Categories
Menagerie Menagerie Feature

Thrifts, threads, and things: Manila’s best markets and thrift shops

Some might argue that shopping is a mundane chore meant for the bare necessities like the sheets you haven’t replaced in five years and the occasional lamp for your aunt’s birthday, while others will say that retail therapy is the way to go. For the latter folk, sometimes all it takes is a new bag…

Categories
Menagerie

Tago Jazz Bar: A dive of blazing passion and chilled drinks

The local music scene is a boiling pot of offbeat characters and personalities. As it continues to flourish, it becomes easier for genres and specific tastes to find a home among the array of bars and venues scattered around the city. Classic rock fans might find themselves along one of the indistinct streets in Makati…

Categories
Menagerie Feature

What’s your favorite thing about Christmas?

“I know it might sound shallow, but the little things get me excited the most—like holiday edition drinks from Starbucks, and Christmas jazz music. Of course, on the more intimate side, it’s the one time a year that I get to unite with my relatives; even just having my mom and cousin with me is…

Categories
Menagerie Menagerie Feature

Quiapo’s ‘Believe it or not’: Of witch doctors and spells

The streets of Quiapo are paved with a precarious aura. The air reeks of a bygone era once Manila’s finest, but has since become home to an ineffable assortment of characters, obscurities, and gems unique to the historical district. It is ironic that the grounds, which the venerated Quiapo Church stands on, is also home…

Categories
Menagerie Menagerie Feature

Cinema ‘76: The little cinema that could

It was the year 1976–the magnum opus era in Philippine Cinema that saw the birth of Lino Brocka’s Insiang, Eddie Romero’s Ganito Kami Noon, Paano Kayo Ngayon?, and Ishmael Bernal’s Nunal Sa Tubig, to name a few. There were no oversaturated plots of hacienda love stories, or marriage scandals with the housekeeper–mainstream films that capitalized…

Categories
Menagerie Menagerie Feature

Breakup playlist: Singles for the single again

Breakups are messy. Anyone who tells you they ended “on good terms” forgot to include the part where they stayed up for three days moping in between watching re-runs of The O.C. and frantically refreshing their ex’s Twitter page every ten minutes, all while living off melted ice cream with tears for toppings. Few ever…

Categories
Menagerie

On getting tattoos: Our skin, our canvas

Beneath an orchestra of faint buzzing sounds and punk music, an artist sits intently by his canvas. This is Jason’s ideal creative environment. He has been a personal tattoo artist for seven years, and the human body is his Sistine Chapel. “Don’t be mistaken just because I like rock and roll and look like this,”…

Categories
Menagerie

Plato PH: The (dining) tables have turned

Years ago, in a small home in Sagada, Laurence Espiritu was welcomed by a family of three. However, he wasn’t there for an aunt’s birthday, nor was he greeted with a barrage of facial prods and “Hijo, ang laki mo na!”s. In fact, he didn’t know them at all. They were a family of strangers…

Categories
Menagerie

Deconstructing Transformative Learning

Much has been said about this generation’s learners—entitled to a vast plethora of knowledge and skills yet unwilling to put in work, impatient with a need for information now, and in possession of an attention span competitive to that of a goldfish. The typical “You talk, I listen” set-up between teacher and student that has…

Categories
Menagerie

The depressing state of depression

“They said I was crazy,” shares 18-year-old Erica, her gaze focused on her lap where her hands have been resting for the past half hour, as if proclaiming an internal apology. She is one of the many who have been slapped with vapid labels—“over dramatic”, “paranoid”, “too emotional”—just a few words among a myriad of…