JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

My lovely friends took me to dinner last night at Benjarong at the Dusit Hotel. Excellent Thai restaurant, and there was no coup attempt on the premises. Some notes on that non-event:

1. If you’re launching a coup d’etat, make sure to check the weather report the day before.
2. My favorite part of the ANC coverage was towards the end, when the ringleaders had given up. Ces Drilon was in the 7th floor of The Pen, and she reported that Senator (You voted for him) Trillanes and General Lim (who if memory serves me right has been a major brain behind every coup attempt since the Aquino administration. . .and is still in a position to plot more!) were weeping…”hindi dahil sa sitwasyon kundi dahil sa tear gas” (not from the emotion of the situation but from the tear gas).
3. During his interview on ANC, the Press Secretary said “at this point in time” ten times. Jay-Lo counted. How Radio Veritas circa 1986.
4. Tina: “Trillanes: mutineer, senator, cookbook author, and wannabe glorious martyr.”
5. Another favorite moment: When the police arrived to serve the warrant of arrest, the way was barricaded so they just pressed the warrant against the glass.
6. The coup attempt was covered heavily on CNN and the BBC. Now we’re really going to be taken seriously.
7. Tinigil nila kasi ayaw da nilang dumanak ng dugo. Kung ayaw nilang dumanak ng dugo, bakit nila ginawa? Gago. (The coup plotters gave up because they said they didn’t want bloodshed. Duh, if they didn’t want bloodshed, they shouldn’t have started it. Idiots.)
8. Everyone says they’re ready to die for their country, but no one actually makes good on the threat. Come on, you promised.

The old triple whammy. Earthquake followed by typhoon followed by coup attempt. Do you know of any other countries where coup attempts are staged from luxury hotels? No doubt many are planned in hotels, but their soldiers are in the field not in the coffee shop. True, the Peninsula has very good halo-halo and arroz caldo. I have a dinner scheduled in that area, so I asked my friends if we were still on for 7pm. Their replies:

The Cynic: Dapat tuloy. Bunch of kids.
The Romantic: Yes, of course. Hopefully she’ll be out by then.
The Pragmatic (even when depressed): If the traffic is bad, I could walk there.
The Been There, Done That: Yes.

Here is a video of Bob from Ohio riding a razor in the Greenbelt area while wearing an Igorot bahag. (I fixed the link.) What do you think?
A. That’s amazing! No traffic on the corner of De la Rosa Street?!
B. It’s a metaphor for the clash of civilizations, the collision of the traditional and the modern as expressed by Bob’s barely-covered ass.
C. Ano ba yan, may mga tao talagang walang magawa. What the hell, some people have too much time on their hands.
D. Kulang sa pansin ang lalaking yan. Ibigay mo sa kin ang number niya at papansinin ko siya. That guy clearly needs attention. Give me his number, I’ll give him attention.
E. Yucch, exhibitionist! Someone has to give him a lecture on proper decorum and etiquette. These foreigners think they can just come here and display their decadent ways, it’s a disgrace.
F. Same as E, plus Give me his number, he has to be taught a lesson.
G. Kainggit, I wish I had no issues about my body.
H. (Your personal reaction here.)

Guga in airports, originally uploaded by Koosama.

This is for Ige, who recently spent 24 hours in an airport terminal—fortunately not on this list—trying to get on a flight to Manila. Foreign Policy lists the five worst airports on earth (NAIA’s not one of them! Yay!):

Léopold Sédar Senghor International Airport, Dakar, Senegal. “There is only squalor, an unnerving sense of confinement, and to some extent danger.” —Patrick Smith, Salon.com, May 25, 2007. Standing room only. To think the Concorde used to fly there.

Indira Gandhi International Airport, New Delhi, India. “Of all the regional capital airports this one takes the cake … a piece of crap … bring the bug spray.” —Anonymous commenter, The Budget Traveller’s Guide to Sleeping in Airports, Dec 11, 2005. Aggressive beggars and used syringes on the terminal floor.

Mineralnye Vody Airport, Mineralnye Vody, Russia. “Mineralnye Vody airport is a lower circle of hell.” —The Economist, Dec. 19, 2006. Snow, ice, and feral cats inside the terminal, plus a guy selling swords and daggers as souvenirs.

Baghdad International Airport, Baghdad, Iraq. “Before jumping out of your seat to complain to the pilot, consider the good news: You’ve just avoided being shot down by a missile.” —Alan T. Duffin, Air & Space magazine, Oct./Nov. 2006. Stomach-churning corkscrew landings. It IS a war zone.

Charles de Gaulle International Airport, Paris, France. “Charles de Gaulle is a disgrace … it’s like a third-world airport.” —Michel-Yves Labbé, president of French travel company Directours, Aug. 14, 2007. Grimy, confusing, overpriced, and the staff is rude. (It’s actually not that bad, but it’s in Paris! It should be better.)

I suddenly remembered how I made a miscalculation in my travel arrangements and ended up spending the night at the airport in Trieste, trying to get some sleep on a cold metal bench while policemen had what sounded like a violent argument that may have been a regular card game. Where’s my notebook from 2006?

So much for my feline early warning devices: my cats slept through the earthquake. I was sitting at my desk when the floor began to shake—the tremor didn’t last long, but it was intense. My cats went on napping—Saffy right on my desk, Mat on the couch, Koosi on top of a bookshelf. It was as if nothing had happened. Friends who live in tall buildings said they could hear the structures groaning. Scary. When was the last big earthquake, ‘99? The one followed by the blackout caused by jellyfish? Ten minutes before it happened my ginger cat Koosi started howling like a horror-movie sound effect, and then an invisible giant was shoving the furniture around.

Dispatches from Nantes, originally uploaded by 160507.

Raymond texted from the Nantes film festival, where Endo is in competition. The first screening was yesterday at 10.45 am. It was sold out. The audience loved it. The leads Jason Abalos and Ina Feleo were applauded on the street.

In photo, from left: Jason (Chin up, please lose bonnet), Ina (Lovely but big earrings swallowed up by scarf), writer-director Jade Castro (Let me get Chuvaness for a second and say that is not a Prada trenchcoat. Come on, humor your stylist). More dispatches later.

I saw The Beat That My Heart Skipped and I loved it, then I saw Fingers, the James Toback movie that it was based on, and I loved it too. The remake is excellent, but Fingers has a wild power and fury of its own, and you have to see Harvey Keitel circa 1978, he’s a demon. Then I discovered the blog of concert pianist Jeremy Denk, and he writes about music with such passion and wit that I’m just about ready to take piano lessons, except that I’d probably make a better gangster.

“Both the Tchaikovsky Trio and the Brahms G major Sonata are incredibly moving pieces; they reach for the deepest kinds of emotions (the highest shelves, the purest groves). And yet, despite my best attempts at self-delusion, despite pumping myself up with Russian manly whatever, the Tchaikovsky leaves me cold somewhere inside (except for a few wonderful places), and the Brahms is like a best friend who I can call at 3 in the morning, when I can’t sleep, a friend from whom all you need is the timbre of their voice, a mere sound and cadence which quiets all the false fears of your life and helps you see things as they are. . .”

“Blade Runner is the only true cyberpunk film, and there need be no others, for there will continue to be infinite cuts, each with subtle variations, same wines of different vintages. Like a Borgesian Heavy Metal cartoon, its attentive custodians and itchy auteurs forever modulating the space between the panels.”

Blade Runner: The Borges Cut in No Fear of the Future.

Hitman, directed by one Xavier Gens and written by one Skip Woods, is so idiotic we couldn’t even hate it. We ended up giggling through most of it—the 80s Eurotrash music! the cheesy slow-motion! the ham acting! Why did I even watch it? Because it stars Timothy Olyphant and I love Deadwood the series. I just hope Timothy got paid major bucks for this, because it is not going to help his film career. I suspect Hitman is a money-laundering enterprise, which is kind of funny because watching clothes go round in the washing machine is more exciting than the action sequences in the movie. Some investors probably approached the producers and said, Hey, we have all this money, make us a movie based on that videogame, and by the way we really like the Bourne trilogy. So the makers go for that world-without-borders feel and even have a score reminiscent of Bourne Supremacy’s, except that everything is 70 IQ points lower than the Matt Damon series. Here’s something I thought I’d never utter in my lifetime: Watch Enchanted instead, just beware of shrieking Patrick Dempsey fans. Sheesh, watch One More Chance even, Hitman is that bad.

Is this surfer dude the next Einstein?

From New Scientist: “GARRETT LISI is an unlikely individual to be staking a claim for a theory of everything. He has no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii. In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, California, to teach snowboarding. Until recently, physics was not much more than a hobby.

“That hasn’t stopped some leading physicists sitting up and taking notice after Lisi made his theory public on the physics pre-print archive this week (www.arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770). By analysing the most elegant and intricate pattern known to mathematics, Lisi has uncovered a relationship underlying all the universe’s particles and forces, including gravity - or so he hopes. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi’s work as “fabulous”. “It is one of the most compelling unification models I’ve seen in many, many years,” he says.”

Gnarly. I keep thinking of Sean Penn as Jeff Spiccoli.

I don’t go to poetry readings if I can help it. Usually I become violent and imagine ripping out the poet’s larynx so he can never defile the atmosphere with his pretentiousness again. Or I burst out laughing, which is rude and I try not to be rude. Musical accompaniment dulls the pain, though not by much. But I do read poetry, I like some of it, and I have a few verses stored in my memory. Sometimes when something happens to me, a line from a poem I thought I’d forgotten will pop unbidden into my head, and suddenly the experience makes more sense to me. I figure that’s what poetry is for, at least in my case.

Before he died this year, the philosopher Richard Rorty wrote: “. . .I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends. Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human — farther removed from the beasts — than those with poorer ones; individual men and women are more fully human when their memories are amply stocked with verses.”

My favorite last scene in a movie: Lloyd and Diane on the plane in Say Anything (1989, written and directed by Cameron Crowe, starring John Cusack, Ione Skye, John Mahoney). Diane is terrified of flying. Lloyd is accompanying her to England for her Oxford scholarship. The best-known scene in Say Anything is the one where Lloyd stands outside Diane’s window holding up a boombox playing In Your Eyes (Alright, who stole my Peter Gabriel album?). This is the one that kills me.

INT. PLANE - DAY. Close-up of Lloyd and Diane’s hands, clasped together. There is a sound.

LLOYD. Wing adjustment. (The plane takes off.) It’s like a big rollercoaster. Everybody likes rollercoasters, right? Blink twice if you’re fine.

DIANE. I’m fine.

LLOYD. Okay, good, this is all very normal. (There is another noise, and the plane shakes slightly.) Very standard for a seven forty-seven.

DIANE. Okay.

LLOYD. Alright, high level air safety tips. If anything happens, it’ll usually be in the first five minutes of the flight, right?

DIANE. Okay.

LLOYD. So when you hear the smoking sign go ‘ding’, you know everything’s going to be okay.

DIANE. Good to know.

LLOYD. Right, I’m just going to keep talking until that ding happens, which is going to be soon.

DIANE. Okay.

LLOYD. Alright, personalised flight care from Corey. Books, cassettes, magazines, anything?

DIANE. Not right now, thanks. (She kisses Lloyd. An old woman stares at them.)

LLOYD. How’s it going?

DIANE. Nobody thought we’d do this. Nobody really thinks it’s going to work, do they?

LLOYD. No. You just described every great success story. Alright, it’s alright.

DIANE. I know. (They look at the smoking sign.) Where’s the ding?

LLOYD. It’s coming… any second now… any second now.

The ding sounds.

BLACKOUT. CREDITS ROLL.

Need a dvd of Say Anything. Please post to arrange drop. Last time I looked for a dvd—Fingers, the first film by James Toback—someone actually sent it to me (which reminds me that I have to write about it), and it’s fairly hard to find, so I’m optimistic.