The Wily Filipino

1976: Steely Dan, "Kid Charlemagne."

When I used to live in the "German Studies house" -- it used to be the "Southeast Asia house," until it got overrun by Stanford grads who read Habermas day and night -- my housemate Mike would scoff at me for listening to Steely Dan. "Look at them!," he'd say, pointing to the photo in the Columbia House catalog of the long-haired musicians in a studio. (Mike listened to the Stone Temple Pilots, so what did he know.) At any rate, Steely Dan was one of my first conduits to jazz, believe it or not (except for a recording of "Budo" on a record my folks owned); their version of Duke Ellington's "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" -- made me seek out the original.

But back to the song on my list: "Kid Charlemagne" sounds like it's starting in the middle -- a little instrumental passage between stanzas, or the middle of a drug bust. Whatever it is, it works: the song drops you right into a seedy, sun-soaked, coke-fueled, sour-tasting hangover of a scene, populated by "Day-Glo freaks" and "low-rent friends."

What makes the song most memorable for me are the two all-too-brief soaring guitar solos unleashed by Larry Carlton (and drums by Bernard Purdie!), particularly the one that still echoes in the ears of the listener on the way out. That and the unforgettable couplet, bracketed in the last verse (and sung by Donald Fagen with a half-faltering note that makes it sound like undisguised joy) for maximum effect:

"Is there gas in the car?
Yes, there's gas in the car."

Sometimes it's just the slightest detail that turns a song into a masterpiece.

Weekly Link Roundup.

- Wretchard writes on suicide bombers as the "least cost-effective weapon."

- And if you haven't seen this one yet: another Matrix parody. Of ping-pong.

- The long-delayed, previously regular, Fetish Find of the Month (probably not safe for work): smoking women (via Geisha Asobi).

- Some bad use of statistics here: California is not Iraq.

- We knew the Man Who Would Be Governor had a checkered past, but this is just embarrassing.

- More poets on novelists: Eileen Tabios on Wilfrido Nolledo, and Ron Silliman on Philip K. Dick.

- And if you had a lot of disposable income and wanted to invest in something super-kitschy, let me give you an idea where to spend it.

- Tom Tomorrow writes on the Dean campaign.

- MacDiva writes a "defense" of Tom Cruise, of all people.

- A lovely poem on Tram Spark (it's the one that begins "The worst bits of love").

- I want a copy of this comic book; where can I get it?

- Slim's in San Francisco has a great lineup in October: Shonen Knife with Deerhoof opening on the 9th, My Morning Jacket on the 10th, two Guided By Voices dates on the 17th and 18th, and Cannibal Ox on the 30th.

- And I'll end with an extended excerpt from Reverend Mykeru on those two tons of rock in Alabama:

Asking whether or not [Judge] Moore should be compelled to follow the law is the wrong question because unless someone amended the Bill of Rights while I wasn't looking, his little brownie-points-with-Jesus stunt is a violation of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. I've seen the Constitution. It's in a sealed, inert gas-filled case in the National Archives building. I've looked it over thoroughly and there is no fine print that gives a special exemption for Fundamentalist Christians.

So the fundies have a clear choice: Obey the Constitution, amend the Constitution or pack the their fucking bags and head off to the jungles of Guyana where they can follow "God's law". Here in this country, in the 21st century we follow secular law and God shouldn't even be able to get his parking tickets fixed.

Nothing is so strange as the particularly American spectacle of people who fancy themselves to be uber-patriots and more- American-than-American thinking they can willfully break the law, even if they justify it with a laughably thin revisionist take on the intent and purpose behind the Constitution.

Like Father, Like Daughter.

And like her dad, she has her lists too:

Favorite movie(s):
Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro
Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders's Lilo and Stitch
John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton's A Bug's Life

Favorite album(s):
The Best of Elmo
Dan Zanes and Friends's Rocket Ship Beach

Favorite book(s) of the last three months, in no particular order:
Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon
Al Perkins's Hand Hand Fingers Thumb
Peter McCarty's Hondo and Fabian
Dr. Seuss's One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish
Marc Simont's The Stray Dog
Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Old Bad Guys, New Bad Guys.

After the abortive attempt to paint Kristina Leung as the evil female Fu Manchu / Dragon Lady, the New York Times is raising the heat on China again:

With unemployment high and American manufacturers reeling from three years of misery, politicians and businesspeople around the country have found a villain to blame for these troubles: China, or more specifically its currency.

Whee! And the front page story is followed up with an even more lurid story on the abuse of urban migrants.

I don't mean to defend China's abysmal human-rights record, and I don't mean to necessarily approve of the billions of dollars in trade deficits with the U.S., but I mean, come on: pot, kettle, black.

Meanwhile, as the war on Iraq -- I'm so sorry, I forgot the war was already declared over -- becomes more grim for American troops, President Smirk pulls out the same tired crap about "the struggle between civilization and chaos:"

We've adopted a new strategy for a new kind of war. We will not wait for known enemies to strike us again. We will strike them and their camps or caves or wherever they hide before they hit more of our cities and kill more of our citizens. We will do everything in our power to deny terrorists weapons of mass destruction before they can commit murder on an unimaginable scale.

In Iraq's case, those WMDs were denied indeed.

We've sent a message that is understood throughout the world: if you harbor a terrorist, if you support a terrorist, if you feed a terrorist, you're just as guilty as the terrorists, and the Taliban found out what we meant.

Saudi Arabia must be quaking in its boots.

Afghanistan today is a friend of the United States of America. Because we acted, that country is not a haven for terrorists, and the people of America are safer from attack.

Man, you can practically see him rehearsing in front of a mirror, looking at the way his lips move: "...Must mention 'friend...' must mention 'the people of America...' See Spot run. Run, Spot, run."

America and our coalition removed a regime that built, possessed and used weapons of mass destruction, a regime that sponsored terror and a regime that persecuted its people.

This is somewhat new, as "WMD" is back (he had initially changed it to "weapons program"), but now that the media's attention has shifted to Gov. Arnie and the Ten Commandments (Chief Justice Moore can put it in his living room), he can confidently bring up WMDs again.

In all the debates over Iraq, we must never forget Iraq.

Uh-huh.

We are on the offensive against the Saddam loyalists, the foreign fighters, and the criminal gangs that are attacking Iraqis and coalition forces.

Yup -- that's a lot of people there, and it's increasingly clear that "the coalition forces" have no idea who they are, where they're coming from, who's financing them. The war is over, indeed...

We're receiving more and more vital intelligence from Iraqi citizens, information that we're putting to good use.

Obviously not good enough.

Our course is set. Our purpose is firm. No act of terrorists will weaken our resolve or alter their fate. Our only goal, our only option, is total victory in the war on terror. And this nation will press on to victory.

"Total victory" can only mean total annihilation in this case, which seems like the sum of the Bush administration's plan for "the war on terror."

Learning by rote is never very effective, but maybe these cheap-labor conservatives know what they're doing. Bush has no new talking points in this speech, except for the deliberate omission of Osama bin Laden. Indeed, it could practically have been delivered a year ago, and the rhetoric would have been similar. WMDs, war on terror, America will prevail, with us or against us, blah blah, completely ignoring everything that has happened since then -- a brutal and expensive war, an even more unstable world order, a rising death toll since Bush squeezed into his flight uniform, more proof (as if anyone needed more) of a tanking economy. (All this is happily abetted by some of the most retrogressive policies in education, social welfare, the environment -- the outrage goes on and on...)

Five Answers, Part 2.

1. What do the letters T.O.D.A.S. stand for?

No one got the exact wording right: Television's Outrageously Delightful All-Star Show. Their skits were uneven, and not as cerebral as "Champoy," but so what? Remember the pie fights they had at the end of every show? Plus, "T.O.D.A.S." also introduced Richie Da Horsie to a stunned nation.

2. The Philippines has stood in for Vietnam in films like Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Apocalypse Now. In which film did the Philippines stand in for Indonesia?

My very good friend Romeo Quintana got this one. Peter Weir's 1982 film, The Year of Living Dangerously, with Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver, was filmed in the Philippines. Watch for the scene when an old Muslim woman drops to her knees in terror, praying to Allah, with the words, "Ama namin, sumasalangit..."

3. What was the name of the building, or building complex, that Imelda Marcos demanded be completed by October 1, 1975?

No one got this one. Ali Mall -- the date's the crucial clue in the question -- had to be finished in time for the "Thrilla in Manila" between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. (The second most popular answer, the Manila Film Center, was built in the '80s; the Philippine International Convention Center was built in 1976; both the Folk Arts Theater and the Cultural Center of the Philippines were constructed by 1974.)

4. "Minikaniko ni Monico..." -- what's the rest of this tongue twister straight from the Seventies?

"...ang makina ng Minica ni Monica." My brother Happy got this one first. Not "ang kiki ni Kikay," as Romeo answered. Ulol!

5. What were the words, heard by witnesses, that were allegedly shouted just before Ninoy Aquino was shot?

My old college classmate Maila Alberto (now Maila Eslabon) almost got this one. The words were "Heto na, pusila, pusila" ("Here he is, shoot, shoot") -- allegedly said by one of the AVSECOM guards. The Apo Hiking Society would later call their concert series "etonAPOsila" -- supposedly a sly reference to the assassination, as the band became more and more vocal against the Marcos regime.

Novelists and Musicians.

Caterina Fake has an interesting thread on poets who have written novels -- itself a takeoff on an entry on Ron Silliman's blog about "poets' novelists".

It's interesting because a somewhat similar thread (on summer reading) surfaces every year on the John Zorn list, and it seems the usual people get mentioned: Gass, Gaddis, Dick, Murakami, Delany, Calvino, and so on. Not sure if this means that people who like their music somewhat more offbeat like their fiction the same way too...

The relationship (poets to novelists / poets to musicians) is obviously different. But I do wonder: What do poets -- or people who like to read poetry -- listen to?

The obvious choices are people in the scene, as it were, like Cage, Ono, Ashley, and Zorn (Lyn Hejinian and Myung Mi-Kim wrote a couple of the texts for New Traditions in East Asian Bar Bands). But it would be silly to think that people who write poetry like their music a certain way as well.

Or are you all closet George Thorogood listeners?

Ethics and Music.

MacDiva writes about "loving the artist, hating the song" -- in particular, Billie Holiday singing "Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do:"

...there I was, listening to a woman declare herself a willing candidate [of domestic violence] and almost singing along with the chorus.

...

I have no magical formula to offer in regard to this issue. Indeed, the answer may be that one learns to tolerate a degree of imperfection in artists one admires and each individual decides where to draw the line. I'll delete "Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do" from my iPod because I find the song too irritating to continue listening to it. Other decisions about lyrics that make me uncomfortable will be made on a case-by-case basis. In some of them, I will keep right on loving the artist and hating the song.

Songs like that one probably constitute a fourth of Lady Day's recorded output, but that's how it goes. My very first Billie Holiday purchase was the live Billie's Blues, which contains the classic "My Man:"

Two or three girls
Has he
That he likes as well as me
But I love him

I don't know why I should
He isn't true
He beats me, too
What can I do?

Oh, my man, I love him so
He'll never know
All my life is just a spare
But I don't care
When he takes me in his arms
The world is bright
All right

Later on MacDiva writes about "Sweet Home Alabama" -- a retort to Neil Young's "Southern Man" -- and how the song's "hot guitar riff" still won't earn it a place on her iPod.

Let me take the topic a little further, because it's something which has (or hasn't) bothered me as well. As a voracious (and fairly omnivorous) consumer of music, I listen to a whole bunch of artists and groups associated with dodgy themes or politics, whether as window-dressing or (unfortunately) in real life. Michael Moynihan has made clear in the very good Lords of Chaos the very real connection between the Norwegian black metal scene and various acts of homicide and arson, among others. (Yes, I listen to Darkthrone.) And a lot of the early Industrial/noise groups also used graphically violent imagery as part of their shock tactics. (Yes, I listen to Whitehouse too. And Boyd Rice. I confess it all: behind the mild-mannered, defender-of-minorities facade, the Wily Filipino is a rabid, Satan-worshipping thug in jackboots.)

It reminds me of how one of my Filipino friends from New York shook his head in disbelief when I told him I was a big John Zorn fan; this was because Zorn had gotten into trouble from the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence for the covers of the Naked City albums Torture Garden (naked Japanese women suspended and tied up in elaborate knots) and Leng T'che (Chinese man ripped apart in a public execution -- you Bataille fans would have already seen that one). (Surely that hidden Araki photograph in Taboo and Exile would have gotten Zorn into hotter water, but it didn't.)

(And probably my favorite film of all time is Apocalypse Now, which is deeply racist, but in an interesting way. Which may have been Coppola's point, but I'm not sure that it is. But as Frank Chin writes: "We have to be able to accept Conrad and Coppola's works as the white racist works they are and still recognize them as great white lit and film. And I think most writers from non-white peoples can and have been reading racist white lit and recognizing it as great lit.")

MacDiva also brings up Miles Davis, which is funny because he's always my primary example of how I conveniently ignore the musician's personal background for the music. He was, by all the accounts I've read, extremely abusive towards women. (But his indefensible behavior is somehow "excusable" because the man is a genius. Is that the logic in operation here? Because I'll be damned if I never listen to Miles again out of principle.)

In any case, it is an interesting quandary...

Weekly Link Roundup.

Who has time to surf anymore? (I do have a couple of extended comments on other blog entries reserved for later, plus the answers to the latest trivia questions -- sometime this week.) But for now:

Joffinmari goes "Fuckety-fuck" after discovering she missed Edie Brickell perform. (I just wanted to give "fuckety-fuck" its own clickable link.)

(I was chatting with Joffinmari on ICQ the other night and I told her that my wife's ex used to be Edie's ex. That isn't as cool, though, as the fact that my mom used to date this guy's uncle.)

And I wash my hands completely of this rash act.

Notes on "Why Eileen Tabios Bugs Me."

I was trying to figure out what to write about next when I looked through my notes on a future post -- one on Eileen Tabios's poem "Parallel Universe" -- and looked at the lines I'd scribbled:

Gazing through a screen/scrim.

Not black hole.

Primary colors. Of being detached.

Watching in slow motion.

The apostate that I am originally saw it as being religious in nature.

Poet's universe is parallel universe.

On level of sentence.

About art, and the poet, and when will we ever meet?

Somewhere in there: "obviate."

Prose with tiny beaks. Discrete events.

Strings tuning up for the last act.

Guided By Voices, 8/20/03, Bimbo's, SF.

For two and a half hours, Guided By Voices was the greatest rock and roll band on earth. Robert Pollard and the boys literally tore into the songs, barely giving the audience time to come down from the previous song's high. ("It's another busy day for the cut-out witch 1-2-3-4!") The band was in particularly fine form, racing through chord changes on a dime, with Pollard doing his deadly sincere rockstar moves (the Mick Jagger pout, the mic cord twirls, and early on in the show when he was a little more sober, a couple of David Lee Roth high-kicks). ("This is arena rock... in a bar!") By his sixth Miller Lite or so -- you could tell because he would toss and spin 'em in the air and catch them before twisting off the cap -- he was hollering, "If I'm outta beer, I'm outta here," to which the audience obligingly responded by sending bottles of Bud to the front.

Most of the material was from the brand spankin' new album Earthquake Glue, but that didn't stop the jumping, dancing, flailing crowd from bobbing their heads along. And laughing too. Pollard at some point was staring at "his friend," a cricket on the floor (I think it was a moth), which inspired a riff on Buddy Holly. (This wasn't nearly as headshakingly absurd and hilarious as his comments that we were living "in paranoid times, boys and girls," and that Saddam Hussein could be anywhere or look like anyone. "Saddam Hussein could look like Lou Reed. Saddam Hussein is Lou Reed.")

The 30-minute encore -- after 2 hours of nonstop playing plus a 5 minute break -- was simply pure, crowd-frenzy joy. (It was after I found myself singing along with the diehards up front to the "For Chrissakes, Charlie" intro to "Skin Parade" that I realized what a GBV geek I'd become.) The band laid down the songs, one after the other: "Christian Animation Torch Carriers," "Echos Myron," "Glad Girls," "Tractor Rape Chain," "Teenage FBI," "Hot Freaks," "Everywhere with Helicopters," "I Am A Scientist," "Motor Away"... with the crowd up front yelling out the lyrics. I don't think I've had so much fun at a concert in a while. (And to the woman in the middle near the front in the sleeveless black blouse and the cat's-eye glasses, waving her arms in the air: thank you for being so enthusiastic. It was infectious.)

(This is turning out to be a great year for concerts for me: the Vetiver / Devendra Banhart / The Angels of Light concert at the Bottom of the Hill, the once-in-a-lifetime Current 93 concert at the Great American Music Hall, and now this...)

Uncle Bob Says...

On why I have no real blog entry today:

That's why I love San Francisco. You're irresponsible. You drink. You shirk work. How many of you have to go to work tomorrow? Shirk work. Fuck work! You tell your boss that Uncle Bob said "Fuck you!"

- liberally paraphrased from Robert Pollard at the Guided By Voices concert last night at Bimbo's in SF

Happy and Unhappy Accidents.

I was looking for reviews on this free Palm program called HandyShopper, which organizes and tabulates your grocery lists -- yeah, really geeky, I know -- when I stumbled upon this obviously babelfished review on Handango:

A race list by store frequented, established in the order of the rays in the field... The possibility to do to evolve his list at any moment, as soon as a stock lack is detected, while keeping the order d'achat... The possibility to compare the prices between them... More of small lost papers, more of forgetfulnesses. And the possibilé well heard to manage with his library, his music library or any collection.

Lovely, eh? Doesn't "More of small lost papers, more of forgetfulnesses" remind you of Walter Benjamin unpacking his library or something?

Speaking of errors, though, this is one that isn't so funny -- from the New York Times's errata section, a couple of days ago:

An editorial on Saturday misstated the projected federal deficit over the next decade. It is $4 trillion or more, not $4 billion.

Five Questions, Part 2.

No time to post any new material, so here are five more:

1. [This one's for DBD.] What do the letters T.O.D.A.S. stand for?

2. The Philippines has stood in for Vietnam in films like Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Apocalypse Now. In which film did the Philippines stand in for Indonesia?

3. What was the name of the building, or building complex, that Imelda Marcos demanded be completed by October 1, 1975?

4. "Minikaniko ni Monico..." -- what's the rest of this tongue twister straight from the Seventies?

5. What were the words, heard by witnesses, that were allegedly shouted just before Ninoy Aquino was shot?

Weekly Link Roundup.

A little late this week, but here we go:

Tim Yu, among many others, weighs in on the "Is Ron Silliman Darth Vader?" debate.

Wretchard goes overboard. Hollywood is also First Blood and Dirty Harry.

Vegetables make music.

And I keep forgetting my brother writes poetry: "357 Meters to the Doormat."

One of Music Collector's big selling points back in the day was that it was CDDB-enabled, which meant that all you had to do to add an album to your collection database was put the CD in the CD player and grab the information from CDDB. ("No typing needed," as they put it.) The latest version, 6.0, just came out, and it is amazing -- now you can queue searches offline, then pull images and info from Amazon.com -- or for complete entries, including reviews, track times and studio lineup, grab them from All Music Guide.

All Consuming.

There's a whole slew of cool blog plugins and whatnot out there, from my GeoURL box in the lower right (not that I click on it very often), to my FastCounter (which, unfortunately, counts my refreshes as hits as well), my referrers list from Stephen's Web, to everyone's favorite, Blogrolling. (I would have installed that Weather Pixie if I found one that looked like me.)

But my current favorite -- and surely the coolest one I've seen in a long time -- is Erik Benson's All Consuming, which takes the place of my "Now Reading" list on the right. The little bit of javascript code reads from your All Consuming collection (of books you're currently reading, but you can also list those just finished, or about to read, or your favorites), fetches an image, adds a link to the book on Amazon.com with your Amazon Associate ID, and even includes your optional comments. The best part, though, is the All Consuming website itself, which tracks books mentioned in the All Consuming-enabled blogosphere every hour, and ranks them weekly.

All Consuming is obviously a real labor of love, and Erik Benson -- who helped me with a problem getting the results to display, above and beyond any kind of call of duty -- deserves your support (if only to spread the word about his great program).

I'm So Boring.

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid:	Low
Schizoid:	Low
Schizotypal:	Low
Antisocial:	Low
Borderline:	Low
Histrionic:	Moderate
Narcissistic:	Moderate
Avoidant:	Low
Dependent:	Low
Obsessive-Compulsive:	Moderate
-- Personality Disorder Test - Take It! --

(Via Nuki's Uchi!)

Five Answers.

All five have been correctly answered (see comments from the other day's post).

1. The old and the new: Beverly Hills and the oldest street in the Philippines is located in this city. What is the city's name?

The exclusive subdivision of Beverly Hills and Colon Street -- named after Columbus, established in 1565 -- are both located in Cebu City. Don't miss the huge Chinese temple up in the hills.

2. In an elaborate parody of Superman, Mighty Mouse and "The Empire Strikes Back," Joey de Leon plays a boy named Mickey with super powers who discovers that his arch-enemy, played by Ruel Vernal in a Darth Vader suit, is actually his father. What is the full title of this film, whose name was bleeped out by censors in television ads?

Dyno -- Dyno Atienza, is that you? -- got this one (and the next): Super Mouse and the Roborats. The voiceover in its TV ads would go, "Super Mouse and the Robo[bleep]."

3. The seminal Pinoy punk/hardcore/thrash band G.I. and the Idiots gave us such memorable lyrics as "The Philippine flag is a dirty old rag" and a stanza of almost Wordsworth-like lyricism, "We can't get along with our music! / We can't get along with our songs! / We can't get along with our assholes! / So we put our assholes in our songs!" What did "G.I." stand for?

"G.I." stood for George Imbecile, their bassist. Their 1986 debut album Fascinating World of Garbage is a must-listen for anyone who cares about Pinoy music history, released by the influential Twisted Red Cross label. (An overwhelming number of people from the previous quiz answered "Genuine Ilocano." Do you really think any "genuine Ilocano" would call their punk band "Genuine Ilocano and the Idiots?" "G.I.," of course, really stands for Government Issue, but not in this case.)

4. In September 1975, he told Sports Illustrated magazine, "I was the national champion in shooting. I won the championship when I was 16 and kept it for many years. My shooting got me in trouble. I was once charged with murder, but was acquitted." Who is the person speaking?

None other than the late "old twat" Ferdinand Marcos. (Lead singer of that other seminal Pinoy punk/hardcore/thrash band, Genuine Ilocano and His Idiots.)

5. "She raised her skirts and contemptuously thrust out a naked foot. He lifted his dripping face and touched his bruised lips to her toes; lifted his hands and grasped the white foot and kissed it savagely -- kissed the step, the sole, the frail ankle -- while she bit her lips and clutched in pain at the windowsill, her body distended and wracked by horrible shivers, her head flung back and her loose hair streaming out the window -- streaming fluid and black in the white night where the huge moon glowed like a sun and the dry air flamed into lightning and the pure heat burned with the immense intense fever of noon." It's the last paragraph of a classic short story by which author?

It's from "The Summer Solstice," written by Nick Joaquin in 1947.

Harassment and Lies.

The U.S. government is very quickly refining its methods of harassment: Americans who acted as human shields in Iraq are receiving letters from the Treasury Department, asking about what they did there and reminding them that "spending money there was a crime that could lead to 12 years in prison and civil penalties of up to $275,000."

...a Treasury spokesman bristled at the notion that the inquiries were politically motivated.

"Of course not," the spokesman, Taylor Griffin, said. "Unlike in Iraq under Saddam Hussein — where dissent was met with imprisonment or worse — the freedom to protest and disagree with the government is a cornerstone of American democracy. However, the right to free speech is not a license to violate U.S. or international sanctions. While free expression is a right enjoyed by all Americans, choosing which laws to abide by and which to ignore is not a privilege that is granted to anyone."

It sure was a "privilege" granted to the U.S., no? What nerve.

Speaking of balls (or the lack of them), Bush lies again (what's new?):

"We are discussing a lot of things, and we believe that the tax relief plan we have in place is robust enough to encourage job growth," Mr. Bush told reporters at his 1,600-acre Texas ranch here, as he stood flanked by his top economic advisers. "If we change our opinion, we will let you know," he added.

"If we change our opinion, we will let you know??" What kind of moronic statement is that? (Well -- the kind of moronic statement you follow previous ones, I suppose.)

...Mr. Bush and his advisers offered no new initiatives or ideas to improve the economy. Instead, Mr. Bush repeated calls that Congress rein in spending, and said that the $350 billion in tax cuts enacted this year would soon lead to economic growth.

This is despite Nobel Prize-winning economist and UC Berkeley professor George Akerlof's warning that "the Bush policy is the worst policy in the last 200 years." (See also Bob Herbert's column for more.)

And for the women and men on duty overseas: nothing beats being lied to and made to pay for it.

Six Questions.

Thanks to Mark from Clickmomukhamo!, who sent me a link to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine -- and lo and behold, almost all of my quiz archives were indeed still alive, and now they're safely downloaded onto my hard disk. (Reading through them, I've realized that they all pretty much end at 1990, which was when I left the Philippines.)

Here were a few questions; there's one completely obscure one that I simply have to include because the answer is just too funny. (Sorry -- you non-Pinoys (and young Pinoys) would probably have to sit most of these out.)

1. The old and the new: Beverly Hills and the oldest street in the Philippines is located in this city. What is the city's name?

2. [Here's the obscure one.] In an elaborate parody of Superman, Mighty Mouse and The Empire Strikes Back, Joey de Leon plays a boy named Mickey with super powers who discovers that his arch-enemy, played by Ruel Vernal in a Darth Vader suit, is actually his father. What is the full title of this film, whose name was bleeped out by censors in television ads?

3. [Another obscure one.] The seminal Pinoy punk/hardcore/thrash band G.I. and the Idiots gave us such memorable lyrics as "The Philippine flag is a dirty old rag" and a stanza of almost Wordsworth-like lyricism, "We can't get along with our music! / We can't get along with our songs! / We can't get along with our assholes! / So we put our assholes in our songs!" What did "G.I." stand for?

4. In September 1975, he told Sports Illustrated magazine, "I was the national champion in shooting. I won the championship when I was 16 and kept it for many years. My shooting got me in trouble. I was once charged with murder, but was acquitted." Who is the person speaking?

5. "She raised her skirts and contemptuously thrust out a naked foot. He lifted his dripping face and touched his bruised lips to her toes; lifted his hands and grasped the white foot and kissed it savagely -- kissed the step, the sole, the frail ankle -- while she bit her lips and clutched in pain at the windowsill, her body distended and wracked by horrible shivers, her head flung back and her loose hair streaming out the window -- streaming fluid and black in the white night where the huge moon glowed like a sun and the dry air flamed into lightning and the pure heat burned with the immense intense fever of noon." It's the last paragraph of a classic short story by which author?

Answers a couple of days from now, plus more questions to mull over.

Meanwhile -- once again, politics intrudes into fun time -- I'm mulling over how to respond to the front-page story in this week's Philippine News that, in an informal poll with a small sample, 70 percent of Filipino Americans said they'd vote for Arnold Schwarzenegger:

Manny Cabildo of San Diego County... said he liked Schwarzenegger "because he had a business background."

The actor looks at things in a simplified way, he added. It's either black or white, "no gray."

Maybe Arnie can hire this guy for his campaign; "all black or white, no gray" sounds pretty catchy to me. After all, simple-minded people deserve simple-minded politicians, and vice-versa.

So, question no. 6:

6. Who are these 70 percent, and why are they being total idiots?

When the Philippines Hit the Beatles.

(Sung to the tune, if you will, of John Wesley Harding's "When the Beatles Hit America.")

The Casual Savant asks: "What was George's last name?" (Or rather: "Ok, I'll bite. This is one piece of pinoy trivia I don't know.")

Here's an excerpt from a later interview, in 1986:

GEORGE: Yeah, well we went to Manila back in the sixties, The Beatles on a tour and we did the concert and next morning we were in bed and somebody knocked on our door of our hotel suite saying, “Come on you’re supposed to be at the palace.” And we said, “No we’re not!” We didn’t have any engagement anywhere but somebody, some smart guy had said, “Sure, I’ll get The Beatles up to the palace.” And they said turn on the TV. We turned the television on and there it was, this big palace with lines of people and the guy saying, “Well, they’re still not here yet.” And we watched ourselves not arrive at the palace. But we were never supposed to be there. And so what they did was they said “Beatles snub first family,” which I’m glad we did. See even in those days we had taste, and so consequently he set the mob on us and tried to beat us up, which they did. They beat up a lot of people with us and wouldn’t let the aeroplane leave Manila, until Epstein, our manager had to get off the plane and give back the money we earned at the concert. So that’s what I think of Marcos, (George gives a lovely British two-fingered salute to the screen). Old twat he was!

(If I remember correctly, Eric Gamalinda's novel The Empire of Memory -- oddly categorized at Kabayan Central as "psychology/self-help" -- opens with this very scene.)

What Was George's Last Name?

I mistakenly deleted all my Pinoy Trivia Quiz archives from Tripod -- and considering I had already lost everything on my hard disks previously -- they're really, really gone. (I was trying to repair my links, and thought I'd make space on Tripod, not knowing that I didn't have those particular files on my Aletia-hosted server.) Oh well. Kind of a shame since that was 40-odd weeks -- or 200-plus questions -- now completely gone. But then I hadn't really thought about them being there until they disappeared.

I did find this little fragment, though, which a lot of people successfully answered, and even a lot of non-Pinoys would get this. (The question was What was George's last name?)

Q: Did you get kicked, John?

John: No, I was very delicate, and moved every time they touched me. I could have been kicked without knowing it, I just know getting booed.

Q: Would you go to Manila again, George?

George: Oh no, I didn't even want to go that time. Because we'd heard that it was a terrible place anyway, and when we got there it was proved.

Claire Danes and Jennifer Beals hated the place too.

Weekly Link Roundup.

This has been a week of little surfing, I'm afraid, what with my pensionado article (done, except for the section on embarrassment), and syllabi to construct (just figured out some essays to go with the ethnography on Iraqi women).

So here's one link: a great article courtesy of my friend Jane: the lead singer of Jesus Jones -- remember them? -- writes about "selling out."

Tropical Poets.

Some of you might like this: this is from Willard Price's 1920 book on the Methodist Church's missionary work around the world entitled Ancient Peoples at New Tasks:

"Any Filipino who can scribble dog verse is a songster, a new Shelley, a budding Omar Khayyam. The population of the Philippines is ninety-nine per cent. poets and one per cent. farmers."

So wrote a critic of the Filipinos. He would not be correct in making such comment to-day. The work of the United States is transforming millions of easy-going, tropical "poets" into progressive farmers, manufacturers, and merchants is an achievement with few parallels in history.

It's A Class War, Baby.

Once again, Bob Herbert tells it like it is:

The official jobless rate, now 6.2 percent, does not come close to reflecting how grim the employment situation really is. The official rate refers only to those actively seeking work. It does not count the "discouraged" workers, who have looked for jobs within the last 12 months but have given up because of the lack of offers. Then there are the involuntary part-timers, who would like full-time jobs but cannot find them. And there are people who have had to settle for jobs that pay significantly less than jobs they once held.

When you combine the unemployed and the underemployed, you are talking about a percentage of the work force that is in double digits.

As he adds: "Right now there is no plan, no strategy for turning this employment crisis around. There is not even a sense of urgency."

The simple truth is that the interests of the Bush administration's primary constituency, corporate America, do not coincide with the fundamental interests of workaday Americans.

Can you say "cheap-labor conservatives?"

(I titled my post "It's a class war, baby!" because I heard it said once by one of my professors, who was referring to the Tonya Harding - Nancy Kerrigan skating fiasco back in the '90s. Since this was pre-Austin Powers, I had thought that this was a catchphrase from the late '60s -- and was a little surprised not to find it on Google.)

I've already written about the merits of Conceptual Guerilla's argument, so I won't rehash it here -- suffice it to say that framing this current crisis chiefly in terms of a basic conflict over class interests should hopefully be effective in galvanizing the public. Bob Herbert's last statement above comes close to formulating that same sentiment.

Day 2 of More of the Same.

Another long night last night. This essay is killing me. At least the night was made more bearable (or perhaps a little longer) by my brother intermittently sending me IMs via Trillian. (My ICQ number, by the way, is in one of the links on the right; my Yahoo! Messenger nickname is "sunny70," in case anyone's interested.) I really need to finish this before classes start at the end of the month: I'm teaching four classes for the first time in my life, and my bosses (no doubt to add insult to injury, considering my students are facing their 30 percent tuition fee increase) have upped the class size to 49 students per section. And no TAs, of course. Plus my in-laws are coming next week for Izzy's mini-birthday bash, so I have to get this paper done.

Izzy turned two today, and we celebrated with ube ice cream and, unfortunately, her first round of Hepatitis A shots. (It's actually rather unnerving because she never ever flinches or complains or even changes her facial expression when the needle goes in. I wish I had a pain threshold like hers.)

Coming up next, if I ever find the time:

Another post on my 1970-2000 music list, this time on Steely Dan's "Kid Charlemagne."

A post entitled "Why Eileen Tabios Bugs Me" (in a good way, really -- there's a couple of lines in her poem "Parallel Universe" which simply won't let go of me)

A post on the University of the Philippines Rural High School Class of '86 (a whopping 16 percent of my provincial high school's graduating class are in the United States).

And a post on Kylie Minogue (and Justin Timberlake) and the joys of mindless pop.

Plus a bonus link: something you can pre-order just in time to celebrate 9/11 with your kids (though it comes out a few days later, on the 15th).

Blogged Out.

I'm a little blogged out today -- went to bed last night past 3:30 trying to finish an essay on the pensionados at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair (and, concurrently, the ilustrado students at the Madrid and Paris Expositions in the late 1880s). I'm trying to write a section on the sociological dynamics of embarrassment, but it's slow-going, and I have another section left on "tribal" nomenclatures and "the native other."

More "Obsessive" Thoughts.

Some responses to Joel Tesoro's recent post:

In my first post on this topic, I used the word "manipulation" deliberatively to be provocative: if the representation of historical events is used to promote or justify present agendas, then the substantive difference between, say, an imperialist vision of history and an immigrant minority recasting of it becomes perilously slim. How much difference does the fact that one was used for "evil" and the other for "good" make when the means are so similar? I see a "usable past" as like a gun -- it's loaded, and thus always potentially dangerous.

I'm afraid I see a rather crucial difference between these uses of history; similar means -- whether you want to go the "tools of the oppressor" route or not -- in different hands may, and do, have different results. Or, you may approach it from a different though somewhat unproductive route: "the representation of historical events" always has an agenda, in which case… what mode of representation did you have in mind?

In sixth or seventh grade in Manila, I remember vividly being taught by my Pilipino/Social Studies teacher that the U.S. was a "core" country and the Philippines was at the periphery, and that the history of both was determined by that relationship. Only much later, in college, did I realize that dependency theory was being drilled into my head at the age of 12.

Then you're a lucky man. I grew up and went to school in Los Banos -- back then a real hotbed of left-wing student activism -- but received the basic historical narrative of tutelage and undying friendship that I think many still get today.

In college admissions, for example, a Latino or African-American will be more likely to be admitted to a selective college than an Asian, all other aspects of their records being equal. Try as you might to transform that rejection into a kind of victimization, but it still doesn't seem all that credible to the majority culture, who think Asian-Americans have done pretty well for themselves.

College admissions are a whole 'nother can of worms, so I'm hiding the opener -- suffice it to say that the operative word in your passage above is "think." A good number of more enlightened Filipino Americans -- who get lumped in with Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and, say, Laotian Americans as fellow "Asian Americans" all the time -- will not hesitate to tell you about the truths behind the model minority myth. But this is turning into one of my classroom lectures, so I'll stop there.

Sure I do wish the Spanish-American War and the conquest of the Philippines had a more prominent place in the teaching of U.S. history (although I'd dispute any argument that claimed U.S. empire began in the Philippines -- the thought may privilege the Philippines, but it isn't that easy to dismiss the American expansion west and south!).

No, it isn't, but I think the United States' vision of itself as an empire, as Imperial America, becomes real after the colonization of the Philippines -- in other words, Manifest Destiny is finally fulfilled not with the Louisiana Purchase, or the land-grabbing in the south, but after the colonial possession of "our islands and their people."

Weekly Link Roundup.

Here's what some people did this week.

Wretchard weighed in on what made the Oakwood soldiers surrender.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil chose a new author photo.

Jordan Davis had some advice that you all should follow.

Kris Aquino taped her dress to her breasts.

I Snoopified my webpage -- mildly offensive, but funny in a juvenile way. (Via Click Mo Mukha Mo!)

K. Silem Mohammad found me an icon.

Eileen Tabios gained some weight.

And critics all over the nation agree: Gigli sucked. (Via Metafilter.)

Measured Critique and Outright Condescension.

I've ruffled a few feathers with recent posts. One invites a "measured critique;" the other one deserves nothing less than "outright condescension:" (I'll respond to Joel Tesoro's "Usable Pasts" post later.)

The anonymous writer wrote:

You and Joel Tesoro should have pointed out when and where the Filipino American War and its aftermath emerged as a legitimate object of academic study before throwing around loaded terms like "obsession" which only serves to smear the historical consciousness of Filipino Americans. You as well as I know -- or am I mistaken here? -- that the finest work on the Filipino American War was and is being produced not (only) by Filipino-Americans but by (white) American scholars as well as by "Filipinos" who are scattered all over the globe but who had been born and raised in the Philippines. The Filipino American War and its aftermath is therefore a trans-Pacific obsession -- if an obsession it truly is -- and Filipinos in San Diego, Canberra, Cebu, Manila, Kyoto, and yes, even San Francisco (and New York!) are equally among the obsessed.

I have no arguments with what you write; no smear was intended either. While it may sound like a bit of a cop-out, "obsession" was my friend's word, not mine; I think it should also be clear from what I wrote that I purposely used "loaded terms" like "obsession" and "obsessive" to refer to my own thoughts as well. I've been studying the American colonial period in the Philippines for over a decade now, and by that token I'm equally "obsessed." (Probing the psychological effects of the colonial period -- about which I'm not especially enthusiastic, as a student of anthropology -- is not a solely Filipino American endeavor either.)

S/he continues:

Indeed in the eyes of some non-Filipino critics what matters more for the Philippines is the obsession with American colonialism of Filipino nationalists in the Philippines rather than any of the feverish imaginings of Filipinos abroad. Remember the claims made by Ian Buruma and James Fallows that such an obsession is the root cause of Philippine underdevelopment? I don't believe that it is of use to anyone to reproduce their foolish arguments in a multicultural American setting.

Once again, you and I agree!

And ends with:

Both you and Joel Tesoro seem to be engaged in a more reprehensible game of one-upmanship than that played by other minorities in the US. I find it disturbing that two Filipinos now living in relative comfort in the United States would cast themselves as somehow more politically conscious and more authentic than those poor Filipino American scholars who can't seem to get past their obsessions, however understandable those obsessions may be. Many of us are in a desperate search for a usable past and many of us stumble intellectually in the process. But, to put it defensively, there are also many of us who can and do think critically about the uses and abuses of history in American and Philippine life without your measured critiques or your outright condescension.

First of all, Joel Tesoro is, I believe, in the Philippines, but you should address him yourself.

Secondly, I don't think I've expressed myself very well; nowhere did I mention "authenticity" or "political consciousness," much less attribute them to myself! (The Authenticity Game is even worse than the Who Suffered More Sweepstakes.) In fact I put forth, in two posts, the tentative argument that Filipino American scholars are, in that respect, more "politically conscious" than their fellow scholars in the Philippines because they are, at the very least, doing all that remembering! (And I explain as well why all this remembering -- okay, to use a loaded term: "obsessing" -- is important, if not crucial, to understanding and engaging (and hopefully, contesting) American empire.)

I really am puzzled by your response; I condescend every now and then, but certainly not in the post to which you commented.

Now for the second message -- [sigh], this is what I get for allowing anonymous comments on my weblog. I won't bother with a response because the letter writer is plainly a fool. But I'm posting it here anyway so that you all know what the rantings of a Marcos Moron™ look like:

At least yung mga anak ni Marcos... matatalino. They were all highly educated. Talagang maipagmamalaki. Matalino rin kasi ang mga magulang! Eh yung mga anak ni Cory? Saan sila nag-aral? Palibhasa 'housewife' lang na naging presidente. Baka nga pagluto lang ng ulam, palpak pa -- tulad ng NANAY nila.

Kaya ikaw Wily...magpakamatay ka na lang. Seriously. Ang mga BAKLANG katulad mo...na 'nahuli sa akto' tapos nagtatakip pa... tumahimik ka na lang. DAHIL ALAM KO KUNG SINO KA!! OKAY???

Required Reading.

Read these now (though you've probably already seen the links): "Defeat The Right In Three Minutes" (via American Samizdat), the Visual Iraq Body Count, and "End the Liberal Voluntary Extinction Movement."

So go now -- you can right-click on the links and open a new window or tab -- before coming back and reading more. =)

...

Already read it? Good. Repeat the words to yourself: "cheap-labor conservative." "Cheap-labor conservative." Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

There is, admittedly, a bit of reductiveness in the Conceptual Guerilla's analysis -- using class as a lens to simply explain gender inequalities, or racial or ethnic discrimination, among others -- but it's the right kind, really, if only to circulate it as a viral catchphrase. To get people to make those connections and think for themselves. (And considering that the Democrats are all trying very hard to fly under the radar -- sorry, but that only works on Survivor, and not even all of the time -- those connections have to be made by other people.)

Why the utter wrongness of this (cheap-labor conservative) administration doesn't seem evident to everyone leaves me dumbfounded, since it's so obvious in many ways. Let's examine something really simple:

Q. We now have more evidence of a massive budget deficit that taxpayers are going to be paying off for years or decades to come. The economy continues to shed jobs. What evidence can you point to that tax cuts, at least of the variety that you have supported, are really working to help this economy? And do you need to be thinking about some other approach?

A. No, the answer to the last part of your question. First of all, let me -- quick history, recent history. The stock market started to decline in March of 2000. Then the first quarter of 2001 was a recession. And then we got attacked 9/11. And then corporate scandals started to bubble up to the surface, which created a lack of confidence in the system. And then we had the drumbeat to war.

Remember on our TV screens -- I'm not suggesting which network did this -- but it said "March to War" every day from last summer till the spring. March to war, march to war, that's not a very conducive environment for people to take risks when they hear march to war all the time.

Let's take a look at what's going on here. "We're all sinners" aside, Bush (in one of his blue-moon press conferences) once again makes himself sound staggeringly moronic. Consider the fact that he lamely dodges the two most important questions on everyone's mind before the conference: evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (he now says "weapons program"), and the terrible state of the economy.

Blaming the deficit on, of all things, television -- people who coddled him all the way, mind you -- is simply beyond belief. Never mind the fact that he clumsily sidesteps the tax cut issue -- he actually blames television for the "not very conducive environment" which he himself created! (Nice of him at least to mention "corporate scandals," since people do need reminding.)

His "Bushisms" have been explained away as Texas-style, plain-folks locution, or as proof of his merely scattered brain, as if the latter wasn't frightening enough. (I can see him saying to himself, over and over, while he brushes his teeth: "Stick to the talking points. Stick to the talking points.")

But this is perhaps a little too generous, for it gives him a way out, some form of excuse -- kind of like the equivalent of his "gentleman's C." Why bother cutting him some slack, since he obviously doesn't give a shit? Why are words like arrogance or malice hardly ever mentioned when it comes to him? Does Bush and his cheap-labor conservative cronies not think that people would finally make the connection between the huge deficit and the huge tax cuts, or, at the very least, the billions of dollars spent on the war on Iraq every month? Or is it because they think they can get away with it?

Lying we're used to. But now Bush isn't even bothering to lie well anymore. See, this is the kind of person we're dealing with here -- that smirk on his face says it all. He's smirking at you and me. The next time you see Bush smirking, just think to yourself: he's smirking at me.

In a month's time I will be going back to school and facing my students, who -- if they can afford to enroll -- would have had to suffer through a whopping 30 percent tuition fee increase.

In two months' time the democratically-elected governor of the severely cash-strapped state I live in may have been toppled in a travesty of a recall election engineered by cheap-labor conservatives and replaced by either a car-alarm salesman, the Terminator, or the publisher of Hustler magazine.

Mykeru reminds us that "This isn't a game." That's absolutely correct. CEOs are making more money than any of their poor fired employees will ever make in their lifetimes. Cheap-labor conservatives piss and moan about the so-called liberal media and pat themselves on the back for their "moral clarity," while at the same time indulging their various hypocrisies. Teachers are being laid off. Funding in almost all social services has been violently slashed. Too many people -- both Iraqis and Americans -- have suffered and died because of Bush's lies, and more people will suffer in the years to come from Bush's "compassionate conservatism."

Enough is enough. It's knives-out time.

Ten, Teren, Tererereren.

I love Mojo, the unapologetically obsessive magazine for unapologetically obsessive music listeners. Yesterday the latest issue came in the mail, and Radiohead was on the cover -- no captions, no names, no nothing, just sullen peering into the camera. I asked Madeline who she thought they were, and she didn't know; I thought that proved my point -- if you didn't know then the magazine obviously isn't for you. =)

But the real prize is a little booklet entitled "The 100 Greatest Guitar Albums," which exemplifies their obsession for making lists, like Nick Hornby's protagonist in High Fidelity. Each album is accompanied by an illustration, a short review, and best of all, a "key moment." Here's an example -- since Catherine Meng's been reading Shakey for a month now, I'll use their description of the "key moment" from Neil Young's Zuma:

Cortez the Killer, 6:11, Young teases out one final molten lamentation, sending the song into endless flight over the abyss.

The booklet is arranged chronologically, from Charley Patton's Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues to The White Stripes's Elephant (if you must know, the key moment is two minutes and seventeen seconds into "Seven-Nation Army.") They're not ranked -- but at the end, though, the critics give in and make a list of the Top 20. Here's the Top 10:

10. Johnny Burnette and The Rock 'N' Roll Trio, The Rock 'N' Roll Trio
9. Brooks Eaglin, New Orleans Street Singer
8. Charlie Christian, Genius of the Electric Guitar
7. Ramones, Ramones
6. Radiohead, The Bends
5. My Bloody Valentine, Loveless
4. Funkadelic, Maggot Brain
3. Howlin' Wolf, Howlin' Wolf
2. The Who, My Generation
1. The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Are You Experienced

I'm suddenly reminded of my former e-mail buddy Boyong Valencia, who hasn't written in years. In a spate of true music geekiness, we would transcribe guitar riffs phonetically and make the other person guess it. Like (and I'm quoting one of his from memory):

TE-NEN-NEN-NEN-NEN!
TE-NEN-NEN-NEN-NEN!

Which was, of course, the opening riff from the Kinks's "You Really Got Me."

I had foolishly thought it was "All Day and All of the Night" at first, but that one goes "Ten, teren, tererereren."

This later mutated into three different threads, if I remember correctly:

1. Cheesy Uses for Horns (funny, there's a thread just like it on the Postal Blowfish list right now -- if you must know, I absolutely hated the one on Men At Work's "Who Can It Be Now"),

2. Best Guitar Solos Ever and One Lame Guitar Solo -- to be precise, Springsteen's half-hearted, wussy fill-in immediately after he sings "Well I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk" on "Thunder Road,"

3. and Best Album Openings Ever. (The Smashing Pumpkins's Siamese Dream had just come out then, and I absolutely loved the way each band member would come in one after the other on "Cherub Rock.")