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.”

Christmas in Wonderland
Iris P. Concepcion


In his short story A Municipal Report (I love this piece a lot since it parlayed a sleepy town in an edgy narrative, confirming the fact that no place is ever boring if people generally appeal to you as digested subjects---this is where Adlair, subject of my previous entry, was invented), one of O. Henry’s characters visits remote towns in America, Nashville as an example, and takes notes of its details.

This character said in one line:

“Your town seems to be a quiet one. What manner of entertainment, adventure, or excitement have you to offer to the stranger within your gates?”

In mine, I shall put curves to my town’s alleys and creeks in the form of a reachable tale---dreamy but properly grounded.

Here goes:

The climate came, went by, and got stuck with the blinking stars. There was a dampened mood in the morning because words did not converge into paragraphs and instead, crawled up tree barks to join a barbecue party, forming “we do not like putting up a tent in your brain right now.”

The narrator then tried watching the news where body bags flashed like walking coffins.

As night fully consummated its own cycle, a J. Satriani riff turned up in a nearby hall. “Speak Softly Love” heavenly stringed. Like power lines connecting electrical posts---linear but with a yielding voltage that one is never pardoned if he failed to hear it. Limb shattering if hyperbole be your forte. Like an occult inside your body.

It was the grandest manner of inviting and the narrator, faithfully too, blinked her eyes, in unison with the stars above.

Narrator noticed the vocalist, he who had done several portrayals in the past: commanding elegance when he rendered Bacharach in a new light, a frayed Pilate in another.

So there must be glamour to a basketball court where no curtains were drawn up for him to show his pipe wares. His falsetto was the kind you do not pit against the thick-maned guy of Air Supply. It was croaky. The narrator felt obliged to issue a mental apology for having dragged that voice when it should have rested. His pipes emitted tones like a stranded nightangle in a siren mating call—it was reassuring as a gentle, blown wind.

For the minor fine points.

The hall. Narrator was reminded of the times spent facing this edifice when a zoo, circus and men with long hair (who knocked on houses to politely ask if they could borrow the records they had heard), were the first unlocally instigated social events the locals gravitated to with gusto. The group who brought in the animals and guitars had an exceptional name : Lamplighters. They ate fire, fed the animals in cages and performed songs. Like gypsies. There was no electricity on the hall yet, in fact, there was no electricity in the whole map this side of the setting. Straight off from the pages of Grimm’s stories, narrator had slipped cents in the pocket to watch the mini zoo and the night performances of singing and was always aesthetically revived after, thrilled by the fact that a giant python was crawling just across her room.

What the narrator is pointing out: this is not just simply a hall. Its history has a great bearing on what was about to erupt.

Once upon a time, there was really an elephant hauled in that ground, bringing a splice of India to someone who did not know yet where India was. Even back then, magic was at a grasp.

Returning to the present, as if flickering images conspired to rush to this particular night, a presentation came : the Artist Specials.

1. Queen. Singer Consummate Theater sang the repertoire like how the Greatest Hits album (black background with bandmembers looking like vampires---Freddie Mercury in bushy moustache in that long history line of lip hair, from Chaplin to Stalin to Rico J. circa promenade in the park) had sequenced it so that intuitively, the attentive listener knows exactly what comes next like the scratchy vinyl needled in rotation for Freddie Mercury to pass by the Radiowealth stereo speakers. Everyone in the narrator’s house loved Bohemian Rhapsody in the past.

2. Pink Floyd. Like Queen, narrator holds the view that rock bands before have deep, theatrical quirks. You can find it in the variations of their chords—they were immense and diverse. When Off the Wall was opened with great promise, a commotion sprang from the end of the block where the hall was facing. There were gulping yells. The slight fracas, according to a walking radio, begun when two close friends exchanged fists. It ended before the song reached its operatic chorus and guitar solo. Floyd and Fist. Everything worked so well in the end.

Then, a marvel afterthought from the narrator. Somehow everyone knows about the band members who were said to have routinely performed at a closed down joint named after a boy with a growing nose. Narrator kept silent because nobody ought to miss great things by establishing nose connections.

3. Michael Jackson. Ben is latently an androgynous vocal song. I’ll Be There was segmented with a guitar solo and narrator thought of the stunt as a lifesaver. The duets pulled out the act from okay to incredible and in that measurement, that was quite a leap.

4. Narrator normally does not care about Starship songs but since this was an opulent revisit to the rock and roll past, including the dissed hall of famers, there was so much to express joy and sit by for.

5. Bee Gees. Everything was falsetto, the narrator realized upon absorption of the playlist range. To make it alien compatible.

Of course the crème de la crème was the legendary whistle to drown all lip tunes. It was more of a melodious call. A wind where sound texture was determined by teeth. The great one had arrived bringing a lip chord that was bridged to the narrator by indelible words. Redemptive. Jesus, as if, went down to sanctify the ground. A lot of people claim they know the whistle blower (used strictly as a musical tool) but narrator thinks nobody really does unless one is a follower and a believer. One will never realize the significance of truly great men unless you live and share air space, even for just an hour, with them. The opening of change is so John Wayne, a western of a dusky time with the lone cowboy returning home after a rodeo game. Only, he wielded a mightier weapon.

Everything wouldn’t come up as cathartic if not for the several—narrator had lost count how many----guitar solos rendered. They went on and on like newly sprung wells (you see this in cartoons, woodpeckers blown off by bursting water) that such amalgamation, putting chords in sweet mounds, were deliberately meant to astound. It was strictly a professional affair and anyone with weak fingers needn’t even try surpassing that mastery. The speakers can go bust but never the source of studied riffs and wails.

Narrator sensed an aggrupation like the world was one giant guitar, scaling up heavens through those strings (let the narrator’s feet stomp by Dm, Ab, F#m, Eb floors as if they were highways). Upon reaching her destination, narrator realized that even angels do killer piccolos. Or mandolin. It totally ripped open narrator’s heart because that dream was laid on a field where up high, the sky vomited twilight stars. Never once did she receive both phenomena in one serving until this. Narrator felt like a kid again, trembling with adventure. She knows where India is now and it kicked like dynamo.

The hall was not a stadium nor even a strict hall. The Who did not resurrect itself; strings got disentangled; the speakers were a feeble rusty (but that, by itself, was great attitude)---nobody wore leather and black masks; the lead looked pregnant; a kid thought this lead was the grandfather of a playmate ---everyone got by and walked like about to purchase pork leg at the market. The rest thought that display as plain and normal.

Yet, it was all superbly odd but only to the narrator because in some cultural ground before where an earsplitting band manufactured waves, everyone was dressed to yowl and the attire mattered.

Only the narrator knew that heaven dropped (with all those riffs, and the narrator’s chord ladder, how can it remain snobbish) to be picked up this time around.

Making mention of the triumphant chops and riffs that went on in full four hours and more (Christmas songs were rendered in sagacious fits of Band-Aid fashion, current hits falling off from their original chord brackets, out of key but absolutely fun), no cent was even given the ticket teller since there was no ticket teller involved in this kind of situation, only faith in invisible affinity. Narrator let out strong claps from the sideline because that was a form of appreciation; that the kindred habitat need not even go cheek-to-cheek to acknowledge each other.

Comfortably sat in a varnished bamboo sofa in a true out-of-work posture, narrator was given popcorn, sofdrink and egg sandwich. It was not a movie house but it felt THX surrounded, complete with pizza stalls. The atmosphere was even better.

If there is something to be understood in the ways of the world and the alignment of planets perhaps, sight and sound would make all come out in vivid colors.

That one bizarre, filling, spectacular night, narrator dreamed of something, a wish thought of before as never to materialize grandly.

Instead of Plasma television which narrator could never afford in her lifetime ( she browsed a catalog and one series costs close to seven hundred grand), she imagined sleeping on her bed and in front of her-------all these kindred people whom she thought existed only in glorified set-ups, came out alive and did what they do best (even if one’s best is in column inches).

It was so close that night. Only the stars and walls intervened for its full realization.

Narrator thought : That should be the new lifestyle. Customized acts that suddenly appear in the kitchen or the living room.

Only, it really did happen to her.

When the reality sequence was over, narrator pulled out her magic wand and said, off I doze now. Pause, then a series of hissy okays.

Alas, it was never to be the end.

Suddenly, a quotable quote whimpered, gallantly, victoriously :

“After this, good night.”

Narrator giggled before dreaming of starfishes and shoes. That was a line fit in any classical play, Chekovian even.

Clicked. Everything simply clicked.

Like O. Henry’s story ascribed above, the character inquired after having discovered gothic things in a Nashville town : “I wonder what’s happening in Buffalo?”

If narrator were to be asked that, in this setting, the reply would be : “A lot Sir, a lot.”

“Muffled silences that sometimes close over a mountain, when the wind dies and everything is held in crystal quiet (this is a line from an Ann Beattie short story), I could hear my own pulse and mistake it as your own heartbeat (this is my line to finish off those borrowed words. “ - for my little spectacle.


I had been on a slack. And everyone forgives me for it (I hope).

We live in hopeful times, the mental shakeups composed, the small aspirations making huge splashes. We are often rescued blissfully not because we feel it is owed us but because that is how good people respond to callings : always to shed light, always to straighten up what is crooked.

And so:

Do I have new friends? Yes, I suppose. I have taken snapsots of remembrances and shredded them in minimum words since I had last written here. What was the last occasion? I watched a musical bonanza and was understood perfectly.

If you care enough to get your binoculars and start peeking into my words so that they may be enlarged, I will allow you, for some good measure. Let me begin by recalling some vivid pictures.

Fruits on Hair.--- I am not quite sure if I had written about this before in this space but in one of the festivities where a friend directed my attention to nuns selling ukay-ukay while competing teams in a street dancing were doing their routines, I did my own pinpointing to this friend and directed her to closely watch two males wearing their huge durian headdresses unmindfully. They were wearing polos and denims so they were not in any way participants of the competition. How brave of them to walk in the crowd without getting bugged by offhand remarks. I wanted to give them a standing ovation until I realized I was already standing up.

A cross on a crewcut-hair --- I was inside a van and seated beside the driver was a guy sporting a crewcut. Only, it was designed with a cross at the back and I was bewildered how that was intricately shaped. What kind of razor was used?

The ghost editors --- I know supernatural things happen and I assume some of the dearly departed also leave their slippers when entering houses even if they do not touch the ground but, I never question the ingenuity, the courage, the Plutonian hand (it is no longer a planet and I grieve along with the rest of the planets its reduction to mere planetoid—is this a word?) stretching all the way from a faraway galaxy. Unseen, unfelt, unrecognized. In the words of……I could not think of a famous person to deliver this so I am quoting myself. In my words : oxygen is my only payment. The life I phrase in paragraphs would have been cut dead were it not for the lease of an oxygen tank courtesy of these happy caspers. I feel so unworthy but loved. How does this sound? To you who may or may not be living, did Jesus talk you into it? Did you ask permission from your respective Moms when you pulled out your magic erasers and fixed everything for the best?

Query : Where did you buy your loooooonnnngggg eraser that it reached me?

Again, for the musicians and the people behind them --- I still am amazed by the pour of talents breeding everywhere like mosquitoes. Bzzzzzzzzzzzz, they bzzzzzzzzed. They do not just give new meaning to songs, they are superbly arranged I jump off my seat often times. There is a certain depth to musical works when they are performed other than the Self. How many times have I snapped out from resentment because of music, I haven’t counted how many. Even in commercial television (you might get the crap sometimes but overall, when specials are done to pay homage to Filipino music, my favorite cradle in the manger aside from the various pools of words absorbed by my eyes, you just necessarily float up there along with the fruity-colored dragonflies). When these people brainstorm without minding themselves---I treasure it. It comes at an instantaneous, magical moment to those who care (it is seldom that artists are grouped in one mystifying production and it is all more astonishing that one is getting it for free). Time and again, these people provide balance to the ugliness of what one can possibly hear to compromise your independent beliefs but the beauty, boy, it lurks, hidden in those melodious voices, the ability to break loose the notes to deafen what is just plain unpalatable. There is an ugly component to sound when it becomes a tool to destruct but one has to give credit where credit is due. Majority of the present crop of musicians are professionals . They know their notes. They are never insecure to shun away from inspired inner workings. They are the remaining glory of this country aside from the other artists and writers.

And I know overtime is simply not done but these enterprising people extend anyway. What more can I say.

I will mention those musicians who brought honor and prestige to the country by shining in other lands. It is not often you see them while sitting in your sofa but when they do, it is worth paying attention to. They are truly, truly great and I become proud they come from a country I also call mine. I mean, I needn’t shrink when I get asked what is to be proud of my place.

To the small company I keep when I wake up, my gratitude also. Let my pointed biases not hinder the good work—we may not agree on some things but we won’t resolve the differences with skullduggery. I never realized everyone can be funny.

When someone says, carry on, I look at the face. When the speaker is credible, pardon my rather childish thinking, I could not help but express : my thanks, my life. That is formidably inspiring.


Accessibility of the warped --- She is my most revered female pen user in these islands because she has a very strong distinction of people and to which categories they should fall in her world. She is the only person I have encountered from reading who shares my rabid fancy for domination (hers is the world, mine is galactical---I fear humanoids a lot so I need a rocket to launch mine and subdue three-eyed wonders-----kidding) without doing it the dictatorial way. I was told she watches films at the orchestra. A friend whispered to me one time, “that is her”. I was in the comfort room. My God, I thought. I was sharing a bladder cubicle with someone who will soon subdue me. Fierce. Why should two people aspiring for big battles still experience urinary discharges? I love this writer so much I want her cloned.

I am so glad she is back in wide circulation.

And to the compact herd of great people : I am still embarrassed, deliriously, by even the briefest notes. I do not deserve it. It is almost blasphemous writing this. Thank you very much.

Just because I promised I shall be writing about his artwork --- The revelation does not unfaze. I have a copy of an imported music magazine which a friend bought for me at a discounted, back issue prize. She said she gave it not because of the articles but because of the sketches. I do not know a thing about what you do with your drawings (I am addressing you not as a third person so give yourself an applause. Only L was addressed that way and of course, the person I opened this entry with) so I will compare yours as against my sole source of illustration reference. I do not know of any other to compare it with but if I do, I may have to go at it by attaching my perception using the syntax of other medium—I am imbecile that way. It is by Robert Risko, doing caricatures of musicians.

I say : although yours is evidently comical in other aspects, bleakness and gloom just engulf your frames. It is as if you wanted the grin tossed away in some aberrant stroke. You do not like bright colors, that I can tell. You are using computers so that must be the reason why the faces always manifest in jaded angles. You can better manipulate the old fashioned brush than Steve Jobs’ paint brush. The machine blatantly tells you that nothing is ever perfect, right? I am over extending my analysis again. Anyway, you are at your best when you draw from the perspective of unhappiness I think (laughter held). Machinated humans—you seem to grasp the speed of technology as a diluting factor to the gaiety and humanity of your subjects. Of course, you have to match them with words but even the most blasé work somehow exudes unspoken torment. You do lips very well. Sometimes, they are so small, like cuticles. And spleens. And skeletons. Promise accomplished already.