“You say goodbye, and I say hello.” To use the Beatles line to talk about awkward social interactions is to take it very much out of context, but it’s a good reminder that social codes are not natural to us.
Chairman Tolentino, if you are the one responsible for those ugly murals, please have them removed or painted over immediately so they don’t give nightmares to children and the creeps to adults,” an exasperated columnist Neal Cruz wrote in an open letter on Monday to the MMDA Chairman about the artworks installed in Edsa a few months back. “If it wasn’t you, please accept my apologies for making a mistake. If it wasn’t you, who did?”
“I’m just a holy fool, oh baby it’s so cruel, but I’m still in love with Judas, baby.” When the infamously stylized hit “Judas” came around to Manila a year after its release, we soon realized that this city was not a place to tolerate Gaga’s very loose reenactment of Magdalene ditching Jesus because she’s got the hots for Judas.
The difference between an old Morrissey fan and a new one is that an old one won’t really talk about to you about Morrissey, or about Morrissey fans for that matter.
“If you see those ugly curtains above the seats, take them down,” my friend and collaborator Nice texts me as I enter the air-conditioned tour bus we’d just rented, and I alert myself to what look like mattress skirts on an upper bunk bed lining the bus. Fifty ready seats revealed to my disbelief that we’ve managed to get the engines running on the little project. “The Single Decker” was a “magical mystery tour” make-believe—a kind that I was hoping, would make itself. I didn’t know where to get a bus or where to make it go.
If you’ve graduated from the kids’ table not too long ago, hosting a dinner party probably isn’t one of your top coming-of-age priorities. I used to think throwing one would be waving my youthful white flag and then spreading it out as tablecloth to discuss my upcoming high school reunion. I thought that in addition to my Home Economics classes, I needed to whip cream like Nigella or have Jamie Oliver’s oil-lugging abandon to throw a pretty fine dinner party. What I didn’t realize was I had an oven, good company, and time for trial and error.
My brother and I are about to leave a restaurant. The service had the promises of “new best friend,” but it turns out the paper money I’d brought only just paid for the dinner. The waiter stands a few meters away, waiting for his keep of giving us so many refills of water and his extensive knowledge of slow-cooked anything. “I thought you brought money!” I confront my brother, as I leave the only thing I have at the bottom of my linty canvas bag: coins. My brother looks at me, gravely, saying that for a restaurant like this, leaving coins is worse than giving nothing. With one toss of a coin, I had failed the reputation of great service everywhere.
I was in my bedroom with my feet up watching YouTube when I first came across Vincent Moon. Removed from a chicken coop of a sold-out arena and from the starch of choreographed music videos, the Frenchman took music out of its evolved comforts and back into the neglected public spaces where it had been born.
If I thought I grew up grieving over Kurt Cobain when he died in 1994, then journalistic integrity ends here. I was born in 1988, and there was nothing much you could really do with Nirvana at three years old.
I love Brian McKnight, but I haven’t always loved him. Brian McKnight is the type of artist people love for sentimental reasons, and the type some rebuke for that very reason. He was my Adele before Adele.
Just six months ago, artist and audio engineer Mark Laccay was looking for another way to fund his projects, as well as the projects of the artists around him.
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