A couple of years ago, a friend of mine asked me to accompany her to a garage sale. Turned out, it wasn’t the usual garage sale with all sorts of stuff put on display on the lawn or garage. When we got there, we were met by another friend and by the couple that owned the house. They served us tea and freshly baked scones with butter and jam. They told us that they were leaving for the U.S. and wanted to sell everything in the house: all the furniture, the paintings, and an entire library upstairs. (I ended up buying just one book: a collection of Dorothy Parker’s works.)
They pointed to one of the chairs and said it used to be in a café called Indios Bravos.
Indios Bravos used to be found in Malate. It became a gathering place for actors and poets and painters and all sorts of artists. There was supposedly a round table where only the privileged ones could sit. To be accepted in that “inner circle”, one had to perform and be judged worthy of sitting down at the table. According to legend, one even went as far as reciting poetry in the nude. There was even a time when they spent a whole afternoon riding the jeepneys around Manila, jotting down the vandalism found on the seats and roof of the jeepney, stringing them together to form one long user-generated poem (before there was just a term as “user-generated”).
Sounded like fun times.
Thanks to Gerry for opening Indios Bravos 2.0.
There is no “special round table” here.
I don’t think we’ll get to see any nude-poetry-readings happening in here (unless Gerry tells us to do so).
Everyone is welcome!
I think it’s great that the web has allowed artists and writers to gather and meet, to discuss and debate, to share ideas and create new ones.
So, please have a seat, look around, the guys have already posted some interesting entries about the different projects they’ve worked on. And please bookmark and click the RSS feed for this site, so you can come back and discover more about the past, present and future of our little corner of Philippine comics.
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OMG!it so heartfelt. for a second there your welcome piece almost brought out tears in my eyes. Thank you dear and kind sirs. :)
ReplyDeleteBudjette,
ReplyDeleteI have a long comment on that other Indios Bravos below in the comments for Gerry's Quick Tips. Indeed I was a denizen of that place a long time ago. I believe, now that you've jagged my memory banks, there indeed was a round table.
Rod