Tuklas Sining: Art in Reposo Street (Life collides with imagination.)

Dubbed as “ Tuklas Sining sa Reposo”, this annual festival boasts of a diverse array of sining or art. such as paintings of artists and would be artists,dance theater, film at its splendor, original Filipino sound, food we inherited from our colonial past which evolved to suit the Pinoy taste, and sculpture that display a series of movements in dance. It is truly a venue for artists to “interact and share visions”, mirroring Filipinos’ love for entertainment, a large and unique part of our culture.





Fascinating murals gazed back at us as we walked under the canopy of dark clouds.







The monotonous sky with chunks of charcoal clouds hovered over the white tents competing with the paintings lined up on the street of Reposo for attention.







The Art Festival was darkened by rain but people still managed to see the show and appreciate the myriad artistic expressions of the ones who participated.

There was a huge canvass being painted by a group of young artists.

As I walked towards the middle of the street, I saw a young painter wielding her magic over her canvass. She was paintin a nude woman, her hair spilling over the canvas, exuding earthiness and mystery.












Painting in all its curious modes









“Crumpling”
Ferdinand Cacnio’s tenth solo sculpture exhibit at LRI Art Pavilion, 2/f LRI Design Plaza.

Krispy Creme on High Street

Krispy Creme,G/f HighStreet, Fort Bonifacio, Taguig




Imagine crunchy, crumbling lusciousness that melts without a sound in your mouth. The white snowy sugar that doesn’t overpower the taste of the crusty doughnut. The moan that emanates from you, your senses floating in overindulgence.
You open your mouth like a big O, letting your teeth slowly sink into that sweetness….

Wait! I can’t eat this! This is laden with calories that will surely go faster than a bullet train to my hips and thighs (to haunt me for the rest of my f…. life.)

There’s a buzzing sound in my brain telling me this will never happen again, its only a glitch and my weight will not really be hugely affected .

Well, Krispy Kreme in High Street is a favorite watering hole of mine not only for the sweet stuff which my daughters love but for the reasonably priced coffee served piping hot.

I could write an essay for the great place and the endearing way the crew welcomed us. It was after all a slow afternoon which I particularly am mad about. I crave and moon for days like this when people seem to have stayed away from my proximity.

Modern and retro at the same time, the lay out of shop is well planned and conveys friendliness. There’s a series of stools covered with red cloth reminiscent of the 60’s soda fountain.



Everyday I wake up with a mantra, “Oatmeal is the best meal. I will eat oatmeal and it will taste like … pizza. “

Is there really such a thing as shortcut to dieting?

Chasing Books (and Angels' Thoughts)

Celestial reckoning… that’s how they go… by the stars…
-Robert James Waller

Time and again I have an affair with books, waking up mornings with sunlight and specks of sun dust in my hair, my arms straddled on the bed with a book that just that night was a stranger to me.

One lazy Friday afternoon I goaded Alvin and Mace to go to a bookstore specializing in old and used books. It is the start of summer and we try to regenerate our brain cells after being fried everyday by the tropical heat. We dabble in works that give mind that matters.

What started me on a wild goose chase was an article in the Sunday Inquirer about small bookstores. As a self confessed bookaholic, I usually scout for quaint out of the way bookshops that cater to my atypical bordering on the absurd taste. The latter remark, compliments of a friend of mine who obviously is much younger and has a different perspective when it comes to books. The bookstore I was seeking was named “Angel’s Thoughts” or so it said in the article. It was situated in the then Marikina Shoe Expo which was now called Cubao Expo.

Cubao was the place to be in the late 1970’s.It was where I found Pancake House and San Mig Pub which was designed like a British pub. But now Cubao is transforming and has yet to find itself and its place under the sun.

Small bookstores are not as ubiquitous as we want them to be owing to the fact that mega bookstores are the Holy Grails where people flock and enjoy their cappuccinos while browsing the newest blood sucking juvenile hardback saga or meet their dates.
It reminds me of the Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks flick (You’ve Got Mail) where two book owners fight it out for a much coveted supremacy in the business.

Back to that afternoon in Cubao and the sweltering heat-it was about 3 pm- that left patches of sweat in my armpits and what have you, my two friends and I braved the humidity and unfamiliar locale. Alvin and Mace, book scavengers both, were hopeful that maybe this jaunt would give them serendipitous finds.

What we first laid our eyes on was Zeitgeist bookstore. It was not an inviting place though we saw some books lined up on the walls. We skipped that for the more alluring “Reading Room” which we found out to our amusement was where your fortune gets read by a spiritualist.



The mystical air was palpable that we moved on knowing that our sensibilities were unprepared for esoteric pursuits.

We noticed that most shops were closed and were to open later at 5pm. The façade was incredible. Old-world but unassuming, it was a blend of avant-garde and bohemian art.Definitely an artists’ haven.



At the cul de sac was an authentic Italian restaurant called Bellini’s.







We entered the restaurant wanting to taste coffee and Italian ambience for the elevated mood that we were in.
We saw the restaurant owners busy with some people. Lights surrounded the place. There was a television crew in the restaurant and rumor has it that Jessica Soho was going to appear anytime that moment.


The luscious cakes looked so decadent. The entire place exuded a relaxing atmosphere. Unfortunately, they couldn’t serve us since the restaurant was going to be featured on a TV show and was actually going to be closed for a while. We escaped at the side door but not before we could take a glimpse of the memorabilia that was paraded on the walls interspersed with tendrils of painted grapevines. It was particularly difficult to wrench Alvin away from the door. He was already imagining the quiche in his mouth.


Out in the afternoon sun again we moved next door, Libreria, to the elation of the book chasers, meaning us.




An eye-catching room filled with books spilling on the floor, on the walls, on the coffee table, and the ledges and other spaces available was on view. But we still had to wait for 5pm for it to open.






The glass that separated us from the books turned misty by the heavy breathing of my companions who were looking at the array of tomes and the coffee brewer. Oh, to be able to reach out and touch those pages…

To fulfill our hunt we went back to Zeitgeist, where Mace found a series of science fiction books and I bought a previously owned Wuthering Heights for my daughter, Bronte, yep, named after the famous sisters.

We ended up in the vintage shops where one can buy trinkets, antiques and ukay stuff. One shop was called Karma, which meant fate, and I guess this trip wasn’t so bad after all, because although we had not found what we were looking for, we found a small corner of this world worth discovering.













We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time
-T.S.Eliot


Found word:
Zeitgeist – a pervading feeling or mood of a certain era or generation

Vast Oceans, Small Boats

It wasn’t a particularly spectacular body of water
With boats like half wings springing to sea
It wasn’t even a river with canoes or bancas slithering to a waterfall

Actually, it was only a creek
The width I can easily span with a jolted jump

It had its share of rainbow boats
Steamed by our breathing.

Now I see the ocean the endless blue
Skydiving horizon melting the hue.

I do not know which is the more
Exhilarating of the two.

Trying to Save the Sunlight

This is a series of photos I took just because I love sunsets. In The Little Prince, the character, a little boy lives in a planet where there’s more than one sunset. In fact, there was a day that he was able to see forty four sunsets!

For Art's Sake

The late poet Sylvia Plath once said, “Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing…I don’t have a pure motive… I still want to see it finally ritualized in print.”
She must have agonized over short stories that kept coming back, like ghosts, haunting her.

On my bookshelf is an assortment of self help books on writing. Writing for Dummies, How to Get Rich in the Writing Business, Be Obscenely Rich by Writing, and so on, you get the drift…

I was a tad euphoric to find out in a book called How to Write Romance and Get Published that even a popular writer, Danielle Steel was not exempted from the harsh realities of book writing. For five years, her three completed works were rejected one after the other. Imagine that. It must have caused her a lot of disappointment, tears and postage stamps. She nearly quit if one publisher had not taken a chance on her. She found a niche for her style and the rest was, as we say, history.

I’m not saying that I’m happy for her obvious setback. It just proved that no matter how long it takes, one has to hold on to hope. In the meantime, enjoy the ride (or the write).

42nd Ballet Season of Ballet Philippines

Faces of Eve

• Schedule of Performances

• Encantada August 2011 CCP Main Theater

• Inamorata September 2011 CCP Main Theater

• The Sleeping Beauty December 2011 CCP Main Theater

• Womb February 2011 CCP Main Theater

Book Review: Sightings by SusanTrott

This book which I fished out of a bargain bin in a nondescript bookshop in Paranaque I consider the find of the decade. Ms.Susan Trott’s inventiveness and insouciance has made me an aficionado. It is a sad fact that she is not well known. Her book deserves a larger readership.

Sightings

by Susan Trott

Sunny, the heroine of this unusual novel is a quirky, flaxen haired girl who happens to find her spy lover, Masefield in the streets of Paris. Her father, Muir Scott, decides to disappear from the limelight of the literati where he has reigned for sometime. Friend to none other than Ernest Hemingway, Muir runs away with Sunny’s childhood friend Chris, which starts the complex situation that our heroine finds herself in. To top it all, Sunny is now in a quandary, whether to choose Masefield, the man she just met a week ago and loves forever, or Buster, the man she has known forever but only loves as a good friend.

Trott crosses the boundary from reality to fantasy, and takes the reader into a surreal journey. She uses first person subjective for all characters effectively that in each chapter, the character is revealed by his/her perspective and choice of words. It is refreshing that each time the reader can peek into a character’s innermost thoughts and feelings in a slow satisfying way.

The real test that I have for a book’s immortality is not only how many people read it but also how one can go back to these pages, perhaps to linger over a few lines, to mull over the meanings of each experience.

I can safely say that this is a book which I can read a few times more, just to taste the saltiness of each page and remember the feel of the wind on my face.



The story begins with the image of a woman sailing a long, slender, silver bay, her mystical blue eyes sweeping the waters over and over for the body of her small son who drowned fifteen years ago…



Quotes:
Maybe it is when you are feeling intensely alive that you are most intensely aware of death.

Masefield: All my life I have been looking for a superior human, a person who possesses intelligence, strength, and soul to a high degree. Naively, I even had a list of names of people to seek out because I thought they might fit the bill.

I was surprised because he( Buster) turned out to be such a human human, which was something I somehow hadn’t expected.

To Write or not to Write

I used to astonish people whenever I told them I was a writer. Many of them went catatonic for a millisecond not really grasping whether it was a gag or if I had been taking Valium (the local version of Prozac). The word writer does have a mystical ring to it.

Of course I was young then, a teenager. I had that self-important look on my face when I uttered those words. Some of those poor people stared at me, mouth agape, as if the earth were ready to devour me anytime.

I was proud of my poems, crude as they were. I had an early fan base you might say. My weepy love poems were a hit among friends and classmates who harassed me for copies, whether to give as a gift to their inamorata or to use as a target practice I really do not know.

My poetic career fizzled out once I learned I couldn’t really make money out of it. I wrote on the side though, hoping and wishing, that maybe, the Muse would tap me on my shoulder once more and say, “Come with me, and you’ll be in a world of pure imagination.” with a Lou Rawls totally cool boom voice.

I switched to writing romances for a while. After a few titles, (which I know in my heart had become hard to find books collected by my fans) , I decided that it was time to move on and become “serious”, so I wrote a World Literature textbook.As of this moment I'm waiting for it to come out. Until it has seen the light of day,I would confine myself to blogging. So there.

Still Life

Years have sliced me

Into little squares.

Flat, shiny jewels

So exact and so still

Quaint, noiseless frames

Captured and hoarded

To fill my book.



It is a known fact

That people have traded everything

For just about anything

But I have never known anyone

Give up photos for something else.

Life in a capsule

Some bitter, some limited

Others contained and coated

With saccharine smiles.

It really depends on

How one wants to be remembered.



They say there comes a time

When one questions and despairs,

Like asking a prestidigitator

To pull out a rabbit from a hat

Or to agitate ancient moss at the bottom

Of a pond. Anything.





When I, a lover of words

Could never make heads nor tails

Out of rhymes

That used to give me chills.



Baby pictures seem to be a favorite.

The first smile, the teeth nonexistent and guilt free.

The wedding picture, execution style.

A façade, bricked off by the layer of lies

We try so hard to believe.

We bleach everything

From pillows to blankets,

Repair the damage good as new

Iron the edges (take no hostages!)

There’s nothing we can’t do

To make everything perfect in a photo.

After all, it’s just about lighting.



At night I’d flip

Through my treasure

Eyes growing sharper

Memory growing dim

The sharp edges cutting my finger

Until it bleeds.
-army granada