So first of all, I owe a tag list to Ktrion, but it’s hard coming up with seven! (I think I owe J-Lu a really long list as well from a few months back.)

So this one‘s from Luna:

Three books I can read over and over:
Well, Izzy’s books, obviously. I don’t think I’ve ever really read anything more than once in my adult life, though I seem to remember reading John Irving’s The World According to Garp twice. And Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo.

Three places I’ve lived:
- next to a hundred year-old cursed mango tree that was the site of various supernatural manifestations, including balls of fire and a woman in a white robe
- midway up a hill on Buffalo St., one of the steepest streets in Ithaca
- two minutes away from Ocean Beach and Lands’ End

Three TV shows I love:
- Fawlty Towers
- Homicide: Life on the Street
- The Sopranos

Three highly regarded and recommended TV shows that I’ve never watched a single minute of:
- All in the Family
- The West Wing
- Sex and the City

Three places I’ve vacationed:
- a former monastery on the cliff overlooking Amalfi
- a mosquito-infested rocky beach on Puerto Galera
- the Maharajah of Mysore’s former summer palace

Three of my favorite dishes:
See this post.

Three sites I visit daily:
Well, almost daily:
- Last.fm
- The New York Times
- The Philippine Daily Inquirer

Three places I would rather be right now:
- Los Banos
- in a villa in Tuscany
- sitting on a sofa, watching TV, eating chips, and drinking beer, with Cate Blanchett

Three bloggers I am tagging:
- the Poeta
- Ktrion
- the V-Monster
(and a fourth: HypoCoffee)

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While I’m a little worried about what happens to the two photographs I uploaded, MyHeritage is a quick laugh, because — well, you can read the lists below for yourself. The free demo software supposedly analyzes your facial features and tells you which celebrities you resemble most:

…the algorithms used by MyHeritage Face Recognition are likely to find relatives of people in your photo, due to the genetic-based facial similarities that exist between relatives. You can use this to form connections between people whom you never even knew were related.

So, in order of facial similarity, these are the people who apparently look like me:

John Williams
Tori Amos
Tiger Woods
Victor Hugo
Liam Neeson
Bill Murray
B.F. Skinner
Peter Kropotkin

A second clearer photo got me this list:

Beyonce Knowles
Sylvia Plath
Wernher von Braun
Jim Carrey
Daniel Radcliffe
Nana Mouskouri
Billy Corgan

Now, if they were dinner guests, that would be another story…

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Last seen alive three weeks ago; towed this morning; hosted on Flickr. (Don’t view it with the slideshow; you’ll miss the explanatory captions.)

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Peter Jackson’s King Kong is grand entertainment in the swashbuckling Saturday matinee B-movie style (not that I saw any of those growing up). It’s also a film that perhaps more explicitly foregrounds the colonial, with knowing nods to Conrad and the historical cinematic / anthropological apparatus. (A poster for Cooper and Schoedsack’s 1927 film Chang appears prominently in the background in an early scene.)

The premise is familiar to everyone: Jack Black plays Werner Herzog, who orders people around to lug his equipment deeper into the jungle — oh wait. Jackson skillfully grounds the film during the Great Depression, with quickly sketched, if sanitized, scenes of hunger and unemployment. It’s a nice contrast to the well-heeled denizens of New York who get swatted around in Times Square near the end of the film. Black and his crew (including the gorgeous Naomi Watts, wonderfully effective in an early scene where she channels her wide-eyed Mulholland Drive performance, plus Adrien Brody as a shanghaied Clifford Odets) head off somewhere in the direction of Indonesia, and end up in a jungly Mordor instead.

It’s not a perfect movie, certainly. It’s too long, for starters, and whatever emotional depth fostered while the cast is still on the ship (showing how everyone falls in love with Watts, basically) is squandered by the long illogical screaming rollercoaster ride in the center. (Illogical because hardly anyone gets injured after being flung, bitten, strangled, swallowed, crushed, machinegunned, dropped, slid, stampeded — you name it. Once you’re wounded, you’re pretty much dead.) At least Jackson is clearly enjoying himself, as in the scenes where Gollum’s head is swallowed by a giant pink leech (J-Lu had her hands over her eyes for that one), or when Kong plays with a Tyrannosaurus Rex’s broken jaw. (Now that I think about it: it’s actually a glimmer of the old Peter Jackson, of Bad Taste and Dead Alive, that we see here.)

In any case the film is a smart illustration, already surely argued elsewhere, of how King Kong was American national psychosexual anxiety writ large, the embodiment of the brute native inhabiting the wild, uncolonized interior. (In fact, we get two gleefully egregious depictions of ooga-booga natives: the first, kissing cousins of the Urok-hai; the second, a hilarious mishmash of just about every Savage in the popular repertoire.) In Jackson’s film the narrative thrust (pardon the pun) is in two parallel directions: the cinematic capture of the unexplored frontier, and the fear — or more precisely, the thrill — of miscegenation.

Of course we know what happens: ape meets girl, girl meets ape, they fall in love, and things end badly. After an unexpectedly touching scene in Central Park (if you’re not rooting for the couple at this point, there’s something wrong with you), Kong and Watts end up climbing the Empire State Building. (It’s significant that Jackson uses a smaller scale in the film; here, Kong is still dwarfed by the New York skyline.) Perilously perched on the phallus of Western capitalism, Kong suffers the consequence of his hubris and impossible love; he must be brought down, aided, in this case, by American military might. For a few tantalizing seconds, we see the devastated blonde hesitate at the precipice — but is rescued by her “real” love. Order has returned.

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Last May it seemed that the two songs that were absolutely inescapable — blaring from jeepney speakers, playing in the background of TV noon time shows or in record stores — were Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina” (good) and Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” (terrible). This time around, there were two other songs as well: Orange and Lemons’ “Pinoy Ako [I Am Pinoy],” a fist-pumping, proud-to-be-Filipino pop song that, by all accounts, has served as an unofficial Philippine national anthem. Which is rather ironic (Tagalog readers will relish the lyrics), considering that a) the track was reportedly plagiarized from a song by the Care, circa the early ’80s (check here for details), and b) the song was the theme to the hit TV show Pinoy Big Brother, which, as you can guess, is a Filipino adaptation of the British original. (If you use Firefox you can open the pages above on separate tabs and play the streaming files at the same time.)

At this point it seems unfair to criticize them for taking their name from an XTC album; my favorite Filipino band took its name from a David Lynch film, after all.

The second song also has Filipino connections: the Black-Eyed Peas’ “My Humps,” just about one of the most annoying songs ever. I know it’s supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, but still. It’s further proof, unfortunately, of a truth becoming ever clearer, which I hesitate, ever so slightly, to declare publicly, but will do anyway: the Black-Eyed Peas suck.

Anyhow, here is a little roundup of albums I was able to pick up and listen to (either bought or borrowed from my sister):

Barbie Almalbis, The Singles

In the world of one-hit (or one-album) wonders that is the Philippine music market, Barbie Almalbis is already something of a veteran. This compilation includes her work with the Hungry Young Poets as well as with Barbie’s Cradle, and it’s as good a snapshot of sharp ’90s Filipino indiepop as you will get.

Isha, Time and Again

While the clear commercial hook here are the sincere piano-jazz cover versions of ’80s hits — Tears For Fears’ “Everybody Wants To Rule The World,” a clumsy version of the Go-Go’s “Head over Heels,” and a lovely reading of my second-favorite Madonna song, “Cherish” — the standouts, interestingly, are the arrangements of some overplayed standards. “I’ll Be Seeing You” is appropriately mournful; “Our Love Is Here To Stay” is turned into a pop torch ballad; “Round Midnight” is a jittery, caffeinated affair, belying the calmness of her vocals. The other half of the album — which makes it rather oddly sequenced — is filled with her own compositions which to my ear sound like “Silent All These Years”-era Tori Amos. Not a plus in my book, but I should listen to them more; songs that reference Milan Kundera can’t hurt. (I still think she should have recorded under her full name, Pearlsha Abubakar.)

Isha, Katakataka

This, however, is the real gem — a delightful and slightly sultry four-song EP of original songs in Tagalog about the things that matter most: love, longing, and the summer breeze.

Juana, Misbehavior

This quartet (two women, two men) plays smart, no-frills power pop; in an ideal world, the first track (“Connected”) would be a Philippine middle-class teen angst anthem, upbeat but full of the burden of unfulfilled expectations. “Reyna ng Quezon City” is even better, kind of like a wiser Tagalog version of J. Lo’s “Waiting for Tonight.”

Rivermaya, Greatest Hits 2005

I’m probably remembering things wrong, but wasn’t there a time when Rivermaya didn’t sound like (or look like) Coldplay? Half the songs on this anthology have those faux-inspirational, hold-your-head-up-high lyrics that U2 should have abandoned twenty years ago; the other half sounds like bad Radiohead — you know, kind of like Coldplay. In a word: insufferable.

The Tilt-Down Men, Together with The Tilt-Down Men

The Tilt-Down Men occupied that space between the British Invasion and AM-radio soft pop; as such, you get the almost requisite covers of songs by the Beatles, the Hollies, the Lettermen and the Bee Gees. The packaging, unfortunately, is quite sparse, and I would have loved to know whether this exemplified what the mainstream “combos” of the late-’60s played. Either way, it’s an early chapter in the fascinating careers of the Sottos; future scholars of the political and cultural dimensions of the Sotto dynasty should take note.

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