Heartbreaker

I don’t get it when people say Mariah Carey songs changed their lives, whichever songs that may be, because with the exception of Hero, I don’t see how Heartbreaker, Dreamlover, Fantasy, Honey and other boy-come-rescue-me songs of hers can change anyone’s life. But maybe I’m underestimating the power of such songs since no one speaks more effusively about boyfriend-longing than she does and maybe these songs really are life-changers in their own special ways. Her songs certainly haven’t changed my life but I will say that her album releases mark one of the highlights of my year, at least since the dawn of the blog, which is to say around the Emancipation of Mimi period, around the time when album information is updated at a pace approximating the speed of light. I don’t camp out of record stores in anticipation in the same way that Star Wars fans camp out of cinemas or Harry Potter fans camp out of bookstores although I think that doing so is romantic and crazy, but I certainly take a moment out of my life to relish a Mariah Carey album release, from the blog-stalking to purchasing to actual listening.

Today would have been the release of Angels Advocate, the supposed remix version of Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, but it’s not going to happen since allegedly, or perhaps matter-of-factly, the album was such a flop. My guess is that it didn’t sell because we are now in an age where music can be obtained for free, true at least for people who don’t care to own CDs anymore and multimillion selling singers such as she are the ones who stand to lose from this the most. Or it could simply be that people’s taste for pop has radically changed and some just simply don’t care anymore for those artists who at some point in their careers have been so successful and popular. It’s kind of sad.

But it’s okay that she puts a halt on the album’s release. I’ll move on. What’s annoying about it is that you just know that the scrapping of the album is due to the fact that her recent efforts (Angels Cry & Up Out My Face) weren’t the hits they were projected to be. Mariah is unabashedly a commercial artist whose fame was largely brought by commercial success. Memoirs the remix could have been a better version but the boardroom presentation of market statisticians and prognosticators at the record label which showed her sale’s steep decline must have prevented the album from being released. And that sucks! Selfishly, I thought it wouldn’t have mattered if she flopped again because flopping is all the rage nowadays anyway and it’s quite cool for Mariah to not care about sales and her songs charting just as long as she releases an album, because finally, people might shut up about her sales already and she can finally really be free artistically and maybe make the best music of her career, #1 on the Billboard Hot 200 or not. If only the decision had been on her instead of on record label executives.

I’d say it’s fine, her not releasing the remix album but it’s really not. If there’s any consolation to that, it’s that there’s not going to be a repeat of the flop fiasco and she’s spared the embarrassment of selling so few. I can live with Memoirs for the meantime since it’s for me one of her greatest, I could listen to it for years, but it breaks my heart just the same. It would have been nice to hear her trade verses with R. Kelly in Betcha Gon’ Know or diva off with Mary J Blige in It’s A Wrap which is one of the cancellation’s major heartbreaks, not to mention the Jump Smokers remix, but such is the state of album selling these days.

It’s weird that a very successful artist such as her is still constrained by record companies that she ‘emancipated’ herself from so many times already. It kind of makes you think that all the emancipation proclamations were just in service of an album theme, the truest in essence of which is exemplified by Butterfly, not that other more explicit emancipation album, The Emancipation of Mimi. With her albums, you never really notice the ‘themes’ because they’re almost non-existent anyway because you obtain a Mariah album to hear her wail and sing with rappers and fellow divas. Personally, I’m glad that she’s sold a gazillion albums in her 20 years of singing but I wish she would just let go and really truly emancipate herself.

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

I usually remember a book that I liked, or just those that were okay enough, those that guarantee discussions with self in here or elsewhere, either because the book stayed true to its blurbs, which is often as plainly put as ‘unforgettable’ or ‘unputdownable’, or the ending is so dry and unresolved which I find nervy of the author, and I occasionally I find it amusing that some novelists would write 500-1000 pages of stuff that seem to stretch for eternity only to end in such low, unremarkable note. Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train is sort of like that for me. I have no recollection of its ending but I won’t soon forget its idea that you can meet a stranger on a train, have a polite conversation, plot someone’s murder and get away with it, or play the conscientious sucker who feels sorry for the murder you were sure you wanted anyway. Put your own twist of that particular idea and try applying that in more tangible, doable or realistic terms and you’ve got a psychological thriller that works.

Instead of being all bloggy-vague about my feelings about my first and definitely not last Patricia Highsmith experience, I decided to check how this book ended and found that it was even drier than I initially thought it had been. In the book, there’s a great build-up about the disposability of morals through some of the seemingly morally bankrupt characters that Patricia Highsmith, believed to be an actual horrible person herself, creates with ease and with such empathy, perfectly exemplified through the Charles Bruno character, that you might as well be convinced that what she’s getting at is that there really are some people who deserve to get away with murder and that conscientious cowards, the Guy Haines character, are punished, and then she drops a bomb of an ending wherein the guilt-wracked of the two, Guy, surrenders to authorities who are nowhere near as shrewd as the brilliant Bruno. The end. No explanations, just a period and a hint of a struggle, which is really how proper ‘dry’ stories should end.

Strangers on a Train is, in a way, scary. But it’s not scary the way most horror stories are. What makes it terrifying somehow is that it makes you realize that anyone is capable of committing truly horrible deeds, given the right circumstances. That it doesn’t even take that much motivation to commit the foulest of crimes, and that all it takes is the right amount of provocation, the location of the right button, and presto, you can murder. Which of course it’s not just murder, but out of all the crimes known to man, the willingness to kill might be the ultimate manifestation of a man’s capacity to be bad.

In fiction it’s acceptable to root for the villains because they are often more interesting. In here, the bad guy is annoying and not really all that compelling as an evildoer. He’s just a regular affluent man who got mad at daddy for reasons that certainly do not warrant killing. He’s simply a drama queen whose psychological make-up happens to be more adjusted towards the attainment of revenge via the committing of heinous crimes and who happens to be in possession of an almost admirable ability to justify such acts in a way that most humans with souls/conscience/heart mostly can’t. In spite of these, you’re still on Team Bruno. My guess is that in reading Patricia Highsmith,  you shouldn’t worry about your conscience too much because she seems to put a lot more thought to creating the complex mind of her primary villains, far more than she ever would for the victims.

Glory of the 90s

Ace of Base. Glicos. Streetboys. Universal Motion Dancers. Pearl Jam. That’s Entertainment. St. Mary’s Academy. Archie & Jughead Double Digest 256 pages. X-Men. Cedie. Uhaw. Solid Gold Songhits. Cutterpillow. Mariah Carey. One Sweet Day. Always Be My Baby. Bone Thugs N Harmony. Bone Thugs N Harmony feat. Mariah Carey. CrazySexyCool. Dragonball Z. Palibhasa Lalake. Cynthia Patag. Gardo Versoza. Seiko Films. Priscilla Almeda. Cory Aquino. Filbars. Goldcrest. Mercury Drug. Nintendo. Rockman 1, 2, 3, 4. Backstreet Boys. Spice Girls. Robin Padilla. Beverly Hills 90210. Cartimar. Jagged Little Pill. Puff Daddy/Bad Boy Records. Typewriter. Boyz II Men. Miss Universe. Miss Belgium. 3-story Tower Records. Quad 2. Quad. Return to Innocence music video. Paolo Contis. Tropang Trumpo. Melrose Place. Cristy Per Minute. Eric Fructuoso. Thank God It’s Sabado. Wacks/Kiko. Donita Rose. VHS Porn. VHS. Angie’s Video House. Ferris Beuler’s Day Off. Romy & Michelle’s High School Reunion. Sega. United Colors of Benetton. Hanson. Freddy Krueger. Dawson’s Creek. Dawson’s Creek Soundtrack Volume 1. Tira-tira. Star City. MTV Soul’d Out. Camille Pratts as Princess Sarah. Angelica Panganiban as Becky. Kurt Cobain. 7-11 nachos. Barbie’s Cradle. All Saints. Top 20 at 12. Fun House. Manilyn Reynes. Jay Manalo. Devon Sawa. Are You That Somebody music video. Aaliyah. Semi-charmed Life. Titanic. Always (Erasure). Low-waist. Nerds candy. Fanta. You on My Mind. Penthouse. Mix tape. 200 pesos pirated CD. Dave Matthews Band. Crash Into Me. Brown-out. Flintstones chewables. Bubble Tape. Cry Baby. Silent All These Years. Sustagen. Kero Keropi. Fido Dido. Tina Paner. Nova Villa. Laser Disc. The Cask of Amontillado. N*SYNC. The Boy Is Mine. Joyce Jimenez. Acne-free. Corn Flakes. TT Boy. Ron Jeremy. Taboo. Nokia 3210. Ice candy. Freestyle Live! Building a Mystery. Landline. Autograph. Sometimes (Britney Spears). 10 Things I Hate About You. Phoebe Buffay. Joey Tribbiani. Floppy disk. Prince of Persia. Lemmings. Michael Myers. Matthew Mendoza. Patrick Guzman. Gelli de Belen. Carmina Villaroel. Decades Bar. Tom & Jerry. Magandang Gabi Bayan Halloween Special. Suddenly Susan. Bugs Bunny. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Maala-ala Mo Kaya. Youth. No Internet.

Dan Brown Writes (and Sells) OK Books

The only reason why I never bothered to read the super famous novel The Da Vinci Code was that it was so very famous. And when it became really, really famous, it just about made people’s head explode with admiration and that turned me off because this was back in college when I was relentlessly trying to be a proper snob (although I remember being a little proud that I was ahead of my business major blockmates, literature-wise, having already read The Alchemist, a nice enough book but one which anyone who’s attempting snobbery shouldn’t be cocky about but which I think I was), and everyone who has ever heard of it are just fans of the book in an instant and these same people were so eager to give uncalled for synopsis of the supernova novel, ie, that it mixes certain historical facts with the type of by-the-numbers thriller the likes of which John Grisham and Stephen King have already popularized, and it all seemed to me too annoying for words.

Actually, I recall having only about 2 people (org mates who would not shut up about Dan Brown’s ‘genius’) tell me about How Great A Novel It Is, and the rest are just background conversations about that time’s most popular book and that it was simply a matter of being unable to escape some book’s admittedly well-deserved fame which causes some people (for all intents and purposes, me) to purposefully ignore it and curse at those who are sucking up to some book, of all things.

So I am now instinctively recollecting Da Vinci Code’s salad days as pop lit’s It book as something that annoyed me greatly, when in fact it hasn’t really. And for something that I claim to not have cared about, I sure go at great lengths to discuss just how totally indifferent I was/am to it. But then I have always had that quality in me that the things that I’m not supposed to, or claim to not like end up being the things I talk about the most and with such passion.

And sure enough, I do have a terrific point to make about Dan Brown and his books’ popularity’s inescapability, which is that no one, or just me, should shun a book or author simply because of ignorance or attitude problem. To be specific, I should not have decided to not read The Da Vinci Code simply because it was a very popular book. And all these realizations, as you would’ve guessed are brought about by my finally being able to read another Dan Brown blockbuster of which fame I’m not sure I’ve been very aware of which is a good thing as I was able to genuinely enjoy it for how it is, which in my case is a book that happened to be given away on that fateful day. My well-timed laziness paid off handsomely when our boss asked the whole of our department who wants to have The New Dan Brown, to which I’d quickly said Want it! and The New Dan Brown was mine.

But now that I’ve thought about it, no matter how much longer I talk about book snobbery and no matter how strongly I urge anyone to give bestselling writers a chance (as if), I still wouldn’t actively go to a bookstore and browse, much less, purchase anything from the Dan Brown section and spend actual money on something that I can have for free. And I don’t mean the free Lost Symbol which I got. When Da Vinci Code was still so popular, we had 2 copies of it at home and I ignored it like a disease. Which was a shame since Dan Brown is a hooker. Shit has been said about his writing and that maybe has some ground though I wouldn’t know, but he is a terrific storyteller.

I’d go on about how enjoyable it is but I feel exhausted already having said too much about that which I normally would have plenty to say about, something concerning certain attitude problem even extending to book choices. The Lost Symbol is ultimately a predictable story in that it is how I imagined it would be: thrilling, fast-paced and with a slightly corny way of describing certain characters and situations. What I didn’t expect was the enjoyment and the lessons: it’s not always beneficial to be snob-acting and that free books are enjoyable.

This is how the entire course of a life can be changed – by doing nothing. On Chesil Beach, he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back. Instead, he stood in a cold and righteous silence in the summer’s dusk, watching her hurry along the shore, the sound of her difficult progress lost to the breathing of small waves, until she was a blurred, receding point against the immense straight road of shingle gleaming in the pallid night.