Your Weekend Guide (nov 6)
EVENTS
The online shopping discovery platform Takatack kicks off the holiday shopping season with its E-Deals Carnival, which will give consumers up to 80% off from purchases on over 40 different lifestyle brands, until Nov. 15. The shopping carnival on Takatak.com features items ranging from clothes and shoes to fragrances and bicycles. Consumers can find discounted products from a variety of merchants, including Zalora. Zalora shoppers can also use the discount code “ZCARNIVAL” to get an 18% discount on a purchase of P1,000 or more during the promo period. Other lifestyle brands include Tern Bicycles, Scent Swatch, Hickok Leather, Del Mundo Body Jewelry, Style Compass, Fashion Hub, Angeline Shoes, OMF Literature, Chaser Action Sports, Fledge Clothing, and Sophia Love Fragrances. All merchants participating in Takatack’s E-Deals Carnival can be found in the special promo page www.takatack.com/pages/e-deals.
EXHIBITS
On Nov. 16, the nation celebrates the 125th Birth Anniversary of Elpidio Quirino, the 6th President of the Philippines, who rebuilt a Philippines devastated by war. To celebrate the man, a commemorative exhibit will run from Nov. 7 to 28 at the Ayala Museum, Makati City. Largely drawn from the Filipinas Heritage Library and the President Elpidio Quirino Foundation’s rich collection of papers and memorabilia, Defining Quirino highlights stories of one statesman’s journey from teacher to president, his vision and achievements, and his deep sense of humanity. Designed to resemble a dictionary, the exhibit features words associated with Quirino and gives their meaning through vignettes of his life and legacy. It will also feature a tribute wall of 125 portraits of the President, contributed by 125 artists, friends, and family in honor of Quirino. A series of events will also be held on all Saturdays of November: A lecture by Manuel Quezon III during the exhibit opening on Nov. 7; a talk by former White Russian refugee Natalie Sabelnik, and a concert featuring Russian Folk Singer and former refugee Nikolai Massenkoff with the Manila Symphony Orchestra on Nov. 14; a lecture by historian Ambeth Ocampo on Nov. 21; and the book launch of Elpidio and Alicia: The Love Letters on Nov. 28. This exhibition at the 2nd floor of Ayala Museum is free and open to the public. Group tours to the exhibit are also available upon request. For inquiries and group tour reservations, e-mail asklibrarian@filipinaslibrary.org.ph, or call 759-8288 local 36.
Art Informal gallery presents several art exhibits that will run until Nov. 21: The Wit of the Staircase by Christina Quisumbing Ramilo, a collection of works that imaginatively re-purpose what is abandoned; Pam Yan- Santos’ Filling Up the Big Room, a series of paintings and installation; and, Violent Noon by Kitty Kaburo, who uses time-lapse video and mixed-media pieces. Art Informal gallery is located at 277 Connecticut St., Greenhills East, Mandaluyong City. For details, call 725-8518, or 0918-899-2698, or visit www.artinformal.com.
The Metropolitan Museum of Manila takes its turn in celebrating the 50 creative years of National Artist BenCab (Benedicto Cabrera) with a retrospective exhibition that will run until Feb. 27. The museum is located at the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Complex, Roxas Blvd., Manila. For details, e-mail info@metmuseum.ph.
Pablo The Fort presents Juni Salvador’s Artshistory until Nov. 28. The gallery is located at C-11 South of Market, 11th and 24th Sts., Bonifacio Global City, Taguig. For details, call 400-7905, 0927-454-8442, or e-mail fort@pablogalleries.com.
In celebration of a recently launched book on the life and art of Roberto Chabet, considered the father of Philippine conceptual art, an exhibit of his works are on display at MO_Space, MOS Design, Bonifacio High Street, Bonifacio Global City, Taguig. The exhibit runs until Nov. 22. For details, call 856-7915, 0917-572-7975, e-mail mospaceph@gmail.com, or visit www.mo-space.net.
Samsung Electronics Philippines and the Yuchengco Museum present a tribute exhibition to National Artist for Visual Arts Benedicto “BenCab” Cabrera who is is marking 50 years as an artist. The interactive exhibit, dubbed BenCab in Two Movements, is on view at the museum until Jan. 16. The exhibition highlights handpicked works he created to capture the dance movements of London-based Chinese dancer San Lee, and Polish dancer and choreographer Paulina Wycichowska. Through Samsung’s SUHD and UHD TV technologies, BenCab in Two Movements hopes to provide museum visitors immersive experiences at the same time curatorial information on shared art experiences between a painter and a dancer. Yuchengco Museum is located at the RCBC Plaza, Ayala Ave. cor. Sen. Gil J. Puyat Ave., Makati City. For details e-mail info@yuchengcomuseum.org or visit yuchengcomuseum.org.
Until Nov. 21, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) presents The Vexed Contemporary featuring 16 Filipino artists whose practices lend themselves to a global compass. They are: Pio Abad, Poklong Anading, Victor Balanon, Yason Banal, Lena Cobangbang, Louie Cordero, Kiri Dalena, Leslie De Chavez, Kawayan De Guia, Patricia Perez Eustaquio, Cocoy Lumbao, Gina Osterloh, Gary-Ross Pastrana, Ikoy Ricio, Maria Taniguchi, and The Weather Bureau. MCAD is at De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde, School of Design and Arts Campus, Vito Cruz, Malate, Manila. For details, e-mail mcad@benilde.edu.ph, call 230-5100 loc 3897, or visit www.mcadmanila.org.ph.
The Mind Museum presents A Glass of the Sea, an immersive, interactive and constantly updated exhibition on the discoveries from the Verde Island Passage in the Philippines, also dubbed as the “center of the center of marine biodiversity.” The exhibit runs until the end of the year, then will go on tour around the country. The Mind Museum is at JY Campos Park, 3rd Ave., Bonifacio Global City. For details, call 909-6463.
PERFORMANCE
Michael Jackson impersonator E’ Casanova presents The World’s Greatest Michael Jackson Experience on Nov. 6, 8 p.m., at the Midas Tent, Midas Hotel and Casino, Roxas Blvd., Pasay City. Tickets range in price from P2,752.50 to P3,853.50 at TicketWorld (891-9999, ticketworld.com.ph).
The Tokyo Manila Jazz & Arts Festival 2015 will be held on Nov. 6, 7:30 p.m., at the Carlos P. Romulo Auditorium, RCBC Plaza, Ayala Ave. cor. Gil Puyat Ave., Makati City; and on Nov. 7 at Aruga, Rockwell, Makati. The Nov. 6 performance features Charito, Mon David, Tetsuro Kawashima, Yuki Arimasa, Kamura, Andrew Dickeson, Igor, Baihana, Isabella Gonzales, Philippine Youth Symphonic Band, ETS Septet, and Cris Villonco. The Nov. 7 show focuses on Latin Sounds, with Charito, Mon David, Tetsuro Kawashima, Yuki Arimasa, Kamura, and Andrew Dickeson. There will be a Young Artists Jam (free concert), on Nov. 8, at Greenbelt 5, Ayala, Makati, with Bratpack, Verve, Charito, Tetsuro Kawashima, Yuki Arimasa, Kamura, Andrew Dickeson, and Tricia Garcia. Tickets for the Nov. 6 show range in price from P1,045 to P3,657.50 at TicketWorld (891-9999, ticketworld.com.ph). For tickets,
The next big thing in Korean beauty: muscles
SEOUL — Looks no longer center only on the face in beauty-obsessed South Korea, where more women are hitting the gym to improve muscle tone and physical health.
Activision bets you will want to watch pros play video games
Activision Blizzard, Inc., the largest US-based video game creator, is forming a division to target the fast-growing business of eSports, where video game players compete against each other for prizes in front of live and online audiences.
Why is Downton Abbey just like Walking Dead?
The Binge
Jessica Zafra
IT SEEMED that Downton Abbey, like the zombie apocalypse, would never end. And yet the series created and written by Julian Fellowes will close this sixth season.
Rio reintroduces howler monkeys after century’s absence
RIO DE JANEIRO — Scientists have given Rio de Janeiro something to shout about with the reintroduction of howler monkeys to the city’s famed Tijuca forest after a century’s absence.
Tijuca, a thick forest rising up to the towering Corcovado and statue of Christ the Redeemer, is one of the world’s largest urban woodlands. But environmental degradation has stripped the area of its fauna.
Now, Brazilian scientists are working to bring those riches back, including by releasing native howler monkeys, properly know as Alouattas.
“The howlers disappeared more than 100 years ago. We decided to reintroduce them because it is a resistant species. They essentially eat leaves and fruits, so they are relatively easy to reintroduce,” said Fernando Fernandez, a scientist with the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
The first five monkeys were released in early September, a key moment in the program which has been in the works since 2010.
And the creatures are more than just a pretty — or furry — face.
In addition to filling the silent forest with their trademark cries, the monkeys’ excrement, pushed around by dung beetles, helps fertilize soil and trees.
That’s important because the authorities also want to save the endangered Atlantic forest, which once covered the Brazilian coast but today is reduced to about 7% of what European explorers would have found 500 years ago.
In Rio, the Tijuca forest covers 39.5 square kilometers and has been preserved despite being just minutes from neighborhoods of the teeming city which will host next year’s Olympics.
Tijuca administrator Enresto Vivero de Castro says the area can become “a laboratory for the rebuilding of the fauna that could work for other parts of the world.”
DELICATE RELATIONSHIPS
The first monkeys let loose in Tijuca were all rescued from animal traffickers.
The modest speed of the project reflects the care needed to avoid any monkey business between potentially conflicting groups of the primates.
“The howler is the biggest monkey of the Atlantic Forest after the spider monkey. We got five individuals — three males and two females — and before releasing them we let them interact for five months in our research center,” Mr. Fernandez said.
“It’s very important because the Alouattas form social groups and stay together in the forest.”
The pioneering animals are already one down from their original number.
The dominant male Chico expelled a young male named Cesar, so researchers pulled him from the project.
However, Cesar should get a second chance with another group down the road.
Scientists monitoring the four identify the males by a bracelet and the females by a collar. Early reports are that things are going well.
“A month and a half later they are doing fine and are pretty close to where we released them,” Mr. Fernandez said.
“There was some concern when the group met some capuchin monkeys, which are more aggressive. But in the end there wasn’t a problem.”
The more familiar danger to wildlife — humanity — will also have to play its part.
“We hope visitors won’t feed them because that can be fatal. Dogs are a danger too,” Mr. Fernandez said.
The plan now is to release new groups of howler monkeys over the next four years to create a self-sustaining population.
A similar program reintroduced rodents called cutias and also seeks to repopulate Tijuca with sloths, endangered golden lion tamarins and other native animals. — AFP
MERS, Ebola, bird flu: Science’s big missed opportunities
LONDON — Anyone who goes down with flu in Europe this winter could be asked to enrol in a randomized clinical trial in which they will either be given a drug, which may or may not work, or standard advice to take bedrest and paracetamol.
Those who agree could be helping the world prepare for the next potentially deadly disease pandemic as well as helping scientists who are now desperate to plug gaps in knowledge left by previous missed opportunities.
Scientists are largely in the dark about how to stop or treat the slew of never-before-seen global health problems of recent years, from the emergence of the deadly Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) virus in Saudi Arabia, to a new killer strain of bird flu in China and an unprecedented Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
They have been unable even to pin down where they came from.
That is because vital studies to analyze transmission routes and test experimental drugs or vaccines have simply not been done during epidemics, disease experts say.
It is a failure of science, they say, that should not be allowed to happen again.
“Research in all of the epidemics we have faced over the past decade has been woeful,” said Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust global health foundation and an expert on infectious diseases. “The world is at risk because there are huge gaps in our knowledge base.
“We don’t now have a vaccine for SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) if it came back tomorrow; we don’t know how to treat MERS; it took us six to nine months before we started clinical trials of vaccines for Ebola and in the meantime almost 12,000 people lost their lives; and during the H1N1 pandemic, the number of people randomized into clinical studies was very close to zero.”
‘BYZANTINE PROCESS’
Bureaucracy, logistics and lack of forethought are the heart of the problem, according to Trudie Lang, professor of Global Health Research at Oxford University who has been working on ways to lower such barriers.
During the Ebola outbreak that swept through Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, Lang’s team, which specializes in planning and operating trials in vulnerable populations in difficult settings, was tasked with setting up a clinical study of a potential Ebola treatment called brincidofovir.
“It normally takes 18 months to set up a trial, and we did it in 16 weeks,” she told Reuters. “But the problem was we were still behind the curve.”
In the 2009 H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic, when many governments had stockpiled antiviral drugs such as Roche’s Tamiflu and GlaxoSmithKline’s Relenza and doctors prescribed them, often as a preventative measure without a confirmed diagnosis, no proper randomized clinical trials were conducted to find out for sure whether they helped.
This has left health officials with little or no concrete evidence on which to base treatment decisions when the next pandemic flu strain threatens the world.
“It is a huge pity we haven’t made the most of our opportunity to generate evidence,” said Chris Butler, a clinical professor at Cardiff University’s Institute of Primary Care & Public Health, who is now working on the European-wide winter flu trial he hopes will help plug the evidence gap.
There is little doubt that launching clinical trials in an outbreak is fraught with difficulty, partly because a new or rare strain of disease can infect so many and overwhelm health services and partly because there are many bureaucratic hurdles.
Lang’s team were awarded funds in September 2014 and by January 2015 were able to start the trial, but this coincided with a sharp drop in the number of patients with Ebola as the West Africa outbreak was beginning to plateau.
Scientists point to vast amounts of form filling, box ticking, contract drafting, committee meeting and agreement signing that are involved in setting up a clinical trial.
“There’s a huge industry around making trialists ‘walk through treacle,’” said Butler. “There’s a myriad of permissions needed. It’s a Byzantine process… which can take months.
“It gives me a headache just thinking about all the approvals” from ethics committees, sponsors, lawyers, research and development leaders and clinicians, he said.
Legal agreements are needed between the suppliers of the product — the experimental drug, vaccine or other intervention — and the people running the trial, the funder and hospitals, clinics or health centers where patients will be recruited.
In an infectious disease outbreak scenario, particularly a fast-moving one like with flu or Ebola, these legal issues can be compounded by competition for access to patients.
During the Ebola epidemic for example, Lang says, there were five or six different research groups seeking to set up and run clinical trials in the three most affected countries, each of which already had limited health systems that had been overwhelmed and crushed by the outbreak.
“It was ludicrous,” she told Reuters. “Because essentially we all had to fight over the same patients.
It was like a land grab, and by that time the [new] cases were going down.”
THINKING AHEAD
Part of the threat of any disease outbreak, be it Ebola in Africa, the 2003 outbreak of SARS epidemic, MERS in Saudi Arabia or the new H7N9 bird flu in China, is the unknown.
Yet Lang and others say there is nothing to say the sorts of clinical trials needed in an epidemic cannot largely be drawn up, agreed, signed and sealed ahead of time.
“We need to have protocols ready to go, we need to have a task force of research staff in each region on standby to be deployed into the next outbreak trials,” she said.
Legal contracts, for instance, cover broadly the same things for any trial — data sharing and storage, patient confidentiality, informed consent, the timing and publication of results, and the pricing, production and availability of the product if and when it proves useful.
And in a rapidly moving outbreak which may be too swift and deadly to allow for months of organization, a coordinated approach would overcome the problem of having multiple research groups with not enough patients.
This would be both scientifically and ethically preferable, said Lang, since if a trial has to be stopped because it runs out of participants with the relevant disease, then everyone who has taken part until then has run a needless risk.
“The main issue is that this needs to be done in days rather than weeks or months,” she said. “That basically means research has to be embedded in the immediate response to an outbreak, and not come as an afterthought.” — Reuters
Dog actors in Modess commercial
Ads & Ends — Nanette Franco-Diyco
A new hire joined the creative department of a multinational ad agency straight from an extended vacation in Europe. She turned out to be my A-student in creativity in all my three advertising classes at the Ateneo a good four years ago.
Here comes the sun
By Nickky Faustine P. de Guzman
With the air-conditioner, television, computer, electric fan, and refrigerator eternally turned on, a typical Filipino household of five members usually has a monthly electric bill of P5,000.
Book honors basketball’s Maestro
By Michael Angelo S. Murillo
THE COUNTRY’s rich basketball history has produced many personalities that have become icons of the sport, one of whom is coach Virgilio “Baby” Dalupan.
The hired assassin’s trade
Movie Review
Sicario
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
By Noel Vera
THE FILM begins with an FBI raid to rescue what are supposed to be drug hostages in an empty house in Chandler, Arizona; the raid ends with two officers dead, and the discovery of the mutilated corpses of men and women, wrapped in plastic, sealed up in the walls — a grim and silent reminder to Agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) that war is being waged with unprecedented violence but elsewhere. These are just detritus, the leftovers from past battles.
Macer expresses the desire to get those responsible (for the bodies, for her agents); she’s apparently never heard of the old warning about wishes because she’s quickly attached to a strike force of murky origins (one officer named Matt Graver [Josh Brolin] wears flip-flops to high-level meetings; another named Alejandro [Benicio del Toro] snoozes quietly through mission briefings) and even murkier objectives (a trip to El Paso, Texas suddenly turns into a wire-tense mission to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico).
How realistic is this scenario? Is the USA willing to move so aggressively through a foreign nation? Okay scrub that — are they able to move so through a foreign nation successfully and without any fallout? Director Denis Villeneuve dismisses all skepticism with the unrelenting tone of his action sequences — not so much the assaultive style of a Paul Greengrass, trying to equate documentary realism with the supposed verite of a handheld camera, but a magisterial glide, a kind of unblinking gaze (with understated but precise editing) that tells you what will happen onscreen is inevitable, there’s no avoiding it. Macer finds herself wound tighter and tighter as the mission (a fleet of black Chevrolet Impalas) is joined at the border by Mexican Ford pickups mounted with M429 machine guns; collects a hooded prisoner at a Mexican military base; encounters a traffic jam on the journey back to the Estados Unidos (along the way sleepy-eyed Alejandro casually points out two carloads of armed gunmen zeroing in on their fleet); ends up in a US military base where — more for our benefit than unwitting Macer’s — said prisoner is locked in an interrogation room and sleepy Alejandro, now smiling widely, drags a 25-gallon water jug to where the prisoner, not smiling, sits handcuffed and waiting helplessly.
Equally effective and perhaps imbued with a touch of soaring poetry are the many overhead shots, of Juarez, of El Paso, that look gorgeous yes but turn out to have a thematic point: El Paso’s neatly scrubbed streets shine in stark contrast with Juarez’s urban sprawl — you tingle with pleasure at the orderly grid patterns of a United States suburb, then bristle when Villeneuve switches over to the chaotic capillaries of a Mexican border town. In between are the smoothly curved hills and sparse shrubs of the border desert, uncaring of all the drama happening at its edges.
The film invites comparison with Zero Dark Thirty, maybe the last successfully concluded US foray into a foreign land to be translated so vividly to the big screen; unlike Zero, where both film and director consciously assumed a “no comment” stance on the subject of torture Sicario does, not just on torture but on the many sins the government committed while waging this (Fantastical? Plausible? Prophetic?) escalation on the War on Drugs: torture works, the film says, but those who inflict it are damned — and so are we by implication because we benefit, we let it happen. Not perhaps the message we want to hear but the filmmakers are at least upfront and unambiguous on the issue.
Less obviously the film works as a companion piece to Ridley Scott’s The Counselor, a considerably more literary work (and considerably funnier, no small thing) thanks to a script by novelist Cormac McCarthy, who doesn’t reveal the full extent of his sensibility as dole out as much of that sensibility as he thinks the screen deserves (there’s a difference). Hence nihilism and despair run rampant The Counselor, the same way they do in McCarthy’s earlier No Country for Old Men (but not in his superior The Road — the novel not the movie, which in my opinion is considerably softened; there horror is leavened, modulated, and strengthened by an equally powerful vision of love). Sicario is wrought in a similar spirit: only what wolves do matters, all else is the effort of impotent sheep. A powerful message, but ultimately limited.
Finally Sicario’s eponymous character with his days-old beard growth and centuries-old eyes reminds me of another far more haunting character, Joel Torre’s Detective Juan Mijares, in Lav Diaz’s no-budget epic Batang West Side (West Side Avenue, 2000). Both bear heavy sins, both are involved in the War on Drugs (cocaine for Alejandro, shabu [crystal meth] for Mijares), both atone for sins in their deliberately gravid way; in fact when I see Alejandro prowling the border tunnels in the former I can’t help but recall the casual grace of Mijares’ stride through the streets of Jersey City in the latter (wonder if Del Toro saw Torre’s performance beforehand). Sicario’s trajectory seems ultimately optimistic: we are damned, they are damned, but at least we’re all doing something about the War on Drugs, if only stabilizing a chaotic situation. Diaz’s vision is bleaker: that some mysteries are unsolvable, some crimes irredeemable, some sins unforgivable no matter how far we travel, or suffer, or struggle. We are damned, and all the dirty tactics and shiny hardware in the world aren’t ever going to pull us out into safety.
MTRCB Rating: R-16