Jessica Zafra's Blog, page 71

Virgin Labfest at CCP is now accepting new one-act or short plays for staging

Drogon ponders the idea for a play that he will dictate to his human. The VIRGIN LABFEST YEAR 12 is now open for script submissions! The Virgin Labfest is an annual festival of unpublished, unstaged, untried and untested works for the theater held at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. This festival is a partnership […]

Sherlock fans, collect your New Year’s present

SHERLOCK fans are among the most patient fans on earth, and they have to be. Since the BBC series created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss premiered in 2010, there have been exactly nine episodes, 10 if you count the one-off holiday special that aired last week. The fans have used the time between episodes […]

If you’ve ever cheated or been cheated on, watch this TED talk on infidelity

Thanks to Ricky for the alert.

Basic Reviews of Potential Oscar Contenders part 1: Western Torture and Gore

Oscar Shmoscar, the best picture of 2015 is Mad Max: Fury Road. We think of these three as the Western Torture Porn Trilogy of 2015. The Revenant. Leonardo DiCaprio crawls through the spectacular wilderness in terrible torment for two hours and 36 minutes, periodically interrupted by mumbling Tom Hardy. Para n’yo nang awa, bigyan n’yo […]

What if George R.R. Martin isn’t actually writing the next books? (He is, but he has the right not to.)

There was a collective cry of disappointment the other day as George R.R. Martin announced that the next book in A Song of Ice and Fire is not finished and will not be out before season six of HBO’s Game of Thrones. And the expected shrieks of fury from people who use the books and […]

Monday Morning Vent: Momelia Versus Evil (or, You’re alone in the house when you spot a giant rat.)

This Monday Morning Vent was written by the valiant Momelia. Warning: Some violence and gross household imagery. Necronomicon from Ash Vs Evil Dead How to Deliver Your Self from Evil by Momelia If Evil were a foot and a half long, scuttled on four short legs, coated in fur as black as corruption, with a […]

Miss Universe and Our Imagined Community

When I was a kid at family gatherings, my elders would recall how, in 1969, as Apollo 11 landed on the moon, Gloria Diaz won the Miss Universe title. They repeated her snappy answers to the host’s questions. They told the story as if it were part of epic tradition, like the Iliad to the […]

A Story for New Year’s Eve: The Dead by James Joyce

Two poems on Bruegel’s Icarus

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1555 (oil on canvas) by Bruegel, Pieter the Elder (c.1525-69); 73.5×112 cm; Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, Belgium. From Wikimedia Commons Musée des Beaux Arts (1940) by W.H. Auden About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it […]

Remembering Benedict Anderson

The renowned scholar exemplified intellectual passion and political engagement. by Eric Alterman Young academics are often advised to prioritize scholarship over citizenship, meaning political involvement. But as the careers of some of our most influential scholars repeatedly demonstrate, especially in the humanities and social sciences, this is often a false and foolish distinction. It’s hard […]