Soundtrip Sundays

Sunday is nearly over. The last few hours of the weekend are bittersweet. On one hand, your mind is racing, prepping that to-do list for the work week ahead, mentally beating yourself up for all the personal things you wanted to complete over the weekend: that book you always told yourself you’d write, the painting [...]

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

Anne Frank had just turned thirteen. Like any other adolescent, she undergoes physical and emotional changes that are a source of both curiosity and frustrations that she records in her diary as letters to an imaginary friend named “Kitty”. However, Anne Frank is no ordinary schoolgirl; she is a Jew living in Amsterdam during the [...]

A Burmese Day

“The struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma is a struggle for life and dignity. It is a struggle that encompasses our political, social and economic aspirations.” – Aung San Suu Kyi Even from a distance, I could tell that the port town of Kawthaung would be intense. The buzz of market vendors, hustle [...]

Berlin Stories: Part 1

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.” – Christopher Isherwood, 1930 Waiting. That’s what happens when you get older. When [...]

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

The God of Small Things begins with a quotation from the writer John Berger: “Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one.” Thus, even as the novel dives into non-linear, multi-voiced perspectives, it is built around the experiences of the twins, Rahel and her brother Estha, the “small things” [...]

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

Losing a loved one is a traumatic experience–especially if the cause of his or her death is, by its very nature, incomprehensible. Nine-year-old Oskar Schell finds solace in the unexpected death of his father–a victim of 9/11–by throwing himself, obssessively, into solving the mystery of  a key found, hidden, inside a vase owned by his [...]

New Wave Revolutionaries: The Sleepyheads

Orchestra conductor Leopold Stokowski once said, “A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.” While most people see music and visual art as separate entities, The Sleepyheads, often serving as the opening act in Manila’s premier galleries such as Silverlens and Mo’s space, construct their songs to serve as the [...]

Memories of a volcano

In Barrio Barretto, everything was an adventure. It was just me, my dad and my pal, Hotdog—a black-and-gray dachshund whose thunderous bark made up for his small size. Days were spent investigating tide pools, digging up sand worms, chasing the neighbor’s chickens and testing how far out into the water we could take the inflatable [...]

Three Women

“Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not.” — James Joyce As the hotel elevator doors opened, I wondered what my mother and grandmother would say to me. I was going to join them for a tour through Europe. I had not seen my family since I [...]

Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes

In his first poem, Fulbright Scholars, Ted Hughes predicts the wonderful disaster that would be his romance with Sylvia Plath: It was the first peach             I ever tasted             I could hardly believe             how delicious             At twenty-five I was dumbfounded             By my ignorance of the             Simplest things Published in 1998, [...]