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Koosi, our 14-year-old housemate, posing with a shopping bag.

Here’s a concept: Vilma Santos playing a TV extra. EKSTRA, co-written and directed by Jeffrey Jeturian and starring Vilma Santos, will premiere at Cinemalaya on July 28, 6.15pm at the CCP. We already have our ticket! Get yours early.

Ekstra also stars Vince de Jesus, Marlon Rivera, Piolo Pascual, Marian Rivera, Pilar Pilapil, Cherie Gil, Eula Valdez, and practically everyone. We haven’t seen it, but—oddly enough—we’ve heard it, and it’s a scream. (We did the English translation based on the recorded dialogue.) Required viewing for everyone, especially those who want to be in show business. It looks easy. It’s not.

Stay tuned next week for our podcast with Jeffrey Jeturian. Post your questions for Jeffrey in Comments.

1. You’re a huge fan of Vilma Santos, and you had to preside over a movie in which she is oppressed by production assistants, assistant directors, producers, directors, and half the planet. How did you work up the nerve?

2. When you were a kid, did you have screaming fights with Nora Aunor fans? (Our yaya was a Noranian and we used to taunt her until she pulled our hair in the bath.)

3. You direct the wildly popular telenovela, Please Be Careful With My Heart. In the movie, Ate Vi is an extra on a telenovela. Is TV production really the way it’s portrayed in your movie?

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale. Photo from Flavorwire.

A writer from Publisher’s Weekly was talking to Claire Messud about her new book, The Woman Upstairs. She said this about Messud’s protagonist:

I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.

Here is Claire Messud’s magnificent answer.

For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t “is this a potential friend for me?” but “is this character alive?” Nora’s outlook isn’t “unbearably grim” at all. Nora is telling her story in the immediate wake of an enormous betrayal by a friend she has loved dearly. She is deeply upset and angry. But most of the novel is describing a time in which she felt hope, beauty, elation, joy, wonder, anticipation—these are things these friends gave to her, and this is why they mattered so much. Her rage corresponds to the immensity of what she has lost. It doesn’t matter, in a way, whether all those emotions were the result of real interactions or of fantasy, she experienced them fully. And in losing them, has lost happiness.

Now we have to read The Woman Upstairs.

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The teaching of the humanities has fallen on hard times. So says a new report on the state of the humanities by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and so says the experience of nearly everyone who teaches at a college or university. Undergraduates will tell you that they’re under pressure — from their parents, from the burden of debt they incur, from society at large — to choose majors they believe will lead as directly as possible to good jobs. Too often, that means skipping the humanities.

Read The Decline and Fall of the English Major in the NYT.

A typical day at NAIA 2 terminal.

Otsu was catching a flight to Zamboanga. At the baggage X-ray machine she was approached by two airport security personnel.

“Ma’am, could you please open this suitcase?” said the female security officer, briskly but politely.

“Is something wrong with it?” Otsu asked as she mentally went through its contents.

“Ma’am, you have ammunition in this suitcase.”

“What!” said Otsu, who opened the suitcase to prove that there was no ammo inside.

“There,” the security officer pointed to a small black bag tucked among her clothes.

That’s when Otsu realized that she did have ammunition in her luggage. The last time she had used that black bag, she had gone to a talk by the Karmapa Lama. She had a souvenir from that talk: a blue Buddha keychain. Afterwards her boyfriend had taken her to a gun show and presented her with a second souvenir: a bullet casing that had been turned into a keychain. The keychain had turned up on the X-ray, hence the search for ammo.

Our friend is really not the type who gets mistaken for a gunrunner. She was impressed that the security check managed to detect a small, ordinary .22 caliber bullet. The security officers examined the evidence: a bullet keychain next to the Buddha keychain.

“Sorry, Ma’am, but you cannot take this bullet onto the plane,” the security officer declared. “We have to confiscate it.” Under different circumstances Otsu might’ve been hustled off to a holding cell and interrogated about the one bullet, but the officers decided that she did not represent a threat to national security.

“Take it,” Otsu said, “As a reminder of how I didn’t shoot my boyfriend when I had the chance.”

The security officers stared at her for three seconds, then burst out laughing. “Si Ma’am naman.” They were still chuckling and repeating the story as she proceeded to the gate.

It’s disconcerting to be told that your favorite writer is a male chauvinist who embodies retrograde sexual politics, treats women poorly and describes them as meals.

It makes us think: Are we a female male chauvinist? Are our sexual politics retrograde? This is a very useful exercise. We acknowledge that we expect men to try and take charge. Try is the operative term. (Our friend asked an interesting question recently: When was the last time you obeyed a man?)

When we read Salter, we see male characters who are products of their times, imperfect beings made compelling by their flaws. Should we expect fictional creations to be fair and respectful at all times, to think righteously and stay within the bounds of political correctness? Is it Salter’s or any writer’s obligation to meet contemporary standards of how to live? We regard fiction as an alternate universe where characters are free to be exactly what they are. It would be a tragedy to police it.

via Geekologie.

Last week we spotted this in the window of a toy store:

The Death Star. In Legos. For just under Php40,000.

We hate the child who gets this for a present. That child will lose the pieces within days. Then again, the child who gets this Lego Death Star probably won’t get to play with it. He or she is merely the excuse for buying it. It’s for the parents ha ha. (That’s what kids are for.)