Qwertyman for Monday, December 18, 2023 MAYBE IT’S that time of year, when we get all wishful and start asking for things that will likely never come or never happen—like peace on earth and goodwill to men—but it’s the wishing that keeps us human. Two weekends ago, I had the extraordinary privilege of spending Saturday night and then Sunday morning listening to two different concerts. The first, at Manila Pianos in Magallanes, featured tenor Arthur Espiritu and soprano Stefanie Quintin Avila in a program that brought the audience to its feet and singing along at the end of many encores. After ..read more

Qwertyman for Monday, January 22, 2024 THERE WAS a lot of snickering around the local Internet a couple of weeks ago when the University of the Philippines announced that it was going to offer a course on the American megastar Taylor Swift. “Why???” seemed to be the most common hair-trigger response, expressing consternation over the need or rationale for such a course. “This is where your taxes go,” lamented another netizen. The clear suggestion was that spending a semester—that’s 16 weeks—on a pop phenomenon like Taylor Swift was a grandiose and frivolous waste of teaching time and people’s ..read more

Qwertyman for Monday, August 21, 2023 THE HON. Victor M. Dooley was in a foul mood, and no one knew that better than his Chief Political Officer and rumored girlfriend, Yvonne Macahiya. When his whiskers began to twitch like he was about to sneeze—but didn’t—then something was upsetting her boss. He was trying to say something but couldn’t find the words for it, so his pursed lips went this way and that way, and Yvonne understood that it was an SOS from the senator whose maiden speech she had crafted a year earlier. “What’s up, boss? Looks like you have a great idea trying to wiggle out of yo ..read more

Penman for Sunday, October 1, 2023 PINOYS WHO came of age in the 1990s like our daughter Demi, born 1974, will swear by “Ang Huling El Bimbo” as their collective anthem—not just the song, but the whole musical and its score by the Eraserheads, who might as well be Martians to Beatles and Woodstock fans like me. On her last vacation her from her long and happy life in California, Demi made sure that she and her cousin KC got to see the show, no matter the cost, and the two girls stepped out of the theater misty-eyed.  It got me wondering if our generation—boomers, I think we’re called—had ..read more

Penman for Sunday, January 1, 2023 IT’s BAD enough to be out of touch with the present, so it must be worse to be out of touch with the past—or at least, someone else’s past.  Nothing reminded me more starkly of the great divides that exist between generations than last month’s Eraserheads reunion concert, hailed by its attendees as nothing less than the Second Coming. “A spectacle unto itself. It was like mix-mashing the Super Bowl’s half-time show and a rock concert. Except it went one better as it was also like one four-hour-long karaoke set,” wrote reviewer Rick Olivares in the  ..read more

Penman for Sunday, February 5, 2023 WE CELEBRATE National Arts Month in February in the Philippines, but it came a little early for me this year, in a January packed full of memorable cultural events that reminded me of how much we’ve missed during the long pandemic.  First off was a trip to Bacolod for a preview of the celebrated theater director Anton Juan’s new film, Amon Banwa Sa Lawud (Our Island of the Mangrove Moons). I’d known, of course, of Anton’s stellar work in theater for many decades now, but this was the first foray of his into cinema that I was aware of, and I—a ..read more

Penman for Sunday, February 6, 2022 YOU’VE BEEN reading about some of my book-buying adventures and the most unlikely places I’ve found some of my most valuable books—like a 1551 book of English essays under a lamppost in Cubao, a signed first edition of Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart at Jollibee on Commonwealth Avenue, and an 1868 two-volume facsimile of Don Quixote at a McDonald’s on that same road. Now here’s an incredible story that happened to me one night a couple of weeks ago—very late that night, just as I was about to go to bed. Beng had just finished an ..read more

Hindsight for Monday, April 18, 2022 ONE OF the most troubling episodes of the war now raging in Ukraine happened a couple of weeks ago not in Kyiv or the eastern region—where ghastly atrocities have taken place—but in Penza, a city in western Russia. A 55-year-old teacher named Irina Gen was arrested after a student reportedly taped her remarks criticizing the Russian invasion; the student’s parents got the tape, and turned it in to the authorities, who went after Ms. Gen. She now faces up to ten years in prison for violating the newly minted law against “spreading fake news” about Russia. E ..read more

Penman for Monday, September 27, 2021 TWO YEARS ago, just before the Covid pandemic turned the world upside down, another and much less noticed reversal took place. Ending a 33-year trend, vinyl records outsold CDs—1.24 million records toting up $224 million in global sales, according to Music Times. You’d think that grandparents the world over had launched a conspiracy to buy out the remaining stock of Mantovani, The Lettermen, and the Ray Conniff Singers, but no—70 percent of the buyers were millennials under 35. Audiophile Eric Teel says that “Music lovers have long treated vinyl with ..read more