Archive for February, 2012
Pork Empanada
The EDSA writing assignment reminded us of Tony Perez’s Cubao stories, some of which happen right on EDSA. Our favorites books in the series are Cubao: Pagkagat Ng Dilim, Cubao Midnight Express and Eros, Thanatos, Cubao.
A couple of years ago we translated one of Tony’s more recent stories into Tagalog. Pork Empanada takes place on Katipunan Avenue.
PORK EMPANADA
by Tony Perez (from his story collection Eros, Thanatos, Cubao, Cacho Publishing House, 1994)
Translated into English by Jessica Zafra
Do you go to Katipunan often?
You’ve probably seen Frankie’s Steaks and Burgers, beside the new Cravings, near Lily of the Valley Beauty & Grooming Salon. If you’ve seen it, then you’ve probably seen Bototoy.
Monday through Saturday Bototoy climbs the winding path from Barangka to the service gate behind Ateneo Grade School, along with his father who works as a maintenance man at the school, and his playmates Nono, Itoc, and Radny. Most of the kids who climb the path stop at the wide covered court of the College, beside Our School, near the Observatory, where they wait for the badminton and tennis players to call for ballboys. Bototoy doesn’t stop there. He walks to Gate 2, which is quite far, and crosses Katipunan Avenue to sit on the concrete island in front of Frankie’s Steaks and Burgers.
Do you remember him?
A Dangerous Method: The historical hysterical
Viggo Mortensen as Freud and Michael Fassbender as Jung in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method
Something Sigmund Freud says in A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg’s stupendous film on the birth of psychoanalysis, caused us to sit up straight in the slouch chair. He tells Sabina Spielrein, the patient, then lover, then student of his estranged disciple Carl Jung: “We’re Jews, and Jews we will always be.” Jung, whom she was still fascinated with, is an Aryan who is interested in mysticism and talks about helping people “become what they were born to be.” Jews, Freud reminds Spielrein, have seen what people really are.
The fates of the protagonists, summarized dispassionately at the film’s end, attest to the truth of Freud’s statement.
(In our own heads Freud is telling us, “We are nerds. They tolerate us now because we are clever, but someday the Sardaukar will come after us.”)
Cronenberg’s deceptively pretty movie based on the play by Christopher Hampton is itself a form of psychoanalysis: it dredges up the dark impulses under the bright surfaces. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung consults his intellectual father figure, the Austrian Sigmund Freud, who sees their relationship in Oedipal terms naturally: the son attempting to kill the father.
Jung has a beautiful house paid for by his rich wife; he sails in the tranquil blue lake in a boat paid for by his rich wife. But his great love and intellectual match may be Spielrein, who enters the movie kicking and screaming literally. He cures her of her symptoms, and then gets her off by spanking her.
Keira Knightley as the hysteric Sabina Spielrein
The alien in Alien. Hmmm. Michael Fassbender is starring in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, which is “set in the universe of Alien.” Freud believed there are no accidents…
As the hysteric Keira Knightley contorts her face and extends her already prodigious jaw so far she looks like the alien mother getting ready to bite off someone’s head. Her acting is almost risible because her costars don’t seem to be acting at all (Vincent Cassel expresses volumes by raising one corner of his mouth very slightly). However, the director has stated in interviews that this is exactly how the historical Sabina behaved. However one regards Knightley’s performance it is certainly brave.
Fassbender caps his amazing year by playing Jung as a very proper man consumed by terrible agonies. (His visions will result in the theory of the collective unconscious.) Mortensen’s Freud is playful, paranoid, magisterial, a man who sees complexes everywhere. His expression on the ocean liner as his disciple goes off to first class says everything we need to know about the outsider who is suddenly reminded of his true status. Don’t get too comfortable.
How to have even more fun in this archipelago
Get a copy of Linamnam by Claude Tayag and Mary Ann Quioc.
Linamnam, Php395 at National Bookstores
Proceed to eat your way around the Philippines. This culinary travel guide is arranged by region for easy reference: now you know exactly where to go and what to order. What! You’ve never had the Crispy Itik and Peking Duck at Tindahan ng Itlog ni Kuya in Laguna?? You call yourself a foodie but you’ve never tried the Chupaculo at Ermin Ray Lim Saavedra Home Suite Home Hotel in Zamboanga?? You need this book.
This one we’re saving for Roland Garros
The Map and The Territory, hardcover, Php995 at National Bookstores.
Perfect for those clay court rallies in which one player stands in the 17th arrondisement and the other stands in the 15th, and the ball goes slowly back and forth until one of them dozes off. Kidding. We have to go.
We’re still not sure whether we like Houellebecq but for some reason we can’t not read him.
The Ermine of Czernopol, Php600-something at National Bookstores
Design is the second thing we love about NYRB Books; the novels are the first. We’ve loved Gregor von Rezzori since we happened upon the NYRB reissue of Memoirs of an Anti-Semite; with the return of The Ermine of Czernopol a nearly-forgotten European genius reclaims his place in literature.
Red shoes and the politics of shopping
While broiling in the heat of the Melbourne summer I realized I was wearing the wrong shoes. My thick-soled tennis shoes might have been useful for chasing a down-the-line forehand by Nadal, except that there is a zero probability of me chasing a down-the-line forehand by Nadal. They were too heavy in the heat; at every step I felt like I was lifting an anvil.
On my return to Manila I proceeded to the mall to look for shoes. I am happy with my topsiders but I can’t be wearing boat shoes all the time: I feel like asking myself where my boat is parked. I needed lightweight shoes such as canvas sneakers, with efficient rubber soles because I walk a lot (Walking being the only thing I do that qualifies as physical exercise).
Read The Politics of Shopping, our column this week in InterAksyon.com.
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