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In the pilot of Jill Soloway’s amazing series Transparent, the former Mort Pfefferman prepares to come out as a trans woman to his three grown children, Sarah, Josh and Ali. The children, being unused to sudden dinner summons from their divorced father, expect him to announce that he has cancer. They have a boisterous family dinner in which they talk over each other, make rude jokes (When Sarah tells Josh to wipe the barbecue sauce off his face, he retorts, “Why don’t you wipe the barbecue sauce from inside your vagina?”), and talk about everything but the reason they’ve been asked to dinner. Maura—the former Mort—loses her nerve and announces instead that she’s moving out of the family house. This triggers a noisy argument over who should get the house.

Later, Maura tells a friend of her failure to reveal herself to her children. “I don’t know how it is that I raised three people that cannot see beyond themselves,” she sighs. Having read of its op-ed-ready premise, I tuned in to Amazon’s breakout series expecting a comedy-drama about a man in his 70s adjusting to his new life as a woman. It is that, and it is also the most intimate and unfiltered look at family I can recall seeing on television.

Read our TV column The Binge at BusinessWorld.

The movie is The Gift, it stars Jason Bateman, Rebecca Hall, and Edgerton himself, and it is now showing in cinemas. We haven’t seen it yet, but according to the production notes it’s about a married couple (Bateman and Hall) who run into an old high school acquaintance (Edgerton) of the husband’s, who starts sending them gifts and alluding to something that happened in the past. Critics have compared it to Hitchcock, which works for us because we love movies that mess with your head.

Joel Edgerton—fine, his distributors—sent us three The Gift notebooks, which we will give to three readers who answer this question: Were you nice to everyone in your past? Don’t hesitate to furnish lurid details!

Post your answers in Comments.

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Thanks antiquaryanne and leeflailmarch! Send your mailing addresses to saffron.safin@gmail.com so we can send you your notebooks.

There’s one notebook left, if anyone else has a story about having personally mistreated anyone in the past.

We give writing workshops at the Ayala Museum. The workshops consist of three two-hour sessions of lectures, exercises, and group discussions held over three weeks. The next workshop, Writing Boot Camp, will start on 3 September 2015. For more information or to make a reservation, email Marj Villaflores, villaflores.md@ayalafoundation.org.

This month we are featuring, with their permission, essays by the participants in July’s Personal Essay workshop. The submissions were half-standup comedy, half-trauma ward. We encouraged everyone to get over their fear of exposure, embarrassment and “What will people think?” Here are some of the results.

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Still from Napoleon Dynamite. When we googled movies about online dating to illustrate this essay, we discovered that there are no great movies about online dating. Because people looking at screens is not exciting. Black Hat almost did it, but only because it starred Chris Hemsworth.

Almost Forty
By Mia V. Estolano

Almost 40. If I were to live until age 70, I would have lived half my life already –no husband, no kids, no house, no boyfriend, no boyfriend…yet. A pasted-on smile is my usual answer to relatives or friends who ask the squirm-inducing question. I love my work. I love to travel. Oftentimes, the person who asks the question lets go. At times, they prod more. I don’t mind answering. It can get annoying, especially when they seem to think there’s something wrong with me, or worse, that I am a sad person.

But I am happy. I love men. And I’ve tried dating, just not the usual route. I tried to get dates online. It’s quicker and cuts the preliminaries of dating. At least that’s what my cousin told me. We are similar, only she lives in the US where online dating is very common. She said that I should try it.

So I did.

(more…)

In the heart of the financial district of Makati and in a basement at the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas complex sits what may be the most valuable tangible heritage of the Philippines: gold objects believed to be a thousand years old. There are gold bangles inlaid with semi-precious stones and arm ornaments of hammered gold. There are belts of woven gold weighing over half a kilogram, and finely wrought ear ornaments. There are death masks, cutwork diadems, ritual vessels and elaborate headdresses. There is a gold halter weighing nearly four kilos that can choke the most avaricious fashion victim.

There are well over a thousand artefacts at the Ayala Museum and at the Bangko Sentral, all of them found in the Philippines, all of them dating back centuries before the Spanish conquest. The intricacy of the designs and the painstaking labor that went into their production point to a sophisticated culture with a high-level of gold and metal-working technology. The number of funerary masks and other grave goods hints at a culture that believed in an afterlife. Recurring Hindu motifs such as the Upavita and the kinnari suggest that the owners of the gold traded with the kingdoms of Southeast Asia or were even part of such a kingdom. Point to, hint at, suggest — meaning we don’t know for sure. It is characteristic of our unawareness of our own history that we do not know who made these objects.

Read our essay Gold and Memory at BusinessWorld.

via 3QD

Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein. . .great books that generations of students have been required to read for their edification. They’re supposed to be “good for us”, like exercise or a trip to the dentist. Nothing kills the pleasure of reading a good book faster than treating it like homework.

What if the novels of Shelley, Bronte, Austen and company were regarded not as prerequisites for intellectual improvement, but as intended by their authors—as entertainment? What if the classics could be fun?

Pulp the Classics is a brilliant idea: taking some of the most famous works of literature and packaging them as 1950s pulp paperbacks with sensational covers, witty taglines, boldly-colored edges and fake scuff marks.

There’s a Ryan Gosling-like Dorian Gray peering out of his portrait saying, “Hey Girl…I’d sell my soul for you!” Marilyn Monroe as Tess of the D’Urbervilles—”She’s…No Angel.” A louche Mr. Darcy, the Colin Firth version, with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and the tagline, “Lock up your daughters…Darcy’s in town!”

The only cover we’re not crazy about is Wuthering Heights with Humphrey Bogart as Heathcliff. We love Bogey, but he’s not a Heathcliff.

The series is so effective, we bought copies for the design and ended up reading Tess again. We’re looking for the edition of Dubliners whose cover is based on Reservoir Dogs.

Pulp the Classics, available at National Bookstores, Php249 apiece.