IS IT SAFE?

ARMAGEDDON HOPEFULS: MY 2011 IN MUSIC

2012-01-23T15:49:00.005+08:00

"The culture with which I surround myself is a reflection of my personality and the circumstances of my life, which is in part how it should be." " (Nick Hornby)

In the end, it all came down to pleasure for me. Not that there's no melancholic surfeit here, there was the need to mope and to rant, mostly over the loose ends every year leaves you with, the ghosts I can't give up, the wolves at my door, all that. But the release you get from the songs you mope and rant to should count as pleasure,too. This list is unapologetically biographical as the connections I make with pop music cuts closer and closer every year, and I can only hope it's also bullish and solipsistic and contrarian, inadequate as cultural dowsing rod, charting rather the turmoils and ecstasies of my year and the reprieves inbetween. The far more burning urge was to dance, or rather, to reconnect with what made me fall in love with music in the first place and the small wonders that love can do for me: the hook-happy endorphin surge. I figure if the world really is coming to an end this year, then none of whatever troubles us now matters, except perhaps what little burst of pleasure we can muster in the face of it, partying, even if it's only in our heads, while hurtling to our doom on a headful of butterflies

Let's do this, then. Albums first, the records I listened to as wholes, then songs. As per usual.

1. Wild Beasts, SMOTHER
2. King Creosote and Jon Hopkins, DIAMOND MINE
3. The Indelicates, DAVID KORESH SUPERSTAR
4. Perc, WICKER AND STEEL
5. Rob Crow, HE THINKS HE'S PEOPLE
6. Mogwai, HARDCORE WILL NEVER DIE BUT YOU WILL
7. Fleet Foxes, HELPLESSNESS BLUES

8. Korallreven, AN ALBUM BY KORALLREVEN

9. TV On the Radio, NINE TYPES OF LIGHT

10.Taken by Cars, DUALIST

40. Panda Bear, Last Night At The Jetty: Tomboy was not so much sonic upgrade as it was sonic upsize, less a taking in of new colors but more a robust re-iterating of old ones, but while it doesn't get as obtuse as Young Prayer, it doesn't get as touching either, only this doo-wop colossus, with Noah Lennox grasping at a failing memory in full-on harmonic grandeur, does stand out, by a transcendent Brian Wilson mile.

39. Woodkid, Iron: Turns out I listened to this more times than anything off the new Beirut, which is surprising given how much of a Zach Condon fanboy I am but is no way meant to imply it was his failure or that Yoann Lemoine, who is all of Woodkid, is a rip-off artiste, just that I was distracted, and that this shares that similarly archaic old world aura.

38. Childish Gambino, My Shine:

" . . . why nobody wanna admit they like me just a little bit?" I'm not sure if the ramshackle nature of Donald Glover's rap is an aesthetic so much as a diffidence that works in his favor, here in particular where he vents his frustration at not being taken seriously with the sort of heightened bravado you find in the heat of the moment but tends to dissipate after you've flustered yourself saying your piece, which in this case, is a spot of bother I'm intimate with myself. " . . . when these motherfuckers gonna understand I'm serious?. . ." I feel you, man. I so feel you.

37. Toro Y Moi, Still Sound: Death Cab for Chromeo, something like that, and apologies to Chaz if that comes off reductive as his funk-lite inversion is fancier than the mashup implies, tempering the opaque introspection of his words by turning up the warmth of his sound for sound's sake ethos that's obviously residue from a love for Stereolab, making it perfect for a song about the comforts that come from the shapes sound makes.

36. Frank Ocean, Swim Good: Love breaks down, as it tends to do, and either Frank's committing suicide or merely using it as a metaphor for how much he's had it and is moving on. The title's an exhortation, of course, to himself, to anyone in the same rut. It also describes the sensuous way the song moves.

35. Avril Lavigne, What The Hell: For the rinky dink organ and the hollaback propulsion and Avril going all punky naughty frisky sexy on us and dispensing truths while she's at it. ". . .love hurts whether it's right or wrong . . ." Damn right.

34. Owen, The Armoire: The center not holding, when the place you call home grows clammy with un-belonging, is a hurt that’s hard-up for solace, and in using junk furniture to articulate the displacement that comes from it, Mike Kinsella doesn’t really offer any, but he does one-up his own tiny gift for quotidian minutiae, one-ups even Dallas Green, whose new one as City and Colour lacked the catch it used to the first few listens in. Not that I've given up on it, or on Justin Vernon, but I'll have to get back to you on those two. Mike's got this covered anyway.

33. An Horse, Know This, We've Noticed: Their Sleater-Kinney auras disperse a little here, but not my much, and not that it needs to. I’m thinking it has a shot at being my Our Deal for this year even if it lopes rather than smolders, if only for how emotive the rah-rah in its chorus gets and for how it invokes Dusty as much, even if it's only in spirit.

32. Adele, Turning Tables: It really was the year the world threw its arms around Adele, wasn't it? Oh, she's earned it, been earning it since 19 , and ubiquity aside, the pissed-off exuberance of Rolling in the Deep can withstand the neutering a thousand talent show contestants can visit on a song and is something whose swampy voodoo curdles with age. But this was the one that got to me, and gets to me still, the song not even Glee could butcher, the song that could possibly top Chasing Pavements as her career-high. " . . .close enough to start a war, all that I have is on the floor . . . " All that minor key roil, all that simmering indignation.

31. Wild Flag, Romance : In which Carrie Brownstein and Mary Timony and Rebecca Cole and Janet Weiss form a supergroup and rekindle their collective punk-pop perk and feist by attaching hooks on them big enough to haul cargo on, which in the 90s, at the height of their powers, or at least of their hipster relevance, would come off like some fluke post-grunge crossover, but in 2011 felt no less than truly alternative.

30. Fucked Up with Madeline Follin, Queen of Hearts: Pried loose from the massive punk rock opera it’s embedded in, you do get a sense of autonomy that gathers its own brunt without sucking at the teat of the big picture, which is to say you could make a single out of it, which is precisely what they did. Riffs with traction catchily pile-drive to its own blaze of pop rapture, and being the part in the story where boy first meets girl, the shaft of light near the end when Madeline from Cults opens her mouth makes both narrative and aesthetic sense.

29. Chad VanGaalen, Peace On The Rise: Feelgood hit of the summer turned lo-fi lullaby for the rest of the year, as disheartening as it is comforting, as broken as it is pretty.

28. Lykke Li, I Follow Rivers: She may not have the same husk and wallop but this girl group mutation had as much, if not more, gumbo and raunch as Adele's stompers, and as I'm not really in any mood to pit one against another, I'll take both, thank you, but give this a few nudges up the list, as I prefer Adele when she torches it down, and because that tinpot drum figure that snakes throughout is as exciting a use of percussion as the digital castanets on Robyn's Dancing On My Own.

27. Shabazz Palaces, Are You . . .Can You . .Were You? (Felt): " . . .my mind hides behind the music . . .” And that music is the sort that begets coinage along the lines of avant-chiaroscuro and dub-noir and prog-hop, the beats stretching and spacing out as if into a stoned soul fugue. If this is indeed MC Palaceer Lazaro a.k.a. Digable Planets’ Ishmael Butler’s manifesto, the music’s just the thing for hiding behind : nocturnal, obscure, sexy.

26. Drake with Rihanna, Take Care: Fuller of sound, and somewhat more assured, over time, the new Drake record might reveal itself as the closest he's gotten to a masterpiece, but given the limits of my immersion, and also given the catchiness of its hook, it's the title track that I lived with for quite a bit, more than Marvin's Room, more than Crew Love , if only because the he said-she said volley between Drake and Rihanna gets so delicious, I hardly notice when Gil Scott Heron butts in on the conversation and by the time I do, they're at it again. " . . .if you let me, here's what I'll do, I'll take care of you . . .", sings Rihanna, words she filched from Bobby Bland, of course, but is an endearment as eternal as it is cliched that also happens to be my last word on certain matters myself.

25. Niva, Ghost In My Head: That tasty R & B chorus repeating " . . .I think about it all the time . . . " as if it were a mantra of something Niva both dreads and relishes, should feel incongruous but isn't, infusing the spry little synth(dream)pop bubble instead with a buoyant prettiness that sends me for no reason and is on here for even less.

24. M83, Midnight City: That riff, that ebullient synthesizer clarion call like OMD sans the intolerable sappiness,the riff of the year full stop, cracking the song open and grabbing you by the loins then bolting and letting you chase it across the verses, half leitmotif half fugitive, until you back it into a corner near the end, throbbing in the backdrop teasing you to come closer, just before it detonates and takes you, willfully, gleefully, in its ecstatic blast radius.

23. Metronomy, Everything Goes My Way: " . . .when I took you back, I thought you'd up and run away, but you're still here, you're still here . . ." Halfway through, Anna Prior comes down from her disbelief as if to countenance her giddiness with a dash of reality-checking doubt by telling us how bad a boyfriend her ex was, but it's really only to give him room to sing a few lines to corroborate her optimism, before she goes back up into its ether. As irony-free a reunion of exes as Peaches and Herb, but at least twice as bubbly with delight at the thought.

22. Summer Camp, Better Off Without You: " . . .I'm better off without you . . ." so Elizabeth Sankey sings, and you know she's trying to convince herself as much as us, but the euphoric swell with which she sings it wins you over so, you take her word for it and hope she does, too.

21. Arctic Monkeys, The Hell-Spangled Shalala: Could be the tunnel vision that comes from being a fan, which is sometimes the point and the fun of being one, but Humbug and Suck It And See were not as regressive as the world claims, more like spurts of forward motion, really, albeit one bigger than the other. The pining on Love Is A Laserquest does get epic and has dibs on poignancy but this bouncy, impressionistic love song manages to slake my throwback fix without drowning me in my nostalgia, reminding me what made me love them and why it's a good thing they didn't stay that way, not to mention that it has the line that is not only my second favorite lyric of the year but what my year essentially boiled down to: " . . .I took the batteries out of my mysticism and put them in my thinking cap . . ."

20. Meyer Hawthorne, A Long Time : Rigorously old school as his artifice comes off, the touchstone here is really Hall & Oates, and that fertile period when they were mashing every mutant subgenre within arms' reach into the Philly soul that was their base matter. This earnest paean to Detroit may not be as protean nor as arch, but it has a keyboard riff so sexy it would've been sufficient to clinch this one for me, in case Meyer didn't have either the chops nor the largesse to write a song to go with it, which of course he does.

19. Mastodon, Curl of the Burl: There's the sci-fic erotica of Stargasm, sure, wearing on its sleeve as much as it can the prog they seem to be eschewing for now. Or perhaps the devastating elegiac prettiness of The Sparrow. But for each new vein they tap on the new record, I kept coming back more and more to the meat and potatoes, which in this case, is the Skynyrd/Sabbath crunch of the single, which opens with what could well be the couplet of the year: " . . .I killed a man 'cause he killed my goat, I put my hands around his throat . . ."

18. Those Dancing Days, Help Me Close My Eyes: " . . .I breathe with a hand on my mouth, I refuse to get poisoned and I swallow my shout . . ." A song that's not only about trepidation but also sounds the way it feels, its verses nervily pulling back, as if gathering the courage to build to a chorus that's not quite as sure of itself as it wants to be but has enough rouse in it to feel as if it is.

17. Jennifer Hudson, No One Gonna Love You: " . . . don't dare send me straight to voice mail, babe,I'm just gonna text you, hope it ain't no issue . . . " And she's telling you she's not going, boy. But don't be so quick to walk away. " . . .I've been through some things, please don't hold that against me . . . " She has and you shouldn't. Insensitivity aside, though, that throb of meta does help nuance what gets by on how underdressed her approach to R & B has always been, not letting any production garnish cross the path of her voice, which, like her love, is all she's got and often all you need.

16. Slow Club, Horses Jumping: Rebecca and Charles have always traded in everyday despair but passed, at all times, through a sieve of hope only here it gets so jubilant as to be almost defiant. "Good love is hard to regret, when you know it was real . . ." goes a line here, before it comes to the emotional boil near the end that's nothing shy of inspiring: "I wanna live where each hand you're dealt is enough so you never feel like you want to bluff, and every road that you drive gives you the crashes that keep you alive . . ." Hands down my favorite lyric of the year. You can't always get what you want but if you try sometimes, maybe you can.

15. The Streets with Claire Maguire, Lock The Locks: Mike Skinner's last bow. Wistful yet unrepentant, wry yet poignant, the last track on his last record is a last goodbye to the pop life, evoking the weariness he claims is his urge for leaving , buoyed by the certainty of his departure and the smoky way Claire makes that torchy chorus stick.

14. Destroyer, Chinatown: I suspect Dan Bejar's above mocking his own devices and that his tongue was as far away from his cheek as it can get when he sang this, veering as it does into a China Crisis by way of Walter Becker soft-rock haze right down to the cryptic lyrics and a sax solo that may be more Spyro Gyra than Bill Evans but goes on anyway to defy its predisposition for elbowing a song dangerously past anyone's thresholds of cheese, giving it updraft instead. Sibel Thrasher's harmonies are an unironic, unsurprising boon, too.

13. Radiohead, Separator: " . . .every woman blows her cover, in the eye of the beholder . . ." The last track on what turned out to be the second Radiohead album after Hail To The Thief that would inexplicably recede from both my attention span and eventually my memory mere weeks after first listen, but for this love song as hallucination, crooned oddly, mysteriously, gorgeously.

12. Memory Tapes, Wait In The Dark: " . . .this is how it ends we just stand each other up . . ." Dayve Hawk, like anyone with a pop gene as skittish as his, understands the protocols of pop heartbreak , how the lyrics confess pain and the music signifies relief, it's the most elegant of structures, the most empathic of co-dependencies. He also says insomniacs are like ghosts, two conditions I found myself in and find myself still, and this is a love song sung through the eyes of one or the other, about the separation anxieties of being so close and yet so far, set to his most effervescent singsong yet.

11. Fando and Lis, Nang Gabing Umiyak Ng Dagat: Full disclosure: I directed the video for this and my name does pop up on the album sleeve as "associate producer",which really only means I heard the tracks before anybody else did, but yeah, I'm biased, but then I also am with the 39 other songs here, and nepotism aside, this song and I do have a fair amount of history. I've always heard it stripped to the bone but adorned now with Khavn's piano curlicues and the way Ledh's voice aches and comforts and wounds, it becomes a song of unfathomable regrets for me to drown my own in.

10. Asobi Seksu, Perfectly Crystal: " . . .we've become what we've never wanted . . ." Almost a pastiche but not really, the way the latter-day Cocteau Twins swirl melds with the tasty My Bloody Valentine guitars that come in at the right moments and never overstays its welcome, and over which Yuki wails dreamily about the clarity that sometimes comes from disillusionment.

9. Flaming Lips and Neon Indian, You Don't Respond: Pardon the hipster obscurantism, as this was buried inside a one-off collab EP, one of many Wayne Coyne seems terribly fond of doing. I confess to never having been taken with their experimental nerve as I am by their pop fluency and a little pissed they could never quite manage the graft on these detours, as that would be wondrous, or at least sounds like it could be. This isn't quite that but it does come really, really close. Much as it's a cul-de-sac of a song, going around in circles, its glitchy anticlimax is weirdly catchy.

8. 2NE1, Lonely: It was only a matter of time before they slowed the party-hearty down, and not to say that this lithe, and rather grand, ballad doesn't have the goods, in and of itself, but it really is their unique alchemy that gives it a boost, and proves itself capable of turning anything Dara and Minzy and Bom and CL touch into gold.

7. Mates of State, Unless I'm Led: If you assume that every time husband and wife Kori and Jordan sing about a relationship, they're referring to the one they've been stalwart in maintaining all these years, then the minor key anxieties here are a glimpse of what they constantly find themselves up against and what they find the grace to overcome.

6. Low, Especially Me: Low has this utilitarian dependability that makes being a devotee less contingent on blind faith, and makes the occasional game change go down like magic. Having been a fan for so long, I never doubted their capacity for beauty and the way they draw forth balm from it. But this ghostly? This majestic? And this attuned to the truth? " . . . 'cause if we knew where we belong, there'd be no doubt where we're from, but as it stands, we don't have a clue, especially me and probably you . . .”

5. Rihanna, We Found Love :" . . .we found our love in a hopeless place . . ." Don't we all? The eight words that everybody will be singing and that rather ingeniously nails the way woe and desperation and euphoria push and pull at and sometimes bleed into each other inside not only nearly ever love song but nearly every relationship. Go by the words alone and it does seem doomed to futility, only Rihanna sings it with a strident sense of purpose to flip the script, which Calvin Harris' rapturous disco synths not only encourage but celebrate.

4. The Antlers, Putting The Dog To Sleep: ". . .my trust in you is a dog with a broken leg, tendons too torn to beg, for you to let me back in . . ." Peter Silbeman proves himself a few stations above the one-hit miserablist I always took him for, as every verse of longing, every cry for love teetering on meltdown, every plea for mercy met unheard on this tearjerky waltz, reveals a blade tucked in its folds, taking little nicks, drawing blood, hurting so bad, which is to say, so good.

3. Jay-Z and Kanye West with Frank Ocean, No Church In The Wild: Frank Ocean breaks the math down for you: " . . .human beings in a mob. What's a mob to a king? What's a king to a god? What's a god to a non-believer, who don't believe in anything? . . . " And Kanye and Jay-Z's spiritual crisis has to do with religious excess and existential voids and the obscene grandiosity of their own multimillionaire lifestyles, appropriately charged with apocalyptic urgency by that sinister Phil Manzanera blues riff.

2. Yuck, Get Away: Dinosaur Jr. for voltage plus Sebadoh for sustain plus Teenage Fanclub for immediacy, meaning its energies will dim over time but will re-up over time, too, and when it does, nothing can quite touch its catchy din for ecstasy, as is the case with it now.

1. Cold Cave, Confetti: Reining in the anthemic bombast that gave the new album crank, but hanging on to the Wayne Hussey affectations that serve him well, Wesley Eisold reverts back to the New Order he rode in on, milking a doomy sultriness from his overwrought melodrama, which, in all matters new wave and goth, is not a redundancy of excesses but a principle of faith.

RETROMANCY

2012-01-23T00:34:00.000+08:00

This is like crack. More here. And more please.

Fritz Lang's Inception. Hell yeah, I'd watch that.

STOP DRAGGING MY HEART AROUND

2012-01-16T07:42:00.002+08:00

This is not a film by Khavn. Ruined Heart!/ Pusong Wasak! just became the first Filipino entry in the Official Selection of the Berlinale International Short Film Competition.

In a word, wasak.

Poster by me.

THOSE MAGIC CHANGES

2012-01-07T03:51:00.005+08:00

When the music changes, so does the dance. - African proverb

DEAL?

2012-01-07T03:48:00.000+08:00

ZERO DEGREES OF SEPARATION: MY 2011 AT THE MOVIES

2012-01-02T04:12:00.007+08:00

I am still, it turns out, terribly susceptible to the delirium of festival fever, and in 2011, the temperature cranked past even my own thresholds, with the demented overlap in the last quarter making matters even more grueling. At the end of that week and a half, I was down with a particularly vicious strain of influenza.

Cinemanila was still the sovereign colossus, as domestic festivals go, Cinema One Originals the squirrely daredevil, Cinemalaya the tasteful prude, although they seem to have grown an extra set of balls to let films like Amok slip through. All three had a robust year. And, despite the persistent and exasperating lament that local cinema is on a downward spiral, and despite bully tactics from the big studios, who got their ass handed back to them at one point, and by a delightful indie zombie film at that, things have settled into a groove of comfortable productivity. The year was copious with moments, still not enough perhaps, as it never always is. But at least now there's an envelope to push.

I flew to HKIFF just as the year begun and co-programmed the 4th .MOV a little after half of it had come to pass. And these were the twin piths of my festival year, the latter slightly moreso. I also curated an exhibit for it, designed posters, translated parts of the poetry anthology we launched, had a hand in marketing, got wrung through the logistical brouhaha, was as privvy, in as hands-on a manner as possible for someone a few jurisdictions away from the main team, to the exhaustion, and exhilaration, of running even a festival as small as ours, not to mention the spate of Club.MOV screenings leading up to it, abolished by default with the sudden, saddening foreclosure of Mogwai Cinematheque. After this, I vowed to never again grumble over another festival's snafus and glitches. But I'd do it all over again in a snap. And three years from now, if the world doesn't end as scheduled, I will be.

Movie-going, the communal experience of going out to a screening and watching a film with people, remained my advocacy. And I try, as much as I can, to disqualify torrents and DVDs from my list, charitably allotting one slot for it, with this year going to a film I almost saw in a theater. I did cheat a little with a couple of films I saw publicly, albeit in another country, but the rest of the list are films shown in Manila, never mind the nature of its run, never mind if it even had a run. As long as it wasn't at home on my TV, or worse, on my laptop. I did see a lot of films that way, and I imagine a few could've possibly made the cut. But with or without these rules, I suspect the list won't be too far off from this one.

I did miss Lav's Century of Birthing. I missed Adolf's Isda (Fable of the Fish), too. I missed Teng Mangansakan's Cartas De La Soledad. I missed Victor Villanueva's My Paranormal Romance. I missed Regiben Romana's Sakay Sa Hangin (Windblown). I missed Jewel Maranan's Tundong Magiliw. These are some of my sins of omission, if you will, prey to my usual deficiencies of stamina and time and resources and singled out because they're filmmakers I like. I did get to see nearly all the locally shown foreign product, arthouse staples and commercial tentpoles both, which ran the usual gamut of odious to tepid to fits of spunk here and there that tended to dissipate the further away you got from the works, with only Terence Malick's The Tree of Life, Wim Wenders' Pina, Justin Lin's Fast Five, Gore Verbinski's Rango and Tarsem's Immortals having sufficient traction and exuberance to deserve a shout-out, not to mention Todd Haynes' foray into longform TV, Mildred Pierce. I liked them all, sure. I liked a tremendous amount of films this year, mostly local. But for my 2011 list, anything less than love I had little room for.

1. 20 Cigarettes (James Benning, USA, HKIFF): James Benning asks 20 of his friends to smoke in their respective environments and films what happens to them in the time it takes to finish a stick. His first work that has to do with people rather than landscapes or architecture, has a strand of voyeurism that can't be helped but is also partially the point. As knotty to parse and even knottier to push, this, like all his films, behaves like an installation but it's the conditions of a theater that are conducive to what it ultimately asks of us: the acute observation of duration in stillness.

2. Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey, Cinemanila): As disingenuous, and as lazy, as it is to invoke the word "magical" for something shot through with secrets and lies and regrets and deaths and the banality of the everyday, regardless of how wryly funny it can sometimes get, no other word feels more apt, even if it's only to describe what random lightning turns the otherwise barren Turkish countryside into. The search for a dead body becomes, for a posse of crusty and haggard civil servants, a night, and eventually a day, of going round in circles, of straying off paths, of detours, the oddest and loveliest being a small village they repair to where the lights go out and an angel appears to serve them coffee.

3. Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times) (Michelangelo Frammartino, Italy, HKIFF): Later on, when the nature of its metaphysics becomes apparent, you tend to marvel at the purity with which it was poeticized, not least with that single take everybody who's seen it is frothing in the mouth about, and rightly so, and with what is hands down the finest goat acting in the history of cinema. The four times of the title refers to the four lives that supposedly live within us and that we go through during rebirth: man, animal, vegetable, mineral. It is also, incidentally, the cast list.

4. Breather (Pahinga) (Khavn De La Cruz, Philippines, .MOV) : The cancer diary it started out as became something more after Khavn's father passed away during the editing, something closer to exorcism, to magical thinking, but not to eulogy, as it's loss is not so much given over to the part of nostalgia that aches but more to the part that exhilarates. A love letter, really, as much to the filmmaker confronting his own mortality as to the parent who left a hole when he succumbed to his, but also to that brief and immortal time they both spent in the shadow of their longest goodbye.

5. 13 Assassins (Takashi Miike, Japan, Cinemanila): Having long parted ways with Seven Samurai as both my Kurosawa and jidaigeki touchstone, here, then, is my substitute, itself a remake but enthusiastically so. The density of the nihilism with which the enemy here is fleshed out demands such an outsize catharsis in his climactic taking down, that no less than half an hour of glorious comeuppance would seem to suffice. Miike knows this. And gives us 45 feral, bloody minutes of it.

6. Big Boy (Shireen Seno, Philippines, Cinema One Originals): A certain warm and often lovely and also familiar strangeness runs through here, as it's not only a film that's both about memory and like a memory, in the way it looks and feels and sounds and threatens to recede or disperse, but also about how every generation's experience of growing up has connective tissues that make them all kindred.

7. Mga Anino Sa Tanghaling Tapat (Ivy Universe Baldoza, Philippines, Cinema One Originals): Three girls grapple with the thorny changes their bodies undergo, as ghosts and portents pool in the luxuriant and poisonous forest around them. Ivy's polarizing but undervalued rumination on sex and death re-imagines the carnal processes of brutal youth as a creepily erotic , maddeningly obtuse horror movie.

8. Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, USA, Domestic Release): Pitched below the requisite volume of panic and spectacle, of course it's going to go over many heads spoiling for crackle, for racing against time and eleventh hour salvation. But its' grim, procedural sobriety has that low hum of unease and exposure. It starts with a cough in the dark, disembodied and nearby, as if saying here is your doom in small, the littlest of things you can't see, loosed now in a world that connects like a network of veins at the speed of god. If none of this makes you very nervous, you really ought to be.

9. Six Degrees of Separation From Lillia Cuntapay (Antoinette Jadaone, Philippines, Cinema One Originals):
If nothing else, for not being the one trick pony I always felt it was prone to becoming, at least on paper, cynical as I was
a
t first about how deep the cachet of its subject ran and if it could sustain more than a couple of gags. Antoinette calls this a mockumentary but it veers closer to that freak overlap of documentary and fiction, and in exalting
Lillia Cuntapay, the iconic bit player, certainly a phenomenon unique to us, it
subtly lambasts how stuck-up the showbiz industry is and how intolerably embarrassing, and distressing, our thrall to it remains regardless. That, and it's also a hoot.

10. Niño (Loy Arcenas, Philippines, Cinemalaya):
Time's a goon, it's been said, and it is, and sometimes it wins.
Emptied-out desperate things palpitate against
obsolescence and all its useless beauties
, not least being the centrifugal matriarch whose opera star has faded but also the religious finery leeched of their divinities but for the wild hope she hangs on it.

Buenas Noches España (Raya Martin, Philippines-Spain, Spanish Film Festival): Raya's experimental opiate is a bit of a quandary for me, hence its position, as I do like the form, but I like the idea of the form even more, and absolutely love the idea of the form in the context of where his ouevre stands, on the cusp of either repeating himself into perpetuity or going so far out on a limb it's likely to wind a lot of people up, which it did, which it should. Painters and musicians get to color outside the lines the way he does here, sometimes to fanfare, sometimes to indifference, but filmmakers are routinely frowned upon, often by other filmmakers, for merely being curious as to what's on the peripheries of the three-act narrative convention we box the medium in, and are all but lynched when they act on that curiosity. This is also where our national cinema stands at the moment, trying to figure out what it is, and slowly fitting itself into safe absolutes in the attempt, when what it needs to do is to go out on limbs more often. Cinema is the youngest art, and Philippine Cinema even younger. Too young, in fact, to get all wussy about winding a few people up.

ELEMENTS OF STYLE

2011-12-31T18:05:00.003+08:00

When writing*, remember three things.

1. You are no one and your work has no value.

2. Nobody cares.

3. Write as if the first two aren't true.

*Applies to painting and filmmaking, too.

WE FOUND OUR LOVE IN A HOPELESS PLACE

2011-12-28T03:37:00.000+08:00

I left the life I wanted to live half a world away where it died waiting for me to come back and get it.

HEADSTART FOR HAPPINESS

2011-12-23T23:26:00.002+08:00

Lonely (Reggae). 2NE1.

Song of the year No.09. Joy to the world. Merry Christmas. Or Happy Holidays. Whichever way you may swing. Crack a smile. Moping is so 2010.

LES YEUX SANS VISAGE

2011-11-19T23:19:00.001+08:00

“We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under. The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public. The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. They are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. This happens to nearly all of them sooner or later. People in the second category, on the other hand, can always come up with the eyes they need. Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark. And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.” — Milan Kundera,The Unbearable Lightness of Being

ENGINE SUMMER*

2011-11-19T19:35:00.005+08:00

"I am one of the searchers. There are, I believe, millions of us. We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content. We continue to explore life, hoping to uncover its ultimate secret. We continue to explore ourselves, hoping to understand. We like to walk along the beach, we are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty. We like forests and mountains, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know - unless it be to share our laughter. We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide. Most of all we love and want to be loved. We want to live in a relationship that will not impede our wandering, nor prevent our search, nor lock us in prison walls; that will take us for what little we have to give. We do not want to prove ourselves to another or compete for love."

- James Cavanaugh, There Are Men Too Gentle To Live Among Wolves via Jonathan Carroll

*Title taken from John Crowley

FOUND MEMORY

2011-11-11T02:43:00.000+08:00

In many ways, like a memory, including physically. Funny. Lovely. Dreamy. Strange. And so what if my friends made it.

Go see. Go see everything, sure. But go see.

THE SET LIST:SIX DAYS

2011-11-10T09:55:00.005+08:00

Day 11. A Song From Your Favorite Band.
Six Days, DJ Shadow.

There was a piece in SPIN about Soundboys, a late-90s strain of music hipster slightly more anal than trainspotters, whose fixation was to forage for and voraciously consume the strange, the esoteric, the obscure, from French pop to Japanese noise to No Wave and whatever else lay inbetween. Packrats of odd pop. An impulse after my own heart. I dug it, nursed it even, but lacked perhaps the stamina and certainly the access and the means to pursue it with any degree of vigor. Soundboys prefer their hoard in vinyl, for starters. I dabbled, of course, but within my means and the pace which it dictated, which makes dabble a bit of an understatement. Torrents cranked things up a little but we all know how downloads are not the same thing.

Josh Davis a.k.a. DJ Shadow was like some proto-Soundboy. And all those pictures of him trawling through stacks of vinyl was a soft-sell with traction. I was terribly attracted, at first, to what he was, more than what he sounded like. I wanted to be trawling through those stacks of vinyl myself. I'm not sure if it colored the way I listened to his music, not that I cared if it did. I doubt, though. Endtroducing, and subsequently The Private Press, has its own sonic mileage, a sui generis double-whammy. The subtext of what he was pulling off, which would occur to me much much later of course, was really a subversion of the God/Man schism between the pop star (they who make records) and the pop fan (us who buy the records) reverting the power back to us. And DJ Shadow is, technically, one of us, a nonmusician taking musicmaking into his own hands. It’s a will to power as pro-active, as exciting, as Eno’s pop oeuvre , as punk, as hip-hop. Which is what Davis has always insisted he's doing. Abstract hip hop, he calls it, but that's really only in aura. Try David Axelrod for a more accurate referent. Try Ennio Morricone. Were I to humor him, and if De La Soul's 3 Ft.High and Rising was the record I popped my hip-hop cherry with, then Endtroducing was the fuck of no return. New adventures in hi-fi, indeed.

The title of Building Steam From A Grain of Salt, from Endtroducing, could be a precis of his process - - -the hearing of new worlds in the mashing up of old ones. Fragments - - - random vinyl arcana, forgotten pop, abandoned rhythms - - - that don't come off fragmentary, but rather, cohesive and whole. But its catharsis relied on knowing that this cohesive whole was made up of disparate, and sometimes opponent, parts, if not necessarily how or even what. Process is product something like that. It's more or less the same thing with Gregg Gillis a.k.a. Girltalk, except it's easier to recognize the parts that make up his mashups, and that recognition is crucial to his manifesto, to his aesthetic. With DJ Shadow, it was the reverse. SIx Days, from The Private Press, mashes up Colonel Bagshot’s Six Day War with riffs from Dennis Olivieri’s I Cry In The Morning. It's magnificent. Ominous, exotic. And possibly my favorite DJ Shadow track barring Midnight In A Perfect World and Organ Donor. Having Wong Kar Wai direct the video sweetened the deal. More than that, though, I had stumbled on Colonel Bagshot because of it, and it was almost as if I'd been trawling through those stacks of vinyl myself. This is how it always is for me with DJ Shadow. Knowing there's a dearth of good shit sharking under my radar is my giddy music geek thrill. And his work really is the most intoxicating distillation of the whole Soundboy dynamic. Has fuck-all to do with hipster elitism and everything to do with the unique ecstasy of digging up buried treasure in my own backyard.

THE SET LIST: HAPPINESS BY THE KILOWATT

2011-11-10T09:55:00.003+08:00

Day 11. A Song From Your Favorite Band
Happiness By The Kilowatt, City And Colour

I know now that the title was taken from, and the song apparently based on, a Kurt Vonnegut speculative fiction short story, The Euphio Question, which tackled the cheeriest of subjects: the underside of absolute happiness. But I've always heard this as a song about marital disillusion. I suspect I've always been predisposed to the inevitability of growing old with a life partner wrapped around my finger, in a manner of speaking, and despite no luck on that front so far, I probably, perhaps foolishly, still am. Call it social conditioning, call it religious fascism, and who knows if it is, but I have no grudge against it. Just seemed to have missed the window is all. I do confess to having this faint but niggling phobia of what Dallas is singing about: " . . .so this is continuous happiness, you know I always imagined it something more . . . " The brutal letdown of pinning your hopes on something and having that something be everything you expected it to be except it turns out everything you expected it to be wasn't enough, and how intolerable the regret that comes from it must be.

Dallas Green, who is sad bastard incarnate and has a voice that tends to melt me in my weakest moments, usually half past midnight with the headphones strapped to my ears, is covering himself here, slowing down a raucous number by his other and frankly bland punk band, Alexisonfire, until it bleeds out discontent and anticlimax, albeit prettily. I tend to lack sophistication in the things that bring me to grief, my index of woes boiling down, at some point, to a sadness of loss. Loss of love, loss of faith, loss of spark, loss of time, loss of awe, loss of anyone you love, what-have-you. I'm pretty sure this qualifies as a song of loss, and even if it doesn't, it does give me the same twinge as if it was. There may be some comfort in being alone together, a grudging comfort but a comfort nonetheless, but one that doesn't go far in tempering the inevitable and unbearable gravity of the song's last words: " . . .was this what we hoped for?" God forbid.

THE SALVAGE DETECTIVES

2011-10-29T21:34:00.000+08:00

Rumor has it that there’s a lost Martin Scorsese film out there, a crime film shot on the cheap from before Mean Streets, that exists in the form of a grimy bootleg VHS. Lost films are the yeti footprints of film geeks, our ghost stories, our fuzzy UFO photographs, our obscure objects of desire. And there certainly is a touch of the arcane to the notion of an under the radar film few have seen, tenuously held together by the duct tape of failing memory, its potentially vital cultural data hostage to the processes of decay. Exotica like this is the vitamin of geeks. But Scorsese hasn’t gone on record to confirm or deny the film nor has anyone bothered picking up its trail. It’s not as if the world is in desperate need for any more Scorsese films, anyway. We have too much as it is, if you ask me. And it’s not as if we’re talking about Citizen Kane either.

But what if we were? Or something of similar exaltation? The few people who’ve seen Gerry De Leon’s lost film Daigdig Ng Mga Api have unanimously proclaimed its magnificence. It had me with that title, sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it lives up to it and turns out be our Citizen Kane after all. Except we might never know. Just as we might never know, too, if Manuel Conde’s Juan Tamad films deserve the legend they’re freighted with. Or if Ishmael Bernal’s Scotch on the Rocks To Forget, Black Coffee To Remember is anywhere near as tantalizing as its title. No prints have survived. No copies exist. Not even on tape. The number of films we’ve apparently lost out of neglect and indifference is a gut punch that can make even the most stalwart of resolves buckle at the knees. And folded into the context of our film history, the stakes are raised and our lost films become more than mere esoterica, gaining instead a sheen of minor tragedy. And, if anyone from SOFIA could have their way, a throb of emergency, too.

Founded by the late Hammy Sotto and a handful of like-minded colleagues in 1993, SOFIA is the Society of Filipino Archivists for Film, a non-profit task force of volunteers whose station is to salvage whatever lost films of ours they can. It’s not yet too late but time is running out. Entire strains of history are literally and inexorably turning to vinegar. There are piles of films past the point of rescue, and there are piles more getting there even as you read this. SOFIA is not exactly bereft of trophies, counting among their triumphs the rediscovery and restoration of films like Giliw Ko, Noli Me Tangere, Tunay Na Ina, Sanda Wong, Kundiman Ng Lahi, and White Slavery. But this, their members will be the first to tell you, barely scratch the surface. And the work that needs to be done is regularly curtailed as SOFIA are continually beset by troubles that swing from the usual lack of funding to the crippling vacuum of a National Film Archive that should exist but doesn’t. Help does come from all sides. Foreign organizations have lent a hand in restoring some films. Even film producers and branches of government are weighing in. But it’s a precarious situation, all told. Still, never say never is their default mantra. Daigdig Ng Mga Api is SOFIA’s Holy Grail. But so were Gerry de Leon's The Moises Padilla Story and Lino Brocka’s Wanted Perfect Mother, both thought forever lost in any format. And if these films can resurface, as they have, suddenly anything is possible.

A few months back, after years of basking curiously in its outsize myth, I at last saw Mario O’Hara’s previously lost noir Bagong Hari for the first time, as part of SOFIA’s Overlooked Films Underrated Filmmakers series of screenings. Cobbled from grungy U-Matic elements, its condition was far from pristine but this was probably the best the film has looked in years. More to the point, though, it surged with energy, felt thrillingly alive - - -dense, ballsy, vigorous. Direk Mario was there and so were the film’s stars Dan Alvaro, Robert Arevalo, Perla Bautista. This was the first of the screenings I attended, and regret missing Jun Raquiza’s Krimen and Danny Zialcita’s Masquerade, regret missing nearly every screening, really. This was how it was each time, I’ve been told. An unsung film retrieved from the fringes, a relatively fervid audience, its director and stars rekindling glory days and meeting new generations of admirers. It’s terribly encouraging. And it makes sense that a generous amount of SOFIA’s energies are now being poured into them.

We are largely a culture who has routinely trivialized, neglected, ignored and vilified our own cinema, elevating our revulsion to a class schism even, while kissing the ground foreign cinema treads. This flippant, often disgruntled, apathy has been more or less crucial to the state our cinema is in now. But, in its own modest way, these screenings embody the almost violent tidal shift in attitude and enthusiasm. And it’s tough not to feel even the tiniest glimmer of hope. The mash-up archaeologist detective mercenaries of SOFIA will not shirk from their first mission , sure. The lost films need to be found and restored. But these screenings are, in and themselves, restorations, too, of the very things that bought SOFIA , and those of us who champion their efforts, here in the first place: the jubilant obsession, the keening passion, the relentless love.

Originally published at Lagarista.

Picture courtesy of SOFIA.

COLD MOUNTAIN CINEMA

2011-10-25T16:16:00.010+08:00

Cinema Leonardo, where last Saturday's Club .MOV held its Baguio screening, is really a room in Khavn's family's sprawling Baguio house, made over to simulate what had been the home of Club .MOV all these months, the prematurely late and much lamented Mogwai Cinematheque. And the cummulative mood of the three films we showed (Johnnie To's Sparrow, Ishmael Bernal's Salawahan and Jan Svankmajer's Alice) helped crank the party atmosphere, already spilling over, such as it was, from the previous night's Folk U gig at Cafe by the Ruins. There were copious amounts of free drink and food downstairs, a miniature bonfire and fog rolling in outside and the air was so cold you had no choice but to tank up on alcohol and layer yourself and snuggle up to someone to ward off hypothermia. Which is to say the conditions were, not to exaggerate, perfect. The turnout was sizable and intimate but I missed Oggs and Chard and Don and Kamy and my two perpetual filmmaking cohorts Allan and Gym.

Apart from that, it was possibly the best Club .MOV screening we've had. I'd have thought nothing could top Friday's drunken sojourn to Baguio Country Sounds & Variety Songs,to watch the best band in the world Knights 'Til Dawn, as the undisputed height of the Baguio trip but . . .no wait, not even this could top that.

*Photographs by Minnie Torres (above) and Mabie Alagbate (below).

THE ETERNAL

2011-10-19T22:56:00.003+08:00

Nothing lasts forever.

THE SET LIST: GIGANTIC

2011-10-19T22:54:00.001+08:00

Day 11. A Song From Your favorite Band.
Gigantic, The Pixies

It was the name and it was the way they seemed to come out of nowhere and it was the surreal amped-up catchiness of their rock and roll but mostly it was the name - - - because, after Kiss and maybe after Sugar and Guided By Voices, no band has/had a cooler name, and the name alone had enough steroid in it to feed and balloon the mystique even before I heard a single note.

The day I would at last hold in my hands, all the way from some boondock record store in New Zealand (don’t ask), a brand-new cassette (yes, a cassette) of Doolittle, was bound to be momentous. What I never factored in was how prickly with chemical displacement it would be. There was nothing about the Pixies I hadn’t heard before when I first heard them. They embodied their flippant sum-up: Husker Du meets Peter Paul & Mary . . . but also meets surf pop and oddball sci-fic and the Old Testament and Tex-Mex and flying saucers. Except there was something about them I sort of hadn’t: equal parts sui generis, cosmic accident and alchemy. That “loudquietloud” dynamic of theirs may have been housebroken by Nirvana, inadvertently brokering alternative rock from a code to live by into a marketing category, but the whiny humorless subcategory of guitar rock that was the house style of the movement had fuck-all to do with the Pixies’ looseness and flippancy and gift for catharsis.

Being the first track on the first album of theirs I heard, it makes sense that Debaser would be the number that embodied their aesthetic for me, but even without those biases, it sort of does: the gutful scream-singing, the up-all-night bass, the guitar jetstreams, the abstract lyrics. The name-checking of Un Chien Andalou would eventually titillate the Bunuel nut I became, but it was always the way this made the grafting of Mission of Burma on a chassis of cranked-up smelted Cure sound like something God intended. I've since exalted it here as one of my favorite songs forever.

But it's Gigantic - - -a minor hit single and a major fan favorite - - - that I find myself going back to more and more. The phrasing of Dig For Fire, from Bossanova,the album that came after Doolittle, had me flashing back to my old Talking Heads records, more than the words really, but they sort of had me flashing back ,too : “. . .there is this old man, who spent so much of his life sleeping that he’s able to keep awake for the rest of his years. . .” Of course, it turned out to be a hommage. But it's the way Kim Deal cuts through the coy weirdness like a blast of helium with which everything lifts on that lovely refrain (“ . . .no, my child, this is not my desire. . .”), the way Tina Weymouth used to do from time to time, that clinched matters. On Gigantic, Kim takes to mic again, but this time full-hogs it, more Joan Jett than anything and all the sultry voltage that implies. Provisionally known as Kim’s Song it effortlessly, gorgeously claims the spot held previously by Led Zep’s The Lemon Song - - - or would that be Donna Summer's Love To Love You Baby? - - - as rock’s touchstone of horny. Having the sexiest woman in rock and roll on vocals will have that effect. And until we rescue Here Comes Your Man from 500 Days of Summer, and maybe even after, I'm saving all my (big, big) love for this.

NOT QUITE DEAD

2011-10-16T15:41:00.008+08:00

The Spinanes’ Manos was not the first record I bought blind. This was a little over ten years ago, as the contrails of the 90s were fading into the next shiny millennium, back when you almost always bought music blind. Back when you almost always bought music, really, sometimes going on nothing more than a glut of praise gleaned from magazines serving as both field guide and failsafe. I bought a lot of records this way, on a wing and a prayer and a Five Star rating from Q. But Manos was the second record I bought blind because of the cover. The first was Nirvana’s Nevermind, and that’s since been rightly exalted into album cover canon. Manos hasn’t. I don’t think it will be but I think it should. Funnily, it’s a line from a Lush song that comes to mind every time I look at it: “ . . .shake baby shake you know I can fit you in my arms . . .” Rebecca Gates’ troubled eyes hiding under a shock of hair, her left hand holding on to his right, her right about to do the same with his left, half given in to their imminent calm, so grateful for them being there she can’t help but kiss the hand she’s holding even before she’s fully tumbled into his arms, arms she knows she would fit into, get lost in. It was love at first sight for me. And as much as I was betrayed by some of the records I bought blind, Manos was thankfully not one of those. Still, even if their songs blew, I’d at least have the cover tiding me over. I’ve since picked it as the album cover I love above all else.

And I have nearly all else. Most of them are stacks of DVD-Rs storing JPEGs of album covers, or sleeve art, as parlance would have it: everything from Peter Saville’s violently minimalist New Order covers to the sinister cartoons of Jim Flora and the benign hallucinations of Hipgnosis to the complete works of Blue Note’s Reid Miles and 4AD’s Vaughan Oliver and, of course, Sir Peter Blake’s monolithic Sgt.Pepper, a multitude of sensibilities, marvels of design all. I even have folders devoted entirely to the worst of the lot and have gleefully dumped that awful one for MGMT’s Congratulations in one of them. Yes, I’m a sleeve art buff. A sleeve art nerd, if you will. A sleeve art packrat, at the very least. But it really is closer to curatorship than collecting as it isn’t consumed merely with the act of collecting. At some point, you can even call it a co-dependency. And it comes more out of being a design fan than being a music fan, although it helps, but one need not dovetail into another, as I’ve fallen in love with the sleeve art for music I don’t necessarily care for as much, like any number of Roger Dean’s covers for Yes, whose gatefolds open into these exquisite alien vistas. But I also own a lot of the sleeve art I love. And this is where the pleasures become even more arcane, as it not only plays into a sensation that’s endemic to even the most cursory record collectors but upgrades it: the tactile high of the album as object.

It’s an even more rarefied thrill now that downloading has all but colonized the way we listen to music. And this whole new zeitgeist of having everything at your disposal tends to make having everything meaningless, taking away so much from what used to be fundamental to the experience of music: the pining for, the foraging, the sleuthing, the deprivation before the elation. There already is, right now, an entire generation of music geeks who have never torn the plastic off a new CD, yet own everybody’s discographies in their hard drives. Frankly, it’s a little unsettling. Sleeve art icons Saville and Blake have gone on record as saying that not only is their trade dying faster than we think because of this, but that the album as physical artifact is dying with it. Except that I see a lot of bands becoming more and more elaborate with their sleeve art. I see more and more bands issuing albums on vinyl even. It’s as if there’s this defiant thrust to restore the cachet of the album as physical artifact back into the mix. Not quite dead, then, sirs.

Oh, I do listen to hordes of albums without the benefit of owning any of them physically. But I still buy CDs as often as I can. If there really is some collective endeavor to rescue the physical album, and with it sleeve art, from obsolescence and eventually extinction, I’m putting a little skin in the game, so to speak. I know that makes me come on like some recalcitrant throwback, a shambling anachronism even, but if you’ve ever peeled the banana off Andy Warhol’s cover for Velvet Undergdound & Nico or used the spectral decoder that came with Bright Eyes’ Cassadaga to see its invisible cover or customized your own cover for Beck’s The Information with its special set of stickers or merely had the optical illusion on Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion play tricks on your eyes, you know precisely what my stake is. There’s a purist stance about sleeve art , moreso sleeve art with aspirations to flamboyance, that has to do with how its extraneous, distracting, bells and whistles. That’s true. But isn’t that also the point?

*Originally published in UNO.

SWAMPED THANG

2011-10-15T18:45:00.004+08:00

Five articles. One AVP script. One film script. Two more brochures for writing and laying out. And at least two grant proposals. The ruthless pile-up of backlog has me feeling like this. Well, not really . . . motherfucker's more relaxed that I can ever be.

You've heard this story before. But you know what, I don't care.

Welcome to the weekend of jingle lang ang pahinga.

THIS WOMAN'S WORK

2011-10-15T15:24:00.002+08:00

Boys know a thing or two about strip shows and boys who don’t know much aren’t really boys although they most likely know a thing or two about the action on the other side of the strip, which, if we keep everything down to just the music - - - and please, let’s - - - drinks from the same sonic well. The quintessential striptease song is long on smolder and even longer on sleaze. A striptease is , after all, about seduction slowed to a tarpit ooze and dangling carrots of hot sex after. Languid, then. And steamy. Horny, too, as in horns, but these days just plain horny will do, although a sticky sax solo can still extend a hard-on into infinity. The filthier, friskier domestic a-go-go not go-go model throws in heaps of power ballad schmaltz to suit the clientele and for demographic nuance. Air Supply is big here, ditto anything by Jim Steinman like Meat Loaf’s I Would Do Anything For Love, which is a stone classic of the sub-subgenre if only for the context it provides, coming, as these things do, with a drink tab that’s tantamount to doing anything for love the way it burns through a couple of days’ wages for the cheap thrill of a fresh leg to fondle under the table.

My alternative playlist only gets to jump genres because not even a naked, dancing woman (or a naked, dancing anything for that matter) can make an overwrought Jim Steinman song sound anywhere near listenable. But it stays true to mood and tempo and suggestiveness.

Here, then. Five songs perfect for a woman/man to slowly take her/his clothes off to that are not Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart or that Wham song. If hot sex does happen after, that’s a whole different playlist. Let me know if you get lucky. I take requests.

1. Can’t Find My Mind The Cramps : I’m picturing a 50s B horror movie slaughterhouse slash biker’s dive hallucinated by David Lynch with a stripper straight out of Russ Meyer by way of Salma Hayek’s Santanico Pandemonium and where these doyens of shockabilly are the house band. I’m not too sure how much turn-on this packs for you and me and everyone else but someone has to strip to the Cramps at some point. You could go with their cover of Fever but this has a bit more of the scuzzy, sinister slither that feeds the aura.

2. Cruisin’ D’Angelo : Leave it to D’Angelo, who after this would have his already manly carcass sculpted to resemble gladiator body armor then pose on the cover of his album with nothing on and show it off, to raise the temperature of a song that Smokey Robinson wrote and sung as lush swoon, and sex it up full of slow burn and come-on. His breathy falsetto, when he sings “ . . .let the music take your mind, just release and you will find . . .” makes the love man of love men Babyface look like a socially-deficient dork. Inspirational, if anything. And the girls in the room probably wouldn’t mind if he took it off at some point.

3. Down Boy Yeah Yeah Yeahs: There’s usually some visceral, acrobatic move that brings a set to a climax - - - serpentine floor writhing, wild pole contortions, a mind-boggling split, all of the above. This is probably why they’re apparently programming a little Metallica inbetween the AM radio mawk. But I’m not quite sure Enter Sandman gives it the vigor and thump it needs. Better off with this sultry quiet-loud-quiet headbanger that starts off languid and trippy for the heat gain then spikes into a massive attack of powerchord. Split to that, sister. Karen O takes care of bringing the sexy, but of course. Oh, and isn’t that title just the champion of puns?

4. Glory Box Portishead: About time someone did a striptease to this smoky, humid electro-torch classic as no song has ever sounded more meant for just that. And know that when Beth Gibbons croons that line “ . . .give me a reason to love you . . .” the girl on the floor is talking to you, boy. Call her to your table and cough up.

5. Love Won’t Let Me Wait Major Harris: Dig that sumptuous, supple Gamble and Huff groove and the suave, seething lothario making his case “ . . . please tell me yes, and don’t say no honey, not tonight . . .” She, of course, doesn’t say no, not tonight. But you can tell that from the unsafe-for-work porno moaning that takes over after the Major stops singing.

SWAMP THINGS

2011-10-08T15:19:00.001+08:00

Down by Law (Jim Jarmusch, 1986): In a Louisiana of the mind, three stooges - - - a DJ, a pimp, a chatty murderer - - - escape from a boondock prison into an opium-sated swamp and eventually a kind of eden, as Robby Muller's sinister curtains of chiaroscuro part for a gnarled voodoo lushness in this chaingang Godot. Save for Permanent Vacation, I've seen nine of Jarmusch's ten narrative features. He can do no wrong - - - but this is the one closest to my heart.

COBWEB CASTLE SIEGE

2011-10-08T03:12:00.001+08:00

Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957): Orson Welles's was like a bad speed trip- - -sweaty, agit, terse. Roman Polanski gutted it, spilt blood and gristle. But Kurosawa, he spooked Macbeth up. Into hallucination, into ghost story, into fever dream, into something unlike anything you've seen before. Or since. That's why he wins.

GRUNGE TYPE

2011-10-08T02:29:00.002+08:00

David Carson was/is terribly influential to my secret self as a graphic designer wannabe, and whichever side of the fence you may be on his aesthetic, you have to admit that his work does tend to scream, a one-up if you're designing magazine covers, and, contrary to rumor, is not as difficult to navigate. I picked up my first issue of Raygun (above) because it was Oasis on the cover and because I used to pick up every music magazine I could lay my hands on back in the day. But the remainder of my collection was bought for Carson's covers, and for the way they reinforced the notion of the magazine as an object of art, which would be a fatuous claim, if we weren't talking about Carson. The stash I have, such as it is, is meager, almost pitiful, and i've always regretted not buying more. A PDF of his entire run would be grand.

RIP STEVE JOBS

2011-10-06T11:02:00.000+08:00

JUNGLE ENERGY

2011-10-05T01:21:00.007+08:00

Days like these make leaving behind a cushy advertising career, and the inflated self-entitlement of a business card with my name on it, for life as a corporate pariah with recurring bouts of poverty and spasms of happiness, the shrewdest and smartest career move I ever made.

Last August. Day 1 of the Entropy Machine shoot with my filmmaking cohorts Gym Lumbera, Kints Kintana, Jet Leyco and the indomitable Macoy Duran.

And, as the 5th picture from top makes obvious, yes, I do my own stunts.

*Photos by Jet Leyco

THE MAN BY WHICH I GOT HERE

2011-10-04T03:12:00.003+08:00

From the January 2007 opening of the Destroy All Monsters group show. That’s Dad at the center, who I don’t have enough pictures with as I’d like, and who wishes I’d paint more. Working on it, Dad.

*Photo by Romeo Lee.

SONGS IN THE KEY OF LIFE

2011-09-25T14:54:00.002+08:00

Not that you can tell but, unlike John Doe and Exene Cervenka, the real-life power couple at the heart of X, the Reivers’ John Croslin and Kim Longacre are only pretending to be one, and that could well be why they evoke this lived-in tenderness. "Late at night awake, talking about some plans, spending money that we'll never have, no I can't do much, only hold your hand, I get up to check the kids, I get up to bar the door. . . " As tropes go, as centers of gravity, as story ore, the messy knots of wedded (sort of) bliss are a rock and roll oxymoron, more so at that time when fashionable despair was slowly becoming the atmospheric condition of rock and roll and the tiniest concessions to happiness were decreed protocols of naivete. But nearly song for song, the Reivers’ End of the Day seemed to exalt married life, or at the very least long-standing partnerships, unburdened with irony, surging with gratitude. "The greatest love could be, at the end of every day, what is left for you and me at the end of every day . . . "

I love the Reivers. I’ll never be sure if that love is heightened by how tough they were to obtain but love is love and what matters is that I had them and that I still do. We were fated. And that’s the truest love of all. I was mad for signals from the post-REM pre-grunge late-80s mid-American New Wave, the unheard music that gnawed at my curiosity more than anything else at that time. I was chiefly horny for bands that came from down South. There was a lot of unheard music for those of us back then, the hipsters of our wireless generation, if you will. All these bands we would read about in music magazines printed on paper, giving us massive geek boners that the local record bars would deflate out of how lame its stocks were and still are, so we would scour thrift shops and garage sales and basement record bins and cast the fate of our pop fix on relatives abroad. Everything was not a torrent away. Nothing was that easy. Amazon was still just a river and a type of female you didn’t want to tussle with. And pop cost to have. You had to work for it. You had to look hard for it. You had to pay for it. And sometimes, most of the time, you had to wait.

The Reivers’ Saturday was one of my earliest transmissions, the first Reivers I would own and on a hissy cassette at that, a half-blind buy incentivized by my affection for the single In Your Eyes. I picked it out of a bargain bin, the elephant graveyard for cultural artifacts few people care about, and also the mecca for penniless geeks with voracious appetites, for half the price of a regular cassette, which would be P50. Produced by the Don Dixon, another of my then unheard musics whose Romeo At Juilliard still remains fugitive, Saturday was/is a thing of minor sonic majesty : catchy, hungry, tight, full, big. Wall-to-wall bang for the buck. The trace elements were easy to pick out: a little Mamas & the Papas in the lilt of their girl-boy harmonies, a little Byrds in the moodswing of their hooky jangle, a little Sundays in the homespun prettiness of their melodies. But the hook that broke skin were all the energy signatures I was picking up from every Southern pop group they called friends: Pylon, the dBs, Fetchin' Bones, Downy Mildew, Let's Active. I was a fan in a snap.

I picked the record that came after it, the record we’re talking about, out of a bargain bin and in cassette form, too. End of the Day was sans Dixon, co-produced by Croslin and Andy Metcalfe, who played bass for yet another of my then unheard musics, Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians. And it was looser and sloppier and rawer but also warmer and lovelier, doesn't try as hard, is more grown-up, more at home, probably not as good. But it's somehow closer to my heart for it. The Reivers were tiny masters of minutiae, romancing the ordinary, poeticizing the everyday, often with a quotidian eye for detail, a minimum of fuss and posture and an open-armed friendliness that made you sometimes take them for granted. They weren’t the only band who did that, sure, nor the one who were the best at it but they were the first I heard who did and it was, if you’ll pardon the melodrama, nothing short of life-changing. Their individual skill sets were unexceptional. I remember a review that described Croslin’s singing voice as “Lou Reed on Kool-Aid” or somesuch. But that tasty way they had with power-pop hooks and changes you could almost call a gift, it was love at first listen.

The Reivers have come and gone and are slowly coming back again. Hootie & the Blowfish covered the loping countrylike Almost Home on record. One of the last things I saw the late Edmund Fortuno play was a cover of End of the Day. There’s been a slew of reunion shows. And constant talk of recording. But to this day, I only have three friends who know who they are and only one is as in love with them as I am. I have since worn out and lost both bargain bin cassettes, but have all four of their records on out-of-print remastered CDs. All of which have never left my iPod. I still play them at least once a month. Saturday was/is their masterpiece but of all the pop-rock records I can play 'til the end of time, End of the Day is the one that I’d probably play the most. Its catchy singsong and guitar shimmer is almost comforting in its wary but convinced optimism that life isn’t as bad as it seems. It has its spells of melancholia, sure, but it also knows to count its blessings as a principle of faith, as a design for life. Joie de vivre is disarming to parse from a rock-and-roll record when you're a kid into punk and volume and angst but it's a sticky implant that tends to brighten and blossom with age. End of the Day doesn't have the grandeur of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors, the floaty transcendence of the Sundays’ Static and Silence, the prickly genius of Big Star’s Radio City, the wry humor of Beautiful South’s 0898 or even the dewy romanticism of Death Cab for Cutie’s The Photo Album. But what it has is that rarest of things, in rock and roll, and in life --- the sound of liking where you are.

FRUSTRATED INCORPORATED

2011-09-24T14:53:00.000+08:00

Taken from somewhere here.

LOSING MY RELIGION

2011-09-22T02:04:00.000+08:00

Today is my birthday.

And REM, my favoritest band in the whole wide world, have broken up.

Happysad is the new weird.

TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS

2011-09-15T03:14:00.001+08:00

5.31.2010. The cosmic would reveal itself more than a year later, and humor me if reading the cosmic in things is not always how you roll. It's mostly the writer's compulsion in me to hew the possibly random to a shape. Or the romantic's. And sometimes things happen that make the compulsion tough to fight off. Like a devout Stones fan enduring 70s Bistro's punishing lack of proper ventilation for a night of all-you-can-drink Lennon-McCartney, oblivious to the precarious nearness of you. Then a couple of months later, the first flutter of recognition, the first look that would make me take a second, more fatal one, the look with the hook, if you will, and the unshakable hunch that came from taking it. I was still clueless then. And I remember little about that night that was anywhere near prescient. Except that one half-told story came to an end, making room, in theory, for a new one. Turns out that story was just a table away. And that sometimes these things really do have a shape.

EVERYTHING IN ITS RIGHT PLACE

2011-09-11T12:08:00.002+08:00

"Perhaps we don’t like what we see: our hips, our loss of hair, our shoe size, our dimples, our knuckles too big, our eating habits, our disposition. We have disclosed these things in secret, likes and dislikes, behind doors with locks, our lonely rooms, our messy desks, our empty hearts, our sudden bursts of energy, our sudden bouts of depression. Don’t worry. Put away your mirrors and your beauty magazines and your books on tape. There is someone right here who knows you more than you do, who is making room on the couch, who is fixing a meal, who is putting on your favorite record, who is listening intently to what you have to say, who is standing there with you, face to face, hand to hand, eye to eye, mouth to mouth. There is no space left uncovered. This is where you belong." Sufjan Stevens via Jonathan Carroll

ANG LIHIM NA HINDI MO NATANGGAP

2011-08-19T14:14:00.002+08:00

Maybe it is better to burn out than it is to rust and when Pat Benatar said that love is a battlefield, she only meant you’re supposed to go into it with guns blazing like Chow Yun Fat in a John Woo movie. Maybe feeling this intensely about someone is a reward in and of itself. And that I shouldn’t want more than what I’ve already got. I can live with that, I guess. But I’m aiming higher. I’m aiming for what Dylan sang about. I’m aiming for someone I can hug for a million years.

A BOUT DE SOUFFLE

2011-08-18T16:11:00.000+08:00

Magic Numbers. I See You, I See Me.

” …looks like it happened again …”

The clip had me at all that Godardian riffing but the song always had me for being about my favorite sort of falling in love, the sort that creeps up on you, the sort that seeps in and calcifies, the sort you deny knowing you’re only lying to yourself when you do, the sort you vigorously fight but wouldn’t mind losing to, the sort you lose to eventually.

CAVE DRAWINGS

2011-08-18T16:10:00.000+08:00

Last night. Before the party cranked up.

*Picture by Anthony Arbias.

NEW ADVENTURES IN SCI-FIC

2011-08-18T16:09:00.003+08:00

Science fiction as rock and roll has to do with temperament, has to do with volume, and I’m thinking Moorcock and Dick and Burroughs, but I’m also thinking the cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk point men because that’s when the overlap got really bacterial and immediate and juiced - - -John Shirley with his City Come A Walkin’, Jeff Noon and Needle in the Groove, Bruce Sterling’s girl group weirdness Zeitgeist , William Gibson’s Zion Dub from Neuromancer foretelling mashup culture, China Mieville, Jeff Vandermeer, among others. But it’s a scant tribe, these science fiction rock and rollers and the other way around is more profuse - - -rock and rollers have dabbled in science fiction with a frenzy, not just in etymology (Duran Duran, Icicle Works, Klaatu) but in actual content. Entire subgenres seem predisposed to it - - -postpunk, synthpop, IDM, prog-glam - - -and much as the lot of it is cheese mold (Styx’s Mr.Roboto, Europe’s The Final Countdown, Queen’s beloved-by-many-but-not-by-me Flash Gordon, am I making you sick yet?) there are vital and shiny artifacts in the bog that ought to be upheld by the genre - - - Ultravox’s first two albums, everything and anything by Kraftwerk, and really, nearly all Krautrock, Bowies’ Berlin trilogy not to mention Diamond Dogs and Ziggy Stardust, countless Zappa, Elton John’s Rocket Man, X Ray Spex’s Genetic Engineering, the Pixies’ Bossanova, the B 52’s Planet Claire, Aphex Twin’s Come to Daddy, Devo, Radiohead, Daft Punk, Parliament , Sun Ra, Klaxons, Empire of the Sun. In a parallel world, it probably has. Along with these.

1. Boo Pinback: " . . .what is time and why does it taste like salt water inside of my mouth? . . . " The snippet of Orson Welles' infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast sets enough mood and metaphor, the last man on earth embodying our longing to connect, but even without it, its gorgeous desolation, sung from inside a submarine with a leaky hull as if by a displaced time traveler, exudes beautiful ghosts from distant futures.

2. Nothing But Flowers Talking Heads: The world ends and is overrun by . . .um, flowers. It's David Byrne so the wry humor and the ebullient tropicalia is a given as is the way the Heads make it mesh as if it were the most natural thing in the world, meaning without a glitch. Funny, too. " . . . if this is paradise, I think I need a lawnmower . . . "

3. Old Black Dawning Frank Black : The ex-Pixie’s cuddly,cartoony self - - -less anguished, more playful ,more puckish, more pixie-ish if you will, riding a catchy Tex-Mex new wave that vogues on alien invasion . . .from the Planet Mabel. Alex Cox could make the flying saucer B movie of my wildest dreams out of this.

4. Space Oddity David Bowie: “Ground control to Major Tom . . .” A little obvious but necessary not only for how it evokes the profound aloneness of being lost in the big empty that is outer space but for how eerily familiar the feeling is even to someone earthbound by gravity. “Though I’m past a hundred thousand miles, I’m feeling very still, and I think my spaceship knows which way to go. . .tell my wife I love her very much, she knows.” Chilling, almost.

5. Unknown Pleasures Joy Division (album) : It almost doesn’t need its deadened alternate-world Manchester milieu to gain what Philip K. Dick called the shock of dysrecognition that qualifies it as science fiction, there's a doomy frailty to Ian Curtis and a sinister beauty to his songs that's other enough.

6. Untrue Burial (album): 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 listen to this a lot as movies tend to play in my head every time I do.

7.Warm Leatherette The Normal : Daniel Miller’s repurposing of JG Ballard's Crash was made tastier by Grace Jones but I tend to go back to the proto-electroclash somnolence of his original for how it captures both the detached tone of the Ballard novel and its deviant perversities more ickily.

8. Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf) The Pixies : The version on Doolittle cooks, too, sure, but this one, slowed down to a surf-goth simmer, gains an eerie, pained elegance that not only wouldn’t seem out of sorts if you stumbled onto it tucked away inside,oh, say, the Beach Boys’ Surf’s Up, but also has the strange yet familiar sheen of a golden oldie from some parallel universe.

9. We Will Become Silhouettes Postal Service: The hooking up of Benjamin Gibbard to Jimmy Tamborello‘s blipful synths makes his emo gain something - - -a naivete, a buoyancy, a sort of candied bliss. Pure surface speaks for itself on one hand, chirpy fervor and skittish optimism superseding ominous ultraviolet and black sheets of rain. Run the Depeche parallels, sure, say it's more Pretty Boy than Blasphemous Rumors. Go deeper,though, and something really is going on. It's not the same as when, say, Erlend Oye forged a similar alliance with Royskopp, a mere transposing of dynamics. It's a specific vein of forlorn Ben mines with Death Cab for Cutie, melancholia swaddled in abstracts. With Postal Service, there's a forthrightness to the songwriting, a childlike surrender, a letting down of guards. If you're asking, it's the eerie post-apocalyptic video they made of this that qualifies it.

10. Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, The Flaming Lips (album) : Done with the head injuries and insects and teenage symphonies to Superman of The Soft Bulletin but not with death and Brian Wilson, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is a retro-futurist cartoon about robot love and evil pink machines - - - Ozamu Tezuka by way of Naruto by way of Rene Laroux - - - with a psychedelic secret life vibrating behind its primary colors except it’s all in your head and brought to vibrant, shiny life by the exquisite sound of Wayne Coyne at last succumbing totally to his shimmering melodic prowess.

WEAPONRY LISTENS TO LOVE

2011-08-18T16:06:00.002+08:00

I promise to buy only one graphic novel this year, no matter how much more money I make. And I promise it will be this.

LOVELESS

2011-08-16T23:24:00.003+08:00

I wrote this about Fando & Lis when they were fresh out of the gate: "Fando & Lis are like a film noir lounge act made of voodoo and heartbreak. Vigilantes of love singing bloody valentines of venom and beauty. Bleed and breathe."

Now they have a record, Found And Lost. And nepotism aside, it's bound to kill you softly.

It launches the day after the Mo Space opening and my other new work, Nang Gabing Umiyak Ang Dagat, screens the same night.

Goes without saying that you will be there but I said it anyway.

MAGIC NOISE SCIENCE

2011-08-12T11:32:00.003+08:00

Abstraction of Beasts, featuring new paintings by my oldest cohort and oldest friend Ronald Achacoso, opens on August 17, Wednesday, 6 PM at Mo_Space, Bonifacio High Street, and runs 'til September 11.

From my notes: "The images themselves, crusted and ridged and cratered, have both a primeval glow and an overt geological presence, the way it’s richly layered as if like strata but also as if like metaphor. Science as a tributary to the realms of memory and dream. Science as a motherlode for a new mythology."

And showing at the Project Room will be Entropy Machine, my new video installation piece, thusly described as " . . .a caveman film about the end of the world." Something like that.

And oh, yes. You will be there.

THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET

2011-08-12T11:29:00.000+08:00

“Point is, what’s so wonderful is that every one of these flowers has a specific relationship with the insect that pollinates it. There’s a certain orchid looks exactly like a certain insect so the insect is drawn to this flower, its double, its soul mate, and wants nothing more than to make love to it. And neither the flower nor the insect will ever understand the significance of their lovemaking. I mean, how could they know that because of their little dance the world lives? But it does. By simply doing what they’re designed to do, something large and magnificent happens. In this sense they show us how to live - how the only barometer you have is your heart. How, when you spot your flower, you can’t let anything get in your way.”— (Adaptation, Charles Kaufman)

DON'T DISTURB THE GROOVE

2011-08-12T11:27:00.003+08:00

Hang a sign outside the door. It's crunch time. See you on the other side.

RAY GUN

2011-08-12T11:26:00.002+08:00

My favorite film by my favorite American filmmaker but you need to see Johnny Guitar, In A Lonely Place, Bigger Than Life, They Live By Night and the truly amazing Party Girl just as much.Orson Welles was wrong. Nicholas Ray was a master. And the Venice tribute has been long in coming.

Belated happy birthday, sir.

WATCHING THE DETECTIVE

2011-08-10T00:50:00.002+08:00

Lester Freamon. Terribly good at what he did but grizzled and lonely and outmoded and underrated. He kept to himself and did the job superbly and no one noticed but he did get the girl. A man after my own heart, then, except the part about getting the girl, but hey, you never know.

Lord, I miss The Wire.

And that's in a literal way as I don't have copies in any form.

Art by Blake Hicks.

THE SET LIST: ELECTRIC FEEL

2011-08-09T22:24:00.002+08:00

Day 19. A Song That Is A Guilty Pleasure.

Electric Feel, MGMT

I have no use for the guilty pleasure. I know it's only pop music but a peeve's a peeve and it's a peeve for how it's a rejection without bearing, and concedes instead to a caste system I'm not inclined to be a party to, at least not anymore, as that's what invoking the clause ultimately is, a means of safeguarding whatever cred you fancy yourself having from whatever harm you imagine comes from liking something the invisible collective otherwise known as "they" also like, a license to admit liking something you're not supposed to like. And if you don't get how fucked up the last six words of that last sentence was, then you're probably out of the long arm of my rant's reach. So you love both the new Washed Out and the new Selena Gomez equally . . . and the world is going to end from admitting it how exactly? Right.

The tremendously entertaining prog-funk of MGMT's Oracular Spctacular took me hostage for a spell, and spurts of it still do, but it was Electric Feel I had on perpetual repeat, which is probably as the band intended, given how it's a single. It is a vapid and rather empty song with lyrics that verge on nonsense, but that's essentially what most pop singles boil down to, and the way that spindly and sensual Shuggie Otis groove and those Barry Gibb falsettos build into ecstasy can be terribly intoxicating for no reason at all. If I dig enough, I'd probably have more than a handful of songs that could fulfill the brief, but hearing Frank Ocean's wonderfully tweaked quasi-cover (Nature Feels) recently has rekindled my infatuation for Electric Feel and I'm back to listening to it again. On perpetual repeat. I give,then. Feeling guilty about pleasure may be counter-productive and more than a little sad, sure. But sometimes having too much justifies the guilt.

MILFSHAKE

2011-08-07T20:15:00.001+08:00

I love you Holly Hunter,

And Brownstone's If You Love Me is a must.

MR. WRONG

2011-08-06T15:56:00.002+08:00

I totally would.

ALL THESE ELIXIRS WOULD BE MOOT

2011-08-01T03:20:00.002+08:00

That these 90s slowcore stalwarts would give 2011 its finest 5:20 is something not even a longtime fan like me would’ve been ballsy enough to predict. Which makes the fact that that's exactly what they do here even more wondrous. This nails my emotional weather so, it’s creepy. But then it’s Low so it sort of isn’t, too.

” …cry me a river so I can float over to you … ”

Sweet.

DEDICATED FOLLOWER OF FASHION

2011-07-31T21:58:00.003+08:00

Lolo Don. The map by which I got here, in a manner of speaking. I never met him but we share the same DNA. My dad looks like him and I look like my Dad. Sadly, his talent for dapper got lost in the scramble evading me totally. As did his luck in love. Them’s the breaks.

THE SET LIST: COME BLOW YOUR HORN

2011-07-29T23:55:00.017+08:00

Day 29. A Song From Your Childhood.

Come Blow Your Horn, Frank Sinatra

My Dad, like most Dads if not all Dads, was a galactic Sinatra nut. He loathed rock and roll but loved nearly all makes and models of jazz. He painted, sure, but was neither bohemian nor hipster, merely a product of his time, and prone to severe moodswings of taste, liking Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and Massive Attack's Unfinished Sympathy as much as he did Spyro Gyra’s Morning Dance and Michael Buble's Home. He didn't drink except maybe a holiday nip of wine or two, quit smoking before it did any damage he would regret, and was thoroughly conservative in his temperament and his politics, stern if not didactic, never laying a hand or a belt on me but making me terrified to piss him off all the same , and at one time radiating cool and possessing a joie de vivre that now takes its time to come out as his 70s have made him more withdrawn and when it does is never as gregarious as before. On weekends when we were small and everybody was still alive, the living room would become his empire, making it vibrate all morning with his music, mingling with the prattle and hubbub of a household that was 12 people strong and the sound of cooking I've never tasted again since the elder matriarchs passed: Jobim, Astrud, Deodato, Tony Bennett. . . but mostly Sinatra. Little did I know that a process of ferment and osmosis had begun to inexorably transpire. And it wasn't so much my Dad's music seeping into me as it was the degree of affinity he had with it.

I do have a fondness for Sinatra but I suspect a lot of it is merely some projection of my own fondness for my Dad. There was this one Sinatra record he liked playing a lot, Cycles, in which Sinatra sang outside his comfort zone and took on, for want of a better term, folk-pop: Glenn Campbell, Jim Webb, Joni Mitchell. The cover, with Frank in a suit, rubbing the bridge of his nose, as if he were tired between sessions, made me uncomfortable as a kid. And the songs creeped me out. Even then, I could sense something was off, as if his soothing bel canto was undercut by something darker. Listening to it years later, I would recognize that something darker as a weary melancholia and would wonder if my Dad heard the same things I heard and empathized. It has since become my favorite Sinatra record. But Come Blow Your Horn, which couldn't be more diametrically opposed, is my favorite Sinatra song.

"Make like a Mister Milquetoast, and you'll get shut out
Make like a Mister Meek, and you'll get cut out
Make like a little lamb, and wham you're shorn
I tell you chum , it's time to come blow your horn

The taller the tree is , the sweeter the peach
I'll give you the whole magilla, in a one word speech : reach . . .

In civilized jungles, females adore
The lions who come on swinging , if you want to score: roar . . .

You can be either read to, or be the reader
You can be either lead , or be the leader
Don't wait until you're told , you're old and worn . . ."

I hear more things in it now than I used to, the joyous swing of the horn section and the uncanny way that velvety baritone marshals everything without seeming to break a sweat and what a hell of a lyricist Sammy Cahn was. But I also hear my Dad, and this is the one Sinatra song that reminds me of him most, that side of him,at least, that taught me I had no one to depend on but myself and to have no regrets and also stop being such a wuss, that side of him that taught me pretty much everything Sinatra's singing here, that side of him that's hardly around these days, but is somehow magically invoked everytime the song comes on.

THE SET LIST:PARIS

2011-07-26T23:56:00.005+08:00

Day 06. A Song That Reminds You of Somewhere

Paris, Northern Picture Library

It's no secret to anybody who has even the most passing of fancies for pop music that songs have this way of trapping moments in time as if they were prehistoric mosquitoes in amber - - -that’s always been pop music’s most fundamental voodoo and nearly all our swatches of nostalgia for nearly everything from hurts to places have song scores to go with it. Like blurry photographs of lost loves in foreign countries. Unrequited memories. Time machines.

Apart from my mother's hometown in Nagcarlan, Hong Kong may well be my favorite piece of geography on the planet. It's always been a city charged with nuance, vibrant with remembering- - -the cuisine, the cinema, the odors, the colors, the noise, the whole throb and tremble of the place. I also owe HK for bringing Sarah Records into my life. And with it, a love that refuses to wither for that strain of pop-with-many-names : indie, twee, drizzle. The carrier of that love was Sarah 100: There And Back Again Lane, bought, and since battered from overplaying, on my first trip there. Tune was the membrane that made this 18-bands-at-less-than-60-minutes comp seem of a piece, but it was a very specific nationality of tune, rightly evoking an aura of Britain, given how nearly all their bands were British, but a Britain that was half-imagined and possibly only half-accurate, the Britain in my head, gleaned from culture amassed over the years out of a genuine fascination with the place, that dovetailed into how I've always wanted to go there and how pre-handover HK was the closest I've been. It's an association possibly unique to me and is perhaps best kept to myself.

One of my favorite bits from Lost In Translation, though, comes near the end when Bill Murray gazes out the hotel room window in Tokyo just before he flies back home. Something you don't want to leave becomes even more beautiful just as you're about to. And the bittersweet tang of the temporal in all things has never been more succulent than at that moment. There And Back Again Lane is a stew of many flavors, from ballads fragile in form as they are in feeling (Harvey Williams' She Sleeps Around) to lullabies for the rainy afternoons in your head (Blueboy's The Joy of Living) to percolating femme caramel (Even As We Speak's Drown) and all that. I pick Northern Picture Library's Paris out of the lot because it was the first song from the comp I fell in love with and I still love it a bit more than the others and it's also loud and fast and pretty and giddy and it makes me inordinately happy every time I hear it. But nearly all of the songs on the comp evoke that happysad feeling, and it's a feeling I get every single time I'm in HK that I can't pry one loose from the other anymore. These songs remind me of Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter,too, which I also bought in HK. Nick Drake but without the damage and for the folkie connotations and the way he gave that color and range, and moreso for the way he similarly prettified the melancholic into something almost medicinal. Like sugaring the tempest in the teapot and believing life would be sweeter for it. Listen up, ain’t it a sad and beautiful world?

LOVE IS A FATE RESIGNED

2011-07-25T02:07:00.003+08:00

Part of me was hanging on to a rather feeble hope in a comeback that was not only imminent but of such fierceness, it would blow the hinges off everybody's snark and doomsaying. Part of me knew my hanging on was futile. I didn't expect this, though. I expected a vanishing from public view on the scale of Syd Barrett, I expected an epic haul at rehab. But never this.

I don't think I was ever this upset over a musician's death, Kurt Cobain and Jeff Buckley included. It's the music, perhaps. They had too many ghosts in it. And they still do.

"Over futile odds, and laughed at by the gods, and now the final frame, love is a losing game. . . "

Love has turned out to be just that, Amy. Not sure if I want to thank you for scarring me with that certainty. But thank you anyway. For the songs and the ghosts it gave a home to. Here's hoping the noise has quieted down at last.

Goodnight.

MAGIC CHAIRS

2011-07-21T12:16:00.001+08:00

It’s a nod to a Jorgen Leth film more than anything else, but Magic Chairs does seem like the perfect thing to name your record if you’re Efterklang, out of how it evokes both a sense of wonder and a sense of comfort. And a sense of wondrous comfort, or a sense of comfortable wonder if you will, is what Efterklang songs tend to evoke and, really, what their name rolling off your tongue tends to evoke just as well.

Ef. Ter. Klang.

What’s an efterklang anyway? Sounds like . . .well, a sound. The sound weathered churchbell metal makes is what comes to mind. Sounds like a place, too. Someplace off the map, someplace small , someplace not a little odd. A town built entirely from scrap iron. Or a fishing village where old sea captains go to live out their last days. Maybe a mountain settlement where people miraculously stop aging physically after 50.

Efterklang is the Danish word for both reverb and remembrance. But that their name makes you think of esoteric geography makes much sense as their songs are like patches of esoteric geography themselves. Tiny environments with multiple moving parts that you can enter but won’t get lost in for how a pop hook or several almost always centers everything like a signpost, or a trail of bread crumbs, if you need to find your way back to where you started, but with room to roam and skittish with burst of color and sighs of nuance that you can loiter and forage and almost always find something arcane tucked in its folds. It’s of a kind with the strain of lush, ornate, unearthly orchestral pop that a lot of my new beloved bands traffic in :Sigur Ros and Mum and Grouper and Gregor Samsa, all these strange little bands with strange little names that conspire to take you to strange little pockets of sound. Only Efterklang is a lot less ambient and moody and a lot more buoyant and hospitable , tempered as it is with a nimble playfulness and an unconditional faith in the power of song.

It’s a faith they pursue to the hilt on Magic Chairs, where the hooking up with Ivo Watts-Russell’s 4AD almost fulfills an inevitability. Polished and determined and robust where they used to be fragile and organic and flamboyant, the songs rein in the wayward looseness and chaotic energy of the last two records for a contained loveliness that does tend to diminish out of how you can see where some of the fairy tale lullabies and toy marches are going, which is sort of the dynamic of pop music, and of songs really. But at some point, it does achieve degrees of transcendence, on Modern Drift, on Harmonics, and on I Was Playing the Drums, the diamond at the heart of the record. Coming to Efterklang songs used to be like wandering into peculiar territory without a map. On Magic Chairs, they come with an itinerary. But it’s not so much an abandoning of the wanderlust they used to incite but more a calming of your urge to leave. Sometimes, in pop music, structure and predictability is a small price to pay for comfort. Moreso comfort as wondrous as this.

EXOTIC/ESCAPEE

2011-07-19T13:47:00.003+08:00

Last Sunday. Down South. Shooting a caveman.

*Photo by Jet Leyco

THE SET LIST: THE LOVING KIND

2011-07-16T01:02:00.009+08:00

Day 09. A Song You Can Dance To

The Loving Kind,Girls Aloud

Do not fear the disco inside you. Dancing is every other boy's macho cop-out and dance music every other rockist prude's, and both were mine for as long as I could fight it. Dance music was a rocker's nemesis. Only it turns out I not only like watching people dance but I like listening to the songs they dance to, which is to say it doesn't take much to get me to get jiggy with it, even if I draw the line on that Will Smith atrocity if not on the Sister Sledge chestnut it nicked its catchy riff, and therefore its catchiness, from. But I'd probably go to the defense of, say, Donna Summer's Bad Girls, Kylie, Chic, Basement Jaxx's Remedy, Justice's Cross and Robyn, and dance a little while I do it.

Girls Aloud's The Loving Kind is its own double-whammy, being a dance song by a girl band, which is just one sexist tier away from boy bands as pop's de facto black pit of taste. I was actually asked to write a piece on the phenomenon, drawing from the conceit that there's a coolness attached to rehabilitating one or two songs from this quagmire of modern music the way Ben Gibbard supposedly did when he sang a cover of Avril's It's Complicated. There isn't. Oh, I do think those Il Divo choirboys are a covert method of torture and most of the rest tend to come on like twats, but I didn't finish the piece as I didn't think it was as bad as they say or at least bad enough to be worth it, and I've never had problems with girl bands, for obvious reasons and also for having the better songs. And if you float the argument, it all comes from a nobler pop tradition than you think. The Sex Pistols were every bit as manufactured by a svengali as New Kids on the Block. And the Supremes were,after all, the proto-girl band. I did write a long, and in spots fawning, piece on dance music before, effectively outing that I had slept with the enemy.

Theories that the Pet Shop Boys- - -who co-wrote this - - -possess a grasp for Spectorian grandeur, prove themselves full-bore when the first surge of the chorus hits and you can’t quite tell ecstasy from despair. ". . . I want you to kiss away the tensions, the issues never mentioned, with all the best intentions, but you turn away. . . " . I've always objected to the notion that pop music is somehow validated by the anointing of someone who listens to the right records, because not only is there no such thing as a right record, but if there was, The Loving Kind would be a shoo-in. No pop song from the last five years nails the wounded exuberance of girl group Motown quite as vividly, as elegantly, as effervescently, as this. Tearjerky disco for dancing away the heartache. With tears in your eyes.

WAKE ME UP WHEN SEPTEMBER ENDS

2011-07-15T11:46:00.002+08:00

Or just before it does, which is when Doctor Who returns.

I have taken on trendy substitute habits - - -Game of Thrones, in particular - - -but there is just no sating the void. There can be only one.

IF PARADISE IS HALF AS NICE

2011-07-15T03:57:00.001+08:00

I've said it before, sure, right after being thoroughly blown away by Yeah So, but I never thought I'd say it again, at least not with my enthusiasm being any more uncorked than it was . . . but I heart Charles and Rebecca like a fetish. Yes, Slow Club are my favourite band right now and new track Two Cousins is my new favourite song. And if we go by how its lush uplift seems to signal a taking in of more sonic colors,not exactly a moving away from their rootsy minimalism but a swaddling in other auras, I might have to say it all over again come September when Paradise turns that hoary old myth of the sophomore slump on its head. Lovely Lucy Needs clip,too.

YUMMY FUR

2011-07-14T03:33:00.004+08:00

”Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.” (Anatole France)

I physically felt a weight lift when our furball perked up today after taking his meds. Oh, he still needs force-feeding and is still a little weak, but about as out of the woods as one can hope and pray for at this juncture. And my praying and hoping has been fierce.

I love you, Diego. Now please get well.

THE SET LIST: DO YOU REALIZE?

2011-07-05T17:49:00.016+08:00

Day 21. A Song You Listen To When You're Happy.

Do You Realize?, The Flaming Lips

"Do you realize that happiness can make you cry?"

Sundown, outside a tent, nursing a cup of coffee, somewhere in Laguna. If you'd asked me years ago what the single happiest moment of my life was, I would've said this, when everything hung brightly and all was right in the world, and I felt impervious to harm and oblivious to turmoil, and the people I loved didn't die before it was their time to die, and I was old enough to recognize this as a blessing to count, even if Wayne Coyne had not yet tapped into his inner Brian Wilson, meaning the moment came to pass without a song to remember it by, only this residual sense of what happiness meant, how it was at its most intoxicating in suspension, how it was in its nature to not stay that way for long, how each and every instance had the potential to transcend into that more rarefied condition of joy, how it was inevitable but sometimes hard to come by and often hard-won.

The moment did pass, superseded by ones that were happier, with more traction and longer shelf lives. And for most of them, Do You Realize? was around, not always in the literal sense, more like a vibration in the air around me. Positivity's always been my weird shit, a gift from my parents that has stood me in good stead, but which my own cynicism and the incidence of defeat in my life has corroded over time and whose mutilated codes I've been frantically relearning since. And art's my no-fail go-to for that. " . . .do you realize that life goes fast, it's hard to make the good things last, do you realize the sun doesn't go down, it's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round . . ." Guards drop and the heart swells, and even if it's a sober euphoria Wayne sings about, not conceding to anything other than the humanity we were born with and often fail to indulge, it somehow gains more spiritual leverage for it. The corny greeting card aphorism about happiness being a choice may not be false, but it also cheapens the sentiment by making it seem as easy as a turn of the switch. No,it isn't. That's the whole point.

THE SET LIST: PICTURES OF YOU

2011-07-05T13:48:00.006+08:00

Day 22. A Song You Listen To When You're Sad

Pictures of You, The Cure

Of course, this only applies to a particular strain of forlorn, and I'm sure you don't need telling which strain that is. I'm afraid no song springs to mind for calming my thankfully rare spasms of existential angst nor for getting me over the death of someone. And sure, it medicates, but I wouldn't exactly call it healing. Healing is the annihilation of pain. And all this does is sweeten it. It's not as if I'd be better off putting on something cheerier either, as a shiny happy song at a time of romantic agony, or any agony for that matter, is nothing short of torture.

What you want for those times when you're alone but don't want to be, when you want the magic words you invoke to not be so vague and evasive, when you've had it with ironic distance, is an unwavering confidante who gets it. And exquisite misery is Robert Smith's vocation. When love breaks down, and love almost always breaks down at some point, this is the song of his that's my staunchest ally. I remember listening to it once, lying in my darkened bedroom, cut off from the world by my headphones, and tanked up on half a liter of whiskey, and getting only as far as the first bridge before my chest started to tighten a little. Not that I do that sort of teenage melodrama anymore. Mostly I just put it on and let its epic guitar wall have its way with me, swooning and suffocating at the same time. The faces may change but the song remains the same. And the more it hurts the more intolerably beautiful it gets. Scream at the make-believe.

THE SET LIST: DOPES TO INFINITY

2011-07-05T12:30:00.010+08:00

Day 20. A Song You Listen To When You're Angry

Dopes To Infinity, Monster Magnet

It's safe to presume some anger does get purged in the presence of power chords cranked to a proper din, but I'm not sure if that has anything to do with my being a bit of a metalhead. I suppose I could go with something like the Pixies' Debaser if only for the therapeutic value of screaming at the top of my lungs, as it probably helps if you actually do something physical along with the song. Air guitar's the only guitar I can play and it's not as if I can catch up with Dave Wyndorf when he sings, given how whatever possessed me to sing Led Zep's Rock And Roll in college and in tune has vacated my premises. But Monster Magnet are my neo-Sabbath stand-ins, the only new metal band I actively follow apart from the occasional Metallica and Mastodon, and like all metal, the effect of their sonic thud and rumble on me has always been visceral.

It's all speculative on my part, of course. My short temper's long been a cross to bear. I used to seethe with such rage that it would sometimes take a 24 hour period to slough off all the bad vibrations, I've done that whole screaming-into-a-pillow-and-beating-it-to-a-pulp bit, if you must know. It was counter-productive and bad for the heart and needed to be quit. Frustration besets me more regularly than before. And I still get terribly annoyed a lot. But I'm not sure if any of that counts as genuine anger. Like hate, anger seems like such an extreme emotion to me these days and never worth the energy dispersed. Much as I don't hate anyone, I've not been angry in the truest sense of the word, least not for a long time. It all seems like another life, another person, and I don't think I was that angry back then, either. So no, I've never played Dopes To Infinity to quell anything. I have no doubt about its potency if the need arises, but I do count it a blessing I don't get to road-test just how much.

THE SET LIST: TIME (CLOCK OF THE HEART)

2011-07-03T03:29:00.006+08:00

Day 14: A Song That No One Would Expect You To Love

Time (Clock of the Heart), Culture Club

I'm not sure about no one, as this shouldn't come as a surprise to people who know me a bit more, and how my relationship with pop music has, over the years, swung from what used to be stand-offish and almost adversarial to the fearless, keening devotion it's happily settled into. Confessing to an affection for Culture Club might throw some of them, though, but then again maybe not, as I've already made public not just a fealty to but a willingness to defend such objects of ire as Duran Duran, Bananarama's I Heard A Rumor , Death Cab for Cutie's Codes And Keys and the last song on the new Bon Iver. Oh, I'm indifferent to and often leery of anything from Waking Up With the House on Fire onwards. And I didn't think much of Kissing To Be Clever , coming to it as I would a pop album, which is to stay, I was in it for the singles, but cared little for the rest of its club-infused tropicalia and cared even less for its refusal to attach itself to actual songs. But there was no denying the iconic, almost transgressive, creepy-cuddly charge of Boy George, and how it was an immense part of their appeal.

It was the aptly-titled second album, Colour By Numbers, that made me a fan, not only exploding their sonic palette but discarding all but the faintest glimmer of their pancultural hubris, and in the process embodying, ironically enough, a polyglot ecumenicalism that befitted their name more. And was endemic to the 80s, when everybody seemed to listen to everything without qualifiers, or could be I was too young to bother. Still, it's a condition that's all but impossible in today's glum and rigid hipster factionalism. Colour By Numbers threw in bits of new wave, both punk and postpunk, old school soul, gospel, disco, R & B and country to make this vibrant seamless pop mongrel, and I'd always thought Time (Clock of The Heart) came from it, if only for the way it mashed up similarly, and in the space of its 3:41 at that. It's a love song, of course, but less banal than what that connotes, and not without flashes of melancholy and eloquence. " . . .and time makes lovers feel that they got something real, but we both know they got nothing but time . . ." It's wise mush, and for someone like me who's always held fast to the system of romance the song opposes, it's a clout up the head,too, the sort that makes your ears ring so that the cheesy sax solo near the end not only becomes listenable but damn near turns rhapsodic.

THE SET LIST: TAKE A BOW

2011-06-19T19:28:00.009+08:00

Day 05: A Song You Heard On The Radio

Rihanna, Take A Bow

Not my favorite Rihanna single, no, that would be either What's My Name? or Rehab, nor the one that hews closest to me, that would be Hate That I Love You, nor the one I actually heard on the radio, that would be the ubiquitous Umbrella and accidentally at that, as I don't really listen to radio, but I'm sure I would've heard Take A Bow if I did. It's up there, though, in my private Rihanna hit list, even if all I have to go by is that piano figure. But then there's Ne-Yo's grasp of the blow-off as pop trope gaining a sharpness of wit and elegance of snark. " . . . you look so dumb right now, standing outside my house, trying to apologize, you're so ugly when you cry . . ." On Irreplacable, that other Ne-yo colossus of kiss-off, Beyonce did exude a cockiness that felt neither defiant nor defensive nor disguising a secret pining. But her " . . .to the left . . ." pales in vitamin and attack to the way Rihanna's sarcastic " . . .please . . ." here cuts like the most poisonous of daggers, turning her empowerment to an assassin's grace and a line of fire you'd be a fool to get caught in, if you aren't one already for pissing her off.

THE SET LIST: LORO

2011-06-18T23:47:00.013+08:00

Day 10. A Song That Makes You Fall Asleep

Loro, Pinback

Which is not to say it’s a boring song, far from it. And do I even factor in how pretty it is, given how prettiness is so much a part of the deal with Pinback that bringing it up smacks of belaboring the obvious? I could, of course, pick any number of Pinback songs. But it's the way this one tends to cradle me, and the way those two riffs repeat over and over and over and the exquisite nonsense of those words and Rob Crow's pacific croon : “ . . .and the ripped ones say goodbye, while the others meet, attached somewhere, at east they share . . .”

Sleep's been evasive these past few months. The rejuvenating sort babies have, that is. All I manage nightly is a fitful burr with fetid soups of the oddest dreams. Dreams, of course, are fallout, if you must be sober about it, and for now let's be. Not so much cosmic forces streaming precognitive data into your hard drive, but white noise mashing up anxieties. Given all that, the losing sleep does make sense. The depleted energy's the hell of my waking hours, though. That nip of alcohol can only do so much and I draw the line at taking pills. This'll have to do. I don't fall asleep to it, of course not. But the soothe it exudes puts me in a state slightly more conducive for it. I eventually get there even if the dreams soften but don't get less odd. Props to the deep chill, then. To this sleepless piece of wreckage, it's boon and salve both.

THE SET LIST: CHET BAKER'S UNSUNG SWAN SONG

2011-06-15T02:00:00.035+08:00

Day 04. A Song That Makes You Sad

Chet Baker's Unsung Swan Song, David Wilcox

How many do you want? Should I rustle up a mixtape? Or would a short list suffice? Here's the last one I made, then.

Sad songs are the currency of pop music, only it's a specific sadness it likes wallowing in, the sort I like wallowing in myself, really, the sadness of missing persons. There's not much range to my miseries, I'm afraid, boiling down, such as it is, to the loss of someone: friend, relative, lover, pet, which is a sort of someone. I wish I had loftier sorrows, but my heart tends to really bleed only when I can’t be with someone I want to still be with.

I knew nothing of David Wilcox before and after I stumbled on Chet Baker's Unsung Swan Song. It's the only song of his I have, let alone know. I do know a lot about Chet Baker, though. He's a tentpole in my tiny but fervid jazz church. His My Funny Valentine is, for me, the definitive version. He played that mournful horn solo on Costello's Shipbuilding. He was also a junkie, which had no special resonance, as musicians and the drug habits that undo them are the sad and brutal cliches of the life. Chet looked a little like Elvis in the flame of his youth, demons reined in, the unsullied cheekbones of God, a ladykiller. By the time he died, his demons had overthrown him, and his worn face looked like the aftermath of ferocious battles, but handsome still, an elegant ruin. And I bring up the way he looks out of how there's no map more telling of how far and how hard he fell. He died from another fall, though, a literal one, out a window in Amsterdam, brain flooded with heroin. Some say it was an accident, some say he was pushed, some say he jumped. And the song is sung as if by him, on that day, in that room, just before.

"He's got a lot on his mind." is Wilcox's slightly flippant but oddly apt way of parsing what could have been going on in Chet's head. " . . .my old addiction, changed the wiring in my brain, and when it turns on the switches, then I am not the same. . . " It's a lovely, gentle song, neither morose nor stark, tonic like a lullaby almost, but often harrowing, and Wilcox never calls it a suicide song, as it's a junkie's lament above all else, but you get a sense that this is a man who's painfully aware he doesn't have much time left. " . . .so like the flowers towards the sun, I will follow, stretch myself out thin, like there's a part of me that's already buried, sends me out into this window . . . "

I had a close friend who hung himself, breaking a cycle held sacred by our inner circle: he was our first and only suicide. It was an untidy death, in all things including the residue, as it had other flavors mixed in with the sadness, confusion and anger and guilt and, for me, a tinge of dread. "He just shouldn't have done that."are Krist Novoselic's words about Kurt Cobain. I'm someone who's always condemned the hipster mythification of suicide as something you exalt, almost heroic, cool. It's not, you silly children. The closest I've come to entertaining it is in trying to fathom what would compel someone to do it. I had been privvy to the fatal parade of woes that beset my friend. He just shouldn't have done that but it gave me a chill that what he did somehow made sense. But it's still an unfathomable phenomenon to me. I've been forced into corners myself. I'm still in one, last I looked. Yet I’ve never felt the urge. My troubles tend to recede and amplify like power fluctuations in a thunderstorm, anyway. And the bitter tang of having the most limited of options has run down my throat too often in the last four years that I've possibly acquired a taste for it. Also, I just don't have it in me.

But the sadness the song speaks to is mine. The part that comes near the end is what gets me every time: " . . . as the springtime of my life's time, turns the other way . . ." are the words of a man who's lost everything, also words that could have come out of my own mouth, the only difference is in the manner in which we came to terms with it. Chet chose drugs and perhaps oblivion. I chose nonchalance and distraction. But I think of the window in the song, the one in Amsterdam, and how the window that lets all that springtime in is the same window from which Chet dropped to his doom and yet it isn't. Telling the difference is what sometimes saves your life. And it's the tiniest of comforts that I still can.

THE SET LIST: GO AWAY

2011-06-13T20:11:00.019+08:00

Day 03. A Song That Makes You Happy

Go Away, 2NE1

One K-pop theory I had was about the purer catharsis that comes from not speaking the tongue, sort of like when Michael Stipe used to mumble the lyrics to early REM songs or nearly everything Cocteau Twins has put out. Also, Sigur Ros. But it doesn't take a genius to figure out what CL, Minzy, Bom and Dara are singing about here, and this kiss-off to some moron who "ain't shit without his crew" puts a bullet between the eyes of my hypothesis. So much for that. Theories for parsing the joy pop music gives you tend to go against the fundamental notions of pop anyway, and of joy, too. Not to mention being uptight and unfun. Besides, there really is sufficient catharsis, and nuclear doses of endorphin, in K-pop, and 2NE1, and I turn to how Asians time and again reverse-engineer American pop culture into something so manifestly their own and so manifestly better that the Americans have to rip it off all over again and rarely pull it off. HK do it with crime films, Japan with comics, Korea with pop. And the genre-splicing here shouldn't work but somehow does: Eurodisco synths melding with tribal punk-pop rah-rah and an ecstatic chorus that makes sense of it all. Sonics aside, the vibrant, inscrutable spectacle of Go Away is really in the unfettered and effortless way it feeds off itself, the way it's brightened and invigorated by its own jubilation.

THE SET LIST: WARNING SIGN

2011-06-13T16:22:00.007+08:00

Day 28. A Song That Makes You Feel Guilty

Warning Sign, Coldplay

Yellow I dig. All of Viva La Vida, too. And this. Otherwise, I can take or leave Coldplay. But this is not my guilty pleasure, as I don't have any of those, being that I think it's a bit silly and condescending to feel guilty about pleasure, specially if it's to do with pop music.

A song that makes me feel guilty per se is a whole other thing,though, and the guilt this rouses in me comes partially from a refusal or failure to bear the burden of proof and that's the most I'll let on except to say that the nature of my crime, if any, is still a little vague, and that this piece doesn't necessarily have to implicate me.

Chris Martin's words at the start of this particular clip, eerily enough, echo my own: "Even we make a lot of mistakes every day. Forgive me for starting again."

Here's to my most beautiful failure, then, the broken film of my squandered destiny and the impossible desire to unbreak it. Even if it takes a lifetime or two. Even if it kills me.

THE SET LIST: THE SPORTING LIFE

2011-06-10T14:34:00.025+08:00

Day 18. A Song That You Wish You Heard On The Radio

The Sporting Life, The Decemberists

Not to make claims of possessing an acumen for picking radio gold and it's not as if I'm oblivious to the irony that I'm talking about a Decemberists song here, verbose and erudite and baroque, all that. But despite lacking a proper chorus, a tiny detail I noticed just a few weeks ago after having sung along to it for years, I've always figured the rather canny way Colin Meloy not only cribs the jungle drums from Iggy's Lust For Life but also makes it the armature to hang the whole song from was a foolproof strategy for mass-market catchiness. Turned out, though, I figured wrong as even the band didn't think so, going instead with 16 Military Wives as single. Good work, ears of tin. I have no use for radio, mind, unless you count AM, and don't really harbor any burning desire to hear this on it but, much as I'm slightly more partial to The Engine Driver and On the Mall Bus, there's a gleeful surge to The Sporting Life that makes me come back to it a lot the way I do with The Only Girl In The World and Just Dance and All of the Lights.

" . . .I fell on the playing field, the work of an errant heel . . ." Lovely couplet, as is Colin's wont. The song has little to do with the Lindsay Anderson film of the David Storey novel whose title it paraphrases but it's about a rugby player,too, or an athlete at least, on the cusp of a championship season, and splayed out on the field with an injury that could turn the tide away from his favor and most likely will. " . . . and father he had such hopes, for a son who would take the ropes, and fulfill all his old athletic aspirations, but apparently now there's some complications . . ." It's a heartbreaking image he cuts and the song he sings as he lies defeated is a song of disappointments- - - his father's, his coach's, his girl's and mostly his own- - - mercifully relieved of tiresome self-deprecation or self-loathing, and finishing up, in fact, on a mildly triumphant note that cedes it with the bearing of a catch-all anthem for underdogs. " . . .but while I am lying here, trying to fight the tears, I'll prove to the crowd that I come out stronger, though I think I might lie here a little longer . . ." The perfect radio song, in other words.

THE SET LIST: CHRISTIANSANDS

2011-06-10T11:57:00.020+08:00

Day15. A Song That Describes You

Christiansands, Tricky

The sexy, serpentine guitar riff wormed its way in first, eclipsing the song, becoming the song almost, until riff and song meshed , revealing its shape and sinking in. Not that it showed its hand after that, no. For all its roiling noir-R&B smoke, Christiansands tends to come on like a bright shaft of pop sunlight taken within the context of Pre Millennium Tension, a record that was all storm and anxiety and blight and corrosion, but it's always been a tough code to crack. And much as the fallback theory is that it's a song about yet another couple in distress, I've always fallen back more on how I've possibly misconstrued the lines that Martina sings (" . . . I met a Christian in Christiansands and the devil in Helsinki . . . ") and the lines that Tricky sing later (" . . . what does it mean? . . . it means we'll manage, I'll master your language, and in the meantime, I'll create my own . . . ") as evoking a broken spiritual congress that somehow mirrors my own. I could be terribly off the mark, as decoding goes, and this could be much ado about a breakup song, but the damage's been done, and parallels have been drawn between godhead and women anyway, which puts me in the clear a bit. It's something I've wrestled with daily for decades, faith and its object, some days a lot less gregariously than others. It’s also something I don’t like talking about. Call it a feint, if you will, but give me this much, and let me nick a line from the song to tide the curious over, as it nails everything with an accuracy so dead-on it's as if I wrote it myself : " . . .my defenses became fences now I'm stumblin' . . . "

THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US IS EVERYTHING NOW

2011-06-06T18:11:00.001+08:00

Block off the days, lovefools. Embiggen for details.

I AM TELLING YOU BECAUSE YOU ARE FAR AWAY

2011-06-02T12:58:00.001+08:00

Do you ever wonder how different everything would’ve turned out if we’d just stayed in the room that day?

*Photograph by Raymond Cauchetier

THE SET LIST: BROTHERS ON A HOTEL BED

2011-06-01T12:53:00.021+08:00

Day 15. A Song That Describes You.

Brothers On A Hotel Bed, Death Cab for Cutie

“. . . nobody ever looked at me without looking right through me” (Brian Setzer, The Knife Feels Like Justice)

Brian Setzer is a poet to no one but that line was my flag to fall under back in the day, given over as I was to this persistent belief in my own inconsequence that it became my embodiment as a grotty teenager. My career as a wallflower was a mercifully brief one and I chalk it up mostly to slightly elevated levels of prepubescent awkwardness and the stage fright I was born with. But I wore that perceived invisibility with something of a grudging pride. And it’s an invisibility I oftentimes, these days, wish to regain, if I ever had it in the first place, that is. If only to diffuse the troubling evidence my body bears of time slowly petering out.

“. . . .you may tire of me,

as our December sun is setting

'cause I'm not who I used to be

no longer easy on the eyes,

but these wrinkles masterfully disguise,

the youthful boy below,

who turned your way and saw,

something he was not looking for:

both a beginning and an end,

but now he lives inside,

someone he doesn’t recognize,

when he catches his reflection on accident. . . "

I had this to say about Brothers On A Hotel Bed sometime back: Ben Gibbard casts a worried look at the eventual vagaries of time, the erosions and the distances, and in the poignant afterglow, signs his name to his masterpiece. The melancholia of bald spots. A valentine to the rot that waits for us all.

And symptoms of decay are what they literally are, every thinning patch of hair, that is, every extra jowl that shouldn’t be there, every edge rounded by a little too much carbohydrate in your diet, every pockmark and blemish and fake tooth. Our defeat against time as it has its mean way with us, laid bare and further darkened by the possible repulsions in its wake that even a longstanding love might have trouble mitigating. Tiny deaths, if you will. And more than the self-consciousness it evokes, the song resonates with me as a confrontation with my mortalities, both belated and impending and not just biological.

" . . .on the back of a motor bike
With your arms outstretched trying to take flight
Leaving everything behind
But even at our swiftest speed

we couldn't break from the concrete
in the city where we still reside. . . "

It's a claustrophobic whirlpool. The chokehold of the traps we set for ourselves, these self-inflicted and false standards of beauty and achievement we're doomed to never meet. What a fearsome thing to confront. And if the song seems reluctant to look it square in the face, making do instead with catching its reflection in the corner of its eye, it's hard to begrudge it its wariness, but it's harder to ride it out to its cul-de-sac ending. Who's to say if the relationship at the heart of the song has always been compromised or dying an inevitable and natural death. But that poignant eponymous image, those brothers on a hotel bed, has always felt like a cop-out to me, in the same way I've always thought their swiftest speed simply wasn't fast enough. And this is where the song and I part ways a bit. Ben Gibbard, at least within the confines of Death Cab, has never been anyone's go-to man for doling out hope. Or perhaps I'm just bullheaded and naive, so it goes. But there's a convenience to settling for next best that I've never been comfortable with. And that accounts for my difficulties in finding surrogates to plug the void all this time. Ain't nothing like the real thing, all that. I don't want to sleep alone, sure. But until everything is in its right place, having the bed all to myself could be the bravest thing I've ever done. Either that, or the dumbest.

THE BOY WHO WAITED

2011-05-25T13:24:00.004+08:00

“‎People fall out of the world sometimes, but they always leave traces, little things you can’t quite account for: faces in photographs, luggage, half-eaten meals, rings. Nothing is ever forgotten, not completely, and if something can be remembered, it can come back.” (The Pandorica Opens)

THE GIRL WHO LEAPT THROUGH TIME

2011-05-22T23:40:00.003+08:00

"I don't need you to die for me, Doctor. Do I look that clingy?"

Our Amelia Pond.

PHYSICAL GRAFFITI

2011-05-22T23:38:00.000+08:00

Jenny Holzer.

THE SET LIST: NO ONE'S GONNA LOVE YOU

2011-05-18T16:44:00.018+08:00

Day 23. A Song That You Want Played At Your Wedding

Band of Horses, No One's Gonna Love You

Never overestimate the pull a man has on what transpires at his wedding for he has little, if he has any at all. And that includes the playlist, unless, of course, he happens to be marrying his musical soulmate, which is , in my experience at least, the sasquatch of modern love. And even if there is some woman out there meant for you whose musical tastes mesh with yours to such a degree you can't tell them apart anymore, the likelihood that she would grant you carte blanche in programming your (her) wedding's playlist is slim to none. The only thing a man is expected to do on his wedding day is to foot the bill and to show up. Fair enough. Oh, I used to uphold such impossible musical compatibility as the sovereign pre-requisite for the perfect partner but I've since drawn the line. All I require is that she not like Air Supply and Lito Camo and Bryan Adams and Owl City. Past that dreadful hump, perfection is virtually pre-eminent. And I don't even loathe Owl City that much. No wait, I think I actually do.

Having to live with other people's music used to seem like such a bitter pill to swallow. Turns out it wasn't at all. There have been overlaps. And what occurs in those overlaps is this rather exhilarating democracy that eventually weaned me off the hipster caste system I was beholden to, as is what happens when you fall in love with intelligent and tasteful women who were above it to the point of not knowing it existed and not caring that it did.There are few things in life as liberating as losing the need to be cool. I still listen to Incognito, Mariah and the Carpenters, if you must know, even if the women who made me hear things in them I would never hear on my own, have long since vanished without a trace. I have included songs by them in my hypothetical playlists but thankfully never had to sneak in that colossus of wedding songs, Paul Williams' We've Only Just Begun. I don't mind Paul Williams. I like Rainy Days and Mondays fine and both Faust and Old Souls from Phantom of the Paradise are brilliant. We've Only Just Begun isn't necessarily bad in and of itself but some nadir of schmaltz is hit when you play a song that's actually about a wedding at your wedding. Also, it's gooey, devotional, earnest, optimistic. And we are told to armor ourselves from these things with a healthy reserve of irony.

Left to my own devices, though, and without even a phantom fiancee to bounce off on, I realize that I'm picking Band of Horses' monster ballad No One's Gonna Love You - - -over Wonderwall, over 500 (Shake Baby Shake), over Maps, over This Must Be The Place, over Northern Sky, over All I Want Is You - - -because it has precisely the same qualities I was supposed to dismiss in We've Only Just Begun: it's gooey, devotional, earnest, optimistic. But it's perfect. So fuck that noise. I happen to think irony is for pussies anyway and even if I didn't, I'm not sure I want to feel ironic about my wedding day. I speak about my wedding day, of course, as if it were inevitable. But the reason I can fantasize about it so vigorously here is because that's all it is at this point - - - a fantasy. The song speaks for itself better than I can, really, and it's possible, given my track record, that if I do get married, I might not have to rethink the repertoire too severely. But for now, outside of nailing everything I think a wedding song should be, the song is relevant for embodying the very thing sharing intimacies with these women has taught me, if a little unwittingly. And that would be how this infantile fallacy that is the indie cred I used to rigidly and foolishly nurse and protect has fuck-all to do with form and everything to do with fashion and hivethink and false entitlement. Because, really, and I mean this as praise with no tinge of snark nor sarcasm, if you take off your blinders, assume no stance and listen without prejudice, isn't No One's Gonna Love You just the prettiest, swooniest, sweetest REO Speedwagon record you ever heard?

ENOUGH SAID

2011-05-16T03:00:00.000+08:00

Yes I did.

Taken from Jonathan Carroll.

IMMEMORIOUS

2011-05-15T13:19:00.002+08:00

A friend of mine had this beloved, hard-won shelf of R1 DVDs, mostly shit-hot Criterions, that he used to sell to buy his sick mother meds, an episode soaked in two flavors of pain - - -an ill parent and cavities in a collection - - -but only one of which most people would qualify as legitimate distress. He sells them, if he can, only to a select few in his inner circle. He tells me it's a little like putting up his children for adoption, making sure they go to a good home, people he can trust. He tells me this because I think he knows I'll get it.

Because I get that way.too.

I am an otaku of many things - - - with parents who aren't self-sufficient and with no children of my own. And sometimes I part with my own beloved, hard-won shelf of stuff to help buy my father his maintenance drugs. Or for train fare. Or supper. I don't get to be as picky who buys it. But that part, I get, too. In boom times,you see, when I'm reasonably liquid, but need to cull my heaps of tackle, the books and comics and bootleg DVDs and CDs, out of some catastrophe of storage, I just give the stuff away, but to a select few in my inner circle,too. See, I have this foolish belief that I charge and somehow venerate everything I hoard with my aura, with my voltage, with my residue. They're sort of like my children, like chunks of me. And passing them on is a sort of passing me on.

We all want to leave tracks - - -biographic spoors, if you will. Most of us do,at least. That's why I write, I guess. And sometimes paint and make films and give away possessions and upload my trivia on a database such as this- - -and let you know about it. If you tilt it at an angle, social networks, for all its provisional functions as a platform to store and flaunt our ephemerae of the moment is fundamentally a memory bank for curating our mundane histories.I tend to be sober about my usages myself if only out of how I could die after my last post and I'm not sure if I'd want to be remembered for what I had for dinner or which celebrities wet my panties. . But that's just me. And it has very little to do with ego. More the basic human instinct for, if not immortality, then longevity. We all just want to shine on, I suppose, just like John and Yoko said. And to be forgotten is the death of deaths. Remember me as a lout, remember me as a geek, remember me as a saint in the rough . . .but remember me.

This happened some time back in my lost years as a working stiff, markedly different from my current lost years as a freelancer, on a jeepney ride home from the salt mines. This guy clambers on as if drunk - - - young and reedy and suspect in a black jacket and the way he was hugging himself tight as if unbearably cold even if it was a pretty warm night. He blabbers semi-coherently about being stabbed with an icepick just half an hour ago. About hospital being futile. About being dead soon. All he wanted was to make it to his doorstep. No, not really. All he wanted was for the handful of strangers on that jeep to listen to his story. And to remember his name. His flail and trauma didn't feel like theater. He made no gesture to sugarcoat himself. He just kept repeating his name.

I went down before he did so I'll never know if he made it. I don't think he did. But what bugs me to this day is that I was sitting beside the driver and in the direct blast line of all that cacophonous Love Radio swill. What bugs me is that the radio was too fucking loud. And I didn't pick his name up.

LOST IN SPACE

2011-05-14T13:36:00.000+08:00

Last night, Friday the 13th, at the Space Encounters party.

In which this meeting of minds arrive at the wisdom that "nothing worth having comes easy but shouldn't come too hard either" yet fail to answer the question "when is a date a date?"

All the while slipping in and out of various states of inebriation. As they always do. As they should.

ON BENDED KNEE

2011-05-08T17:08:00.000+08:00

"I don't know what your type is. I don’t know what your deal is. I don't even know if you have a boyfriend. I know I like you and I want to be in your life, that's it, and if you have any room for a boyfriend, I would like to be your boyfriend, and if you don't have any room, I would like to be your friend. Any room you have for me in your life is great. If you would like me to start out in one room and move to another, I could do that." - Rob Sheffield, Love Is A Mixtape

THE SET LIST: PEOPLE HELP THE PEOPLE

2011-05-06T23:21:00.029+08:00

Day 08. A Song That You Know All The Words To

Cherry Ghost, People Help The People

I could've gone to Jenny Lewis for this. " . . .there's blood in my mouth 'cause I've been biting my tongue all week . . . " is still, if you ask me, peerless, as first lines go. Costello, of course. Morrisey. Ben Gibbard. Jay-Z, even. And I've always had this niggling sense that this is a song that shouldn't, in principle, come to the boil it's brought to.The ickiness of being earnest,all that. Oh it was love at first listen, which has happened before, but not as often as I'd like, and in this case, I suspect it has a lot to do with how I have a soft spot for this sort of soaring, serious, middlebrow piano balladry." . . .I guess the loneliness came knocking, no one needs to be alone, oh save me . . . " Sometimes we can't make it on our own is what it's saying. And help is closer than we think. It's a noble sentiment,actually, if a little naive. And, as a rule, songs built on a motherhood statement, have a tremendous potential to lapse into corn. And I'm not sure if I can think of anything more horrible than the pop song equivalent of a Paolo Coelho truism. God forbid something like that transpires and that I should hear it.

Simon Aldred has a loftier way with words, far more ornate, really, than his proclaimed allegiance to the unfussy minimalism of Bill Callahan would suggest. "God knows what is hiding in that weak and drunken heart, I guess you kissed the girls and made them cry, those hard-faced Queens of Misadventure . . ." is how the song starts and then there's the line that struck me first " . . .a fiery throng of muted angels giving love and getting nothing back . . . "The tendencies for preciousness are apparent but they are, in and of themselves, lovely lines. Cryptic, perhaps, but in the way Donald Fagen's or Robert Pollard's lyrics are, albeit without the wry literacy and weird mischief, respectively. And by that I mean that they have a way of rolling off the tongue, even at their most obtuse. It's the way the words are shaped so. And they certainly don't lack for emotive brunt. " . . .behind the tears inside the lies, a thousand slowly dying sunsets . . . "

Much as it teeters and totters precariously between the poignant and the mawkish, as we often do ourselves, it also gains this aching vulnerability from not quite settling on one or the other, nailing my own temperament about things more than I'd care to admit. Every time I get to the song's most forthright moment, something tiny catches in my throat, which I realize probably says more about me than it does the song but there you go. " . . .and if you're homesick, give me your hand and I'll hold it. . . " Aldred may traffic in a warier strain of optimism, but he's never stingy with hope and much as this is a song about the isolations we share without knowing, it's also about the imminent possibility of relief.

HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY

2011-05-06T21:38:00.001+08:00

As if the De Lillo-referencing of their name wasn't enough to send me, they had to write the songs to back it up.

" . . .I just wanna be numb . . ."

Because sometimes that's the only thing worth wanting.

LAST NIGHT'S LAST SIGH

2011-05-06T21:22:00.004+08:00

" . . .I'm getting so tired of giving a damn about an absent-hearted man . . . " Wouldn't you?

Last night's last song. Lingering in my head like the Jack Daniels that lingers in my blood still and sometimes sings. Laura Nyro much.

MAD ABOUT THE WRONG GIRLS

2011-05-06T20:46:00.000+08:00

". . . I'd like to collapse with you and ease you against this song, I think we're compatible but I see you think I'm wrong . . . "

Story of my life. Song of the year. And it's only May.

THE SET LIST: SONG TO THE SIREN

2011-04-30T22:36:00.011+08:00

Day 24. A Song That You Want Played At Your Funeral

This Mortal Coil. Song To The Siren.

I used to make funeral mixtapes. It's a parlor game among music nerds but I took it with a disquieting measure of seriousness. Not out of some pursuit of cool, which is oxymoronic anyway or maybe just plain moronic, but as a sort of contingency measure. Dying tends to leave terrible gravities and infinite silences, all those vacuums to plug, conversations cut off, things left unsaid. And the mixtapes are partly to remedy that. They're also partly to remedy the glum and blah music they play at funerals here. Amazing Grace is a perpetual standby, sure, but that's as far as I'll go. I have a friend whose brother died before his time and had some beloved Pink Floyd album play on the way to his burial. I heard that story in college and it's inspired me since.

I don't tinker with my funeral mixtape these days. I don't think of my funeral much these days, really, out of how I don't want to hurry up what should come in its own good time and also out of how I nurse this fantasy of going up in flames in the thick of some cataclysmic event instead. But its New Orleans funerals I think of whenever I do, and the way the music and mood segues from the solemn to the ebullient. Death, after all, can be a joyous occasion. And funerals ecstatic and transcendent. If death by apocalypse is not in my cards, the eventual ceremony should start and end with my favorite This Mortal Coil cover of my favorite Tim Buckley song, of which I've written about in this context before, not exhaustively, but enough to sum up everything that needs to be said.

Cocteau Twin Liz Fraser has the uncanny ability to bend any song to her will with that voice and the spooky, beautiful thing she makes out of this Tim Buckley classic. It has a transporting lull, like the dulcet swoosh of the water on your ferry ride to final repose.

TIME IS LIKE A CLOCK IN MY HEART

2011-04-30T20:02:00.001+08:00

"Love is all a matter of timing. It's no good meeting the right person too early or too late." (Wongkarwai, 2046)

THE SET LIST: TIME CAPSULE

2011-04-24T00:38:00.002+08:00

Day 05. A Song That Reminds You of Someone

Time Capsule, Matthew Sweet

8 AM. Coming early was never my strongest suit. If you know me well, you'd know that. But here I was, out of bed and standing at the bus terminal across Ali Mall before lunch on a Saturday of a long weekend just before it swelled like rush hour, anxious bones in an Astroboy shirt, the sky turning a treacherous shade of gray and starting to, well, not rain, nothing quite as melodramatic, but drizzle, light enough to make umbrellas unnecessary but constant enough to put a damp on the day still. I had my beatup canvas bag slung over my right shoulder. And a ticket to ride for half a world away. Because that was how far places I haven't been to feel like for me. Another girl, another planet. And this was my first time to go to where I'm going which is where she came to be and where she's been these last 40,320 drab and vacant and lonesome and disorienting and chemically-imbalanced minutes.

I was an amateur, a virgin to all this, scared and thrilled in equal measure. Not like these people milling around me, locked as they were in a holding pattern of ritual they could do from muscle memory. We were all waiting for the same bus, sure, all headed the same way except where they were going, it was warm and friendly and familiar. And I felt lost in space as if tumbling without coordinates into a planet that was obscured by clouds and doesn't show up on any of the maps.

I perched myself on a railing, feigning cool, chewing a wad of gum that had long lost its flavor.

And waited.

The bus rolled out the terminal a little after 10. And there I was, squeezed between a man built like a gorilla who read the same decrepit tabloid over and over again and some mountaineer whose backpack had a life of its own.

I could see the outskirts come up ahead, I pulled out the mix I made speically for the trip. At last I was on that long and winding road to her, crossing the divide, unturning the last stone left unturned. My palms were sweatier than their usual sweaty and I figured it was the caffeine at last mixing with the nerves. But my palpitations had calmed down and I was mostly a Pink Floyd song. Comfortably numb. I settled in my seat, eyes closed, drifting to sleep. I turned up the volume on the music, drowning everything out, and inbetween half-awake dreams and semi-automatic memories, I flipped back in time.

AMBIENT VALENTINES

2011-04-10T13:36:00.005+08:00

If any of you are in the area, Zero and Memories of Places I've Never Been are screening at the SOLO(s) Project House in Newark, New Jersey, from April 15 to May 5. Thanks to my friend and one of my favorite visual artists Kim Bello for curating/programming the show. And to my collaborators on the films: Mina Cruz, Sue Prado, Allan Balberona, Ligaya Leccio and Khavn for lending me his music to use.

More details here. Plus my notes for the show here.

OSCURO OBJETO DEL DESEO

2011-04-07T13:55:00.001+08:00

Virtual Mixtape# 2. Love songs. Nothing but love songs. Songs for whoever, sweet declines, leaps of faith, murder ballads, bloody valentines, prayers on fire. Something for the perpetual longing.

FILE UNDER: EASY LISTENING

2011-04-06T15:02:00.000+08:00

First stab at a virtual mixtape. First of many. Press and play.

DANCE DANCE OTHERWISE WE ARE LOST

2011-04-06T14:55:00.002+08:00

Not a fan of dance films. Not a fan of 3D. Not a fan of Wim Wenders.

Loved this.

Must be seen on the big screen. Must be seen in 3D. Must be seen.

Because as good as it looks on 2D, it's simply transcendent in 3D.

Dance. Dance. Otherwise we are lost. That we are.

MEMORIES OF WINTER AND MAGIC STREETS

2011-04-04T00:58:00.012+08:00

Trip No.8 to Hong Kong. Trip No. 1 to the Hong Kong International Film Festival. Making me a veteran and virgin both. Making me heady,too. HK and film festivals separately make me feverish. Mashed up, it's a splendid giddiness. I've taken a very casual, almost cavalier, attitude to traveling. Gone are the days of making elaborate shopping lists, of anal-retentive itineraries, of bulky luggage, of boy scout preparedness. I've always craved the aerodynamic mobility of someone who lets the day take him where it will but I've never been predisposed to the fine art of rolling with it. Not until this trip, which was very organic, very given over to caprice and whim, to making it up as we went along. Adding a new strain of endorphin to the mix.

W, the hotel I bunked in, was an experience in and of itself reeking, as it did, of hipster venom, from the Phillip Starck interior design to the horse in the lobby made from speakers to the way the elevator lights up and pipes in Phoenix. The programming at the festival was impeccable and much as I missed out on some crucial work (Bela Tarr's Turin Horse, Yoon Sung Hong's Bleak Night, Hong Sang Soo's Oki's Movie and I would've wanted to catch a few Abbas Kiarostamis and Johnnie Tos and Shunj Iwais on the big screen) the films I did catch were worth the trouble and in at least a couple of cases (James Benning's 20 Cigarettes and Wim Wenders' Pina) flat-out grand. The Chabet exhibit at the Soho branch of Osage wasn't on anyone's map of to-dos but I'm supremely glad I took the time. That big bowl of seaweed noodles after was epic. The afterparty was a blast. And then there was Hong Kong, the city that never falters in giving me surges of joy. Took me a while to gather my bearings, sure. Contrary to rumors of humidity, there was a lingering memory of winter in the air and I wasn't dressed properly, the massive HMV on Peking Road is no more leaving a tiny void in my heart and the city seems to have grown a few new train lines amping the confusion of getting to and fro a bit more.

But everything else was how it was,making acclimation a breeze. The streets still magic with that hum of energy, with that intolerable gorgeousness, with that familiar strangeness. And, as always, open to getting lost in.

NOBODY DID IT BETTER

2011-04-01T20:40:00.003+08:00

I spent a couple of hours walking around in the leftover winter air of HK last Tuesday looking for a Page One between screenings. And as soon as I find one,found myself promptly surrendering to the urge and getting this. Not anyone's favorite Bond novel out of how it's the Bond novel that's the least like one making it the Bond novel for me. Also, that title. Love it.

And yes, sometimes you can judge a book by its cover.

Isn't she lovely?

THERE'S A PLACE FOR US AT THE END OF THE WORLD

2011-03-01T16:09:00.007+08:00

The song, provisionally called perhaps a little too much in jest Kandado Apocalypse but has since been changed to Kandado, was meant for some experimental pseudo-biographical meta-whatever feature, the working title of which was and still is Holocaust. The lyrics came to me in a white-heat tumble two years ago, based,as it is, on a missing person whose pattern recognition was too palpable still to be shrouded in anything but the most determined and willful of amnesias. Khavn set them to music, fiddled a little with the syntax of the chorus to make it pop more, but gestated until Fando & Lis could be formed so they could breathe life into it. The film, though, has been in limbo. And the pieces that make up this short were cannibalized from footage shot for other aborted films that somehow, perhaps magically, dovetailed into the context of the song feeling weirdly enough as if it were shot from the original sequence treatment. Whether any of this makes it to the longer piece, only time will tell. The song's a given, of course, and if i could have my way, the wonderful Vanni Liwanag will act in it again, as she does here, with so little to go on and beautifully at that.

MINUS THE BEAR

2011-02-28T22:24:00.001+08:00

In which I put my credibility on the line by proclaiming that not only is this the first poster of the year that qualifies for my 2011 yearend poster list but also that I am actually looking forward to its release.

DARK THEY WERE AND GOLDEN EYED

2011-02-23T16:02:00.003+08:00

I do the Oscars . Or rather, five of the ten nominees, including that one up there with the poster that's sumptuous enough to want to lick. Three are here with links to the other two.

YOU DON'T LOVE ME WHEN I CRY

2011-02-15T17:27:00.003+08:00

I fall prey to the piano, all forlorn and surrendered, but I only start to choke when the song gets to its second verse : ” …you’d know how the time flies, only yesterday was the time of our lives, we were born and raised in a summery haze, bound by the surprise of our glory days … “ The bleeding starts right after, when Adele goes back to the chorus: "… never mind, I’ll find someone like you … ” The niggling sense that she won’t, that very few of us often do, only makes matters worse. You can’t go on when the knife feels like justice.

THE LIFE AQUATIC

2011-02-08T14:59:00.002+08:00

It is possible my fervid love for submarines, and for sea monsters, has primordial steampunk Jules Verne's 20000 Leagues Under The Sea to blame. Happy birthday,sir. Loving the Google tribute. Oh, and I want a copy of this edition.

DIVER DOWN

2011-02-07T11:35:00.001+08:00

Arc of A Diver (1981)
Steve Winwood

Classics revisited. The sweet-tooth melodies percolate and tingle like black coffee buzz. The giddy blankets of synths sweetening without sugarcoating ,never curdling into cheesy. The silly-cryptic - - - “ jealous nights and all her secret chords/ I must be deaf on the telephone/ I need my love to translate”(Arc of a Diver) - - - and sometimes naughty-sexist - - - “ . . .go down babe/ a slot machine to take my time/ cunning diversion to pass the time”(Secondhand Woman) - - -poetry parsing varying aftermaths of heartbreak with a utopian buoyancy. The rickety soundscapes that buckle and creak like they could fall apart any minute but don't. Not so much a touchstone of its time but a gemful fluke. And Winwood's pivot point from cool mod glory to bland pop reign. It holds up - - -without a drop of nostalgia. And the way his haggard soulboy rasp crows here, the way he gives in to the ecstasy of the moment, it's as if he knew this was his personal best ,as if he knew his star was in supernova, as if he knew he would never make a record as unfettered, as determined, as pure.

MELANCHOLY IN THE DISCO HOUR

2011-02-05T15:08:00.003+08:00

Dancing with tears in your eyes. Only without the dancing.

So tearjerkingly lovely the digital castanets aren't missed.

Look away if the Robyn postings start verging on overkill for you. can't promise that they'll stop anytime soon.

GET ME AWAY FROM HERE, I'M DYING

2011-02-04T11:33:00.007+08:00

"I don’t know if anyone could say I’m successful with affairs of the heart. I don’t know why. I would love that one last real romance. But I’m not very realistic about it happening. What I can’t deny is my yearning." (Jack Nicholson)

My sentiments exactly.