JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Try getting this song out of your head. It’s been following us around for days. Of course we still have the Fleetwood Mac cassette in a bin somewhere. This was the cut we played over and over again, which was unnecessary because you only have to hear it once and that drum riff will take over your brain. Who gets the USC Trojans Marching Band to play on a song about a disintegrating relationship?! Fleetwood Mac did. That’s why we don’t mind growing old—the stuff from our childhood was so weird.

Our ancient iPod crashed some weeks ago, and as we were reloading music the other day, this suddenly played on our computer. The following day we hitched a ride with our friend, and this was playing in the car.

This afternoon we watched a screener from Jack City for their new series, The Americans, and this figures prominently in the premiere episode. It starts playing two minutes into the show, and that’s when we realized that any TV show that involves Tusk automatically wins our approval. And that every time we hear this song we have to shout the chorus: “You don’t say that you love me!”

In The Americans, Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Phillip Jennings (Matthew Rhys) appear to be an ordinary middle-class couple living in the suburbs with their two kids. Wrong on all counts: they’re Soviet spies, they’re not married, those kids are part of the charade. It’s 1981 and US counterintelligence is hot on the trail of Russian agents.

The series was inspired by the unmasking of several KGB sleeper agents living in the US in 2010. It’s like Mr and Mrs Smith plus Salt, with Felicity instead of Angelina Jolie, doing stuff Felicity would never do.

In the premiere, Mr and Mrs Jennings are assigned to kidnap a KGB colonel who has defected to the US. The mission does not go as planned. The colonel triggers Elizabeth’s buried memories and Phillip’s secret aspirations…turns out he wants to be an American for real. Years of pretending have gotten to him. Elizabeth is committed to the mission, but her resolve is undermined by her unacknowledged feelings for her fake husband.

To ratchet up the tension, an American counterintelligence officer (Noah Emmerich) moves in next door. Yeah, that’s a bit much, but the series looks promising. Authentic period feel (See All the Wigs Worn on The Americans So Far), Keri Russell being a badass, geopolitical And marital tensions, and plenty of hand-to-hand combat. Okay, you’ve got our attention, we’ll watch the next episodes.

The Americans premieres on Saturday, 13 April on JackCity (UHF Channel 31, SkyCable Ch. 72, Destiny Ch. 60, Cablelink Ch. 40).

The film critic Roger Ebert has died. Some years ago, after he was diagnosed with cancer, he wrote this advance review of the afterlife in his online journal.

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear.

I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

Thank you, Mr. Ebert.

Pages from the working notebooks, the “Cahiers,” are written in fluid, all but illegible script, suggesting that Proust wrote quickly and easily. He wrote in lined notebooks, with double-lined red margins, where you sometimes find the absent-minded doodling of the author; at other times, he seems to be elaborating on the things he has set down. On one notebook page, he’s drawn a kind of surrealist collage of portraits (Proust looks to have been a capable, imaginative draftsman) that blend into one another, and which may offer clues to the way he conceived of his novel: an amalgam of people he knew in life, dismantled and reassembled to form the characters of his fiction.

Which reminds us that we’re reading Proust this year.

Read The Thrill of Proust’s Handwriting. Thanks to Butch for the alert.

And check out the syllabus for English 135: Fate and the Individual in European Literature, a class taught by W. H. Auden. (Thanks, Chus!)

Photo courtesy of CARA

According to our friend from CARA (Compassion and Responsibility for Animals), the Manila Polo Club called the Makati City Pound on Wednesday to round up the cats living on the club grounds. The Polo Club had announced that the cats would be put up for adoption.

Eight adult cats were captured—all of them already neutered and spayed. Also caught was one 4-week-old kitten separated from its mother. CARA members visited the city pound yesterday morning and asked the head veterinarian to release the cats to them. The head vet said new protocols were set up recently, and all the cats would be released on Friday at 10am.

The Manila Polo Club released this statement: “In the light of growing concerns regarding the Club’s cats for adoption program, the Manila Polo Club affirms that it is being done to ensure a safer environment for its members and their dependents while helping stray cats find a more appropriate habitat.

“Moving forward, the Club chooses to be proactive in addressing potential threat of the rabies virus and related Zoonotic Disease. While some animal welfare advocate friends may insist that most MPC cats were spayed and vaccinated, this offers no guarantee. Vaccination expires and the stray cats in the Club are neither monitored nor well taken care of. MPC has a standing policy – “no pets allowed” etc.”

There is a vaccine for rabies, but there is no vaccine for narrow-mindedness.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Manny Pacquiao, whose application for membership was rejected by the Manila Polo Club, could adopt the cats evicted by said club? Apparently neither Manny Pacquiao nor the cats have the pedigree to satisfy club standards.

The Hobbit limited edition Moleskine notebooks have just arrived and should be at at National Bookstore branches shortly.

The plain pocket notebook retails at Php1140, the larger journal is Php1550.


All notebooks come with a map of Wilderland, in case you need directions to the Desolation of Smaug.

Not a lot of stocks available; we’d stake out the nearest branch if we were you.

Eavesdrop on our conversation with Atty. Lorna Kapunan, legal counsel of James Yap. Obviously we discuss the ongoing Kris Aquino-James Yap case—at least the parts that can be discussed in public. Then we talk about family law, men’s rights, spousal abuse, things to remember before you get married, community property, why there is no divorce in the Philippines, the legal profession and political office, and how to hang on to your soul when everyone is selling theirs.

Podcast episode 2.2: Atty. Kapunan, Un-Gagged.

P.S. The exact quote from Henry VI is: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”