Black to gray

It was the time of the assassins in monsoon Manila — post impeachment trial, pre-SONA — where shows ranged from homage to penguin, to a musical collaboration between a painter and a trusted card shark of a guitar player.

Just as the rains began in June, the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf along Adriatico, a cartwheel away from Remedios Circle, launched its glass house with a performance of the Electric Underground Collective, whose prime movers are the Syjucos but with a general setup akin to the Rolling Thunder Revue, Dylan’s not Durant’s.

Performers included the Syjucos — sometimes referred to as the Addams Family of Philippine arts and letters — Danny Sillada, Gus Albor, Eghai Roxas (not Navarro nor Fernandez, different Egays altogether), Bobby Balingit of the Wuds, Orville Tiamson half of a double bass, and yours not so truly.

Theme was “Homage to the Penguin,” and I texted the patriarch Cesare beforehand, the bird or the bar? The bar, he answered back, that landmark formerly off Remedios Circle but now transposed some meters away also on Adriatico but as 1951, which may or may not have been a good year, and not before doing time on Kamagong across the tracks until residents complained of the racket of good vibes in a section of auto repair shops and other holes in the wall.

The drizzle was falling in earnest when I arrived at the glass house, and proceedings were already at fever pitch; too bad I missed most of the performances such as by the daughters Trixie and Maxine, some photos of which were posted by one Yob Achacruz by way of Sillada, and the collective could be said not only to be UG but electricity.

I obliged the throbbing raucous throng with a couple of poems dating back to more than 20 years when Penguin was still on Remedios, “In Malate There is a Street Called Paris” and “Freddie’s Last Night on Earth,” which had Cesare in stitches when I could barely read some lines without glasses that had been left at the office, and Roxas not Navarro nor Fernandez kept pounding on one of two bongos that seemed to summon the ghost of Pepito Bosch, or was it Santi Bose’s that was staring beneath an imaginary staircase in that new coffee and teahouse.

Later it was the mother-and-daughter tag team Nelia and Nicole that did an impromptu dance to the percussive sound of bongos and bass, preceding Balingit whose deadpan vocals about a certain Lorenzo echoed the Talking Heads of yore, his punk sensibility considerably toned down if not subdued by the persistent rain showers and thunderstorms inundating the city of glass houses and barong-barongs.

The matriarch Jean Marie was smiling, the jazz guitar player Ayahuasca Yuson was smiling, the Venus in transit hiding behind the clouds was surely smiling even as someone approached and said the next day at Galleria Duemila Junyee of Los Baños was exhibiting his latest soot of lights.

And deep into the night of remaining Wuds the musicians essayed some De Colores coda and fadeout, our ears smiling and ringing with the seeming anachronistic combination of religion, bongos and double bass in a cool glass house of underground collective electricity.

Cesare himself read, or was it recited, the “Table of Zero” and another poem about the heat which was left hanging after the poet dang forgot the last lines like the strains fading from a harmonica, exiting with self-deprecating laughter.

The rain would not go away that night, and neither would the coffee beans and tea leaves, as if asking where have all the old bars and watering holes of Malate gone?

The Right Spot nowhere to be found, ditto Sidebar and Remembrances, where a black Nazarene look-alike held forth with his posse of Carlos Primero guzzlers including the future ambassador to Poland, neither Bodega nor Father’s Moustache, which only come up in radio interviews with Lolit Carbon, old friend of the folksinger Ysagani Ybarra.

Hobbit House, too, has moved house closer to Padre Faura, where once there was a tribute to the late great Anabel Bosch of Elektrikoolaid, whose Black to Gray of the petulant ambulant bass still rings smilingly in our ears like a memory of Rosie’s Diner.

Then in July coming up not anymore in Malate but across the tracks in SaGuijo Makati is the painter Igan D’Bayan’s latest transmutations on canvas “Mysterious Diseases,” that features a jam along with guitarist Noli Aurillo and drummer Jayman Alviar, definitely something to be seen if not heard.

The long-haired brethren pulling out the stops to the monsoon and assassins have fallen upon the city, making easy pickings of Pacquiao-Bradley pay per views, impeachments, SONAs, the whole hog of custom and ceremony of which a poet of the ages once sang, if no one will come to Malatapay with me then let water seek the level of frogs.