WALA LANG OIL ON OAK Adoration of the Kings, Jan Gossaert (National Gallery of Art, London) The Three Kings arrived in Bethlehem bringing to the Child Jesus gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Everyone knows gold but frankincense and myrrh? Used in religious ceremonies, they came from faraway...
WALA LANG The year after the stars and stripes were lowered in 1946, the Philippines and France established diplomatic relations. Various cultural events are marking the event’s 75th anniversary. Sponsored by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, the French Embassy and the Cultural...
WALA LANG With a bit of prodding, barbers can be loquacious. Ranny Perlas was late, he apologized, because he had to walk all the way from his apartment in Santa Ana to the Makati CBD barber shop. The previous week, he continued, he was waiting for the red light to change when a speeding car turned...
The secrets of the Malacañan Palace as told by someone who grew up there WALA LANG …‘mid pleasures and palaces, though not many can think of a palace as home. Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos Jr. is one of the few who can. His family moved there when he was eight years old and there he stayed in the...
WALA LANG Rainwater was forever flooding the sala so my wife and I decided to roof the rear terrace and make it into a library. We removed the heavy wood and glass sliding doors, replacing them with arches and columns that I discovered in a junk shop on España near Welcome Rotonda. That was in...
WALA LANG The house—mansion actually—of his grandmother’s grandfather still stands and Álvaro Bartolomé Ruiz was awestruck. He lives in Madrid, visiting the Philippines for the first time. Bartolomé’s ancestor Valentín Teus (1832-1909) was from Navarra at the foot of the Pyrenees. At...
WALA LANG The State of the Nation (SONA) delivered by President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. last week is the roadmap of the journey we are beginning. The mission is clear: (a) for GDP (goods and services produced, net of imports) to grow by 6.5 percent to 8.0 percent each year from 2023 until 2028; (b)...
WALA LANG I could and probably should have stuck to equities like San Miguel and Ayala Corporation. As it was, my savings have been going to paintings, books, and the open-ended list of what ex-friends called junk. Not that it was money badly spent. The Ang Kiukoks and HR Ocampos I got as a toiling...
WALA LANG I was seated at dinner recently with two gentlemen from Vietnam who happened to be here in the early 1980s. They remarked that then, Vietnam was importing a lot of things from here, including food. One thing led to another and the conversation led to how come it’s now the other way...
WALA LANG Among the barong-clad sekyu trying to be invisible, sweating equipment-bearers, staff members with pen and pads in hand, newsmen, nurses, and doctors following cigar-chomping President Fidel V. Ramos was the 21-year-old Jojo T. Terencio, neophyte reporter. His task was to write official...
WALA LANG In response to the charge that the Marcoses will now rewrite history, Senator Imee Marcos replied that they will simply try to present their side. Indeed the past 36 years as well as the recent campaign demonstrates what an 18th century biographer said, “it is the victor who writes...
WALA LANG In three days, the 17th President of the Philippines, Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos, Jr., is taking his oath of office on the front steps of the National Gallery of Art. That is the very place where in 1935, the Philippine Commonwealth was inaugurated and Manuel L. Quezon sworn in as...
