Tag: Joseph L. Garcia

WITH all of us stuck at home, most of us unable to fly to another place or even just step into a bar, we must commend Jameson for giving us a taste of Ireland, even for just a sip.

BOREALIS CRYSTALS continues to make money from jewelry sales amid a coronavirus pandemic, though it had been difficult to sustain operations due to supply and manpower constraints during the lockdown.

ART IN THE PARK, held annually on a summer Sunday at the Jaime Velasquez Park in Salcedo Village, Makati, had to take a new route by going virtual this year because of the coronavirus disease 2019  (COVID-19) pandemic. The fair — known for its relatively affordable pieces with a P50,000 ceiling — was first postponed then held over a whole week in August online via the website www.artinthepark.ph. Despite the limitations of the virtual sphere, 2,600 works from over 50 galleries went up for sale and display. The fair also boasted special online exhibits by Richard Quebral, Dex Fernandez, and with a collaboration with Globe and BPI, exhibits by Robert Alejandro, Reena Gabriel, Jackie Lozano, and dance group Fifth Wall Fest.

THE TWO centerpieces to Salcedo Auctions’ seventh edition of its grand September auction, The Well-Appointed Life, are National Artist Vicente Manansala’s Quiapo, and National Artist Cesar Legaspi’s Descent.

WHEN times are hard, we all need something soft and comforting to get us through the days.

THE COMMUNITY quarantine has left us all to bake: we’ve all been under pressure and heat either to rise, fall, or settle. Two twenty-somethings have taken up the challenge and instead of being baked themselves, went on to bake cake.

A GRAND old house is longing for you to make your home your own with its treasure.

JEWELS sometimes reflect a fantasy world beyond our reach, and their combined beauty and durability show us perfection that we sometimes can’t find in our own lives. But sometimes the imperfect is more beautiful than the perfect.

FOOD diplomacy takes center stage this month for the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) and The ASEAN Ladies Foundation, Inc. (ALF).

MASTERS and maps are all the rage this season for Leon Gallery’s Magnificent September Auction, happening live at 2 p.m. on Sept. 19 at the gallery’s salesrooms in Legazpi Village.

FIVE Filipino designers showed their mettle late last month in Singapore’s first virtual fashion show. The project, conceptualized by Daniel Boey, with the cooperation of AP Media, was presented in the last days of August via an immersive 3D website, thefrontrow.style. The show featured several local and regional designers from the Asia-Pacific area.

I RECEIVED two boxes last week, and opening them opened new doors for me in the kitchen.

ORGAN meats such as the heart, lungs, kidney, and liver have fallen out of fashion, save for in dishes such as in sisig (pig’s face and brains, boiled, chopped, then grilled and served on a sizzling plate); or in bopis (sauteed lungs and heart). While people can pretend the steaks and cubes on their plates were never alive, organs look all too real, which might turn off some diners.

ENTRIES are now welcome for the 53rd Shell National Students Art Competition (NSAC), with the theme corresponding to the COVID-19 crisis: Hope In Our Art. 

IN THESE dark times, local shoe brand Annie & Lori finds hope and light in the nation and in nature.

JAPANESE clothing brand Uniqlo has unveiled its Fall/Winter 2020 collection, which revolves around having clothes fit for the “new lifestyle,” with longtime collaborators British-Japanese designer Hana Tajima and French designer Ines de la Fressange introducing new styles for their respective lines.

WITH more people spending time at home, many have parlayed both their time and ability into cooking -— and some of them have even translated that into a new career. San Miguel’s Home Foodie held a webinar last week with two seasoned online food entrepreneurs to help budding businesses get up on their feet.

THE IRISH Government Food Board, Bord Bia launched its first online culinary competition, called East Meets West, with participants welcome to submit their recipe entries until Aug. 31. The top 10 participants will be announced on Sept. 7, and the five winners will be known on Oct. 23.

FILMING sensibilities and food meet in Asian Food Network’s show, Maximum Foodie. While the show premiered last week, opening in Hong Kong, the show’s second episode, shot in the Philippines, will premiere on Aug. 22.

I FIRST read Some are Smarter than Others, a book detailing the excesses of the Marcos Regime, as a freshman in an “elite” private university. It was out of print then, and the only copies to be had were in university libraries, at a few hundred dollars on Amazon, or a very battered copy at the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ gift shop. Now with an annotated reissue, it will serve me now, as it did then, as an anti-Social Register. The last names in that book either directly assisted or collaborated with the plunder of the country, and were now sitting next to me in class. These are the last names I had to avoid. In the same classroom, there would be girls from indigent families who just so happened to be smart enough to be granted scholarships, while another set were there because, well, their parents and grandparents were “smarter than others.”

THE LETTERS of the dreaded COVID-19 virus spell out fear, but a talk by pharmaceuticals company Sanofi tries to reverse this fear by using the letters to spell out a message for self-care.

“THE whole world is aflame. All the peoples of the United Nations are fighting the savage enemies of freedom,” blared a propaganda film by Disney and the US Department of Agriculture in 1942. The title of the film? Food Will Win The War, in turn taken from a WWI slogan popularized by President Woodrow Wilson. We at home now fight a war, not against the Axis Powers as in the 1942 film, but against a virus. During times of trouble, it is wise to have easy access to food. Three ladies we talked to took it directly from the Earth (with a little bit of prodding from their green thumbs).

WHEN confronted by an exotic meat, some people will usually say it “tastes like chicken.” A new vegetarian line by food giant San Miguel called Veega, consisting of nuggets, sausages, ground meat analogue, balls, and burger patties might make you say the same.

ART IN THE PARK goes online this week, and we’ve taken a peek at some of the things the art fair gone virtual has to offer, via artinthepark.ph. The virtual art fair is ongoing until Aug. 17.

ART GALLERY Pineapple Lab will be closing its doors at the end of August as the pandemic and subsequent technical recession claim another victim.

AS HEALTH workers called for stricter protocols to lighten their load in an overwhelmed healthcare system, there is one thing you can do to help: get vaccinated.

THE Chocolate Kiss Café, a restaurant just as beloved and as respected as any other institution in the UP Diliman campus, is closing — another casualty of the pandemic. The announcement was made via its website earlier this week.

THAI, Chinese, Japanese — their cuisine, or at least iterations and versions of them, have already made themselves known to the world. The West has adapted some of these dishes for their own repertoire. If California Maki and Orange Chicken exists, well, why haven’t we heard of, say, a San Francisco adobo?

AS health workers call for stricter protocols to lighten their load in an overwhelmed healthcare system, there is one thing you can do to help: get vaccinated.

“DRESS is a form of visual art, a creation of images with the visible self as its medium,” wrote art and clothing historian Anne Hollander in her book, Seeing Through Clothes. “People dress and observe other dressed people with a set of pictures in mind — pictures in a particular style.” A recent talk by Dr. Stephanie Coo under the Icomos Philippines (International Council on Monuments and Sites) Lighter Side Talks series called “Clothing and Spaces” planned to highlight the dynamics of 19th century clothing in the Philippines, but managed to say so much more, namely, on the matter of clothing itself.

ORIGINALLY slated to run in March this year, Art in the Park was postponed when Luzon was locked down because of the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic. Instead the popular one-day art festival will run from Aug. 10-17. It won’t be held in its usual venue, the Jaime Velasquez Park in Salcedo Village, Makati, but online, at www.artinthepark.ph.

DESIGNER, entrepreneur, and community leader Brian Tenorio passed away on Monday, July 27. He was 42.

DAME OLIVIA Mary de Havilland, aged 104, died on July 25 in Paris. Entertainment Weekly cites that the last surviving cast member of Hollywood epic Gone with the Wind “died peacefully in her sleep.”

WITH THE ongoing COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic, everyone has had to evaluate what are or what aren’t essentials as far as they are concerned. Multi-brand store Urbanize has put together a collection of items of what it considers new essentials. BusinessWorld had a chance to give these items — which include a handy little door gadget, a reusable face mask, rolls of copper film, and an air purifying necklace — a spin.

IF YOU find yourself having very few things to laugh about in 2020, Comedy Manila might be able to help.

THAI, Chinese, Japanese — their cuisine, or at least iterations and versions of them, have already made themselves known to the world. The West has adapted some of these dishes for their own repertoire. If California Maki and Orange Chicken exists, well, why haven’t we heard of, say, a San Francisco adobo?

ENDERUN COLLEGES is opening a new College of Architecture and Design, with enrollment beginning in mid-August of this year. It will be offering two new professional undergraduate degree programs: Bachelor of Science in Architecture and Bachelor of Science in Interior Design.

THE pandemic is forcing people to look at how their cities and homes really work for the kinds of lives they live today. Cities, it turns out, are less than user friendly for pedestrians and bikers — an age-old problem that has suddenly come to the fore with the disappearance of public transportation thanks to the need to control the spread of COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019). Meanwhile, open plan homes, it turns out, are less workable when the space has to be shared to do things that were done outside the home pre-pandemic.

A PANDEMIC does not seem to freeze the movement of art, for Salcedo Auctions subsidiary Gavel&Block is going on its fourth online auction titled “Interiors.”

SINCE THE pandemic has effectively frozen our lives, we might as well freeze the treats it took away from us, and enjoy them at home. BusinessWorld talked to two institutions (one of a considerable age; the other of a considerable size) that have offered their usual fare on ice.

SINCE THE pandemic has made sure that one will be staying at home a lot, one might as well fill it up with treasures. And treasures are what one will find in Leon Gallery’s 16^th edition of its online auction LeonExchange, which will be held on July 18 and 19 at 11 a.m. Up for grabs are Picasso lithographs and etchings, a Zobel serigraph, and watercolors by Botong Francisco and Jose Joya. And that’s just the first day, running under the theme “The Collector’s Vault.”

NOT EVEN a global pandemic can freeze a fashion capital. Due to measures placed on gatherings, Haute Couture Week in Paris presenting the Fall/Winter 2020/2021 collections became an exercise in creativity — not just for the clothes, but how the brands would reach people, and most opted to show online. With people enjoying the collections at home, instead of jostling in Paris for the seats closest to the runway — the whole world gets a front-row seat.

It was once easy to take one’s freedom for granted, thanks in part to the relative peace we’ve had — thanks to people who fight for it. However, viruses that have been mutating society faster than they mutate themselves, as well as other forces hard at work, are forcing us all to hide.

IN the months since the first announcement of community quarantine to control the COVID-19 pandemic, our dining and eating patterns have changed considerably. After the pandemic struck, there hardly seemed to be any reason to celebrate — or ways to do it, due to the ban on mass gatherings.

IN times of great uncertainty such as these, flowers provide a welcome respite, and one of the Philippine art world’s most respected names, Betsy Westendorp, provides just that in an exhibition by Salcedo Private View, the gallery and private sale arm of Salcedo Auctions.