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Patrice, Wolfie and David at the Sutera Harbour Magellan, Kota Kinabalu.

Sport is war in microcosm, the civilized version. Send us your best warriors to do battle with our best warriors, and when the fighting’s done we’ll all have a drink and be friends.

On the day of battle I find Harry Morris and Justin Coveney in the breakfast room of the tournament hotel, the Sutera Harbour Magellan. They are having ham, eggs, sausages, ham, eggs and sausages. No coffee—they explain that caffeine gives you a high then brings you down. No carbs and sugar for the same reason. “I am always hungry,” Coveney says. “I moved out of my parents’ house last year, but my mom still cooks all day because she knows I’ll be by and I’ll be hungry.”

Read The Rugby Chronicles 2: One ball to bring them all. Today in the Philippine Star.

Nobody ever uses the blasted dressing rooms. I should lodge a complaint with management. Not. Wolfie and Flowers at the Borneo 7s 2010.

Jon at the Cock and Bull bar, Kota Kinabalu, October 2010

Here’s the second column from our straight guy columnist, Jon Morales.

polaris: Jon, have you ever seen any Richard Linklater films? Like Wong Kar-wai, Linklater doesn’t seem to appeal to heterosexual men’s cinematic taste. Maybe it’s the talkies.

Jon: I’ve seen Before Sunset, Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly, and The School of Rock. They’re not bad, I especially liked Waking Life out of those but as you said, they’re very verbose. I tend to prefer movies and literature that lean towards understatement and ambiguity, like WKW’s films or Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory of Prose. In my opinion Linklater’s films tend to spend a lot of time talking at the viewer rather than showing. Many of them feel more like a lecture than story to me.

sirius black: i’m currently in love and in a relationship with this wonderful, wonderful girl and gawd knows i couldn’t ask for anything else at the moment. what i am afraid of, however, is that the love spark we both have for each other will eventually die out. i know i shouldn’t be thinking that way but i just can’t help it, what with all the relationships i had in the past going the same route. the question is: how should we keep the fire burning?

Jon: You can’t. It come when it come, it’ll go when it go. The things that she does that thrill you may do so until tomorrow or until the day you die and vice versa; just treat what you have now as a gift. I believe there’s only a very limited set of things in life that we can control as people; feelings and attractions are not among them. I know it sounds rather sickeningly Zen, but don’t waste your todays worrying about tomorrow. That’s how you ended up regretting your yesterdays. I should send that to Hallmark. I’ll make a mint.

The Bund, Shanghai, 2008. Photo by JZ. Carlson of the Empire of Snacks gave us a tour of the city: we went to all the places mentioned in Lust, Caution and Empire of the Sun.

geekwad: You’ve mentioned living in China. I just got an offer to work in Shanghai for a year for onshore assignment, but I’m having second thoughts. My hesitation seems to come from my unwillingness to give up censor-free internet, cleaner air, talking to people without using flash cards or hand signals, and personal space. Are my fears unfounded? (Also, is RMB 13,000 monthly allowance enough to survive, or should I ask for more?)

Jon: The first month I moved to China I didn’t own a bed. I had to pay three months of rent on a single month’s pay. I couldn’t front the money for a bed so I spent the first couple of weeks sleeping on the couch that came with our semi-furnished apartment. My roommate, my former co-captain on my university rugby team, would come into the living room every morning, glance out the window at the smog as I rubbed the previous night’s back-alley Tsingdaos from my eyes and greet me by saying “Just another beautiful day in paradise” before stepping out into another ‘cloudy’ Beijing morning.

When I arrived in China I thought I could speak and read a little bit of Chinese after two semesters of Mandarin in college. My first meal was a rude awakening. Looking for something safe I recognized the characters for water, boiled, and pork on the menu. I thought to myself, “water-boiled pork, that sounds nice and safe let’s go with that.” When the bowl came out and it was blood-red with the amount of chili peppers and spices in it, my face went pale. Out of pure pride I got through half the bowl with the waitress standing over me looking smug before I turned to my roommate Ed and said, “We have to go home. NOW.” I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

So no, your fears aren’t unfounded. Saying that though, I loved my time in China. In fact, 5 years later, Ed is still there, and, though I ended up in Manila, I was actually trying to get back to Beijing (took a wrong turn somewhere). Yes, the air is awful, yes sometimes in Beijing dust storms and government-induced rainstorms happen at the same time and mud falls from the sky (they don’t even have weather like that in the Bible!), yes, it’s crowded, and yes, your access to Facebook and Youtube are curtailed, but it can be a great time if you have the right attitude. Our mission for the first 3 months of living in China was “finding new and exciting ways to embarrass ourselves every day.”

The dynamism of the coastal cities in China is dizzying. When I went back to Beijing for the Olympics in 2008 the city I walked into was almost unrecognizable from the city I arrived in in 2005. Skyscrapers go up in a matter of weeks, new restaurants, bars, shops pop up, burn brightly, and flame out within months. Every other week you hear another crazy story about someone ‘taking a runner’.

Of the problems you mentioned only the pollution and the crowding are insurmountable and have to be endured. You can easily get a VPN and have uncensored internet. The only drawback to those is really that your access to porn sites slows significantly, and while we all know that’s what the internet is for, you get over it pretty quickly. In my experience, being thrown into a place where you can’t communicate in your native languages really accelerates your learning, even if you have no natural gift for languages. The sheer pressure of needing to have something puts your brain into overdrive.

Don’t forget sound effects either. Hand gestures are simply not enough. I still have an entire internal dictionary of common sound effects for basic requests like salt, the bathroom, fried vs. boiled, and drinks. They also seem to be universally applicable as far as I can tell. And, if you’re in Manila, let’s admit it: living in Manila isn’t exactly a slice of pie either.

13,000 kuai (RMB) is enough to live on I think. I lived fairly well on 9,000 kuai/month post-tax in Beijing in 2005-2007. I assume some inflation has occurred and I think Shanghai is slightly more expensive than Beijing but the currency has appreciated a bit since then so you should do fine. I lived in a high-end condominium there, ate out every meal, and went out at least 2 times a week, if not more. I didn’t save a dime but I lived well. But if you think you can get more, hell, why not ask for it?

I think it’s a great experience to be a stranger in a place. If you don’t have the right mindset it can be overwhelming, depressing, and lonely. On the other hand you can see it all as a challenge to your resourcefulness, cunning, and charm. Even small victories like buying electricity (it’s prepaid there) can make you do a dance out of exhilaration the first time you succeed. Moving to another place gives you the opportunity to try out being another person too. You can reinvent yourself completely, act out a completely different persona, which can be somewhat addicting. So I say jump. That may not be reasonable advice, but then again reasonable people lead reasonable lives.

I have a question for you readers. I was sitting in traffic today in Manila and there was an ambulance behind us with its sirens on not going anywhere. Have any of you had direct experience with having to use an ambulance in Manila? If I am bleeding out and need to be taken to the hospital immediately, should I just go ahead and call it a life? Because right now that’s what it seems like.

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Got a question for Jon? Post it in Comments and he’ll get back to you next week. If not sooner.

“Manthropology,” a tongue-in-cheek look at the science of maleness, examines what recent discoveries in the fields of archaeology and anthropology can teach us about the state of modern masculinity. Ice Age aboriginal tribesmen, he discovers, were able to run long distances at approximately the same speed as modern-day Olympic sprinters. Classic Grecian rowers could attain speeds of 7.5 miles an hour, which today’s rowers can only attain for short bursts of time.

Peter McAllister: I have a strong feeling that masculinity is in crisis. Men are really searching for a role in modern society; the things we used to do aren’t in much demand anymore, and it seems we’re having a little trouble finding a way to establish ourselves. I don’t know about America, but it’s certainly the case in Australia, that men have an ignorant, blithe assumption that they are the best that’s ever been. But it’s not really supported by the facts at all. . .

Read The dramatic decline of the modern man by Thomas Rogers in Salon.

Who’s going to tell Justin?

This photo is from his modelling portfolio shot three years ago. Since then, to paraphrase the Salon article, the Flying Jeepney has gotten twice as muscular and now has a chest circumference attainable by only one in 50 men.

The Jeepney was a guest player at the PRFU 7s 2010 tournament the other week. He turns up at 2:10. Look, guys you recognize from this blog! Jon, Wolfie, Mark, David, Ned.

A couple of weeks ago I asked you to choose from among the designs you yourselves sent in for the official Jake Letts, Letts Hug It Out fan club T-shirt. As expected, chaos ensued. So we asked Jake himself to pick the design and he demurred, adding that he’d be happy with whatever you pick, but he did express a preference for this.

So this is it, Jakelettes. Now we need to figure out how many T-shirts to order. We can only have one color per batch, so cream it is, but we will ask the manufacturer to make different sizes because I personally hate wearing shirts that are huge.

How many shirts are you ordering, and in what size? Please post in Comments. We’ll accept orders until Tuesday, 23 November 2010.

When we know how many shirts to order, we will figure out the cost per piece.

And then, if it is alright with brewhuh23 and with you, I’d like to ask her to coordinate with the Jakelettes for payments etc. But that comes later.

Does anyone have a line to the Converse people?

We’re looking for sponsorships/modeling gigs for Patrice, Justin, Harry. And Jake, since he’s heard my Ari Gold impression. (Actually everyone on the team could use sponsorships, but I can’t speak for the ones who haven’t asked.) The team management is lining up clothing sponsors for next year, but according to Justin individual players may sign with other brands as long as they don’t wear the clothes (or logos) during matches.

Yesterday I was talking to the Rimowa people (I love Rimowa and look down on other luggage) and I said, “If the polycarbonate luggage is so invincible you should get some rugby players to sit on it.” And they said, “Hmm, there’s an idea.”

Ideas! We need ideas! And useful contacts. Look, they’re going to get “mainstreamed” soon enough, so Letts reduce the yucch factor (for ourselves) and help smooth their introduction to the mass market. I am Ari on this one. They get bupkes, that’s not right. Be a mensch, help.

Straight guy readers, we know you’re out there, and we know your relationship with this site is in crisis. There was no problem when we started covering rugby a few months ago—you approve of sports in which guys hit each other. But then we started featuring individual rugby players and squealing over them and things just got girlier from there. Before long the rugby players were taking their clothes off and you began to fear logging onto this site lest your coworkers see what you were reading and question your manhood. We sort of feel bad for you, but there’s no way we’re giving up our rugby guys.

Therefore we proposed a compromise. Reader Cacs suggested a column specifically addressing straight guy concerns like how to get the girl. We nominated a straight guy columnist: Jon Morales of the Philippine Volcanoes, the national men’s rugby team. Jon has lived all over the US, recently in China, and is currently based in Manila. And while he is regularly tackled playing for the Nomads rugby club, Jon sounds like a guy who’s never been hit on the head.

Cacs is concerned that our guy columnist will trigger a fresh wave of alpha male envy. So he asked Jon to list his top five guy flicks of all time, to give us a clearer idea of how his mind works. Here is the list.

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Jon Morales’s Top Five Guy Flicks Of All Time

Saving Private Ryan

When I was young my greatest dream was to be a World War II fighter pilot, piloting my Mustang shooting down Messerschmitts and then going back to the airfield and having a tragic pint at the pub with my surviving squadron mates in the evening. If I’m ever rich my first completely excessive and gratuitous purchase will be a pilot’s license and a faithfully restored P-51 Mustang. While this movie isn’t about any glamorous coolly tough and tragic flyboys it feeds into that World War II fetish.

The opening shock of the D-Day landings has to be one of the best battle scenes in any movie (I prefer to quietly ignore the schlocky old man in the graveyard opening). While Matt Damon’s character is the title character and appears in the opening and closing scenes of the movie the main character is really Tom Hanks’s Capt. Miller and the rather subtle central question of the movie is not the one that’s actually openly stated in the movie about how many sacrificed lives is one life worth?

The real question is how a civilized man, a high school English teacher who loves to tend to his roses at home with his wife, deals with the barbarity of war and the awful burden of responsibility for other mens’ lives. The arc of Miller’s relationship with his leadership position and his men from D-Day to the shaking hand episode to the disastrous assault and leadership crisis at the machine gun nest and his redemption at Ramelle saves the movie from being just another rather shallow and sentimentalist celebration of America’s “Greatest Generation” (for a pretty grievous example see: Pearl Harbor).

Days of Being Wild/In the Mood for Love/2046

Ok so it’s supposed to be a top 5 but I’m going to cheat on this list. You can’t really separate this semi-trilogy of interrelated characters spanning the 60s directed by Wong Kar-Wai and shot by Christopher Doyle (now of Slumdog fame). On first viewing all three movies are maddeningly confusing, In the Mood for Love especially uses repeated shots with small changes to advance the ‘plot’. Each movie relies more on character study than a traditional plot but Doyle’s understated cinematography does a great job of evoking a bygone Hong Kong.

If there’s one thing I learned while living in China it’s that Chinese love stories never end well, and these three are no different as they trace the missteps, bad choices, and alienation of its main characters and the evolution of different characters and how they deal with their broken hearts. Plus Tony Leung’s suit and fedora wearing, cigarette smoking tough-guy with a broken heart is so Rat Pack Cool you can’t help but like him even if he is a conscienceless playboy who spends most of his time mooching off everyone around him, breaking innocent hearts, and sleeping with prostitutes by the last movie.

Old School/Fight Club

Ok so you might think this is a weird pairing but hear me out. These two are actually the same movie.

What the hell does David Fincher’s ultra-violent, dark, nihilistic movie have to do with a jolly romp involving Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell, and Vince Vaughan? Watch closely and you can see that Old School is actually just Fight Club as a comedy. The directors of Old School even self-consciously and openly allude to Fight Club, like the photocopying scene at work in both movies and the diner scene where the waiter refuses payment. They’re both about men retreating from the influence of women and a mundane existence into initially fun exclusively male societies. In the end both decide that having women around is probably a Good Thing.

Aside from any deeper philosophical considerations Old School’s just damn funny and still my favorite of that genre of comedies that started coming out in the late 90s/early Aughts that continues to this day.

Kung Fu Hustle

Kung Fu, singing, dancing, gangsters, comedy, a love story, lollipops…really what more could you want from a film? Stephen Chow pays homage to just about every movie ever, Chinese or Western, in a light-hearted comedy. Plot’s pretty basic, petty loser who gets up to random antics and is kind of a jerk unlocks his inner goodness and discovers he has super powers and saves the day. My friend who watches a lot of movies contends that the less famous Shaolin Soccer is better but he’s probably being an elitist jerk show-off.

All of the Bourne Movies

So you’re probably going through this list and thinking ‘my god! I thought this list was for straight guys! I thought this guy was a rugby player? Where are the action movies? What sort of fellow is this? Is he man? or mouse?’ So here you go, the Bourne movies. Starring a guy from my hometown who made his name making a movie about my hometown.

The first one was a nice antidote to the Bond series of the 90s which, while we all like Pierce Brosnan and he’s a great guy and all, let’s face it, had basically become a parody of itself. Anyway Bond works for The Man and if you really think about it doing The Man’s dirty work isn’t really all that cool, even if you do get to wear tuxedos and sleep with gorgeous international women while doing it.

You know what’s cool? Fighting the Man. Fighting the Man and winning. That’s cool. The Bourne movies are probably also directly responsible for sending Bond into the new, grittier, much better Daniel Craig direction. You know? The one where Bond actually acts like a person who kills people for a living? That one. The Bourne movies pull off the pretty tough trick of each one getting better than the previous one too, which is fairly impressive.

As you probably have noticed I’ve left The Shawshank Redemption off the list because apparently that’s totally clichéd. Actually I left it off because Shawshank is so damn good that there’s really no need to discuss it further. If you’re a straight man and you don’t like Shawshank please proceed directly to the bureau of manliness and turn in your man card. That will be all.

Runners-up:
Old Boy
Casablanca
Terminator 2
The Road Warrior
Blade Runner
The Big Lebowski

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Post a question for Jon. He will answer your questions every week.

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Jon has answered your initial questions.

Thanks for the love on my opening column.

@#1 angus25: I like Shawshank, but I didn’t realize that it was a masculine movie. How come?

We could go into a long discussion about exclusively male societies in art, from Plato’s Republic to Hemingway’s Men Without Women to every war movie ever to the Old School/Fight Club pairing. Or the implied misogyny of having only two women in the entire movie: one’s a dead adulteress who is the root of the movie’s central dilemma and the other one’s a poster. But maybe straight guys deep down just fantasize that if there just weren’t so many damn women around we could get down and talk about our feelings!

@#6 Akyat-Bahay Gangster: How does one find time or make time to watch movies? I work 60 – 80 hours a week and barely have enough time to go through my subscription copies of The Economist and Fortune. Layer on that the usual family and social obligations (already minimal for me), and there’s nothing left for films. Or so I think. Advice?

I used to work in Manhattan on Wall Street hours (90 average 130 peak hours a week) so I can empathize. With all of the technology out there now you can treat movies like books and carry them around with you if you have the means to buy the gadgets. Watch it when you’re commuting, or waiting for someone, or sitting on the toilet (I would suggest not trying to watch while showering though). I try to be really selective too and wait to hear buzz from trusted sources or media to see if its worth the time commitment. I miss a lot of mainstream movies because of this though: I still haven’t seen Anchorman, Tropic Thunder, or Toy Story 3.

@#8 goofy: Strange. I always thought that Wong Kar Wai worship was a gay thing.

Is it? It might be. I don’t know as many gay people here in the Philippines as I used to so maybe I’m out of touch. Then again Moulin Rouge almost made this list so maybe I’m just a really sensitive guy.

Come what may…….