All right, here’s a bootleg offering for you folks: the best band in America, Yo La Tengo, doing a blistering cover of Brinsley Schwarz’s “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace Love And Understanding” on the first night of their series of Hanukkah concerts in Hoboken back in 2001. (Okay, it’s really Elvis Costello’s cover version they cover here.)

Earlier this year I was driving up and down Interstate 80 from San Francisco to Davis and back and was overly conscious of the “No War On Iraq” bumper sticker on my car. I have to admit that, at the height of my paranoia (and anger and confusion), I was a little worried every time I’d step out to get gas; I looked different, and my politics were probably different too. But no matter: when this song came on my car stereo, practically at the beginning of Yo La Tengo’s set, I felt oddly… invincible. Like the war would never begin and everything would be all right. Or something like that.

(It’s not the clearest recording, but it’s still a great version, and anything Yo La Tengo performs is still tops in my book.)

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M. Evelina Galang’s Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images (Coffee House Press, 2003) arrived in my mailbox today, and — from what I’ve gleaned in the last 20 minutes since I pulled it out of the priority mail envelope — it sure looks like it kicks ass. Scholarly articles, memoirs, poetry, fiction, art, primary historical documents, advertisements — it’s all here. Thankfully it’s not too late to change my syllabus for the spring; this looks like essential, thought-provoking (and most important for my students, exciting) stuff. And yes, I do read the books before I assign them. =)

(I got my copy from Small Press Distribution — okay, I know it’s cheaper at another online bookstore, but…)

p.s. to you poet-types out there: Does anyone know why Michael Gottlieb’s Lost and Found seems to have been “removed,” with a new version apparently coming out in mid-December instead? And why Roof Books doesn’t even list it?

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Michelle writes that I beat her to the punch by posting spam poetry. I don’t know if what I posted would really qualify as “spam” — “real” spam poetry would probably look like this crude offering:

I am hard.
I stay hard.
I am natural viagra.
I add three inches to my cable descrambler.
I make $$$$$ from my hot and horny computer.
I find the truth about my neighbor’s gas mileage.
I astound my wife with prescription drugs delivered overnight.
I watch Jenny and her slutty cheerleader friends refinance home loans.

I am spam.
I contain multitudes.

Since then I’ve received about three or four more of those odd spam messages — with great titles like “restless old immanuels” and “when he laid” — and I’m not sure what to do with them. “restless old immanuels” doesn’t start off very well — the first two words are “german pecan,” and “gesture wotan cheesecake cunningham” just stops the whole thing dead (though “cheesecake cunningham” works with “terrible betsy”). But it ends with:

glued thickish.
delinquent
soften

which I kind of like.

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Damn you, Rhett! I should be working!

15.77909% — Geek.

And:

The Dante’s Inferno Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!

Level descriptions: http://www.4degreez.com/misc/dante-inferno-information.html
Take the test: http://www.4degreez.com/misc/dante-inferno-test.mv

Which is, alas, crap for various reasons, like the Gender Test (it thought I was “definitely a woman!”)

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Adobo — eating it, cooking it, talking about it, thinking about it — is also about memory, colonialism, cultural contact, consumption, family, cuisine, the senses, identity… and it’s good to eat too!

Remembrances, poetry, stories, recipes, photographs and other ruminations, whether fragmented or complete, long or short, rough or polished, are all welcome.

“Deadline” — or rather, posting time — will be Monday, December 8 — just drop me a line via email at wily [ a t ] thewilyfilipino.com when you’ve posted it on your blog, and I will combine the links (which you can then similarly append to your entries). (If you don’t have a blog, feel free to send me the writeup and I can post it on mine.) I encourage everyone to comment on each other’s work as well.

Hopefully this will be the beginning of a kind of collaborative Pinoy/Pinay blog project — one in a series where Filipina/o bloggers all write and post on the same topic (on the same day). (“Submissions,” by the way, are open to *everyone* who’s ever tasted / smelled adobo, whether it’s the Filipino, Mexican, or Peruvian variant…)

And please spread the word — the more participants, the better!

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