OUR BACK PAGE(S)

My UST professor — the poet Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta — once said, “Journalism is literature in a hurry.” What I do now is slow journalism: dreading deadlines, staring at the computer page, putting it off till it’s absolutely needed at the desk, then banging noisily at the keyboard. Like a roofer. I took my articles for the paper for granted. Until one day almost all of them were wiped out. Not a trace. It’s scary to feel as if you’ve never lived, simply passed through, collected gift certificates, and then withered away. Thus, we decided to set up this website: a home for my bastard Writeups (at least those that do not try to sell you stuff you don’t want or particularly need). I kind of like these little buggers, about the stuff that photographer Avee Navarro Tan and I care about: travel, records, food and art that is fighting for its life and not just installed in rich socialites’ parlors. A forewarning: grammatical and factual errors abound in some of these entries, which have been untouched since they were first published in The STAR, to reinforce the fact that a human being wrote them — warts, dangling participles in all. And oh, invite us if you have something brewing in the kitchen, an art show, or simply want to talk about the real-time, livestreamed decline of civilization. Netflix subtitles have a phrase that often pops up: indistinct chatter. And we’ve collected them here.