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Koosi on suitcase

Originally uploaded by Koosama.

Picture posting finally works!

This is Koosi Ivanisevic-O’Brien.

Visit the online sculpture gallery of Steph Palallos.

And then let’s send Steph to Chelsea.

You ever have those days when everything’s fine or better than usual, and you’re not rushing anywhere, and you can do pretty much as you like, and then you realize that what you really want is to smash people’s heads in? It’s a pleasant day so you go to the mall and dine in the restaurant where you’re a regular and you always leave a good tip even with the 10% service charge and the 12% VAT. You have your lunch, then you signal for the bill, and you wait and wait and no one brings it to you. So you signal again, and the waiter nods and the manager nods, and still nothing happens so you go to the counter to pay up when you could’ve just walked out, and the restaurant isn’t half-full but everyone acts like they’re too busy to even take your money.

You take a deep breath, it’s not a big deal, you’re having a nice day, and you walk to your friend’s building to drop off a book. It’s 1pm and the sun’s blazing so you ask the guard in the back of the building if you can leave the book at his station for your friend to pick up, and he says no, you have to take it out front to the reception desk. So you ask if you can just pop in and leave it at reception because it’s too hot to go round to the front, and he says no, it’s not allowed, and you want to be polite and egalitarian, but no one is cooperating so you end up addressing the guard as if he were your serf, in rapid English, and that’s the only time he springs into action and buzzes your friend’s apartment to tell him there’s a book for him. You didn’t want to do it but goddammit they asked for it, it’s like they want to be oppressed.

Then you head on to your appointment with a European journalist who knows someone who knows a friend of yours and wants some information for his article, and he’s alright he’s not the problem but right there you realize that you’ve had it with foreign journalists picking your brain and waiting for you to hand over the story, and you want to say, “Call your editors, tell them to hire me to write the story, I can do it in my sleep, and they can pay me what they pay you which is at least twenty times what local writers get,” but you’re too polite so you decide you will only answer questions that are asked of you and volunteer nothing that resembles an original thought. By which time you hate everyone—the ugly yuppies braying their stupid stories at the next table and the troglodyte in the short-sleeved barong tooling down the street not stopping for pedestrians as if he owned the shiny BMW he was driving and by the way why are snazzy cars always driven by trolls I guess they need them more, and I’ve forgotten what the point of all this is but I’m glad I blog it’s faster than therapy.

Never liked Madame Bovary. I thought Emma Bovary was a silly woman who killed herself because she owed money to the draper. Sure, she got dumped by her lover, but the curtains really did her in. I was required to read Flaubert in high school, but it didn’t take. I preferred Woody Allen’s story The Kugelmass Episode, in which a magician invents a device which projects anyone into the novel of his choice. Professor Kugelmass decides he wants to have an affair with Madame Bovary, so he steps in the box and whammo! All over the world, literature students wonder who the bald Jewish guy is on page 36. That’s the mark of great literature, a teacher declares. Each time you read it, you find something new.

Yesterday I accompanied my friend to SM to buy curtains. She’d moved into a new apartment, and had been without curtains for a month. True, she lives in a high-rise building, but there are people out there with binoculars. She wouldn’t take my suggestion: Just tape manila paper over your windows. Yes, I have the interior design sensibilities of a crackhead. So we go to SM, not some posh draper’s, and they have all these fabulous Restoration era/Victorian bordello curtains. So many choices, so pretty, and (comparatively) cheap! For a few minutes I actually considered redecorating my own apartment, and then I remembered I’ve never actually decorated it, then I snapped out of it. But I began to understand why Emma Bovary would forsake everything for curtains. I wouldn’t do it, but I think I get it.

(Still can’t post pictures. Server glitchy.)

“Museums creep me out,” a Korean producer told me. “They’re full of stuff that belonged to dead people.” Not just dead people’s things—sometimes there are the actual dead people themselves, their remains, mummified and placed under glass for tourists and schoolchildren to gawk at. Fine if you were Tutankhamen and visitors seek you out—it’s ghoulish, but at least you’re not forgotten. (Your image will be stored in the memory of a digital camera, even if there are signs all over the museum prohibiting flash photography, until the camera’s owner spots Tom Cruise coming out of a restaurant and your photo is erased to make space for the ambassador of Scientology. Three thousand years of civilization, the rise and fall of empires, the beginnings of monotheism are no match for a two-minute dance in underwear and Ray-Bans.) But what if you were Tutankhamen’s assistant pastry chef or nose-hair trimmer? You probably wouldn’t even have your own exhibit: you’ll be stuffed into a cabinet along with the people you couldn’t stand when you were alive—the fishmonger who wouldn’t shut up about his vacation in Gomorrah, and your ex-wife who ran off with the tannery worker who always stank of urine because that’s what they treated the leather with. The museum employees with their advanced degrees, the archaeologists with deep tans from turning up the desert sands with teaspoons and brushes, all these geniuses wouldn’t even get your name right, and you spend a few more lifetimes after your own mis-identified as someone else. You’ll be the third mummy from the top, a not particularly rare or interesting artifact that museum-goers, their eyes stinging from the dust of history, scoot past on their way to the gift shop. Museums are crammed with the possessions of the long-dead, and I am a necrophiliac.

Only an idiot would try to see all of the Louvre in one day. It may not even be physically possible unless you’re on rollerskates. I don’t know why I did it. Could be sheer perversity and the fact that I haven’t done enough idiotic things in my life.

It was perfect museum weather: cold and rainy. At 10am the main tourist horde had not yet arrived, although a small throng clutching copies of The Da Vinci Code was massing in the glass pyramid, looking for the alleged final resting place of Mary Magdalene. My plan was simple: I would dispense with the guidebooks and seek out only the exhibits that interested me. Since I didn’t know where anything was, and have no patience with maps, I would rely on my personal radar. In other words I would wing it. The Louvre is vast, but I like taking long walks. (A friend tells me that in the 1960s, when there were far fewer tourists in Paris, he and his friends would go jogging in the Louvre. They would also break into the catacombs and throw parties.)

First the sculptures and the Mesopotamians, the apartments of royalty, the Greek and Roman statuary and Egyptian antiquities. I went back and forth several times across the ancient world before I found the Winged Victory of Samothrace. She’s kind of scary, but I like looking at her. If you stare long enough she seems to be breathing. It’s as if she’s about to step off that boat and beat up the camera-wielding mob (“Read the sign, moron! No flash photography!”).

After a late lunch in the crowded cafeteria I looked at the paintings. The Dan Brown fans clubs had congregated in front of La Gioconda to decipher her smirk, or decide if she was indeed Leonardo Da Vinci in drag. La Gioconda seems to know something we don’t (“Yes, the wedding at Cana was their wedding, and he turned the water into merlot.”). Worse, she seems to be taunting the viewer with her secret, which may explain the attempts by vandals through the centuries to wipe that smile off her face. Near the end of the Italian gallery are the Caravaggios. Michelangelo Merisis a.k.a. Caravaggio—the name is almost as dramatic as the paintings, and the little we know of the painter suggests that his life was as turbulent and violent as his work.

A great painting holds a universe within its frame, and you can only teleport yourself so many times before your molecules feel like they’ve been stretched thinly across space. At four-thirty I was staggering through the hallways and my brain was refusing to process any more information. It was like being drunk, but without the hilarious side effects. I should’ve left then, to shut myself up in a dark room and recover from this museum overdose, but my feet were no longer taking orders from my brain. The Vermeers, the Vermeers, said the obsessive-compulsive geek in my head, and finding those little paintings took another hour.

Fifteen minutes before closing time I found myself sitting on a couch in the Rubens gallery. My feet felt like they would burst out of my sneakers, so I put them up, and soon I was stretched out full-length on the couch, surrounded by chubby, rosy Baroque nudes. No one seemed to think there was anything strange about a semi-conscious visitor lying on the couch. The museum guard nodded as he walked by. From inside their framed universes, the dead people painted by a dead artist looked down upon the living with pity and compassion.

My Life in Accessories # 2. My Life in Accessories appears every month in Metro. (Panawagan sa nawawalang web designer: Melo, help! I can’t post pictures!)
I was visiting my friend Stephanie in Barcelona, where she was
studying sculpture and doing the whole struggling artist bit.
Barcelona looks the way I imagine Manila would’ve looked if it hadn’t
been bombed to smithereens during its Liberation in 1945 (a bit of
historical irony there). But unlike in Manila where pedestrians are
just another species of roadkill, pedestrians own the streets of
Barcelona. People walk in the middle of the street, while cars jostle
for space on the sides. The Ramblas, the city’s famous bazaar, covers
several streets with a mind-boggling array of merchandise. I found a
pair of pencil earrings for five euro (Don’t convert to pesos, it’ll
only make you miserable). They really are pencils, very useful for
writing phone numbers on table napkins or on the backs of receipts.

You hear all sorts of warnings about gypsies, possibly the most
maligned people on the planet (Bad enough that they’re in a song by
Cher). “Watch out for gypies,” I was told. “They work in pairs. One
picks your pocket and hands off the goods to a partner, so that even
if you catch the pickpocket your wallet will be gone. Or they’ll
create a distraction and while you’re looking away, one of them will
reach into your bag.” I laughed off their warnings. “Excuse me, I’m
from Manila. You can’t fool me.”

So Steph gives me the tour of Barcelona. We take the subway to Gaudi’s
unfinished cathedral, Sagrada Familia. The train is full and we’re
standing by the doors. The second the woman walks in I know she’s a
thief. You don’t live in Manila your whole life without developing a
kind of Spidey sense. She’s not a gypsy; she looks South American. She
lurches into the train car, swaying like a drunk. I clutch my shoulder
bag, noting smugly that it has an inner zipper and an outer
zipper–unless your hand can pass through solid matter, you’re not
ripping me off.

The thief bumps into various passengers, who brush her away. Then
she’s in my face. She hangs onto my arm as if she’s about to fall
down. I move away and she staggers down the length of the train car.
“Idiot,” I mutter. “Your pathetic little ruse won’t work on me.”

When we get to Sagrada Familia I reach for my wallet to get some change.

The wallet is gone.

That’s not possible, I say, I was watching her the whole time. I look
in my bag again, in case the interdimensional blip that had caused my
wallet to vanish temporarily has been corrected. It still isn’t there.

We sit on a bench and I empty the contents of my bag. It takes a while
for me to accept the fact of my wallet’s disappearance. I mean, a
wallet can be replaced, but what about my confidence in my
Manila-honed street smarts?

Then I reminded myself that the joke was on the thief, because I had a
grand total of twenty euro in my wallet. Still painful, but not
excruciating (as long as I don’t convert to Philippine pesos).

Hey, I’m from Manila. I don’t put all my money in my wallet.