Jack The Scribbler

No records indicate whether Imelda Marcos has visited Daslu, the world’s most luxurious store, located in Sao Paolo.
But then again, who knows?
The woman with the famous footwear fetish may have already gone on a secret Brazilian shopping expedition when she was powerful enough to commandeer jumbo jets at a snap of a finger.
In any case, easy access to planes wouldn’t have mattered that much to Daslu’s visitors, including imeldific individuals.
For all its offerings — three car dealerships, a yacht broker, and yes, haute couture for men and women — Daslu doesn’t have its own private airport.
Or at least not just yet.
Its high-flying clients don’t seem to mind.
After all, they can always touch down on the five-storey building’s helipad, safe from Sao Paolo’s notorious carjackers, known for stealing autos at gunpoint, even in broad daylight.
Customers who still prefer to go by car can do so as long as they pass muster at not just one but two of the compound’s gates, designed to keep out the have-nots and the hoi polloi.
Indeed, security and privacy are just a few of the many things that set Daslu apart from regular luxury establishments around the world.

Trade paperback cover of "Deluxe" from Amazon.com

Take Daslu’s second floor, where the women’s section is located: It doesn’t have a fitting room. Female clients can just strip off their garments and try on dresses in any corner since no males—whether customers or employees—are allowed on the floor.
“It’s natural for Brazilians. You aren’t ashamed if men aren’t around,” said Eliana Tranchesi, Daslu’s owner, as quoted by Dana Thomas in her book entitled Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster (Penguin Books, 2007).
Established in 1958, Daslu began in the living room of Lucia Piva de Albuquerque, Tranchesi’s mother, who sold clothes and accessories she brought from abroad since Brazil at that time was closed to imports.
Its origins explain its name: Daslu is Portuguese for in Lu’s house.
Even though advertisement was only through word of mouth, the store would become immensely popular, later occupying a whole stretch of 23 houses — either rented or owned — in the posh neighborhood where it began.
When parked limousines of the rich and famous began to clog the streets and upset the neighbors, management decided to move to an area just a few blocks away from its old location.
Some fifty years later, Daslu has certainly outgrown its origins.
Besides featuring a Japanese restaurant (considered as the city’s best), Daslu also has a champagne bar, a hairdresser, a bank, a pharmacy, a stationery store, a wedding chapel, and a ballroom, among others.
Of course, it also has men’s and children’s departments on the third and fourth floors.
By far, the store is famous for its Dasluzettes — female shopping assistants from Brazil’s rich families who offer personalized services to each of the store’s 70,000 clients.
“The salesgirls live the life the customers live,” Tranchesi was quoted by the book as saying. “So they understand.”
While Daslu may very well represent the ultimate in luxury shopping, it also stands out as an exception in an industry as bloodthirsty as any.
Or at least it does in Thomas’ view.
Other luxury brands always intend to make a quick buck off its customers, even fooling them as to the provenance of their items, including handbags to which she devotes a chapter. (“Brands that deny outright that their bags are made in China make their bags in China, not in Italy, not in France, not in the United Kingdom,” Thomas says.) But not Daslu.
The store established by Tranchesi’s mother knows and cares about its customers because they are guests, first and foremost.
“Chances are, you’ll run into [Tranchesi] while you are shopping, and she’ll ask you how the kids are, help you pick out a few things, or assist in fittings,” Thomas says of the daughter of Daslu’s founder.
As expected, the personal touch of Daslu is not left unrewarded.
“When you go to Daslu, it’s not to buy a new pair of shoes. It’s to see your friends,” said one customer whose husband owns a local Mercedes dealership. “You can’t find this service anywhere in the world.”
So who says money can’t buy happiness?
Not Daslu customers obviously.

GOOD books and groceries—like beer and tequila, socialites and squakings—rarely go well together. (I should know—I’ve sworn off tequila more than ten years ago—after having barfed bits of my brain out on a Bacolod to Manila flight minutes prior to touchdown, thanks to copious Cuervo Gold shots chased by beer the night before. Meanwhile, to this day, I remain confused which social category best deserves my working-class rage: uppity Makati coño kids with trust funds or unsophisticated squakings in Quezon City who can’t even ride the train right. But enough of this self-indulgent commentary lest it deteriorate into pure drivel, if it hasn’t already).
As I was saying, good books and groceries don’t go well together.
No one visits a bookstore to get a discount on Kobe beef nor does anyone make a trip to the grocery to try and stumble upon Adrian Cristobal’s Occasional Prose, which remains sadly out of print.
But stranger things have happened.
For more than two years, my wife and I have frequented this grocery, the name and location of which will not be disclosed for reasons that will become self-evident later.
Just last year, the establishment suddenly decided to put up two stalls filed with used, cheap books, many of which I would have been proud to call my own.
Acting on this impulse, I have, in various trips to the said grocery store, I have amassed a number of excellent titles.
Take my recent trip last week.
While my wife was busy figuring out what needed to be restocked in our household—not exactly rocket science for a two-member, one feline family—I trooped to the used-book stands and immediately scanned titles for possible finds. It was, by far, the best decision I have ever made regarding anything faintly related to groceries.
Besides acquiring the 29th issue of Granta, a UK-based literary quarterly, I also got myself a copy of the Granta Book on the Family, a special anthology featuring memoirs of American short story writer Raymond Carver, among others. The last, but not the least, of my literary haul was Best Music Writing of 2004, published by Da Capo press, which I am reading right now.
All three books—expensive-looking trade paperback editions in good condition—set me back by approximately P300, far cheaper than the latest issue of Granta, occassionally sold at Fully Booked for P700 or so.
On another occasion, I have bought Sleeping with Extra Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety by Atlantic Monthly columnist Wendy Kaminer, Bad Elements by journalist Ian Buruma, The Tale of the Scale: An Odyssey of an Invention by Solly Angel, a housing expert.
Which now explains why I will not disclose the name and location of the said grocery store for fear that readers of this blog, however few, may stake out the establishment, hiking competition for good but cheap books.
But since I believe in a level playing field, I will nevertheless give one clue regarding the whereabouts of the said grocery: it’s in Metro Manila. Hardy har har. Why would I take the fun out of grocery shopping?

———————

From the Six Degrees of Separation Dept.
Raymond Carver’s best friend is Chuck Kinder. Besides being a writer himself, Kinder, who also teaches fiction at the University of Pittsburgh, is supposedly the basis of one of the characters in Michael Chabon’s novel, Wonder Boys, which was later turned into a movie. When we were in the US, my wife and I occasionally joined the movie nights that he hosted at his house. I remember seeing the original Carrie movie and Short Cuts, a movie on which a number of Carver’s short stories are based. Short Cuts features, among others, jazz singer Annie Ross who plays, not surprisingly, a jazz singer. Ross is famous for being one-third of what I believe is the greatest jazz vocalist group of the twentieth century, LHR, also known as Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross. LHR has influenced similar groups such as The Manhattan Transfer and New York Voices.
Picture shows covers of Wendy Kaminer’s Sleeping with Extra Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety and Best Music Writing 2004.

HOWEVER cleverly written, newspaper columns have never been given a decent break.  Treated as the poor cousin of the essay, opinion columns and other similarly-configured pieces of writing have been disallowed membership into the literary club.  Which perhaps explains why in the early nineties, Adrian Cristobal decided against asking fellow columnist and current Makati representative Teodoro M. Locsin Jr. from writing the foreword of Pasquinades, a collection of Cristobal’s pieces printed in the weekend supplement of the defunct Daily Globe, of which Locsin was publisher.  “…I believe that a collection of newspaper columns in book form is sheer vanity: what is perishable—and newspaper pieces are perishable—should be allowed to perish without benefit of clergy,” Cristobal said in his book’s introduction. “[B]eing a ruthlessly honest writer, [TeddyBoy] might go at it too well for my comfort, and I happen to perversely value his friendship more than his honesty.”  Although Locsin was able to defend himself in a speech he delivered at the book’s launch which was later published in the Philippines’ Free Press, their witty exchange emphasized the amorphous position occupied by well-written, non-straightforward news pieces published in dailies, weeklies, and some glossies.  Are such pieces simply just passing fancies, perishable goods to be consumed today and discarded tomorrow? Is there a clear demarcation between the non-fiction piece written under a tight deadline as opposed to the one that was produced leisurely?  An easy enough answer is provided by American critic Cristina Nehring in a May 2003 Harper’s Magazine essay.  “[T]here is only good writing and bad writing, strong thinking and weak thinking,” she said, in a piece entitled, Our Essays, Ourselves: In Defense of the Big Idea.  Going by the Nehring protocol, the collections and anthologies of a number of Filipino writers are not going to lose their luster anytime soon. Besides the work of Cristobal and others, among these anthologies include Renato Redentor Constantino’s The Poverty of Memory: Essays on History and Empire.  With four sections discussing an impressive array of topics—an American anti-imperialist group protesting US annexation of the Philippines to a profile of Iran’s pro-poor prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh—Constantino’s collection is more than just a samples of good writing and in-depth research. It is proof that combining talent, tenacity, and noble intentions can do more than just beat deadlines: it can stimulate ideas, widen perspectives, and help propose alternatives to the current local millieu, which has only helped to deepen oppression, encourage mediocrity, and tolerate ignorance.  In “The vitamins of Erma Geolamin,” Constantino relates the life and times of a domestic helper who has spent 14 years in Hong Kong only to find out later that the money she sent home was squandered by her husband who has been living with another woman.  “Another familiar story…It’s like the relationship between overseas Filipino workers and the Philippine government,” Constantino says, referring to the larger, menacing yet often-overlooked form of squandering: the Philippine government’s automatic provision of using precious dollars earned by the likes of Geolamin to pay for fraudulent, graft-tainted debt, exemplified by the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP). These automatic debt payments, Constantino adds, is “a monumental barbarity that re-exports the dollars remitted by overseas Filipino workers.”  While also celebrating the achievements of these unsung Filipinos, Constantino nevertheless offers a few rules for those intending to secure a brighter future for everyone.  “Rescuing tomorrow from those who wish to appropriate it carries some requisites,” he says in the introduction. “History must penetrate memory. Memory must permeate history. Act deliberately but with dispatch. Understand. Listen. Reach out. Act with others. Rescue tomorrow together. Hope abounds. “The future’s already here,” said the writer William Gibson. “It’s just not widely distributed yet.” Thankfully, in less than 300 pages, Poverty of Memory succeeds in its attempt to enrich and enliven Filipinos’ collective consciousness.

———————

This shortened version of a longer unpublished review will finally see print in the March 2 issue of Personal Fortune, the monthly magazine of Business Mirror, a Philippine broadsheet