effects and also ceded much of the singing to M.I.A. And, of course, there are LCD Soundsystem and Justice, who—following the lead of Daft Punk—continue to show obnoxious hipsterish rockist kids how smart dance music can be.

Anyway, here’s the list.

1. Sleigh Bells, ‘Tell ‘Em.’
2. Jamie Lidell, ‘Hurricane.’
3. Robyn, ‘Dancing on My Own.’
4. The Ronettes, ‘Be My Baby.’
5. La Casa Azul, ‘Vamos a Volar.’
6. Justice feat. Mehdi Pinson, ‘DVNO.’
7. Jorge Pardo, ‘Mugavero.’
8. Santigold, ‘Lights Out.’
9. Christina Aguilera feat. M.I.A., ‘Elastic Love.’
10. LCD Soundsystem, ‘All My Friends.’

* ‘We will travel across the city like raindrops,’ from La Casa Azul’s ‘Vamos a Volar.’

** It was maybe a bad idea to cross-post the summer soundtrack to Blogger. I deleted the original Blogger post, and had to publish the summer track list as a new post. The vigilant online robots of the American music industry sent me two DMCA takedown notifications, even after I had deleted all download links. Which made me think: One of the tracks I included in the mix was maybe so sacred I couldn’t even say its name—a veritable pop Tetragrammaton.

Various small movements # 5.

2010-07-23T23:12:00.000+08:00

Friday is cheating: No post here.

Various small movements # 4.

2010-07-22T23:40:00.010+08:00

Thursday is your name, but someone else's words, someone else's voice. Bible Study—Note how easy it is to mock the words' unfortunate initials. Think of the vulgarity of the initials' secular meaning. (Consider, in passing: the Latin sæculum. Age, span of time, generation.) And then think of the truculence, the foolhardiness of their Christian meaning. (Another parenthetical: the Latin truculentus, from trux, 'fierce'; and fierce from the Latin ferus, 'wild.')

There's a voice that, for some time now, has been making you feel a fierce, wild kick in the gut, a voice that will last for an age, for generations. The man whose name you also carry. (But before he himself carried that name there was blindness on some road; the great conversion or the great seizure.)

If I speak in the tongue of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

The nakedness of his admission may mirror your own, but not the fierceness, which, if you don't look close enough, may be all but invisible. These make it invisible too: how it has been covered, made apocryphal (from the Greek apokruptein, 'to hide away') by numerous repetitions, vulgarizations. The ease of thinning out its meaning, eroding its sharp edges.

Later you see how its fierceness lies in its mortal confrontation of ultimate invisibility. I am nothing. How the weight of that pins you down, and yet how it moves you.

Various small movements # 3.

2010-07-21T07:08:00.000+08:00

Wednesday is standing, futilely, still.

Various small movements # 2.

2010-07-20T23:25:00.008+08:00

LCD Soundsystem, ‘All My Friends’

How Tuesday is about work that doesn’t get done. There is an open document, the tailless donkey on which you pin commas and colons and semicolons and ellipses, or articles and conjunctions and prepositions, or random words and phrases and clauses; this buys you time. Next you take them down, pixels and serifs and lines, slipped back in through the cursor’s slit; this too buys you time. You will be doing this for most of the day.

How your fingers on the keyboard keep time, discordant with the music being delivered as micro-vibrations in your ear by earphones, which might as well be a piece of cardboard or plastic, hanging from your neck and saying, ‘Do not disturb.’ How you choose a song that begins, ‘That’s how it starts.’ (Ignore the fact that the words aren’t really the beginning. Wonder if you really hear that split second of silence before the seven-minute-long, near-discordant tapping of piano keys begins. Then consider how ‘start’ is related to the Dutch storten, ‘to push’; to the German stürzen, ‘fall headlong, fling’: the violence at the root of words showing itself, yet again.)

You latch on to the couplet that says, ‘It comes apart the way it does in bad films / Except in parts when the moral kicks in.’ Briefly toy with the idea of writing something based on that couplet. You open a new document. How, with just a few taps, the commas and colons and semicolons and ellipses deleted from the earlier document end up colonizing this new one.

You keep playing the song, your fingers keep tapping. The sound of discordant piano keys, the appearance of random marks on the page. Soon the song says, ‘You spent the first five years trying to get with the plan / and the next five years trying to be with your friends again.’ The song ends. That’s another seven minutes. You start again.

Various small movements # 1.

2010-07-19T13:07:00.005+08:00

How Monday is about knees that don’t touch. At the back of an FX taxi: briefly wonder why the name has stuck, even when very few of them are still really FXs, when now they are mostly Crosswinds and Innovas and Adventures, or vans stretched out too long that entering them feels less like taking public transport than tunneling, burrowing. Today it’s a Crosswind. A woman sits facing you. She’s not tall, but she slouches, her knees unyielding: you should take them as part of the space. You’re not tall, but you’re taller than her. You wish to alter the shape of your body so it wouldn’t, by mistake, lay claim to what she, for this trip, has claimed as inalienably hers. In your seat you straighten up. How almost each one of the spinous processes of your vertebrae seems to touch the backrest and part of the seat. The woman feigns sleep, or sleeps as if she were feigning sleep: how her knees encroach (from the Old French encrochier: en– ‘in, on’ + crochier, from croc, ‘hook’) into your space; how they intrude (from the Latin intrudere: in–, ‘into’ + trudere, ‘to thrust’). How these small movements belie a violence that inhabits, animates them. How yielding induces, is, a kind of pain: Her legs advance, and you imagine the skin on your back tightening over the contours of your spine; her legs advance, and you imagine your spine leaving a transient cast of itself on the backrest’s cushion; her legs advance, and you imagine your limbs receding, shrinking, becoming vestigial, as her knees continue occupying the progressively larger space you’re ceding. Your destination is still twenty minutes away, but it’s as if you were already gone.

You don’t have to run away this time.

2010-07-18T23:00:00.002+08:00

(A repost, from last summer.)

With summer nearly over, I’m posting the tracks of the Blagador official summer mix.

I have to say that coming up with an all-cover summer mix is pretty tough, especially because I didn’t want it to have too many obvious choices. Whatever that means. I started fiddling with the track list in January; by April I was still fiddling with it. This repeated fiddling with an apparently inconsequential summer mix speaks volumes about my reserves of pettiness, don’t you think?

You know what’s sadder? (Not ‘traumatizing, soul-crushing ontological misery’ sadder, to be sure, but ‘pathetically shallow sadness only the pathetically shallow understand’ sadder.) I didn’t get to listen to it as much as I would’ve wanted. I was too busy going crazy over Sleigh Bells’ amazing ‘Treats,’ as well as ‘Quarantine the Past,’ the best-of album from Pavement, a band I wasn’t cool enough to listen to in the 1990s.

Anyway, here’s the track list. Update: The link has been removed because I just got my very first DMCA Blogger Takedown Notification!

Paddy Milner, ‘Blister In The Sun.’ (Violent Femmes)
The Futureheads, ‘Hounds Of Love.’ (Kate Bush)
Quadro Nuevo, ‘The Windmills Of Your Mind.’ (Noel Harrison, et cet.)
Astrud Gilberto, ‘Light My Fire.’ (The Doors)
Ivy, ‘Streets of Your Town.’ (The Go Betweens)
Gotan Project, ‘Vuelvo al Sur.’ (Traditional)
Seu Jorge, ‘Ziggy Stardust.’ (David Bowie)
Smith, ‘Baby, It’s You.’ (Burt Bacharach)
Otis Redding, ‘Satisfaction.’ (Rolling Stones)
Marble Sounds, ‘Come Here.’ (Kath Bloom)

Classes now open.

2010-06-15T10:40:00.000+08:00

The Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis and interpretive dance.
The Frankfurt school of evolutionary pomposity.
The Manila school of post-Orientalist laparoscopy.
The Project 4 school of Neo-Kantian facticity and Merleau-Pontyan puppetry.
The department of post-verbal Englishes and comparative stenography.
The Philippine Primipara-Military Academy.

A horror story.

2010-01-08T09:42:00.002+08:00

Teacher said, “You don’t obey.
You fidget and twidget
And won’t sit down.
So go in the corner now
‘Til I say you can turn around.”
So there I stood ‘til it got dark
Without a whimper or a tear,
‘Til everybody else went home.
I guess that she forgot me here.
And that was Friday, so I stayed
All through the weekend—bein’ good,
And Monday was the first day of
Summer vacation, so I stood
Through hot July and sticky August,
Tryin’ to obey her rule.
Stood right there until September,
When—yikes—they closed down the school!
Boarded up the doors and windows,
Moved to a new one way ‘cross town.
So here I’ve stood for forty year
In dark and dust and creaky sounds,
Waiting for her to say, “Turn around.”

This might not be just what she meant,
But me—I’m so obedient.

—Shel Silverstein, ‘Obedient.’1996.

Music year 2009. The lists.

2009-12-21T08:36:00.001+08:00

Cross-posted from me Fezbook. The disclaimers are here.

Albums I like:

1. Phoenix, ‘Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.’
2. The Dirty Projectors, ‘Bitte Orca.’
3. The Very Best (Esau Mwamwaya and Radioclit), ‘The Very Best Mixtape.’
4. Klaus & Kinski, ‘Tu Hoguera Está Ardiendo.’
5. Micachu and the Shapes, ‘Jewellery.’
6. Kelly Clarkson, ‘All I Ever Wanted.’
7. The Mountain Goats, ‘The Life of the World to Come.’
8. Zeep, ‘Nina Miranda and Chris Franck Present Zeep.’
9. Amadou et Mariam, ‘Welcome to Mali.’
10. Leonard Cohen, ‘Live in London.’
11. Marit Larsen, ‘The Chase.’
12. Sugarfree, ‘Live! With the Manila Symphony Orchestra.’
13. Rodrigo y Gabriela, ‘11.11.’
14. Bituin Escalante, ‘Ur Luv Thang.’

Songs I like:

1. Phoenix, ‘1901.’
2. The Raveonettes, ‘Last Dance.’
3. Bon Iver, ‘re: Stacks.’
4. The Very Best (Esau Mwamwaya and Radioclit), ‘Boyz.’
5. Kelly Clarkson, ‘Don’t Let Me Stop You.’
6. Sondre Lerche, ‘Heartbeat Radio.’
7. Curumin, ‘Compacto.’
8. Camera Obscura, ‘French Navy.’
9. Klaus & Kinski, ‘El Cristo del Perdon.’
10. Iron and Wine, ‘The Trapeze Swinger.’
11. Grizzly Bear, ‘Two Weeks.’
12. St Vincent, ‘Actor out of Work.’
13. She and Him, ‘Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?’
14. Rye-Rye feat. M.I.A., ‘Bang.’
15. Aterciopelados, ‘28.’
16. Beyoncé, ‘Halo.’
17. The Dirty Projectors, ‘Temecula Sunrise.’
18. Micachu and the Shapes, ‘Golden Phone.’
19. Amadou et Mariam, ‘Sabali.’
20. Neko Case, ‘This Tornado Loves You.’
21. The Mountain Goats, ‘Romans 10:9.’
22. Amerie, ‘Tell Me You Love Me.’
23. Lily Allen, ‘The Fear.’
24. Solange Knowles, ‘Stillness Is on the Move.’
25. Thom Yorke, ‘All for the Best.’

I’ll maybe post a downloadable zip file somewhere. If I feel like it.

Music year 2009: A few notes.

2009-12-16T12:44:00.002+08:00

Soon to be posted—for real—are some of the newish things I enjoyed listening to this year. Stay tuned.

Not all of them are from 2009—a few from 2008, one from 2007.
There are two lists—one for albums, another for songs (not necessarily singles).
The lists are more or less in descending order.
I wish I could include Glover Gill’s fantastic original score for Richard Linklater’s ‘Waking Life,’ but it came out in 2001.
Then again, if I could include any album from any year, the Beatles will never be knocked down from the top spot. Or maybe only by Bach.
I almost kicked Iron and Wine’s ‘Trapeze Swinger’ off the list for using ‘seldomly.’ As much as I love you and your music, Mr Beam, in my book ‘seldomly’ is as bad as ‘farly’ and ‘longly.’
Despite its ridiculous title, Bituin Escalante’s ‘Ur Luv Thang’ is pretty good.
It sucks that I’m not the only or the first guy to think Ebe Dancel looks like Efren Bata Reyes.
When I’m an old man, I wanna be Leonard Cohen.
I vehemently refused to listen to Lady Gaga’s ‘The Fame’ until this morning. Turns out it’s not bad at all: several good hooks, cute electro effects, many songs that could benefit from being ~3:15 long instead of 3:59 or 4:25. What’s really surprising is that it’s so inoffensive and normal. Britney’s ‘Blackout’ is far superior, or the stuff the Swedes produce even in their sleep.
If you think you’re too cool for Kelly Clarkson, you should try getting over yourself sometime.
Don’t ask me how much money I spend on music.

Stuck on you.

2009-12-16T12:40:00.000+08:00

Oh, hello there.

You're actually sticking around in this dump?

Wow.

Don’t dance at the top of the house: Summer mix 2009.

2009-04-17T14:50:00.006+08:00

Since 2006, this blog—whose only reason for still existing is that I haven’t quite decided whether to delete it or not—has featured ‘official’ mix tapes every summer. (See the track lists for 2006 and 2007.) I kinda didn’t do it last year because I was trying to have a life that didn’t need to be written about and posted online. Not that I’m deluding myself into thinking anybody missed the summer play lists, or missed witnessing me embarrass myself in this here blog. Anyway.

I know it’s kinda trite to depend so much on Brazilian music when making a summer mix, but it works well for me. (The mix tape’s opening track, from Japanese-Brazilian Curumin, is totally beachy, even if I don’t understand what he’s singing about.) And then of course there’s my usual tactic: the musical version of going on a world tour. There’s stuff from France, Mexico, Scotland, Cuba, Sweden, England, and Spain. And there’s just one track from the US—from New Orleans’s Hot 8 Brass Band—a fact I feel vaguely smug about. Even the fact that I’m using that song as the final track is vaguely smug-making too.

Anyway. Following is the track list; you can download the zipped file here. Actually you can't; got a Blogger DMCI Takedown Notification for another post, and I decided I don't enjoy the idea that the few hits that I get are more interested in giving me takedown notices than love. Heh.

‘Compacto,’ Curumin. (Japan Pop Show, 2008.)
‘Lalala,’ Nouvelle Vague feat. Julie Delpy. (Two Days in Paris OST, 2007.)
‘Sufoco,’ Alcione. (O Samba: Brasil Classics vol. 2, 1990.)
‘1901,’ Phoenix. (Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, 2009.)
‘Azul,’ Natalia Lafourcade. (Hu Hu Hu, 2009.)
‘French Navy,’ Camera Obscura. (My Maudlin Career, 2009.)
‘En Casa del Trompo, No Bailes,’ Orquesta Riverside. (Sí, Para Usted: The Funky Beats of Revolutionary Cuba, vol. 1, 2007.)
‘Dance, Dance, Dance,’ Lykke Li. (Youth Novels, 2008.)
‘Olerê Camará,’ Alcione. (O Samba: Brasil Classics vol. 2, 1990.)
‘Introducing Mr Furia And Professor Manso,’ The Pinker Tones. (BCN Connection, 2003.)
‘Smokebelch II,’ Sabres Of Paradise. (Sabresonic, 1993.)
‘Te Queria,’ Seu Jorge. (Samba Esporte Fino, 2001.)
‘Su Recuerdo,’ Single. (Pío Pío, 2006.)
‘Sexual Healing,’ Hot 8 Brass Band. (Rock with the Hot 8, 2007.)

Mere Christianity.

2009-04-01T16:10:00.003+08:00

In man there is an inextinguishable yearning for the infinite. None of the answers attempted are sufficient. Only the God himself who became finite in order to open our finiteness and lead us to the breadth of his infiniteness responds to the question of our being. For this reason, the Christian faith finds man today too. Our task is to serve the faith with a humble spirit and the whole strength of our heart and understanding.

--Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, speaking in Guadalajara, Mexico, May, 1996.

Two years of reading.

2008-12-11T16:36:00.003+08:00

Been an awesomely busy year, and because of the overall busyness I haven’t gotten much reading done. Well, that isn’t entirely accurate: I’ve been reading—books, articles, stuff online, recipe instructions, the fine print of several dozen contracts, archival stuff, stuff I have to line-edit for work, street signs, et cet.—but I haven’t finished too many books this year.

But I’ve read a few really good ones. Here they are.

The favorite: ‘The Gastronomical Me,’ M. F. K. Fisher.

The others:
‘A Death In The Family,’ James Agee.
‘Gilead,’ Marilynne Robinson.
‘Innocence,’ Penelope Fitzgerald.
‘Austerlitz,’ W. G. Sebald.
‘Twenty-Eight Artists And Two Saints,’ Joan Acocella.
‘Three Gospels,’ Reynolds Price.

Also: I don’t care if you don’t care, but I’m also posting a list of the books I liked in 2007.

The favorite: ‘The Sign Of Jonas,’ Thomas Merton.

The others:
‘The Savage Detectives,’ Roberto Bolaño
‘Lions, Harts, Leaping Does, And Other Stories.’ J. F. Powers.
‘Housekeeping,’ Marilynne Robinson.
‘Pig Perfect,’ Peter Kaminsky.
‘The Periodic Table,’ Primo Levi.
‘A Tomb For Boris Davidovich,’ Danilo Kiš.
‘Varieties Of Disturbance,’ Lydia Davis.
‘The Man Who Ate Everything,’ Jeffrey Steingarten.
‘The Lover,’ Marguerite Duras.
‘Veronica,’ Mary Gaitskill.
‘Divisadero,’ Michael Ondaatje.
‘The Arrival,’ Shaun Tan.

A celebration.

2008-11-30T21:04:00.021+08:00

Music by Satie, 'Gymnopedie no. 1'

Six months of a marriage, finally made legal and binding and qualified for tax-related micro-benefits. Her first birthday as a wife, with specific God-sanctioned pareunial privileges. It is November 19, and we are at home—actually half a home, which we share on weekday mornings with people working with the urban poor and which we share on certain evenings with Mangyans in transit—where we expect to spend the next couple of years before we move in to a much smaller space that currently exists only as scheduled deductions on our checking account. In the fridge cools a bottle of a complicated grape-based beverage, which is prepared to let loose an army of bubbles as soon as the cap is popped. There is risotto on the stove, demanding to be stirred. Each grain of rice is taunted into obesity and softness by fire and the incremental addition of a broth engineered to plagiarize the flavor of a blue cheese; Gorgonzola, maybe, or Roquefort, something that, joyfully, can trick our palates into perceiving as the real thing. The oven has also been preheated, while I try to do my best impression of a KitchenAid mixer, harassing butter and sugar and flour and vanilla and eggs and chocolate into forming a hopefully tasty mixture, something that I’m almost sure will compare unfavorably, once tasted, with the Platonic ideal of a chocolate lava cake. Castrated for our enjoyment are several tulips, whose scandalously pretty reproductive organs are now making a slow descent to flaccidity and death and decay in a water-filled vase on the table. Under the table is a beautiful aging dog, the de facto daughter, obsessively licking the air around her face or hiding from the threat of medication, which she is scheduled to receive in a few minutes. It is a night that is vastly different from the night my wife made for me, in celebration of my first birthday as a husband, a grand feast involving the hacked corpse of a lamb, homemade yogurt (which is nothing but milk made cozy for the survival and reproduction of certain forms of microorganisms, if you think about it, except the mixture has made a wise leap to deliciousness), homemade paneer (another species of milk-based food), and chocolate–peanut-butter cheesecake. It is also not readily mistakable with the night when all we had for dinner were leftovers, and, to allay feelings of poverty and deprivation, we dressed up before we sat at the table, she in a dress and heels, I in a long-sleeved shirt and tie. But tonight is also like these nights: all these nights have us trading words and smiles and touches, all those things that we were paralyzed from giving for so long, in fear of appearing mortally sappy or irony-deficient. These are nights when we affirm that succumbing to sentimentality and squareness is not a problem at all; the inability or refusal to risk sentimentality so that what is genuinely felt and known can be expressed nakedly is the problem.

Now out of the oven, the cakes provide sufficient proof to my failure as a baker; what should’ve approximated the consistency of molten volcanic material look more like Pompeii several decades after the eruption of Vesuvius. I make my apologies, but she waves them off. For her, rescuing cakes are not nearly on the same level of difficulty as mitigating droughts and famines and financial crises. I will turn the cakes into a kind of chocolate–coffee trifle, she says casually. I say thank you, meaning it, meaning it very deeply.

Token post.

2008-11-27T08:23:00.003+08:00

I’ve been meaning to post stuff here. Really. But I’ve been lazy, although I’m probably going to post my year-end lists soon. (A reminder: I’ve made too many promises here that I haven’t fulfilled, haven’t I?)

So if the reader I’m addressing in this post (and to whom I’m apologizing profusely) actually exists, here’s a token post: a meme!

Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
Turn to page 56.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post that sentence along with these instructions to your blog.
Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

Here it is:

Sin embargo … tales consideraciones y clasificaciones, no resultan en exceso apropiadas para dar cuenta de lo que sucedió en España entre 1940 y 1958.

— from ‘El grupo de Cuenca,’ published 1997 by the Fundación Caja de Madrid. The book is about the works of the members of the Cuenca group (Gerardo Rueda, Gustavo Torner, and Fernando Zóbel, as well as José Guerrero, Antonio Lorenzo, Manuel Mompó, and Eusebio Sempere). Their works form the core of the collection of the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Cuenca, Spain.

Canine pose-striking.

2008-09-29T10:40:00.002+08:00

Kitty Roldan-de Guzman, subjected to an instant photo session using Photo Booth by her fawning parents, inexplicably tilting her head to one side when the beeping starts. Pop quiz: Why?

She just loves to turn tricks for photo equipment (i.e., the ‘using more words when one would do’ version of that strangely outdated infinitive, ‘to camwhore’).
The cervical-vertebral/cranial axial tilt is a transient neurological reaction to certain combined aural and visual stimuli, in this case the green pinlight coming from iSight and the soft beeping sounds.
She damn well knows she’s pretty, and whatever ridiculous thing she does is pretty too.

Pre-eulogy.

2008-09-16T08:23:00.003+08:00

There’s going to be a post about David Foster Wallace in this space. (A number of Pinoy writers have posted stuff on him: see here, here, here, and here.) ‘Infinite Jest’ remains one of the books I consider really important, as are the stories ‘Good Old Neon,’ ‘Little Expressionless Animals,’ ‘Forever Overhead,’ and ‘Church Not Made With Hands,’ and goddamnit his speech at Kenyon College a few years back continues to speak to me—but right now the only words I keep going back to are the ones I already posted here, this sentence from ‘Infinite Jest’: ‘The very imprisonment that prohibits sadness’s expression must itself feel intensely sad and painful.’

A few days before my thirtieth.

2008-07-15T08:31:00.003+08:00

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes to the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.

—Marilynne Robinson, 'Gilead.'

Yup. I read that somewhere.

2008-06-13T16:46:00.006+08:00

I liked the idea behind this enough to write my own ‘certain book read in a certain place’ story.

‘The End Of The Story’ by Lydia Davis.
Read in Paris, France, and Manila, Philippines.

In the spring of 2006 I was walking around Paris, missing a girl whom I’d been sort of seeing for years in Manila, and who just two months earlier had left for Seoul on a writer’s grant. I’d promised to take a flight to Seoul to visit her, before I flew back home. Unfortunately my Schengen visa had come only three days before I left for Paris, so I didn’t have enough time to apply for a South Korea visa.

Some parts of the city had become familiar. The previous winter, when it had gotten too cold to be out in the streets, I descended to the nearest métro station and started hopping on and off trains just to get warm. That spring, when waves of tourists started flooding the city, I decided to go in and out of any bookstore I could find.

At Shakespeare & Co.—the formerly legendary turned trendy (thanks to ‘Before Sunset’) Paris bookstore—I found a copy of Lydia Davis’s ‘The End Of The Story,’ which, although I’d wanted to have it for the longest time, I decided, inexplicably, to give to the girl in Seoul. There might be something too pointed about giving a book with that title—and a book about a woman remembering the breakdown of a middling relationship—to someone who didn’t seem like I was going to be with anymore, when I saw her again. And yet I was thinking of her while the book was in my hands. I decided to get it. When I walked out of the bookstore, it was raining. I ran down rue de la Bûcherie, entered a touristy café, and started reading.

I listened to the voice saying the words on the page, and I could hear very clearly someone trying mightily to speak softly and slowly so she wouldn’t have to cry. It was someone trying to cover up pain with clarity and specificity. It was someone struggling to achieve a certain grace out of the minutiae of pain.

But it was also a quietly playful voice, as she continued to ask how true, how reliable her memories were. Recovering a memory is a mind game, the voice seemed to be saying; the sheer act of remembering, together with knowing that one is engaged in the act of remembering, is like the mind trying to catch itself play tricks on itself.

It was the only book I could read on the way home. From Roissy to Schiphol, and then flying over eastern Europe, Russia, the Himalayas, and China, and then over eighteen hours of waffling from city to city, airport lounge to airport lounge and over six years of waffling from ‘sort-of relationship’ to ‘sort-of-not relationship,’ it didn’t seem fair to keep dicking around, what a character in a different book, probably less smart than the one in Davis’s but just as honest, described as jumping from rock to rock until there weren’t any rocks left. This was probably the last rock.

Soon after I finished the book I knew that something good would happen when the girl returns from Seoul in September. And yet just a few weeks after I’d arrived in Manila, what wasn’t planned until three months later happened.

There was a phone call, and it was her calling. ‘Hello,’ I said. She began to speak.

This was two years ago. I haven’t returned to Paris since then. The girl from Seoul is back in the Philippines. We live in a house in Quezon City.

Three years, one blog, two poems.

2008-06-02T15:07:00.002+08:00

Disgraceland*
by Mary Karr
(‘Sinners Welcome,’ 2006)

Before my first communion, I clung to doubt
as Satan spider-like stalked
the orb of dark surrounding Eden

for a wormhole into paradise.
God had formed me from gel in my mother’s womb,
injected by my dad’s smart shoot.

They swapped sighs until
I came, smaller than a bite of burger.
Quietly, I grew till my lungs were done

then the Lord sailed a soul
like a lit arrow to inhabit me.
Maybe that piercing

made me howl at birth,
or the masked creatures whose scalpel
cut a lightning bolt to free me.

I was hoisted by the heels and swatted, fed
and hauled around. Time-lapse photos show
my fingers grow past crayon outlines,

my feet come to fill spike heels.
Eventually, I lurched out
to kiss the wrong mouths, get stewed,

and sulk around. Christ always stood
to one side with a glass of water.
I swatted the sap away.

When my thirst got great enough to ask,
a clear stream welled up inside,
some jade wave buoyed me forward,

and I found myself upright
in the instant, with a garden
inside my own ribs aflourish.

There, the arbor leafs.
The vines push out plump grapes.
You are loved, someone said. Take that

and eat it.

Late Ripeness
by Czeslaw Milosz
(‘New And Collected Poems, 1931–2001,’ 2003)

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas
assigned to my brush came closer,
ready now to be described better than they were before.

I was not separated from people,
grief and pity joined us.
We forget - I kept saying - that we are all children of the King.

For where we come from there is no division
into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.

We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part
of the gift we received for our long journey.

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago -
a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror
of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel
staving its hull against a reef - they dwell in us,
waiting for a fulfillment.

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,
as are all men and women living at the same time,
whether they are aware of it or not.

* Mary Karr uses some snazzy formatting in this poem that I can't seem to reproduce, so just see the original here.

Something good.

2008-05-19T08:18:00.004+08:00

The Filipinas Heritage Library

Makati Avenue, Makati City

17 May 2008

6.00 p.m.

With an iron-clad fist, I wake up and French-kiss the morning.

2008-03-10T16:25:00.005+08:00

These past few months Sandra and I, together with a few friends, have been trying to diversify our blogging CVs to include ‘food blogger,’ except that this refashioning hasn’t exactly been working well.

For one thing, it’s been a little bit of a challenge to gather all of us together—each one of us, after all, has a life outside of blogging. (Yes, that includes me; it may strike you as a claim bordering on fiction, but I do have an actual life. Its quality, of course, is debatable.) For another thing, in the few instances that we could gather our respective asses together for a meal, we become too caught up in enjoying the food and the conversation that we usually end up abandoning, neither deliberately nor willfully, to be sure, all plans to transform the meal into words that could be posted to our respective sites. For yet another thing—at least as far as I’m concerned—I’m not too crazy to believe that there are people who hold their breaths and suspend their daily activities just so they could find out what I have to say about this particular meal, this particular book, what I did at this particular time. I mean, come on—I’d be very lucky to get about five visitors a day, most of whom are people looking for the lyrics to that classic song ‘Larawang Kupas.’ So I have no great compulsion to update this blog.

But screw all those: Today, I’m hanging the ‘Blogger is in’ sign at the door (or whatever passes for a door in a blog writer’s dubious non-office) and writing about the Morning We Spent At The Salcedo Weekend Market.

As soon as Sandra and I arrived at Salcedo Park (officially called Velazquez Park) at some minutes past nine last Saturday, we gave the place the once-over—there was a wide variety of stalls that sold stuff ranging from organic fruits and vegetables, to fresh seafood and poultry, to prepared food, even plants. If you lived there, you could even get a cedula. But something caught our eye—and within five minutes of our arrival, we already spent over six hundred bucks at one particular stall.

The stall was La Cuisine Française, run by Michele and Jean D’Orival.

We had high hopes for it, because a Japanese friend of Sandra’s who’d lived in Salcedo Village had told us to check it out. I myself am always on the lookout for good French food—not high-church, high-priced haute cuisine, although that’s fine too, depending on the well-being of my wallet. What I’m looking for is the casual, unpretentious French bistrot*or café, or better yet good French home cooking, for which we don’t have to feel like we had to pawn our ancestors’ farm land just so we could afford to eat there.

The stuff La Cuisine Française had on display was impressively diverse. They had canard confit à l’orange, bouillabaisse (which I want to try next time), some pasta dishes that I’m sure were Frenchified. They had sausages and pâtés, a good selection of breads (which Mme. D’Orival called ‘artisanal’), different kids of quiches, and several selections of pastries, such as the humongous macarons.

We got a long baguette-like country bread, two kinds of quiche (one with basil and tomato, another with blue cheese), and two kinds of macarons.

First, the bread. We hesitate to call it a baguette because it was surprisingly heavier and more substantial than a regular baguette. It had a fresh, pleasantly yeasty odor, which would’ve been amazing if it had just come out of the oven. The texture was okay—chewy on the inside, maybe partly due to the unevenly spaced and sized holes (what baguette snoots would probably call good aveolage); the crust, however, could be a little crustier, maybe baked a couple of minutes longer. David Lebovitz wrote that many Parisians want their baguettes ‘pas trop cuite,’ or ‘not too baked,’ but I’m not French, which gives me the license to demand that my baguette be crustier. As for taste, I liked the delicate saltiness of the bread, with a very tiny hint of sweetness. We finished the entire loaf, which we ate with our baon—Italian Gorgonzola and ultra-thin slices of jamón serrano that had become crispy like bacon. It was fairly satisfying bread, although the best baguette we’ve had in the Philippines is still Chef Aklay’s demi-baguette in Sagada.

Next, the quiches. The crust was disappointing—it was pretty soggy, the kind that you find in bad buko pie. The filling of the basil and tomato quiche was fairly interesting, however—the thinly sliced tomatoes were perfectly blushed, its shiny surface and texture almost like candied fruit. The basil was fresh without being too assertive; Sandra said that perhaps spinach was used as an extender. It was decent quiche, except that other layers of flavor could’ve lifted it up; maybe some onion or a tiny hint of garlic, or some strongish cheese. The blue-cheese quiche, meanwhile, was not very good. It tasted a little too eggy and creamy for us, and had a too smooth consistency, like a custard. The blue cheese was there, we could smell and taste it, but it could use a little more. I would also like some texture in it—maybe if the crust were flakier that would’ve been good enough. We ended up crumbling over it bits of the Gorgonzola we had brought, to strengthen the flavor, and to add some texture.

Then we shared an orange macaron. As noted, M. and Mme. D’Orival’s macarons were huge (about the size of a saucer), and they crumbled nicely. It was sweet, but not cloyingly so. It had some chocolate (I think; this time I wasn’t paying close attention to it anymore) in the middle, which was a nice surprise. Sandra said that the Cuisine Française macarons tasted tame compared with those at Bizu, whose macarons are tiny discs of intense flavor.

I wish we’d tried more of their stuff, if only to know exactly what La Cuisine Française’s specialty is. But considering how much we had to spend on only a few items, I guess we may need to wait another day to try some more of their food. We didn’t get to talk to M. and Mme. D’Orival. They were accommodating and approachable, to be sure, but they were always intent on listening to their customers’ questions, and giving them adequate answers—which means that they never ran out of people wanting to talk to them. I don’t mind: In my book, this is simply what any good food-business owner should be.

I wanted to love La Cuisine Française, if only for the fact that I would like to see more places that serve relatively inexpensive French food.** But we must’ve caught them on a less-than-great day. Still, I want to eat there another time.

Next: The search for the perfect laksa.

* Admittedly, however, as more and more bistrots are getting their Michelin stars, they are becoming more and more upscale and forbidding as well. (See, for instance, Jeffrey Steingarten’s ‘The Man Who Ate Everything’ for an excellent essay on the matter.) I really wish I’d made notes on the meals I’d had in Paris, but I was just too amazed at the idea that someone as shabby as I am could actually have the chance to go there—proof of which is that I’m still talking about it, almost two years after the fact. Still, if you’re interested to know, of the cafés that I remember going to, the ones I enjoyed the most were Les Deux Magots at place Saint Germain des Prés, and the open-faced-sandwich stall at La Grande Épicerie, whose entrance faces rue du Bac, I think.

** Attention, L’Eau Vive in Asia: Please, please, please, finish your renovation soon. We totally want to go.

Here is a picture of clouds.

2008-03-03T11:02:00.002+08:00

Just because. There are a few more of them elsewhere.

Back when I’m more coherent.

For S., before change comes.

2008-02-14T08:29:00.002+08:00

Click here to get your own player.

The biggest change, of course, is the change in tax status. But before that happens—and it sucks a little that we’re not beating the April ITR filing deadline, haha—there are other important changes as well: my upcoming library residency, your brewing graduate essay, our spiritual counseling.

It’s all coming along swimmingly, and I’m more than glad that you’re here with me—prepare for a metaphor groaning with the strain of extending it—enjoying the water.

I know it’s fashionable for people of our generation to dump on Julie Andrews and ‘The Sound Of Music,’ but fuck them. That’s not our problem; let’s think about something else, something more, something good.

Dining list. From last year.

2008-01-16T14:42:00.001+08:00

While compiling this list I realize that last year, S. and I blew a lot of cash on food—some of it stuff that we ourselves cooked, but much of it we spent in restaurants. Pero okay na rin yun, I rationalize, kesa naman mag-drugs ako.

Anyway. Following is the list of my favorite restaurants from last year (and they’re more or less S.’s too, I think), in descending order. The others are … well, just the others. Stuff to fill space with. Stuff you may or may not take seriously.

Log Cabin, Sagada, Mountain Province.
Assad Café, U.N. Avenue, Manila.
Swagat Indian Cuisine, Rada St., Makati.
Woorijib, Kalayaan Ave., Quezon City.
Gumbo, The Block, SM City North, Quezon City.
Abé, Trinoma, Quezon City.

The old but reliable: Muang Thai, Malakas St., Pinyahan, Quezon City; S. R. Thai, Katipunan Ave., Loyola Heights, Quezon City (although as of Monday the 14th they have moved); Chocolate Kiss, Bahay ng Alumni, U. P, Campus, Quezon City; Chateau Verde, U. P. Campus, Quezon City; Cibo, Glorietta, Makati City; Bizu Patisserie, Greenbelt 2, Makati City; A Veneto, Trinoma and Visayas Avenue, Quezon City.

Best service: Gumbo, The Block. Hands down. No contest. You get the point.

Favorite bread: Chef Aklay’s etag-studded sourdough bread, in his bakery and at Log Cabin, Sagada; a somewhat distant second is the olive foccaccia at Bizu, Greenbelt 2.

Favorite coffee: Plain brewed coffee at Mi Piace, The Peninsula Manila, Makati City.

Favorite drink: Flamango (mango, banana, and peach shake), Fuzion, Trinoma, Quezon City.

Favorite rice meal: Bibimbap, Woorijib; Seafood jambalaya, Gumbo; Malayan fish curry and rice, Banana Leaf Curry, The Block, SM City; baked rice with seafood, Mister Choi, Robinson’s Galleria Ortigas and WalterMart Chino Roces, Makati.

Favorite dimsum: Hakao and kuchay at Causeway, Timog Avenue, Quezon City.

Favorite pasta dish: Spinach cannelloni with gorgonzola, Amici di Don Bosco, Amorsolo cor. Chino Roces, Makati City; fusilli (I think) with crabmeat and saffron, La Grotta, Rufino St., Makati; spinach ravioli (some ravioli have mushrooms too), Cibo, Glorietta.

Favorite meal with pork in it, just because I want to put something about pork here: The vegetable fried rice with fried pork chop at St. Joseph’s, Sagada.

Favorite I-don’t-know-how-to-classify-this: The deep-fried milk with spare ribs, Jumbo Kingdom, CCP Complex, Manila.

Biggest disappointment: New Bombay Canteen, The Columns, Ayala cor. Buendia, Makati City.

Other disappointments: Hossein’s and Crustasia, both Trinoma, Quezon City; Masas, Greenbelt 2, Makati City.

Something that makes me sad: Butter Diner, Shopwise, Araneta Center, Cubao. They used to have a charming all-day breakfast menu, which I loved. Now it’s gone.

Last complaint: I don’t understand why Fish & Co.—whether the Greenbelt or the Shangri-La branch, and I’m almost sure their Trinoma branch is likely to have this problem too—never has any mustard in its kitchen. It’s kinda unthinkable for me to eat fries (excuse me, chips) without mustard. So please? Mustard?

Moosic list. From last year.

2008-01-11T10:41:00.000+08:00

So here comes the first part of the 2007 year-end lists. There’s going to be a post on food and books sometime in the future, so if you’re a fan of this blog—in which case the likelihood of you being imaginary is immense—just keep coming back for updates. Haha. I’m not including movies here; of the few movies I saw in 2007, the one I enjoyed the most was ‘The Fugitive’ starring Harrison Ford.

I arbitrarily decided to include a few 2006 albums I hadn’t listened to in the year of their release; maybe because if I didn’t there’d be very little to post here.

Albums, 2006 and 2007.

1. ‘Night Falls Over Kortedala,’ Jens Lekman. Sitcoms could use song-and-dance numbers, and pop music could use more sitcom-style scenarios. The songs in this album are just so clever and sweet and dorky they kill me. No doubt my favorite album of 2007.

2. ‘Double Up,’ R. Kelly. I’m probably going to put Kells on the list of creatures I would scare a young daughter with, but damnit, this album is as entertaining as it is ridiculous. Every song is an effing LSS magnet. If the Lekman is a dorky musical, the Kells is a grotesquely overwrought soap. I also found it bizarrely amusing that just after a song that offers to ‘[tour] your black hole,’ boasts about the singer’s ‘rocket’ being ‘full of fuel,’ and promises to make ‘painless’ his ‘trip to planet Uranus,’ Kells offers to ‘hold [the] hand and be by [the] side’ of the parents who lost their kids at Virginia Tech.

3. ‘La Radiolina,’ Manu Chao. A number of songs in this album would’ve merely been dour protest music (with lyrics like ‘Señor presidente George Bush, ¡cuidado!’), except for the fact the music itself is beautiful. (Listen to ‘Me llaman calle’ and know what I’m talking about). Even using the same tune in two different songs is pretty cool.

4. ‘Under The Surface,’ Marit Larsen. This is what well-constructed, well-structured pop should sound like—traditional verse-chorus-verse patterns woven with unexpected flourishes (as in the line breaks and rhymes in ‘Don’t Save Me,’ the mixing-and-matching of instruments), the Abbaesque melodic boldness, and lots and lots of hand claps (just because I’m a sucker for hand claps).

5. ‘The Trials Of Van Occupanther,’ Midlake. I read somewhere that this is supposed to be a concept album, but looking at the sort of opaque lyrics don’t exactly reveal what that concept is. Still, the tunes are just lovely and sad, I was playing this album repeatedly at some point.

6. ‘In Rainbows,’ Radiohead. When I heard this album for the first time, I was like ‘Whoa, actual songs!’ I mean, I love their concept albums (especially ‘Kid A’), but Radiohead’s not-so-successful conceptual stuff could be a little heavy—and that’s from someone who claims to be a big fan and who would like to nominate Th. Yorke et al. for sainthood. Here, there is a sophisticated lightness to the tunes, even when something incredibly complex is going on underneath.

7. ‘The Million Colour Revolution,’ The Pinker Tones. I don’t care much about the Euro-clubby tracks in this album, but the other tracks are just so wildly adventurous and enjoyable and clever. (Apparently cleverness is a criterion of value for me.) And maybe the fact that they sing in four languages (English, Spanish, French, and German) appeals to me—even if I don’t understand them most of the time.

8. ‘The Reminder,’ Feist. I am one of those opportunistic poseurs who latched onto Feist in 2007, although I could be more pretentious in denying that ‘1 2 3 4’ is the best song in the album. (For some reason I love ‘I Feel It All’ best, followed by ‘Sealion Woman.’) In Sasha Frere-Jones’s review in the New Yorker, he called this album ‘radiant,’ and I couldn’t agree more.

9. ‘Lost In A Moment,’ Shrift. As I told S., Nina Miranda’s project post–Smoke City sounds less aggressive and more sophisticated. There’s just something incredibly relaxing about this album—it’s almost like wallpaper music, except the textures are just so pretty you can’t help but notice them.

10. ‘Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?’ Of Montreal. I really love ‘Satanic Panic In The Attic’ and ‘The Sunlandic Twins,’ and while I like those better than ‘Hissing … ,’ the somber tone in many of the songs here is an interesting departure. Or maybe I’m really just a sucker for an album with a song that rhymes ‘Georges Bataille’ with ‘Story Of The Eye.’

11. ‘Kala,’ M.I.A. I won’t say anything about M.I.A.’s politics [Sample lyrics: ‘All I wanna do is (sound of gun shots), gonna (sound of cash register opening), and take your money’] because every single major review of this album seems to have zeroed in on that, as if provocative politics—or maybe provocative political statements—automatically equals good music. The ‘rapping’ is pretty bad, but the music is danceable and fun and bold.

12. ‘Beauty And Crime,’ Suzanne Vega. Suzanne Vega produces consistently good work it’s almost boring. It isn’t, of course—the lovely, pared-down stories, mostly of New Yorkers; the deceptively simple melodies; and the highly literate lyrics are all classic Vega.

13. ‘The Last Romance,’ Arab Strap. Obscene, angry, creepy, but weirdly beautiful and sweet at the same time. And the lyrics are literate too.

14. ‘Because I Love It,’ Amerie. I read somewhere that Amerie has recently been dropped by her record label, so the possibility of this album’s release in the U.S. is kinda slim. (It’s been released in Asia and Europe, however.) That’s kinda sad, because this is a solid album, with amazing vocal textures.

15. ‘Timbaland Presents Shock Value,’ Timbaland. A lot of people have ripped into this, complaining that it is a big mess, but it is exactly that mess that I like—it’s as if all of Tim’s shiny, expensive sonic toys were thrown together and then smashed. Although I have to agree ‘Apologize’ sort of sucks.

Songs, which I’m maybe posting to my abandoned and unloved Multiply.

1. ‘I’m A Flirt,’ R. Kelly feat. T.I. and T-Pain.
2. ‘Sipping On The Sweet Nectar,’ Jens Lekman.
3. ‘A Postcard For Nina,’ Jens Lekman.
4. ‘Me llaman calle,’ Manu Chao.
5. ‘Anonymous,’ Bobby Valentino feat. Timbaland.
6. ‘Jigsaw Falling Into Place,’ Radiohead.
7. ‘Jimmy,’ M.I.A.
8. ‘Girlfriend,’ Avril Lavigne.
9. ‘Champion,’ Kanye West.
10. ‘Must’ve Done Something Right,’ Relient K.
11. ‘The Magic Position,’ Patrick Wolf.
12. ‘Oversleeping,’ I’m From Barcelona.
13. ‘Gotta Work,’ Amerie.
14. ‘Again And Again,’ The Bird And The Bee.
15. ‘Lose Myself,’ Lauryn Hill.
16. ‘Get Me Bodied (Extended Version),’ Beyoncé feat. Fabolous.
17. ‘Paper Planes (Remix),’ M.I.A. feat. Bun B and Rich Boy.
18. ‘I Feel It All, ‘ Feist.
19. ‘Wuthering Heights,’ The Puppini Sisters.
20. ‘Last Night,’ Diddy feat. Keyshia Cole.

Cha-cha, marcha, and the whole shebang.

2008-01-04T10:43:00.000+08:00

(Photo from the Video 48 blog.)

From the Blagador Bureau of Corrections:

Over a year ago I fell all over myself praising Radioactive Sago’s ‘Wasak Na Wasak’ video for alluding to one of the greatest jokes ever committed to film—the ‘cha-cha/marcha’ sequence, which I claimed comes from a ‘Mang Kepweng’ movie.

It turns out that I got a couple of things right in that post, but I got one big thing wrong too.

A guy (I automatically assumed it was a guy, for some reason; Chiquito worship is probably a guy thing) from Hong Kong, who apparently knows much, much more about these movies, chanced upon my cha-cha/marcha post this morning and offered enlightenment.

He confirmed my suspicion that there is at least one more Mang Kepweng movie. In fact there are three: ‘Mang Kepweng,’ ‘Mang Kepweng Final Confict,’ and ‘Mang Kepweng En Son.’ He also confirmed that the ‘Santa Maria’ song is from ‘Mang Kepweng,’ in the scene involving Piling’s funeral.

But he corrected my assumption that the cha-cha/marcha sequence is from ‘Mang Kepweng’—it is, in fact, from ‘Estong Tutong,’ this time Bayani Casimiro is the dead guy being buried.

He also said that ‘Estong Tutong’ is now available on VCD. If you don’t have the patience to visit your friendly neighborhood video store (or pirate) to buy the VCD, I’m sure you have the greater patience and spiritual strength required to download an ‘Estong Tutong’ torrent. (Google it up, dudes.) If you’re impatient though, a portion of the glorious scene is on YouTube.

To the guy from Hong Kong: By way of thanks, let me dryly retell a brilliant joke from another movie I barely remember anymore—this one a vampire movie starring Redford White. I’m sure you know this one, and exactly where it’s from.

Our Man Redford, his vampire cape trailing behind, brings a chick he sort of digs to his ancestral house. As he tours her around the house, chick notices two skulls, big and small, on top of a piano, and asks Our Man Redford whose those are. The bigger one, Our Man says, is his grandmother’s. The smaller one is also his grandmother’s, back when she was young.

Hearing voices.

2007-12-18T09:01:00.000+08:00

A quick post, and a bit of a cheat—a list of the albums currently stored in my overly used, now dilapidated music player. Most of the stuff is in Spanish (not that my Spanish is that hot), and recently I’ve been obsessing over listening to nuevo tango as composed by the great Ástor Piazzolla.

Ana D, ‘Satélite 99’ (1997).
Aventuras de Kirlian, ‘Aventuras de Kirlian’ (1989).
Aventuras de Kirlian, ‘86–88’ (2001).
Carlos Berlanga, ‘Impermeable’ (2001).
Carlos Berlanga, ‘Indicios’ (1995).
The mysterious ‘Extra’ folder, which contains stuff like R. Kelly’s ‘I’m A Flirt,’ Avril Lavigne’s ‘Girlfriend,’ and recently, Camera Obscura’s version of Abba’s ‘Super Trouper.’
Murray Perahia, J. Sebastian Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’ (2000).
Ibon Errazkín, ‘Escuela de arte’ (2003).
Radiohead, ‘In Rainbows’(2007).
Manu Chao, ‘La radiolina’ (2007).
Ástor Piazzolla,’ ‘Suite Troileana’ (1975).
Le Mans, ‘Le Mans’ (1993).
Le Mans, ‘Entresemana’ (1994).
Le Mans, ‘Saudade’ (1996).
Le Mans, ‘Aquí vivía yo’ (1999).
Ástor Piazzolla, ‘Libertango’ (1974).
Shrift, ‘Lost In A Moment’ (2006).
Jens Lekman, ‘Night Falls Over Kortedala’ (2007).

Eating a meme.

2007-12-12T08:37:00.000+08:00

(Cross-posted from Takaw Mata.)

Screw the conventions of meme-related tagging: I was reading Burnt Lumpia this morning, and seeing the guy behind the blog help in perpetuating this meme activated my ‘Hey, me too!’ gland. That kinda sounds obscene. Anyway. If you want to do this too, hey, be my guest.

What were you cooking/baking ten years ago?
-- In college, I hardly ever cooked, let alone baked. I was so loserish that I couldn’t even do a decent sunny-side up. I only became an apostate of the ‘just add water’ culinary cult when Sandra and I started cooking together early this year.

What were you cooking/baking one year ago?
-- I sometimes brewed my own coffee. Yeeha.

Five snacks you enjoy:
-- Stinky cheese, especially Camembert.
-- Good onion rings; the ones they sell at Brother’s Burger is OK, but not great.
-- McDonald’s fries.
-- I really like Stik-O wafer sticks.
-- Fish balls, squid balls, kwek-kwek, and isaw at U.P.

Five recipes you know by heart:
-- My own version of ratatouille niçoise, a microadaptation of Sandra’s recipe.
-- Something moronically simple: cheese, tomato, and basil omelette.
-- Two variants of tomato-based pasta sauce—one bacon-intensive, the other tuna-heavy.
-- (Since I’m still trying to find my kitchen legs, I don’t really know too many recipes yet.)

Five culinary luxuries you would indulge in if you were a millionaire:
-- After reading Peter Kaminsky’s ‘Pig Perfect,’ I fantasized about having a house close to a Spanish dehesa and being sort of involved in raising pigs that will be turned into ibérico hams.
-- Less fantastic: unlimited supply of good bread, good cheese, and good butter. Rawr.
-- Twice-yearly eating trips abroad.
-- My own wine cellar!
-- A fully equipped kitchen.

Five foods you love to cook/bake:
-- (See ‘Five recipes you know by heart.’)
-- I love helping Sandra cook laksa.

Five foods you cannot/will not eat:
-- The only thing that comes to mind, or at least right now: deep-fried day-old chicks.

Five favorite culinary toys:
-- The Bodum French press Sandra gave me last Christmas.
-- I’m planning to get a good nonstick pan for my parents’ kitchen.
-- (I’m still a kitchen rookie, so I don’t have cool kitchen toys in my possession.)

Five dishes on your ‘last meal’ menu:
-- Sandra’s laksa.
-- Lamb chops, maybe vindaloo style.
-- Fresh lumpia.
-- Really good coffee; Gevalia Kaffe’s Arabica coffee from Popayán, Colombia, is wonderful.
-- Crème glacée from La Maison du Chocolat. I’m thinking of pouring hot coffee over the ice cream to make my own weird version of granita affogato. Then I could die.

Five happy food memories:
-- Cooking and eating tinapa-and-Guinness risotto with Sandra, June 2007. (Our anniversary! Yeh.)
-- Dinner at Le Pré Catelan, somewhere in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris, Spring 2006. The perfectly grilled lamb chops; the pea-foam soup; the endless supply of pinot noir and Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, and some champagne variant from Moët et Chandon. I miss eating there because it’s highly likely it won’t happen again.
-- Drinking Singha beer on the sidewalk, Rajdamri Road, Bangkok, January 2005. After ten in the evening food vendors set up chairs and tables to serve beer and whatevs to locals and tourists. I was with an ABS-CBN Bicol producer and a U.P. student, drinking and talking. We were drunk, and we were sort of bitching about not having seen an elephant up close in our weeklong stay in the city. Then a baby elephant walked by, its trunk brushing against my shoulder. We were stunned.
-- Dinner with Sandra at the long-gone Gene’s Bistro on Mother Ignacia Street, Quezon City, sometime in 2000. I had paella; she had some puttanesca-like pasta dish, with lots of capers.
-- The very first time I had Beach House pork barbecue, June 1995. I was a freshman, and I was with my block mates. Good times, those.

Meanwhile, at the Hall of Justice ...

2007-11-28T15:49:00.000+08:00

I’m supposed to be editing dozens of news and feature articles, copyediting four booklets, and writing an article for some raket, but I feel compelled to come up with a token post for November.

Actually I cheat: True, I haven’t updated this space in a while, but I’ve been posting stuff to Takaw Mata (the food blog Gina, Exie, Sandra, and I started), my Flickr, and my Twitter. (Actually Twitter’s creepy: my Twitter posts have been finding themselves all over the place, in sites I’m not a member of. For instance, some of my October Twitter posts have inexplicably turned up—but posted within minutes of each other—in this dating site, where I’m supposed to be from Egypt and ‘seeking a man.’ Coolness.)

Anyway, this is just me saying Hi and officially declaring that the Blagador hiatus is now on hiatus.

Break muna.

2007-10-23T10:53:00.000+08:00

Amazingly, there's actually stuff going on on the life front. Some of it's annoying (work, mostly), some are scaryish, but much of it's pretty good, so I'm not really complaining.

While I'm gone, stare at them socks. Don't dare blink, damnit. A full minute or so of staring is enough to induce seizures.

Blagador will be back shortly. Enjoy seizing!

Sem saudade.

2007-10-05T09:05:00.000+08:00

Midwinter, late spring.

2007-09-25T10:39:00.000+08:00

You're sorry you keep going on about missing this city. You know it's easy to be blinded by the horrible clichés surrounding the place. (You read DeLillo's 'White Noise' years ago: you should know better than fall for available variations on the 'Most Photographed Barn In America' scenario.) You know it's easy to forget about the stink of garbage and piss, the homeless people warming their hands over small fires as night comes in the middle of winter—the fact that there is poverty at all.

Keeping yourself from succumbing to the banal, to the manufactured, to the manipulative, to the sentimental, to the appealing lie, to the fantastic–delusional hybrid, could be difficult. Especially when part of you knows that the likelihood of you returning to that city and finally feeling as if you possessed the luxury to see past the illusion is slim. So this moment you think about the trees, and marvel at how fast they could change in just a few weeks. Then give in to the most sentimental form nostalgia takes: think that the trees will go on changing without you, and try to be thankful that at least, you witnessed it once. It's never enough to convince you, but it's a way to go on with your life.

At home in the world.

2007-09-20T11:57:00.000+08:00

What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
— Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Questions Of Travel’ (1965).

‘Think of the long trip home,’ Elizabeth Bishop scolds. But—you object—Ms Bishop, coming back is maybe the easiest part. How about the long trip out? And before that, how about the desperation that comes with saving up for the trip (which takes longer than the flight out or back, in fact longer than the flights out and back), or the indignity of showing proof to some embassy employee that you have a bank account and property and profession to return to, or the greater indignity of being denied a visa and waiting for the next time you are qualified to apply again? How about the stupidity of having to take off your shoes at the airport, after passing through three or four X-ray machines and metal detectors, so some hapless security guy could reassure some president or king or prime minister that you haven’t replaced your little toe with anything vaguely resembling a weapon of mass destruction? How about the discomfort of flying coach—cramped spaces, crying babies, terrible food, people who fart in the enclosed, high-pressure cabin? How about the smirk on the face of some immigration officer as he examines your passport and visa for the slightest sign of counterfeiting, so he could reassure some president or king or prime minister that you don’t intend to pursue a career in ‘terrorism’ in their country? How about overcharging taxis and hotels and restaurants, pickpockets and muggers and scammers? How about malaria and HIV and schistosomiasis and bovine spongiform encephalopathy and cholera and snow blindness and heatstroke? How about condescending and xenophobic locals, condescending and xenophobic fellow travelers, your condescending and xenophobic self?

But you go through them anyway, chalking them up as necessary obstacles, the precondition even, to seeing the world. Or seeing yourself seeing the world. Or, when you come back, making others see that you’ve seen the world. Or seeing yourself as someone perceived by others as a guy who has seen the world. And on and on it regresses. You even look for those special online maps, where you color in the places you’ve been. You rejoice at the size of the shaded areas; you feel like a colonizer measuring his territory. Then you post the map to your blog.

The vastness of this world is bullied into becoming small, so the self may become bigger. What starts out as an attempt to get out of the confines of your skull and into the world becomes an attempt at crumpling the world, as if it were a map, so it could fit in your head. ‘Think of the long trip home,’ Ms Bishop tells you again; is your head then your home?

But yes, Ms Bishop, it might have been ‘a pity’ not to have gone through them. The sense of wonder that you had upon seeing those exotic museums and malls and cobbled streets and street lamps and cafés; the amusement that you felt when you realized that some city’s reputation as a romantic city is no more the result of representations in advertising and the movies and magazines than tourists who are single-minded in making romance happen there so they could look back and say, yes, it is a romantic city; the futility of your laughable attempts at passing yourself off as a local; the satisfaction that you got from finally figuring out complex transport systems; the pointlessness of ‘soaking up the local culture,’ because the mere fact of your presence made this ‘local culture’ that you wished to ‘soak up’ vanish immediately; the realization, this very moment, that in most of these trips you were by yourself; the escalating sense of longing to do it all again, but with someone you love, so everything wouldn’t have to be reduced to objects that merely adorn the inside of your head, so everything would become things and sensations and emotions and thoughts that could be genuinely shared, that could make solipsism impossible, or at least difficult—all these you gather, so you could find, go, come, be, home.

The hounds of LSS.

2007-09-14T16:43:00.000+08:00

This is like two years late: Been listening to the Futureheads’ version of Kate Bush’s ‘Hounds Of Love’ repeatedly since yesterday. And yeh, their version is amazing.

It’s a great song: being scared of the ‘hounds of love’ and running away from them, and yet despite this fear wanting to stop running away—As in ‘Take my shoes off and throw them in the lake.’ (I know, my description sounds kinda hokey. But trust me. It’s a great song.)

While Kate’s version has grandeur and emotional complexity—when she growls ‘throooowww them in the lake,’ for instance, she sounds movingly brave, a moment that’s sort of epiphanic, something arrived at after feeling terrified, feeling ashamed of that terror, and then wanting to summon the courage to fight the shame and the terror, let the fucking hounds finally get her—the Futureheads’ has reckless abandon: As in ‘Here I go!’ And damnit, the harmonized ‘Oh-oh-ohs’ are cool.

But enough of my rock-critic impressions. Just listen to the song, damnit. Repeatedly.

What it looks like.

2007-09-06T14:53:00.000+08:00

So Kanye West’s ‘Graduation’ and 50 Cent’s ‘Curtis’ are dropping 11 September. Both albums are third albums. Timbaland is involved in some way in both albums. (Tim, together with JT, appears in 50’s ‘Ayo Technology’; Tim is credited with doing drum-production work in a couple of tracks in ‘Graduation,’ including first single ‘Stronger.’)

In August, in the spirit of ‘rais[ing] the stakes,’ 50 said that if Kanye sells more albums, ‘Curtis’ will be his last. In response Kanye supposedly joked in a TV show: ‘Please, 50, don’t retire once my album sells and beats your album.’ Less than a week later 50 changed his mind and said he’ll do nothing of the sort, but he’s still confident that ‘Curtis’ will outsell ‘Graduation.’

But if Amazon rankings should be taken seriously and if 50 hadn’t changed his mind about the retirement threat, it would’ve been bye-bye 50 in a few weeks.*

Today I see on Idolator the Rolling Stone cover with 50 and Kanye in it. Never mind that Idolator says it kinda looks like the sweat-deprived version of the cover of some Hall and Oates album (although that was funny). Never mind that some people say it looks gay (which it sort of does). For all the hype and the macho-preening and ’hood-operatic heckling surrounding the 50–Kanye face-off—observing which is turning out to be a particularly engaging spectator sport for someone like me—something outrageously funny but oddly appropriate is posted to the comments section of that Idolator post:

‘I dunno. I see a vase.’

Whoever you are, I salute you.

* I checked a little while ago: ‘Graduation’ ranked fifth, while ‘Curtis’ twenty-fourth in the Amazon music-sales thing. You wanna know who’s number one? Why, it’s the Boss!

(Even if I’m the guy you’re probably convinced wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about MCs, let me just say that I have both albums and I happen to like ‘Graduation.’ Admittedly I wasn’t too crazy about ‘Stronger’ when I first heard it. I thought it was a little too long, but it’s starting to grow on me. Some weeks ago I saw the alternate video for ‘Can’t Tell Me Nothing’ with Zach Galifianakis, and I was like: ‘What the fuck was that? But lemme see that again. And again.’ You get the idea. Now the song wouldn’t stop playing in my head. But so far I like ‘Barry Bonds’ best, the track where Lil Wayne guest-raps. Fave line: ‘I’m doing pretty good as far as geniuses go.’ Fave rhyme: ‘arm’ with ‘uh-uh-uhrm.’ As for ‘Curtis,’ I liked ‘Ayo Technology’ when I first heard it, but I need to give the rest of the album a closer listen.)

An enormous change at the last minute.

2007-08-24T10:16:00.000+08:00

This bit of news saddened me, via The Millions:

Grace Paley, a great American writer, died 22 August, age eighty-four, after battling breast cancer.

These past few years I have been dipping my fingers into her books of stories—‘The Little Disturbances Of Man,’ ‘Enormous Changes At The Last Minute,’ and ‘Later The Same Day’—and practically all of those that I’ve read are are so intensely light and quick-footed, as buoyant as they are explosive, that after reading each one I always end up scratching my head and wondering, ‘How the fuck did that happen?’

The stories also feel true. I don’t know what makes me say that; maybe it’s the same impulse that makes one say something as dubious as ‘I know (beauty, true love, et cet.; just insert your favorite ineffable virtue or vice here) when I see it.’ Still, from every story, I come away with some sort of recognition of something that is both strange and familiar, the shock of recognizing something extraordinary in what is perfectly ordinary.

My attempt at explanation, of course, is still maddeningly banal and vague and lame, so let me just make do with an analogy: Reading a Grace Paley story makes me feel as if I just tried on her head, which is a great and cool and fun head to try on.

A. M. Homes, a former student of Paley’s, did an excellent interview with her some years ago for Salon, and in that interview Paley said something that has stayed with me.

Do writers have a moral obligation?

Oh, I think all human beings do. So if all human beings have it, then writers have some, too. I mean, why should they get off the hook? Whatever your calling is, whether it's as a plumber or an artist, you have to make sure there's a little more justice in the world when you leave it than when you found it. Most writers do that naturally, see that more lives are illuminated, try to understand what is not understood and see what hasn't been seen.

Update, 2.02 p.m.:

The KCRW web site posts an audio of Michael Silverblatt’s July 1996 interview with Grace Paley, and about halfway through the interview G. Paley reads ‘Wants,’ a four- or five-page story that is as dense and compact as it is small, like a neutron star. It’s a puzzling, beautiful, and incredibly moving story. It’s one of those stories that I love rereading—for me one of the benchmarks of short-story writing—and hearing her read it has made me love the story even more.

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

2007-08-22T13:29:00.000+08:00

Not feeling coherent, and yet feeling the compulsion to post something here. Hence, this.

Halfway through David Markson’s ‘The Last Novel’ (from which this post’s title comes). It’s lovely, and funny, and sad.

I’m supposed to be working on a post re Ondaatje’s latest novel, ‘Divisadero,’ which I finished reading a couple of weeks ago. I’m feeling lazy, so some other time.

Or not at all.

Finished watching the first season of ‘Lost’ and the first season of ‘Veronica Mars.’

Also read F. H. Batacan’s ‘Smaller And Smaller Circles.’ There’s one moment in the book that made me laugh.

This: After a few pages containing dialogue in French and Italian, untranslated, Batacan writes that a character supposedly says something in Tagalog. But Batacan writes it in English.

Presumably for the benefit of the reader who understands French and Italian but not Tagalog.

Coolest bit in ‘Lost’: the fucking polar bears on the island.

Other books, started or half-finished: the short stories of J. F. Powers. Roberto Bolaño’s ‘The Savage Detectives.’ Jeffrey Steingarten’s ‘The Man Who Ate Everything.’ Colm Tóibín’s ‘The Sign Of The Cross: Travels In Catholic Europe.’

Stuff I’m listening to: Suzanne Vega’s ‘Beauty And Crime.’ Richard Hawley’s ‘Coles Corner.’ Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Breakaway.’ Phoenix’s ‘Alphabetical.’ Soundtrack to ‘Veronica Mars.’

Check this really funny essay by Peter Cherches (parts 1 and 2), on a visit to India. After reading his ‘Dirty Windows,’ one of my favorite stories in the ‘Between C & D’ anthology, I was wondering where I could find his other stuff. So I was very happy to find his food blog, which is one of the things I regularly read.

Even if it’s highly unlikely that I’d get to eat at the places he reviews.

Nothing to add.

Rain-Grinch.

2007-08-15T12:03:00.000+08:00

I belong in that mystifying species of chronic umbrella carriers who absolutely resent having to whip their umbrellas out of their bags and use them.

Sometimes I imagine I need a therapist with me whenever I have to open my umbrella. (Which means that it’s highly unlikely that I’d be attracted any time soon to the inverted-umbrella-hoisting ecstasies emblematic of El Shaddai gatherings, but let’s not go into that.) I just can’t stand getting my umbrella wet, damnit. I know, it’s ridiculous.

Anyway, I was lucky to have already been in the office before the rains started today. Lucky, because my office is located in the Makati version of España St. Or its approximation of Malabon/Navotas. Whatever. It took only a few minutes of violently diarrheic raining for the streets around my building to get flooded.

I was supposed to take a picture of the flooded streets, but I was, inexplicably, autistically taken in by the droplets of rain on the window pane. (What an ugly rhyme.)

Jukebox. Fourth (or fifth) of a series.

2007-08-06T16:38:00.000+08:00

I know, I know, I promised I was going to post it last week, but I doubt the delay has inflicted any potentially debilitating emotional problem on you. This is an obscure blog whose visitors are either (a) friends I could coerce into bookmarking the blog’s url, or (b) strangers who hunt down the lyrics to ‘Larawang Kupas’ or those who enter cryptic phrases in their search engines such as ‘name that tune naman foster’ and who mysteriously, inexplicably, find themselves faced with this blog. Right?

Anyway. If you would still like to find out how the play list I assembled sounds like, here is a rar file of the songs. (File size is 40ish MB.) I don’t know how long it’s going to stay up here, maybe a month or so, but if the robots get me, I guess I’m going to have to take the file down as soon as possible. So click on the link now, damnit.

There. Hope you like the songs.

Twee tracks for the nauseatingly hipsterish.

2007-07-27T16:35:00.001+08:00

So much of my ‘I’m such a poppist hipster’ posturing is confined to my Twitter thing, since this space is pretty much cannibalized by my ‘Watch me be smart and funny and clever and mordant and thoughtful and sincere, often at the same time, as I talk about obscure literary whatevs’ stunt. Today let me do the whole poppist-hipster thing right here.

Which is the long way to say that I’ve just finished a play list that I’ll maybe send out to friends in a few days.

For this particular mix I wanted something cute and bubbly and twee, maybe Nordic, since a bunch of Swedes and Norwegians are churning out really fun, occasionally silly and dorky, but generally outstanding pop tunes these past two, three years. (One pretty good specimen is ‘Under The Surface’ by Norwegian Marit Larsen, a.k.a. one-half of the duo that used to go by the unfortunate name M2M. I shit you not.) I know, there is something totally trendoid-android about my jumping the whole Scandinavian bandwagon, but damnit, I really like the stuff that I hear.

I didn’t want to make it like a catalog of Norse ear candy—or I might be tempted to include stuff by Aqua—so I ended up doing the whole round-the-world thing again. I put in songs from England and Scotland (Camera Obscura, Arab Strap, Patrick Wolf), Spain (Le Mans and the Pinker Tones), and Brazil (Caetano Veloso, who sings here that song from ‘The Sound Of Music’). The rest are a pretty arbitrary sampling of U.S. bands—with the exception, of course, of Scandinavians Marit Larsen, I’m From Barcelona, and Maia Hirasawa—that the nauseatingly hipsterish maniacally idolatrously revere. (Hurray for overheated adverbs and adjectives.)

It’s up to you to make sense of the stuff that I wrote above. If you’re not up to doing that, look at the track list instead. I’m posting a rar file of the songs next week. Promise, I’m going to really do it.

‘Bit Part,’ Lemonheads.
‘In Pea We Nuts,’ The Pinker Tones.
‘Oxytocin,’ Snowglobe.
‘The Magic Position,’ Patrick Wolf.
‘Again And Again,’ The Bird And The Bee.
‘Don’t Save Me,’ Marit Larsen.
‘I Don’t Want To Get Over You,’ The Magnetic Fields.
‘This Is The Sound,’ Juliana Hatfield Three.
‘Juan,’ Le Mans.
‘Oversleeping,’ I’m From Barcelona.
‘Gothenburg,’ Maia Hirasawa.
‘If Looks Could Kill,’ Camera Obscura.
‘Something Good,’ Caetano Veloso.
‘Who Loves The Sun,’ The Velvet Underground.
‘There Is No Ending,’ Arab Strap.

Eroto-mystical.

2007-07-24T13:31:00.000+08:00

Catholic mysticism is moving, beautiful, profound. But it also creeps the hell out of me.

I’m not an expert on the subject at all; I’m just a half-assed dabbler. Although stories involving the violent deaths of martyrs are a staple of my childhood—St Lawrence on the gridiron; St Rita and her purulent crown-of-thorns wounds; St Peter crucified upside down; various saints with their eyes poked out, their breasts turned to bread, their limbs torn by wild horses—I’m unfamiliar with the primary or even secondary sources of these accounts. In addition, even as a child I was aware that the factuality of a great deal of pious martyrologies is questionable. Still, those shouldn’t stop me from enjoying these stories. I still read accounts about Catholic mystics—as in the blatantly entertaining ‘Teresa Of Ávila, The Progress Of A Soul’ by Cathleen Medwick, or ‘The Bleeding Mind,’ a highly skeptical survey of ancient and modern stigmatics, by Ian Wilson—and I’ve just started reading key texts of Christian mysticism.

(Parenthetical: The term theologians use to describe mystical experience is unio mystica. In the fourth edition of the Diagnostic And Statistical Manual Of Psychiatric Disorders, unio mystica is considered a symptom of mental illness, something that falls under disturbances of thought content.)

Something that totally blows me away is the sheer carnality of mystical experience—that is, the carnality that we, the ones who have no access to the experience, find obvious. Although most mystics have no words to describe their experience, the ones who have made attempts at description appear to conflate eros, philia, and agape, with eros and agape feeding off each other fairly uhm passionately, in such a way that it could be disturbing or kinky.

This, of course, is hardly an original thought. It’s an observation that has been made about the supremely amatory Songs of Solomon, or a few of the Psalms. Some people find Bernini’s ‘Ecstasy Of St Teresa’ highly erotic, as are Teresa’s own accounts of the intense pleasure and pain she felt when a mystical hot sword pierced her heart.

And of course, there’s John of the Cross, in whose work I’m immersing myself every so often. This morning I was reading ‘La llama de amor viva (The Living Flame Of Love),’ and if I were a total prude I would’ve flinched at the sadomasochistic imagery—as in ‘¡O cauterio suave! / ¡O regalada llaga!’ (‘Oh sweet cautery, oh delightful wound!’)—to describe ‘the soul in the intimate communication of loving union with God.’ Then again, this was the Middle Ages, when mortification was considered a precondition for sanctity.

Understand that the above is not a sneering putdown of mystical experience, which is something that I find genuinely moving and profound. I will read more about it, and if you are made of strong stuff I sure will attempt to bore you with the things that I discover. But for now, here’s Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez’s translation of ‘La llama de amor viva,’ which can be found on the web site of the Order of Discalced Carmelites in Australia. (I think I saw a copy of John of the Cross’s ‘Selected Works’ in Powerbooks Greenbelt.)

Songs of the soul in the intimate communication of loving union with God.

1. O living flame of love
that tenderly wounds my soul
in its deepest center! Since
now you are not oppressive,
now consummate! if it be your will:
tear through the veil of this sweet encounter!

2. O sweet cautery,
O delightful wound!
O gentle hand! O delicate touch
that tastes of eternal life
and pays every debt!
In killing you changed death to life.

3. O lamps of fire!
in whose splendors
the deep caverns of feeling,
once obscure and blind,
now give forth, so rarely, so exquisitely,
both warmth and light to their Beloved.

4. How gently and lovingly
you wake in my heart,
where in secret you dwell alone;
and in your sweet breathing,
filled with good and glory,
how tenderly you swell my heart with love.

P: NR.

2007-07-23T16:53:00.000+08:00

Paul de Guzman has a wife named Fe, and lives with his family in Oklahoma. Yeeha.

Not me. Goes without saying.

Via Tarlaqueños Photo Gallery. And no, I’m not from Tarlac either. Same region, true, but not quite Tarlac.

In awe.

2007-07-16T13:14:00.000+08:00

Two quotes, one from Marilynne Robinson, whose novel ‘Housekeeping’ is one of the loveliest things I’ve read this year. (If you find her book of essays, ‘The Death Of Adam,’ in some bookstore, please, please get it for me. I’ll pay you back, promise.) The other is from Thomas Merton, whose journal is likely to be my favorite book of the year.

I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of the miracle is here, among us. The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention.
— Marilynne Robinson, in ‘The Death Of Adam’ (1998).

God never does things by halves. He does not sanctify us patch upon patch. He does not make us priests or make us saints by superimposing an extraordinary existence upon our ordinary lives. He takes our whole life and our own being and elevates it to a supernatural level, transforms it completely from within, and leaves it exteriorly what it is: ordinary.
— Thomas Merton, in ‘The Sign Of Jonas’ (1953).

An actual post in a few days.

Our endless, numbered days.

2007-07-11T16:45:00.000+08:00

A.k.a. random stuff.

i.

I have never read anything by T. S. Eliot in full, but the random bits that I pick up here and there are just amazing. Like this bit from ‘The Waste Land’:

He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience.

Now I know very little about poetry, but that ‘With a little patience’ bit kills me every time. And this bit from ‘Four Quartets’:

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

I have very little clue what the hell it actually means, but it’s just so fucking moving.

ii.

I love this cool bit from an interview the poet Mary Karr did with the San Francisco Chronicle last year:

There are a lot of different kinds of Catholics. What kind are you?

The really fun kind. The really cute kind. [Laughter] The really excellently dressed kind—I don't know. My spiritual state shifts from day to day. I feel I'm either moving closer to God or further away from minute to minute.

But I do find the more I permit myself to be engaged with other people—not as a writer or poet or whatever, but just having people around—the better I feel. I have a lot of ex-students here, and my son's here.

Everybody comes over on Sunday. I make turkey meatballs, and we watch 'The Sopranos.' So that's the kind of Catholic I am. You know? I like everybody. I'm vain and pretentious and arrogant and terrified and full of longing for the numinous and for that joy. And yet I sometimes think I do everything I can to shove it away.

iii.

And this song just kills me every time I listen to it.

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Subida al monte Carmelo.

2007-07-09T11:13:00.000+08:00

Reading Thomas Merton’s journals (‘The Sign Of Jonas,’ 1953) got me interested in reading John of the Cross again. (And I asked S. to get me a copy of Bernard McGinn’s ‘The Essential Writings Of Christian Mysticism,’ available at the huge bookstore on the top floor of Galleria.) So here’s a portion of the first book of John of the Cross’s ‘Subida al monte Carmelo,’ available in the original and in full here. An English translation of the whole thing can be found here, one of the sites that make me very happy.

Yikes. I’m not even done reading Teresa of Ávila’s ‘Moradas del castillo interior.’ Ugh, too many books, too many books.

Para venir a gustarlo todo,
no quieras tener gusto en nada.

Para venir a poseerlo todo,
no quieras poseer algo en nada.

Para venir a serlo todo,
no quieras ser algo en nada.

Para venir a saberlo todo,
no quieras saber algo en nada.

Para venir a lo que no gustas,
has de ir por donde no gustas.

Para venir a lo que no sabes,
has de ir por donde no sabes.

Para venir a lo que no posees,
has de ir por donde no posees.

Para venir a lo que no eres,
has de ir por donde no eres.

Modo para no impedir al todo:

Cuando reparas en algo,
dejas de arrojarte al todo.

Porque para venir del todo al todo
has de negarte del todo en todo.

Y cuando lo vengas del todo a tener,
has de tenerlo sin nada querer.

Porque, si quieres tener algo en todo,
no tienes puro en Dios tu tesoro.