Yap: Confesor and CNU
SO, what’s your narrative?”
You can imagine the former labor secretary and now professor for the Asian Institute of Management Nieves Confesor tossing the question to Cebu Normal University (CNU) board of regents secretary Leodinito Cañete, who was taken aback. The latter came to give...
Yap: Art and tabloids
HERE are some of the things this man did. He brought photography to the level of assault, taking pictures of the Forbidden City, flashed a dirty finger at the foreground and called it art. He took serial photographs of him dropping and smashing ancient, sacred china. He installed a collage of a...
Yap: Art appreciation 101
THE cross-fire surrounding the installation work of artist Mideo Cruz’s “Poleteismo” threw me back to that inglorious time when the MTRCB shut off the theaters for Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” because something in it made a close circle of morality guards puke—a “pumping scene” and a “frontal...
Yap: Rubbish
CERTAINLY, it isn’t just because the law asks for it, but because you care so much about your city that you wield enough will to get tough about segregation. You are mayor, and whenever you get the opportunity, you speak of shaping up your city regardless of cost—political or financial.
Yap: CNU Centennial
WE were in this 30-seater tramvia, and this lady tour guide told us to raise our hands. Everybody did so, and at that point, the road went on a steep descent. “Welcome to Corregidor Island’s roller-coaster ride!” That was when we knew we were in for a mad tour with a crazy guide.
Now,...
Yap: Dizzy
THAT strange house in your neighborhood, the one on whose towering fence you have religiously inscribed “Pikoy was here,” keeps Muammar Gadhafi or Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Or you may not have noticed, too, that last week, in the middle of the night, while you were set to catch the unscrupulous...
Yap: Virtual summer
SUMMER'S outdoor part is confined to driving off for siopao in a favorite Chinese restaurant or some quick midnight runs in Asiatown, and that’s it. This column isn’t going to talk about “pristine, white sands,” “breath-taking zip-lines,” “sweeping panorama of green mountains,” “spicy,...
Yap: Spirit
IT WAS probably The Script playing “Nothing” on the car stereo that did it, but the door ended up locked while the engine was still on and there was no duplicate key. Or maybe it was my good friend Oking playing the role of a curber, seeing to it the car was safe from the barbecue stand as I...
Yap: No Thief Village
Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s novel “Song of Solomon” has improbable and magical bits and pieces of historical grounding of character and place names.
The character Milkman, for instance, was named so after he was seen as a baby with an insatiable gusto for breastmilk.
The novel...
Yap:‘Little Miss Sunshine’
THE movie won multiple awards, let us be past that fact. The screenwriter Michael Arndt was inspired by a newspaper article where Arnold Schwarzenegger spoke to a bunch of high school students, saying, “If there’s one thing in this world I hate, it’s losers. I despise them.”
Yap: To Batch 2011
A STUDENT in a class exercise wrote about what he went through the morning he was set for school. Unable to send him out with something in his pocket, the mother asked his son to borrow money from a neighbor, the owner of a convenience store. That wasn’t supposed to be too hard, but that day...
Yap: Impermanence
“WHEN the earth gapes my body to entomb,/I justly may complain of such doom…” Thus Voltaire wrote in “Poeme sur le desastre de Lisbonne.” This was the poet raging in the dark aftermath of the Great Lisbon Earthquake in 1755. In effect, he was saying it was okay to wail and howl against the...
Yap: The Big Wave
ON THE day the big wave loomed over Miyagi, I was listening to poet Marjorie Evasco giving a lecture on the teaching of poetry to a crowd of teachers and graduate students. Some strange stroke of nature made it a point that she should mention Japanese literature, particularly the haiku, Murasako...
Yap: Windmills of your mind
WINDMILLS, in Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote, stood as archetypes of giants. Or so that was how the protagonist, the retired country gentleman Alonso Quixano, who later renamed himself for a windmill-slaying adventure as Don Quixote de la Mancha, saw the giant stand fans before him.
Yap: Ricky Lee
SO HE'D lecture on the topic we were yet trying to define. The audience the following day would be eclectic—mass communication students, creative writing classes, teachers, independent film makers, media, graduate students, literature students, Noranians, Vilmanians, and maybe showbiz hopefuls...
Yap: Like a bridge over-troubled
THIS one is a little bit self-serving, although it connects a bit to the voguish string of leaps and stunts on buildings and bridges these past days. I wrote a short story some years ago about a man who, stuck in his solitude, literal and metaphorical, finds himself at the supposed conclusion of...
Yap: Learning to shudder
THERE'S a tale in the Brothers Grimm stories about the boy who sets forth to learn what fear is. His father asks him what he wanted to know that will help him make a living. “I want to learn to shudder,” says the boy. The elder brother, supposedly endowed with better gray matter, says, “What a...
Yap: Whistleblower site
WHILE conducting a joint checkpoint/__MP CO fired on a vehicle when the driver failed to obey the posted warnings and commands of the IPS who were manning the checkpoint.
The vehicle, A__Sedan (NFI) with two occupants, approached the checkpoint and attempted to bypass.
“IPS...
Yap: Killing our fathers
IN THE the third sequel of the epic “The Godfather,” Michael Corleone dies unceremoniously—alone in a chair outside his villa in Sicily, he falls in the dust while a lone dog hovers over him. Nobody seems to mourn over a man who had become totally evil.
Yap: Unblinking human eye
JUST to give you a kind of context. When the Lumiere brothers in France in 1895 invented the cinematographe, the first successful motion picture camera, the mechanical contraption was treated as an “unblinking human eye.”
The human eye, snugly placed in the skull’s socket, has a limited...
Yap: Community
SO WE found ourselves scaling the mucky slopes of this mountain barangay called Capaculan in our junior year in college. Although, some rain and cursing jumbled the name into “Calapucan.”
The program required us to go to the barangays and spread the good news to the poor communities—the...
Yap: Press freedom as CSR
AFRICAN-born journalist Dele Olojede won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his stories on the Rwandan genocide. The New York Newsday, the paper he was writing for, didn’t quite last long afterwards, so he set up his own in Nigeria, a newspaper called Next.
Journalist...
Yap: Bearded dreams
WHEN I was a kid, I swore I’d grow a Fu Manchu, and it was all the fault of the Shaolin masters. I thought the straight and pointed spires gave them extra-sensory powers, detecting the tiniest hint of a flying kick or a spitting cobra, and enabled the masters an effortless parry. Just like the...
Yap: Depression
IN A graduate school literature class, a student felt uncomfortable over a recent reading.
Yap: ‘Sangtuwaryo’
IN Jovy Taghoy-Gerodias’s Sun.Star Cebu report yesterday, Dexter Yaun, 22, went fishing with his father off Tominjao, Daanbantayan last Tuesday.
