Related apocrypha

Night. Interior: A bar in Malate. The long bar resembles a bow of a ship, angling for last call of pwera bisita. In between writing jobs and their publication, I thought of revisiting the old stuff, whether all that related or disjointed apocrypha can be compiled in a volume, maybe a book.

There appear some recurring themes, favorite topics, artists rewritten about until, come to think of it now, credibility may have suffered.

Dante Perez, whose recent works “Cold Turkey Flies” opened the Art Informal’s art calendar last February, I’d written about at least twice — first for his exhibit at the now-shuttered Blind Tiger along Visayas Avenue, then for his show at Alliance Française in Reposo. Not that we have nothing new to say about Perez’s art that is anyway always fresh and exciting, but we risk sounding biased, short of PR-like, having known the fellow since way back in Jingle days, long before he discovered a new love in filmmaking and lost his wife to cancer and almost everything else to Ondoy and had his arm tattooed.

True enough, habitués in the gallery on opening night were a motley group, a substantial bunch of which were film people, the indie sort, and the artworks and sculptures and installations themselves were like leaves drawn from the pages of a typhoon-soaked diary, your whole life flashing before your eyes and dead butterflies inhabiting a corner of memory.

“Discourse with the Psycho Killer on Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground”

Let’s see now: “Apocrypha,” “Bitch,” “Utopia” are all worthy harbingers of things to come in Philippine art and film in the unwinding century. If, say, Lav Diaz is a painter whose canvases became film, Dante Perez is a filmmaker whose footage consists of paintings and sculptures and installations. Or is it panting, for beer did seem to run out on Connecticut Street, especially for latecomers from the other side of town. But that’s all right, that’s all right, for we live so well so long, and tomorrow’s going to be another working day…

Also gracing the start-up exhibit was jukebox king Victor Wood, a late arrival. It was one of the weirdest moments in art history as we stood there gathered breathless as the cold turkey flew around the gallery and we waited to see if Victor would find his voice to sing.

Cesare Syjuco had given, last Xmas, a book of poems with accompanying CD of recorded music and performance numbers. Called A“ Sudden Rush of Genius” it contained Robert Fripp-like guitars and semi-punk vocals. Hearing him live you might say he was vodka-driven. Sometimes he blows on his harmonica as he did in Greenbelt and it was like he was reliving the heat in a street corner of wide America, or wide-awake Alabang.

But don’t call it genius-not yet anyway, more like sudden rush of Tom Sawyer chords and progressions, the quick sand and the mighty bond. In the elevated LRT trains is a poster poem of his that captures the moment of transit, that indescribable hiatus between stations, giving words and shape to a black hole of emotion or experience. More like the great gig of inspiration the way the guitar thrums and chunks on the outskirts of consciousness sending the cat into a panic running roughshod through the apartment. Of course I’d written about Cesare before, his postcards and posters from the far side of what might have been near oblivion.

But if you are looking for genius you are better off searching for Jean Marie or any of her shapely talented daughters or better still a cool box of ensaymada.

Meanwhile on the other side of town at one of those interminable Yuvienco reunions a cousin or aunt on the maternal side Tita Esen Bataclan sang a few songs a cappella in the still of the night.

“Apocrypha”

I’d come across her name before in the serial tomes on Pinoy jazz history also reviewed in these pages, and learn in the book written by jazz drummer Richie Quirino that she went by the stage name Priscilla Aristorenas, no relation to Jun or Robin, complete with posters but for a while there her octogenarian voice could have summoned the likes of Batman and Robin and the whole siete pares.

It must have been Billie Holiday or Billy on holiday that Tita Esen sang, her voice a bit shaky but strangely whole. Or it could have been Sarah Vaughan or Lena Horne, any of the great chanteuses of yesteryear, except this was 2011 on the edge of La Vista, on the trail of Priscilla A. of the golden unaccompanied song.

There was minus-one, too, as reunions go, with Elvis and Frank and the rest of the soundalike gang, and one-liner poetry that stopped the lechon in its tracks down the gullet of everlasting esophagus redemption.

The old texts beckon but surely not for long. Reading the old stuff, which already could be new, affords one not to repeat oneself. Or else why bother.

Each rewriting a gauntlet, cut to Plaza Lawton. Afternoon. At a jeepney stop near the post office is the writer teacher Jess Cruz, weeks or months before he died I ask him why his column seldom comes out, hadn’t he been writing lately? He says his confidence is shaken, maybe he isn’t that much of a writer anyway. I take it as a cautionary tale of how important it is never to stop writing even if indeed what’s been written never gets published, or printed, or sent into orbit of cyberspace, whatever. Fade out with a wisp of white hair and the scent of the Pasig, but I forget to tell him this, forget to tell him to let the others stew in the sages of flatulence.