nameabledays Archive One

It is not an insomniac, sleepwalking thing. It is done wide awake, though a little bit woozy sometime later. This thing we do nights, visit our few watering holes, as promised in a previous post, we blog on once again. Apart from Conspiracy on Visayas, Newsdesk on Scout Madriñan and Sarah’s on C.P. Garcia, artist-types and “workers of the word” stop on their nocturnal jaunts in Mag:Net at Katipunan, where Joel Toledo and poet friends read their stuff first and third Mondays of every month, the Happy Monday anticipated by many young poets, that also features Joel’s band Los Chupacabras (another subject for a future posting). Haunt of the Katipunan poets (from Ateneo, Miriam and UP), but of course being slowly invaded (on invitation or cajoling) by poets from far off La Salle and UST, Mag:Net is a story in itself. Under the compass of owner and artist Rock Drilon, Mag:Net gathers the local avante-garde and experimenters in his downstairs gallery (monthly show schedules are periodically posted on the Net, particularly in the Plaridel Papers e-group). And the generations, too, meet here, to share a beer and a poem with younger voices (and be young again by osmosis),
but let the pictures speak.

So, that's Conchitina "Chingbee" Cruz, who leaves soon for the Bellagio (Italy, not Las Vegas) fellowship by the lake, to write without worry; Andrea "Drey" Teran, who alternates with Joel in emceeing the Happy Monday night and takes care of gathering the readers; Mikael "Kael" de Lara Co, this year's Palanca first place winner in Poetry in English, and playing guitar for Los Chupacabras; and, oops, that's Dr. Jimmy Abad, doing his his "anti-Alzheimer's" copy-less performance of poems from Dr. Ben Jonson to Dr. Cirilo Bautista. (These pictures are taken from Joel Toledo's blog, Rambling Soul, courtesy of literature students)

And downstairs of the Cafe, at the Gallery terrace, on another night...

The poets had read their pieces (and with throats dry, wanted more beer), the moon came out of the wet clouds, and the cold pilsner had warmed passions in the conversations that went beyond the mundane stretch of Katipunan to... wherever, from the rarified academe to digital cameras, to the new iMac (mouths watering), to Butch's iPhone (threatening to be delivered soon), to the noble and the silly, and in varying degrees of "happiness"...


But not too silly when the interpelator is lovely Mookie Katigbak, award-winning poet; not too far away would be Sarge Lacuesta, premier fictionist, novelist, etc., her constant companion; Poet RayVi Sunico, both the artiste and professorial here; young fictionist Douglas Candano (who was leaving for Canada the next day) and newfriend Alexis "Exie" Abola, Ateneo professor, award-winning fictionist, essayist and newspaper columnist (apparently plotting these shots because he took these pictures, which I stole--I asked his permission--from his Multiply Journal); RayVi again, the great Jose (Butch) Y. Dalisay and you-know-who, just a little soused; and, again, y-k-w sharing a laugh with Kaibigan Jimmy Abad.

& Alchemic, Too

Then one Palanca night (the last), after the ceremonies, journalist and PR writer Claire Agbayani buttonholes me and my partner Pamela Grace to go with her and visit a potential poetry-reading venue, the Alchemy on Julia Vargas, near corner E. Rodriquez in Pasic, one of her client shops. (The possible venue would be the small ground-floor bar that offered some quiet from the frenetic music of the multilevel dance clubhouse.)

We would rendezvous with Krip Yuson there (he could not make it to the Awards), and we find the huge clubhouse vibrating with a multitude of young people dancing to electronica and house music. At the uppermost floor (or circle, of the electronic Inferno), the DJ was spinning and scratching disks in his glass-encased perch like a deity conducting the fates of the dancing mortals. Ah, it was a place for energetic young people who could lose sleep, or who lived in a different time zone because they had just come from their graveyard shifts at a call center (business processing office, in the official euphemism). So we had to make the most of watching from our corner the sinuous bodies gyrating to the orgiastic beat of sampled ethnic drums and synthesizers, sipping our beer until we decided we had to go back to our own time zones. Of course, that's the famous literary columnist Krip Yuson under the club lights, making like a hacendero, because he had to stretch his hand with the cellphone camera for a better angle, and moiin a mode that would have been called "psychedelic" if these were the 60s. (Krip took the shots)

PHOTO Credits: Mag:Netic: by literature students; Downstairs: by Exie Abola; Alchemic (last two): by Krip Yuson