No detail seemed right. Look at anything in the place and you'd find yourself tilting your head a few degrees. Not enough to cause you any real harm, nor enough to seem particularly odd. Who knows? You might get used to this slant on things (but if you did, you'd never be able to view the world again without holding your head out of true.)

Dance, Dance, Dance, Haruki Murakami

That was how Haruki Murakami described the Dolphin Hotel in his book Dance, Dance, Dance, but  it could easily have been the Ayala Museum during the launch of Under the Storm he was talking about.

Surrounded by anime artworks from the current exhibit Manga Realities: Exploring the Art of Japanese Comic Today were 150 Filipino poets (Germinio Abad, Pete Lacaba), celebrities (Glaiza de Castro, Gee Canlas), musicians (Vigo, Corporate Lo-Fi, Ely Buendia), artists, Bekimons, models (Ornussa Cadness), movie moguls (Mother Lily, Roselle Monteverde), ventriloquists and the plain curious reading poetry, the Under the Storm book launch was perfectly askew. I'd be utterly disappointed if it was anything less.

It was my first time watching Corporate Lo-Fi perform and I definitely would want to see them perform live again. But I can't say the same for the elderly gentleman in front of me, who briefly looked up from his Blackberry to shake his head the moment Corporate Lo-Fi started rapping.

It was Tao Aves' vocal acrobatics and Khavn dela Cruz's intense piano playing versus  Fade Longboy's yoyo tricks in Vigo's performance of Where Are You My River.

For details on how to purchase Under the Storm, Antithesis Collective and the 4th .MOV International Film, Music and Literature Festival schedule click the widgets on the sidebar.

____________

Total Gastos: Php 555.00

• Php 105.00 (A bottle of San Miguel Pale Pilsen at M Cafe. Needless to say, it was a direct assault to my middle-class beer drinking sensibilities)
• Php 450.00 (Under the Storm: An Anthology of Contemporary Philippine Poetry book)