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Chus says the Filipino psyche may be summed up with a line from Temptation Island by Joey Gosiengfiao. The beauty queens and hunks are shipwrecked on a desert island with no food or water, only a cassette player and a disco album by Giorgio Moroder. Azenith Briones sums up the situation.

“Walang tubig. Walang pagkain. Magsayaw na lang tayo.” (No water. No food. Let’s just dance.)

There’s a bit of that loony logic in Here Lies Love, David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s song cycle about Imelda Marcos and her yaya, Estrella Cumpas.

It’s arrived! Had to yell at someone in DHL, but it was finally delivered last Saturday (Thank you for coming through on a holiday, but you are in the Urgent Delivery business).

The Here Lies Love package contains a 120-page book with the lyrics, David’s notes, and archival photographs of Imelda Marcos,

Two CDs of original dance music featuring vocals by Sharon Jones, Florence Welch from Florence Against The Machine, Cyndi Lauper, Natalie Merchant, Tori Amos, Kate Pierson of the B-52s, and many others, and a DVD with six music videos.

Here’s a photo of Imelda Marcos with Andy Warhol at an art opening. Of course the most important page in the book is 101, the Acknowledgements, because I’m in it nyahaha (The continuing quest to be an extra).

The official release date for Here Lies Love is April 6. You can order your copy here.

The album is available in multiple formats: MP3, FLAC, Apple Lossless, and CD/DVD.

Make it circular.

Relief copy of a panel from Lorenzo Ghiberti’s The Gates of Paradise showing the story of Noah

Relic reveals Noah’s ark was circular

That they processed aboard the enormous floating wildlife collection two-by-two is well known. Less familiar, however, is the possibility that the animals Noah shepherded on to his ark then went round and round inside.

The now battered tablet, aged about 3,700 years, was found somewhere in the Middle East by Leonard Simmons, a largely self-educated Londoner who indulged his passion for history while serving in the RAF from 1945 to 1948 . . . in the Guardian.

Listen to Flood Tablet in BBC Radio 4’s A History of the World in 100 Objects.

Some local psychics insist that Noah’s Ark landed in the Philippines, specifically, Mount Arayat. “It’s the biblical Mount Ararat,” they says. Riiight.

Upon the recommendation of my annoyingly knowledgeable friend Rene I looked up A History of the World in 100 Objects, a BBC Radio 4 series, on the Beeb’s website. You can listen to all the episodes, 18 so far, on the site, or download them for free on iTunes. Each episode is about 15 minutes long, and narrated by Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum. . .

Stone chopping tool from the British Museum

Episode 2 features the oldest object in the British Museum, an Olduvai stone chopping tool 1.8 million years old, found by the archaeologist Louis Leakey in Tanzania. It’s a stone that’s been chipped several times to turn it into an efficient knife. According to the host, the people who made tools like this were probably not hunters but “brilliant opportunists”. They lay in wait while lions and other predators killed their prey, and after the predators had moved away they collected the meat from the dead animal. Without such sneakiness our species would not have survived.

Stone chopping tools were used for stripping meat and breaking into the bones to collect marrow fat, the most nutritious part of the carcass. (The host notes that marrow fat doesn’t sound too appetizing; obviously he’s never had bulalo.) Having this protein to eat meant that they would survive to produce offspring who could make even more complex tools. We’re here today because our ancestors were clever enough to get bulalo. . .

Bulalo photo from pinoycravings.com

Objects make us human in Emotional Weather Report, last Sunday in the Philippine Star.

A History of the World in 100 Objects, with photographs of the objects and transcripts of the podcasts, is at www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld.

Photos from http://www.dasblauelicht.net/

As a director Leni Riefenstahl was singularly focused and driven, a perfectionist who made other perfectionists look like casual practitioners. We see pages of her working scripts, heavily annotated with camera angles, apertures, filters indicated for each shot. Every shot is planned in advance: this is a professional who left nothing to chance.

For her documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics she started training her large crew of cameramen months ahead of the event. They trained as hard as the athletes. She took them to sporting events so they could practice filming athletes in motion and figure out the best angles. Her main concern, she tells Muller, was to make the documentary “interesting”.

To this end she employed the techniques of feature filmmaking—close-ups to heighten emotional intensity, play of light (In the fencing matches we see the competitors as giant shadows on the wall, crossing swords), perspective. She introduced now-commonplace techniques that were unheard of at the time. It was her idea to dig pits alongside the tracks so the camera could shoot the runners and jumpers from below (I thought Orson Welles invented that shot). She fought for permission to dig those pits, though the organizers rejected the idea of placing a camera on a catapult so it could run alongside the runners. The effect of the pole vaulter twisting his body over the beam then falling towards the viewer is breathtaking.

Riefenstahl and her crew shot 400 kilometers of film at the 1936 Olympics, and she spent the next two years editing the footage herself. The result of her labors, Olympia, was hailed as a masterpiece.

Throughout Muller’s film Riefenstahl stresses her obsession with detail and her need to get her films done exactly as she envisioned them. She is a filmmaking genius, and that is where the problem lies.

How could such a brilliant control freak be unaware, as she claims to be, of the atrocities that her employer Adolf Hitler was perpetrating?

Leni Riefenstahl in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.

Look! Museum tickets! Let’s give them away.

To win a pair of tickets to the Ayala Museum, answer this question:

What is the title of the exhibition of pre-colonial treasures in the Philippines at the Ayala Museum? The spectacular one.

The answer is at the museum’s site, www.ayalamuseum.org.

Post your answer in Comments. All correct answers are eligible for the raffle tomorrow.

The Ayala Museum is on the corner of Makati Avenue and De la Rosa Street in Greenbelt, Makati. Yes, they still have the dioramas.

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The winners of the pairs of tickets to the Ayala Museum are entry numbers 5, 8, 13, 22, and 34.

That’s theimaginist, pelonggo, livedangerous, joanishwatching, and madmooselle. Congratulations! Please post your full names in Comments so you can claim your two tickets each at Ayala Museum.

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Thanks for the quick response. Winners, you can claim your pairs of tickets at the lobby reception counter of Ayala Museum starting tomorrow, Wednesday, January 13. Just give your full names to the staff and tell them you won tickets from this blog.

Watching The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl. The title is accurate.

Photos of Leni Riefenstahl from www.dasblauelicht.net.

Ray Muller’s documentary about the women who made Hitler’s propaganda film Triumph of the Will is not something you can view casually. More later.