Night #1

Crawled and searched for my earphones buried deep in my purse. It's 3 am. Bob Dylan's harmonica transports me back to that long dry dusty cornfield at Hollister one time near a bus stop in between our 10 hour trip from San Francisco to LA. Strips of desert, apple orchards and ranches. How much of a good cliche that it had an abandoned merry-go-round. At the other side, a tiny town fair. A smallish number of rednecks gather in front of the local produce stalls of honey, wine and apple ciders, who mostly in jeans, torn, turned into shorts with spaghetti strap tops and white shirts are up and about, all a bit bouncy but seemingly carrying blank faces. No tumbling weeds, just stale air, almost dead.

I cannot sleep again, after years of insomnia, this must be one of the worst nights.

Most nights, leaves shine like silver, tonight though, no light reflections on their surfaces. I told you through text that I could only see the silhouette of those branches waiting to snatch me from bed and eat me whole like that from the poltergeist movie. not good. Things morphing into horrific creatures. I get to doze off from time to time only to dream about me being awake in the same bed,in the same room, then wake up for real, disoriented thinking why the wall is on my left where it should be at my right. I could have fallen off the bed when i was violently turning to get a good position.

Dylan's getting annoying like a whinny kid, and his harmonica is starting to sound like a squealing sound of an accordion being played by a novice. I say if you don't like your neighbor learn how to play an accordion or a violin at the window where he sleeps.I should try to sleep again.

fireflies and crickets

There's a creek about 50 meters away from the back of our house. surrounding it like walls are tress of mangoes, bananas and bamboos, homes of fireflies, crickets and geckos rarely seen at this part of Bulacan. When we just moved here and I was about to turn ten, they all wandered around our house as if they're in an expansive acacia tree. In years, relatives started to erect buildings to what now is a secondary school and a pest of a neighbor who had put up ugly lines of corrugated roofs and GI sheets for walls to house a poultry slaughter. Gradually, bugs (except from mosquitoes) and smallish reptiles disappeared. The other night, in my room, screened and airtight, there was a curious firefly floating about in the dark. In wonderment, I watched its light flicker as if it's battery is dying. I hear crickets, very load this time, like a lynchian droning sound, drone like the theremin in a mid century scifi/B movie, by this time Kafka's clerk is turning into a big roach. Again, a little past midnight, right in the middle of my sleep,I turn flapping my arm to face left, opened my eyes and saw the poor thing on my pillow near the tip of my nose lying there helplessly, still twinkling. I must have hit it with my hand. Lights more weakly, intervals more erratic than the broken Christmas light of our neighbor. Several days I walked outside and see 2-3 fireflies around small trees.Their natural habitat must have immensely disturbed by the flood Ondoy and were displaced. Anyways, you are all welcome to rest on my pillow.

R.I.P. Loula Angelica Lekas 1913-2009

3 more years and you could have reached a century. S'agapo Lula, thanks for teaching me a little Greek and letting me have a piece of Turkish delight from that little wooden box, filled with powdery treats,

Strawberry Burger

Breakfast was okay. burger, bread and butter. So, there is a strawberry burger , mom exclaiming the whole time how good it is and that i should try it.no thanks. But see, if i was just in the right mood this morning, I could have. You gotta be in a mood for such things as a strawberry burger. NHK is on. She wants to keep the matryoshka doll I got from Salvation Army, and gee, does she love stacking them. . . it was supposed to be a gift to someone who reminds me of a character in a Russian novel.

So,there, I woke up welcoming some almost strange facts of life, eating breakfast as I look outside the window,quite amused. I see the grease of what was once butter slathered over the burger patties and I imagine how many arteries it will clog as i devour the entire plateful of beef in front of me. I chewed the jelly vitamins after and went back to bed.

Waiting for a bus at the corner of Oakmont and Murfield drive

A flower at the corner of our street, have to check what kind of flower this is.

It is 4:30 in the afternoon and it is starting to get dark. I missed long walks and it is one of the few good things about this place, only if the streets weren’t too steep. Night starts early and the scent of pine trees is wonderful. I have to wear at least three layers of clothing or else my fingers would fall off. I’ve been seeing a lot of squirrels lately and I’m sure I’d see more of them in the coming days. I saw a Siberian husky yesterday and it looked exactly like our dead dog, Kevin. I should get used to people being courteous and attentive. . . It freaks me out sometimes. There is something about rudeness and courteousness coexisting that I do not understand.

Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey

I've always been a fan of early sci-fi movies -- The Day the Earth Stood Still 1951, It Conquered the World 1956, Planet 9 from Outer Space 1959, The Forbidden Planet 1956, Manos: The Hands of Faith 1966 and Robinson Crusoe From Mars 1966, not to forget those silent German films like Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari -- aside from them being hilarious and cheesy (the kind of cheese I like), they were undeniably brilliant. Brilliant in a sense that there were enourmous amount of creativity and innovation, almost always prophetic, involved. And you then realize that no filmakers today did something as extraordinary as they did. Maybe Tarkovsky, but he's on another category. My guess is that, those were the times that people were more enthused about technology and outer space. Obviously because they were new and they had a lot of reasons to celebrate the future. On the contrary, sci-fi films of today seemed tired, as if it has seen everything, nothing excites. There was a gleamer of that excitement in AI but Speilberg chose a different way and abandoned it as quickly as possible (I wonder what Kubrick could have done).

Anyway, this entry is not about sci-fi movies, really. I found a documentary on Theremin,I was transfixed by the story of this little instrument.Russian Leon Theremin invented the first electronic instrument which he named after himself. You control the pitch and volume by moving your hand like a Symphony conductor. You do this without touching the metal rods connected to a big wooden box.Supposedly,it is the first musical intrument that is played without being touched. It produces an eerie sound common in the films I mentioned above. Think of UFOs and aliens, and you can easily associate it with the sound. Hitchcock perhaps overused it a little. Unfortunately, the Theremin is associated only with that strange sound and sci-fi movies. What is unknown is that it plays a decent Bach or Wagner in the hands of an adept musician. Leon Theremin was an usual man who had an unsual life and invented an unsual instrument. It is definitely worth seeing. Yesterday I checked ebay for Theremins. The cheapest Theremin on auction is about $200. Apparently,they still make them. It would be interesting to start a band using it.

Matisse

Our clothes had a photoshoot with the Hollmanns, Albert & co again.The red wrap-around dress is new. Also, Summit Media featured our clothes last February and March in one of their magazines.

How can both sequential and simultaneous movement be created in an image?

Excerpts from the notes on the exhibition:

My friend,P used "two-dimensional flat surface of stretched canvas, erased the inherent texture by priming 10 coats of gesso, and created succeeding layers of ground in the form of transparent acrylic paint medium tinted with white acrylic."

This is to simulate "sequential and simultaneous movement. Thus, images found in the layers of transparent ground act as sequential and simultaneoud snapshots of movement in time and space. A sense of history and narrative can be perceived."

It achieved showing motion, also sound. P will add more gel medium on this series, therefore, the coming paintings would look more like blueprints. . . very interesting.
Goodluck on your thesis!

PS. That's me drinking wine.

3 Bald Men

I finally finished my term paper in my Michel Foucault class. Fr. David is good instructor. He reminds me of Woody Allen. Well, aside from that horrible comb over, he's sarcastic, random and talks too fast that he usually runs out of breath . . .then he would suddenly pause and snatch some air to fill his lungs again for another set ramblings.

'Discourse is not life: its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying, you will make a man that will live longer than he.'

Michel Foucault. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge.