The Wily Filipino

Oops!

Actress Claudine Barretto swears (sorry, you have to be Filipino to get this); so does Tom Brokaw (the latter link swiped from Gawker).

Protecting You from Terrorism, One Restaurant at a Time.

From Metafilter:

Loaded guns pointed in faces, people made to crawl on their hands and knees, police officers clearly exacerbating a tense situation by kicking in doors, taunting, keeping their fingers on the trigger even after the situation was under control.

Jason Halperin, on being raided while eating at an Indian restaurant. Courtesy of the PATRIOT Act.

"Asian American," Part 3.

Tim Yu writes:

Here's my question, though--and I don't have an answer: What is the difference, then, between the category "good poets who happen to be Asian American" and "the fantasy of social colorblindness"? If we reject the idea that the category "Asian American writing" has determinate content, then what does it mean to employ the category at all? In particular, what's "Asian American" about a text whose only racial marker is the ostensibly Asian name of its author?

(I had to snip a delicious tidbit about a couple of poets that he asked me not to post, alas.)

But let me take a hastily written stab at it: I'm not so sure that I'd agree that "Asian American writing" doesn't exist as a category, or that it refers to nothing on the ground. I simply reject what "Asian American writing" as a
discursive category has evolved (or devolved) into, as an Orientalist beast defined from within and without. Eileen's recovery/rescue of Jose Garcia Villa (in her edited volume of Villa's work, The Anchored Angel) into the Asian American canon represents a main phase of this project: interrogating what Asian American literature has narrowly come to be. In turn, Tim's excellent essay argues for Villa as a "proto-transnational" figure, haunting the borders of both "American" literature and "Asian American" literature and whose work, shorn of the usual ethnic signifiers, provides an excellent entry into questioning the notion of Asian American lit per se.

(Villa's position in Filipino literature is a different story all together. My mother went to school in the '50s and majored in English, which was why I was exposed to Villa at a young age. (One of her brothers was a poet, another was a critic, and so there was always poetry around the house.) In any case, she was totally into his coconuts/nipples poem, and was trying to explain it to me -- now that I think about it now, it seems a little disturbing.

But by the time I went to college in the '80s, the '60s had happened, and the world had changed. A lit professor of mine in the Philippines was talking about how literature had to be socially engaged for it to have any relevance, and should not be created as simply art for art's sake -- "like those poems by that American, Jose Garcia Villa," he said with barely disguised contempt. True story. It's either that kind of dismissal, or Villa is way too canonized in the Philippines as a kind of distant literary father -- enough so that people don't have to read him anymore.)

(And I'll digress and muddy the waters even further: if Tchaikovsky was gay, then would "The Nutcracker" be gay music? Or is he simply a good composer who happened to be gay? Does one runs the risk of devaluing sexuality if one says no? Or is there a huge gap in terms of content between music and poetry, i.e., is it less possible to be "ethnic" in music than in poetry?)

There are a couple of positions one can take regarding ethnicity, for instance, but it's clear that there's always a dynamic tension between both poles:

1. Ethnicity is elective. That is, all those ethnic markers -- whether it be food, or language, or clothing, however seemingly arbitrary they may be -- are things to be deployed, to be operationalized, and as such, ethnicity is malleable and flexible and highly contextual.

2. But many people labor under particular ethno-national categories imposed on them by states or other people, and so in that sense they have little choice in the matter. Tagalogs, for instance, like to think of everyone else in the Philippines as Filipino, even though that lived experience of being "Filipino" may be extremely different to, say, a Muslim resident in Mindanao. Ethnicity therefore can be shot through with unequal power relations and as such isn't all that fluid.

3. And we know in any case that those ethnic choices are a fiction as well, since I have to wear my brown skin all day. Such colorblindness (or generic Americanness) does not exist in the same way for the person of color, as s/he is always/already marked as Other. The idea of race as a cultural construction may have been fostered by well-meaning sociologists and anthropologists, but one cannot wish away those pesky phenotypical differences (regardless of whatever cultural significance is accorded to them). In contrast, an Anglo American can wear four-leaf clovers and drink green beer and, in short, be Irish American for just one day, then retreat to Vanilla American the rest of the year. Asian Americans simply don't have the "luxury" of retreat. (But to digress again: can literature give the writer that illusion of momentary retreat? But can the text be so easily demarcated from "real life?")

In any case, there probably shouldn't be any absolute position -- or, ultimately, it may all be a matter of semantics, and the debate becomes pointless after a while. The statements about the Wayne Wang films in my previous entry are, according to Eileen's criteria, both accurate. But if someone were to say that Chan Is Missing is a "more" Asian American film than Smoke, surely one would agree, and one doesn't have to be acceding to Orientalist criteria to say that.

I'll end with something from Dana Takagi, from her essay "Maiden Voyage: Excursion into Sexuality and Identity Politics in Asian America" (found in Russell Leong's edited volume, Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay & Lesbian Experience):

A politics of identity and whatever kind of politics ensues from that project -- multiculturalism, feminism, and gay movements -- is first of all a politics about identity. That is, about the lack of a wholistic and 'coherent narrative' derived from race, class, gender, and sexuality...

And later on in the essay:

The gist of this essay has been to insist that our valuation of hetereogeneity not be ad hoc and that we seize the opportunity to recognize non-ethnic based differences -- like homosexuality -- as an occasion to critique the tendency toward essentialist currents in ethnic-based narratives and disciplines. In short, the practice of including gayness in Asian America rebounds into a reconsideration of the theoretical status of the concept of "Asian American" identity. The interior of the category "Asian American" ought not be viewed as a hierarchy of identities led by ethnic-based narratives, but rather, the complicated interplay and collision of different identities.

All right, back to grading.

"Asian American," Part 2.

In response to a recent posting by Eileen Tabios, who writes, in part:

I'm sure the sunny professor doesn't realize he struck a nerve with me (or perhaps he does). You see, prior to tending my grape vines (all one stalk of them), I was fairly active in the Asian American literary scene.....but what I noticed is that much of my work never gets classified as "Asian American" or "Filipino American" literature. Why? Because I don't write the kind of stuff that has mostly become classified (as Timothy has observed) as Asian American works by referencing biography, food and ethnicity. I am not the only "Asian American" poet who's ranted before at this practice.

I really didn't mean to strike a nerve -- though I realize that now -- but my initial hesitation to classify her as such was partly in reaction to what Tim Yu wrote earlier. That is, I didn't want to simply pigeonhole her poetry as "Pinoy poetry," as poems (or as a blog) that is only brought up within that Asian context. (Not that that's a bad thing, but I think the readers know what I mean.) Both Asian Americans (and well-meaning non-Asian editors, etc., out to "diversify" their anthologies) are complicit in fashioning particular tired images, narratives, paradigms, and so on that keep Asian Americans in safe, domesticated categories. And that was what I was reacting to when I wrote what I wrote -- I think Eileen and I agree about things, only I came about it the other way round. For instance, I think Lew's Premonitions is important precisely because it does not simply proclaim Asian American poetry as an "Other voice." Not all Asian American poets may want their work to be ("merely") classified as "Asian American poetry," with all that that label, positive and negative, entails.

She writes as well:

Let me spell it out: if the author is Asian American, that makes the works "Asian American" -- the work itself doesn't have to fit your preconceived paradigms. Kapisch?!

Oh, I completely agree. But -- hee hee -- let me play devil's advocate and present a couple of statements:

Chan Is Missing is an Asian American film.
Smoke is an Asian American film.

Both may be true, but is one truer than the other? =)

(There will be a Part 3 to this entry as well, including a response to a letter by Tim Yu, and Dana Takagi gets thrown in there somewhere.)

Photo Noir.

Swiped from Metafilter is an excellent exhibit of tabloid photographs from the Los Angeles Herald Express, curated by Diane Keaton. But aside from the lurid nature of the photographs -- it looks like a James Ellroy gallery come to life -- the high aesthetic quality of the images cannot be denied either. (This has already been explored in, for instance, Luc Sante's Evidence, the Police Pictures exhibit at SFMOMA a few years back, and Sean Tejaratchi / Katherine Dunn's Death Scenes, not to mention Weegee's place in the photographic canon.)

The caption reads:

Mrs. Shirleen Kunin
March 27, 1948 Saturday
“Dennie got so many Christmas presents! But the dreadful accident happened 10 days before Christmas.

What's striking about the photograph is not just the Diane Arbus-like quality of the image, but the way the light falls on her unreadable (rapturous?) face and how her gaze similarly follows the light. It's almost reminiscent of a shot in La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc!

Compare this, for instance, with Carol Jo Pivar's portrait, which looks like a Cindy Sherman "film still" -- she looks like she just stepped out of some noir film.

More Lessons from Parents.

From my friend Romeo:

Here's one that wasn't there:

"Naku, kung puede ka lang ibalik sa pinanggalingan mo, matagal ko ng ginawa."

You can probably label this one as a lesson in REMEMBERING YOUR PAST.

Isa pa: "Naku, kung ahas iyan, kanina ka pa tinuka." Lesson in CREATURE APPRECIATION.

Filipino-American Scholars Lead API Colleagues in Protest

Thought I'd post this, from Robyn Rodriguez, friend, colleague, and Ph.D candidate in Sociology at UC Berkeley:

Filipino-American Scholars Lead API Colleagues in Protest

MEDIA RELEASE:
For additional information contact: Robyn Rodriguez
510-364-3252

The Critical Filipino Studies Collective (CFSC) is calling on Asian-American Studies professors, researchers and professionals to live up to their historic mission and oppose the Bush administration’s global “War on Terror” at the annual Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) conference next month. The AAAS conference will take place at the Cathedral Hill Hotel from May 8-10, 2003 in San Francisco.

In addition to the resolution, the CFSC will be sponsoring an exhibit of Asian American photographers who have been documenting Asian Americans’ leadership and involvement in San Francisco’s anti-war protests, as well as a benefit for the Filipino immigrant airport screeners who unfairly suffered a mass lay-off at Bay Area airports in the wake of the 9/11 tragedies.

Dozens of highly respected Asian-American and Pacific Islander professors from around the country have added their names to the anti-war resolution sponsored by the CFSC, an organization of Filipino studies scholars. The Filipino and Asian American scholars denounce the recent war of aggression and subsequent occupation of Iraq. According to the CFSC-sponsored resolution to be presented on May 9 at the AAAS business meeting, “This war is a manipulation of the American public's grief over the 9/11 tragedy, an illegal and undemocratic campaign to further U.S. multinational corporate interests.” CFSC calls on the Association to “actively defend and support the academic freedom of its members’…in challenging this imperial ‘War on Terror’.” Moreover, the CFSC calls for “the Association [to] form a task force to organize a national day of action and produce educational materials.”

Asian-American studies along with other ethnic studies programs and departments trace their histories to the 1960’s anti-imperialist movements and struggles for Third World self-determination, including, most notably, the San Francisco Ethnic Studies Strike of 1968-9 (for reference see: http://www.library.sfsu.edu/strike/). The AAAS will hold its annual meeting in San Francisco, the very site of these historic struggles and the recent anti-war protests.

Events:
May 8-10:
Association for Asian American Studies Annual Conference, Cathedral Hotel, San Francisco

May 8:
Critical Filipino Studies Collective Public Meeting, 11-1 at SF Public Library

CFSC Organized Events:
May 9
3-5PM: Presentation of CFSC-Sponsored Anti-War Resolution to Board
7:30-11PM: “Filipino Activism and Immigrant Rights in the Bay Area Benefit” (co sponsored by Asian American Studies and Philippine Studies, USF and Asianweek) and “Rise Up, Stop the War! Asian Americans in the Anti-War Movement” Photo Exhibit. The theme of the exhibit will be “Strength in Unity, Peace through Justice Now”

I'm Filipino, But Is This A Filipino Blog?

(I'm totally blushing. And you should see Eileen's comments on my blog! Brown skin doesn't blush easy, but in this case...)

Anyhow, this will be a more rambling entry than usual. The title of the entry came to me as I (thoughtlessly) clicked on the category "Pinoy" (look to your right for the category archives) after I posted the entry on Eileen Tabios's WinePoetics blog. This was, of course, technically true -- she is Filipina, after all -- but the entry wasn't really Filipino in content, and neither is her blog very Filipino either. Whatever "Filipino" means, anyway.

And then a very nice mention from Mac Diva on her Mac-a-ronies blog (a must-read, by the way, along with her other blog, Silver Rights), where she calls my blog "an olio of news, entertainment, poetry and material about the Philippines." But I feel I'll let some people down, because I hardly post on Filipino or Filipino American things, really.

Much of this is going through my head lately because of Tim Yu's tympan blog, where he has a hilarious and thought-provoking entry on writing an "Asian American" poem -- link swiped from WinePoetics, natch. (See also his equally interesting response to a post by Ron Silliman.) Or rather, parodies of the four categories of Asian American poems he has seen:

--the grandparents poem
--the family photograph poem
--the exotic food poem
--the erotic poem, usually employing imagery from the exotic food poem

Yeah, it is indeed a little snotty, as Yu put it, but not inaccurate. I can think of a few elements contributing to and mitigating this phenomenon:

1. I see this more often in small student-edited collections: young poets learn from those "Asian American" models (and may be given the same writing exercises, i.e., "write what you know") and (unwittingly) imitate them. Nothing wrong with this in general, but...

2. This also operates on a "culturalist" level, i.e., stop a random Chinese American person (for instance) walking in the street and ask her or him what "Chinese culture" is all about, and it is likely that family, respect for ancestors, food, etc., will be invoked. Again, nothing wrong with this in general, but...

3. Unfortunately, this becomes reified uncritically as "Asian culture," and editors/reviewers looking for "a distinctive Asian voice" or something with "an Asian sensibility" would end up selecting an ancestors poem or a food poem because they are coded as Asian. Writers like Amy Tan have been living off the proceeds of this "sensibility" for years.

4. And if outfitting oneself in Asian drag sells, well... this may explain the success of all those footbinding memoirs. How many permutations of "golden," "lotus," "heaven," "jade," and "dragon" could there be? Thus, the reproduction of Orientalist cliches, both internally and externally.

5. But if ethnicity, in opposition to a "biological" category like race (yes, I know both are culturally constructed), is a combination of "culture" and descent, then it would make perfect sense to have a family poem and a food poem (and food preferences, as Bourdieu argues, are practically seen as hard-wired, and integral to notions of culture) as the two models of the "ethnic poem."

Something like Walter Lew's Premonitions was, perhaps conceived to escape those four walls of the Asian American poem-jail (kind of like the prisonhouse of language?). As Maria Damon writes on the backcover blurb:

Neither a multiculti feel-good anthology, an instrumentalist teaching anthology that condescends to its audience and subject matter, nor an Orientalist rehearsal of anti-Orientalism, this book will liberate the reader from the strictures of the known at all levels.

She makes it sound like acid! But that's beside the point: I think what she means is that the poems contained inside weren't selected to communicate an Asian American sensibility (though some do), but perhaps because they were written by good poets, to paraphrase Ron Silliman in his post, who happen to be Asian American.*

I'm preparing for two sections of an "Asian American culture" class in the fall, and as an anthropologist, I taught my previous sections from a social sciences angle, only to be told later on that the classes were meant to deal with "the expressive arts." But while reading through different anthologies recently, I found myself stupidly passing over the fiction and poetry that weren't specifically coded as "Asian American," i.e., those pieces that didn't deal with language or racism or food or repressive tradition, as if "Asian American" couldn't encapsulate anything else. And so I was therefore unwittingly duplicating some Orientalist notion of what Asian or Asian American meant. In any case, the discussion in class should be interesting next year.

*It should be made clear, though, that this is very different from the fantasy of social colorblindness.

Decks of Cards.

A few days ago I posted something about making a deck of Bush Cartel cards. Well, they've been made -- Roger Ailes (not that Roger Ailes, obviously) has a link to one set, and here's yet another.

(They say every rightist has her/his favorite leftist, and vice-versa. Some acquaintances of mine on the staff of the UPLB Perspective who later actually up and joined the New People's Army were totally into Arnold Schwarzenegger, no matter how detestable his politics were. In any case, my current favorite evil attack dog of the right happens to be a four of diamonds.)

WinePoetics.

It's about time I wrote a little something about the sparkling joys of poet Eileen Tabios's blog, WinePoetics. I imagine her drinking her wine, her entries spilling like tiny diamonds onto the keyboard, getting stuck between the "j" and "k" keys.

I met her a few months back at a reading, where she stumped me with a question on some offhand statement I made (I was introducing the writers) about how poets are needed to imagine the nation. I couldn't really answer. Then I ran into her again buying Peet's at SF State (god, this is starting to sound like some kind of mash note), just before she had a poetry reading. (I couldn't go because I was teaching my research methods class at the same time.) Anyhow, she clearly had no idea who I was. =)

Her latest entry, "Song of the Torn Footnotes," is characteristically lovely. "Your hands never memorized the circumference of her ankles." And again: "As the moon rose, we never entered a room whose lights I cancelled from a sudden shyness."

So, Eileen, if you're reading this, consider it fan mail. Or better yet, consider it a toast.

Waling-Waling.

My dad, also named Benito Vergara (he's D'Original Benito Vergara), wears many hats -- I think he was befuddled, but secretly pleased, at being called a "rice guru" -- but the last few years he's been writing children's science books. Children's books! My dad!

Here's a review of his latest, Waling-Waling: The Search for the Most Beautiful Orchid in the World.

The Friday Five.

This week's Friday Five:

1. What was the last TV show you watched?
Survivor, last night. I've said many times before that the show is my foremost absolute guilty pleasure, and I've always wondered whether or not I could incorporate in an anthropology class or something -- you know, tourism, colonialism, cooperation, competition, plus issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, etc. It's all there.

2. What was the last thing you complained about?
I complain about everything.

3. Who was the last person you complimented and what did you say?
Can't remember. Probably Madeline.

4. What was the last thing you threw away?
A wrapper of a miniature Snickers bar.

5. What was the last website (besides this one) that you visited?
WinePoetics.

Musicians and Ads.

A letter from Tom Waits to The Nation, reacting to an article by John Densmore about using the Doors' music in commercials ("I hope Sting has given those Shaman chiefs he hangs out with from the rainforest a ride in the back of that Jag he's advertising, 'cause as beautiful as the burlwood interiors are, the car -- named after an animal possibly facing extinction -- is a gas guzzler.")

Artists who take money for ads poison and pervert their songs. It reduces them to the level of a jingle, a word that describes the sound of change in your pocket, which is what your songs become. Remember, when you sell your songs for commercials, you are selling your audience as well.

Although as someone on the Zorn list wrote, the irony is is that advertising may be just about one of the last places for creative music programming left, as radio has practically been given over to mega-corporations who play the same 25 songs over and over. (Classic rock really is the new muzak.)

At least in those Volkswagen commercials you could hear Charles Mingus, Stereolab, Nick Drake, Velocity Girl, and Psychic TV -- when was the last time you heard them on radio, except if you were tuning in to an indie college radio station?

The Fetish-Find of (Next) Month.

Grabbed again from Metafilter, in what looks like a monthly series of bizarre fetishes on my blog: girls eating sandwiches.

And women wearing headphones.

And women brushing their teeth.

Ebert on the First Amendment.

Swiped from MetaFilter : an excellent interview with Roger Ebert:

The right really wants to punish you for having an opinion. And I think both the left and the right should celebrate people who have different opinions, and disagree with them, and argue with them, and differ with them, but don't just try to shut them up. The right really dominates radio, and it's amazing how much energy the right spends telling us that the press is slanted to the left when it really isn't. They want to shut other people up. They really don't understand the First Amendment.

Plus: more from Ebert on Michael Moore, Justin Lin's Better Luck Tomorrow, theocracy, the repeal of the estate tax, and Do The Right Thing.

Mga Aral Mula sa mga Magulang.

The following was forwarded to me by my friend Jane -- it looks like a fairly direct translation of this unfunny version in English, but the Tagalog version is so much funnier (and coarser):

MGA KAPATID... Tiyak na kapupulutan niyo ng mahahalagang aral ang e-mail na ito...

TANDANG-TANDA NAMIN NI KUYA ANG SAYA AT LUMBAY SA PODER NILA INAY AT ITAY. LALO NA ANG MGA MAGAGANDANG LESSONS NA NATUTUNAN NAMIN SA KANILA....

1. Si Inay, tinuruan niya ako ng HOW TO APPRECIATE A JOB WELL DONE.
"Kung kayong dalawa ay magpapatayan, doon kayo sa labas. Mga punyeta kayo, kalilinis ko lang ng bahay."

2. Natuto ako ng RELIGION kay Itay.
"Kapag yang mantsa di natanggal sa carpet, magdasal ka na!"

3. Si Itay, tinuruan niya kami ni Kuya kung anong ibig sabihin ng TIME TRAVEL.
"Kung di kayo tumigil ng pagngangawa diyan, tatadyakan ko kayo ng todo hanggang umabot kayo sa isang linggo!"

4. Kay Inay ako natuto ng LOGIC.
"Kaya ganyan, dahil sinabi ko."

5. Kay Inay din ako natuto ng MORE LOGIC.
"Kapag ikaw ay nalaglag diyan sa bubong, ako lang mag-isa manonood ng sine."

6. Kay Itay naman natuto ng FORESIGHT si Kuya.
"Siguraduhin mo na lagi kang magsusuot ng malinis na brief, para pag-nakascore ka sa syota mo e di kahiya-hiya."

7. Si Inay naman ang nagturo sa akin kung ano ang ibig sahibin ng IRONY.
"Sige ngumalngal ka, kundi bibigyan talaga kita ng iiyakan mo!"

8. Kay Inay ako natuto ng science of OSMOSIS.
"Punyeta, itigil mo ang kadadakdak at tapusin mong kainin ang inihanda kong hapunan para sa iyo."

9. Si Inay ang nagpaliwanag sa akin kung ano ang CONTORTIONISM.
"Tingnan mo nga yang dumi sa likod ng leeg mo, tignan mo!"

10. Si Itay ang nagpaliwanag sa akin kung anong ibig sabihin ng STAMINA.
"Wag kang tatayo diyan hangga't di mo natatapos kainin lahat yang gulay mo!"

11. At si Inay ang nagturo sa amin kung anong ibig sabihin ng WEATHER.
"Alangya, ano ba itong kuwarto nyong magkapatid, parang dinaanan ng bagyo!"

12. Sa CIRCLE OF LIFE, ang paliwanag sa akin ni Inay ay ganito:
"Malandi kang bata ka, iniluwal kita sa mundong ito, maaari rin kitang alisin sa mundong ito."

13. Kay Itay ako natuto kung ano ang BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION.
"Tatadyakan kita diyan, huwag ka ngang nag-uumarte diyan na parang Nanay mo!"

14. Si Inay naman ang nagpaliwanag sa amin kung anong ibig sabihin ng ENVY.
"Maraming mga batang ulila sa magulang, di ba kayo nagpapasalamat at mayroon kayong magulang na tulad namin?"

15. Si Itay naman ang nagturo sa akin ng ANTICIPATION.
"Tangna kang bata ka, hintayin mong makarating tayo sa bahay...!"

16. At si Itay pa rin ang nagturo kay Kuya kung ano ibig sabihin ng RECEIVING.
"Uupakan kita pagdating natin sa bahay!"

17. Si Inay naman ang nagturo sa aking kung ano ang HUMOR.
"Kapag naputol yang mga paa mo ng pinaglalaruan mong lawn mover, 'wag na 'wag kang tatakbo sa akin at lulumpohin kita!"

18. Kay Itay naman natuto si Kuya ng HOW TO BECOME AN ADULT.
"Kung di ka matutong magbati, eh di ka nga tatangkad."

19. Si Inay ang nagturo sa akin kung anong ibig sabihin ng GENETICS.
"Nagmana ka nga talaga sa ama mong walanghiya."

20. Kay Inay din ako natuto ng WISDOM.
"Pag umabot ka na ng edad ko, saka mo pa lang maiintindihan ang lahat."

21. At ang paborito ko sa lahat na natutunan ko kay Inay at Itay ay kung ano ang JUSTICE.
"Isang araw magkakaroon ka rin ng anak, panalangin namin na sana'y matulad sila sa yo... haliparot!"

More on Nina Simone.

There's a lovely tribute to Nina Simone at Body and Soul.

Send 'em to Iraq!

On Brainwashed (you have to scroll down close to the bottom of the page), a poll on which band should be sent to Iraq. (Me, I picked Audioslave.)

And Maya Makes Three.

Congratulations to my very good friends (and new daddy and mommy) Jeff and Kumi: Maia Dorothy Hadler was born today, sometime around lunch -- all seven pounds and ten ounces of her!

You're Out!

The other day we were discussing in class the politics of outing, and how hapa studies also theorizes outing -- a similar epistemology of the closet, as it were. The premise here is that mixed-race Asians who may look phenotypically Caucasian may experience a kind of coming-out process as well. The conversation naturally turned to hapa celebrities who hadn't "come out" -- not that this was necessarily a required thing, and not that their "silence" meant that they were somehow ashamed, or in denial, or afraid that they would be typecast in Asian roles -- and I think the talk winded down with "Well, it would be nice if Keanu Reeves acknowledged his Asian origins once in a while" or something like that. (We also discussed Asian men in gay porn, but my student Jesse has already blogged about it.)

Anyway, much of this was still on my mind a couple of days later when I went into my anthropology class and was talking about that comic genius, Rob Schneider, who is part-Filipino. Schneider, in his movies, routinely sneaks in some joke or reference to something only other Filipinos would understand. (I once had the privilege of interviewing Pilar Schneider, Rob's mom, who was running for re-election to the Pacifica, California school board. Her husband came too, and showed me photographs. Man, I'd never seen such prouder parents! "He doesn't behave that badly," she said, referring to the then upcoming premiere of Men Behaving Badly.)

So here are a few current celebs, off the top of my head, who some of you readers may not know are indeed part-Filipino or of Filipino descent or are people who are probably Filipino but whose identity I can't be quite sure:

- Tia Carrere.
- Lou Diamond Phillips. (Both of them, as well as Schneider, are quite active in the campaign for Filipino veterans' equity rights.)
- Kirk Hammett, from Metallica.
- Shannyn Sossamon (I have no idea who she is, but my students mentioned her, and I can't be bothered to IMDB her right now)
- Joey Santiago, from the Pixies, one of the greatest bands in the world. (I thought he was Latino, given their sometimes Spanish lyrics, but he's Filipino.)
- the Baluyut brothers from Versus.
- I think David Pajo from Slint and Tortoise and Aerial M and Zwan is Filipino, but I'm not sure either.
- and of course you know DJ QBert (and a good number of the Invisibl Skratch Piklz) are Filipino.
- um, Enrique Iglesias is part Filipino.
- Phoebe Cates isn't, but everyone in my high school thought she was. (A Burmese friend of mine claimed that everyone in Burma thought she was part-Burmese.)
- Prince (I swear, I'd claim him as one of my people in a heartbeat if I had positive, documented proof. But as far as I'm concerned it's all completely unsubstantiated, even though Filipinos say "I think I read it in a magazine somewhere," kind of like people's responses when asked for proof of the Saddam-bin Laden connection. In any case, just because Prince is short and horny doesn't mean he's Filipino.)

And finally my students mentioned some other name I wasn't familiar with: "Cris Judd," someone said. "Who?" I asked and the class laughed.

So I looked him up:

Oh, okay. I guess he's a celeb now.

The Chicks, the Boss.

While I do not necessarily condone nudity to spice up a film, album cover, magazine cover, or, um, a blog, here's the naked truth (on the cover of Entertainment Weekly:

And here's Bruce Springsteen -- I was actually wondering whether he was the "famous rock and roller" that Tim Robbins was referring to -- on the Dixie Chicks, where he calls the radio boycott against them "un-American":

The pressure coming from the government and big business to enforce conformity of thought concerning the war and politics goes against everything that this country is about -- namely freedom. Right now, we are supposedly fighting to create freedom in Iraq, at the same time that some are trying to intimidate and punish people for using that same freedom here at home.

Read his short statement on his website.

While putting Izzy to sleep

While feeding Izzy her bottle before putting her down in her crib, this came to me:

Like a curlicue whorled on the corner of a desk:

Corpuscle, chalice, snow.

Half-Naked. Pregnant. And Smoking.

Swiped from Gawker, the lovely mother of two. Cigarettes can cause cancer, girl!

[Update: the link is now down -- supposedly by orders of her lawyers -- but I'm sure enterprising readers can find the pictures on Usenet.]

(Literary) theory.

Ron Silliman has a provocative essay on literary theory -- or rather, people who do theory -- and its "antipathy" for contemporary poetry and fiction or, as Silliman puts it, writing, period. Eye-opening to me, at least -- although it was a bit of a cheap shot mentioning such miscreants of theory as de Man and Althusser in the same column. =)

[Update: turns out the permalinks don't look like they work, so just go to the main page.]

Nina Simone, 1933-2003.

The high priestess of soul, dead at 70. (Story here.)

from Naya Valdellon's "Woman in Verses"

This is totally swiped, without permission, from Krip Yuson's Philippine Star column -- an excerpt from Naya Valdellon's poem "Woman in Verses," recent first-prize winner of the first Maningning Miclat Poetry Awards, first-prize winner of the second Meritage Press Holiday Poetry Contest, and recent graduate in Creative Writing from Ateneo:

This year’s return to the town
of my birth has made me conceive
how some things have not changed --
the same women can still be heard
chanting the passion, the pious
are at their pews, the contrite
hide behind the confessional screen
atoning for moments of passion
while the procession moves on.

No need to join those penitents
lashing rivers and rivulets of red
on their backs -- these women have
known pain, their songs may as well
have been written in their blood
first spilling at the body’s ripening,
tender skin tearing at the willing
bite into the fruit of desire, labored
breathing at the womb’s harvesting.

You can read another lovely poem of hers here.

Project in the making...

Now this sounds like a good project in the making: a "Warmongering Assholes of the West" (but what about their non-western allies?) deck of cards.

Anyone know where I can download card templates I can steal from? A little time with Photoshop could work wonders...

(And who would be the Queen of Hearts? Condoleeza Rice? Ann Coulter?)

Media amnesia.

Speaking of historical amnesia, Buzzflash last week published an excellent editorial on its offshoot, a kind of amnesia on the media's part:

For those Americans who don't watch FOX News, CNN or MSNBC, it is despairingly unbelievable that the Bush Cartel has gotten away Scott-free [sic] with its failure to find any Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. It was the most frequent cudgel that they used to try and get the U.N. Security Council to authorize an invasion of that country. We heard Bush, Rumsfeld, Powell, Perle and the crew rail on and on about how time was running out before Iraq would attack America. We might all be incinerated within weeks by Saddam's nuclear capability -- and wantonly killed in subways by his chemical and biological weaponry.

There's an awful lot of rejoicing about the fall of Baghdad, with pictures of grateful Iraqis kissing U.S. marines, and P.O.W.s coming home -- but no one seems to be asking the WMD question.

...the media in America has little, if any historical memory, beyond the latest news cycle. The Republicans... are masters at creating "unfolding factoids" that become news events with ongoing stages. This means the media covers each stage almost separately. News cycles turn over in a matter of minutes and hours... This process eliminates the likelihood that the Bush Cartel will be held accountable for the fact that a new stage of the "unfolding factoid" completely contradicts a former Bush Cartel statement. The press is too busy reporting about the new crumbs tossed to them as the story moves onto another "stage."

IE6 scrolling bug

Obviously no one's reading this blog =), because I just checked it on IE and realized it had fallen victim to the dreaded IE6 scrolling bug, which cuts off the text just after the "Powered by Movable Type" tag. But one quick visit to the Movable Type forum changed all that. (I use Phoenix myself.)

SARS, Civil Liberties, and the Yellow Peril.

Abraham Verghese, a writer whom I generally enjoy reading, has a piece in the New York Times Sunday Magazine where he essentially advocates the use of quarantine to contain SARS or we -- meaning the U.S. -- would totally regret it. (He points out that Singapore, with its authoritarian government, was able to reduce the spread of SARS more effectively than Hong Kong, which was more democratic.)

So he writes that

'quarantine' is a loaded word with metaphorical implications that many of us in America have fortunately forgotten.... Fear of catching disease from immigrants (as well as fears of losing scarce jobs to them) caused citizens to rally against immigrants and immigration. Indeed, it is not far-fetched to think of race-based immigration bans as the ultimate form of quarantine.

And towards the end:

But the virus that causes SARS has no political agenda, no jingoist banner to wave, and it has not read John Stuart Mill's ''On Liberty.'' The virus is democratic to its core, affecting rich and poor, doctor and patient, crossing borders with impunity and thus freezing commerce, threatening a global recession.

But this is surely true of most viruses when ripped from their social contexts, except for certain diseases for which certain ethnicities show a genetic propensity.

Verghese's invocation of history is also somewhat selective; as scholars have shown, Chinatowns in the U.S. (and in Hawaii) were the targets of harsh, burn-the-village-in-order-to-save-it disease eradication programs. The point I'm trying to make here is that the people most affected by SARS -- from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, and now the Philippines -- are of Asian origin. Quarantining people before entering the U.S. proper is one thing -- and doubtless panicky people in Chinatown, who are avoiding certain restaurants and so on, would even agree -- but Verghese's hint of more drastic measures, with explicit comparisons to civil liberties just after 9/11 (hey, we're still living it!), is another. The coronavirus may have "no political agenda, no jingoist banner to wave," but people do. The last thing one wants to see (especially with the New York Times ratcheting up the buzz every other day against their new Mata Hari, Kristina Leung) is a resurgence of Yellow Peril on these shores.

Heineken?! Fuck that shit!

Via Fark: suddenly I feel vindicated.

My friends and colleagues know about my long, penny-pinching quest for good cheap beer: Schaefer, Stroh's, Schlitz, Old Milwaukee, Steelhead Reserve, Rolling Rock (ok, that's a little classier), Bud, Miller, Michelob -- whatever the Safeway down the street stocks, I've tried it.

And nothing -- okay, no other cheap beer -- can compare to that good ol' red, white and blue can of PBR. (My good friend Jeff's reaction to seeing me drink it in a bottle: "What are you, some kind of communist?")

(Personally, though, Full Sail Golden Ale is my beverage of choice, followed by Anchor Steam, and maybe Riptide Red Ale from the Beach Chalet (also down the street), and then maybe Sierra Nevada...)

Grading and Good Friday

Yesterday I felt a slight twinge of guilt. I was chopping up turnips and carrots for Izzy (for the lamb stew I was making later that day) and listening to Hotel Costes Quatre, Stephane Pompougnac's happily mindless downtempo / deep house / Latin compilation. It's the kind of music you'd hear in clubs that would never let people like me inside, or -- as my brother is fond of saying -- models-to-jiggle-their-boobs-to-while-coming-down-a-catwalk music. Or words to that effect.

In any case, I felt a little guilty when I realized that Christ was actually dead and buried in the ground, and there I was, listening to party music. So I cast about looking for something somber, even if inappropriate, to play -- Verdi's Requiem? A Shostakovich symphony? (I almost pulled out an old Amy Grant CD, but realized that wouldn't work either.) It was, after all, Good Friday, when Filipinos are nailed to the cross and reporters from all over the world promptly file their stories on it. My favorite crucifixion-related story has to do with the only non-Christian, Shinichiro Kaneko, who was crucified in 1995 or 1996 supposedly to ask God to heal a terminally ill brother. It turned out he was an S&M porn star in Japan, and the videotaped proceedings were sold in sex shops all over the country. (Later on his name even shows up on a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode!)

I'm also swamped with grading, since I just received a whole slew of papers yesterday. And I would have to admit that I gave the students some rather difficult topics: one on raves and the creation of mass culture (or subcultures) and its relation to cultural capital, or one on dance music and sexuality.

What a bad time, then, for the following books to all arrive in the mail yesterday -- I keep peeking at them little by little when I get bored: Aimee Nezhukumatathil's Miracle Fruit, Oliver de la Paz's Names above Houses, Nick Carbo's El Grupo McDonald's, and Luisa Igloria's In the Garden of the Three Islands.

All right, back to work.

Watch The Skies!

I will be struck down by a meteor!



How will you die? Take the Exotic Cause of Death Test

More Colon Madness!

Philadelphia's Mutter Museum has a Big Colon, but it doesn't compare to the Colossal Colon (see the cancerous one above) -- a 40-foot long colon... and it's coming to a town near you!!!

(I'd bet Donald Rumsfeld has a bigger one though, to fit all those embedded journalists.)

The Friday 5.

From The Friday 5:

1. Who is your favorite celebrity?
But what do you mean by celebrity? Right now my favorite movie actress is Julianne Moore.

2. Who is your least favorite?
Celine Dion, probably.

3. Have you ever met or seen any celebrities in real life?
Not really -- saw Jack Nicholson biking on Figure Eight Island, off the coast of North Carolina by Wilmington. He waved.

My favorite celeb story would probably be when Madeline and I (and Izzy, in Madeline's tummy) were walking somewhere in Venice when we heard this loud squeal coming from inside a shoe store. I turned to look and there, trying on shoes, wearing an orange tank top, was none other than Richard Simmons. (Madeline wouldn't believe me at first.)

4. Would you want to be famous? Why or why not?
Sure I'd love to be famous (for all the right reasons). Who wouldn't?

5. If you had to trade places with a celebrity for a day, who would you choose and why?
Can't think -- Renee Zellweger, maybe, if only for a free dinner at Nobu.

boogie oogie oogie oogie.

From Walter Hughes's "In the Empire of the Beat: Discipline and Disco," in Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose's Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture:

As the lyrics of disco songs make clear for us in a characteristically redundant way, the beat brooks no denial, but moves us, controls us, deprives us of our will. Dancing becomes a form of submission to this overmastering beat.

The oft-noted vacuity of the lyrics of disco songs is itself a part of the medium's message: they usually strive only to translate the rhetoric of the beat into simple imperatives... Language is subjugated to the beat, and drained of its pretensions to meaning; almost all traces of syntax or structure are abandoned, reducing language to the simplest sequential repetition, a mere verbal echo of the beat itself.

This emptying out of language parallels the refusal of narrative structure in the song overall. There is rarely an identifiable direction, progression or climax in disco music; the prolongation of its own continuity is its only end.... In the discotheque, the 'disco-text' strives to shake off all remnants of its own textuality, to become pure, unconstructed, undifferentiated discourse, this purity being another expression of its unmediated power to stimulate dancing.

But if these words ("Get up get up get busy," or "I'm so horny horny horny horny") still comprise a "text" -- "a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture," as Barthes put it -- then what are their referents? Is there still some intertextual reference to the vast tradition of dance music, to funk and soul and blues and beyond? Or are they now truly devoid of meaning as hollowed-out signifiers, denoting only a triggered sample? The words, like the participants in the party on the dancefloor, are merely slaves to the rhythm.

My grad student Karen is writing her thesis on Filipino DJs in the Bay Area, and taking quite seriously DJ QBert's assertion (or maybe it was said by another member of the Invisibl Skratch Piklz) that turntablism was a language. Or like a language. In any case, I love the idea that there can be a syntax of scratches, a grammar of grooves -- but none of which are simply floating signs.

The difference here -- despite turntablism's inherent subversion of notions of musical authenticity, or the aesthetics of "live" instrumentation, or (certainly for Filipinos) an interrogation of the racially dichotomous and racialized music industry -- is that turntable DJs draw from a deep metatextual well of interrelated musical signifiers. A James Brown grunt here, a Winstons drum break there, a Bob James piano riff here -- all are promiscuously incorporated into the turntable "text." And while its language community -- not as producers, but as hearers -- could simply stand back and nod its head to the beats, there will still be a smaller coterie of insider language speakers -- again, very much like a language, with its specialized jargon -- who can identify, say, the guitar riff from the Chocolate Watchband's cover of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" from Beck's "Jackass."

So: do disco and turntablism speak a different language, and is one necessarily linguistically richer than the other?

Patricia Barber wins a Guggenheim

One of my jazz pianists/singers/composers, Patricia Barber, just won a Guggenheim. Apparently she'll be composing a song cycle based on Ovid's Metamorphoses. (I would personally recommend her 2000 album Nightclub for Barber beginners.)

What does the U.S. and the former Soviet Union have in common?

And via Metafilter again -- they're on a real roll today -- the United States in good company.

Dating Tips

Via Metafilter -- man, I posted this link two weeks ago! -- comes dating tips from the same writer, Michael Kelly:

Well, bear in mind that if you take her to dinner or the cinema or something and pay for it, she has to go to bed with you. If you split the bill but you pay for the drinks, you're entitled to a grope at least.

If at the end of the night you drop her off at her place and she invites you in for a coffee, don't whatever you do say, "No, thanks, it'll keep me awake all night." The coffee is unimportant, what she is really inviting you in for is Lurve. But it's bad form to act aware of this. Even if you really don't want a coffee and are confident of your chances, don't say anything like, "I don't want coffee, but I'll come in for sex."

..Once inside, the ritual of making coffee can be used to make subtle innuendo,e.g.:
..SHE: "How do you like it?"
..YOU (knowingly): "I like it well-ground...hot...wet...with lots and lots of cream."

The New "Empire Lite" and the Philippines, a Century Ago

There has been a lot of talk about empire lately, and even with Bush's denials ("America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish," he said in a speech last June) this vision of a Pax Americana -- or at the very least, a kind of "liberal imperialism," as David Rieff put it -- seems more and more apparent. Michael Ignatieff's now-notorious article in the New York Times has him, despite his denials, still essentially advocating taking up the white man's burden:

America's empire is not like empires of times past, built on colonies, conquest and the white man's burden. We are no longer in the era of the United Fruit Company, when American corporations needed the Marines to secure their investments overseas. The 21st century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known. It is the imperialism of a people who remember that their country secured its independence by revolt against an empire, and who like to think of themselves as the friend of freedom everywhere. It is an empire without consciousness of itself as such, constantly shocked that its good intentions arouse resentment abroad.

The first two sentences made me choke; the last three made me stop and think. Why did this seem so new to him? Of course there was historical precedent for this "new invention;" as many scholars have long argued, the American military occupation of the Philippines was already the dawning of the American empire, a reopening of the closed American frontier, the first moment of America's assertion of military might in a foreign land as a world power for the very first time. (Add to this the genocide of Native Americans, the colonization of Chicanos in the Southwest, the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii, the takeover of Puerto Rico (and Cuba) during the Spanish-American War -- a war that took a lot less time to wage than the Filipino American War -- and you have a beast that sure looks and talks like an empire. Richard Drinnon similarly argues in Facing West that the racist attitudes embedded in westward expansionism (and toward Native Americans) served as a template for foreign policy from the Philippines to Vietnam.)

In any case, "empire lite," or "liberal imperialism," still smells to me like "benevolent assimilation," which was William McKinley's policy for governing the Filipinos. He, too, passionately denied any mercantilistic aims for the colonizing of the Philippines, pretending instead that the country fell into his lap and that he was commanded by God to "uplift, Christianize and civilize" the poor Filipinos. McKinley and Taft and their cabal of colonizers similarly vowed liberation and upliftment for the hapless Filipinos -- and they too, were "constantly shocked that [their] good intentions arouse resentment abroad."

Some folks have at least taken notice of this historical precedent. (Gen. Tommy Franks has been likened to Gen. MacArthur and his occupation of Japan after the surrender, but as John Dower put in the New York Times Sunday Magazine a couple of weeks back, the comparisons are spurious: for starters, there was worldwide (and regional) support for the occupation. Similarly, the Japanese postwar economy was seen at the time to be a non-starter, unlike Iraq with all its oil resources. Okinawa, Dower said, would be the more historically accurate parallel.) This one, from Emphasis Added, looks at it differently, however. Comparing Iraq and the Philippines, the blogger writes:

[The United States] finds itself in charge of a hot foreign country, teeming with fanatics of various stripes with a long tradition of mutual hostility, for centuries under the sway of a backward and repressive religion.

Well, "hot foreign country" is at least accurate. (And while I have no real quibbles with "backward and repressive religion," Catholic priests from the U.S. set up shop in the Philippines as well.)

Within a generation, American administration instills basic cultural values and a democratic political culture...

And so we see where he's coming from: what exactly are these "basic cultural values" that the Iraqis and the Filipinos lacked?

By any measure, the impact of 45 years of US rule there during the first half of the 20th century must be seen as a net positive, and the Filipinos remain close, generally supportive allies.

This depends, of course, on what this measure would be: Economic? Political? And was this a "net positive" to Americans, or Filipinos, or both?

I can see how the parallels are tempting, but for all the wrong reasons. For all of the American government's patting itself on the back for making the Philippines into a "showplace of democracy" in Asia, the colonial government was fairly inefficiently run, carpetbaggers were grabbing land and mines and fields, and bad deals were made with landlords with no real benefit to the peasantry.

Sure, "liberal imperialism" could certainly be used to characterize this particular form of the colonial yoke (albeit one supposedly padded in velvet) used in the Philippines: the Americans, after all, brought roads, bridges, hospitals, Hershey bars, and, most important -- something the Spaniards weren't particularly interested in -- schools. For free. And there was English, too.

But to embrace the colonization of the Philippines as a "net positive" -- and a template for governing Iraq -- would be to discount the consistently brutal war that took the lives of... 200,000? 400,000? a million? Filipinos from 1899-1903. (These numbers -- which don't even include the death toll from the various skirmishes and massacres in Mindanao, where the war never really ended -- vary greatly depending on the source. Both the Philippine and American soldiers kept fairly good records of casualties, but these do not include "indirect" deaths -- exacerbated illnesses, hunger, and the like. Ken de Bevoise, in Agents of Apocalypse, cites about 1.7 million, which already includes people dying from the various cholera and malaria epidemics and those who died of natural causes.) And it would also have to take in consideration Filipinos who mourned the loss of national sovereignty, as well as the aftereffects of neocolonial dependency and exploitation well after independence was "given" in 1946.

No, the lesson to be learned from comparing Iraq to the Philippines is this: for the U.S., the war on Iraq is simply coming full circle to the imperial depredations it committed just about a century ago.

(Thanks to Javier Morillo-Alicea from Brindle Planet, whose comment a few posts back pointed me to Emphasis Added, and whose excellent posting "Where Is The West?" inspired me to write this. But Javier -- horrors! -- please don't call it the "Philippine insurrection!" Scholars have tried for years to get the Library of Congress to change its categories from the "Philippine Insurrection" to the "Filipino American War" precisely because it shouldn't count as an "insurrection." The insurrectos -- later denigrated as "ladrones," kind of like those wandering Afghan "bandits" and "pockets of resistance" -- were only defending their newly independent, sovereign nation-state from foreign invaders!)

More culinary nastiness

And to add to my recent posting on balut -- I actually regaled the students the other day with a slightly less explicit description, but this time combined with miming gestures -- a thread, with lots of links, on Metafilter.

oh, goody

It looks like everything made it alive to Movable Type -- entries imported, urls updated, categories assigned, etc. Not many people wrote comments anyhow, so it's no great loss (the archives on the old Blogger-based blog are still up anyhow), but there were a couple I wanted to address.

Here's hoping that MT doesn't die on me again.

testing to see whether this

testing to see whether this puppy's working

Okay, Blogger is still dead.

Okay, Blogger is still dead. Or maybe it's Aletia, I don't know.

For starters, every time I would try to retrieve my template via w.bloggar (same thing via Blogger), I would get a template that was a *month old*. No amount of saving and publishing could change it, and I would receive a message saying

java.IO.FileNotFoundException: java.IO.FileNotFoundException: /home/Templates2/[some number].html Permission denied

Then retrieving my old posts for editing via w.bloggar would simply give me a different error:

Your blog server returns the following message: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/pyro/blogger/Logger

However, I can post and publish *new* entries via w.bloggar -- I just can't seem to edit them or edit the template.

The weird part is that I can post, edit, delete, etc. posts via the Blogger page. The only similarity is that it keeps giving me the same old template, which I still can't change.

Okay -- according to Blogger,

Okay -- according to Blogger, "templates were briefly unavailable for editting [sic]" around 8:45, but "has now been fixed." Obviously not.

I hope this clears up in the morning -- if not, I'll be in a panic. I really really don't want to republish everything on mt. And what about all those pointers to my blog!

Hmm... something seems deeply wrong

Hmm... something seems deeply wrong with Blogger -- I'm trying to edit my template and I keep retrieving something from a month back. Or -- god -- I hope it's not my server itself. I am able to post still (as I just did), and I hope this one will work.

(On another odd note: movable type -- my .cgi files are still on my server -- actually seems to be working.)

[Update, 9:46 pm: okay, something has gone totally wrong. Everytime I try to retrieve my template for editing via w.bloggar or through Blogger, I keep getting a month-old template. I also keep getting a java.lang.NoClass.Def.Found error everytime I try to retrieve my posts for editing via w.bloggar. I can post new entries, though.

I do know the following:

1. My server may have been rebooted by my service provider. I say "may" because I'm not sure which server my domain is on. (But the last time that happened, the permissions on my cgi scripts went completely awry and I couldn't use movable type anymore.)

2. Movable Type is suddenly working for me again.

However, there is no way I'm going to export my entries and publish everything all over again...]

And now, a Filipino First:

Quite possibly the very first time for the phrase "chicken adobo" to appear on the front page of the New York Times:

"I'm going to fatten my boy up a bit with some chicken adobo and rice when he gets home," [Anecita Hudson] said after she learned that Specialist Joseph N. Hudson, 23, had been set free.

(You all know how I feel about the war -- yes, I support the troops, but they're fighting an unjust war -- but I thought the "adobo" comment was touching all the same.)

20 in 20

Courtesy of largehearted boy, identify the 20 songs in this competition from Swish Cottage. I'm not going to bother joining, because I can only identify about 6 of the songs; I have a suspicion the "bounce bounce" sample is from well after I stopped listening to the radio. =)

I dreamed this last night:

Do you know how the ark arrives at the Threshold
Pele, spider, fruit.

The Friday Five.

1. What was the first band you saw in concert?
How embarrassing -- probably Swing Out Sister, in 1987 or 1988.

2. Who is your favorite artist/band now?
Still the Beatles.

3. What's your favorite song?
Too many to count. But Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road" would probably be up in the top three.

4. If you could play any instrument, what would it be?
Maybe the violin.

5. If you could meet any musical icon (past or present), who would it be and why?
Miles Davis, definitely.

On eating balut.

(Inspired by recent balut-related e-mail from Lia at cheesedip.com and Caterina at Caterina.net, I thought I'd write this.)

Balut. That much-loved, much-maligned Filipino delicacy: favorite of beer drinkers all over the country, degree zero for culinary nastiness (used as a stunt on TV's Fear Factor, apparently), the dreaded food test for the Kano (and Filipino American, as my students tell me).

Say it: balut. Ba-lut. Your lips gently press together at the beginning, your tongue flicks quickly up towards your palate, your lips move as one in the shape of a narrow ooo, and ends with your tongue teasingly poking behind your teeth.

(This is, however, in contrast to how balut is sold in the Philippines, by ambulant vendors who yell in the streets, "Ba-luuuuuuuuuut!")

But there is nothing sensual per se about balut; it is, after all, an aborted duck fetus. As opposed to, say, eating an ordinary chicken egg with yolk and all, the balut is already fertilized and ready to go, as it were, with an actual, healthy, living duck embryo (incubated up to 18 days in a hatchery). And this where, of course, the balut gets its notoriety: the duck really looks like a duck, eyes, pink little limbs, gray feathers, useless beak and all.

Duck embryo in the shell,
I pluck you out of the shell; --
Hold you here, beak and all, in my hand,

My fondest memories about balut had more to do with buying them. They were always sold late at night (my father would bring them home after playing mahjongg until midnight), but sometimes we would go out ourselves. In Los Banos they were sold by this gaunt, gray-haired woman who would squat by the side of the road. The balut would be swaddled in cloth, and nestled in an old wicker basket; the woman would carefully unwrap the rolled-up blanket that kept the eggs warm, give us a thimbleful of salt in a twist of recycled graphing paper, and count her money in the light of the candle anchored with melted wax on the pavement. (I remember these were windless, humid July nights.) We would then ride home, feeling the heat of the eggs in our laps.

Instructions for eating balut:

1. Boil water gently in a pot, and put the balut in it for a few minutes.
2. Untwist the salt and put it in a dish. (A dipping dish, the kind used for soy sauce or patis, works very well.)
3. Hold the balut upright and, with the underside of a spoon, make a crack at the top of the egg.
4. Chip away pieces of eggshell with your finger until you have a hole about the diameter of a finger. (This could be bigger, it depends.)
5. Sometimes you'll see some kind of gauzy membrane. Pierce it.
6. You can peek inside the balut now and see broth. Is this albumen? (I always preferred to think of it as amniotic fluid.)
7. Tip the egg to your mouth and suck out the amniotic fluid.
8. Continue removing the eggshell. Depending on how you cracked it open, you may then see an undifferentiated mass of stuff that feels like slightly runny, soft-boiled egg in texture. Dip the stuff in the salt and eat it.
9. Or you may encounter a hard, spherical section that looks like a seed. Throw that away. (My godmother swears that it's all calcium and good for you, but it's tasteless and hard for me.)
10. Or you may finally get to the jackpot: the duck fetus. You may pick it up by the head -- at which point the body unrolls from its fetal position and its little legs dangle -- dip it into the salt, and pop it into your mouth.
11. Wash down with a cold bottle of San Miguel beer. (I think I may have been drinking it with milk when I was in elementary school -- now that sounds disgusting. Balut and milk...)

Answers to frequently asked questions:

1. Yes, you can feel the feathers on your tongue.
2. As a former (white) professor discovered (he was being administered the balut test), entering a pitch-black closet so you don't have to see it makes no difference. You can still smell the faint, slightly gamey, deliciously menstrual aroma. (Also see #1 above.)
3. No, the duck's eyes are closed.
4. Of course it's dead.
5. No, I have never been able to buy good balut in the United States, and I won't try to. One time my schoolmate Tim (can't remember his last name, but he lived in Mountain Province once and was studying Heidegger and Japan for his dissertation), Jenny Franco (I wonder where she is now), and I drove to Queens to Roosevelt Avenue to buy Filipino food. I bought a six-pack of San Mig and two balut eggs, which were simply horrible -- they were all pinkish and looked under-incubated, and they tasted rotten.
6. No, you can't pop the whole thing in your mouth. To begin with, there's too much, unless you have a big mouth. You have to separate the balut into its component parts to appreciate it, and that requires reverent contemplation of the duckling, forever asleep.
7. Yes, it tastes great and I miss it.

Battleground God.

Just took the Battleground God test -- link by way of Kieran Healy's blog -- and I scored fairly well (must be all that self-reflection on Christianity and secular humanism):

You have been awarded the TPM medal of distinction! This is our second highest award for outstanding service on the intellectual battleground.

The fact that you progressed through this activity being hit only once and biting very few bullets suggests that your beliefs about God are well thought out and almost entirely internally consistent.

More Poetry.

This poem is by Amitava Kumar, professor at Penn State and author of the excellent Passport Photos (University of California Press, 2000) (note to self: must assign readings on Partition before assigning the book to my grad students again). It's called "Iraqi Restaurants," reproduced in full (without permission) from Walter K. Lew's anthology Premonitions (Kaya Press, 1995):

The Americans turned each home
in Baghdad into an oven
and waited

For the Iraqis
to turn up as cooks
in the U.S. like the Vietnamese before them.

Yet another beautiful poem: Mary Cornish's "Restoration," published in the New England Review.

The Friday Five.

1. How many houses/apartments have you lived in throughout your life?

Let's see: our house in Los Banos (I may have lived at the International Rice Research Institute staff housing for a little while while the house was being made), then Schuyler House (the old infirmary) in Ithaca, then to a couple of apartments also in Ithaca (first, when it was mostly a Southeast Asia Program house, and later, when it became a German Studies house), then right smack-dab in Filipino Central in Daly City, then to the Lower Haight in San Francisco, and now to the Outer Richmond -- in fact, you can see the last three at an old blog entry.

2. Which was your favorite and why?

Probably the one I'm living in now.

3. Do you find moving house more exciting or stressful? Why?

It's extremely nerve-racking. The last time we moved we had 200 -- two hundred -- boxes.

4. What's more important, location or price?

Price.

5. What features does your dream house have (pool, spa bath, big yard, etc.)?

I want a big back yard for Izzy and Shelby and a deck where I can grill some meat and Madeline can put her feet up, sip a gin-and-tonic, and look out at a view.

Via Metafilter: the dullest blog in the world:

I looked at the clock and saw that it was getting very late, so I went to bed.

Almost like a Nicholson Baker novel!

Things in the Photograph.

The few things I could identify in The Angels Of Light's new album, Everything Is Good Here / Please Come Home (I love looking at people's shelves):

Books: - "Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher" - Adam Parfrey's "Apocalypse Culture" - Michael Moynihan's "Lords of Chaos" - Herbert Asbury's "The Gangs of New York" - Andrew Vachss's "Blue Belle" - M. Gira's "The Consumer" - Georges Bataille's "Erotism" - Jack London's "To Build a Fire and Other Stories" - books by Mark Twain, Joyce Carol Oates, Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges (2), Thomas Hardy (2) - travel guides to Morocco and Australia

CDs:
- Swans-related titles: What We Did, Soundtracks for the Blind, Ten Songs from Another World, the Filth / Body to Body, Job to Job two-fer, and How I Loved You (on the back cover)
- a Foetus CD
- Bob Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks"
- Stereolab's "Peng!"
- Stereolab's "Emperor Tomato Ketchup"

posters

Via Scrubbles.net, an online exhibition of anti-war posters on the Vietnam War, from the U.S., Vietnam and Cuba.

By Jesus Gallardo; Comité Cubano de Solidaridad con Viet Nam, Cambodia y Laos; 1972.

Snow dog.

Queen of all she surveys, the snow dog (formerly the apartment dog) gazes out at the wintry wilderness. The forest awakens something primal in her, a creature of sinew and teeth, ancient blood beating in her ears. (Sled and parkas Photoshopped out of picture.)

Poem fragment.

I was very recently introduced to the poetry of Maria Luisa Aguilar-Carino (now Luisa Igloria), a professor at Old Dominion University). (I went online and tried to buy up everything I could by her.)

I'm bad with describing -- heck, understanding -- poetry in general, but this is fine, fine stuff. This is an excerpt (the last stanza) from "Familiar," anthologized in Nick Carbo's Returning a Borrowed Tongue: An Anthology of Filipino and Filipino American Poetry:

In the evenings my ears fold
close, against the clatter of dishes,
the sing-song of voices
bordering the road. I murmur
these incantations, spell words
on blue-lined paper: bizarre, irrevocable,
reproach, syllable, steerage, ballast,
gesture -- taking them with me to sleep
like furry animals, hiding them
in my mouth like pebbles
newly dug up from the moonlit
garden -- taste of earth,
crushed bones, verbena, flared
nasturtiums.

Courtesy of basic hip on the Sound Scavengers mailing list, Vertigo... Then and Now -- before-and-after photographs of San Francisco as seen in Vertigo (circa 1957-58) and in 2003.

Bush and Nixon

Via also not found in nature, a column from the Hartford Advocate on Bush and Nixon, by Alan Bisbort:

Indeed, the crimes of George W. Bush ON A DAILY BASIS surpass the collective crimes of Richard Nixon's entire presidential career.

So, why aren't people more outraged by the current White House's abuse of power, unprecedented in American history?

And as he continues: "I miss the America that stood up to Richard Nixon. Even Dick Nixon looks good to me now."

Yo La Tengo Sells Out

And via largehearted boy, Yo La Tengo sells out.

Stumped

From All The Pages Are My Days, a funny (and sad) image on George Bush, the late Edwin Starr, and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?:

Who's paying for this war?

Bob Herbert's op-ed piece in the New York Times today is about Bush's tax cuts -- 1.4 trillion dollars for the wealthy -- and who's really paying for this war.

As he quotes from the House Budget Committee's analysis:

"The cut in Medicaid, if achieved entirely by reducing the number of children covered, would lead to the elimination of health coverage for 13.6 million children."

"The cut in foster care and adoption programs, if achieved by reducing the number of children eligible for foster care assistance payments, would lead to the elimination of benefits for 65,000 abused and neglected children."

"The cut in the food stamp program, if achieved by lowering the maximum benefit, would lead to a reduction in the average benefit from an already lean 91 cents per meal to 84 cents."

When's the last time one of the plutocrats in Congress waded through a meal that cost 84 cents?

This is especially egregious considering that they're considering eliminating school lunches for 2.4 million low-income children.

But then we're told by USA Today that Bush gave up sweets before the war began, so we know he's a man of sacrifice as well.

Arundhati Roy on the war

A characteristically eloquent (and fantastic) essay by Arundhati Roy, courtesy of ZNet:

So here's Iraq - rogue state, grave threat to world peace, paid-up member of the Axis of Evil. Here's Iraq, invaded, bombed, besieged, bullied, its sovereignty shat upon, its children killed by cancers, its people blown up on the streets. And here's all of us watching. CNN-BBC, BBC-CNN late into the night.

There's jazz and there's... Sade.

Richard Cook, from The Penguin Guide to Jazz, on record collecting (in The Wire):

Sade once told me that she couldn't imagine going through life without a big record collection, and I think that was about the only time I felt any empathy with her.

That NPR/PBS e-mail hoax strikes again!

That hoary old e-mail message about NEA cutbacks and the possible axing of NPR and PBS arrived in my e-mailbox today for the nth time.

But look who got suckered! The cool part, though -- and this indeed may be part of the hoax, though it's an iteration I haven't seen yet -- were the following signatories:

> > >1095) Salman Rushdie, New York, NY
> > >1096) Peter Carey, New York, NY
> > >1097) Annie Proulx, Wyoming

I would have been #1103.

Maybe it should become a new trend: counting your degrees of separation from famous people on e-mail petitions.

And now, the fetish-find for this month...

No sooner did I post the Roy-Orbison-in-clingfilm story when this month's fetish, tamakeri, was brought to my attention via the Sound Scavengers mailing list.

As a student interviewed said:

"I recently asked my girlfriend if she'd kick me, but she looked at me as though I was some sort of weirdo,' he says. "All I can do is watch the videos. The more painful it looks, the more excited I get."

Yowza!

Bush's lies

Sydney Schanberg's essay in the Village Voice on Bush's lies (link via thoughts on the eve of the apocalypse):

I'd like to explain why I'm using lie in its several forms, instead of the euphemisms journalists usually employ, such as spin or misspeaking. I think it's probably because this graying journalist has perhaps been around so long and seen so many of the really foul things humans can perpetrate on other humans that the urge to call things by their proper name has overtaken him. I hope it doesn't put anybody off.

Happy Pinoy Easter!

From my friend Jane, by way of Something Awful:

Fetish-Find of the Month.

Whoa! The fetish-find of the month: Roy Orbison in clingfilm.

I start from the ankles and work up to the trademark dark glasses, wrapping slowly and carefully. Soon Roy Orbison is completely wrapped in cling-film. He is like a big black beetle wrapped in a silvery cocoon. The satisfaction is unparalleled by anything in my previous existence.

What next? Robert Pollard in jello?