Music

Aretha Franklin

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As I’m sure you know by now, Aretha Franklin has died. One of the greatest singers of our time, regardless of genre or gender. I never saw her in concert and have no special tales or memories to share but I couldn’t let this pass without posting something.

For those who love her, and especially for those who don’t know her music or why she is the undisputed Queen, I’ll share a selection of videos.

Here’s a clip of her from 1964, while she was still with Columbia Records, which could never figure out quite what to do with her. Probably they should have just stood back and let her do her thing, as she does so well here.

more after the break

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Philippines, Politics

Following The Bouncing Ball In The Philippines

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I don’t write about American politics here, at least not very often. (I do comment more frequently on it on Twitter and Facebook.) Plenty of other people are already doing a great job of it and anyone who knows me already knows where I stand on the issues. I don’t believe that anything I would write here would do anything more than preach to the converted – I don’t think anything I would post would convince even a single person to change their vote one way or another.

I don’t write very much about Philippines politics here for a different reason. It’s illegal for foreigners to participate in political demonstrations here and even if it’s not strictly illegal for me to comment on what I see in the news, it’s potentially dangerous. I avoid any sort of political discussion with people whom I don’t know well and I don’t discuss politics in the office. I don’t believe that my expressing an opinion would have any positive results.

On the other hand, this has been possibly the wildest week in Philippines politics in a very long time and I can’t help but take note of it. For those of you who don’t live here or don’t follow the news from here, this is what has been going on, mostly based on articles I’ve read in local newspaper The Inquirer.

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Manila, Medical, Philippines, SpikeLife

The Most Filipino Sign Ever and Coming Up For Air

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I pass this sign several times a week – there’s actually 4 or 5 of them spread out along side this property. They can be seen from C-6 in Taguig. Every time I’d drive by I’d be in the car alone and there’s no place to pull over but it stuck in my head and finally one day when my wife was in the car with me, I instructed her to get her phone ready and slowed down so she could capture it for me.

BEWARE OF CRAZY PEOPLE

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Manila, Philippines

It’s a Jungle Out There

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All around the world, the news media understands that scaring people is the best way to sell newspapers and get high ratings. That’s doesn’t mean the stuff they’re reporting on isn’t true, it’s just a matter of the emphasis on this kind of stuff.

I’m not sure that the Philippines is any better or worse at this than other places (just look at any of John Oliver’s montage sequences about local news TV in the U.S.) but it does seem that every day the news is a compilation of horror stories. I’ve been tempted to start a twitter feed that’s just Philippines crime stories, or do weekly updates here on the previous week’s murders.

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Driving in Philippines, Manila, SpikeLife

Driving Today Was the Worst It Has Ever Been

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Monday, July 2nd, was Pasig Day, the anniversary of the founding of one of the cities that makes up Metro Manila. It was a holiday in Pasig – but not in the rest of Manila. Go figure that one out.

This shows Pasig’s position in Manila.

Of course they had to celebrate and of course that meant a parade. The thing is, it had to be somewhere near Pasig City Hall, the problem being that most of Pasig consists of shitty roads in poor condition and horrible intersections, most of which can be anarchy.

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Food, SpikeLife, Travel, TV

Blues for Anthony Bourdain

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“I took a walk through this beautiful world, felt the cool rain on my shoulder …”

As the old joke goes, I start every morning by checking the obituaries in the New York Times. If I don’t find my name there, I go on with my day.

We all die. It’s a cliche but cliches are cliches because they’re true. Celebrities, major or minor, die every day, just like the rest of us. Mostly I take note of their passing, think “ohhhh,” and move along. Very few celebrity deaths hit me on a deep emotional level. The last death to really hit me that way was David Bowie. Sure, there were rumors of poor health, but I’d been a fan of his music for almost 50 years, I’d seen him live in concert several times, and I listen to his music almost daily.

I found out about Anthony Bourdain’s death in a very 2018 way – someone posted a link to his obituary on Facebook and tagged me, knowing what I big fan I am of his work. My first reaction was that it must be yet another internet hoax but I googled his name and saw he was really gone.

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Music, SpikeLife

My Mother and Keith Richards

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For some reason I was thinking about this tonight and I don’t think it’s a story I’ve ever told here.

The first thing to know about my mother in relation to this story is that when it came to music, she loved Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand and show tunes and big band jazz and that was it. Forget about rock & roll – even Elvis was too new for her.

(She went on a date with Buddy Rich once. He was Jewish and from Brooklyn, just like my mom. She said she didn’t like him; all he did was talk about himself.)

When my mother was in her 60’s she worked as a bookkeeper for a jewelry design company. The owners had a lot of famous friends. One was Raquel Welch and I can remember when I got divorced for the first time I begged my mother to give me Raquel’s phone number. “What are you going to do with it if I give it to you?” “I’m going to call her up and ask her out on a date of course! Her last husband was Jewish, he has an even bigger nose than I do, she’ll love me!” Never happened.

One of the owners’ friends was this woman who was a manager who handled rock superstars. If they wanted to go shopping when they were in New York, if they wanted some jewelry, she’d bring them up to the sisters’ place to take a look around.

(My mother suggested I should ask this woman on a date. I figured she hung out with every superstar rock musician in the world, what could I possibly say or do to impress her, so no.)

Often she brought her superstar friends to the showroom at lunch time, when my mother would be the only person there. And she had no idea who any of these people were.

She would call me at night and ask if I had heard of the person who’d come in that day.

“This man came in the shop today. He was very rude and he smelled bad. Did you ever hear of Rod Stewart?”

“This man came in the shop today. He got very upset that I didn’t know who he was. Did you ever hear of Luther Vandrop? Vandrip?”

And then finally one day, BOOM! “This man came in the office today. He was so sweet. He called me dear. He held my hand. I loved him. Did you ever hear of Keith Richards?”

Well, I lost it. I started screaming into the phone. “KEITH!!!!!!!! KEITH!!!!!! KEITH!!!!!!”

Which was quickly followed by “Wadjagetme? Wadjagetme? Wadjagetme?”

“I didn’t get you anything. You didn’t make a big deal about Elton John.”

“FUCK ELTON JOHN this is Keith Richards!!!!!! Wadjagetme?”

As it turns out, the check he wrote for the stuff he bought bounced. (He later made good on it, of course.) So when the check came back, she made me a xerox of it, I probably still have it lying around in a box somewhere.

Back in those days, Keith lived in New York, on 4th street in one of the condos above Tower Records. I would see him all the time, usually walking his dogs in the neighborhood. I always wanted to go up to him and go, “Hey Keef! You know my mom!” But every time I ran the scenario in my head, it ended up with me scaring the shit out of him and him either running away or having his dogs attack me.

To this day I haven’t met Keith Richards. Or dated Raquel Welch. Somehow I’ve survived.

 

 

Driving in Philippines, Manila, Philippines, SpikeLife

Another Reason Living in Manila is a PITA

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I suppose one could call this “first world problem” in that it involves the fact that I have a car and am unable to use it at certain times, while so many others in this country don’t have a car and are reliant on insanely bad public transportation 7 days a week. I’m not unaware of that. But I do have a car, it was a significant expense for me, I pay a lot in taxes to use it, and I’m not happy.

My wife is opening a shop in the province that she’s originally from. Rent is insanely cheap there and she has what appears to be a large, built-in audience. So, fingers crossed.

I want to be there for the opening day, which is this Friday. And that presents a problem – one that wouldn’t be a problem almost anywhere else. The shop is a little over 20 miles from our home. To drive there on a weekday would take two hours. On Fridays it might as well be in another country because I’m basically not allowed to drive my car to get there.

Friday is my “coding day.” For those who don’t know, every car in Manila has a sticker on it issued by the MMDA and under the Unified Vehicular Volume Reduction Program, the last digit corresponds to a day of the week when you can’t drive in a lot of places. Most of the cities in Manila have window hours – e.g. you can drive between 10 AM and 4 PM on your coding day – but the major roads (C-5, EDSA, etc.) don’t have window hours.

And I cannot drive out the front gate of my subdivision on a Friday because that’s in Pasig. I can’t drive out the back gate because that puts me onto C-6, which has no window hours.

So I can’t drive to the shop on its grand opening day.

Public transportation? That’s a good one. I could walk for 15 minutes, then a 30 minute ride on a tricycle to Pasig Palengke, then a 30 minute ride in a mini van to BGC, then a one hour ride on a bus to about 5 miles away from the shop, then maybe I could do a 20 minute ride in another tricycle.

Taxi? No taxi driver will want to go there unless I give him a pocketful of cash, because it’s too far away, there’s traffic, etc.

So that means find a hotel for two nights – because the only way I can drive there is to do it on Thursday. The only hotel in the vicinity is a branch of the Sogo love hotel chain (“So clean! So good!”) There are some Airbnb places not far away but they’re kind of a joke.

A bit further afield, in the Santa Rosa / Silang / Tagaytay corridor, there are more reasonable choices. The nicer hotels in this area charge as if they were in BGC. The Airbnb’s? I’ve stayed in cheaper ones in BGC. And a lot of them show pictures of the outside of the building, no pictures of the rooms inside, no reviews. The ones that have pictures and reviews are almost as expensive as hotels.

Oh wait, there is this lovely place for US$22 per night.

Seriously – someone put that place on Airbnb.

There is one “nice” hotel in Santa Rosa, a branch of Seda, which I think is owned by Ayala. It’s close to $200 a night, and fully booked one of the two nights I need.

There’s a “microtel” under the Wyndham banner, a 30 minute drive away, and that’s a hundred a night and I think that’s where we’re going to end up.

And it’s just … well, we’ve poured a lot of cash into the shop, at least by my standards, and there’s not a lot left over at the moment. I really don’t feel like spending $200 for two nights in a hotel. But it’s been a journey of several months to get this shop off the ground and I don’t want to miss opening day.

It’s just that … in the US, in Hong Kong, in every other place I’ve lived and in probably every other place I’ve visited, I wouldn’t have to go through all this. I could wake up Friday morning, fire up Waze and go.