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In The Honourable Schoolboy, the spy Westerby goes to the races in Hong Kong to observe his quarry, Drake Ko. He spots one of Ko’s associates in the owners’ box.

“Shading his eyes and wishing he had brought binoculars, he made out one fat, hard-looking man in a suit and dark glasses, accompanied by a young and very pretty girl. He looked half Chinese, and half Latin, and Jerry put him down as Filipino. The girl was the best that money could buy. . .

“”That’s Arpego,” said Grant, in Jerry’s ear and indicating the fat Filipino. “He owns Manila and most of the out-islands.”

“Arpego’s paunch sat forward over his belt like a rock stuffed inside his shirt.”

Incidences of the word “Filipino” in recent American literature:

In Patricia Marx’s novel Him Her Him Again The End of Him, the romantic interest’s name is Eugene Obello and the unnamed heroine’s friend says “obello” is a Filipino word for machete. I don’t know which Filipino dialect or language is referred to. Marx’s novel is hilarious until the halfway point, when it begins to resemble a Daily Show segment that’s gone on too long. Yes, smart women do stupid things for love, we got it in the first ten pages. Marx was a former writer on the Harvard Lampoon and Saturday Night Live–if she’d written for The Simpsons she’d have the same career track as Conan O’Brien.

In Tobias Wolff’s story Benefit Of The Doubt, the protagonist takes the bus in Rome and notes that most of the passengers are Filipino. Benefit Of The Doubt is one of the new stories in Our Story Begins, my favorite story collection of the year even if half its contents appeared in his earlier books.

In The Mayor’s Tongue by Nathaniel Rich, the Dominican character Alvaro has an affair with a Filipino nurse named Betty. Just started reading the book. Someone else is obsessed with Jan Morris’s book about Trieste!

Takashi Miike, Far East Filmfest – Udine, 2006, originally uploaded by 160507.

The LUA tells me that Takashi Miike’s The Guys From Paradise is set in Manila. According to midnighteye.com: “Allegedly based on a number of true cases, The Guys From Paradise is a prison story set in the Phillipines against a background of corruption, drug trafficking and paedophilia. . .Though somewhat overlong, The Guys From Paradise paints a lurid portrait of The Phillipines as a country awash with all manner of vice, symbolising a side of Asia which the civilised Japanese have lost touch with. Even though they hold a position of privilege, their suits and ties won’t protect them from being swallowed up by this more savage society. . .” (Note spelling of Philippines. Could’ve been worse, they could’ve spelled it ‘Philistines’.)

In short, the yakuza in the movie find the Philippines scary and weird. Haven’t seen the movie, I don’t know if it was shot here.

To recap our list of foreign productions in which the Philippines plays the Philippines and not Vietnam (Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Born on the 4th of July, etc), Thailand (Brokedown Palace), or Indonesia (The Year of Living Dangerously):

1. Days Of Being Wild by Wong Kar-Wai, with scenes in Tutuban and Villa Escudero
2. Supercock, a B-movie about cockfighting, not a porno
3. The Guys From Paradise, maybe

Now I’m going to watch Takashi Miike’s The Happiness of the Katakuris with its enticing tagline: “The hills are alive with the sound of screaming!” Prefer bloodcurdling shrieks to Climb Every Mountain any day.

P.S. This one’s a real scream: Richard Quest Thought Process Flowchart on 23/6.

From the New York Times, March 20, 2008: “Sebastian Horsley, a British author who has written an eyebrow-raising memoir detailing a life of rampant drug use and voluminous encounters with prostitutes, was turned back at Newark Liberty International Airport on Tuesday as he tried to enter the United States for a book party and New York news media tour. Mr. Horsley, whose memoir, “Dandy in the Underworld,” was published last week…said he was detained by United States customs authorities for eight hours and questioned about his former drug addiction, use of prostitutes and activity as a male escort. “I’m absolutely shattered and upset and gutted about not being able to come to America,” Mr. Horsley said in a telephone interview from London…

“In “Dandy of the Underworld” Mr. Horsley, who is notorious in Britain, writes of being raised by alcoholic, sexually promiscuous parents and bouncing through several schools. He details a debauched life of cocaine, heroin, opium and amphetamine use, writing that he spent more than £100,000 (nearly $200,000) on crack cocaine and £100,000 to consort with more than 1,000 prostitutes. He also chronicles his trip to the Philippines to be hung from a cross, an event that was recorded by a photographer and videographer and formed part of an art exhibition that was extensively covered by the news media in his home country…”

Hmm, drug-taking dandies and Crucifixion. Very much on the Pinoy public’s mind right now. The article quotes a US Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman as saying that under a waiver program that allows British citizens to enter the United States without a visa, “travelers who have been convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude (which includes controlled-substance violations) or admit to previously having a drug addiction are not admissible.” Two words: Keith Richards. (Always confused about Keith’s surname. Apparently it was the singular form till 78, plural after that. So now I know.)

Three Pinoys are among the, um, winners of the 2007 Darwin Awards! Not only are they not around to claim the glory, but their identities remain unknown. The Darwin Awards are given to individuals who improve the gene pool by removing themselves from it.

“(21 June 2007, Philippines) Three entrepreneurs planned to profit from stolen scrap metal. They entered a former US military complex and approached the prize: an abandoned water tank. Bedazzled by the potential upside, the three threw logic to the wind, and began to cut the metal legs out from under the tank. Guess where it fell? Straight onto the thieves. Their flattened bodies have not yet been identified.”

Meanwhile, a radio prankster known as the “Filipino Monkey” (no one knows his real nationality, he could be more than one person) is being blamed for triggering the latest diplomatic row between the US and Iran. The “Filipino Monkey” has been pestering ships in the Persian Gulf for years. This time he almost caused American warships to fire on Iranian patrol boats.

In J.M. Coetzee’s new novel Diary of A Bad Year, the old protagonist is in lust with a Filipina named Anya. From the New York Times book review:

“At 72, Señor C has Parkinson’s disease; his eyesight is failing him; his typing isn’t what it used to be. But his lust is intact, at least as expressed by “a metaphysical ache.” In the laundry room of his apartment building, he encounters a young woman with “a derrière so near to perfect as to be angelic,” and soon he has hired the owner of this apparition, a Filipina whose name is Anya and who lives upstairs, to type the manuscript of his opinions, which he dictates to her. These make up the first of the novel’s narratives and appear at the top of each page. Beneath them are Señor C’s accounts of his transactions with Anya, who (like Marijana, the Croatian nurse who cares for Paul Rayment in “Slow Man”) provides at least as much psychic as physical assistance. In contrast to her employer, Anya is body first and intellect second. Her less lofty point of view inhabits, fittingly, the nether portion of the page. . .”