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Billboards, Los Angeles, 2019. From Blade Runner.

Rush hour traffic northbound on Edsa Guadalupe, 1 July 2011

1. “ . . .”
“OMG.”
“WTF!”

2. “They’re so. . .they’re so. . .naked. I mean technically they’re not naked because they’re wearing little briefs but the tiny scraps actually call attention to what’s under them so they couldn’t be more naked.”

3. “It’s a sign. I’m breaking off my engagement to Ursula, whom I only proposed to at the insistence of my parents, to be with the one I truly love: Facundo.”

4. “You can get those pecs and abs by sniffing glue??”

5. “Stop this train! Stop it! Where is the emergency cord? Mama, para!”

“I’ve. . .seen things. . .you people wouldn’t. . .believe. Attack ships. . .on fire. . .off the shoulder of Orion.”

Read my column at interaksyon.com.

Meanwhile, The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie from the Red Hot Chili Peppers album I’m With You, out 30 August.

Don on the set of Unfaithful Wife. Photo by Uro de la Cruz.

A Eulogy for Don Escudero, 1955-2011
by Peque Gallaga

How can I talk about Don without talking about the movies?

I never even knew that Don Escudero existed.
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Futzing with ancient myths: Tarsem Singh’s The Immortals, starring Henry Cavill who will play Superman

Superhero comics – secular modern myths, written in collaboration by generations of writers – have tracked our culture for more than 70 years, providing wish fulfilment fantasies, cultural exemplars, vehicles of satire and cautionary tales of the abuse of power. Attempts to work out what they say about us have been around nearly as long. When Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman in 1938, as fascism took Europe in its grip, they intended him to be, in Siegel’s words, “a character like Samson, Hercules and all the strongmen I ever heard of, rolled into one”. Umberto Eco proposed, in a 1970s essay on Superman, that in a society increasingly dominated by machines, it was down to the “positive hero” of myth to “embody to an unthinkable degree the power demands that the average citizen nurtures but cannot satisfy”. As the comics writer Grant Morrison pithily observes in Supergods, his book-length analysis of the superhero phenomenon, the idea of these characters has long been “at least as real as the idea of God”.

Read Hero Worship in the FT.

Movable concrete walls seal everything in.

Read The First Zombie-Proof House.

Do you want the Zombadings bag with the matching Awaaard! filmfest button? You can have one if you’re proficient in Baklese or gay lingo. Some people still call it swardspeak, though gay men have long ceased to be called “sward”. They have returned the term to gardening, where its original meaning is “an expanse of short grass”.

Here’s an example of a translation: from the writers of Bubble Gang in 2007, Bahay Kubo in Baklese. As its speakers know, Baklese is a dynamic, swiftly-evolving language that incorporates elements not only from other languages such as Tagalog, English, Visayan, but from a variety of fields and disciplines.

For instance, Friedrich Nietzsche is not someone we usually associate with gay culture, but he may have contributed to the language. He titled his autobiography Ecce Homo, after the words uttered by Pontius Pilate in the Vulgate Bible. “Ecce homo” led to “Etching” or “Etchos” as in “Ano na namang etching yan?” which was later shortened into “Chos” as in “Ang salitang yan ay nanggaling pa sa may-akda ng Thus Spake Zarathustra. Chos!”

Now for the exercise. The French author Raymond Queneau wrote Exercises in Style—99 variations on one unremarkable story, told in a variety of styles. Below are three of these variations. Translate them into Baklese, bearing in mind that they all tell the same story but require different ways of telling.

We are using the translation by Barbara Wright.
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The long years of waiting are at an end. The fifth book in A Song Of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin has arrived. Jon Snow, Tyrion Lannister, Arya Stark, Daenerys Targaryen, absent from the previous volume, return.

You can order your hardcover copy of A Dance With Dragons from National Bookstore Online.

May the sixth and seventh books appear soon.

* * * * *

Five hundred copies of A Dance With Dragons in hardback appeared on National Bookstore shelves last week. They sold out in a couple of days.