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Saffy with vintage Howling Mad Murdock action figure

Before the movie.

Bert: What are we watching?

Me: I’m not watching Sex and the City, I’ve seen Prince of Persia, and Emir is not showing here, which leaves The A-Team.

Bert: Oh, the one with the two gays.

Me: Two? I’ve heard the Bradley Cooper rumors, but who’s the other one?

Bert: Liam Neeson.

Me: NOOO! Liam Neeson is not gay. He is famously not gay.

Bert: He’s been involved with all kinds of women—Helen Mirren, Julia Roberts—and after the death of Natasha Richardson, maybe he wants a change.

Me: You baklas have taken everybody, but you cannot have Liam Neeson! (Colin Farrell we share.)

The trailer.

Me: Ooh, it’s the Christopher Nolan movie.

Bert: Gasp! It’s my husband, Leonardo DiCaprio!

Me: Gasp! It’s Cillian Murphy!

Bert and Me: Gasp! It’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a man!

Bert: We must watch this smorgasbord.

The movie itself.

Bert watches the first two minutes with the bad handheld camera and senseless blocking and falls asleep. Ten minutes later he is called back to the editing room. I stick around because I am an optimist. I figure that if a movie can’t be good, it can at least be bad fun.

Liam Neeson is a far better actor than George Peppard, but Hannibal Smith is not an acting job, it is a charming cartoon. Neeson cannot do fluff, too much gravitas. Also Peppard could really work that cigar and in Neeson’s case it just reminds us of his famous attribute.

When Bradley Cooper trowels on the charm he just looks oily and cloying and makes us miss Dirk Benedict.

I’d gotten it into my head that Spike Jonze was Howling Mad Murdock. No, it’s Sharlto Copley, who was terrific as the dorky bureaucrat in District 9 and just looks lost in this clunky movie. The original Murdock was Dwight Schultz, who could pull off the combination of bonkers and dependable. Schultz later played J. Robert Oppenheimer in Fat Man and Little Boy, a movie about the Manhattan Project.

But the A-Team rises and falls on the actor who takes over the Mr. T role, and you knew this was coming: I pity the fool who cast that actor.

In the scene where the CIA guy visits Hannibal Smith in prison, there is a shot of Liam Neeson walking towards the camera, and for five seconds the camera stares at his crotch. We don’t even see his face, just his fly—a lingering shot of his famous attribute. I did not imagine this, I swear. Either the director was attempting humor—a quality strangely absent from this movie (and it’s The A-Team!)—or the projectionist was fascinated by the famous attribute.

And the sad part is, I still got up and walked out of the movie. What a waste of time.

Palma Hall, UP Diliman, 2009. Or is it Melchor Hall. Did you know the two buildings are mirror images?

Last Thursday at dinner Ren mentioned that the Chemistry Pavilion at UP Diliman had burned down the previous night.

“No!” I cried. I used to hang out at the Chem Pav, at the toxic vermin-infested laboratory of Din and Mr Dorothy Schiff Professor of Genomics at NYU (Oy, Michael). Or as I thought of it, Arrakis with smaller sandworms. (Human genomics: building the Kwisatz Haderach.)

“Yes,” Din replied to my text, “What a way to start Chem’s 100th anniversary this year! Only the second floor of Pavilion 2 was hit. Besides, the new building has already been built. My friends who are faculty there actually woke me up last night just to tell me.”

And so Din was woken up on two consecutive nights with the same news.

Chus had to drop by the gallery to see his painting hanged so we tagged along.

Cubao always reminds me of the opening of school—my folks used to take me shopping for black school shoes at Gregg’s or Shoemart back when it was a shoe store and not the megamall chain. Shopping for shoes was always a fraught occasion because I never liked any of the shoes I tried on, my mother always lost her patience at me, my father lost his patience at both of us, and my parents carried on like characters in Russian novels while I watched them with entomological interest and thought, “I’ll never be an adult.” Cubao also meant the cinema (Before the age of the multiplex my parents used to take me to those standalone movie houses along Aurora Boulevard: Coronet, Remar, and Diamond), the Xmas display at C.O.D., the record stores near Rustan’s, and Fiesta Carnival with the train that went into the tunnel of horrors that scared no one.

All these places are gone. Now I associate Cubao with the first Bellini’s. When I first ate there it was literally a hole in the wall with plastic chairs; now it’s four times larger and movies have been shot there.

When we got to Sining Kamalig (Level 4 of the Gateway Mall, come to the opening reception tonight from 6 to 9), I was pleasantly surprised to find that Chus had painted my portrait.

The detail on the left is from the shower murder in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Kris Soguilon painted this homage to Ishmael Bernal’s Himala.

On the way out we dropped by Fully Booked to see the most literary floor in town: The Prince is on the tiles. I wonder how Machiavelli would feel about people treading on his prose; then again he was Mr. The End Justifies The Means.

Afterwards I suggested a trip to Cubao X at the old Marikina Shoe Expo because I was under the impression that the vintage stores and art galleries stayed open till after midnight. I was wrong: the bars stay open till late, but everything else is closed except for the comic book and toy shop that sold

The Holy Grail!

The other open store had vintage furniture, chandeliers that remind me of the unfinished Death Star,

and these brilliant earrings.

My other mistake was thinking that stuff in Cubao X would be cheap. Ha! Ha! Ha!

Noel wanted an apartment with a chandelier, not a chandelier with an apartment. So he made his own, based on a design he’d seen in a book. That design used champagne flutes. Instead of glasses, he used bottles.

He found a stash of Magnolia Choco-Vim bottles at a vintage store (Somebody told me that an “antique” has to be 100 years old at least) in Cubao Expo.

Choco-Vim, infant readers, was a chocolate drink that was popular when we were kids in the 1970s. I used to drink Choco-Vim during recess time.

Noel and his decorator cleaned the bottles and strung them up with lights. Voila.

A piece of Seventies nostalgia dangling from the ceiling. You can see it at Noel’s house, which I call “Jackie O in the Hamptons”.

Abe Florendo who was my editor at TODAY asked me to contribute an essay to a book he’s putting together. The subject is Teachers. My mother was a public school teacher. Here’s a snippet from my essay.

Paakpaak. Sculpture by Leo Abaya.

My mother had a reputation as an excellent teacher, slightly fearsome in the enforcement of standards, but fair. Her students seemed devoted to her—they frequently hung around our house after school, sometimes with their mothers. True, many of them were her co-teachers.

I don’t know if this sort of extracurricular fraternizing (sororizing?) is condoned these days, but it seemed perfectly natural in the Seventies. In fact my mother would casually tell her students’ mothers, “Ay naku mare, medyo mahina ang utak ng anak mo at may katamaran.” (My dear, your kid is a little slow on the uptake and rather lazy.) Then they would laugh, and within hearing distance of the child in question.

Under the current code this would be denounced as a violation of the student’s rights and self-esteem, but my mother’s brutal honesty had good results. Her pupils, she pointed out, became doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, managers, and expats. She taught them to exercise their strengths, mitigate their failings, and accept themselves for what they were. It’s the kind of clear-eyed appraisal we lack in this digital age, when technology enables and empowers so much mediocrity.

This weekend I had the opportunity to watch a master manipulator at the peak of her powers. The master: my niece Mika, who just turned three. Mika was named after the Formula One driver, so she might well have been called Schuey, Jensen, or Juan-Carlos. She is big for her age—she is often mistaken for a 5-year-old—and very independent. Not only is she proficient with spoon and fork at the table, but every morning she picks out her own clothes for the day. After she’s made her wardrobe choices, she decides what her mother—my sister Cookie—is going to wear to work.

If my sister declines the styling advice there is a huge scene. For Mika has a mutant superpower: a very loud, bloodcurdling shriek. It stops grownups in their tracks and sends cats running for cover. I suspect it can pierce metal and interfere with sonar devices. The minute I figure out how to weaponize it I’m calling NATO.

Impressive as this superpower is, it is not the main weapon in Mika’s arsenal. Her greatest ability is bending adults to her will.

Little Dictators in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.