A Universe of Stories

Finished reading Marvel 1602, the 8-part series in which Neil Gaiman reimagines the Marvel Universe. But it's really not just a reimagining or a simple what if (think DC's Other Worlds), but something that will still fit in the current Marvel universe.

The premise: it is the last days of Queen Elizabeth's reign. The ides of March bring inclement weather, and not just the umbrella-requiring kind--lizards and fire--enough to make people think of the Apocalypse. There's threat from James VI of Scotland in the north. The Spanish Inquisition seeks "witchbreeds," people and creatures with suprapowers, and burn them at the stakes. There is a "school for the sons of gentlefolk" run by a Spaniard called Carolus Javier, who is bald, has no use of his legs, and has a page named John Grey. And oh, there's also Peter Parquah who's forever having close encounters with spiders but never bitten. It's 1602, but the Age of Heroes has started 400 years early. Something called a "Forerunner" came from the future and caused all this to happen out of sync with time and space. It has to be stopped--or returned where it came from--so that the universe will exist as it should.

I like how the story is peopled by recognizable characters from the Marvel pantheon--which Gaiman says come from no later than the 1969 catalogue, as there are many Marvel heroes. The same things happen in 1602 as they happened 400 years later. It doesn't feel too forced, and it only shows that the dilemmas felt in present times can somehow still fit in that past where science and magic live side by side.



The panel excerpt comes from issue # 7, and the witchbreeds are on their to the New World. Richard Reed was thankful for the time he spent in Otto Von Doom's dungeons. There were no "distractions" and he "was able to reduce many things to their fundamental principles." The others thought that he had discovered how to turn lead into gold. But Reed says it is the principles of stories which he had discovered, as stories give him hope. They live in a universe where they are given a chance to exist. The Flame Man contradicts him--stories end, all tales end, and it is how they will also end. But the Thing is curious about the transmutations. He wants his humanity to be restored, as he has been "a monster too long." Reed, in all his wisdom replies, that yes, a cure is possible in the natural sciences. "But the laws of story would suggest that no cure can last for very long. For in the end, alas, [you] are so much more interesting and satisfying as you are."

For me that captures the rationale for the entire series, as with the immediate sequel "1602: New World." It is possible to "treat" this monstrosity, these witchbreeds in the past and make "corrections" on the mistakes we now know as history. But then again, perhaps it won't be as interesting.

A Moveable Feast

The title page of Ernest Hemingway's memoir about living in Paris in the 1920s opens with this quote from a letter he wrote a friend in 1950: "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."

In the book's preface he also tells the reader, that if she prefers, "this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact." It is clear though that Hemingway writes about People Who Really Existed, and as one turns the page and on to the new chapter, the previous one is alluded to, and there is a linear build up as far as chronology is concerned. Each chapter is self-contained, the situation builds up and ends with what seems like insight. I don't know if that was what Hemingway meant when he said that the reader "may regard this as fiction"--in that the structure is similar but the characters are People Who Really Existed. If so, Hemingway makes it obvious that there are some Nice People, like Ezra Pound, who's really a saint, but who is also friends with opium addicts/poets--the distinctions weren't very clear as to which came first. It's also obvious that there are some Pompous Asses in the cast of characters. Some are named, like Gertrude Stein, but some are too silly that they remain anonymous, like the young man who wanted to be a Great Creative Writer but didn't have what it takes so Hemingway convinced him to write criticism. Of course, later there is an aside wherein Hemingway says that it would have been great if the young man turned out to be a great critic of the ballet, books or the moving pictures, but unfortunately, even there he was not gifted enough. So okay na rin na wala siyang pangalan para di napahiya. Hehe.

In the first chapter, "A Good Cafe on the Place St.-Michel," Hemingway talks about the process of transplanting oneself, wherein simply put, "in one place youc ould write about it better than in another." It's fall in Paris and the wild, cold blowing day was the sort of day it felt right to tell the story of a boyhood incident up in Michigan, which also happened on a wild, cold, blowing day like that day in Paris in the fall.

Later in the chapter, he writes about how the weather is really bad and he was thinking of leaving Paris for a while. He thinks, "Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan. I did not know it was too early for that because I did not know Paris well enough. But that was how it worked out eventually..." The rain in Paris was "now only local weather and not something that changed your life."

For when Hemingway finally wrote about the incidents of his life in Paris in the years 1921-1926, it would be almost thirty plus years later, he would be in Cuba, 1957, or in Idaho, 1958 and all the way to Spain in 1959 and back to Cuba and Idaho once more. It was near the end of his life, and in two years he would be found dead in Idaho.

But in A Moveable Feast, Hem is a young man, poor and hungry but happy, and it would take forty years for him to realize that.

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway, Scribners Classic, 1987. Php 100 from Zeitgeist. Bought only because my Thesis Adviser kept on quoting Hemingway and I got tired of not knowing what she was talking about. Now I want to read all of Hemingway.

Jonathan Yardley reviews it for The Washington Post here, and a 1964 New York Times review by Charles Poore here.

Tunay na Lalake, Totoong Babae

It started like some kind of in-joke from the fellows of the UP Baguio Workshop: "Ang tunay na lalaki hindi natutulog;" or, "Ang tunay na lalaki laging may extra rice." They formalized their manifesto in a blog and a few days in, they now have something like 30,000+ hits.

According to their hilarious, macho shit logic, Cesar Montano is not a real man, but Chynna Ortaleza is not. The evidence:

Cesar Montano's ad for a water company. I often see this plastered on the sides of mini-trucks. Cesar in wifebeaters, gaily looking at the camera, smiling and all while he splashes the contents of a bottle of mineral water all over himself. The real men ask: Sa tingin nyo tunay na lalake ba ang umaasta nang ganito?

On the other hand, you've got former 5 & Up reporter Chynna Ortaleza. She's done everything--and really, everything--acted in commercials, starred in youth-oriented shows, sang and danced in public (something a real man would never, ever do), played a kontravida in a fantasy soap opera, posed in men's magazines. Name it, she's done it. And she never came close to real stardom. In spite of everything, Real Men know a Real Man when they see one. And so the verdict: "Pero sa ganitong sigasig at pagpupursigi sa trabaho, sigasig at pagpupursiging baka pumantay o lumampas pa kay John Lloyd, kinikilala ang status ni Chynna bilang tunay na lalake. At kung ma-demote man siya'y siguradong hahanapan niya ito ng paraan."

Kaya tunay na lalaki si Chynna Ortaleza. Yun yun eh: Ang tunay na lalaki, gagawa ng paraan.

The last time I checked, somewhere in the comments someone left a link to a counterpart blog: Ang Blog ng mga Totoong Babae. Only a handful of entries there right now. But you can see the seeds of it already: Real Women Love Housework (see: Snow White), Real Women will kill for a man (See Keka--ang girlfriend mong astig, pamatay kung umibig.) But I think mas funny yung mga tunay na lalaki.

Item # 82: Doctrina Christiana, en lengua espanola y tagala

I really should be doing something else, but via some links I found out that the World Digital Library, slated to open later this month, is already operational. I didn't really expect to find anything from the Philippines. But I saw that there were several entries from Southeast Asia, and the Doctrina Christiana was part of the list. The book is described as follows:

Published in Manila in 1593, this catechism in Spanish and Tagalog is the first book printed in the Philippines. It is also the first book printed in a Philippine language and the first, and only, 16th-century source showing an explicit and distinctly Philippine abecedarium (alphabet). The book is illustrated with a woodcut frontispiece of St. Dominic and initial letters in both Spanish and Tagalog. Part of the rare book collections of the Library of Congress, it is the only known copy in existence.

The book was donated to the Library of Congress by the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, and this is the only extant copy in the whole wide world. It has 76 pages, with illustrations and roughly 12.5 inches in height. And if you have the bandwidth, you can download a PDF copy of it, all 32 MB of it.

The other interesting finds in the Philippine section include a map detailing The Attack of Manila, October 1762, a photo of a religious parade featuring the Santa Rosa de Lima--the Patroness of the New World and the Philippines-- and a 22-second, black and white silent reel about Aguinaldo's Navy. All are downloadable.

The other item which peaked my interest was the journal of Magellan's voyage supposedly written by Antonio Pigafetta. The surviving copy is in French and unfortunately NOT downloadable. But really, I have nothing to complain about since the journal can be browsed, and perhaps it's only a matter of time before the World Digital Library will have a version of it available for downloading in one piece. If not, there's always the option of saving it per page--all 200+ pages of it. Then again, one has to be well versed in French in order to fully understand this.

The Great Train Wreck

Pictures for Sad Children illustrates what the vortex of negativity is capable of, or at least Murphy's Law:

Kitty Wigs

Fox News brings us a century's worth of bad inventions. For me, the top of that list should be this:





Cats are notorious enough for not wanting to be accessorized. Slapping on a kitty wig on them seems like the easy way out. But look at the claws on this one. You just know that she's not very pleased. But wait, there's more:




At least with this one, they were able to make her stay put and look a bit sultry. Unless what she's really saying is, "Just wait when you're asleep. You will then know what it really means to say, 'I have lost face.'"

The Smelly Dog

This T-Rex from Dinosaur Comics admits on coming down hard on poetry in the past, even dismissing it: "Poetry Bloetries." But he realizes that poetry is a very sophisticated form of communication that even antedates the written word. One must memorize lines, which is easier if it rhymes. Thus the need for "The smelly dog who pooed / Has spied me in the nude."

If you roll your mouse over the strip, the author says that he looked up "poetry bloetries" in the web. It's there alright. Some people who post poems on their blogs call their works "bloetry."

Kabog. Hehehe.

Read entire strip here.

Cats Don't Care

Robert Sergel of Idiot Comics shows why cats are the best pets you can ever have:



Full page here.

Call Work

Callwork is one of the more interesting comics I saw at the Komikon last November. Hazel Manzano's blog calls the strip a "tribute to all Business Process Outsourcing workforce here in the Philippines."

In this particular installment, the imminent doom of the economic crisis is creeping onto the country's sunshine industry. Now, more than anything, people are just thankful that they have work and that it pays.

EDIT: Callwork is reviewed in the February 2009 issue of FHM, the one with three girls and some sliced fruits. Vincent Coscolluela writes: "More a series of comic strips than a comic book, Callwork gives you one of those, "Why didn't I think of this?" moments. Call centers, the industry's lifestyles and habits, are a rich source of material. Poking fun at absenteeism, overtime, payroll discrepancies--you name it--who knew you'd get such a laugh out of corporate suffering?"

The FHM review also got me curious about Edwin Estioko's Bless Our Trip, which is "as indie as it gets": photocopied and stapled bond paper. But what got me was the description of what happens. It's told in vignettes, and links together several characters who meet everyday at a jeepney stop: "A boy finds his girl, a father his son, and a thief his whore." Panalo. Does anyone know how to get a copy of this?

Change This Movie

We literally had two minutes to get inside the theater last Wednesday. I just picked a time that was convenient, 5:10PM. I figured it wouldn't be that crowded because people were still in schools and offices. But when I got to the counter almost all the seats were taken and I didn't know it was in a THX theater. That's how I ended up paying a full day's pay for the John Lloyd and Sarah movie.

The first teamup between John Lloyd Cruz and Sarah Geronimo was A Very Special Love. Plain girl Laida desires the masungit rich boy Miggy who publishes the magazine Bachelor, which is published by Flippage, one of the many business ventures owned by the Montenegro clan, whose black dressed and tuxedoed members scowl from the cover of the Society magazine's huge billboard along Guadalupe. Laida the plain girl moons over this billboard every time she passes it, and she likes Miggy so much that upon graduation, she applies to Flippage to be an Editorial Assistant. And lucky girl she was because on her job interview, she ends up offering a cup of coffee to the love of her life. They fall in love. They do weird things like dancing to stop the downpour and hire trucks so they could sing Smokey Mountain songs on them.

AVSL was a big hit when it first came out and I suspect it was because it was pure fantasy: plain girl gets rich boy. Of course, the rich boy has issues: he was an anak sa labas. He resents that his mother (Agot Isidro, in pictures) died and his father's family doesn't really like him. The good (legitimate) brother doesn't trust his capacities as publisher. Laida helps him get through all of this, even meeting his dead mother. And in the end, Miggy's father vouches for him so Rowell Santiago has no other choice but to take him in. Sarah Geronimo is a funny girl, unafraid to make a fool out of herself and the energy with which she throws herself is admirable. John Lloyd is trading on his sullen boy act, which for some reason girls find attractive. There's one scene where John Lloyd gets sick and Sarah nurses him back to health. It's the atsay and amo act all over again. So this is what the Pinay really wants is to play mommy, yaya, assistant and girlfriend all in one.

These are the issues that You Changed My Life takes on.What happens after the "happily ever after"? In fact, I was rather surprised that the movie is actually a direct sequel of A Very Special Love. Perhaps the creators thought they had a story that worked well, and decided to just pick up where they left off. We find out that Bachelor lives, and Laida takes care of their advertising load. Meanwhile, the Montenegros venture into a partnership with an airline company, and Miggy has to write a speech for his brother announcing this. The speech was horrible and he has 30 minutes to revise it. Guess who he calls to revise the bloody speech? Laida is the middle of a client presentation, but her mobile phone fills the conference room with Miggy screeching, "Bebe ko, bebe ko!" It's one thing to be in love and announce it to the world via mobile ring alerts. But I tell you, that ring tone was like a rusty nail being dragged across a blackboard. To fill the theater with that ringtone was torture. But of course, Laida is in love, she pushes aside the client presentation and ducks under the table to think of a tag line for this wonderful venture into the airline industry.

All relationships have their ups and downs, and our protagonists have more on the way. Miggy gets entrusted with the family's manufacturing gig. It's a plant in Laguna where they make jeans. It's a low profile, minimum output operation. Rowell Santiago as Miggy's older brother used to manage it. He comes to the plant ready to roll up his sleeves and iron some jeans, the workers respect him, and Manang, the assistant, simply adores him. When Miggy shows up for his first day at work there in a coat and tie, he is greeted with hesitation. Will this wimp of a boy do the job as well?

The boy wants to impress, so he ups the production quota. He targets big clients, and one of them is Mikee Cojuangco on the verge of turning matronix. She doubts the boy can deliver. But if he hands in Mikee's huge load of skinny jeans, Montenegro Manufacturing's Clean Living can have the contract. Miggy accepts amidst howls of protest from workers. He later turns the place into a 24-hour sweatshop. The workers take arms, call his dad and kuya, and Miggy is shamed once again. "Hindi mo na naman pinag-isipan ito," Rowell tells him.

The Montenegros are forced to renege on their word and tell the clients they are sorry. Mikee and Rowell Santiago exchange memories of their old courtship. Rowell would call Mikee complaining about his sore back, that he needs Salonpas, and poor Mikee gallops to Laguna bearing Oil of Wintergreen or something. The scene affords us the opportunity for Rowell to shed the Evil Kuya role--he went through everything Miggy is being subjected to, even more. He had to let go of the girl he loved so he could be the good son. But this is also a little nice throwback to the '90s: Rowell and Mikee make for a nice looking couple, a director and model tandem for Swatch advertisements, or a loveteam showcasing the travails of boy and girl love in the dinosaur age before the Internets. It would have been a really nice cameo for Mikee Cojuangco, who had to abandon her movie career to be wife and mother. It really would have helped if they gave her a really nice wardrobe--not the mumu-esque black monstrosity they made her wear. And somebody smudge that eyeshadow!

Meanwhile, in Laida land, Sarah reconnects with her best friend from high school. Makoy also reneged on a promise: he and Laida were supposed to study in the same college, but he took off without warning and left Laida hanging. He's back now, and it seems like he wants more than just play patintero outside the Montenegro building. It's the best friend drama of the century: Makoy suffers his love for Laida in silence because he is the best friend. With Miggy busy in Laguna, Laida finds herself declining invitations from colleagues to eat and go out, only to be told at the last minute (by that annoying Bebe-ko ringtone) that yet again, Miggy can't make it to their date. Laida is taken for granted. She wants to make the ultimate sacrifice: resign from Bachelor and just play Miggy's assistant in Laguna. Isn't this what being in a relationship is all about: to be at the lover's beck and call?

It's a conflict that makes me recall all those movies from the 90s onwards, like that film with Eric Quizon and Giselle Tongi as preppies (or was it advertising executive and flight attendant, whatever). Or it could be that movie where Bea was a call center agent and John Lloyd was an accountant. Or this could have been a movie directed by Joey Reyes. It has that feel. You could replace Sarah with Bea or G or another pretty face. Except that none of the prettier faces could work as well in this particular movie. But the Laida Magtalas in You Changed My Life didn't have that many funny scenes. And the most fun part in the movie was the flashback sequence from AVSL.

There's no doubt in my mind that this movie will be a hit. The theater was full. And when we went out, there was a really long line of people waiting to see the movie. And this was the first day. I didn't even know that it was the first day of showing. Which brings us to the question: What else does this movie have to offer? The John Lloyd's scowling boy and Sarah's naivete act will wear off soon. What will the third movie offer? Miggy and Laida get married; we follow Laida's misadventures as she is introduced into "society?" We can't just follow them step by step into marriage and old age. Or maybe it's best to stop here, while the kilig (like fizz in a bottle of cola) is still there, while there's a chance at a happy ending, while Miggy and Laida still work as a fantasy project.