Autumn's Velvet Underground

This is officially subjectively the first day of autumn at my place, and I decided today that autumn will be my friend. I shall play with it, make fun of it, fool around with it and remember it dearly once it's dead and gone.
Only then shall I tune in to Winter Song.
This year, autumn will be my Fairest of the seasons and I shall be Beginning to see the light, ha!
After all, Who loves the sun? - definitely, not just anyone...
Yes, Somewhere there's a Feather and I shall be there to catch it!

Thank you Diana for that picture.

Mindanao Revisited

Once again I spend a few days in central Mindanao. While a day in Pikit area, two days in Cotabato city and a brief stint to Midsayap gave me impressions, it was certainly not enough to immerse in a community and really deeply understand the impact of the current conflict. So I shall stick to a few impressions. In Cotabato I felt detached in a complex way, much the more since I spend a good chunk of time in the guesthouse in order not to be a liability on my companion’s short-notice trips to a hotspot area in Datu Piang.
Cotabato once again struck me as a sad town. While Davao, Kidapawan or even Midsayap are buzzing and booming with traffic and commerce and forever changing their faces, Cotabato still seems poor and neglected with a looming shadow. There are frequent bombings, assassinations of local politicians and the crime level is high. At one crossing in the town center there are about six or so pawnshops. Each time I come to Cotabato, friends and collegues tell me horror stories – “this is the café where a local councillor was shot the other day, I was just driving past”, “just 30 meters from my home a bomb went off last year, body-parts splashed up to the wall of my house”, “this hole is the remnant of yet another bombing of the bus station just a few months ago”, etc.
Of course, these superficial impressions are influenced by me being Caucasian, all the inner city travel advisory from my Filipino companions and the overall mystery of crime and punishment that overcasts conversations when you say you intent to travel to Cotabato. Also, the city hardly has any taxis – there are too many hold-ups and too few people are willing to pay the extra Peso for a cab, I was told. My mobility, in turn, was limited and I could not help feeling like a spoiled child waiting for people to pick me up.
I was touched by this lush and abundantly overgrowing garden around a small fishpond at my guesthouse – long ago somebody had created this little idyllic Eden there and had even placed clay figures into the scenery: In the middle of the pond stood a child wearing a T-shirt with “City Boy” written on and he was happily waiving its clay arms. To his left sat a large white swan, which in his glorious past must have even been able to spout water. I particularly liked four musicians joyfully playing from within an overgrowing bush and I could not help thinking of the Beatles. Above it all and in the back stood a large virgin Mary. I was really puzzled by this garden and I wondered what it said about its maker – other than that he/she was probably Christian – was this intended as an antidote to the city, like a treatment to the trauma of harsh everyday realities or was it merely an expression of somebody’s love to a city? The latter, somehow, seemed to me too naïve to be true. Maybe it shouldn't.
But what am I writing here… To be honest, I do not want to write about the conflict today, although I had some interesting conversations and I did get a fair grasp of the current situation. But I do not want to jam this place with half-baked political analyses. It’s meant for impressions...
Just a few snippets from my beloved Pikit – there are still about 400 families evacuating within the municipality, waiting in makeshift huts for the calamities in their villages to settle or too scared to go back just yet. There are many more in other places in Maguindadao and Lanao, all in all currently around 34,000 families. Rumours of war are frequently cropping up and there is a lot of uncertainty. From Pikit, we drove some way into Liguasan marsh and I was torn between the beauty of the area and the hardship of its people. An Al Jazeera TV crew was interviewing an old man in his preliminary shelter along the side of the dirt road: How many times in his life he had had to evacuate, they asked him. He could not remember. Another man told me they had not received any food supplies since the beginning of Ramadan and he was starting to get worried. Yet another one burst out in a frustrated rant against conflict, poverty and the government when I greeted him. Later on we drove past a large crowd of pupils on their way home from school and our companion said “here comes the next generation of MILF mujahideens.” I was wondering what else I would have become if I had grown up in this beautiful, fought over place.

Have You Ever Seen The Rain?

Yesterday it rained like I'd never seen before. A thick curtain of wet strings fell from the sky and within minutes drains turned into creeks and streets into rivers. The two seconds it took me to jump out of the taxi under the porch were enough to make me wet. Just how much water can fit into a cloud, I was wondering, and this one might have just been overambitious and was now coming down with a crash. I cannot imagine what Manila itself might have looked like - or the slums alongside the river Pasig.
For us up in Quezon City, however, it was mostly fun - the kids in the neighbourhood used the opportunity to swim on the street and I became a laughing stock when I tried to cross the street with my flip-flops on and they got carried away, me hurriedly hobbling after them. Also, I was happy that somebody had warned me to watch out for open manholes: Apparently they are one of the great dangers during rains like that.

Who is Kathy?

There was always something I loved about America by Simon and Garfunkel. The music is gorgeous and the lyrics really get to me. It is basically about a bus journey through America with Paul’s former girlfriend Kathy. It’s so full of friendship, love, longing and the search for some place where all these were actually possible, where one could truly be at home. It is about personal language between lovers and friends as well as unbridgeable distance – the sweet pain of being in love and alone, because there are places within ourselves which remain inaccessible however much we share.
I love it when songs become real. It happened to me before with the lyrics of Famous Blue Raincoat by Leonard Cohen – he describes the same story in his book The Favorite Game, so when I heard the song it really struck me – “yes”, I thought, “this must have really happened.”
I just accidentally found out that also Kathy’s Song is originally by Paul Simon. I had heard some cover version before, but now it makes so much more sense. Kathy just became real for me and the bus journey must have actually happened. Apparently Kathy is also referred to in Homeward Bound. Hence three of the best S&G songs are about the same girl! So what’s the real story here?
This is what the internet comes up with:
Kathleen Mary (Kathy) Chitty and Paul Simon met at the very first coffeehouse Paul played at when he arrived in England in 1964. She was three years younger than him. Kathy apparently rarely spoke and Paul referred to her as his “friendly haiku”.
They broke up in 1965, when The Sound of Silence became a big hit. Some say that Kathy wanted no part of the success and fame that awaited Paul. How painful the breakup was? I don't know, but in May 1991, when Paul was touring England, he received a letter from Kathy, much to his delight. Kathy was married with three children and living in a remote village in the Welsh mountains, working part-time at a technical college. Despite the great interest of the British tabloids, she did not talk to the press…

Hotel Paradis

Manila is large, loud, smelly and hot. There’s just so much life packed and crammed into this place, you feel like its fermenting, constantly brewing futures, fortunes and fate. Its population is young, hence active and constantly communicating, be it in terms of career, pastime or survival. There is so much life here, that it does not let itself be digitally managed as, say, in London, Frankfurt or Paris. Urban management here seems mostly manual – I watched a traffic police officer yesterday who was physically struggling with the waves and waves of cars, jeepneys, tricycles and people breaking into a crossing – despite working traffic lights. I recently spend a lot of time on public transport and I cannot stop looking at people. I try to imagine their lives, or at least something about them. What a snag that I don’t speak tagalog! On the other hand this allows me to listen to conversations and contextualise, like I’m dubbing brief sketches I make up of people.
If you take the MRT from Cubao to Manila, you can change train lines between Recto and D. Jose stations. These two stations are connected by a totally fenced in skyway through an urban slum area. It feels like a zoo, like a catwalk, like a prison and I had a strange feeling of segregation, like one gets by looking through fortified glass barriers at international airports – you can see the flights to Atlanta, Tokio or Sydney, but you cannot take them.
This was when I saw that sign – “Hotel Paradis – Sound proof wall!!”. Obviously one urban slum dweller had picked it up from somewhere and was now making a point to all those hurriedly passing upon business or pleasure through the skyway. Or at least so I'd like to think. Maybe he is just getting paid by the said hotel...

Six Feet Under

Everybody dies and everybody lives
With their struggles and their pleas
Our crystal sorrow summer afternoon
Teaches a child swim attune
The powerful calm of life sways
From in between
And not a rock and a hard place

Musical Life Cookery

When life did not feel right Martha started playing a game she called “musical life cookery”. It was an amazing, imaginative game where she could just about detach from her own life and let lyrics, sounds and all those fictional and non-fictional characters of popular music mingle and meet. That usually made her happy.
Martha liked weird, funny, poignant and occasionally touching connections switching and mixing issues, people, ideas and personalities between songs. Making up a musical movie in her mind allowed her to live other lives for a while until their experiences brought her back home.

One rainy Saturday night, Martha made Frank Zappa and Beth Gibbons accidentally bump into each other in an old funky jazz bar in Louisiana. Frank was just in the middle of a whacky Nixon impression, when Beth nearly ran him over.
"Blimey!", Beth said, not instantly noticing that very strange and weird change that happend as she spilled her drink amidst Frank's attentive audience - Frank and her had mixed personalities: Frank suddenly was Beth, or rather a Beth-like Frank, still retaining some aspects of his but with some of Beth’s personality traits - and vice versa. Frank felt curious. Not only had he never been to Portishead before, but he had also never felt that particular kind of serenity. Strangely inspired he grabbed a guitar and sang

“And the right and the wrong and insane
And the answers they cannot explain
Pulsate from my soul through my brain
in a spanish guitar“ (For a Spanish Guitar by the Byrds)

Beth, in the meantime, had gotten herself a glass of white port with lemon juice and was chatting up the band disrupted by Frank’s singing. When Frank had finished, Beth smiled and cracked a joke about the American guitar she had grabbed. Together with the band she played Egyptian Reggae by Jonathan Richman and even Frank joined in the dancing...

Martha was happy with the world where Frank Zappa and Beth Gibbons would become friends and people were happy with each other’s similarities and differences. Jacques Brel was sitting next to her on the sofa, gently stroking her hair and kissing her forehead. Martha took a sip of her tea. Outside, the rain was pouring down and her good friend Tanita Tikaram waived at her from under a large black umbrella. Distant music trickeled into her room -

“On a midnight voyage,
One that has no ending;
And it's sending me
The things that I need.
Far away from shore—
Further than I've been before;
But I feel the strength of the new sea.
(Of a midnight voyage for just what you need...)
Dreams come and go,
And I sift through them.
Love starts to grow
From the thoughts that I find within them.” (Midnight Voyage by the Mamas and Papas)