by David Byrne
This morning I struggle to wake up. I pedal to Casa del Tango, which is about four kilometers away, joining the string players to observe a rehearsal by El Arranque. I sit in the dark theater seats in their rehearsal space—a modest former theater—watching as they prepare. They discuss arrangements and how to play various sections of the piece. Then they run through a few full numbers, which are amazing.
The Takeback
While Argentina was under a military dictatorship in the 1970s, the IMF and World Bank provided loans and in return demanded that Argentina’s industries be opened up to foreign investors and its national industries be privatized. The country soon went heavily into debt (which is fairly typical whenever the World Bank gets involved somewhere) and unemployment rose. A lot of the country’s wealth was quietly flown out, in dollars. In 2001 it all came to a head and the government closed Argentines out of their own bank accounts and food riots broke out across the country. The peso was devalued, factories were closed, and half the population fell below the poverty line.
Later that year some workers decided to restart some of the shuttered factories themselves. The owners, who had abandoned these factories, protested and took the workers to court. The owners and the banks wanted to sell off the assets—the machinery and materials—and make a quick buck. In some cases the workers won the right to keep the factories running—the judges, it seems, sometimes felt that employment was more important than a one-time profit. The factories, a few of them, are now run without bosses; they pay their property taxes, and have begun to pay off their debts. Here’s a still from a documentary called The Take:
This might be inspiring for some U.S. businesses now: for example, newspapers that are saddled with debts due to take- overs by investment funds and forced to declare bankruptcy. One wonders if the workers in those businesses, and maybe even in Detroit, could run the factories themselves. In the 2003 elections here President Menem, who backed the factory owners, eventually dropped out of the race and Néstor Kirchner became president. The present president is Kirchner’s wife, pictured here with Mercedes Sosa. Times change—as they have in the United States.
The distinct nasal twang of an “American” accent echoes through the plane as I head north. I’m flying American Airlines to Miami. The voices exude confidence, superiority. (They don’t sound like they’re very flexible or open-minded, and they’re not.) After the gentle, sensuous vowels of Latin America, this—my language—sounds harsh, cruel, authoritarian.
Manila
This is not the most bike-friendly city in the world—even though a lot of Southeast Asian towns swarm with scooters, food delivery guys on motorcycles, and cyclo taxis. I suppose I value the perspective I get from a bike, and the freedom, more than I realize. I’m more addicted than I think. Well, I also know that this city is relatively dense—unlike L.A. or Mexico City—so though some things and certain far-flung neighborhoods might be a bit of a trek, much of the flavor will be within reach by bike. I can explore without an itinerary, though I do have research and meetings prearranged.
Two quotes encapsulate for me why I came to Manila. One is from James Hamilton-Paterson’s book America’s Boy, one of the best accounts of the Marcos era: “There are moments when it seems that the world’s affairs are transacted by dreamers. There is a sadness here in the spectacle of nations, no less than individuals, helping each other along with their delusions. What is thought to be clear-sighted pragmatism may actually be shoring up a regime’s ideology whose hidden purpose is itself nothing more than to assuage the pain of a single person’s unhappy past.”
And this, from Imperial Grunts by Robert D. Kaplan: “Just as the stirring poetry and novels of Rudyard Kipling celebrated the work of British Imperialism . . . the American artist Frederic Remington, in his bronze sculptures and oil paintings, would do likewise for the conquest of the Wild West. . . . ‘Welcome to Injun Country’ was the refrain I heard from the [U.S.] troops from Colombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq . . . the War on Terrorism was really about taming the frontier.”
The first quote, for me, summarizes the Rosebud view of historical (and contemporary events) while the second is about the enduring power of mythology and potent image to justify, well, whatever you want it to.
I arrived in Manila over the Christmas holidays in 2005 with a pretty specific agenda. A few years earlier I had been reminded that the former first lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos, was a habitué of discos during the late ’70s and early ’80s. This would have been the era of Studio 54, Regine’s, Privilege, and Le Palace (in Paris) and other velvet-rope clubs. This was also, um, the era of martial law and heavy censorship in the Philippines. Being a fan of some of the club music of that time I wondered if it might have supplied the sound track for a person in power like Imelda. Could dance music be a vehicle through which to tell a story like hers? A story of power, personal pain, love, and social class? Was the lightness, effervescence, and headiness inherent in that music—and the drugs that went along with it—similar to the feeling one gets when one is in a powerful position? And was there even a story to hang this idea on?
I also had another agenda, another reason for being attracted to a project such as this—I wanted to see if there was a way to tie a group of songs together besides the fact that they happen to be on the same CD. I wondered, in this form, would songs play off one another and receive some added weight from one another? Why not, if the same characters recur now and again? In this format, the listener would get some additional insights and progress on the characters’ lives and feelings so songs would be informed by other songs. Within a song cycle like this could songs strung together become more than the sum of their parts?
I’d spent about a year reading and doing research and I soon became attracted to what I saw as a story that perfectly elucidated Hamilton-Paterson’s proposal that politics and history are a kind of personal psychological spectacle. The Philippines is an extremely class-conscious society, and Imelda, who grew up in an unsuccessful branch of an important regional family, was, after her mother died, raised by a servant, Estrella, who was only a little older than she. Being that close to being socially accepted, but not quite, Imelda had a pile of psychological baggage to lug around from pretty early on. I saw part of a possible story being about the initial closeness of these two women and their subsequent estrangement, and also about Imelda’s “class struggle”—her need to be accepted, and her working out that need in public on a grand scale. The project would be about her conflation of fantasy, personal pain, and politics, a combination that played itself out in a tragic and dramatic way in the history of that era.
I contacted Fatboy Slim, the British DJ, to cowrite songs that I felt would embody what these two women were feeling at various points in this story and that, when appropriate, would sound authentically clubby. Sometimes I used the women’s own quotes, or texts from speeches or interviews, as a basis for the lyric material, which was a new experience for me. It was liberating to write almost exclusively from their point of view—and sometimes even use their words. Not that I hadn’t written through characters before, but having their own words available made it easier to find truly unique and surprising phrases that I wouldn’t have come up with on my own.
One of these quotes serves, for now, as the title of this project: Here Lies Love. In a contemporary interview done for the Ramona Diaz documentary Imelda, Mrs. Marcos is quoted as wishing that her epitaph, what she wants written on her tombstone, should not be her name, but the words here lies love. In her view she has, in the words of a classic Filipino song, “done it all for you.” The “you,” from her point of view, being the Philippine people.
Tiny Doors
Once I had these songs—about twenty or so—written and demoed, I thought it might be a good idea to see firsthand the country and people I’d been reading about. Besides gathering some more research and archival material—images, video, film, and texts—I hoped that by going there I might
catch and absorb some of the Philippine ethos, sensibility, and awareness—by osmosis and through conversations. I realized that this sequence was backward and so I was half prepared to discover that my previous research and assumptions might be all wrong, in which case I’d have to revise everything or scrap the project. This trip maybe should have taken place sooner, and I would soon find out if that was the case.
I believe that politics is, besides being pragmatic, social, and psychological, also an expression of a wider surrounding context. That includes everything that might affect what people feel and do—music, landscape, food, clothes, religion, weather. Politics is a reflection of the streets, the smells, what constitutes eroticism, and the routine of humdrum lives just as much as it is a result of backroom deals, ideologies, and acts of legislature. Sometimes this occurs in obvious ways. The Philippines is a Catholic country with animist roots, spread out among scattered islands the geographically isolated towns of which are distant from the capital, Manila, and those factors all contribute. Sometimes there are visual and other clues to things that influence events—attitudes expressed and made visible via posture, body language, humor. A visual and gestural language is by nature untranslatable into words, but nevertheless indicative of attitudes and even ideologies. I wanted to catch some of that, or at least as much as I could.
Just as there are elements in our genes waiting for chemical keys to allow for expression as a chicken liver or a human heart, there might also be elements in a place that trigger expression through politics, action, and culture. Much human behavior is a manifestation of these keys being inserted and turned—keys that open genetic, geographical, and cultural doors—through which the latent tendencies pass.
I was given a few contacts in Manila by friends and acquaintances in New York, and I asked a few of them if they thought it would be crazy for me to bring a bicycle in order to get around Manila. Some of them thought I was nuts or just plain obsessive but a few said, “Why not? The streets are pretty crowded and chaotic, but you could give it a try.” I packed up my folding mountain bike and after a long flight I looked out the plane window at Manila and the surrounding bay and wondered what I’d gotten myself into.
Joel Torre, a local actor, generously meets me at the airport and everyone says hi to him as we walk to the car pickup area. We drive by Imelda’s Cultural Center on the way to the hotel—a giant Lincoln Center-type edifice that Mrs. Marcos had built on landfill. She wanted both to put the Philippines on the world cultural map and to encourage local talent. And, especially with the film and theater schools that she established, she definitely accomplished the latter.
I’ve booked myself into the Aloha Hotel, a small pink building facing the bay. Some friends in New York recommended staying in Makati, the more upscale district of modern high-rises, fancy hotels, and glass-walled shopping malls, but geographically this less-chic area seemed closer to the historical and political landmarks I’d been reading about.
Across from the hotel is an esplanade that borders the bay. It is lined with kiosks, vendors, and outdoor bars and cafés, some of which have either live or piped-in music. Appropriately enough, as I unpack and assemble my bike in my hotel room the disco beats from one of the cafés waft in through the window. There’s no chance of taking a postflight nap with the music booming, and since there are only a few more hours of daylight I force myself to stay awake and get out and see something.
I must say, given that I’m filled with thoughts of this project, the disco music is actually inspiring rather than annoying—though I’m glad it doesn’t go on all night. A song with a fairly radical synth playing a squealy pulse gives me some musical ideas. A cover version of 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” is the last thing I hear as I pedal along the esplanade toward the old city center.
A Special Relationship
I pass more hotels, giant Chinese restaurants, Rizal Park—where a lot of political demonstrations and rallies that I read about took place in the ’80s—and the U.S. embassy, a heavily fortified edifice that I initially mistake for a military base, which in a way I guess it is. The special relationship between the United States and the Philippines is immediately obvious. The Philippines became a U.S. colony merely a year after the United States gave assistance in the Philippine struggle for independence against their former Spanish rulers. After ousting the Spanish the helpful Yanks must have decided it was too good an opportunity to walk away from, so, under a suspicious pretense, and with the drum-beating help of the Hearst newspapers, the United States had its first real colony—though not without a long, drawn-out war that claimed at least one million lives. The Philippines only achieved independence in 1946. They like to say their history was three hundred years spent in a nunnery and one hundred years in Hollywood, as a way of explaining the wacky cultural collisions and attitudes that abound here.
Postindependence and post-World War II the United States continued to maintain a number of massive military bases just north of Manila. From here supply lines were established to what would become the Vietnam War. From the United States’ point of view, any politician who ran the Philippines had to be aware of what side their bread was buttered on, so as a result there was always a tight relationship between the two nations.
Emergent Architecture
Binondo is the area I end up biking to today. Karaoke machines are everywhere. Right on the street! Even little stalls in this funky old city center have them. This is a neighborhood of winding streets and vendors, many with tiny one-table emporiums. The traffic slows to a crawl here, or is relegated to bikes and little trucks that bring supplies and goods to the vendors. Regular traffic seems to avoid these areas, as the narrow streets are too crowded with pedestrians and the overflow from the stalls inevitably slows the movement of motor vehicles. Here the custom-decorated jeepneys are the largest vehicles on the streets and even they can only inch forward while attempting to pick up passengers, but I can move faster than most of them on my bike. This area is a great place for walking too—and for buying fruits, vegetables, washcloths, bootleg CDs and DVDs, Christmas gifts (at this time of year), fresh fish, medicines—anything that can be displayed stacked in little piles on wooden tables. How many kinds of things can be stacked in little pyramid piles? Pretty much anything you can name. Here is one kind of common denominator in the world of stuff.
Why is it that all third-world markets are structurally more or less the same? I am reminded of similar ones in Kuala Lum pur, Cartagena, Marrakech, Salvador, and Oaxaca. It’s almost as if these markets were all designed by the same person the world over, as they take very similar forms everywhere. The human scale and the pleasant chaos must be part of an unconscious, though thoroughly evolved, plan, as are the smells and the piles of refuse here and there. One of the stall owners sweeps the rainwater and mud out of the street with a broom. This is evidence to me of an unwritten layout, a subconscious form, and an invisible map, which extends even to an unwritten system of self-maintenance. I suppose this recurring pattern and structure emerges because human scale automatically self-regulates the manner in which similar goods are best sold, how they are most efficiently displayed, and where. It is as if some genetic architectural propensity exists in us, that guides us, subtly and invisibly, as to how to best organize first a kiosk, then a stall, and from there add incrementally as our innate instincts guide us, until soon enough there exists a whole marketplace and neighborhood. Some tiny part of our DNA tells us how to make and maintain places like this in the same way that genetic codes tell the body how to make an eye or a liver. That architect who designed all those markets the world over is us. Could it be that our genes tell us not just how to make ourselves but how to make the built external world? I’m glad the whole city hasn’t been malled, as some of the guidebooks claim.
Oddly enough one could say some of the same things about the newer built-up areas of many big cities, where many of the districts of condos, glass-walled offices, and chain stores could have all been designed by the sam
e person—a very different person—who would by definition then be the most widely hired and ubiquitous designer/architect in the world, despised by some, a source of pride for a few, envied by others. I think with modern shopping malls and glass office buildings there is a little more conscious borrowing, ego display, and one upmanship at work than in the pleasant hodgepodge typical of the stalls and tiny shops in front of me.
Victor Gruen built the first mall in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina in 1956, and one could argue that he was more a conceptual developer than an architect. Malcolm Gladwell, in a New Yorker article, says that Gruen didn’t just invent the mall; he invented an archetype, as so many other malls followed the exact same model as this first one. I would agree that both the mall and the souk tap into some kind of meme for social shopping that reproduces itself prolifically. A kind of self-replicating architecture.
Along the bayside walk that I take back to my hotel, there are outdoor restaurants, many of which feature cover bands. As rumored, the bands are all surprisingly good—if by good you mean amazingly faithful in their ability to reproduce well-known songs. Close your eyes and it’s Seals and Crofts, or Neil Young, with an ever-so-slight accent. The singing and playing is uniformly competent and professional, though of course completely unoriginal, which is by design. One man sings on a little stage with two glowing plastic Santas on either side of him. I wonder to myself if I should consider using one of these bands or these singers for a live band for Here Lies Love?