Thanks to Melo Villareal of lakbaypilipinas.com for the new look of this site. We were getting tired of the blue palette and figured it was time to spruce things up a little. “A little”, ha ha. This is a work-in-progress; please bear with us.
Went to Tina’s birthday brunch. Brought the Baroque Birthday Cake by Carlo Estagle: chocolate with sculptured sugar frosting and orange liqueur, or as I prefer to call it, Kill All The Grown-Ups. As always, I picked up all sorts of advice and bits of information. A random sampling:
(1) If you’re staying in a hotel, keep your toothbrush in the room safe. Ambeth is serious about this. Don’t leave your toothbrush in the bathroom, where the cleaning person may be tempted to use it to scrub the toilet.
(2) RayVi says if you’re lucky enough to score tickets to a play starring Al Pacino, don’t sit in the front rows. The great man sprays. True, this would not be a problem if you have a fantasy about being spat at by Michael Corleone.
(3) The 16th century Tagalog word for “binabae” or effeminate man was “bayogin”.
Saw the new Harry Potter. I suspect it wasn’t bad, but I didn’t get it. It didn’t answer the question I’ve been asking since Fiennes turned up in the last one: What happened to the Voldemort guy’s nose?
Then there are the other questions. Did he have one to begin with? Is this the cause of his nastiness: proboscis envy? Apart from his meanness towards the kid, what forms does this nastiness take? Did Harry’s dead parents have something to do with the loss of the nose? What does he have against Harry anyway, didn’t he approve of the nude scenes in Equus? Why can’t Voldemort’s name be mentioned when everyone knows what it is, even the poor schmucks in the audience who haven’t read the books? Why can’t Voldemort’s name be mentioned without one’s voice dropping an octave and an eyebrow rising significantly? And what is that girl’s problem, is she attempting semaphore with her eyebrows? So what if the noseless one wins, how bad can it get? How will it affect the lives of the ordinary powerless mortals?
And there’s the big question, the one the entire Potter movie series has been pretending not to hear: What exactly is at stake here? As long as it remains unanswered, the movies will have as much sense of urgency and emotional impact as a power struggle in a boarding school drama guild.
A film adaptation should be able to stand alone, independent of its source, and it must be coherent even to those who have not read the book. At least with the Lord of the Rings movies, you need not have read Tolkien to know why Sauron looked like a glowing vagina.
Signage. Sent by pitirpol., originally uploaded by 160507.
I have some unsolicited advice for mall developers: Air-conditioning. If you’re building a shopping mall in Metro Manila, your market wants air-conditioning. I don’t mean air-conditioned shops that you get to by walking in the open air; I mean completely air-conditioned, fully-enclosed, an artificially-cooled biosphere. Because in case you haven’t noticed, it’s hot. Or it’s raining and hot. And the air is polluted. Forget about dining al fresco or strolling in the sun—where do you think you are, Paris? Milan? San Diego? No, you’re in Manila! Deal with it.
Sure, foreigners like to bake in the heat, but in case you haven’t noticed, the locals outnumber tourists, not to mention that solar exposure negates the locals’ passionate attempts at skin-whitening. Fine, put out tables for the tourists, the smokers, the rich people who think sweat is exotic, but do air-condition your entire mall. You won’t be doing it for charity anyway, you’ll be charging your tenants. Who can afford the electric bill, if there’s enough human traffic to generate steady sales. And don’t mention environmental issues and carbon footprints as your “design rationale”—oh please, you’re full of compost.
Charlie Brooker on murky lyrics. Wonderful analysis of the jewels of Tom Jones’s oeuvre.
“There should be more of this sort of thing in pop. You’re Beautiful by James Blunt, for instance, is infuriating: partly because it is actually quite a nice tune, but mainly because thanks to some indefinably smug aspect of his voice, every time you hear it you want to leap inside his larynx and kick your way out with barbed-wire boots on. Yet all would be forgiven, and it would become my favourite song of all time, if the final line revealed Blunt had been singing it to himself in a mirror while hanging a dog from a noose in his living room. Especially if there was a video to go with it.”
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