People
By Iris P. Concepcion

At least half of a year had been cut off from my appreciation of the world outside because I lack materials that I could read to veer away from my usual accounting of movements. No films either. Just myself getting posse tears out of slicing bulb onions (I prefer the green leafy ones but they do not look well on certain dishes) and thinking of ways how to utilize bread crumbs to the best of their crumbled abilities. Oatmeals in drag, they are.

So, in one of my very few incursions, about twenty steps or more where I normally engage myself in pleasant talks with human beings across the front yard, I asked : “I need some magazines to read.”

I was immediately given a back issue of National Geographic (I like looking at its pictures; I do the same for old Life issues) and two daily prayer books.

I was promised issues of one foreign magazine. Subscriptions had piled up and do I wish to read issues of the previous year, I was inquired. Of course, I replied. I need them like a fish needs a bicycle if I may quote a U2 song.

When I finally had the reading materials, I discovered that some of the global people I admire the most were given spaces. One issue after another issue, their faces popped out as if I were opening a photo album specially designed for kindred souls. I said some of them. And the issues are not complete for the entire year.

Crossing waters therefore as I scanned the pages, I may have to repeat myself : I have soft spot for writers and musicians and the spottier they are, the spottiest I get. And artists in general.

Why do I exactly marvel writing about these people?

It is an infant’s partiality with a Mom’s smell.

Who really knows about that bind. Not even Jeeves has the answer (see how embarrassingly artifact I am on the whole search engine issue).

I had been writing about people from where I live and had personally experienced why some of them are rawfully immense. You like arts, words and music? My country can give you a serious headbutt for excellence on this. You wouldn’t be lost with our own humor in print.

I push my kind of people, from where I am, to be acknowledged worldwide. They deserve my words.

How about the offshore, twanged ones? I thank this magazine then for having picked and arranged the subjects like I would do, if I had a hand on these things. I still love flipping actual pages. When I touch the pictures, I do not get the feeling of being in contact with a mirror like a computer monitor would but the silkiness of the paper.

By the way, they really had stick-out hair even from way back, these people. I just noticed as parlayed in my previous entry that my favorites really do something odd to their hair, one way or the other. All unintentional on my part.

Let’s get ready to name them.

1. John Updike. - I like him talking in interview form. Tiffany;s silver hair. So he had a new book out and has become more embracing of the world view with his latest address to America. He picked out his three best liked books. Anyone who follows him would know he likes James Thurber whose short story collection is in the list. I had read Thurber’’s short story “Mr. Preble Gets Rid of His Wife”. It contains, in my own reading jar, one of the most hilariously ariculate endings in solving the mystery of that often pen-melted caricature, the nagging wife.

Mr. Updike is my all around compass for reading. Anything he favorably reviews will surely digest well with my own word palate. I had sufficiently written about him, and my readings of him, and it is a walking rainbow when I saw that picture of S.’s creator, that head of his so intricately evolved from his child picture in Self-Consciousness. Updike can ably assume any voice because he truly delights in observing all sorts of people. They are his biology of choice.

If I were to ask him one question, this is what I will pose, recorder angled rightly so he wouldn’t be deflected by the importance of my query : “Would you still write even if it is for food labels as you had once suggested, if the food (or drink for this matter) is that obesely packaged ginger ale bottle you so derided as unfit in your refrigerator? “

2. Kevin Smith - Laughter, Snigger. Guffaws and Grins. The ONLY person on earth who had landed in widely circulated magazines worldwide who WROTE BACK to answer a post of mine back when I was fastened to a movie theater chair more than my wrist watch. And he called me Ma’am. What a FatBoySmart. I can call him that because that was how I named him in that post and he didn’t call me FatYouTooBanshee to get even if I may recall it headingly.

I like him by virtue of Dogma and its funny lines that go knotty, attributed to either his mouth or hand. He also likes to use big words as if his fan base frequently goes to a library filled with dictionaries. For this piece I had read, he said, he had gone bald and “when I turn around it’s like I’m wearing a skin yarmulke.”

I still like his friends B and M if only for the fact that they had helped finance that one great little movie I had squired in the past, Stolen Summer.

I hope her daughter did not develop his vocabulary. If someone alerts him about this, I implore the director to read a portion of Philip Roth’s novel Our Gang. Also a trilogy (until Lucas doubled the triple years after) like his favorite Star Wars films. Tell him to look for that part where the character Tricky gets assassinated. Get bawled by the jewels of alliteration heaped there by the author. The character speaks like him, I think, with all the words coming out unmercifully funny.

3. Leo, Jack, Matt and Marty. – I figured, I do like reading interviews of people who talk like film dialogues. Nicholson, he is the cuckoo you’d petition any mental ward for him to get out to clearly sanitize any boring world. That actor talks in a perpetual youth mode. I like his About Schmidt, when his character was assessing his wife unfrontally as if she were a furniture.

4. Albert Einstein - I know he is no longer with us but look at his hair. It is a dead giveaway if you talk about my confessed partiality with mane. It is great to know he underwent a very personal turmoil when he was formulating his E=mc2 which I still can’t figure out to this day. It explains the fact that even great minds can’t crack affairs of the heart. And I finally saw him, pre-standing hair and it was as if a different person previously occupied his body.

5. That drummer of Pink Floyd giving tribute to a fallen former lead singer. I like his way of saying, as a rock star that is, that he hides his shyness behind monosyllables and Ray-bans. It is a line I could write myself.

6. Dave Eggers--- He has a new book too and it is still set on the African continent. No interview about him from the issue I read. Just a tip on where to go if someone wants to read an excerpt of his new book. The title beleaguers my query-allergic words for titles. What is What. The guy is like that, so let him rest with his mind uniquely. He had said before he dislikes being the subject of any interview as is the itchy tick of much of the staggering authors. So he writes about himself the most. Great trend, if you ask me. He had a huge smile in this picture and his curly hair inspired me to connect it with the brain surgery essay that was featured in the same magazine. The essay had a cartoon drawing of a brain. You know, the one that looked like intestines, only, curled up like a long snake that could likewise raise itself up, given a proper flute music. Eggers’ hair is like that. His brain is so open.

This writer is one of the reasons why I browsed the internet voraciously before. He keeps a real neat ring of people to collaborate with. He does not slam-bang it. He is said to be one of the most influential people in the planet and I know why. He insists on doing things his way. The more untested the territory is, the more he enters its frontiers. That is one way of sustaining creativity I suppose.

He had put together in the past Joyce Carol Oates, Jennifer Egan and Michael Chabon for various causes like teaching children about creativity. I hope he had found one child who can write similarly like what I had read in a Life feature (1970). Eleven year olds writing about being “on a sailboat of sinking water” and “I used to be a fish / But now I am a nurse”. Also these gems : “I was to be a lion but the skin tore” and “I think of going ice skating in the sewers”.

Amazing. Kids’ brains are amazing. Eggers know that and had built something for that kind of protection, before the kids’ minds get soured up and infiltrated by logic and reason.

I write as if he is the Bill Gates of the lettered word. He is not. He can be so pissed off also. I am just saying, he speaks the language of the now with an I-want-to-change-the-world poesy in it. And a one fine writer, if you ask me.

You can be a member of this fast-paced generation, belong to a group that is normally called cool by outsiders and be a reformer in the name of arts like Eggers (he does drawings, carpentry and stuff for ads if I am correct---but look at his humanitarian credentials).

Why these people, you may ask. Perhaps, in a democracy as in the absorption of crafts, I have my choices. Can I connect the abovementioned people in one sentence? I will try.

Updike treats religion with much probing as Smith does and the gang of Scorsese (who did direct a controversial Christ film) did rib the Titanic which Eggers, perhaps in his life, would like to re-enact using Einstein’s E=mc2 which he did slip in one of his books, if I am not mistaken. I really do not know.

But these are some of the minds you might want to sit down with in a dinner. What about the Pink Floyd guy? Just keep his monosyllable. It could go : “Shoo.”