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In the course of my friend’s quest we sought out a psychic who’d been recommended by a columnist. This manghuhula used regular playing cards to read the future. We sat at a table—I was the designated note-taker—and he shuffled the cards. He asked my friend to cut the deck, then he lay the cards on the table. “You used to live in Makati,” he told my friend, looking her straight in the eye. In a sort of trance, he described the house she’d grown up in, including its color, the color of the gate, and the stones leading up to the front door. Then, in similar detail, he described my friend’s mother.

“Wow,” my friend said, “You can see all that in the cards?”

“No,” the manghuhula replied, “Don’t you remember me? I was your houseboy in 1973!”

Emotional Weather Report, today in the Philippine Star.

Last Saturday I went to Manny del Rosario’s birthday party. So that’s what Embassy is like: long queue of people dressed to impress and waiting to get in. Made a mental note to call Jim Libiran and suggest a sequel to Tribu. Tribu 2: Shet, pare. Chus prefers Tribongga. In the climactic sequence there would be a walk-off, then a dance-off, then the in-crowd would send in their security guards to do the fighting. We left the place round 1 am, before anything exciting had happened, and went back to that 24-hour carinderia to eat lechong kawali, tokwa’t baboy and beef pares. Heavenly. You don’t get food like that at The Fort.

The party was 90% advertising folk. I had a chat—okay, we had to yell over the music, but in a polite way—with a risk management consultant. He said, Could you not write about Roger Federer? So here’s something about the Fed on the practice court from 3Quarks.

“Seen at close range, I can perhaps best describe his play as explosively graceful, or violently precise. He wasn’t very focussed, though, missing some shots and laughing, “Nein!” (Federer tends to exposulate in different langauges, using “Allez!” for the French, and “Come on!” in Queens.) At one point, Kiefer aced him, and Federer, without looking, smashed the ball off the tarp behind him, neatly banking it into the hands of a waiting hitting partner. It was the kind of thing you might see a magician do, yet for Federer it was just an absent-minded expression of annoyance. Such is life as the greatest practitioner ever of tennis.”

The other day we were talking about Magnolia. I love that movie, not in a feeling-movie-critic-cineastey sort of way, but on a visceral level. The first time I saw it I grabbed my head and shrieked to myself, “What is he doing!?! I want more!” It’s the kind of all-out hang-by-your-balls high wire act that film production profit margins don’t allow anymore. There are so many things that could go wrong with it—emotion teetering on the brink of hysteria, multiple plotlines stretching the movie to breaking point, flirting with absurdity (that sing-along might have been hilarious)—but writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson holds it together. By the time that thing happens, we’re ready; he puts us through the wringer, but he pays up. Many critics deemed it a disaster, but that is how I want my disasters to be. I want to get hit in my soul, because I’d feel like I had one.

Even Tom Cruise is fine in Magnolia—maybe not in the scene with the dying father, that was a little cringe-making, but in the interview with the TV reporter, where he looks at her with those dead eyes and says, “I’m silently judging you”. That is the secret to casting Cruise: he’s really effective at playing assholes. Look at him in Collateral and Jerry Maguire. He does well in roles where his little-boy charm can not save him, and he’s forced to dredge up other resources.

It’s been five years since PTA’s last movie Punch-Drunk Love (in which we discover depths to Adam Sandler, not that I mind him shallow). His new film There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a prospector in the oilfields of early 1900s California, opens in December.

In a better world, intelligent people would have more power and influence than the stupid, mediocrity would be criminalized, no one would have to pander to anyone just to earn a living, and bloggers would actually make money for their good work.

Now let’s act AS IF this were a better world. Visit the Madcrowdmedia site now.

Colman Andrews writing in The New Republic: “It is my opinion that whoever said “Nothing tastes as good as thin feels” has probably never sat down with three ounces of Iranian osetra, a stack of freshly made blinis (the kind that aren’t made with pancake mix), a small bone spoon, and nobody else in the room; or attacked a steaming plateful of fettuccine alfredo made the right way (with only very rich butter and the best parmigiano-reggiano, no cream); or addressed a big, juicy bacon-cheeseburger with homemade fried onion rings and a bottle of Cornas on the side. Or maybe that person has done all or some of the above and just didn’t like the experience. It’s possible, I guess. We all have blind spots in our appreciative abilities. Vladimir Nabokov apparently didn’t see the point of music. François Truffaut, in so many ways the quintessential Frenchman, considered food a necessary annoyance, and probably would have preferred watching an Ozu movie for the fourteenth time to eating lunch. Me, I wouldn’t care if I never saw Cirque du Soleil again in my life.”

Hmm, makes me love Truffaut a little less. One reason I love The Sopranos: everyone constantly stuffing their faces. They eat, they whack each other, they eat, they whack each other. (Reminds me of a conversation I once had. “What’s the plot of Less Than Zero?” my flatmate asked. “They do coke, they do each other, they do coke, they do each other,” I said. My flatmate was floored. “They do the polka, they do each other?!” That might’ve helped the movie.)

Too big a deal is being made of today’s eclipse. I watch for signs of the apocalypse, and I don’t think it is one. It’s not extraordinary enough. There are five, six eclipses every year, and the red moon stuff sounds like fear-mongering—it makes people think of war and Old Testament plagues. (I hate to break this to you but the world is already at war, there’s always been a war going on in some corner of the world, and war is big business.) In many ways we’re still the ancient tribesmen beating the drums to keep the moon from swallowing the sun.

My druid kept getting text messages from people asking about the effect of this eclipse upon their personal destinies. Her answer: Probably none. We were at a bookstore and two kids asked the staff for a book called Eclipse. We thought they wanted a science book, but it turned out to be a young adult novel with a vampire protagonist. So we started riffing on eclipses: that movie about Rimbaud’s affair
with Verlaine starring Leonardo DiCaprio, that horrible Bonnie Tyler karaoke staple that makes me want to rip people’s throats out through their noses, and the Antonioni movie with Alain Delon and Monica Vitti in which they arrange to meet but neither one shows up and for about ten minutes the camera shows the empty street corner, lampposts, random pedestrians, and you figure something has to happen, and then it’s The End. My friend came up with a great idea for a costume party with an Eclipse theme. Half the guests show up as the sun, the other half as the moon, and they take turns covering each other. On the way home I noticed an Eclipse gym. What profound insights am I trying to impart? None. Absolutely none.

If you’re not in the mood for revelation, look away. I hated high school. It’s no secret; I’ve written about it a few times. Most of those years I remember as an abyss of rage, misery, and loathing. You don’t know how angry I was, I was about two minutes from going Columbine. I don’t blame the school; I probably would’ve been as miserable elsewhere, and my family life didn’t help. I don’t blame my classmates because I didn’t know them and they didn’t know me. I was an angry, alienated teenager—not a unique situation, and not one I relish remembering.

That should be the end of the story, but for the ironies that follow. Anger gave me material. I actually became mildly famous for being angry. (It was the grunge era; rage was in.) This is not how I thought my life would turn out, but on the whole it works. And now because of the fame shit my old school wants to have something to do with me.

Do you know how warped and bizarre that is? I have no school spirit. I can’t get nostalgic for the time I spent seething. When I watched Auraeus’s movie Pisay I wished I had been like those kids, well-adjusted and happy. I can’t feign retroactive bonhomie. Then I realized that no one is asking me to do these things. It’s just a gig for which I’m qualified. I talked it over with my friends, I talked it over with the alumni, and I thought, what the fuck, I’ll do it. It’ll be an exorcism.

Read Newsweek. I have an article in this week’s issue (cover date 3 Sept 07) about three new Filipino movies: Tribu, Pisay, and Endo.

Who was it who told me to watch A Love Story? I hope you were kidding, because if you weren’t I’m going to have to euthanise you. The non-linear storytelling: different. The movie: a steaming turd. The sheer grinding obviousness. Wall to wall cliche. Rampant overacting. Relentless overscoring. The 45-minute drunken Aga self-pity orgy. The godawful phony melodrama. This movie should’ve been released months ago, there are enough tears shed onscreen to end any drought. Put those people out of their misery.

Emotional Weather Report, today in the Philippine Star.
Saturday, 2 am, somewhere in Makati. Raymond insists that we go to this 24-hour carinderia, a favorite among filmmakers.

“What’s it called?”

“It doesn’t have a name,” Raymond says. “You have to try the tokwa and lechong kawali.”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know the name of the street.”

“Then how will we get there?”

“I know the way. Sort of.”

“Di kaya tayo ma-Tribu nyan?” Ricky asks.

“No.”

“What do they serve?”

“Pares. Lechong kawali and tokwa.”

So at 2 am, after only three minutes of confusion that Raymond blames on a tikbalang, we find the carinderia on a crowded street. I can’t be more specific because the place has gotten popular enough as it is. It’s so popular that by the time we get there the only food left is lugaw and tokwa. True, the fact that it’s past 2 am may have something to do with the lack.

The carinderia is clean and bright, with that cruel fluorescent lighting that picks out and reveals your zits from twenty years ago. We sit on the bench by the long metal table and order lugaw and tokwa. The neighborhood is pretty lively despite the hour—people keep popping up for midnight snacks. At the next table, the owner is having a serious conversation with a transvestite in a halter dress. Across the street is an electric sign offering “24-hour organic massage”, whatever that is. (”They massage your organ?” is Raymond’s guess.) Down the street someone is doing karaoke: it sounds like he’s being garrotted with his own vocal cords.

Two picturesque teenagers sit at our table and inhale bowls of lugaw. Raymond wants to put them in a movie, but they leave before he can deliver his spiel. However, the woman at the counter tells us their names, addresses, and hobbies without our even asking. Then it starts raining again. I feel like a character in the Edward Hopper painting, or more accurately, the Tom Waits album. “There’s a rendezvous of strangers around the coffee urn tonight, all the gypsy hacks, all the insomniacs, now the paper’s been read.” In that instant I even wish for a piano, until I remember that I don’t play.

The Chicago Tribune, quoting Veterinary Pet Insurance, says the most popular name for cats and dogs in the US for the fifth year running is. . .Max. The top ten names for cats are Max, Chloe, Lucy, Tigger, Tiger, Smokey, Oliver, Bella, Sophie, and Princess. For dogs: Max, Molly, Buddy, Bella, Lucy, Maggie, Daisy, Jake, Bailey, and Rocky.

Bo-ring, dull, blah. Where’s the imagination? Where’s the majesty? A cat needs a grand name like Koosalagoopagoop Galadriel Ivanisevic-O’Brien. A friend of mine called his dog Torquemada, because no one expects the Spanish Inquisition. Unfortunately his mom couldn’t pronounce Torquemada, so she took to calling him Turkey.

Just read Old School by Tobias Wolff (This Boy’s Life). I found it on the bargain bookshelf at Powerbooks last Sunday while waiting for a friend. Hardcover, P99. The other day I picked it up with the intention of skimming through it before I fell asleep. The next thing I knew the sun had risen and I was on the last page.

Wolff has won many prizes for his stories, but this is his first novel, published in 2003. It’s about a scholarship student at a New England prep school in the early 1960s. The narrator wants to be a writer, and his school emphasizes Literature. Every year a famous writer is invited to give a talk, and one student gets a private audience. In his final year the visiting writer is his idol, Ernest Hemingway. To get the audience his story has to be personally selected by Hemingway. But as the deadline looms, he finds he cannot write the story. Being an adopted member of a tribe (the rich), he has thoroughly imbibed their habits and attitudes while revealing nothing about himself. He hasn’t lied outright, but he hasn’t corrected the misconceptions about himself, either. He’s allowed himself to be mistaken for one of them. You can’t do that when you write a story; it’s an act of revelation.

“The life that produces writing can’t be written about. It is a life carried on without the knowledge even of the writer, below the mind’s business and noise, in deep unlit shafts where phantom messengers struggle toward us, killing one another along the way; and when a few survivors break through to our attention they are received as blandly as waiters bringing more coffee.”

Despite the narrator’s adoration of Hemingway, Old School is squarely on Scott Fitzgerald territory: the fascination with the rich, the longing for acceptance by the tribe, and the discovery that it’s not worth it. I’ve always loved Scott Fitzgerald, a fact that has boggled my friends, and as I grew older I figured out why. Being from a middle-middle class background, I was raised to look up to the rich and pretend to be one of them. Being clever, even “adoptable”, I’ve been allowed to observe tribal behavior at closer range, and goddamn Scott is right. The writers we love always tell us the truth. Scott Fitzgerald lied to himself a lot, but he has never lied to me.