Well, it seems that Sarah Mennefee, that old poet, homeless activist, and Facebook gadfly is not entirely wrong. The corporatization of the Bay Area, which really kicked into gear in the 1980s and is now on self-propelling steroids, was completed with a final nail in the coffin: Super Bowl in Silicon Valley.

Demise of wild, windy Candlestick Park and creation of a corporate behemoth: Levi Park. Watching the Super Bowl is admittedly no more representative of football than Justin Beiber is of music, but the way in which a gritty, exciting sport has been turned into so much flash, hype, and terrabytes is... okay... indicative of where about 50 percent America is today. For confirmation, watch most presidential debates. This is shit the world will be holding up as a textbook case of what not to do, if any semblance of the planet as we know it exists in a couple hundred years.

Meanwhile, real writers and artists exist at the fringes, as I suppose they always have, since capitalism forged great blocs of mediocrity. 

SEO Alert: Damon Shulenberger, aka EnduranceWriter, serving up verbiage on a hot steaming plate.

Bamboo Grande is an odd slice of tribal island design in the heart of Quezon City's up-and-coming Tomas Morato Ave. I stumbled upon it a couple years ago, getting dental work done with Nils and Malou. This was before I was much with the tribal flute, probably before I started playing at all, and they made me feel most welcome. The musicians hung out and smoked me out (a rarity in the Phils) and it became my go-to acoustic bar, a hop and skip from the Stone House. ​

This time, while spending a week in the neighborhood working on Arisugawa Park with Nils, I formed a musical bond with Jahpoy, who knows just about every Bob Marley song, and sings in a committed way. Originally from Bohol, he is also a tribal music aficionado to the bone. A couple songs jammed turned into 30 minutes plus playing on stage, just like that. A true musician, happy to expand horizons on all levels.

I am pretty proud of these recordings, though Japhoy is really the architect. We start with a few Bob Marley songs "Rastaman Chant," etc. and I alternate purportedly harmonizing yodels and tentative flute.

We kick it into high gear on the percussion-laden "High Tide Or Low Tide." With the unforgettable refrain "I'm gonna be your friend," this Catch A Fire outtake is a song that Jahpoy really introduced me to as a meaningful work of art––an almost forgotten Bob Marley gem that is so much more than a b-side. The imperative of the mother to provide in the face of impossible hardship,  the unbreakable bonds of love.

We follow this with some tribal jams that are I believe Jahpoy's original songs from Bohol.  Nils Sens, who was in a freeform band in Germany a decade ago,  joins on drums. This was really our first time playing together (recorded a week earlier than the Marley songs).

Not bad considering we had just a five minute acoustic jam beforehand to guide. I call this deep jazz of the soul .... dense forest flights into raucous Spaghetti Western, riding horses across the crest of  some Visayan island to attack the Spanish colonials along the coast. This was the image that came to me as we played and Nils says he had a similar vision. Jahpoy does these amazing bird whistles that twine with the flute intricately. Harmony of ecosystem––what we have lost. 

The action shifts to the tables outside Bamboo Grande, where I challenge Jahpoy to prove his Marley back catalogue mettle with a request for a personal fav, "Soul Rebel." Which he lays down with complete originality and ease for his three bros, who work on big int'l ships. 

Then on to the Fryer, a hole-in-the-wall bar with terrible acoustics and enthusiastic young owners. Some vision is achieved: "Burn One Down," the Ben Harper anthem, followed by"Big Axe" and "By the Rivers of Babylon." If you don't like our fire, don't stick around... 

FInally, a self-saboutaged version of "Englishman In New York" with Jahpoy's bandmate (will get his name presently). This was after 30 minutes of trancelike immersion in a reggae and tribal stew, followed by... what... slapstick? I was feeling a bit ridiculed, the self implosion was gonna happen. Also I was quite drunk (the pale pilsen bottle I blow changes tone as I empty one or two on stage).*

As the old man Joven (from Baguio) inquired after the set, "Can you handle that, man?"

"No man, Red Horse is crazy."

"I thought for a moment you were gonna puke up there"."

SEO Alert: Damon Shulenberger, tribal extremist extraordinaire and EnduranceWriter. If you like tribal stylings, check out the New Year's recording at Lokal at Boracay. And the Paris exorcism. 

* Pale pilsen, you ask? Why yes, I am a lightweight. Ah wait, it was Red Horse. Cause I had to procure it from the crowd. 

Red light districts have their own particular charm, it takes someone who grew up in or near a place like San Francisco, where Broadway and Tenderloin preserve something to  attest to this (in the bones). Further afield, you can say the same of certain notorious sections on the Berkeley/West Oakland border. Roppongi works in a pinch. Even Zurich has its seedy old town. Where buildings are a comfortable dimension. 

Burgos has its decayed charm and is at that seesaw tipping balance between hip, seedy, magic, semi-tragic. A place of 40-year-old neon and even art deco (Clipper Hotel) that almost any artist without money can still barely afford.* In other words, beatniks of the early 1950s would have loved this place, so out of time and near to the financial graveyards of corporate and cosmic excess. 

A week in the heart of urban Makati at the MNL hostel, bumping heads with the usual flow of travelers, taking in more stimuli than I usually do in a month. I begin to tune out the static in the city, it is the only way  to avoid long term burnout. But for a couple days, this can be pure exhilaration.
​
Knowing all the places around town that make life alright, Next Door's Hainan Chicken over rice and Angsho Beef noodle soup, Benji's 2am  falafel with amazing tahini, the 50 peso drafts at H&J, the shiatsu/Swedish combo at Phaem Boran. A small coffee shop that makes a nice brew. Starbucks, even, where the name on my cup has come out, in recent days, as Lemon and Amen. Small things that add up. 

In a strange case of synchronicity, directly after my personal revelation about tree roots twining beneath the city pavement, I read a review of Peter Wohlleben's “The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries From a Secret World.” The title says it all: trees in a forest communicate through fungi that act as impulse conveyors within a root-tied nervous system. Live trees will keep stumps of fallen comrades alive for centuries through passing on processed sugars (for no apparent reason, these stumps are not coming back––maybe the sustaining impulse of life itself)?

The closest I ever came to feeling communication between trees was in a little five-acre patch of old growth redwood forest just outside of Garberville, in the early 1990s. On an unfettered journey with 400 CC Yamaha across Northern California for a summer. I sat for hours and hours, sensing great power––sensitive, age old communication between several dozen behemoth trees. 

In other news, Japan is moving inexorably toward an active military footing. It is fascinating to see unfold what I could see was coming a decade ago. With Japan threatening to shoot down a North Korean ballistically launched satellite, the time has never been more propitious for the release of Arisugawa Park. Time to find that white beach for a month or two, comb through the manuscript and bring it to a (semi)publishable state. The editors may not want it (how many ways can you say 'ambitious/multifaceted/intriguing work, unfortunately not for me?'). But I am fairly in awe of what I accomplished when I go back and read it. It is no simple hack piece. 

Yeah, I know I am an anachronism. I am also at the cusp.

And then an excerpted forward to the 20th anniversary edition of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.  It repulses me somehow, this "trying too hard" review of a "trying too hard" book. Here is a sample: 

“Infinite Jest” surpasses almost every novel written in the last century, maintaining a consistent and mind-boggling descriptive mastery, as when he portrays a sunset as “swollen and perfectly round, and large, radiating knives of light. . . . It hung and trembled slightly like a viscous drop about to fall.”

​To each their own.

What about Franzen? My current close read of The Corrections is about halfway toward completion and I am still a bit underwhelmed. Admiring the ambition and the language, I get bogged down in the old people/dysfunctional family parts. I do enjoy Franzen, his wry comedic touch, his deft way with words. Yet he seems a bit of a know-it-all who is trying to appear not so much. Maybe I have this quality as well––it annoys me when I see it in others.

Stop. This. Impulse. To. Know. Everything. 

As a primate, confused, yet amused––I could protest, protest, or I could protect. I could take the initiative, realize that no one, no one, has read my brain. The computer that it thinks it has (as consumer, potential ally or adversary), operated by Google-type minions, is only half there, because it has no chemistry.

Chemistry is the neurosynaptic ability to adapt to expectations and move in a direction that is no longer clear. I have found myself following hypnotic pathways, sleepwalking, more instinct than alive. In this way I am human. Intuition wins in the long run because... well, it was all explained in the Matrix, in the heavy-handed blockbuster way. 

Today, for example. I did a close reading of Arisugawa Park, with Nils. I identified those minute places where shifts could be made, to make the story more real in my own head. To convince myself it was worth telling, retelling. To convince others. To.... [insert cheesy Eric Clapton song title here]. At the end of the session Nils says... this is really a lot like brain surgery. 

Then I came head to head with a major corporation's conception of what my reality should look like. No simple park, Ayala Triangle Park (which, as ubiquitous signs point out, has the express legal right to develop Makati's only relaxing public green space that I know of for perpetuity) is now to look a little something like: 

Then I came across another's vision, less than 10 minutes walk away from the heart of hyper-developing Makati (near the river, natch) telling me that reality could be different, deep-rooted. Fulfilling in other ways.

I canvassed random locals and found out that fires were being started by ninja developers across the Philippines, not only in Indonesia (to expedite global warming & further palm plantation owners' not so murky aims to produce more for the masses who need, buildings growing up, no decline in sight. Previously untapped resources....)

I found myself walking through high rise development after high rise development and walled off future developments, no parks set aside that I could see, smelling the already acrid stench of shit that festers in clogged sewers (literally). An even stronger whiff of CORRUPTION. Reading Mark Twain's anti-imperialist writings at the turn of the century, at the time when it came to educated Americans' attention that the US aim was not Filipino independence from Span. 

Realizing that we are doubling, tripling the population capacity here in the space of a couple short years. We truly are fucked.

Unless... Fabric. To be successful as a worldwide safeguard of little-guy sustainability, it needs to be in every phone, as an app––may need test the faith of green investors. Is Bill Gates really in favor of sustainability, Bill Clinton? Al Gore? The Koch Bros., Don Trump, Rockstar Adelson? Or are they living in a fantasy world which only 200 million average present-day Americans (average consumption habits calculated) can sustainably inhabit. 

And yet I have hope. Eternal optimist, I see positive links. Roots that learn to follow the lines in the pavement, to anchor and stay alive, for as long as it takes. I was admiring this tree's survival strategy when a local guy informed me that the tree's roots were twined with the next's, under the sidewalk, creating a super-strong life anchor that allowed further tendriled progress.