Let’s Make Something Splendid and Vacuous
Iñigo
Around Christmas, the already-calamitous traffic situation turns into a behemoth that consumes all that engage into combat with Metro Manila’s ill-planned passageways. EDSA turns into this steel-strung parking lot, thousands of cars idling, all adding up into sinister decibels of whirring motors and rotting motorists. The Skyway reprimands all of its denizens, swindling RFID holders around the Metro in exchange for SMC-sanctioned inclines to drive on (lumps and all). For a majority of my weekends, I’ve become desensitized to oppressive brake lights, of which there are a multitude to choose from, all coming to the same conclusion: you’re in line. This is what I hate about driving; for the moment you’re in a car, your sole purpose is diminished to Simply Getting There.
And all this because I wanna go to Mow’s? Definitely.
When you go to a gig, do you know anyone there? Whether or not this is even a question you should ask yourself, consider the airspace you’re entering. If there’s anything else you’d rather be doing, would you drop it for a thirty-minute set? Maybe you just want to hang out and let things soak.
These spaces we inhabit are haunted, without a doubt. Music and art are haunted crafts, always enshadowed by forms and familiars of what came before. This is why you try your best not to compare newer acts to music thought to be ubiquitous; you’re attaching specters, immediately dating the works you tackle. Nothing’s original because what’s always there is the ideal evergreen, the ideal that we’ve All agreed upon. Let’s be real though, no one’s reaching that. Expression extends beyond grading and microscopics in ways that will always escape us. The Commodification of Things preludes competition. Taste is a betrayer of Things, past, present, and future, but not all things. So why not let it be?
There’s more than enough lionization to go around. People are ecstatic to find peers, to finally be perceived in lights that wouldn’t shine as bright in a professional setting. Characters in play, the playing in question. The musicians, the witnesses, the nebulousness of social circles intermingling; falling in and out with each other in different speeds and depths. The subliminally brutish atmosphere-economy of gigs and gig-goers: high, low, lengthwise, and crosswise. In every band, there’s a galaxy of things at play within its inhabitants, with collected war stories and other assorted lore serving as gravity between them. Collectivization imparts mass by numbers, but the densest of stars implode with calamitous consequences. There are many such cases, yet sometimes the majesty of the peaks makes their forced divisions inconsequential to what they’ve shown at their brightest. It almost always gets ugly before it gets beautiful.
Compassion is what makes this world rotate, and it gets fatiguing, to be honest with you. Ideologies are always bound to clash, but internet war medals are never in high demand. A person in line serves only one purpose: to get to the end. A person in a space serves every purpose, for as much as they want, and for as much as they can.