In the neighborhood of ink
When I learned that an artist friend was dying, my first impulse was to look for the old Heavy Metal magazines stashed somewhere in the dusty apartment, most of them vintage ‘90s with the sexy women in various apparel and degrees of dishevelment leaping from the cover in all their drawn details.
The power of ink to render the human body, in this case female, would be a welcome reminder that not everything is cast in stone; on the contrary, pen and paper can have their own discreet twilight that can be soothing to the bones, like an alternative painkiller. Maybe I can send the magazines to him, if I can find them in the apartment in varied degrees of dishevelment.
But at the get-go, I secured the man’s address on the border of Manila and Pasay, a stone’s throw from the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design of the College of Saint Benilde along Vito Cruz, where once we had ventured to see the work of an old classmate of his under Chabet in Diliman, in the early years of martial law.
A product of the old school of drawing, he wasn’t really comfortable with conceptual stuff, relying instead on the illustrator’s instinct of perspective, shaded line, vanishing point. What you see is what you get in his strips and cartoons, sometimes corny sometimes not. But never touch the high-fallutin better suited for academe and the avant-garde.
Such, he thought, was the atmosphere in MCAD, but this did not mean he did not appreciate the unerring life of the mind. As an old teacher of signs in nearby De La Salle said, there’s no such thing as grammatical error, only ideological comprehension.
Since the friend was not taking any visitors, preserving the last vestiges of privacy as the body slowly gives way, my mind found it best to walk through the old haunts of Malate with its leafy streets and hidden watering holes, avoiding cracks on the sidewalk heading west from MCAD toward the bay.
San Andres gym where for several Thursday nights the Port Area office boys played basketball to sweat out the toxic stuff of deadlines, till the exercise regimen was moved closer to Anda Circle to the Knights of Columbus gym in Intramuros, a stone’s throw from office. Here the smell of efficacent and urine was unmistakable, and the loud cheers of the motley gathered crowd could still be heard when on the big screen Manny Pacquiao knocked out Erik Morales.
Then on to what used to be Penguin Café on Remedios Circle, passing through a slum area that resembled a favorite site of the so-called war on drugs, but now has turned into a mini Koreatown, even the nearby circle has lost much of its old world charm, still a clash of cultures between Seoul and Manila.
On Adriatico the Bar 1951 has long ceased even before pandemic, turning into the Minokaua which may or may not be there anymore, another victim of the coronavirus but where once live bands played, art hung on the wide walls painted white, and illustrations of assorted ghosts at the bar from Frida Kahlo to Freddie Aguilar long since erased, and on the second floor a window looking west could still catch a glimpse of sunset and a stray sea breeze if not whiff of hashish.
Further north on Bocobo what should come across but an incarnated Oarhouse, where an exhibit of formerly Norway-based artist Benjie Lontoc is ongoing till end August, Inksistentialismo, where pen and ink drawings exist side by side with smaller sized photographs of Oslo in its innumerable reflections, a shifting chimera playing with the balance of light in the northern hemisphere.
Of course the editorial cartoonist had told me that upon reading an obit piece I had written for a colleague in Port Area, he wanted me to do the same for him when the time comes. I don’t know if that time is now, but just to let the man know the Heavy Metal is surely somewhere in the apartment, that there’s no such thing as mortal combat, only the comprehension of ideologues: mind over matter, easier said than already done.
