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.

Cousins These Days

A., who's in his early twenties, finished high school and is attending College in Sydney. He is currently in the Manila as he tries to renew his student visa. During Christmas dinner, he prepared roast beef with a capsicum side dish. He made a mean leche flan, and in a country that's preoccupied with anything instant, he took time with ground arabica coffee using a French press. "A plunger" was how they called it down undah, he said. Our conversation revolved around the upcoming Phoenix concert, the musical development of Mishka Adams, and the crowd in Conspiracy.

His brother, D., will be watching a Dave Matthews concert in Sydney. D. also saw Pearl Jam, and we shared a fascination with JD Salinger. Now he's a breadwinner.

J. is in Melbourne now, but he remains both a significant part and enormous influence in my life. I end up calling him when I bump into a slump, as I did when I had trouble with grade 3 math - particularly rounding off a .5

E. has fathered three incredibly good-looking children, and boosted our family's confidence in the looks department of our gene pool. He came here on Christmas day, telling me (and not for the first time) that he's fallen on hard times. And every time, I remember how we kept me company and bought me a drink at the right time.

J., from my father side, is a cousin I didn't speak with a lot,Well, I didn't think he spoke very much. He's now based in Vienna and I see him instagramming Europe and the good life. I wished we actually talked more while drinking Pale Pilsen in the spirit of our grandfather. I imagine him telling me about those castles in Bruges.

Several of our cousins from the US, my best memory of which is how we spent their vacations either sneaking out to drink or go to clubs, are actually Honor Society students who eventually graduate from Berkeley or the University of Texas.

Many Christmases ago, I celebrated with these cousins of mine who are now spread out to Melbourne, Sydney, New York, California, Texas or Vienna. The frequency and population of those Christmas reunions scaled down, but I'd like to think our lives are all interwoven as we are all, somehow, cut from the same fabric.

When we were driving on the way home from our two Christmases last night, we asked our little what his favorite part of Christmas was. "Getting gifts" he said, all thrilled and bubbly even at one in the morning. His ironman blasters were strapped to his arms.

The little one added his second favorite part of Christmas, "Sharing with my cousins."

D. and I talked about how concerned you were with your Kuya E. when he had to throw tantrum. We knew you loved him.

Your Kuya Z. is also 9 years old. He just took his first communion a few weeks back. He also recently got his Tita D.'s pre-loved smartphone as a present. He made a comment about some songs we left there. He liked Jamie's Cullum's version of Radiohead's High and Dry. He liked the You and Me Song from the Wannadies. Hearing about his taste in music, my hopes sprang as sparkly as this evening's Christmas spirit.

That fabric will be woven quite nicely.