Interesting article on chill out music finding its way to us. Am currently getting my fix via Kazaa, rediscovering Portishead and Air again. But my heart still goes to Moby. I went to Music One yesterday, but they don't have "Play" in stock. Anyone know where I can get it?

My dreamboat* grows up and learns to play the Hollywood game. There is so much buzz surrounding his films coming out this Christmas season, it must be the best comeback of all time. If it works. If it doesn't, at least he can claim to be in Scorsese's "Gangs of New York." Scorsese will get a Best Director Oscar, which is like 20-25 years delayed. Patience is a virtue.**

*This is pre-Titanic, when he was still doing those little films and he wasn't a poster on every girl's bedroom walls. But I once had a poster of him with a swan draped around his neck, a la Bjork. Of course he had to be adorable.

**I never claimed to be virtuous. These days, I am finding myself becoming too impatient. Ha.

Woke up to an sms from my friend Abi: "may natagpuang dead body sa palma hall dis a.m.!" Two years ago, this wouldn't have bothered me. I read, ate and drink to crime stories, and it didn't make me squimish. The mere mention of a massacre makes you happy in a twisted kind of way (Yey! We have a new story!) But now it makes me cringe. That's when you realize you've had enough and ship out, or maybe we've been subconsciously wishing a slow death to this crime glam on television.

This could change my mind about Harry Potter:

Harry was transfixed by Myrtle's wet, purple lips before they disappeared under the water. A cool tingling sensation began to work its way down Harry's body. The tingling, combined with the warm pulsating jets along the length of his backside, seemed to mimic Harry's ambivalence about what was happening. On the one hand, he didn't want to be here, he didn't even like Myrtle. On the other, the pain down below was growing stronger, and he just wanted someone, anyone — even a ghost — to end it.

The above paragraph is "allegedly" part of the chapter that JK Rowling wants to include. Well, that is if the publishers are brave enough to put raging hormones in the series, parents' protests aside. If the fifth installment is really something like this, heck, I'll run out and read it in a jiffy. I always knew that there was something odd to that Harry-Hermione-Ron axis. It's a love triangle right there. Just bungle the coordinates.

"Want to play cards? Love Buffy? Perhaps you’d like to do both... Well, now you can with the Cult Buffy Trumps card game*...Ever wanted to find out what would happen if Buffy fought Giles? Or wondered if Xander or Oz is the cutest? Now you can find out with our fun card game. Pit yourself against the computer, and find out if you know your Buffy well enough to win."

This is mighty fun, especially if you're a Buffy fan. Still haven't watched the musical which Bluekessa recorded for me, but I'll get to it the soonest that I can.

*Requires Flash Plug-in

I refuse to watch this, even if I'm the last person on earth. I was able to dodge it last year, and I can do it again and for all the next years to come. Not even with Alfonso Cuaron directing, no.

Caffeinated lipstick? I love coffee, I hate lipstick. Coffee + lipstick = kikay convert me? No. ::shakes head vigorously, with fists raised::

Comics as dialogue

The questioning Ant asks Grumpygirl: "So what's the diff between a blog and a homepage?" Much debate which included the raising of eyebrows ensue.

[ via jill/txt ]

A team of faculty and students from Stanford University spent a year in Italy scanning the scultptures and architecture of Michelangelo. The Digital Michelangelo Project aims to put together the complete set of 3D computer models and make these available to scholars worldwide. They even patiently scanned 1,163 fragments of the Forma Urbis Romae, a giant marble map of ancient Rome. Now, if I could only make me a replica of Michelangelo's David right in my own living room. Makes for a nice piece furniture, 'no?

I am Michiko Kakutani. I don't know what it is about creating alteregos of oneself. Eminem is Slim Shady is Marshall Mathers. Michiko Kakutani is actually the creation of this guy who bothered to enroll her in college classes and eventually she had a life of her own. And oh, kantogirl doens't live here anymore.

I am not a lean mean kikay machine. I can be vain, but it never mattered to me. But now, things surface to prove otherwise. I don't want to be sucked by the void. Please do tell me something I don't know.

A good show, even with the moon

The good thing with November, while it is cold and not too sweet, is the meteor showers. The Leonids show is just around the corner, 19 November, with some few dozen meteors blazing the sky per hour. Last year, my chron-agnostic friend whom I've always had the urge to strangle, rang me up at three in the morning. "Get out of your house, girl," she screamed into my ears before I can even say hello. "The sky is falling." Right.

You can find ten tips to maximize Leonid viewings here, and more forecasts here.

Time Magazine takes a look into the odd rituals of adolescent girlhood. It's tough being a girl. You can never be thin, smart or kikay enough. Other girls will pick on you for having frizzy hair or for no apparent reason at all other than they randomly hate you. It's a freaking hormonal hell. But while girls can be mean to each other, it's still your bestest girlfriends you run to when the going gets tough and you need to get better: It's a complex relationship, one among girls:

The good thing about having female friendships is that there isn't any of that sexual tension involved. I mean, I have guys who I can cry to and have fun with, but it's not the same bond. A lot of the time, girls and guys become friends because one of them thought the other one was attractive. And there's none of that involved with being friends with girls. You can just be real.

Having female friends who you can have fun with and run around with and act all giddy with and then share your most embarrassing, real moments with is worth so much. And just being able to have people who can support your choices or, even when you f*** up in your choices, still love you through anything.

There's tons of drama in the relationships between girls. Girls have catfights and girls hold grudges. But when you have your best girlfriends who you've been through thick and thin with, you get past who looks better when and who gets what guy. With a boyfriend, you don't necessarily know if you're going to be with them in a certain amount of time. But you can be sure that your girlfriends will be there.

Here's where you can find the photo essay and the book review.

Buffy as academic treatise: Salon writer Stephanie Zacharek attends an academic conference in England to read a paper about modern and mythical sexuality in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." People are deconstructing Buffy. Wish I did this for Comm I in my undergrad. Feh. This is one of those days I wish I had a subscription to Salon premium. Damn.

Guess which movie this is from. FilmWise makes invisibles quizzes.

The Police get inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The ceremonies are set for spring 2003, and "if [Sting] can get out of the studio and there's time to rehearse and the equipment is right," we might see The Police together again, a decade after their last gig at Sting's wedding.

Sana lang Sting wouldn't sell any more of their songs to Sean Combs/Puff Daddy/P.Diddy or however this guy wants to call himself.

Speaking of Spike Jonze, the man shows us how to do a commercial. Astig, man. Buy me an Ikea lamp. Now.

Winona Ryder was convicted for 2 counts of shoplifting:

Why, Winona, why? Why did it have to be shoplifting at Saks? This is worse than Noelle Bush getting busted for forging a prescription for Xanax. This is worse than Janeane Garofalo going on a diet.

Hot damn. Let us all go out and air our grief and lamentation by dancing to "My Sharona" in convenience stores everywhere.

Falling in love is a time consuming thing

"First, there is the time spent with the person, talking and laughing and tracing the perimeter of his hand with my finger. And since the person happens to live in another city, there is the time spent wishing I were with the person and the time talking to friends about the person, telling the same story 10 different ways, and then there is the time spent on the phone with the person and writing emails longer than most magazine articles. I have to plan my weekends carefully. I have to reconsider my underwear. I have to puzzle over how to sign my correspondence. “With love”? “Yours”? Am I his? And do I want to be? I have to worry about the person meeting my friends. I have to worry about the person meeting my family and me meeting his family and our families meeting each other, which hasn’t happened and maybe never will and I’m galloping into the future again I gotta stop that. I have to worry about the person’s past, which I can only take his word for, and I have to pretend like no, no I’m not worried about your past at all, it's in the past, right? It’s all so exhausting that I have to go out and get drunk and then I have to of course call the person I’m falling in love with because now I’m drunk, and then say dumb, rambly things because well, I’m drunk and then wake up regretting it all and wondering if the person I’m falling in love with has discovered, as I blathered to him drunkenly, my true and twisted self which he will no doubt cast aside so I have to kick the sheets at 5am, resolved to end it all, and then wake up hours later wondering what on earth I was thinking, wanting to break up with someone I am falling in love with. I have to realize that, while being a nice and caring and well-meaning individual, I am also a bit of a maniac."

*sigh*

Say my name, bitch

Jessel is

jessel is mad
jessel is looking forward to an afterlife of pain
jessel is metaphorical of world
jessel is either god or death

jessel is all innuendo and allure – a kind of sexy severity
jessel is a slut in décolleté silk
jessel is here tonight to put on a show at 1900 hours

jessel is clear
jessel is there
jessel is not there
jessel is even more vague

Who wants to be a macho macho girl?

"There is a kind of machismo among girls now," he said. "They have the male-conquest attitude." Mr. Beckerman is the author of "Generation SLUT," to be published next year by Simon & Schuster/MTV Books. SLUT stands for "sexually liberal urban teenagers," and his book is a plea for a return to more chaste behavior. He surmised that girls may be trying to transform sex into something as meaningless as they believe it is for boys.

"All kids are scared of long-term relationships now," Mr. Beckerman said. "Our parents are all divorced, and we have never seen a successful long-term relationship. Girls don't want to think of sex as something which is about love because that will just come back and bite them later. The sex thing is just the most visible sign of disconnectedness we feel."

Can I say yeah to this one? Call it whatever you want: as the trickling down of feminism or an effect of global warming, but I think it's a good thing. We've been told that girls shouldn't just stay at home, to go out and get it. Whatever "it" means -- a great job, education, sex -- it's just about freaking time. For some it means drinking or smoking as much, but hell, if girls wanted to booze up or burn up their lungs, fine. Role reversal is a good thing sometimes, when you're put in the role of hunter rather than prey.

But then of course, it might take years to totally rewire everything.

Happy requiems for the dead and dying

How to tell the end of an era [1]
How to kill your Friends

The end of a television series, especially a successful one, is like the feeling near graduation. You're about to let go of something you know how to do very well, and at the same time you're eager to let go of something you've had enough of. I can't say I am a really huge fan, but I've watched it often enough, and it defined a specific time of my life. Friends works because it's an easy pitch:

In the beginning there was a pilot, and it featured these six: Ross, a sensitive-guy paleontologist who has been ditched by his pregnant lesbian wife; his sister, Monica, a fastidious chef who, all appearances to the contrary, is said to have suffered an unsvelte adolescence; Monica's rich-girl high-school pal, Rachel, who dashes into Central Perk in a wedding gown, having fled her appointment at the altar with an orthodontist; Monica's neighbor Joey, a vapid, hunky, aspiring actor; Chandler, Joey's smart-aleck roommate, who works as a data-processing drone; and Phoebe, the dippy vegetarian twin of a character on ''Mad About You.'' The friends were plucked from the chipper, optimistic wing of Gen X: they were as loyal and attractive and well heeled as they were aimless, solipsistic and irony-drenched.

I can't say I'm a huge fan, but I've watched it often enough and I can more or less say that Friends has an influence on television writing. Simple three-pronged plotlines, and titles with "..when Joey and Chandler had a duck" or something like that. When I first started working, I remember one teacher saying that they couldn't place see me writing for [certain tv show] because my humor is more like Friends-type, not that sitcom. I don't know if that's good or bad though. I still can't hack sitcoms.

.........

How to tell the end of an era [2]
The end of hiss:

The tape will die, but the tactile nature aof it, and some of the lexicon, will remain: "Fast forward" will always mean something, will forever recall the chirpy, panicky sound of tape being sped to and fro, as its surgeon-fingered listeners searched for a particular few seconds of words or music; and how that gibberishy sound came to stand, as aural icon, for haste and excitement, or for admissions of guilt, or certain refrains where you don't know what the singer is singing, so you RR or FF to it, back to it, back to it, back to it, back to it: dweee-deely-wedee-deely-we-dwee-deely-wweeeeee-dweeeep.

People don't talk about doing mix tapes anymore. We download mp3s and burn them on CDs to make our own compilation albums with such irresistible titles like "Banished from the Catwalk" or "Music from the Barracks." I was talking with this friend, when I had this sudden blast of music in my head. "What song was this: Huwag nang malumbay/ang pag-ibig ay tunay/ Sabihin man ng iyong kapitbahay/na di ako nagsusuklay." I couldn't place the album, but she knew the song. "I was already back in Manila when that came out. I know what I'll give you this christmas already. It'll have all those band songs."

Making mix tapes reminds me of that scene in Virgin Suicides. The girls couldn't really talk on the phone. So the boys would call up, and play music and not talk. All their emotions condensed in the smooth vinyl relayed across the phone lines. Someday perhaps, music will be like air. Something we breathe naturally, and we will never have to acquire players and bulky stereos. But then we will lose the romance of pressing play and pause, waiting for the right moment to begin recording, unspooling tape and transmitting all our thoughts and emotions in pop songs mix tape.

In television, how a series is going to proceed has to be kept a mystery. I remember reading about how Chris Carter (series creator of the X-Files) had scripts printed on colored paper -- because type on colored paper cannot easily be photocopied. You don't want the whole world to know how the season is going to proceed. It's really just a big deal, especially if your pool of writers racked their brains many many nights just to make it seem different. Imagine the horror of suddenly knowing that the other series in another network made use of a device or storyline resembling yours (so eeriely similar it could only be..) What can only be more appalling is when the actor in your series does a promotional interview and begins to unravel three seasons' worth of plot twists. Mystery no more. You can only wish to decapitate the thoughtless guy. Blech.

How to create your dream network. All I can say is, I still like the rainbow better than the multi-colored heart thing. Para na ngang logo ng Selecta ice cream, o kaya banner ng Gay Pride March -- which isn't really that bad. Bongga di ba? Hehe.

To those who were 21 in the Year 2000
Are these really the years of living dangerously? I was browsing through my notebooks, looking for a particular entry when I came across this:

16 October 2000
Monday, 7.37

There is something in the air which makes me fear that we are living in interesting times. In the span of a week, a huge controverysy involving gambling, disgruntled friends and the highest official in the land has plunged the country in near chaos.

Or are we just imagining this? The peso has plummetted to Php48+, you cannot trust your leaders, what is there to turn to? And yesterday on Twisted, part of the discussion was that the Philippines has that same state of panic and anticipation as what had been in 1986. I had been hankering on and on that I had been too young to remember ever having participated in Edsa, and what if I get my wish to experience a life-changing revolution right now?

It is quite undeniable that something is bound to happen. Earlier this morning on the radio, there was news that since Thursday, ATMs have been off-line a lot. And since I'm not really fond of keeping money in my wallet, all I have at this very minute is Php 43.75. I wouldn't even be able to do anything at all if all the ATMs in the world conked out.

I am tempted to ring up people and ask them: Are we about to experience a revolution?

The huge difference between Martial Law and Edsa and now is that there are no protesters -- no banner toting students clad in red, shouting "Down with the Dictatorship!" Student activism may very well be dead, and my peers, those who are 21 in the year 2000 -- do not give a flying fuck as to what is happening in this country. They are all occupied with their mobile phones, their e-mail, their cable shows and MTV to even think of what is going to happen in the future.

What if we don't have a future? Twisted pointed out that we're the ones who should give a shit, because they've lived a life and we're only starting, and there's no foundation to build something on. We desperately need a figure head, someone to believe in, someone to cheer on, to lead us out of this miserable state. Who is brave enough to step into the melee? Who wants to be Messiah and die a horrible death?

If this is the moment to prove ourselves as a generation, then I think this should be it. This is our Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage, the time to do something reckless, to do something as a collective. Our claim towards a usefulness, a definition of identity, something to anchor our nation's history upon.

We are in the cusp of change, if you think about it. 30 years ago there was the First Quarter Storm. 14 years ago was Edsa. In 2000, time dictates that a shift should happen. To define the difference of who we are now. Because if we don't do anything, if nothing happens, or if something does happen and we refused to make a stand, then our generation will definitely be lost adrift, anonymous, unremembered. How is that for a coming of age tale? And it's not yet even 8 a.m.

It's strange how it's been two years already. I didn't even have a mobile phone back then, and I still spent a huge amount of time hanging out in my headwriter J's house, and I'd get up early and scribble on his breakfast table. Several days prior to that entry, we all huddled in his living room. We didn't dare go out because some guy was assasinated right out into the street. All that chaos. Fast forward to now and we're all living different lives but the inflation is even worse. People you know have been victims or near victims of kidnap gangs. The Chinese are right, living in interesting times is a curse.