The Wily Filipino

They Call Me Cormac?

From Bruce Springsteen's "Black Cowboys" (from the 2005 album Devils and Dust):

In the twilight Rainey walked to the station along streets of stone. Through Pennsylvania and Ohio his train drifted on. Through the small towns of Indiana the big train crept, as he lay his head back on the seat and slept. He awoke and the towns gave way to muddy fields of green, corn and cotton and an endless nothin' in between. Over the rutted hills of Oklahoma the red sun slipped and was gone. The moon rose and stripped the earth to its bone.

Okay -- lame pun on the bad '80s comedy They Call Me Bruce? aside, the new Springsteen album is (I think) the best he's done since the underrated Tunnel of Love (1987). I'll post a review later.

Signed.

Should have. Checked. My e-mail. Sooner. (And to think it was on the auction block for 6 hours! And it ended via "Buy It Now!")

For the low, low price of $9.99: check it out.

"Languages of Whiskered Ghosts."

So a bunch of us in blogland have been keeping quiet about the Poeta's big secret for maybe over a month now -- but now the secret's finally out (scroll to the bottom).

What the Poeta didn't link to on her blog entry, however, was the list of former James Laughlin Award winners -- the only proper response for which is "daaaaaaaaaang." Have come, am here indeed.

And so I thought I'd pull out my old comments from almost a year ago on a slightly different version of the now-award-winning Poeta en San Francisco; I've boiled them down from a rambling six-page, Lorca-ignorant, Ezra Pound-foolish letter that rather lamely begins with:

Hello Barb,

I must confess I'm still not entirely sure what I'm doing on your committee... I don't think I'm equipped at all to examine line breaks, or to be able to see how your work draws from specific literary traditions (or doesn't). All I can do is read it as if I were "analyzing" it, so take what I say with a grain of salt...

and my puzzlement continues from there.

But I think I'm equipped to recognize a crucial, essential work of art when I see one (one you can bet my students will be reading once it comes out), even if I completely failed to identify the Clash lyrics she quotes. As you can tell, I loved the poem, which by the end achieves a kind of dirty, ragged transcendence. The poem is an obviously contemporary one, though with an odd timeless quality, as if it dealt with some ancient humid corruption.

So here goes:

----
What makes your poem important in my eyes is its direct, poetic confrontation with colonialisms. In that respect, the poem functions -- even on a purely linguistic level -- as a critique of conquest. But it's an epic, catholic one, encompassing different places and times, Vietnam and some stand-in jungle in the Philippines, the churches of Rome and Hollywood. It's a deeply (dare I say quintessentially?) Filipino American poem, one that interrogates (not just in the lit-crit sense of the word, but in the fist-shaking, confrontational, bare-bulb-hanging-from-the-ceiling sense), on multiple levels of the colonial. And the title is excellent. (I was actually thinking of something of a return to San Francisco at the end -- a reminder that the procession at the beginning continues.)

I love it. It's head and shoulders over your previous work (which is already really saying something), and I think it's great that the reader is, in a way, under no obligation to love it.

It's a terrific, hallucinatory, corrosive read. Its tension / descent is almost unrelieved, and there lies both its virtue and "problem." (I put "problem" in quotation marks because it's not really one.) Tonally it reads like, say, a Diamanda Galas album, a long, keening shriek in the jungles of the colonized. But it's also the reason why listening to a Galas album all the way through is difficult, enervating and sometimes even painful, but pierced with many moments of beauty. Like Poeta. It's unapologetically hard work, and in a way it's hard for the reader to take pleasure (in the ordinary sense of the word) in reading it, and as I wrote earlier, she or he isn't under any obligation to "like" it.

The pleasures of language, however, are another matter; there is an awful lot to like.
----

There are various excerpts scattered around her blog, but you folks might as well wait for it once it comes out from Tinfish Press.

And once again, Poeta: congratulations.

Home.

From Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle:

I listened, making suitable responses. I heard no more than half of what she was saying. Not that I disliked listening to her talk about these things. Contents of the conversation aside, I loved watching her at the dinner table as she talked with enthusiasm about her work. This, I told myself, was “home.” We were doing a proper job of carrying out the re­sponsibilities that we had been assigned to perform at home. She was talking about her work, and I, after having prepared dinner, was listening to her talk. This was very different from the image of home that I had imagined vaguely for myself before marriage. But this was the home I had chosen. I had had a home, of course, when I was a child. But it was not one I had chosen for myself. I had been born into it, presented with it as an established fact. Now, however, I lived in a world that I had chosen through an act of will. It was my home. It might not be perfect, but the fundamental stance I adopted with regard to my home was to accept it, problems and all, because it was something I myself had chosen. If it had problems, these were almost certainly problems that had originated within me.

Picture Meme: The Answers.

Some of you folks might know that in a fit of relative turmoil about a year ago I ransacked my entire music collection for The 1100 Greatest Songs Ever. (It has now swelled to almost 1600.)

The songs on constant shuffle on my iPod -- at least before iTunes 5.0 destroyed my smart playlists -- are drawn from that pool of 1600. As one can imagine, from looking at my Last.fm / Audioscrobbler page, it would be heavily weighted towards certain artists, so Puffy, Guided By Voices and the Carter Family would inevitably show up on the list; not sure why this list contains a disproportionate amount of women with guitars though. So here are the answers, with the songs that happened to be on random shuffle:

1.
Arvo Pärt, "Spiegel im Spiegel"

2.
Prince and The Revolution, "Pop Life" (though this is obviously a still from "When Doves Cry")

3.
Guided By Voices, "Echos Myron" (my favorite GBV song ever)

4.
Beth Orton, "Central Reservation"

5.
Yo La Tengo, "The Whole of the Law"

6.
Alex Chilton, "Don't Be A Drag"

7.
Richard and Linda Thompson, "Withered and Died"

8.
The Carter Family, "The Wonderful City" (cheated a little here, since this is actually performed with Jimmie Rodgers)

9.
Puffy, "Long Beach Nightmare" (my favorite Puffy song ever)

10.
Jonatha Brooke, "Nothing Sacred"

11.
Nine Inch Nails, "Head Like a Hole"

12.
Slayer, "Angel of Death"

13.
Gillian Welch, "By the Mark"

14.
Daryl Hall and John Oates, "I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)"

15.
The Velvet Underground, "What Goes On"

16.
Nat King Cole, "Somewhere along the Way"

17.
Captain Beefheart, "Moonlight on Vermont"

18.
Bruce Springsteen, "Independence Day"

19.
Stereolab, "Outer Bongolia"

20.
Laura Cantrell, "Not the Tremblin' Kind"

(I wasn't keeping track of who got more correct answers -- answers are posted publicly anyhow -- but thanks to torn, Dan, Rebecca, J-Lu, JP, juan tamad, skipscada and krangsquared for sending in their guesses. No one got Slayer!)

Gaaaaahhhhh!

After the rollercoaster ride of the last two weeks (though it's been good), more minor miseries here at the batcave, in degree of annoyance:

1. iTunes 5.0 won't recognize my iPod. (I can hear the chorus already: that's because you should have bought a Mac!) No amount of uninstalling and reinstalling could make this piece of buggy and bloated, if beautiful-looking software mount the iPod, even though the computer (and Ephpod, which I'm now using) does.

2. My two-month old Toshiba Satellite is dead. The profile corruption of the week before -- the recovery CD bought me some time -- was a portent of bad things to come, and hopefully no more. "Hard disks do fail," said the repair guy. Gee, thanks. I suspect he wouldn't have been so relatively blithe if the laptop wasn't under warranty anymore.

3. This needs a little context: I have never had a tooth cavity ever. I do not know what novocaine feels like; no needles have ever come near my mouth; no root canals, no tooth extractions, nothing. (The closest I've ever come to dental trauma was having my braces cemented on the week before my high school prom.)

So after years of ignoring my dentist -- "Yes, I know, I should have it removed some time" -- one of my wisdom teeth, which had already been leaving a little dent in the gum below it, decided to erupt with a vengeance yesterday afternoon. (This is the sharp, pointy and evil wisdom tooth in my right cheek; the other one on the left -- the one growing diagonally backwards -- isn't a problem yet.) Now, everytime I bite down -- actually, I can't clamp my teeth together anymore because it hurts -- there's a nice chunk of tender gristle back there that seems to be growing in size every few hours.

I'm hoping the Tylenols and black bean soup (dinner actually hurt) tide me over until my appointment early Monday morning (about 34 hours from now), but I think I'm feeling a little feverish, already talking with a slight lisp, and dreading the night to come. I was going to grade some papers, but I can't concentrate; I'm probably going to bed after popping another Tylenol. (And I'm hoping that I'll be able to lecture for six hours come Tuesday, bleeding gums and painkillers notwithstanding.)

Despite all that, this extremely busy week has been pretty good, the highlights being: 1) Sunday night: dragging J-Lu to see Jun Ichikawa's very fine Tony Takitani (I might post a review later); 2) Friday night: Indonesian rack of lamb at Trader Vic's with Smoothie, Seanny Depp and Big Gay Al; and 3) tomorrow morning: in anticipation of when Izzy and I release our butterflies in Golden Gate Park.

Otherwise: Gaaaaahhhhh!

The Director Who Films My Life.

Just e-mailed to me by the Poeta (what is all this online dating stuff though?) -- no matter that it completely ignores auteur theory, it's fun, if a little troubling in my case:

Sofia Coppola Your film will be 63% romantic, 13% comedy, 23% complex plot, and a $ 35 million budget.

Relatively inexperienced (The Virgin Suicides, Lost In Translation) as a director, but already highly respected and connected -- her dad, Francis, directed all The Godfather movies, Apocolypse Now. Also, at last word she's dating Quentin Tarantino, so I'm sure he'll have some input into the substance of your film. Sofia's good at making the romantic drama that is your life. Who didn't have at least a lump in the throat at the end of Lost In Translation? She's already won one Academy Award for her writing, now she'll be the first woman to receive one for directing -- YOUR FILM!

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 87% on action-romance You scored higher than 0% on humor You scored higher than 3% on complexity You scored higher than 56% on budget

Link: The Director Who Films Your Life Test written by bingomosquito

Gawd -- my life better not be Lost in Translation!

Picture Meme.

Tagged by J-Lu -- actually, I begged to be tagged, which doesn't count, so she deservedly called me lame -- but here goes:

1. open your winamp/itunes
2. put the shuffle -mode on
3. find a picture of the first 20 artists. if the same artist comes again, skip
4. why you should do this? so that other people would know what you're listening and how the bands look like
( 5. GUESS !!!!! )

[answers already up]

I feel a little bad not including credits for the photos, but will do that once enough people have tried their luck guessing. (I was tempted to cheat and select cool / difficult bands, but this is really it.)

Don't know who to tag -- this is a difficult undertaking (okay, it actually took me all of 20 minutes, maybe).

[Update: changed one picture for greater clarity, not that it mattered, since they were already identified...]

The Aristocrats.

In case the arrogance of the Bush elite and their cronies isn't clear -- Republicans are actually presenting the fact that Bush's advisers were attending a wedding in Greece and Condi Rice was watching Spamalot and buying Ferragamo shoes as excuses -- here's the former First Lady of this nation, being interviewed on TV after touring the evacuee centers in Houston:

In a segment at the top of the show on the surge of evacuees to the Texas city, Barbara Bush said: "Almost everyone I’ve talked to says we're going to move to Houston."

Then she added: "What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this -- this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them."

I mean, this is just unbelievable. I don't think even Imelda Marcos ever said anything so crass (okay, she probably has).

As a former student said today, "the smoke is clearing" -- that the Bush aristocracy's relentless war on the poor, whether in the form of tax cuts, or as cannon fodder, is slowly being revealed.

"The Aristocrats" also happens to be the title of a hilarious documentary about the filthiest joke in the world, the unfunny punch line being "The Aristocrats!" But now the joke's over: guess who was screwing and shitting on and pissing on the poor all along?

Izzy This Weekend.

We try something for the first time on our semiregular walk to the PollyEggettes Experience at 39th and Noriega: Izzy decides to take her Disney Princess portable CD player and her headphones, which she hasn't really used, and loads it up with Puffy's "Jet" CD, and places it in her pink Hello Kitty shoulder bag.

Izzy: "This is a better way of walking!"

I tell her that it seems kind of unfair, since she won't be able to hear Daddy talk to her. (I set the volume very low, however.)

Me: And I can't play "I Spy" with you anymore.

Izzy: You can play "I Spy" with yourself!

But we played I Spy anyway. And every now and then she'd sing a fragment, so I'd know which song she was listening to.

Got a little Hamtaro finger puppet for her at Eggettes, then to Polly Ann's: a dish of strawberry ice cream for Izzy (she's a total purist when it comes to ice cream), and a cone of Peppermint Fluff (peppermint and marshmallow chunks) for me.

Afterwards:

Me: That totally hit the spot!
Izzy [looks around]: What spot?

And in case you were wondering how she managed to walk the total of 20 blocks back and forth to PollyEggettes, here's how:

Lately she has been preparing some elaborate stage show with her toys. The stuffed animals will be arranged, quite deliberately, on the bed, with "sheet music," i.e., propped-open books on either side, and will generally involve something related to Halcali or Puffy (keep in mind that neither one of us can understand Japanese).

The stage show doesn't always begin on time -- I'm usually kicked out of the bedroom because they're still rehearsing. ("Daaad! We still need to practice!") Now she's starting to charge money as well: $45 for what was clearly only a dress rehearsal! (It went up $10 from the previous show, probably after Ticketmaster started charging extra, and I'm running out of little colored paper slips to give her.)

The coolest part is the utter unpredictability (and inventiveness) of the shows. The other week Ami and Yumi, these two stuffed cats, performed "Kore ga watashi no ikiru michi." (Act 2 involved a Carebear and a necklace, but can't remember now what it involved.) Keroppi and
Pooh joined them on stage, while Izzy played guitar and drums simultaneously, and launched into this completely extemporaneous 5-minute song about a "panda clam" with the chorus "Everybody sunshine room." Then she segued into "a sad song" titled "The Sun Won't Come Out."

Then she announced that she was going to see a song entitled "Somebody Stole My Birthday," which went like this:

Somebody stole my birthday
Somebody stole my birthday
Somebody stole my birthday
Somebody round and round

At this point I started getting concerned, fretting that the song was reflecting deeper psychological unease, especially since she just turned four a month ago:

Me: Oh, Izzy! Sweetheart, nobody's going to steal your birthday! You know you'll always have your birthday!

Izzy: Daaad! It's a song! Not my birthday!

My favorite title is still "An Alligator Ate Me," which sounded a lot like Roky Erickson's "I Walked With A Zombie:"

An alligator ate me
An alligator ate me
An alligator ate me
An alligator ate me

And then she concluded with a song entitled "Via Va," which she explained was "in Japanese:"

I have been fast folks
There's nowhere to be done

More on Kanye West's Comments.

Just to put some of Kanye West's comments in context:

We already realize a lot of the people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way.

From the St. Louis-Dispatch (reprinted in the San Luis Obispo Tribune, via Daily Kos):

Currently, members of the Guard and Reserves make up four of every 10 military personnel in Iraq. It's the largest long-term deployment of the nation's reserves in 50 years. And their casualties reflect that.

Men and women who just months ago held jobs such as truck driver, accountant and teacher now make up nearly one of every four servicemen and women being killed in the war.

...

In no state have those deaths registered more than in Louisiana. Louisiana, along with New York, has lost more guardsmen and reservists -- 23 as of July 24 -- than any state in the nation, and all but one of those deaths have come in the last eight months.

And posted August 1, from ABC News 26 in New Orleans:

When members of the Louisiana National Guard left for Iraq in October, they took a lot [of] equipment with them. Dozens of high water vehicles, humvees, refuelers and generators are now abroad, and in the event of a major natural disaster that, could be a problem.

"The National Guard needs that equipment back home to support the homeland security mission," said Lt. Colonel Pete Schneider with the LA National Guard.

Col. Schneider says the state has enough equipment to get by, and if Louisiana were to get hit by a major hurricane, the neighboring states of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida have all agreed to help.

Kanye again:

And now they've given them permission to go down and shoot us.

You just have to love this Brigadier-General Gary Jones, who clearly knows how to talk to the press:

“This place is going to look like Little Somalia,” Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force told Army Times Friday as hundreds of armed troops under his charge prepared to launch a massive citywide security mission from a staging area outside the Louisiana Superdome. “We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.”

They were, after all, given "shoot-to-kill" orders.

[Update: More on Bush's tour of New Orleans as a massive photo opportunity. There's also a link to the apparently now-infamous Geraldo Rivera / Shepard Smith video where they lose it on air on Fox News -- yes, on Fox News.]

"George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People."

Just in case you haven't heard about it:

A celebrity telethon for Hurricane Katrina survivors took an unexpected turn when outspoken rapper Kanye West went off script during the live broadcast, declaring America is set up "to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off as slow as possible."

And there's more:

...West began a rant by saying, "I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family, it says they're looting. See a white family, it says they're looking for food."

While allowing that "the Red Cross is doing everything they can," West... declared that government authorities are intentionally dragging their feet on aid to the Gulf Coast. Without getting specific, he added, "They've given them permission to go down and shoot us."

After he stated, "George Bush doesn't care about black people," the camera cut away to comedian Chris Tucker.

The video is right here. (And perhaps the icing on the cake: his comments were actually censored when the telethon was broadcast on the West Coast.)

Is this the Month (or Year) of Ye or what? Last week he drops an album -- yeah, I preordered the limited edition digipak with the poster and the T-shirt -- that is likely going to be on my favorites of the year (and will certainly end up on many others' lists as well), and then this. The man deserves a medal.

Growing / Earth / Merzbow / Circle, Great American Music Hall, SF, 9/2/05.

(Writing this, I realized I never did write about the fantastic Teenage Fanclub concert last month, or the PinoisePop concerts -- Ninja Academy, the Skyflakes, and the excellent From Monument To Masses -- that I saw with Special K and 40.)

I missed half of Growing's set -- two guitarists who were outfitted (almost hilariously) with a wall of six Peaveys and Ampegs: total MBV-like guitar drone, with loops feeding on themselves.

I've never really liked Earth, which is odd, considering how much I hold similar bands (and their albums) -- Sleep's Jerusalem, Corrupted's Llenandose de Gusanos, Naked City's Leng T'che -- in high regard. Live, their music translates to stoner rock at an excruciating, audience-testing, slow pace, with the same, not-as-chunky Black Sabbathy riff repeated a few hundred times. (Indeed, the best part was when some guy in the audience yelled "Slower!") It's music best appreciated if one is slumped, in a stupor, on a sofa, but I was sober, and a couch was nowhere near.

The real star of the show, at least in my book, was Merzbow, whom I'd never seen live before. (I'm something of a Merzbow nut; at last count I had about 120 Merzbow titles.) I managed to wriggle front and center until I was pretty much right in front of Masami Akita himself (who did not even bother to look at the audience at any point). The man in black -- black clothes, long hair, sunglasses, black New Balances -- sat at a table, and faced a small arsenal of wires and knobs and two Powerbooks (one with the big sticker "Meat Is Murder"). His music resists language; there are barely any linguistic referents for this sort of sonic assault of electronic screeches, giant slabs of bowel-loosening bass rumble, waves of chest-tightening, frighteningly amplified fuzz and feedback. This was literally violent music; at some point I thought my eyeballs were vibrating uncontrollably in concert with one particular loop towards the end of his set -- the sound of infernal machines on the brink of explosion. Awesome.

Circle was, in a sense, anticlimactic (the crowd had thinned considerably once they came on), but they were certainly the most energetic of the four acts. A Finnish postrock / krautrock band, Circle had two skinny shirtless guys, a big curly-haired rawk dude, and a masked drummer, beating a motorik groove to the ground. The vocalist, who looked oddly like Will Oldham, alternately orated and screamed like Keiji Haino. Much headbanging among the audience, which unfortunately inspired a couple of obnoxious drunk frat-boy types to push their way to the front. I think I like Circle's studio albums more, but maybe my eardrums were already ruined by Merzbow before they began. It's about an hour now since the concert and I can think my ears are still ringing...

My Pet Goat.

In "recent years:"

In recent years, Bush repeatedly sought to slice the Army Corps of Engineers' funding requests to improve the levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain, which Katrina smashed through, flooding New Orleans. In 2005, Bush asked for $3.9 million, a small fraction of the request the corps made in internal administration deliberations. Under pressure from Congress, Bush ultimately agreed to spend $5.7 million. Since coming to office, Bush has essentially frozen spending on the Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for protecting the coastlines, waterways and other areas susceptible to natural disaster, at around $4.7 billion.

Wednesday:

On his way to Washington, Bush had Air Force One fly low over the hurricane-ravaged area. His plane flew over New Orleans at about 2,500, and it descended even further, to about 1,700 feet, over Mississippi. Bush surveyed the damage from a couch near the left front of the plane.

The plane flew over New Orleans and saw the Superdome, downtown areas and outlying neighborhoods, then traveled along the coast to Mobile before turning north toward Washington.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan quoted Bush as saying, "It's devastating, it's got to be doubly devastating on the ground." Among other things, the president saw an amusement park with the tops of wrecked rides protruding over bridges covered by water.

Today:

We've got a lot of rebuilding to do. First, we're going to save lives and stabilize the situation. And then we're going to help these communities rebuild. The good news is -- and it's hard for some to see it now -- that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch. (Laughter.)

You all have heard, I hope, the 15-minute interview with the mayor of New Orleans -- as damning a condemnation from a public official as anything I've heard recently. It's on the New York Times website, in the Multimedia sidebar. (There's a transcript here, but the audio interview drives the point better -- it's uncensored, for starters.)

(I should have taken a screen clipping of how the webpage originally looked -- it was to the right of another sidebar that had Bush's photo on it with the caption, "'Hang in there,' he told refugees.")

But folks, all criticisms above aside -- anything will help: 1500 blogs (now 1501) are participating in Blog Relief Days. There's more information at Instapundit's roundup page and the TTLB Katrina Relief page. I recommend the American Red Cross, and, if you want log your contribution here.