Furniture designer Ann Pamintuan, decked with her own jewelry creations–gold-, silver-, and copper-plated brooches, rings, and bangles made from leaves and roots of trees. Behind her is one of her furniture designs.

In this Q&A with curator Sonia Ner, Davao-based furniture designer Ann Pamintuan, one of the members of the globally respected Movement 8, talks about her design philosophy, her fluid artistic process, and how, despite her lack of a design background, she found her groove.

Twenty years ago, Aya Yuson came home in trance. He just had his first live musical Sensurround at the U.P. Conservatory of Music. Now he wanted to drop a course in business management at the Ateneo de Manila and defect to the Muses full time.

There was no stopping him and a wild ride began. After an intensive summer course on the acoustic guitar with Lester Demetillo, Aya, 16, won first prize for a haunting “Capriccio Arabe” in a university-wide classical guitar competition. Contrapuntal discovery followed: what he really, truly wanted was to become a jazz artist like Wes Montgomery.

He’s the closest a Filipino has ever got to Oprah Winfrey, having once been the personal chef of the talk show host, but there’s certainly more to Chicago-based Ron Bilaro than cooking for Hollywood stars and Chicago’s creme de la creme.

Ron Bilaro’s cooking show Life . . . Pinoy Style, shown on The Filipino Channel, is a big hit among Filipino Americans who are rediscovering Pinoy cooking away from home and getting acquainted with their heritage by way of the kwentuhan [conversations] that happen in the kitchen and in the dining room, over steaming hot Pinoy dishes.

This writer was looking forward to seeing two things on the day of the interview with UP professor and Palanca Hall of Famer (and recently a finalist in the Man Asian Literary Prize) Jose “Butch” Dalisay, Jr:>/p>

His Moleskine, which was his travel companion for three years before it retired, and his Macbook Air, Apple’s newest baby and a treasure everybody is so excited to see (and touch and be photographed with), as you’ve probably read about in the blogs of those who attended last Saturday’s “A Conversation with Butch Dalisay” at Serendra’s Kape Isla.

The first time I heard Ramon Zialcita I was a college freshman barely versed in the ways of the world. I had no musical preference whatsoever, and I pretty much ate up as much bubblegum pop as could be shoved down my gullible teenage throat. I was a mindless preppy happy to eat up the inane banter that passes for proper English in this social stratum.

Then I met this pretty girl who thought herself the next reincarnation of the Goddess of Pinoy Rock (I have a sneaking suspicion most girls in the nineties felt this way–admit it, even you had your own band) and was nothing but a loyal and avid listener of the only “real” radio station that paid her satisfactory supplication. Determined to impress her, I tuned in one day to see what the fuss was about. Ramon was on air.

“Students these days are distracted by so many things,” bemoans mathematics and psychology professor Queena Lee Chua.

In her twenty years of teaching at the Ateneo de Manila University, she has discovered that more than television and computer games, family problems and relationship issues also stand in the way of good academic performance.

Many times, students would run to her not for help in homework but to seek advice about a father having an affair or parents not having the time for them. Learning all this was “shocking,” Queena says, and she admits she was not prepared to deal with the issues at first. “If it was just mathematics, it would be easy,” she observes, which is what led her to study psychology.

Running a restaurant in the Philippines is not easy, what more running a Filipino restaurant abroad. Foreigners find Pinoy food too oily, too sweet, or too salty, and most Filipino restaurateurs have found it difficult to market our cuisine outside the country.

In New York especially, “It is never about the food,” says Amy Besa, who runs the 12-year-old Filipino restaurant Cendrillon in New York, with her husband Romy Dorotan as head chef.