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In The Honourable Schoolboy, the spy Westerby goes to the races in Hong Kong to observe his quarry, Drake Ko. He spots one of Ko’s associates in the owners’ box.

“Shading his eyes and wishing he had brought binoculars, he made out one fat, hard-looking man in a suit and dark glasses, accompanied by a young and very pretty girl. He looked half Chinese, and half Latin, and Jerry put him down as Filipino. The girl was the best that money could buy. . .

“”That’s Arpego,” said Grant, in Jerry’s ear and indicating the fat Filipino. “He owns Manila and most of the out-islands.”

“Arpego’s paunch sat forward over his belt like a rock stuffed inside his shirt.”

Incidences of the word “Filipino” in recent American literature:

In Patricia Marx’s novel Him Her Him Again The End of Him, the romantic interest’s name is Eugene Obello and the unnamed heroine’s friend says “obello” is a Filipino word for machete. I don’t know which Filipino dialect or language is referred to. Marx’s novel is hilarious until the halfway point, when it begins to resemble a Daily Show segment that’s gone on too long. Yes, smart women do stupid things for love, we got it in the first ten pages. Marx was a former writer on the Harvard Lampoon and Saturday Night Live–if she’d written for The Simpsons she’d have the same career track as Conan O’Brien.

In Tobias Wolff’s story Benefit Of The Doubt, the protagonist takes the bus in Rome and notes that most of the passengers are Filipino. Benefit Of The Doubt is one of the new stories in Our Story Begins, my favorite story collection of the year even if half its contents appeared in his earlier books.

In The Mayor’s Tongue by Nathaniel Rich, the Dominican character Alvaro has an affair with a Filipino nurse named Betty. Just started reading the book. Someone else is obsessed with Jan Morris’s book about Trieste!

Takashi Miike, Far East Filmfest - Udine, 2006, originally uploaded by 160507.

The LUA tells me that Takashi Miike’s The Guys From Paradise is set in Manila. According to midnighteye.com: “Allegedly based on a number of true cases, The Guys From Paradise is a prison story set in the Phillipines against a background of corruption, drug trafficking and paedophilia. . .Though somewhat overlong, The Guys From Paradise paints a lurid portrait of The Phillipines as a country awash with all manner of vice, symbolising a side of Asia which the civilised Japanese have lost touch with. Even though they hold a position of privilege, their suits and ties won’t protect them from being swallowed up by this more savage society. . .” (Note spelling of Philippines. Could’ve been worse, they could’ve spelled it ‘Philistines’.)

In short, the yakuza in the movie find the Philippines scary and weird. Haven’t seen the movie, I don’t know if it was shot here.

To recap our list of foreign productions in which the Philippines plays the Philippines and not Vietnam (Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Born on the 4th of July, etc), Thailand (Brokedown Palace), or Indonesia (The Year of Living Dangerously):

1. Days Of Being Wild by Wong Kar-Wai, with scenes in Tutuban and Villa Escudero
2. Supercock, a B-movie about cockfighting, not a porno
3. The Guys From Paradise, maybe

Now I’m going to watch Takashi Miike’s The Happiness of the Katakuris with its enticing tagline: “The hills are alive with the sound of screaming!” Prefer bloodcurdling shrieks to Climb Every Mountain any day.

P.S. This one’s a real scream: Richard Quest Thought Process Flowchart on 23/6.

From the New York Times, March 20, 2008: “Sebastian Horsley, a British author who has written an eyebrow-raising memoir detailing a life of rampant drug use and voluminous encounters with prostitutes, was turned back at Newark Liberty International Airport on Tuesday as he tried to enter the United States for a book party and New York news media tour. Mr. Horsley, whose memoir, “Dandy in the Underworld,” was published last week…said he was detained by United States customs authorities for eight hours and questioned about his former drug addiction, use of prostitutes and activity as a male escort. “I’m absolutely shattered and upset and gutted about not being able to come to America,” Mr. Horsley said in a telephone interview from London…

“In “Dandy of the Underworld” Mr. Horsley, who is notorious in Britain, writes of being raised by alcoholic, sexually promiscuous parents and bouncing through several schools. He details a debauched life of cocaine, heroin, opium and amphetamine use, writing that he spent more than £100,000 (nearly $200,000) on crack cocaine and £100,000 to consort with more than 1,000 prostitutes. He also chronicles his trip to the Philippines to be hung from a cross, an event that was recorded by a photographer and videographer and formed part of an art exhibition that was extensively covered by the news media in his home country…”

Hmm, drug-taking dandies and Crucifixion. Very much on the Pinoy public’s mind right now. The article quotes a US Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman as saying that under a waiver program that allows British citizens to enter the United States without a visa, “travelers who have been convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude (which includes controlled-substance violations) or admit to previously having a drug addiction are not admissible.” Two words: Keith Richards. (Always confused about Keith’s surname. Apparently it was the singular form till 78, plural after that. So now I know.)

Three Pinoys are among the, um, winners of the 2007 Darwin Awards! Not only are they not around to claim the glory, but their identities remain unknown. The Darwin Awards are given to individuals who improve the gene pool by removing themselves from it.

“(21 June 2007, Philippines) Three entrepreneurs planned to profit from stolen scrap metal. They entered a former US military complex and approached the prize: an abandoned water tank. Bedazzled by the potential upside, the three threw logic to the wind, and began to cut the metal legs out from under the tank. Guess where it fell? Straight onto the thieves. Their flattened bodies have not yet been identified.”

Meanwhile, a radio prankster known as the “Filipino Monkey” (no one knows his real nationality, he could be more than one person) is being blamed for triggering the latest diplomatic row between the US and Iran. The “Filipino Monkey” has been pestering ships in the Persian Gulf for years. This time he almost caused American warships to fire on Iranian patrol boats.

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. . .”

treeofsmokefellapart2.JPG, originally uploaded by 160507.

This is not the prize, I just wanted to show you this book. Butch passed me his copy of Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson. He bought it new, a first edition, from Powerbooks about a month ago, and it literally fell apart while he was reading it. (Correction on previous post on Tree of Smoke: Johnson was not a consultant on Apocalypse Now, but he’s spent time in the Philippines. By the way, does anyone know if William Boyd actually came here to research The Blue Afternoon?) Maybe the good people of Farrar Straus Giroux need to check their binding. I don’t mind having the book in pieces, though—this way I don’t have to lug the entire doorstop-sized volume around, just the chunks I’m reading.

Now the contest. The prize is. . .a copy of Stars and Bars by William Boyd, which was adapted for film in the 90s. Mediocre, but it stars Daniel Day-Lewis. The book goes to the first person who answers all these questions correctly. Thanks to Chus and Ricky for thinking up the items.

1. In which movie does Rita Gomez tell her daughter in her distinct Rita Gomez enunciation: “Why don’t you traahvel? Go to Yooh-rope.”
2. Name the movie in which Ricky has one line: “O, tapos?”
3. Noel and I suspect we are the only people who have seen all the movies by this American writer-director whose first movie contains an extended argument about Mansfield Park.
4. What movie contains this bit of dialogue:
- Mag-ko-confrontation scene ba tayo?
- Wag na, nakakapagod.
5. Stefania Sandrelli and Dominique Sanda do the tango in which movie?

10.52am. Ha! No entries yet, and in this instance googling will not help you! Okay, item 2 is too specialized, as in only Ricky’s friends would know, so here’s a clue: Sharon Cuneta stars in it.

21.21. Ha! Only one entry posted, with a score of 2/5. The answers:  1) Ina, Kasusuklaman Ba Kita? 2) Crying Ladies by Mark Meilly 3) Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan; his other movies are Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco 4) Salawahan by Ishmael Bernal, a treasure trove of great lines, and 5) The Conformist by Bernardo Bertolucci.

No one wins Contest #3. The prize will be given out in Contest #4.

Chapter 5 of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist is set in Manila. The Pakistani narrator and his fair-haired, light-eyed American colleagues are in Manila on a business trip. He finds himself attempting to act and speak like an American because the Filipinos they work with seem to look up to his American colleagues. One day, on a busy street:

“I was riding with my colleagues in a limousine. We were mired in traffic, unable to move, and I glanced out the window to see, only a few feet away, the driver of a jeepney returning my gaze. There was an undisguised hostility in his expression; I had no idea why. We had not met before—of that I was virtually certain—and in a few minutes we would probably never see each other again. But his dislike was so obvious, so intimate, that it got under my skin. I stared back at him, getting angry myself—you will have noticed in your time here that glaring is something we men of Lahore take seriously—and I maintained eye contact until he was obliged by the movement of the car in front to return his attention to the road.

“Afterwards, I tried to understand why he acted as he did. Perhaps, I thought, his wife had just left him; perhaps he resents me for the privileges implied by my suit and expensive car; perhaps he simply does not like Americans. I remained preoccupied with this matter far longer than I should have, pursuing several possibilities that all assumed—as their unconscious starting point—that he and I shared a sort of Third World sensibility. Then one of my colleagues asked me a question, and when I turned to answer him, something rather strange took place. I looked at him—at his fair hair and light eyes and, most of all, his oblivious immersion in the minutiae of our work—and thought, you are so foreign. I felt in that moment much closer to the Filipino driver than to him; I felt I was play-acting when in reality I ought to be making my way home, like the people on the street outside.”

So why was the jeepney driver glaring at the narrator?

#17 on the New York Times Bestseller List (trade fiction) on September 30: Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos (Plume). “A cafe manager falls for a Cary Grant-like charmer, then learns he has an 11-year-old daughter.” I googled Marisa de los Santos, and I was right: she’s Filipino-American, based in Delaware. I’m guessing this makes her the highest-ranking author of Filipino descent ever on the NYT Bestseller list, though I have to check the stats for Dogeaters, Fixer Chao, Umbrella Country. Reviewers have described Love Walked In as a smart contemporary romance, or at least chick lit of the non-nauseating variety. The film rights have been acquired by Sarah Jessica Parker. I saw the book in hardcover in National Bookstore: there’s a half-Filipino half-Swedish character in it named Teo. One of the blurbs is by David Schickler, author of that lovely book Kissing In Manhattan. Here’s the Bookslut review of Love Walked In.

Tree of Smoke, the new novel by Denis Johnson, opens in the Philippines on the day John F. Kennedy was shot.

“Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed. Seaman Houston and the other two recruits slept while the first reports traveled around the world. There was one small nightspot on the island, a dilapidated club with big revolving fans in the ceiling and one bar and one pinball game; the two marines who ran the club had come by to wake them up and tell them what had happened to the President. The two marines sat with the three sailors on the bunks in the Quonset hut for transient enlisted men, watching the air conditioner drip water into a coffee can and drinking beer. The Armed Forces Network from Subic Bay stayed on through the night, broadcasting bulletins about the unfathomable murder. . .”

According to Butch, Johnson was in the think tank brought in to advise Francis Ford Coppola on the Apocalypse Now script when the shoot was in trouble. Another adviser was Jean-Pierre Gorin, Godard’s collaborator in his Maoist period.

A description of the Philippines: “The setting sun lowered from the clouds and struck up at them in such a way that suddenly the entire town throbbed with a scarlet light.” The central metaphor of the tree of smoke: “”And I will give portents in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and palm trees of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon come to blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.” (from the Book of Joel)

“On the question of pedophilia, The White Book was unequivocal: it formally advised against Thailand, which no longer had anything to recommend it, if indeed it ever had. It was much better to go to the Philippines or, better still, to Cambodia—the journey might be dangerous, but it was worth the effort.” - from Platform by Michel Houellebecq

The movie 8mm refers to the Philippines as a source of snuff movies.

Patis dissed: “The nuoc mam from Phu Quoc Island was the best of all, clear and with an astonishingly subtle taste. . .But the sauce in this restaurant is from the Philippines, very bad, not from Thailand, which at least is a pale second-best.” - from the story Love by Robert Olen Butler

In the movie Constantine, the possessed girl hisses at Keanu Reeves: “PapaTAYin natin siya!” So Hollywood has established that Tagalog is the language spoken in hell.

This just in from Budj.
IF: Illegal Facilitator, a criminal whose crimes facilitated the crimes of others.
…
“He’d looked, Milgrim thought, like an ethnic version of a younger Johnny Depp. Brown had once referred to the IF and his family as Cuban-Chinese, but Milgrim would have been unable to make an ethnic identification. Filipino, in a pinch, but that wasn’t it either. And they spoke Russian. Or texted in an approximation of it.” —Spook Country by William Gibson

To recap:
Novels by foreigners set in the Philippines

1. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
2. The Tesseract by Alex Garland - made into a movie set in Bangkok; too bad as Ige points out there was a great Eddie Garcia part in there
3. Ghosts of Manila by James Hamilton-Paterson
4. The Blue Afternoon by William Boyd - doesn’t read like he was actually here.
5. Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard by Timothy Mo
6. And Now You Can Go by Vendela Vida
7. Someone alerted me to Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro—Thanks, I’ll look it up.
8. Biggest Elvis by P.F. Kluge, who reportedly got his ass kicked at Scrabble by a madame in Malate
9. Ay, almost forgot Fires On The Plain by Shohei Ooka (Thanks for the reminder), a strange and wonderful novel about the Japanese soldiers trapped in Leyte towards the end of the Japanese Occupation.

Filipino characters in novels set elsewhere

1. The hero in Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Who else would know how to deal with alien cockroaches. By the time the book was adapted for the screen, the Pinoy had mutated into Casper Van Dien.
2. Eugenio Martinez in Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
3. Filipino nanny in A Man In Full by Tom Wolfe
4. Pinguez in Thomas Pynchon’s V
5. Conchita the maid in Fragrant Harbor by John Lanchester
6. Tatsuo’s parents in Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami

Songs with titles alluding to the Philippines: Filipino Box Spring Hog by Tom Waits; Bebot by the Black-Eyed Peas.
Movies set partly or completely in the Philippines (the Phils as the Phils, not Vietnam or Indonesia): An Officer and A Gentleman (don’t think they actually shot here), No Way Out (signifier: bananas), that Claire Danes one, and Days of Being Wild by Wong Kar-Wai, who makes casual reference to Manila in all his movies. And Kon Ichikawa’s masterwork Nobi (Fires On The Plain), which is set in Leyte but was actually shot in Japan. (Really minor quibble: The Filipino cast members should’ve been speaking Visayan.)

Tagalog heard in movies: The Rock, Constantine, Her Alibi, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.

Does anyone know the title of that French spy novel with an episode at the Hobbit House?

Tina notes that several of the novels set in the Philippines are of an apocalyptic nature. It’s only fitting that Apocalypse Now was shot here, even if it’s set in Vietnam. Apocalypses R Us.