Magazine Brain
If you opened up my brain I think you would find what looks to be the contents of a magazine.
a.) Everything is in bits.
b.) I always have something to prescribe or recommend. (I know that's everyone these days. Which makes me feel my identity is being robbed, like the bike in broad daylight outside our house at noon yesterday.)
c.) Conditioning-wise, I have been reading magazines since before I was old enough.
Inspiration: Sigmund Freud’s consulting room at his home in Vienna, 1938
Things Considered
Items to draw out your creative self.
Fili
Block rug
Abaca fibers underfoot give a sense of place. 92 cm x 162 cm, €310, www.shopfili.com
Nooke
Stone bookends
Limestone offcuts, inlaid with small white shells. Php 5,990.00, www.nooke.ph
Angelina Paris
N°226 Chocolate
Flavored Tea
Chinese nookum black tea, cocoa and flower petals, from the tea house frequented by Coco Chanel and Proust. PHP 1700, Dough & Grocer, 86 Sct. Gandia St, Diliman, Quezon City, Metro Manila.
A combination that glides:
Papernotes
Classic Series A5
Debossed Notebook
PHP 325, Shopee.
Artline
Drawing System 0.7
₱TK, Art Bar, 1C-11 N2C-10 G/F Serendra Bldg. The Fort, Taguig, Metro Manila.
In elementary school, I got my first flip of Seventeen, dispatched from the States in balikbayan boxes from my dad’s relatives.
My dad himself was a magazine hoarder, of Esquires and GQs from the 1980s all the way to the present decade, squirrelled away in newspaper racks, shelves, and even the cabinet of our dirty kitchen at home. He’s an economist, but claims a past where he considered being a magazine editor. My mom, less of a pack rat, was the actual editor, in the eighties, of a newsmagazine, Starweek, that came with the weekend paper. Her very pregnant belly would bump the paste-up tables where the graphics team would manually lay out - cutting and pasting the elements - of a printed page.
Me - I was a nosy reader. I liked the embarrassing stories section of Seventeen, where American girls would write in about things like tucking their skirt in their panties after leaving the restroom, having a tampon string stick out at the beach, or kissing someone at a party and realizing they were cousins.
Vasari
Veneziano Plaster
Diffuses the light on your face or the printed page.
Versions of these horrors would happen to me as I made my own way through the long road of adolescence and adulthood that still lay ahead of fourth-grade me.
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Like in the 2010s when I used a combination of the color correcting palette of Make Up For Ever with the three dots (green to counteract redness, purple for sallowness, yellow for bluish bags), under flesh-toned concealer, under high-definition loose powder, in order to camouflage two mustache shaped burns on either side of my mouth - which were the unfortunate result of getting a chemical peel (to solve for my acne) and then absently self-depilating at home with Nair (to remove my natural mustache). I remember, I had to cancel a night out with my best friend at the time, Hannah and a person I liked to text to drive us around, Rico Blanco.
Those were my early twenties.
Flos
Bellhop Lamp in
burnt orange
Low, direct, light like a candle to write by. From PTK, Steltz, 6/F East Wing, Shangri-la Plaza, Mandaluyong.
Cassina LC4
Chaise lounge
A lying position helps you access subconscious thoughts.
POA, Design Story Inc.
Caran D' Ache
soft black charcoal pencil
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PTK, Art Bar, 1C-11 N2C-10 G/F Serendra Bldg. The Fort, Taguig, Metro Manila.
Caran D' Ache
sketcher non-photo blue pencil
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PTK, Art Bar, 1C-11 N2C-10 G/F Serendra Bldg. The Fort, Taguig, Metro Manila.
In my mid-twenties I went to journalism school in New York. It's where I learned the technical term for a recurring section, a la “embarrassing stories” - a “rubric.” Q&A, quizzes, fashion picks, scene pieces, how-to’s, who wore what?, this-versus-that, tips from this celebrity, a recipe by someone famous, someone's room, 24 hours with... - these form the foundation of any magazine’s first 10 or so splashy pages called “front of book”.
Journalism school is also where I learned not to use words that don't really say anything, like "nice" or "good."
Of course, I still forget sometimes. Like when a girlfriend says "love yeww!!" and I say it back.
To this day when I encounter someone or something interesting, I still think of how I might present my precious find as a page.
Stack
Music app
Put on the classical music station and write what comes to mind, then keep building and building in a game of free association with yourself. It will help you find your inner voice. £2.49 Auto-renewable monthly subscription, Google Play and Mac App Store.
Angelina Paris
N°226 Chocolate
Flavored Tea.
The problem with thinking this way is there's no room for the abstract. Or even a break.
My mom can't forget a pimple that wouldn't die in her Starweek years. Symbol of a magazine’s sights that are ever forward, reminding you that whatever you do, it is never going to be enough.
Vintage
Free press cover
Novelists place artifacts on their desk or in their room to transport them to the atmosphere of a time and a place.