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On my way to UP for the premiere of Kinatay I received a text joke.

‘Carlo Caparas named National Artist for Visual Arts and Film.’

Hahahahaha, I replied.

Then I remembered where I am.

I’m in the Philippines where the bizarre is ordinary and the ordinary is bizarre.

So I checked. It is not a joke. It is the Ultimate WhattheFuck.

All this week I’ve been blue for no particular reason. I thought I was depressed. This news snapped me right out of whatever funk I was in. My non-problems are nothing compared to this Cosmic Absurdity.

So thank you, Malacanang. You have banished my ennui and replaced it with full-blown Insanity.

Art is Shit. Shit is Art. Mediocrity is Excellence. To quote the bomba star Stella Strada’s suicide note, It’s a crazy planets!

*****

Our friend Noel Orosa is returning to Manila Friday after a year in KL. Hey Noel, Carlo Caparas is a National Artist now. Welcome home, bitch.

Greeting card by Charles Platt, 1994 (found on Boing Boing)

Here’s a tract by a theologian who argues that Santa IS Satan. And it’s not just dyslexia!

Michelangelo’s tomb, Firenze, originally uploaded by Koosama.

“Between 1974 and 1985, seven couples—fourteen people in all—were murdered while making love in parked cars in the hills of Florence. The case was never solved, and it has become one of the longest and most expensive criminal investigations in Italian history. More than 100,000 men have been investigated and more than a dozen arrested, and scores of lives have been ruined by rumor and false accusations. There have been suicides, exhumations, poisonings, body parts sent by post, séances in graveyards, lawsuits, and prosecutorial vendettas. The investigation has been like a malignancy, spreading backward in time and outward in space, metastasizing to different cities and swelling into new investigations, with new judges, police, and prosecutors, more suspects, more arrests, and many more lives ruined. It was an extraordinary story, and I would—to my sorrow—come to share Spezi’s obsession with it.”

A writer’s obsession with a serial killer leads to his being charged with obstruction of justice, planting evidence, and complicity in the killings. The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston in The Atlantic.

You and your pets are invited to the grand launch of Pupil’s second album Wildlife tomorrow, November 9, from 8pm onwards at Eastwood City Central Plaza. You’re encouraged to wear red, black, and white; pet outfits optional. The album is now in stores.

Watch James Gray’s terrific new film We Own The Night (motto of the New York Police Department) starring Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg, and Robert Duvall, and discuss: Why do most of today’s good movies look like they were made thirty years ago? Did American cinema peak in the 1970s?

In totally unrelated news, a priest has been arrested for stalking and harassing Conan O’Brien, the talk show host and father of my eldest cat, Koosi O’Brien. Apparently the priest had been following Conan’s career since they were at Harvard. In his letters he made reference to the Virginia Tech shooter and to the gangster Frank Costello, who was shot in the Manhattan building where Conan lives. The priest is said to have been turned on to religion by Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Which tells us that maybe something’s not quite right there. But I would understand people who get the calling after seeing La Strada.

A gruesome little item from Popbitch: “We heard an amazing story from an aging playboy this week. Some years ago, this upper-crust chap was chatting up a buff black man in a bar and the conversation turned to their occupations. The American said he was an undertaker. And that it was to his funeral home that Marilyn Monroe was brought on her death. He went on to confess that all the local undertakers then took turns to have sex with her corpse. (FYI: The undertaker claimed the practice was rife in funeral parlours.)”

Poor Marilyn. Screwed over in life, screwed over in death. My friend pointed out that it took a while before the body was discovered, so try not to imagine the state it was in. One hears all sorts of stories about mortuaries, and I don’t mean the Six Feet Under (I never watched it) variety. They’re mostly untrue and defame an honorable profession, but here in the P.I. we guard our dead through every stage of the process.

I just got a text message from film director Elwood Perez, who wishes it known that news of his death have been greatly exaggerated. In a newspaper today, he is referred to as “the late Elwood Perez.” I think the author may have confused him with his close friend and colleague Joey Gosiengfiao, who died last year. Perez and Gosiengfiao are the campmeisters of 1970s Filipino cinema.

What’s interesting is that Elwood has been having visitations from dead people for over a year. In April last year, Zed and I ran into him at the mall, and he told us that various dead persons, including Rolando Tinio and some entertainment reporters, had been appearing in his dreams. And then last Saturday I got this text message from Elwood (the longest SMS I’ve ever received):

“Include this in your prayers: That spirits of the dead stay away from me. If a few nights ago, Joey Gosiengfiao told me in my dreams that he still ought to direct, how can you explain that I woke up this morning realizing that the person who paid me a visit last night was food critic Doreen Fernandez, who knew me but was never close to me. There must have been a connection: Last night I was profuse with praise for the orphaned host—a Perez, but Tito’s first cousin, not mine—for the sumptuous dinner that was served rather late, after a late evening mass for her late father and brother who died years ago before her mother, two sisters and only niece perished in a fire that gutted their house. Needless to say I overstuffed myself with big helpings of roast, stuffed turkey, wild rice risotto, vegan spaghetti, melt-in-your-mouth lengua in cream sauce, praline and chocolate cake and Godiva chocolate cookies and red wine. I went to bed bundat na bundat.”

And now he’s referred to in the papers as “The Late”. Spooky.

My diagnosis: If you’re a filmmaker and you stop making movies, your life turns into a horror movie. Aiiiieeeee.