Category Archive for: sarili

kultura

do something

<…> Enjoy the stories, admire the craft. Then put it in your backpack and go. As far as you can, for as long as you can afford it. Preferably someplace where you have to think in one language and buy groceries in another. Get a job there. Rent a room. Stick around. Do something. If it doesn’t work out, do something else. Whatever it is, you will be able to use it in the stories you will write later. And if that story turns out to be about grungy sex in an East Coast dorm room with an emotionally withholding semiotics major, that’s okay. It will be a better story for the fact that you have been somewhere and carried part of it home with you in your soul. — Geraldine Brooks, Introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2011.

radikalchick.lit

considerations

it must have a lot to do with the conversations. over those introductory cups of coffee it was a lesson in first meetings: (1) choose a quiet(er) place, (2) remember to pee before it begins, the better to (3) prepare for a four-hour conversation. measure the time spent sitting across each other, compare it to the time spent in each others arms. get a ruler: how far is the distance between us as we walk the streets? how many minutes to walk from your building to the hole in the wall next door, the convenience store further down, the squatters area accessible on the other side of this street. how many minutes before they are comfortable with the image of us, distant but together, an arm’s length away, a table between us, chairs beside each other but apart, i settle on the couch for one. count the times the waiter gives us a sly a smile, the deaf-mute screams his high-five, the manongs we pass grin ear-to-ear, the guard at your building counts 24 hours. how many seconds does it take for the good friend to tease you about me, out of earshot, more of the pinoy macho thing, you say. more a measure of the distance we choose to keep: i sleep against your shoulder, you put your hand on my thigh. you look down the length of our arms as you hold my hand for the first time. absolutely ridiculous you say. i wonder about coffee as the sun streams into the room i am seeing for the last time.

radikalchick.lit

composition

it must have a lot to do with the conversations. there’s the limits of a text message, like a finish line i refuse to cross, so i stop right before it, and begin again. you call it eloquence. i edit myself. you call out to me through the tiny box that you complain is too small a space, appearing just above your right hand as we chat. the tiny box ain’t so bad i argue, and isn’t it above your left hand? it’s limitless, these silly conversations we have, where we make mountains out of molehills i say, where we know some molehills are actually mountains you say, where we must know that some of the latter aren’t really such. we pare down mountains with words. we cut the world in thirds: here’s what you think, here’s what i think, here’s where nothing can be said. as you put food on my plate before you put some on yours, with no romance for that mountain of your leaving in the backdrop, no love for the facts we do not speak of. for two people who get off on words, we hold impending conversations, a paragraph in your head, a sentence that trails off in mine. you look at me in the middle of a crowded noisy restaurant for the leaving and left behind, to say: we know that what matters is what we don’t say, yes? yes. here, take this box and watch mountains become molehills become nothing but ellipses. here, have a box and fill it words.

kultura

Kuya and OPM

this was previously published in Metakritiko when it was still cool and fearless (haha). and because i don’t like repeating myself, and we were brought up to not talk about ourselves, am posting it here as tribute to pinoy music on the one hand, birthday greeting on the other. for Kuya, without whom this blog (and therefore my writing) wouldn’t be possible, and who should really be writing more often, too. cheers!

Mix Tapes for the Story of Distance:
or OPM? Music that Binds

Mix Tape 1: Ode to Sibling-hood

When I was a kid, my liking for the local was judged as baduy by my Kuya who took to liking everything not Pinoy. We fought over the remote control on Sundays when I couldn’t get enough of GMA Supershow, and he wanted the rerun of any other foreign show or movie on Channel 9. I watched That’s Entertainment, day in day out, to Kuya’s raised eyebrows. Yes, the talentless lived there, and they were “watermelon singing!” Kuya said, exasperated. That is, they didn’t know the words to the songs they pre-recorded and so they just keet repeating the word “watermelon.”

And here, the songs that I love(d) from the height of baduy Origina Pilipino Music (OPM) in the mid-80s to early 90s, all of which I’ve got memorized like a know how to ride a bike, to Kuya’s distress/disgust/despair, of course.

Side A: The Baduy Collection

  1. I Love You Boy, Timmy Cruz
  2. Points of View, Pops Fernandez and Joey Albert
  3. I Remember the Boy, Joey Albert
  4. Mr. Kupido, Rachel Alejandro
  5. Kapag Tumibok ang Puso, Donna Cruz
  6. Mr. Dreamboy Sheryl Cruz
  7. I Like You, Geneva Cruz

And then the next thing we knew, we were in the same boat, of loving OPM, memorizing whole albums (cassette tapes, baybeh!) and even (yes! show our age!) the last of the 45 records. We also started loving Gary Valenciano (before the V.), but were wont to spend more on tickets for – or tried harder at finding free passes to – the foreign acts. Name it, we went to it, Vanilla Ice, (the fake)Milli Vanilli, Gloria Estefan. I would try and keep this tradition going and watched Metallica with my first boyfriend (bad idea, he hated that I failed to catch the fluggin’ guitar pick thrown my way); watched Earth Wind and Fire with my boy(best)friend and did think there could be some sweet love growing on a Saturday night.

But then, there was Kuya, and our growing collection of OPM that we both agreed weren’t baduy, anyone who said so, be damned.

Side B: The Compromise Collection

  1. Each Passing Night, Gary Valenciano
  2. Leaving Yesterday Behind, Keno
  3. Tatlong Beinte Singko, Dingdong Avanzado
  4. Nandito Ako, Ogie Alcasid
  5. Enveloped Ideas, The Dawn
  6. Mga Kababayan Ko, Francis M.
  7. Humanap Ka ng Panget, Andrew E.

Mix Tape 2: Distance(d)

And then Kuya left, just as I hit college and found my own kind of OPM in the Pinoy rakenrol and alternative music of the mid-90s and first decade of 2000. He would come home and visit, and find himself in record stores to buy CDs that I couldn’t bring myself to get: an acoustic album here, a live album there, of the most recent hitmaker, non-songwriter. Meanwhile I lent him bags filled with CDs: the Eraserheads, the new ones of FrancisM, some of the older ones he might not remember, or we didn’t have money to buy CDs of when we were younger.

And then there are times like the past two months, when we spend more time together than we have in the past 13 years that he’s been away, and we realize how we remain within the same sphere as far as taste is concerned: Jason Mraz, between the two of us, without knowing it. I give him Peryodiko and Sugarfree’s Mornings and Airports, the only two OPM albums on my laptop that traveled from Manila to Kuya’s home in Holland. He introduces me to Stephen Lynch, downloads the latest Natalie Merchant. And now in Manila, the conversations of our pasts, a reminiscence and presence of music, and yes it has been mostly OPM.

Side A: Past Forward

  1. Perfect, True Faith
  2. Paglisan, Color it Red
  3. Ang Huling El Bimbo, Eraserheads
  4. Kaleidoscope World, FrancisM
  5. Babalik Ka Rin, Gary Valenciano
  6. Bakit Ngayon Ka Lang, Ogie Alcasid

Side B: (Re-)Present!

  1. The Yes Yes Show, inuman session, feat. FrancisM, Parokya Ni Edgar
  2. Oka Tokat (with Humanap Ka ng Panget by Andrew E.), inuman session, feat. Jay of Kamikazee, Parokya Ni Edgar
  3. Eto Na Naman, original by Gary V., Sugarfree
  4. This Guy’s In Love With You Pare, Parokya Ni Edgar
  5. Agawan Base, Peryodiko
  6. Bakasyon, Peryodiko
  7. Dear Kuya, Sugarfree

And for the first time, we are going to gigs. It is the teenage life of having a Kuya that I didn’t have, the one where there’s always back-up at the same time that someone has my back. Quite a liberating thing, really. It would be silly to refuse OPM this reunion.

radikalchick.lit

exigencies

it must have a lot to do with the conversations. when it can be had about the billboards that riddle the streets, where capital and colonialism, consumption and crises, become par for the course, of that long stretch of EDSA that cradles the car from one city to the next two, as it shifts from quiet residential to sprawling Manila, the dip in the tone, the way that it sounds, onomatopoeic i say, a conversation you’ve been having with your brother you say. which moves us down other cities far from here: shanghai, islamabad, bangkok, and we stop at sin — singapore, towards which you are moving, not leaving, just taking a trip, you insist, i insist, we rationalize. there seems to be no reason to stay in this conversation of refusing to acknowledge the impending distance, from one end of the road to the next, one country to another, one long stretch of time between what we cannot say now and where it might lead next. much like you giving me directions in your part of the city, and i follow even as i might know a shortcut, an easier way, of laying cards on the table, letting it all hang. it’s too soon and sudden, striking but also surreal. and right now what is urgent is only: this stretch of road, a u-turn to make, a right, until everything’s left, you and me on that stretch of road, like the silences that surround roadkills, the swiftness, the transience, when a new set of cars and dangers, noise and victims, take our place.