JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Just because I was out of town on the day itself doesn’t mean you are absolved from giving me presents. I want presents! Lots and lots of presents! You can send them to my house (if you know where it is) or to my book publisher, Anvil (8007B Pioneer St, Mandaluyong). You can bring them to the dinner (if you were invited). Or you may accost me at the mall or approach me in a restaurant, remembering to grovel and scrape, but only if you have a present for me. And it has to be nice. Useful hints: the new Tom Waits 3-CD album Orphans, new Powerbook G5, signed first edition of The Catcher In The Rye, open-dated airline ticket to Paris…

Borat is now in Manila theatres. (I was worried that the MTRCB would ban it just for the title.) It is crude, vulgar, and disgusting. It is offensive the way comedy should be. It looks like it was made for twenty bucks, and deserves to make bazillions. God, whoever yours is, bless Sasha Baron Cohen that filthy English Jew.

Thanks to Vince in Seattle for pointing out this article in the L.A. Times.

COLUMN ONE
Filipinos’ hip-hop anthem
Allan Pineda of the Black Eyed Peas honored his homeland with a rap in Tagalog. ‘Bebot’ has become a surprise phenomenon.
By David Pierson
Times Staff Writer

Hey, man, all of you listen
to me
Here comes the real Filipino
Came from the barrio — Sapang Bato
Went to L.A. and labored
In order to help my mother
Because life is so hard
But the disposition’s still bright.

SO begins the story of Allan Pineda, a member of the hip-hop band the Black Eyed Peas, who two years ago wrote a song about his journey from a poverty-stricken district in the Philippines to Los Angeles’ Atwater Village.

The lyrics were personal, written entirely in Tagalog, the dominant language of the Philippines. Pineda wanted to recount his experience as a Filipino American but wasn’t sure how much the song would resonate with others — especially the Black Eyed Peas’ teenage fan base.

The song, “Bebot” (Tagalog slang for “hot chick”), appeared on the Black Eyed Peas’ multiplatinum-selling album, “Monkey Business,” released in June 2005. The album contained several chart-toppers, but “Bebot” — as Pineda expected — wasn’t one of them.

But over the last year, “Bebot” has become a phenomenon in ways Pineda, 31, said he could never have imagined.

The musical story of his immigrant experience has become an unlikely rallying cry in California’s Filipino American community.

With its choppy beat and shouting chorus of “Filipino! Filipino!,” the song became a showstopper at weddings and birthday parties. Teenagers — many of whom don’t even speak Tagalog — choreographed dance routines to it.

But it was the lyrics, not the beat, that had lasting resonance.

The Filipino American community is famous for putting its cultural identity behind assimilation. Though they’re the second-largest Asian group in California behind the Chinese, they have never established set “Filipino” neighborhoods — the equivalent of Monterey Park for Chinese Americans or Little Saigon for Vietnamese Americans. There is a historic Filipinotown west of downtown L.A., but the U.S. census found that less than 15% of its residents are actually Filipino.

Many Filipinos arrive in the United States speaking English, immediately making assimilation easier. Continued

“Robert Altman is all of a piece, but he’s complicated. You can’t predict what’s coming next in the movie; his plenitude comes from somewhere beyond reason. An Altman picture doesn’t have to be great to be richly pleasurable. He tosses in more than we can keep track of; he nips us in surprising ways. In The Long Goodbye, as in M*A*S*H*, there are climaxes, but you don’t have the sense of waiting for them, because what’s in between is so satisfying. He underplays the plot and concentrates on the people, so it’s almost all of equal interest, and you feel as if it could go on indefinitely, and you’d be absorbed in it. . .Maybe the reason some people have difficulty getting onto Altman’s wavelength is that he’s just about incapable of overdramatizing. He’s not a pusher.”

– from a review of The Long Goodbye by Pauline Kael

Because the cosmos has a bizarre sense of humor: Barge carrying sludge collected from the oil spill in Guimaras sinks in Misamis.

The news hit as the World Wildlife Fund-Philippines was hosting the premiere of Al Gore’s environmental film, An Inconvenient Truth.
(Does anyone else think WWF is a bit too friendly with Big Oil?)

Don’t say “Onlyindipilipins”, it’s so tired.

Chuvaness asks a question.