Jessica Zafra's Blog, page 39

Why Aren’t You Laughing? David Sedaris reckons with his mother’s alcoholism.

Any week that we find two new David Sedaris essays is a good week. The funniest memoirs deal with old pain. The author (rear) with his sister Lisa and their mother, Sharon Sedaris. Sober, she was cheerful and charismatic, the kind of person who could—and would—talk to anyone. Unlike our father, who makes jokes no […]

Reasons David Sedaris has been depressed lately (We know exactly how he feels)

Chus and I went to David Sedaris’s reading at Powerbooks Greenbelt some years ago. He was hilarious and shockingly nice. He got to the venue early and went around asking people if they wanted their books signed. We chatted about Chickenjoy. He did an impression of his sister Amy going shopping (“Buy it!”).* David, I […]

The reviews promised epic awfulness, but The Mummy is just dull.

Sofia Boutella in Kingsman could slice and dice The Mummy. I love bad movies, not for the movies themselves but for the opportunity to laugh at them. Between a movie that’s just dull and mediocre, and a movie that is full-on garbage, I choose garbage. It is hard to describe blandness without boring yourself, but […]

The Lost City of Z: Meanwhile, another Amazon casts a spell

Too lazy to type my notes. Also, I would’ve made a good expedition scribe if it weren’t for the sweating, carrying of heavy packs, lack of sleep, flesh-eating insects, general privation, and dodging of spears. Time to read David Grann’s book. Correction: Jack Fawcett was 21 when he went to the Amazon with his father.

Your brain is a time machine.

“Time is a road without any bifurcations, intersections, exits, or turnarounds.” With that, neuroscientist Dean Buonomano sets up the meat of his new book, Your Brain is a Time Machine – and an intriguing difference between the way we animals navigate time as opposed to space. Not that contrasting time and space makes the task […]

Marvel, DC, Image comics on sale, 70 percent off. Run!

At National Bookstore in Shangri-La Plaza, Mandaluyong. Many, many titles.

The passion of Marty: Scorsese pens a stirring defense of cinema as art

Do we still have to identify the movie this came from? I think Martin Scorsese may be even better as a teacher than as a filmmaker. In reviewing Silence, a critic disparaged the cinema. Scorsese accepts criticism of his work, but you do not say that about the movies. Go Marty, the mayor of our […]

We really needed to see a woman beat the crap out of murderous maniacs. Thank you, Wonder Woman.

Achtung: Spoilers. For two hours we were charmed, fired up, and inspirited by Wonder Woman, directed by Patty Jenkins and embodied by Gal Gadot. After a week of terrible news we were so cheered by the tale of an Amazon meeting the outside world for the first time, that towards the end when the movie […]

Getting to know Hong Kong all over again and meeting the Empress of Tea

View from the Hotel Stage, 1 Chi Wo, Jordan I will always have a special fondness for Hong Kong because it’s the first foreign city I ever visited on my own. (There’s an extremely detailed account of that trip in the first Twisted book.) Since then I’ve been to Hong Kong a few times, but […]

Tell us why you want to visit Prague and we’ll give you a copy of this book.

Layag is available at National Bookstores, Php250. Layag: European Classics in Filipino contains fourteen short stories by writers from eleven European countries. Included are works by the Italian Luigi Pirandello, Polish Henryk Sienkiewicz, Austrian Stefan Zweig, French Guy de Maupassant, Czech Karel Capek, and German Erich Kästner. This anthology is published by Anvil in cooperation […]