FLY ART
By: Iris P. Concepcion
Art, that arrogant branch of human thematic explorations, was butchered by an axe one day, and found itself legless. That was also the moment it had decided to acquire a gender in the form of a gonad bearing being. Art, that boasting piece of Towering Craft, decided to become a he.
And he, that legless form of gallivanting creativity, shook the drawing pencil with might and conviction and had uttered:
"From your tip shall arise the most hawkish eyes, the mocking irises, the conscience-piercing pupils, the sly retinas, the snowy orbs."
The drawing pencil, suicidal at this point for the production of horrendous cartographic sketches, chopped ears, misunderstood shadows, cross-eyed faces, straight and limp hair, faced him, that legless creative tyrant with a thinning eraser on its tail's tip, growled like a pained chimpanzee :
"Damn you art! Damn you and your pretensions for one lined eyebrows, your noses with only two dots as its breathing holes, your four-fingered ladies in tights, your uneven tilting heads, your pouty mouths, your canvasses with drawings that always start in the middle, your shadow strokes looking like substandard road cement.
Damn you for liking death so much, you and your incompetent fingers wincing my tip with your incongruent noses, your faces with bland emotions, your lips with nary a character to grip me with the words : "MAKE ME ALIVE! MAKE ME ALIVE!"
Sunday, November 11, 2012
ADVICE OF A FATHER TO A DAUGHTER, A YOUNG WOMAN IN BRAIDS
By: Iris P. Concepcion
And thus it shone, lined in bright skies, a signal that a father is about to give his daughter away to a man of noble stock, in celebration of multiplying humanity and spreading the good genetics to fill the living rooms of cheers swathed in velvet canopies.
The clue is spelled out in the clouds, wooly cottoned in white fur. It illumined a word: UNION.
Ginter Grass, the European, haunting writer who had dramatized and horrified food in his mocking novel, Hunger, would have traded his big toe to craft the sentences supporting the word apparition that flies like an airplane on air.
To the ordinary father though, it holds a different meaning. Itched in unshaven stubble, soaked in grey hues all over his body, it brought forth a panic unlike the wound shots that he had bitten and brandied in the past: how to pacify a daughter's desire to experience a bonded, marital hell.
His own had been ordinarily blissful with routines of a dining table and desk shuffling like outworn crads. It had ranked a little higher than a soap opera boredom. He had been dissuading his daughter to forego the wedding gown and instead, sprain her feet in marathon tracks, drink apple cider juice for a week, carry ten sacks of rice, gulp down a barrel of barley, to test her stamina. But, all these, for naught.
His daughter wants to burden her ring finger with a gold plated ornament festooned with a giant stone at the center weighing like a volcano, perhaps dipped and coated in second class alloy that could, in twenty years, give her red scabbies.
He had been meaning to write her in ballpoint pen, ditching the computer keys that he had never fallen in love with. He had originally thought of them as a squared driveway that gives him the frantic thought of turning into a bald man. He sees it, even as he ponders on its usage, as a vulcanized platform to Braille his soles, mistaking them for blind bats.
How to paragraph the words in their exact meaning, how to slice the sentences with the handy appearances of commas, how to galvanize the semi colons in between words, how to wind the letter contents to bring home the message of urgency that a wedding is only meant to be solemnized by and among squirrels, how would a man, of ordinary pedigree, be made to put all these in stringed words and offer it as wisdom to her only daughter?
My own foray into romantic liaisons was not entirely a feast of triumohs. Women are loudmouths with words zooming out from their mouths like jetplanes, forming foamy chatter from their razor mouth teeth. I have squired plenty of them in various anatomical diagrams with their foul and shrill voices animatedly engaged in gossip, instigating frictions and poking into their neighbors' woes and affairs. Their jealousies show peasant-like envy; I have often dreamt of putting my smelly, unwashed socks on their mouths to turn off thei inane diatribes forever. It is unnerving to wake up in the morning, especially when they shout like untuned orchestras, bewailing about smudges, money, baby poos and stains. Why couldn't they live in tents then? Or as a better alternative, use their aluminum roofs, misused as house walls, as their future coffins?
I have, nonetheless, met a few possessing elan and fortitude, docile and meek like tongue-less herd of sheep. They have provided a homing nest better than the wagging, nagging and tweaking beaks of the rest. Your mother belongs to this latter group. I was treated like an unsatisfied pig by this lot, finding myself rewarded with food in cupboards, cabinets and refrigerators as if my digestive organ is their whole revolving universe. You find yourself opening your eyes not to an irritating wail or misplaced anger but to a bowl of hot chicken macaroni soup with carrots. I was even nudged out of my deep slumber once to find a tenderized goat's head marinated in ginger and lemon grass beside my bed. My first ever voodoo meal.
This might sound awfully Neanderthal to you my child but rarely can you find a mate who can fully grasp your own individuality, a mammal who could intuit the unruffling of your moods.
The temerity of the married flock could never give you a widespread insight the travails of being marooned forever with a partner, bondaged as you are in a series of foul smells and spooky sound, irritatingly routinary like a ticking clock.
I shall, nevertheless, impart my miniscule wisdom on how to combat this boredom and repetitions made more important by your visions of tykes cuter than the animated characters, your own children looking like Ava Gardner in sequined gowns, shrieking like fairies, elongating their pink tongues like hissing snakes. Think about their oval eyes first before you dread the actuial mincing of that goat's head.
Allow me to deliver the marital tips to you, my daughter, freshly experimented from my busy cranium. These are tests meant to examine your future spouse's loyalty not only to his archaic and hymnal devotion to the two prominent orbs frotning your body.
Could he gaze beyond the wonder of your twinkling eyes and dig deeper into the cuticles that had camped on your feet like flattened ginger?
This brings me to the fore of boasting my old wit. Call it a wit's tip, from an old owl.
Is he willing to clip your blackened nails without causing you a scandalous wince? Could he extract their ingrones without cursing to the gods in heaven the futility of, ostensibly, foot servitude?
If he ever develops a curious goiter that has caused his neck to swell, would you scram away from that terrible sight or would you lovingly wipe it with an Oriental ointment to reduce its size? IF he vomits copiuos red corpuscles in your urinary pan like a Quentin Tarantino character, would you scream out of your llungs or would you scream out of your lungs or would you carefully wipe his mouth and pray for a catastrophic wrath and famine to the vicious people who had caused it?
If he suddenly finds himself without a leg in a gradual series of amputation owing to some undiagnosed sickness, would you hide in your closet, run for your life and seek refuge behind the curtains or would you rather consume all your money to order artificial legs in prosphetic mastery from atelemarketing program?
If he serves you food that looks like womited worms and shove it in your mouth as an appetizing gourmet fare, would you show dissatisfaction or would you be very polite to excuse yourself from the table ans sneak a bar of Reese's chocolate and peanut butter hidden under your bedroom pillow?
If he suddenly, insiduously and maliciously, annoint you as the founder of the Satanic Cult in your rough neighborhood, brandish your forehead with incense and holy water after muttering spiritual incantations without halts, would you throw her the King James version of the Bible and shout at the top of your visceral voice that you had, in fact, edited its English translation and holler piously, with cherubic sonatas piping in the background, that his false postulation is inanely unfounded?
If he hastily leaves you for an Interracial Planetary Alignment of Constellation and HEavenly Bodies in Nevada, U.S.A. while you are wallowing in a decrepit cornerstore selling sugarcane vinegar in a far flung village in Croatia, will you feign an incurable dementia to forestall his departure or will you allow him to fly so that he could pursue his alien dream?
My child, the horror and tribulation that I have mentioned thus far is not even an inch to the 12 ft. ruler of doom awaiting you in that, pardon my genteel puke, state of bliss.
Succumb to the intelligence of handling this conjured pairing in purgatory, persist like an Amazon jungle survivor like your mother who had faced bullets, insults, blood, gore and ill will all by herself to build the future, even those of her tormentors. She is an impervious and cunning matchmaker too who had singlehandedly improved the mental faculties of infants, removed their illnesses, fattened their bank accounts and gifted them prestige and respect in a society previously hostile to them.
The preparations laid before you, waging in a way into a marital combat that could drain you, is no match to the promise of living in glorious castles specially lit for your presence once you have hurdled the hell of this marital damnation.
Bravery, my daughter, has nothing to do with i9nnocent courage. Bravery is measured by how far you can endure the degrees of responsibilities, clasping your existence like a hawk, staring at your face like opal, blank void, swirling in your periphery like an unformed guilt.
Why am I terrifying you with prophetic assaults on the home front? Why am I not twiddling you with sash and bolts, the shrieks and guffaws, the birthday candles lit to illumine your freshly scrubbed cheeks and Listerened mouth? Why am I not weaving you a quilt of mountainous mayonnaise surrounding your pasta like snow dug by ski men in neon spandex? Why am I not magnifying your retinas with the nervy sheen of your beloved's toned biceps? Why am I not orating to you the versed rhapsodies in iambic meters that might have, surprisingly, emboldened your pillow to talk, mouthing the piled letters, penned no less by the Mennen-breezed aftershave who is your husband, liquified and trapped in a swirling bottle of fragrance?
The answer to these questions is akin to the four-fingered dwarf with a fat nose: no one has fully assimilated the logic reasoning of domestic unions in textbook understanding. It can acquire a nose with only a single hole on it, an elbow with hooks, toes with peanut butter fillings in between them.
I do not mean to startle you with these frightening predictions but astrology could save you from this grim foreboding.
Your husband can add a little finger to your uneven hands, remove the hooks from your arms, sculpt your toes to look like Taj Majal.
Think of that 40 inch waistline shrinking into a dimunitive 24 inch wrappable anatomy. The plaque of your teeth expelled, leaving your chomping pearls earnestly flossed in horrible whiteness.
Seize that field where you could pluck your dreams like growing grains bathed by spring rain. Marriage is all about the nourishment that considers your body a wondrous habitation, a harvest of abundance that could sustain any of your expectant desires. Have I not laid down the tribulations only to open another window that could grope your soul with mental prosperities? Is it not a puzzle then, that your husband could widely stretch that window for you to marvel at the other side of this domed coin?
Part then, that sullen gaffe of confusion that is now inhabiting your mind. Envy, gossip and fricrions shall hover to dissuade you from enjoying that zone of satisfaction that welcomes you in that bonded bliss. Set forth your sword of defense against the incompetent harangue of doomsayers who might have lavishly poured you with unfounded criticisms. Announce proudly the security of your chastity belt that had not been unlocked at your very young age where others might have immediately and freely given, producing unwanted pregnancies and fodders for dizzying scandals.
All the swallows on streams, their beaks privy to the secrets of the ground worms, shall be with you in that aisle of abundance and prosperity of noble stock and genteel breeding, of a luife free from the chaos of the muggy and murky underworld.
Even the reindeers, with their twiggy horns furnishing shadows to the dark and sullen moon when flown by the Sleighs Of December, shall provide a chorus in that age of equatorial marriage, to be witnessed not only by the piquant but moody giraffes, but the uniquely pouty mouthed, and here comes the punishing insult, very crossed water hippopotamuses who are prouder than ever by their vulgar unfriendliness to camera lenses.
Let us then advance our ruminations on this wedded communion with nappies and budgeting by envisioning the allure and scenery of your wedding ceremony. Shall the entire zoo and all the offspring of the outback wildlife be present? Call in the marching zebras with their gifts of cups and teaspoons, the white Bengal tigers with their ironing boards, the white sharks with their electric pots, the gayest porcupines with their immaculate dinnerware porcelain, the roaring lions with their air conditioners and the little, furry rabbits with their soft towels and linens!
By: Iris P. Concepcion
And thus it shone, lined in bright skies, a signal that a father is about to give his daughter away to a man of noble stock, in celebration of multiplying humanity and spreading the good genetics to fill the living rooms of cheers swathed in velvet canopies.
The clue is spelled out in the clouds, wooly cottoned in white fur. It illumined a word: UNION.
Ginter Grass, the European, haunting writer who had dramatized and horrified food in his mocking novel, Hunger, would have traded his big toe to craft the sentences supporting the word apparition that flies like an airplane on air.
To the ordinary father though, it holds a different meaning. Itched in unshaven stubble, soaked in grey hues all over his body, it brought forth a panic unlike the wound shots that he had bitten and brandied in the past: how to pacify a daughter's desire to experience a bonded, marital hell.
His own had been ordinarily blissful with routines of a dining table and desk shuffling like outworn crads. It had ranked a little higher than a soap opera boredom. He had been dissuading his daughter to forego the wedding gown and instead, sprain her feet in marathon tracks, drink apple cider juice for a week, carry ten sacks of rice, gulp down a barrel of barley, to test her stamina. But, all these, for naught.
His daughter wants to burden her ring finger with a gold plated ornament festooned with a giant stone at the center weighing like a volcano, perhaps dipped and coated in second class alloy that could, in twenty years, give her red scabbies.
He had been meaning to write her in ballpoint pen, ditching the computer keys that he had never fallen in love with. He had originally thought of them as a squared driveway that gives him the frantic thought of turning into a bald man. He sees it, even as he ponders on its usage, as a vulcanized platform to Braille his soles, mistaking them for blind bats.
How to paragraph the words in their exact meaning, how to slice the sentences with the handy appearances of commas, how to galvanize the semi colons in between words, how to wind the letter contents to bring home the message of urgency that a wedding is only meant to be solemnized by and among squirrels, how would a man, of ordinary pedigree, be made to put all these in stringed words and offer it as wisdom to her only daughter?
My own foray into romantic liaisons was not entirely a feast of triumohs. Women are loudmouths with words zooming out from their mouths like jetplanes, forming foamy chatter from their razor mouth teeth. I have squired plenty of them in various anatomical diagrams with their foul and shrill voices animatedly engaged in gossip, instigating frictions and poking into their neighbors' woes and affairs. Their jealousies show peasant-like envy; I have often dreamt of putting my smelly, unwashed socks on their mouths to turn off thei inane diatribes forever. It is unnerving to wake up in the morning, especially when they shout like untuned orchestras, bewailing about smudges, money, baby poos and stains. Why couldn't they live in tents then? Or as a better alternative, use their aluminum roofs, misused as house walls, as their future coffins?
I have, nonetheless, met a few possessing elan and fortitude, docile and meek like tongue-less herd of sheep. They have provided a homing nest better than the wagging, nagging and tweaking beaks of the rest. Your mother belongs to this latter group. I was treated like an unsatisfied pig by this lot, finding myself rewarded with food in cupboards, cabinets and refrigerators as if my digestive organ is their whole revolving universe. You find yourself opening your eyes not to an irritating wail or misplaced anger but to a bowl of hot chicken macaroni soup with carrots. I was even nudged out of my deep slumber once to find a tenderized goat's head marinated in ginger and lemon grass beside my bed. My first ever voodoo meal.
This might sound awfully Neanderthal to you my child but rarely can you find a mate who can fully grasp your own individuality, a mammal who could intuit the unruffling of your moods.
The temerity of the married flock could never give you a widespread insight the travails of being marooned forever with a partner, bondaged as you are in a series of foul smells and spooky sound, irritatingly routinary like a ticking clock.
I shall, nevertheless, impart my miniscule wisdom on how to combat this boredom and repetitions made more important by your visions of tykes cuter than the animated characters, your own children looking like Ava Gardner in sequined gowns, shrieking like fairies, elongating their pink tongues like hissing snakes. Think about their oval eyes first before you dread the actuial mincing of that goat's head.
Allow me to deliver the marital tips to you, my daughter, freshly experimented from my busy cranium. These are tests meant to examine your future spouse's loyalty not only to his archaic and hymnal devotion to the two prominent orbs frotning your body.
Could he gaze beyond the wonder of your twinkling eyes and dig deeper into the cuticles that had camped on your feet like flattened ginger?
This brings me to the fore of boasting my old wit. Call it a wit's tip, from an old owl.
Is he willing to clip your blackened nails without causing you a scandalous wince? Could he extract their ingrones without cursing to the gods in heaven the futility of, ostensibly, foot servitude?
If he ever develops a curious goiter that has caused his neck to swell, would you scram away from that terrible sight or would you lovingly wipe it with an Oriental ointment to reduce its size? IF he vomits copiuos red corpuscles in your urinary pan like a Quentin Tarantino character, would you scream out of your llungs or would you scream out of your lungs or would you carefully wipe his mouth and pray for a catastrophic wrath and famine to the vicious people who had caused it?
If he suddenly finds himself without a leg in a gradual series of amputation owing to some undiagnosed sickness, would you hide in your closet, run for your life and seek refuge behind the curtains or would you rather consume all your money to order artificial legs in prosphetic mastery from atelemarketing program?
If he serves you food that looks like womited worms and shove it in your mouth as an appetizing gourmet fare, would you show dissatisfaction or would you be very polite to excuse yourself from the table ans sneak a bar of Reese's chocolate and peanut butter hidden under your bedroom pillow?
If he suddenly, insiduously and maliciously, annoint you as the founder of the Satanic Cult in your rough neighborhood, brandish your forehead with incense and holy water after muttering spiritual incantations without halts, would you throw her the King James version of the Bible and shout at the top of your visceral voice that you had, in fact, edited its English translation and holler piously, with cherubic sonatas piping in the background, that his false postulation is inanely unfounded?
If he hastily leaves you for an Interracial Planetary Alignment of Constellation and HEavenly Bodies in Nevada, U.S.A. while you are wallowing in a decrepit cornerstore selling sugarcane vinegar in a far flung village in Croatia, will you feign an incurable dementia to forestall his departure or will you allow him to fly so that he could pursue his alien dream?
My child, the horror and tribulation that I have mentioned thus far is not even an inch to the 12 ft. ruler of doom awaiting you in that, pardon my genteel puke, state of bliss.
Succumb to the intelligence of handling this conjured pairing in purgatory, persist like an Amazon jungle survivor like your mother who had faced bullets, insults, blood, gore and ill will all by herself to build the future, even those of her tormentors. She is an impervious and cunning matchmaker too who had singlehandedly improved the mental faculties of infants, removed their illnesses, fattened their bank accounts and gifted them prestige and respect in a society previously hostile to them.
The preparations laid before you, waging in a way into a marital combat that could drain you, is no match to the promise of living in glorious castles specially lit for your presence once you have hurdled the hell of this marital damnation.
Bravery, my daughter, has nothing to do with i9nnocent courage. Bravery is measured by how far you can endure the degrees of responsibilities, clasping your existence like a hawk, staring at your face like opal, blank void, swirling in your periphery like an unformed guilt.
Why am I terrifying you with prophetic assaults on the home front? Why am I not twiddling you with sash and bolts, the shrieks and guffaws, the birthday candles lit to illumine your freshly scrubbed cheeks and Listerened mouth? Why am I not weaving you a quilt of mountainous mayonnaise surrounding your pasta like snow dug by ski men in neon spandex? Why am I not magnifying your retinas with the nervy sheen of your beloved's toned biceps? Why am I not orating to you the versed rhapsodies in iambic meters that might have, surprisingly, emboldened your pillow to talk, mouthing the piled letters, penned no less by the Mennen-breezed aftershave who is your husband, liquified and trapped in a swirling bottle of fragrance?
The answer to these questions is akin to the four-fingered dwarf with a fat nose: no one has fully assimilated the logic reasoning of domestic unions in textbook understanding. It can acquire a nose with only a single hole on it, an elbow with hooks, toes with peanut butter fillings in between them.
I do not mean to startle you with these frightening predictions but astrology could save you from this grim foreboding.
Your husband can add a little finger to your uneven hands, remove the hooks from your arms, sculpt your toes to look like Taj Majal.
Think of that 40 inch waistline shrinking into a dimunitive 24 inch wrappable anatomy. The plaque of your teeth expelled, leaving your chomping pearls earnestly flossed in horrible whiteness.
Seize that field where you could pluck your dreams like growing grains bathed by spring rain. Marriage is all about the nourishment that considers your body a wondrous habitation, a harvest of abundance that could sustain any of your expectant desires. Have I not laid down the tribulations only to open another window that could grope your soul with mental prosperities? Is it not a puzzle then, that your husband could widely stretch that window for you to marvel at the other side of this domed coin?
Part then, that sullen gaffe of confusion that is now inhabiting your mind. Envy, gossip and fricrions shall hover to dissuade you from enjoying that zone of satisfaction that welcomes you in that bonded bliss. Set forth your sword of defense against the incompetent harangue of doomsayers who might have lavishly poured you with unfounded criticisms. Announce proudly the security of your chastity belt that had not been unlocked at your very young age where others might have immediately and freely given, producing unwanted pregnancies and fodders for dizzying scandals.
All the swallows on streams, their beaks privy to the secrets of the ground worms, shall be with you in that aisle of abundance and prosperity of noble stock and genteel breeding, of a luife free from the chaos of the muggy and murky underworld.
Even the reindeers, with their twiggy horns furnishing shadows to the dark and sullen moon when flown by the Sleighs Of December, shall provide a chorus in that age of equatorial marriage, to be witnessed not only by the piquant but moody giraffes, but the uniquely pouty mouthed, and here comes the punishing insult, very crossed water hippopotamuses who are prouder than ever by their vulgar unfriendliness to camera lenses.
Let us then advance our ruminations on this wedded communion with nappies and budgeting by envisioning the allure and scenery of your wedding ceremony. Shall the entire zoo and all the offspring of the outback wildlife be present? Call in the marching zebras with their gifts of cups and teaspoons, the white Bengal tigers with their ironing boards, the white sharks with their electric pots, the gayest porcupines with their immaculate dinnerware porcelain, the roaring lions with their air conditioners and the little, furry rabbits with their soft towels and linens!
Saturday, July 28, 2012
PERISH MANICURES; LONG LIVE LIGHTER NAILS!
By: Iris P. Concepcion
A Mongoloid-looking man who serves the best cinnamon-almond baked pastry is slumped on his cushioned bed with monochromatic kitty pictures, looking at his half-consumed intravenous medicine, a dextrose.
He is sick at this time of the day, the 364,111,111 full lunar moon, as he barely hides behind the mast of a grey sky.
His daughter, a china doll, is playing wood blocks nearby, counting the numbers one to ten. She forms house designs in triangular and oval forms. She does not know how to use the hula hoop, preferring to circle it in motioned calisthenics using her luminiscent hands.
She has rejected my polite offering of sports education: she could use it around her waist in a mock belly dancing that could then be circled around her neck, knees and forefinger in Olympian Science. She grabs her green, pureed vegetable, contained in her milk bottle and pours it down her tiny throat.
We look at each other as her father is watching us when her mother appears from of the house's doors.
She hovers on her brood, her own mother (the perennial grandmother sitting not on a wicker chair but a dwarfian stool) miraculously farts every 10 minutes on the dot, bewailing the routinary bathing schedule in the house. Her language is incomprehensible; she has probably left her false teeth somewhere, tucked inside a coffee mug with warm water, overnight. She is the last person who could use the resident bathroom in this house, constructed with towering showers and large toilet seats. It is a wonderment how her tiny tush can fit in the bowl to catch her bodily dump, a receptacle that could swallow her whole anatomy.
The grandmother's child, the wife and mother in this story, suddenly barfs as she falls down on her knees. A liquid and white stream of mouth extracts goes straight to a pail, hastily placed there by his ill husband as a saving gesture.
The mother's own sister, a stout woman with a huge ribbon clamping his butt-long hair, looks at her without puzzlement while ironing the neatly embroidered babay clothes. Animatedly, the barfer barfs like an anorexoic woman recycling her ingested food.
I am a stranger to this house with its wails of barfs and farts, its ozonizer gadget that allegedly catches bacteria and germs, its handwashing liquid soaps placed in a kitchen sink that one could mistake for a pharmaceutical store, its frail and thin women with olive eyes walking in silent steps even in moments of precipitation.
"You wet here,: says the almond chef who is not feeling well at this time of the day.
I am marooned in his house as a meeting place to attend a conference of bible scholars with their spiritual passage exchanges and verse marathons.
I am riding with his brood, in their D-MAX pick-up car with tools and screwdrivers securely hidden in a built-in toolbox en route to the God questing herd.
He has meant the word "wait" of course, but his enunciation has lost its sing-song lilt in the middle of his stuttering English, having been born a pure Chinese-Thai.
"What time are we leaving?" I ask him as I squat on the floor without chairs, surveying the washing machine, cabinets and overflowing pillows that do not look compressed even when arranged in a small room.
The sick man looks at his oversized wrist watch with rotating knobs that resembles a compass. He diverts his eyes to a curious looking weighing scale that iimmediately converts kilos into pounds in digital form.
"We leave at three p.m.," he replies in his Bruce Lee mouth repartee. It barely opens as his dextrose is still dripping his invitro healing medicine that seems to throttle his palm. It is kept busy by his mobile phone tinkering, calling up people, coherent in Thai vocabulary, negotiating to alleviate his sickness in exchange for acclamation.
I nod my head in abeyance. I have no other option except to play with his kid drinking pureed vegetables and eating thumb-like bananas while waiting for the car to take us to heavenly eternity.
Grandmother at this point, is looking at his ailing son in pious deliberation. Her farting exrecise performed but never ceasingly. She asks for water, a polite halting breaker to her bottomed sound system.
A newcomer to the scene, a robust man with the deepest dimples hallowed in both his cheeks gives her water. He is a friend to one of the olive-eyed hou8se women. He sits on the floor like myself as he readily fires off his barage of questions. He is a genuine querist, a glib talker with a gift of gab.
He parades his capability potentials when I ask him, curiously, what his occupation is. Without any hesitation, wiping in a cultured manner a snot on his nose with afacial tissue, he speaks of his numerous credentials: lawyer, teacher, engineer, architect, electrician, plumber with a minor mechanical work capacity.
"You do not happen to be an astronaut?," I ask him in a deadpan manner.
"Ahh, no, I haven't been to the moon," laughing loudly as he files his riposte. He continues: " Have you already taken your lunch?" while folding his denim jeans on the hem, his curly hair sitting like firebrands on the loose as he bows down to perform his styling chore.
"Yes, I already took my lunch. Pig's blood with its innards. I likewise had pork rind, a pig skin deep fried in oil. And chocolate bread," I spew off my replication as I eye his yellowish noodles with chili and ginger that he takes with him in a frightening feign of a tummy break when he appears on the scene.
The barfing woman, his kid and the sick man eat in unison in a circle formation on the floor, their abundant house appliances and gadgets almost filling the roof seams looking for the basic dwelling amenities like knives and teaspoons.
The other women, frail and tiptoeing on their dainty feet, prepare for the biblical trip, securing their backpacks painted with funny cartoon caricatures. They take turns inn using the bathroom for their preparatory baths.
The kid and myself continue with our number revelry using the wood blocks. I notice that the tot has created an uneven building. He counts until eleven and repeats my intonation of the numerics in American twang. She laughs and shows her milk bottle with pureed vegetables as she fumbles with a cabinet with only one leg, still standing.
I sudenly experience a thirst and requests for a glass of water from the bedimpled newcomer, taking a cue from his cordiality and generosity accorded to the grandmother. He does not own the house but he acts like the perfect and most amiable host.
He takes his steps downstairs, getting water from a dispenser with pebbles and observing the grimace on my face, he explains it as possessing with medical healing powers.
I sip the quenching offer, thinking of the nursery books donated downstairs, the 29" flat T.V. set, the mini library with ape drawings, a funeral booklet for the dead grandfather whose grin is plastered on the booklet cover, the office for water filtration at the hallway and the refrigerator filled with various fruits.
As we all find a place to nomadic acting in this dwelling with complete but curious amenities, the almond sick man suddenly removes his dextrose, weighs himself on the weighing scale, imitates Popeyes's buceps of body building pose and exclaims with a Jack Nicholson's snickering mouth, to the chagrin of the other members of the house:
"I am well!!"
As he feels himself dandy and healthy, I relish at my own trick in that short span of time, teaching his kid the words "asleep" and "awake" with bodily movements fit for toys.
The hefty woman offers me a peared apple as we all prepare to leave at 3:00 p.m. in search of Heaven's Entrance, with screwdrivers and ax on hand and a kid who dutifully watches the ani,ated cartoon series Doremon.
All set, we leave at 6:00 p.m. instead, circling the markets bursting to the rafters with fruits, meats and vegetables.
This is not Milwaukee: Welcome to modern Shanghai that has traded Mao tse Tung with Jesus Christ as their own personal savior.
I do not even know their names. Names are akin to incapacitated accident victims in this place, in this dwelling, in this street, in this road block.
"THERE ARE NO FOWLS ON THE STAIRS;
THERE IS NO PULTRY HERE."
-----Mother D-----
By: Iris P. Concepcion
A Mongoloid-looking man who serves the best cinnamon-almond baked pastry is slumped on his cushioned bed with monochromatic kitty pictures, looking at his half-consumed intravenous medicine, a dextrose.
He is sick at this time of the day, the 364,111,111 full lunar moon, as he barely hides behind the mast of a grey sky.
His daughter, a china doll, is playing wood blocks nearby, counting the numbers one to ten. She forms house designs in triangular and oval forms. She does not know how to use the hula hoop, preferring to circle it in motioned calisthenics using her luminiscent hands.
She has rejected my polite offering of sports education: she could use it around her waist in a mock belly dancing that could then be circled around her neck, knees and forefinger in Olympian Science. She grabs her green, pureed vegetable, contained in her milk bottle and pours it down her tiny throat.
We look at each other as her father is watching us when her mother appears from of the house's doors.
She hovers on her brood, her own mother (the perennial grandmother sitting not on a wicker chair but a dwarfian stool) miraculously farts every 10 minutes on the dot, bewailing the routinary bathing schedule in the house. Her language is incomprehensible; she has probably left her false teeth somewhere, tucked inside a coffee mug with warm water, overnight. She is the last person who could use the resident bathroom in this house, constructed with towering showers and large toilet seats. It is a wonderment how her tiny tush can fit in the bowl to catch her bodily dump, a receptacle that could swallow her whole anatomy.
The grandmother's child, the wife and mother in this story, suddenly barfs as she falls down on her knees. A liquid and white stream of mouth extracts goes straight to a pail, hastily placed there by his ill husband as a saving gesture.
The mother's own sister, a stout woman with a huge ribbon clamping his butt-long hair, looks at her without puzzlement while ironing the neatly embroidered babay clothes. Animatedly, the barfer barfs like an anorexoic woman recycling her ingested food.
I am a stranger to this house with its wails of barfs and farts, its ozonizer gadget that allegedly catches bacteria and germs, its handwashing liquid soaps placed in a kitchen sink that one could mistake for a pharmaceutical store, its frail and thin women with olive eyes walking in silent steps even in moments of precipitation.
"You wet here,: says the almond chef who is not feeling well at this time of the day.
I am marooned in his house as a meeting place to attend a conference of bible scholars with their spiritual passage exchanges and verse marathons.
I am riding with his brood, in their D-MAX pick-up car with tools and screwdrivers securely hidden in a built-in toolbox en route to the God questing herd.
He has meant the word "wait" of course, but his enunciation has lost its sing-song lilt in the middle of his stuttering English, having been born a pure Chinese-Thai.
"What time are we leaving?" I ask him as I squat on the floor without chairs, surveying the washing machine, cabinets and overflowing pillows that do not look compressed even when arranged in a small room.
The sick man looks at his oversized wrist watch with rotating knobs that resembles a compass. He diverts his eyes to a curious looking weighing scale that iimmediately converts kilos into pounds in digital form.
"We leave at three p.m.," he replies in his Bruce Lee mouth repartee. It barely opens as his dextrose is still dripping his invitro healing medicine that seems to throttle his palm. It is kept busy by his mobile phone tinkering, calling up people, coherent in Thai vocabulary, negotiating to alleviate his sickness in exchange for acclamation.
I nod my head in abeyance. I have no other option except to play with his kid drinking pureed vegetables and eating thumb-like bananas while waiting for the car to take us to heavenly eternity.
Grandmother at this point, is looking at his ailing son in pious deliberation. Her farting exrecise performed but never ceasingly. She asks for water, a polite halting breaker to her bottomed sound system.
A newcomer to the scene, a robust man with the deepest dimples hallowed in both his cheeks gives her water. He is a friend to one of the olive-eyed hou8se women. He sits on the floor like myself as he readily fires off his barage of questions. He is a genuine querist, a glib talker with a gift of gab.
He parades his capability potentials when I ask him, curiously, what his occupation is. Without any hesitation, wiping in a cultured manner a snot on his nose with afacial tissue, he speaks of his numerous credentials: lawyer, teacher, engineer, architect, electrician, plumber with a minor mechanical work capacity.
"You do not happen to be an astronaut?," I ask him in a deadpan manner.
"Ahh, no, I haven't been to the moon," laughing loudly as he files his riposte. He continues: " Have you already taken your lunch?" while folding his denim jeans on the hem, his curly hair sitting like firebrands on the loose as he bows down to perform his styling chore.
"Yes, I already took my lunch. Pig's blood with its innards. I likewise had pork rind, a pig skin deep fried in oil. And chocolate bread," I spew off my replication as I eye his yellowish noodles with chili and ginger that he takes with him in a frightening feign of a tummy break when he appears on the scene.
The barfing woman, his kid and the sick man eat in unison in a circle formation on the floor, their abundant house appliances and gadgets almost filling the roof seams looking for the basic dwelling amenities like knives and teaspoons.
The other women, frail and tiptoeing on their dainty feet, prepare for the biblical trip, securing their backpacks painted with funny cartoon caricatures. They take turns inn using the bathroom for their preparatory baths.
The kid and myself continue with our number revelry using the wood blocks. I notice that the tot has created an uneven building. He counts until eleven and repeats my intonation of the numerics in American twang. She laughs and shows her milk bottle with pureed vegetables as she fumbles with a cabinet with only one leg, still standing.
I sudenly experience a thirst and requests for a glass of water from the bedimpled newcomer, taking a cue from his cordiality and generosity accorded to the grandmother. He does not own the house but he acts like the perfect and most amiable host.
He takes his steps downstairs, getting water from a dispenser with pebbles and observing the grimace on my face, he explains it as possessing with medical healing powers.
I sip the quenching offer, thinking of the nursery books donated downstairs, the 29" flat T.V. set, the mini library with ape drawings, a funeral booklet for the dead grandfather whose grin is plastered on the booklet cover, the office for water filtration at the hallway and the refrigerator filled with various fruits.
As we all find a place to nomadic acting in this dwelling with complete but curious amenities, the almond sick man suddenly removes his dextrose, weighs himself on the weighing scale, imitates Popeyes's buceps of body building pose and exclaims with a Jack Nicholson's snickering mouth, to the chagrin of the other members of the house:
"I am well!!"
As he feels himself dandy and healthy, I relish at my own trick in that short span of time, teaching his kid the words "asleep" and "awake" with bodily movements fit for toys.
The hefty woman offers me a peared apple as we all prepare to leave at 3:00 p.m. in search of Heaven's Entrance, with screwdrivers and ax on hand and a kid who dutifully watches the ani,ated cartoon series Doremon.
All set, we leave at 6:00 p.m. instead, circling the markets bursting to the rafters with fruits, meats and vegetables.
This is not Milwaukee: Welcome to modern Shanghai that has traded Mao tse Tung with Jesus Christ as their own personal savior.
I do not even know their names. Names are akin to incapacitated accident victims in this place, in this dwelling, in this street, in this road block.
"THERE ARE NO FOWLS ON THE STAIRS;
THERE IS NO PULTRY HERE."
-----Mother D-----
Tuesday, May 01, 2012
ON WALKING EARLY IN THE MORNING, ONLY TO FIND MYSELF AS THE NEW SCISSORED DESIGNER IN THE MOLDS OF ALEXANDER McQUEEN AND KENZO
By: Iris P. Concepcion
"On burberry blues
And lilacs and pinks
Merged a color of ostritched
Flamingo bleached in stitch."
The forthnight before the moon dropped its luminosity to the mortals below, treasure chests with locks were hauled off to the next tent city of wonder and merriment.
I stood in a garage that camouflages with Angry Birds, Earth and Oscar drawings, described by young men and women with seriously guffawing suggestions (I am Big Bird/ I have long beak/ I am thin/ I have a big head) and the truck was there, immobile, with its circus whoops and domed beds. Our house used to own one of this kind. The treasure chests reminded me of of my own childhood fear of opening them least a monster would come out, crush my limbs and feed me to Satan. It was placed in a small room with a big, furry teddy ิbear gifted by a grandfather from Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.A. I simply stared at them like I did the truck and its treasure chest.
My new housemate, Devon Sawa alias Delvin (I suspect he is laughing his way out of his shin right now) opened his own version of the loot chest consisting of old plastic bags filled with used clothes. He asked me to select the items that I could use (he selected the hand me down clothing ware for everyday wear). I selected four items that I had refashioned with cutting scissors, no needles and sewings required. The materials is Miss Sixty inspired with a Romanian print of a fat woman with cherubic hair looking down on the ground. Sheer in nylon, the original creator must have been struck by a brilliant idea of converting the nylon stockings of his wife into a vampy top. The outcome is splendid, charismatic, outlandish and deliriously avant-garde sphinx. The original shapeless drab and garment turned into a sexy mammal with birds flying on top of shoulders that I merely tied from the cut sleeves. I scissored the sides to give it a firmer contour and I had tied the loose ends too.
I hereby propose that tying is the new needle work.
Thus far, my premonitions on the different visual explorations had widened here in Thailand: deeper writing styles, more natural attractions for my novel settings, wider latitude to engage in shape art that includes all sorts of clothes re-engineering.
I only have 20 baht in my bag but feels like a billionaire. Guffaws. I even take pictures like I could dislodge the top photographer of the country from his seat.
By: Iris P. Concepcion
"On burberry blues
And lilacs and pinks
Merged a color of ostritched
Flamingo bleached in stitch."
The forthnight before the moon dropped its luminosity to the mortals below, treasure chests with locks were hauled off to the next tent city of wonder and merriment.
I stood in a garage that camouflages with Angry Birds, Earth and Oscar drawings, described by young men and women with seriously guffawing suggestions (I am Big Bird/ I have long beak/ I am thin/ I have a big head) and the truck was there, immobile, with its circus whoops and domed beds. Our house used to own one of this kind. The treasure chests reminded me of of my own childhood fear of opening them least a monster would come out, crush my limbs and feed me to Satan. It was placed in a small room with a big, furry teddy ิbear gifted by a grandfather from Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.A. I simply stared at them like I did the truck and its treasure chest.
My new housemate, Devon Sawa alias Delvin (I suspect he is laughing his way out of his shin right now) opened his own version of the loot chest consisting of old plastic bags filled with used clothes. He asked me to select the items that I could use (he selected the hand me down clothing ware for everyday wear). I selected four items that I had refashioned with cutting scissors, no needles and sewings required. The materials is Miss Sixty inspired with a Romanian print of a fat woman with cherubic hair looking down on the ground. Sheer in nylon, the original creator must have been struck by a brilliant idea of converting the nylon stockings of his wife into a vampy top. The outcome is splendid, charismatic, outlandish and deliriously avant-garde sphinx. The original shapeless drab and garment turned into a sexy mammal with birds flying on top of shoulders that I merely tied from the cut sleeves. I scissored the sides to give it a firmer contour and I had tied the loose ends too.
I hereby propose that tying is the new needle work.
Thus far, my premonitions on the different visual explorations had widened here in Thailand: deeper writing styles, more natural attractions for my novel settings, wider latitude to engage in shape art that includes all sorts of clothes re-engineering.
I only have 20 baht in my bag but feels like a billionaire. Guffaws. I even take pictures like I could dislodge the top photographer of the country from his seat.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
WHAT HAPPENS IF MY PARENTS ARE PERFORMING PUNK ARTISTS INSTEAD OF BEING STAID TEACHERS?
By: Iris P. Concepcion
In the household of four where I grew up, the instruments were never off key. Stereos sound off blasting tunes of properly melodied symphony and pop songs readily fastened for ears that liven my musical experiences in catchier progressions.
I would stare at the album covers like I would the humungous goat's eyes, clearly in constant wonderment when I could land my pixel self in an album, vinyl cover with outlandish costumes and shiny legs creamed in cocoa powder for special effects.
In my forays to musical listening, I had sometimes wished that my parents with their words of protocol, plantilla, memorandum, voucher and education may be replaced by an avant garde word like "rock lobster". I had also wished that my brother, him with his tales of W gold mines, become the musician in Queen singing the Galileo song (Bohemian Rhapsody).
This is where I had derived my idea of stupendous wish calculation. What happens if my parents are really the creators of "Rock Lobster" and my brother, really the pianist in Bohemian Rhapsody? Shall I scream out of my wits upon realizing the fact that they had singlehandedly created a movement where shrimps could truly dance and where bass guitars can be improved to a more classical string trombone (refer to Rock Lobster's opening riffs). The idea is to foster a group of discarded and often maligned in the society to make their message clear: Young. Poor. Angry. But Productive.
The era was, perhaps, started as a protest to the loud music without meaning; a march against music with repetitive lyrics without any semblance of rhyme; a disgust over melodies that are best used as tranquilizers for putting one to sleep. Punk became an antidote to the senseless awning of lazy creativity. Consider the titles as a slap against that period's decadence. My Sharona, Whip It Good. The punk movement was created by people, in fact, envisioned by a couple who were early on exposed to perfect rhymes and musical incantations but had suddenly found themselves faced with substandard audio equipment (either the guitars crash or the bass is out of tune). To add salt to the wound, they made their sound senseless and repetitive as the mediums they were raucusing about. They had wonderful costumes though, especially the dyed hair that had suddenly stood vertically erect instead of being pulled down.
Thanks to a bizarre neighborhood, I had rekindled all my memories of notes that had made me more musically mature.
By: Iris P. Concepcion
In the household of four where I grew up, the instruments were never off key. Stereos sound off blasting tunes of properly melodied symphony and pop songs readily fastened for ears that liven my musical experiences in catchier progressions.
I would stare at the album covers like I would the humungous goat's eyes, clearly in constant wonderment when I could land my pixel self in an album, vinyl cover with outlandish costumes and shiny legs creamed in cocoa powder for special effects.
In my forays to musical listening, I had sometimes wished that my parents with their words of protocol, plantilla, memorandum, voucher and education may be replaced by an avant garde word like "rock lobster". I had also wished that my brother, him with his tales of W gold mines, become the musician in Queen singing the Galileo song (Bohemian Rhapsody).
This is where I had derived my idea of stupendous wish calculation. What happens if my parents are really the creators of "Rock Lobster" and my brother, really the pianist in Bohemian Rhapsody? Shall I scream out of my wits upon realizing the fact that they had singlehandedly created a movement where shrimps could truly dance and where bass guitars can be improved to a more classical string trombone (refer to Rock Lobster's opening riffs). The idea is to foster a group of discarded and often maligned in the society to make their message clear: Young. Poor. Angry. But Productive.
The era was, perhaps, started as a protest to the loud music without meaning; a march against music with repetitive lyrics without any semblance of rhyme; a disgust over melodies that are best used as tranquilizers for putting one to sleep. Punk became an antidote to the senseless awning of lazy creativity. Consider the titles as a slap against that period's decadence. My Sharona, Whip It Good. The punk movement was created by people, in fact, envisioned by a couple who were early on exposed to perfect rhymes and musical incantations but had suddenly found themselves faced with substandard audio equipment (either the guitars crash or the bass is out of tune). To add salt to the wound, they made their sound senseless and repetitive as the mediums they were raucusing about. They had wonderful costumes though, especially the dyed hair that had suddenly stood vertically erect instead of being pulled down.
Thanks to a bizarre neighborhood, I had rekindled all my memories of notes that had made me more musically mature.
Thursday, April 12, 2012
ON GENETICS
By: Iris P. Concepcion
I have, for the past three months, been playing the compact discs of two of the most high-pitched voices in the musical world arena, Olivia Newton-John (given to me by a shopkeeper who likewise moonlights as waterboy) and Diana Ross.
They both sound differently each time I blare them on speakers, finding a flute or violin in cameo, improv musicale. Even the lyrics to their songs had been twiddled for more rhymed verses with one line guffawing the singsong declaration: "I am Tier's sister." Olivia and Diana, masters of melodic shifts, are suddenly accompanied by symphony and orchestra intruments. They have ceased to be Olivia and Diana; they have become The Music.
I am particularly shocked to find a reawakening to the ultimate mushy ditty of all time, Endless Love (a duet of Diana with Luther Van Ross) that had, surprisingly, gained a new musical sphere that I now like, much to my wicked chagrin. I remember this song as a soundtrack to the iconic Brooke Shields film, the town premiere of which was then sponsored by my very strict high school alma mater. This already strikes me as funny: I was academically punished for skipping a symposium on education to watch the Dina Bonnevie, Snooky and Maricel Soriano starrer, Katorse, which was adjudged by a mother superior as kinky and saw the double entendre of morals when the same strict school allowed virginal novices to view an almost topless Brooke Shields on reel.
I return to the subject of music. As already essayed here superfluously, I grew up in a surrounding with music permeating entrance to my ears in every nook and cranny of our house. My auntie and uncle who lived beside our house with my cousins, would have their own variety of cha-cha, rhumba and modern music, to complement our Billy Vaughn classics and Ray Conniff orchestra albums. We were encouraged to sing to our hearts' content with various instruments: guitars, ukuleles, maracas, banduria and electric organ. I could not remember, ever, being reprimanded for turning up the volume of our Interlude to its maximum level. Perhaps, it gave my family a natural embrace for melody. We have always sung; we are still singing until now. All my aunts and uncles, even on the second, third and fourth degrees, can carry a tune, lugging any musical instrument that they could find. Even our godparents can sing, hitting decibels never been heretofore known. The priest who had baptized me can sing exceptionally. And so did the doctor who had brought me out unto this world.
I now understand the world of Nick Hornby, with his Top 5 all-time favorite hits. I am, however, in a position to contradict the writer over his fascination for Rod Stewart (I would pick Sweden's biggest import, ABBA, anytime). I agree with his Nelly Furtado choice but I would declare, Bette Midler is far in the constellation of belters who can wreck a melodic balcony seat. I had often wondered why Usher cleanly swept all the awards in the Grammy's before; I finally found the reson now. He starts his songs in middle notes instead of the usual C, G, C chord variations.
I also hold the postulation now: the best singers are never recorded commercially. They creep in songs like feathered mascots and fix the notes here and there, inserting a symphony on a line. Surprisingly, they do sound better after the note tune-ups.
Finally, I also concede: sports athletes are the best crooners in the universe. It must be the sharp spikes on their shoes that lent them their masterful ears for improv accompaniment.
A note to my favorite Philippine film and music critic Erwin Romulo of Ateneo de Manila University and Philippine Star: No wonder you were very cocky with your musical choices. You and your clique absolutely know where to place your chords, right to the core gut.
By: Iris P. Concepcion
I have, for the past three months, been playing the compact discs of two of the most high-pitched voices in the musical world arena, Olivia Newton-John (given to me by a shopkeeper who likewise moonlights as waterboy) and Diana Ross.
They both sound differently each time I blare them on speakers, finding a flute or violin in cameo, improv musicale. Even the lyrics to their songs had been twiddled for more rhymed verses with one line guffawing the singsong declaration: "I am Tier's sister." Olivia and Diana, masters of melodic shifts, are suddenly accompanied by symphony and orchestra intruments. They have ceased to be Olivia and Diana; they have become The Music.
I am particularly shocked to find a reawakening to the ultimate mushy ditty of all time, Endless Love (a duet of Diana with Luther Van Ross) that had, surprisingly, gained a new musical sphere that I now like, much to my wicked chagrin. I remember this song as a soundtrack to the iconic Brooke Shields film, the town premiere of which was then sponsored by my very strict high school alma mater. This already strikes me as funny: I was academically punished for skipping a symposium on education to watch the Dina Bonnevie, Snooky and Maricel Soriano starrer, Katorse, which was adjudged by a mother superior as kinky and saw the double entendre of morals when the same strict school allowed virginal novices to view an almost topless Brooke Shields on reel.
I return to the subject of music. As already essayed here superfluously, I grew up in a surrounding with music permeating entrance to my ears in every nook and cranny of our house. My auntie and uncle who lived beside our house with my cousins, would have their own variety of cha-cha, rhumba and modern music, to complement our Billy Vaughn classics and Ray Conniff orchestra albums. We were encouraged to sing to our hearts' content with various instruments: guitars, ukuleles, maracas, banduria and electric organ. I could not remember, ever, being reprimanded for turning up the volume of our Interlude to its maximum level. Perhaps, it gave my family a natural embrace for melody. We have always sung; we are still singing until now. All my aunts and uncles, even on the second, third and fourth degrees, can carry a tune, lugging any musical instrument that they could find. Even our godparents can sing, hitting decibels never been heretofore known. The priest who had baptized me can sing exceptionally. And so did the doctor who had brought me out unto this world.
I now understand the world of Nick Hornby, with his Top 5 all-time favorite hits. I am, however, in a position to contradict the writer over his fascination for Rod Stewart (I would pick Sweden's biggest import, ABBA, anytime). I agree with his Nelly Furtado choice but I would declare, Bette Midler is far in the constellation of belters who can wreck a melodic balcony seat. I had often wondered why Usher cleanly swept all the awards in the Grammy's before; I finally found the reson now. He starts his songs in middle notes instead of the usual C, G, C chord variations.
I also hold the postulation now: the best singers are never recorded commercially. They creep in songs like feathered mascots and fix the notes here and there, inserting a symphony on a line. Surprisingly, they do sound better after the note tune-ups.
Finally, I also concede: sports athletes are the best crooners in the universe. It must be the sharp spikes on their shoes that lent them their masterful ears for improv accompaniment.
A note to my favorite Philippine film and music critic Erwin Romulo of Ateneo de Manila University and Philippine Star: No wonder you were very cocky with your musical choices. You and your clique absolutely know where to place your chords, right to the core gut.
Saturday, April 07, 2012
ON BUTTONS, LACES AND CRYSTALS
By: Iris P. Concepcion
I embarked on another one day sojourn at Kelantan, Malaysia and had come across a little nook named Cintra, a small palace of potpourri with stairs blooming with makeshift flowers and dainty drawers of buttons and laces.
My eyes were, again, opened to the opportunity of unlocking the hidden secrets of modified hems and sewings, of stitches and embroideries, of gowns and well-dressed men in castles. The table covers were intricately handwoven with designs that matched the railings of zigzagged stairs in Grimm's and Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales. Kelantan, by this time, is suffused with materials for accessories and embellishments for production designs, the very things that I have seen and utilized productively in a small village at Yala, Thailand. This enclave of learning educates young people the rudiments of being productive. I had interacted with them one day, fashioning randomly a short tale of a kid hugging a goodlooking buffalo with a wide grin on his face. It sounds like a poem when recited.
Connecting the two places (Kelantan and Yala) that I now call my sheltered inn for existence has given curves to my stories with fascinating settings. Before, I could only create verbally adept talkers with impressive dialogues in conducting their conversations. Now, these characters can sit in cushioned sofas that look like bags, drinking water from handpainted porcelain glasses, invited by gracious and hospitable hosts that remind them of Sleepy, Smiley and Dopey, the lovable dwarfs in Snow White.
The magic carpet, at this hour of the day, has yielded gentlemen of genteel stock with refined, instead of coarse language.The cakes of Angry Birds have emotional and evocative eyes, using circled chocolates as their orbs. The almonds of pastries now bear the fruits of kiwi, strawberries and peaches. Young men with adventurous spirits are jet-skiing but are surrounded by the lush greens of the wilds, gliding in between lines of water trees.
The Chinese are very engaged in their chatters while regally eating their french fries; the Muslim women's fish balls have grown thrice their sizes; the bread had been leavened and became bigger.
The television set was showing a spade of dramatic and zombie stories, of people rising from the dead, of shirts declaiming: "The Brain" and "Certified Freaky". Tim Burton would find a cluster of amusement in these productions, with gorgeous kids crying over heavy-soled shoes, pacified only by colorful football shod in blue and white (witrh spikes).
The women were buying gifts for their husbands and kids; calf skin had suddenly turned into a shoe ornament; the watches are set on their proper time frame by turning their clock tuners.
This brings me to the wonders of interactions and how creativity works, especially on children. The small village I had mentioned earlier has teenagers who can converse in English. Their rooms are equipped with camera projectors. They were given free lunch (European boarding school impetus) and were taught the art of confidence in a wholistic manner.
My hosts for one day are mild-mannered with well-bred customs and traditions. I was made to write my impressions about my stay in a photo album-like story book. I scribbled my own simple poetry, using the theme of fruits that had been served on the table: sweet watermelons, tasty Mandarin oranges and crunchy apples. Their chicken dish is close to Philippine adobo, spiced with green chilis. Table conversations revolved around the literacy competence of children, comparing their levels of comprehension. The children, without being instructed, know ho to pose before the cameras properly, for them to look elegant in photographs.
It is charming in a way where the education of "School of Rock" is transferred in reality to remote villages where students can draw helicopters with sound effects (provided by their Acer projector screens).
It is here where I saw the buttons, laces and crystals of kelantan designed and embossed on tissue holders, placed on the dining table of my village hosts. The tissue holders, in short, were fully clothed, like the noble men of the olden times.
These experiences encapsulate the adage that I had always written in my blog site: Creativity shoots off from everywhere, including swanned ponds.
By: Iris P. Concepcion
I embarked on another one day sojourn at Kelantan, Malaysia and had come across a little nook named Cintra, a small palace of potpourri with stairs blooming with makeshift flowers and dainty drawers of buttons and laces.
My eyes were, again, opened to the opportunity of unlocking the hidden secrets of modified hems and sewings, of stitches and embroideries, of gowns and well-dressed men in castles. The table covers were intricately handwoven with designs that matched the railings of zigzagged stairs in Grimm's and Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales. Kelantan, by this time, is suffused with materials for accessories and embellishments for production designs, the very things that I have seen and utilized productively in a small village at Yala, Thailand. This enclave of learning educates young people the rudiments of being productive. I had interacted with them one day, fashioning randomly a short tale of a kid hugging a goodlooking buffalo with a wide grin on his face. It sounds like a poem when recited.
Connecting the two places (Kelantan and Yala) that I now call my sheltered inn for existence has given curves to my stories with fascinating settings. Before, I could only create verbally adept talkers with impressive dialogues in conducting their conversations. Now, these characters can sit in cushioned sofas that look like bags, drinking water from handpainted porcelain glasses, invited by gracious and hospitable hosts that remind them of Sleepy, Smiley and Dopey, the lovable dwarfs in Snow White.
The magic carpet, at this hour of the day, has yielded gentlemen of genteel stock with refined, instead of coarse language.The cakes of Angry Birds have emotional and evocative eyes, using circled chocolates as their orbs. The almonds of pastries now bear the fruits of kiwi, strawberries and peaches. Young men with adventurous spirits are jet-skiing but are surrounded by the lush greens of the wilds, gliding in between lines of water trees.
The Chinese are very engaged in their chatters while regally eating their french fries; the Muslim women's fish balls have grown thrice their sizes; the bread had been leavened and became bigger.
The television set was showing a spade of dramatic and zombie stories, of people rising from the dead, of shirts declaiming: "The Brain" and "Certified Freaky". Tim Burton would find a cluster of amusement in these productions, with gorgeous kids crying over heavy-soled shoes, pacified only by colorful football shod in blue and white (witrh spikes).
The women were buying gifts for their husbands and kids; calf skin had suddenly turned into a shoe ornament; the watches are set on their proper time frame by turning their clock tuners.
This brings me to the wonders of interactions and how creativity works, especially on children. The small village I had mentioned earlier has teenagers who can converse in English. Their rooms are equipped with camera projectors. They were given free lunch (European boarding school impetus) and were taught the art of confidence in a wholistic manner.
My hosts for one day are mild-mannered with well-bred customs and traditions. I was made to write my impressions about my stay in a photo album-like story book. I scribbled my own simple poetry, using the theme of fruits that had been served on the table: sweet watermelons, tasty Mandarin oranges and crunchy apples. Their chicken dish is close to Philippine adobo, spiced with green chilis. Table conversations revolved around the literacy competence of children, comparing their levels of comprehension. The children, without being instructed, know ho to pose before the cameras properly, for them to look elegant in photographs.
It is charming in a way where the education of "School of Rock" is transferred in reality to remote villages where students can draw helicopters with sound effects (provided by their Acer projector screens).
It is here where I saw the buttons, laces and crystals of kelantan designed and embossed on tissue holders, placed on the dining table of my village hosts. The tissue holders, in short, were fully clothed, like the noble men of the olden times.
These experiences encapsulate the adage that I had always written in my blog site: Creativity shoots off from everywhere, including swanned ponds.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
KELANTAN REVIVED (WITH PARACHUTE)
By: Iris P. Concepcion
"Credit The Omnipotent And Higher Being To The Heavenly Supremacy Of Sound, Shapes And Lights.:--Iris P. Concepcion
Kelantan, Kota Bharu, Malaysia offered me another highlight to the wonders of hues and woodwork designs the last time I had visited it.
This is my fifth visit to the town, silted on a bus chair with my ticket dispensed from an ATM-machine like machine. My friend, Sitti, provided me a map of Kelantan this time around, a treasure find to the art of visuals. She had placed them on her receiving desk at Perdona Inn, my usual area of residence when combing this Malaysian enclave. I was immediately delighted over the presence of museum sites as provided in the locator's guide map where the artifacts of the town's history are introduced to the visual hawker.
Brpchures of Kelantan always feature the open-gated, three-coulumned doors (Merdeka Square) with a sculpture of an open book nestled on top of the middle column. I find it proper with its page leaves neatly molded as if flipped. Once you enter this wide, open fortress, you are greeted with the Museum Istiadat di Raja, a splendid structure with oblong and circled shapes illuminated on wood windows that are covered with corn-dusted curtains. They play an impressive backdrop to the window carvings.
Next to it is the Istana Balai Besar, a handicraft area with a curious cross and triangle-columned designs overlooking the central area. Its gate resembles the Merdeka Square book gate. It is nonetheless structured with dark brown, wood panels in between columns like a wired fairy tale, eureka entrance. It has more dimension and looks more enthralling from afar.
To its right is another immense, triangle building that houses various government and e-commerce place of transactions. The huge stairs leading to the main area are shiny and glassly vaulted. Inside it is a bank/tax office with humongous wood panels. This transaction hub on the ground floor shall remind a visitor of the spacious hotel front desks in big cities. Its interiors are airport-like with a giant clock hung on the second floor area like a cuckoo's nest waiting to get egged.
During the time of my visit, Merdeka Square displayed various motioning floats decorated with themes of Nature. This could be the town's version of the Rose Bowl Parade in New York, with a play of lights and shapely contours.
Floats come in different designs, from hotel structures and pagoda roofed, mini installations. Chinese temples and open water areas are likewise present here. The well-lit place stands as an entertainment foil to family night prowlers. Instead of the beach-themed restaurants, families can partake of nature parks, wildlife, flowers and cascading gardens inside this open, visual auditorium.
Down south is the calm and serene Kelantan River running still with a vast forestry across it, uniquely silent and sleeping. The river shelters differently-designed boats marooned in water houses. This could be the forerunner to bay areas with their anchorages of well-built yachts and jet skis. Here, the appeal is rustic as the jet skis are transformed into wooden sailing splendors with regalian chairs never failing to catch the eye of the visitors. The teriific usage of river stream, a liquid howl to River Kwai, is perfectly circumnavigated. Next to the river stream is an open verndah of tables and chairs for nightly diners with a small road separating it from Ridel Hotel, a Maine-like residence with restaurants below selling cakes, coffee and other freshly squeezed fruit beverages. I have squired a neat leather bag here, stitched and pruned in Hollywood design of production work.
This side of Kelantan is a miraculously, united area of eyeful delights. All its main buildings start from the visage of a circle. It is unnamed in the map but it refuses to forget the past with its war chests, old fashioned automobiles and tanks preserved in their original forms. No traffic light is needed here. Vehicles circle around and enter/exit in whatever form of direction without any structural hindrance. I found myself walking inside the round pedestrian lane as if I am Mt. Olympus. Spanish meld with the Chinese and American designs, basked in European sunlight.
Three Europeans were walking here like myself, enthused by the beautiful Moorish, Hindi and Muslim edifices built freely beside Mediterranean hotels. If urban planning had visited Manila in this manner, Philkippine tourism's tax receipts could perhaps generate a billion hits per month. I can imgaine the Jones Bridge and Pasig River plied with gondolas and swans instead of the garbage piles polluting the waterways.
My lunch here consisted of the Muslim fare, saramudin, a rolled, fried fish dipped in sweetened sour sauce which reminded me of mother. My servings are big; crucnchy too, with their curious tips perfectly snug to my taste buds. This could be the food devised by sun gods, immensely tanned and golden, with their Pharaoh eyes and immaculate head gears that cascade down to their hips. Their eyes are lined in black like Lawrence of Arabia. I had seated myself beside these men on my train ride where they, too, ate a sesame-seeded dough filled with minced filling. I had asked one of the Pharaoh ladies where she had come from. She gazingly looked at me in a haunting manner with the word: "Peru." The book Bridges of St. Luis Rey immediately flashed to my mind with its bridge stories of people traversing the river bank, their minds occupied with sacks of tales in purposeful wanderings.
It is likewise here that I had sampled my thirst quencher whioch hydrated me for the whole day: a guava juice. I bought it from a vendor who likewise peddles corn juice, hotdogs and shrimps. If one fancies a more elaborate and quixotic taste explorations, Ridel and Riverfront hotels offer a mixture of the Orient, Western and Mediterranean cuisine with a more eclectic selection of fruit beverages. I saw from the menu that it also offers goat dishes and a wide array of tasteful desserts.
Pelangi Mall is, moreover, located here with its intricately designed small shops selling curious finds on the ground floor: unique athletic wear to leather bags. I saw a young man strumming his blue guitar sheened like Elton John's, with his back in intermediate fusion with the jetted river. He played it like a Mexican troubador would, unmindful of the richness of his adequately shaped surroundings with a glimmering sun provising the melodic heat. At night, the hotels bear stripe shadows using only one material in one stroke: white paint. The light below provided the illusion and it was quite fanciful staring at the elegant but simple trick of the visual from my chair.
I personally think that this place is a virginal paradise to the artistic voyeurs, with mosques, temples and western designs blending in one united front. To bellow profanities here is almost a sacrilege. This is not a nocturnal area for the rowdy. At night, it invites mediation and self-preservation with yawdles of orchestra serenading one's senses, if one has learned the art of musical progression within one's harmonious self. At Ridel hotel, even the waiters are impeccably attired and obscurely polite with ready suggestions for the food enthusiasts to calm their hungry tummies.
I likewise saw Chinese men sitting in elegant manner, sipping their teas and taking pictures of the differently-designed residence that had suddenly acquired loft and daintiness.
I returned to Merdeka Square at night and was greeted with lights in various shades. This could educate a watcher to proper cinematography lighting if one aims to become a film director or simply, to teach an engineer how to fasten his light inisde a room with an optimum aesthetic radiance.
This, in a town, is much more than a traveller's insight to the uses of Nature and how it properly communes with people. Even its tourism folks had gifted me with a box of postcards in recycled carton papers. One could write his/her own impression on Kelantan in its Guest Book under the eloquently columned: "Remarks". I had placed my comment with people from France and Belgium, imagining myself as a giant. I inscribed them in big, bold letters since the book is a 10 footer with an 8 width dimension (funnily transcribed).
I had then purchased my daily provisions at Pantai Timur. For 20 ringgit (200 baht), once could buy Chicken McNuggets (RM5.95) two packages of sausage frankfurters (RM1.99 each) and spiralled fries from Belgium (RM3.95). PT never fails to astound me with its ridiculously lowered prices.
Kelantan is also home to the massive Tesco grocery store with its impeccably designed surroundings but it is quite far from the town proper.
I headed back to Thailand, breezing through immigration and had waited for my train back to Yala. I had, in this recent experience, capped a wonderful sight of a man descending from a parachute, bolting out from the sky, landing on the train station just like how my Reader's Digest stories had scribbled the ascent/descent of these paragliders. There was no helicopter hovering nearby thus, I had wondered, where the parachutist may have come from. He seems like a character straight from my short novella, "Slow" who had jumped off to leave an urbanized zone.
Perhaps, he too, had visited Kelantan but had chosen a more wicked and more adventurous transportation than myself back home.
By: Iris P. Concepcion
"Credit The Omnipotent And Higher Being To The Heavenly Supremacy Of Sound, Shapes And Lights.:--Iris P. Concepcion
Kelantan, Kota Bharu, Malaysia offered me another highlight to the wonders of hues and woodwork designs the last time I had visited it.
This is my fifth visit to the town, silted on a bus chair with my ticket dispensed from an ATM-machine like machine. My friend, Sitti, provided me a map of Kelantan this time around, a treasure find to the art of visuals. She had placed them on her receiving desk at Perdona Inn, my usual area of residence when combing this Malaysian enclave. I was immediately delighted over the presence of museum sites as provided in the locator's guide map where the artifacts of the town's history are introduced to the visual hawker.
Brpchures of Kelantan always feature the open-gated, three-coulumned doors (Merdeka Square) with a sculpture of an open book nestled on top of the middle column. I find it proper with its page leaves neatly molded as if flipped. Once you enter this wide, open fortress, you are greeted with the Museum Istiadat di Raja, a splendid structure with oblong and circled shapes illuminated on wood windows that are covered with corn-dusted curtains. They play an impressive backdrop to the window carvings.
Next to it is the Istana Balai Besar, a handicraft area with a curious cross and triangle-columned designs overlooking the central area. Its gate resembles the Merdeka Square book gate. It is nonetheless structured with dark brown, wood panels in between columns like a wired fairy tale, eureka entrance. It has more dimension and looks more enthralling from afar.
To its right is another immense, triangle building that houses various government and e-commerce place of transactions. The huge stairs leading to the main area are shiny and glassly vaulted. Inside it is a bank/tax office with humongous wood panels. This transaction hub on the ground floor shall remind a visitor of the spacious hotel front desks in big cities. Its interiors are airport-like with a giant clock hung on the second floor area like a cuckoo's nest waiting to get egged.
During the time of my visit, Merdeka Square displayed various motioning floats decorated with themes of Nature. This could be the town's version of the Rose Bowl Parade in New York, with a play of lights and shapely contours.
Floats come in different designs, from hotel structures and pagoda roofed, mini installations. Chinese temples and open water areas are likewise present here. The well-lit place stands as an entertainment foil to family night prowlers. Instead of the beach-themed restaurants, families can partake of nature parks, wildlife, flowers and cascading gardens inside this open, visual auditorium.
Down south is the calm and serene Kelantan River running still with a vast forestry across it, uniquely silent and sleeping. The river shelters differently-designed boats marooned in water houses. This could be the forerunner to bay areas with their anchorages of well-built yachts and jet skis. Here, the appeal is rustic as the jet skis are transformed into wooden sailing splendors with regalian chairs never failing to catch the eye of the visitors. The teriific usage of river stream, a liquid howl to River Kwai, is perfectly circumnavigated. Next to the river stream is an open verndah of tables and chairs for nightly diners with a small road separating it from Ridel Hotel, a Maine-like residence with restaurants below selling cakes, coffee and other freshly squeezed fruit beverages. I have squired a neat leather bag here, stitched and pruned in Hollywood design of production work.
This side of Kelantan is a miraculously, united area of eyeful delights. All its main buildings start from the visage of a circle. It is unnamed in the map but it refuses to forget the past with its war chests, old fashioned automobiles and tanks preserved in their original forms. No traffic light is needed here. Vehicles circle around and enter/exit in whatever form of direction without any structural hindrance. I found myself walking inside the round pedestrian lane as if I am Mt. Olympus. Spanish meld with the Chinese and American designs, basked in European sunlight.
Three Europeans were walking here like myself, enthused by the beautiful Moorish, Hindi and Muslim edifices built freely beside Mediterranean hotels. If urban planning had visited Manila in this manner, Philkippine tourism's tax receipts could perhaps generate a billion hits per month. I can imgaine the Jones Bridge and Pasig River plied with gondolas and swans instead of the garbage piles polluting the waterways.
My lunch here consisted of the Muslim fare, saramudin, a rolled, fried fish dipped in sweetened sour sauce which reminded me of mother. My servings are big; crucnchy too, with their curious tips perfectly snug to my taste buds. This could be the food devised by sun gods, immensely tanned and golden, with their Pharaoh eyes and immaculate head gears that cascade down to their hips. Their eyes are lined in black like Lawrence of Arabia. I had seated myself beside these men on my train ride where they, too, ate a sesame-seeded dough filled with minced filling. I had asked one of the Pharaoh ladies where she had come from. She gazingly looked at me in a haunting manner with the word: "Peru." The book Bridges of St. Luis Rey immediately flashed to my mind with its bridge stories of people traversing the river bank, their minds occupied with sacks of tales in purposeful wanderings.
It is likewise here that I had sampled my thirst quencher whioch hydrated me for the whole day: a guava juice. I bought it from a vendor who likewise peddles corn juice, hotdogs and shrimps. If one fancies a more elaborate and quixotic taste explorations, Ridel and Riverfront hotels offer a mixture of the Orient, Western and Mediterranean cuisine with a more eclectic selection of fruit beverages. I saw from the menu that it also offers goat dishes and a wide array of tasteful desserts.
Pelangi Mall is, moreover, located here with its intricately designed small shops selling curious finds on the ground floor: unique athletic wear to leather bags. I saw a young man strumming his blue guitar sheened like Elton John's, with his back in intermediate fusion with the jetted river. He played it like a Mexican troubador would, unmindful of the richness of his adequately shaped surroundings with a glimmering sun provising the melodic heat. At night, the hotels bear stripe shadows using only one material in one stroke: white paint. The light below provided the illusion and it was quite fanciful staring at the elegant but simple trick of the visual from my chair.
I personally think that this place is a virginal paradise to the artistic voyeurs, with mosques, temples and western designs blending in one united front. To bellow profanities here is almost a sacrilege. This is not a nocturnal area for the rowdy. At night, it invites mediation and self-preservation with yawdles of orchestra serenading one's senses, if one has learned the art of musical progression within one's harmonious self. At Ridel hotel, even the waiters are impeccably attired and obscurely polite with ready suggestions for the food enthusiasts to calm their hungry tummies.
I likewise saw Chinese men sitting in elegant manner, sipping their teas and taking pictures of the differently-designed residence that had suddenly acquired loft and daintiness.
I returned to Merdeka Square at night and was greeted with lights in various shades. This could educate a watcher to proper cinematography lighting if one aims to become a film director or simply, to teach an engineer how to fasten his light inisde a room with an optimum aesthetic radiance.
This, in a town, is much more than a traveller's insight to the uses of Nature and how it properly communes with people. Even its tourism folks had gifted me with a box of postcards in recycled carton papers. One could write his/her own impression on Kelantan in its Guest Book under the eloquently columned: "Remarks". I had placed my comment with people from France and Belgium, imagining myself as a giant. I inscribed them in big, bold letters since the book is a 10 footer with an 8 width dimension (funnily transcribed).
I had then purchased my daily provisions at Pantai Timur. For 20 ringgit (200 baht), once could buy Chicken McNuggets (RM5.95) two packages of sausage frankfurters (RM1.99 each) and spiralled fries from Belgium (RM3.95). PT never fails to astound me with its ridiculously lowered prices.
Kelantan is also home to the massive Tesco grocery store with its impeccably designed surroundings but it is quite far from the town proper.
I headed back to Thailand, breezing through immigration and had waited for my train back to Yala. I had, in this recent experience, capped a wonderful sight of a man descending from a parachute, bolting out from the sky, landing on the train station just like how my Reader's Digest stories had scribbled the ascent/descent of these paragliders. There was no helicopter hovering nearby thus, I had wondered, where the parachutist may have come from. He seems like a character straight from my short novella, "Slow" who had jumped off to leave an urbanized zone.
Perhaps, he too, had visited Kelantan but had chosen a more wicked and more adventurous transportation than myself back home.
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