I have nothing against stories of the paranormal and the dark gothic, which most mainstream broadcast media seem to spew out during the Halloween and All-Souls season, massively to the point of surfeit and silliness. Continue reading “I have nothing against the paranormal and dark gothic, and yet…”
The lugaw stall with no name
I’ve been eating lugaw (aka rice porridge, aka congee) all my life.
I started at home, associating lugaw with the usual spells of childhood flu, as standard bedside comfort food offered by my worried mother. Hence evolved my lifelong love affair with proletarian lugaw bangketa, savored with satisfaction in working-class districts and poor people’s markets, especially after I became a full-time activist in the early 1970s. Continue reading “The lugaw stall with no name”
Nimble memories of Padi Solang
Describing Padi Solang could sound somewhat like the song that describes Maria von Trapp in the famous 1960s musical hit, The Sound of Music: “a flibbertigibbet, a will o’the wisp, a clown… how do you catch a cloud and pin it down?”
There are a few other parallels between Padi and Maria: their religious background, and their love of the hills “alive with the sound of music,” for example. But these points are mostly superficial. In more substantial matters, Padi Solang is sui generis and sans rival, full of elan and eclat and panache and all other superlative Latin and French terms I could think of.
