<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
	xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
	>

<channel>
	<title>The Wily Filipino</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Fri, 30 Jul 2010 06:35:11 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<language>en</language>
	<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
	<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
	<generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1</generator>
		<item>
		<title>On Rafe Bartholomew&#8217;s &#8220;Pacific Rims&#8221; (2010).</title>
		<link>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/07/29/on-rafe-bartholomews-pacific-rims-2010/</link>
		<comments>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/07/29/on-rafe-bartholomews-pacific-rims-2010/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 30 Jul 2010 06:35:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Benito Vergara</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Pinoy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bartholomew]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[basketball]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pacific rims]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rafe bartholomew]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/?p=1909</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When I was growing up in the Philippines, every guy in my neighborhood played basketball. As a writer one is trained not to use absolute terms like “every” or “all,” but this is surely a statement of empirical fact. Maybe those guys were too busy now, or their knees, like mine, had given way in middle age, but at some point in their lives, they had picked up a ball and chucked it through a hoop. And in every neighborhood, there was one. Even I can still remember the makeshift basketball court near my house: planks salvaged from some construction site and nailed to a tree, a frayed net clinging to a rusted hoop bent funny from all the dunk attempts, skinny street dogs weaving between the players’ skinnier legs, worn-out tsinelas and fake Reeboks raising little puffs of brown dust, overshadowed by the clouds of diesel smoke as a jeep rumbles down the street, and the game is temporarily interrupted to make way for the vehicle. To tell you the truth, I saw that court probably only two or three times. Everyone played except for me. My neighbors apparently thought I was some sort of invalid because I never [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/07/29/on-rafe-bartholomews-pacific-rims-2010/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>3</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>On Arthur Phillips, &#8220;The Song Is You&#8221; (2009).</title>
		<link>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/07/10/on-arthur-phillips-the-song-is-you-2009/</link>
		<comments>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/07/10/on-arthur-phillips-the-song-is-you-2009/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 10 Jul 2010 22:29:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Benito Vergara</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[music]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[arthur phillips]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[phillips]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[the song is you]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/?p=1903</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[[Crossposted from a 3-star entry on Goodreads.] No, it&#8217;s not a proper review (I leave that up to the experts), but more of an extended observation, which can perhaps be best illustrated with an example of Arthur Phillips&#8217; prose, with our protagonist Julian listening to his Walkman in the Manhattan twilight: &#8230;and he had the sensation that he might never be so happy again as long as he lived. This quake of joy, inspiring and crippling, was longing, but longing for what? True love? A wife? Wealth? Music was not so specific as that. &#8220;Love&#8221; was in most of these potent songs, of course, but they — the music, the light, the season — implied more than this, because, treacherously, Julian was swelling only with longing for longing. He felt his nerves open and turn to the world like sunflowers on the beat, but this desire could not achieve release; his body strained forward, but independent of any goal, though he did not know it for many years to come, until he proved it. Because years later, when he had captured all that — love, wife, home, success, child — still he longed, just the same, when he listened to [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/07/10/on-arthur-phillips-the-song-is-you-2009/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>On Andrew Ross Sorkin&#8217;s &#8220;Too Big to Fail&#8221; (2009).</title>
		<link>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/06/14/on-andrew-ross-sorkins-too-big-to-fail-2009/</link>
		<comments>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/06/14/on-andrew-ross-sorkins-too-big-to-fail-2009/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 15 Jun 2010 01:00:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Benito Vergara</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[andrew ross sorkin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sorkin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[too big to fail]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/?p=1893</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[[Crossposted from a one-star review on Goodreads.] I always used to say that life was too short for bad movies or cheap beer, but with books I had an ironclad and perhaps foolish rule: you make a commitment to read it all the way to the end. Not so with Too Big to Fail; for once (okay, twice), I broke that promise. I&#8217;ve been working in financial services for over two years now, and was then employed for a company that went down spectacularly in flames during the crash. It was important for me to read something that tried to make sense of the Wall Street chaos. This isn&#8217;t that book. There&#8217;s only the most cursory discussion of credit-default swaps, for instance &#8212; for explanations, NPR&#8217;s Planet Money, or The New Yorker&#8216;s James Surowiecki, does a far better job &#8212; and for all of Sorkin&#8217;s attention to detail throughout, one doesn&#8217;t get a good sense of how everything is connected. The book is also terribly formulaic. By the third chapter or so the schema is set: introduce yet another person, describe their backgrounds (disappointingly uniform, I must say), add some detail about their culinary habits or the car they drive or [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/06/14/on-andrew-ross-sorkins-too-big-to-fail-2009/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>On William Vollmann&#8217;s &#8220;Argall&#8221; (2001).</title>
		<link>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/06/13/on-william-vollmanns-argall-2001/</link>
		<comments>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/06/13/on-william-vollmanns-argall-2001/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 13 Jun 2010 21:22:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Benito Vergara</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[argall]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[vollmann]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[william vollmann]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/?p=1898</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[[Crossposted from a four-star review on Goodreads.] Weighing only a little less than last year&#8217;s book Imperial, Argall is Vollmann&#8217;s 746-page retelling of the &#8220;true story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith &#8212; though by &#8220;true&#8221; Vollmann refers to what he calls a &#8220;Symbolic History&#8221;, and that the facts contained within are &#8220;often untrue based on the literal facts as we know them, but whose untruths further a deeper sense of truth.&#8221; I can&#8217;t claim to be any good arbiter of the ethics behind this, only to note that it&#8217;s fiction, after all, and that Smith, as meticulous a chronicler as he was, was guided by ideological and commercial considerations just like anyone. And indeed, Argall is perhaps closer to that &#8220;deeper sense of truth&#8221; in the sense that it&#8217;s stubbornly, refreshingly, anti-Romantic. (Smith himself barely mentions that famous incident &#8212; enshrined in elementary schools all across America, at least in the pre-Howard Zinn days &#8212; when Pocahontas supposedly saves Smith from execution, and so Vollmann similarly glosses over it.) One can imagine Argall almost as the dark twin of Terrence Malick&#8217;s film The New World (my favorite film of the last decade, but hey, go see the others). Where Malick&#8217;s vision of America [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/06/13/on-william-vollmanns-argall-2001/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>On Brian Selznick&#8217;s &#8220;The Invention of Hugo Cabret&#8221; (2007).</title>
		<link>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/06/12/on-brian-selznicks-the-invention-of-hugo-cabret-2007/</link>
		<comments>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/06/12/on-brian-selznicks-the-invention-of-hugo-cabret-2007/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 12 Jun 2010 15:03:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Benito Vergara</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[brian selznick]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[selznick]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[the invention of hugo cabret]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/?p=1890</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[[Crossposted from a four-star review on Goodreads.] Engrossing and thrilling and wonderfully evocative of 1930s Paris. Best part: how the book nails the magical aspect of cinema (though there are many other movies that do this better, for obvious reasons). Don&#8217;t be daunted by the length; I finished it in three hours &#8212; but that&#8217;s because I was reading it out loud to my daughter. You adults will be done with it in less than an hour. I had no idea it was going to be about Georges Méliès, so it was a treat to have the various aspects of his story &#8212; the boot heels, his career as a magician, etc. &#8212; be included in the book. (He becomes somewhat peripheral, in an odd sense, from the second half of the story; his wife Jeanne Méliès is transformed into a far more vibrant character at this point.) Fans of French cinema will enjoy the many cinematic references, including the stills of Méliès films reproduced in the book (and the unexpected homage to Truffaut). Why only four stars? (Actually, I would have given it something closer to 3 and a half.) The crosshatched illustrations are beautiful, but there&#8217;s an uneasy [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/06/12/on-brian-selznicks-the-invention-of-hugo-cabret-2007/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>On Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall&#8217;s &#8220;The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television&#8221; (2009).</title>
		<link>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/06/11/on-tiffany-potter-and-c-w-marshalls-the-wire-urban-decay-and-american-television-2009/</link>
		<comments>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/06/11/on-tiffany-potter-and-c-w-marshalls-the-wire-urban-decay-and-american-television-2009/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 11 Jun 2010 07:09:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Benito Vergara</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[c.w. marshall]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[the wire]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tiffany potter]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/?p=1886</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[[Crossposted from my five-star review on Goodreads.] I rarely give out five stars, especially to an essay collection (where the quality can be uneven). But this is just fantastic: a highly readable selection of scholarly essays &#8212; mostly from professors of English, actually, but the essays are written from a more sociological perspective. Doubtless the fact that I love the television show &#8212; perhaps the greatest in the history of the medium, but take my hyperbole with a grain of salt &#8212; has much to do with my appreciation of the book. The variety of the essays is its main virtue: there&#8217;s a discussion of &#8220;the production of gender&#8221; among the &#8220;Barksdale women&#8221;, two essays loosely about genre (the police procedural, and the melodrama), capitalism and violence (as seen through Stringer Bell and Avon Barksdale), serial vs episodic narratives on television, inner-city manhood, a close reading/viewing of Agnieszka Holland&#8217;s visuality, and an analysis of fan reaction to Omar Little (and queerness and American citizenship). Foucault is mentioned a lot &#8212; not just because of the theme of surveillance running throughout the show, but because, like Foucault, The Wire takes as its main topic the nature of modern institutions and the [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/06/11/on-tiffany-potter-and-c-w-marshalls-the-wire-urban-decay-and-american-television-2009/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>On Lionel Davidson&#8217;s &#8220;Kolymsky Heights&#8221; (1994).</title>
		<link>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/06/10/on-lionel-davidsons-kolymsky-heights-1994/</link>
		<comments>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/06/10/on-lionel-davidsons-kolymsky-heights-1994/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Jun 2010 14:40:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Benito Vergara</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[davidson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[kolymsky heights]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lionel davidson]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/?p=1882</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[[Crossposted on Goodreads.] Exceptional offbeat minimalist thriller, with an unlikely hero &#8212; a &#8220;Native Canadian&#8221; linguistic anthropologist! (Actually, I think the proper term is &#8220;First Nations&#8221;.) The book didn&#8217;t quite suit my purposes at the time &#8212; I was about to board a plane, so I wanted a relatively mindless airport novel &#8212; but it generates its own peculiar level of excitement. It&#8217;s closer in style to, say, George Smiley interviewing and re-interviewing retired Circus employees and shuffling through redacted reports &#8212; in other words, a patient, incremental enumeration of observations and deductions and steps taken. But it&#8217;s not a procedural in the usual sense; the narrative is set on a few continents, and the last third of the novel is pretty much an extended chase sequence. It&#8217;s a surprisingly complex plot nonetheless, full of carefully calibrated moments of subterfuge, and this complexity is all the more impressive considering the fact that the plot elements can be boiled down to only two phases: there&#8217;s a top-secret base, and our hero has to get in, and he has to get out. Recommended]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/06/10/on-lionel-davidsons-kolymsky-heights-1994/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>On Dennis Lehane&#8217;s &#8220;Shutter Island&#8221; (2003).</title>
		<link>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/06/09/on-dennis-lehanes-shutter-island-2003/</link>
		<comments>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/06/09/on-dennis-lehanes-shutter-island-2003/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Jun 2010 06:10:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Benito Vergara</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[book review]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[dennis lehane]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lehane]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[shutter island]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/?p=1876</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[[Crossposted on Goodreads.] VERY MILD SPOILERS CONTAINED INSIDE (you&#8217;ll have read the same in the book&#8217;s blurbs, anyway): I love a good page-turner every now and then, and this novel &#8212; locked-room mystery, ghost story, haunted-house flick, cop thriller, in various amounts &#8212; definitely didn&#8217;t disappoint. (Especially when you&#8217;re on a plane.) But the success of the story is wholly dependent on some sleight-of-hand on Lehane&#8217;s part &#8212; nothing wrong with this, really, except that skillful construction doesn&#8217;t quite conceal the fact that Shutter Island is missing what Lehane does best. In Mystic River, with its Shakespearean dramatic arc, or almost any of the Kenzie/Gennaro books (except maybe for the weak Sacred), one had the sense that Boston and its people were living, breathing, essential characters in the story. (Other than the performances, this rootedness in place is what made Clint Eastwood&#8217;s Mystic River, and Ben Affleck&#8217;s vastly underrated 2007 directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, so powerful.) Would it be remiss to say that Dennis Lehane&#8217;s Boston is, albeit in a more limited fashion, as fleshed out as David Simon&#8217;s Baltimore? (Or Richard Price&#8217;s &#8220;Dempsey&#8221;?) It&#8217;s that sense of vibrant reality that&#8217;s missing from Shutter Island, the idea that a city and its residents had lived [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/06/09/on-dennis-lehanes-shutter-island-2003/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Where&#8217;s The Other Pinay?</title>
		<link>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/04/06/wheres-the-other-pinay/</link>
		<comments>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/04/06/wheres-the-other-pinay/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 07 Apr 2010 02:19:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Benito Vergara</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Pinoy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[music]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[charmaine clamor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[david byrne]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fatboy slim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[imelda marcos]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/?p=1872</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Dear Mr. David Byrne, You mean to tell me the one single Pinay singer who actually has a lead vocal on your project didn&#8217;t get to be on your cool poster? I mean, she sings lead vocals and all! Sincerely, The Wily Filipino p.s. Thanks, though, for the big spike in visits on my very old Wit and Wisdom of Imelda Marcos page. And I dig the album, though I wish you&#8217;d written more about the horrific abuse of human rights (and corruption, and poverty) that the Marcos dictatorship perpetrated upon the Filipino people. That&#8217;s all.]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/04/06/wheres-the-other-pinay/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Music Video Quiz #1.</title>
		<link>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/03/25/music-video-quiz-1/</link>
		<comments>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/03/25/music-video-quiz-1/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Mar 2010 02:51:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Benito Vergara</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[music]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[music videos]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/?p=1854</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Back in the day &#8212; four years ago, a lifetime in Internet terms &#8212; when I was more active on Last.fm and had way too much time on my hands, I would change my avatar to a screencap from a music video and have people guess its source. (Back then YouTube wasn&#8217;t that popular yet, so it was a little more difficult for folks to confirm whether one&#8217;s guess was correct.) But at some point I lost interest and things got busy and I had no more images left &#8212; none of these screencaps were taken from YouTube, but from video files I actually had &#8212; so the whole thing just faded out. Anyhow, in the process of messing around with my other blog last night, I found all the images on a stray USB flash drive, and so I thought I&#8217;d slowly post them here until they&#8217;re all gone. (And you Last.fm friends who might know all of these already: play nice and don&#8217;t answer them all, okay? I know who you are!) Guess the artist and song title in the comments: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://www.thewilyfilipino.com/blog/2010/03/25/music-video-quiz-1/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>
