Black is the color and none is the number
Sydney in autumn has the bluest skies I’ve ever seen. Like something from Turner. Without flailing ships and an enraged sea. Or much cosmic reckoning.
There is a stillness in this autumnal Tuesday at the start of the Holy Week as I walk the length of Bridge Street in search for streets called Pitt and George. Walks are always meditative, like activating one’s sense for Zen. Siddharta Gautama was a great walker. And I imagine Nietzsche taking long, demented walks. Ruminating on life, the afterlife and the Superman, and one day chancing upon a man flogging a horse and trying to stop it. What a great painting that scene would make.
If Dali painted it, there would be impossibly long equine legs and something dead and melted in the foreground. If Magritte took a stab at it, there would be a bowler hat without a head, and a mysterious text above the figure. In Francis Bacon’s raw canvas, the paint would have the texture of heavy liquid: as if a snail crawled existentially across the surface, trailing the carcasses of memory and desire. If Warhol did it, Nietzsche would be wearing a Coca-Cola shirt, and the horse would be poised like the Polo logo. Picasso would have done it his way — depending on which Pablo Picasso we are dealing with.
A poster catches my eye. Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama has a retrospective at the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art. I could just picture the light bulbs, water and mirror room she has put together for one of her artworks (“Fireflies on the Water”). Something oracular and revelatory, like the rest of her oeuvres. Something worth seeing.
I remember a couple of biennale’s ago in Singapore wherein Kusama put red dots on one of the trees lining up Orchard Road as her installation. As an extension of the artist’s fascination of dots that littered her hallucinations as a child. Imagine trying to get to HMV or Borders and then walking right up to that psychedelic tree. I remember a Singaporean colleague telling me how much the Kusama tree baffled her. “It sticks out like a sore limb,” I remember her saying. Maybe it disrupts the great day of shopping she planned for herself, that consumerist quest for that elusive handbag or pair of stilettos. From boutique to boutique she must have pilgrimed, then suddenly this red-dotted tree jutted out of the curb. Like some cosmic reckoning. I muttered how she understood Kusama completely. That baffled her even more.
I contemplate on taking the bus to the museum to see the works of an artist who has spent time in a mental asylum, but commerce can be more convincing. I end up scouring the CD and DVD stores, looking for that digital holy grail, a bit fearful that a tree might just grow out of the sidewalk filled with infinity dots.
Pitt Street is punctuated by buskers and street painters. One guy fingers an acoustic guitar with the reverb knob turned up to 11. Each note creating a seemingly infinite army of sonic shadows. I never heard the Hotel California solo played that way. Picture a chorus of Joe Walshes.
Filipino bassist-extraordinaire Dondi Ledesma, who died last February, used to do things even better during his solo spots while playing with Wally Gonzales’ band at My Bro’s Mustache in Quezon City. Dondi would do sweeps and arpeggios at mind-numbing speed, but you could still hear the chord changes or the melodies of the tune. Jaco had a flair for that. Same with Stanley Clarke. Like those greats, Dondi made it look easy. Celtic legend Larry Bird once said Bernard King could never be mentioned in the same breath as the Jordans and Magics of the world because King “made difficult shots look, well, difficult.” Matt Damon says in Goodwill Hunting that geniuses would look at one thing — like mathematics or piano playing — and it just made sense. Something easy. A cinch.
“I look at a piano and I see black and white keys, three pedals and a box of wood,” Will says. “Beethoven, Mozart, they looked at it and it just made sense to them. They saw a piano and they could play. I couldn’t paint you a picture, I probably can’t hit the ball out of Fenway Park and I can’t play the piano…” “But...” Robin Williams’ character reminds him, “you can do O-chem lab in under an hour.”
I see a bass guitar and all I see is wood and wiring. I can’t even get the proper intonation. But Dondi Ledesma made the bass an extension of himself, and it made perfect sense. I was floored when he played the fretless on Langit during the first Juan dela Cruz reunion (wherein Lourd De Veyra and I got in for free by borrowing stage passes — Lourd was “Mike Hanopol” and I was “Dondi Ledesma”). I was astounded to hear Dondi play with Jun Lopito and, another late great Pinoy Rocker, Edmond “Bosyo” Fortuno as a power trio, taking on Jeff Beck covers and doing interstellar jams. I found his independently produced prog-rock DNDI cassette tapes bafflingly brilliant. And more recently, my girlfriend and I (together with our friend Sari) used to religiously watch Wally Gonzales at My Bro’s just to see Dondi do wonders with the instrument.
During one drunken moment at Penguin, a month after Dondi’s death, I told guitarist Noli Aurillo that I can never get myself to write about Dondi because, firstly, he was so damn good and, secondly, he was such a nice guy. I simply don’t have the skill to encapsulate the career of one of the greatest Filipino musicians in our lifetime in one article. I’m sure Lourd can do it. Or Eric Caruncho.
Noli was emotional at one point in our conversation, having played cosmic jam sessions with Dondi and Bosyo in Mayric’s many moons ago. “You owe it to Dondi,” that’s what Noli said through the fog of cigarette smoke and the mist of memories. With that, Noli strung his guitar and played The Beatles’ A Day in the Life.
Oh boy.
More musicians play from the bottom of their hearts on Pitt Street. The music meanders from Paul Simon to some emo shtick. Time to get the chill off my back by entering the Virgin Megastore, Borders and Kinokuniya. Their DVD selections are awesome, but the best place to buy discs is a store near The Strand. EB Games, I think. Upon entering it, all you see are stacks upon stacks of games — X-Box, PS3, Nintendo DS, etc. — but toward the back are racks of BBC documentaries, animated features, Brit-coms, and Eastern Eye DVDs.
As I get older I find it more and more pleasurable to just stay home and watch documentaries about the Nazis, serial killers, or the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I seem to have struck gold at that DVD store on Pitt Street.
Anatomy for Beginners features the Bodyworlds genius Gunther von Hagens doing an autopsy in front of a studio audience. Demonstrating how to do a “Y-cut” and basically talking about what makes us humans tick. Believe me, after watching one segment of that DVD, you wouldn’t want that ticking to stop.
Dumplings, a Fruit Chan film, tells the story of Aunt Mei (a woman played by Bai Ling) who makes “rejuvenation” dumplings using a mysterious ingredient. Hint: Bai Ling’s character used to be a black market gynecologist. Her abortion of a Hong Kong schoolgirl goes horribly wrong in one scene. The way she prepares her dumplings is both poetic and perverse.
Another Eastern Eye Cinema treat is Tokyo Gore Police, starring Eihi Shiina, whom I remember from Takashi Miike’s unnerving Audition. Here, Ruka the protagonist battles with biomechanical criminals and other genetic aberrations. Gore, blood splattering, and much ultra-violence follows. I also bought Ichi the Killer, the one-disc pack. Not the one with the bizarre anime version.
For surreal gallows humor, there is Snuff Box. Matt Berry (the boss from The IT Crowd) and Rich Fulcher (Bob Fossil from The Mighty Boosh) play “Matt” and “Rich.” This is the most twisted Brit-com I’ve ever seen. More bizarre than The League of Gentlemen despite the latter having a butcher who purveys “special meats,” local shopkeepers Tubbs and Edward, and all the weirdos of Royston Vasey. How offbeat is Snuff Box? The two hang out in a gentlemen’s club for hangmen. Rich turns out to be the son of Mama Cass of California Dreaming fame. And that’s just in the first episode. Cameos to come from Jack the Ripper and Elton John.
Before I get out of the DVD store, I grab a Cheech & Chong double-disc pack and documentaries about Stalin, Rasputin and Idi Amin.
With this cache of odd discs in my bag, I step into the normal autumnal world. A busker finishes his song. A crowd of people turns away.
