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Pool at the New Majestic, originally uploaded by Koosama.

There looked to be a problem before our tour of Singapore had even started: our tour guide was observing Ramadan, and could not partake of food and drink between sunrise and sunset. The tour organized by the Singapore Tourism Board included sumptuous dinners at some of the city’s finest restaurants. (The dinner at Saint Julien at the Fullerton Boat House was so good, some of us burst into tears.)

“Not a problem,” shrugged our guide, whose wardrobe was inspired by Pinoy singer Freddie Aguilar. “I’m used to it. I’ll just not eat.” And for five days, as we tucked into some fairly spectacular meals, he sat at the table regaling us with tales of Singapore life, impervious to the feasts appearing and disappearing right under his nose.

The tour was designed for visitors interested in arts and culture, cuisine and night life. Barely a decade ago the words “night life” and “Singapore” would not have occurred in the same sentence. Back then, cyberpunk author William Gibson described the city- state as “Disneyland with a death penalty.” Many viewed it as an antiseptic nation of robots in which punishment was meted out to drug users, gum-chewers, and people who did not flush the toilet. It was an impression that the government of Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew did not waste time dispelling - they had other priorities, such as transforming a tiny country with no natural resources into one of the wealthiest (and cleanest) on the planet.

Now that the mission has been accomplished, the citizens are being urged to cultivate pursuits outside the office. Translation: They must learn to have fun.

Property developers have been acquiring old buildings and repurposing them into chic hotels with theme rooms executed by local designers. For instance, the New Majestic Hotel in Chinatown has 30 theme rooms ranging from the Mirror Room (”Watch and be watched!”); Hey Diddle Diddle, a reinterpretation of the nursery rhyme; and the Pussy Parlour, which I leave to your imagination. It’s all excruciatingly hip and a tad self-conscious, but let no one doubt the Singaporean determination to achieve coolness. Yes, they have toiled for the right to party.

Another boutique hotel, The Scarlet, aspires to the look of an upscale Victorian bordello: all deep red hues and plush furniture. It’s like early ’90s Victoria Court with a budget, with Temptation Island tossed in. The rooms have names like Lavish and Passion, the gym is called Flaunt, and the boardroom is the Sanctum. Even the mailbox is made of leather.

Physicist Robert J. Lang quit his job to do origami full-time.

In his book Heat, Bill Buford describes how he quit his job as an editor at the New Yorker to become a kitchen slave at Mario Batali’s restaurant Babbo, then a line cook, then an apprentice butcher in Tuscany.

Do you have a theoretical parallel life? Ever think of dropping everything to pursue some possibly half-assed notion? That’s a real question, I want answers.

Half-conscious among Rubenses, originally uploaded by Koosama.

My most recent book, The 500 People You Meet In Hell, is on the National Bookstore bestseller list. Thanks to everyone who bought the book; do buy more copies. The 500 was designed and illustrated by Ige Ramos, whose culinary/consumerist column Bandehado will appear in Bandera Sundays starting March 4. On Sunday the aspiring Nigella answers the question: “Bakit hindi lumulobo ang fishball na nabibili sa supermarket di tulad ng fishball na nabibili sa kalye?”

Twisted volumes 1 to 7, Twisted Flicks, and Pinoy Elections are all available in softcover at National Bookstores and Powerbooks. My book publisher tells me that we have to keep the prices down, hence the newsprint. Something about my readers being predominantly students, etc. So kids, sorry about eating into your allowance; we’ll keep the books under P200.

My columns appear Fridays in the Star and monthly in Metro. Manila Envelope 3 will launch in May. Also, I have a few dozen tapes of my old radio talk show Twisted on Sunday waiting to be converted into mp3s, but who has the time to do that? If you have the time (and the equipment), email me; we’re talking a couple of years’ worth of podcasts.

Martin Scorsese is my favorite Catholic. How many great films does a guy have to make to win a goddamn Oscar? Alright everyone, time to stop humping Marty’s leg.
I had thought cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s work on Children of Men was unbeatable. Pan’s Labyrinth is amazing though. I hated Babel, but the Mexicans (Cuaron, Del Toro, Inarritu) are on to something.
During the telecast I saw many ads I’d never seen before. I learned that coffee and malted barley are good for me. Must drink more coffee and Guinness then.

Did you know that Airto Moreira and Flora Purim played at the Coconut Palace last Friday? I didn’t. Nobody told me. You’d think that of all the email I get from people I don’t know, at least one would tell me that Purim and Airto were performing in Manila. Instead I get letters from aliens claiming to be evil dictators or their accountants appealing to my greed to help them move their imaginary funds out of their countries, or press releases from politicians trumpeting their alleged achievements. (Suggestion to politicians: In the series Rome, no matter what you’ve done, you can try to redeem yourself by bravely baring your throat when the time comes, or stripping off your armor and walking into an opposing army. That’s the season 2, episode 6 recap, by the way.)
You’d think the posters for the Philippine Jazz Festival would have “Airto” and “Purim” in great big letters, but all we see are silhouettes of saxophonists and scatters, and I’m not into scat because I can’t help thinking they’re doing it because they’ve forgotten the lyrics.
You’d think that of all the billboards blighting the urban landscape at least one would say Airto would have a concert here, and by the way what happened to all those declarations post-typhoon Milenyo that billboards, being threats to public safety, would be taken down? The billboards are back up, in greater numbers, informing us that your grandmother, who if you looked again turned out to be Cliff Richard, is having a Valentine’s Day concert, and that if everyone used Botox, we’d have one vision, one nation, presumably because we wouldn’t be able to contort our faces in rage.
I did find out that Purim, Airto, and Diane Schuur were supposed to jam at the Ayala museum cafe Sunday night. I didn’t go.

Five fashion designers/stylists propose makeovers for North Korean strongman Kim Jong-Il, whose attachment to the James Bond archvillain look of the Sixties is even stronger than his attachment to his nuclear arsenal. For the sake of world peace, I propose a runway walk-off between the two scariest men of our time: Kim Jong-Il and Karl Lagerfeld. Bring out the garlic and the holy water! Place your bets.

Last Night, a short story by James Salter. It’s only 6,000 words long but it’s more filling than most contemporary novels. Critics often wonder why Salter does not have a wider audience. I don’t think I want Salter’s books on the bestseller list. I don’t want him to be endorsed by Oprah, although if justice exists his books should make him a wealthy man. Let him be an open secret among the readers who get him.
Richard Ford on Salter: “It is an article of faith among readers of fiction that James Salter writes American sentences better than anybody writing today. Good writing in the fiction category matters to us because fiction is where we readers expect writing to be the most eventful, where virtuosity within sentences meets the un-plannable energy of the imagination, harnesses it to a narrative and enacts an entirely new and exhilarating and important occurrence dedicated to the reader’s delectation and renewal.
“This is a large part of any fiction’s basic appeal - what makes it, or can make it, exciting. And surely there’s no intuition for the world’s details and for its unobvious emotional business, no glint in the jeweller’s eye for our frail human kind as keen as James Salter’s, and no one who forges great notice and verbal imagination as beautifully, lavishly, surprisingly, sometimes as heartlessly, but always excitingly into sentences.”

A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source 

When half a dozen students in Neil Waters’s Japanese history class at Middlebury College asserted on exams that the Jesuits supported the Shimabara Rebellion in 17th-century Japan, he knew something was wrong. The Jesuits were in “no position to aid a revolution,” he said; the few of them in Japan were in hiding.
He figured out the problem soon enough. The obscure, though incorrect, information was from Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia, and the students had picked it up cramming for his exam…

February 21 was the centenary of W.H. Auden’s birth. Even if you’ve never read him, there is one poem of his you must be familiar with: Funeral Blues (”Stop all the clocks”) was recited in Four Weddings And A Funeral. I have one Auden seared into my cerebellum: Musee des Beaux Arts (”About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters”), which I had to read over and over in class.

To mark the Auden centenary, taxi drivers in his birthplace of York have been trained to recite his poems to their passengers. A pop song from the 70s has a weird sort of hommage to Mr. Auden (I don’t know if it was intended). The song Macarthur Park, which we know from the Donna Summer version, contains the line “Someone left the cake out in the rain.” Auden said his face looked “like a wedding cake left out in the rain.”

Songs from the 70s that make food come out of my nose: the aforementioned; the one that starts “One less bell to answer, one less egg to fry…”; and A House Is Not A Home (”A chair is still a chair…but a room is not a house…”), which sounds like it was written by a desperate Philo 11 student.

David Thomson, film critic and author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, asks: What if the secrecy of the ballot conceals incapacitated voters, dodgy tie-breaks, and even someone reading the wrong name out on the card?

Alfred Hitchcock NEVER WON AN OSCAR. Dances With Wolves won over Goodfellas, Oliver! beat 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kramer vs. Kramer beat Apocalypse Now, and dozens of other examples.

Rumor I like: Mark Wahlberg will win the Supporting Actor award for his foulmouthed sergeant in The Departed.

What I really want to see at the awards night: A losing nominee ditching his “I’m just happy to be nominated” face, screaming profanities, and running onstage to snatch the trophy.

The winners of the caption-writing contest:
Renfield: “Basta nood tayo ng Equus after, ha?”
Ria Celine: “OMG, your knees. . .it’s smoother, the pores are smaller, and ang lines…parang nawala!”
Carla: “This is your femur. Now bend over and I’ll show you where your hamstring is.”
You’ll be emailed instructions about claiming your prizes.
Thanks to everyone who posted their captions.

Erfoud. Desert. Photo by Scrat.

Originally uploaded by Koosama.

I first heard about the writer and composer Paul Bowles from a Police song. Bowles wrote The Sheltering Sky and many amazing short stories. An American, he lived in Morocco for most of his life. Read Paul Bowles’ Journey Through Morocco (1963). (I was a huge Police fan and still listen to their albums but I’m not interested in their concert tour. I find these reunion projects kind of sad. Senior citizens singing Roxanne.)
By the way there are cellphones in Morocco. So much for the American tourists’ troubles in the movie Babel. “I was told that even after riding three hours into open desert with nothing but rocks and sand, kids will appear if you stop,” says Scrat. “I thought the guide was overdoing the hashish and imagining things. We had a flat three hours into nothingness—and I mean nothingness—and what happens. In the shimmering distant horizon, barefoot kids start to run towards us from out of nowhere. A bit like the feral kid in Mad Max2. Don’t ask me where they popped out of, I assure you there was nothing out there. A mystery, although it may have been out of this. . .”