The Philippines: Living with the Dead

Photo by Jeffrey Lau / The Toronto Star

I keep a growing list in my phone (and in my notebook) where I put everything memorable. It wasn't always so organized, though.

It's certainly an improvement - I used to just write things in the margins of whatever book I was reading, or I would maintain a current of post-it notes wandering in and out of my life for weeks at a time. This was inspired by a book I read when I was younger, where the protagonist's mother, a novelist, would hide notes throughout the house and use them as inspiration for her books whenever one happened to find her. 

I was browsing through my own collection today and read, "Filipino family, living in grave for shelter".

This is a misnomer. You can't live in a grave but, as evidence by the photo above, you can build your life around them. It's an interesting phenomenon in my home country, and has been written about in several places around the internet.

All of these articles discuss Manila. It's the capital, and it's the most densely-populated. (To wit, dense was not a word I understood properly until I observed it all for myself. Picture Hwy. 401, the busiest highway in Canada, quintupled. Then add a cacophony of noise and the lightning quick, though terrifying, reflexes of your father, a former cab driver.)

While we did travel to more remote places in the Philippines, we spent most of our time in San Pablo City, a metropolis a few hours outside of the capital. 

One morning, we set off to visit my Lola's (Tagalog for "grandmother") grave. The place was beautiful, with lush spanning green lawns and a smattering of headstones and mausoleums. There were palm trees, and a lot of interesting sculpture and details on the graves. I wish I took pictures. (Out of respect, though, I didn't.)

I was struck by a mausoleum a hundred meters or so away from my Lola's. Within the barred, glass-less windows of the memorial (presumably installed to ward off grave robbers), there was an entire family. They had hung clothes to dry and were sitting on plastic lawn chairs, simply hanging out around the stones that concealed their dead relatives.

It's a similar image to the photo above. It was a memory that was quickly replaced by something else not too long after - I only thought of it after passing a crowded* cemetery on my way to work the other day. 

It also brought itself to mind after reading this quote the other day:

“We think we no longer love our dead, but that is because we do not remember them: suddenly we catch sight of an old glove and burst into tears.”

- Marcel Proust, letter written to his wife in 1913

Grief comes in waves (think about going through a break-up and finding something small that sends you into a half-hour long rampage of Facebook creeping). I just wonder how you can weather that when you, quite literally, don't have anywhere else to go.

*I love the double entendre with "crowded" here. I should clarify - crowded with the dead, not the living.

Field Trip 2014: A Tribe Called Red

I'll be meandering through random bits of Field Trip 2014 in the next few days (or weeks...). This was my most memorable moment - my "apple" of the weekend, as my friend would call it.

It's really hard to find things on your own. I was reading an article the other day that said we're just repeating everything we see on Twitter. It's not easy to be original anymore, is what I'm saying. We're all derivatives of derivatives.

This is why keeping a sense of curiosity, which often leads to new discoveries, is so important. 

And that's why dancing and swaying with the crowd at A Tribe Called Red felt really fucking good. 

Some friends of mine knew of the band, and thought their genre ("Powwow-step") sounded intriguing - so we stayed put. They'd recently played a free show at our school which, I'm sorry to say, I didn't go to but should have.

Admittedly, I almost missed it. They were the last act in a long lineup (which included Kevin Drew, Shad, Austra and a bunch of other Canadian indies). I was about to leave to watch Interpol, something I thought would be good to add to my musical education.

But once the first ATCR song started, we kept watching. This slowly crept to our group of four standing up, and then weaving our way into the crowd where we danced just behind a bunch of bros who brought something resembling Gandalf's wizard staff with them. If you were at Field Trip this weekend, I'm sure you saw them.

My friend Brenna put it best in her tweet.

I don't expose myself to Aboriginal issues all that willingly. I don't have an excuse for it. My time at the Journal allowed me to follow certain aspects of it. And I still find this a bit odd to say, but my experience at this show got me, if anything, a bit more interested in the story of a people so consistently ignored.

Plus, the video montages and hoop dancing were spectacular. It was a welcome relief after a day of five-ish-piece bands with semi-emotional lyrics and guitar strumming. There's only so much Canadian indie folk rock you can take.

I'm still trying to learn new things. I'll have to do some digging around and see what literature I can find on the issues ATCR tackles.

Projects

It's been a year or so since I gave this blog its whole minimal aesthetic (ahem, the same one you see on like 15 other blogs per day). I think I'm ready for something new.

And just in time! I found this neat step-by-step process on creating vector illustrations, care of Creative Blog. I love vector illustrations. They're so abstract, and I find that the form gives you a lot of freedom, but imposes enough restrictions that it truly exercises your creativity as an individual and not just as an artist. It's a lot like my other favourite artistic medium, photography (which I'll be sure to do more of this summer. Like every summer).

I've been working on Photoshop since I was 14, InDesign since I was 19, but I've yet to master Illustrator. It looks like I have my next creative pursuit (outside of the ever-present writing, of course). Now it's just on to learning how to code the header, maybe switching this whole operation over to Wordpress, and who knows where we'll go from there?

This weekend promises to be fun. I'll be going to Field Trip, my first large-scale music festival and my first time seeing BSS. I'll likely be a physical and emotional wreck as of Monday morning.

We're not allowed to bring DSLRs into the venue, but with the potential of disposable cameras (hip) and the ever-advancing quality of the iPhone, I'm sure I'll have plenty to share post-weekend.

Before you go, though, he's an acoustic version of a song I refused to listen to for, oh I don't know, nearly two years? 

Have a great weekend.