DEATH AT THE DISCO

TYBS#10 (FEB 2007)
Katwo Librando has shaved her head. Barely recognizable as the frisky singer from the old Narda, or the glammed rock chick on her FHM spread, this girl with her visible scalp nevertheless looks more apt for the newest incarnation of Narda.

While the old Narda was unabashedly indie pop throughout their four EPs and their LP Formika, this album presents a darker, more belligerent and tormented side. See, for Discotillion, Narda has gone the way of dance-punk.

That strain of electro clash that began with groups like Kraftwerk, Gang of Four, Visage, New Order, Human League and Gary Numan plus early 80s Italo Disco. There are also quaint stories about momentous events like A Certain Ratio recording a track with Martin Hannet while touring with New Order, or reggae greats Sly and Robbie doing the same thing except with folkie Grace Jones. The New York loft-disco scene is also credited with having blended an eclectic mix of Philadelphia disco with dub-reggae cut and pasted over it and the improv style of greats like Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk. Wow.

These days Bosco, Franz Ferdinand, !!! and a host of other young Turks (like Pedicab and If Disco is a Crime) are pushing the electro clash envelope to new heights. Add Narda to the list and bury the hatchet.

“After Formika. . .” says Katwo in her stream of consciousness, sing-song speech, “It was very hard to be in the band. Things were so turbulent. Every moment in the band was a paranoid experience. Dyos me, heto na naman kami! I had the creeping feeling that it was bad karma, something that me and Ryan had done in the early days that was coming back to haunt us.”

Haunted is a fitting term. If this were the komiks Narda she’d be a tattooed, mascara-wearing suicide girl who cruises the local bars and discotheques looking for some action or a fight. This Narda would be perennially pissed because sidekick Ding has hit adolescence and has been copping a feel every chance he gets. Because Dad has been shot by a mobster and Mom has taken to the salvation of shabu and alcohol. Because Narda’s boyfriend just found out he’s gay.

This Narda would take out her frustration by brutally killing rapists and con men instead of incapacitating them for the cops. This Narda comes home late, drunk and high on E, and it still isn’t enough to dull the pain. This Narda does not want to be a hero. In fact, she doesn’t want to save the world or any of the idiotic, lemming citizens that inhabit it. Right now her problems are tougher than any monster.

This is why Discotillion is a brilliant and critically acclaimed album. This is why we must applaud Katwo Librando (vocals), Ryan Villena (drums), Tani Santos (guitars), Jeps Cruz (synths) and Yaps Tagle (synths) for mustering the courage to finally bring us a heroine with flaws and fists intact.

“Dance punk feels like an evolution for Narda,” exclaims Tani. Sure, but it also feels like a coming of age. It’s way past time this girl became a woman. And the realization of just what that means is capsulated in the loudspeaker clarion of “Molotov” and the teenage wasteland pressure cooker of “Ang Mitsa.”

Elsewhere, “100 Taon” cleans house in the mind-space where politics and personal life meet -- and how the former impinges on the latter with enormous, invisible pressure. They even find time to eschew fame with “Kamikazee.”

Discotillion was made at Sound Creation Studios and the whole thing presided over by Mike Dizon (Pedicab and Sandwich) and Mong Alcaraz (Sandwich and Chicosci), so that’s why the double synths and the layers are as textured as they are. Ryan Villena’s drumming has taken on a more cymbal-heavy, riotous feel and Katwo’s vocals have finally found a niche that allows her to shine without overreaching.

Just check out the range of emotions that “Gasolina” brings. Sexy and spiky, flirtatious and insolent, this is a template dance-punk song that conjures images of Narda whirling dervish-like around a rave floor alight in laser lights and strobes, as her boots splash up puddles of blood and brain matter. Gives the chorus “Sasabog na `ko!” whole new meaning, hey?

That this is a terrific album is without doubt. However, the psychic rewards for the band far outweigh their radiant creation. “Apparently you don’t have to be a very skilled musician to reach out to people. Just being honest is enough,” shrugs Katwo.

Now that is enlightenment worthy of heroes.

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

TYBS#9 (JAN 2007)
In the movie adaptation of the graphic novel From Hell, a furious Jack the Ripper tells the stupefied Inspector about the symbols he mistook for mere mystical chicanery. He exclaimed, “Even one as depraved as you are can sense that these symbols course with meaning and power.”

I feel the same way about Wawi Navarroza’s collection of fine art photography, Saturnine: A Collection of Portraits, Creatures, Glass and Shadow. These are a series of pictures inclined to mythical fancy, anthropomorphic personification and a fascination with shadows. While they may seem to be digitally manipulated they are actually, painstakingly handmade.

Says Wawi: “I do not take pictures. I make them. I manually subject the negative to a careful blend of chaos and control. I let the heat and chemicals take them as nature will. And then I control the disintegration.”

Wawi has gained notoriety in bohemian circles as both a working photographer, fashion or otherwise, and as the maker of Polysaccharide: The Dollhouse Drama, her previous photography collection. Some of you may also recall the images from that collection reproduced in the popular record Doll’s House of The Late Isabel, where Wawi also does vocal duties.

While Polysaccharide took Wawi around the world on a touring exhibit it was, for eyes like mine ill-used to the sensibilities of fine art, its nuances or ambitions, too obscurantist. In parts they seemed ostentatious, even trivial. I felt no power behind the images, or perhaps the force of the message didn’t reach my depraved head because the vision was too personal. Saturnine, however, is a different collection altogether.

Swedish industrial band Interlace told me in interview that they make music like a riddle, and that “If you create a riddle you don’t want everyone to solve it. Because then it would be too easy. But you don’t want no one to solve it. Because then it’s too hard.” Saturnine feels the same way.

When you view the photographs they feel potent without being in your face, they feel clear with the illuminating significance just out of reach. All this is made with her trademark streak of enthrallment with the dark. It seems Wawi has finally found a way to let us share the visions in her head (or gut) without compromising her love of symbols, story or atmosphere. Or giving too much away.

While the Silverlens Gallery is probably the most clandestinely located art house in the metro (where Saturnine runs until Feb 17) it’ll be worth it to go just to see the evocative photo of the artist on bare feet in a shallow pool of water with paper boats scattered around, lengthily titled “The Return (After the Storm)/ The Traveller, Always Alone.”

“The seed of Saturnine,” writes Wawi, “came about in a period when I was seized by the mystery about the passage of time. Of looking at framed photos, friends come and gone, missing places, of looking at the mirror at 3AM. It all came to me that every moment is fragile, temporal, fleeting.”

Two of my favorites are “Voyage Solitaire (An Ode to Beginnings)”, where a sullen Hank Palenzuela (bassist for Agaw Agimat) sits amid a gloom of books and cards, and the mix of anxiety, waiting and vain romance that is “Her Greatest Fear is That She May Never See You Again.”

In Saturnine Wawi has created images of universal emotion capsulated by people and not-people (creatures who look like people?) that surprisingly share the same woes, dilemmas and delights.

“Pretty pictures alone does not fine art photography make,” she explains. “Pretty pictures you can hang on your living room is fine but you got to expect more if it's called `fine art.’ I'm cool with décor but I'm more for those images that poke at the head or heart, images that reflect the mind of its maker, the vision of the artist, the voice of conviction behind the works. Then, that to me is `fine art photography.’ ”

People will never doubt Wawi for her art not being honest or sincere again. Meaning and power resides in them. Look at the photos. Solve the riddle.

Silverlens Gallery is located at 2320 Pasong Tamo Extension, Makati City.For inquiries, please email manage@silverlensphoto.com or call (+632) 816 0044

LO-FI GRANDNESS AND AN EMO OPUS

TYBS#8 (JAN 2007)

Your boring desk jobs and surprisingly uncreative creative jobs can leave you with a sense of frazzeldness and general woe. For a cure I always turn to good music or good art.

Here are two records forged from polar opposites of the sonic spectrum (one minimalist and back to basics, the other over the top and full of excess) that nevertheless share unrestrained originality, vision and method musicianship. At times dark and brooding, always entertaining, these are truly good buys. God bless both of them.

PRANK SINATRA
Footlong Players
(D Chord Records)
While many critics may mistake Prank Sinatra’s sonic creations as mere novelty songs, these trivial ears miss the point completely. Prank does not make music simply to make people laugh or smile, his rough gems are intentionally made so to cater to a back to basics motive.

It’s a grassroots aesthetic shared by his low-fi idols like Guided By Voices, Dinosaur Jr. and Boss Hog. If you’ve listened to his previous album, The F Defect, then you’ll be prepared for the adventure in sonic fun that is a Prank Sinatra album.

Prank Sinatra, by the way, is a one man band in the person of Iman Leonardo, the same guy who played bass for local goth forerunners Dominion for about a decade. For his songs he recruits top caliber musicians like Czandro Pollack (Sugar Hiccup) and sound engineer Ron Francisco.

In any case, for Footlong Players, Prank has dropped the garage purity shtick and opted for a thicker, more electric sound. The resulting music is a mix of psychedelic pop and garage punk if it had been played by some very stoned Beatles.

“The band has no fixed genre,” says Prank/Iman. “I hope the second album conveys that.” As a corollary, we can also take that to mean these musicians are some of the most versatile and skilled in the local scene.

Anyone who doubts that Prank can play conventional rock should check out the flanger-tinged goodness of “Glorify DIY.” In between the samples of commercial spiels is an irresistible melody pushed even deeper by a chorus of voices doing the “la la la” bit. It only has a single phrase lyric, but it feels like a whole song.

“The album is so titled because we all ate footlong hotdog sandwiches after recording,” quips Iman. Hmmm, that would probably explain all the food references. Check out “Yesthurling Egg” and “Prelude to Footlong Midnight Snack” for some frolicking, lost in space sounds.

But the deepest hit from the bong here is the triad of songs: “I am the: a) Center of the Universe b) Illustrious Orbiting Noneffervescent Star c) Mother of all Satellites.” All the letters are different tracks, slightly connected like a prog song, but my favorite is the last with Iman’s voice sounding like it’s coming from underwater as it’s run through a vocal processor.

If this is novelty songwriting then this is the most well crafted and seriously unserious kind of mass pablum I’ve heard. We need more of it.


My CHEMICAL ROMANCE
The Black Parade
(Reprise/ Warner Music )
People have laughed when I told them this is a brilliantly made album. Then again, let’s amend that to: “some music critics laughed when I told them. . .”

I can see why this isn’t everybody’s rave record, though. My Chemical Romance is closely associated with the emo movement currently in fad. While I have nothing against emo, the sheer surplus of sentiment in some bands make for subpar, merely bathetic music that smacks of mock, hand-on-forehead tragedy that’s as overacting as it is poseuristic. Pweh.

Not so with MCR. Even their previous records had the seeds of greatness in it. They were never OA just for the heck of it, their themes were spot on and synergized with the lyrics and the musicianship was always top caliber.

With The Black Parade, MCR are no longer a potentially great band. They are now an impressive band whose work stands up to greatness and wears magnificence like a cloak. Never mind that said cloak rests on uneasy, young shoulders.

While we don’t have enough space to explain what the story behind The Black Parade is (you can log on to http://www.mychemcialromance.com/) suffice to say that it’s a concept album that revolves around the main protagonist called The Patient. We travel with him as his story progresses, starting with the time he dies, thence through to the afterlife where he meets all manner of creatures both amazing and terrible. All this as he reflects on his previous life.

Mind blowing, eh? It was sometime around track eight (“Cancer”) that I realized MCR have made not just an amazing record or just a well conceptualized, well executed concept narrative in sound but also a manifesto of pain, insight and empowerment for the teenagers today. Vocalist Gerard Way and Co are trying to make sense of the war, madness and tumult around them, just like the kids today.

This is the kind of music that speaks to a generation. Just like Nevermind did. Just like American Idiot did. The Black Parade is an emo opus that uses the conventional signifiers of the genre (screams, heart on sleeve lyrics, a mix of metal, goth, grunge, alt rock and hardcore riffs) and transcends it by being masterful. I dare you to listen to tracks like “Mama,” “The Sharpest Lives” and “Cancer” and remain unmoved by the sentiments therein.

Take for example: “Well, mother, what the war did to my legs and to my tongue/ you should have raised a baby girl / I should have been a better son / If you could coddle the infection / They can amputate at once.”

What a great gift, a polaris pointer and catharsis heatsink for those who came of age in the post 9/11 epoch. Bravo, MCR.

Footlong Players and The Black Parade are both available at all major record outlets.

THE DEVIL AND THE D

TYBS#7 (DEC 2006)
Courtesy of the good people at SONY-BMG Music Entertainment Phils, and Magic 89.9 a bunch of friends and I (with significant others in tow) went to the premier of Tenacious D in “The Pick of Destiny” a few weeks ago.

Hampered only by a bunch of mall zombies, who thought the thing was a free for all, we went in with high spirits. After all, like the marketing tag announced, this was only: “the greatest motion picture of all time”!

While not exactly a fan of Jack Black as an actor (way too over the top and still mining the dregs of old SNL sketches) I loved his work in Tenacious D – a real band starring him and fellow SNL alum Kyle Gass.

This one does not disappoint from the get go, what with an intro that lampooned those old THX sound announcements with "THC: The Audience Is Baking." That’s tetrahydrocannabinol for the square readers. At the very least you know this is going to be a stoner movie par excellence, without pretension or guilt and with as much comic exaggeration as can be mustered. But let me tell you about the story first.

The Pick of Destiny takes us to the origins of Tenacious D, starting with the childhood of Jack Black as he realizes that living in a home with extremely religious parents (with Meatloaf as father) isn’t exactly the best thing for his music. All this unfolds in musical, rock opera fashion.

On a particularly inspired scene, after his dad has just given him a spanking and ripped most of his posters off the wall, JB prays to a Sabbath-era poster of Ronnie James Dio and Dio – bless his metal fantasy curls – actually answers like some (un)holy messenger. Whoa.

So it’s off to LA for JB. At Venice Beach JB meets up fortuitously with Klye Gass as a street side guitarist whose skills blow his mind. It is at this point that we must turn vague, lest we reveal too many comic spoilers. As they struggle to make it JB and KG meet less than expected audience response and their trek to greatness leads them to a quest for a legendary, magical guitar pick.

This green pick (shaped like a stylized ram’s head) is the fabled "Pick of Destiny." Legend has it that, since the dark ages, this supernatural pick has been passed down through many hands, including Angus Young, Jimmy Page and Eddie Van Halen.

Their quest takes them to the Rock And Roll History Museum (where the Stairway to Guitar Heaven is just brilliant) and to a totally leftfield and unnecessary sequence about a shroom encounter with Sasquatch. The movie also contains the origin of the band’s name, the story behind the Tenacious D hit song “Tribute,” cameos by Tim Robbins and Ben Stiller and a high-stakes rock-off with Satan himself (played to the hilt by an unrecognizable Dave Grohl, reprising his “Tribute” music video role). Oh, and look out for hot and tasty blonde Melissa-Anne Davenport in Kyle’s groupie sequence. That girl’s going to be a star one day.

A San Francisco Chronicle critic said it best when he wrote: “The finished product is. . .comic gold for anyone who is currently stoned, has been stoned in the past or spends a lot of time around stoned people.”

Quite true. There’s a sequence at the back of a guitar store where Ben Stiller stops in his narrative abut the Pick and exclaims, in a cross between mockery and seriousness, “Satanus. That’s Latin for Satan!” That just cracked me up. I don’t know why. But the non-linearity of the jokes is pure stoner comedy and just thinking about it still gets me smiling. I mean, this harks back to watching Chuck Norris videos in a state of total bakedness. Recalling that lofty sensation in a movie theater with nary anything organic in my veins is genius in my book. It makes me want to shout: “Long live the D!” while flashing devil horns.

The brilliant parts actually make you forgive the plodding, mediocre ones. Thank you, director Liam Lynch. But as rocking as the movie is, I’m sure the second Tenacious D album will be so much better. Or is the soundtrack actually the second album? Hmmm. Well, just go see it. If you don’t enjoy yourself you’ll at least go home with a new set of pop culture references.

PARENTAL ADVISORY: Please be warned that this movie contains profanity (probably nothing the kids haven’t heard before, though), drug use, sexual humor, comic violence, and even more toking. Just a friendly reminder.

TRIVIA FROM IMDB.COM ABOUT “POD” (Warning: Spoilers!):
1) The conversation JB and KG have at the end of film on how they have forgotten the song that defeated the devil is a reference to the song "Tribute" from Tenacious D's debut album.

2) When KG and JB go to the open mic night for the first time Neil Hamburger is being escorted offstage. He is their opening act for their current tour, which features music from the soundtrack.

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN BLACK AND WHITE (JOHNNY HOLLOW PART 2)

TYBS#6 (DEC 2006)
In last week’s column I featured Canadian goth band, Johnny Hollow’s history and self-titled debut CD. Here’s the best bits of our on-line interview where the members talk about their music, gaining a global fan base and the impressive parts of Russian mystics.

TYBS: Tell me about the persona of Johnny and how he was formed or conceptualized?
Vincent Marcone: For the moment it’s a secret, but all we can tell you is that you’ll be seeing a whole new side of Johnny soon.

TYBS: How have “recent” developments in technology (eg. the Net, file sharing, CD-burning, etc.) affected the way you make music?
Janine White: We embrace technology and quite possibly might not exist without it. Although we use a lot of organic sounds in our music, the creations themselves often start and end on the computer. We do a lot of editing and sampling of our own sounds to create musical fabrics and ambient backdrops. Thanks to file sharing we are able to tag-team on mixing and share ideas without even being in the same city.

The argument about Net file-sharing will be forever debated; our experience, however, has been quite positive. Throughout the entire process of recording our album we were able to post songs in various stages of completion and receive feedback which really propelled the project forward. Our online home at johnnyhollow.com has really broadened our fanbase.

The internet allows people to choose for themselves in a much more democratic manner what they really want to listen to. It is so important as an independent band to be able to reach the world, and as this is an interview from the Philippines I would say its working.

TYBS: Are you searching for a kind of “beauty” through your music? Do you consider it art as a means of meaning or is it just personal expression?
Janine White: There aren’t enough people speaking out for independent creativity. We don’t consciously try to be political or controversial with most of our lyrics, but our music combined with our whole visual/web presence is a statement of aggressive independence and our dedication to it.

Art as a means of personal expression is often purely intuitive, but regardless of intention there is always an aspect of communal meaning that reaches the people who respond to it.

TYBS: Why play dark music?
Kitty Thompson: We don’t consciously play “dark” music. We simply make music. If we come off as being creepy it’s because we are.

Janine White: There’s something cathartic in finding beauty in the darker side of human emotions.

TYBS: Tell me about all the unusually atmospheric instruments in your repertoire, especially the effects-laden cello. How exactly does that work?
Kitty Thompson: It is often difficult in our music to tell what is made up and what is real. Many noises are digitally created, many are raw acoustic sounds, and others are performed and then strangely manipulated.

There is nothing mysterious about the cello. It functions much like a guitar with pedals. However, the extensive palette of colors that can be obtained from such a cavernous acoustic body far outstretches the imagination.

TYBS: Why do music independently? The pros and cons?
Janine White: I’m not sure we’re independent on purpose. It’s more a default phrase for anyone that has not been signed by a label but appears to be functioning alright on their own.

The pros and cons are obvious. Working on your own project for your own reasons is the most rewarding experience you can have, because there are no “forces that be” pressuring you to follow any formula; but it comes at the price of budget constraints and long hours.

Right now it works for us, but that’s not to say that we might not change our minds if the right team for us came along.

TYBS: About performance. How do your dynamics work on-stage? Especially with the more danceable songs like “Stolen”?
Kitty Thompson: Well, obviously some songs are harder to pull off than others. We make use of several sampling devices on stage to cover the drum beats, sound FX and any extra layers that we added in production. We write and record all of our songs layer by layer before we ever play them, so its always a bit of a challenge to figure out who’s going to do what and how I’m going to play four cellos.

I’m usually busy with cello and back-up vocals, Vince runs the electronic layers and performs the male vocals, and Janine handles the lead vocals and keyboards, occasionally switching to the electric guitar when she has room to move.

We’re currently working on projected backdrop screens designed by Vince and Tom (JH’s animator) that will add a visual element to the live show.

TYBS: Tell me what motivated you to write about Rasputin (in the same titled track), the Russian mystic?
Vincent Marcone: It was a whim, I guess. He was such an interesting character, who seemed to draw both admiration and revulsion. I love those legends that ride somewhere between black and white. And he (or a certain impressive part of him) “ahem” is apparently on display in an erotic Russian museum right now. We didn’t know that when we wrote the song.

TELL ME, DARK (JOHNNY HOLLOW PART1)

TYBS#5 (DEC2006)
I corresponded on-line with Canadian indie trio Johnny Hollow back in 2004. They were nice enough to send their CD all the way across the Pacific and, in return, I sent them some albums by local goth bands.

Has Black Sabbath or Motorhead ever saved your soul? If you’ve ever sat up late at night, rocking your grief out with just your stereo, Johnny Hollow will remind you why music can, and does, save lives.

I think they’re the shape of things to come for dark music. This piece of TYBS will probably seem too musically obscurantist, but this is the point: JH don’t deserve to be so secret.

Johnny Hollow are Janine White (keyboards, guitars and vocals), Kitty Thompson (cello), and Vincent Marcone (vocals and digital work). Johnny Hollow is both the band’s name and a persona that lives only in their music. The project all started in 2001, when Marcone, White and Thompson were drinking buddies in the university town of Waterloo.

White and Thompson were unsatisfied with the kind of music they were playing in other bands. When they linked up with Marcone and jammed for the first time, there were “whisperings of a voice that was not to be silenced.”

So the trio premiered their first experiments as an audio feature in the ”Sonic Skeleton” section of Marcone’s site for his digital artwork. Audience response was extremely encouraging, giving them a significant fan base nearly overnight. In March of 2003 they launched a teaser site to promote their indie debut. And enthusiasts from all over the world have since flocked to this site, including yours truly.

I wholeheartedly refer you to www.johhnyhollow.com and http://www.mypetsekeleton.com/ to discover their on-line presence that’s as strong as an earthbound soul. Also, as if the endorsement on this column isn’t enough, I strongly urge you to try and get the CD.

The trio is warm and truly generous. I mean, you wouldn’t even be reading this if they weren’t kind enough to send their work all the way across the Pacific.

Though the CD cover gives you an idea of what Johnny the character looks like, I personally imagine him as a cross between Red Dragon’s Tooth Fairy serial killer and a chattering, mad hatter Baron Samedi of the voodoo pantheon.

Both ominous and elegant he is a menacing figure by his very passitivity. He’s content to wait, like the man at the crossroads. All things come to him, eventually, after all. There’s no need for haste. He seldom moves but when he does we see him blurred, never quite in focus even as he peers into our eyes, nose to nose. His gestures are too fast for us even as, to him, it’s quite leisurely.

If you listen closely you can hear his voice: a fused whisper of several other voices, layered and intermingling. The adventures and spirit of Johnny provides a sort of discontinuous narrative backdrop as the songs on the album unfold.

Johnny Hollow the album is relentlessly impressionistic. They use instruments like keyboards, electric and acoustic guitars, ethereal and aria-soaring vocals, plus a cello linked to effects -- or a series thereof – that the poor instrument was never meant to be put through. Though it is this whole beating-sound-into-submission idea that cellist Kitty Thompson was going for in the first place. The things you can do on a cello with pedals, she says, “Far outstretches the imagination.”

Even the fillers like the updated, traditional ballad “Motherless Child” and a few instrumentals are full courses in themselves. But the real meat is tracks like the anthemic, wounded “Dark Thing,” and the scathing apologia that’s also a razor observation of our theatrically absurd society in “Bag of Snow.”

On this last one White sings so scornfully, “I’m sorry if I’m low and dirty and mean and cold / God told me to, it’s all for you / For what it’s worth, this is my bag of snow,” that you want to cackle along to the derision like some prime evil before shooting your dealer.

There’s also the full on, danceable saturation of “Stolen.” On this last one it took me three listens to finally realize, with much head shaking shock, that the unearthly distorted riff which the song is built around is played by a cello and not a guitar.

Johnny Hollow’s musical compass is firmly set to a terra incognita we can only glimpse at, but one which our psyche never fails to recognize for it contains recognizable angels and devils playing out our millennia old conflicts. Visually, sonically and digitally, their indie LP is one of those intimate, profoundly intense records whose gestalt will remind you why you fell in love with the dark in the first place, and will make you fall all over again.

More from JH on the next TYBS.

STORM SEASON AND A GHOST STORY

TYBS#4 (DEC 2006)
Storm season is frightening. In a good way, though, it’s both scary and exciting. The suspicion that something severe is going to happen gets me too amped. So there’s little else to do but peruse old memories when the wind howls, the lights are out and you can’t sleep.

That last big storm, Milenyo, had me commuting to work dodging tree branches like missiles and one particularly ill-timed street bulb that decided to loose itself from its post as I came near.

It landed a meter away and the explosive impact made me freeze, close my eyes and look away. My back was to the wind (at 150kph it’s real hard to lean against it) so most of the shards rolled quickly away. Another pedestrian coming the other way did the same stop and duck routine, but had to cover his face with his hands and arms to ward off the incoming shrapnel. I wanted to pick up the remaining bulb coil as a memento but I just walked faster.

As I write this a bigger storm is on the way and its approach is undeniable. The language of an impending storm is a subtle but tangible one: the floorboards creak like a burglar taking his first steps into a house he’s going to case, a drizzle falls that’s as cold as arctic frost, there’s a sigh in the wind that mimics the nativity of the newly risen dead who’ve come back to seek the perfection they couldn’t find beyond the grave.

You remember stuff as you anticipate a storm. Like elementary school. The fish balls I ate like caviar during recess, those Sticky Fingers that collected dust too fast, and Teacher Mylene’s taut, supple hamstrings as she walked clickety clack down the corridor in her black stilettos -- on display with a blue skirt only on Thursdays.

Stuff like a ghost story. This one is true. I was in it. Listen: I forget the names of my buddies, but there were four of us that night. As far as I can remember we were fulfilling a dare. Not from outside pressure, no. We considered that stupid. Instead we had dared each other until all of us agreed to go that night before we chickened out. In retrospect this was equally as idiotic.

Back then we were enrolled in the UP Integrated School (UPIS), Kinder to Grade Six Division. You probably know UP’s campus grounds are suffused from end to end with vegetation. Our school was tucked away beside the squat red building of the College of Home Economics. In front of it the elementary school’s modest soccer field and about five classrooms formed an annex apart from the main building.

Beside this is a heavily foliaged area (fenced off as well) filled with thin, crooked trees plus scores of bushes and undergrowth that hid a small, flowing creek (we could hear the water but couldn’t see it). And snakes. We saw them wrapped on the trees, we saw their mottled hide on the roof of a nearby tool shed where the caretaker -- who came once a week to tend the grass of the soccer field -- sometimes killed and skinned them.

We all called this place The Forest. When night came it was very, very dark there. The road was closed with two long sawhorses, the height of a 10 year old, put on each side.

So there we were climbing the short fence with two penlights between us, jogging to the other side that led to The Forest.

We climbed the next fence and landed on wet soil. It squished our shoes. We formed a single file and decided to make our way to the tool shed, which lay just a few meters away -- probably to find out what secrets he kept (it was rumored that he also had boy’s hearts preserved apart from bottles of snake poison).

The biggest boy walked point. I think I was in the middle. We hadn’t gotten far when the guy in the front yelled that he was sinking. Looking down, we saw this was true – we had taken a wrong path and were too near the creek, thus the mud and the quicksand-like bog. Checking for another route we found none.

We turned back, then up over the fence and across the field towards the other side, disappointed, upset about the TV shows we’d missed for this shit, the ruckus our mothers would raise at our muddy shoes, socks and pants. It happened when the last of us climbed down the fence.

The guy beside me, named D___, was talking with the Big Guy who had walked point. They were staring at The Forest as they discussed the merits of whether it was better to make up some lame excuse or telling the whole truth. Big Guy was saying that it didn’t matter, since either explanation would get him sent to bed without TV anwyay. D___ was about to reply when he stopped and just stared. His mouth was open, his eyes wide.

Before we could point our lights to his line of sight he gave out a true scared s*&^less shriek and ran past us. We all looked at each other and wasted no time following suit, squealing like girls. There was light enough to see that D___ had just about reached the high metal sawhorse that bordered the road. We thought he would duck like all of us did since it was too high to jump for even the tallest jock. We were wrong.

D___ did not slow his hellish pace, did not even blink, as he hurdled that sawhorse with inches to spare as if his legs had springs.

When we caught up to him at the waiting shed we asked him what he saw. He just kept on mumbling: the shadow, the shadow. Then Big Guy announced that he thought he saw something too. We turned to Big Guy and grilled him. It looked like a man on a tree, he said, a very thin man made of shadow that he wasn’t even sure he was seeing right. Until this darker, liquid shadow moved and looked directly at them. Or rather at D___.

The next day we asked Big Guy to sketch what he’d seen. Then we went to D___ and forced him to sketch what had suddenly made into an Olympic jumper that night.

We compared notes. Big Guy’s heavy hand and stick figure was less proficient than D___’s practiced crosshatch and shading, but they had drawn the same thing: a rake thin man with a knob for a head, his arms and legs clasped around a tree, his body made of darkness.