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A little town in Austria, originally uploaded by 160507.

Don’t forget your screwdriver.

Suddenly remembered these friends of mine who had a gaming club in UP. One of the club members liked to cuss a lot. He’d go, “Dat packing teacher. Dat packing exam.” So everyone just called him Paking.

I hadn’t seen my friend Michael in nearly a decade. We used to hang out in college. Rather, I used to hang out at his and Din’s lab in the UP Chemistry department while they worked on their graduate research project. As far as I could tell there wasn’t much work going on: I just assumed they were distilling liquor, but then I barely passed high school chem. (My lab partner Alec, whose chem grades were probably worse than mine, is now a partner at a big architectural firm in New York, so take that, periodic table of elements.) The one tangible result of my loitering in a lab was a short story that ended up in my first book, Manananggal Terrorizes Manila. It’s a fairly awful story, but I enjoyed writing it, and I used Michael’s and Din’s real names. (You cannot sue me, you haven’t copyrighted your names, haha.)

The last time I saw Michael he was teaching at a state university in North Carolina. “What are you doing now?” I said.

“I live in New York, I teach at NYU.”

“What!”

“I’m the Dorothy Schiff Professor of Genomics.”

“What! Who’s the most famous scientist you’ve ever met?”

“I met James Watson at a party.”

“The poor man.”

“And Francis Crick, and Jared Diamond who wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel.”

“Have you written any popular science books?”

“No, but I have a publisher. I have a groupie in New Zealand.”

“Whatever.”

“I got a Guggenheim fellowship.”

“What!” (Must break news to Vince, who used to be the only Pinoy Guggenheim fellow we knew of.)

Michael said he wanted to see I Am Legend because it was shot near his apartment. Filming took place in mid-2006. The special effects team torched a line of cars in Washington Square Park. When the cars were set on fire, giant rats the size of basketballs burst out of the bushes, hundreds of them, and they all ran to the south end of the park. In the morning the tourists would see the burnt automotive wreckage and wonder why the riot wasn’t in the news.

I said, “Are you insane enough to keep a car in New York?”

“Well I have my midlife crisis car, I can’t get rid of it.”

“What!”

“It’s a silver Mercedes roadster.”

“What!”

“I got it before my divorce.”

“What!” This is what happens when you don’t keep in touch with old friends: they overachieve and have midlife crises. This only reinforces my commitment to underachievement and immaturity.

I just read a short story called Perkus Tooth by Jonathan Lethem in which the title character diagnoses Al Gore and David Byrne as “super high-functioning autistics”. DB has described himself as “borderline Asperger’s”. He’s like those elders from advanced civilizations in old Star Trek episodes, the ones who guard the time-travel portals or decide to spare the human race.

In this piece in Wired, he explains the workings of the music industry from his unique perspective. “I have seen this business from both sides. I’ve made money, and I’ve been ripped off. I’ve had creative freedom, and I’ve been pressured to make hits. I have dealt with diva behavior from crazy musicians, and I have seen genius records by wonderful artists get completely ignored. I love music. I always will. It saved my life, and I bet I’m not the only one who can say that. What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. . .”

So Madonna abandons the record company for a concert promoter, and Radiohead not only debuts its new album online but allows buyers to name their price for the download. Do we hear bells tolling the end of the music industry? Or is this the sound of the artists telling the major labels to go screw themselves? DB’s Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists—and Megastars.

In J.M. Coetzee’s new novel Diary of A Bad Year, the old protagonist is in lust with a Filipina named Anya. From the New York Times book review:

“At 72, Señor C has Parkinson’s disease; his eyesight is failing him; his typing isn’t what it used to be. But his lust is intact, at least as expressed by “a metaphysical ache.” In the laundry room of his apartment building, he encounters a young woman with “a derrière so near to perfect as to be angelic,” and soon he has hired the owner of this apparition, a Filipina whose name is Anya and who lives upstairs, to type the manuscript of his opinions, which he dictates to her. These make up the first of the novel’s narratives and appear at the top of each page. Beneath them are Señor C’s accounts of his transactions with Anya, who (like Marijana, the Croatian nurse who cares for Paul Rayment in “Slow Man”) provides at least as much psychic as physical assistance. In contrast to her employer, Anya is body first and intellect second. Her less lofty point of view inhabits, fittingly, the nether portion of the page. . .”

“Recently, though, anthropologists have subtly revised the view that the invention of agriculture was a fall from grace. They have found the serpent in hunter-gatherer Eden, the savage in the noble savage. Maybe it was not an 80,000-year camping holiday after all. . .”

Is constant violence a modern pathology, or is it the natural state?

Hunter-gatherers: Noble or savage? in The Economist 

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”