The Wily Filipino

My Bloody Valentine, The Concourse, San Francisco, 9/30/2009.

My Bloody Valentine was punishingly loud -- louder, perhaps, than the SUNN O)))) or Merzbow concerts I've attended. This isn't necessarily a good thing, even if I do enjoy the sensation of my ribcage and my nasal bone rattling the entire length of the concert; inevitably you'll have to wear earplugs, and if they're cheap Flents like mine, you run the risk of submerging MBV murk into non-trebly murk.

And at a venue much like an airplane hangar like the SF Design Center Concourse, it's diffused non-trebly murk, but Jane and Xochitl and Jens and I were about a fifth of the way up front, so it probably sounded better for us. And it then becomes hard to make out the thick layers of guitar, like the wobbly choral ocean bed to which "To Here Knows When" is anchored. (On the other hand, the guitar motifs are practically burned into your head: I woke up this morning and could still hear that ten-note riff from "When You Sleep" ringing somewhere back there.)

But nonetheless, this means that one could still enjoy the live My Bloody Valentine experience on a purely somatic level, your body vibrating in sympathy to the speakers and to everyone else. Add to this a whole array of flash strobes so bright you can see where the lights are attached to the ceiling through your closed eyelids -- well, you can see what I mean by "somatic". You could have been asleep and the music would have still burrowed through you.

I can't really provide a setlist -- Jens said he recognized songs from both albums and both EPs -- but as one can imagine, most of "Loveless" made an appearance. ("Loomer" was fantastic; MBV opened the set with "I Only Said" -- you know, it's the one with that repeating chirp -- went on for what felt like a blissful ten minutes.) They came on a little after 10:30, and finished right at midnight -- and as expected, around 11:35, "You Made Me Realise" began, culminating in 20-odd minutes of a tsunami of churning guitar feedback. One of my best concert experiences of 2008, in a year filled with them.

Entries on Wayne Wang.

I have two entries on the director Wayne Wang on my American Pop blog. One is called The Saga of Wayne Wang and will probably inaugurate a whole series of reviews (if not a full-on retrospective) of his work to date on my movie blog. The second is an interview with Wang himself, called Insider / Outsider: An Interview with Wayne Wang.

And on film, eyeballs, brain, I have reviews of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Princess of Nebraska.

Fetch... The Comfy Chair!

From "The Michael Chabon Interview: Special Sarah Palin Edition", on TheAtlantic.com:

Jeffrey Goldberg: Isn't it great that Michael Palin's sister is running for vice president?

Michael Chabon: Jeffrey, I fear it might actually be kind of sad that I had exactly the same thought when I first heard her name. At least we can safely assume, at this point, that Governor Palin fully appreciates the deep wisdom contained in that old axiom: nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

New Blog!

I was playing with WordPress this morning and thought I'd repost my longer blog entries on movies into a new site. (The category page was getting too unwieldy to load anyhow.)

So: three entries will be uploaded a day until the old posts run out, which will probably be a month. I won't be editing any of them (regardless of how wrong they might sound to me now), just reposting them as I go.

It's interesting to see that, in the 11 years or so I've been blogging, my writing has actually changed -- for the better, I think. Whether it's an improvement in style (debatable), an acquisition of both writing and cinematic vocabularies, or a genuine attempt in taking the stuff more seriously, it's a reflection of an ongoing, immersive, giddy education in consuming movies. Or, perhaps more aptly, being consumed by them. I can't think of any other art form that has given me as much pleasure.

It should be clear that this cinematic "education" is not formal at all; when it comes to movies I'm a total amateur -- and yes, in the older sense of the word too. (And I should add that despite the mention of Tarkovsky and Kubrick -- and that screen capture from Last Year in Marienbad, which will change from time to time -- I'll still be mostly writing about flicks you can find at your local multiplex.)

The name of the WordPress blog -- Film, Eyeballs, Brain -- partly comes from an essay in The New Yorker by Jonathan Lethem called "The Beards". An excerpt from the piece is reproduced in a sidebar, and it should be self-explanatory. (However, I've actually taken it a bit out of context. It may be best not to reproduce the succeeding paragraphs as they're probably a little too revealing -- not of Lethem, but of myself. You can find it in anthologized in Lethem's essay collection The Disappointment Artist, but he rewrote the passage I quote.)

Please add me to your feedreader, link to me on your blogroll, tell friends, and most of all: please leave comments! (And please don't tell me that the url looks like it's four separate words ("Film, Eye, Balls, Brain") -- I know that already.

New American Pop Entry: Accents.

Called Accents, because I couldn't think of a title: mother tongues, Tagalog, from sea to shining sea, forming words in my head, dismay at "losing" my accent, and (I'll stop with the Journey references at some point, honestly) yet another little mention of Arnel Pineda towards the end. And no mention of "tongues like parrots" either, how about that!

From the Wiretaps.

A sampling of topics from my e-mail and IM conversations of the last seven days:

- the Joker as the Übermensch

- Gotham = Baghdad

- "Is Batman a Jack Bauer-like Republican vigilante figure, who takes the hatred of the world upon himself to do the necessary work of getting rid of terrorism, or a slightly-more-liberal figure who represents the moral gray zones surrounding every good action?" [quoting my friend Eleanor here without permission]

- "I was just watching Les Miserables... here was the symptom of postmodernity if there ever was one -- a musical phenomenon that hit the world globally as the... faith in revolution declined. Now that there ain't large metanarratives, all we're left with is Harvey Dent..." [quoting my friend Kiko here, also without permission]

- Alfred as servant and father figure

- the burning of currency and postmodern chaos

- Bruce Wayne is to Harvey Dent what the Batman is to the Joker -- or a different configuration altogether?

- Does power still lie in the hands of "the people" (including, paradoxically, the incarcerated), and do they ultimately correct the extralegal excesses of the state?

- The Dark Knight, the new iPhone, queues, obsessive consumer mentality, and the demise of national ritual, secular and otherwise

- IMAX and the aesthetics of scale

- Christopher Nolan quoting Michael Caine in Entertainment Weekly: "Superman is the way America sees itself, but Batman is the way the world sees America."

- and Tina Turner's "We Don't Need Another Hero"

I haven't responded yet to Gladys' comments, on female identification and Wanted -- it's over at my American Pop entry -- but more food for thought: according to EW, 48 percent of the audience at The Dark Knight were women. (I can hear your answer already, though: "Christian Bale, duh.")

New American Pop Entry: It's Steve, And It's Not Steve.

The third and last part of a series of related posts on Journey's new lead singer, Arnel Pineda, called "It's Steve, and It's Not Steve", on American Pop.

Two Movies That Actually Have Something To Do With Each Other: Hellboy 2 / The Dark Knight.

Almost five hours of movies (Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy 2: The Golden Army and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight) and four hours of sleep later, I find that I can barely string together a coherent review. (This is also a break from my usual Two Movies That Have Nothing To Do With Each Other series, because they're pretty similar.) I'll leave the real reviews up to Barb, who (we're such nerds) just posted hers within minutes of my posting this [WARNING: SPOILERS in her entry!] and Oscar, so here are some random notes instead. I tried keeping this under 1000 words, but no dice:

1. As great as Hellboy 2 was, The Dark Knight blows the 2008 summer movie lineup out of the water. Easily one of the best films I've seen this year. I missed seeing Iron Man and Hancock, and sure, that X-Files movie won't be out for another week or so, but The Dark Knight was simply fantastic. Leave work early, find babysitters, cancel unnecessary meetings, even promise to see Mamma Mia or The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 as a trade -- just go.

2. The guy at Jack London Square Cinemas told me last night that 600 people were coming to the midnight show. People were lined up before 10 pm, so strategize!

3. Selma Selma Selma, lovely as ever. (My friend Jane once said, "Selma Blair?? Ugh! She looks like some Comp Lit major from Radcliffe!", or words to that effect, to which I answered, "Exactly.")

4. What The Dark Knight "lacks" in terms of visual variety -- it's practically a uniform palette of washed-out blue and gunmetal -- Hellboy 2 delivers in spades. The surreality of Pan's Labyrinth (a film I didn't care for very much, actually) runs gloriously riot in Hellboy 2: carnivorous tooth fairies spilling out of the woodwork, caverns with enormous cog wheels, a truly frightening Angel of Death, and an entire bestiary seen only in bad dreams. (Thank goodness they're del Toro's and Mike Mignola's dreams, not mine.)

5. And three reasons to go early: previews for Quantum of Solace, Terminator: Survival (Christian Bale as John Connor!), and a third, shiver-inducing preview, which you may have heard about already, but here's a hint about what that movie is: "This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face."

6. The Dark Knight wins the prize for best casting, a prize made sweeter by the fact that the infinitely cooler Maggie Gyllenhaal has replaced Mrs. Tom Cruise this time around. And it's great to see Eric Roberts, Keith Szarabajka, and Anthony Michael Hall on the big screen.

7. What left me somewhat cold in del Toro's film was that the stakes didn't seem terribly high -- not cinematically, but in terms of the film's narrative. Perhaps the most stunning sequence has to do with an Elemental, a cross between Alec Holland and Cthulhu (and at the conclusion of the scene, more reminiscent of those forest giants in Princess Mononoke) -- and then it's unexpectedly dropped. Mignola and del Toro hint at an epic backstory, in an opening storytelling scene right out of Pan's Labyrinth, but what happens between then and 2008 is tossed aside.

8. The Dark Knight is surprisingly violent (I was shocked to discover that it was only PG-13), and references film noir more directly than any of the previous Batman movies. In fact, it's probably best seen not as a "comic book film" -- del Toro's movie is closer in spirit to the comics -- but as an urban policier, complete with a whole series of crosses and double-crosses, of unmaskings and deceptions, and a suffocating sense of an irresoluble moral impasse.

9. And lots of explosions. God, the things they blow up in these two movies.

10. Heath Ledger's Joker isn't just some buffoonish criminal mastermind like Jack Nicholson's Joker; his Joker feels genuinely psychotic and unhinged, and he's not the sort of sadistic villain that easily inspires any identification from the audience. As Barb will probably point out, Heath Ledger doesn't exactly deliver an Oscar-worthy performance. It's too one-note, on the level of Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow, but it hints, sadly, at an untapped talent cut short. As Oscar will probably point out, the heavy lifting is performed here by Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent: unctuous, ambitious, charming, and blinded by rage in the course of the film.

11. I now have no doubt that The Hobbit will be fucking awesome.

12. Hellboy 2 was genuinely heartwarming, even if these feelings were mostly earned by an unexpectedly sweet use of a Barry Manilow song. (And yes, it's a love story too, though as written above, the choices made in Hellboy 2 are nowhere near as consequential as the decisions in The Dark Knight.) It also has more of the humor of Mignola's books, though it's a little more forced here.

13. There's no similar exhilaration in The Dark Knight as you walk out of the theater, simply because it's almost relentlessly bleak; you're sitting at the edge of your seat almost the entire time, for starters, and the cumulative effect of two hours and forty minutes of this leaves you feeling bruised.

14. Though there's a nighttime scene of Batman flying over Hong Kong which is just marvelous.

15. Finally: two new movies, set in Manhattan, set in two major American cities, that no longer reference 9/11. (EDIT: Thanks, Eleanor from Urbana-Champaign, for the Gotham/Chicago correction.)

16. As with many good superhero movies, the protagonist struggles with the duality of her or his concealments, the split between public and private, the thin line between criminality and order, the meaning of heroism and the divided life, whether you're a lumbering, cigar-chomping spawn of the devil with a liking for six-packs of Tecate (and Ron Perlman is excellent here, his best role since I saw him last in Larry Fessenden's The Last Winter) or an asshole billionaire with a big R&D budget (and Christian Bale is also very good).

17. But in Hellboy 2 this struggle comes too late and undeveloped. The Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense is sworn to protect humanity from rogue supernatural elements, but the B.P.R.D. is composed of "freaks" themselves. (In fact, the word "freak" gets mentioned a lot in both films.) And thus, Hellboy's dilemma: he's there to eradicate one of his own, but he entertains this doubt for maybe a full minute.

18. In contrast, the struggle is front and center in The Dark Knight. I don't think I've seen a genre movie in a while -- maybe Ben Affleck's very fine Gone Baby Gone? -- that has explicitly foregrounded these questions regarding morality, and the consequences of one's actions, as this one.

New American Pop Entry: Unfunny.

I'm in a crabby mood, so be forewarned: a new American Pop entry on the rather dreadful Esther Ku, some petty infighting, and what happens when satire runs off the rails, called "Unfunny".

The Police / Elvis Costello and The Imposters, Shoreline, Mountain View, 7/14/2008.

At some point in your life, Dear Reader, you must have said to yourself -- and you probably wouldn't be reading this blog if you didn't -- you must have said to yourself, This is my favorite band. That band was The Police, back in 1983, at the tender age of [don't even ask], when I saved up my allowance to buy my very first album on cassette, Synchronicity, which was followed by a voracious rifling through their back catalog, beginning with Outlandos d'Amour. In hindsight I can see, even back then, the obsessive quality of my consumption: it wasn't enough to get the five studio albums; I had to go buy a bootleg Synchronicity T-shirt, and even that volume of The Secret Policemen's Ball, on vinyl for crying out loud, where a solitary Sting sings "Roxanne" without his fellow band members. (But my incipient critical faculties didn't cling to The Police for too long, fickle as they were; they were supplanted, in too-quick succession, by Talking Heads, U2, and The Cure (1984, 1985, and 1986 respectively) as my Favorite Band Of All Time, but no matter: The Police were the very first.

Just a few hours ago, with Son and Eloise, I finally fulfilled something of a lifelong and impossible dream of mine: to see The Police in concert. It feels odd to report that the highlight of the concert was Sting making a surprise appearance to sing a duet with Elvis Costello on "Alison", but the element of surprise gets me every time. (Costello also played "Pump It Up", "Radio Radio", "Watching the Detectives", "Everyday I Write The Book", "Clubland", "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding", and I swear they were playing "Accidents Will Happen" during the soundcheck, but he didn't play it.) But again, no matter: The Police gave a fantastic concert from start to finish, with my brain completely fried from what was technically 25 full years of waiting.

So, the setlist, as far as I can remember, below:

1. "A hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore."
2. "I hope my legs don't break."
3. "I'm a walking disaster."
4. "Echoes things that you said." / "Same tape I've had for years."
5. "Just like that old man in that book by Nabokov."
6. "Shame wells in my throat."
7. "I shake like an incurable."
8. "I resolved to call her up a thousand times a day."
9. "I will turn your face to alabaster."
10. "And no one's jamming their transmission."
11. "Looking like something that the cat brought in."
12. "And my LP records and they're all scratched." / "Rio riay riayo."


13. "I won't share you with another boy."
14. "There's a skeleton choking on a crust of bread."
15. "I always play the starring role."
16. "I keep crying baby baby please."


17. "I sold my house I sold my motor too."

Style Sheet.

In most matters of style, the Press follows the Chicago Manual of Style... unless the author has used an alternative style that is reasonable and consistent.

The alternative style sheet, as provided by my copyeditor, which is an oddly accurate snapshot of what's inside my forthcoming book, though I hesitated for a minute about "Q-Bert" versus "QBert":

Adobe PageMaker
anti-abstinence
anti-communist

balikbayan (ital. at 1st appearance, not afterward)

CommLink

DJ Q-Bert

ethno-linguistic

family-reunification as adj. before noun
family-reunification preference as adj. before noun
Filipino
The Filipino Channel
Filipinoness
Financial District
first-preference as adj. before noun

hiphop
Hiphop Nation
hyperaccelerated

I-Hotel
inarticulable
insurmountability
intraethnic
intraracial
Invisibl Skratch Piklz

Jefferson High School District

maidless
maidlessness
Manileños
middle-classness
misrecognition
multilocality
multisited
museum-ized

national origin as adj. before noun
neo-functionalism
non-citizen
non-fulfillment
non-existent
non-participation
non-practice
non-profit
non-quantifiable
non-quota
non-resident

occupational-preference as adj. before noun
Orientalism
Other
Otherwise

pakikisama
PhilNews Network
Pilipino
Pinoy
Pinoys
politico-legal
postcoloniality
postcolonially

reggaeish
re-turn

Second Wave open as adj before noun
semi-autobiography
semi-conscious
semi-fictional
semi-mythical
semi-official
semi-permanent
semi-racist
semi-religious
Serramonte district
St. Francis district
subheadline
Sunset District

Taglish
Tenderloin district
Third Wave open as adj before noun
third- and sixth-preference as adj. before noun
third-preference as adj. before noun
Top of the Hill district
transnationality
transnationally
turntablist
turntablism

unpatriotism

Westlake district

Stevie Wonder, Shoreline Amphitheater, Mountain View, 7/6/08.

One of my earliest childhood memories ever -- come to think of it, this is the first time I've seen this clip from Sesame Street in color, since I watched it back in the day on a small black-and-white TV. I don't think it gets any funkier than this.

Three decades later, I finally saw him live for the first time at the Shoreline, just over the weekend with Joannie and Luna. An amazing concert all around -- not quite as tight a band as in the vintage video above, and with an audience a little more sedate than the kid in the red shirt, but with massive amounts of goodwill radiating outward from the stage, it wasn't hard to be swept up and feel overjoyed. (Despite the odd sequencing, at times: the crowd on their feet with "Higher Ground", only to sit back down with an extended jam on Chick Corea's "Spain". A great reminder, nonetheless, of Wonder's place as a titan of American popular music, one not "limited" to funk and soul.)

And I can't pick from my favorite 1-2-3 combos: was it the "Isn't She Lovely / Ribbon in the Sky / Overjoyed" combination halfway through, or "Signed Sealed Delivered / Sir Duke / I Wish" two hours in? Nevertheless: an unassailable selection of songs, a fantastic concert.