man.  I just saw PJ Harvey perform on Leno tonight.  Funny thing is, when she started performing, I didn't even recognize her.  She looked familiar, but...this woman was cradling an autoharp and strumming serenely, singing with an atmospheric tenderness, and playing a few harmony keys with her right foot on what looked like a quaint, little piano contraption on the floor.  I thought she was a "newly discovered", wispy, anti-folk artist.  She was singing, strumming the autoharp, and lifting melodies from this alien piano all at the same time.  I was mesmerized.  I was like, "Who is this wonderful person?..."  I even started daydreaming, like, "Man, I want learn how to play the autoharp..."  Ha!...anyways, I was waiting with that anticipation to hear Leno say the name of the guest as he's walking into that camera frame to congratulate her.  "PJ Harvey!"  Wha?!  I pretty much only know of PJ Harvey from a few of her scrape-the-guts, gutteral, frustration songs.  The only other time I saw her perform was several years back on tv and she was'nt playing any instruments but her voice smoked like a burning house.  I guess I then always saw her as a gutsy frontwoman who wasn't a musician, but could sing the hell out of a song that she wrote with the right band.  More postmodern Janis Joplin than sugarpunk Maybelle Carter.  But after watching her on Leno, I just felt stupid.  Her versatility is so delicious.  I must buy all her stuff.  Argh!  "Must...follow...budget..."

Went to check out the Westheimer Street Festival today.  The last time I went was probably 10 years ago.  It's gotten a lot smaller.  I had heard of battles between the Street Festival people and the local residents because the street festival would close down several blocks of Westheimer to allow for the festivities to be fully indulged and the residents, I guess, didn't appreciate the hordes of strangers frollicking about.  It seems a compromise of sorts was made.  A section of Westheimer is no longer closed down and the festival has been swept away from the street and now resides in the venues/bars/eateries in that general area with people spilling out and flooding into these places checking out bands, art, DIY vendors, and beer/food.  I finally got to check out the Helios after it had finished renovating and is now called Avantgarden.  It's changed alot!  It used to be a kinda hole-in-the-wall place.  Now it's got a sweeter ambience and seems more upscale.  I know it's probably a totally different kind of venue now, so I kinda miss that dingy, retreat for recluses, vibe it had.  But I'm still glad the place is still up and running. 

Local music.  Great weather.  Sane crowd, but thankfully not too sane.  I know it's not as crazy and weird as it used to be, but I'll be sure to check it out again next year...

the blood on a poor father's hands

working all day, money falls through his fingers like sand

debts, America's political narcissism, the Philippine elite

all take bread from the mouths who have desperate hearts

the world economy breeds killers in the streets

festivals in towns

funerals that are merely days apart

a peasant military learns the beauty of artillery rounds

Aguinaldo, Quezon, and Roxas

administered an Independence embargo

the colonial fugue is what fucks us up

what's left but pre-Catholic nostalgia and post-Catholic aggression

must we rely on a foreigner's ideologies to bring us luck?

where everything rests in obscurity

is a stare that is preparing to predict

what is daring enough to create a new universe

if the future is a bluff of perpetual symmetry

which frame of reference sees through this perpetuity

to give birth to what was the same

but this time, daring enough

who observes the heart in love?

nothing disturbs a romance more

than to place a chance against it

as if a competition

a heart will find a detour

and start to ignore this game

games require an audience

and audiences hate repetition

a heart will find a detour

for love need not be observed

love also need not entertain outside its intimacy

otherwise, love is a disturbed universe

a synchronicity snatched of its privacy