On Soledad’s Sister: Unsaid, Untold

I’ll start this (non)review by saying that I want to write about Gina Apostol’s Gun Dealers’ Daughter, but as I have not yet gathered my thoughts into coherence about it, I’ll delay (once again!) and talk about a more recent read, even if it’s likely considered a “classic” in the canon these days.

When I think of Soledad’s Sister by Butch Dalisay, I think of a school bag slung over my shoulder, a list of books to read for the semester, the hustle outside the glass doors — out into the sunshine, the busy street — so analogous is it with my university days. But there’s a kind of freedom in reading a book everyone tells you is canon, reading it because you can, and because you know every curriculum has its limits.

Ah, but precisely: this novel is premised on what the reader doesn’t know.

Para lang maiba: Jose “Butch” Dalisay’s Soledad’s Sister in sepia

A coffin arrives in Manila, you are told, and from the get-go it’s a disaster veiled in what looks to be orderly logistics. But what captivates in the novel is not the mystery that the dead body has been mislabeled Aurora V. Cabahug’s — who is, in fact, Soledad’s sister, alive and well — but the language in which the author deftly describes the crudeness of life, which outlines not vulgarity, but rather simplicity. It is not that life is reduced to physical needs, but rather that life is defined by the concrete and the puddles and the karaoke bar as much as the inner turmoil of never understanding a family member.

When the crate arrived, Al had just finished his supper of fish in black bean sauce, two cups of rice, a glass of watery coffee, and a banana, taken in the outdoor stall just beyond the airport fence. One of the new helpers, a girl from Ozamis, has blushed when he mentioned something about a Sunday walk at the Luneta, and how relaxing and cheap it was to spend the night on the grass, like many couples did. I’ll give her a week, he thought, picking the fish out of his teeth—or was it the gummy young banana—as he strode through the gate toward the cargo warehouse (Dalisay 6-7).

In reading novels, we are told that suspension of disbelief is a must. What they don’t tell you, but which you suspect anyway, is that suspension is always more difficult when the setting is your own. When a novel shuttles between Manila, Hong Kong, and Jeddah, but pivots in its attempt to solve mystery in the small town of Paez, talking about the construction of a village named after a mayor’s wife and then a play between Bagumbayan and “bayani,” the multiplication of its phases, its cheap architecture, and even when the narrative winds its way to nineties EDSA, nothing of it is romanticized.

Interestingly, the novel is easily mistaken for the hundred-odd takes into the lives of the OFW: the plight, the struggles, the families left behind, the bodies shipped back in boxes, neither luggage nor package. And while its mystery looks to be how Soledad, taking the name of her sister Aurora, met her demise, the tragedy is in the unnamed space the latter occupies, that ever-fragile, long-winded pause between thinking up a goal and achieving it, stuck as one is in a pale imitation of success (in the case of Aurora, or Rory, a cabaret-cum-bar complete with a DJ, karaoke, and GROs.

It was a little past six <…> indeed he Flame Tree was home to a good many of these gentlemen, for whom dinner was achieved by ordering several platefuls of diced pig’s cheeks or tuna sashimi, washed down with a few cases of San Miguel. Rory got a kick out of pretending before newcomers that she was just one of the girls, and a particularly hardworking one at that. Her name was on the bill outside the bar, but it was a tiny sign that had become more than shopworn over the past three months. Few people made the connection between the routinary “Tonite’s Queen of Song Ms. Rory Cabahug” of the white plastic letters (with the broken right leg in the second ‘A’), punched into velvet backing like a funeral announcement, and the slim, pale woman who left her guests feeling that she had known them all their lives but that they would never know her with the same unnerving confidence (Dalisay 37-38).

These little tragedies are what make the story tangible, hold the disbelief at bay. The entire novel is told not only in different places, from different points of view, but from different points in time, all without taking leave of the present timeline, where Rory Cabahug and her less-than-a-white-knight policeman Walter G. Zamora fetch a body, lose it, and discover, with the reader, that what is at stake is more than the act of reclaiming a body, a name, but blood ties, relocation, identity.

In the end, the novel (re)turns to what it has only apparently promised you from its first word: Soledad in the name of Aurora, well and alive, just before death. But more a glimpse into a narrative than an actual narrative itself, she disappears, elusive. After all the details, after the suspension of disbelief, the unraveling of character pasts and segues into car theft and various petty crimes in the metro, the novel shows, incidentally, not just a mystery, but becomes a mystery in itself.

Now if only I, as reader, could reconcile myself to and appreciate this path.

-

-

Gun Dealers’ Daughter next, I promise. That’s a whole other Soledad.

The Things that Belong to Us

I’ve been thinking lately of the things that belong to us; and of what makes us believe that they belong to us.

In part, this is because I’ve been thinking of what possessions leave behind, when they are taken from us (in retrospect, we lose things everyday, but the passive silence and lack that an active getting-from-us creates is more powerfully a hollow that is more palpable because involuntary). Reading V‘s doctorate thesis brings to the mind (at least on a scale of relativity), the thought of missed opportunities: what careful planning might have saved us from, even if the fault was not perhaps voluntary.

But if one is not careful, what is also tool for redemption becomes excuse for wallowing; in the opposition of reimagining versus linear thinking, what is hollowed out becomes similar to staying put. That is the danger, to become obsessive rather than forward-looking; to lose ground rather than to find the potential of future footing.

Moreover, the essays, precisely by way of their construction, evoke a sense of openness: gaps between elements are as crucial as the elements themselves. Benjamin writes that dialectics at a standstill produces a figural relation between constellated elements: it is this figural relation of openness that Joaquin proposes by way of the Almanac‘s structure. By privileging porosity, non-linearity, and simultaneity, the Almanac forces its addressees–principally ManileÑos but theoretically any reader–to reckon not just with what Joaquin has blasted apart but also with what he has put together: to come to terms with relations between fumigant and myth, architecture and festival, calendar and essay. Joaquin’s aesthetics of historiography doubles back and forth from present to past, referring simultaneously to one of the most ancient of genres, and to an open, indeterminate present shot through with clips of the past (Serrano 91).

What are, really, the things that belong to us? In moments of wakefulness (what I like to call Our Most Rational Selves), we realize that the world doesn’t owe us anything. Yet it is our right to claim what is ours (in such cases, what are the chances of misunderstanding; of our work being attributed, even by implication, to be not-ours, somewhere else? Quite a lot, in fact).

Perhaps because in losing things, we are decentralized: the reason, then, why we assign to the dispossessed the area of the margins. Then, I think, in losing things, we can then ask if the footnotes weigh us down or enrich us (ending, in my experience, at least, to the intersection of both; a conjoining of interstices), and reminding me ultimately of Gina Apostol and her The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata:

Entry #2

January 20, 1872 [20] [21] [22]

…We played the game Guess What the Branches Look Like, Tanga. Stumps of gnarls and tangled crosses. Corpses, scimitars, and rocking chairs (Apostol 37).

And then there is also the opposition between dispossession and longing, and the fight for what is believed to be a nation’s belonging: at a time when it becomes important how we call what it is we claim is ours: Scarborough, or Panatag? We claim possession even when we believe we are being stripped of what is ours.

*

The game of territory possession can be discussed in length by another source. I have better knowledge of the politics of my own.

Personally, I believe that what ties our principles to our belongings to ourselves is the principle of time: moments fingering twisting lipsticks, applying them in a semi-smile; the rush-touch of hands in a bag looking for a pen; the thankful ownership of a USB for a needed file. Life is broken down into moments and the moments are linked with the objects we spend them with; hence we believe they are ours, just as we believe that the time we spend is ours.

Not so for the field of postmodernism, which is not so much a space of play as it is of acknowledging that linear development, which is repudiated in distinct ways, in turn by Agoncillo, Ileto, and Benjamin, can also mean stasis (Serrano 91-96). But in Hooks, we learn that it is also of identifying not only where the center lies but who is talking of the margin when there is actually little contact with the margin.

When desire for footing and multicultural experience, without actual emphasis or tangible evidence or impact in the economics and personal politics of real life can be found, theory fails. What we believe we posses, achieve, or are given become instruments to disengage with the discourse we are trying to touch base with: an aunt who died who gave you that branded zip-up makeup kit is hardly remembered, except in the gift’s loss: in this realization, the rupture is not just the dispossession of what was taken, and gives a reason to disengage from the object itself so that the hollow of its loss creates a more tangible connection to the deceased.

Always, it must be remembered: that every act of severing ties means new space, and this is true even for the things which we believe belong to us.

Postmodern culture with its decentered subject can be the space where the ties are severed or it can provide the occasion for new and varied forms of bonding. To some extent, ruptures, surfaces, contextuality, and a host of other happenings create gaps that make space for oppositional practices which no longer require intellectuals to be confined by narrow separate spheres with no meaningful connection to the world of the everyday. Much postmodern engagement with culture emerges from the yearning to do intellectual work that connects with habits of being, forms of artistic expression, and aesthetics that inform the daily lives of writers and scholars as well as a mass population. On the terrain of culture, one can participate in critical dialogue with the uneducated poor, the black underclass, who are thinking about aesthetics. One can talk about what we are seeing, thinking, or listening to; a space is there for critical exchange. It’s exciting to think, write, talk about, and create art that reflects passionate engagement with popular cultures, because this may very well be “the” central future location of resistance struggle, a meeting place where new and radical happenings can occur. (Hooks, Postmodern Blackness)

*

These, of course, are mere meanderings. I mull over concepts, things left in the dust or margins, and stop, telling myself to exercise the mind. I leave to those who would know better, the degree of seriousness with which these words should be treated. And just think! That I almost lost this pendant, too, while writing this entry.

*

[20] This, of course, is the year of the Cavite Mutiny, often considered a vestigial phase of the revolution of 1896. In fact, in     the Calendar for ManileÑos, I note that it is the date of the Cavite Mutiny! But the Calendar is unreliavle (it has no bibiliography); so let me check Agoncillo’s Revolt of the Masses. Yep, it’s the day of the Mutiny (Trans. Note.)

[21] On this date, fiesta fireworks went off in Bilibid, a jail town visible at the time from Cavite (now obscured by miles of videoke bars and the diesel belch off Southern Luzon Expressway). Philippine-born Spanish solders of the Cavite arsenal mistook fiesta noise across the Bay as a signal for battle (but why?!), and so began their sorry motin . It was a bourgeios riot, similar to the Boston Tea Party instigated by American-born British merchants. Some historians call this “the first labor strike” in our history. I call it katangahan, yes, idiocy!–typical of the tragic absurdities that bedevil the province of Cavite. The mutiny ended up killing Gomburza: three innocent priests of varying reformist tendencies, Mariano Gomez, Jose Burgos, and Jacinto Zamora–further proof of the errors of Cavite! (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Insitute and Sanatorium, Leyte)

[22] Clue; three-syllable dvandva used as Katipunan password. Answer: What is Gomburza? And why was it a password? Because Gomburza mattered! No one (except invalid scholars writing in primitive spleen) disputes the importance of the Cavite revolt (just as few would portray the Easter Rising of 1916 only as some drunken Irish mayhem–though some have tried). The Cavite Mutiny is a glorious case of dysrecognition and mis(taken) identification! Every Filipino should take a stab at interpreting its mess(age). In “The Garrulous Garrote: What is GOMBURZA Says, “I point out that the triad Gomez-Burgos-Zamora is, ies, a pancit mix, a noodle combination that will never cohere. The triplet priests, each of whom has nothing to do with the other, are a symbolic knot. Sure, Father Gomez, saintly reformist, was by then retired. Father Zamora was perhaps just a jugador, an unlucky gambler; no wonder he lost his mind at the scaffold: he thought all he’d been doing was losing at cards! Father Burgos, the radical heresiarch–he was the genius provocateur, prelude to the overbearing genius, Rizal. His talents as prator, philosopher, and elegant blasphemer–the panoply of his skills–give lie to the notion of equality among this Holy Trinity. He is the center of tragedy. This, the notion of GOMBURZA as a salutory unit and singular heroic entity is, yes, arbitrary, a bad yoke: the sad fate of the signifier. But that does not lessen its importance. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Clyde, Ohio)

Form(s) of Ecstasy

Coming out of an illness these days is like coming out of an uneasy sleep; the kind where you were sure you dozed off in the midst of noise, which you were only ever able to effectively block out with some meds and the insistence of your body on enough, enough.

The actual awakening, per se, is not so much a barrage of things you don’t want to hear, not because they are irrelevant but because they are less than comprehensive: cue the Facebook posts about the latest corporate massacre of trees in the summer capital; cue the SM-as-evil graphics;

cue the endless outpouring of criticism/metacriticism/anti-criticism parading as metacriticism in the form of status updates, x number of shares, and convenient, takeaway comments, for an article about the status quo that you’ve heard of and experienced.

It’s a slower process than it sounds.

In the interim, while hacking your throat out and trying not to forget the antibiotics to combat your infection, you ask yourself why you were so concerned in the first place; why you bother about how your country makes you feel, at all, when most of the day–which you spend, anyway, these days, toiling in front of an old laptop for the usual peso-per-word rate–you don’t experience the grand heat of such hatred anyway (But of course there’s the knowledge that the bigger picture is only ever thus because of its instances: in the way your elders tell you there are outfits that shouldn’t be worn in the event of using public transportation; in the way narrow back alleys and groups of men should be avoided; in the danger of cat calls and good morning greetings that are anything but because their eyes say more than their mouths do. So you attempt to articulate, because you feel it is the little you can do).

Then, thankfully, P posts something that makes sense. Maybe it isn’t the best kind of criticism, lacks that lauded university flair (no heavy school-of-thought name dropping, here!), but good god, it’s still more fair (the informed kind, mind) than the news you see on TV or the angry Facebook outbursts

(There’s also this: calls to boycott SM? I’m sorry, did we suddenly and with ease just magick ourselves from the specific confines of our third world country? Have we re-eimagined into sheer nonexistent delusion the convenience that the said establishment brings, og perhaps not immediately to the middle class to which I belong, but rather to the masses? But then again there’s the more sound suggestion: not to boycott it, but merely to avoid it; patronize the competition whenever possible and go to SM only as a last resort.

Please. I’ll be the first to tell you that even having read Indolent Indio, followed the story on TV and radio, and attempted to compartmentalize this issue aside from whatever personal biases I may have gathered against the great Henry Sy empire, I would still rather those trees stayed put, period. I would rather we invested in more sustainable means of construction and forestry. I would rather we didn’t need an SM in every effing city.

But my next move would be to tell you that frankly, it’s a mall culture, baby. Bobby Chinn has noted it, but if you missed that you need only to walk around a mall or two to note the many passersby without a clear destination in mind, the clumps of people sitting around busying themselves with their cellular phones without any particular urgency.

And this stasis goes on, mind you. I witnessed it myself, having had to wait for an appointment and having nowhere else to go. It’s not a matter of passing the few spare minutes but of literally wasting away in a mall, waiting for something I obviously couldn’t name for them.

Boycott? Avoid? I can try, but when push comes to shove and I need a place where I can pay my bills or today’s price of gas (the bulk of which, no matter how much I may try to shoulder, still largely falls on my elderly parents) says it is more convenient to go to where they insist We’ve Got It All for You rather than somewhere else, I can’t say I’ll put up much resistance).

But hey, it’s all in a day’s work, isn’t it? Because to live is to come to terms with life and its forms of irony.

And all the better when it’s the third world, Philippine kind of irony.

In the slow awakening of still recovering, you will learn that James Templeton needs the Internet to give him a conscience, because he’s been “stealing from a 23-year-old freelance designer from a third world country.” And your guts scream that this is wrong. It is wrong.

How do you know? Because you have principle. Then you back up slowly and think of how much of what you know as principle was shaped by your alma mater, and how that education has limits (Ironically, and therefore in keeping with an observation, for an article that discusses a Western take on the matter, there’s this, found first by M and thereafter shared with G).

But you also know that “to go beyond” means “to construct the specific limits which your Jesuit, Filipino, and yet still tongue-in-cheek ahistorical education gives you.”

Oh, you wish the answers wouldn’t come so easily, but they do. You know it, because you do gush about Harry (and to a great extent Katniss and Jonathan Strange and Chrestomanci, all):

but you can gush local, too!:

And it sounds like such a privileged state, doesn’t it. But because it is privileged, it is questionable, as such:

Where then, if you stand so proudly thus, are the rest of “you”? Why do you have to go to such lengths to describe what this is? Why do so few of your peers understand the politics of publishing (You are flattered by their insistence that you should come up with your own book, admit it; but you are even more immensely fearful of the fact that even the thought of it already tastes of backlash and the already um no thanks, I’d rather not), when their very own book-buying preferences and the structure of your friendly neighborhood bookstore dictates it?

The answer is in believed normalcy, in the status quo. In an uneasy peace, built on the premise that we should agree to see what is wrong as simply what is–cue the sight of endless shanties covered up by MMDA insistence on Metro Gwapo, cue the reality of children selling sampaguita held up on strings perceived as nostalgic cultural icon instead of something that ought to move us into no pun intended action–this is where we are and where many voices will insist we stay.

And you ask me why I am stressed? Or why I seem a little “nega”?

My dear, writing and talking about these things don’t constitute being a cesspool of negative energy. It means simply to be alive and accept the fact that I am an intellectual. I am this intellectual, born and bred not by mere institutions but by my milieu, by friends and teachers who became friends, by book-buying habits, by mistakes I made as an employee and now as whatever it is you would deem to call me.

(Puwede rin namang sabihin na ‘di tulad ng iba, tila hindi naman malupit ang naranasan  ko. When it comes down to it, I don’t have the industry coming at me with claws and fangs but a small but steady stream of comments made in passing. Ang pagsusulat ko dito ay hindi rin naman upang subukin na makihalo sa isang hot na isyu o para lamang mapag-usapan tulad ng kilala kong nasabihan na, tulad ng natukoy ko na, ng mga mas marahas pang mga salita. This isn’t a case of misrecognition or projection, either, as I cannot help if I feel some empathetic solidarity with those who have experienced so much worse, without mistaking myself for them.

Besides, I have asked myself if the very fact that what I experienced would amount to a collection of passing remarks only, would make these instances acceptable. And after some thought, the answer I received was “No.” And it continues to be “No” as I type this).

And isn’t it ironic, now? So you thought I was going to stop at getting good grades. I am reminded of my brother, when, in my teenage years he kept lashing out against people who call themselves “critics.” Anong klaseng trabaho yun, he would say, sisiraan mo lang ang gawa ng iba. So we know that not only is there a deep misunderstanding of what criticism actually is; the other ugly head of the problem is that critics are boxed separately from intellectuals, and too, critics are seen as nothing but–oh no wait, I repeat myself.

Destructive? Noisy? Negative? Did you think we were coming to inspire ideological peace? Non-violence as a way of life, always. But harmony in criticism? Ah, my dear, you make me laugh.

–

I suppose I wrote this because I was seriously considering shutting this blog down.  Which wouldn’t be a catastrophe, mind you. I have no delusions about academic credibility, and better writer-critics have said similar in sleeker styles than mine.

But then stopping this would have meant to stop reading the people I read online; would have meant to stop talking to certain friends at all because largely what holds us together are the things we know better than to be silent about. And I would fool myself into thinking I am okay with this. But if I think the field needs anything but ideological/critical peace, what right have I to fake a conscience that is at peace with silence?

And well then, thank god for meds*. I think.

_

*Edit to add: or perhaps for the after-the-stasis feeling they inevitably lead to later on.

A Preface to Reduction

They told me to cut the meat into lean pieces, and to abhor the rich excess of fat and oil, that I may suck only at the juices that have truly embedded themselves into every slice, and therefore that I may better savor happiness in every bite:

In my bedroom I tear my books to their barest pages so that I can read only the most heartfelt lines. In the kitchen with knife and scissors, I trim my dresses into ribbons. In the bathroom I cut my hair to shreds. In the pause before bed I deconstruct a picture of us

(I keep your hand because it is the one part of you my sensibility misses; the rest I throw away).

At night I lengthen my hours awake to guard against too much sleep. In the car I listen to a modicum of combination salads–a snippet of Bach, a melody from a commercial, a bridge from a pop star. In the dining room I think of the meals we shared together and cut my serving into half. In my heart I tell myself that I must put down this pen: this string of extravagance, as of this minute, seems too much, seems overdone, seems to be enough.

–

1.) “By ‘void’ I mean that which has no beginning and no end. It expressly deals with that which cannot be seen. By knowing things that exist you can know that which does not exist.”

2.) “In order to achieve enlightenment without trying, you have to forget everything you know, and just be.”

3.) “It’s the perfect distillation of any art: reducing everything to its essence; its most perfect form.”

- Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings (explained and quoted in the second) via Mark Dacascos, in the documentary entitled, “Samurai.”

–

And to end: a song.

Myself to Ask

And now, you refuse to allow yourself the audacity of space to say, I could once do better than this. Instead you allow yourself the space to say, these were the things I used to say–what Internet archives will let you see–during this or that part of my life, this was then, this half-hearted insistence is now. Perhaps there is only self, but ironically like many true things, also this self that reminds you there are more selves than I, in the top hat of identities archived you choose to write, how odd the hours you defy construct, in which defiance is also material and therefore only just another chosen path. Where others such as yourselves veer off, is also where your mind can pick a track, these isolated cases of endurance that cross your path. And then there it is: to write, that which is an end in itself, that also perhaps it ends itself.

A Taste of the Symphonic

So I must say that this isn’t exactly a review. For one thing, I don’t know much about orchestra, and the closest I’ve got is to get this sudden urge to obsessively listen to Vivladi’s Winter–my favorite among his Seasons.

But September 3, 2011, as my friend Anela pointed out, was just a day that reached both ends of the cultural spectrum (For those who know Anela, relax. That’s not a verbatim quote, but that’s basically what she said). In the morning, we had resolved to watch Zombadings: Patayin sa Shokot si Remington. As for the evening, almost all of us eventually decided that we would accept Boleng’s invitation to attend her cousin Reggie Espiritu’s concert called Symphonic Passion at the Philam Life Theater.

So perhaps I don’t have much that I can say when it comes to composition and its resulting quality, which is probably just as well because it is the experience of attending an orchestra concert that I want to write about, particularly in the context of myself and my friends: Filipinas in their early twenties, fresh out of university, or just about finishing it, with varying tastes in music and well, as I’ve already confessed, little knowledge about orchestra.

As we walked into the theater, the experience is first one of confusion–Is that food? What are those things they’re handing out? Are my friends and I heading to the right row of seats? And then there is the act of sitting down, of taking in the place where lights and music and action must follow musical script, in defiance of their spontaneous composition in daily life: the stage.

The experience, then, first and foremost, is visual.

Logically, you’d expect that the next stage of the experience would appeal to the audio, but I think that aside from it being an act of listening, it’s also an experience of puzzlement. No matter the genre, I think our first instinct at the first note of an unfamiliar tune is always one of a slight jolt: it is the moment before judgement, perhaps the first pure moment of actually hearing something for the first time.

The next stage (no pun intended), I think, has more to do with distinction. Particularly for those of us who are not composers ourselves, it is a challenge (and a good one at that) to try and distinguish what makes one composition different from another.

Performance of Paulina Siopuatco’s “Angel of God”

That being said, maybe I’m just a sucker for well-placed spaces, in both literature and music, but I never got tired of the sudden hush after each performance, that brief space that doesn’t feel as if it exists just for applause alone, but, rather, for the realization on the part of the listeners that a piece has ended, so that the pause and the piece before it mutually define the other.

But anticipation is probably one of the things which really made the experience come alive. I’ll have to admit now that there were moments in the concert where I was lost and mentally fumbling, partly because a) I knew the experience was there for me to sit back and enjoy and yet b) it was also such a new experience that I couldn’t help but anticipate how I could possibly react to it properly, knowing so little of its structure.

As I was saying, though, this was definitely not a concert which didn’t challenge itself to add some spice to the performance.

Rivermaya performed “Sugal ng Kamatayan,” “No Where to Run,” and “Lipad”

Julianne performed “Fly,” “Grateful,” and “Liwanag”

More than that, one more layer of richness is added to the concert in the form of guest performers because it calls to mind musical history in the context of local Philippine artists. Rivermaya’s performance is in some ways a kind of past-meets-present. I assume most of the audience knows all the past lead singers of this well-respected band, at the same time that it welcomes the youthful energy now imbibed into it by Paolo Valenciano.

On the one hand, Julianne’s vocals, combined with Reggie’s role as conductor did not disappoint, with the sounds of Julianne’s hit Suntok sa Buwan still fresh on my mind despite the fact that it had been released a few years back. I may not be an expert when it comes to orchestra, but I do know that nostalgia as an effect of art is symbolic of its power.

But things take a different turn when Jose “Quest” Villanueva takes to the stage. Together with Reggie, the performance becomes inclusive. In getting the audience to repeat certain sounds and to have little sing-along’s, the spectators also become co-performers. And let’s face it, anything that we term as performance, as art, as music, is just made that much more fun when it has that distinct element of community.

And too, it doesn’t hurt when it is an instance of both family relations and friendship.

Conductor, composer, and arranger Reggie Espiritu poses with just a small but essential unit of his strong support system

Incidentally, this *might* be the part where I think of a witty caption to describe a picture with my friends at the said event…

But let’s face it, it’s all just talk, and empty talk at that, especially when it comes to music–unless you take the time to listen yourself, and decide on your own, whether you’re a certified orchestra aficionado, or just a case of the curious and grateful for the experience–like me and my friends.

Enjoy!

__

For more information about Reggie or Symphonic Passion, visit the official concert website. Photos taken by Rosa Espiritu, and taken from Facebook. You can also find other videos of the performances over at YouTube.