Act Part Deux
I was about to put last night's topic to rest and just listen to the "So Little Time" track online when I accidentally clicked on the new album of Arkarna (new in the year 2000, haha!). Curiosity had me try listening to cuts of the songs to put closure on the why-did-they-not-have-a-follow-up-album-or-did-they question. I think I was right on the big bucks when I said their new album had to be heavy on both quality and promotions to top what their first album did. In my limited judgement and not-so-expert opinion, they failed on both. The Family Album has 10 new tracks covering, again, multiple genres. I have identified some to be ambient (End Rage), others house (Frontal Lobotomy, Skin), pop (Life is Free), rap (Somebody Else's Song), a hint of reggae (Rehab), and alternative pop-rock (Insecurity, Partners in Crime). Nothing could be more diverse than that!
It is hard enough to perfect or be good at a genre let alone try and tap almost every style in one blow. Let's face it, be it in art style or music, fashion, or literature, the artist or band or writer could only afford to stick to one look or sound or feel and hone it to perfection before venturing on yet another territory. Unless you already have epic status could you have the right to do experimental stuff, and even legends could fail without the right balance of quality and promotion in the unmapped and unstable. It almost always do not work the first time around. The outcome is often hit or miss (make it work and we'll call it a breakthrough). Yet again, it is a predominant style among artists in independent labels or production, come to think of it.
The band does well with the ambient and downtempo style tracks, in my opinion. Their tripped pop also does good with Ollie Jacobs' voice style. I am reminded of U2's earlier years, Massive Attack, (just a little sample of Dee'Lite,) and Gorillaz with some of their grooves. Nice and transcedental. Powerful but not quite.
The great aspect of the album remains to be the music behind the vocals. It has that well meshed feel which only comes when great effort is put into something. And the album covers are nicely done with a play on color saturation and a faint hint of noir.
Whew, I hope that's enough closure. Pseudo-writer's block is closing in on me fast. (There, it hit me just when I did the period.)
Vintage Cut
Time reads 12:19 and 23 seconds. The blasted clock in this sorry excuse for a net cafe isn't working. I have got to write something, else I'm doomed to let a long while pass and make COMPLEX VERTIGO one of those exitedly-started-but-never-got-enough-cinder-to-continue-burning kind of weblogs. Another effort reduced to plain statistial occurence is what the only thing those kinds are of use (did you ever know that 34% fo the blogs hosted by blogger are never updated more than 1x a month?----no actual basis for the figures but something I conjured up to kind of strengthen my point).
I was staring intently over a rerun of Survivor All-Stars last Sunday when I noticed that the CDs and the old cassette tapes stacked under the TV are abnormally well arranged (the stuff is normally wilder than the kind of hair that "rhymes" with pubic). I saw a chimp picture on one of the covers and recalled it being my Arkarna record, bought in 1998 while still in college, the pre-audio CD era (or just my pre-CD era. I'm a late bloomer. Great excuse for not having enough dough to invest on gadgets). It's been years and I wondered if it still works. And dang it did! So I went to the "So Little Time" track and revved the volume up to the you-must-be-freakin'-deaf notch. The song still sounds great! I did a simple research and found out that "Fresh Meat," the name of their debut album, was self-produced (much like Alicia Keys' recordings). The tracks are varied to the point of it being unidentifiable to a specific genre. I would so far as conclude that their music is a little ahead of the mainstream back then. The band is ambitious, read: it would take a major move to come up with the next album, both marketing and quality wise to top what they started. Sad to note that I don't think I know of anybody who has heard of the succeeding projects Arkarna did. In their website (which has a sample of the track I was blogging about), I found something on a new album and several photos of what purportedly were album covers, all of which may have never been introduced or sold locally. Well, too bad. If my allegations are correct then they could just be another talented group reduced to a number in the list of bands under one-hit-wonders. Well, for the time being.
3 Dreams
For the need of an excuse to dream, read on:
Be boundless. There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.
-Douglas Everett
Achievement is not when you complete what you wanted to do, but when you accomplish what you dreamed of doing.
-John Glueck
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.
-T. E. Lawrence
Formula Blueprint
It's a given: soaps or telenovelas dominate as the top grossers among local TV shows. Why would they occupy the much coveted prime time slot if they do not at the least click (or, at the most, take the country by storm) with the viewing public, anyway? The format and storyline have grown as the script is written to have a faster pace than what they normally had, say 10 years ago. Special effects experts have also been brought in to add grandeur to the newly coined fantaseryes.
The aspect that troubles me is why should there be a need for a deluge of popular actors in one very predictably-plotted soap when a powerfully woven storyline grounded on the "now" and casting the right mix of good (and real) actors could very well be the elixir for a potentially cheaper and effective prime-time-slot-worthy soap opera of international-distribution caliber?!
The common reaction would be: "so the masses could feed on it without the need for tripled-effort promotional campaigns as these are actors that the people already know and relate to who happen to already have a strong fan-base and following." So why then, o bright Padawan, could Meteor Garden have soarded as it did when no body knew its actors before it even saw the light of Philippine-day? Add to the bunch the latest Korean telenovelas, which might not showcase great acting, but whose gripping plot is worthy of people going home from work at an earlier time than usual.
Point is, the audience have matured. But it seems that the Filipino viewer's actions and reactions resonate as likenend to a huge tree falling to its natural death in an uninhabited forest: without a human ear to hear and an intellectual brain to process it. Who needs feasibility studies to assess this theory when the fact is bellowing from all sides of the peninsula like ecstasy of a million simultanious orgasms, pardon the pun.
People thirst for fresh stories and plots but the conservative way of addressing the need is not the only way to go. Learn from the trend and take the risk to attain what might well be a start of Philippine TV Renaissance.
Cheap Fuel
I have been reading extensively lately which makes it hard to write something which is not based or lifted from the stuff I've come accross.
I have also been thinking of making a unique design for this blogsite, but that would entail me studying html or other intenet-publishing-related language which would take up much of my time, sacrificing time which I've alotted for more readings or re-readings.
To have some excuse of having something to blog, here are some thoughts which have crossed my mind a while ago:
1. Is data considered matter?
2. Why can't they make instant-tea (from the teabags sold in supermarkets) taste like freshly brewed tea?
3. If there is such a thing as a third eye, could there be such a thing as a fourth, fifth, or sixth?
4. If fuel prices skyrocket in the world market (to like P50 per liter, as some would speculate, before the turn of the year), shouldn't they already consider mining deuterium from the Philippine deep since it is purported to be "inexhaustible" and "cheap" and "renewable" and well within the Philippines' area of responsiblity?
(I had the grandest time of listening and participating as my family discussed [point # 4 over dinner on Christmas eve last year. An interesting and intellectual bunch, that lot.)
Of the four, the last issue tend to have the most politics involved since there would be a need for investors whould would have to put up the needed infrastrucure for such to operate. There should be international support, as well, from maufacturers of machines, such as car engines for example, who would have to require deuterium as fuel. So much work needs to be done but the government has to be vigilant about the project since it would take years to plan and implement. Then again, much like all money-making ventures, the project will cost us, and it will not come cheap (at the start, that is).
(Read on the link provided in "deuterium" above to have an overview of the sheer magnitude of what this project could bring to the country)
Brit Writer
Sometime in 2003 when Endless Nights came out, I was over at Fully Booked at the Rockwell looking for the Sandman poster they had on sale months ago (as I would be asking for it as a wish-listed gift for Christmas from a good friend who happens to be Nevada, Death, and Rain Harper, all-in-one). To my demise, it had already been sold. Since I'm at the store already, might as well check out the latest TPBs they have. I asked the guy slouched on the floor with a bookstack facing the TPB shelves if they still had the Sandman poster on stock, and he said the one displayed is the only copy left and if it was not there anymore then maybe it had already been bought. Having searched the DC Comics website on the latest offerings for the month, I asked if there is by any chance a possiblity of them carrying the Frank Quitely poster of the Endless Family in connection with the then just-out Endless Nights. And he said, he'll try. And he bagan asking stuff about Sandman, much to my delight, and what story at Endless Nights I liked the most, and stuff about my collection. He said then that he is also gonna be trying to bring Neil Gaiman over. Whoa! Now, that would be great!
And so it happens, a little over a year later. Neil is coming. Long live the Dreamking! I've read there are a great many Gaiman fans in the country. Who would not be, after reading just maybe two of his works? Now, its just a matter of picking out from my loot which work of his I could bring over for him to sign. And I just realized I think I lost my first-ed TPB of The Day I Swapped my Dad for Two Goldfish (ironically great gift for dads on father's day). Damn.
I've read his journal, aware of the do's and don'ts when going to booksigning events, refreshed my recall on his works by re-reading his works, bought some more old comicbooks. I could not be too ready for a surreal moment to see Neil face-to-face (and side-by-side in a photo keepsake) while he signs my books, woo-hoo-hoo!
Hungry Fool
I was talking to a bright, promising, young, would-be-lawyer friend over the phone just before dinner, catching up on unanswered calls and text messages, talking about school and work and stuff, when she suddenly directed me to a text reproduction of the commencement speech made by Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple Computers and Pixar Animation Studios) to the 2005 graduates of Stanford University.
I remembered mine, several years back (delivered by Atty. Katrina Legarda) bearing the message, "Try Anything Once." It is much in the same format as Jobs' where lessons are backed by personal experiences. Same is true with Butch Jimenez's "What's Better Than?" for the UP Diliman Class of 2003 (thanks to Dianne for forwarding a copy the very same year this came out). Then there's this article about wearing sunscreen which could pass as a commencement speech had it actually been delivered to a graduating class.
Wired Hit and Caffeine Fix
Saw a news segment last night about the latest ringtone hit among mobile phone users featuring the infamous "Hello Garci" line of the president in the alleged wire-tap recording of her conversation sometime in May or June in 2004. Had me picturing a jump packed trance-house-downtempo themed Saturday night over at Club V featuring the filler-cut as interlude as the city's social class strut and groove indifferently.
The part that caught my attention was that people caught using, reproducing, and sending the purported ringtone version of just a minuscule portion of the recorded conversation could be incriminated under the Anti-Wiretapping Law. Say what?!? Curiosity got the better of me to look into just what the law states and got this over at the Chan-Robles site, the most expansive Philippine Law resource on-line. The learning was that, yeah, they have a point.
---------------------------------------
Ever tasted Jollibee's Coffee Jelly Ice Craze? Not bad for P27! For me, it's second to Starbuck's version and far-far-way-freakin-far better than Tokyo Tokyo's. I got curious when I saw it on an ad inside the branch near my place. Plus, I got a free People's Tonight tabloid by getting an Ice Craze on top my meal. And the headline reads: "Hello Garci" Ringtone Banned.
Street Sense
The smell was that of a place where old garbage piled on top of older garbage, where rodent and hints of dead cockroach stench dominate. This characterized the daft air over one of the many underprevileged part of the should-be CBD of the Philippines...Makati City. If you let your mind go blank for a while, making it not process anything intellectual, for a change, you could actually triger your senses up on hyper-mode, like seeing and processing details you would not think of having noticed before (like a part on the asphalt of your neighborhood street that accumulates rain-puddle and dries up last after the rain, for example), some things only the idle would waste time on. This is how I noticed the smell, walking two blocks away from where I'm residing the other day. It just unwelcomly hit me. The stink could not have been made in a year's time. You would sense. You will know. No confirmation needed there. Then the idea of writing about stuff crossed my mind. I would write with vivid details through scholarly fashion but thought better because it would only be a fleeting idea I could write about. An instant. Not much point to it other than having my observation writ on webspace. Purpose served. Time wasted. My time writing this pointless thing down, and your time reading this.
I recalled of reading some prose that had surprisingly similar characteristics. Where often missed out details are given form in vividly sewn and impressive vocabulary. Had run-on sentences been criminal offences, the author could have been sentenced to four life ones. Beautiful words. Impressive workmanship. Pointlessly worthless. Only middle parts, no beginnigns and ends. For some, the so-called literature might have validated a point. Good for them. But my time was wasted.
So I search for a redeeming factor. Something I'm optimally good at. And it seems to be not so bad at all. And I go tell my self that, at least twice. And I close the issue believing I gained something. Then I believe. And I leave it at that.
(Originally published at aramaic.blogs.friendster.com on June 12, 2005)
