JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Fucking, Austria; the Tititorea Maori dance and other inadvertently hilarious linguistic misunderstandings:

Spotted at Solidaridad Bookshop.

This is an academic treatise.

Remember that you are intelligent, respectful, culturally-sensitive readers.

Stop that.

That is the First of His Name, King of the Andals, the Rhoynar and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm.

Jack Gleeson discusses his aversion to celebrity culture, which would be ironic because the primary reason he’s been asked to speak is his celebrity, but he has declared that he is quitting show business after Game of Thrones.

We hate him, we love him, we hate him, we love him, we hate him….

Update: The Q&A that followed his speech. Tsk, tsk Oxford students.

Group portrait of the 19th century Ilustrados at the NHCP.

We’re starting our own publishing imprint this year. Yesterday our friend and book designer Ige accompanied us to the National Library of the Philippines on T.M. Kalaw in Manila to get the ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers) for our first two books.

When people describe their experience of getting permits and other documents from government agencies, their accounts range from the aggravating to the Kafkaesque. Ige told us that the process of securing an ISBN would take all of 20 minutes.

It took 15 minutes. The staff was brisk and efficient, and she patiently pointed out the errors on our application form.

Have you been to the National Library? The building is being retrofitted, but the library is open to the public from 8am to 7pm, Mondays through Saturdays. Get a library card and hang out there. There’s something about sitting in a big room with high ceilings, surrounded by bookshelves, that makes you want to write.

For information on ISBN registration, library collections, readers’ cards and others, visit the National Library website.

Afterwards we went next door to the National Historical Commission to check out their publications.

Someone must have borrowed our copy of The Memoirs of Artemio Ricarte, the Revolutionary general known as El Vibora and one of the most intriguing characters of his era. (He always referred to himself in the third person, hmmm.) We found this more recent edition of the memoirs, selling for Php200.

The NHCP also published Apolinario Mabini’s La Revolucion Filipina, his account of the Philippine Revolution of 1898. There are so many questions we want to ask Apolinario Mabini, not the least of which is ‘How do you feel about being called The Sublime Paralytic?’ Seriously, the man is a hero, and that’s his honorific?

The NHCP edition of La Revolucion Filipina retails for Php160. Mr. Willy Bas of the publications office reminded us that on July 23 we celebrate Mabini’s 150th birthday. He gave us a copy of ‘Mabini’s Letters to the President’—the text of a lecture by Adrian Cristobal, and a postcard of the Mabini Shrine in Pandacan. We’re ashamed to admit that we’ve never been to the Mabini Shrine or the Nakpil-Bautista house in Quiapo where Gregoria de Jesus-Bonifacio-Nakpil lived, and we have no memory of a trip to the Rizal house in Calamba when we were little.

The full list of NHCP publications is here. Plenty of interesting titles, including Angry days in Mindanao: The Philippine revolution and the war against the U.S. in East and Northeast Mindanao, 1897-1908; Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas; The Diary of a French Officer on the War in the Philippines; and The Cattle Caravans of Ancient Caboloan.

Our mission accomplished, we introduced Ige to one of our favorite spots in the city of Manila, the Sky Deck of the Bayleaf Hotel in Intramuros. We had coffee and their eevil ensaymada pudding while enjoying the cold air,

the amazing views,

and the glorious sunset.

We bitch constantly about Manila, but it is beautiful if you know where to look.

This arrived in the mail yesterday morning. We hadn’t ordered anything, so it was a nice surprise. (The design of the cardboard package would work for a clutch in kid leather. In fact we will use this carton as a clutch when we hang out with our friend who uses a ziploc bag or brown envelope with bubble wrap padding for his iPad.)

The package contained a paperback of The Privileges by Jonathan Dee. Ah. We had started reading The Privileges in December and loved it…until we got to page 139.

There was no page 139. Our copy was missing pages 139-170 (in printing, one signature). After we had gnashed our teeth, it occurred to us to contact the publisher and report the defective copy. We found the publisher’s website and sent a letter using their general email form. The very next day, a representative contacted us and asked for our delivery address. They would send us a replacement copy free of charge. (And we could keep our freak copy.)

So our reading of The Privileges has a happy ending.

The Privileges is about Adam and Cynthia Morey, a beautiful young couple who amass incredible wealth through a flexible attitude towards morals and ethics. We should hate them, but for some reason we don’t—in this New York morality (specifically, the lack of it) tale, true love justifies financial shenanigans. Then again, when the Morey children and relatives turn out to be screwed up, we’re not surprised. Elegant and exuberant, The Privileges is a novel about love, money, class, and what they really cost.

* * * * *
First paragraph:

A wedding! The first of a generation; the bride and groom are just twenty- two, young to be married these days. Most of their friends flew in yesterday, and though they are in Pittsburgh, a city of half a million, they affect a good- natured snobbish disorientation, because they come from New York and Chicago but also because it suits their sense of the whole event, the magical disquieting novelty of it, to imagine that they are now in the middle of nowhere. They have all, of course, as children or teenagers, sat through the wedding of some uncle or cousin or in quite a few cases their own mother or father, so they know in that sense what to expect. But this is their first time as actual friends and contemporaries of the betrothed; and the strange, anarchic exuberance they feel is tied to a fear that they are being pulled by surrogates into the world of responsible adulthood, a world whose exit will disappear behind them and for which they feel proudly unready. They are adults pretending to be children pretending to be adults. Last night’s rehearsal dinner ended with the overmatched restaurant manager threatening to call the police. The day to come shapes up as an unstable compound of camp and import. Nine hours before they’re due at the church, many of them are still sleeping, but already the thick old walls of the Pittsburgh Athletic Club seem to hum with a lordly overenthusiasm.

How compelling is Martin Scorsese’s latest film The Wolf of Wall Street? We opinionated, slightly mouthy people (pilosopo) went to see it—and it shut us up. (Also there was a pretty good audience for a weekday afternoon and we couldn’t really talk.)

The Wolf of Wall Street—not for nothing is its acronym WOWS—is so big, loud and outrageous, we can imagine Scorsese telling DiCaprio: “Leo, I saw The Great Gatsby. You were good, but the movie…too subtle. Too small.” The Wolf of Wall Street could be a re-imagining of The Great Gatsby, if Daisy Buchanan were a stash of Quaaludes.

It’s supposed to be a biopic of Jordan Belfort, the stock-swindling, money-laundering, securities-defrauding, mega-whoring scam artist whose crimes had inspired an earlier movie, The Boiler Room. A huge subject for sure, given the protagonist’s legendary excesses and mass consumption of drugs, but too small for Scorsese’s purposes.

Marty—we’re presumptuous—is in an odd position: he has to out-Scorsese all his cinematic spawn, including Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino and David O. Russell (whose American Hustle is practically Goodfellas). So instead of telling the tale of one criminal, he makes a satire about a land of opportunity, where you can be anything you want to be if you have the stones and an On/Off switch on your scruples, and where making money is the religion, as we are reminded every time Belfort addresses his troop of stockbrokers like an old-time preacher. “Stratton Oakmont (Belfort’s company) is America,” he declares. You can’t get much clearer than that.

No wonder Wolf was placed in the Comedy or Musical category at a recent awards show. It’s wildly, hysterically funny, and its cast is in take no prisoners mode. Leonardo DiCaprio throws himself into the Belfort role—literally—and reveals unsuspected skills in physical comedy. He’s hilarious. His scenes with Jonah Hill as his cohort Donnie Azoff just blow up the screen. Watch for the bravura sequence involving quaaludes, a Ferrari, a telephone and some ham.

Matthew McConaughey appears early on as Belfort’s mentor Mark Hanna—when did he get this brilliant? We call him a talentless hack, and then he steals Magic Mike and delivers a series of excellent performances that might lead to one or two Oscars this year. Margot Robbie comes on very strong as the antihero’s wife, Jean Dujardin is the perfect sleazy Swiss lawyer, and Joanna Lumley holds the copyright on fabulous.

Working with cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto and frequent music collaborator Robbie Robertson, Scorsese evokes the pumped-up, coke-addled, testosterone-fueled insanity of the boiler room where aspiring masters of the universe con regular people out of their hard-earned money. Later, they adopt the posh name and target rich people. As Hanna teaches Belfort, nobody knows why stocks rise and fall, the thing is to sell the hell out of them.

This is a movie that makes the viewer ask, “Am I on drugs?” Belfort and his crew are high on drugs, sex and money, and when they come down they don’t have existential crises. That would require more depth than their three thousand dollar suits (in 90s prices) can contain.

It’s impossible to watch Wolf and American Hustle and The Blue Jasmine without connecting them to the frauds, failures and abuses that broke the global economy. Why target the small operators like himself, Belfort asks FBI Special Agent Denham (the ever-reliable Kyle Chandler), when Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and other big players were collateralizing debts? Belfort is no good guy by any stretch of the imagination, but in a world where money rules, what’s illegal?

Happy Birthday, Jay!