The Transformation Of Memory

From 2005

The resort's service drove us over to Station Two. This was the bustle of the beach on a Monday: blonde European (Eastern European, seems like) stick figures paraded in their bikinis. Preschool American girls walked like barbie dolls, their southern-accented parents scouting the restaurant menus for cheeseburgers and french fries. Foreigners from the Asia Pacific stuttered in broken English as they ordered mango shakes. The dazed voices of teenagers. The lethargic, hung-over hum of twenty-somethings in conversation. A little while later, when the tides are low for the sunset, the hardworking middle class of the Philippines visiting this island will take pictures of themselves during sunset in a fleeting moment of majesty. The last embers of sunshine will paint the landscape golden, against blue sails, powdery white sand and green turning into teal then blue waters.

2014

It's all beautiful, but there's also an unconsoling effect in how places lose their old-world flair. "It didn't have the charm it had when you first brought me here." D. says. We were dismayed with how overly commercialized the place was, with how the back of the beach looked like a typical busy street in downtown Manila. The beach also had a Starbucks, Pancake House, Andoks, several banks. While we don't loathe those establishments it was certainly a sign of decay for a place such as the beach. Many years ago, there were small-scale, not-so-known restaurants here which played good music, served decent food and nurtured a thriving spirit. What we truly abhored, with a passion, were people who leave their garbage and cigarette butts in the beach.

And while our expectations were properly gauged, the beach remains spectacular enough to assuage our disappointments. The moment our heels pressed against the purity, the softness the sand, we were delighted to be back. We sipped the welcome drink. We've only been to a couple of beaches, but this had the most immaculate sand greeting our toes like old friends. The little one found the sand irresistible. The sand was anthropomorphic - it was a living playmate to him.

Summer is on its way to its peak, but it drizzled every now and then and it was mostly cloudy. There was a better spread of sunshine and it wasn't too scorchingly hot.

D. made a terrific choice in our resort. Beach-front, quiet, less cramped and fits our tastes and preferences like a glove - family oriented, decent liquor prices during happy hour, and excellent pizza. We associate the beach with the smell of baking bread. As we gobbled their thin crust four-cheese with pale pilsen, we were gearing up for a new high.

The enzymes of food was being broken down by my mouth, and it lights a neuron in my brain: the margherita pizza I had in Hey Jude, here, around a decade ago. I was eating it while watching a Daliesque sunset, like being inside his "Persistence of Memory," watching time melt. I was lot more alone, and I only thought I was wiser. I can't say I'm any wiser now, but I certainly have developed an ability to positively, more strongly adapt and respond to change, to my own life's catalytic actions. I didn't know what I really wanted back then. And looking at what I have now, so less of myself, I have everything.

We spent a lot of time lying down in the beach-front cabanas. There was a bigger foreigner versus local resident ratio and people mostly read while getting a tan. You can hear some faint chillout music which was back from the late 90s and that's a nice glimmer of an older, kindred spirit. 

On our second day, we went to a music bar that's been around since the first time I was here. It was 2pm and couples were having drinks and enjoying the music. In conversation, D. remarked, “That’s what it’s supposed to be like. Like Riley bay with the music.”

Boracay is known as a party resort, but that perspective really depends on what you do when you get here. We weren't here to party or meet people, but we sought out our own unique pleasures. We didn't go para-sailing or the water sports. I. and D. were sun-worshiping and building sandcastles. And we all went swimming too, the pressures and worries of ordinary life getting cleansed. The resulting saltiness in our tongue was washed away with Jonah's fruit shakes. I did go running barefoot in this soft sand, spanning all the stations of the island. I also started juggling a football with my legs and toes and a moment later, I was doing some passes with a Russian family. All in this in between enjoying the 1pm - 8pm happy hour.

On the resort's wide beach front, there were poles of a volleyball court and a net planted on the sand. There was a home vs away set-up: foreigners vs locals. I took time off my book tow watch and look around. Two Caucasian gentlemen who had their skin toasted to an orange were playing racket. Around them, some teenagers, in their bikinis and board shorts, were throwing each other a frisbee.

There's an LTE signal and the beach air was thick with wifi, but we preferred conversations with each other and with some guests at the resort. We barely touched our phones, and only posted a picture or two. We didn't expect to make friends, but from a good distance, we naturally do some small talk with a family from Canada who traveled with their one year old, and exchanged a welcoming gesture to the family we rode with in the resort's shuttle. I suppose our little one was friendlier than us. He sits with kids in 

the sand, and borrows or trades the beach toys.

We only spent three days, and put as much sun block on the little one as possible. But he was surprisingly all tan after the trip. Well, we all were. We will light up afterward, but in the meantime we will enjoy this color. Its the sun's thousand kisses scattering itself on its skin. And in our minds, it creates this beautiful, impermanent ripple of memories that's always positively transforming.

Muscovado Versus the World

I was out there for work in the first place, but I didn't want work to distort my notion of travelling. While I was concentrated on business as I will only be on the locations only for a very brief visit, I wouldn't want to let the company steal the too little personal time I'll have left.

We often commit these sins against ourselves: being all busy and self-important all savvy on smart phones while building someone else's empire. 

I came straight from a full 8-hour shift and upon arriving to the airport, the flight on the way to Bacolod was delayed. I kept answering a few emails and received a call or two. There was time, and it would have been another sin to be bored. So I pull that ebook reader out and rekindled my penchant for being alone. I got a chapter each from David Sedaris, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen. The stomach grumbles and I head to a shop for shepherd's pie and coffee while I watch an episode of Bourdain's No Reservations on the phone. He takes me to Argentina, somewhere I wouldn't mind going but somewhere I'll probably never be. I'm in the airport, so, close enough. The sun is bright and and it's a glorious day for travel. I'll see the cities and the islands from the plane's window. 

From the airport to the hotel, Bacolod greets you with sugarcane fields as they claim the landscape. My memory fills me with a short story or two I read about hacienderos and their children who marry their cousins to keep their estate within the family. I learned from one of the managers later on that the local sugar industry's struggling as it has to compete with importers from abroad who came here from the free trade agreements. Not to mention that the world is also brimming over with high-fructose corn syrup. 

I'm out here in a beautiful province where the air supposed to be fresh. I arrive at the hotel and smell of their many cleaning agents and air fresheners a lot like the fabric conditioner in my newly dry-cleaned suit. I go down for another merienda and the pasalubong has a small kiosk for freshly-made (right in front of you), hot purple-yam flavored piyaya almost for the price of a piece of hard candy or a stick of gum. Before we head to work, C., drives me to town for dinner. We had coffee and cake at place called Calea. The place was packed and I can taste why. You can tell that this food is a craft, a family oriented specialty as opposed to being a mass-produced industrial product. Coffee is served along with a jar of muscovado. Interestingly enough, the place is owned by the same person or family who also owns a hotel chain, or maybe a row of cane fields.  

The lifestyle's laid back and the crowd speaks in dialect that's almost like a song. It's no wonder they don't need much corn syrup or artificial sweeteners. 

And a Little of Iloilo

A meal is a gastronomical handshake and I'm glad to be here again and be acquainted even for just a little bit more. You expect everything from Iloilo's La Paz Batchoy: pork rinds, liver slices, beef, innards, noodles, an egg, soup. There's the warmth, and a sip's a relief that has the effectiveness of an embrace. It made me feel alive after last night's chugging of beers with clients and our office folks. While I consciously enjoyed myself, I know how tentative this pleasure is, as I've always been intent on leaving the company. I've been saying, but I haven't left for over eight years.

It's a quiet Tuesday afternoon. I'm having this tablea frappe at a dessert place in Iloilo's Smallville. The local chocolate tastes more natural and delicious, and it's not as sweet. As it fizzles out in my body, i'm trusting that it's helping me recover from an almost heart-attack induced by La Paz Batchoy The breeze though, is the one that's rich and sweet, there must have been muscovado in the air. This is also the area where we had dinner last night. Interestingly enough, you've got six or so different restaurants and a hotel owned by the same person or family.

A young crowd fills the other chairs: students in uniform or clad in the trendy fashion of the young. The chairs beside me are empty, so I start to imagine the two of you sitting like we do when we are out together. Wherever I go without the two of you, I am empty and I've never really gone anywhere.

The Way Light Falls

While I do not fear contradiction, I am nagged by a feeling of guilt for being too quick to judge. I think I am still right about everything I said about books in this post a few months ago, but in a sense I've also betrayed the books. I feel unfaithful for abandoning my profoundly sentimental reasons.

I gave in to ebooks for practical reasons. While I had to dish out six grand for an ebook reader and another grand or two for the smart sleep cover, it was easy to redeem the value of the investment. Even if I've been selective, I have gathered enough reading material to last me a few years. I've acquired an decent line-up of ePub versions. To name a few: Hauruki Murakami, Salman Rushdie, Italo Calivno, Umberto Eco, Banana Yoshimoto, Tom Wolfe, as well as more recent ones I haven't read from Jonathan Franzen, Nicole Krauss, Junot Diaz, Gary Shtyengart, David Foster Wallace and even a short story collection edited by Jeffrey Eugenides that included one from Alice Murno. I also got some current magazine issues and for the first time in my life, I wasn't just reading New Yorker back issues that I pick-up from second-hand bookshops.

Perhaps it's an infatuation, but I did read a lot quicker and more often. The convenience of technology allowed me some advantages. With a built-in comfort light that's not too glaring, I can read in bed and still lay beside my D. and little I. I've spent a lot of time at airports the past few weeks and with a device that can carry thousands of books, it allowed me to switch back forth a few that I've stored. I've made an attempt to read "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace. If that gets too heavy, I couple it with a chaser or two of non-fiction from David Sedaris (Exploring Diabetes with Owls) or Jonathan Franzen (Farther Away) which I honestly end up reading more.

A perfect handle, adjustable font sizes/margins, a variety of font selections, long battery life, a web browser, a dictionary, highlights and annotations in a touch are also built-in conveniences. There's barely anything poetic about technology but I feel fascinated with what goes on whenever light falls on the surface of the ebook reader. From halogens of coffeeshops, the CFCs of our bedsides lamps, and especially sunlight, the pearl-ink screen gives off a magical glow. There is a perfect scientific explanation with what's going on behind that gray-scale screen. But each swipe of a finger still feels like alchemy: the wave of a magic wand, a foretelling of the future or an accumulation of an imagined experience. This must have been how enthralled people were after the invention of the Gutenburg press and when books started getting published.

It's a different medium of consuming content, an enabler to feed your imagination as a novel or  mere words, come to life. It wasn't as soulless as I thought it would be, given that it was just a perfunctory 6-inch, colorless tab.

Perhaps all my self-contradiction and incongruity is really just being romantic. The old man is now sitting in his lazy boy, all the while dreaming about his old chair.

No technology, no chemical could ever replace the smells.

We are Still High

The evening's city lights and wine as we celebrated five years of marriage.

We called our wedding "the making of our lives as a truly blissful trip." We've settled down since then. While the ride has been smooth sailing, we remained on a high. 

The Hipsterrific, Instagrammy Future

While I am no one important or influential myself, I credit Spike Jonze as a profound influence in my taste for consuming media. In the zit-ridden absurdity of my teens, his work was a sweet bubble gum that my vivid imagination kept chewing, spending countless hours as though drugged on MTV. It had the randomness, creativity, formlessness, vicissitudes  of joy versus pain, and perhaps plain insensibility of videos such as Buddy Holly by Weezer, Cannonball by the Breeders, It’s oh So Quiet by Bjork, Diamond Sea by Sonic Youth and Praise You by Fat Boy Slim. It made all the weirdness I felt --- pleasant. Moreover, the tenets of the Spike Jonze’s “Her” has been entrenched in me long before and I have finally witnessed a fulfilling, enlightening culmination that is the movie.

Okay, that was a little vague, most especially for kids who were just born in the late 90s. But I’m an avid reader, and in fact I have read something from a hotshot contemporary author like Jonathan Franzen that references, and certainly better explains the foundational possibility of the Spike Jonze love story, “Her.”

“…according to the logic of technoconsumerism, in which markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks of nothing and gives everything, instantly and makes us feel all-powerful…. the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, ” is to replace a natural world that is indifferent to our wishes – a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance – with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self. Let me suggest, finally, that the world of technoconsumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but o trouble love in return.”
By Jonathan Franzen, in Pain Won’t Kill You, commencement address, Kenyon College, May 2011. Published in the collection Farther Away  

In Her, the not-so-distant future is hipsterrific and instagrammy. My, I’m even inventing my own terminology! The fashion of the day is high-waist and inelegant, but it looks like it finally makes sense as nobody could care less. This future is a logical result of a love affair that begun with our ubiquitous iPhones. Siri’s descendant is an “OS” that speaks with the voice of Scarlett Johansson. This OS, with its fuck-worthy voice, is also super-customized to be simultaneously everything we ever wanted, while being an effective extension of ourselves.

Theodore: Well, you seem like a person but you're just a voice in a computer.
Samantha: I can understand how the limited perspective of an unartificial mind might perceive it that way. You'll get used to it.
[Theodore laughs]
Samantha: Was that funny?
Theodore: Yeah.
Samantha: Oh good, I'm funny!

Several, even canonical works of literature tossed out the idea that technology will surpass humanity. Maybe so, but maybe not always in a way that we get gobbled up by the monsters we create. In the space made in-between, there will be so much novelty . There are dance numbers, great conversations, the aesthetic strangeness I felt when I saw the video of Diamond Sea, Buddy Holly or Praise You.

In a witty dialogue seemingly tailor-fit to a hipster audience, a line from the movie goes, “We are only here briefly, and in this moment I want to allow myself joy.”

And A Chummy Side Note

On this first You Tube Music Awards, Spike Jonze directed a live music-video performance of Arcade Fire's Afterlife, featuring Greta Gerwig. I posted it on Facebook, with the intention of spreading a piece of joy and the privilege of being fascinated, to friends who share the same tastes.

Nobody but my Her liked it. We watched it again and again, fending off all the aloneness that may have been rooted upon (quite ironically) by social media and the technology that enables it.