The Whirling Mechanism

This is How You Mourn P.II

2011-02-28T21:50:00.000-08:00

A year and a half ago during my mother's funeral, my family staged an intervention, my father's spending was out of control (nothing different but this time it was effecting them directly) and they didn't like my father's lady friend. They wanted to run this gold digger out of town. I don't mind hanky panky, my uncle said, but I hate gold diggers. This time around I founnd out she'd been caring for my father for the last year. The former caregiver, an arthritic, rolled-tobacco puffing, cackling but kind older woman told me she was let go for no good reason. Her younger burly, hulking sister (who could carry my mom in her arms) would sometimes come to help when my mom was still around (they were the loudest mourners at my dad's wake. The bigger sister sounding like she was speaking through a megaphone her mouth on the plastic sheath that covered the open casket). People tell me that the gold digger was a much better caregiver, gave my dad more regular baths. It's different when you're being cared for by your girlfriend, my Aunt says envoking the L-word. And other relatives corroborate that in the last year my dad was smelling much better. Even my dad tried to convince me that his gold digger had a heart of gold (why didn't she claw out her own heart then), possibly my age or thereabouts with two children, long time widow. But as my mother liked to say about people she was wary of: she had a face like money.

If you can't laugh, then it isn't truly awful.

A few days after the burial, the gold digger came to talk to me one evening as I was smoking alone on the porch, the cool evening breezes wafting down from the bordering mountains. She gave me all the hospital bills that my Aunt and Uncle had paid for (I had tried to send funds but international transactions are notoriously slow. The hospital also managed to tie up funds by using my dad's BofA checking card and his thumbprint in lieu of a signature. The only money that made it through from my end arrived days after his death). The gold digger proceeded to tell me how much my Aunt had paid for my mother's lot in Quezon City. My father had sold the lot which is near a thriving commercial district in a moment of desperation, his pension and SS money barely covering his spendings (yes medicine is expensive here in the PI but so is killing time when you're old and careless, maybe self-destructive). The gold digger had me believe whether through my own misunderstanding (maybe my Tagalog isn't as proficient as I thought) or maybe her deceit (those crocodile tears--your father left me nothing, she said, how woeful am I, and you even more woeful if I don't set you straight on your father's financial situation.) Long story short, I thought I was in the clear, so I let her have the less-than-one year old car (you should have consulted me first, my aunt said), she left for Manila 5 days after the burial (I gave her more money for gas and food) to see her son off to Israel as an OFW. Yesterday my Aunt returning an equally deceitful gesture called her to tell her to come back before my departure on the 3rd so that I could give her more money (we were on our way to the river for the ritual bathing that marks the end of mourning. After she made the call she stuck her tongue out mischeviously and made a smug self-satisfied shrug.

Converting pesos into dollars makes my head swim, the figures still sound like a whole lot of cash in either denomination. My father picked the most expensive hospital to die in. I've convinced myself that even if the gold digger never comes back, I can pay back my aunt and uncle (who graciously asked nothing for for both the burial and catering services. Although I think this may have been part of the bargain in paying less than the highest bidder on my mother's lot. Sell the lot to me, my Aunt inveighed my father, who else is going to help you out if you're sick or after you die.) with my dad's life insurance and his remaining savings that I managed to hold onto for emergencies.

During my mother's wake my father asked me if I wasn't afraid of my mother's ghost, since I was sleeping in her old quarters just ten feet away from her open casket. I AM my mother's ghost, I said half-jokingly in a moment of bad poetic license, maybe a reiteration of my commitment to materialism.

Maybe I was my mother's avenging ghost when I first spied my father's blackened legs and opened sores (who knows how long it had been that way since he'd refused to bathe for at least the last week) and even though I was horrified in the moment I still let him fly back to the Philippines instead of taking him to a doctor, even though he refused follow up treatments for the arterial buildup in his legs. Maybe if I haven't fabricated this in hindsight, part of me thought, let THEM deal with him now.

My father was in the hospital almost as soon as he deplaned. Even with his gangrene, they managed to save his legs (the angiograms files that for some reason I couldn't send electronically, possibly somekind of anti-duplication measures, I had to send via mail and arrived as late as the money.) My father was in and out of the hospital for a month when they finally released him to convalesce at home in QC, he called me and said he was okay. But maybe a day or so later he had trouble breathing and was rushed to the ICU where a host of other problems surfaced, consequences of the diabetes, enlarged, bi-passed heart and his immune system still compromised from his initial disease that left him paralyzed 6 years ago, the survival rate for his initial sickness being 5 years, he beat the odds if only by a year or so.

Maybe I was my mother's avenging angel (my mother's anger being legendary, throwing over mahjong tables when the gamblers had overstayed their welcome, and this at the neighbor's house) when they called me early in the morning (thank god I won't have to fear those early morning calls that never fail to make the heart stop) to ask if I wanted to continue dialysis. My aunt and cousin both doctors had already consulted and agreed that dialysis was useless (there was already bleeding in the brain, and they asked if they wanted to enlist a neurologist, and on top of this a blood shortage in the hospital). Maybe I was my mother's vengeful ghost, when weak of voice then loudly because of the weak phone connection I said no to dialysis, and no to resuscitation. I booked my flight for two days after and waited for the final call, which came the afternoon before my departure when I thought I'd still be able to make it to the hospital in Quezon City to see my father intubeated full of feeds like something fetid taking root. We'll fetch the body, my Aunt said, just take the connecting flight to the Province.

The gold digger with the heart of gold along with my Dad's nephew/driver and other nephew/nurse were at the hospital 24/7 in the waiting room by the ICU (apparently the homeless and down on their luck are known to sleep there sometimes, recharging their cell phones camping out on the floor. But it was the gold digger with the heart of gold that was there from beginning to end, even when my Aunt had to return to the province because it was the town Fiesta (my Uncle in the last year of his nth term as mayor. And so this is also why the woman they wanted to run out of town a year and a half ago, got her name on the commemoration poster with my father's photo and "Papa ... Your memories is worth remembering" [sic], her name following the names of all my father's siblings (he was the 2nd eldest of 5, the only one who moved to the US) all still surviving.

I am in the heart of Marcos country, his hometown just three towns over. Last week was the 25th anniversary of people power EDSA, but not around here, where Marcos's son is a senator, his daughter the governor, and Imelda is a new congress woman. The morning of the EDSA 25 festivities I'm watching live covereage when my Aunt tells me I can change the channel, we're not interested in that she says.

Today in the car on a drive to the capital, even with my barely passable grasp of the local dialect I get the gist of If EDSA never happened we'd be as prosperous as Singapore, the opposition and current leadership claiming we'd be more like Libya.

Death seems to come in pairs. With my mother there was Michael Jackson. This time around my uncle's nephew. Dead of a heart attack and brain aneurism at the age of 36, found by coworkers in his apartment in Singapore where he was an OFW, a civil engineer with an 8 yo son in Manila.

The Ilocanos must have the most complicated funeral rites in the whole country, customarily a 9 day wake. We decided on 6 days for my dad, what with the 2nd funeral to attend. The widow of the 36 yo should count herself lucky that the custom involving the day long isolation of the widow veiled and sequestered to a corner of the house no one allowed to address her or interact with her in any way has long been fallen out of favor.

Somewhere toward the end of the wake, one morning during breakfast the dogs were barking restlessly in response to the screeching and persistent yelping of another dog. I went out back followed the yelping to where the two sister caregivers were smoking and laughing and saw next to them in a drainage ditch, belly-up with it's paws and bleeding muzzle wrapped in wire a scrawny dog, that evenings offerings for visitors, crying for it's life. Why don't they put it out of it's misery I wondered. Do you like dog they asked. No I said with more than a little disdain. Later that afternoon stepping out to the kitchen separate from the house I catch the butcher cutting up the last pieces, the upper and lower jaws detached but discernible on the pavement next to the bowl of meat ready for cooking.

This Is How You Mourn--Part I

2011-02-23T19:59:00.000-08:00

1.
You wait at a 12 hour stop over at Manila airport, after a 17 hour flight waiting for the connecting flight to Laoag. Same layover as the last time I was here for my mother. And now the same things I saw and experienced before don't carry the same poetic weight, whether out of the demistifying effects of repetition, the novelty of first blush. the 8 gate terminal of the domestic wing of MNL the polished white surfaces flooded with diffuse light, the entire space like a long hall or sarcophagus for the serpent king. Like that neurologist that wrote a book consisting of several different conceits about the afterlife, I too had imagined airport terminals being some kind of purgatory, all the souls awaiting reunion/release/departure--(Maybe that's what allowed me to attach an undeserved gravitas to the TV show LOST with it's opening plane motif)but this time around I just saw the leacherous old white men with impossibly young girls or boys in tow and the statement printed on the Immigration Declaration forms about how the PI punishes all forms of child trafficking. You marvel at all the scuba diving, adventure seeking, sexcapading tourists, white, Korean, Chinese, Japanese that weren't scared off by the recent hostage incident where a tour bus was hijacked and 6 Hongkongese killed. Maybe if the overhead lights had worked on the transpacific flight (Sorry sir, we'll try rebooting the system that controls the overhead reading lights, when we stop for refueling in Honolulu), I would have been too weary to read for another half a day.

2. Last time the tome I brought along was Pynchon, a hefty volume, the book jacket with it's august typography and simulated patina of generations of sebum and sweat rubbed into the spine and folds, fooling people into thinking I was reading the Jerusalem bible not some mostly obtuse multi-genre puzzle being at heart a mostly obtuse and arcane treatise on the nature of light. This time around I've brought Roberto Bolano. The cover being some possibly Blakian Nightmare of angels in the abyss, against the black inscrutable forms the red laquered title printed off center and clpped at the spine, rife for misreading. What are you reading Kuya? 666? Yes I am reading the satanic bible. During the wake sometimes I hold the book at a shallow angle if I'm embarrased and feeling filialy submissive, other times held aloft in plain sight, covering my face as if to say this may be paradise, lush and verdant but I feel otherwise, all you other people. An island of horror in an ocean of boredom.

3. With both reads, there were passages at the time-- although I can't recall the gist--that were as consoling to me as Psalms is anodyne to any Christian soldier. In that bifurcating way that you can not tell which is casting the light, the life lived on the page or in the world. Would this still make we want to cry if I had read this in other circumstances. Is it only so beautiful because I need a refuge from all the ugliness. And are even the nightmarish passages something that can buouy the spirits?

Broadside XI

2010-03-19T16:49:00.000-07:00

Everybody Loves Raymond Pettibon

2010-03-14T14:08:00.000-07:00

During the intermission for Blast Phemy, I thought I saw Raymond Pettibon standing in the aisle with his back against the wall fidgeting, gesticulating to some younger art-faggy looking cohort, standing next to him. I had a feeling it was Raymond Pettibon, because when I see Raymond Pettibon, I see him as somewhere on the spectrum between Geoffrey Rush and Clive Owen, maybe the eyes keening in a dual-processing kind of way, his gray locks formulating some kind of architectural argument, the perpetual upward swing of a maestro's baton. He was gesticulating, and I was sort of mad dogging him from across the room, back a couple of rows, and maybe he could tell that I was trying to read his lips, but he's mumbling so I'm trying to parse his gesticulations, but they are like cut-ups of Hart Crane or Henry James and can only be surmised as indeterminate totalities, dispatches from a black hole, and the only thing I can make out to which his blonde companion's head slowly lists and his eyes scan the stage in reaction to what he just heard, "I'd rather be blind than deaf" and then Pettibon repeats it a beat later as if he wasn't sure of the import of what he said when when he first said it. "Yeah, I'd rather be blind than deaf." And this reminds me of pre-dawn fishing trips to San Pedro, the way all dreams are just childhood memories of being half-asleep in the backseat, hot water in a thermos and cup-o-noodles, bits of dehydrated eggs, peas and carrots suitable for spaceflight, monosodiumglutamate, maybe the fog lit up by the lamps lining the palm-lined lane down to the harbour, and then the black shore and horizon that has never seen sunrise, and after the engine is shut off the distant crash of northerly waves on the breakwater.

Blasphemous Humours

2010-03-13T10:46:00.000-08:00

The other night went to the Cinefamily on Fairfax to see Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo along with Alan LIcht on guitar and saxophonist Ulrich Krieger accompany the silent films of Stan Brakhage as the ensemble TEXT OF LIGHT.

It was a shotgun wedding--Brakhage's mythos of ambi-colored thumbnails in a loveless marriage with Ranaldo's hamfisted, feedback snarls, his answering machine sonatas which seemed to overpower his cohort's comparatively subtler skronks and noodlings. Afterwards I remembered that the name of the Cinefamily series in which this was the 2nd installment was Blast Phemy, suggesting a practice of Détournement—the kingdom of experimental film must be taken by storm, say my name with blood on your lips.

So if the idea was to cajole an older work into relenting further meaninglessness, maybe chipping away at years of narrative placations, art history clinging like barnacles, re-skewing that which had previously energized the field with it's disruptive powers--then yes it should be perverse, but shouldn't it still be liberating as well. The chromatic scales droning like a NASCAR stadium were joyless and leaden, relentless volume like they were trying to snuff out any whimsy and lyricism out of the Brakhage films, with no surcease of volume or menace in the darkness between reels.

The first film, the Mammals of Victoria with it's watery vistas was accompanied by less rancorous feedback and made me think of Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man--later on Ranaldo whos solo works always felt so mordantly serious, a humorless poetics, in full form would yield his guitar like a battering ram against his amp, poised as if to puncture the screen itself.

There was one passage in the films that seemed to break through the sonic wall, for a second the fugue of angular brush strokes, gave way to this fantasia: a constellation of tiny iridescent dots on a white field, like mold growing on a rainbow, like a freak-out of paramecium, like a hundred hallucinogenic suns their coronas in brilliant plumage. Maybe for the moment the music was imbued with other textures, a timpani, sleigh bells, round open tones on the sax, the drone transposed to a lower chair-rattling octive, so that for that brief passage Brakhage could play solo, a posthumous improvisation, death and the present one and the same in its inexorable procession.

O BAMA, MY BAMA

2009-01-24T00:18:00.001-08:00

BroadsideX

2008-11-18T13:51:00.001-08:00

BroadsideNine

2008-10-12T00:05:00.001-07:00

Broadsideight

2008-10-05T10:04:00.001-07:00

BroadSeven

2008-01-12T20:10:00.000-08:00

Broadside 6

2008-01-10T12:01:00.001-08:00

Broadside 5

2007-12-25T10:25:00.000-08:00

Animated intro for documentary on San Francisco activist Bill Sorro:

Stories from strangers

2007-12-05T10:16:00.000-08:00

The average age in the novel writing class I took this fall semester at the local JC must have been a solid 45, weighted by the 5 or so senior citizens (the 3 sept/octagenarian men all WWII vets). Maybe just as many are in there 20s and the majority late 30 to 40 something.

Many of them have taken the class repeatedly for a number of years, the instructor having been teaching the same class since his late 20s, now in his late 40s(?) So maybe they've grown accustomed to their eccentricities, or maybe it's true what the Lizard King said: People are strange.

Richard is one of the WWII vets. Meek but amiable, he rarely speaks up in class, but when he does it usually elicits laughs from the rest of the class, whether or not he intended his comments to be funny. He often bakes brownies from scratch to share with us on our coffee break halfway through the 3 hour class. In the bio that went with his short story posted on the department's online literary journal, he was a factotum from the midwest.

His novel in progress is a collection of short stories about the travails of a hermaphrodite born in the sticks, cast out as an infant and raised by wolves, subsequently exploited by a travelling circus, and now as an adult looking to settle down into married life as a heterosexual man though he has opted not to have surgery. The best man at his wedding is a domesticated pig, his best friend.

For a deluded minute I thought that Richard was Thomas Pynchon. That maybe Pynchon hid out in community college writing classes and that part of the reason his tales are so densely impenetrable, so obfuscate is that he wrote everything in direct opposite to the sound opinions of his classmates who have been instructed by the instructor to judge everything by the standard conventions of story telling, arcs and POV and all that page-turning stuff.

Richard's story read like an old Appalachian tall tale you would find in a highschool English lit textbook, the burgeoning literary identity of a nation (these days we've traded in hyperbole for hyper-real). Pugilist butterflies and libertine pigs. It was effortlessly bizarre but somehow sounded like something so sweetly conventional like Laura Ingles pining for that brawny buck Alonso. But then again completely something else, done up backwards so that sentimentality never felt so subversive. (I thought about saying to the class how this reminded me of Samuel Delaney, about a love story where the lovers eat each other's shit)

After the class had it's say ("This is Richard being Richard," they said lazily sweeping away dust into some remote corner), Richard tried to explain some detail in his story we all missed: in the brawl with the butterflies, when the butterfly stuck it's tongue in the protagonist's ear, this effectively made the hermaphrodite more masculine, "That's why his voice was suddenly deeper," Richard offered. This destroyed my illusion. Never listen to the author. The day Pynchon makes an appearance will be the undoing of his career.

Broadside 4: Synaesthetic I

2007-11-01T14:54:00.001-07:00

Broadside 3: self portrait

2007-10-16T18:02:00.000-07:00

When I grow old I want to be as amicable
as a glassy-cold, well-tempered skull

Broadside 2

2007-10-02T17:28:00.001-07:00

broadside 1

2007-08-25T15:52:00.000-07:00

broadsheet

2007-08-23T18:05:00.000-07:00

sloganeering: gays shoot to kill

2007-08-09T18:26:00.000-07:00

sloganeering: hate the player

2007-08-09T17:53:00.000-07:00

sloganeering

2007-08-08T18:28:00.000-07:00

sloganeering

2007-08-03T16:32:00.000-07:00

sloganeering

2007-08-01T19:11:00.000-07:00

It's Beginning to end Back again

2007-07-26T15:34:00.000-07:00

After 3 months of traveling on the Asian continent, I went back to the Philippines, spent a week in Manila and then flew north to see my parents. I didn't call before hand, I just showed up, which I used to do when I would visit them in LA. (sometimes noone would be home and I'd spend hours sitting in the backyard since I no longer had a house key.) I arrived in Laoag just before noon. From the Laoag airport I took a jeepney to the city center and then took a tricycle to another Jeepney that would take me to Solsona.

The last time I had taken a Jeepney, I was 12, just about to enter junior high school, the 6th grade, vacationing in the Philippines for a month with my mom. I remember accompanying my mother one afternoon to Laoag to find My uncle Ninong's second wife. My uncle Ninong was living in eagle rock and he could barely support his first wife let alone his second wife and her kids. On some street bustling with tricycles, some seedy looking building we knocked on a door that seemed so close to the street that an errant wheel would clip the door jamb. A woman in her forties came out and maybe I remember small children peeking out from behind her. I remember she looked sad and tired, telling us the eldest was sleeping on the streets. My mother gave her dollars. I remember afterwards her telling me, in response to some unspoken question "...if you only knew what it was like to be hungry, to not know where your next meal was coming from." She was 9 or 10 during the Japanese occupation. She never spoke much about those times. She had a hard life and would only tell me about when I did something especially awful and disrespectful as a kid. A different take on the usual parental posturing, "When I was your age we didn't even have a home, we had to flee the city because of all of the bombs..." I can't recall that my father had any harrowing war time stories. I just remember how he never forgot how to count in japanese.

When I arrived at the Laoag airport, the skies were overcast. It was coming on the rainy season. The rain began in earnest as soon as I got off the jeepney and walked the last 2 blocks to the house. My mom was alone eating lunch in front of the television. "Why are you back again," she asked.

I beckon to beguile again

2007-07-23T16:41:00.000-07:00

my mother trying to stab my father with a kicthen utility knife from a 99 cent store.

I remember now that this anger had its roots years ago. I may still have been in school. my dad was alone in the philippines, either attending someones funeral or someone's one year death anniversary when the immediate family is required to wash in the river, signaling the end of black clothing and the ending of mourning, or maybe it was someone's wedding. my mom was calling him everyday to make sure he wasn't cavorting with some young thing, and I remember trying to calm her over the phone, she said she was so angry she could murder him, she asked me what she should do because so much anger wasn't good for her already high blood pressure. I told her to write a letter or keep a journal, which she did, I don't remember if this helped or just convinced her further of the righteousness of her murderous impulses.

While I was in the philippines this last spring, during the campaign speech of an incumbent senator, the photogenic young politician claimed that Ilocana women--his wife being from this province--are the most beautiful women in the country but don't get them angry because they are also the fiercest. Everyone laughed because they knew this to be true.

It's Beguiling to be back again

2007-07-19T23:21:00.000-07:00

One afternoon or maybe it was late morning, some day in January, Solsona, ilocos Norte, my mother made good on her promise to stab my father in the back. She was murderous mad, mad about possibly the money he took from her bank account, closing out the savings she began when she was a young single teacher in Manila, or maybe he was openly texting or calling his chix on his cellphone in front of her, in front of everybody, playing her for a fool. She took one of the 99 cent store knives we brought over from the states and waddled to the front yard where my dad was gabbing with the women helpers, maybe getting his swollen feet massaged. I followed along behind her to see how far she would get. When they saw her wielding the knife, at first they cackled and told my dad that he better flee, then they told me to get the knife from her. The neighbors across the street, one of them a policeman looked on--they'd probably seen this show before--I was amazed how strong my mother's hold was, she had quite a death grip on that knife.

2007-07-16T17:11:00.000-07:00

The Gray Gray Hereafter

2007-07-13T15:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I thought Spalding Gray spoke to me from the dead. The IFC channel that afternoon aired the 1991 film adaptation of his monologue, Monster in a Box. I had never seen it. Probably in the early nineties I thought I was too cool to see it, maybe I thought I was over his Jewy-Waspy salingeresque, breakdowns already then an echo of some other gotham fading into fiction, making way for Carrie Bradshaw and the Guliiani years; maybe I was feeling the pull of the nascent, newly branded generation x, thinking all baby boomers were souless vampires; most likely I was in the thrall of a polemical-hate-the-white-man mode, and who more to get ethnic-studies on than some neurotic new england transport spinning anecdotes about LA on the eve of the Rodney King riots. For whatever reason, I never saw Monster in a Box. But I remember liking swimming to Cambodia and the stuff he did for American Playhouse (remember when PBS really was a bastion of the left, trying to revive old lefty institutions like american theater?) I forgot how compelling his logorrhea, his blathering sublime could be. I was making dinner, frying up chicken and zucchini and eggplant for parmigiana, so was only half listening to the monologue when I caught the bit about some high school student asking him what David Letterman was like. I thought oh my god he's talking about Ms. Jester's guidance/career-counseling class I think my sophomore or junior year in high school. Ms. Jester, who looked kind of like Dianne Keaton and had the same penchant for drawing out her sentences in dreamily sibilant whispers, taught guidance and I'm not sure what else maybe social studies. She was schooled in the pedagogy of all aging-hippies and yippies turned teachers: she was your friend and confident first and your ill-prepared, burned-out teacher second, I remember her T.A. for our class was some pale, jet-blacked, punk, sporting suspenders dangling from the seat of his ass-tight dickies and probably had t-shirts for corrosion of conformity or econochrist. (To her credit, Ms. Jester was the only teacher who gave us the straight shit when Mr. Cholandria our history teacher took sick halfway through the year, she told us the truth, that he was dying from ARC as it was called back then) Ms. Jester as it turns out was a childhood friend of Spalding Gray's and so one day brought him into class. I think I was the only one in class who knew who he was. Later he had us write down question's on index cards. I think that was my question, what was David Letterman like, having just seen him on Late Nite plugging what I can't remember. To my question I remember him giving some curt, cursory response like "oh, yes, Letterman was great," and I thought maybe he was snubbing me for thinking I was better than everyone else in the class for actually being familiar with his work. In Monster in a Box, Spalding Gray says that he had wanted to tell the students that Letterman was actually really great, that Letterman treated him very well and made him feel important, like a real downtown artist. Turns out I was wrong, the reference wasn't to me at all. I rewatched the segment this morning when IFC re-aired it. I had missed the part about him being in Russia for a film festival, running into high school students from West Chester, NY at the Hermitage, and a few of them recognizing him and asking him about David Letterman. How disappointing. Then I remembered that that wasn't even my question. I had asked him a different question. That was my friend's question, probably Salvador Covarrubias who thought Letterman was the fucken funniest thing. My question as I remember it now was even more of an obnoxious, wise-ass, name dropping question: I asked Spaulding Gray what it was like working with Jonathan Demme who made his first film Swimming to Cambodia--and I do remember him glossing over my question, muttering "he was great" under his breath, as if to say "I drive all the way out here to the east side, way past the 110 freeway which itself is way out of bounds of my comfort zone, I expect to talk to some real LA kids who along with their parents probably have nothing to do with film or television, and you throw me another fucken industry question, balls to that!" Oh well, Spalding Gray, I hope the afterlife hasn't calmed your neurosis. I hope that you blather on eternally, forever digress discomfitingly , world without end.

It's Beginning to unbuckle again

2007-07-11T15:02:00.001-07:00

1/9/07 Like most days, I stay at home with my mom and watch television. Periodically she'll wake up from her half-sleep and tell me to turn off the television--it's been on all day and there's nothing to watch. I wonder now if at the time I realized how much it was like regressing to being at home on vacation from year-round school, spending all day watching tv, or home for the summer from college, spending all day aimlessly with my parents, the comfort and the lethargy.

in the morning I watch news coverage of the 400th anniversary of the Feast of the Black Nazarene. In the Quiapo district of metro Manila today, there will be a huge procession, a replica of the black nazarene on top of a platform hoisted on the shoulders of maybe fifty men, all the streets along the procession crowded with devotees, pilgrims some from the states walking along barefoot in the streets, young men, impassioned and foolish in their youth trying to surf the crowds to get on top of the platform to cop a feel of the replica of the black nazarene--this simple act would enoble and charm the remainder of their ordinary lives.

I think to myself, how special, what serendipity, that I'm here in the Philippines on the 400th anniversary of the feast of the black nazarene, albeit 500 miles north of the action. I feel special for being here. Is this me trying to console myself because I don't want to be here?

They have changed the parade route anticipating even larger crowds. In previous years people have been trampled to death. I wished I was there, but then again not really, manila traffic is already a mess so I can't imagine what it's like today--hallowed ground where jeepneys fear to tread.

My dad left the house early in the morning for who knows where after a brief but dramatic scuffle with my mom--a routine argument probably over my dad's philandering, escalating to shoving and slapping and the help yelling for them to stop, aren't you ashamed, they scold my dad after he lamely boxes my mom with his fat hands and flabby arms, acting like this in front of your son, my mom just laughs sardonicaly and tells my dad to leave and not come back, maybe she also tells him she hopes he gets in a car accident and dies.

Later that afternoon on the local cable station they inexplicably air the first movie of the Russian vampire trilogy Nightwatch and I am excited because I remember reading an article about this very movie.

The next morning my mother, my father and I eat breakfast and happily watch Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina as if nothing out of the ordinary happened the previous morning.

It's Beguinning to and Back again

2007-07-10T14:45:00.000-07:00

New Year's Eve 2006. Waiting at the Philippine Airline's Gate at LAX for our evening flight. It's already been a trial checking in all our fifty pound balikbayan boxes full of coffee, spam and kitchen knives from the 99 cent store and then getting my dad to waddle to the waiting area for an airport wheelchair to get him to the gate. I'm trying to mellow out, I call friends on the phone to wish them a happy new year and let them know I'll be out of the country indefinitely. My father strikes up a conversation with a filipino couple who, like my father, were brought in on wheelchairs by the airport staff, the husband is wearing a rather ratty knitted cap and looks like he's been sick and has been forced into early retirement, his wife on the other hand looks to be in good health, she's probably in her mid to late 60s but she could pass for someone in her late 40s (that radiant Moreno skin--no bain de soleil for this san tropez tan, bitches). So my father and the couple bond over their decrepitude-ness. Naturally they move on to the topic of their children. My sons, my father claims, refuse to send me money. The woman looks over at me, not quite a reprimand, her face doesn't change from the same put-upon, long-suffering look that she came in with, a favorite mask for many a filipino mother. I try to explain to her that me and my brother can't send money fast enough to cover my dad's spending. that's nothing, she says, you know what our son did? My son and his wife connived to steal our house. they convinced us to put the house in my son's name and then you know what he did, he evicted us, his own parents. talagang salvaje. So now we've had enough and we're going back to the Philippines.

In the Philippines old people are worshipped like saints, honor them well and your crops will not be ruined, your children will make lots of money, all your endeavours will reach a bounteous fruition.

It's Beginning to and Back again

2007-07-05T16:31:00.000-07:00

I've been back from SE Asia for a month now. Back in clusterfuck Los Angeles, the woolybully, local-slo-motion of Long Beach. According to a podcast of WNYC's radiolab I just listened to our memories are actually physical manifestations, a construction of proteins. Scientists agree that filing cabinets are terrible metaphors for the mechanism of memories. The act of remembering is an act of recreation, there is no pristine, endlessly retrievable databank. When we remember we reconstruct, an intepolation of things past, calling into play the vagaries of the senses and the imagination, so that with every act of recollection, the original experience is changed irretrievably

At the snout end of this year of the pig, when I was in the Philippines for a month and a half, I brought with me Proust's Swan's Way, an old linen-bound, yellowing, edition that I had picked up from the Oakland library's downtown book store. I packed this brick of a book, thinking that in my forced convalescence I would finally get through it (so I could read onward--I've been trying to learn delayed gratification-- to the books with the S and M that Maria told me existed.) I managed to read most of the book, but with a fevered incomprehension, having long since discovered that only a certain clarity of prose and the assistance of caffeine or nicotine leads to that optimal comprehension and retention, like watching an engrossing spot of television.

Did you know that Proust was a neuroscientist?

Now at the fulcrum of the year, the lowest point of the belly of the year of the pig, I will try to retrieve from across the ocean of water and time, some things both ghastly and wonderful that bear repeating, things that maybe I tried to record in my notebooks, almost illegible scrawls mostly reading things like: this fucken sucks or it was alright. I remember it like it was right now.

It's Beginning to and Back Again

2007-05-19T23:47:00.000-07:00

I'm back in Ilocos Norte. Been here a little over 2 weeks and of course it's like I never even left. Although in a matter of less than 3 months, my mother has stoped walking supposedly because of arthritis--have to pick her up just to sit up in bed to drink water. Got here in time for the last week of election campaign (Commisioner of Elections and the media use the term ERVI: Election Related Violence Incidents). Here in my father's hometown. The current mayor, my uncle, is running for re-election against his current vice-mayor, his younger brother. The current mayor's choice for vice-mayor is his only son, my cousin who is 9 months younger than me. His brother's choice for vice-mayor is another uncle of mine--who apparently doesn't get along with my father and his family. Aparently this is typical of Phil. politics--keeping both political regimes and oppositions all in the family--read a story about one town where the 2 candidates for mayor were an ex-husband and e-wife. Thankfully there was only one ERVI here, apparently unrelated to any of the family, some political fallout in a remote barangay of the town, an officer guarding a school polling lpace shot. Right after midnight on the eve of elections at my uncles house, they slaughtered 2 horses and made various dishes with the meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner--tasted like a tougher less gamier beef--maybe mcdonald's does use horsemeat. There were accusations aired on the local tv news between the brothers of vote buying--which it seems like no one is absolutely innocent of perpetrating.

The Great Malls of Manila

2007-05-06T20:50:00.000-07:00

I'm in Manila. I've been touring all the great malls: Robinson's in Ermita, Mega Mall, Glorietta. I can't decide whether it is more alienating not to be able to understand any of the street chatter around you, or know enough tagalog to catch passing phrases, but not enough to carry an actual conversation--then again everybody speaks english. I inadvertently speak English in a filipino accent--trying to blend in--but the lady at Greenwhich (a pizza chain)clocks me, "Where are you from, I've never heard that accent before." I don't even sound like a balakbayan.

I was born here but that was a very different Manila, before texting and EDSA. I start to realize that my tagalog has a different accent. Sometimes I want to pronounce my e's as short rather than long vowels (e.g., heend-EH rather than heen-dEE) and I wonder where the hell did I get that from, why did my mother speak that way. Are accents even regional to neighborhoods within Quezon City? Maybe like my fake filipino-english I made it all up.

The skys are clear blue here, apparently the miasma of jeepney and bus fumes stays at ground level. I've visited all the Rizal shrines and memorials. The museum at Fort Santiago is especialy edifying: He was a sceptic of Roman Catholocism: Ever the scientific rationalist he believed in a historical Jesus, preached against rituals of blind faith. He did not believe in violent revolution (nothing good could come of hate), but felt there was no other option to escape colonialism. But those too were different times when novels could incite revolution.

Tomorrow I fly to Laoag, Ilocos Norte. And then back to Bangkok for a third time before I head back to Cali (I had to buy an onward ticket at the Bangkok airport--The Phil. allows no entry without onward itinerary).

Phnom Penh, Cambodia Part II

2007-05-03T20:47:00.000-07:00

Four three-storied school buildings face a large open courtyard. They are painted the same warm ochre color as many colonial-looking buildings you find throughout central Phnom Penh. They remind you of your Freshman dorm, despite the warm tones they share a bauhaus flair for the cold practicalties of boxes. The first classroom you enter on the ground floor in building A is empty except for the bare metal frame of a cot. Lying on the cot are lengths of metal rebar with links of chain attached to large eyelets, a corroded metal box. Then you notice a blown up unframed photo hanging on the wall just beyond the bed, like something Andy Warhol would have silkscreened in foursquare: a darkly reproduced photo of a mutilated body lying half in half out of the bed frame. Throughout the building you find more of the same. The windows have all been outfitted with bars, but the southern light bleeds through the open windows from the shophouses across the street and bathe the ochre walls and the maroon and gold checkered tile floors in a soft glow. In some rooms the old blackboards are still there with a palimpsest of inscrutable drawings and writings. You notice the dark stains in corners and seeping from the ceilings, rust or blood or mould you cannot tell. Bolts pounded into walls to create makeshift constraints, so many strangely emotive textures like you'd find in nine-inch-nails album art. And you think oh the dark dark tropes that pop likes to play with, and then you worry what does it say about you that you're initial reactions lie in the purely aesthetic.

In building B, the classrooms have been divided into makeshift cells divided by brick or wood walls, the cells no bigger than a restroom stall. The balconies looking over the courtyard lined with lengths of barbed wire. You feel like you shouldn't be taking photos, but then everyone else is, and you think maybe we are all here bearing witness regardless of what drew us here in the first place: morbid fascination, guilt, history, a history of collective guilt.

In the next building, the ground floor is a gallery of photos, hundreds of headshots, a gallery of stoic glances on either side of you, punctuated by photos of mass graves and aftermaths, scenes discovered by the Vietnamese forces after the Khmer Rouge fled. Then there are bones and paintings recreating the actual acts. Tools. Some expat photographer has created a series playing with the quality of light in the classrooms and the reflections seen off the glass cases in the gallery of photos, he claims he is giving the spirits voice by imagining a dialog between the long dead prisoners and the latter day museum-goers captured in the reflections.

On the top floor of the last building you finally find substantive text, a narrative beyond an abandoned crime scene. A series with portraits and testimonials from relatives, lovers, friends of the killed. Brothers, sisters, sons, daughters disappeared. You notices phrases repeated: "He was a kind man" "She was proud to join the revolution" "Joining the army seemed a better option then toiling in the fields." In another room portraits of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge and this place Toul Sleng (S21) central detention and interrogation center for the Khmer Rouge. Their portraits are covered in graffiti, all in khmer script you can only imagine the anger and rage through the scratched out eyes and mouths. In another classroom a child of the killing fields now a photojournalist has created portraits and interviews of former prison guards of this very compound. Their old black and white IDs, young teenage boys and girls unsmiling in there severe uniforms, accompanied with their present day photos, now fathers and wives, a woman gives alms to a monk, a man picnics with his family, another man tends to his field. They all seem to say the same thing, we did what we were told, otherwise we would have been killed. All these voices bring the things you have seen to the human scale of emotion and empathy, a hundred rooms, so much hysteria and fear and anger and loss that still lingers and it becomes all too much to take in at once.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia--Part I

2007-04-24T07:32:00.000-07:00

In Angkor visiting the ruins of temples and walled cities, the vast scale and impossible intricacy left me mystified and awed. In Phnom Penh visiting the memorial sites of the Cambodian genocide, the magnitude of the terror and inhumanity was disquieting.

Choueng Ek, the killing fields, lie about 15 km southwest of central Phnom Penh. Riding on the back of a motorcycle, I watched the haphazard flow of traffic thin out to a trickle on an unlined two-lane highway, the low-storied buildings and bustling marketplaces giving way to fields and lonely houses. Choueng Ek was once a grove of Longan trees, Longans being lychee-sized fleshy white fruit. The killing fields have since been turned into a memorial to the thousands of dead. There's a stuppa at it's center, replete with pagoda-like roofs with their winged and serpentine khmer ornamentations. Enshrined behind the glass walls of the lower half of the stuppa a tower of shelves about 12 feet high holds hundreds of skulls, looking more like an anthropological archive than a memorial. On the floor beneath the shelves a ragged mass of clothes is gathered in an unfolded pile. Throughout the compound there is a rambling collection of exhumed graves and building sites (most of the actual buildings have been dismantled). The accompanying signage is at turns coldly factual (this is where the transport trucks stopped) or gruesomely explicit (body counts of beheaded victims in one pit, women and children in another, a list of torture instruments found, a tree trunk on which infants were beaten to death with one fell swing). The main sign in an information kiosk gives a moving testimonial to the extent of destruction and upheaval under the madness that was the Khmer Rouge. Elsewhere there are objects without a single word of explanation and since I declined a tour guide I will never know what meaning if any these things held, I cannot help but give them some ominous eligiacal significance: differently sized mounds of dirt covered with bright multi-colored swatches of fabric; nestled between trees, what looked like a spirit house (spirit houses being the ubiquitous animist shrines in SE Asia that usually look like very elaborate birdhouses) holding bundles of shattered bones instead of the usual offering of food or flowers; and in one remote corner a smoldering pile of trash.

The surroundings are fairly idyllic; if you didn't know where you were, maybe you would guess you were in a park or village meeting place. There's a creek directly behind the compound, a densely packed lotus pond, well-manicured shrubbery and bright boungavilla. The silence evoked by solemn places is always punctuated, transgressed in counterpoint, by the mundane sounds of the present. Far from the commotion of the city, the only sound besides the usual chorus of bird calls is the sound of children from two adjacent grade schools, each on either side. As I sat on a bench by the mass graves the slight wind carried the sound of children reciting numbers in English, the universal din of school yard retorts and the screams of play. There are no ghosts here; they have all fled. More vanquishing than the lack of proper burial rites, a proper cremation for their exhumed bodies, or even the foreign interests in this site as an enterprise: the spirits cannot abide by the ignorance of successive generations, more and more children losing a sense of the monumental sufferings of the past. Almost three decades later and they have only now assembled a tribunal to try war criminals. I read another news item in a Phnom Penh paper about how a textbook on the genocide had just been published, but is still under the scrutiny of a textbook committee. The committee has asked for rewrites freeing current figures in government from any complicity.

After Choueng Ek, my driver asked me if I wanted to go to the shooting range. Shooting range, I asked, wondering if it was another historical site. Just 1 kilometer, he said, pointing further south down a dusty stretch one side of it undergoing some kind of construction. He held up his arms and mimed aiming and shooting a semi-automatic, pak pak pak pak, no okay, he asked. I said sure, complacent as always. After some minutes of bouncing and dust clouds he turned off into a narrow road, past a military post and pulled into what looked like a restaurant, an open air shed with tables, chairs and a billiard table facing a dirt parking lot. A young teenage boy came out to greet me. What is this place, I asked him. Shooting range, he replied and brought me to a wall festooned with maybe a dozen assault rifles hanging on racks, the guns aligned symmetricaly outwards like the arms of shiva. Would you like to try, the boy asked me. I declined and pulled out my camera to at least take a picture. Please, no photos, the boy said politely. Then I recalled the billboards I saw in Siem Reap of the recent ban on guns, Cambodia historicaly being a hub for trafficing of stockpiled arms and ammunition. I got back on the moto and as we drove away, my driver muttered something and chuckled. I guess I was the wrong kind of tourist.

Angkor, Cambodia

2007-04-20T06:04:00.000-07:00

WE BUILT THIS CITY ON ROCK AND ROLL

We built this city on Rock and Roll. Every temple, every gatehouse in every cardinal direction, every tower blossoming like a lotus flower, every labyrinthine, cruciform floor plan, conceived like the sweetest and heaviest rock ballad ever, sandstone compositions on a Wagnerian-scale, stairways to heaven and city walls to withstand the infrequent but awesome power of the November Rain. Nothing is more important than symmetry, mirror perfect, like a reflecting pool perpendicular to the horizon extending to the stars--you know symmetrical like a heavy metal logo, serifs splayed like swords in battle. We were given succor by the sweetest of angels, we sacrificed our souls to the demons of the record industry, kept up with the latest innovations from 8-track to CD to itunes. Little did we know that even the Gods of Rock are mortals like us--spend so much time reproducing that signature wall of sound, sharpening our battle axes, perfecting the most effortless arpeggio, and the whole time those upstart kids from Siam are coming up, coming up, coming up from behind, with their brash new and more marketable pop sensibilities, their fay schoolboy poses belying their vicious intentions, and thus we lose our edge. First the cornerstones shift, the keystones settle, and the rest just goes slack and sloppy, and nothing you could palm off as velvet-underground inspired either, just one big shit pile. All our boldest gestures, once shocking and sublime have turned pedestrian and dull--blame all that AOR radio airplay round the clock. And before you know it we're just another dime song on some bootlegged mp3 comp you can buy from any night market, from any schmuck with a CD burner and a color printer. The age of stone is no more and even the kingdom of metal is failing to the ashen shadows of dusk. Heed this warning you carefree daughters and mop-headed sons of Siam, all songs, no matter how long and contrived, will have their coda.

Lao New Year

2007-04-16T07:17:00.000-07:00

Day of No Day

2007-04-14T21:37:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a very wet day, though it didn't rain one drop. Yesterday the youth posted themselves by the side of the road equipped with huge buckets and pails and constantly flowing hoses, dousing each other and every passerby. I got a bike again and road throughout the town, got completely soaked in jeans and a polo, and the super absorbent flipflops I bought in the castro made from beer-cosy foam, I left a trail of water--usually by midday most days I am soaking with sweat anyway from hoofing it around town, and it was a particularly warm day yesterday so the cool water was welcoming. There were roaming bands of teens, boys and girls, dressed in matching t-shirts or matching Hawaiian print shirts either posted at water stations or roaming around on motorbikes or on the backs of pickup trucks, school clubs, civic youth organizations, gangbangers? After riding outside of the old city I returned to the street along the Mekong with it's row of guesthouses and riverside patio eateries where most of the action was. I was lucky up until that point, not getting smeared with much more than some perfumed bright pink grease along the left side of my face. But here along the Mekong it was a decidedly more boisterous scene, at the stations they were downing big bottles of beer Lao, blasting ready-for-the-airwaves mixes of black-eyed peas and Gwen Stefani and Lao music from mega-woofers(The Lao music sounded like something off the Broken Flowers soundtrack--swirling minor key organs, a 60s groove). Along this last stretch I was accosted by a youth carrying a blackened wok, excuse me, he yelled, happy Lao new year, rubbing his wet hands on the burnt pot bottom he smeared my face with the soot and almost got a finger in my eye, others were throwing bags of talcum powder or maybe it was rice flour, the better to make a sticky goopy mess, at the end of the strip where my guesthouse was,a mob of farang had amassed, some shirtless, some of the girls in spandex sports tops, all armed with huge fluorescent squirt guns, shooting anything that moved. Up until then, most of the hosing down and dousing seemed to be done in a relatively considerate and dutiful manner (possibly it was because most of the stations I passed were attended mostly by younger girls and they were simply showing respect to their elders by not getting me in the eye or up the nose or in the ear if they could help it), I would slow down on my bike and they would jog alongside of me and pour water down my back or splash my pant legs. Along the Mekong, there were mostly hordes of boys--better to give them buckets of water than assault rifles to work out all that bottled-up sexual energy--so the splashing was done somewhat more aggressively, if they missed the first time, they ran after you and tossed one big bucket on your back. When I got to the farang mob at the end of the street, it was like a melee, I hopped off my bike and immediately got squirted in the face by two french boys--allo, allo, I think you have some powder zer, oh no there eez still more powder, let me get it off for you--I splashed back with what little water was left in my water bottle. Your welcome, you're welcome the french boy said. I had a beer and then took a long afternoon nap, when I woke up just after five I could still hear screaming and chanting and banging on pots and buckets.

Today seemed more mellow, or at least the dowsing got off to a later start. I went up to the top most temple of Pou Si, the sacred hill in Loung Prabang, that seems to rise suddenly above the old town (kind of like that hill in El Cerrito, a geographic anomaly) At night this topmost temple is spotlighted by klieg lights, it's gilded stuppas glowing, hovering in the dark air above the town--it's like the mansion on the hill in Edward Scissorhands or Phil Spector's mansion hovering above Alhambra. So this morning Imade my way up to Pou Si and bought a couple of flycatcher birds, these small brown birds the size of chicks, kept in a cage made from palm fronds. The idea is that you get karma points through various merit-making acts: giving alms to monks, leaving flowers at altars, or freeing small animals like turtles or birds. So I climbed up and up to the top. I thought it would be packed with both locals and tourists given the holiday, but there were only a couple of boystowatch mecash in my buddha points. After some wrangling with the palm fronds, getting birdshit on my fingers and for a second thinking I would get SARS, I finallygota sizeable opening. First one bird darted out and then the next,I was startled by how quickly they alighted on a tree some 20 meters away.

I descended on the other side of the hill facing the Royal palace of the long dead kings and watched a parade that didn't feel too different from the town fiesta parade I saw in the Philippines, except that the parade participants were all getting wet from a lineup of women with buckets, even the most venerable monks riding atop a float were getting water poured into their laps, which seemed somewhat sexual: a bunch of celibate men getting ritually bathed by a host of women.

Later that afternoon the waterfights reached peak frenzy, but this time situated along Thalong Falong, the tourist lane. After walking down the street without getting too wet and escaping getting potblack in the face, I found a bench next to a guesthouse where the women of the guesthouse and one rather fay boy were getting drunk and dirty, they were all soaking wet, their faces smeared with soot and powder, downing beer by the crate load. They danced in their lao way almost like a hula arms slightly raised rotating the palms at the wrist like tai-chi movements and splashing water on the slow procession of pickups and tuktuks all crammed with drunk kids. An old beat-up convertible bombed-out in multicolored hastily drawn spray paint marks passed by and the driver was waving a wooden dildo (that was hanging from his rearview mirror) at the guesthouse women. The drunkest of the guesthouse women, she looked to be in her late thirties if not older, wore a pail on her head like a valet cap and danced barefoot in the middle of the street. Playing the consummate flirt, she would throw herself onto the hoods of cars, and said probably scandalous things to the passing military men who were also getting their fair share of wet and potblack. On the other sideof the street from me was Louang Pabang bakery, packed with a whole peanut gallery of curious and some of themanxious farang watching the natives get more than restless--at onepoint a truckbed with hellbent teens doused the farang gallery with huge sheets and ribbons of water. Periodicaly the fay boy would walk over to me and the couple of other passive spectators in my vicinity and pour water down our shirts.

Earlier that afternoon at the Scandinavian bakery I overheard some knowledgeable-by-the-hushed-tone-of-his-voice farang explaining the whole water thing to a couple of dutch women in their late 30s--he told them how he thought the whole thing was really a mating ritual, how during this holiday--the Lao being a very demure and modest society--things became more permissible. He told the ladies how one time a girl in a crowd grabbed his crotch. I guess she wanted to know if the stories were true, he said.

And maybe Mr. Anthropologist was right, because from what I saw, there was some kind of raunch going on, maybe not quite like bare boobs and crotches on Bourbon street, but more like the rain scene in a bollywood production, squeaky-clean fun.

Lao New Year

2007-04-13T05:41:00.000-07:00

I've been here in Louang Prabang for 5 nights so far, and now it's Lao New Year. It's a 3-day event: (1)the last day of the year, (2)the day of no year--inbetween days as it were, (3)and then new year's day. Like in Thailand,which also has their version of Songkan, people throw pails and buckets of water on each other to wish them good luck, supposedly it's done without malice, but doesn't fun always have some element of malice?

Yesterday I rode a bike around town and at first the kids with the pails would pass me up in favor of other kids on motorbikes, you see lots of kids riding around town drenched. Finally when I got to the old city I got doused and I couldn't help but laugh.

This morning while I was walking to the dry goods market to buy some sausage for lunch a group of farang on bikes with water pistols caught me by surpise from behind--from what I've seen the people doing the wetting are clearly stationed and you see it coming when you get to it. There were three or so farang on bikes, a guy and the rest of the horde girls, I heard them giggling as they approached, but suspected nothing, farang are always laughing at some dumb thing or another. It was the guy that wet me, got me at the nape of the neck and yelled Sabai Dii, I flinched, it wasn't all that hot today because of the morning rain, when he saw that I wasn't amused, he made a little sheepish grunt, maybe he thought oh he's a tourist and maybe doesn't know that this is the local custom--I wasn't that angry, but still I wanted to half-seriosly chastise him, get ethnic studies on his ass: you fucken farang, you're not supposed to ambush people, you give them fair warning, what? do you think you're fucken hunting down Hmong in the jungle. But he didn't strike me as a fratboy, a geeky bespectacled boy with curly hair. La dee da.

Went to the small village across the river, which was all mudded over, saw some abandoned temples up on the hill that I always saw from the other side of the river, all the trails were mudded over from the rains and the temples were further from the boat landing than I realized. a little boy of 8 or 9 from the village took it upon himself to be tour guide, he showed me a snail shell deposited on one of the weeded-over stuppas, and a strange grotesque figure at the back of the building that smiled like the cheshire cat, then when I asked for Wat Long Khoun, he lead me down a steep, muddy trail, bounding down like a jack rabbit, at one point after he saw how slow I was descending--I didn't want to slip and break a leg like in the short film made by some California film maker I saw in a gallery the other day--the little boy who I probably outweigh by some 150 pounds, held out his hand like he was a boyscout and I was an old lady.

Later that evening at the riverside restaurant of my guesthouse (and by restaurant I mean a shack with a wok over burning wood and plastic chairs and tables with table cloths--this is not to say there aren't fancier places further up stream, like one restaurant has a modest selection of wines (possibly for all the frogs in town) and the cook is dressed in whites and a chef's hat) like every other day I've been here, I watched the sunset, polished off a huge lao salad: eggs, tomato, lettuce, cucumber, and some homemade kind of sweet dressing. I was finishing off a big bottle of beer lao. The skies because of the rains were less hazy than they've been, and so it was a longer, more beautiful sunset, and a longer more protracted dusk, watching the lights come on across the river in the village I'd been at earlier, the evening boats coming in, the picturesque silhouettes of the boatmen standing with bamboo in hand poleing towards shore, the stern cabins of the slowboats lit by candle as they come downriver making sharp fast arcs as they head to shore turning about face. And I thought what I wouldn't give so my friends could be here right now for just these few minutes, no one saying a word, I only brought one cigarette so I wouldn't chain smoke at dinner--it's too easy to--but I can run back to my room and get more to share, the guesthouse keepers aren't rushing us, there's no second-seating here, just people drifting in and out, and then I wonder maybe only the tourists, maybe only the wealthy "blue-blooded" Louang Prabang families, maybe only irresponsible derelicts like me can enjoy the sunset, or maybe everything really does slow down at day's end, evening repast, and for a few minutes we can forget that life is hard and even harder for other's, forget that there are things we wish to forget, be lulled by the soft lilacs and the pale pinks of the quickening dusk before the resolute dark of night sets in--the french lady next to me just asked me if I know how to type in an "arabesque" a what I said? she went and asked the attendant showing him an "arabesque?" drawn on paper--she broke my mood--good thing too, I was probably getting cheesy sentimental in a filipino kind of way. ciao!

The Journey is the destination

2007-04-10T05:42:00.000-07:00

The journey is the destination. Sorry to open with such a hackneyed sentiment, but this statement most accurately sums up my last 5 days here in Laos. In the last five days I've logged in about 39 hours of travel time and over a 1000 kilometers, traveling by bus and slow boat and minibus. Last Saturday morning I boarded a slowboat headed North up the Mekong to Houakxai, some 300 km upstream on the Mekong. This journey took 2 days, 9 hours each day, stopping halfway at the backwater town of Pakbeng, where the electricity went out at 10:30 and soldiers armed with AK47s wrangled drunk farang into their guesthouses at the 11 o'clock curfew. Between Louang Prabang and Houakxai I saw some of the most remote stretches of the mekong, where steep standbanks were left to erode on their own, flowing like sand glasses into their watery reflections, carving out facsimiles of the grand canyon--like watching the history of the earth at an accelerated time scale, saw albino carabou that looked like big pigs with horns, saw small fishing villages where the fishermen young and old in their skimpy briefs, cast their nets, their compactly muscled and tanned frames like something Walt Whitman would have waxed rhapsodically over, catalogueing each limb, each sinew, met on the boat a girl from Manila (at first though she was fil-am, the few phrases I first heard her utter without an accent, also her voice reminded me of Julia Reodica, who once appeared in a photo in the NY Times Sunday arts section in an article about performance artists working with biohazard materials--in the photo she was wearing a tshirt that read terrorist and was disguised in a ski mask) who taught acting in an arts center in Manila and was travelling with her Italian boyfriend who sported an off center pigtail and worked in Manila for a Spanish-Catholic NGO, among the many things I learned from her on the first leg of the trip: there exists a cult in the Philippines, the Rizalistas, that worship the national hero Jose Rizal as the second coming of Christ (I told her that in Bangkok a cult formed around King Rama IV, where people left offerings to his statue to improve their lives and fortunes), she agreed with me that between Buddhism in SE Asia and Catholicism in the PI there's not a whole lot of difference, just different icons and different talismans that people offer things to to curry favors. Among the people on the boat I immediately made judgements against: an italian guy--not the filipina girl's BF, another italian guy who wore the same yellow Lao-beer shirt and sagging jeans two days in a row (who also spoke english with an american accent for some reason) who tried to take a photo of an old Lao woman riding with her drunk middle-ages son, he asked her if he could take a photo, but she covered her face and said something in complaint, her drunk son argued with her and forced her to pose, making a scene, the italian guy was flustered by her protests and said that's okay I won't take her picture, I told him jokingly: after 5 hours of being wind-blown, she's not at her best, which I think further embarassed him, you have to admit she's a beautiful woman, he said, and when I didn't respond he slunked back to his seat at the back of the boat (In Pakbeng this guy roomed next to me in a 2-dollar guesthouse, stumbling around his room drunk after midnight, the wood sheet walls were so thin that not only could I hear his every drunken move, but I could see his flash light through the wall and the spotlight on my ceiling), the There were these 2 Germans a boy and a girl, couldn't figure out if they were siblings or a couple who brought along cards and dice, and played some dice game where they vigourously shook the dice in a cup like they were making a cocktail. The three blonde swedish kids turned out to be okay, the curly-haired one taking photos at the aft of the boat and writing in his journal, the girl at turns languidly gazing at the banks or smoking a cigarette, the other boy with the mesh cap and studded belt always waved back enthusiastically whenever village children waved at our passing boat, you gotta love that, there was an older north american guy with his Lao wife who for some reason only talked to the Germans, on the second leg of the trip there was a Japanese guy--I thought he was Lao at first--who kept to himself and never smiled or showed much enthusiasm, and I saw how I could easily be mistaken as a Japanese national.
On the stretches, where I would watch the scenery pass me,I thought about fractals, the enumeration and repetition in rock formations, stratified layers of rock pitched at an upward angle by ages of tectonic pressure, the lines etched on the bank formed by the receding river, the trees, the eddies and ripples in the river, I watched how the Mekong would narrow to these craggy, rock-strewn passages and at the next bend suddenly widen into vast, calm waters, the juxtaposition like cinematography out of a Kubrik film, I watched ashes from clear-cutting drift from the sky along with downey, cotton-fluff seedlings, I watched sparrows with their dagger wings wheeling tight circles above the river, we saw a few speedboats their passengers with lifevests and crash helmets (they can make the same 300 km stretch in 6 hair-raising hours), I saw strange flotsam: folded banana leaf packages, animist offerings to the river spirits? Sometimes I would fall asleep my head resting on the edge of the boat, the wind blowing in my face and I would wake up startled by so much water.

Louang Phrabang, Laos

2007-04-06T07:16:00.000-07:00

After one night in Vang Vieng, I jumped on the first bus out of there (actually the second, nine seemed too early)--not that Vang Vieng isn't a beautiful town with the limestone karsts towering over the Nam Xong, but there really wasn't much to do there and I thought I was getting the jump on the other tourists (lately I feel like i'm in the Amazing Race), only to find so many familiar faces on the bus again--this is the first time I've taken chartered bus transportation--in Thailand we were riding trains and buses with the Thai Polloi, and now riding with European and American backpackers seems a whole different experience, there's that "ugly" mirror again, I can't really separate myself from these other children of privelage. The bus ride was I think 7 hours, winding through even more majestic limestone cliffs, towering like ancient temples of some ancient behemouth race over the small bamboo mountain huts of the nieghboring villages. It felt more majestic than what I remember of Yellowstone, but I may be coloring it with my own orientalist notions of chinese scroll paintings--tiny toothpick trees on vertical limestone slabs and calligraphic clouds swirling like steam out of a teapot. We arrived in Louang Phrabang close to dusk. (right now in this internet cafe-tourist package shop, this bear couple are having a mini-tiff about the tour package they want--Evan, come here now please--I don't want to argue about this right now--one doesn't want to walk for an hour and a half--the other, apparently the type-A one of the pair just wants to arrange something, anything. I hope this isn't their honeymoon) After I checked in to a guesthouse and had dinner on the Mekong again, I took a walk over to cafe L'Estranger (heard about it and read about it in the rough guide, the only other option being hanging out in a bar on Thanon Falang)--the name taken from that indochine classic about the despondant Lao that kills a Frenchman on the Mekong. Walking to L'Estranger in the barely lit dark along the Nam Kham I could easily imagine I was in Europe somewhere, not sure where quite-euro-river-lake-town (Louang Phrabang is the Lao cultural mecca housing the most sacred image of the Buddha, sacred texts and epic poems have been written here. I'm considering taking a slow boat north up the mekong (north being the less touristy direction, although many others have probably read the same advise in their guide books) and coming back here in time for Lao new year's on the 13th, we'll see how that goes (I gotta pee like a motherfucker. had a big pot of Lao green tea all to my lonesome).

Vang Vieng, Laos

2007-04-05T06:47:00.000-07:00

Today I arrived in Vang Vieng, Laos. I rode a bike out to some caves in the lime stone cliffs across the river, the man at the end of the rice fields gave me a torch-- I clambered up to the top most cave--kind of dicey--went down to the chamber where it looked like there would be a pool during rainy season, I think I surprised a french boy and his girl who were probably enrapt by the rock formations, the french boy said hey want something crazy for your movie and he pointed out a spider on the ceiling big enough to smother my face.

Stoned is the way of the walk

2007-04-05T06:18:00.000-07:00

I admit that since I've been in SE Asia, when I'm tired from walking in the afternoon heat, visiting temples and shopping malls, I gravitate towards a starbucks if there's one around, so maybe I understand crashing out on daybeds in bars in Vang Vieng, Laos, watching endless episodes of Friends and Simpsons (through the wall of the internet shop I can hear the theme song to Friends right now). Maybe they've all partaken of items off the happy menu or maybe after weeks of the runs and not getting laid in Laos, their western bubbles need reinforcing, maybe I'll stop by for a fruit shake and hope they're showing episodes before Chandler and Rachel got together, Simpson's episodes before the writing went to shit...

Lightning on the Mekong

2007-04-05T06:16:00.000-07:00

Lightning on the Mekong, Vientiane, Laos

Vientiane, Laos

2007-04-04T06:36:00.000-07:00

1) view of the Mekong from the Orchid Guesthouse Veranda, Vientiane, Laos, as you can see it's the height of the dry season, further dams in China are creating even lower levels and delaying the shipment of cargo in Laos.
2) One of the sculptures in Vet Xiang Khouan, 27 km from Vientianes city center, a folksy scultpure park built in the 50's, one self-made holy man's vision of buddhist-hindu cosmology. You crawl into the mouth (like something from Pan's Labyrinth) and climb through a rather dicey series of stairs to find dim floors cluttered with idols, some looking like Mr. Howdy from the Exorcist.

Death Railway Thailand, Kanchanaburi

2007-03-31T10:51:00.000-07:00

Kanchanaburi, Thailand

2007-03-29T19:16:00.000-07:00

Posting from Kanchanaburi, Thailand. I was going to leave for Laos, but then agreed to go with Todd to Kanchanaburi, hoping it to be a break from the heat and hysteria of Bangkok. Took the train here on Tuesday afternoon, 60 or so km west of Bangkok, about 3 leisurely hours on an old wooden train (through some cracks in the planks you could see the railings below) all the windows open and 4 ceiling fans interspersed throughout each car. It was actually pleasant with the air flowing openly through the windows, sometimes the airconditioning in public transportation is a little too chilly and I always worry I'll get sick from the sudden temperature changes. The river Kwai runs right through Kanchanaburi and just north of the center is the bridge on the river Kwai. Along the river have cropped up a plethora of bars, some pretty obnoxious bars with hostesses welcoming every passing farang, one bar opened up by some expat called the no name bar reads at the top of the facade: get shitfaced on a budget. Along the same 3 km stretch of road right by the river there's a couple of tattoo parlors, tour groups (real eco toursism one place claims, with a photo of some girl eskimo kissing a beetle) the requisite massage parlours the masseuses mostly unoccupied watching tv from the reclining chairs, and an outfit that makes and repairs dreadlocks--unsure if this last place caters to rastafarian farang or the locals who hang out at the reggae themed bars listening to Arrested Development and drinking whiskey. There are floating disco barges dragged up and down the river and plenty of war memorials, cemetaries, a war wall, a couple hours away by train there's hellfire pass. In the evenings by the river Kwai bridge boys play soccer, there's a small gathering (which seems to be required in every public park and square) a dance aerobics group. We've been staying right on the river a couple nights in cabins on stilts above a lotus garden and last night a hotel on a raft. It's so quite here once the disco barges have docked for the night.

The Collosus of Pho

2007-03-26T21:25:00.000-07:00

http://www.watpho.com/

2007-03-25T00:00:00.000-07:00

2007-03-23T22:30:00.000-07:00

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1) This is also sukothai for sure, note the sign posted in the lower right hand, telling people not to climb the pedestal, signifying this is probably a site frequented by many tourists, therefore I'm certain this is Sukothai, a farang favorite, while I was there saw some hulking shirtless white guy, looking like the gold's gym mascot, pose cross legged in front of a statue possibly this one, making his girlfriend take several pictures till she got it just right, the glint of the high noon sun off his wrinkled stubbly dome, tourists kill the buddha too, if unwittingly.
2) The top of Gold Mount in Bangkok
3) A really really big reclining Buddha, each of his toes seen at the end of the hall bigger than my big fat head. He is reclining because he is tired of sitting cross-legged, his back has been bothering him all week, he lost feeling in his ass who knows when, so he reclines, propping his big golden head on his slender golden fingers, with a bemused smile he thinks I could go back home any old time, pick up some fine young thing and rule the kingdom, but I think I'll stay right here and slum it for a little bit longer.
4) Buddhist monk descending steps of temple at Wat Ratchanaddaram. The dogs I have seen in the streets of Bangkok are either mangy and emaciated or morbidly obese, the latter hanging out by food stalls. All temples have dogs. What do you have to do to become a dog in the next life? I want to sprawl on the ground by a food stall, not move an inch all day, and have food laid down in front of me by passing strangers.
5) Enlightment at the end of a shadowy hallway at Wat Ratchanaddaram, the temple with the armada of metal spires, the whole thing like a big jungle gym, you climb a spiral stair case at it's center up to the top most tier and climb a set of outside stairs to the top most spire to find some sacred object in a caged room. At the level this photo was taken every cardinal direction had a buddha, very disorienting, when I went back down to the ground, it took me a while to find where I left my shoes.

2007-03-22T23:57:00.000-07:00

1. Young buddhist boys in Phrae, after having been made to rake ginormous leaves in the hot dusty afternoon sun 2. A Buddhist statue possibly in Nan or Phitsanulok, so fuck me for being such a half-assed temple-tourist, all I know is that when I see the Buddha, I want to kill the Buddha, but softly, smother him with the coolest and downiest of hotel pillows 3. Asshole of temple guardian in Nan--notice the clockwise swirls of his pucker-- don't ask me what temple, the one with the white walls and square structure 4. Another gold buddha in some other temple 5. This is Sukothai for sure

Thai foot massage

2007-03-21T06:39:00.000-07:00

The other day, after a full afternoon of site-seeing, hanging out in Khao San the backpackers ghetto (the biggest concentration of white people I have seen in SE Asia, sickeningly ominous) and dinner at a lauded noodle house specializing in Pad Thai, Todd took me to go get a Thai foot massage in Silom, the gay ghetto of Bangkok (though there are plenty of other spaces outside downtown that queer Thai frequent, beyond the reach of marauding farang.) They sat us abreast in leather reclining chairs with foot rests--the place smelled pleasantly of camphor and none of the outside din of tuktuks and vendors could be heard inside,just the hum of the AC. Our masseurs were two thai boys maybe 20 or so in woven ethnic pants and castro-issue white v-neck t-shirts, they were both thin, but well toned, and fairly cute. It started out with a foot bath,toweled down and our feet massaged gently with camphor oil, giving me a fair amount of shivers it was so soothing, but then too soon the work of hitting the pressure points began, digging into tendons, and rubbing around ligaments and ankles with the balls of his fingers. This went on for the better part of an hour, getting my heels slapped, my calves punched, and getting the tips of my toes and the soles of my feet re-shaped with a wooden stick. I seemed to be getting a much rougher treatment than Todd (later he claimed that he had a reputation there as liking his massages on the lighter side, he also mentioned a friend may have gotten a torn or sprained trapezius from an especially thourough full body session at the same place), I didn't hear as many punches and slaps coming from his masseur, unless my flesh is especialy resonant and it just sounded like I was getting worked over more. When my masseur would dig into an especially sore spot of my shins or the arches of my feet , I would visibly wince, is that okay, he would say in his very fay english, just say stop, I said it was kind of hard, but okay--thinking it proper etiquette to just grin and bare it--not too spicy. The rest of the session, anytime I flinched, my masseur would just smile laughingly, which in turn made me smile at the ridiculousness of it all--on the edge of my seat at the hands of some Thai boy. The rest of the session included getting forced into leg bending positions, my knee pressed into my chest, and my torso turned, and then a strange, potentially titillating (but not in this instance) maneuver in which he rested his weight on his hands pressing into my thighs,and then walked his hands up towards my pelvis (one slip and he would've made me break into falsetto) and then back down again. They sat us up at what I thought was the end of the session, and gave us a nice cup of sweetened black tea, then they did a mini-backrub, and more forced stretches with the arms and back, and then the hour was over. Walking back to the sky train station, my feet were still tingling, feeling I had an extra set of cushioning in my shoes, but I felt like I had a crick in my right leg. Now I know what it's all about, and this knowledge didn't put me back more than 10 bucks and maybe a few smal bruises.

Bangkok

2007-03-17T22:02:00.000-07:00

3/10 Went to a buddhist talk at Wat Maha Tat, a Buddhist University right off the river in Bangkok, by the grand palace--My Rough Guide mentioned that every second Saturday they give free seminars in English about different topics relating to Buddhist practice. Todd had been using some breathing/meditating techniques that a therapist had taught him and was also interested in attending a talk. I've never had any desire to seriously study Buddhism, maybe like everyone else I have romantic notions about dharma bums and Salingeresque figures pulling existential hyjinks, Richard Gere foresaking Hollywood Babylon to cruise the Dalai Llama, but my interests were mostly as a tourist--show up, observe, maybe take some pictures to post on a blog. We took a water bus up river towards the royal palace--wasn't quite sure where to get off because few of the docks had an easily visible sign in English. After disembarking I took us on a wrong turn--names of temples indistinguishable to me, they're all named Wat followed by sometimes over a dozen consonants and vowels all running together, some poetic Sanskrit phrase parading around as a compound word. My mistake lead us too far south and we had to circle the collosal grounds of the royal palace. When we finally found Wat Maha Tat, we then had to find where the talk was being given--the rough guide said an outside plaza, but there were only construction workers repairing the temple eaves and mangy dogs lounging in the shaded alcoves between buildings (dogs always seem to have the right idea). We finally found a map of the grounds and found the instructional facilities, a bungalow where aspirants, mostly farang (Farang being the word for whitey, literally meaning guava, as in pale as the flesh of a guava) were learning how to walk with a buddhist sense of presence (left foot goes left, right foot goes right...) But this wasn't the talk we had read about, so we went and had some ice cream instead from a vendor we found on the temple grounds. We wandered back to the classroom in a stupor of heat and icy sugar; the walking class was just breaking up and an older farang couple happened to be looking for the same talk (the older man, who seemed the more invested of the two, looked like Locke the former-parapalegic and water-cooler-philosopher from the tv series Lost, and what I assume was his wife kind of had a put-upon, long-suffering look on her face, but maybe it was just too hot to smile, not to mention the probably two-hour long session they just spent shuffling around in an air conditioned room, staring at their tourist's bunions.) So we followed them around eating our ice cream (I thought I must have looked like an idiot-man-child in a Faulkner novel, ice cream coating my hanging lips) asking the monks where the talk was being given, the monks mostly responding with quizical smiles and verifying that we were indeed at Wat Maha Tat. When we finally found the talk, we were over an hour late; it was not in an open plaza, but in a small room, what looked to be graduate or administrative offices, crowded with cubicle dividers and desks, a group half of whom were farang gathered around a central table, phallanxed by a guy with a video camera and a few monks in some administrative capacity, passing out xeroxed handouts and little hermetically sealed cups of drinking water. The monk giving the talk at the head of the desk, a 50 year-old Thai man, his full lips and his swollen lower eyelids, along with the ready-to-wear aura of his safron robes gave the impression of a perpetual quite state of bemusement. After sweating like a snowball in a hot house for an hour, I was so glad to be in an air-conditioned room that the horror I would have had at joining mid-discussion, a smallish roundtable, was easily subdued (still I tried to grab a seat far from the table, but they offered me a seat instead just outside of the "inner-circle" two people away from the head monk. The discussion topic written on the agenda hands out said something like "Buddhism and Modern Day Concerns," but I noticed the older white woman in front of me had crossed this out on her sheet. The monk leading the discussion, was discussing something about like and dislike, his English a little less proficient than I would have expected, what with all the Western aspirants they must surely see. I surreptitiously glanced around at the motley gathering, the farangs included the older couple we followed around, the older woman in front of me who turned around not long after I sat down and gave me a wide welcoming smile, a 20-something maybe 30-something blonde boy--the hipster hierophant--that I sat directly behind of, wore a dark brown tracksuit jacket, and had a van dyke and wire rim glasses (Todd told me later he also had a stack of books, but he couldn't see the titles), another older white guy, a hoop earing in his right ear lobe--an interesting face, like a character actor from a Cohen brothers movie--possibly gay, possibly just an old yippie trying to tread softly in his dotage--the days of being mild. Their was a youngish Japanese boy, his tussled mop of hair, screaming more harajuku-style-council than seeker of inner wisdom, and the rest of the asians I surmised were all Thai. When the monk opened up the discussion for questions, the guy with the hoop earing asked a question confirming my suspicions that the the original topic about Buddhist practices addressing modern day concerns wasn't really addressed. The lady in front of me had begun writing a letter, the lines I spied included words of thanks and appreciation and towards the end something about a Bank of America account. The guy that looked like Locke asked about why he felt there was more power in meditating in a group rather than meditating on his own. The monk gave an incongruous response in his broken english, his calm and beatific deliviery of clipped phrases, a catalog of dual concepts: like and dislike, in and out, rising and falling, I thought I was grasping at least some vague notion of Buddhist cosmology and the spiritual efficacies of breathing from your diaphragm, but now I'm not sure what he was trying to say. I nodded anyway, and laughed when everyone else laughed. After the monk's rambling answer to Lockes question, the boy with the van dyke and track jacket spoke: Master I don't think you answered this man's question if you will allow me to repeat his question, at which point he broke into-- to my untrained-ears--effortlessly fluent Thai. The monk gave the slightest jump in his chair and his expression brightened as if someone had finally scratched an elusive itch on his back, he nodded and gave a much shorter, concise answer, something mundane like: it's best to first practice with much instruction before exploring on one's own, and the others in a meditation group can offer as much guidance as the teacher. Ta-Dat-Boom. The farang chimed in unison a sound of satisfaction at possibly the first clear insight of the 2-hour long talk. Locke mentioned something about how he had a number of scientist friends, who if they had no basis in the scientific method for understanding a phenomenon or concept (e.g., the human soul) wanted nothing to do with it. Locke wanted a scientific explanation for the feeling of connectedness in group meditations, he wanted what the string theorists, and cosmologists want: a GTE, a grand theory of everything. The woman in front of me offered some names about the so-and-so's at so-and-so university possibly having a response to his question. The guy with the hoop earing gave a clever answer about how even when we meditate alone, we are all interconnected and therefore always meditating in a group. The Japanese guy said that he detested meditating in groups because it made him overly-self concious, am I breathing correctly, am I maintaining the correct posture, egotistical even, am I gaining as much wisdom as the others--to which the monk replied that gain is the wrong word: we all have the same buddha nature, the same potential, it's a matter of uncovering it [I felt like a cynic thinking: gain/uncover, brainwashing/self-exploration, empty-mind/cognitive-breakdown, but this is probably all just semantics from which no true wisdom can be purchased--I'm no better than Locke's doubting Thomas friends]. What followed seemed to materialize from my worst fears. The monk said that for the time remaining we would close our eyes and practice meditating, using whatever method we felt comfortable. Then afterwards we would go around and share our observations and he would give us individual feedback. Oh my god, I've never meditated before, staring at the evening sun till it turned into a shimmering blue worm (something I did on long car trips as a child) probably doesn't count, daydreaming and procrastination, my mind if seldom stormy is a bumperboat in a carnival basin, careening haphazardly through oily hose fed waters, the brownian motion of free assocciation, I've seldom felt aggrieved by my restless mind, maybe denial is a stronger agent for quelling negative thoughts, I've never been able to sit cross-legged for very long, before my legs sometimes my ass falls asleep, they will expose me as a fraud, why don't you go hang out in Banglamphu with the birdshit farangs, the crusty party punks, the full-moon MDMA lotus eaters, don't waste our time with your half-interests, your passing curiosity, go lie with the dogs you shameless dilletante. It was an effort just to keep my eyes closed, feeling the strain in my cheeks, did the Buddha have epicanthic eyefolds, could he wink effortlessly without contorting the rest of his face? They are looking at me shake in my seat, my fingers and arms quivering, my head and neck twitching, they can see the unease in my breathing, my shoulders tensed and the flow of air irregular and choppy, through my eyelids I see the red flash of a camera--the monks are fucken taking pictures, the sweat is beading on my forehead and dappling my temples, welling in the cleft of my upper lip, can I wipe my brow, is this permissible, but it's trickling down my nose now, dribbling down my chin, they are fucken taking pictures of my discomfort, I feel heavy, torporous, this is torture, I feel very very heavy like my limbs are swelling, my head the size of an american watermelon, what am I going to say when it's my turn? DO I answer truthfuly: I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. I can't help opening my eyes for a second, just to make sure everyone else still has their eyes closed, make sure no one is watching me. I remember one of the techniques Todd told me about, you try and observe with all your senses at once, a collusion of five orthogonal planes of perception, a resounding affirmation of now now now now the ever-unfolding Now, towards a heightened sublime state of nowness. Foresaking my hooded sight, I hear a child yelling outside, the buzz of the AC and fan, the shuffle of chairs, bones settling, grunting, maybe snoring, I taste the coat of sugar from the ice cream forming into plaque on my teeth, I smell nothing much because I've been smoking too much, maybe if anything the smell of sun and sweat and dirt on my clothes, I fucken stink because I washed the shirt with bath soap in the hotel basin--no laundromats in the orient, I've been mislead all these years, an amalgam of dirt and mold from 5 different countries, I feel my weight bearing down on the chair on my ass bones, my stocking feet against the wood floor, I feel the heat of the bodies around me, my sweat begins to evaporate, someone's cell phone goes off, the sweat no longer beads, I am cooling off, I imagine the heat of everyone around me dissipating, the child's voice outside heats the air and this too dissipates, an old less chaotic order of the sun, handed down the gifts of light and heat to the vegetation and flesh of the earth, a history of calories burned, eating and shitting and recreating and adapting, calories burned in thought and breathing, the heat of the cosmos reaching out spiral arms, vortexes, and eddies, lost to ever expanding space, the eros of entropy, a single arrow shot after which all things follow, all energies lost to heat, the breakdown of all systems, the heat of words, the laptop overheating from the hour or so I've been here typing, the words burning into your retina from the monitor screen, everything everywhere a trickling down of energy through heat, words, lists, meanings disseminated, obscured, misunderstood, restated, information lost to magnetic storms, burrowed in telephone line insulation, refracted in fiber optics cables, once dissipated into heat the energy is intractable, becomes one with the swelling space of space, we are all burning, whether we are pinpoint embers slowly descending on the ends of joss sticks, whether we are the combustion of makeshift bombs strapped to torsos and bus seats dropped in proffesor's mailboxes, the heat of love, the cool radiance of empathy, the fire of murderous libidos, the uncontrollable raving of mad men and women, the long heat of suffering and hunger, the burning twin engines of pride and fear, the industrious and the stagnant, proliferating, procreating, proscilitizing, we are all turning and burning, and maybe a hundred ressurected christs communing with blood and flesh, a million sisters of mercy the healing warmth of their fingers and their cooing songs, a billion profligate princes turned ascetic preachers of love and peace, a trillion prophets singing enumerations, sacred names, with each name a spark of heat returned to the universe, each and eveyone helping us burn slowly, calmly, evenly, and irregardless of our will, our intentions, our evil souls, the world will end in fire and fire will end in the chasms of space the whole round of days will become one endless day, the whole relief of hills will become an endless plane* I hear Carl Sagan's voice, our cool sun too small to go supernova, but swelling and scorching the earth, eviscerating the atmosphere, all stars will burn away, turn into black holes--pools of chaos--or birth lesser stars, all the heat of the cosmos, cooling into the vibration of ever-expanding space, and the space will grow till there is only space, indifferentiable space, standing still or at the speed of light there is no difference, a massless sameness, but there is no same because there is no difference, time will trickle to a stop, no ashes, no fleeting causalities, no metaphors, time's diminished domain seized by the overspowering swell of space, and in this timeless indifferentiated space, maybe in all this homogeneity, meaningfulessness, a pinpoint inditermancy will arise, a quantum bubble, a desire to remember remembering,and with this most improbable probability arising starts a chain of difference, and the cycle repeats, and will repeat again, loops within, loops within larger descending arcs ad infinitum,seeking to light the shores of existence.
Todd told me later that it was only 20 minutes that we sat with our eyes closed. I felt cool and collected, the AC in full swing. So we went around and gave our two bits and the monk gave us back two bits, the blonde boy with the van dyke and track jacket said "I don't want to say too much, because it probably won't make any sense, but I've been meditating for many years now, and I don't have to focus on my breathing any more, I can just immediately empty my thoughts," thus spoke the white llama. I spoke after him, I said that I tried to focus on my breath, but I felt heaviness. I don't remember what the monk told me.
Outside puting on my shoes, I overheard the trio of the Japanese guy, the older white guy with the hoop earing, and the older white woman grousing about how uninformative the monk was, same old buddhist hardline they said. The white llama left alone, still wearing his track suit in the afternoon heat, I saw a streak of dirt on his back where shmutz probably adhered to a sweaty patch, maybe leaning up against a column in the skytrain station, he clutched his stack of books and didn't look back.
Later that evening Todd took me to a rooftop bar across the river with a commanding view of the Bangkok skyline, a far flung smattering of none-too-interesting buildings. Then we went to the street with the boy gogo bars, future boys, muscle boys, every flavor, peeked in Tawan--specializing in muscle men--for a minute but didn't want overpriced drinks and have to consort with a bunch of trolls, we passed through the street with the girl gogo bars, every few feet a tout showing us a list of sex acts which read like sundry items from a ninety-nine cent store. We ended up having a drink on Silom Soi 4 at the telephone bar, watching the parade of boys and farang, Todd flirted with the waiters, the rest of the evening all manner of defilement flowed through us and emenated from us like the heat in the night air.

*glass eye, endless day

Red skies at night

2007-03-13T07:29:00.000-07:00

I've been in Thailand since March 8th. Before that I was in Kuala Lumpur for three nights. I am currently writing from the Northern mountainous province of Nan where I drove up from Bangkok with my old housemate Todd and another expat San Franciscan, Stuart. Just like in the Philippine's mountainous provinces, Nan was in the 80s a refuge for communist guerillas. The air here is hazy from all the smoke from forest clear-cutting--I can't quite tell that it's any worse than Solsona in the evening and early morning when most of the burning of trash and fields goes on--also I've been smoking enough cigarettes so that it probably doesn't even matter. In the evenings the sun seems to be setting eventhough it's still at least 10 degrees above the horizon, a reddish circle in a smokey sky. (Apparently Thailand has just issued a state of emergency regarding the haze problem and looking to curb outdoor activities for the young and elderly)

After 3 weeks of travelling alone, getting around by my own rather addled wits, and talking to virtually no one, having the company of better informed fellow travellers is a godsend. (The only conversation of any length I had in Singapore was on the last night I was there, with the owner of a Malay restaurant in the Arab quarter--he was very nice but he tried to sell me if somewhat passively on some pyramid scheme--he said his sideline was networking--he told me about his two wives, having just married his second, a 23 year-old--and then he told me of his new found interest in some positivist guru in Sedona, Arizona. This was the only conversation I had in Singapore.

Bilog ng mundo:Philippine backlog

2007-03-03T22:28:00.001-08:00

Bilog ng Mundo--the world is round. This is the ad for the San Miguel Ginebra (Gin). It's in a clear globular bottle like Red Stripe. It's a sign that we always pass on the way to Laoag.

My parent's quality of life I would like to believe is much better here:
*relatives in close proximity
*criminally cheap 24-hr care
*My aunt and my cousin are doctors (my cousins parents put her through medical school, expressly so that they would have someone to take care of them in their old age)
*All food is organic--it's an economy of size, they can't afford pesticides or hormones for livestock. Just about every day on the highway to Laoaog my father will stop by the road side stands selling the catch of the day or fresh fruits and vegetables, hawaiin mangos, eggplant, bittermelon, all kinds of greens and legumes with no apparent english corollaries. Octopus, Blue Merlin. There's also young deer from the hills. My aunt and uncle's helper who is Visayan but has lived in Ilocos Norte most of her life is an amazing cook. Lots of vegetables contrary to what most people think of filipino cuisine--maybe it's just the northeners who love their greens (even down to the algae growing in the flooded rice fields). My favorite dish, sweet chile charred on a grill and then tossed with tomatoes and fish sauce. Most dishes are that simple. Grilled catfish, some kind of squah in broth with small clams. Every day my parents have pandesal and coffee followed by a full breakfast of whatever canned meat we send them or maybe local longaniza. Then at 10 or 11 there's mirienda, pastries or empanada and coke, then a big lunch, and at 3 or 4 mirienda again, and around 7 a big dinner--additionaly becuase my uncle is the mayor, there are sometimes extra dishes that they have prepared for town meetings. Every meal we had fresh mangos, a hawaiin breed even sweeter and more savory than the small yellow manila mangos.
*One day my father bought a huge box filled with maybe three dozen green mangos (apparently he usually bought more food than he and my mother could possibly eat--and from what I saw neither my mother or father are big eaters. It's a mystery why my father's belly is so big). He bought the green mangos with the intention of pickeling them, but he also had Lilly the cook make fresh bagoong: shrimp paste fried with garlic, so that you dip the green mango in the warm bagoong--two great tastes that compliment each other like no other--the tart green mango and the slighty sweet and salty bagong, with the fried garlic. So simple yet so complex.

There was this fruit, Lonzanas, that gave me a sort of proustian moment--they're these little grape sized, thick skinned fruits, a white fleshy meat with a pit the size and shape of an olive pit. The taste is somewhere between a pomello and a grape. It tasted so familiar and apparently you can't find this in the states. But it didn't really trigger any memories from when I was 2 or even 12 when I first returned. It could have just been a kind of manufactured deja vu of taste and smell.

So food-wise they were pretty well fed, although my mother didn't really care for most of the dishes and often just ate rice with some broth and the mangos. She's thinner than when she was in the states but not alarmingly so. One night when she especially detested the selection I went with the helper to go buy ice cream (the one thing she'll always say yes too) when there was no ice cream and she didn't want the donuts we bought, we bought her balut for dinner instead. See how we live, my father said, but I told him even if he bought a dozen balut every meal it still wouldn't amount to the credit card bills he racked up.

Bilog ng mundo:Philippine backlog

2007-03-03T22:28:00.000-08:00

Singapore

2007-02-28T21:33:00.000-08:00

Swinging Chandeliers

2007-02-28T21:24:00.000-08:00

Amazing installation at the National Museum of Singapore: Countours of a rich manoeuvre--by Suzann Victor. Every 15 minutes there's a different pattern.

Philippines Back Log

2007-02-26T20:18:00.000-08:00

My knowledge of Ilocano the local dialect is limited to simple statements around eating, pissing and shitting. It's pretty radically different from tagalog, a lot of the words sound like they have completely different origins. A lot of Ilocanos roll their R's and the way some men talk with an upward intonation, their voices on the verge of cracking, sounds like a liverpool accent. I also noticed that they use a vowel that the french use--I forget what it's called but you make the sound by rounding your lips as if to say a long O, but instead saying ee. The Ilocano word for yes is wen, and sometimes when someone says wen in exasperation they use that french vowel. So really most of the time I barely understand what's going on and must infer from the way they look at me (paranoid that they're talking shit right in front of me) or the tone of their statements.

1/5/07
Went to Burgos with Gianing (the younger larger sister of the two helpers) and 2 of her daughters--one of the daughters my father refered to as half-man-half-woman, isn't intersex like I thought, but a tomboy (who I think used to be "sweethearts" with one of my cousins who moved to manila.) A fourth woman came along and I had no idea who she was (she had the same name as my father's purported girlfriend from manila, but later my father would tell me this was another of Gianing's daughters, but then I thought she was calling Gianing'Ate' which means older sister.) So we left my mom at home (eventhough she was shouting when I left that she wanted to come along). We went to Burgos which is by the CHina sea and had a picnic lunch. On our way back we passed the myriad road side stands all selling sea salt in huge rice sacs and vinegar in what looked like vegetable oil jugs. Of course my father picked the stand tended by the young girl in the denim hotpants--to the titillation of Gianing's daughters.

1/6
My dad insisted on driving us to Isabella (June his usual driver wasn't available) to visit my only first-degree cousins on my mother's side: Jojo and Minnie the son and daughter of my mother's late brother, her only sibling. Jojo had a stroke a year ago and he's barely 40. We were about to hit the highway, but my aunt scolded my dad telling him that side of the Island was experiencing heavy rains(Not to mention it's at least an 8 hour drive, because you have to go along the northern shore the mountain road still unpaved). My aunt turned to me and said, see how your dad is? hardheaded. So we went to Laoag instead just to have lunch.

I didn't let my dad drive while he was in the states even though I took him to the DMV to get his license renewed. In Ilocos Norte I was reluctant to drive, especially in Laoag where there didn't seem to be any logic to right-of-way. My dad drove okay, but honked at every jeepney and tricycle that didn't pull over to let him pass--and if they happened to cut him off after picking up a passenger, he would honk long bleeting honks and slow down in front of the offending driver. Don't be an asshole, I said, but he was too incensed and determined to teach them a lesson. If he were a dog he would have been frothing at the mouth.

Philippines backlog cont.

2007-02-22T20:49:00.000-08:00

So what did I do for a month in a half in the Philippines?
*I was introduced to single ladies, teachers, nurses, students. At parties (since it was coming on Fiesta time at the end of January)and every possible occasion. One day I went with my father to Laoag thinking we were going to repair the AC in his car. I was pissed to find myself lunching with my father, a niece in her mid-twenties, and 6 of her women friends and classmates in physical therapy. I think only about half of the girls were actually available. After a while I wasn't sure if this was for my benefit or my dad's (although I can't imagine his grand niece pimping out her girlfriends to a man old enough to be their grandfather. On our way back I told my dad if he pulls something like that again I'm leaving (to my horror he repeated what I said to relatives). [Filipinos are obsessed with relationships--on the PI version of Deal or No Deal hosted by the Chris Aquino, the daughter of the former president, the hostess during Q and A delves deep into the contestants' personal lives: Asked of men and women who either look too fay or too tomboyish for their gender: are you gay, and if so do you have a boy/girl friend (one contestant a butch watchperson, replied she had a "special" friend. Of one contestant who had nine children the hostess asked him if they were all by the same woman). Apparently Filipinos didn't inherit american's squeamishness at too much information.--Anyway after 3 weeks or so, probably because everyone was so busy preparing for the town Fiesta, they left me alone, and I couldn't help feeling like a lost cause.
*Otherwise I observed a life of convalescence, I slept in the same downstairs den as my parent's and their helper, so I was privy to my parent's late night screaming fits (which apparently happened frequently because everyone is so godamned blasse about it: my cousin's wife said "they fight Like cats and dogs, I guess that's how they show their love," she said half-jokingly.

Singapore

2007-02-22T20:32:00.000-08:00

My favorite restaurant in the Arab quarter, didn't right down the nAME, CAN'T TELL IF IT'S VIEWABLE IN THE PHOTO, BUT IT'S RIGHT OFF vICTORIA ON jALAN pISANG--ACROSS THE STREET FROM bLUE HEAVEN, A GAY BATH HOUSE, IN THE SHADOW OF THE MAIN MOSQUE A BLOCK AWAY. The dinner pictured a steal at 3.50 SIngapore dollars or roughly $2.25: a lime cordial, spicy beef, some kind of spicy vegetables, a relish of fish paste with chili sauce, like bagoong with chili paste, all prepared according to Islamic dietary law.

Singapore

2007-02-22T20:30:00.000-08:00

Singapore

2007-02-22T20:29:00.000-08:00

Singapore

2007-02-22T20:20:00.000-08:00

Singapore Chinatown

2007-02-19T00:42:00.001-08:00

Picture 006,
originally uploaded by jgluz71.

I'm fairly certain that this same exact subject appears in a folio by that German photographer or someone else with the same schtick: big architecture dwarfing little people. All scenes have been photographed, all vistas have been captured. Destroy the world for posterity.

Singapore Chinatown

2007-02-19T00:38:00.001-08:00

Picture 005,
originally uploaded by jgluz71.

Singapore

2007-02-19T00:37:00.001-08:00

Picture 004,
originally uploaded by jgluz71.

I met face to face with Daniel Craig at a 7-11 in Chinatown

Singapore: Gateway buildings

2007-02-19T00:36:00.001-08:00

Picture 003,
originally uploaded by jgluz71.

Singapore: Raw Gym

2007-02-19T00:33:00.001-08:00

Picture 002,
originally uploaded by jgluz71.

Stumbled on this men's gym and spa, while walking through Chinatown looking for an art gallery. It's at the end of a cul de sac on top of a hill by Ann Siang park. The sign says it's 24 hours and on Monday of Chinese New Year they have a special call out to 21 y.o. chinese boys. They also have special nights for men of Indian descent.

Singapore

2007-02-19T00:30:00.001-08:00

Picture 001,
originally uploaded by jgluz71.

Park View Square, Cheesy gothic art deco looking tower straight out of Gotham.

Manila backlog I

2007-02-18T23:53:00.000-08:00

1/2/07 Arrived in Manila at 4 in the morning. Dad bought 3 bag's worth of duty-free. He somehow managed to lose the baggage claim sticker for our 3 tremendous balakbayan boxes and his luggage. Luckily at the Laoag airport they weren't such sticklers for such details. Also luckily someone was there to pick us up, since we didn't call ahead of time to confirm we were arriving (Why didn't you call my aunt and uncle ask me, but how do you get a call through on new year's eve?). On the drive to the house my aunt again tells me I need to get married so I have someone to take care of me when I'm old, and also to have kids to prove that I am macho (she says squaring her shoulders in a show of machismo).

When I see my mom, it's kind of a shock to see how old she has gotten, (she can't really walk much, and when she does she's always afraid of falling, even when she uses her walker) After a few days though, after the initial shock of seeing her, I realize that she hasn't really aged that much since she's been here and could pass for someone ten years younger if not for her mobility and communication problems.

1/3/07 My dad is a little less of a pain now, mainly because I don't have to drive him everywhere anymore and see to his needs in the middle of the night, and because most of his needs are met, he's much more agreeable than he was when he was in the states. the next day we take a trip to Vigan (the capital of Ilocos Sur, known for their longoniza and old spanish architecture). As soon as my dad declares his wish to go to Vigan, he calls up a driver, and gets the helpers to ready changes of clothes for him and my mom, and we're off right after breakfast. After lunch in Vigan an impromptu picnic in the car with food bought at some foodstalls, we head over to the ocean. At first I think it's to buy the catch of the day, which we do, all bloody and gleaming in styrofoam coolers, but then my dad goes to the last possible barangay before you hit the beach to buy some fighting cocks. He rides his motorized wheelchair out to see the cocks, and all the children in the village all gather around to gawk at his big exposed belly and his fancy machinery (it looks like a scene out of a spielberg movie. While my dad sizes up the cocks, I sit by the beach where my parent's helpers are taking a smoke break. They tell me that this is what they do most every day: take of on a whim to go wherever whenever, spending money till there's none left. On the way home with the chickens cooped up in cardboard boxes my mother keep muttering "they're all gonna die, matay, matay" which is apparently what happened to the last fighting cocks he bought, all four dead before they even had a chance to spar.

On the way home to Solsona at dusk

2007-02-17T00:44:00.000-08:00

Solsona

2007-02-17T00:10:00.001-08:00

jgl 020,
originally uploaded by jgluz71.

This is dusk heading back into Solsona. Solsona is just due east of Laoag, the capital of Ilocos Norte province, Philippines. Solsona is where my dad was born and most of his family still resides, his brother in law, his youngest sister's husband the mayor of the town for the last decade I believe. To get to Solsona you follow the national highwway North of Manila, and when you detour to Solsona at San Nicholas you end up at the foot hills of the mountains, where the paved highway turns into dirt road. In these mountains are where the New People's Army use to camp out, now it seems they've headed south to join the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). I thought I could describe Solsona as Hobbiton, idylic, rustic, removed, provincial [the town is up for the National Greenest town award (Not sure if they award these to each class of municipality, but it's an auspicious designation regardless)], but I'd might as well build Nipa huts and paint watercolors of the men and women casting nets or doing some inexplicable thing with unrefined rice. Suffice to say it a small (municipality class 4 don\t know what this means), quiet, mostly agrarian, some of it very beautiful. Solsona is where both my parents have lived since 2004, their quality of life being much better here than what it would be in the States: oweing to all the relatives in close proximity, some just houses away, and the almighty dollar compared to the Philippine Piso.

Solsona

2007-02-17T00:09:00.001-08:00

jgl 001,
originally uploaded by jgluz71.

This is my dad in the room where he and my mother now live in the ground floor of my Aunt's house, a former mayor and town doctor of Solsona, her husband the current mayor. The room they reside in was first built as a clinic for my Aunt's private practice, I remember being 12 and playing chess (was never very good at it) with my father's father (I beat him only once eventhough he was old and my faculties just bripening)in the waiting room. At some point the room was turned into a bar/recreation room, and now as my aunt says it's a home for the old. In the photo, the 2 women on the right are the sisters that take turns giving 24 hour care for my parents (The woman outside the sliding door, Gianing,is a big and powerful woman, she can carry my mother in and out of cars, several meters if my mother's too tired to walk and there's no wheelchair available, her elder sister, Vering (these are their nicknames not sure what the real names are possibly Valeria and Gianine) smokes huge handrolled cigaretted:tobacco rolled in tobacco): laundry, bathing, cooking, cleaning, foot massaging. I'm ashamed to tell you how much my father pays them--apparently the deal started as payment for just a daily bath, but the sisters felt sorry for my parents and stuck around at night. Don't know if they're earning a decent living working for my parents, there are probably other benefits I don't realize like my dad buys more food than he or my mother could possibly eat, so most likely their families benefit as well. I will send the helpers something nice from the states out of guilt and grattitude: maybe earings or a carton of menthols.

Solsona

2007-02-17T00:07:00.001-08:00

jgl 002,
originally uploaded by jgluz71.

This is my mother in a good mood. When this photo was taken, my father and I just returned from the states. Upon first seeing my mother I was shocked to see how old she'd turned, but then later realized she hadn't really changed much in the years she's been here. I can never tell how she's really doing, because she always says she's dying, but then the next minute she's laughing because the help just made a joke at my father's expense (most likely something about a gun with no bullets). She had a stroke maybe 4 or 5 years ago now, the residual effects being coughing every time she drinks and eats as if she's choking and difficulty with names (this is not to say she doesn't recognize anyone, but sometimes she calls them by the wrong name, e.g., since her stroke she refers to me or my brother as Sammy, the name of her long dead younger borther, her only other sibling. If you ask her to correct herself, then with some effort she gives you the right name, but nights when she would wake me up to help her to get out of bed to be changed or to use the bathroom, she would be calling for Sammy.

Singapore Sling

2007-02-15T23:14:00.000-08:00

Dear friends, I write you from the moneyed island of Singapore. I decided on Singapore as an initial destination over Bangkok, worried that a month and a half of living passively in the Philippines with my family had left my wits slightly addled and atrophied. So Singapore seemed like a good compromise (My aunt had been advising me to go to Singapore instead of Bangkok, because it's clean and they speak English there). I finally got off my ass and bought a ticket to get here by Chinese New year, the new moon on February 18, having found out that it's the Year of the Pig, which is my cycle, a very fitting time for generous upheavel and new experiences. I flew the day after Valentine's Day--and honestly it would have not been so bad staying with my family for 2 months like I originally claimed (What the hell are you going to do for 2 months!). As much as I complain about my parents (I'll be posting the entries on what all happened in the Philippines later), I realized how much I missed them as soon as I said goodbye and boarded that plain out of Laoag and had to wait around the Manila airport for 2 hours not a familiar face in sight--oh lonely lonely world.

So I arrived in Singapore at dusk, flying in you could see all the rectilinear developments, buildings like the ones that that German guy photograps can't remember his name--the mute hysteria of the Grid. The airport runway was immaculate, the medians manicured like bowling greens. All the signage in the airport effortlessly corraled me through customs, the money exchange, and directly to the metro. The ez link cards, you just tap on the turnstyle regardless of orientation. The trains are all virgin New York subways, scentless and spotless. If it weren't so clean I could have easily imagined I was on my way to some far stop in Queens, the riders being mostly Indian and Chinese. I climbed out of Bugis station where there were a lot of budget hotels and guest houses, it was already dark. I had planned to try the New 7th Story Hotel, but didn't realize I was on the wrong street having got out of the wrong exit and misoriented my idea of Singapore by 90 degrees. I was blocks away when I finally realized and consulted my guide book. I crossed the street to head back to the station, passed an indian man who muttered something to me about american dollar. I quickened my pace, determined to reorient myself. There were sidewalk tents set up for vendors, and I think it was one of the tethering wires that I tripped over. efore I knew what was happening, the extra 9 kilos on my back made me hit the pavement with a loud crack (I'm guessing since my cheekbone wasn't fractured, it was the sound of my teeth slamming closed, my swollen lip proof), landing on my right cheekbone and biting my upper lip. I quickly got up and looked to see that no one had noticed, that side of the street being mostly empty. I continued my way to the station and then things got kind of fuzzy. I remember feeling my lip and cheek swell, but I dabbed a napkin and there didn't seem to be too much blood. As far as I can tell I never blacked out or got nauseous, but the details are like trying to remember a dream. I vaguely remember passing restaurants and offices and getting paranoid that I fucked up my head and thought I'm going to turn into a street person, this is how it happens. At some point I was trying to remember things and couldn't remember if my parents were still alive, couldn't remember that I had just left them in the Philippines. One of my last thoughts, shit I think I'm in trouble. Somehow though I managed to find my way to the Raffles Hospital, a huge private hospital a block from Bugis station--I can't remember though how I managed to steer my way there, must have been on auto pilot. The person at the front desk immediately asked me if I needed a policeman (I thought is my face that battered) but I suddenly recalled falling and told him there was no crime. As I waited in the examination room for a doctor my head slowly rebooted and remembered that I had been in the Philippines since January. So they did a CT scan and found no hemmorhaging, no sign of a concussion, and the cuts on my face just superficial abrasions (looks like I tried to scratch my eye out with a small-tined fork. So my first night in Singapore was in a 4-bed room in the Raffles Hospital (a venerable private hospital, I assume linked to the four-star Raffles Hotel. Civic safety and orderliness being job one in this country and leave it to me to find a way to fall and break my face barely an hour into my stay. Oh well, the service and food at the hospital were excellent and prices are high this weekend in most place anyway because of Chinese New Year. As I write this I still have a slight headache--on the wrong side of my head--I'm still swollen and earlier this morning had trouble reading a map and calculating my hotel fee, I had trouble convincing myself that 8 x 7 is indeed 56. Anyway I want to take this episode as pre-disastering measures, leaving the rest of my journeys as safe and calm as lavendar, and not as some lunar new year portent of more headaches. I'm sure and the good doctors are sure that I'm okay, but you'll tell me, won't you if you discern any change in my personality.

Bilog ang Mundo

2007-01-16T00:50:00.000-08:00

I'm posting from an internet cafe somewhere in metro manila I'm not sure where. We're stuck here because of the stupid coding laws: any vehicles that end in the number 3 or 4 cannot be out on the road all day long till 7 pm.

I've been here in the Philippines since January 2. Left LA on January 31, rang in the new year somewhere over the Pacific halfway between LA and Manila. Landed in Manila the morning of the 2nd and then flew a connecting flight to Laoag Illocos Norte later that morning. For the last 2 weeks I have been in Solsona, Ilocos Norte where my parents live in the ground floor den of my aunt, my dad's sister and her husband the mayor. They have lived there for the last 2 weeks. On Sunday night, the 14th, my dad his helper, his driver and me took an overnight bus to Manila, to go pick up my dad's car from the dealership, where it was being repaired for the last three months for a broken transmission casing and detailing (from when my dad fell asleep at the wheel and veered off the road into the rice paddy, luckily no passengers or farmers were hurt. He was driving back to the house in the afternoon from the family farm, a 10 minute drive).

Today we went to go visit one of my dad's old friends, Tito Manny, who's kids used to be my playmate but I have yet to meet as adults. He's been in the states almost as long as we have and has built a vacation home in Bulucan. His house in the middle of some podunk township with streets even narrower than my dad's hometown, looked like it was directly transplanted from orange county, one of any of those ranch style stucco jobs in any Santa Ana cul de sac. Later we visited the grave of my sister who died before I was born at the unripe age of 9 months from some virulent strain of influenza, next to her grave my mother's father who died in 86.

Afterwards we went to go get mirienda and got pulled over by a traffic cop for having the wrong number at the end of our license plate and now I'm here at this internet cafe with abunch of kids playing on line RPG games, which apparently is the reason for most internet cafe's around here. At the counter I tried to talk in tagalog, but the girl couldn't here me over the din of the outside traffic and the billiards/karaoke room, so I broke into english, and now everyone in the place knows I can't speak tagalog, and now I'm paranoid of getting worked over by some juvenile street toughs, steal my dollars and my digital camera--but I just now looked around at the other customers and half of them are elementary school age and the rest are in College uniforms. In any case it's too hot in here and I'm not sure if my dad realizes I'm in here, when I left his helper was adjusting his car seat so he could recline, because apparently we really are grounded here till 7pm. We already wheesiled our way out of the ticket by palming over 200 pesos or about 5 bucks to the traffic cop, who didn't give in to our driver's pleas "We're from out of town, we just visited this man's child's grave and we're leaving Manila tomorrow. We're also staying in Del Monte (a relatively incorporated area of Quezon city, lots of building materials and mechanics, which I think gives us some kind of blue collar credit to soften the impact of us driving around a 2006 x-trail.

That's it for me, it's too hot there's 2 dumb schoolboys next to me playing some stupid online war game, and I've got the runs from the water or the fish or something.

Bilog ang mundo

2007-01-15T05:48:00.000-08:00

Here in Manila since this morning at 5 am. Othrwise was in Ilocos Norte for the last 2 weeks. Hate being carted around and introduced like a mail order bride, this fucken sucks, trying to stay diconnected and aloof, but am planning my escape. Will most likely be with family through the month, the 25th is the local town fiesta up north. After that if I ever manage to get a ticket to Thailand, I am out of here. More later when I find a quicker internet connection.

You are the Son of a Motherfucker

2006-12-16T23:18:00.000-08:00

My cousin is gone. He flew back last week. Thank fucken god, more space in the house, one less person to entertain, no cigarette smoke wafting through the front door at 3 in the morning, no more unsaid obligations to get my cousin a lap dance in Hollywood or one of those creepy strip joints off the PCH in the Gatsbian wasteland between Wilmington and Terminal Island. This isn't to say that my cousin wasn't entirely useless, getting my dad in and out of the car, entertaining my dad's endless conversations about putang, he did let me play with the Playstation and Nintendo handheld that he supposedly bought for his 5-year-old son, and my cousin was also unfailingly upbeat if in a happy-go-lucky, entitled kind of way (I was never quite sure what his title as manager of his family's beer and beverage distribution company entailed: most week nights and weekends from what I saw he would stay up late drinking beer, eating pulutan (essentialy anything that goes good with beer), chain-smoking Marlboro lights and shooting the shit with his friends and lackeys—he explained to me once that this was important for any business: self-patronization—I forget the exact term he used— drinking your own beer by the case— Apparently over there, it's not only okay but beneficial to piss where you work, like a budweiser workhorse I guess.) What my cousin lacked in caregiving skills (it was supposed to be my other cousin, the RN, that should have accompanied my dad but couldn't clear a visa) he made up for by acting as a buffer of sorts between me and my brother and my dad: as long as my cousin was there, tempers still flared, but no slamming of doors, nothing broken or thrown, we didn't freely cuss out my dad like we usually do "Fuck you, dad, don't be a jerk"—didn't want to get too ugly for real in front of the houseguest. Growing up, me and my brother were the least respectful, least deferential of all our cousins and friends: never using the honorific kuya or manong for our elders, or saying yes, uncle, or yes, auntie, yes lolo, lola. I'm not sure why. Social awkward, aculturated, painfully shy, snobbery? I admit I was and am a fucken snob, I'm not like any of you, fuck you all.

So my routine for the last 3 weeks has been: getting woken up late in the evening to empty my dad's piss bottle (we could just go to the medical supply store and buy a second 4 dollar container, but I guess everything needs to be difficult so I can feel justifiably put upon) and too early in the morning to make coffee or go buy Jack-in-the-box breakfast croissants (" Come on, anak, go to jack-in-the-box, buy me some coffee and a breakfast croissant—two years I haven't had a breakfast croissant," he said. The other day it was 2 years since he's had a pastrami sandwich, and last week it was steak from Norm's) This morning I woke to him whining about getting him a caregiver for his last two weeks in the states, because I don't do everything he says, and when I do, it's not fast enough "I'm homesick," he told me and my brother one evening, "In the Philippines I have three old lady's, three sisters who take turns taking care of me, but they all smoke tobacco. Also a bakla massages my feet for 250 pesos." "Do you get a blowjob too," I had to ask. "We still have your foot massager in the garage," my brother says.), and then driving to go shopping (If I'm lucky the Walmart or hardware store will have a supply of motorized wheelchair/shopping carts for the elderly and handicapped and I'll spend a half hour wandering the aisles trying to hunt him down. I've been taking him to see his old friends in Downey, his comadre and compadre my dad is godfather to their now 25 year-old daughter, who last time I saw her—since I refused to go to their christmas day lunches—she was barely pubescent and her younger brother was playing peewee hockey. Now they're both artsy 20-something indie rockers. Most nights we pick up food for dinner, more bad filipino food from pinoy/pinay, and when my brother gets home from work, I escape to the gym.

Some days are more trying than others. The other morning was especially trying. I was half awake when my brother reminded me to get one of my dad's bank checks from the safe to pay his credit card bill (This year my dad spent on average 9000 US dollars a month, on what we're still not quite sure.) The safe box was from their old house and required a key and a combination. My brother left me the key and the Jesus refrigerator magnet on the back of which was written the four number combo. I gave my dad one of his checks to fill out and sign, retrieved the box of checks when he was done and put it back in the safe. I looked around for the Jesus picture, but couldn't find it. I asked my dad what happened to the Jesus icon and he said he placed it on top of the box of checks. To my horror I realized I had locked the combination in the safe. I tried to remember the combo but couldn't recall the last 2 numbers. My dad blamed me for not noticing that he had put the Jesus picture "on top of the box," he claimed. Later he remembered that they'd also written the combo on the inside of their old filing cabinet. I told him I thought the cabinet might be in the storage rental in Bell Gardens, but in the back of my mind I thought I remembered donating it to Goodwill or Out of the Closet (2 years ago when my Dad was still in the hospital my brother hurriedly packed up my parent's possessions, trashed or left behind a sizable backyard's worth of junk, and sold the house we grew up in). So we went to the storage and of course the filing cabinet was long gone and my dad blamed me and my brother for throwing away their stuff (My mom's orchids, the gargantuan green and wood-paneled station wagon my dad bought from Auntie Julie for 200 bucks, they were seventh day adventists, so there weren't a lot of miles on it). Later that evening when I told my brother what happened, he lost his shit and called me and my dad idiots. "Are you fucken stupid, you're both fucken idiots" my brother yelled and slammed the bedroom door repeatedly. Turns out all I had to do was call the Manufacturer, which I did the next day when my dad remembered that he had sent it to the manufacturer in case he lost the combo. So I called them up,I gave them the model and serial number which were both written on the safe door, and they gave me the combo without a single question. I opened the safe and found the Jesus icon. I showed my dad how he had buried it in the check box beneath 2 booklets. "Godamn it," he said.

Kamay Kamay

2006-12-15T23:19:00.000-08:00

My uncle Ninong, who became a Mormon not because he believed the indians were a lost tribe of Israel, but because of his Poligamist sympathies, used to give me violin lessons when I was 10 or 11. He loved slight of hand tricks and was the person that first took us to the magic shop in Hollywood—is this shop some kind of venerable institution among slight of hand artists, I don't know, didn't recognize any of the photos they had on display, No Penn and Teller, No Blane, no Ricky Jay. I don't really know why my Uncle Joseph wanted a deck of marked cards, or why his son bought a dvd to learn misdirection and palming techniques with nerf balls. I can only imagine that it's something to amuse their kids and buddies back home, drinking with their barcada, they can't be talking about chix all the time, and everybody has the same 3-minute bluetooth porn that they trade around like scabies ("scandals" they call them, soon to be if not already the rage in the states along with wireless-machineless karaoke), so maybe every once in a while someone breaks out with some cheeseball trick, pulling red felt balls out of his compadre's pants pocket. "I've got your balls!" Maybe Filipino boys grow up learning different bare-handed skills: eating rice without utensils, uncapping beer bottles with other beer bottles, and then there's the ubiquitous overgrown thumbnail that many a Filipino man's man/street tough seems to cultivate, and use like an all purpose decal scratcher, pimple popper or letter opener or what have you. And of course there's that other league entirely of slight of hand artists who palm pig hearts and goats intestines, as seen on that's incredible and RIpley's Believe it or not:
" One of the most dramatic forms of faith healing that has attracted significant international attention is "psychic surgery." "It involves the painless insertion of the healer's fingers into the individual's body, re moval of tissues, tumors, growths, or foreign matter, and closing the incision without a scar" (Harper & Fullerton, 1994, p. 62). Numerous Western scientists have investigated tales of "miracle cures" produced by psychic surgeons and found evidence of fakery; however, they also have reportedly witnessed incredible feats of healing (Harper & Fuller ton, 1994)"— http://www.livinginthephilippines.com/philculture/practices.html
Why magic tricks? Maybe it's one of the few ways boys can show such delicate manual dexterity and gesticulate so elegantly and still be manly. Maybe it's just more stupid shit, to kill time, and if you say so then you're just a killjoy. I dunno but it makes for a lovely trope, don't it, the whole thing with presentation and misdirection. Can't deonstruct everything all the time. It's okay to be a fool for magic.

Knock Knock Knockin on Heaven's Door

2006-12-03T23:14:00.000-08:00

It's only been 2 weeks that my dad and cousin have been staying with me and my brother in his 2 bedroom house, but it feels much much longer. My cousin most nights (when he hasn't fallen asleep flopped on the love seat, having been texting his paramours in the Philippines into the early AM) sleeps in my bedroom, and I camp out in the living room on an inflatable mattress ten feet away from my dad his semi-liquid bullk perched on a leather sofa looking like he could easily roll over in his sleep and crash to the floor. It took me a week to get used to his frequent and persistent moaning ("Apo, Apo" invoking the god of pain and old age) Last week I drove my dad to go to the doctor (who I found out is Taiwanese and if not quite the quack I made him out to be is prescription happy, always plying my dad with samples for asthma inhalers, blood-sugar stabilizers, and viagra.) Other days I took him shopping, to visit old friends unannounced, or to eat bad filipino food for lunch in Carson or Norwalk. On Thursday I ended up driving my cousin and my dad to one of the last remaining seedy blocks of Hollywood Boulevard, where they went to a magic store (buying some 80 dollars worth of trick cards, a chinese wand, vanishing foam balls, and a functioning pen that can puncture holes through dollar bills without a tear.) Three doors down they made their way to a sex shoppe to look for dildos and aphrodisiacs. I did not accompany them into the sex shoppe, but instead shoved my dad on his wheelchair through the open doorway, beckoning my cousin to take over, and parked my ass on a bus bench to read the LA weekly. After 15 minutes, I went in to check on them and found my dad sizing up a rack of pornstar dildos ("do these vibrate?" he asked me). My cousin purchased some kind of "Spanish fly" in powder form ("I can put this in their salads" he told me later in the car, pulling out a baggy with what looked like ground cumin). Later that evening at a Denny's in downtown Long Beach (At my dad's insistence on T-bone steaks for dinner), my cousin complained how hard it's been to go without fucking for the last week. "I want to go home," he said, "back home I can't go 2 days without..." and then he gestured by rapping his knuckles on the table.

They eat raw goat hide in Earlimart don't they

2006-11-24T23:15:00.000-08:00

Tuesday night I found myself in Earlimart, California. Earlimart if you don't know, (and why would you know anything about Earlimart unless you picked grapes or you're fortunate enough to be able to underpay a bunch of people to pick grapes or maybe you're dad happened to be born there) is a small farming town in the central valley a few miles north of Delano. 3 hours up from LA barring traffic. I found out last week my father was flying in the Sunday night before Thanksgiving, with his nephew and his brother -in-law, his brother-in-law my uncle is the mayor of Solsona, the town in Illocos Norte where my dad is from. My uncle is here to meet with the sizable community of transplanted townspeople here in California—most of them in LA or Delano— to raise money for civic improvements back home. According to my uncle his town has suffered a brain drain, not only farmers, but nurses and other professionals have moved to Cali or Hawaii. We thought my dad would never come back to the states again, he was paralyzed from the waist down when I left him there 2 years ago this November. But now he can stand and waddle around if only a few feet before he gets winded, his prodigiously globular bulk now resting on atrophied but stunningly smooth legs that would put any woman a third his age to shame. So my semi-incontinent, mobily-challenged father has returned for a check-up—either he doesn't trust the doctors over there (even though his US doctor of many years is something of a quack) or else they're ill equipped (back when he first went back to the PI, someone advised me that in the event he would need an oncologist, I'd be hard-pressed to find one in Manila, no less the northern province. So only 2 days with my dad and I'm emotionally and physically drained. Tuesday I thought I was just driving them to Glendale for lunch and ended up driving three hours to Earlimart where the Solsona transplants were cooking up some kilawen kalding, which is ceviche but instead of raw fish it's goat hide. So by the time it was dark in the valley we were only in Bakersfield. I misunderstood the directions and looked for Exit 48 not realizing 48 was avenue 48. Turned out Avenue 48 was the wrong exit anyway. So for about an hour we were driving past vast pitch-black grape fields, trying to read street names obscured by trees and dust. While driving, I've had to overhear countless conversations about pootang. Eventhough I barely understand their northern dialect, which is vastly different from tagalog, I know for certain that my 70+ year-old dad and 34 year-old cousin were talking about fifteen year old pussy, estudiante, as they say. (I'm writing from an internet cafe with my cousin right now and I was so sure he would be looking at porn which I told him would be frowned upon especially at the way gay cafe I've taken him to, and he's actually being good, maybe I'm being an asshole...OK no, he just looked up from his laptop and asked me if I want to meet someone). On the plus side when we finally got to the party in a suburban-looking enclave of Earlimart—it's middleclass facade given away by a preponderance of parked semi-trucks—there was some good goat and seafood and finally got to try out the wireless microphone with the karaoke chip, a whole karaoke machine with a thousand songs contained in a microphone. We left the party after 11 and by the time I got back to the 5 Interstate it was fogged over—visability down to 10 feet. Thank god the 5 is straight as a straight man in straightown. Luckily when we got to the grapevine we reached an elevation above the fog. I couldn't help blaming my dad for the fog. Goddamn asshole ruins everything.

No one should ever have the same knowledge again

2006-10-17T17:31:00.000-07:00

Pamela Z created a piece inspired by the museum of Jurassic Technology. What was sublime now has no rhyme, no vim, nor whim, and at worst it was total cheese. No one should ever have the same knowledge again...

Image Hosting | Video Hosting | Myspace Games

Tried to get in all the bits

2006-09-19T15:41:00.000-07:00

September Girls

2006-09-15T16:27:00.000-07:00

Some song written by Alex Chilton, covered by the bangles, though none of the lyrics would illucidate anything here. ("Even though I keep away/ they will love all our days") Just that it's the middle of september already, so soon. Nothing much done except some fine fine television viewing. Yesterday I went with Ji Sung to the Burbank IKEA to go buy Anthony some BILLY book shelves. It seems like all IKEAS I know of (Emeryville, Carson, Burbank) face in a westwardly direction. Never ate the meatballs before, was quite a revelation--I thought it would taste like particle board, but they were actually tasty and cheap to boot. Must go back and try their 2 buck breakfast. Later had dinner with Anthony and Ji Sung at an Italian place in Los Feliz. They informed me that David Lynch dines every friday evening across the street at Figaro's where they also once saw the blonde girl from Grey's Anatomy. Nothing much else this Friday afternoon spent at the public library, and now sending this missive from a cafe by Bixby park a block from the ocean. Oh yeah, went to the Long Beach art museum where they had these old portraits, silhouettes and duegerrotypes of african americans: abolitionist tracts, moneyed freed slaves commisioning portraits, it was very edifying--at one point one of the gallery rooms was filled with moms and their screaming and stomping children wsith downey blonde hair, where's a changeling when you need one.

Bill Viola

2006-09-13T15:55:00.000-07:00

Last week I drove to Belmont Shore here in Long Beach to buy a bag of Peet's coffee. Waiting for my complimentary cappuccino, I overheard the middle-aged white guy with the salt-and-pepper beard chat with the waifish blonde girl working behind the espresso machine. You know Bill Viola, he asked her. He came to my school one time, she replied. You know he lives here in Belmont. Really, she said without a hint of surprise or incredulity (If it was Starbuck's, there surely would have been more feeling to her response). Yeah, and he keeps a studio in the neighborhood, too. Margo—non-fat latte! He turned around just then and saw me jerk my head in response to his information: Zoinks, that's news to me. I thought maybe he would notice my new "Brown Jesus" t-shirt that Ji Sung got me from the Chicano art exhibit at the De Young. I wanted to call Michella and verify this info on Bill Viola, since he had just spoken at that multi-media art conference in San Jose that she worked at, but then I remembered she might be in Belgium. Belmont Shores if you've never been is one of the last neighborhoods of Long Beach before you hit the O.C.Â—it's the gates of Mordor (The dark lord lives in Disneyland). It's got a mile long commercial stripÂ—Stage IV gentrificationÂ—with a requisite Banana and adjacent Gap and a Body Shop. It's got four or so cafes, a handful of beachcomber clothing shops, an Aardvark's, and an equilibrated ratio between it's independent ethnic and chain restaurants, hence it's stage IV classification. The denizens and patrons are middle-class white, even the vagrants are white, old circuit-surfers, grizzled and sun-damaged from the endless summer. The sidewalks here are barely big enough to accommodate the persistent fleet of chic ergonomic and aerodynamic baby strollers. Bill Viola, the golden boy of conceptual, video art lives here? How long ago was this neighborhood at Stage-I gentrification, late 70's, early 80's, a shuddering row of Bukowski bars, seedy galleries, and artist's shacks made from L.A. River flotsam, where have all the hipsters gone, or when they finally shed their youth, who did they become? Does Bill Viola shop in his own neighborhood? Does he buy his bland, solid-colored (so as not to produce moirÃ©-patterns on video) button down shirts and chinos at the Gap? Does he do the 20-minute circuit training at the Executive Fitness club? In his evening strolls does he sometimes stray from the shore and head down to second st? Does he look down the straight-as-an-arrow strip past the quick succession of half-sized blocks, witnessing the untimed traffic lights, shifting like retinal cone cells, tracking a residual line to some elusive vanishing point. Does he conceptualize the proceedings as some kind of memento mori: retail and it's audacious claims to immortality. Later at the Jack-in-the-box across the way where I ate a breakfast croissandwich with my cappucino, I thought, why should I be so surprised that Bill Viola lives here. Wasn't there always some ineffable middleclass whiteness to his work, all those home videos of his daughter's birth and birthday parties, all those tableaus screaming midlife crises. All those humorless elegies, those golden days fading to static, the digital decay and dying, waxing poetic like an aging baby boomer would. Welcome to Belmont Shores, stomping grounds for O.C. housewives, calstate Long Beach co-eds and international art stars.

SF Mem 12: Reminisce and her horses

2006-08-03T15:26:00.000-07:00

Heat stroke

2006-07-21T18:22:00.000-07:00

It's hot down here. I forgot that summer means heat waves and brownish thunderhead clouds by the san gabriels, the san bernadinos. Even by the beach it's hot, no cool wet breeze, just more warm stifling air like the AC is broken. I've been trying to go running earlier in the morning to avoid the heat at its worst, but I hit the pavement after 10 and the sun was already near its apex, already above 80. I made my way down to the bike and running path at the beach where I stop at every half mile or so at a drinking fountain. I take the ramp exit at the park and do the circuit training stuff by the rec center, where all the hoods and derelicts hang out. By this time I'm so sweaty I look like I've come straight out of the harbor and I can taste the salt and diluted sun screen on my skin. There's a very old asian lady doing stretching exercises, she's unaccompanied and I wonder how she waddled her way down here with her toddling, diminutive steps. She's wearing a house dress with bright, primary-color flowers on a bright blue field and navy blue sneakers. Her short hair is dyed a light auburn and at the crown of her head is a seeping white patch. She could be my mother. For a brief instant I think that my dad and his family, sick of her old woman's complaints and arguments, have conspired to send her back to the states and she's been fending for herself at some city convelescent home. I haven't called them since last October maybe last September so I don't know. I have to look at her face to make sure it's not her. The woman's right eye is half closed, but I don't remember which side of my mom's face was affected after her stroke. She returns my stare and facing her now I she looks too chinese to be my mother. Mayhe it's too hot to be exercising. I watch her as she waddles away and I try to remember how dark my mother's bare limbs were last time I saw her.

SF Mem 11

2006-07-19T16:35:00.000-07:00

SF Mem 10

2006-07-19T16:34:00.000-07:00

I don't miss San Francisco: 17 Reasons

1. What is the opposite of nostomania. (I learned this word the other week from word-of-the-day). nostalgia equals stasis equals no where left to run to. I want to go where they're still building and burning down love, still burning down love.
2. I heart LA.
3. I don't want to freeze like Walt Disney or Mark Twain, cryogenically entombed, a simpering sliver of never-scintillating summer to remember my name, any name.
4. They have a saying about this town, but I never knew what it was.
5. Maybe it went something like: Too many good men shanghaied, bagdhaded, haight-ashburied, western-additioned, their hopes Dashielled in the Hammets.
6. Never look back, lest you turn into a pillar of finishing salt to be pinched and plated on a fifty dollar entree at gary denko's for the heirs and heiresses of the western seaboard.
7. My hopes and aspirations withered and died—no, they were murdered—here in this city—Burn all the bridges down to the pillars, let no one leave this island once I've gone——silly rabbit, that's not me, that's that megalomaniac with the hemp jumpsuit and the 99-cent-store superpowers, this town (i.e., all those johns) left a bad taste in his mouth, like drinking OJ after having just gargled listerine.
8, 9, and 10: Cow hollow, Pac Heights, the Marina.
11. Hipsters never die, they buzz around like flies.
12. Have you seen those prices? At those prices, I'll have a lien on my soul before the next boom buries me for good.
13. I will come back to die here if I don't die somewhere else first.
14. I know where they store the rainbow flags off season. I know the garage where, the week after pride, they fold all 525 flags into 21 boxes, each box with a handful of cedar shavings. I know where pride hibernates for 11 months of the year and it beats horribly like the telltale heart.
15. Hippies never die, they buzz around like hipsters.
16. The burritos keep getting bigger and bigger, like little baby bunting.
17. My friends are always with me in everything I believe and everything I do, no matter where we end up.

SF Mem 9

2006-07-12T20:37:00.000-07:00

This isn't a memory because this is now. I'm back where I was when I first started blogging. Back at Ritual drinking french-pressed coffee and using their spotty wireless. Surprised to find it's packed with people either grinding away at their laptops or after-dinner chatting—it's half past eight in the evening, middle of the week, the yellowish overhead lights and they're playing early stereolab--heavy on the droning guitars and moog, a distorted calliope. The cute hapa dyke barrista--you know the one-- she got her hair done but now she looks too coifed as opposed to somewhere between tussled and bedhead. I left Berkeley at about noon today on a mission to get to baker beach before it was completely fogged over. But by the time I got to the richmond it was pretty overcast. Always the hopeful fool, I rode the bike out to baker beach anyway hoping for a break in the fog. And as I turned off Lake onto 25th ave heading down hill, the sun broke through. I had forgotten that baker beach, the way it's tucked in the corner of the city before the bridge, the fog whips around it, a confluence of different wind fronts, leaving it fairly sunny--enough to get a tan--eventhough the neighboring beaches, china beach, fort point are fogged over. There was barely anybody there, a handful of nudists camped out just before the rocks. I tanned my bare ass; I think I'm slightly sunburned.

SF Mem 8

2006-06-30T00:41:00.000-07:00

SF Mem 7

2006-06-27T13:00:00.000-07:00

Queerbeat at Liquid on a Monday night, circa early winter 2002, 16th btw Cap and Van Ness. It's packed and everybody's found their groove, dancing to an extended remix of Nina Simone's Sealine Woman. Call and response. Jazz flute. Nothing better ever again.

SF Mem 6

2006-06-21T10:06:00.000-07:00

They were the chosen people. They would be clones if not for their bellybuttons, even the most feral ones that ate their mothers along with their own afterbirth. a UNIVERSE in a scrotal sac. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a righteous sound system erect. The chosen people had matching torsos and interchangable limbs, matching fist tags, they all writhed to the same fascist 2/2 beat and their beaded sweat glistened in the same frenzied lights. Half past midnight, the mothership broke through the ceiling and spun it's rotary probe toward the floor and the chosen people all bowed to her laser beam teets, sucking the milklight like a ravenous litter.

SF Mem 5

2006-06-19T18:06:00.000-07:00

In 10 years:
196 burritos
148 tacos carne asada
68 tacos lengua
124 fish tacos
47 papusas
823 shrimp dumplings
614 pork dumplings
419 steamed bbq pork buns
84 burger joint burgers
48 claimjumpers from grubsteak
64 Salvodoreno pastries
49 quesedilla suizas
69 vietnamese sandwiches
59 bowls of pho
154 entrees from Pasta Pomodoro
29 ginger cakes with pumpkin ice cream from chow
104 pieces of yellowtail sushi
25 pieces uni sushi
27 seitan sandwiches and orders of garlic fries from Jay's cheese steak
79 pieces of naan
43 samosas
37 fried fish cakes
32 scoops Michell's Mango Ice Cream
16 scoops Michell's Avacado Ice Cream
1094 cappucinos
2942 cups of coffee
17 creme brulees
12 legs of duck confit
7 orders foie gras
2147 bottles of beer
237 glasses of wine
1956 mixed drinks
23 warm chocolate cakes
145 falaffel deluxe and
112 lamb shawermas from truly mediteranean
9 souffles
Only a couple cases of bad food poisoning

SF mem 4

2006-06-19T11:02:00.000-07:00

I still had birkenstocks. We were on Valencia for some reason. I stepped on a humongous pile of shit--like horse-size but fresh-dog-poo consistency--maybe one of those horse-dog hybrids. When I stepped in it, I slid about a foot on the worn out sole of my birkenstock. I said wooooohhh as I slid and regained my footing. I scraped that shit like a spatula on frosting and it came that close to coming over the brim of the cork foot bed and smearing my toes. Forever after I watched the sidewalk and discovered all the stencils spraypainted on the pavement.

SF Mem 2 and 3

2006-06-15T16:57:00.001-07:00

Mem 2: First time coming out of 16th and mission station headed to the epicenter zone. This part of town is tore up. A decade later and the intersection looks the same, same old crackhead.

Mem 3: Was that the first time we went to the city? At night? Visiting Kris and Fernando in Hayes Valley, Rose st., before they tore down the freeway and there were still lots of hookers and the neighborhood wasn't quite ready for so-and-so's girlfriend's homegrown couteur. Fernando Marti, no matter how hard we deny/politic/protest/sustainable-developement-proselatize, seems like gentrification takes root wherevers we lay down our seedy little hats.

The Magnetic Fields of the Whirling Mechanism, Part III

2006-06-15T16:56:00.000-07:00

The epigraph in the Kircher exhibit, Valentine Worth, he recognized the name. When he got home, Abrams hunted through his archive of pulp fiction for the bound set of Eerie Tales, a Canadian fantasy monthly published between world wars. Later that night, instead of the next story from Isaac Basheevis Singer's Old Tales from the New World for Ethan's bedtime story he read a Valentine Worth installment from issue 14 of Eerie tales, the story: The Island of Death. The ehxaustive yet lyrical descriptions of the flora and fauna and Abrams' monotone delivery put his 4-year-old to sleep within minutes, but he continued reading aloud, looking for a connection. The story was your stock mad-scientist-plays-god-in-paradise, but seeded, if somewhat artlessly, among the man-eating plants and powder-coat-finish drones, was a strange borgesian conceit. And therein lay the connection to Athanasius Kircher exhibt at the museum. In the heart of the Island of Death lay an impendingly disastrous anomaly, the holy grail of electro-magnetism, a monopole. Magnets have both a south pole and a north pole, thus creating a regulated field. Instead, the monople was steadily gathering mass and strength like a blackhole. Kircher believed that magnetism ruled all aspects of our existence, the invisible strings and knots that linked all our choices and fates, our dreams and desires all given to the pull of magnetism's omnipresent flux aeterna. There are no demons or angels, just points in a field seeking to align and resonate. In the case of the monopole, however, the field can only grow stronger, a juggernaut of influence, nullifying any free will. Valentine's story went further to claim that God is Death and Death is a monopole, entropy is a consequence of this anomaly, all things must decay, subsumed by chaos, our souls eviscerated. All our lives in service to a single anomaly like flotsam reeling in a boundless vortex. This is good stuff, Abrams thought, like a conversation cross milenium and across hemispheres between a Jesuit polymath, Kirchner and Valentine Worth a dime-story writer. This stuff is too good not to use. It would take him several years to cook it all down on the back burner, inbetween Alias and a handful of movie projects. Soon he'd have the specs for a whole new tv series, add some fresh faces, some exotic locales, palm off the whole thing as a work in progress. Who would have thunk that the seeds of an emmy award winning show, adored by critics and fans, were housed in some obscure museum on Venice Blvd. The world is indeed bound with secret knots.

SF Mem 1

2006-06-07T18:37:00.000-07:00

You are riding Z Bus. No, this is not an approximation of a fucked-up French accent. I did not do K through 12 at the l'ecole Francais, you privelaged sons of junior league bitches. This is the transbay bus, route Z as in Zed is Dead. This is the bus for ye who fear the BART tube, does the tube rest at the bottom of the bay or does it float in hydrospace, a liquid cushion protecting it from the inevitable 7.0+ from the Hayward fault. Like most people, you are not privy to the engineering merits of the tube and prefer the light above ground to the cold murky green depths of the bay, all shark shit and man-made muck. The Z bus picks you up in the transbay terminal which also houses the Greyhound fleet, a village of schizophrenics and hippie burnouts, and a legion of diseased pigeons molting in the shit crusted rafters. The south wall of the bus terminal is a grid of dirty glass panes, bathing all who wait in an afterwordly glow. Coupled with your bleery vision, the cavernous space is the scene for a fellini-esque anxiety dream. The Z bus waits for no one, last east bound bus at 8, hope the J Church got you downtown in time. You are a cross commuter, the majority heading to the city in the morning, you are emeryville-bound the quasi-town built on drained marshland and landscaped post-industrial waste. On the cross commute Z bus, only half the seats are taken and most everybody chooses the same position day after day, congregate in the same groups. You and your coworkers have names for some of the people, the harraser, is the 50 year old lech who loudly explains to the bus driver the origin of his favorite seafood dish. Do you know why they call it Putanesca? Sneaker boy works for the music magazine officed in the old jelly bean factory. He always wears converse, but the colors never match, black-left, white-right, or maybe on Fridays one purple one red, a testimony to his deeply iconoclastic ways. The CGI effects people are a surly bunch and usually just stare out the window, they are migrant workers, moving back to LA to do commercials after the summer blockbusters are done. What does it do to your psyche to find out that you have spent 80 hours on a 15-second scene for a B-movie that will most likely go straight to DVD? The evening ride, the last half of the bridge, the downtown skyline comes into view, it's like finally unsquaring your shoulders after being at attention all day long. Between the equinoxes in spring and fall, if you catch the right bus, you witness the most beautiful sunsets you will ever see. From your high moorings, you see straight over the bridge rails, the toy boats and thumb-sized freight carriers with their paperclip cargo. Like a jumper's last vista, it is painfully beautiful, maybe the cooling sun is further cooled through the first tendrils of the evening fog, and the sky begins to bruise purple above the blackening spires of downtown. It is a private moment shattered when you hit the cold-surface, the bus takes the first exit off the bridge, the wide-arcing off-ramp circles around the Merril-Lynch building and you reach the terminal and must pass through the throng of the eastbay-bound, their slack and myriad faces in the evening light are like so many choppy waves fighting past you, reminding you just how tired you trully are.

The Magnetic Fields of the Whirling Mechanism, Part II

2006-06-05T17:50:00.000-07:00