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Found these at a weekend market in Italy: earrings made of empty coffee pods. They’re very light, they’re environment-friendly, and it is highly unlikely that you will meet anyone wearing the same earrings.

Already our favorite line from the movies this year.

Is The Martian even science-fiction? Reads like engineering to us, and not that far-fetched.

Diplomatie stars Niels Arestrup who played horrible father figures The Beat That My Heart Skipped and A Prophet.

Having done very little in the past week, we are catching up this week and our schedule is crammed. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Ever notice how articles written at leisure seem too casual and relaxed, but work done at the very last minute has a sense of urgency? We don’t recommend living like this, but it makes an interesting change.

Today we’re watching 4 movies at the French Film Festival and writing 2 columns of 1,000 words each. One column has been written, and the first movie starts in 1 hour.

Observations: Central Square in Bonifacio High Street where the cinemas are is sorely in need of cozy coffee shops. A fairly swanky mall like this requires more than Starbucks, even if it is the upscale Starbucks. It also needs more dining options.

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1606. One movie down.

Diplomatie is about one of the quietest but most intense battles waged in the last days of the German occupation of Paris in World War II. The combatants were the German General Choltitz (Niels Arestrup), a professional soldier who was under orders to blow up Paris when the Allies arrived, and Raoul Nordling, the Swedish consul who was sent to argue him out of it. It was based on a play by Cyril Gely, and of course it’s mostly talk but director Volker Schlondorff (The Tin Drum) moves his camera around the luxurious suite at the Hotel Meurice where the film happens, and adds archival footage of Paris under occupation.

The argument goes like this:

Choltitz: If I disobey orders my wife and children will be executed.
Nordling: But Paris is so beautiful.
Choltitz: The Allies dropped bombs on Berlin and Hamburg.
Nordling: But Paris is so beautiful.
Choltitz: The Parisians didn’t resist but welcomed the Germans with open legs.
Nordling: But Paris is so beautiful.

The thing is, Nordling’s argument is hard to contradict because when the Germans and their French consultant discuss the sequence for obliterating Paris beginning with the bridges which will flood the Seine, the Louvre, the Opera, the Place de la Concorde, Notre Dame, your inner tourist shrieks, No! Not that bookstore! Diplomatie is a drama about civilized men dealing with the barbarity of war and trying to hang on to their self-respect, but it’s really a love letter to Paris.

1915. Two movies down and 45 minutes to wolf dinner before the next screening.

The version we saw

The official version

Saint Laurent is the unauthorized biopic of the designer starring the lovely Gaspard Ulliel as YSL, Jeremie Renier (not to be confused with Hawkeye) as his longtime lover and business manager Pierre Berge, and Louis Garrel (from The Dreamers) as the designer’s lover Jacques, whom he shared with Karl Lagerfeld (who does not appear in the movie). It is less soporific than the authorized YSL biopic, and has more sex and full-frontal nudity. The clothes and interiors are fabulous, but we’re filing this under “What Is Your Damn Problem?”—movies about brilliant, beautiful, rich people loved by everyone but themselves. We saw this with a friend who’s read Saint Laurent’s biography and says it stays close to the facts, but leaves out some very interesting characters. That fashion show where all the models wore turbans—Anna Bayle was in that.

2045. Three movies down and we decide to go home.

Lulu in the Nude is one of those deceptively light movies the French do so well. Lulu, a middle-aged woman who is married and has three kids, spontaneously decides to take off for a few days and in the process gets reacquainted with herself. You know it’s not a Filipino movie because Lulu feels no need to explain her decision to herself or anyone, is not eaten up with guilt, is not consumed by fear over being alone in unknown places, and doesn’t care what other people might think of her. She is not punished for not being a martyr. Best bit of dialogue:

Old woman: What is Simone de Beauvoir’s first name?
Oppressed waitress: …Simone?
Old woman: Right, I wanted to make sure you weren’t stupid.

And now we have to work.

Regulars may have noted that we have not been posting articles daily. This is because the last week of May always tries to kill us, so we took time off from writing columns and blogging. Also our ancient Mac and slow internet connection were sucking all the joy out of going online. The allergy (to prickly heat powder) is gone, the Mac is new, and the connection is fast, so we are back.

This is how we spent our “vacation”.

1. Defrosted the fridge. Why we do not do this regularly is a mystery, since all it entails is pushing a button. Maybe because we think of it as housework and we hate housework. We only remember to defrost the refrigerator when the icebox is sealed shut. When the ice has melted after a day or so, we expect to find The Thing in the freezer.

2. Thought of writing fake family history to claim relationship to the late billionaire Edmond Safra. There’s so much unsubstantiated information online, just posting a claim gives it traction. The only thing stopping us is the sheer weirdness of Edmond Safra’s story.

3. Read The Love Object by Edna O’Brien.

4. Shopped for feline overlords. We have found a regular source of Fancy Feast, which of course we will not reveal.

Sidebar: We’ve mentioned the cat epidemic in February which killed three of our outdoor ampon. We did not mention that Meriadoc disappeared on the day the outdoor cats started falling ill, because we could not accept the possibility that he had gotten infected.

Meriadoc

Yesterday the guard reported that Meriadoc has been turning up very late at night, wearing a collar. He has found other humans. Traitor! Deserter! Then we realized that he did the smartest thing in order to avoid the epidemic. Humans get sentimental about cats; cats are not sentimental. They survive.

5. Watched 6 seasons of The Good Wife, which we had avoided seeing because everyone told us to. The full review in our column on Friday. We enjoyed the show, but cannot rein in our indignation: What is the point of casting Matthew Goode, possessor of the most adorable overbite on the screen, and then not giving him anything to do?

According to reports he won’t be back for the 7th season as he is joining the cast of Downton Abbey. So we’ll start watching Downton again, but not the two seasons we missed since Cousin Matthew died in the Xmas special. Here’s Matthew Goode in Stoker, which we missed for some reason or other but have to look up because it’s inspired by Hitchcock’s Shadow of A Doubt, which we love. Stoker was directed by Park Chan Wook (Old Boy) and written by Wentworth Miller (Prison Break).

6. Started listening to Basic Russian audiofiles. It’s supposed to be easier to learn Russian than Hungarian. It occurred to us while pronouncing common Russian names (Boris is “Ba-REES”) that world leaders have gotten Putin wrong. If you want anything from him, you challenge him to single combat.

The Love Object: Selected Stories by Edna O’Brien, hardcover Php1,199

Edna O’Brien is one of the acknowledged masters of the short story. If that’s not enough to make you pick up this collection, this might: she writes elegant, sexy stories. How sexy? Her first book was burned in her native Ireland. We’re reading this book right now.

Shovel Kings by Edna O’Brien

In one lapel was a small green and gold harp, and in the other a flying angel. His blue jacket had seen better days. He wore a black felt homburg hat, and his white hair fell in coils – almost to his shoulders. His skin was sallow, but his huge hands were a dark nut brown, and on the right hand he had a lopsided knuckle, obviously caused by some injury. Above it, on the wrist, he wore a wide black strap. He could have been any age, and he seemed like a man on whom a permanent frost had settled. He drank the Guinness slowly, lifting the glass with a measured gravity. We were in a massive pub named Biddy Mulligan’s, in North London, on St Patrick’s Day, and the sense of expectation was palpable. Great banners with Happy St Patrick draped the walls, and numerous flat television screens carried pictures of the homeland, featuring hills, dales, lakes, tidy towns, and highlights of famed sporting moments down the years. Little votive lamps, not unlike Sacred Heart lamps, were nailed in corners to various wooden beams and seemed talismanic on that momentous day. Only three people were there, the quiet man, a cracked woman with tangled hair gabbling away, and myself.

Keep reading

We’re a little confused as to when school starts exactly, but this is as good a time as any to think about the teaching profession. If life were fair, teachers would be the highest-paid professionals in the world. Their job isn’t to cram young people’s minds with information they can regurgitate on command, it’s to teach these young people how to use their minds. They deserve our highest admiration, an admiration which society chooses to lavish on celebrity dimwits.

As in any profession there are good teachers and there are bad teachers. There are teachers who inspire you to reach your aspirations, and there are teachers who try to mock you because you’re smarter than they are. There are teachers who forego lucrative careers in other fields in order to guide ungrateful jerks like ourselves, and there are teachers whose families traded the family carabao to buy them a teaching position because they’re too inept to get a job. And there are teachers who imprint themselves on our minds, whose influence on our lives goes beyond classrooms and report cards.

To mark the start of another schoolyear, we’re paying tribute to our favorite teachers. We invite you to tell us about the teachers who made a real impact on your lives. Post your tributes in Comments. We’ll start.

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“Misery” does not begin to describe our four years in high school: we were so unhappy that we hid in the least-used girls’ bathroom in order to avoid all human contact and read books in peace. The horror began to ease only in our fourth year, when we became editor-in-chief of the school paper for a second term. As the school was focused on science and math, literature and the humanities were almost an afterthought in the curriculum. We recommend that anyone who intends to go into literature and the arts attend a science high school: if you can survive having your ego crushed on a daily basis, if you can maintain your resolve despite constant reminders that what you want is not allowed by the system, then you are prepared for the writing life.

In senior year, our Literature teacher was Mrs. Helen Ladera. She was elegant, straightforward, and formidable. The passing grade for Literature may have been lower than that of Chemistry and Calculus, but her teaching standards were consistently high. She demanded the best of her students, and for this she was considered a terror by some. She welcomed and enjoyed unorthodox interpretations of class assignments as long as these interpretations were well-argued.

At the beginning of the schoolyear, she gave us a list of novels from which we could choose four to write papers about. It was this list that introduced us to Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Augie March. For some reason she thought we might be interested in a book about Babi Yar, and now that we think about it, this kicked off our interest in Russian literature. She praised us when we did good work, and called us out when we were being jerks, like the time we wrote a wall news editorial asking why we had to take the national college entrance exams when they were so easy.

The word we used was “chickens**t” and she was not amused; we argued, unsuccessfully, that we meant chickensuit, chickenspot, chickenslut, etc. Excessive pride must be punctured early lest the student become an insufferable adult, but the response should be calibrated so that the student’s confidence is not damaged permanently. Even when she was reprimanding us, she never talked down to us. She explained that the issue was not fact, but respect and humility. She did not spew threats as lazy teachers might; she treated us as intelligent humans.

Thank you, Mrs. Helen Ladera. You were badass, and we mean that most respectfully.