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We wantsss it, preciousss. If you spot it anywhere, give us a holler.

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A Story of Stolen Salamis

My son’s Italian landlord in Brooklyn kept a shed out back in which he cured and smoked salamis. One night, in the midst of a wave of petty vandalism and theft, the shed was broken into and the salamis were taken. My son talked to his landlord about it the next day, commiserating over the vanished sausages. The landlord was resigned and philosophical, but corrected him: “They were not sausages. They were salamis.” Then the incident was written up in one of the city’s more prominent magazines as an amusing and colorful urban incident. In the article, the reporter called the stolen goods “sausages.” My son showed the article to his landlord, who hadn’t known about it. The landlord was interested and pleased that the magazine had seen fit to report the incident, but he added: “They weren’t sausages. They were salamis.”

More stories from Can’t and Won’t here.

Lydia Davis photo from The Cultural Cat

Cats watching TV

This year we realized we watch at least as much television (though not on television) as film, so we figured we’d write about it. The Binge appears every Friday at BusinessWorld.

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I watch a lot of television, but I haven’t always respected the medium. Even if it taught me English (Sesame Street) and science (reruns of old Star Trek episodes) and gave me a world-view (Woody Allen movies at 10 am on RPN-9), I regarded it as the poor, déclassé cousin of Film. Film aspired to Art and should be taken seriously; TV was the babysitter and the background noise at lunch.

Something changed in the last decade or so: television became great. I am referring to American cable television, although free TV has lately showed signs of ambition. Cable is subscription-based, unlike free TV which depends on advertising to survive. This means cable is comparatively free of the burden of generating high ratings. Its creator-producers—“showrunners”—can worry less about pleasing their target demographics and focus more on executing their vision for their project. They can be Auteurs.

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Read our column at BusinessWorld.

Drive co-workers insane!

“The Lost Tribe of Coney Island: Headhunters, Luna Park, and The Man Who Pulled Off The Spectacle of The Century” by Claire Prentice is the story of 51 Igorots shipped to the US by impresario Truman K. Hunt to perform “native rituals” in a mini-tribal village at an amusement park in Coney Island. These included wearing their traditional costumes in the cold, slaughtering and eating dogs bought from the local pound, chanting and dancing, weaving, and fighting mock battles recreating their headhunting practices. Hunt, a brilliant promoter, promised the American public nearly-nude headhunting dogeaters, and he delivered. Prentice doesn’t use “sideshow” or “freakshow” to describe the proceedings, but that’s what it was.

The Igorots, jarringly referred to as “Igorrotes”, complained about their diet: they ate dog on special occasions, not every single day. But Hunt had promised the spectators savage, spear-wielding dogeaters. News reports of missing dogs were orchestrated to stoke public interest. The crowd also watched in horrified fascination as they beat a chicken to death. Remember that movies were a new invention at the time, and there was no TV yet.

Read our column at InterAksyon.com.

What would you do in Ferguson that a standard reporter wouldn’t?

Owning their actions. Not even their actions. The actions of your dad. Yeah, it’s unfair that you can get judged by something you didn’t do, but it’s also unfair that you can inherit money that you didn’t work for.

Read his conversation with Frank Rich at Vulture.

Anyone else love his TV series about his teen years Everybody Hate Chris?

Aargh, we missed Resil Mojares’s lecture on Andres Bonifacio yesterday. He’s giving a series of lectures at the Ateneo de Manila as part of the Master Teacher Visiting Program of the School of the Humanities.

Professor Mojares is the author of Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel (1983), The War against the Americans (1999), Waiting for Maria Makiling (2002), Brains of the Nation (2006), and Isabelo’s Archive (2013), among other books on Philippine history, culture, and literature.

Here are the scheduled lectures for 2015, which we intend to attend. Seats are limited. RSVP 426-6001, loc. 5340.

January 12 (Monday), 4:30-6:00 pm, Faura AVR
GUGMANG KABUS: FANTASIES OF CLASS RELATIONS

The lecture demonstrates the value in analyzing “symbolic action” (enactments on a symbolic plane of social desires and fantasies) in large masses of Philippine literary texts, as a way of understanding Filipino popular mentality. It takes as its example an analysis of Cebuano short stories built around the “poor boy-rich girl/poor girl-rich boy” (gugmang kabus) plot formula, and the meanings that can be drawn from this body of texts about the realities of class division in Philippine society.

January 20 (Tuesday), 4:30-6:00 pm, Faura AVR
WAR OF THE SAINTS: THE POLITICS OF THE SANTO NIÑO DEVOTION IN CEBU

This lecture traces the history of Cebu’s Santo Nino devotion (including the sinulog dance), from its introduction in the sixteenth century to the present. Exploring the tensions between church and state, official and popular practices, and the competing communities (and their divine patrons) in Cebu’s weakly aggregated urban zone, the lecture discusses the claims and counterclaims in the shaping of a popular devotion that has become a symbol of the Cebuano community.

January 26 (Monday), 4:30-6:00 pm, Faura AVR
THE STRANGE AND SAD CAREER OF PASCUAL RACUYAL

The lecture revisits the mostly forgotten story of Pascual Racuyal, the quixotic “nobody” who ran for Philippine president in elections from 1935 to 1986, challenging incumbents from Quezon to Marcos. Commonly cited as the iconic “nuisance” candidate, Racuyal (the lecture argues) deserves more respectful remembrance, as the sad clown who appears on stage to show up the idiocy and farce that characterize much of Philippine politics itself.

February 3 (Tuesday), 4:30-6:00 pm, Faura AVR
THE DANGEROUS BEAUTY OF THE HEADHUNTER

What does beauty have to do with headhunting? Drawing from the ethnographic studies of Renato Rosaldo and Michelle Z. Rosaldo on the Ilongots of Northern Luzon–in particular, headhunting and its rituals–the lecture teases out an indigenous conception of beauty that has important implications for aesthetics, politics, and social life in the contemporary

February 9 (Monday), 4:30-6:00 pm, Faura AVR
IS THERE A PHILIPPINE NOIR?

The recent publication of Manila Noir (edited by Jessica Hagedorn) by New York’s Akashic Press, as part of a successful series of noir stories about cities in the world, raises the question: Is there a Philippine noir in fiction? And what is distinctive and local about its stance and style in representing noir’s associated notions of crime, violence, law, morals and urban society?

February 16 (Monday), 4:30-6:00 pm, Faura AVR
THE INVENTION OF A NATIONAL LITERATURE

From his 1880 “El Consejo de los Dioses” to his unfinished “third novel” of 1891-92, Jose Rizal wrestled with the idea of a “national literature,” and sketched the conditions needed for its creation. The lecture shows how the discourse on a national literature has been carried forward, elaborated, contested, and enacted in the decades after Rizal.