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  • i've got a shitload of stories to tell you

    email: qwerticali@yahoo.com

    qwerticali@hotmail.com


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  • Ultimo Hombre

    Tuesday, Nov 17, 2009 3:50PM / Standard Entry

    With all the creative geniuses the history of world has produced, the best monster they could ever come up with is a vampire. How lame, I thought to myself. Yes, I’ve seen countless other freakish mishmash of severed body parts, taped together with the same duct tape that holds the scattered aftermath of a suicide bomber’s Audi, form itself into neon colored kaiju or the rubbery primate with the head of a condor. But vampires dominate the brood along with other sinister minions of the undead. They have this enigmatic aura that sends thousands of shrieking teenaged girls drawn, not away but into them.

     

    But what if all the brooding vampires in the world would suddenly drop dead, vaporize in mid air, and never to be heard of again. It would become a sensational history, a romantic mystery. People would talk of the vampires as they would of the dodo. Could their disappearance be the cause of over hunting of vampire slayers, proliferation of garlic in their ghastly Romanian chamber, or to the countless other factors only the masters of the dark realm know of. We may never really know, it will always be the paradox of the death of the last vampire, the stuff mystery books are made of.

     

    After the death of the last vampire, what would the vampire slayers be left to do? They could make a reality show documenting their depression over the death of their arch nemesis. They’d be bored to death. With no vampires left to hunt down and slay they’d be too bored they’d probably resort to killing fellow vampire slayers just for the heck of it. They’d kill each other until all the vampire slayers in the world, too, become extinct.

     

    I see the same pattern in a house without mosquitoes. Without these nasty blood suckers buzzing around, what would the lizards be left to eat, except for the occasional pizza crumbs left in the open in the oven toaster. The lizards would be deprived of these bloody treats they’d resort to eating smaller lizards for their trifling blood content. Yes, some of you would say that even with plenty of insects around, lizards would still eat other lizards, but you wouldn’t believe what I’ve seen these past few days in my own house. These ubiquitous, four-legged freaks are engaging in a free for all skirmishes in my bedroom ceiling. They’d made a smorgasbord out of it. It’s a lizard eat all you can, not unlike the cannibalistic annihilation between warring tribes where the gecko is the ultimo hombre.

     

    These morbid fascinations of grim encounters of the same species have led me to be reminded again of an experiment in natural history which is the Easter Islands. As you all probably know, Easter Island has got to be the most remote habitable piece of rock on the whole world, so remote that when it was settled by unsuspecting Polynesians sometime around AD800, nobody else arrived there until 900 years later. As far as we know, nobody left either, alive or dead. Apparently the last men standing were the gigantic Moai.

     

    They are what made Easter Islands famous, these gigantic stone Moai, the largest of which, weigh as much as three fully grown blue whales. Just imagine all the work the Polynesian islanders have to deal with. They first have to carve the stones from a volcanic quarry, transport them near the shore and erect them in any which position they liked. They did all these without the help of work animals, or simple machines like levers and pulleys. They achieved all these with human muscle power alone. What they have in excess, their human population, gave us an amazing view into what humans can achieve in numbers, but what they have in excess, also resulted in their demise as a society.

     

    When European explorers arrived at that fateful Easter day in 1722 they have discovered the statues that the islanders have erected at such great collective strength were fallen down. How, why and who erected the statues, and why were they thrown down?

     

    The answers to the questions above have mostly been settled in the last several decades by archaeological discoveries. The Easter Islanders were typical island dwelling Polynesians. Now the island is barren and not a likely setting for a development of great civilization. It is a grass land and no native trees appear to have grown since the end of the first infusion of the human species. With the advent of technology, archaeologists doing paeleo-botanical studies on the island had identified pollen grains in the soil and in the lake cores. It showed that when the Polynesians arrived at the island, they have discovered a virgin island, it was covered by a vast rainforest that included the worlds largest palm trees and flowers of tree height and included the largest collection of breeding birds in the Pacific.

     

    The humans settled Easter and they began to clear the forest to be used as agricultural land, they cut down the gigantic palm trees for fire wood, for the rollers of their stone statues and for the canoes in which they used to catch porpoises and tuna in the ocean. The first few centuries were abundant days, for food and resources were everywhere. They ate everything they see. They ate the land birds, they devoured the sea-birds, and they feasted on the fruits of the palm trees. Their population exploded to an estimated 10,000 people, until by the year 1600 all of the gigantic palm tree and all of the land birds were decimated to the point of extinction.

     

    The self inflicted ecological suicide by the humans resulted to some very dire consequences. Without the palm trees, they no longer had shade from the brutal sun, they could no longer erect the stone statues that they had so greatly revered. Without the trees, they no longer have firewood except for their own agricultural waste. Without the trees to cover the ground, the islanders suffered from soil erosion and in consequence, agricultural yield decreased. And then without trees they could no longer build canoes to catch the porpoises and the tuna in the ocean. There were a few land birds left and because they didn’t have pigs, the largest animal left to eat with the disappearance of the porpoises and the tuna were humans. And just like the free for all skirmish of the lizards in my bedroom, the once great Polynesian civilization collapsed in an epidemic of cannibalism. The spear points from that gruesome end still litter the ground of Easter Island today, just a brutal reminder of the horror that happened there.

     

    That is why the collapse of the Easter Island society captures the minds of people is its obvious parallel of our world today. It has become a fitting metaphor of what the world is and what might happen still. Easter Island is an isolated scrap of rock in the middle of a vast expanse of sea, nobody to turn to for help, nowhere to flee once it collapsed. An analogue would be our world. What if the acts we do today would result to the destruction of our environment and we destroy the very place that gives us food and life, we have to face the reality that we are alone, we are in the middle of the galaxy with no one to seek help from, and if we get into trouble, there’s no way we can flee.

     

    With these stories in hand, I strongly believe that the end of the world will not be served to us as what the Mayans have predicted. The world might not end in another ice age, from the fiery flares of the sun or from a collision with an asteroid. The world might not end with the shifting of tectonic plates. Doomsday might come from a monster, an intelligent one, with two hands and thirty-two teeth. Doomsday might come when all the humanity of being human just becomes an abstract concept. And the last man standing is the one with a very voracious appetite.

    (This is a draft of an essay i plan to submit for a local circulation daily, it is not edited yet)


  • Math Test - it works!

    Friday, Nov 13, 2009 7:54PM / Standard Entry

    Math Test

    This math test can predict your all time most watched film, mine was Saving Private Ryan. Try it without looking at the answers. It works!

    Pick a number from 1 - 9.

    Multiply by 3.

    Add 3.

    Then multiply by 3 again.

    You will get your answer by adding the two digits together to find your all time favorite movie. Good Luck !!

    Your all time most watched movie is:

    -

    -

    -

    -

    -

    -

    -

    -

    Answers from Test

    1. Gone with the Wind.
    2. Aliens.
    3. Oliver.
    4. Star Wars.
    5. Forrest Gump.
    6. Saving Private Ryan.
    7. Jaws.
    8. Grease.
    9. The joy of Anal Sex with male goats & leather clad gay boys.
    10. Mary Poppins.


  • My Ice Cream Looks Abstract And Yours Surreal

    Monday, Oct 26, 2009 11:23PM / Standard Entry

    I have learned a lot of things today, one of them is, if you eat durian ice cream in the afternoon you would end up burping until late at night with a durian after taste. And the other is, a life in the arts presents huge opportunities for success and even more titanic trip holes for failure.

    I was awoken early in the morning by a commotion in our neighbors house. My neighbor was recently discharged from the hospital because of a mild stroke. Apparently sometime between his bath and breakfast he had an accident of some sort or probably just a minor fall. I am the closest thing to a nurse that they could think of so I was summoned to supervise fist aid.

    It was a reality check for me, because once there I was completely clueless to what a nurse would actually do. I ended up taking his blood pressure and I slowly made my way out and faded out from the scene.

    I went back to my bed and slept on until I was awoken up again by a honk from a sedan. The driver was calling out my name and I was bewildered because I had no idea who would look for me, since I have made myself a vitual recluse these past few weeks.

    It was my client who was looking for me and she asked me why I didn't meet up with her at eight in the morning at the designated meeting place. I told her I don't have an idea what she's talking about. She assumed that I probably haven't received her message and told me that she needed my "expetise" on some matter. She then told me that since I am still in my underpants with no shirt on that I should dress up immediately and meet her at some odd place in the city.

    "Meet me in Javellana residence in Jaro in one hour, you should know where that is. It's near the Angelicum school", she said.

    Oh Angelicum, yes, I know that place.

    She was my client to whom I sold some of my paintings recently, a nutritionist from Manhattan who has a taste for expensive abstract expressionist paintings. She's a fifty something and single. It was from her that I learned the term "rogue art peddling".

    We had a conversation way back and she related to me a story when she was approached by a struggling Filipino artist who made his way to her New York apartment. She didn't know the guy but he introduced himself as John Santos and he made a painting just for her. She was surprised and though it was a "rogue art peddling" she bought the 4 x 6 ft. sucker out of delicadeza. It cost her some whopping five figures.

    After hearing that story, I immersed myself in abstract expressionism and positioned my self as a struggling, starving artist. After a week I had paintings and was ready for some "rogue art peddling". And that's how she became my client.

    ~~~

    In less than an hour, I was already there in Javellana residence drinking juice from fancy glasses with my client, her sister and Doña Maria. The Javellana's are old rich people and the house is full of paintings by the owners children, the floor hardwood and everything spells socialite. I wondered if Doña Maria likes abstract expressionism too.

    The whole afternoon was spent hunting for really expensive furniture in the downtown area and there I was strutting beside them offering my "expert" advise on minimal design, what ice cream flavor is best on a hot sunny afternoon, how to make more money from fine art, how not to lose money from fine art and mentioning every now and then how abstract expressionism is the hottest art in these contemporary times and giving a reference to abstract expressionism in almost any topic that they talk about.

    They would talk about Junjie Lopez's blue poodle and I would butt in, " oh how abstract expressionist that is". While eating durian ice cream in Crave Misono, I exclaimed with a burp, " this is Abstract Expressionist Josef Alber's favorite ice cream flavor you know?". They would test a sofa and I would say, "this would look good with an abstract expessionist painting, and I have just the right painting for that". I knew by mid afternoon that Abstract Expressionism is finally seeping into their psyche when even the driver would exclaim how cool Jackson Pollock is.

    The day went great, though I haven't sold another Abstract Expressionist work. I had an interesting day on what would have been a dismal Monday on an ordinary week, splaterring brutal layers of red paint on an otherwise serene looking canvas and wondering if I could get anywhere painting distorted figures of naked women.


  • Illumination

    Saturday, Oct 24, 2009 11:31PM / Standard Entry

    It has always been dark ever since the sun began its collapse. Some say, one day might come that it will ultimately turn itself into a blackhole. Others say it will devour us all for all eternity, engulfing us and transporting the entire galaxy to some godforsaken parallel dimensions. 

    It is as if everyday is a twilight.

    Today is thirteen thousand years since the end of the last ice age. Today is the beginning of a new ice age.

    People roam the streets like they are hundreds of light years apart. Everyone is a stranger. Even to themselves.

    I look at the mirror and I see nothing. Only darkness. I am stanger. I don't know myself.

    Everyday, no, it is not fitting to say everyday anymore. Humans live by the hour. Hour? Humans don't even have a concept of time anymore.

    Every now and then, I would scourge the streets for food. Or anything that might come valuable.

    And every now and then, our paths would cross. We would bump into each other. It's dark and I can't see your face. But I know it's always you.

    You always carry those books around with you.

    Useless! How can you read?

    You carry on and I carry on.

    ~~~

    Today, no, this time I'll go fishing for beached whales in the estuary. I might be lucky today. The last time I bumped into you I got lucky and I found a can of tuna from 2008.

    I ate half of it and left the rest by your cardboard box house.

    But this time I found nothing. Only this baby grand piano that got stuck in an islet in the estuary. I used to play the keys before and tried to remember Beethovens 5th from memory.

    I played. It's a little off key.

    Dammit.

    Something's stuck in the keys.

    Oh, just a flashlight.

    It reads: This is a flashlight that will illuminate the world. Haha. What a mockery.

    I turned it on. It's bright but I doubt it could even illuminate the insides of bathroom.

    But I had something. I had a light. I could dive the deepest sea and the angler fish would be jealous of me.

    Hungry and rustrated I went back to my shack and I passed you by. Reading books over a candle light in your cardboard box house.

    Its the first time I saw your face. The first time I saw anyone's face in weeks. You are a stranger and to me you are beautiful.

    I went over to you. And you smiled. I smiled back.

    You were reading Gustav Klimt and Renoir. Picture books.

    You liked art you said. I thought, what a dummy. Everyone's hungry and cold and you still had some time for art appreciation.

    You said you really wanted to see the paintings for real and for the last time.

    I held the flashlight over my hands and told you "what if we tour the Louvre before the battery dies. Or before the sun swallows us", I joked. You didn't laugh but you smiled again.

    ~~~to be continued

     

     

     

     


  • The hero, his river and his slipper

    Friday, Oct 23, 2009 5:25PM / Standard Entry

    A columnist once wrote, " in Jose Rizal's time, the Pasig River was both EDSA and SLEX". The Pasig river is a highway of sorts. Long before the streets were crowded with jeepneys and buses that belches rancid smoke, the mighty river was the passageway of colossal steamboats, dugout canoes and other spindly watercrafts that fed the chinese black market.

    In Rizal's novel, El Filibusterismo ( The Filibuster ), begins with the steamship Tabo's "unsteady progress up the river, arduously sailing upstream through the winding course of the Pasig, carrying numerous passengers to the province of Laguna".

    For those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Philippine history , Jose Rizal, one of the late 19th century's most infamous famous Filipino, is the country's national hero. He is an illustrado. A native who have friends in high places. He is fortunate enough to get himself educated in Europe, have high tea in cafe's in Florence and chat with intellectuals in Oxford. He is also well hung enough that legend says he had bedded thousands upon thousands of Europeans across the continent. From French schoolgirls to English ladies, from Irish farm lass to German housewives, he had a taste of them all. Legend says that he bedded so many German women that he fathered Adolf Hitler himself. Hitler as half-Filipino and half-German is quite plausible because der Fuhrer enjoys a speisewagen(buffet) of adobo and balut. How more Filipino can someone get?

    Rizal is so great a man that he's the first Mr. A - Z, and not the musican of the same moniker. For (A) Rizal is an Architect, (B) a bingo player, (C) a circus acrobat and so on. The list is endless that I could write another book about his awesomeness.

    He wrote El Filibusterismo, set in old Manila where once the legendary Pasig River was still in it's prime. He captured the beauty in his novel where he wrote, " a busy thoroughfare, a lively scene, a fertile fishing ground".

    I'll quote more antique words here, "the steamship Tabo threatens everything in its path, now seeming about to crush the salambaw", a scraggy fishing contaption which in their movements are not unlike skeletons " saluting an antedeluvian turtle now running straight against the bamboo brushes and against the floating..." - and so on.

    Picture the Pasig in Spanish days. It looked like a cross between the Amazon, the Everglades, Venetian Canals and the French Riviera, snaking it's way across the old city of Spanish occupied Manila.

    The water is so clean and serene, you can see the riverbed twenty feet below from the highest level of the steamship.

    But today, anyone who makes his or her way by night or by day up the Pasig would be satarized, not lyricized. The Pasig today is only a shadow of it's once glorious existence. It is now a black, muddy, murky current, something one crosses over to get from one place to another.

    No fish can live here anymore. You can only see rows upon rows of shanties lining its shores. Garbage is everywhere, floating just like lilies on a a crowded lilypond, floating like millions of man-o-wars in the Carribean.

    I wonder if Jose Rizal has got something to do with it. In a popular parable about Rizal when he was a young boy, he rode a canoe with his father down the Pasig River. Once there, one of his slippers fell from his feet and on to the river. He could not reach it, so what little Pepe did was he threw the other slipper into the river too. Asked why he threw his other slipper, he replied that if someone saw one slipper, then it would be useless. But if he threw the other slipper, some person might see the other half and can still use it.

    Scholars and historians thought the mentality and reasoning for a young boy is brilliant and just plain genius. Many young kids did as Rizal did and thought  as Rizal would have thought.

    It is only last last week that I realized the full extent of his slipper throwing legacy.

    The entire world saw the onslaught of two tropical supertyphoons named "Ondoy" and "Pepeng" who apparenty had a simultaneous and preplanned attack on our islands. Heavy rains was followed by heavy floodings that left thousands of people stripped naked and without homes.

    In the aftermath, they found the culprit, among the obvious was garbage that got stuck on man holes, sewers, canals and dams.

    And majority of these garbage were slippers. Yes, millions of slippers of all shapes and sizes. 

    Havaianas, birckenstock, nike, dragon, islander, bakya, adidas, tsinelas, simagol.

    And I strongly think that, that one sunny Sunday afternoon, that one simple slipper throwing episode, that one brilliant and genius thinking triggered it all. It all gave us a reason to condone throwing slippers on the river. And slippers are just one of them.


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