Who wouldn’t want to have as much fun as they do in this video?
Here’s a fantastic way to welcome the month of March. Voted best Brazilian song ever by the musical people of Brazil themselves and only from the legends Elis Regina and composer/lyricist Tom Jobim.
Can one be in love with a language?
Don’t get me wrong, I love my own native tongue. i.e. Visayan, one of, if not the most widely spoken, of the numerous Filipino dialects across the islands (+ Tagalog and English, obviously).
But I fell in love with Português do Brasil. Portuguese as spoken in Brazil is music to my ears. So how much gusto do I have then for Brazilian music itself? Epic. It’s music with so much emotion. You can feel the joy and, very much so, the twinge of pain in their songs. Yes, they are extremely fond of saudade, this sentiment of longing for what is gone, or the feeling that roughly translates to, but a bit more than, nostalgia. I think Brazilians and Filipinos are very much alike in soul.
Brazilian music made a meteoric rise sometime in the 1960′s when Antonio Carlos Jobim (composer, piano) and João Gilberto (vocals, guitar) created bossa nova (new wave) with Vinicius de Moraes (poet, lyricist). They were the triumvirate in the rise of this musical style, that had roots in samba, the folk dance music of Brazil. Bossa nova songs became worldwide hits when they crossed over to the US, and to the rest of the world with their English versions. Perhaps the most iconic bossa nova song would be Garota de Ipanema or Girl from Ipanema.
Here’s my cover of it, using my Cebu-made Ukulele with strings from Aquila, and my djembe drum, all put together in Garage Band.
I’ve always loved stories, especially stories for children. My mother read bedtime stories to me as early as I can remember, all the classics from Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. My father didn’t need any books to tell stories. He simply made up his own as we lay in the dark of the 1980s power outages. By the time I could lift books out of shelves on my own, I read my own bedtime stories. I had two pillows. The fluffier one and a hardbound one. I even wrote my own stories. At least I recall finishing one when I was maybe 9 years old.
When I listen to talks, especially very interesting ones, I like to take notes and add my visual / graphical interpretation of the ideas being proposed.
This is my Illustrated Takeaway while I listened to Tony Schwartz talk on The Myths of the Overworked Creative.
This is exactly where I am. Well, not literally. The location is irrelevant although New York City would be nyc.
This is what my life is turning into. I can even be seen mostly with a bike and also in an eccentric cycling group just like the crazies in the video, buzzing like fireflies and collecting the ire from urban motorists at night. (more…)
As forewarned in the first entry, I am publishing a post on why I’ve put up a blog. And true to blogging parlance, I’ve entitled it in the formula of “n things of something”, just for kicks.
Before delving into the 5 items, let me confess that I have attempted to blog about a year or two ago. I started a Tumblr because it appeared to be the next thing after twitter. It didn’t last. Partly, I think, because of what I perceived to be a lack of control on the platform. This time around, I am hosting the blogging app on my own web-hosting account, and can modify everything from functionality to the look-&-feel. I am a web designer by trade, you see. Taking the Tumblr route is like asking a carpenter to sleep on a couch bought at Ikea. Actually, I’m not sure if that analogy works, we don’t even have Ikea here. Anyway, on to the numbered stuff. (more…)
So now I’ve finally hosted a blog. This was years in the making, i.e. years in procrastination. But just really one day in a four-day weekend to build… the site theme. WordPress itself was running, again, for years (maybe just two). This was supposed to be launched yesterday, the 1st of November, but interweb and server issues were pulling some gag on me.
This is going to be just a quick launch post. I’ll be posting something more substantial, something like My Reasons for Blogging, or something very predictable like that.
The photo above, by the way, is posted just to see if images will blend well with the minimalist theme. If you’re really interested, that’s a photo I took in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, Australia, around May of 2010. You can see miles and miles of trees in that canyon. They say this canyon alone supplies half of the world’s oxygen supply. Ok, I just made that up. It’s so vast your eyes will give up seeing miles and miles beyond. Had some memorable trekking with my nephews there. By memorable, I mean it was too much trekking for a day.
As for the site icon at the top left, that’s Ka Bau. I created him once and he kept popping up in many personal projects so I adopted him as my mascot of sorts. There will be many more incarnations of him.
I’d be glad if you keep dropping by. Thanks.