Ein Brief

© Joselito Briones

Erlangen, den 30.11.2006

Lieber James,

vielen Dank für deinen netten Brief. Du hast richtig gehört, ich wohne jetzt in Deutschland. Die Stadt, wo meine Wohnung ist, heißt Erlangen. Diese Stadt is nördlich der Gegend, wo die Leute Lederhosen zu tragen lieben. Ja, ich lebe in Bayern.

Erlangen ist eine schöne Stadt, aber zu klein. Es gibt kein kino für Filme auf Englisch. Es gibt auch kein Geschäft mit dem A3 Fotopapier.

Die Leute hier sind nett, aber manchmal gibt es auch hässliche, alte Damen in den Geschäften. Ich glaube, sie sind wirklich unzufrieden mit ihren Männern. Sie sind ganz, ganz unfreundlich.

Meine wohnung liegt in einem roten Haus, das Gebäude ist sehr modern. Du musst mich besuchen.


Herzliche Grüße,

dein Joselito

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Yep, another homework sent to you. My Lehrerin, Aline, has corrected the mistakes I made in the text.

The photo is of a house, right in front of the building where I live. It will soon be demolished, to be replaced by a new multi-family building, similar to ours.


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Filipino Food

© Joselito Briones

This is something I see everytime I go to my German class - a Siemens building, an annex to the tallest one in the neighborhood, that is used as company canteen. I always like to peep in to see what sort of things they cook there, there's always a few white-hatted employees visible from the street, busy preparing enormous amounts of food. I like the building's horizontality and openness, it reminds me of the pictures of modern buildings in architectural books that I used to browse through in uni.


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I was browsing through magazines when I saw this mention of a new cookbook, from one of my favorite restaurants in New York, "Cendrillon". The book is called "Memories of Philippine Kitchens" (Stewart, Tabori & Chang). Can't wait to see the more than 100 recipes inside.


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My Dear Mr. Bond,

Promotional photo of "Casino Royale" from Sony Pictures

Damn good movie, this one. When's the last time you did "woaaahhhh!"'s and "holy crap!!!" in the movies? As with the last few Bond movies, the opening credits alone was worth the ticket money already. So cool!

Daniel Craig puts the character back to its original erhmm... character. One played to perfection by Sean Connery and softened to parody-status by Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan (OK, fine, Brosnan's still the best Bond, first few times he did it, if one takes into account the "fit" of the characterization with the times). Craig didn't really have any choice, with Hong Kong movies having redefined the adrenalin-level standard of action movies, he might as well have refused to make the movie if he was just gonna do another Brosnan film.

The chase alone, on feet, in the beginning, was enough to carry the whole film, action-wise. That guy Bond was chasing was just awesome! I actually wanted him to be able to get away from Bond.

I started getting bored somewhere in the middle, with the long poker game sequences, and wondered why they even bothered with it, before I remembered that the movie's title is "Casino Royale". Another downer was how everything was explained to the viewers... like "M" asking Bond if he knew why he's still alive, explaining how the girl (Eva Green) made sacrifices to make that possible. Like, hello? A five year old would've figured that out by himself (if he's allowed to watch the movie, I mean). And Bond professing his love to the girl??? Come on! I'd rather he act it than say it. Heath never said anything about his feeelings for Jake, did he?

The jokes are better too, more clever. Or maybe it's just Craig's delivery. His face is always so serious that when he delivers a punchline it's usually unexpected, unlike Brosnan from whom everybody expects jokes all the time. The best proof that Craig can really act are the scenes where he was being tortured, the worst when he was all mushy with Green. You'll never see anyone more uncomfortable with a smile.

I enjoyed the movie so much that only when I got back home did I realize upon thinking about the story, that it didn't have a good one.


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P.S. I've noticed that recently more and more people wanders into this correspondence of ours, looking for celebrity pics. I wish they'd come to look at the photos I've taken, but alas, it isn't so. Having said that, in case some random people do wander in here looking for Daniel Craig's naked photos, I thought I'll do the nice thing and direct them to right place. They can be found in this link. Bye, and thanks for dropping by.

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Fusion

© Joselito Briones

My first attempt at fusion. Or maybe I've always been doing it, just don't realize it. For tonight's dinner, I curried (yellow) mashed banana and with lemon juice, kaffir lime leaves, lemon grass, coconut milk, and grapefruit slices. I thought the curry would overpower the banana flavor, but the banana persisted. I ended up with a thicker than usual curry sauce, poured all over pan-grilled fish fillet.

The photos above are quite old... on the left is Tour Eiffel, of course, taken September 1994, and on the right is a temple in Bangkok, Thailand, taken September 1996. I used to do my travels mostly in September.




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Reformat

© Joselito Briones

So... blogger.com, the medium with which I'm sending you these letters, decided to upgrade their system. What it means for me is that all my customized modifications are screwed up. I had to tweak my module back to what it was, although it's not all done yet. I also took the chance, since I was gonna do a lot of modifications anyway, escpecially in adding keywords to all the previous entries, to enlarge some of the photos. So if you're using an RSS reader to view these, you might notice old letters getting reposted.


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Rehashed

© Joselito Briones

Don't even start with me about the photo... I just don't have anything else to put here, OK? It's an old picture, one that I took in Greece, a slide printed on a non-color-reversal paper (hence the negative effect).

Today I'm officially lost in my German lessons. Genitiv? What the crap is that? I must've spent the whole class time with my mouth open and my hands constantly scratching my head (and I swear I washed my hair this morning).


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Thanksgiving

© Joselito Briones

It's that hokey time of the year again... when you're supposed to think of all the positive things that has happened in your life, or things that you have, and express gratitude. Naturally, I do not want to think THAT hard. I do think it's appropriate to be thankful to have had "Bed Day", yesterday.

I phoned Norie in California to wish her happy thanksgiving. Turns out they had an early dinner, with her Kevin and Dave, my two brothers Noel and Cesar, and Uding and Little Kevin. Since this holiday calls specifically for enormous dead birds, she decided to (gasp!) order, from the place where she usually gets her honey-roasted ham, a (gasp!) deep-fried turkey. She's adventurous that way, you'll have to give her that. She was already doing the dishes though, by the time I called, and was getting ready for her nap.


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"Bed Day"

© Joselito Briones

Have you heard of this holiday before? We don't have school today here in Germany (or maybe it's just Bavaria) because this is supposed to be the day in the middle of the week when you're supposed to just lounge around in bed all day. Am not shitting you, it's true!

Oh well, I might have spent all day in my pj's, but in front of my computer. I edited some pictures, for the brochure. I also did a new version of this photo that I took of Carrie a couple of years ago in New York. I wanted to experiment in high-key desaturated colors.


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You know you're in the pits when..

© Joselito Briones

...what you're used to walking two blocks for, you now have to go to the next city, by train, to look for, and be informed when you do find a store that carries it, that you have to pre-order it, and that you'll have to come back after 3 days to collect it.

The item in question is a pack of matte-finish heavy stock A3 size photo paper. Fortunately, one of the shops I inquired from recommended one other shop that might carry this item. The name of the place is Saturn. I had to ask for directions at least 3 times, and use what little German I know in trying to understand whatever directions I was given, to find the place. It turns out they do carry the paper, although not the double-sided kind that I was looking for. I bought a pack anyway.


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P.S.
The picture, again, has got nothing to do with anything else written here. This isn't even what I wanted to print on the paper I was looking for. This is just another experiment in post-processing images taken with a digital camera.

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Borat!

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (20th Century Fox)

Roxy time!

Wow... record number of viewers in the cinema. There must've been at least 20 people in the audience. Pop culture rules. (Hm... hello? It wouldn't be called so if it doesn't, would it?)

By now of course, the novelty that is Sacha Baron Cohen is already somewhat worn out. Good thing is, throwing mud on people is still very much in, especially if the aforementioned people are just asking for it... As in his Ali G personna, the best thing about Borat is the way he brought out the true character of the people he encountered and recorded in the movie. Thinking he's someone they don't have to be politically correct with, they blurt out things they wouldn't normally say in public, much less in film. Now, one can argue that they're just trying to be agreeable with him to avoid confrontation, a human trait, don't ask me what it's called because I don't know, which has been thoroughly documented. The thing is, though, it's easy to tell that he wasn't feeding these people the words, he just makes them careless or carefree enough to actually say what they think. And what they do say, sadly, is what everybody else suspect to be their real sentiments all along. The way a man strongly agreed with him when he said something about beating up everything in Iraq including its lizards, and the shocked face the woman next to the man had when she saw his reaction... these are expressions no actor has yet to muster, so any suspicion of these scenes being staged with good actors can be safely put aside.

Another good thing about Borat? The way he doesn't discriminate against whom he supposedly unknowingly discriminates. Jews (Cohen is himself jewish), gays, blacks, minorities, politicians, religious fanatics. Everybody's fair game.

Eventually though, what he failed to do is to learn from what he discovered (or more probably, knew all along) in making this movie. That is, that there's really a lot of people who are stupid. Stupid in the fixed-in-my-own-ways-don't-bother-me-with-any-attempt-to-get-educated kind. The same people who can understand the satirical nature of the movie are those who are capable of understanding to begin with, and to these viewers, this movie is nothing more than reaffirming light entertainment. To the rest, those who are not even aware that this is meant to be mocking and ironic, yet see this as light entertainment nonetheless, would naturally see everything in this movie face-value and have this as something to fuel their own prejudices and stupidity.


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What did I do today?

© Joselito Briones

You can tell this is just a filler. There's really nothing to post, this is an old photo of a building in Upper East Side, New York that I took 3, maybe 4 years ago.


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Mystery solved.

This is a promotional photo from Nike

Sometime in June, I mentioned the gesture made by Spanish forward Fernando Torres, after scoring a goal in a World Cup match, and provided a link to a photo showing this gesture. 5 months on and I keep on getting visits here, by bulks, looking for that photo, which has since been removed by its original poster. Maybe they're just curious as to why he was not invited to join the national team this time. Or maybe they're just wondering if he's recovered from his current injury. The image shown here is a publicity shot by Nike, his current sponsor.

Come to think about it though, it was quite obvious that he was gonna be huge, and a lot of people would be looking for anything at all about him. So maybe it's not such a surprise after all.

One visitor who eventually found the entry, I guess after some digging through my archives, left this comment:
"The gesture done by Torres is known as "the archer". He did it imitating his Atletico Madrid idol Kiko"


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Old trees

© Joselito Briones

Just another experiment in post processing... this is a digital snap of trees as observed from a window of a moving train... on the way to Berlin. I tried to make it look like an old sepia print.


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Back to Basics

© Joselito Briones

Back to Erlangen, and back to experimenting with digital pics. This one is taken in the Bamberg train station... I was trying to create an old-world, hand-colored character to it.

MTV: In constant rotation nowadays is Christina Aguilera's "Hurt", from the album "Back to Basics", really well made, the make up alone when she's sitting down crying is flawless and a pefect fit to the video, it must've cost a fortune. Also, among the top British MTV's dance videos is the one that Frieder produced, "Dance for Life". And I happened into MTV2's Barrio 19... wow! How could I have missed this show before?


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A Little Lesson in Filipino

© Joselito Briones

I challenged one of my nephews, DanMark (yes, same as the country, German spelling), "Big Mac" to some of us, "Kuya Makky" to some of his cousins, to tell me something, so I can tell you about it.

Here's what he came up with (with my attempt at understanding the relatively new Filipino shorthand, and a translation):

sori poh sa late reply heheheh
d poh ako nkapag log in ng 2 days hehehehe
dto poh ang bago d2 nagtitinda cla lola ng fishball at halo2 un ang bago d2
hmmpp c kuya magkakaroon na ng panganay ewan ko lng poh kung kelan ang due date ni ate lanie ^_^
bkit yaw nyo poh pagandahin profiles nyo??.

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Sorry for the late reply ("poh" is "po", a Filipino word to indicate some sort of respect, the way one would say "no, sir" to an older relative)
I wasn't able to log in for 2 days hehehehe
Here, what's new is that Gramma ("Oma" in Germany, "Inay" to me) is now selling fishballs and "halo halo" (a typical Filipino treat of sweets in ice and milk). That's what's new here.
Hmmpp... Don Don ("kuya" is brother, usually how all the siblings call the eldest brother, as "ate", sister, is used to address the eldest sister - older brother or sister other than the eldest is addressed as "kuya" or "ate" with the name attached to it) will have a firstborn already, I just don't know when Ate Lanie (Don's wife) is due. (a smiley)
Why don't you make your profile (referring to my friendster.com profile) look better?
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You know how nothing ever happens to me when I ask my nephews to provide content to my letters to you.

The picture above is a composite, of course, the background is Times Square, in New York, while Mark's picture was taken in the Philippines.


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Berlin Revisited (Literally)

© Joselito Briones

As last time I was here, it's dark. Only now it's cold and raining too. Argggghhh!!!


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Hearst HQ

© Joselito Briones

I was browsing through magazines and saw a full-page photo of this building, so I thought I'd show you my version of it, taken early this year.

The building is the Hearst Corporation Headquarters, in 8th Avenue and West 57th Street in Manhattan, designed by Sir Norman Foster.


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Delineated Sunset

© Joselito Briones

This train station is somewhere in Germany, of course. I wasn't paying attention when I took this digital snap, and I was probably half asleep, so I didn't see where exactly.

The only thing I find interesting in this photo is the geometirc sunset, which is the reflection of the overhead lighting inside the train on the window, through which this is the view.


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The Siemens Sun Also Rises

© Joselito Briones

It's always nice that the Schlaffgutzimmer is filled with sunlight every morning, it's one of the things I like most about this apartment. Sometimes though, it gets confusing when, after leaving the sunlight-filled bedroom (photo, above), in the east side of the apartment, I see that the sun is shining just as brightly in the kitchen and dining area, west of the apartment (photo, middle).

© Joselito Briones

I've got Siemens to thank for it, of course, as the westerly sunlight in the morning is a reflection in their tallest building (photo, bottom).

© Joselito Briones

In the afternoon, it hailed. I was planning to go to Frankenlabor, I decided to just stay in. Goodbye golden October. Hello cold!


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