birthday spaghetti

As far we can remember it, my mom always cooked spaghetti during our birthdays.

Eventually, she taught Manang Terrie, our loyal cook, how to make that spaghetti with ground beef and hotdogs and basil leaves and it became a staple for every birthday celebration.

When we were kids, we associated birthdays with big celebrations, where the house was filled with family and guests.

At the end of the evening, when all the guests had left, our friends would stay behind and we’d continue talking late into the night, occasionally standing up to get our third or forth helping of spaghetti.

After two months of living here and coming home to an empty apartment, it felt wonderful to come back to my apartment and be welcomed with a home-cooked meal made by my mom, Brandie, and Wella.

Indeed, it was a very happy birthday day.

the man with the plan

This is Talis and he's got a plan to save the world.

I’ve been itching to do a Pinoy super hero story for the longest time. So, early this year, when I was supposed to be working on the Trese Book 4, I ended up scribbling this story and pitched it to Kajo.

We had a grand plan to juggle working on Talis on one month and working on Trese on the other month. Well, our dayjobs and other projects got into the way, so we ended up getting delayed with both books.

So far, this is the only finished TALIS story and we’ve decided to focus on the very delayed Trese Book 4, so it might be sometime before we can get back to revealing the other people who’ve crossed paths with Talis.

We hope to release Trese Book 4 early next year and if we’re lucky, we’ll get the chance to do another Talis book soon after that.

That’s the end of my intro and this link http://tresekomix.blogspot.com/2010/11/talis.html leads you the first issue of TALIS. Please do give it a read and tell us what you think.

Enjoy!


TALIS #1
Story by Budjette Tan
Art by Kajo Baldisimo


Mina needs to do a lot of things today, like study for her exams, take care of her ailing mother, and when the world needs her help, swallow a magical gem and transform into the high-flying super-hero Minakawa.


Mina was chosen to receive this magical gem because of her brave heart and kind soul; chosen by the man only known as Talis.


So, just when Mina thinks she’s done saving the day, Talis shows up to ask for one more favor. How can Mina say refuse the man who gave her all this power?


Read the complete story at:http://tresekomix.blogspot.com/2010/11/talis.html

NU107 rocks forever

I started listening to NU107 when I was in college because of a girl. I found out that NU was her favorite radio station, so I thought if I tuned in as well, I’d have something to talk about with her. “Hey! That Midnight Countdown! That so rocks, yeah?” Did it work? Well, let’s just say I freaked her out and she didn’t talk to me for an entire sem.

But I kept listening to NU anyway. It’s always Station #6 in my preprogrammed settings.

It was 1993, I was trying to find parking in that patch of dirt that was considered the university car park when I heard these lyrics on NU: “Ilang isaw pa ba ang kakainin, o giliw ko? Ilang tanzan pa ba ang iipunin, o giliw ko? Gagawin ko ang lahat pati ang thesis mo!” Me and my blockmates were in the middle of preparing for our thesis and as far as we were concerned, that was the impossible task that needed to be done that year. When I got to the barkada tambayan I was raving about this song from a band I’ve never heard of, a song about a guy willing to do a girl’s thesis just prove his love for her. We all agree that was an insane thing to do.

1995. We heard that the NU107 Rock Awards was happening at the Music Museum, so we drove there in my Nissan Maxima. As it turned out, you needed an invite to get in. So, we just stayed in the Greenhills car park, cranked up the volume to 11, listened to the bands play and the awards being handed out and pretended we were part of it all.

Strangely enough, because of Alamat Comics, we became part of the Rock Awards the following year. We had started sending copies of our comic books to NU107 and struck an exchange deal with them to plug our books on-air in return for ad space in all the titles we were going to publish. (Yeah, we thought we were going to release monthly Alamat titles back then.) So, when the next Rock Awards came up, Marceline Santos and Camille Portugal (who were in charge of NU107’s Ad&Promo) called us up to design the stage of the event. Which is why, if you any of you have pictures from that particular Rock Awards, you’ll see characters from Batch72 as part of the stage design.

I remember that we were given production passes that night, which we flashed around and said, “Backstage Pass! Backstage Pass!” –doing our really awful imitation of Mike Meyers and Dana Carvey.

Ever after that Rock Awards, we continued to do projects with Marceline and Camille.

Camille always found a way to include Alamat in various NU events. We were even able to launch Batch72 during an NU Pocket Concert at Robinsons Galleria, which featured Color It Red.

With Marcelline, we staged events in Club Dredd that combined poetry readings, comic book launches, and illegal screenings of X-Files episodes videotaped and shipped from the States.

Talking about X-Files, that was the reason why I got invited to an NU107 show in 1995. I realized that the MTRCB was censoring certain episodes of X-Files and I wrote to Jessica Zafra about it. So, she invited me to talk about it on TWISTED IN THE MORNING which was co-hosted by Claire Miranda and Allen Yotoko.

There was also that period of time when I worked at my dad’s office, which was in the same building as NU, which gave me an excuse to hang out at the DJs booth, hang out with Myrene, Zach, Joey, Francis Brew, April aka Tabitha, Roxy, Jelly Jean, Ron T, and Jaedee. I think I even got to attend two drunken anniversaries of NOT RADIO.

We loved NU so much, we even tried to pitch for the concept of the ROCK AWARDS. We got as far as presenting the idea to Atom Henares himself, but they didn’t buy the idea of basing the theme of the awards on a noontime variety show. Well, we thought it was fun and crazy enough for NU. Still, we had fun putting together that presentation.

I am now 7000 miles away from the Home of New Rock, wishing there was a way I could’ve listened to the last blasts of soundwaves from that great rock’n radio station.

Thank you NU107 for providing the soundtrack for the best and not-so-great moments of my life.