The Wily Filipino

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.

New American Pop Post: "The Man Can Sing Anything."

The answer: someone was hot enough -- Arnel Pineda, that's who. Following a previous entry on Filipino overseas musicians, a new entry on Pineda as "the ultimate OFW", called "The Man Can Sing Anything".

(Image swiped from the WFMU blog.)

New American Pop Entry: Cool Stupid.

My summer class got cancelled (long story having to do with new job opportunities in combination with low enrollment), so I guess I get to watch summer movies instead.

New American Pop Entry: Tongues Like Parrots.

A new entry, on Filipino musicians, on my American Pop blog, called Tongues Like Parrots.

Xavier Gens' Frontier(s).

Horror movies, as any Comp Lit freshman would tell you, are often allegories of something or other. They can, on occasion, be a little more direct and literal in their targets, as seen in works like George Romero's Land of the Dead (2005) or Joe Dante's Homecoming (2005), The first is a thinly-veiled call to smash the oligarchy; the second, an anti-war film about zombie soldiers and elections and the war in Iraq, with no veils at all. The French director Xavier Gens' unremittingly nasty Frontière(s)(2007), a refreshing breath of dungeon-dank air, doesn't quite fall in the same category -- it takes too much pleasure in tormenting its characters for it to be taken seriously as political contestation -- but there is, at least, an intriguing undercurrent of criticism to the entire grotty mess.

The setup should be vaguely familiar: two groups of young bank-robbing Parisian Arabs fleeing from the police -- and also running away from suburban rioters, in the wake of a right-wing election triumph -- make a wrong turn and end up at a bed-and-breakfast run by (youll never guess) a neo-Nazi cannibal family. The first two men arrive and are greeted by two suspiciously friendly women; they have sex, and -- well, it's obviously too good to be true. By the time the second pair -- an estranged couple, the woman a few months pregnant -- gets to the inn, the mayhem has already begun.

The dysfunctional family members range from two brothers with hair-trigger tempers, to a couple of sullen silent women, to a gun-toting blonde straight out of an Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS movie. But the most frightening of all is the grand old patriarch, looking spiffy in his brown shirt, played by Jean-Pierre Jorris, who delivers speeches on the virtues of racial purity.

There are no Leatherfaces in this family, but the movie's gore ancestors are clear: Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1976), and Eli Roth's Hostel (2005). Like these three films, Frontier(s) specifically emerges from a particular historical moment filled with state-sponsored violence, but at the same time frolics in the puddles of blood.

And frolic it does: fans of violent horror (and I count myself among them) would undoubtedly relish all the hijinks with the meathooks and a huge bolt cutter. There's a moment when one of the antagonists flips on the switch to a table saw, and one can practically feel the delicious, anticipatory collective thrill ripple inside the theater. Gens has a good feel for pacing, even if we've seen this narrative structure played out many times.

The reader is correct if you think all this gore overwhelms any kind of meaningful critique of Sarkozy's immigration policies. But Gens clearly wants to utilize his film as a way of violently intruding into the recent debate, as the notion of frontiers and their political significance resonates throughout the movie. One of Gens' interesting points made here is that even the extreme right -- at least before revenge by butcher implements is exacted against them -- would have to make concessions to immigrants in order to literally survive.

But the fact that France has long claimed a coterie of luminaries like Emile Zola, Marie Curie, Maurice Ravel, Charles Aznavour, Isabelle Adjani, and Serge Gainsbourg -- of Italian, Polish, Swiss, Armenian, Algerian, and Russian descent, respectively -- as quintessentially French optimistically points to a kind of pluralism historically embedded in the French national character.

Or this long list of foreigners may be seen, alternatively, as evidence of the assimilation of immigrants into le peuple franc -- but in the case of this film, assimilation in a disgustingly literal fashion.

In any case, it seems somewhat hypocritical on Gens' part to gesture towards political critique as a tasteless way of adding depth to what is otherwise torture-porn. For instance, one of the final scenes in the movie shows the gaunt and traumatized heroine -- all a-tremble, shuffling numbly into the sunlight, her hair crudely shorn, drenched in blood and pig filth -- and it looks as if she's staggering out of Buchenwald in 1945.

The title Frontier(s)is generically, perhaps deliberately vague, as it could mean nothing and everything; "frontiers" could be applied to a science-fiction TV series, a medical documentary, or even gauzy erotica. In this case, it refers to the borders of both nation and good taste -- as if everything that came before it didn't cross those lines already.

(Thanks to Rumsey Taylor for some of the revisions!)

American Pop.

Yes, that's my ugly mug staring at you from my brand-new "American Pop" column for AsianWeek.com.

There are a few entries posted already, waiting to be read:

- Introduction
- What Asians Listen To
- Grand Theft Auto IV and the American Dream (the first part)
- Grand Theft Auto IV and the American Dream (the second part)

Please drop by! I want your comments, folks!

You Wouldn't Get This From Any Other Guy.

Either Manila is the greatest concert city ever...

...or the most cursed.

Still: Rick!

And Where I Was The Afternoon Before.

Where I'll Be This Afternoon.

From the University of the Philippines Centennial Recognition Rites -- check out that last guy on the National Scientists list! (Galing talaga nang erpats ko!*)

2008 UP Parangal Sentenyal: The University fetes past former UP Presidents and National Scientists and Artists from the University in a fitting ceremony June 16, 6 p.m., at the University Theater.

UP Presidents: Murray Simpson Bartlett (1911-1915), Ignacio Borbon Villamor (1950-1920), Guy Potter Wharton Benton (1921-1923), Rafael Velasquez Palma (1923-1933), Jorge Cleofas Bocobo (1934-1939), Bienvenido Ma. Sioco Gonzalez (1939-1943; 1945-1951), Antonio Guillermo Sison (1943-1945), Vidal Arceo Tan (1951-1956), Vicente de Guzman Sinco (1958-1962), Carlos Peña Romulo (1962-1968), Salvador Ponce López (1969-1975), Onofre Dizon Corpuz (1975-1979), Emanuel Valdez Soriano (1979-1981), Edgardo Javier Angara (1981-1987), José Veloso Abueva (1987-1993), Emil Quinto Javier (1993-1999) and Francisco Nemenzo Jr. (1999-2005).

National Scientists: Encarnacion A. Alzona (1985), Teodoro A. Agoncillo (1985), Clare R. Baltazar (2001), Julian A. Banzon (1986), Paulo C. Campos (1989), Gelia T. Castillo (1999), Onofre D. Corpuz (2004), Lourdes J. Cruz (2006), Geminiano T. De Ocampo (1982), Fe Del Mundo (1980), Casimiro Del Rosario (1982), José Encarnacion Jr. (1987), Pedro B. Escuro (1994), Francisco M. Foronda (1983), Bienvenido O. Juliano (2000), Alfredo V. Lagmay (1988), Ricardo M. Lantican (2005), Hilardo D.G. Lara (1985), Clara Y. Lim-Sylianco (1994), Luz Oliveros-Belardo (1987), Eduardo A. Quisumbing (1980), Dolores A. Ramirez (1998), Juan S. Salcedo Jr. (1978), Alfredo C. Santos (1978), Francisco O. Santos (1983), Dioscoro L. Umali (1986), José R. Velasco (1998), Carmen C. Velasquez (1983), Gregorio T. Velasquez (1982) and Benito S. Vergara (2001).

National Artists: Napoleon V. Abueva (1976), Virgilio S. Almario (2003), Fernando Amorsolo (1972), Francisco Arcellana (1990), Francisca R. Aquino (1973), Daisy Avellana (1999), Ishmael Bernal (2001), Lino Brocka (1997), Antonio R. Buenaventura (1988), Benedicto Cabrera (2006), Levi Celerio (1997), Felipe D. de Leon (1997), Carlos V. Francisco (1973), Jovita Fuentes (1976), N.V.M. Gonzalez (1997), Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero (1997), Amado V. Hernandez (1973), Abdulmari Asia Imao (2006), F. Sionil José (2001), José T. Joya (2001), Cesar Legaspi (1990), Leandro V. Locsin (1990), Bienvenido Lumbera (2006), José Maceda (1997), Vicente Manansala (1981), Antonio J. Molina (1973), Severino Montano (2001), Ramón Obusan (2006), Carlos P. Romulo (1982), Lucio D. San Pedro (1991), Ildefonso P. Santos (2006), Guillermo Tolentino (1973), Andrea Veneración (1999) and José García Villa (1973).

*Someone asked me to translate this into English. How about: "My dad rocks!")

The Joys of Dislocation.

I read the first half of uncommonly prolific scholar Patricio N. (Jojo) Abinales' new collection of essays on a Philippine Airlines flight from San Francisco to Manila. Unlike myself – I only had a 90-minute ride to the foothills of Mt. Makiling once I arrived at Ninoy Aquino International Airport – some of my fellow passengers had to take dusty jeepney rides to the provinces, to places driven past on the way to Baguio.

The second half of Jojo's book I read on yet another plane – one from Manila to Tagbilaran (a place I know close to nothing about) and back – and then I'm typing this up in my childhood home in Los Banos, a town from whose everyday life I’ve been long detached.

There's a reason I'm sharing these particular bits of information, even if it likely comes across as indulgent hand-wringing on my part. But to the Tagalog-speaking, Laguna-educated reader like myself, whose knowledge of the Philippines is embarrassingly parochial and severely restricted to Manila's egregiously narrow cultural production, the book, as a whole, comes as a sharp and necessary rebuke. I suspect that Jojo would certainly have meant it to be one.

Entitled The Joys of Dislocation: Mindanao, Nation and Region (Anvil, 2008), these uniformly intelligent, wide-ranging essays – laced with bitingly honest wit – are superb illustrations of Jojo's life as a scholar and a public intellectual. A collection of columns from the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Newsbreak, and UP Forum, among others, the book spans a little over ten years of Philippine political upheaval, and Jojo – both as perpetual and peripatetic outsider and uncomfortable insider – was there to chronicle the events. If anything, this compendium serves as a correction, even (or especially) to academics who generalize about the country as a whole from the Diliman Republic. (Though Jojo may sometimes need to be gently poked in the side and be reminded that UP does not equal Diliman.)

What the book is most concerned about is Mindanao, as should be clear from the book's subtitle. (An inversion of the traditional "Luzon-Visayas-Mindanao" arrangement would have worked as well, but Jojo, himself happily afflicted by "el demonio de las comparaciones", instead writes perceptively about Southeast Asia as a region. Abdurrahman Wahid and Lee Kuan Yew probably figure more in this book than do the miscreants in Malacañang.)

One of his primary arguments is about Mindanao's centrality in the formation of the Filipino nation, forced into both benign and malicious neglect by Manila and its Western enablers by the middle of the 19th century. He writes, pace Warren and Reid, on the incipient "transnationalism" (my words) in Sulu and Zamboanga’s historical role as a Southeast Asian entrepôt. There is a certain repetitiveness in this initial section – the neutralization of Nur Misuari, for instance, is discussed about half a dozen times – but nevertheless the essays display a remarkable breadth.

A column on wild boar meat, for instance, becomes an opportunity for culinary nostalgia and a reflection on business relationships between Christians and Muslims. Reminiscing about his days as a nicotine fiend, Jojo writes (in a gem of an essay, "Smoking and the Pulang Silangan") about how smoking was de rigueur for members of the kilusan – at least until he discovered that Mao actually preferred British cigarettes and not Chinese peasant cigars. But by then, his diminished lung capacity made outrunning riot policemen a little more difficult anyway.

One might think that, amidst such somber topics as the breakdown of peace talks in Mindanao, or environmental degradation, or an open letter to Hashim Salamat, that the "joys" of the title are meant sarcastically. This couldn't be farther from the truth, as Jojo's well-chosen zingers and bon mots alone are worth the price of admission, give or take a belly laugh or two. Abinales pulls no punches: Jose Ma. Sison, the "Filipino Ayatollah" (his words), is singled out to hilarious but deadly serious effect. In fact, one of the collection’s many pleasures is its sometimes subtly scabrous humor. (Full disclosure: I experienced Jojo's humor first-hand, as we braved the below-zero winters and tinikling-at-gunpoint of upstate New York together. I consider him a mentor and a slightly elder brother, though he would no doubt bristle at being called "Kuya" or worse, "Tito".)

This very frankness makes the collection a constantly stimulating read, as Jojo, in essay after essay, takes a stand and defends it. He argues, for instance, for the abolition of UP Diliman's "intellectually deficient" Institute of Islamic Studies – arguing, rightly, for its establishment in Mindanao as it should be – and promptly kicks to the curb a reader who wrote in response, daring to defend the Institute. On the arguments about the burial of Marcos' "putrid cadaver" in Philippine soil in 1998, Jojo writes about how over 43 percent of military salvaging in a ten-year period were from Mindanao and asks, rhetorically, "How can people ever forget what Marcos did to Filipinos, especially those far from the national center? If there is one reason to oppose Marcos' burial in the cemetery of dead heroes, it should be the viciousness with which he unleashed state power on us."

A lingering bitterness (nay, sorrow) at the failures of the radical Left if not its stunning lack of foresight to claim a stake in the EDSA Uprising, then its murderous purges of anti-Sison cadres in the early '90s – is the topic of many a column. His scholarly knowledge, for instance, of different peace negotiations between communist organizations and the state throughout Southeast Asia underpins an essay called "Peace Negotiations and Peace Processes" and very likely puts Satur Ocampo and Roilo Golez (the putative subjects of his column) to shame.

For all his concern about dislocation, one wonders why there aren’t more essays about migration, or – given his current position as Professor at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University – at least about his fellow Filipino countrywomen condemned to pouring drinks for Japanese businessmen. I can only hope that he is saving those essays for another volume, but this intelligent collection fits the bill for now. May it shake you out of your provincial complacency as it did mine.