Some notes on Alex Gilvarry’s From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant:

1. First of all: the sheer chutzpah, to write a comedy about Guantanamo. But comedy it is: Boyet (Boy) Hernandez, just-off-the-jet fashion designer from the Philippines and armed with a degree from the Fashion Institute of Makati; landing wide-eyed and hungry in New York to get the “dollar dollar bill y’all;” roaming through an underworld filled with exotic models, Williamsburg hipsters, and bad performance art; then, in a narrative shift worthy of a comedy of (t)errors, arrested and spirited away to Guantanamo as a “fashion terrorist.” A comedy set in Guantanamo is too soon, one might say, but as the detention camp just celebrated its tenth birthday, one may argue that remembering it is not soon enough.
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Heard any exciting new music this year? I mean, genuinely exciting, can’t-wait-to-tell-everyone-about-it music?

My friend Jane and I were talking the other day about how this year* seemed to be a particularly bland one for music. Is it the recession? The splintering of musical audiences? Or was everyone waiting for the holiday season to release their good music, the way movie studios release their Oscar hopefuls close to the winter holidays?

In a separate conversation, my friend Jens and I also wondered if it was because there was too much access to too much music in general. Back in the day, I’d play Remain in Light and The Joshua Tree and Wish You Were Here and Synchronicity and The Head on the Door and Hatful of Hollow over and over because those were all I could afford on a high schooler’s allowance, and those became, by default, the albums I was most excited about. Now, every musical obscurity could practically be had for free on the internet, each new release streamed on demand.

Or maybe I’m just getting old.

But really, what is going on? For the last few years now, Pitchfork seems to be hyping one unGoogleable band from Brooklyn after another, their music interchangeable and forgettable. I look at the lineup of the shows at the Independent and I don’t recognize half of the bands anymore.

The other month I preordered a bunch of fall albums from bands/singers I love — Wilco, Tom Waits, Bjork** — and realized I couldn’t even remember a single track from their previous albums. And that goes for my highly anticipated releases this year that I should have loved: The King of Limbs? Gloss Drop? Stone Rollin’? Let England Shake? Cannibal Courtship? Watch the Throne? They’re all from folks I love, in varying degrees (Radiohead, Battles, Raphael Saadiq, PJ Harvey, Dengue Fever, and Jay-Z / Kanye West, respectively), and the albums aren’t dull or bad by any means, but they suffer from the affliction of being merely… okay. (Back in the day I thought Polly Jean Harvey and Bjork were these two twin goddesses of music, but only recently I realized that their really good albums — and I mean really good — were released in 1995 and 1997 respectively.)

Nonetheless, there were numerous bright spots in 2011, and I’m happy to share what tickled my ears this year. Here they are in no particular order, with a Spotify playlist to accompany your reading.

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I’m absolutely thrilled to be reading with some fantastic writers this weekend as part of the Filipino American International Book Festival in San Francisco.

First off, I’ll be reading at Eastwind Books in Berkeley on September 29 (that’s tomorrow, Thursday) for an event entitled The Places We Call Home, with a killer cast of folks (in alphabetical order): Oscar Bermeo, Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, Rashaan Alexis Meneses, Veronica Montes, and Barbara Jane Reyes. I’ll be reading an excerpt from a non-fiction piece about growing up in my Philippine hometown of Los Banos, Laguna, which will be a first for me. (Another first: reading with all these fine people.)

The Places We Call Home

Sept. 29, 2011

Eastwind Books of Berkeley

2066 University Ave.

Berkeley, CA 94704

Next, I’ll be reading at Koret Auditorium at the lower level of the San Francisco Public Library on October 1, Saturday, for a FilBookFest event entitled Hot off the Press, where I get to read an eight-minute excerpt from my novel in progress. I expect this to be rapid-fire, flash-fictiony, haul-you-off-the-stage-if-you-go-over-the-time-limit stuff. I don’t think I’ll be able to kick the very tall Rafe Bartholomew off the stage (he’s reading right before me) so I leave that up to Veronica, who’s moderating the event.

Hot off the Press

Oct. 1, 2011

Koret Auditorium

San Francisco Public Library

100 Larkin St.

San Francisco, CA  94102

And I’ll also be signing books! I’ll be at the Philippine Expressions Bookshop booth on Saturday at 1:45 (right after the reading above), and at the Philippine American Writers and Artists booth on Sunday, Oct. 2nd. All the booths will be out on Fulton Street, at the Civic Center.

My latest book, Pinoy Capital: The Filipino Nation in Daly City will be for sale at both the Philippine Expressions and Eastwind booths, and if you have a hard-to-find copy of Displaying Filipinos: Photography and Colonialism in Early 20th-Century Philippines, I’ll sign it too. (Or just come by and say “hello!”)

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The parking lot. I think that may actually be Anne Lamott in the foreground.

I’m loving the mix of people here. There are teachers, there are MFA students, there are retirees, there are folks like me with day jobs that have nothing to do with their writing.

One great thing about the workshop: no name tags. (You can figure out who the writers are by the familiar way they hug each other.) That snootiness I experience with strangers at (ahem) anthropology conferences — people in the hallway drop their eyes to your name tag, realize you’re a nobody, and walk on — doesn’t seem to exist here.

And can I say that these were the nicest people? Of course, I may have been lucky this year, but this was surely the warmest bunch of (then-) strangers I’d ever met at a conference. And I suspect it had a lot to do with the very nature of the conference and its organizers (although of course these participants were special too): laid-back, supportive, excited, friendly. It’s difficult to be shy when people are so welcoming, and soon you find yourself easily going up to other strangers and introducing yourself. The eagerness is infectious.

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Mountain + trees + stream: I saw this view about six times a day.

The clerk at the literary liquor store looked at us fiction writers and shook his head. All seven of us were at the register and between us we had only a measly couple of six-packs and a flask-sized Jim Beam.

“The poets drank waaaayyyy more than you folks,” he said, referring to the poetry workshop the week before. Indeed we had heard tales of drunk driving and general inebriation; whether this was conduct unbecoming a poet wasn’t clear. “They certainly bought more hard liquor,” he said. The clerk took our money and counted our bills. He still shook his head. “This is kind of sad.”

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