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This just in from Budj.
IF: Illegal Facilitator, a criminal whose crimes facilitated the crimes of others.
…
“He’d looked, Milgrim thought, like an ethnic version of a younger Johnny Depp. Brown had once referred to the IF and his family as Cuban-Chinese, but Milgrim would have been unable to make an ethnic identification. Filipino, in a pinch, but that wasn’t it either. And they spoke Russian. Or texted in an approximation of it.” —Spook Country by William Gibson

To recap:
Novels by foreigners set in the Philippines

1. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
2. The Tesseract by Alex Garland – made into a movie set in Bangkok; too bad as Ige points out there was a great Eddie Garcia part in there
3. Ghosts of Manila by James Hamilton-Paterson
4. The Blue Afternoon by William Boyd – doesn’t read like he was actually here.
5. Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard by Timothy Mo
6. And Now You Can Go by Vendela Vida
7. Someone alerted me to Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro—Thanks, I’ll look it up.
8. Biggest Elvis by P.F. Kluge, who reportedly got his ass kicked at Scrabble by a madame in Malate
9. Ay, almost forgot Fires On The Plain by Shohei Ooka (Thanks for the reminder), a strange and wonderful novel about the Japanese soldiers trapped in Leyte towards the end of the Japanese Occupation.

Filipino characters in novels set elsewhere

1. The hero in Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Who else would know how to deal with alien cockroaches. By the time the book was adapted for the screen, the Pinoy had mutated into Casper Van Dien.
2. Eugenio Martinez in Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
3. Filipino nanny in A Man In Full by Tom Wolfe
4. Pinguez in Thomas Pynchon’s V
5. Conchita the maid in Fragrant Harbor by John Lanchester
6. Tatsuo’s parents in Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami

Songs with titles alluding to the Philippines: Filipino Box Spring Hog by Tom Waits; Bebot by the Black-Eyed Peas.
Movies set partly or completely in the Philippines (the Phils as the Phils, not Vietnam or Indonesia): An Officer and A Gentleman (don’t think they actually shot here), No Way Out (signifier: bananas), that Claire Danes one, and Days of Being Wild by Wong Kar-Wai, who makes casual reference to Manila in all his movies. And Kon Ichikawa’s masterwork Nobi (Fires On The Plain), which is set in Leyte but was actually shot in Japan. (Really minor quibble: The Filipino cast members should’ve been speaking Visayan.)

Tagalog heard in movies: The Rock, Constantine, Her Alibi, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.

Does anyone know the title of that French spy novel with an episode at the Hobbit House?

Tina notes that several of the novels set in the Philippines are of an apocalyptic nature. It’s only fitting that Apocalypse Now was shot here, even if it’s set in Vietnam. Apocalypses R Us.

From Reuters: The dream of a free world becomes a nightmare of modern day slavery in Ken Loach’s latest film, about migrant workers trying to eke out a living in Britain where they are exploited and abused. The 71-year-old British director brings his trademark gritty socialist style and themes to the Venice film festival, where the ironically titled “It’s a Free World” is in competition. . .

Loach said he wanted to shed light on the fate of the thousands of economic migrants, many from Eastern Europe, who arrive in Britain each year in search of a better life. “There is an established consensus in our country … that this is progress, that this is the way things always have to be, and that there is no alternative,” Loach said. . .

The question: Is migrant labor slavery? Is our country engaged in the slave trade?

At a bookstore I noticed a display of pretty bookmarks at the counter. One of them said, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

Bonga, the nearest star is 93 million miles away.

Heard of the new controversy involving the game show Wowowee. Which thrives on this stuff—name another game show with a body count. Wowowee has one of those contests where people have to choose from among seven covered digits, and if the number 2 turns up in the correct decimal place, they win two million pesos. Turns out all the covered digits were zeroes—you can watch the incident on YouTube. This leads to a new round of sniping between Joey de Leon, host of Eat Bulaga, and Willie Revillame of Wowowee. De Leon’s recent pronouncement: “Ang yabang mo, Willie. Hindi lang ikaw ang mandaraya dito sa Pilipinas!” (Subtitle: You blowhard. You’re not the only cheat in the Philippines.)

It works on many levels, no?

There’s an entire genre of Filipino movies set in Tondo, the oldest and reputedly the toughest slums of Manila. In these movies an ordinary man defends the poor and the weak against powerful oppressors, be they landlords or criminal gangs. Sometimes the hero is himself a wanted criminal, a Robin Hood figure who robs the rich and gives to the poor. This was the trademark role of Joseph Estrada, who parlayed his image as a man of the people into a career in politics culminating in the presidency (and eventual ouster on corruption charges). At present there are three heroes of the Tondo genre in the Senate, making Robin Hood figures an overrepresented sector. Whether the cast members of Tribu will go on to be senators is highly doubtful; they have enough trouble taking a stroll in their own neighborhood.

Tribu in the Hong Kong Standard.

In 30 Rock, network honcho Alec Baldwin tells jeans-clad comedy show producer Tina Fey to dress up for a business lunch with a comedian they want to recruit. Wardrobe finds her an outfit, then he tells her, “That’s the way you should dress, by the way.” “Yeah,” she snarls back, “If I was president of the Philippines!” Tina Fey is the long-time headwriter of Saturday Night Live, and is the writer and producer of both 30 Rock and the TV comedy it’s about.