Ghost-hunting, patchouli, and life update

1

I can’t remember the last time I spent Sunday morning on a sunny chair over some coffee and oranges, cracking the pastry slowly, as if careful not to break the inviolable hum of the late morning. Sometimes it would be with friends, invariably of the sort I know only superficially; but mostly I would be alone: it was the solitude, after all, that I was after. I haven’t had coffee outside in ages. I think I miss it, but unless it is cloudy, Manila at ten o’clock is rarely the perfect place for brunch, what with the warmth of the sun too quick to turn to a biting heat.

2

I saw Operation Finale a week ago. Oscar Isaac was in it, whom I only know from Inside Llewyn Davis, which is perhaps the saddest movie I remember seeing. I don’t know what made me think the film would be in Hebrew. Ben Kingsley, who plays Eichmann, is too good an actor to play someone so notoriously ordinary. Even Kingsley’s stares are terrifying; which makes me wonder if they meant it consciously: an odd choice, if that were the case, seeing that the point of Eichmann is that he is unremarkable. Leonard Cohen once wrote of him: “What did you expect?/ Talons?/ Oversize incisors?/ Green saliva?/ Madness?”

3

Yesterday I saw Unorthodox, a limited series on Netflix about a Hasidic Jewish woman who flees to Berlin to start a new life. The show came out last year, and I’ve been planning to watch it for some time, though of course as with most new shows on Netflix, that meant it stayed in my to-watch list for months. The protagonist (the Israeli actor Shira Haas) looks like a diminutive Kate McKinnon and had a voice that was eerily like hers, too. Her clipped lines spoken with a vaguely Central European accent, even sounded at times like they were from an SNL skit. Still I loved how nuanced and at times ambiguous the show portrayed Esty’s flight and her husband’s subsequent pursuit of her. In a pivotal scene, when asked by one of the friends she has made in Berlin about the reason for her “escape,” Esty responds calmly, “You make it sound like I was in prison.”

4

We had dinner Saturday night at a newly-opened place in Legazpi; we entered out of frustration (mine, mainly) from the foiled plans from earlier that evening. We have passed by it before one time, peeked at the clear glass, intrigued by what the soft melange of lights from its inside had made to look like a bamboo forest, or at least something vaguely oriental. We didn't come in, that time, deciding the place looked too expensive. That it was a Saturday and the eve of a holiday, too, meant we could not get a ride; and I was too pissed off to walk.

The food was mediocre: I was more interested in the assortment of breads they served us after we sat down, especially the ones that looked like posh tree barks and had sesame seeds that popped when you bit them. I had a margarita, which I immediately regretted since it didn’t go well with any of the amuse-bouches. It could easily have ruined the evening were it not for the obnoxious party next to us, which provided us ample entertainment. We saw them enter one by one: first the family of four that looked thoroughly unremarkable, as if conjured straight from the pages of Tatler; then a gaunt man with the hair down his shoulder in a white Elvis Presley ensemble trailed by a girl in a racing green jacket and too much gold glitter; then another girl of about twenty dressed as a witch with half her face painted purple, followed by a man in a straw hat, an impeccably white shirt and a clean, crisp denim that absent the occasion would still have been unmistakable as a costume. It would have been a pity not to make fun of them.