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Rhythm and Blues pioneer Sugar Pie de Santo was born in Brooklyn in 1935 to a Filipino father and an African-American mother and christened Umpeleya Marsema Balinton. (Umpeleya from ‘ampalaya’?) As a kid ‘Peliya’ hung out with a neighbor named Jamesetta Hawkins, who became the R&B legend Etta James. Peliya took to entering singing contests in San Franciso, and she won so often that she was asked to stop joining. The full story is here.

Thanks to Ige for the alert.

From Vulture in New York magazine:

Steve Carell has shown off his musical pipes on film many times, whether crooning “Age of Aquarius” in The 40 Year Old Virgin, or harmonizing with Dane “voice of an angel” Cook in Dan in Real Life. But does he have what it takes to play an international pop idol? Warner Bros. thinks so: Vulture has learned that the studio is negotiating to buy the rights to remake the unreleased documentary Of All the Things — which traced Dennis Lambert’s transformation from musical hit-maker to suburban Florida real-estate agent to one of the most beloved pop stars in the Philippines — as a comedic starring vehicle for Carell.

In 1972, in the middle of all that offstage success, Lambert made his first and only attempt at being a recording artist: He cut a little-heard album called Bags and Things. It sank like a stone, and was quickly forgotten almost everywhere — but not in the Philippines, where it took off; even today the record’s single, “Of All the Things,” remains a staple at Filipino weddings. . . Read the article in New York.

I have three songs by Dennis Lambert in my iPod. I got them off Juan’s iTunes library.

From Michael P: I was watching Dr. Who today and there was a reference to the Philippines. The year is 2059 and the Doctor shows up at the first Mars colony Bowie Base One. Nobody knows who the Doctor is, and one of the crew speculates he may be from the Philippines since it is rumored the Philippines was building a Mars rocket.

The Waters of Mars on Dr. Who

Volcanic bumpy boulder on Mars from the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day archive.

Remember that movie Lukas Moodysson shot in the Philippines, starring Gael Garcia Bernal? Mammoth. It just opened in New York. Manohla Dargis’s review in the NYT.

“There is a real sense in which we are what we are called, at least from the Old Testament onwards, when God renamed Jacob Israel, which means that he struggled with God. Tolstoy, with his usual practicality, wrote an early draft of War and Peace in which Count Rostov was simply named Count Prostoy: prostoy means ‘simple, honest’ in Russian. So we have Becky Sharpe (in Vanity Fair) and Miss Temple (in Jane Eyre) and Felicite (in A Simple Heart) and scores of characters in Dickens like Crook and Pecksniff. . .Fiction is not being very fictional, really, when it resorts to such tricks. After all, in life people do seem uncannily to have become the names they have, or to be the opposite of those names (but still in some strange relation to the import of their names): Wordsworth is surely worth his words, and Kierkegaard means churchyard in Danish, and the late Cardinal Sin was Archbishop of Manila. . .”

From How Fiction Works by James Wood, a very practical guide to the novel. 

My name means “God is watching the sugar harvest” or “Behold muck” or “Clairvoyant drip-jar”. (Jessica is Shakespeare’s variation on the Hebrew Iscah, Abraham’s niece; zafra is a Cuban agricultural term).

In my continuing search for post-Soviet novels written by Russians (Victor Pelevin!), I chanced upon Ghostwritten by David Mitchell. Its blurb mentions that part of the book happens in St Petersburg. So I started on Ghostwritten, which is every bit as exhilarating as the later Cloud Atlas. The novel consists of nine parts featuring nine characters who are oblivious of each other. The narrator of the Tokyo section is 19-year-old Satoru, a half-Filipino, half-Japanese clerk at a jazz record store.

“I wondered about my real mother. Not hankeringly. It’s pointless to hanker. Mama-san said she’d been deported back to the Philippines afterwards, and would never be allowed back into Japan. I can’t help but wonder, just sometimes, who she is now, what she’s doing, and whether she ever thinks about me.”

He turns up again in the later sections. I peeked. I like Mitchell’s novels because something actually happens in them (I’m old school, I like plot), and they’re big. Too many contemporary novels suffer from a lack of ambition. Look, if you’re going to aim so low, why bother to write it?