Wala Lang HEARD ON HIGH Mark Kenedy Rocas on his flute, accompanied on the piano by Dr. Michelle Nicolasora Millennial musicians have been our unsung diplomats, so to speak. They generate goodwill and bring honor to the Philippines. Tenor Arthur Espiritu has been performing lead roles...
WALA LANG White-haired, bleary-eyed, wrinkled, and hearing-challenged seniors were once young. So were the men and women standing frozen on plaza pedestals. They all were once vigorous youths, had loves, disappointments, ambitions. A street in Paco and another at U.P. Diliman and a house in Taal...
A tour of heritage houses in Batangas, Bicol, Bulacan, and Boac Wala Lang … there’s no place like home. Most unusual was a Taal (Batangas) bahay-na-bato that was a bahay kubo in disguise. You wouldn’t notice the masquerade from outside. The home had the usual stone-walled ground floor and...
Wala Lang … there’s no place like an ancestral home. With the end of the Galleon Trade in 1815, the Spanish colonial government embarked on structural reform. Foreign trade, heretofore restricted to Spain and her colonies, was opened to other countries. Commercial agriculture was prioritized...
Wala Lang Small pieces of paper, tiny bits of metal—neither is edible nor useful but people work, fight, kill for them. Paper money and coins are the subject of Yaman: History and Heritage in Philippine Money , a weighty tome just published by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. Authored by...
Wala Lang Journalist Andrew J. Masigan points out the alarming results of a survey conducted by the OECD Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) of some 600,000 15-year-olds from 79 countries. Filipino teenagers ranked last in ability to comprehend lengthy narratives, to deal with...
Wala Lang Mactan was not an impressive place in the 16th century. As late as 44 years after Magellan’s stay, Miguel López de Legaspi found Mactan “swampy, largely inhospitable, and sparsely inhabited” by “some 300 indios in four or five small settlements.” It was strategically located...
Wala Lang The “Genesis” curtain by H.R. Ocampo, Tanghalang Nicanor Abelardo, CCP Enter the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Tanghalang Nicanór Abelardo and you’re greeted by a blaze of red, a giant tapestry. The artist, Hernando R. Ocampo, would have been 110 years old last month and...
Wala Lang (PART I) Salad bowls, giant spoons and forks, man-in-a-barrel, anyone?Our handicraft shops have plenty.Carved from our best woods, they attest not only to our ignorance of the value of what we have but also to our low regard for our natural endowment. Native forest tree seedlings ready...
Wala Lang BLURB I made it a point to sit beside fellow Dean Jose Joya during UP University Council meetings. It took a while for him to sell me a painting but he finally did, one of his first collages. Later, not knowing any better, I asked him for something in pink to match the bedroom wall of our...
WALA LANG VIEWS OF MANILA by José Honorato Lozano (photo courtesy of Leon Gallery) With a starting bid of five million, the super rare letras y figuras Views of Manila must have sold for an eye-watering sum in last Saturday’s Leon Gallery auction. It was painted in the 1840s by José Honorato...
WALA LANG Seniors old enough remember cannon booms, smoke, and flashes of light reaching Dewey Boulevard from across the bay, from Bataan and Corregidor where Filipino and American soldiers were making a stand against Japanese invaders. That was exactly 79 years ago in February 1942. Manila and...
