SUI GENERIS

My sister emailed last night, wrapping up family eklat-issues with news from this side of jologs: c, did you know that Jake Gylenhaal went to Columbia for 2 yrs before heading West? I replied, No, I don't, and uh, do I care?

Sshhh, for purposes of this blog, let us pretend that I do. After all, it has come a long way and been a long time since Hollywood was known as the hodgepodge of stupid people, owing it to the cliche that beauty and brains don't mix.

Like me, that cliche is old and tired. It's likewise unfair. At this day and age where nothing is impossible, it becomes possible, too, for a smartass to have a smart ass (or some ass described by Janet Mandlebloom as resembling a bifurcated cantaloupe).

The saying was actually universal, stereotyping a stunner in any nation and culture as one whose grey matter is somehow grayish in terms of existence. (Q: Miss Beauty Contestant #1, where does your father work? A: In the Department of Labor. Q: Uh, what does he do? A: Uhm, he's a laborer).

But as Darwin may himself said, things evolve, thoughts inclusive. We now begin to appreciate intelligence behind physical attractiveness and the thinking that beauty and brains don't mix is no longer part of the Reality Principle.

So, Jake Gylenhaal went to Columbia, huh? (Big deal!, as the Counsel will say. "Columbia U does not even come close to the rigors set by UP".)

Anna Pacquin went there, too. At Columbia, I mean, though I heard she's intelligent enough to be accepted at UP, unless someone, say, Cha, will remark, Excuse me, you don't belong!

Which brings the thesis to the fore, beauty and brains could mix, Hollywood has a place for the intellectually attractive.

I heard that Mina Sorvino graduated cum laude from Harvard (I saw her on tv as an undercover cop, in a telemovie about human trafficking, shot in the Philippines); Tommy Lee Jones went to Harvard, too, (and was the roommate of ex-veep and part time Columbia prof Al Gore) and so did Meryl Streep. Jodie Foster graduated from Yale, while David Duchovny got his baccalaureate in from Princeton and his Masters from Yale, both in English Lit. (In James Lipton's Inside the Actor's Studio where Duchovny guested sometime last year, he discussed his Masteral thesis in brief and it blew my mind. It has something to do with American Poetry and technology, the magnetic ek-ek of Robert Frost's poem , which I could not remember well because, remember, my mind got blown away and I was not able to retrieve it.)

There's an Ivy League connection to some Hollywooders, too. John Travolta's mom was an English teacher at Columbia (which somehow helped shape his career), and Uma Thurman's dad, the well-respected Prof. R. Thurman, teaches Philosophy, also at Columbia, and leads an annual trek to Bhutan where he probably gives a big piece of his Buddhist mind.

Beauty and brains, however, do not reside in me. Women's attraction to my being, I believe, is merely fatal (if they consider me handsome, they die, probably in laughter). Besides, the school I went to is affiliated with the Poison Ivy League.