A day of thanks and giving
THIS great holiday of thanks and giving is not a date on a calendar, but a state of mind. It is about our capacity to realize things that we can,…
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Gone but not forgotten
IT has been five years since the ignominy of a conscious and premeditated crime, where 58 people (32 of them were media workers) were slaughtered on a hill top in…
Under the weather
CALL it the pompous sickness—the spell which hushes the household, with its desert-like stillness felt through its innermost chambers. One in a world unto herself, her own theater. It is…
Generally speaking: Brigadier General Alfredo S. Lim
AT THE center of crime is a brotherhood of hard men, who fight for whatever justice is possible on this deadly world. They’re called cops, whose battle for a little…
People watching as we age
Everywhere people are talking about themselves, discussing their doings, their loves, their fighting, their poems, their goals, their music, their meeting their movies, their millions, their misfortunes—their celebrity (or notoriety)…
Aboard a floating carnival
The most notable about time in an ocean voyage is that it is so purely relative. What a fragment is in space, a moment is in time. We sailed in…
October to Remember
It was a month of passion, erudition, pastimes but mostly politics and government at every turn both here and across our country: in a trove of bemused reflection, of follies,…
Once upon a time in newspapering
THE fall season always brings something new that will astonish us. Let the leaves fall, leaves leave, fall falls. But perhaps ushering the season comes with the promise of new…
A table for one
The operating room could be likened to a theater: cupboards hold tanks of oxygen, refrigerators are filled with bags of blood and a table for one—besides where laid out a…
The agonizing malady of writer’s block
How strange, the demented feeling it gives me. I realized that I have spent agonizing whole days before a pen and a notebook, with nothing better to do but jot…
The delicate dance of the publisher and the advertiser
“THAT, if all printers were determined not to print anything, till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed… That I got five schillings by…
The Philippine Development Foundation (PhilDev): Ideas worth supporting
FUNDraising is not a game, not a social commentary or a religious revelation. It is not the breeding ground for the trite or shallow. To say “Enough of fundraisings” is…
The frenzy for awards
It is not just the celebrity allure. It is the public, acclaim, the attention, the limelight. It’s a cut above all. Everytime you turn around, someone’s winning an award for…
‘La Traviata, the woman gone astray’
OPERA was born in Italy at the end of the 16th century. Some say that opera is a stepchild of the arts—a sort of mongrel offspring to ballet, music, drama—and…
One is a lonely number
LAS VEGAS – On this dry, heated day and hour in September, the whole city is breathing and heaving like a tired beast. On the strip that controlled all the luxurious…
Ivy Violan: An evening of her love story
BEING a writer on the frontlines of culture and music, I am faced with the task of writing a piece that will not only tell about a performance, but the…
Cancer is not a death sentence
I HAVE no expiration date. And I know more clearly than ever, that each day is a treasure gift to be lived to the fullest—till tomorrow comes. Having cancer invites…
The passion of teachers
CULVER CITY — There is that saying: “Those who can, do; Those who can’t, teach.” It is insulting. The prestige is still there. Teaching is a very serious pursuit that…
A widow’s lament
FOR such a monumental thing to be accomplished in seconds defies logic. In fact, it was almost insulting, but there it was. It happened in less time than it took…
The gaiety and freedom at San Francisco’s Castro
SAN FRANCISCO – With the Pacific at their shoes, people roam, dream and venture in San Francisco’s dazzling waterfront, winding streets and hills halfway through the skies. They scale the…
The responsibility of choice
IN the legends I have read thIn the legends I have read that males wrote to explain life, it was said that the first human creature was a man called…
Pacquiao-Algieri fight ushers a new dawn of boxing promotion
CENTURY CITY – The small sensation of power that a press pass can give (it gets you past the first guards) ebbs quickly once you’re in corridors of an international…
The tyranny of gossip
Some love or hate it, others write or repeat it. But the obsession with gossip seems here to stay. From what we read and see, from the unholy and unchanging…
The Artists
ARTISTS are those few anywhere whose gifts set them apart; who by talent and wisdom and integrity are superior. As of late, at the Ford Theater Walt Disney Concert Hall…
Dance lovers
It is not the kind of column one usually pursues. There was no edge to it, no compelling plot, no dynamic of change. It’s about a lot of dance lovers with…
Thank heavens there are cops!
I went through the grinder back in the Philippines as a crime reporter of a tabloid (People’s Tonight) that started off by exploiting shame and facilitated rage to work up…
Of Doctors and the Literati
BEVERLY HILLS – Everyone will agree that if you exercise and eat right and don’t smoke or drink or annoy a cop, you’ll never die. I have been told that…
A little boy starting kindergarten
IT was love at first sight. As soon as I set my eyes on him, no one else mattered inside the room. I stood there on one sweet Thursday, cradling…