Brechtfast Cereal

How It Is

.

The way he sets

quiet in me: with

a sadness so small

.

the way a dancer will say

well I’ve always had

weak ankles

.

and he and I will

shut our eyes,

nod slow.

Yesterday Marked A Couple Nifty Firsts For Me

First of all I got to perform at Salon de Ning [one of three in the world, google that shit], which is one of the most beautiful venues I’d ever seen in my ever. And which is home to an entire ROOM filled with Imelda’s shoes. Clearly, i was enamored. The crowd was surprisingly receptive for such an upscale place, and it was all around a really brilliant experience. Also the management liked what we threw together so much they bought me a much-needed whiskey, so that was a splendid sign.

But more importantly, I had the opportunity to collaborate with this musical ensemble I’ve working with tangentially [also tour-managed by the illustrious BSide Productions] named Deoro and comprising Dave Eggar on cello and piano [though i’m not sure the buck stops there…], Chuck Palmer on percussion, Ariel dela Portia on the upright bass, and the insanely talented Jason Oremus, one of the best Irish step dancers in the world. I mean, these cats are just unreal. They’re absolutely engaging to watch and listen to, and they’re some of the nicest people I’ve ever met.

So when after our joint performance at Carlos’ The Living Room last week, they asked me to collaborate a little more in-depth-ly, I said yes even though I had no idea what the fuck we were gonna do or how the fuck it would work out.

We ended up doing this: I read two short pieces from this here blog [Manila Under the Covers #s 3 & 5] as they underscored my words beautifully. BUT THEN, we tried this thing where I read a much longer, sort of rambling piece about my relationship to New York [kind of maybe a pre-break-up break-up letter?] while they played around, through, behind, and over me…

It… felt… magnificent. The piece is as close to stream-of-consciousness as my perfectionist ass can come, and what ended up becoming of it was that my words were sort of rendered into an instrument… I found a rhythm with them by the end, like a guitar taking solos then fading back, or playing with/off the bass or drums or cello. It took some easing into but by the third installment of the one and a half hour set, I feel like we were really grooving… it was as though the audience had a choice where I seldom leave them one: a choice to hear my words or not. I hadn’t really any control over it… I mean I pushed certain segments and there were clear moments when Chuck, Ariel, and Dave felt me rising and pulled back a tad to give my words more clarity, but on the whole, I was only as clear as they wanted to work for me to be.

For someone who clings to the failure of language, it was incredibly humbling. Because as hypocritical as it might sound, so much of my other pieces that I’ve read or performed have hinged on a captive audience… one that I wield and batter and coax and prod carefully as I myself experience language’s inevitable failings. But this was almost the reverse of that… I felt myself sliding into a comfort at having meaning absolutely dissolve from the words my mouth was spewing alongside the other voices of the instruments. There was this dissolution of, I guess, verbal meaning that gave way to the other languages being braided into mine.

The fallout was pretty fuckin’ awesome, I gotta say. I could see people’s heads turning from me to the cello, and see them tune in and out of my words that continued on steadily, picking up scraps of my poem the way you’d spot a salmon in a stream.

I’ve never played an instrument for shit. Never thought I had it in me, I guess. But last night I felt, more than anything, like a musician. And my instrument wasn’t my voice… it was my words. And the music wasn’t in my rhythm… it was in the vacillations of my coherency on the listener’s ear.

I fell head-over-heels… for the whole thing… for Deoro… for the tides in people’s attention… it was an incredible experience looking back on it, and I hope very badly that I can work with these guys again before they peace out and head back to Brooklyn.

Manila Under The Covers #5

Every other day pretty much I drive by this huge-ass billboard on a big highway here in Manila called C-5. Usually I just drive by it, see it, wish I hadn’t, feel a shiver down my spine, and go on my merry way. But because it’s the Christmas season, which in Manila means that for the entire month of December and halfway into January you spend FIVE HOURS EVERY DAY in gridlocked traffic, yesterday I was forced to sit in front of this billboard and consider it in all of its wretchedness for about thirty minutes.

It’s the stuff nightmares are made of. First of all the product is called GlutaMax… which is like… great. Really definitely want to rub something named GlutaMax all over my body. But it’s some papaya-based soap that you rub all over you and, reputedly, it washes all the brown away and POOF. You become white.

Now as horrifying as that sounds, that in and of itself is pretty standard around here. In fact skin whitening soaps/lotions/peels are pretty expected almost anywhere where Spain or France or America butt-fucked a country for decades. They’re a dime a dozen.

But what sets good ol’ GlutaMax apart is its motto. See good ol’ GlutaMax knew it wouldn’t just do to say “MAKE YOURSELF WHITE OR YOU’RE AN UGLY COTTON/RICE/BANANA PICKING WHORE.”

Because that kind of thing is just, you know, understood. So GlutaMax, never one to be lumped in with the rest, decided to really go the extra mile with their tagline.

The billboard features this filipino movie star named Gretchen Barreto sprawled out across some sort of platform like Manet’s Olympia.

And like Olympia, Gretchen is very beautiful. And like Olympia, Gretchen is very white. [Except what contrasts her color is a ream of black studio fabric instead of an ogling black slave.]

Except UNLIKE Olympia [who was a whore ], Gretchen is very rich.

And it’s a good thing, too. Because GlutaMax’s motto is Kutis Mayaman.

Which translates into RICH SKIN.  Just… just look at this shit…

Now maybe mayaman, like “rich,” is multivalent. Perhaps, like “rich,” mayaman might imply a richness or… a depth of, say… color… Wait a second… that doesn’t work, does it?

No kiddies, even the most lenient of poetic connotations of mayaman, in good ol’ GlutaMax’s usage, would seem to hinge on, rather, a stark absence of color.

[Hey, hey look at this white sheet of carbon paper… aren’t its hues just, like, so rich?]

And so kiddies, here you have it. The dirty truth:

PAPAYA CAN MAKE YOUR SKIN WHITE… WHICH IS THIS WEIRD WORD THAT ALSO MEANS - YOU GUESSED IT BITCHES - RICH AS GRETCHEN FUCKIN’ BARRETTO.

Papaya, it turns out, is quite a talented little fruit. On top of being a potent diarrhetic, I recently learned that it is routinely sliced up and chucked into the giant pots that filipino medical school cadavers are boiled in after dissection because of its aiding properties in stripping flesh from bone.

Which is apt, because that’s about how GlutaMax’ ad makes me feel.

two guys, a girl, and a baseball bat.

I am currently in Tagaytay on a spur-of-the-moment getaway with the Mom at our friend Lita’s incredibly quaint quasi-bed-and-breakfast. From my balcony I can see Mars glinting directly above the world’s smallest active volcano, Taal.

Not that I give a shit about either astronomy or nature, but it’s really peaceful out here, and no one has bumped into me for a day and a half… so there is that I guess.

My mom spent the day working on a new book she’s written about Ten guidelines within the bible for a Christian woman to keep in mind when choosing her husband.

I spent the day working on a script about gay serial killers.

Our conversation at dinner tonight was quite interesting.

THIS FUCKING SCRIPT THOUGH. I started it last October. As in fifteen months ago. I’ve got about a hundred and fifty pages strewn across my desktop, two moleskines, and my small intestine. It’s been hacked apart, scotch-taped together, and facelifted so many times I often fail even to remember where this story and these characters came from in me, where they’re going, why they’re here, and why they refuse to get there.

But today, for the first time in months, I saw it again. Glinting [like Mars? fuck no I ain’t going there] at me like it did a year ago before it stopped glinting and I got bedbugs.

I don’t know if it qualifies as a breakthrough. But I find I’m falling back in love with them, these monsters I want to make that come out of me and out of what I see and want and hate and don’t understand in my generation and the cinema that kicks me in the nuts. And I’m excited. I’M EXCITED. For the first time in so fucking long. Excited to be writing. Excited to be writing this.  Excited about where this could go.

It feels totally schizophrenic to spell this out - and I probably oughtn’t to because there’s still a whole lot of me in them to be edited out in revisions - but I think my break with Tristan, Diana, and Peter is finally over.

And, good lord, but the reunion’s been a colorful one.

Marriage Is Apparently A Thing That Happens [excerpt]

My baby brother is getting married in July. He’s not the first one, either. To get married, I mean. It seems to be a thing that happens a lot. From what I can gather through various Google searches and Wikipedia, millions of people before him have also gotten married. And included among these millions is my older brother, who got hitched three months ago. So that makes two out of the three of we Darwin progeny to have tied the knot.

This, as you can perhaps imagine, is making my life fucking miserable.

Relatives I didn’t even know existed until now have emerged from the woodworking to ask me through pursed smiles How it’s possible that someone as fill-in-the-blank as me doesn’t have a girlfriend yet? and Might I just have a special someone tucked away in a suitcase somewhere that no one knows about? and How old are you again, Daniel, because you know that men are at their most virile between the ages of eighteen and thirty? I’m twenty-three. And, hysterically, they know that. I’m also gay. And, hysterically, they don’t know that. If they did, and though it’s now a viable option in a smattering of places, I somehow doubt they would be asking me these questions so vociferously.

Chief among these inquisitive relatives are my grandparents, who moved into our house at about the same time as my baby brother proposed to his fiancée and who, on top of serving as a constant – as in every day constant – reminder that I am not married, also serve as a constant example of exactly why I do not want to get married.

See the thing is, all of this marriage ballyhoo that’s brought on the onslaught of questions and kicked our family into high gear of late – the lace and the cake, the veils, the vows, the unions, the dresses, the gifts, the sobbing, the bloodshed – has just confirmed a quite concrete resolution that I’ve felt hovering above me for about six years now:

I am almost positive that I will never get married.

Like, I’m pretty sure that if China were to overthrow the world tomorrow morning and beat India into the ground and launch its nuclear devices at the ever-crumbling EU and the ever-deserving US of A and just fucking eradicate everyone in everywhere, and the only people left alive to re-propagate the human race were me, Beyoncé the day after her period ends, and a priest with two gold rings, I still wouldn’t get married, I don’t think.

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I Saw A Show And It Did Things To Me II

a sort of review by Daniel Darwin

Last Friday I met up with the resplendent Jenny Jamora and watched Repertory Philippines’ production of Peter Pan [starring Sam Concepcion, Tippy dos Santos, and Michael Williams, dir. Jaime del Mundo] at the Meralco Theater.

It was a breezy night, and the stars were out, and a deep-seated fear that has loomed at my back for years was undeniably confirmed:

I can not come into contact with Peter Pan without falling into a cripplingly deep depression for days.

Like, days.

In this particular instance, the crippling depression that I inevitably fall into whenever I encounter Peter Pan was compounded by another inevitably crippling depression to which I fell prey. This was the experience of having to sit through one of the shittiest musicals I’ve ever heard.

As this blog centers itself [or tries to] around theater and/or other depressing things, and as it’s late at night, and as I’m drunk and haven’t flown off the handle in a while, I figured good ol’ Brechtfast Cereal would be a fitting place to try and process this double-whammy of emotional wreckage that Friday night heaved onto my chest.

Since subsections make everything look fancy, I’ve decided to split my introspection into two subsections. We’ll see if sobriety and the sun’s heat see me wanting to continue on to the second. In the meantime, here’s the first:

SUBSECTION I: DON’T DO BAD THINGS TO PETER PAN

You’ll notice that, above, I wrote that Peter Pan was one of the shittiest musicals I’ve ever heard. This was because just about everything I saw was beautiful.

Jaime del Mundo’s production was, on the whole, wonderful. The sets were delightful - simple in all the right make-believe places, creative and whimsical. The lighting was on point, taking us into the sky and planting us in a lush and vibrant [never never] land.

The fly-rigging was gorgeous; whoever was tugging at those wires achieved an effortlessness that thrust us into that incredible and rare abandon wherein one might actually just buy that thinking a good thought is enough to simply lift off.

And on top of that, the performances of the entire cast were for the most part marvelous.

The energy they exuded was incredible, when given the steaming pile of shit they had to rake through.

Filipino actors, man. They’ve been doing a total number on me since I got back. These theatre practitioners have displayed such talent - clarity, effortlessness, and electricity - in every piece of theatre I’ve seen thus far, and it’s been my honor to have the opportunity to watch these performers do what they were born to do.

Perhaps that’s why it pained me so bad that the material - across the board, from lyrics to music to book - was just so utterly and untenably abysmal. It was like rubbing my face against shards of glass, having to watch this beautiful direction and these beautiful actors do their absolute best to breathe life into a horse that was so glaringly dead.

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Manila Under the Covers #2

It didn’t, before you ask. But as the internet is best paired with the imagined, this is how I would’ve liked the conversation to’ve gone:

Daniel:  Hey, darling. My darling. Sweet, candy-nippled darling.

Him:     Erm… [guffaw] …nhYes? [giggle]

Daniel:  Do I look like a Brontë sister?

Him:     Erm, pardon?

Daniel:  Do I look like a Brontë sister? Do I look malnourished? Like I haven’t seen the sun in twelve years? Like I’m wearing a camel-hair chastity belt? Do I have milk coming out of the bottoms of my eyes?

Him:    Erm… I’m not sure I -

Daniel:    Do I look like I hinge on a man’s word? On his breath? On his back-hand? Do I look like I worship decorum and high tea and manicures and codpieces and all of that other ceremonious twatsuck bullshit??

Him:   …No?

Daniel:   [drawing a samurai sword] Then what makes you think…

[Chun-Li-like ducking sweep kick to Him’s feet such that Him faceplants before Daniel. Then, as Him wriggles to Him’s knees:]

Daniel: …I would SUFFER… [raises samurai sword sun-glintingly high] …A LINTON CHILD TO LIVE?!

[Swift downward stroke. CUT TO: blood spattering across Daniel’s totally awesome Kenneth Cole boots]

[Roll credits as Daniel mouths: “Thank you Dear Coke Talk.”]

[fin.]

A Gay Teenager Kills Himself. Or, Another Gay Teenager Kills Himself.

Those of my friends who’ve sat down with me and discussed my position on it know that I’ve found the It Gets Better movement quite problematic for a slew of different reasons. But I haven’t said anything, for the same reason I haven’t said anything about how I find Lady Gaga’s pseudo-cooptation of the celebrity homosexual problematic…

First, because regardless of what hairs I might nit-pick about either the It Gets Better project or Gaga’s Born This Way and the privilege, generalizations, and assumptions that play into both phenomena, at least they are using their platforms to speak. To speak of. And to speak out.

And secondly, and most heart-wrenchingly at present, because fucking shit like what’s addressed in the article I’m including below is still fucking happening all the fucking time. Tyler Clementi and the It Gets Better may have spurred the theretofore woefully neglectful media to go batshit insane over gay teen suicides; but, as expected, the media soon forgot about it, and, as expected, kids are still killing themselves daily.

Read and watch: Bullied Teenager in Buffalo, NY Takes His Own Life

Well, it’s three in the morning, and I’ve had a weatherbeaten ass day, and I’m sad and I’m angry and I’m [thank God] not in a position of authority. So I’m going to let my tongue unfurl with the following:

FUCK. Fuck that this happens. Fuck that it’s happened since the dawn of time. Fuck that it will keep on happening. Fuck that our media forgets about it. Fuck that our educational system washes their hands of it. And fuck every single last one of you complacent American Christians. Fuck you for your active hatred and just as much for your ruinous, and loathesome passivity. Fuck you for your pity, and through it your shirking of how culpable you and I and our fucked up distorted religion are in all of this.

And finally, fuck these kids for giving up. For not realizing that there are millions of people out there who can’t wait to meet and see and love them, we who know their pain, we who cherish their stories, and we who need - more than ever - their voices. Fuck them for not holding on. For instead giving in to the torment and taking it upon themselves to silence their own voices, when so many of our voices are being silenced by forces beyond our control.

7 Questions I can answer before completion, and their answers

                                                                                                                                      .

“If you could be anyone in the whole world -“

“JULIETTE LEWIS”

                                                                                                                                      .

“What should we do with elderly people who -“

“SHOTGUN.”

                                                                                                                                      .

“What’s the worst thing that ever -“

“Baseball.”

                                                                                                                                      .

“How do we solve -“

“Kill all below seven.”

                                                                                                                                      .

“What is the absolute most important -“

“THE MIRROR HAS TWO FACES.”

                                                                                                                                      .

“If you were stranded on a desert -“

“Never.”

                                                                                                                                      .

“To the extent that you believe in God’s -“

“Sondheim.”

The thing that I almost just said to a coworker whose name I don’t know

a poem by Daniel Darwin

.

Yes. You haven’t asked

me, but, Yes. I did not,

in fact, hear your question.

And I am, indeed, only

.

listening to forty per

cent of what you are saying.

But I swear to god it’s taking sixty per

cent of my brain capacity not to projectile vomit on your face right now.

.

So content yourself

to repeat yourself or

GRAB THE NEAREST TOWEL WHORE.

Excerpt [Tiny]

.

CANDACE, 18, beautiful, sits on a park bench with her cellphone at her ear. Lights a cigarette. Inhales deep.

CANDACE:   (into her cellphone)   No… Mom, I’m not (Exhales) smoking. (Pause) What click? There was no click. (Beat) Mom – Listen to me. Jesus, can you calm down, please? I don’t understand why you’re freaking out so much. It’s not like -(Pause) I’m sorry… but it’s not like - How is this hard on you?! (Pause) Yeah but – Mom – it’s not like you won’t keep on being friends with Marla and Jim! It’s not like Brian and I won’t stay in each others’ lives! (Pause) Well of course it won’t be the same but – Mom – MOM! It’s not like anything’s set in stone and besides… This is my decision to make. This isn’t a townhall meeting, it’s a fu- it’s a relationship between two consenting people! Not a majority fricking vote, Mom. (Beat) Because he’s not your boyfriend, he’s mine!Was… Mine. (Pause) Oh God, Mom… why are you crying? Please don’t cry. I’m – I’m sorry I yelled it’s just – Mom, come on, calm down. It’s going to be alright, I promi- (Beat) What? (Pause) No. Not yet. Umm. No. (Beat) I don’t know! …I don’t know… I just don’t. Haven’t. (Beat) Of course I feel things, Mom! I – God! I have feelings. I feel things. All of the normal things that normal people feel I feel. I just don’t pitch a tent and wail like a fu… camel every time I have a crappy day. (Beat) No I wasn’t saying – I didn’t mean you I just… Mom…

Long pause. Candace, exasperated, rustles her long hair.

CANDACE:     Look I… I don’t know… Things have just… Well, I suppose I’ve changed a lot and… I just… (Long pause) I mean, a lot can happen in five months, Mom and… I was… (Build, makes a sound) Listen, can we talk about this later, Mom? I -(Pause) Okay! Okay. Fine. I’ll try…

Long pause. Candace brings her feet up to the bench.

CANDACE:   (quietly at first)   I wasn’t planning on this. I didn’t plan this. I was just - and Brian came at a time when, and he didn’t – it was sweet that he wanted to surprise me but it just caught me off guard and I’m, you know, I’m in the middle of finals here and I’ve been – I’m trying to build a life for myself here and he just… I mean it just… And yesterday, yesterday I was hanging out with Collin and – (Pause) No. Mom, I told you, I haven’t – (Beat) It’s not like that, I – (Beat) MOM! Collin is the FIVE YEAR OLD THAT I BABYSIT. JESUS. (Pause) Living in New York does not automatically make me a whore, Mom. Will you let me finish? (Pause) I was babysitting my five year old, Collin. And we were talking about the universe, you know, like the planets and stuff. But he wasn’t really following, so I – I drew them all out for him, right? And he wanted to color in Earth, but we didn’t have any blue for some reason so he had to use purple so it was all purple and green and he… he asked me why I drew it so small, because his favorite color is yellow so he wanted to use yellow for the deserts and. (Beat.) Earth. Are you listening? Okay, so I told him. About how the sun is this giant, you know, ball of fire and how we spin around it because it’s like a giant magnet, and how our planet is actually one of the smaller ones, you know? Like how it’s pretty dwarfish in comparison to, like, Jupiter and stuff. And he didn’t get it. Or, no, he just wasn’t getting it right off the bat so I pulled out my laptop and I showed him Google Earth. (Beat.) It’s this program that lets you start from outer space and zoom in to your address or, like, any address based on satellite footage. (Beat.) Yes. Satellites.Mom, this is important I swear just listen. (Beat.) So we type in his address, and it starts with the whole world, except obviously the water was blue not purple but it starts with the whole world and just zooms in super slowly all the way to America, then New York, then Manhattan, then to his block, until we’re looking right at the roof of his apartment building. And he just started screaming. He started screaming at the top of his lungs and running around in circles just tweaking out. He kept screaming “I can see my tree I can see my tree I can see my steps that’s,” you know, “those are my steps!” and shit-I-mean-stuff like that until I finally caught up to him, you know, caught him in my arms and like yelled “What’s wrong?! What’s wrong Collin?! Why are you crying??” You know? (Pause) Yeah he was shaking and crying and he finally looked at me and said… “We’re so tiny… I’m so tiny.” And it was… I just held him and and I didn’t know what to say so I just said “Yes, honey. Yes, you are… And it’s okay.” (Beat.) You know? (Beat) And it broke my heart. (Beat.) Yeah he’s like a baby genius. (Beat) And then I met up with Brian this morning and we were just sitting in Washington Square and he kept on asking me if I knew where he could get some bud and I (Beat) Oh. Umm. Nothing its - It’s a nickname for bubble gum. (Pause) Anyway, I kept trying to talk to him about what had just happened and he just – It was like… I guess I realized that –

Pause. Candace makes a sound in exasperation.

CANDACE:     I realized that in four and a half years, Brian and I had never had a conversation half so friggin’ profound as the one I had just had with my five year old, okay, Mom? And so I took his head in my hands and I kissed him and I took him back to my dorm room and broke up with him. That’s the story. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go. (Beat) BECAUSE. Because it’s the first real day of summer and I’m in the middle of finals week and because I have four papers to write and because I have to finish reading this goddamn French play about how hell is being stuck on the phone with your goddamn Mother.

Sonnet

I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.

I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.

I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.

I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.

I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.

I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.

I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.

I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.

I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.

I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.

I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.

I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.   I am.

    I am.  I am.  I am.  I am.  I am.

    I am.  I am.  I am.  I am.  I am.