JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Champorado with tuyo is comfort food. Guinataan is comfort food. It’s what you have when you’re glum or stressed-out or when Roger Federer is leading Novak Djokovic two sets to love then up a break in the fifth set at the US Open semis, and the Djoker somehow slips through. Preferably in a bowl that you can hug as you rock back and forth in fetal position, humming to yourself. Coke and Chippy is Roby’s comfort food. Teddy Boy’s comfort food is…food (Though he is way fitter these days so he must not need it).
 

Laing is not comfort food to me; laing is more like a blood transfusion. I will take a plate of shredded gabi leaves, coconut milk, pork and searing hot chilis over any ten-thousand-dollar ten-course molecular gastronomy showcase served in test tubes any time. (I don’t see why my food has to come out of an autoclave.)

Laing is my madeleine out of Proust. I cannot see a tray of laing behind the glass in a turo-turo without becoming eight again. It is my time machine, my childhood, my mom. 

Photos from My City, My SM, My Cuisine at SM City Naga, Camarines Sur. Of course the main event was the Laing competition. All photos by Wayne Lim. Thanks, Mang Wayne!

Read Laing is my I.V. drip, my column this week at interaksyon.com. Should be up later today.

Dear Auntie Janey,

Yours sincerely,
Worried Sister

Johnny Depp is not an eldest child.
(more…)

The invitation said, “Wear dots.” The Swatch Interactive Billboard at Greenbelt 5 was done up in dots.

The food followed the dot theme.

(more…)

The one thing we were never taught in elementary school was how to be a skeptic. We were trained to believe, obey and never question authority. In effect school was an extension of church (they are run by religious orders after all); those who dared suggest that the teacher was missing something were condemned as walang modo (uncouth), suwail (willful) and worst of all, pilosopo. Yes, to be “philosophical” — to ask how the teachers arrived at their knowledge and why we should accept it as true — was bad, the equivalent of heresy.

It was not until I moved to a public high school — Philippine Science — that I realized it is not only right to question long-held “truths,” it is the responsibility of every intelligent person. What is your evidence? How do you know? If we didn’t ask questions we would still be deluding ourselves that the sun and planets revolve around the earth.

Now that no one is going to make us stand in a corner or write “I will believe what my teacher says” on the blackboard 500 times, let us review some “truths” we were trained to accept for the simple reason that teachers, priests, parents and other authority figures said so.

Read 25 “truths” we put through the wringer in Emotional Weather Report in the Philippine Star 25th anniversary issue.

Since posting the video for “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” on Sunday night I’ve been listening to the early Elton John, particularly the songs he co-wrote with Bernie Taupin. I realize that I’ve never really paid attention to Elton John and now I’m making up for it. When I was a kid he was the silly man with the glasses singing “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” with Kiki Dee. We could never hear that name without being convulsed with laughter. Kids.

“Daniel”, “Your Song” and “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” were already classic rock radio staples and “Skyline Pigeon” was what one-legged one-eyed guitarists with screeching amps sang on overpasses and underpasses in Manila. (Along with “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin, which is no longer on the overpass-underpass playlist but which you can still hear live in London tube stations.) When I got my first Walkman and started buying my own music the Elton and Bernie partnership had split up and Elton was doing stuff like “Nikita” and “I’m Still Standing”. Which I did not care for. Then came “That’s What Friends Are For” (Uck) and what Ricky calls “the anthemic” stuff like the music for the Lion King. Pass.

Sir Elton’s music often turns up in movies—I remember a conversation about “Rocket Man” in Michael Bay’s The Rock. (All of Michael Bay’s movies are stupid but some I love and some I loathe.) “Your Song” was sung several times in Moulin Rouge (German Moreno staged better musical medleys than Baz Luhrmann) and “Tiny Dancer” has a key role in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous. What else are you going to sing together on a bus? Crowe’s movie is also where I heard “Mona Lisas” for the first time.

In Scorpio Nights the drunken neighbors burst into the chorus of “Skyline Pigeon”, unaware of the events in the guard’s room.

Kermit reminded me of Two Rooms, the documentary on how John and Taupin worked together (never in the same room), which reminded me of that tribute album in which Sting did “Come Down In Time”. I looked up the original. Here it is.

Dammit.

We had a discussion on what the line “Come down in time” means. I think it means “Don’t be late” or “Show up at exactly the right moment.” Love, be it for a human being or a piece of music, is often a matter of timing.

“You listen in slack-jawed wonder — realizing that “Come Down in Time,” alone, could have established the legend of any lesser artist.” Read an appreciation by Nick Deriso.

P.S. “That’s What Friends Are For” is to Elton John as “I Just Called To Say I Love You” is to Stevie Wonder. Yiiiiii. Wait, Stevie co-wrote “That’s What…” As did Burt Bacharach. Aiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeee.

Arthur Rackham illustration of The Goose Girl.

Good people suffer. Bad people reign. Terrible things happen. There is ugliness in the world. Life is scary and it ends in death. The fairytales that really stay with you understand these things, and you believe them no matter how prettily Disney lies. When people say “That’s a fairytale” to refer to a story with an improbably happy ending, they must mean the Disney versions or Hollywood flicks. The best fairy tales are full of cruelty and terror, so when you hear in the end that “They lived happily ever after” you know they have paid dearly for their happiness (and you ignore that foreboding. . .).

Cornelia Funke, the author of Inkheart and Reckless, discusses her top 10 fairytales in the Guardian. The article contains links to the stories themselves. I still remember how disturbing The Goose Girl and The Six Swans were the first time I read them; what is it about girls, curses and birds?