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Starring Sqeeky (white) and Pouncer (black-white-orange)
Directed by Squeeky and Pouncer
Cinematography by their serf, Ren

Pouncer after the shoot. Making movies is exhausting.

Saffy’s review: Cats have no thumbs, so I give it two claws up!

Saffy’s human’s favorite Hitchcock movies. Perfect for long weekends and sudden non-working days. (Note: It took us decades to seek out and watch all these movies, and you can view them all in a day, lucky you.)

10. Frenzy. Someone is strangling women to death with neckties in 60s London, and the bad-tempered protagonist is the suspect.

9. Psycho. Dun-dun dun-dun dun-dun don’t go in the shower!!!

8. Rear Window. Wheelchair-bound photojournalist is so busy watching the neighbors through a telescope he doesn’t notice his beautiful girlfriend.

7. Strangers on a Train. Creepy guy offers to kill a tennis player’s horrible wife if the tennis player will kill the creepy guy’s father. Set at the US Open.

6. The 39 Steps. See Holden’s summary in The Catcher in the Rye.

5. Shadow of A Doubt. Charley’s favorite uncle may be the Merry Widow killer.

4. Vertigo. Acrophobic detective falls in love with his client’s wife, fails to save her, then meets someone who looks exactly like her…

3. North by Northwest. Advertising executive is mistaken for a spy, goes on the run and gets picked up by a cool blonde.

2. Notorious. Nazi’s daughter is in love with her American case officer, but he sends her off to spy on her father’s colleagues.

1. The Lady Vanishes. The feisty heroine reports that an old lady has been kidnapped on the train, and everyone but the annoying musicologist insists that there was no old lady.

Concept and illustration by James Reyes

and hula-hoop.

Lena Headey (Cersei Lannister) and

Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister) hula-hooping in a gay bar. So many happy concepts in a single sentence.

If Jaime, Tywin and Joffrey had joined them…(Internet explodes)

Strahov Monastery Library, Prague. Photo from Flickr.

Real reading is reincarnation. There is no other way to put it. It is being born again into a higher form of consciousness than we ourselves possess. When we walk the streets of Manhattan with Walt Whitman or contemplate our hopes for eternity with Emily Dickinson, we are reborn into more ample and generous minds. “Life piled on life / Were all too little,” says Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” and he is right. Given the ragged magnificence of the world, who would wish to live only once? The English major lives many times through the astounding transportive magic of words and the welcoming power of his receptive imagination. The economics major? In all probability he lives but once. If the English major has enough energy and openness of heart, he lives not once but hundreds of times. Not all books are worth being reincarnated into, to be sure—but those that are win Keats’s sweet phrase: “a joy forever.”

The Ideal English Major by Mark Edmundson in the Chronicle of Higher Education. via 3QD

Leo Abaya, writer and director of our favorite New Breed entry, Instant Mommy.

As for the devotees and supporters, it was one of the few occasions when they could feel like part of a community rather than freaks who care too much about characters who don’t really exist. Half the fun of attending Cinemalaya are the post-screening discussions in which friends pass judgment on the works: “Uma-Apitchapong”, “It’s one act, where are the other two?” and “Sana di na lang ako nag-sssshh doon sa mga katabi kong maingay, mas exciting yung kuwento nila kaysa sa pelikula.”

Read our (long delayed) column, Notes on Cinemalaya 2013: Who’s going to watch this stuff? Everybody. at InterAksyon.com.

From the archive: The Soul-Sucking Reality of Indie Movie Distribution.

The second installment: Indies try to cross over, at InterAksyon.com.

Ooh-la-la, madeleines. Those little shell-shaped buttery cakes that go so well with tea. We found some at Tous les Jours, the Korean bakery, Php36 for a pack of three.

We bit into a madeleine and waited for overwhelming memories of our childhood to kick in. Then we remembered that we never had madeleines in our childhood. A bite of Choc-Nut, guava jelly made by Carmelite nuns, pan de coco or siopao from Ma Mon Luk might transport us back to those times, but not madeleines, which we didn’t taste until we knew how to pronounce the word.

The only childhood we remembered while eating madeleines was Proust’s. Funny how the novels we read become our memories.

Then he goes on about madeleines for the next 300 pages. We exaggerate. But only slightly.

Swann’s Way, the first book in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, turns 100 this year. Penguin has a new translation by Lydia Davis. Available at National Bookstores, Php699.