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There is no acknowledgments section in my new book or it would be longer than the novel (126 pages only). This novel took way too long to come into being, and it would not exist without my friends. Who, being my friends, would prefer not to be mentioned. (If someone announces it loudly, check with me.) Thank you to the friends who hang out with me for no reason, who enjoy our long, pointless meals where we laugh hysterically at things we won’t remember (Well I do, because material), who buy my books and force them on their friends, who know the difference between my written and actual selves, who took an interest in cats just to humor me and have now been colonized. I wrote The Age of Umbrage in 2016, in 3 months (after decades of false starts), so I don’t remember exactly what’s in it, but if you find your name in it or recognize a character as being based on you, remind me!

Published by Ateneo University Press. Cover art by Bianca Alexandra Ortigas.
SRP P295. Buy your copies online at Mt Cloud Bookshop, Shopee, or Lazada. Coming soon to Fully Booked.

Online book launch on 17 October 2020, 7pm at Mt Cloud! Will post invitation.

In Milan, shady art critic James Figueras and Berenice, his mysterious American lover whom he just met yesterday, is invited to the lakeside villa of rich-as-Croesus art collector/gallerist Cassidy and roped into a scheme to steal a painting from reclusive artist Debney, who may have set his own work on fire many years ago. Giuseppe Capotondi’s film of The Burnt Orange Heresy, based on the novel by Charles Willeford (which I now want to read), is supposed to be a thriller, but it’s too languid and stately to raise your pulse.

The movie starts to fizzle out right when the crime is committed, but it raises fascinating questions about Art. Like, wtf is it? What do you really see when you look at art—the art itself, or the artist? How do we value a work when a critic can spin a tale turning paint splotches into a tragic masterpiece? Who really owns a work of art? What does the artist owe the world?

With the elegantly elongated Elizabeth Debicki (who will play Princess Diana in the next season of The Crown), Claes Bang (best name in showbiz, as a rancid version of his character in The Square), Donald Sutherland, and Mick Jagger as the devilish collector (He should always be cast as the devil). The cast is perfect, the Italian locations are gorgeous, the subject is intriguing, the movie is tepid but stress-free viewing. Debicki is always worth watching.

P250/issue + shipping. The first issue is out now. Second issue in November, third issue in January, and fourth issue in March. Subscriptions are available. Email saffron.safin@gmail.com or DM @jessicazafrascats.

We donate part of the proceeds to the UP Ikot and Toki drivers, whose livelihood has been affected by the pandemic.

Nearly everything I know about Black American History, I learned from Spike Lee movies. They are compelling and vivid, funny and furious, and they are an education. He will interrupt the flow of his own movie to have a character address the audience directly and deliver a lecture about some point of African-American life that we need to know. Reality is more important to him than the movie. In the end the movies merge with the real world: the undercover cop in BlacKkKlansman steps into a present where a sitting president empowers racism and murder. Da 5 Bloods is even more emotionally charged than other Spike Lee movies because Chadwick Boseman is in it, and the moment he appears onscreen his character is already a myth.

Spike Lee is an angry man, but he is fair. We understand Danny Aiello’s pizzeria owner in Do The Right Thing, we understand Edward Norton’s drug dealer in The 25th Hour, and here we almost understand Delroy Lindo’s Trump-voting, MAGA cap-wearing, PTSD-suffering Vietnam veteran. In a towering performance, Lindo pulls us into the rage and resentment of a man who feels that he has been cheated by life and will lash out even if he hurts himself. (Fans of The Wire will enjoy the reunion of Clarke Peters and Isiah Whitlock, Jr, who got one of his trademark Sheee-its in there.)

Da 5 Bloods is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as a Vietnam war picture. Five men go into the jungle to retrieve the body of their fallen leader and a stash of gold bars they view as reparations—they were conscripted into someone else’s war to kill and die for rights they themselves did not have. I do not know if it was the filmmaker’s intention or budgetary constraints that led to the flashbacks in which Chadwick Boseman (the joy and pain of seeing him, especially now that we know what he was going through during filming) is young and heroic while his squad is old and grizzled (no digital de-aging), but it drives home the movie’s point: Wars never end. Those men are still fighting to this day.