lia bulaong's blog

lia: michael jackson’s mugshot is soooooo bad
matt: like a surprised housewife
matt: “you rang?”
lia: i want a large file so i can make a t-shirt
matt: I love the eyebrows in their perma-surprise position
lia: scary
lia: also the cheekbones that slide straight into the jaw, wtf
lia: who has bones like that?
matt: yeah. did he get his eyes enlarged?
lia: yah
lia: dude, there’s nothing left of his old face!
lia: it’s all been done over and over and over again
(Question now is what’s been done more often, Michael Jackson’s face or Paris Hilton?)
See also: Separated At Middle Age, Michael at the doomed Gest-Minelli nuptuals with the newlyweds and Liz Taylor.

Neal Stephenson did a Q&A and book signing for his new novel Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1) in Union Square last night, so naturally I walked up from Washington Square after my drawing class and sat in an awful folding chair along with my fellow nerds to hear him talk and get my book signed. He said he wore a suit because New York was dressy but then opened his jacket to show his concession to his geek roots: five or six pens neatly lined up in his shirt pocket. I don’t know, I think I would’ve been more impressed if he’d a protractor in there, or at least a pocket protector.
Anyway, one of the things I love most about Stephenson’ last book Cryptonomicon is how authentic the parts of it set in the Philippines feel to me, in every case more so than in most any novel I’ve ever read written by someone who actually grew up in the country, so I asked him how he does his location research; he said he did it by reading up, especially about places he knew nothing about, and then visiting them with his eyes wide open, taking notes on everything he saw. He also said he could only stay somewhere to do that for about a week, because after a certain amount of time he’d get too comfortable and would stop noticing things—diminishing returns, if you will.
The Confusion, the second book in Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, goes on sale in April 2004. Harper Collins has an interview (transcript and audio available) with him about Quicksilver, if you’d like to find out more about it. If you’ve never read any of his work, might I suggest you start out with the book he’s most famous for and that most people love most? Amazon has Snow Crash for a measly $11.16, a bargain any which way you look at it.
Thanks again to Skot, who sent me The Diamond Age off my wishlist a very long time ago, when I was too broke to buy books and feeling very sorry for myself.

Last night I realized one of my life’s goals: I saw Mssrs Mills, Buck and Stipe play at Jones Beach. So good, so so good, even if it was so cold out that Michael Stipe jokingly asked the crowd near the water if they wouldn’t mind standing up to block the wind from blowing over and freezing him.
Thanks to David for coming with! He took this photo of me on the LIRR train home. And apologies to Jessica Zafra, whom I’ve never met but have bitterly hated from afar since I was sixteen because she got to fly from Manila to Hong Kong to watch R.E.M. play there and I never thought I would get the chance to ever see them.

Last Saturday I invited David, Alaina, Anil, Jason and Silas along to what turned out to be the most fun thing I’ve been to since I moved to New York a year ago: “The Golden Girls: LIVE!”
Four men play the girls in a reenactment of two (soon to be three) of the best episodes from the show’s seven seasons. You can see them at Rose’s Turn in the West Village (on Grove Street, a minute away from the Christopher Street 1/9 subway stop) twice a night on Fridays and Saturdays until December (when they move to another venue and start performing eight times a week), but make sure to call a few days in advance to make reservations as they’re always sold out. Peter Mac, John Schaefer and Darren Polito are excellent as Sophia, Dorothy and Blanche (Schaefer with make-up in profile looks uncannily like Bea Arthur—but then again, she’s always looked like a man in drag!) while Desmond Dutcher’s Rose still needs a little work, but “The Golden Girls: LIVE!” is hysterical and I guarantee you’ll enjoy it.
If you’ve already been to the show (or are just an insane fan) you can download mp3s of the musical moments they play in between scenes courtesy of some kind souls who put together “Meet the Golden Girls!” My personal favorite is “Miami Beach”, which has been playing in my head—complete with Blanche’s escalating “Girls!”—for the better part of the past week.
Those of you on the West Coast, rejoice, the show will be visiting L.A. and San Francisco for two month runs next year so you can see it then.

Last week I wrote about Louise Glück’s appointment as the new poet laureate, and today in the New Yorker I found this great profile of Stanley Kunitz, her teacher and mentor. I loved this anecdote in the piece from another one of his students, Lucie Brock-Broido (who was in turn The Boy‘s teacher a few years ago):

Lucie Brock-Broido, another of his students and now the director of poetry at Columbia’s School of the Arts, says that “much of my adult life had to do with magical direction from Stanley from afar.” Then, ten years ago, when she applied for the position at Columbia, she was asked to compare herself to her mentor. “I was in front of a very formidable committee—the dean, and the chairs of all the divisions of the School of the Arts, the real heavy hitters. The very last question of the interview was “What could you possibly offer here at Columbia that, say, Stanley Kunitz could not?” I took a moment and I said, “More hair.””

(Granted, Kunitz has more hair than most men in their 90s, but she’s got a horse’s mane!)
Slate’s published three Brock-Broido poems so far this year, “Leaflet on Wooing”, “Almost A Conjurer” and “Dire Wolf”—if you have Windows Media Player installed, you can hear her read the poems as well.