Notes to my 13-year-old self
Mama Says MercyBy Mara Coson
A few weeks ago, my friend produced a play called “13.” It was about a 13-year-old boy moving out of New York into this small town in Indiana, where he tried desperately to fit in.
A few weeks ago, my friend produced a play called “13.” It was about a 13-year-old boy moving out of New York into this small town in Indiana, where he tried desperately to fit in.
For a 20-something-year-old, art appreciation can often feel like pure window-shopping, or to the more cynical, an exercise in snootiness. Galleries are beautiful shrines of artworks whose prices are more the taste of champagne-drinking 50-year-olds, and the image reproduced in the gallery brochure, website, someone’s camera often, becomes unintentionally more accessible to the rest of us (just like the wine at exhibit openings).
I can’t believe I am writing about “Ang Nawawala” again. It’s not because I feel like I have spoken about this film more than brand ambassadors do ice cream (I actually have) but because “Ang Nawawala” is finally having its run at mainstream theaters beginning Sept. 12.
Hand-washed. Hand-labeled. Hand-capped. Manila might be witnessing the beginning of a small uprising in the hands of four bros with the ferment of their labor: Katipunan Craft Ale.
This piece started out as a letter to a friend of mine, because I felt that my silence abandoned her in the unforgiving density of Tokyo; and I mean “abandon” not in the traditional sense of the word, but by reducing her experience to something she could live through easily.
You should be afraid of Katrina Stuart Santiago. Intelligent but belligerent, and known for being unforgivingly hellbent on biting political commentary, this polemicist is a hand grenade you never want to see rolling by your feet.
Lately you might have heard about Marie Jamora’s debut film “Ang Nawawala,” from relentless musikero retweeters and Facebook sharers, from the boys on 89.9 if you’re on the road, or maybe even from Dawn Zulueta on “ASAP” talking about her latest indie film role.
Twitter was the first to tell us. Then, it tried to undo its own news perhaps not only because they were really false alarms, but also because there also has been, in such talent, an assumed immortality.
Preview’s Best Dressed List. I didn’t really know what that meant, but the next thing I knew, three photo shoots with my eyes closed and sessions of hair spray later, I was on it.
“Agent Provocateur.” “Founder of agencies, creator of legends.” “Supernova.” I took these lines from the blurbs of George Lois’ book “Damn Good Advice (for people with talent!).”
Last week, we saw the end of the emphatic first season of Lena Dunham’s HBO television series, “Girls.” If you’d been moved by the show in spite of initial resistance, or felt no resistance at all, then the end of the 10-episode run might feel like an emotional scapegoat has just been snatched from its herd. The awkward, hot-and-cold willfulness of the show’s self-obsessed lead, Hannah Horvath, played by Lena Dunham, is someone that 20-somethings on monetary parental guidance seem to identify with. But is Lena Dunham about to wear the diamond crown of the zeitgeist? Is the jobless, directionless “me, me, me” attitude of her character, Hannah Horvath, the one clear voice amidst our cackling individualistic generation?
