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Weng Weng, originally uploaded by 160507.

Look at this fantastic t-shirt. I was at dinner with a film director and a retired but still fabulous movie queen (my late mother would’ve plotzed with joy) when an Australian video crew arrived. They were doing interviews with the directors and stars of Pinoy cult movies from the 60s and 70s, and they were wearing “The Search for Weng-Weng” t-shirts. I said, Where did you get that shirt, I need to buy one. So they gave me this shirt. It turns out that we all know Pete Tombs, yes, Tombs, what else would a guy who distributes classic cult and horror movies on video be called?

Uro’s father died in his sleep on the morning of the 25th. He was in his 80s and had been ill for some time. Butch was thinking of driving to Lucban, Quezon for the wake. “On the way there, we could stop at Ernest Santiago’s restaurant for lunch.” The restaurant had opened about a month before Ernest’s death.

“Great idea,” I said. “Two wakes on the same day, way to spend the holidays.” I never met Ernest Santiago, but I’ve heard many stories about him and the Cocobanana era. Joey Reyes recalled how Ernest used to turn away would-be customers at the velvet rope by saying, “Go away, it’s not your year.”

“And on the way back, we could go to Adrian Cristobal’s wake.”

“Making it three wakes on Boxing Day,” I pointed out. “The Road Trip of Death.” I had met Adrian Cristobal, but never got to know him, much to my regret. He chaired the board of judges for the English short story at the Palanca awards the year my story won. According to Isagani Cruz, Adrian had championed my story over the second prize winner, which was perfect, the more accomplished work. Adrian said my story “grabs you by the neck”—very apt description, as that is how I try to write. In fact that is how I conduct my relationships, which probably explains why most of them run shrieking for their lives. So Portents got the first, and at the awards dinner Adrian broke about twenty fingers of my right hand and boomed, “You don’t look old enough to know what portents are!” That was as good as it got for me at the Palancas; I joined a couple more times and got two thirds, then I decided to quit while I was ahead.

The car’s brakes were shot, so the road trip was cancelled. Instead we had lunch with Tina at Szechuan House at the Aloha Hotel, where David Byrne stayed when he was in Manila, in case you’re a fan. When Dick Baldovino the photographer was alive, we would visit the Norte and Chinese cemeteries after Christmas. It was the best antidote to the enforced gaiety of the season: the reminder that we were mortal.

R. Crumb’s NO HOPE diagram, originally uploaded by 160507.

Here’s something to think about as you do the rounds of Xmas parties.
R. Crumb’s diagram presents incontrovertible evidence that there is No Hope.

Let’s have another contest tonight. I’m thinking of an essay question that would at least be complicated to google.

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.”

“We went up to the second floor where the shelves, sofas, tables and lamps are all arrayed into tasteful little room settings — rooms, but with mysterious tags hanging everywhere. Immediately I thought it was like entering a videogame world. Who lives here? What do they do? Why is that book on the table? Is that significant? Could it be some kind of clue to the occupant’s identity?

“Why does everything have weird names? Every container, shelf, cabinet or appliance had some odd name, as if people from Planet Sweden anthropomorphized these objects, naming each one they encountered as best they could. . .” Walk-in videogame in the David Byrne Journal.

Richard Dawkins reviews God Is Not Great in the Times Literary Supplement.

“There is much fluttering in the dovecots of the deluded, and Christopher Hitchens is one of those responsible. Another is the philosopher A. C. Grayling. I recently shared a platform with both. We were to debate against a trio of, as it turned out, rather half-hearted religious apologists (“Of course I don’t believe in a God with a long white beard, but…”). I hadn’t met Hitchens before, but I got an idea of what to expect when Grayling emailed me to discuss tactics. After proposing a couple of lines for himself and
me, he concluded, “and Hitch will spray AK47 ammo at the enemy in characteristic style”…

Elsewhere: Incroyable! England storms into Rugby World Cup final on Jonny Wilkinson’s boot. And Stephen Colbert writes Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times.