Yes, folks—it’s finally happening! But first…
Look at these beauties! These are the new Blush Books edition covers for Six de los Reyes’ Beginner’s Guide: Love and Other Chemical Reactions, Mina V. Esguerra’s Better at Weddings Than You, and my book, Scandalized! Aren’t they amazing? Many thanks to talented local artists Enid Din, Ren Bit, and Shai San Jose for giving our books a glow-up!
Hey, hey! Where I’m from, August is a month spotlighting Filipino-authored work (although if you ask me, Filipinos should be reading more Filipino-authored work all year round), so here’s a month-long sale—Get a copy of What If We Fall In Love? for only $0.99!
If you’ve already read and enjoyed this book, please feel free to share this post with someone you think would enjoy it as well. And as always, I hope you give it some love on Goodreads!
Before anything else, I will preface this post by saying I’m a (not-so) casual A’Tin who divides her time between two houses: the maisan, and the farm. I’m not a film or music expert, and I don’t claim to know everything about EVERYTHING. This blog post contains my personal interpretation and opinions, and anything said here should not be taken as FACT.
Anyway, Justin of SB19 released a new single and music video last week called Kaibigan, and the visual storytelling just tickled my brain in a good way, so here I am, writing a blog post about how much I appreciated how detail-oriented our bunso is with his work. Obviously, for Justin, storytelling is KING, and my oh my, how I looooove what he’s been doing so far!
But before we go to Kaibigan, let me first direct you to the music video for his first single, Surreal.
Listennnnnn.
I’m not a fan of the horror and gore genres, but put it in a musical and inject into it a dose of campiness and dark humor and I’ll most probably give it a try. (And it also kinda helps if I have a friend in the cast, ‘cos honestly that was the case here.) So yeah, we watched The Sandbox Co.’s Little Shop of Horrors over the weekend, and had so much fun!
I was in my early 20s when I first encounted the musical RENT in its movie iteration. I’m not sure why, but it took me a bit of time warming up to it. Perhaps I felt too removed from the themes of the musical at the time, or because the music didn’t quite capture me at first listen. But the more I got into the material, the more my appreciation for it grew. However, it wasn’t until a week ago that I was actually able to see RENT on stage! My gosh, finally!
RENT is a Jonathan Larson musical about eight New Yorkers who are struggling with life in general as they are faced with challenges related to their careers, relationships, drug addiction, and AIDS. It came out in 1996 and is still one of the most enduring musical productions to date.