Our estrangement
It begins with a boat trip of course, as all things do, and where else but to Dumaguete, city in the south, year 1962, with elder sister and the old folks, who weren’t quite so old back then.
Overnight at the pier of north harbor, the ship not moving an inch from its moorings, and in the morning when we get up all excited and look out to what we expect is the open sea. However, it’s still the same old squalor of Manila, although admittedly not as squalorous way back when. You get the picture, a kid’s disappointment can’t be measured, but the adventure of a lifetime no doubt has started.
Dumaguete is the city of the beloved as well as my estrangement, its boulevard reeking with the sea and kelp on the rocks, random rats scurrying along the steps leading to the breakwater. Poor folk scouring the shoreline for sea urchin and shellfish, water up to their shins in the lambent low tide. Then the clip-clop of a passing tartanilla, and the call of the occasional hawker selling his wares: balut, tocino, half ripe papaya in vinegar.
Pass the beer, please, just as we drank endless pale pilsens on those boat rides to the south, and back north again. On the sun deck at twilight, passing by the islands in their blue and green kraken disguises, then night gently falling and the lights of the fishermen out early turning up one by one.
Look in the distance, a lone flashing lighthouse guiding the solitary soul of the ship, blinking as if in the netherworld surrounded by the sound of the engine and the smell of marang.
Friends & effigies
The little I know of Marie Marjorie may be like that flashing light from a cellphone with message waiting to be read, or a lighthouse that guides ships in the dead of night, blinking along with the sound of the stern slicing through waves as if in reverse, trying to retrieve something from the past.
And somewhere someone must have written that the light peering through a crack in a closed door resembles an inserted letter, both assuming a slanted rectangular form.
That, too, could be her.
Like the house on San Jose extension in Dumaguete, in that maze of wood and iron sheets, a stone’s throw from the street, smoke rising from the kitchen.
Or the house on Rovira Street in the selfsame city, gone with the scent of ylang-ylang outside the window of a second-floor room.
In separate summers no less.
Yet why do we mention these things?
In Manila there is a festschrift to be put together, and one maker of effigies gets up each morning to resume work on something she or he knows will only be set aflame, as if the work encompasses the meaning of all art.
The cycle of build and destroy, and when an artist is most like god.
In Hagdang Bato in Mandaluyong City, there is a Japanese garden where there is no place for effigies, only for a stray stone named uyuqa, a chime that sings agtona, a chipped jar with the word besoso engraved underneath.
Nonsense coins in a word game in the age of slippers and piranhas, as alive as Jesus in our hearts.
But how sure is the reader that they make no sense, when there are poems waiting to be sung, and the cats come home to scratch on a giant carrot post?
The light waiting to be read, the message that is not there, the sound a ship makes upon leaving port and later, slicing through what can only be dark water.
The coven meant to be retrieved from the ashes like a covenant or phoenix.
A woman smiles with a pinprick of leaves in her hair, in the year of the molave that was not like the molave, the gift of fruits, reconstructed effigies and reverse departures…
Towards a theory of musicology
Though I first heard many of the songs of the Allman Brothers Band’s Eat a Peach sometime in the ‘70s, it’s only recently that I got to hear the 33-minute long “Mountain Jam” in its entirety. This is because in the original vinyl double album, the song stretches over the B-sides of each LP, virtually cut in half. Most of the songs on sides 1 and 3 I’d heard before on radio, their running time more manageable. Even “Mountain Jam” (sides 2 and 4) was heard in snatches through the years, but never the whole hog of a jam of two guitars, keyboards, bass, and two drums.
Thanks to Spotify, we get to hear the complete dynamics and range of the Georgia-based band, two of whose members (Duane Allman, guitars & Berry Oakley, bass) died in motorcycle crashes at the peak of their powers and height of the band’s popularity in the early to mid-70s.
What a song it is, with a lesson or two in improvisation, flights of fancy at times deliberately straying off key until shift of scale is complete, each band member accorded more than the usual 12 bars in the spotlight, the solos not by rote, but driven by brotherly love to give the other a chance to shine.
A trick too trying to distinguish the dueling guitars, the rougher slide apparently being Duane’s, and the other more lyrical crescendos likely his partner Dickey Betts. The band is no stranger to instrumentals, the most popular being “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” which also stretches out some, a must play by fledgling cover bands and whose title also gave the name to one such post-metal mutation of the local variant, Elizabeth Reed.
And we have not even talked about the drums, which not so much dueled as complemented each other, the percussive collaboration of Butch Trucks and Jaimoe. It’s the first time I heard, too, of two drums in a band, and contrary to bombast or a tendency to be heavy handed, the twin timekeepers actually gave more space to stretch out and improvise, without worrying about getting lost in the muddle. Those drummers gave new meaning to the word syncopation.
Of course, there’s the keyboard work of Gregg Allman, who finds no need to sing in “Mountain Jam,” and Oakley’s bass lines that serve as punctuation and draft like a good swig of craft beer leading the song into the next section.
What a band that was indeed, and “Mountain Jam” may be their pinnacle as instrumentalists. It’s a good sample of the limitless possibilities of music structure and theory of composition.
When Gregg died some years ago, there was barely an item in the local papers, not even in the celebrity foreign news. Which is just as well for he could have considered it as mere wasted words. The drummer Trucks most likely is uncle to a fellow named Derek, a guitarist who along with Susan Tedeschi would form a band that continued the tradition of southern rock, full of mountain maids, blue skies, the idle wild codas and slides.
Whatever happened to Pelrico’s
A record store selling other dry-goods merchandise located off market Dumaguete City, sometime late ‘70s, where once we had taped an album or two, one of them, if memory serves, by the Doobie Brothers, by the rather small and defensive proprietor, as if he had a chip on his shoulder, and true enough a fellow old timer of the city remarked the store has been closed for quite a while now, though back in the day was known to be the only such store of its kind in that sea of sweet potatoes, dagat ng camote, guess couldn’t keep up with the competition, poor Elmer Fudd…
The tapes including the Doobies I took to listen on a battered tape recorder off San Jose Extension, echoes of love, among other erased landmarks of a gentle city: Dainty’s with its distinctive halo-halo, Oriental panciteria where we washed down the noodles with endless bottles of beer with the lawyer piano player poet Ernie Yee in the early afternoon, on the second floor the peranakan cabinets with pictures of ancestors and incense sticks before them, speedmeals and a room in Tubod underneath a chico tree, hear the fruits falling on the corrugated roof in the sleepless dead of night, Main theater and Park theater where surely we watched Flower Drum Song and South Pacific in one of our first summers ever, the foyer of the old-style movie houses rivalling those along Avenida, airbrushed photos of a forgotten Hollywood glamor lining the walls leading to the balcony, and in our seats in the dark could actually smoke a cigarette while the reel unspooled and, cough cough, isn’t that Bali Hai calling just outside across the plaza, toward where else but the sea and its silences well kept…
Said I was writing something about Pelrico’s, and old timer says when it comes out try posting it, and so here it is, an idea for a piano bar cum record store cum library, where a flat screen TV linked to cable shows mostly live sports 24 hours, where you can nurse your beer and anywhere you go can smell the sea, whatever happens.
The longest walk
Not many know that to get from point A to point B, you have to go through the entire alphabet and back again, not really the shortest distance but rather encompassing a slew of side streets, alleyways in the tangential peripheries.
Used to be that every holy week, either Maundy Thursday or Good Friday, in particular, we walked the length of Boni Avenue in Mandaluyong down to Maysilo, the municipal hall, partially skirted the circle then started the trek back to the apartment via one of the intersecting streets that leads to San Raphael, thence back to Boni. It was a quiet, windy walk in the late afternoons, sometimes with barely a soul in sight, most people absorbed in their Lenten reflections, else ruminating on the stations of the cross, also along Maysilo, Christ’s passion encircling city hall and its bureaucracy taking holy leave.
Times when you could count on the fingers of both hands the establishments still open and catering to customers, even during a prolonged pandemic, the 24-hour pugon bread store or fast food selling inihaw na bangus. Out of the blue may come the redundant procession, with the Christ figure in a box, the congregation fingering rosaries and reciting a litany of mysteries.
Another longest walk surely was the one that occurred in Singapore early 2013, coming from a gallery called Gillman Barracks somewhere on the outskirts, even if the whole island state seems on the verge of a suburban runaround, in the dead of night trying to find a way back to a light train station that would provide a route to the hotel. The natives in the multiracial nation were most helpful in providing directions, which train to take and where to get off, down boy down, no reason to panic you’ll be safe here. The trains ever efficient, although not 24/7 at the time, still was able to catch the last trip or what might well have been, until familiar neon signs of our temporary habitation came into view, back in the comfort zone of a strange but ultra-efficient land. Everything like clockwork, have to admire them for their discipline and pride of place.
Little more than a year later, in summer 2014, came another exciting trek, this one in pitch darkness on the island of Mindoro, making our way from the crossing back to writers camp retreat after a night at the Malasimbo music festival, and we couldn’t see a foot in front of us, only the light coming from a low batt cellphone helping guide our steps already somewhat wobbly from varied substances. No moon in memory or if there was, certainly blocked by clouds, in sky or in the windmills of our never mind. Then familiar lights in the distance, and a couple from out of nowhere also returning to the same beach area, effectively warding off some stray dogs in an adjoining vacant lot that always pop up at the wrong time, like Internet ads.
However surely unbeatable was the walk or was it excursion to the communist rebel camp in late 1986, months after the restoration of our so-called democracy. We went up and about the hinterlands, across shallow rivers and streams, on narrow paths carved out of the mountainside, battling fatigue and bramble even if it felt we were literally going around in circles, crowns of thorns sticking to our poor feet.
The welcome in that mountain oasis was unforgettable and befitting those heady times, pairs of rifles forming a bowery above us as we walked into the camp, cheers in the air and the joyful cries of cadres as if they’d recruited new fighters to the fold.
Barely was able to sleep that night due to sheer tiredness and excitement after walking what felt like four, maybe five, hours in the fastness of Bondoc Peninsula, but in the morning was the smell of mountain rice and brewed coffee, a stew of newly-harvested vegetables and in the half dark and nippy air began hints of a new day, the dawn striking the eastern palette with a dash of unworldly red.
Interview with a prototype writer
At the outset was given an idea of writing as some form of punishment, when was forced to copy out whole paragraphs from a journal or other onto a blank sheet of paper after committing a misdemeanor during childhood.
Word for word, slow and steady as if carrying adobe blocks from one part of the yard to another. It was hardly creative, but nevertheless gave the feel of writing if somewhat in a mechanical, technical way.
As an exchange student in Texas during a year of adolescence, we sought refuge in the act of writing or anything resembling literature, poems, stories, even rock music, and spent time in the Pearland High School library looking as much at the spines of books as the legs in their mini skirts and perhaps what lay underneath. Such tantalizing possibilities…
Filled out reams of yellow pad on the alienation and homesickness one felt while listening to, say, Traffic’s when the Eagle Flies album, the first stirrings of the young writer in a strange land given time to vent on chicken scratch. The bass line in the song “Walking in the Wind” was what drove one poem on, or what we thought was a poem, the acoustics turning into acrostics on the quarter note.
In college fell to the temptation of plagiarizing whole chunks of text for reaction papers in one subject where teacher wasn’t particularly industrious, but come to think of it now, was disrespect for the old lady who still gave me a passing grade, even if she did pass on the suspect papers to my father her colleague at the department. The copying out and transfer of adobe blocks had come full circle.
Still, what got me started was an essay writing contest called how much has rock changed your life for Jingle magazine, for which won a year’s subscription. Then, for the same rag, a reflection on the Beatles, which was stylistically patterned after the meta memoirs of Cesar Ruiz in Ermita magazine read some years prior. For Ermita, had written a piece that never got published, magazine had closed by then, something about twilight in the corridors of Diliman and the endless sound of cicadas.
Neil Cicada was well on his way then, what with some poems published in Expressweek and Focus, a couple of fiction pieces, too, having to do with a whole lot of drinking and the protagonists getting sick and displaying a general lack of compassion. Or was he? Maybe just going through the motions and trying to get back to scratch or quits after that misdemeanor.
What was the fault, anyhow? Beats me, except in a misplaced dream or nightmare, the episode comes flickering back, but still not clear, you just have to follow the bouncing ball into further vagueness and everlasting enigmas and the act of writing becomes as much stalling as unconscious discernment.
The adoracions
What to say except she reminded me of Helen
Mirren, in her prime or even afterwards
Don’t know where she’s lying in state or if that’s the
Case, whether she’s there or not there
As if there was a difference or the
other sad way
Around
Except for Helen Mirren smiling
with a wisp of a
Poem on her lips
On sloping Matimyas road in old Sampaloc, writing
Images out of their mirrors.
