The Wily Filipino

Obsessive Thoughts.

Joel Tesoro has written an excellent, thought-provoking response to my previous post, where, as he writes, "The real issue is how the Fil-Am obsession with that victimization plays on both sides of the Pacific."

I should probably qualify something: this "obsession" is really only limited to a small handful of academics, activists, artists and students; the real Fil-Am obsession (and I'm not being entirely flippant here) is paying their car loans and mortgage payments on time. That is, not all Filipino Americans have the luxury of ruminating about postcolonialism; that's something for people (like academics) who are paid to do it. =) (And yes, I'm being defensive, as he pointed out, simply because I've written about the American colonial period as well.)

He writes:

Many Asian-Americans have, for reasons I'd be curious to know more about, taken a leaf from the minority playbook and decided that emphasizing marginality, suffering and victimization ought to work for them as well in raising their political and social status. Hence the frequent emphasis -- especially among Asian-American groups on campus -- on cases of anti-Asian violence or anti-Asian racism and discrimination, both past and present.

I think it would be naïve to think that "victimhood" doesn't get you brownie points. I don't particularly like using the term because it's often employed as a slur by right-wing critics of liberal and minority politics, but there's truth to what you write. (I quote myself from my comments here.) But such is the double bind of identity politics in general, I think; one has to constantly walk the narrow middle ground between victimhood and self-affirmation or else leave oneself open to criticism. There is, in any case, the necessity to consistently address acts of racism and violence, and the "frequent emphasis" upon them only reflects the sad realities of life as a minority in the U.S.

But let me paint an utterly cynical, hypothetical scenario (and gentle readers, please do not quote me out of context, since I'm playing devil's advocate here): in comparison with, say, African Americans and Native Americans, Asian Americans were relatively better off. (Alas, I've seen the Suffering One-Upmanship Game played all too often in reality.) Blacks were enslaved, Native Americans were slaughtered, and Asian Americans -- well, the Japanese Americans were interned, and Chinese Americans did time on Angel Island, and Filipinos… hey, it sucked being a migrant worker back then. At least the Filipino-American War seems a lot more… catastrophic. [Devil's advocate mode off.]

But there's another reason for this obsessiveness, as you've pointed out: Filipino Americans locating themselves in the American narrative, and another factor that I'll discuss towards the end.

But to a Filipino academic, the focus on how marginal Filipinos are in America serves more to advance the agenda of Fil-Ams rather than Filipinos.

But of course (but see below).

In fact (a Filipino academic might say) how the hell do Fil-ams know what the U.S. colonial period was like: At the time, many of their ancestors were taking the opportunity to emigrate to the States!

While I don't want to raise the specter of the know-it-all Filipino abroad, this goes back to the point I made previously regarding commemoration. At least someone is doing the remembering. Besides, there are already few Filipinos alive today who were, say, teenagers during the Commonwealth period, so the same question could be asked of Filipinos in the Philippines. When I was growing up in the Philippines there was little mention in my history textbooks of the Filipino American War, and I can't imagine that it was simply due to people having "moved on," so to speak; it meant, at least to me, that there was still some digging up necessary.

So in a sense, aren't Fil-Ams, in their quest to advance themselves in their adopted homeland, just manipulating the Philippines and the Philippine experience -- essentially becoming another set of Americans colonizing Filipinos, except in this case they share the same skin color.

What exactly do you mean by "manipulating?" If by "manipulating" you mean shifting the historical lens onto the war -- perhaps even to the point of "obsession" -- then that still doesn't seem much like "manipulation" to me.

I can see your point about "colonizing" and "appropriating," but historically it's been shown many times that the fates of people in the U.S., particularly those of immigrants, are often inextricably linked with the U.S. government's policies towards their respective "homelands." That is, if the American empire -- not including the whole swath of westward expansion -- has its beginnings in the Filipino American War, then surely it "belongs" to Filipino Americans as well, if only a little more than it belongs to all "generic Americans" as well. (One can argue that the extraction of labor from Filipino migrant farmworkers mirrors the same neocolonial capitalist system in place now.)

Yet their colleagues on the other side of the Pacific continue to devote their energies to the production and research into victimization and suffering -- because it's both appropriate for them and also timely, as more and more young Fil-Ams enter academe and start to learn themselves about their "home culture." But that divergence only underlies the chasm between Filipinos and Filipino-Americans which has always existed.

Again, it's not exactly just about "victimization and suffering" -- see below. (I've been writing about this "chasm" as well, so I'm glad you mentioned it.)

This brings me to Vergara's final point: that remembering events like the Philippine-American war helps correct the Eurocentrism of American schoolchildren.

Not entirely my point, but more of an attempt to destabilize the glorious American narrative (which too many people still believe), and, at the very least, to shake up people's complacent notions about the United States.

Portraying themselves as victims, if rather remote, is certainly part of it. But I think the larger project here is to point out the historical connections between the American empire then and the supposedly new "Pax Americana" being established -- particularly in terms of its supposed benevolence, its arrogance, its notions of the dark-skinned "other," its unquestioning belief in military solutions. Bush's "war on terror," which has been extended to Philippine shores, surely has its echoes (and arguably, roots) in the American military occupation of Mindanao in the first decade-and-a-half of the colonial period. Such "obsessiveness" over the war -- while it may be unhealthy -- can only illuminate the political and cultural dynamics of empire. If it stirs people, both in the Philippines and the United States, to think more about the consequences of America's actions past and present, or to question political and historical orthodoxy, then so much the better.

How I Discovered Sex.

One. Princess Leigh-Cheri masturbates.

Two. A female classmate in sixth grade reads me a passage about a housewife and a motorcycle rider.

Three. John fucks his sister Frannie; someone says, "Nothing like wet balls."

Four. Piet gets a golden shower from his wife.

Five. A woman fucks a guy up the ass with a dildo named Steely Dan III.

Six. A monk fucks Therese up the ass.

Seven. Rojack fucks his wife's maid up the ass.

Eight. A page-long, one-paragraph sex-scene ends with the sentence: "Silky red fuck."

Nine. Sophie rubs Stingo's come into her cheeks.

Ten. Alex manhandles a piece of liver.

Yowza.

I'm a little horrified by my brother's candidness both to his (newly-wed) wife and the rest of the world.

But don't worry -- I'll also be posting something of a sexual nature, for mature readers only, tomorrow. Stay tuned.

1985: The Cure, "In-Between Days."

There once was this character in the Police Academy series who, I believe, was called Motormouth Jones, and his claim to fame, aside from ventriloquizing and doing "impressions," was being a human beatbox.

There was one song I could perform all the way through as a human beatbox, and that was The Cure's "In Between Days," which is on my list. (Sorry, no cool revelations here about how much I loved Grandmaster Flash back in the day.) So much so that I recorded it on tape, played it for my good friend Dudz Villanueva -- funny how he reappears in this story -- and he was utterly convinced that it was a drum machine and keyboard. (Yeah, I did the guitar part too!)

Back then, in Los Banos, there were no strict divisions between goths or punkers or preppies; The Cure (and the once-great Filipino band The Dawn) was the sound of Young Pilipinas. The Cure made a slightly belated splash on Philippine airwaves (though BLS, I think, was playing them long before) with the release of The Head on the Door; after that, the entire Standing on a Beach catalog conquered alt-radio. Students who had read The Outsider in Humanities 101 could now pontificate about "Killing an Arab;" jeepneys blared out "Boys Don't Cry;" my friends now knew the lyrics to relative obscurities like "Fire in Cairo" and "A Man inside My Mouth." I loved it all: Robert Smith's hair, that feline whine, all that dark jangly energy. (No, I never dressed the part -- too hot and humid to wear black and all that hair -- but I did have spiked hair.)

"In Between Days" was a pretty damned catchy single; it wasted no time on solos, it had a fairly simple organ riff I could play along to, it was a perfect three minutes, and the lyrics encapsulated the frustrations of my fervid teenage mind: "Yesterday I got so old / It made me want to cry / Yesterday I got so old / It made me want to die." I still remember wearing my cassette tape out: it was, if I remember correctly, the fourth song on Side One, and I would have to forward through "Kyoto Song," "In the Blood," -- all great songs though -- to get to it. And play it over and over, just to get that rush again and again.

Haunted.

Got this via e-mail today:

THIS IS WEIRD - YOU HAVE TO CONCENTRATE TO SEE IT

A friend sent this to me. I'ts pretty exciting stuff!

Apparently, the owners of this house had been seeing images and hearing voices for quite a while. They did some research and found that a lady, who once lived in the house, lost her husband in the Civil War. Legend says that she used to sit at the table and look across the field in anticipation of her loved one returning home. He never came.

So, they say she still waits.

They caught this photo, of what they claim to be her. This one was wild and a little spooky, once you find the ghost in the picture. It took me about 20 seconds, before I think I saw a ghostly image. So DO wait as it takes a little bit of time. One hint I was given was to concentrate around the table, but not to focus too much on one spot.

Look around the table and toward the window. Be sure to enlarge window to full screen. It is very faint, but I thought I could hear something. I'm sure you will see something. Let me know what you see and if you hear anything. Feel free to pass it on.

Be sure to turn up your computer volume, as the sound may be hard to hear.

Here's the link.

Still.

The other day I was having a discussion with a fellow Filipino scholar, and he was criticizing what he called "the Filipino American obsession with the Filipino-American War" -- that there was, as he put it, "a Fil-Am orthodoxy of 'I am Pinoy and I feel the pain of the American colonial period.'"

I didn't necessarily disagree with him. Previously I had, somewhat unfairly, criticized in print a couple of my colleagues in Filipino American Studies for, shall we say, obsessing over the subject. (I'm biting my tongue hard here, and any more dropped hints or blunter comments would be imprudent.) Suffice it to say that I saw this phenomenon as well, but wasn't as puzzled about it as I was before. My friend, in any case, had "gotten over it," meaning the colonial period and the war, and recommended that others should move on and get along with their lives as well.

What I couldn't explain to him at the time was that the political dynamics of Filipinos in the U.S. were very different from those in the Philippines. First of all, the former is a minority, in almost every sense of the word, and with everything that that entails. And for Filipino Americans to seemingly keep rehashing the subject -- why, it was new to many of them, after all, and even if it only served to personally deepen some sort of grievance -- well, there was something there too. (I didn't add, either, that at least someone was remembering it; centennials came and went, but it's never clear that, say, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo actually "got over it" and "moved on" from something and was now able to declare undying friendship with the U.S. government. Selective memory is a wonderful and fearsome thing.)

Just the other day as well I was carrying on an e-mail conversation with another fellow Southeast Asianist who asked why it was necessary for there to be a "center" of "civilization" at all. (He was referring to my entry on Angkor Wat, where I wrote that it served as a reminder that not all "civilization" was centered in the West.) My response to him was that it was important because most American schoolchildren are taught otherwise, i.e., that at heart curricula, from elementary on up, are still very much Eurocentric. And he wrote: "Still?" And I wrote: "Still."

Still, indeed. Yesterday there was a little flurry of articles on the Philippines on my browser's home page (My Way), and Madeline pointed out to me one I had neglected -- a little article, serving as a bit of a primer, if you will, from the Associated Press (!) called "Philippine Facts and Figures." Here's an excerpt from the "history" section:

HISTORY: Spanish colony from 1521 to 1898, when U.S. Navy defeated Spainish [sic] fleet at Manila Bay. Americans crushed Filipino rebels in six-year war. Japan occupied islands in World War II. Independence granted in 1946.

So now you see why we must remember still.

Bayan Muna Statement.

Thought I'd post a couple of excerpts from Bayan Muna's statement regarding the "coup:"

We believe the grievances being aired by the young officers are legitimate and merit immediate investigation. The statement issued by the mutineers disturbingly highlight the deep involvement and culpability of the AFP leadership as well as the Arroyo government in a number of corrupt and devious activities.

Bayan Muna also calls for the creation of a special investigative commission:

This fact-finding body should get to the bottom of the claims of the junior officers that the special operations teams of [Defense] Sec. [Angelo] Reyes and Intelligence chief Gen. Victor Corpuz orchestrated the spate of Davao bombings which have killed dozens of civilians as well as the escape of terrorist-bomber Fathur Al-Ghozi. This further gives credence to suspicions aired by Bayan Muna and other progressive organizations that the militarists in government, led by Reyes, have been responsible for the widespread terror in Mindanao and the rest of the country to justify the need for repressive measures against the people and US military intervention in the country.

Link Roundup.

After a long hiatus, I'm back to discover that:

- Jean Gier is actually "blogging." (I missed the first Nightjar, so I don't know what she wrote there.)

- K. Silem Mohammad wonders whether there are any Slavoj Zizek jeans. Of course there are: the pants worn by the Siegfried-and-Roy twins from The Matrix: Reloaded.

- K. Silem Mohammad is also teaching a Zombie! class -- but with no Lucio Fulci's Zombie? It isn't very good (at all), but there's an infamous gorehound-fave scene in it which should work well with Mulvey -- or Bataille, for that matter. (Plus there's an underwater zombie scene! When was the last time you saw zombies swimming?)

- And Tim Yu's in Chicago now?

- And Happy's married and obviously can't post anymore.

- And a cyberwelcome to some new blogs to the right: Pork* The Whole Hog, Lavender Fields, Texture Notes (see the "Shoes" poem, for instance), Oh Manchester, So Much to Answer For, and The Bloggy, Bloggy Dew.

(And Guided By Voices are playing at Bimbo's in SF on the 20th -- anyone interested?)

Huh?

The Australian ambassador?

More Twists.

This whole new development is getting more and more curious: while the official government statements have floated various rumors -- connections with Estrada, officers disgruntled with low pay -- the BBC reports on the Magdalo group's statement:

In a statement read out on the video, the group accused the government of selling arms and ammunition to Muslim and communist rebels, staging recent deadly bombings to justify more aid from the United States and preparing to declare martial law to stay in power.

Something's going on, all right, as reported by the Philippine Daily Inquirer:

One of the leaders of the group, identified as Navy Lieutenant Senior Grade Antonio Trillanes, earlier called out: "We mean no harm to anyone," adding that "we are putting these (bombs) to defend ourselves."

"They are putting a death warrant on us," he said, adding, "they want to suppress what we know."

...

"This government is pushing us to do this," Trillanes yelled.

(None of this is mentioned on CNN, by the way.)

ABS-CBN has Joey Lina's reaction:

Interior Secretary Jose Lina said the allegations of staged bombings to justify an Arroyo move toward martial law were "black propaganda."

"This is a lie," Lina said on radio. "They are just being used by the politicians who want to seize power."

Here's more of the Magdalo group's statement:

The statement charged the Arroyo administration, through the Department of National Defense headed by Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes, with selling war materiel from the Armed Forces of the Philippines arsenal to rebel groups.

As a result, the statement underscored, Filipino soldiers fighting the rebels are being killed by bullets and weapons from their own arsenal.

The statement also claimed that the explosions that rocked Davao City were masterminded by Secretary Reyes and Brig. Gen. Victor Corpus, commander of the Armed Forces Intelligence Service.

The staged explosions that killed scores of civilians, the group alleged, were carried out as part of the effort to brand the Moro Islamic Liberation Front as terrorists and eventually to secure anti-terrorist funding for the military establishment.

Not Good.

Not good at all.

1990: Matthew Sweet, "I've Been Waiting."

I've always said that the mark of a classic album is how one can't pick a favorite song off of it: one day it's this song; tomorrow, another. Matthew Sweet's Girlfriend is the almost-perfect power pop album of all time (I say "almost perfect" because "Holy War" simply doesn't belong on it).

A lot of folks think the real heroes on this album are the lead guitarists, and it's all-star indeed: Robert Quine, Lloyd Cole, and Richard Lloyd. And it's true -- the guitars soar and swoop like freed, angry birds. But for me it's always been about Matthew Sweet: his reedy, Neil Young-like voice, at times weary from lovelorn longing or resentment, or exulting in a newfound love (though probably with the slight bite of leftover bourbon in the throat).

Sweet would never release an album that even came close to this masterpiece, though some later singles like "Someone to Pull the Trigger" and "Sick of Myself" were just as classic. The "Helter Skelter" dynamics of "Divine Intervention," the crushed-out melodrama of "Winona," the bruised lyrics of "Looking at the Sun" -- it's one pop jewel after another.

I picked "I've Been Waiting" for my list simply because Madeline loves it too. Imagine it: a summer's day, driving in a car, the wind in your hair, the sun in your eyes -- yeah, all those cliches and more -- and Matthew Sweet on the radio. No, I take it back: not "almost-perfect," but perfection itself.

On English.

Here's Bernard Moses, Secretary of Public Instruction in the Philippines during the American colonial period, writing in 1904:

The boy who in his school days has learned the language of a civilized nation, even if he has learned nothing else, has put himself en rapport with civilization. Aside from the practical circumstances of his life, it makes little difference whether he learns English, French, German, or Spanish, but it makes a great deal of difference whether he learns French or Tagalog, English or Bicol. The one makes him a citizen of the world, the other makes him a citizen of a province in the Philippine Islands. If the government were to make the local dialects the media of school instruction, a limited number of the more or less wealthy and influential persons would use the facilities which they can command to learn English for the sake of the additional power or other advantages it would give them in the communities to which they belong, and these advantages or this additional power would tend to perpetuate the prestige and domination of the present oligarchic element in Filipino society.

When I was much younger I got into an argument with a friend, where I defended the use of English as public instruction in schools, claiming that translating textbooks into Tagalog, or any other Filipino language, was simply time-consuming and expensive. I said English, after all -- and here it comes -- enabled Filipinos to be employed overseas, which was the main reason for their being hired.

Moses wrote the above quotation only a little after American schoolteachers were let loose on the islands, and we have the good fortune to knows what happens next; as Renato Constantino famously put it in 1966, "Philippine education was shaped by the overriding objective of preserving and expanding American control."

Moses, however, is also essentially correct. English did pull the rug off underneath many a member of the Spanish-speaking elite, though it clearly did not contribute towards dismantling the oligarchy in any real fashion. He is correct in that the glamour / grammar (I think their etymologies are the same) of English also provides social and, in this case, ultimately, economic capital. But surely this is no excuse to let native languages languish in schools in favor of English; the point here is to provide job opportunities locally (a tall order) rather than use English as a tool to make Filipinos more employable abroad.

One can call Moses prescient, but one can also argue that the present defenders of English -- and usually only for purely capitalist reasons -- are using the same colonialist reasons to fight for this alien tongue.

1983: Spandau Ballet, "True."

More about my list: The great NYFD firefighter and actor Steve Buscemi immortalizes this song in the otherwise forgettable Adam Sandler vehicle The Wedding Singer: he winces, he exhales extra H's, he emotes. Spandau Ballet's lead singer, Tony Hadley, would never have done that; dressed in all his Bryan Ferry finery and sporting his New Romantic do, he stood with the mike pinched in the fingers of his hand... and emoted. "Oh I want the truth to be SAIIIIID [then his voice breaks]. [Pregnant pause.] [And then the Uh-huh-huh-huh-hi comes in again.]

Yes, "True." Performed by a band with one of the most stupid band names imaginable, "True" invaded Philippine airwaves, spawned a silly Spandau Ballet - Duran Duran showdown on DWLS 97.1*, and jumpstarted the dead-end careers of a million amateur singers. (My good friend Dudz Villanueva, who actually could sing, once performed this during some high school party, and had it choreographed so that the lights would go out during the "pregnant pause." The women screamed.)

But darn it, the song still gets to me -- not every time, God no, but only when I'm in a semi-nostalgic mood regarding the worst years of my life (high school). That cheesy sax instrumental break that still haunts my dreams! The harmonizing Kemp brothers! "Always in time / But never in line for dreams!" The sound of my soul indeed.

*I was the "Durannie," primarily because the Taylor brothers could actually play guitar, and Simon LeBon looked like he actually got chicks; my brother was the -- can't remember what they were called. He actually had a Spandau Ballet poster in our room. We also used to annoy each other by replacing syllables with the word "fuck," so he would get really pissed off whenever I said "Spanfuck Ballet." (All he could respond with was a pathetic "Durfuck Durfuck" or something like that.)

Wedding Photos.

Some from my brother Happy's wedding, as promised. (Click on the thumbnails for a bigger view.) Be thankful you're not getting all 700 photographs, which can be downloaded somewhere off my brother's domain.

Without the bride (this was taken before the wedding), from left to right: my sister Joy, my dad Benito Sr., Happy, my mom Lina, me, Madeline, Izzy, and below, my niece Issa. My dad's summer project is to try to Photoshop Clarissa into the picture, between my mom and me.

And from left to right again, things I bet you didn't know:

1. Joy, a T-shirt and jeans kind of gal, is wearing a shawl because she's too embarrassed to show off her back (the dress is backless). Girl, having a 20-inch waist isn't anything to be embarrassed about.

2. My dad's looking a little shellshocked, no doubt due to the state of his bank account (in the Philippines, it's the groom's family that pays).

3. Happy's actually somewhat annoyed here because my folks insisted that he wear a barong with these pearl studs that are just about impossible to fasten on one's own. The last stud broke, and he had to get a cousin to donate an earring to hold the top buttonhole together.

4. The two guys that came over to do my mom's hair gave her a Geraldine Ferraro wave which she instantly disliked ("Mukha yata akong kikay"), and washed out immediately after the guys left.

5. Running through my head was Stitch's robotic alien voice saying, "Ohana means family."

6. I think Madeline looks totally hot here.

7. Izzy has been holding my cell phone for about an hour now, and will continue to hold it the rest of the night. Any attempts to remove it, especially since I really needed it, would be met with much wailing. (The wedding took place right in the middle of her usual naptime.)

8. Issa doesn't like being photographed, so it's a good thing she stood still for this one. (Although there are a number of surreptitious photos of her during the ceremony playing with a communion wafer.)

Clarissa in the car, a minute before her walk down the aisle.

The happy couple.

1973: Marvin Gaye, "Let's Get It On."

This was a bit of a joke: time, in any case, has made this song something of a laughingstock. Audiences don't even laugh anymore when the inept seducer in some comedy puts the song on the stereo to woo his partner into bed. When Jack Black sang it in High Fidelity, "Let's Get It On" was already dead and buried.

So, I'm not sure what it's doing on this list. It certainly moved me, at some point in time -- the horns, the oohs, "We are sensitive people." Gaye will at least always be remembered for his epic What's Going On album and for "Got To Give It Up," which is the song more deserving to be here.

Some Advice.

From Sui Sin Far's "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian," circa 1906:

I also meet some funny people who advise me to "trade" upon my nationality. They tell me that if I wish to succeed in literature in America I should dress in Chinese costume, carry a fan in my hand, wear a pair of scarlet beaded slippers, live in New York, and come of high birth. Instead of making myself familiar with the Chinese-Americans around me, I should discourse on my spirit acquaintance with Chinese ancestors and quote in between the "good mornings" and "How d'ye dos" of editors,

"Confucius, Confucius, how great is Confucius, Before Confucius, there never was Confucius, After Confucius, there never came Confucius," etc., etc., etc.,

or something like that, both illuminating and obscuring, don't you know.

Wake Up.

I usually don't stoop to this level, but I thought I'd reprint some comments from a reader on a post I wrote about the Marcoses:

Ano ba problema mo? just enjoy life and wish that all people do the same thing. tama na yun hate gimiks mo -- pang 70s lang yan, iba na ang takbo ng mundo ngayon. WAKE UP!!!!

Or, in English:

What is your problem? Just enjoy life and wish that all people do the same thing. Enough of your "hate gimmicks" -- that's only for the '70s, the world is already different now. Wake up!!!!

Those of you who have seen my Imelda Marcos page would know that the angriest letters I received were from so-called Marcos loyalists who would tell me to get a life.

The problem, of course, is that the world doesn't seem all that different to many Filipinos; the same grinding poverty and grinning politicians are everywhere to be seen. The same bad deals made with foreign governments, and so on. And while hunting down the Marcoses, and demanding some form of retributive justice, will not solve all of the country's ills, it would, I think, go a long way in moving further. The fact that the people guilty of the most egregious crimes in recent Philippine history are free to flaunt their stolen riches -- well, that really says something.

If anything, my anonymous comment writer (I have your e-mail address, but I'll be polite and won't publish it) should be the one to wake up.

Songs, 1970-2000.

Back when I turned 30, I thought I’d make myself a little gift: a couple of mix CDs with 30 songs: one for each year I was alive, and to make it a little harder, one from each year I was alive. Then I thought I’d play it for the guests at my birthday party.

Here was that list:

1970 – The Jackson Five: ABC
1971 – Van Morrison: Tupelo Honey
1972 – Stevie Wonder: Superstition
1973 – Marvin Gaye: Let’s Get It On
1974 – Bob Marley and The Wailers: No Woman No Cry
1975 – Bruce Springsteen: Thunder Road
1976 – Steely Dan: Kid Charlemagne
1977 – Elvis Costello: (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes
1978 – Earth, Wind And Fire: September
1979 – The Knack: My Sharona
1980 – Talking Heads: Born under Punches
1981 – Squeeze: Tempted
1982 – Roxy Music: More Than This
1983 – Spandau Ballet: True
1984 – The Smiths: Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now
1985 – The Cure: In-Between Days
1986 – New Order: Bizarre Love Triangle
1987 – 10,000 Maniacs: The Painted Desert
1988 – Pixies: Gigantic
1989 – The Bangles: Eternal Flame
1990 – Matthew Sweet: I’ve Been Waiting
1991 – My Bloody Valentine: Soon
1992 – Bettie Serveert: Under the Surface
1993 – The Breeders: Cannonball
1994 – Portishead: Wandering Star
1995 – Bjork: Hyper-Ballad
1996 – Underworld: Born Slippy
1997 – Yo La Tengo: Sugarcube
1998 – Boards Of Canada: Aquarius
1999 – Aimee Mann: Deathly
2000 – Stereolab: Outer Bongolia

The trouble with making lists is the stuff you missed. All those other words and tunes of which you could not get enough, that wormed their way inside your head and made you press the rewind button over and over, or made you laugh and bring you close to tears like the songs listed above – they couldn’t fit on the CD. Like the Eraserheads’s “Alapaap,” Liz Phair’s “Stratford-on-Guy,” Neil Young’s “Powderfinger,” Cyndi Lauper’s “Time after Time,” the Joe Boxers’ “Just Got Lucky,” Galaxie 500’s “Fourth of July,” Current 93’s “Frolicking,” Prince’s “Kiss,” The Five Stairsteps’ “Ooh Child,” Pink Floyd's "Fearless" (or "Astronomy Domine," or "One of These Days"), Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good,” Tears For Fears’s “Head over Heels,” The Clash’s “The Guns of Brixton,” The Incredible String Band’s “A Cellular Song,” Everything But The Girl’s “Get Me,” Alex Chilton’s cover of “Let Me Get Close To You,” Modern English’s “Melt with You,” Spiral Starecase’s “More Today than Yesterday,” Dub Narcotic Sound System’s “Ship to Shore,” Ray-An Fuentes and Tillie Moreno’s “Umagang Kay Ganda,” The Cardigans’s “Daddy’s Car,” Bryan Adams’s “Heaven,” The Fall’s “No Bulbs,” Anita Baker’s “Been So Long,” Tom Waits’s “The Heart of Saturday Night” (or “Temptation”, or “Jockey Full of Bourbon”), Oasis’s “Wonderwall,” Dianne Reeves’s “Better Days,” American Music Club’s “Why Won’t You Stay,” The Police’s “Voices inside My Head,” Seona Dancing’s “More to Lose,” David Bowie’s “Five Years,” NRBQ’s “What Can I Say,” Yes’s “Heart of the Sunrise,” Fotheringay’s “The Sea,” Yoko Ono’s “Listen, The Snow Is Falling,” Superchunk’s “The First Part,” Sarah McLachlan’s “Elsewhere,” De La Soul’s “Eye Know,” Apo Hiking Society’s “Mahirap Magmahal Nang Syota Nang Iba,” Rickie Lee Jones’s “The Horses” (or her version of “My One and Only Love”), Dinosaur Jr.’s “Get Me,” The Eagles’s “I Can’t Tell You Why,” PJ Harvey’s “To Bring You My Love,” Richard Dworsky’s “A Morning with the Roses,” Katrina and The Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine,” Tuck and Patti’s cover of “Like a Lover,” The Chemical Brothers’s “Chemical Beats,” Prefab Sprout’s “Cars and Girls,” Luna’s “Slide,” Aphex Twin’s “3,” Jane Monheit’s version of “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android,” Paul Simon’s “Hearts and Bones,” the Trees’ “The Garden of Jane Delawney,” U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” (or “Bad,” or “New Year’s Day,” or “Sunday Bloody Sunday”), Cowboy Junkies’s “Song for Elvis,” Roxy Music’s “More Than This,” Cassandra Wilson’s cover of “Harvest Moon,” Fiction Factory’s “Feels Like Heaven,” The Brand New Heavies’s “Brother Sister,” Led Zeppelin’s “Since I’ve Been Loving You” (or “When the Levee Breaks”), John Cale’s “Paris 1914,” Orchestral Maneouvres In The Dark’s “If You Leave,” the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine,” or The Magnetic Fields’ “100,000 Fireflies.”*

And because this was a party, certain genres of music simply wouldn’t work. The music couldn’t be too “noisy” or “experimental;” thus, no John Zorn, no Cryptopsy, no Coil, no Merzbow, no Swans, no Ghost. No Bach or Shostakovich or Feldman.

The starting point of 1970 imposes some rather strict limitations**: no early ska, no Cole Porter-era tunes. Dusty Springfield’s “No Easy Way Down,” Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” the Supremes’ “Reflections,” Simon and Garfunkel’s “For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her,” The Velvet Underground’s “Stephanie Says,” Billie Holiday’s “I Thought About You,” The Troggs’s “A Girl Like You,” Smokey Robinson and The Miracles’s “Tears of a Clown,” or Nat King Cole’s “Red Sails in the Sunset” couldn’t be included. No Miles, Sinatra, Coltrane, the Rolling Stones, Dylan, Mingus, Ella Fitzgerald, Louie Prima, James Brown or Bill Evans when they really really counted.*** And God, no Beatles.

I think it’s time to burn some new mix CDs.

*As much as I would have loved to stuff my list with obscure funk or some underground punk or something, I can’t. My tastes, ultimately, are fairly indie-mainstream (and sometimes unapologetically embarrassing – I don’t apologize for “Eternal Flame”): mostly Matador circa 1995 or so. And all I know of hiphop is only really book knowledge, which is even more embarrassing. My forced immersion into Public Enemy and the Wu-Tang Clan didn’t work.

Somewhat frightening to me is the idea that there seems to be no Filipinos on the list, with the exception of Joey Santiago from the Pixies! Not sure what that means. (Kim Deal, by the way, is the only person that appears twice – not sure what that means either.)

**I also toyed with the idea of limiting the songs to what I was actually listening to during that year, but that would have been extremely embarrassing and/or unlistenable: horrible pop-jazz in the mid-‘80s, dopey disco in the late ‘70s, “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” in the early ‘70s. Plus my memory just isn’t that good: what were you listening to in first grade? (I’m fairly positive it was “Rubber Duckie,” then at some point I moved on to the theme from “Voltes V,” and then, much later, when I became really conscious of music on the radio, “My Sharona,” “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” and “Another One Bites The Dust.” I was a real late bloomer – to put this all into perspective, the first full-length album I ever bought was The Police’s Synchronicity.)

***Okay, that’s not completely true. “Brownsville Girl” from Dylan’s Knocked Out Loaded is fantastic. So is “Beast of Burden” (was that from Some Girls?). And I have a soft spot for some of Sinatra’s disastrous forays into ‘70s singer-songwriter territory, with his atrocious covers of “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and “Mrs. Robinson.” And yeah, Interstellar Space is great, and so are parts of Get Up With It. And I think “The Payback” was from 1972. Have I listed all the exceptions yet?

Scenes from Sangandaan.

1. The Sangandaan conference was just about one of the best conferences I've ever attended. Really. Not just because of the quality of the panels -- some panels were fairly uneven, most of them descriptive rather than deeply analytical, but the good papers happened to be very good -- but because of the overall coherence of the theme and the panels (and plenary sessions), the coordination of the entire festival, and the networking (it's great being with fellow Filipino academics again). (All this may sound like a backhanded compliment to the organizers, but it isn't -- I really did indeed find the conference quite satisfying. And this doesn't even include all the cultural events and exhibits!)

2. There were somewhat superfluous wrap-up "discipline" sessions towards the end discussing the adoption of resolutions, but they proved to be important because it impressed upon the audience the need to address the Manila-centeredness of the whole affair. (I think there were three presenters from Mindanao all told, and one attendee from UP Los Banos!) Being at the conference, in any case, reminded me of the time I was taking a couple of MA-level comp lit classes in Diliman and being acutely aware of my "promdi" origins; I was from UP Los Banos, and I was still all wide-eyed about being in the big city and marveling at all the Diliman students speaking English. (My fellow students in those two classes are all big shots now, too: Mila Laurel, Wendell Capili, Rofel Brion.)

I attended the literature session -- primarily because the lit panels, I think, were the best of the lot, even though I was on a "visual arts" panel -- and it was amusing to note that we had the least practical resolutions, because we got rightly bogged down on a discussion of "nation."

3. Each dinner -- hosted separately by different universities -- kept upping each other in terms of performances. Guitar and saxophone quartets from UP played at the first night; by the last night, the UP Madrigal Singers (beating out the previous glee clubs from La Salle and Ateneo the previous nights) were already performing. (They also brought out what sounded like their most technically difficult arsenal of songs.)

The DLSU dinner was the swankiest of all (though the food all four nights was uniformly superb): it was held at the La Salle Greenhills gym -- white flowers covering the scoreboard and on the tables, white tablecloth, jazz, airconditioner blasting away, candlelight, and two lechons. (And I dug the "No Parents, Yayas, Etc. Allowed Until 30 Minutes Before Class Dismissal" signs in the waiting shed.)

4. It would have been really, really nice if the hard work done by Nerissa, Leny, Penelope, Lucy, Theo, Luigi, Evelie (and Vince and Dawn), among others -- preparing for the ill-fated Kasarinlan conference, massaging the funding proposals (which miracle-workers Helen and Nic originally wrote), selecting our (also ill-fated) keynote speaker -- was also acknowledged somewhere. But I guess not being able to deliver just doesn't cut it. After much work, we still came out almost empty-handed, despite our approaching private corporations, non-profit organizations, and funding institutions. I can't remember how many lunches Helen and Vince went to, trying to court potential donors. If it weren't for the Filipino American National Historical Society East Bay chapter's gallant eleventh-hour save, many Stateside people would have been unable to go (and there were still people and activities that couldn't be funded).

So I guess I was a tad annoyed when one of the FANHS folks chided the academics at the final plenary: "What's all your education for if you can't raise any money?" He was right, of course, but I didn't feel like having to defend myself by reciting our litany of excuses -- the state of post-9/11 philanthropy, War On Iraq jitters, the SARS scare, the recession, the difficulty of securing US money to spend outside of the US. In any case, they had the moral high ground, as it were: they personally cracked open their checkbooks, for which I'm grateful; I didn't. (But it would have been nice if Nic mentioned FANHS in the closing address as well!) Rant over.

5. Name-dropping time! Some conference highlights: Rey Ileto's close reading of a Filipino-American War awit; Resil Mojares's epic sweep of a plenary talk (the man walks on water) on Filipinismo and how many national symbols were assembled and circulated during the American colonial period; Sarita See (one of the folks on our wishlist for Kasarinlan) on Filipino American postcolonial aesthetics; the Writing Against / About / For America panel with Jimmy Abad, Jing Hidalgo and Butch Dalisay; Charlie Veric on Villa's different receptions in the U.S. and in the Philippines (Eileen, you were cited all over that one); Kim Alidio (yet another Kasarinlan wishlister) on American children's books; Jody and Marivi Blanco's baby daughter Sophia (okay, their papers were good too!); Neil Garcia revisiting Villa, Montano and Perez through a postcolonial lens (he had written about them previously in Philippine Gay Culture from a queer perspective); Tatsushi Narita on T.S. Eliot at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair (one of about five papers on the expo, including mine). (And it was great to run into my friend Jun Aguilar, who is now teaching at Ateneo, and also Oca Campomanes, and Shirley Lua, and Dean Alegado, and Marjorie Evasco, and Theo Gonzalves, and Laura Samson, and Preachy Legasto...)

6. Probably the most touching thing during the conference was the sight of Liz Megino and Carolina San Juan, among others, filming everything -- and I mean everything -- for Helen Toribio. Sangandaan, as some of you readers might know, is partly Helen's brainchild; her and her partner Abe Ignacio's superb "Colored: Black and White" show was the germ for the conference, and Helen (also SFSU and CCSF professor) was the indefatigable conference organizer in the US. Unfortunately, Helen couldn't make it because she recently fell seriously ill, and so her absence was very much felt.

7. Cell Phone Blues! During Resil Mojares's talk, someone's cell phone kept beeping right behind me -- repeatedly, all throughout the talk, with total disregard of the audience members. Frustrated, I quickly turned around to shoot him a dirty look -- and discovered to my horror that it was none other than UP President Dodong Nemenzo, fumbling with his cell phone. Embarrassed, I slunk back in my seat. (My guess is that he didn't know how to turn it off, or configure the mute settings -- although at the dinner the night before, Nemenzo was happily puffing away at a cigarette despite all the No Smoking signs in the airconditioned auditorium.)

At another session, Resil Mojares, who was sitting next to me, was speaking when a cell phone started ringing. It took him about half a minute to discover that it was his own cell phone that was ringing, but after similarly fumbling with the cell phone, he gave up and gave it to me to turn off.)

8. Lito Cortes Watch! Butch Dalisay had a great story to tell about Lito Cortes and how he applied for (and won) his Wallace Stegner fellowship at Stanford. Similarly, Danton Remoto, who I met in front of the men's bathroom -- he would tell others later that we "met in the bathroom," which wasn't entirely true =) -- had something funny to say about Lito as well, but I honestly can't repeat it here dahil ayokong gumawa nang iskandalo. (Nerissa, if you're reading this, contact me; matutuwa ka.)

9. Vangie Buell's plenary address was excellent: a wide-ranging, personal history of Filipinos in the United States, complete with her own photographs. I suspect that not many people had heard the basic narrative of Filipino American history before, so this was mostly new to the listeners. By the end of the talk, Buell was in tears, and so were some members of the audience. She was finally greeted with what seemed like half a minute of applause. (Earlier at breakfast she was talking about the great treatment she would receive from strangers -- doors being opened, being helped up and down stairs -- because of her gray hair. I think that added to her presentation as well: the voice of wisdom and experience.)

My Computer Is Dead.

Came home to a shorted-out power supply and two fried hard disks. Thank goodness I brought my dissertation and bibliographic notes with me on a CD, but everything else -- class lectures, years of e-mail messages, my master's thesis, albums of mp3s, scanned photographs, research notes, URLs, people's contact information, census documents, passwords, a CD database -- is all gone. (Not to mention the fact that I have to reinstall dozens of programs.)

Flowers, get-well cards, etc. will be graciously accepted in the comments section below.

Crop Circles in the Bay Area.

Here's a letter from a student of mine:

I would like to share my crop circle experience with you. Recently on July 1 or 2, mysterious crop circles appeared in a wheat field in Rockville, California, a small agricultural town near Fairfield which is about 45 miles from San Francisco off of Interstate 80 going north fron San Francisco. On July 4, my wife, three of my sisters, a nephew, grandson, and I went on a family outing to Sacramento with other relatives and friends. On the way back to San Francisco we stopped at the crop circles. I am notorious for getting lost, however on this occasion we arrived at the destination without getting lost once. I must admit that there was some apprehension about encountering no trespassing signs, fences, gates with huge locks or other obstacles. Nothing of the sort appeared, the circles were in a wheat field without a fence directly across the highway from an active church and an old church building that is being used as Japanese social club. Both of these facilities had huge parking lots directly across the highway from the wheat field. we parked and went into the wheat field. I proceeded to the largest circle and sat down in the center to pray and meditate. Immediately, I felt a surge of positive energy that was overwhelming. Actually, I had a slight toothache that had been causing me minor discomfort all day. It instantly disappeared. I had told everyone in my car that I would meditate for about five or ten minutes. ...my wife, said that I was there meditating for 15 or 20 minutes. anyway, it was a very blissful, serene, and spiritual experience. Once I stopped meditating, we formed a prayer circle in the center of the circle and prayed. One of my sisters pointed out that a perfect circle had appeared in the sky of swirling clouds directly overhead. Once we completed the prayers the circle in the sky disappeared. On leaving I decided to take some of the wheat that was not in the circle with me. It was very difficult to pull up, therefore, I started to get wheat out of the circle. It was disconnected and very easy to pick up. The experience was very rewarding in the sense that I can still feel the positive energy that is in part motivating me to write and share. There is a lot of information on the Internet about crop circles plus many beautiful pictures. If you are near the circles I suggest you stop by and investigate.

More articles here, plus a Reuters photo; Google has more.

"Not in My Hometown."

I really loved this essay by Cynthia Patag (as posted on the Flips list, though the essay's source would have been nice), in the light of one of my recent posts about the Marcoses:

The first jolt came when I went to the West Visayas State University... The dean of education... mentioned casually that their guest speaker for this year's graduation rites was Congresswoman Imee Marcos.

And so she talks further with the dean:

"As Christians, we must learn to forgive," the dean reminded me.

I had to take a deep breath. "The Marcos family is not asking for forgiveness!" I told her.

During a visit to General Santos City, Imee Marcos, who many believe is seeking a senatorial post in 2004, said, "We are willing to apologize provided we know what it is we are supposed to say sorry for."

Reminds me an awful lot of the same excuses that, say, my mom would make -- Christian forgiveness, sins of the fathers, and so on.

As for me, I simply refuse to believe that Filipinos are stupid. (Or are they too forgiving?) Filipinos are not stupid. But I can say that over and over until it loses meaning and the words are pulled from each other and all semantics disintegrate.

Scenes from Los Banos, Part 8.

1. Went to Tagaytay yesterday, about a couple of hours from Los Banos. Tagaytay City, which has been a booming resort town for a while now, is up on a ridge of mountains overlooking Taal Lake (the latter with an island in the middle and the still-active Taal Volcano on it). The view is lovely. We went to visit my aunt's summer home in some gated subdivision called Royale Tagaytay Estates (reminds of "Royale with cheese"). I was a little puzzled by the street names (Fillmore, Grant, Washington, Kennedy, Roosevelt) until I realized they were American presidents. My aunt had the great misfortune to actually live on Nixon Street. Probably only in the Philippines could you find a street named after Tricky Dick. Does Yorba Linda even have a street named after him?

2. Zoning laws don't apply: ate an excellent Filipino lunch (more of the same grilled fare) at Dencio's Bar and Grill. Right next to it was an actual Starbucks, with a large roofed terrace overlooking the lake and volcano, making it possibly one of the few Starbucks cafes in the world with a picturesque view. (Does the McDonald's next to the Spanish Steps in Rome count?) Probably coming up next: a Banawe Rice Terraces Starbucks.

3. The other day I was watching the news: President Macapagal-Arroyo was doing one of her surprise visits again (remember when she publicly berated the now-disgraced LTO Commissioner?), and this time she dropped in on a police station in Cubao. The head honcho wasn't there; he had gone to a conference in the U.S. and was already two weeks late. But what got the President's goat was a pile of porn VCDs on the boss's desk, next to a TV and VCD player:

[paraphrased dialogue, translated from Tagalog]

President: What are these?
Second-in-command [flustered]: Er, we confiscated those.
President [with look of distaste]: I think you were watching this.
[Second-in-command mumbles something.]

The Philippine Daily Inquirer picked up the story as well, with further comments from the President on moral responsibility, but unfortunately the news item was not accompanied by the image I saw on TV (which just about made me bust a gut): the President of the Philippines holding up a VCD clearly entitled "ANAL QUEEN." (My friend Jane later sent me an article confirming it.)

4. I won't be writing anything for a little while -- I'm off for the week-long Sangandaan conference next week, and then we have to pack for our loooong flight to San Francisco the following day. Back to our dog Shelby and our home on Ocean Beach...

Everyone Else Is Doing It, So...

Which X-Men character are you most like?
brought to you by Quizilla

You are Professor X!

You are a very effective teacher, and you are very committed to those who learn from you. You put your all into everything you do, to some extent because you fear failure more than anything else. You are always seeking self-improvement, even in areas where there is nothing you can do to improve.

Shucks. I was hoping to be Wolverine.

More Stuff to Get Angry About.

First of all, one of my new modern-day heroes, Stephen Eagle Funk, is being charged with desertion (desertion!) and a possible two-year sentence -- even though, as he writes, he returned to his unit after applying to be discharged from the army as a conscientious objector:

Under media attention, the military initially claimed my application for discharge would be handled quickly and fairly, and that I would likely receive only non-judicial punishment for my unauthorized absence. Now that public scrutiny has died down the military says that I deserve to be convicted. I feel I am being punished simply for practicing my First Amendment rights, and they are seeking an unfit punishment to dissuade others from becoming conscientious objectors.

BuzzFlash has a couple of excellent commentaries, one of which is on Condoleeza Rice pleading innocent about the CIA's warnings regarding the forgery of documents alleging Iraq's uranium purchases:

It's really quite impossible for the White House not to have known that the information was, at best, unreliable, and almost certainly forged. Just look at Condoleezza's public statement: "Maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, " Rice said on NBC's "Meet the Press...", "but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery."

It's one thing to engage in disinformation. It's quite another thing, to lie stupidly. Are we to suppose that the only method of communication between the CIA and the National Security Director boils down to "advisories" e-mailed back and forth, which they may or may not get? Do they seriously expect us to believe that this is how the White House gets its security information? The White House bases a war on a few pieces of misinformation, and they don't even sit down with the intelligence community, and discuss how accurate, or reliable, or verifiable their information is? They don't even check it out? Think about it! This is information that the President of the United States of America is announcing to the entire world as provocation for war!

And then more outrage from that Son of a Bush, also via BuzzFlash (the title of the Reuters article is "'Bring Them On,' Bush Says to Iraq Attacks"):

President Bush on Wednesday [July 2] challenged militants who have been killing and injuring U.S. forces in Iraq, saying "bring them on" because American forces were tough enough to deal with their attacks. "There are some who feel like that conditions are such that they can attack us there," Bush told reporters at the White House. "My answer is bring them on. We have the force necessary to deal with the situation."

Well, here you go, Mr. President. Enjoy your Fourth of July.

US soldier shot dead in Iraq

One United States soldier serving in Iraq has been killed and many others wounded in separate attacks, the US military says.

One serviceman from the First Armoured Division was shot dead in Baghdad on Thursday night [July 3], when his Bradley vehicle came under sniper fire.

In a second attack, at least 19 soldiers were hurt when mortar rounds were fired at a US military base north of Baghdad.

At least 26 American soldiers have died in combat since US President George W Bush declared the Iraq war over on 1 May.

Accounting Terms.

Slightly edited and passed on from my friend Jane:

In spite of the overwhelming pressure from members of Congress, Philippine President Gloria Arroyo vetoed a bill to use Filipino language as a medium in Accounting and other financial transactions. Why? Below are some of the accounting terms that, when translated to the national language, seemed quite inappropriate.

Asset - Ari
Fixed asset - Nakatirik na ari
Liquid asset - Basang ari
Solid asset - Matigas na ari
Owned asset - Sariling pag-aari
Other asset - Ari ng iba
Miscellaneous asset - Iba-ibang klaseng ari
Asset write off - Pinutol na pag-aari
Depreciation of asset - Laspag na pag-aari
Fully depreciated asset - Laspag na laspag na pag-aari
Earning asset - Tumutubong pag-aari
Working asset - Ganado pa ang ari
Non-earning asset - Baldado na ang ari
Erroneous entry - Mali ang pagkapasok
Double entry - Dalawang beses ipinasok
Mutiple entry - Labas pasok nang labas pasok
Correcting entry - Itinama ang pagpasok
Reversing entry - Baligtad ang pagkakapasok
Dead asset - Patay na ang ari
Secretary - Secret na ari
Liability - Malayang ari (kaya naging problema)
Liquidity - Laman ng ari
Solvency - Clean-up ng ari

To Sleep, to Write.

Surfing at less than 33.6kbps is -- well, not really surfing. And so it feels a little odd as a blogger not really being able to read anyone else's blog, at least until I return to San Francisco. I don't what Tim Yu or MacDiva or any of these folks (I'm only filling in the urls from memory) are up to. (It doesn't help that Blogger templates make extensive use of tables which have to be loaded in their entirety for the page to display.)

For instance, I completely missed out on the whole WinePoetics - CorpsePoetics name change -- what was that all about? (I'll have to look through the archives.) An Exquisite Corpse reference, perhaps? Lilacs from the cold dead ground?

The image that came to me, in any case, was not of death, but of sleep, though they're close enough. As I've written before, I see words just before I go to sleep (I literally see them on a printed page), in that hazy period between oblivion and wakefulness -- as if the unconscious prematurely takes over and starts filtering the dream-material before I'm actually asleep.

Hypnagogia, I think it's called. Is that right? (Is hypnagogy, then, the act of receiving the words, as a pupil?) I seem to remember the music lore about either Richard D. James or Kevin Shields, who would keep awake for days at a time and then start composing.

Like last night:

The stammer of orchids.
The language of frost.
A container of bees.

Who knows what it means? I don't. But I had to get up, grab pen and paper, and scrawl the words in the dark.

Then, a caption underneath a photograph of water:

The Ganges does not see you.

Vacation from Our Vacation, Part 1.

1. The food in Bangkok is simply fantastic, collectively up there with my top five culinary experiences. Khun Tawee and Khun Kalaya (and their daughter Awika) took us to a restaurant (translated as "Dining Car," with a train motif) close to their condo (and the railway station), and I had the best meal I had in Bangkok, which is saying a whole lot. (The food in Cambodia was more of the same, except a little less spicy -- because they were tourist restaurants, maybe?)

2. There's so much already written about Angkor that I feel obligated to bring out the weary clichés about ancient grandeur and so on, but I think I'll let some pictures -- haven't scanned them yet, but I will when I get back -- speak for themselves. Suffice it to say that the argument a group of scholars have been proposing - that Asia was very much the civilized center of the world for an awfully long time (sorry, I don't have my student-of-history hat on, just my blogger hat) is irrefutable in the face of something like Angkor. When one considers that much of what we were seeing was over a thousand years old, one realizes how misplaced (or rather, displaced) Eurocentrism is. (My little tourist recommendation: see Ayutthaya in Thailand before Angkor, otherwise it becomes anticlimactic -- Ayutthaya is certainly amazing as well, but the whole Angkor complex is simply out of this world. Unforgettable.)

3. There are hotels and guesthouses all over Siem Reap. There are also literally 2-3 internet cafes per block -- mostly 56kbps dialup, but for the relatively cheap price of $1 per half hour (as compared to 150 baht at our hotel in Bangkok). Yes, that's right: one U.S. dollar, which seems to be the principal currency among tourists here. Remarque-moto (not sure if I spelled that right) rides are about a buck -- they're like the Bangkok tuk-tuks, which only the farang seem to ride) -- and so are bottles of water. Our hotel, the Angkor Saphir Hotel, is a great deal for $20 or so a night (this includes breakfast too). (The moaning toilet, the big gecko over our door, and the hilarious sight of a cockroach fly up some American tourist's shorts were all free of charge.)

4. Unwittingly (much to our welcome surprise) our already affordable package tour also included a full two days with an extremely knowledgeable tour guide named Borin, who took us all over the temples, the use of an air-conditioned car, lunch and dinner. (I don't like guided tours -- I keep thinking of coach buses full of Korean tourists, of which there were a lot here -- but this was literally just me and Madeline and Borin with a very flexible schedule. We would start at 7:30, stop for a lunch break, go back to the hotel for a respite from the noonday heat, visit more temples, have dinner, and be home before the regular monsoon rains began in the early evening.) Borin could rattle off lengths and heights and numbers of Buddha statues without straining to remember them.

5. Everytime you come out one of the temples a flock of girls walk over to you as well. "Two for one dollar!" "Cold drinks, madam!" "When you come back buy from me, ok?" "Postcards, sir, one dollar!" they cry. It's all a little unnerving, especially the children singing and dancing for money in the parking lot.

6. A couple of the T-shirts they're selling, in addition to all the Angkor Wat / Bayon / Banteay Srei / Tiger Beer T-shirts, are reproductions of the landmine warning signs, with illustrations of different kinds of military ordnance and what to do if you step on one. (I actually did not see a single sign, because most of Siem Reap has already been de-mined. You are still instructed, however, not to venture off marked trails to pee.) This I find quite tasteless, as there are limbless and blind people wherever you look -- a product of both the Khmer Rouge's twisted logic regarding winning the hearts and minds of the people, and the United States's merciless carpet-bombing of a country with whom they were not at war. (More tonnage was dropped on Cambodia, I believe -- I don't have my books with me -- than the amount dropped on Hiroshima during World War II.)

7. Thai massage (I've never had it before, and I'm not a big massage fan), at the Wat Po School of Massage, is excellent.