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You are living in a slum with your ailing parents. You work at a shop in a mall, and life is hard but you can support your family and you’re okay. You’ve just bought a smartphone and you can sneak a cigarette now and then. There is a terrorist attack on a train, and because you admire the people on Facebook who say what they want, you post a comment. “If the police watched them die, doesn’t that mean that the government is also a terrorist?”

And so you descend into hell: arrest, interrogation, jail, the media circus, terrorism charges, people howling for your blood. Because you wanted likes. A journalist writes up your story of grinding poverty, hunger, squalor, and it’s used as evidence that you hated your country. Meanwhile the trans woman you were teaching to speak English, and your former PE teacher want to testify on your behalf, but find there are advantages to participating in your destruction.

Devastating, compelling (Dare you not to read it in a single day), bleakly funny. You know this happens. This is today’s world in 289 pages.

How many times have I thought, “I just want to lie in bed all day reading books”? I’ve been staying at home for five months, and I had not done so. Why? I have the time, I have the books, so yesterday I read all day and night, stopping only to feed cats and self.
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Too lazy to type.

Even if hard lockdown is not reimposed.
Even if you’re just getting some air.
Even if you feel fine.
Only go out if you absolutely have to. “Absolutely” as in you’re running low on food, medicine, and necessities.
Nearly everything you need, you can order online.

“Our health workers are suffering burnout with seemingly endless number of patients trooping to our hospitals for emergency care and admission,” said Jose Santiago, president of the leading doctors’ group Philippine Medical Association.

“We are waging a losing battle against Covid-19 and we need to draw up a consolidated and definitive plan of action.”

Read Filipino medics beg for lockdown as health system teeters

Victor Erice, whose first feature was The Spirit of the Beehive, only made one more feature after that: El Sur, based on the novella by Adelaida Garcia Morales, to whom he was married at the time. The movie was planned as a complete adaptation of the novella, but Erice’s producer decided that the movie would stop two-thirds into the script, as the protagonist Estrella was packing for her trip to the south. As it stands, the “incomplete” film is beautiful, but what might the complete film have been like?

We are joined by film critic Richard Bolisay, and filmmakers Baby Ruth Villarama and Sally Gutierrez.

This weekend, Clasicos Contigo gives you La buena estrella starring Maribel Verdu. Directed by Ricardo Franco, it swept the Spanish film industry’s Goya Awards in 1997. To access the film, go to https://vimeo.com/437642948 and enter this password: clasicoscontigojulio24. The movie is available until Monday, July 27 at 2am.

Then join me and my guests, filmmakers Monster Jimenez and Annicka Dolonius, and Philippine Ambassador to Lisbon Celia Feria for the fourth episode of Cineclub Pelikula, live on Zoom.

Heard about the Giordano Bruno series from S.J. Parris’s guest shot on the Art Detective podcast. Now reading the Elizabethan-era mystery thrillers. Knew very little about Giordano Bruno apart from the manner of his death (burned at the stake at Campo dei Fiori, as stated in the wonderful poem by Czeslaw Milosz). I did some reading, and learned that one of the Vatican inquisitors who condemned Bruno to his horrific death was St. Robert Bellarmine, the same Jesuit theologian for whom the Ateneo de Manila building which houses my publisher is named. Bellarmine was also involved in the trial of Galileo.
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