JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Two things happen simultaneously when you travel: you discover a new place, and you discover something about yourself. The first is the stuff of travelogues, packed with adjectives (verdant, pristine) and descriptive shortcuts (It’s like The Lord of the Rings!); you know that National Geographic/Discovery Channel/Lonely Planet have been there before you. The second is an expedition into largely uncharted territory: yourself. You are in unfamiliar surroundings, among strangers; your comfortable assumptions do not operate here. We could argue that this is the natural, stripped-down, real version of you. Meet yourself. A mildly terrifying prospect, if you think about it: What if you don’t like you?

The other week I learned that I am a complete moron in the outdoors, that there are places in the world where no one’s heard of Manny Pacquiao, and 25 years is too short a time not to hear the 80s pop hit “Der Kommissar”. I learned that walking barefoot on stones is painful, where a handbrake is, and how to take a shower, shampoo, and apply conditioner in under ten minutes. I also confirmed my long-held suspicion that if you go to a dance club and the first song you hear is “It’s Raining Men”, you are in for a night of horror.

New Zealand, the epic in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.

Over merienda recently Ted mentioned that Helen Chan, the owner of Video Take-Out, died several years ago. I didn’t know Ms Chan personally, but in the early 90s I haunted her laser disc rental shop in the basement of Makati Cinema Square. I practically lived there on weekends. Their collection of films was both broad and specialized, erudite and popular. It was a large chunk of my education. I hope Ms Chan knew how important her shop was to us. Some of the best parts of my 20s were spent flipping through the bins of laser discs, then hurrying home to Blanco Center to watch Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan or the British horror movie Dead Of Night or The Last Temptation of Christ in an unmarked white wrapper. (Whenever some kind of censorship crackdown was expected, the laser discs would be stashed in a secret compartment next door, in a boutique that sold lingerie for exotic dancers.) I still regret not renting Twilight of the Cockroaches.

Good times. Thanks, Ms. Chan.

Painting by Jacques vanden Heuvel.

My regularly-scheduled column will appear on Sunday instead (it’s longer than usual).

Olive oil and sea salt gelato at Lusso in Greenbelt 5. Not too sweet, perfect for days when you feel like you’re being boiled alive.

Table centerpiece. Because it’s too hot to look at red roses.

Mixtape: 10 Songs for English Majors and other Word Nerds

I don’t know anything about Adolf Alix’s new movie, but judging from this publicity photo it’s a weltschmerz-y bildungsromanesque full of sturm und drang that encapsulates the weltansicht of the auteur. These actors must be playing nuclear physicists in a race, fraught with existential despair, to repair flaws in the Large Hadron Collider, only to find their clothes swallowed up by baby black holes.

Has anyone seen D’Survivors? Please post a review.

Daniel Matsunaga models my silly glasses, 2009.

I can’t bring myself to watch Clash of the Titans not because of the withering reviews but because of Sam Worthington’s hair. Why does he have a buzz cut? Did he forget his wig?

Louis Leterrier’s film stars Sam Worthington, but you will have guessed that already. These days, no major production is allowed to embark without him. He is the strapping Australian lad who, without warning, has found himself cast as a cyborg, in “Terminator Salvation,” as a would-be alien, in “Avatar,” and now as the demigod Perseus, in “Clash of the Titans,” while retaining the look of someone who cheerfully expects to be returning to a steady job on a building site.. . .Read Anthony Lane’s review in the New Yorker.