BANDWAGONESQUE: KEEPING UP WITH NORAH JONES

A fossil written at the height of the Norah Jones phenomenon that meant to cast an anthropological gaze at it and finished up declaring, a little too pompously it seems upon re-reading, that none of her fervent fans at that time will be listening to her next albums. None of them did, making this my only rock journalism prophecy fulfilled. Excavated because I'm massively digging her new sngle Chasing Pirates, not to mention her Q-Tip collab and My Blueberry Nights, but of course. I did tell you that I've since re-evaluated my opinon of her and her music. No? Well, I have. Just as I have with pop music in general. And incidentally, that second album, Feels Like Home, is a gas. Your loss, lemmings.

The music’s there, give her that. The math ,as it is, is simple enough. If the music’s top, people bother. But Norah Jones’ sleepy-sexy country-jazzy Come Away With Me is only half that, not bad but not much, merely nice , often pretty, and songful , because Norah knows song and song is what nice albums feed off on.

Why we care is that Come Away With Me is finishing large in ways only the truly bland and/or the truly great albums, of which it is neither, do,in this part of the world. There’s a lot of monkey- see monkey-do hype to factor in, because Norah’s massive internationally. Her chart-troubling year you can pin on jazzheads the world over looking for their pop fix, drawn, possibly, to that sincerity which is her asset and her curse, something more real, something more meant.

The part where she became a fad gadget, almost a pop paradigm, the part where the same throng who give Las Ketchup mileage started giving her props, has less to do with her and more with how pop culture works, and how its most ardent champions, the popfan, think. Or not think is probably more like it.

Norah Jones is more than just a girl on a piano singing weepy. She’s a girl on a piano singing weepy with eight Grammies on her mantle. Everything pop is hype and nothing strikes a nerve anymore without a little help from Ad & Promo. Hype is the talk the popfan talks. And the Grammies are hype. Its placebo effect, as a kind of shorthand pedigree, no matter how superfluous it is as cred in real life, is , for the popfan, part heavenly benediction, part Pavlovian bell ring : Go, lemmings! Buy! Buy! Buy!

Norah Jones was Norah Who? before Grammy night. After was when the spike in units shifted really went berserk , the surge in profile really got insane, after was the name-dropping in inane teen gruel like Berks, after was the Norah Jones pod people. She got so high up on the pop radar, she practically was/is the radar. Norah Jones, Bandwagon.

Simplified, the Norah Jones phenomenon has unwittingly tapped into the two prevailing structures of popfan desire. The community they crave, that sense of fraternity with an imagined ,massive peer group. And in a country that places so much mileage on being “in”, as if it was a good thing, a bandwagon is always ,always , the popfan vehicle of choice.

And of course, there’s the stupefyingly unconditional infatuation with all makes and models of mush. Pop music as aromatherapy, hygienic, preferably sentimental to the verge of being tearjerky. Sap takes, big time, in this here parts. And annoying nice-guy bilge ,and fellow bandwagons , like Stephen Speaks and John Mayer, are this year’s model of sap. And ,in many ways, our Ms.Jones fits the profile.

Which doesn’t have to be a downfall. After all, Norah Jones really does have pedigree. Her bio- - -the hours clocked in coffeehouse toil, the muso schooling, having Ravi Shankar for a Dad - - - smacks of it. And there is a reservoir of influence informing her music and the album boosts it.

Popfans don’t have much wanderlust or much range or even much prerogative or imagination. And the possibilities of Come Away With Me turning them on to Patsy Cline or Hank Williams or Hoagy Carmichael are tantalizing , only if expecting them to be there when Norah Jones herself turns sophomore weren’t too utopian in and of itself.

In aura, she’s like Diana Krall. But in principle, she’s closer to Lauryn Hill or india.arie, just as who-the-hell and out-of-nowhere, whose albums really flew only after the halo of their Grammies validated them to the popfans. Norah Jones most likely has a second album in her. And a third. And a fourth. But whether it falls on deaf ears, like Lauryn’s second album did , like india’s second album did, or not, it really has less to do with whether its nicer and prettier and more songful , and more with how popfans have the attention span of gnats. Norah Jones is , without a doubt, no false alarm. But only time will tell if she’s a fluke.

COLOSSAL YOUTH

Duckie didn’t get Andie at the end of Pretty In Pink . . .and it felt at first like high treason. John Hughes' teenage movies were like fight songs for the high school underclass, tapping as they did into those overfamiliar dichotomies - - - popular versus unpopular, jock versus nerd, all that - - -and always coming out in favor of the ones who never got to sit at the cool table, the freaks and geeks and dorks and misfits, that entire strata of outcasts. He had our backs.

I don’t remember there being such dichotomies in my high school, though, nor jocks or nerds but rather a curious mixture of both, nor was there a cool table. There was the usual obsession with girls and the usual trouble with them and I’m not sure what strand of empathy I was picking up from Duckie - - -the social retard or the hopeless romantic or maybe both - - -but I rooted for him nonetheless. And the original ending of Pretty In Pink - - - scripted, filmed, not used - - -would have been the ultimate revenge of the nerd. But the one the world saw felt like a test screening cop-out, given over to wishful thinking . . .except maybe it wasn’t too wishful.

John Hughes' teenage movies had the temperament of fairy tales but all that groggy optimism was always undercut by this gnawing anxiety, this creeping melancholia. Duckie and Andie felt like a mortal lock,sure. His fidelity to her was hardcore - - -he was that into her. And when he did that sublime Otis Redding lipsynch, well. . . wasn’t it almost heroic? Try a little tenderness, Andie - - -what's not to love? Looking back, though, Duckie ending up with Andie was wishful thinking and Andie ending up with Blaine was probably the purest hit of reality in the entire Hughes ouevre. . .unless Duckie ended up with Blaine, which is another story and another Brat Pack filmmaker. Giving Duckie a hot girl as consolation prize was sort of the cop-out. What was a boy in love going to do with a bombshell? Well . . plenty, really, but you know what I mean,fellow boys in love. Still. The petty,percevied betrayal turned out to be just that - - petty and perceived.

There was no going back after that for me,though. The spell had been broken, the gauze lifted ,the cycle ground to a halt. There was no going back after that for John Hughes either - - -his lapse into the immensely lucrative blandness of safe as milk adult comedies and preteen slapstick came almost immediately after, followed by semiretirement, and sadly, his untimely, albeit serene, passing. That the six high school movies he left behind - - - -of which Ferris Bueller is what the world upholds as the height of his powers but I'm more partial to the hormonal anarchy of Weird Science - - - have become touchstones of several generations comes as no surprise: youth movies tend to have that totemic charge. 400 Blows, Napoleon Dynamite, Dazed and Confused, Battle Royale, Linda Linda Linda. All these pivot thematically on the knotty interior politics of a specific time in your life, but they also had this exuberant cockiness, this finite surge of invincibility that's almost empowering even if it often mixes with a resentful sense of loss and even if it lasts only a little while and mostly in your head.

Not so odd ,then, that I'm remembering John Hughes' death just now, a little belatedly. The birthday has come to pass and I get a little more maudlin than usual this time of year. And there's also been a lot of disquiet and vertigo lately before and after the not-so-big day, the repercussions of too much happening too fast - - too many conversations cut short, too many status quos shifting, too many disappearing acts,too many irreversible goodbyes. A part of it has to do with receding into the warm corners of nostalgia, looking for places to hide for a little bit. But mostly I'm harnessing that exuberant cockiness. God knows how much time I've got left on my side but I'm thinking this empowering surge will prop me up long enough to ask that pretty girl in pink for a last dance. And maybe the movie ends differently. Maybe. Just this once.

URGENT

Please help find this family: Edgardo Pantilla, Jose Rufino, Katrina Flor and Fe Alburo. There has been no contact with them since Saturday September 26.

Their address is: #20 Shearwater Stret,Vista Verde Country Homes, Cainta,Rizal. Their landline is 6567860.

Please forward to rescue and relief officials. And contact JP Carpio (09204610955) and/or Yve Pantilla (09085186938) if you have any news.Or know of anyone who can help.

Or message me here. And I will relay.

UPDATED: Alex Garcia and the Holcim Cement Rescue and Relief Volunteers found the Pantlla Family on Tuesday September 29.

The flood damaged nearly everything. But everyone is safe and in good health and spirits,

A small miracle in a time that desperately needs every little one.

MEMORIES OF PLACES I'VE NEVER BEEN

Fragment from my Here Be Dragons installation piece. With the indefatigable Sue Prado as Divine. The piano piece is called Pianono and is played by my equally indefatigable friend Khavn de la Cruz. Allan Balberona,as always, shot and edited. And I did everything else.

ALEXIS TIOSECO 1981-2009

I didn’t know Alexis enough to say we were close but knew him enough to feel kindred with him. And maybe that was all it took - - -the too few run-ins, the too few conversations, the too few emails, the too few fond anecdotes. Why else would there be this much shock and fear and regret and grief? Why else would all the cinema in the world suddenly feel so outmoded and impotent in the face of what happened? But let’s not put cinema down, as it was, after all, the magnet that drew us to each other - - -this mad fervid love for it that many thought almost freaky. Having declared my unwavering fealty to it even before I was in high school and knew better, I always thought my love bottomless and indomitable but the depth Alexis’ feelings ran - - -and the things it made him do - - -makes mine look like a petty crush . It put me to shame. But also had me keyed up. If there was one thing Alexis left with me, it’s knowing that there was still, and will always be, much more cinema to fall in love with.

Much as I'd like to say I was writing this as a friend, and much as I know Alexis wouldn’t mind if I did that or called him one, I feel it’s not entirely my place to do so. I’m writing this instead as a fellow lover of cinema and a fellow writer, a fellow film critic if you will. The movie blog was my secluded little pocket of the internet to write about something I loved. I never factored in that there would be traffic- - -the spotlight and me never really did see eye to eye, always had a touch of the hermetic, camera shyness. But the very first thing Alexis said to me when I was introduced to him was ”Hi. I like your blog”. It was immensely flattering. And it would later fuel me to not just write, but write faster, write truer, write more - - -my sloth may be my downfall but I’m getting there. But it was also immensely daunting knowing there was someone reading, let alone someone like Alexis. It was the second most frightening thing he ever said to me,really.

The most frightening thing was when he asked much later on if I really was shooting my first film. I told him sheepishly that I had shot one scene. Who knows what he would have thought of it had he lived to see it finished? Not that it would’ve mattered, I figured, long as I make it with generosity and conviction and love. That's how Alexis did his work. And that's how everyone in this ragtag so-called scene of ours sets out to do theirs, too. That's how he would've prefered it, I think - - -I don't know, I won't know. But it's all about love in the end. The last few days I've been swimming in this warm and fraternal and almost familial inundation of community, this coming together in consensual sorrow,bonded by this shared and senseless loss and by this shared love for both cinema and for two people who gave so much for it. Too much.

Love is,as Alexis once said, the first impulse of critics. It is also the first impulse of friends.


Peace for the last time, Alexis and Nika. I hardly knew you but I'm glad I did.

GOD TOUCHED BY THE HAND OF MAN

Just in case you're in the area, my friend Kim Bello is having a show at the City Hall of Jersey City this Tuesday called Fervor. Clickety click to embiggen.



Faith exists in a vacuum. It’s the invisible we see, the nothingness we grasp, the silences that sing to us in all this terrible emptiness.

The Word became flesh to take on the sins of the world - - -and somehow complicated things a little. Jesus Christ was a ghost in a shell, a human embodiment of the divine. But he also embodied a schism - - - supernatural/natural, body/soul, spirit/flesh. His physicality became the seeable, the graspable, the audible. The corporeal made corporal. And everything made in his image and in his name gains this totemic charge - - -the statuaries and rosaries and holy oils. But it’s not as if Catholicism is riven by all these polarities, more like it feeds off them, it’s faith as talisman and ritual - - - visceral, theatrical, sensory. And tactile - - -there’s this mania for the tactile. Something to touch and be touched by, if you will, manifested in this almost hysteric exuberance, this mad ecstatic frenzy. It’s as if the commune between human and divine had taken on a tinge of the carnal.

Who knows where devotion ends and hysteria begins - - -and is there a difference between the two? But could there be more than just some pidgin iteration of faith here? More than just blind fealty? Could there be,perhaps, a genuine and deep-seated longing? Touch these facsimiles of divinity and something happens - - - a transfer of energies, a crackle of transcendence, a brush with divinity itself. In their profound hollows exist vacuums, after all. These vacuums that are the muck of insatiable mysteries. Imagine what awaits anyone tapping into them. What invisibilities we’ll see, what nothingness we’ll grasp, what silences will sing to us.

AUGUST AND EVERYTHING AFTER

Nobody felt like cooking that first night after cremating my brother. In all that monochromatic pall falling like some severe after-party sugar crash over the household, it had come down to the five of us again, the left-behinds, the survivors - - -haggard and devastated in equal measure. The weeks before that, we had somehow worn each other out as support systems. And comes a time when one must grieve alone. So that night, it was going to be takeout. And solitary confinement - - -retreating into our own private crannies of soothe to face the vacuum before us. No group hugs for now. I didn't know what the others had. My father still hadn't woven his internet cocoon. My mother didn't have her soaps yet. My aunt had already found Jesus. But only He knew what her daughter had. Bereft of partner at that time, I took to my perpetual refuge on bachelor days: the video store. I had decided to pacify my sorrows with a John Woo laserdisc. I spent hours combing the stacks. I stayed there up until they closed, I think. I don’t remember if I did get that John Woo laserdisc or if I rented something else or what that something else I rented was. I don’t remember much else about that night. Except what we had for dinner - - -McDo. And the terrible stillness, the unbearable gravity. Here’s what I wrote some time back about the night when he went.

“I held his leg as he was going. It was still warm and I was expecting to feel something deplete, a sensation of leaving, a sigh of discharge. But there was none. There was just the terrifying certainty that nothing will ever be the same from then on.”

Nothing was the same after that. And I never thought I’d get over it. I hung on to my grief bullishly,like a cause, as if to lose it would be to betray his memory. But I did get over it. I am now as used to him gone as I was to him here. I expected pangs of guilt but there weren't any. It was his birthday yesterday. Like before, nobody felt like cooking. But there was a party this time - - and the takeout food was exquisite. Had he lived, he would doubtless have a crucial presence in everything that has happened to me since, up until this month really. And I miss him terribly still ,sure, wish he were here. But the dreams had trickled out. The waking up after in tears,too. The benign sting. After all this time. Diminished. And perhaps that's a good thing. All that’s left is bulletproof memory. And, most of all,love.

BIONIC JELLIES ARE A PNEUMATIC JOY

Hot tipped by William Gibson on the wondrous mechanisms of Festo.

I could watch these forever.

This one is particularly sublime.

HERE BE DRAGONS: TOPOLOGY OF ALLEGORY

Here Be Dragons: Topology of Allegory. August 15,2009. Manila Contemporary.








You will be there.

Official poster is the one on top, the study that came close is below.

Click to embiggen, if you must.

SENTIMENTAL HYGIENE

It was the dead of night and outside the van window was a world soaked in squid ink,pelted by black rain. Deep coma is what bodies crave at this hour. Deep coma is what my gorilla carcass should be craving. A low hum of light sleep is as far as I got. I know why. Not the beer basting my brain, not really, but that helps. No,there it was, that familiar prickle of anticipation that goes through me, like an endorphin shot, every time I’m on my way to a set - - -any set, not necessarily mine. This one wasn’t, was in Zambales and I’m to help burn a village when I get there.

It was, at first, the rigors of process that made sets superconductive for me. Later on, it was something else. This sealing-off from everything else that happens. This sense of time slowing down. This luscious seclusion. Sometimes, like on a commercial shoot, the sensation is undermined by anal clients, cocky agency people, stragglers that drag residue from the outside world in, all that corporate crap. Most of the time, I roll the zeros of my paycheque in my head to get me through the day. On D.I.Y. film shoots, where there are no zeros - - -and really, no paycheques - - - the sensation has stayed inviolate, palpable. Not so much a sense of the world going on without you but more of you going on without the world.

And it doesn’t matter who’s shooting. Or where. A labyrinth of dorms in Kamias where the heat gain was fat and adhesive. A huge and empty house in the highland suburbs of Antipolo. A noisy bus terminal in Buendia perpetually threatening to sabotage the live sound but not following through. The gaffes get profuse on D.I.Y. film shoots. But the buoyant sense of ease hasn’t flagged,least not yet. It’s terribly exhausting, sure. But it’s the terribly exhausting you get when you go on holidays.

And like any holiday, the souvenirs can get just as profuse. I was defenseless to the otherworldly resplendence of that river system. And dumbstruck by that surreal bar where grown heterosexual men converge to dance with each other. Oh, and I fell into an actual brook. But one other thing from the Zambales sojourn sticks with me the most.

The sun was already up when we at last got there. Barangay San Miguel, Botolan, Zambales. Our hosts were these impossibly gracious born-agains who lived in a tiny cluster of houses, tucked away from the street, where at least two cancer patients have apparently walked out of completely healed through prayer. I find this out much later,of course. As I walk down the muddy pathway to where we were staying, this wall of croon from next door crashes on me like a wave of mush. Peak volume high fidelity ‘50s schmaltz. Dean Martin, Patsy Cline, Platters, Elvis, Sinatra - - -dead man's pop, the ghosts of tearjerky. It’s been more than a week since and no, I’m not just amping the saccharine, as is sometimes my wont. A middle-aged woman cranking up her music to fix breakfast to- - - how could something so innocuous, something almost banal attain such aura? Could be the confluence of many disparate things: actual and emotional atmospheric conditions, sleep deprivation and hunger, my inner wussy , the coziness resident in pop standards. Whatever. It really was warm, soothing,almost pure. You could bathe in it and I did.

“Eto lang kaligayahan ko.” I remember the woman playing the music saying to no one in particular as she watched us slog past her house from her little terrace,almost apologetic but not really. The very thing that makes her happy - - -and she could do it every morning for the rest of her life. It was her smile that disarmed me,really, made me a little envious. I realize then that I could turn my back on nearly everything to wear a smile like that. More than calm,it was serene. Benign even. The invincible smile of someone partway into the mystic, going on without the world.

MELANCHOLY AND THE INFINITE PLAYLIST

Tagged by my former editor Edwin Sallan over at Facebook a while back.

The 15 albums that gave me new eyes to see the world, that bit into me and not only left marks but bits of teeth.

I took liberties with annotation and got a little carried away - - -hah, there’s an understatement but like that comes as a surprise anymore

15 is easy. Or maybe not. Records take me hostage on a regular basis and do things to me I don’t walk away from the same. Metric's Grow Up and Blow Away, Passion Pit's Manners and the Beach Boys' Surf's Up are the most recent ones. That’s the melodrama of being a music nerd and how we tend to immerse and obsess with what is, to most people, aromatherapy. And I own at least a thousand CDs. So picking just 15’s a little tricky logistically . . .but pick I did except I cheated and picked 20, which is still tricky, which still doesn't feel enough, but any excuse to write about the music you love,you know. Casualties - - -Catch Without Arms(Dredg), Low (Bowie), Give Up (Postal Service), Plastic Ono Band . . .the list is potentially endless so I'll stop here.

These 20 records, at turns, took me in its loving arms, remind me of someone, helped me make it through the night, turned my life inside out. Time machines, demonic possessions, coats of paint. A few of these I haven’t played in ages. One or two are not exactly favorites anymore,if they were at all. But most of them I’d take to a desert island. Some of them I’m actually playing as I write this.

Alphabetically.

1. IV Led Zep

Ground zero. Physical Graffitti is the hotter rock. But this was the start of everything.

2. Broken Social Scene

Supergroups that factor in not only the brand name personnel,but also the sheer number of brand name personnel they rope in, tend to be . . .um,patchy. But as wayward and scatterbrained as the first few records of this Canadian indiepop juggernaut sounded it wasn't without its charms and it has always been that patchiness, that ecstatic chaos, that stole my heart. Here is where they sounded most cohesive but in doing so also kept their ragtag grandeur so the songs - - possibly their strongest tracklist - - - benefit by being perkier and quirkier and stickier

3.Call Me Al Green

Let’s Stay Together (not here) may have been the catalyst but this was the binding agent . All it reminds me of; - - -that heady time (1998ish) and who was around and the sensations that still vibrate to this day only fiercer

- - - might be better served by other, timelier records - - -The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill perhaps, Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite, something by Mariah - - -but I’m sticking with this because . . .well, because it’s Al Green and because he has a version here of I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry that makes my knees buckle a little but somehow feels like a state of grace at the same time. He’s a minister, too. Go read the cosmic into that.

4. Copper Blue Sugar

The guitar-bass-drum crunch doesn't so much give the misery an ironic distance but rather a sense of its own cathartic possibilities, to crank up when you’re alone and you don’t want to be alone anymore, so you can dance away the heartache. At some point, no songwriter was more heroic for me than Bob Mould. As a grunge nonbeliever starved for new music after Nirvana wore off, he saved me from having to turn to Crash Test Dummies and Better Than Ezra. And band names don’t really get any cooler. Except for the Pixies. And except for Kiss.

5. Disintegration The Cure

My perpetual accomplice in misery when love breaks down. And you only need to get as far as the first bridge on Pictures of You before your chest tightens a little, lying in your darkened bedroom cut off from the world by your headphones, tanked up on half a liter of whiskey as the epic guitar wall swoons and suffocates at the same time. The faces change but the songs remain the same and the more it hurts the more intolerably beautiful they get. Scream at the make-believe.

6. The Dionne Warwick Collection: Her All Time Greatest Hits Dionne Warwick
The Bacharach-Warwick axis was among pop's mightiest. Without Burt, Dionne never sang songs that soared as high and without Dionne, Burt never found an ingenue with as much give and feel. Not that I needed to enact this sort of rock critic surgery for this to win me over. First song in and I was goo. Sentimental value, the rekindling of specific memories, is what keeps mush from becoming mawk. But none of these songs rekindle specific memories in me and yet all of them sort of do. Maybe because vulnerability is universal. And vulnerability strapped to a catchy tune is eternal.

7. Doolittle Pixies

Everybody loves the Pixies. Surfer Rosa is the one hipsters might pick. This is the one for going karaoke to. " . . you think I'm dead but I sail away, on a wave of mutilation . . . " Catchy. Kim Deal's bass sounds like it's been up all night. And Black Francis' primal screams get so emotive he turns a song harping on Un Chien Andalou into some kind of manic pop thrill.Also, Joey Santiago. Represent!

8.Endtroducing DJ Shadow

Building Steam from a Grain of Salt sort of sums up the process here - - -hearing new worlds in old, wholes from fragments. De La Soul would be who the rockist prude in me lost his hip-hop virginity to. But this- - -which its mastermind Josh Davis insists is hip-hop even if it’s really closer to David Axelrod, to Ennio Morricone even - - -was the fuck of no return.

9. Here Come the Warm Jets Brian Eno

My first brush with solo pop Eno. Taped off vinyl at the late, lamented A2Z back in the day. I played that hissy cassette over and over as if trying to crack some code. Wore it down that way and later got a CD. Wore that one down, too.More savant than avant,this is almost by-the-numbers pop - - - porno sing-a-longs, sci-fic doo wop , piano fugues, serrated guitar hooks - - - by someone who had no idea where the numbers went. Needles In The Camel's Eye is forever.

10. Hot Rats Frank Zappa

What sucked me in at first was that cover . Turns out this was Zappa sedated , a jam-happy fusion record of all things, but this is not the rest of the world's sedated and this is not the rest of the world's jam-happy fusion record. The only jam-happy fusion record that does anything for me. And the one Zappa I swear by.

11. In It For the Money Supergrass

The Britpop years were when I went avid as a fan. And fell in love with HK. Sum it up in glorious records and get a handful - - - the second Oasis album , Suede's Coming Up, the Elastica debut, Lush's Lovelife, Pulp's Different Class,The Bends- - - but I pick this out of how I stood outside waiting for an HMV in HK to open on the day it came out Avid, yeah. Haters claim Britpop was little more than reductive nostalgia. I'd agree . . . if I could whip up any cynicism about a time in my life when I was, musically at least, irrevocably happy. But I can't. So tough titties.

12. Lanquidity Sun Ra

Having been a jazz hanger-on for so long and not having heard a single Sun Ra was a bug up my ass so I took measures. This was not my first , not his freakiest, but the stickiest. Sun Ra believed not only that his psych-jazz was medicinal - - -it is - - -but that he was of Saturnian lineage, too. Uh huh. But then there’s There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of) which not only lets you know, it actually tries to take you to as many of them as it can. Maybe he wasn't kidding about that Saturn thing after all.

13. Loveless My Bloody Valentine

One of my many sidetrips into the rock and roll hinterlands and one of the few that finish up with me liking the place so much I kept coming back. Turned me on to the beautiful noise feedback makes. A record I swim in.

14. Marquee Moon Television

It was always the guitars with this one - - - the way they seemed more the song than the song itself. Tom Verlaine’s, Coltrane-ish. Richard Lloyd’s, rockier. Conjoined - - - art-punk, if you will. Conjoined - - -guitarporn. And like all good porn, at least twice a week is the right dosage.

15. Private Eyes Hall & Oates

I give. Gigantic and everywhere and near-camp so you tend to dismiss them moreso if, like me before, you nurse some childish node of indie rock cool. Zero taste in album cover art,sure , but this hijacked my kid ears for months. Ironic that it doesn't have my most beloved of their songs in it (You Make My Dreams,Say It Isn't So, Diddy Doo Wop) but the musical genre-splicing is often mighty, almost prescient. Really.

16. The Queen Is Dead Smiths

Safe, yeah. Everybody picks this one. But how would I know, eh? Back then it did sound like the glorious level up of all their buoyant jinglejangle. It was. It is. But Strangeways Here We Come was not bad at all. And this is here because There Is A Light That Never Goes Out is the closest a pop song has come to autobiography. Well, there's The Boy With The Thorn In His Side but that was when I was a little younger. I hope.

17. Rain Dogs Tom Waits

The second part of the trilogy that would bridge what Waits used to be - - - bohemian wino balladeer- - -and what he became - - -avant blues weirdo - - gains cachet out of being my entry-level Waits and for how it brokered the transition wonderfully. Helps that it's also unconditionally listenable. I got around to Dylan ,sure. But before I did, and even after, Waits was my Dylan, even my Beefheart until Beefheart became my Beefheart - - - poet and prophet and preacher and primitive.

18. Rumours Fleetwood Mac

It took an immersive love affair with Midlake’s The Trails of Van Occupanther for it to hit me how much today’s so-called indie rock owes Fleetwood Mac and this ubiquitous record I had an immersive love affair with, too, a love affair that deepened immensely after the internecine backstories came to light and turned the two-punch salvo of Dreams and Go Your Own Way into pop's grandest lover's quarrel.

19. Untrue Burial

The somnolent beats - - over which the disembodied voices of R & B singers skittishly crackle - - - have this spooky, submerged quality, as if they were broadcasting from underwater on what one song title seems to be describing : ghost hardware. I like the pastoral weirdness of Boards of Canada, also Eno's experiments in pop-as-aura, for creating environments you could fold yourself into but this is oddly more tactile. I play this at least once a week because movies play in my head every time I do.

20. The Wayward Bus-Distant Plastic Trees Magnetic Fields

Stephen Merritt dresses up his weird and lovely and sappy and sad folk songs, not with guitars, but with tinny beatup machinery and gets an angel named Susan to sing them. He would go on to make better records, of course. But none quite as given over to bliss.

MAPS

It was one of the happiest days of my life as much as it was, at first,one of the worst.

Rain at the start of it. Even more rain at the end. I was a man on a mission with a ticket to ride for half a world away. Feigning nonchalance with bubblegum. Butterflies in the stomach. Seeing about a girl. Mixtape stuck to my ear like valium. Comfortably numb on the long bus ride to the country and on the long bus ride back to the city after the final reel kiss-off.

People take buses to go on holidays, motored by destination. You can count me out - - -my holidays rarely go further than my bedroom. But I was motored by destination, too - - -one so viral it was the planet I lived on for who knows how long and in many ways still is. Also, love - - -I was motored by love. The downfall turned out not to be a downfall and that rainy day bus ride would careen my life from grayish to fulsome. And the many bus rides after, every other weekend to the same place,would have residue so vibrant, it would make every bus ride I took to the country tingle with the closest I ever came to bliss.

The road - - - and long trips on it - - - has its own pull ,of course. It's own vibrant mythical/ mystical/ existential/ romantic/ therapautic residue. That displaced sense of drift, the calmative lull, wanderlust and melancholia. I could invoke all that Kerouacian zen but the meat of it might be far less poetic: bus rides have become my ganja, motored by all this but mostly by this amped-up nostalgia, like a torch I bear.

All this throbs anew on a bus ride to Nagcarlan - - - my mother's hometown - - - I took a few weeks back. On any map, Batangas and Laguna converge and overlap- - - soft currents of deja vu were a given. But there were other currents of deja vu beaming in from another frequency, beaming in from the place I was going to. Bats on church walls, superhero masks from strips of film, pancake batter in vinegar shot glasses, the cliff at the bottom of the garden - - -an exhale of ghosts from the fog of childhood. I was there a few months ago. There were these verdant clumps of forest outside the new house I wanted to shoot in. My aunt, matriarch superchef of this sleepy town and born feverish with hospitality, cooked enough food to feed a regiment. The roast chicken was divine. She was always giddy to see me and I was always giddy to see her - - -and eat her cooking. I don't come back often enough,though. But invisible membranes seem to tether me to the place. And they make themselves felt as soon as I set foot. I promised my aunt I'd be back soon to shoot. I asked her if she could cook more of that chicken when I do. I never did go back for that,though - - -that's another story. I was going back,less than a third of a year later, to bury her.

I got to Nagcarlan a little past noon with no bearings and my beatup mobile halfway to comatose. The membranes take hold before I could radio for coordinates. And I walk down shapeless and anonymous streets as if on some kind of psychogeographic sonar, like a map in my head had flicked on, or like the place itself was navigating me. I find my aunt's house with a minimum of fuss. It was tough to miss out of the carnival aura swarming around it. And I sink in. I used to put as much distance between family and me. Not today, not anymore. I eat,mostly. The food had been painstakingly cloned from her recipes. Every morsel was a tribute ,a giddy gesture of welcome, a long goodbye. As the day wore on, I felt the membranes loosen their grasp. The urge to escape dissolves, possibly forever.

It may fluctuate in degree but love was the only reason I've taken a bus to the country. Now there's another - - -but it has to do with love, too. And the opponent emotions that pushed and pulled at each other in that blissful tingle seeped together and swam in the swirl. Bittersweet has always been the flavor of funerals but never this heightened. There were two deaths in the family that week two days apart. The other one was gruesome,a bludgeon to the nerves. This one was no less weakening but was also heady, becalmed, almost transcendent.

It was raining the next day for the burial. And there was a sea of umbrellas - - - a sea of tears, a sea of love. I have one arm around my mother as we wade through it. Down streets that were no longer shapeless and anonymous but suddenly vibrant with residue.

It was one of the worst days of my life. It was also one of the happiest.

THE BASKETBALL DIARIES

Basketball is my broken dream.

I wanted a career playing it more than filmmaking, more than writing. God and biology, unfortunately, were against it. And I comforted myself over my lost athletic career with a grossly presumptuous cliche - - - basketball players can't write.

The same week Lebron wowed me and pretty much everyone who gives half a shit about the game, I stumble upon Mad Ants power forward Coleman Collins' blog.

Here's a particularly juicy entry. It's called Second Person Is The New First.

The title alone has me breaking out in envy. Not even guys who write about basketball write this good.

A fragment : "This smell was like a girlfriend moping around the house with a sad look on her face, looking absolutely heart-broken, moaning, groaning and begging for attention. You ask her "What's wrong?" She sighs, looks away and says: "Nothing." Forcing you to keep at it, attending to her until she's ready to stop acting. Never-ending. Annoying."

Effortless. Beautiful. Dammit.


Excuse me as I curl up and die.

FROM THE TEETH OF ANGELS

Two in a row,two days apart. One gruesome,another benign, but both come with a throb of shock and a trauma of void. I just found out about the last one. I'm still reeling.

I took this from Jonathan Carroll's blog. The timing couldn't be any more supernatural.

"But you will get over their death, although you don't believe it now. Know why? Because you knew them alive. Memories of life and living always win. You knew them dead for one terrible night but you knew them alive for a decade. Death is strong and has a viciously powerful hold for a while, but life is constant and insistent. It refuses to let go or be pushed back. When their deaths have eventually stopped bullying your memories, life will shove it aside and say, "Give me my place again. You have had your time in the spotlight but it is over. Go to the background where you know you belong."

WHAT WE LOST IN THE FIRE AND WHAT WE LOST

RIP,Ems. RIP, Tita Tessie.

MY LOVE IS LIKE CATHEDRAL BELLS

They've been co-opted by Crossover FM dweebs for so long, you tend to forget how Tracy and Ben came out of the gate tiny masters of tweepop
. . .and wondrously, irreversibly British.

Something's up when I dig through my Everything But the Girl records
- - -and it's not just how much the new Camera Obscura somehow takes me back to their early work. But that adult contemporary middle period of theirs does reek a little too Citylite icky to be of any comfort, and apart from their supple club emo, it's only Love Not Money that gives me proper tingle.

And dig the do on our Ms.Thorn.

BOYS IN THE ATTIC

NEVER FELT MY HEART STRINGS 'TIL I NEARLY WENT INSANE

Another gray morning.

San Diego Serenade - - - in which Tom Waits sings his heart out about how true love is not the hokey piffle of chick flicks . . instead, it's lived-in with healed-over battle scars and miles of road under its feet. And a tremendous shaking to the core as the white light of what is written shines on you through all the odds and traumas that argue against it. And you wait on the outside looking in hoping someone opens up, so you can come in from the rain.

Betcha that Carrie Bradshaw woman was never touched this way.


Click play. And cry in your beer.

UNLESS IT COMES UNASKED

Retrieved from Vince, something from Charles Bukowski. Post Office is on the nighstand queue, making this timely.

"so you want to be a writer?

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked
out of your heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.
if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and pretentious,
don't be consumed with self- love.
the libraries of the world have yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would drive you to madness
or suicide or murder,
don't do it.unless the sun inside you is burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was. "

The monkey on your back, the angel you wrestle with, the bitch that won't die.

Amen to that.

A FIERCE AND WAYWARD BEAUTY

"J.G. Ballard, in a string of extrapolative, and really, quite beautiful disaster sci-fic novels in the 60s,almost singlehandedly made catastrophe and aftermath emotive, intimate, personal, ecstatic."

That bit up there I nicked from my exhibit notes to last year's Them! Only my work started out as remotely Ballardian and even that germ mutated into something else. But it felt right to keep the line in. Not surprisingly, reading it now, it sums up what ultimately draws me to the man's work.

Or to sum it up even more and in Ballard's own words - - -that fierce and wayward beauty.

It would be a soundbite with fangs if I said that my first run-in with JG Ballard set off a supernova in my imagination. But that wasn't what happened.

My first run-in was as a grotty teenager-in-flux, in thrall to the seductive opulence of speculative fiction but not yet entirely inoculated from the juvenilia I was desperate to outgrow - - - Tolkien and Bradbury and Crichton and Chris Claremont - - -but didn't know how. I thought Terminal Beach was how. But I didn't get it. I tell myself I came in blind,I was ill-prepared, but it wouldn't have made a difference, I still put it down,frustrated but with a nag that told me I missed something. I moved on, of course, but I had no appetite for what would be the sci-fic totem of my generation - - -Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game - - -so sustained by a parallel thrall to punk and new wave, I dove instead into cyberpunk, into Philip K.Dick and Alfred Bester and Samuel Delany. And I also picked Terminal Beach up again. There was still no supernova, that would be pushing it a bit, but there were a million tiny bursts of color that would seep and stain. And, this time I got it.

Surreal and dystopian and fucked-up would be the keywords if you want to pin him down. I'd use them. But I'd also use funny and moral and poetic. I wanted more. And there were more. High Rise. The Crystal World. Empire of the Sun. Crash. Ballard would turn me on to Joy Division, wean me on lo-fi sci-fic, reverse my opinion on Steven Spielberg and become the fourth tentpole in that aforementioned pantheon, a fourth set of brand new optics, if you will, to process the world with. I'm a fan but I'm not even halfway through his ouevre ,the man's body of work is a work in progress for me, which is a good thing for how it keeps him in many ways alive. I have an unread stack of his newer books somewhere at home. I suspect consumption will be resumed in the very near future. I suspect it will be voracious.

RIP.