The Wily Filipino

Make A Joyful Noise.

Saw the Polyphonic Spree in concert last night -- the show was fantastic. I had a smile plastered on my face the whole time. Total crowd sing-along mania: "HOLD ME NOW, DON'T START SHAKING!" The folks up front and center were mimicking every freaked-out move the choir made.

Jon Brion also played with the Spree the whole time. (This was at Bimbo's in San Francisco -- fairly small club, so it was great.) It was almost the exact same setlist they've been doing this whole tour (starting off with the harp solo, then into "We Sound Amazed," and barreling joyously into the set with a rapturous "Light and Day," including the same covers, Bowie's "Memory of a Free Festival," a little detour into Prince's "Let's Go Crazy," and the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" at the end). It's also apparently the last concert of the tour; Tim promised the show would be different next time around, and alluded to a summer release of new music.

(Alas, I missed Toshio Hirano, who the bartendress ("my boyfriend is half-Filipino") described as "this 70-year old Japanese guy who sang old cowboy songs and did the whole yodeling thing." But I did get to catch From Bubblegum To Sky, whose album I have to check out; they played perfect little scrappy pop songs.)

(Confidential to Boyong: just for you, I touched Ms. Orange's robe. They walked through the audience just before the encore and happened to take a path right in front of me.)

And one last cool thing: the whisper went through the crowd that a certain indie-rock goddess was in the audience, and sure enough, on my way to the bathroom, I saw Polly Jean Harvey...

Film, Eyeballs, Brain.

Attempting to burrow and disappear into the admiration of certain works of art, I tried to make such deep and pure identification that my integrity as a human self would become optional, a vestige of my relationship to the art. I wanted to submit and submerge, even to die a little. I developed a preference, among others, for art that required endurance, that mimicked a galactic endlessness and wore out the nonbelievers. By ignoring my hunger or my need to use the bathroom during a three-hour movie by Kubrick or Tarkovsky, I'd voted against my body, with its undeniable pangs and griefs, in favor of a self composed of eyeballs and brain, floating in the void of pure art.

- from Jonathan Lethem, in "The Beards"

Evolution and Time.

So I've got tickets to see Lav Diaz's Ebolusyon ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution of a Filipino Family), showing at the NAATA filmfest here in the Bay Area next month. While I've long wanted to see anything by Diaz -- in particular, Batang Westside, which as far as I know never showed anywhere near here -- Ebolusyon should give one pause, since it's 10 and a half hours long.

That's right: 630 minutes, and it isn't a typo; the zero's really there. While the film itself sounds fantastic -- it traces the life of a Filipino family from 1971 to 1987, both before and after the martial-law years -- I must confess a curiosity about what a ten-and-a-half hour long film might be like. (I've never seen Shoah or Berlin Alexanderplatz; the longest film I've ever sat through was Frederick Wiseman's Near Death, which will test anyone even in the shorter version shown on PBS.)

Will it be like a wayang performance, where people chat and sleep and walk in and out? Or will there be a hardy few left in the theater when the movie ends, everyone congratulating each other for making it through? Will it play like a soap opera, or will it be like Andy Warhol's Empire? I'm tempted to think of it almost like a Morton Feldman piece, but there has got to be more of a narrative... maybe a view of Philippine history as written by Fernand Braudel...

There's a great interview here made by Brandon Wee for Senses of Cinema, where he is asked about why he wants to "[mount] such provocative durations:"

In Ebolusyon, I am capturing real time. I am trying to experience what these people are experiencing. They walk. I must experience their walk. I must experience their boredom and sorrows. I would go to any extent in my art to fathom the paradox that is the Filipino. I would go to any extent in my art to fathom the mystery of humankind's existence. I want to understand death. I want to understand solitude. I want to understand struggle. I want to understand the philosophy of a growing flower in the middle of a swamp.

And read the last paragraph of the interview: art can wait indeed.

Your New Favorite Song.

Continuing the all-Japanese uploads: the Boredoms' musical career can be roughly divided into two phases: their early spastic punk, augmented by noisy electronic squiggles, and expansive, mind-melting Krautpsych.

I happen to like their second phase best: "Super Going," from their 1998 album Super Ae. The track here doesn't do the album justice, since the album is really an hour-long suite. At the very least, crank it up for the full effect -- phased vocals coming in and out (the lyrics are simple: "Shine in / Shine on"), keyboard chirps and twitters, and a relentless, trance-inducing drumbeat. (Wait for the part in the eighth minute or so when the whole thing gets kicked up a notch.)

Saw them a few years back with Karen when they toured as the Vooredoms: Eye on vocals and synth, three drummers (Yoshimi, ATR and E-Da), and one hour-long song -- the kind of concert that leaves bodies in its wake.

Hear it (17 mb).

"Terrorists" and Bounty Hunters.

Having been approved 261-161 in the House, H.R. 418 is about to wend its way through the Senate, and it's one nasty bill, designed in part "to unify terrorism-related grounds for inadmissibility and removal." Because Sec. 103 is so (intentionally) vague, it becomes almost infinitely applicable and malleable.

Check out, for instance, their criteria for inadmissible aliens:

'(IV) [Any alien who] is a representative (as defined in clause (v)) of--

`(aa) a terrorist organization; or

`(bb) a political, social, or other group that endorses or espouses terrorist activity;

"Endorses or espouses" could already refer to (for instance) Ward Churchill. It's the politico-legal embodiment of David Horowitz's bleating about how the academic left supports terrorism.

`(VII) [Any alien who] endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization;

That is, you don't even have to be a "representative" -- just someone who "persuades" others to support those so-called terrorist organizations.

`(IX) [Any alien who] is the spouse or child of an alien who is inadmissible under this subparagraph, if the activity causing the alien to be found inadmissible occurred within the last 5 years...

It's retroactive, and applies to your nearest and dearest as well.

Moral of the story: the next time there's, say, a Palestinian solidarity rally (or, for you Pinoy readers, any leftist organization that in any way remotely resembles the Communist Party of the Philippines -- since we know those people overseas can't tell those orgs apart) in your town, remember that "solidarity" may be a semantic hop and a skip away from "endorse or espouse." Don't forget: that strict upholder of the Constitution, Alberto Gonzales, is watching!

The bill gets worse, particularly with Rep. Pete Sessions' last-minute amendment, described here:

Representative Pete Sessions (R-TX) offered an amendment that passed the House by a voice vote. The amendment would provide unprecedented authority to bounty hunters to "pursue, apprehend, detain and surrender" immigrants in removal proceedings. It also would set the minimum bond amount at $10,000 and prohibit the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from releasing on recognizance anyone placed in proceedings.

You've been warned.

And don't even get me started on denying drivers' licenses to undocumented immigrants...

Joel David Makes A List.

Poking around on Sight and Sound's most recent critics/directors poll (from 2002), I somehow missed the lone Filipino critic Joel David's top ten:

Salò (Pasolini)
Manila by Night; City after Dark (Bernal)
Khalnayak (Ghai)
The Opening of Misty Beethoven (Metzger)
Hour of the Furnaces (Solanas)
La Règle du jeu (Renoir)
God Told Me To (Cohen)
La Région centrale (Snow)
Olympiad Berlin 1936 (Riefenstahl)
The Devil in Miss Jones (Damiano)

It's something of a shitstirrer of a list -- indeed, even folks like, say, Bruce LaBruce, John Waters and Roger Corman had fairly conservative choices. None of the usual suspects are here except for Renoir and Reifenstahl. Otherwise, David's list has:

- two films almost impossible for plebes like me to see (Snow and Solanas),

- one Bollywood film (and the description sounds somewhat ludicrous, but what do I know),

- one movie from the director of some favorites from my youth, The Stuff and Q (haven't seen it, but I have it on this cheapo horror anthology packaged with Pieces and Satan's School for Girls),

- two porn films (one, incidentally, enthusiastically reviewed by Roger Ebert upon its release),

- one Filipino film (not Brocka's Maynila Sa Kuko ng Liwanag or De Leon's Sister Stella L. or (my semi-obnoxious favorite) Tahimik's Bakit Dilaw Ang Gitna Nang Bahaghari?),

- and one designed, as it were, to be seen only once (also selected by, surprise, Catherine Breillat and Michael Haneke). (My pervy friend Jane was looking for a copy of Salò on DVD because, as she put it, "the sex was really hot.")

But I do agree, kind of, with David's concluding comments:

So are American porn films better than Citizen Kane? Almost all of them aren't, but a precious handful are... I already found Kane too whiney-white-guy precious the first time I saw it, 20-odd years ago.

As fantastic as Citizen Kane is, I'd probably take Touch of Evil over it any day -- no "whiney-white-guy" preciousness there.

David Horowitz at SFSU.

So David Horowitz -- I used to think of him as "David Horriblewitz," but that would be as ad hominem as the stuff he was calling students -- was invited by the local handful of College Republicans to give a talk here on my campus last week. He spent the first 10 minutes or so complaining about how Michael Moore and Jesse Jackson get invited and paid for out of student money, but folks like him don't.

(It's perhaps a valid complaint, just as -- at least in theory -- there is little to disagree with regarding the Students for Academic Freedom's "Academic Bill of Rights". Again, at least in principle; I'm not sure I agree with the point on "organizational neutrality." But when you start your talk already on the defensive, it seems to undermine the rest of what you have to say.)

Then he spent the next half-hour rambling and railing against... the Soviet Union. I mean, Jesus, the Soviet Union doesn't even exist anymore. You'd be hard-pressed to find members from what passes for the American left calling herself or himself as Marxist! (One person pointed out that that Marx's economic principles barely resembled what was implemented in the USSR, but that was essentially ignored.) Then he spent the next 15 minutes or so with some rather long-winded answers to two questions -- which some members of the audience interpreted as stalling for time -- about Marx and Trotsky.

Probably because people were thinking that Horowitz was on campus simply to deliberately bait the audience, a lot of people stayed away. (A few articles on SFSU have been featured on The Front Page before, especially after a couple of Horowitz's ads in SFSU'S [X]press were rejected for publication.) The folks from Students Against War gave a relatively silent protest at the back of the auditorium -- they were more centrally positioned earlier, but were asked to move because they were "blocking people's view" -- holding up banners ("Horowitz Is A Racist Ideologue" and "U.S. Out Of Iraq Now!"). Even the organization of Palestinian students didn't seem to bother to get a group together. (It was the Spartacus Youth Club folks that ended up getting ejected for no good reason; this was after Horowitz kept hollering for security and threatening to sue the administration if the hecklers weren't thrown out.)

So, not much to write about. Horowitz mentioned Ward Churchill once in the context of "the Left supporting terrorism" (you can read more about this on his website), and later said something to the effect that "Zionism is the only true national liberation movement for one people in the history of the world," and that was about it. Almost every time someone would heckle him, he would either call them "idiots," "brain-dead," or look at the audience and start talking about the McCarthy era or say, "This was exactly what it was like in Weimar Germany!" Talk about Godwin's law...

In an odd way his talk effectively neutralized him at least in my eyes; for all the speaking engagements he seems to have, the man was a terrible speaker, jumping from topic to topic with little coherence.

The Weekend.

Work in the afternoon, then off to Sean's surprise birthday party down in Campbell, awash in linguini frutti di mare and big slabs of garlic bread. As I figured, it would be yet another trip in '80s nostalgia: Lan and Juan pulling out the most obscure-sounding bands (Celebrate The Nun? Sorry, the sound samples didn't sound familiar...), Eloise's story about how Dave Gahan kissed her hand (cooler than the story about how she snubbed Beck)... The upshot is that a post-tax refund '80s party in April is definitely in the offing; now I have to pull out my red Lacoste shirt from the closet. On the way home we drove back up 280, Romeo and Anna and I, the stereo cranked up, "I don't want your freeeeeeedom -- girl all I want right now is you."

(People have been coming to me for '80s trivia advice in the last few days; not sure why. Eloise was going on last night about how she wrote me some lyrics to a song ("Boys do fall in love") she needed to identify. Didn't need to Google that one -- it was by Robin Gibb, from his 1984 album Secret Agent.

But Lawrence had a question last night that stumped everyone: who sang "Love Is Contagious?" Google came to the rescue for that one the next day: Taja Sevelle, surprisingly, a Paisley Park protege.

Lan, if you're reading this: that Seona Dancing track is at this link; it's the only mp3 I haven't deleted from my server (at least until Ricky G. himself tells me to take it down) because I still keep getting e-mails and comments from people telling me that they've looked for this song everywhere for years and finally found it, and do I have their other song? (I don't.) According to my logs it's been downloaded about 225 times, so there are interested people out there for sure... So Lan, maybe you'll recognize it; if not, I hope it's the long-lost New Romantic classic you wish you'd heard in high school.

And then Happy calls me up early in the morning to ask me the name of the model who starred opposite Richard Gomez in the TV series "Ang Boyfriend Kong Mamaw." Finally, something unGoogleable that I could answer: Leah Orosa, also from the "Get Outta My Dreams" Shell commercial. Happy, Happy?)

Today Izzy and Shelby and I went out to the Marin Headlands for a morning hike. The sun was everywhere. We walked for a little while and then spread out a blanket and ate our sandwiches and she ate a pear. We were all alone except for the two deer we saw. Everything was quiet except for the surf and the ringing of the bells on the buoys floating out in the water. Then Izzy felt a little sleepy so we snuggled up close and lay on the blanket. The last thing she saw before she closed her eyes were yellow flowers and green grass and blue sky and blue ocean and when she opened her eyes they were all still there.

Your New Favorite Song.

There are two phases to Monday Michiru: the acid-jazz phase, and the serious-jazz phase. This rather simplistic division can be traced to the release of the ambitious 2001 double "concept" album 4 Seasons; it's very good music, but ultimately somewhat too weighty.

More to my liking are her earlier albums, when she was right at the tip of R&B and neo-soul (do the marketers call it J-soul now?). "Conversations with Myself," from her 1996 album with the Paradox Band, Delicious Poison, is a great example, all sleek and sophisticated and irresistible.

It's beyond my comprehension why Monday Michiru isn't an international superstar; she's a talented songwriter, a fantastic soul and jazz singer, and she happens to be gorgeous to boot.

Hear it (8.4 mb, m4a).