The Wily Filipino

Lists of 3.

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

So this one's from Luna:

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

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

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

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

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

Three of my favorite dishes:
See this post.

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

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

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

I Am Tiger Woods.

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

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

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

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

A second clearer photo got me this list:

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

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

My 1989 Honda Civic, 1995-2006: A Photo Essay.

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

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

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

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

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

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

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

OPM Roundup, Part One.

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

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

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

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

Barbie Almalbis, The Singles

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

Isha, Time and Again

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

Isha, Katakataka

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

Juana, Misbehavior

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

Rivermaya, Greatest Hits 2005

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

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

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

My Friend R.

I was in fifth grade when I met my friend R. I'm not sure if we ever really hung out, or played the way fifth-grade kids do. He sat somewhere a few seats behind me. I do remember one of my classmates calling him (in English) an ape, which may have had to do with the way he somewhat lumbered around. I can't imagine R. liking that very much.

It was perhaps in my third year of high school that R. became my friend. He was rather gentlemanly, and a funny if obsessive storyteller, with a good critical eye, as far as kids went, concerning the TV episodes and cartoons he watched. We talked about movies, about The Return of the Jedi, about girls we had crushes on. He had an infectious, neighing laugh, which I heard pretty often over the phone. He was, in short, a seemingly well-adjusted teenager, except for one crucial thing.

Every high school class has its punching bag, the person or group of people who was shat upon mercilessly by everyone. Whether or not you are in the heart of the First World, or in a provincial high school in a small town 90 minutes south of Manila, this miserable person exists. That person was inarguably and indubitably R.

Well, let me rephrase that. It wasn't exactly "everyone," but rather, a group of bullies who made life miserable for a sorry few: the nerds, the geeks, the effeminates. (As one of the geeky ones, and the youngest guy in the entire class, I endured countless slaps upside the head, being rubbed with the equivalent of poison oak, and a couple of tosses into a swimming pool and a steel drum full of stagnant, mosquito-infested water, but that was nothing compared to what R. had to go through.)

Individually the bullies weren't so terrible; collectively, their brand of rambunctiousness (not counting all the people smacked down the chain of command) should have had them locked up: shoplifting bags full of highlighters (which were redistributed during class time, but I wasn't cool enough to deserve one); chucking a brick into the biology teacher's aquarium; breaking into the poor agriculture teacher's office and pissing all over his desk and chair. They were truly a piece of work, these guys; most of them have thankfully mellowed out and have become good fathers. (I should add that at least three of them have turned into surprisingly affable, responsible, and -- perhaps most important in the context of this story -- genuinely regretful people.)

But back to R. Unfortunately, it only requires a little knowledge of the twisted dynamics of early teenage cruelty to know that R. was more or less earmarked for destruction. He was, for starters, a little on the husky side. He sweated profusely; sometimes he stank. (Sample remark from one of the bullies: "Putang ina, maligo ka ngang baboy ka, ang baho mo! [Son of a bitch, take a bath, you pig, you stink!]") He was also a lot paler than most of the kids, which made the unsightly rashes and hives on his arms stand out more. Unlike the stereotype of other bullied children, R. did not make up for it with a sharp tongue or spectacular grades; I remember him barely passing his classes. (I suspect he may have had some sort of learning disability -- he would tell me about having trouble reading -- which couldn't have endeared him to the teachers at the time.) To make matters worse, his fits of rage were visually spectacular displays of impotence: once the bullies got him going, my friend R. would turn red, with tears and snot smeared on his face, and proceed to launch into a series of inarticulate grunts and howls.

Such a status at the bottom of the hill was not exactly inherent (or, obviously, objective), but the hierarchy of taunts was established fairly early on. His social mobility was fixed, with nowhere to go. Towards the end, once the name-calling had settled into a more stable and finely-honed act of inflicting pain, his weight didn't matter anymore.

Male circumcision in the Philippines, as it is in many other cultures, is considered a rite of passage. The main difference is that it's taken fairly seriously as the initial entry into a state of manhood, which means that the operation is performed -- if not by the local herbolario with a razor blade who spits chewed guava leaves onto the wound to form a poultice, then at least the local doctor's clinic -- just before the boys hit puberty. (In a neat act of gender inversion, the deskinned boys would wear a skirt for the next few days while their penises healed; skirts were, after all, looser and more comfortable than jeans.)

I'm sure you can tell what would happen next. The story went around that R. was still uncircumcised, and taunts of "supot!" were hurled openly at him -- shouted from across the street, yelled from passing jeepneys, scrawled on his notebooks, spread in a whisper campaign to all the girls. (The Tagalog "supot," with emphasis on the second syllable, means "uncircumcised;" "supot" with the stress on the first syllable means a paper or plastic bag.) It was the perfect insult: no homophobic male teenager would demand proof, much more want to see it, and no self-respecting kid would offer such evidence publicly.

To this day I wonder whether, in high school, I was his only friend. We talked on the phone, maybe for hours at a time, almost every week. And this is what shames me today: I never made this friendship public. I don't remember ever really standing up for him; sometimes I'd gleefully join in the chants of "supot" from the back of the class. The one time I saw him throw his backpack to the ground, put his fists up, and challenge his antagonist ended badly; he was floored instantly, and pathetically, with one punch. He was left sitting on the ground, with his nose bleeding. I think I may have walked away.

Perhaps my lowest point was joining a "rescue brigade" to which my services were harnessed. For our so-called "Acquaintance Parties," I and a group of other guys happily volunteered to cut in every time R. would ask a girl to slow-dance. I can't imagine what it would have been like: to be turned down repeatedly, by girl after girl, until the vastness of the second-year high school conspiracy against his sorry ass was finally fully revealed to him, in all its noxious glory.

Life at home wasn't any better. From what I was able to piece together from my long conversations with him, R. came from what was almost quaintly called, in those days, as a "broken home." R. had never seen his father; he had moved out in a fury after his wife cheated on him repeatedly. (His mother had left and was working in a Manila department store.) R. was essentially raised by his grandfather, who was similarly estranged from his wife (though she was living in a separate house in the same compound). He didn't think much of his younger sister, who he thought had taken his mother's side because she was living with her in Manila.

I don't remember his grandfather very clearly, though my folks had had him and R. over for lunch one Saturday at some point. What I seem to remember was that he seemed to have stepped out of some TV advertisement for brandy: the somewhat sleazy older man with coiffed hair, fitted shirt over middle-age spread. Perhaps a gold necklace around his neck. It did not help that his grandfather spent most days sitting in their car parked outside the high school, ready to whisk R. home right after class, ostensibly to protect my friend from the bullies. "Super Lolo to the rescue!" found its way very easily to the list of insults for R. (In fact, if I remember correctly, R.'s grandfather initially didn't want him chatting on the phone with me, or anyone, for that matter.)

One thing was for sure: he loved his dad, the father that existed only in a faded picture which I only now remember he showed me once. One day he was sporting a new binder or notebook, I forget which -- given his bad luck, it probably ended up getting stomped or stuffed down a toilet -- and he proudly showed me the Christmas wrapping paper, which he had kept it in the binder for safekeeping. Written on it were words like "I'm proud of you, son! Merry Christmas! Love, Dad;" the gift wrap was heavily creased, as if it had been re-read and re-folded constantly. One other thing was definite: he loved his grandfather, who seemed equally devoted to him.

His dad's gift made him happy. Most of the time he was not. That laugh of his became rarer and rarer. The beginning of each school day was also the beginning of a constant cycle of taunts and elaborate pranks. Hell was Monday to Friday, a daily journey through a series of predictable torments.

Day after day: The whispers or yells of "supot" behind his back. The contents of his bag, pilfered. His clothes at gym time, thrown into the trash. The food, the garbage, the spit that would end up in his hair or on the back of his shirt. His new backpack, thrown into the urinal. His books, secretly scrawled with insults. He was the guy who ended up somehow getting tied to his chair, the guy whose bag got stuffed with a dead reptile, the guy who got thrown into the swimming pool with all his clothes on, the guy who at first was simian, then porcine, then finally reduced to his foreskin. Even the quiet, mild-mannered boys made fun of him. Even some of the girls.

And night after night: he would call me, and confide in elaborate, loving detail how, John Rambo-style, he would execute his tormentors. The kinds of guns he would buy. The way he would enter the lobby of the high school and proceed up the stairs, past the principal's office, and turn to the right, and hit the third-year wing. The order of their deaths. And then his fantasy would blow over, and he'd start talking about our high school professors again. But sometimes his anger would be directed toward his mother, who he would calmly (and constantly) call a puta. She was the one, he said, who ruined her marriage; she was the one, he said, who broke up their family.

(I honestly don't know how I reacted when he would tell me these things. Was I afraid? Did I egg him on? Did I join him in his fantasies? Did I find it boring? As I type this, I realize I can't remember. I've already repressed it.)

I do remember this, though: one day, after a long shouting match with the guy who was Number One on his hit list, my friend R. angrily told him he would actually pay him not to tease him again. Amidst his tears, he then pulled out his wallet and gave Number One a twenty-peso bill. Incredulous, Number One stared at the money, pocketed it, then, with a smile on his face, called R. a faggot, his palm outstretched. (Later we heard that R. ended up giving Number One his entire weekly allowance for at least two weeks.)

One day early in the first semester of 1986, in our fourth year -- ah, I can't remember the details anymore. A bunch of us were standing outside by the flagpole in front of school, and my friend R. had been worked into another one of his rages. Someone from behind me had picked up a rock and lobbed it at R.'s head. It hit him. There he was, blood streaming from his temple and mixing with the tears in his eyes, snot running from his nose. He turned and went across the street, sobbing as he ran, where he flagged down a jeepney. I never saw him again.

I talked to him a few times afterwards, maybe a week later: his grandfather was finally pulling him out, he was thinking of cooling off for a little bit, maybe getting his high school degree somewhere else, apply to college one day. He was still angry, but talk of returning to our school to kill Numbers One to Eight had disappeared. Then I went to college. I never heard from him again. Neither, it seems, did any of my classmates. He had gotten married, he had kids, he finished college, he was running their family's business, he was as big as a house -- all secondhand rumors, all unsubstantiated. No one had seen him. No one even knew if he was still alive. And I completely understand why he wouldn't want to get in touch with any of us; we were young and stupid, which is still no excuse.

About two years later, after hearing the details from a friend, my mother sat me down and told me R.'s story.

It was apparently common knowledge in our small town, at least among people of a certain generation, and now among my classmates as well, that my friend R. and his sister were the product of an incestuous union between his "grandfather" and his own daughter, R.'s mom. Repeatedly abused, she gave birth to both R. and his sister in turn; disgraced by her pregnancies, she was fired from her job as an elementary school teacher and fled to Manila.

This was the reason why she took R.'s sister with her, for fear that she would be next; this was the reason why the "grandfather" was so protective of R., so that no one could tell him the secret; this was the reason why his grandmother was estranged from her husband. In short, the mother he detested and repeatedly called a whore was perhaps the saddest victim of all; the "grandfather" he adored was a vicious, lying monster; and the "father" he loved -- the man who never forgot him on his birthday or on Christmas, the man whose blurred photograph he treasured -- was the product of an elaborate, horrible lie.

I was stunned. I was angry. I wanted to strangle that vile insect of a "grandfather" myself. And I was afraid -- and was secretly thrilled -- of what would happen if -- or when -- R. found out.

And I wept: I wept for my friend R., for his fucked-up life, for his poor mother. I ask no forgiveness for the casual, oblivious cruelty of my friends and classmates who simply stood by. The people on his hit list have to make their penance some other way. And some friend I've turned out to be: a friend in secret, who, like a coward, could not acknowledge this friendship, and now, by telling this story, I've betrayed him further.

It's almost been twenty years to the day since I last saw him. Sometimes I wish his grandfather was long dead; sometimes I wish they had somehow worked things out; sometimes I hope he and his mother have made peace, and that he understands why she did the things she did; sometimes I hope he has a family of his own -- or something, anything -- to mean that he could start over. Most of the time I hope he's still laughing that laugh of his.

Hmm.

I wonder, with just the slightest bit of worry, whether insights into my personality can be gleaned from the fact that Bree Van De Kamp is my favorite Desperate Housewife.

Nuts!

My mom's a "villager" -- she doesn't actually call herself that, but it's what Lemax Christmas Village nuts call themselves, apparently. I'm not even sure how she got started on it, but a few years, hours of eBay trawling (on my and Bulletproof Vest's part), a few tons of styrofoam, and many balikbayan boxes later, the result can be seen here.

I don't have a tripod, so my photographs aren't that great, though I have to say the blur sometimes works. (My brother and his friend Cathy are better at it, so I'm hoping they upload theirs at some point.) But on my Flickr set you don't get that many details, including the styrofoam tunnel (complete with icicles), and the few dozen other buildings. However, you do get an accidentally blurry shot of the mayor coming down the steps of City Hall shot from, say, a helicopter; it reminded me somehow of a Gerhard Richter painting, so that's why I chose it as the graphic above.

Lame!

Even a relatively "politically incorrect" feller like me doesn't think this is very funny -- check out Vanessa Au's recent blog entry about some T-shirts at Spencer Gifts (possibly at a mall near you).

In any case, I can't imagine the species of loser that would actually wear a hat like this. (I'd upload the photo here, but 28.8k dialup is a drag.)

My Cousin, the Pornographer.

The photograph, taken by cell phone, shows my cousin Rico's head, diagonally entering the frame from one side. He is his usual baby-faced, slightly chubby self, his hair tousled as always, his face serious but betraying the slightest hint of a grin. (He was always a bit of a goof anyhow; a few minutes before he was gleefully lifting up his T-shirt to show his large gut and the bandages from his recent gallbladder operation.)

Behind Rico is a green pool. In it are about eight naked, wet, and glistening women in an almost unrecognizable tangle of limbs. None of them are looking at the camera, for they are concentrating on each other. One woman has her head buried between another woman's naked breasts.

"This is my work," Rico said.

The photograph, he explains at our family's Christmas party, was taken on the set of Sex Guru 2. "We made Sex Guru 2 because, well, there was Sex Guru 1," he said. Sex Guru 1 apparently had the honor of being the #1 best-selling DVD at Tower Records for a while, and so a sequel came naturally.

My cousin Rico is a pornographer. This is not what he has always wanted to do for a living, but, he hastens to add, it's his bread and butter.

I had more or less grown up with Rico -- we are about the same age -- probably doing much of the same things: watching robot cartoons, playing tag or hide and seek. Our paths diverged in college; later, he would arrive at our Christmas parties later than everyone else, talking about wrapping up a shoot. A major in theater arts -- with an emphasis in set design, if I remember correctly -- Rico moved from one job to another: a stint dressing store windows, organizing singing groups to be sent off to perform in Brunei, and now, directing TV commercials and episodes for seven shows for GMA TV, including the popular Extra Challenge, a combination of The Amazing Race and Fear Factor. An advertisement for Red Horse Beer he directed ended with a woman pouring beer on a guy's pants; this won him an advertising award and the wrath, as he put it, of "troops from GABRIELA," the Filipino feminist group. (The ad agency wanted the beer poured on the guy's knee; he insisted it had to be on the crotch, and he won that little battle.)

But if there was anything that would inspire any ire (or admiration, in certain quarters), it would probably be his body of work with the revolving stable of model-slash-actresses popularly known as the Viva Hot Babes. The films Rico directs, he says, are like "Sports Illustrated swimsuit videos -- only more hardcore." I myself have only seen two samples of Rico's work. The earliest one I saw was a video shot as background for videoke songs, playing at a high school reunion a couple of years ago -- and so it was relatively tame, though the women cavorting on the beach were clearly naked underneath their wet clothes.

I asked him if his films had any particular style, whether or not one could tell that they were "Rico Gutierrez films." "Not at all," he responded quickly. "No lighting, no story" -- the videos are mostly vignettes strung loosely together -- "and the camera work is mostly close-up or not.

"It really is just a job," Rico said. "I go to the set, we shoot, I go home. It's not very exciting," he added. (He also described, in slightly more graphic terms, the fact that he found the whole business of filming rather unerotic.)

"The thing is, when I'm there, I'm a different person," Rico said. "I'm not like this," he explained to everyone at the table. "I can get pretty lewd, but that's the nature of the job." He turned to one side and addressed an imaginary actress in Tagalog: "No, damn it -- grab her pussy! Yes! Thaaaat's it! Now, everyone, we'll do the orgy scene! Okay, cut!" My God-fearing cousins blanched. I was taken aback as well. "But you know, we're all professional," he added. (Whenever his longtime girlfriend would accompany him on a shoot, he said, the actresses knew how to behave.) He suddenly looks around the party. "Hey, where did my kid go?"

His eight-year old son was, in fact, running around outside in the front yard with the rest of the clan's youngsters. Later he came in, all sweaty from his exertions; Rico mussed his hair with one hand and sent him off again.

(I wasn't kidding, by the way, about "God-fearing." The father's side of my family is fairly religious, with cousins who are actually working full-time in the "ministry;" saying grace before the big Christmas lunch is taken pretty seriously (my dad has been leading it for the last few years now), followed by singing performances and one of my cousins leading the kids on a rather painful "Happy Birthday Jesus" sing-along. Rico's choice of profession doesn't exactly make him a black sheep -- in every Filipino clan there are infidelities and shotgun weddings and substance abuse and various "improprieties" (at least in the predominantly Catholic Philippines) -- but his mom (my Auntie Baby) tells him seriously (in English) that "he will burn in hell."

"I wanted to tell her that I use the money to buy her medicine," Rico said with a laugh, "but it isn't true.")

Pornography in the Philippines isn't exactly like pornography in the United States; it's technically illegal in this country, so "you can't have insertion of the penis, or insertion, period, or blowjobs," he said. I can only imagine that it's the equivalent of late-night movies on Cinemax -- though I own neither cable nor a TV, so, uh, I can only imagine.

Sex Guru, for instance (which I only saw the other day), is actually a rather tame affair, enough for me to wonder whether I picked up the wrong title. Hosted by the fabulously stacked Asia Agcaoili, Sex Guru is an hour-long instructional video on -- I'm not quoting from memory, but I'm sure she must have said this at some point -- "the fine art of sensual massage," with lots of close-up shots of slick fingers and rose petals and a soundtrack making ample use of the Casio "choir" and "electric drums" midi presets. Still, Agcaoili is an engaging host, particularly in the most explicit scene when she licks and swallows plastic objects of different sizes. (One of Sex Guru's most interesting elements is its democratic attention to sexuality: there's an almost equal attention to beefcake, including long sequences featuring two men lovingly rubbing each other's chiseled asses in a shower. There really is something here for everyone, even if the video presupposes the straight male gaze.) In the end, the film is a loving tribute to oiled brown skin.

Rico has a funny way of touching your leg with his fingers when he wants you to pay attention to a particular point he's about to make, and while relating this next story, he was all a-finger. The first scene in Sex Guru 2, apparently, was a demonstration of "Tantric massage," and he had wanted to show a penis being masturbated. There was, of course, no way he could get this past the censors, because, as he said, "we would get a technical. So we bought this strap-on dildo and made the two women give it a massage," he related. "No technical!" he added happily.

Another sequence, perhaps in a different movie, had Patricia Javier masturbating. "When that happened," he said, "I went over to the camera and de-focused it."

My brother Bulletproof Vest asked, "Couldn't you have done that in post-production? I mean, save it for a Director's Cut?"

Rico shook his head quickly and said, "No, no Director's Cuts. We don't film anything illegal or anything that's not in their contracts." (Maui Taylor, for instance, apparently does not do full frontal nudity.) In fact, a representative from the Department of Health has to be present at the shoot, making sure that everything is, well, sanitary. "I may be filthy, but I'm not a pig, " Rico said.

I asked him what film from his oeuvre he would choose as his favorite, or as one to recommend to a Rico beginner. "You mean, the most intelligent, or the hottest, or the lewdest?" he asked. "The most intelligent?" He paused. "I haven't made that yet."

The film he is happiest with right now, he kept telling me, is this three-minute short called "Haplos" [Caress] he made for an in-house contest for Sunsilk shampoo. (You can see it here -- then look for the "Mini-Movies" link on the left.) The film is short and sweet, with only the barest bit of reference to the product it’s selling; it's anchored, most poignantly, by a loop of another mini-movie, on a cellphone, played within the short film itself. "Each director," he said, "was asked to pull out the cast and the plot from a hat. I picked one that read 'A girl is in a coma' and I said to myself, 'I've lost before the contest has even begun." The finished work apparently began as a loose adaptation of Almodovar's Talk To Me. "But that's the film that's more personal. That's really me. That's what I want to do."

Rico called himself a "hostess" -- that quaint Filipino euphemism for "whore" -- and said that he would pretty much direct anything for money. "It's definitely not art," he said, referring to his work for the Viva Hot Babes. "Although," he continued with a grin on his face, "it's artistic in a different sense.

"I'm a pornographer," Rico said flatly. "It's soft, but it's still porno. I'm the Zalman King of the Philippines," he thought after a while. "I don't have a body of work like he does, but I'm getting there. That's it. The Zalman King of the Philippines. That sounds good."

Kamayan.

This is a tribute to perhaps my favorite restaurant in the Philippines right now, located at the outskirts of the town of Bay, in the province of Laguna. Bay (pronounced "Ba-ee") was, at some point, perhaps the major commercial town by the lakeshore; Bay, after all, was the town for which the body of water was named. (Early maps already called it the lagoon of Bay -- "Laguna de Bay" (or "Bai"), though by the time Americans arrived, the pronunciation had changed erroneously to the English "Bay," and it remains wrong even now.) Established around 1570 or so (I don't have access to my books from here, so I'm relying on the perhaps-iffy Wikipedia entry), Bay is now a fairly bustling provincial town, eclipsed by the action in Laguna's capital of Santa Cruz, the busy Calamba (home to Jose Rizal), and Los Banos (home to my University of the Philippines campus, hotbed for research scientists and student activists). But the main reason to go is the restaurant.

This is Kamayan sa Palaisdaan (or, literally, Place-Where-You-Eat-With-Your-Hands by the Fishing Grounds), off of the National Highway.

The restaurant consists of over a dozen huts floating in a circle around a pond filled with carp. (There's also a two-story structure that can host weddings and other big functions, plus a swing and slide for the kiddies.) Reservations on weekends are strongly recommended; I've gone there on rainy weekend nights and for Monday lunches, and every hut was filled. (Did I mention that it's cheap? It's generally less than 200 pesos per person, not counting the San Miguel Lites.)

Below are the reasons why I love this place:

Pinakbet (basically, the Ilocano way of cooking vegetables -- bitter gourd (ampalaya), eggplant, okra and other stuff).

Kare-kare (oxtail, beef tripe, peanut butter -- purists, feel free to attack -- and shrimp paste on the side).

Liempo (grilled and sliced pork spareribs).

Shrimp in coconut milk.

Deep-fried catfish.

Sisig: pig cheeks and ears, on a sizzling plate. My fave.

Crispy pata: deep-fried pork knuckle.

Bicol Express: minced pork and evil chili peppers.

Tilapia with coconut milk.

They were still standing.

Food coma!

Screenshot Answers.

Shot 1:

Chris and Paul Weitz's About a Boy (2002)

Shot 2:

Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle [Breathless] (1960)

Shot 3:

Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain (1973)

Shot 4:

Derek Jarman's Jubilee (1977)

Shot 5:

David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch (1991)

Shot 6:

Jean Cocteau's Orphée [Orpheus] (1950)

Shot 7:

Vincent Gallo's Buffalo '66 (1998)

Shot 8:

Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Shot 9:

Jonathan Hensleigh's The Punisher (2004)

Annual Report.

Today my father gave me a copy of his (late) annual Xmas letter to copy-edit. This one was entitled with the cutesy "Annual Report to the Board of Trustees" of my family. Unfortunately, it was just as dull as what an annual report would read like.

This is actually no fault of my parents' lives after retirement; it's probably more of a function of my dad's scientific writing, filled with descriptions of seedling heights and leaf widths. My parents are, in fact, busier than ever, and they both travel all around Asia frequently. But the letter was simply a colorless monthly "we-did-this" and "we-did-that" type of litany, so, pen in hand, I went to work.

1.0 was the proofread, original version.

2.0 was the version with stylistic comments, mostly filled with suggestions regarding the addition of actual adjectives; we students of anthropology like that sort of stuff anyhow. (Actually, my dad sat at the computer for over half an hour and filled in the details.)

3.0, which I started on a lark, was a bruisingly honest report, filled with embarrassing disclosures and details regarding various fuckups. That was kind of funny, actually; the last entry began with "December treated us to the semi-annual spectacle of grown adults, suddenly under the same roof as their parents, regressing to the emotional level of a twelve-year old."

4.0 was the one spun from thin air (or whole cloth, or whatever the American idiomatic expression is); it had entries like:

April: Thank Christ I found my crack pipe; I was worried one of my damn students had run off with it again.

December: The orange handcuffs we got Dad were a smash hit; we made sure it was color-coordinated with his jumpsuit!

I still can't decide whether 2005 was a good year for me or not; I guess it means it probably wasn't. But no: this year Izzy grew into a exceedingly sweet, smart, wisecracking, beautiful girl, who can do a perfect little ballet knee bend, sing in "Japanese," and score a goal in soccer. I also spent a lot more quality time (both off and online) with my friends (some old, some new), for whom I will always be grateful. I suppose, in the end, 2005 wasn't so bad; after all, it's the many little moments of happiness that count.