JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

There’s nothing like a seemingly casual inside-out forehand pass that just air-kisses the line to make a watch look good. I’m watching The Fed and thinking, I should get one of those. (Not Roger because there is only one of those, but a proper wristwatch, and not that exact brand because I would feel like a congressman). Yup, when I buy my yacht and bid for Edith Wharton’s letters to her governess, which recently went for US$182,000. Noel and I were too late to make a bid, or we might’ve pooled our funds to buy a scrap of letter with a vowel and a consonant.

While rooting among my things in search of something to destroy, my cat Saffy dragged out my old Chairman Mao watch. I’d stopped wearing a watch out of sheer laziness—my phone has the time anyway—but how much effort does it take to put on a wristwatch? I get away with so much, I could try to maintain a little decorum (especially if I’m meeting with capitalists). More importantly, must not give in to entropy.

The watch never worked properly—a friend bought it from a sidewalk vendor in Shanghai. I took it to a watch repair shop, where the nice watchmaker (like Dr. Manhattan’s father) replaced a mechanism which cost more than the watch itself. Then he reminded me to wind the watch every morning. “Wind?” I asked stupidly. “Turn this thing here,” he explained. I felt like the kid who didn’t know that audiocassettes were supposed to be turned over.

Tonight: the Wimbledon men’s final. 15! 15! 15!

First time I clapped a pair of Sony Walkman headphones onto my ears I thought, ‘This is the greatest invention ever!’ Ah, the Eighties. For the next decade I was never without my beloved Walkman. And extra batteries, and two cassettes.

Now that I think about it, my beloved Walkman was not the same unit my parents bought me in senior year high school. That one was stolen from the office of the school paper at Pisay. We all had a good idea who did it, but the perp never confessed nor did he return it. Whatever ill luck has befallen that perp since high school may be traced to this nefarious crime. The Walkman had been left in Clomski’s charge so he accepted responsibility and replaced it with the exact same model, the first edition from Sony. That is why he’s now the CFO of a giant multinational.

My ancient, heavy, metal Walkman is still alive. It has played countless hours of music and eaten up miles of tape. It just needs to have a couple of parts replaced but I’m sure it’ll still work.

Dorski sent me this hilarious review of the 30-year-old Walkman by a 13-year old kid. It took him three days to figure out that a cassette has two sides. Love his manual random shuffle method.

Photo: Matthias Eomer Octavian

The Pacquiao-Hatton bout was over so quickly we had to entertain ourselves by discussing Pac-Man’s youngest daughter, Queen Elizabeth.

– I’m sure the Brits get a kick out of it. Their boxer lost, but Pac-Man named his kid after their monarch.
– Imagine when she gets a little older. “Queen Elizabeth huwag kang makulit, papaluin kita!”
– The names Filipino parents give their kids. “Nina Ricci”.
– Yes, but Nina Ricci carries it well.
– You should call your kid Coco Chanel. “Coco Chanel, naglaro ka na naman sa putikan, ang bahu-baho mo na!”
– “Coco Chanel, tingnan mo nga yang suot mo, ang dungis-dungis!”
– I know someone who named his kid Dracula. He should get a perpetual visa to Transylvania.
– “Hoy Dracula, nagsimba ka na ba?”
– “Dracula, first communion mo na, male-late na tayo.”
– As we speak, there are people out there who plan to name their future children “Wolverine Sabertooth Wraith Gambit Deadpool”.

Oedipus and the Sphinx by Gustave Moreau. Creepy, no?

Speaking of myths, I like the way Sigmund Freud summarizes the story of Oedipus in Interpreting Dreams. This extract from the Penguin Classic edition appears in the prologue to Salley Vickers’ novel, Where The Three Roads Meet.

Oedipus, the son of Laius, King of Thebes, and Jocasta, is exposed as an infant because an oracle had informed the father that his as yet unborn son would be his murderer. He is rescued and grows up as the son of a king at a foreign court until, unsure of his origins, he consults the oracle himself and is advised to avoid going home since he is destined to become the murderer of his father and husband to his mother. On the way from what he thinks of as home, he encounters King Laius and kills him in a fight that erupts swiftly. He then approaches Thebes, where he solves the riddle posed by the Sphinx barring the way; the grateful Thebans express their thanks by making him king and giving him Jocasta’s hand in marriage. He rules for many years in peace and honour and, together with the woman he does not know to be his mother, has two sons and two daughters—until a plague breaks out, occasioning a fresh consultation of the oracle, this time by the Thebans…

The plot of the play consists quite simply of the gradually intensifying and elaborately delayed exposure (not unlike the task of psychoanalysis) of the fact that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laius as well as the son of the murdered man and of Jocasta. Shattered by his unwittingly performed atrocity, Oedipus blinds himself and abandons his homeland. The words of the oracle are fulfilled…

My introduction to Oedipus and the Greek myths was via Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. There was a dusty paperback in my cousins’ house, where my parents had parked me in the hope that I would learn to play with other children. That didn’t work, but it got me interested in the classics. If they’d known what I was reading they probably would’ve freaked out—big ick factor—and had me exorcised again. In my defense I could’ve pointed out that part in the Bible where Lot’s daughters decide that in the absence of potential mates their father would have to do.

In Pasolini’s film adaptation, Oedipus is a young man in fascist Italy.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex

Woody Allen’s spoof Oedipus Wrecks in the New York Stories trilogy is the story of a guy whose mother vanishes onstage during a magic act and reappears in the sky to embarrass him.

Oedipus Wrecks

I was caffeinating at the mall when a youthful lady with white hair said hello. It was Celeste Legaspi. “I’ve been listening to your versions of American pop songs translated by Tinio!” I babbled. That album came out ages ago, she laughed. “I copied it from my friend’s iTunes library last year,” I said. “Please record again.”

The music industry is so different now, she said. Commercial considerations override all others. “You could record the tracks in your house and upload them on the net,” I went on. Her daughters laughed. “She’s lazy,” they said.

When I was growing up in the 70s, Filipino musicians regularly did Tagalog versions of songs in English. Hajji Alejandro did the Bee Gees’ Charade as Tag-Araw, Tag-Ulan, and in his cover of Barbra Streisand’s The Way We Were, Rico J. Puno suddenly switched to Tagalog and turned the song into something else entirely. They didn’t cover songs the way Pinoy singers do today (note-for-note exact imitations, down to the breathing and the hand movements. Today’s most successful proponents of the full mimicry (‘plakado’) approach: Arnel Pineda/Steve Perry of Journey and Charice Pempengco/Whitney Houston.) The material was borrowed, but they colonized it completely (“Namamasyal pa sa Luneta”).

The finest translations/adaptations of the words to popular songs were by the great Rolando Tinio. He’d already translated Shakespeare into Filipino, so pop music must’ve been a breeze. Take the Burt Bacharach-Hal David songs, One Less Bell to Answer and A House Is Not A Home. Every time I hear them I start giggling. Look at these lyrics:

One less bell to answer
One less egg to fry
One less man to pick up after
I should be happy but all I do is cry
(Note: Were you the lover or the maid?)

A rudimentary literal translation would begin:

Isang timbreng di sasagutin
Isang itlog na di piprituhin…

How about that Philo 11 hommage:

A chair is not a chair
Even when there’s no one sitting there
But a chair is not a house
And a house is not a home

Literally:

Ang salumpuwit ay salumpuwit pa rin
Kahit walang nakaupo roon. . .

Instead of a literal approach that would expose the cornball silliness of the lyrics, Tinio went for the literary.

Di na hahainan
Di na susundan
Tuwing siya’y may kinakailangan
Sinong hindi pa
Pasasalamat na

and

Walang nagpapalit
Sa datihang ayos ng silid
Nguni’t di magpapalit
Ang himbing ng pag-idlip…

The risible has been made poignant, and with Celeste Legaspi’s lovely theatrical delivery (very clear enunciation) it’s positively heart-rending. Remember when singers interpreted songs rather than belting the hell out of them? A lot of what passes for singing these days is actually song abuse.

The masterpiece among the Celeste Legaspi-Rolando Tinio collaborations is their version of Rodgers and Hart’s The Lady Is A Tramp. Their title: Ako’y Bakyang-Bakya. It’s not merely a linguistic translation, but an adaptation from one culture to another. The original lyrics are full of American references; Tinio placed the song firmly in a Philippine context while keeping its wickedly funny spirit.

I’ve wined and dined on mulligan stew and never wished for turkey
As I’ve hitched and hiked and grifted too, from Maine to Albuquerque

becomes

Ang hilig ko’y butong-pakwan, ayoko ng pastillas
Nagdi-jeep ako miski saan, hanggang sa Dasmarinas.

When you were a kid did your parents make you pluck out their gray hairs? What rate did they give you per piece? I got five cents. Now I have my own grays to pluck out. I can get some grays at the back of my head using two mirrors. Bruno’s had a gray-plucking service, I wonder if they still offer it.

What do scientists know about the causes of graying? Very little.

The age of graying seems to be determined by heredity, The Journal of Investigative Dermatology reported in 2005. Whites tend to gray first, often as early as their mid-30s, followed by Asians and then Africans. About half of 50-year-olds are at least 50 percent gray. So it would seem that Mr. Obama, at 47, is a little late to the graying game.

But while the arrival of gray hair is relatively predictable, how and why hair ages this way is not well understood. Unlocking those secrets could have potential well beyond vanity, leading to a better understanding of the aging process at the cellular level. Scientists even hope that by identifying the mechanism that kills hardy hair-pigment cells and leaves us awash in gray, they can develop new treatments for shutting down more troublesome cells — like those that cause skin cancer.