JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Banana Bag, originally uploaded by 160507.

“For generations, the banana has been embraced and celebrated in pop culture: “Yes, we have no bananas. We have no bananas today!” But it took muscle and outright carnage to turn this fragile tropical treat into the most popular fruit in the United States. The banana is “the yin and yang of American culture and blood,” Koeppel says. The fruit became his obsession and the subject of his book, “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World.”

“Surprisingly, Koeppel isn’t the only journalist of late to light out to the tropics and come back with tales of the banana’s bloody role in history. For Peter Chapman, a Financial Times reporter, who spent years covering Latin America, the great banana company, United Fruit, which later became Chiquita, prefigured the rise of the modern multinational corporation. “It’s interesting, isn’t it, that something we would imagine as innocuous as bananas has produced as many exercises in regime change as has ever been enacted in the name of oil,” says Chapman, whose book is called “Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World.”

When bananas ruled the world in Salon. Histories of Latin America remind me that the Philippines is in the wrong continent.

You think that if a mysterious plane containing millions of dollars were to crash in your backyard it would solve your problems? This is what happens in real life. Thanks to the LUA for the alert.

“It was like a script from a Hollywood film. A small plane carrying millions of dollars in cash crashes right in the middle of a poor village in a remote corner of the world. But this was no movie – this is what actually happened in the north-eastern Brazilian village of Maracangalha, and the event has since sparked a missing money mystery that provided an unhappy ending for the villagers.” (Read the report.)

Misteryo Sa Tuwa is a film by Abbo de la Cruz, produced by the ECP in the early 80s. You might catch it on Cinema One. Partly based on actual events, it not only prefigures real occurrences such as the above, but also the ear-slicing scene in Reservoir Dogs.

I can only take so much earnestness, but I’ve been taking it from U2 for the last 25 years. Go see U2 3D at iMax in Maul of Asia. It’s the cheapest, best value U2 concert seat you’re ever going to buy, short of marrying Larry Mullen, Jr: 500 pesos and the band is literally in your face. On the huge screen you can see that Bono’s palm has a very long life line, The Edge looks young, Adam Clayton seems cheerful (that outfit), and Larry has veins popping out of his forearms. Also, Bono’s shoes define “Elevation”.

The set list: Vertigo, Beautiful Day, New Year’s Day, Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own, Love and Peace Or Else, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Bullet The Blue Sky (with a bit of The Hands That Built America), Miss Sarajevo (Bono sang the Pavarotti parts), Pride, Where The Streets Have No Name, One, The Fly, With Or Without You. I told myself that if they played I Will Follow I would burst into tears, but they didn’t so my 3D glasses stayed unfogged.

(Rumor has it that U2 is playing in Manila in July—I’ll believe it when I see the band take the stage. They were supposed to do a concert here during the Rattle and Hum period. It didn’t happen.)

This one caused crumbs to shoot out of my nose. From McSweeney’s: Cookie Monster Searches Deep Within Himself and Asks: Is Me Really Monster?

“Me was thinking and me just don’t get it. Why is me a monster? No one else called monster on Sesame Street. Well, no one who isn’t really monster. Two-Headed Monster have two heads, so he real monster. Herry Monster strong and look angry, so he probably real monster, too. But is me really monster?”

(Note: My definition of “funny” is “causes food to enter wrong passage and come out of nose”.) Me is friend of Carlo the baker, and Carlo name juancas for Juan Carlo and rickoise for Ricky, but me still have no cookie named after me.

I’m getting this site organized and posting links to articles I’ve written for foreign publications. See Podcasts + Journalism, above. So far I’ve found links to some Hong Kong Standard pieces, but not all of them. There’s quite a lot of stuff published in Newsweek (Centennial, the fall of Erap, female golfers, “porn”, Pinoy youth, etc), the defunct Asiaweek (yayas and world domination, etc), and the catalogue of the Far East Film festival in Udine, Italy, which I haven’t found online, not that I’ve looked very hard and I have some deadlines looming.

If you find my articles in the abovementioned publications online (the pieces not yet included in the Podcasts + Journalism listing; I’m adding them as they come in), please post the links here and I’ll give you a book for your trouble. One book per link. I’ll be in touch on Saturday.

Junot Diaz has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. (See previous post, Otakuness.) Here’s an excerpt from his Newsweek interview with Jesse Ellison.

“I think that the reason I don’t mind being labeled (as a “Dominican/Latino writer”) or labeling myself is because I think the entire universe can be found in the Dominican experience. I don’t see the Dominican Republic as a limitation. People seem to think that coming from a tiny island with this really bizarre history in the Dominican Republic is somehow limiting. But in my mind, I think that the same way a small, cold, gray, drizzly island nation in the North Atlantic could imagine itself the center of the universe, I see no difference why a Dominican who comes from this tiny little place and time can’t also imagine himself the center of the universe. . .

“All of us, to misquote Whitman, we all contain multitudes. I think more specifically, we all contain universes. It doesn’t matter who you are. You could be some guy who writes code in Mumbai for a major corporation or you could be a truck driver in Cincinnati. But in the end, none of that means that the whole universe isn’t contained inside you.

“But more specifically, the Caribbean generally and the island of Hispaniola specifically is the linchpin, the pivot point where the old world swung into the new world. If you want the transformation point, if you want the ground zero where the Old World died and the New World began, it’s there. I mean, nothing is more quintessentially American—in the entire span of that description—than the Caribbean and more specifically the Dominican Republic. If you want to be incredibly grandiose, the entire world, we’re all the children of what happened in the Caribbean, whether we know it or not. I mean, the extermination of indigenous people, the conquest of the New World, slavery and in some ways the rise of this form of capitalism that we all live under. I mean really the modern world was given rise by what began in the Caribbean.”

Note: The concept is almost. . .Pinoy.

Bad news, good news. The bad news is that my basic plan for world domination—send out Pinay maids to raise the next generation as Pinoys—will not work in China. The Chinese government frowns upon the “importation” of Filipino domestic helpers and nannies, as this takes employment away from the local nannies called ayis. Smart move. It’s not just to protect local labor, I think; they know the importance of being raised in one’s own culture. I mean, they don’t have a culture that’s thrived thousands of years for nothing. There are some Pinay maids working in China, but most of them are employed by expats.

The good news is that the bestselling line of snacks in China is Oishi, a Filipino brand. Oishi is manufactured by Liwayway Co., which began in Manila in 1946 as Liwayway Gawgaw. According to my source, Oishi has 10 percent of the huge Chinese snack food market; given the competition, this is enough to take the number one ranking. According to an extremely cheerful Chinese volunteer, Oishi snacks were handed out free at her school, so everyone became habituated to the chips and whatnot. There are Oishi products that aren’t even available in the Philippines yet, such as the grilled mushroom, the sweet and spicy, and the tomato ketchup-flavored potato chips in cans. (Although it must be noted that the truly Pinoy flavor would be banana ketchup.) As my sister, who consumed mass quantities of Bread Pan during her pregnancy, will attest, Oishi snacks can be quite addictive. Perhaps addictive enough to compensate for the absence of Pinay domestics in China. . .

Interesting piece in the NYT: Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty? by Sara Corbett. Interesting newish career: user anthropologist.

Alright, if you only read the previous excerpt you may have gotten the wrong impression, so I’ve digested the article for you. The point being that cellphones, like most technology, may be put to the most stupid uses, but they are beneficial.

“In an increasingly transitory world, the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity. Having a call-back number is having a fixed identity point, which, inside of populations that are constantly on the move — displaced by war, floods, drought or faltering economies — can be immensely valuable both as a means of keeping in touch with home communities and as a business tool.”

Cellphones “have an economizing effect”–for instance, you don’t have to waste time waiting at a designated time and place, you can coordinate with each other incrementally. “Even the smallest improvements in efficiency could reshape the global economy in ways that we are just beginning to understand.”

“Something that’s mostly a convenience booster for those of us with a full complement of technology at our disposal can be a life-saver to someone with fewer ways to access information.”

The cellphone has the “ability to increase people’s productivity and well-being, mostly because of the simple fact that they can be reached.”

“Mobile banking (GCash is cited as an example) will bring huge numbers of previously excluded people into the formal economy quickly, simply because the latent demand for such services is so great, especially among the rural poor.”

Communication is “quite viable as a fundamental right. The phone represents what people are aspiring to.”

I want a cellphone that’s a tricorder and a phaser.

Kermit the human RSS feed showed us a video he found on the Internet of a French guy who has achieved total self-sufficiency. How shall I put this delicately? The appendage was of sufficient length as to allow subject to vacuum himself with very minimal contortion.
Bert: Wow, he’s cute And French.

Ernie: But he doesn’t need anyone.

Big Bird: He has nice eyes.

Grungella: That’s what you notice about this anatomical wonder? His eyes?

Big Bird: Do we have to watch this?

Everyone: Yes.

Big Bird: But there’s a lady present!

Grungella: The only lady here is you.

Bert: That’s Big Bird. He’s half-manang, half-manyak.

Kermit: Question. Technically that guy (in the video) is having sex with a guy. Does that make him gay?

Ernie: No, because it’s with himself.

Later I put this conundrum to Cookie Monster.

Cookie Monster: No, but it makes him a cannibal. He’s eating his own children.

Grungella: What are you, a Vatican fundamentalist?

Cookie Monster: Who’s that guy in Greek mythology who swallowed his own children?

Grungella: Cronos. Hey, nerdiness Is contagious!

Koosi in the kitchen, originally uploaded by 160507.

Happy Birthday to my eldest cat Koosi, who adopted me in 1999. I found her sitting in a patch of sunlight on the sidewalk in front of the Today office while cars and buses roared by. My sister named her after the imaginary friend in Dexter’s Laboratory. Koosi is the most antisocial cat in the house, preferring to hang out on the tops of bookshelves and cabinets. When she deigns to come down she announces her presence by biting my toes. Her favorite pastime these days is people-watching from the living room window. She thinks she is invisible.

If after seeing No Country For Old Men your reaction was “Huh?!” rest assured that that is the point. Insofar as the Coens’ movie has a point. Which it doesn’t necessarily have. Whatever. No Movie For The Incurious, in Emotional Weather Report today in the Star. If you haven’t seen the movie, which is now showing at Greenbelt 3 and Glorietta 4, do not, I repeat, do not read the column, as it contains many spoilers. Watch the movie, which really must be seen on the big screen for the cinematography and for Josh Brolin at maximum tallness, because we just realized Barbra’s stepson is hot even with that hair. Of course strange hair is a hallmark of the Coens’ work, and it reaches its apex with Anton Chigurh’s.

I’ve posted the original draft of my Theory of World Domination as it appeared in TODAY newspaper on 24 November 1994. If you’re doing work on the theory, remember to credit the source.