Categories
University

Lasting first impressions

Every candidate vying for the highest position in the University Student Government (USG) has a narrative. The incumbent. The angry. The experienced. The hopeful. Maybe a hodgepodge of all. We take a look back on the past five USG presidents and see what made them stand out during campaign week and throughout their term.  …

Categories
University

Campaign movers and shakers: Core members in the spotlight

“In a span of two weeks, I had five nosebleeds,” Mark Jacinto (III, BS-FIN) of Alyansang Tapat sa Lasalista (Tapat) confesses. This was during the 2015 General Elections, when the campaign failed to reach a voter turnout of 50 percent plus one vote. Mark had not been fielded as a candidate, but showed up every…

Categories
Menagerie

A Tale of Love and Darkness: A boy’s recollection

Last June 8th at the Teresa Yuchengco Auditorium, the Israeli Embassy hosted the 14th Israeli Film Festival with a showing of Natalie Portman’s directorial debut, A Tale of Love and Darkness. This year’s theme for the festival was “Romance in the Holy Land,” featuring Israeli films which will be available for viewing in different Cinematheque…

Categories
Headlines Menagerie

The 22nd Metro Manila Pride Festival: Letting love in

On June 28, 1969, the very first gay riot broke out in New York. It was a time and place that shunned homosexuals, and it was normal for police back then to raid clubs and bars that made a home for homosexuals to drink and socialize. But on that day, in the Stonewall Inn, members of…

Categories
Menagerie

Hope for the Philippine literary scene

Last April 28 and 29, the National Book Development Board (NBDB) held the 7th Philippine International Literary Festival at the QCX Quezon City Memorial Circle as part of the celebration of National Literature Month. With the unifying theme Against Forgetting, delegates and festival-goers conversed with respected authors and burgeoning contemporary Filipino writers. The program was…

Categories
Menagerie

Writing for others: Joel Griffith’s process of self-creation

It was in the early months of 2015 that Joel Griffiths (III, ADV) started writing a screenplay about two friends on the cusp of change. Flipping through Facebook, he came across a poster for Crossroads 12, a festival of student theater production in DLSU-College of St. Benilde, with the theme Autopoiesis, auto meaning “self” and…

Categories
Menagerie

Of Barbies and bleaching: Our notions of beauty

Before my older sister went away for college, she left me with her makeshift box of Barbie dolls in a moment that felt rather ceremonious. When she came back that first summer, she found that I had already split the legs apart, displaced the head from the body, and removed the left arm from its…

Categories
Menagerie

The manifold lives of nuns

Once, while riding the train, I sat next to a nun reading the Bible. She wore a religious habit, with her arms covered up to her wrists, legs pressed close, eyes focused downwards.  Maybe she loved the man in the book. And maybe there was no real difference between her love and my love for…

Categories
Menagerie

Notes on our social media identities

Who remembers the time when the only way we could make friends was to be invited to someone’s table in the cafeteria during recess, the walk both exhilarating and excruciating as you fixed your skirt and approached a group of strangers? Or how about those long telephone calls with a high school crush that seemed…

Categories
Menagerie

Scenes from Performatura

The Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) opened its doors for its inaugural literature festival, Performatura, last November 6, 7, and 8. To enter, no fee was required—only the donation of a book, be it fresh and glossy or old and battered. With the goal of exploring intertextuality, the event created a place where the…