Esquire 08/2017 Anne Curtis

BUSINESS ATHLETE. THE ALL-NEW BMW 5 SERIES.

You can choose to play by the rules, or you can change the game entirely. When you’re at the top, your greatest competitor is yourself—and your greatest partner on the journey is the all-new BMW 5 Series.

Visit your nearest BMW dealer or go to www.bmw.com.ph for more.

Photo may vary from actual unit.

Metro Manila

Autoallee BMW North EDSA, Quezon City Tel. (632) 433 8338

Autohaus BMW Libis, Quezon City Tel. (632) 638 0734

Motor Ventures BMW Alabang, Muntinlupa City Tel. (632) 772 6022 to 24

Prestige Cars BMW Pasong Tamo Ext., Makati City Tel. (632) 892 8127

Luzon

Visayas

Premier Cars BMW San Fernando, Pampanga Tel. (6345) 963 7777

Autobahn BMW Talisay City, Negros Occidental Tel. (6334) 495 0082

Mindanao

Autowelt BMW Nivel Hills, Lahug, Cebu City Tel. (6332) 268 9888

Premium Motoren BMW Mastersons Ave., Cagayan de Oro Tel. (6388) 851 7960

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08.2017

CONTENTS 19

MaHB ESQ&A

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TO T H E WO M E N W E LOV E Our final love letter to the beautiful Filipina, starring Anne Curtis, Agot Isidro, Angel Aquino, Tweetie de Leon-Gonzalez, and Zsa Zsa Padilla

p a g e 51

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M a H B Trave l Make your way to somewhere warm and sandy.

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MaHB Drinking Getting buzzed on the new cold brew trend.

P H OTO G R A P H BY PAC O G U E R R E RO

Rappler’s Maria Ressa

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T H E M A N W H O B O U G H T T H E WO R L D What’s 24 hours with Chavit Singson like?

p a g e 74

CONTENTS M a H B B o o ks Bittersweet escapes for you and woke books for the kids.

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Style Trends in watches come and go but the classics endure for a reason.

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N o t e s & E s s ay s Sarge Lacuesta, Martina Morell, Carlos F. Bautista, and Tim Serrano on farewells

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY JASON QUIBILAN, TIM SERRANO

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B U L L ET P R O O F !

International man of mystery Karl Glusman wears suits to carry you through any situation.

page 92

CONTENTS 82

T h e Fo r t u n e Hunter

86

The Hedonist We a r s Lo u b o u t i n s The secret life of a dominatrix

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T h i s Way O u t One more thing before we go.

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P H OTO G R A P H S BY T U R E L I L L E G R AV E N

To figure out your next move, consider signs and stars.

L E T T E R F RO M T H E E D I TO R

GENTLEMEN, LADIES Being a gentlemen’s magazine in an age where it has been pointed out (rightly) that it’s a concept that peers ever so dangerously over the precipice of sexism means having to tread a very delicate balance, every day, on every story, on every page. Nowhere else is that balance more difficult to manage than in our annual Sexiest Woman Alive issue, as you might imagine. How does one look at a woman with frank sexual attraction, without overstepping boundaries? If the male gaze has become anathema to politically correct polite society, is it possible at all to maintain a gentleman’s gaze instead?

I’ll bet that every Esquire editor in the world, upon being given the top-secret driver’s manual to the brand, turned right to the page about Women. At the risk of spoiling the magic, here is what it says in its entirety: “An Esquire branded way to present women, this is a four- to eight- page feature on a gorgeous woman, usually an actress, model, or musician and is a ‘must-have’ to every edition. It can

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be a cover story or can be an annual reveal of the editor’s choice of Sexiest Woman Alive.”

In short: Figure it out, buddy, you’re on your own.

It should be easy, right? Sexual attraction should be the simplest thing: It exists partly subliminally, running below the surface of self-consciousness; but there is also no way we cannot be aware of its effects. Sexual attraction insists on being recognized, even when we don’t understand it.

But the politics of sex and sexual attraction are a little bit more tricky, and this is the context in which we name our choice for Sexiest Woman Alive. This is a public choice, and so it is also a somewhat political one.

Through the six-ish years of its existence in print, Esquire Philippines has named a wide range of women, sometimes controversially, to the title: Solenn Heussaff first, in 2013; Hollywood actress Shay Mitchell in 2014; TV newscaster Karen Davila in 2015; Miss Universe crown-holder Pia Wurtzbach in 2016. (Also of note: journalist Maria Ressa was named to the international list on Esquire.com in 2010. She again appears in this issue for our ESQ&A, on page 19. We kind of like that symmetry.) Some were more obvious choices than the others.

Others worked precisely because they were unusual picks.

In the changing global media landscape, men’s magazines everywhere have pulled back from this mine-filled territory because it’s been so difficult to navigate. But at Esquire…we love women. And we love them well.

So, if this is the last love letter we get to write to the women we love, we wanted to write it to all the women we ever loved, and whom we never got to tell. The Filipina—for all her grace and her beauty, for all her strength, and for all the crap she’s had to put up with— is the Sexiest Woman Alive.

Kristine F O N A C I E R with gratitude and respect for Patricia, Audrey, Clifford, Kara, Miguel, Sarge, and Paul, who always asked for nothing less than excellence, always.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY RENNELL SALUMBRE (FONACIER) AND FRANCISCO GUERRERO

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KRISTINE FONACIER

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LISA Y. GOKONGWEICHENG

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Advertising Assistants Sheena Claricia, Lorena Santiago, Jackelyn Que Advertising Traffic Supervisor Eliziel del Rio Advertising Traffic Assistant Arthur Villaflor PRODUCTION Production Manager Eliz Rellis Production Coordinator Arnel Laigo Cover Artist Mady Marcelino Production Artists Monica Saputil Joy Vincent Serrano Natz Bade Production Interns Nika Enriquez Brian Mickey Buan Katrina Cabezas Aran Lyn Napiere

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CONTRIBUTORS FRANCISCO G GUERRERO is a travel and lifestyle

photographer who has shot for Condé Nast Traveller, Monocle, and GRI GRID Magazine, among many other publications and cclients around the world. Last year, Paco shot Pia Wur Wurtzbach for the cover of our August 2016 issue. He rep reprises the role of photographer to our Sexiest Woma Woman Alive this year, taking the portraits of five cover subje subjects in a series that celebrates the enduring beauty o of the Filipino woman—the final declaration of our abiding love for her.

SAM AM LLIM is a photographer who who, apart from

taking photos of food, also happens to cook.

When he’s not shooting restaurants and dishes for som some of the country’s top publications, Sam al also runs Eggs for Breakfast, an all-day breakf breakfast place in Antipolo. For this issue, Sam (who h has also tried his hand at being a barista) took ph hotos of Nitro 7’s cold brew coffee. photos

LEE CACES is an illustrator,

graphic designer, photographer, mural artist, and calligrapher whose work appears in many of the country’s top publications, as well as on the walls of several restaurants and local ozens of portraits for Esquire establishments. Lee has illustrated dozens Philippines’ contributors page, including all the ones you see here.

is a veteran in the business of making images. After more than a decade of working as a documentary filmmaker, he took to photography to explore his “passion for lighting.” Jason is the managing director of Shutterspace Studios and is a vocalist in a blues band for which he plays harmonica.

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LALA A GALLARDO is an accomplished er and mixed-media artist who has painter bited in several group and one-woman exhibited s, and has participated in TransCultural shows, ange’s worldwide Tile and Coaster Exchange’s Projects. Recently, Lala has been working on the centennial celebrations of painter and National Artist Cesar Legaspi, her grandfather. In this issue, Lala’s art accompanies our story about Filipino fortune-telling, in which one of our writers was told by three separate mystics to expect twins in her future.

I L LU ST R AT I O N S BY L E E C AC E S

JASON QUIBILAN

Man at His Best:

08.2017

E S Q & A

MARIA RE S SA The MOST HATED Sexiest WOMAN Alive Interview by Kristine Fonacier Photographs by Fruhlein Econar “Despite her size, fearless enough to write an eyewitness account of Al-Qaeda,” Esquire trumpeted in 2010, when the website named Maria Ressa to its list of 195 Sexiest Women Alive. It’s a factoid that was resurrected earlier this year by (let’s be frank) fake news sites and hyperpartisan blogs, ostensibly to hold her up anew to social media ridicule. “They’ve said worse,” says Ressa, a lifelong journalist whose rèsumé includes leadership positions at CNN and ABS-CBN. “Name the animal, I’ve been called it. This isn’t new.”

CONTINUED

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July 2017_Esquire 19

Man at His Best Her book Seeds of Terror, which Esquire referenced in its blurb, was published in 2003; since then, she’s also published From Bin Laden to Facebook, further buttressing her reputation as arguably the region’s foremost media expert on terrorism in Asia. Another interesting factoid, though of dubious distinction: recordings of her TV reportage were reportedly found in Bin Laden’s lair in Afghanistan.

But it’s not even her focus on terrorism that’s made a target out of Ressa.

In 2010, she left her post as head of the news and current affairs department at ABS-CBN in order to put up Rappler, heralding the advent of online news.

Since Rappler officially launched in 2012, Ressa and her team have become the poster children (and punching bags) for modern news media in the Philippines, drawing both accolades and ire from politicians and from the public.

Ressa spoke to Esquire during an interesting time: After a week that saw huge shake-ups in traditional media, the president himself—at the State of the Nation Address, no less—trained his attention on Rappler, which he alleged was “fully owned by Americans.” Before Ressa took to Twitter to reply (“President Duterte, you are wrong. @rapplerdotcom is 100% Filipino owned. Any leader should vet his information”), she answered our questions about the social media wars, the future of news, and her continuing optimism about Filipinos.

E S Q U I R E : When you started Rappler in 2012, having come from a long

career in traditional broadcast media, people must have said you were crazy.

M A R I A R E S SA: They did, but you could see it

coming. [In my book, From Bin Laden to Facebook, I say that] information cascades are everything. And digital actually makes it very, very efficient. And I knew that if we could tap this, if evil guys could tap this to spread the ideology of terrorism, why can’t the good guys use it to enable and empower?

E S Q : In the Philippines, you saw that we were ripe for that, too.

MR : Big time. In ABS-CBN, we embraced citizen journalism. In the physical world, you can only pass an idea on to every person you’re talking to— it’s one-to-one. But if you’re in the virtual world, you’re automatically speaking one to many. That’s super exciting, right?

I could see it coming, even when I was in ABS-CBN. I threw everyone on Twitter and I threw them to Facebook. I was the one who said, you know, every reporter will now tweet.

Because, normally, if you leave this in the hands of bureaucracies, it’ll never happen, because you have to make the argument that it is worth the risk.

Here’s the other part—because we were also the first ones going in, we could help shape its evolution, and we were far more proactive.

Filipinos, in general, became far more proactive on social media and became far more positive, I think. Part of it was, when you get there first, if you are among the first, you help shape what that landscape looks like. And that was the best fun that we ever had, you know?

E S Q : But we’ve also seen the backlash to that kind of power.

MR: We didn’t really see the backlash ‘till 2016….To do social media really well, you have to be vulnerable, right? And for a large company, being vulnerable is anathema—nobody wants to do that. This is the dilemma we now face. In 2016, the same thing was twisted against us—and I will say that, it wasn’t used just against Rappler, but against every Filipino on social media.

So, these were the two warring things: now we know the evil, we know the good. Which one will win? There’s a battle for it now. Now I think, in the long term, we will use it for good but it’s going to be like getting rid of the pollution that’s there. I think people will become more savvy. We just have to live through these very painful times.

ESQ: Do you think that you were ahead of the curve in terms of using social media?

MR : Globally? Yes. When we started Rappler, the idea was to actually be able to crowdsource both help and information during times of crisis. There’s an average of 20 typhoons every year, and when we started Rappler, [disaster risk reduction] was actually a goal.

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I wanted to connect the government’s first responders, instead of having to call a hotline where no one answers, you could tweet, you could post, you could SMS. And we built the tech platform we called Agos. If Uber can build an Uber for cars, why can’t we do that [for information]? Bottom up, top down.

We connect bottom up: Social media calls for help and information, from the top down there are government first responders and work flows. And so that was the first experiment of crowdsourcing on a larger scale.

NDRRMC [National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council] and the Office of Civil Defense, they’ve done presentations globally that show this. We built Agos [Rappler’s disaster information platform]—so I made it very no-risk for the government. We built it and we said, here, let’s do it! We’ll help you execute because we have a civic engagement arm that actually sits at the Office of Civil Defense every time there is a typhoon. We launched Agos a month before Typhoon Yolanda. We launched it then because that’s when we had scaled enough so that we had enough of a community that would then volunteer to help during disasters. So, that was exciting.

So yes, were we first globally? Yes, absolutely. We built on top of what Haiti did, with Ushahidi [a company that built open-source mapping technology], but on ours there’s now a dashboard, for example, where volunteers can input.

It’s a whole system and the government’s been using it. In 2015, NDRRMC put it into their operational workflow.

You know our change model? What you see on social media is only the tip of the iceberg. The post or tweet carries an emotion, and that emotion travels on social networks, and those social networks change behavior. That was always our change model that we wanted to see whether it really worked like that. And all of our experiments on social media showed us it did.

E S Q : But, as you said, the tone of online conversation changed in 2016…

M R : That same change model worked to elect President Duterte, right? He was the one who recognized it best among the politicians, and they were able to mobilize people. And they did a very good job at it.

E S Q : Have you tweaked your change model then, since last year, in light of everything that is happening?

M R : No, it’s still the way it is, right? That will always be there. It’s how we deal with people who want to take advantage of it. This is what I loved about moving onto the Internet. I did television before because it influenced people. It helped show you the battle for truth! That’s essentially what it is. It was easy in the old days.

Now, we’ve gone through a phase where we’ve empowered people and given them a voice against old power structures. Now, they’ve been able to organize themselves both for good and for evil.

In the past, I used to say evil was ISIS, Al Qaeda— they all use this. But now the same thing, it’s being able to take advantage of that exponential curve in reach. Now, all politicians can do it. So, this is our change model, and it works! The emotion is what enables social network to run.

I always say family and friends are your physical social network, but social media are your family and friends on steroids—and that network influences behavior. This is our conversion funnel. Every single campaign is the same exact thing that works in politics.

ESQ: There are dangers, too. With that same model, you’re vulnerable to attack.

MR: Living through it, you have to just weather it. In the end, they’re not really interested in engaging in ideas, which is the reason for responding. They just want to hit you with a charge until it sticks.

E S Q : Has any of it stuck?

MR: I think in the short term, people who don’t know news, people who don’t have any real background in it, they can be misled. But I go back to maybe my best defense and the best offense, which is physical-world actions. In the end, there will be a track record.

You can’t give up on your work—you influence a large number of people right off the top! If you give up on it, and some people have, they shut down

Man at His Best their Facebook. That’s abdicating responsibility as well. You know, Facebook helped in Rappler’s phenomenal growth, but I also think Facebook has abdicated responsibility by not cleaning itself up. But just because they’re behaving poorly, doesn’t mean we need to behave poorly, right?

E S Q : Do you mean to be a primarily Philippine-based news network with interests outside or do you want to expand your focus to the region?

M R : I’ve never wanted to just be a Philippine-based network. The reason why we are based here is because we’re Filipino. I actually thought about setting up Rappler in Singapore and the reason why we didn’t was because it was connected to our identity: I’m primarily a journalist, and I am Filipino.

I wanted to be global from the beginning, but because we’re based in the Philippines in the same way that CNN is based in Atlanta, it makes our perspective unique. So, for us, our strength is the Philippines. All of our editors have written books on corruption: Chay [Hofileña] wrote the book on media corruption, Marites [Dañguilan Vitug] wrote the book on judicial corruption, Glenda [Gloria] and Gemma [Bagayaua Mendoza] and Aries [Rufo], who is now gone, they wrote the book on military corruption. Aries wrote the book on corruption in the Church. So, it’s like for us, we know this landscape really well. What we wanted to do was to create something that wasn’t there before.

E S Q : You didn’t foresee that it was going to be this crusade.

MR: We’re not just throwing words out into the vacuum—What we want to do is to actually have a direct link between what we create, a vision of truth and spotlighting areas that require public attention, and we put that together with real world action, because you can build.

So, if you ask me what Rappler is in one sentence, it’s not just an investigative journalism group; Rappler builds communities of action. From the very beginning, that was our goal. So, it was both with the use of technology and the regional and global perspective.

ESQ: You began talking about how crowdsourcing was at the heart of what you wanted to do, but over the past few years, there’s just been backlash against crowdsourced content.

M R : I still believe that the principle—regardless of execution, and as technology—gets better.

What’s coming online? Artificial intelligence, neural networks, right now you have basic machine learning. This can be a whole different world from what I grew up in. I think that older folks, my generation, hold on to these rules like they’re the Bible and it just isn’t true, because you fundamentally altered the landscape, and what’s done that is technology. I think journalists today and tomorrow have to face [the challenges of technology.]. And if the tech companies don’t help in this, if they continue to take the lion’s share of the revenues, then how are the democracies going to work when the primary sources of information no longer exist?

The discipline of journalism is more important today than ever before, and I actually think that crowdsourcing can help that. If you think about it, fundamentally, crowdsourcing is exactly what a journalist does anyway. It’s just that there’s so much information that people are deluged with that they can’t actually just watch and see how this group or that group is manipulating them. It’s a far more chaotic landscape. You have to tell people what’s happening because they’re only looking at their neck of the woods; they’re not looking at everyone else’s…I’m hoping that what this would do is create a more sensitive, more wary, more educated [audience]. I know media literacy will take time.

ESQ: Do you think the social media platforms should exercise more control?

MR: That’s the reason why I think Facebook, at least in the Philippines, is the only group that has the power to act in the short term. I think, when you’re the platform, you need to draw the line between freedom of expression and dangerous speech—speech that incites hate or mob violence, whether that is an online mob or real mob. That [kind of] speech, that doesn’t belong.

That is against the law.

ESQ: Okay, now I want to get into that, because first of all you and your

reporters have been targeted by the online mob in a very personal and a very frightening way.

MR: I suppose it’s a badge of honor (smiles) ABS-CBN was actually hit first during that time, and then after ABS, it was the Inquirer because of its Kill List, then after that it was GMA for a little bit, then us.

ESQ: Yes, but not…

MR: Not the way I was hit. We were also the only ones who did stories on the propaganda machine.

ESQ: What was the reception like on that series?

MR: People said: that’s why, yes, thank you! But at the same time, of course, the machine turned on us, which we expected. I think the biggest problem is that news groups haven’t yet realized that this is not the time to stand alone. This is actually a time to collaborate with other news groups. If news groups had worked together for the truth instead of focusing on the petty rivalries, we would have had the ability to help shape the narrative against the propaganda machine better, because in the end, that machine is manipulating people.

ESQ: That also goes against old-fashioned reporters’ instincts. I mean, maybe now that the younger batch is looking to collaborate…

MR: You know what? You need to go back. What is the end goal? What are the things we’re still trying to work on? Something we’re all trying to work on, and we all decided to do this, is to fight fake news.

One thing that’s weakening the fabric is that when one news group does a story, we don’t follow up on each other’s story. Even when it comes to attributions, many news groups don’t attribute anymore when we really should.

ESQ: Why are you still optimistic?

MR : If I wasn’t optimistic, I wouldn’t be here.

If you weren’t optimistic, you could leave the country.

ESQ: I’m thinking about it.

MR : Don’t, because this is our generation’s battle. This is our battle. Do you stand up and be counted, or do you walk away? And I don’t mean stand up against government, I just mean, this is a time where you define who you are and what values you stand for.

ESQ: As a child growing up through Martial Law, I still think to that time as fearsome, and I think of the very real danger of being taken away and to be disappeared, a fear that you don’t seem to share.

MR: It’s not that I don’t share it. I worked under authoritarian governments before. In some ways, it was easier to work through Suharto’s Indonesia because you knew what the rules were, and you pushed against those rules. I think the way to not be afraid is assess the worst-case scenarios and prepare for them.

And you decide what risks are acceptable and what risks are not. Now that I’m much older, it’s not that I’m not afraid. It’s that I prepare for anything that might happen. And that’s the same for our team. No one wants to be attacked, but if that’s what you have to go through to get to the end, then you take it and move forward.

Do we have a choice? I can’t change who I am. I’ve been a journalist my whole life. I’ve lived through worse. I’ve been nearly kicked out of countries, I’ve been shot at. This is not any different. What is different is the masquerade. That is part of the reason that you have to shine the light and say here it is. Governments have long intimidated people who oppose them, and they’ve intimidated those they believe can threaten them.

The best government understands it needs these checks and balances.

That they serve a purpose. hWe don’t oppose the government, we do our jobs—we’re journalists. That’s why we need to stay the course. We just need to.

July 2017_Esquire 21

Man at His Best

T R A V E L

THE BEACH RESET Do-nothing S A N D Y G E T A W A Y S not your thing? There’s still time this S U M M E R to learn how to love to lounge at these new resorts.

The beach is not my natural element. Tell me I’m going to London and I dream of martinis.

The Bahamas? I think of how uncomfortable sand is. But I’ve lived through enough beachless seasons to know that avoiding them is no way to summer. If you get through September without breathing in some salt air, life just feels kind of flat. There’s a richness in the contrast of lazy and busy days—it’s apt that the glare of the ocean sun makes virtually all phones annoying to use. Mother Nature is telling you to be alone with your thoughts.

Would it hurt to ponder the curvature of the earth where the sky touches the sea for a while? Email and Facebook will still be there in the fall. Pro-level beach fans have always instinctively known how reinvigorating the coast can be. For the rest of us, here are some new places to test the waters. Sand washes away pretty easily, after all.

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TRUE BLUE

You’ll feel like you have the beach to yourself at the Shore Club in Turks and Caicos.

1.

Idyllic Suite

Andaz Mayakoba Resort, near Playa del Carmen, Mexico The newest property of the luxe Mayakoba ecoresort development has minimalist rooms with plunge pools and patios that open up directly onto the shore. Just step out and choose where to dip—they’re fantasy beach hangouts come true.

Esquire_August 2017

2.

Baller Escape

Faena Hotel, Miami Beach

Can over-the-top be a compliment? It can be when you’re talking about this hotel, a maximalist’s fever dream of a property in the Faena district of Miami Beach. Damien Hirst’s gold-plated mammoth skeleton will stir up as many existential thoughts as the ocean.

3.

Baja Hideaway

4.

Unsung Beach

Liz Lambert’s Bunkhouse group, the company behind Austin’s Hotel San José and Marfa’s El Cosmico, brings its own brand of Texas cool to the boho fisherman/surfer town of Todos Santos. Details like kimono robes and a gong that’s hit when the sun sets are impeccable.

But it all takes a backseat to ridiculous views of the Pacific.

Long Bay Beach, despite having three miles of soft white sand and warm shallow water, was relatively under the radar until the Shore Club opened last December.

Key amenities: a private yacht you can charter and a complimentary kids’ club (so parents can have a bit of a real vacation). —Kevin Sintumuang

Hotel San Cristóbal, Todos Santos, Mexico

The Shore Club, Providenciales, Turks and Caicos

Man at His Best

D R I N K I N G

COFFEE O N TA P The new C O L D B R E W T R E N D that people should start raving about.

By Kara Ortiga Photographs by Sam Lim AT FIRST GLANCE, the Nitro 7 Coffee and Tea bar that has made its presence felt in a number of bustling locations will definitely catch your eye. They’ve got spouts set up like they’re running some kind of mobile pub—except their menu consists entirely of coffee and tea. Out of curiosity, I decided to give it a try... not expecting much, to be honest, except another gimmick, perhaps.

I ordered the vanilla breve: a mixture of nitro brewed coffee on ice, half-and-half, and a pump of vanilla syrup. My immediate reaction: holy cow— this shit is good.

Here’s a little bit of a background about this thing called nitro brew: infused with nitrogen, cold brew coffee is run through a contraption exactly

We Li ke It Di r t y Coffee mixes you never thought were possible

DIRTY HORCHATA Horchata, a Mexican drink made of rice, almonds, and vanilla, is scrumptious on its own. But chill in and mix with a shot of espresso, and you’ve got a dirty horchata. Third Wave (@ThirdWavePH) bottles their own horchata so that you can make these babies at home.

COFFEE TONIC Tonic water and coffee?

It may not sit perfectly on everyone’s palate. But the citrusy taste from the tonic with the right shot of espresso makes a hell of a refreshing drink.

COFFEE SODA Not into the unique combination of tonic and coffee? Swap out the tonic for club soda, and it’s like you’re sipping a crisp, bubbly Americano.

23

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like they use in beer, through a pressurized valve with tiny holes. The result is a drink that is so smooth and creamy, you’ll forget your drinking coffee, until the caffeine kicks in.

I like my coffee black, so their nitro black hit the right spot. Using Ethiopian beans in their brew is low on acidity and bitterness, creating the perfect black cup. And while I’m not normally a white-coffe drinker, I wouldn’t mind indulging in their iced lattés. They have a concoction of half-and-half that is decadent, unlike any other latte served in the market.

They also have other playful flavors like the irish crème, hazlenut caramel mocha, and even the peppermint mocha, all of which may tilt toward the overpoweringly sweet, but there’s no doubt that white-coffee lovers will be all over these mixes. In the works, they say, are frapuccinos and even spiked cold brews. Don’t mind if we do.

Man at His Best

“Send nudes” is not a bio.

Microtargeted Love Is i n t h e Ai r Got a thing for high earners? Beards and mustaches? Goat farmers? There’s an app for that.

S E X

HACKING C H I VA L R Y

Some people say that dating apps are making men F L A K Y, S L E A Z Y, and S E L F I S H . . . and that dating apps are the solution.

“MAKE AMERICA LOVE AGAIN,” the ad blared through my news feed over black-and-white photographs of pre-Pill couples courting at the sock hop. A few taps later, the website for tech start-up Eve informed me with only a hint of irony: “Modern dating is in crisis. We thought there should be an app for that.”

It’s been five years since Tinder disrupted the dating game, allowing millennials to summon potential partners like taxis and Chinese takeout.

Then came the backlash. Think pieces decried a

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Happn The pitch: “The app that saves us from missed connections.”

Luxy The pitch: “Tinder minus the riffraff.”

FarmersOnly The pitch: “City folks just don’t get it.”

Tastebuds The pitch: “Meet new people. Discover new music.”

Bristlr The pitch: “We love beards. You love beards. Everyone loves beards (even if they say they don’t).”

High There!

The pitch: “Meet cannabis enthusiasts around the world!”

wasteland of empty promises and one-night stands.

One article blamed Tinder for the “dating apocalypse,” prompting an infamous Twitter tantrum from the brand. Books like Aziz Ansari’s Modern Love wrestled with our hookup-happy culture’s “paradox of choice.”

Stock prices wavered. Mobile dating was in need of a PR makeover.

According to the doomsayers, men are swiping right with abandon, “ghosting,” and dodging commitment. (Millennial-to-English translation: They’re coming on to too many women, disappearing after two dates, and generally behaving like they have a whole sea of fish waiting in their pocket—which, of course, they do.) So who can save singles from the calamity the tech bros have wrought? “Us,” say the tech bros.

And so a crop of new app features have emerged.

“Men have been taught to peacock and get our attention, especially in online communities that create this sense of urgency and aggression,” says a representative from Bumble, a spin-off from one of Tinder’s cofounders that nixes creepy pickup lines by letting women make the first move. (Bumble has introduced a watermark feature to its photosharing function, in the hope that plastering users’ names across every snapshot will give them pause before they send that unsolicited dick pic.) Apps like Hinge—which makes matches via mutual friends— and Tinder also launched campaigns to rebrand themselves as relationship-focused services rather than friction-free hookup tools. Eve, which launched this past spring, introduced a system that rates men on how they use the app. For every swipe right, men lose points for being less selective—encouraging them to narrow their criteria from “any female with a pulse” to “women I’m really interested in.”

Eve cofounder Hank Dumanian is well aware that guys may bristle at the idea of being scored by an algorithm (and indeed, all the men I spoke with felt at least a little uncomfortable with the double standard). But Dumanian insists he’s doing them a favor. The problem with dating apps, as he sees it, is that they “treat male and female users as functional equivalents.” The reality is that men not only far outnumber women (some apps have a male-female ratio as high as 70 to 30) but also behave entirely differently. The average man will swipe right on nearly half the women he sees. (A secondary, auto-right-swipe app market has even sprung up to mitigate the risks of carpal tunnel.)

By comparison, the average female user swipes right only 14 percent of the time.

As a woman, I find Eve a little intimidating.

What are the odds a 9.2 will use one of his precious swipes on me? But I spoke with others who were excited by the idea of an app that pushes men to, as one woman put it, finally “swipe with intention.”

So if it’s an all-you-can-lay buffet you’re looking for, keep Tinder on your home screen.

But if—bless your heart—you’re holding out for The One? Then step away from the slot machine and try a game that involves a little strategy; the jackpot’s bound to be bigger. —Julia Black

Man at His Best 1.

The Seventh Function of Language

By Laurent Binet An affectionate send-up of an Umberto Eco–style intellectual thriller that doubles as an exemplar of the genre, filled with suspense, elaborate conspiracies, and exotic locales.

2.

New People

By Danzy Senna If a woman sabotages her own life but there’s no one around to hear her, does she make a sound? That’s the question underlying this taut novel about a couple grappling with guilt, race, and desire in the late ’90s.

B O O K S

BITTERSWEET ESCAPE T A K E A T R I P T O T H E ’ 9 0 S , into the mind of an addict, and to a small fictional town trying to M A K E A M E R IC A G R E AT AG A IN.

By Jonathan Dee The Pulitzer-prize finalist’s latest work focuses on a small town touched by the New American Values: greed, paranoia, and spite. No wonder it’s been billed as the Hillbilly Elegy of novels.

4.

Lights On, Rats Out

By Cree LeFavour Ever sat in therapy wondering what was going on in the other chair (or what a third-degree burn felt like)? Look no further than this harrowing memoir of self-harm told through the prism of a psychiatrist’s notes.

5.

Moving Kings

By Joshua Cohen This lively story of the fraught ties that bind an American, Republican Jew and his Israeli family makes another strong case for Cohen’s admission into the ranks of the Great American Novelists.

AVA I L A B L E AT N AT I O N A L B O O KSTO R E

3.

The Locals

August 2017_Esquire 25

Man at His Best

B O O K S

BEDTIME STORIES FOR THE WOKE

AVA I L A B L E AT N AT I O N A L B O O KSTO R E

Books to stock in your children’s libraries.

By Sasha Martinez A CHILD’S CURIOSITY IS A PRECIOUS, oh-sowholesome thing—a wide-eyed thirst for knowledge that must be cherished at all costs and nourished and addressed. Dad, why is the sky blue? Dad, what are hiccups? Dad, why do my fingers wrinkle up when I stay in the bath too long? Dad, why does Mommy cry whenever she’s washing the dishes? Dad, was Ferdinand E. Marcos really a dictator and was his decades-long reign, including his declaration of Martial Law, the true modern dark ages of the Philippines and not the golden era that all these strangers on the internet tell me when I go online to watch Shaun the Sheep reruns?

So pure, so adorable. So precocious.

Next time you tuck your spawn into bed, best whip out Ito ang Diktadura by Equipo Plantel and illustrated by Mikel Casal. This damning children’s book lays out some of the most straightforward descriptions of a dictatorial rule by running the reader through a day in the life of a despot: Wake up grumpy, get briefed by your officials during breakfast to ensure there are no uprisings on the horizon, etc., the usual. It reads like a checklist: Is his name on everything? Are there celebrations in his honor sponsored by his government? Are his critics enemies of the state or in jail or exiled or dead? Are his friends rich beyond belief and untouched by his laws?

Children—and, sure, maybe even the more willfully ignorant adults among us—won’t have much trouble with the book’s enumeration of the dictator’s playbook: He sets the laws; he sets the rewards; he sets the punishments. You’re not allowed to think for yourself, and especially not against the government. You’re not allowed to not like the government, or the dictator. The dictator is the bravest and the strongest, the smartest and the most cunning, the best at pretty much everything.

The dictator will keep on reminding you of this. The dictator is a bully.

Casal’s illustrations are delightfully retro but oddly haunting—the woodcut prints and the color blocks should bring one cheer, but the juxtaposition only underscores the gloom and horror of what they convey. The dictator of the storybook—mildly rotund, dressed in blue, topped with a blocky orb for a head—also looks familiar. It’s his stone-faced expression, we think.

Adarna House immediately scooped up the local translation and distribution rights for the book, Así es la dictadura, when it went viral on local social media a few years ago. The book’s end pages—which looks like a psychedelic police lineup of history’s absolute worst—had Marcos, pursed lips and pomaded hair, rubbing elbows with Fidel Castro, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-Il. Oh, and Adolf Hitler, you may have heard of him.

Ito ang Diktadura, and another book in the imported series, Mga Uring Panlipunan—which reads as a primer on social systems and is pretty much a condemnation of rampant social inequity; some light reading for you there, kids—were originally published as part of the four-volume Libros para Mañana (“Books for the Future”) by the Barcelona-based publishing house La Gaya Ciencia in 1977. That’s a mere five years after Marcos declared Martial Law over the Philippines, and the world was pretty damned sure that guy was a dictator.

In their introduction to their new edition, Adarna House notes: “Nearly 40 years have passed, and we believe that the spirit and the message of these books remain prevalent.” Unfortunately, we’re going to have to agree with that one.

And when your offspring start asking you the real questions—Dad, does Wi-Fi come from the sky? Dad, why is Mommy emptying our cabinets? Dad, why is it that despite overwhelming evidence of the reality of Martial Law and the Marcos family’s acts of cruelty against an entire nation, they still get overwhelming support from citizens and the government?—hit them up with the old standbys guaranteed to hold them fast against the pro-dictatorship Internet trolls and random Titos who drank the Marcosian Kool-Aid. There’s Raissa Robles’ Marcos Martial Law: Never Again. Nick Joaquin’s Reportage on the Marcoses is a classic. The Conjugal Dictatorship by Primitivo Mijares—one of Marcos’ top propaganda guys who turned against the regime, and who disappeared upon the first publication of the book— has been reissued in an annotated, dead-tree edition

by Mijares’ estate and has easily become an essential volume in the libraries of Filipinos worth their weight in adobo flakes.

You say indoctrination, we say this-shit-reallyshould-be-in-core-curricula. Potato, po-tah-to.

T h e D I C TATO R i s the bravest and th e stro n g e st, th e sm ar te st an d T H E M O ST C U N N I N G , th e b e st at p re tty m u ch eve r y th i n g .

T h e d i ctato r w i l l ke e p o n re m i n d i n g yo u o f th i s. T h e d i ctato r i s a B U L LY.

August 2017_Esquire 26

Style: hit

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08.2017

Ti m e White-gold Classique Hora Mundi

by Breguet; breguet.com

Trends in watches come and go, but these classics endure for a reason—they mark a man of taste and style. Here are 42 timeless watches for every occasion.

August 2017_Esquire 27

Style: Golden Hour

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less is more There was an era when, at certain key times—like dinner —consulting your POCKET WATCH was considered the height of rudeness, the early-20th-century equivalent of busting out your iPhone too often. The solution? The wristwatch—an elegant accessory that also allowed one to (hopefully) discreetly glance at his wrist. There is little need, when tucking into the consommé, for tachymeters or chronographs.

Hours, seconds, minutes will do. Simpler movements mean thinner movements, which make a dress watch easier to slip under a shirt cuff. Unless you go out in a T-shirt, in which case you’re probably not bothered by those subtleties.

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01. Pink-gold WW1 Regulateur by Bell & Ross 02. Steel Metro by Nomos Glashütte; nomos-store.com 03. Pink-gold Richard Lange by A. Lange & Söhne; alange-soehne.com 04. Rose-gold Arceau Automatique by Hermès; hermes.com 05. White-gold Pierre Arpels by Van Cleef & Arpels; vancleefarpels.com 06. Steel Elite Chronograph Classic by Zenith; zenith-watches.com 07. White-gold Altiplano by Piaget; piaget.com 08. Rose-gold Golden Ellipse by Patek Philippe; patek.com

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Style: Golden Hour

in THE Black-cased watches have hit the market hard in recent years—that’s partly a symptom of our current taste for murdered-out everything, but mostly thanks to space-age advances in metallurgy and chemistry, which can change the composition and color of metal.

Watchmakers bonded vaporized metal to the surface of the case and later realized they could also deposit carbon. Now ceramics are the future: Heat-, scratch-, and corrosionresistant, the material is pitch-black through and through. (If there were a scratch, it wouldn’t really show.) The watch’s only real weakness is a heavy impact. So don’t hit yours with a hammer.

black

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01. Steel Stop2go by Mondaine; mondaine-usa.com 02. Steel Night Vision chronograph by Victorinox; victorinoxwatches.com 03. Steel with ADLC Santos by Cartier; cartier.com 04. Ceramic Superocean Héritage Chronoworks by Breitling; breitling.com 05. Carbon Octo Ultranero Solotempo by Bulgari; bulgari.com 06. Steel Black Bay Dark by Tudor; tudorwatch.com

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the LIFE aquatic

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A scuba diver’s life depends on his

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ability to keep track of the time (and air) he has left before he must return to the surface. The dive watch, which has a one-way bezel to gauge set intervals, is the best tool for the job. Tudor has based its latest model on this 1961 photo of a French Navy diver wearing his own Tudor Oyster Prince Submariner (aka “the Big Crown”). He’s a lefty, so he’s got the watch on his right wrist (freeing his dominant hand) and upside down (to better adjust the crown and bezel). Back then, it was the most efficient way for a southpaw to keep tabs on the time. Today, it’s inspired the designers at Tudor to create a left-handed version for the brand’s Pelagos line of titanium dive watches.

01. Steel Luminor 1950 by Panerai; panerai.com 02. Steel Aquatimer Chronograph Edition “Sharks” by IWC; iwc.com

03. Titanium Pelagos LHD

by Tudor; tudorwatch.com 04. Steel Royal Oak Offshore Diver chronograph by Audemars Piguet; audemarspiguet.com

05. Steel Prospex PADI Special com Edition by Seiko; seikowatches.com or 06. Ceramic Master Compressor ltre; chronograph by Jaeger-LeCoultre; jaeger-lecoultre.com

August 2017_Esquire 31

Style: Golden Hour

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There’s a lot of history packed into pilot watches. They’ve taken us to new frontiers and saved lives up in the air and in outer space.

In the age before GPS, timing one’s journey in relation to speed and fuel was a crucial part of flight navigation. (Lindbergh even designed a watch with Longines in 1931.) In space, the Apollo 13 crew used the Omega Speedmaster to time a lifesaving, courseadjusting thruster burst. If accuracy, ruggedness, and a legacy of adventure aren’t enough to make you a watch guy, throw in the white-knuckle experiences of aviators and astronauts. And if those do nothing, well, check your pulse.

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adjustments

IMAGE: PIXABAY

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01. Ceramic Mark XVIII Top Gun Miramar by IWC; iwc.com 02. PVD Airboss Mach 9 Black Edition chronograph by Victorinox; victorinoxwatches.com 03. Steel Speedmaster Professional chronograph by Omega; omegawatches.com 04. Steel DH-88 by Bremont; bremont.com 05. Steel Heritage Pilot Ton-Up by Zenith; zenith-watches.com 06. Steel Avigation Type A-7 1935 by Longines; shop.us.longines.com 07. Steel Navitimer 01 by Breitling; breitling.com

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Style: Golden Hour

01. Big Bang Unico Sapphire by Hublot; hublot.com 02. Yellow-gold Oyster Perpetual Cosmograph Daytona by Rolex; rolex.com 03. Titanium-and-aluminum BR-X1 Hyperstellar chronograph by Bell & Ross 04. Red-gold UR-110 by Urwerk; urwerk.com 05. White-gold Emperador Coussin XL 700P by Piaget; piaget.com 06. White-gold Tradition Independent chronograph by Breguet; breguet.com 07. Red-gold-and-titanium RM 11-03 by Richard Mille; richardmille.com 01

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Fantastic Beasts These are the concept cars of the watch world: ld: mindnumbing, often beautiful, and sometimes WTF? TF? pieces made in such limited numbers (1, 2, 3) that you’ll u’ll never see them in a shop window. This rarefied category pushes watchmakers to ever greater heights of precision, innovation, and aestheticism—see: Hublot’s Big Bang Unico Sapphire, whose entire case is made from m polished sapphire crystal. Yes, this is a prime examplee of boys and their prohibitively expensive toys. But from rom these unicorns descend the watches we may one day ay slap on our wrists.

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speed dials It’s rare you’ll find a car nut who isn’t also into mechanical watches. The common ground found in gears and power transfer may explain n that joint obsession. Of all watch movements, s, the chronograph—with its subdials and stop-start functionality—is most closely identified d with speed. So when Heuer (as TAG Heuer wass once known) introduced the Mikrograph, a 1916 6 stopwatch capable of recording to a 100th of a second, it established the brand’s reputation forr sports timekeeping. But just as cars aren’t solelyy about transportation, watches aren’t solely aboutt punctuality. With both machines, style matters— — and the best chronographs convey maximal al information with minimal visual clutter.

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07 Formula 1 World Champion James Hunt wearing the Heuer Carrera 2447 NST

01. Steel Meister Driver Chronoscope by Junghans; junghanswatchesusa.net 02. Steel Drive de Cartier by Cartier; cartier.com 03. Rose-gold Mille Miglia 2016 XL Race Edition by Chopard; chopard.com/us 04. Steel Capeland Shelby Cobra chronograph by Baume & Mercier; baume-et-mercier.com

05. Steel Carrera Automatic Tachymeter chronograph by TAG Heuer; tagheuer.com 06. Gold Historiques American 1921 by Vacheron Constantin; vacheron-constantin.com 07. Bronze 1858 Chronograph Tachymeter by Montblanc; montblanc.com

August 2017_Esquire 35

Style: City Slick NICE THREADS Clowkwise, from below: a hybrid stadium jacket pays tribute New York style; Louis Vuitton’s fall 2017 men’s wear collection presented in Taipei; a pajama set uses a print from an old LV ad material; personalize your luggage and backpacks with patches.

Ease In In its latest collection, LOUIS VUITTON looks to the M A N I F O L D S T Y L E S t h a t c o - e x i s t i n N e w Yo r k C i t y.

B Y C L I F F O R D O L A N D AY

I am looking at the coin-sized hole in my favorite zip-up sweater. I’ve been wearing it forever and only recently noticed that it has seen better days. It’s not terrible, but not new. That fresh-out-of-the-box sheen has long disappeared after years of wearing it everywhere, throwing it on the

36

back seats of cars, and crumpling it into a ball (it’s very soft). The wide blue stripe that runs across its chest has muted and the collar is now decorated with tiny nicks that I suspect is due to overzealous laundering.

But the red is still vibrant, the ribbed collar and cuffs still has grip, and the zipper works. So I wear it.

Here’s how that hole

Esquire_August 2017

happened: On one manic morning, I hurriedly put on the jacket, thrusting my arms through its thin sleeves. I heard the crackle of a rrripp. Half asleep, I ignored it. It would take a week before I noticed the hole, which was underneath the left sleeve, near the armpit crease. Unless I raise my arm, I figured no one would ever see it, so I

continued to wear the magical garment that’s warm enough for the icebox temperatures of the office and light enough for a slow stroll on a sunny day. Besides, the old boy was the last thing my dad bought for me, before he decided that I was grown up enough to buy (and not ask for) things that I want.

What do you see when you look at clothes?

Do you see them as the things you need to put on to shield the world from your naked and lumpy body? Do you use them as markers of time in the way that no-fun trousers are for weekdays and shorts are for Saturdays? Or do you ascribe a feeling to them, wearing a worn jacket with ferocious conviction (what hole?) because it just feels good?

Kim Jones, creative director of men’s wear

of Louis Vuitton, makes clothes that you’ll want to wear again and again.

The itinerant designer has lead his audience all over the world, from the Atacama Desert to South Africa, the Himalayas to a “garden in hell” (the living room of Vogue editor Diana Vreeland) in order to create a giraffeprint shirt that’s not just a shirt ( he grew up in Africa) or a rope motif that’s not just decoration (it’s a tribute to his favorite designer). This time, he lands in New York City—but not the New York of now, but old New York, particularly the period between the ’70s and ’90s, or what Jones calls its “glory days,” when men like Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat mingled with one another.

In his ode to the manifold styles that co-existed in the great city, Jones underscores the idea of ease.

The woven leather, mohair, and wool of a thick sweater called attention. The raised Vs of its herringbone pattern invited a lot of pawing as if the piece was asking you to play hooky on a rainy morning. Elsewhere, a pajama shirt and pants, which were adorned with a collage taken from a 1930s LV ad material (a nod to the Art Deco revival in the ’70s), and the slightly large overcoat and roomy pleated pants (a reference to the ’80s) also spelled comfort.

Spun with downtown in mind, the roomy fit that has been simmering in seasons past is used

to great effect here. It feels contemporary or street-smart (not too fashion or weird) when done with a baseball shirt covered with the house monogram and the Supreme box logo or painted in a palette of grays, tans, and blues.

The loose proportions also give the clothes newness.

The shirt, the pants, the jacket—these have remained more or less the same for decades, but if you shrink or blow up, twist or elongate then the familiar is reborn as something fresh.

Everything is loose and fluid, soft and slouchy, which just translates to an appearance of no

obvious effort like that old red sweater that you reach for over and over again, because it makes you look and feel good.

Sometimes clothes are magic, sometimes they have meaning, sometimes they are just clothes—cool, easy, and beautiful but clothes nonetheless, and that’s just fine.

THIS WAY PLEASE

Finally—and for the first time—Louis Vuitton’s ready-to-wear collection for men is now available in its new super-sized store in Solaire Resorts and Casino.

REWIND One more look at Louis Vuitton in the pages of this magazine.

Sep 2014 Funny story: Our favorite fashion intern chose to save this coat rather than himself when he stepped (and slowly sunk) into a soft spot on the volcanic mud field in Zambales.

Photograph by Czar Kristoff.

May 2015 Manila’s golden light lent a film-y quality to this lazy afternoon story. Photograph by JL Javier.

Sep 2016 A downpour derailed plans for shooting at Seoul’s Namsan Park, so the crew moved to the sleepy alleys and secret rooftops of the city. (Turned out better, we think.)

Photograph by Kwak Kigon.

Jul 2017 What do you do when you’re shooting a guy who drives fast cars for a living? You ask him to chill.

Photograph by Paolo Pineda.

August 2017_Esquire 37

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We’ve never really needed an excuse to get together for drinks, but Esquire’s Whiskey Wednesdays have been especially suitable occasions for communal merriment around fine liquor. The second installment of our signature event series took place last July 19—and, like the first of its kind last April, was yet another great evening to remember.

A group of our good friends and partners joined us at Pampas Latino Bistro & Bar in Bonifacio Global City, where we opened up a few of the choicest bottles of The Dalmore and had our fill of great food. Guests were also treated to a quick tasting class in which The Dalmore’s resident expert let everyone in on the fine art of enjoying great whiskey. The festivities extended until midnight and were a great reminder of the value of kicking back and sharing a good drink with friends. Esquire’s Whiskey Wednesdays are among the many exclusive lifestyle events that Globe Platinum subscribers are afforded full access to. Learn more about the Platinum Lifestyle here: http://platinum.globe.com.ph/rewards.html.

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1.) Esquire’s Whiskey Wednesdays are among the many premium lifestyle experiences that Globe Platinum is a part of. 2.) Mawen Ong, Yvette Fernandez 3.) Chef JP Anglo, Camille Malapas, Kaisie del Carmen, Coco Domingo 4.) Lester Codog; Florence Bienvenido, Advertising Director Summit Media; Kristine Fonacier, Editor-in-Chief, Esquire Philippines 5.) Christopher Chilip, Arlene Cu, Ernest Cu, Globe Telecom CEO and President 6.) Guests taking an interest in the offerings of The Dalmore 7.) Elbert Cuenca, Coco Alcuaz 8.) Ernest Cu; Christopher Chilip; Robbie Antonio, Esquire’s July issue cover and Founder and CEO, Revolution Precrafted 9.) Different variants of The Dalmore were brought out that night, so guests could get a taste of each. 10.) Yvette Fernandez, Berck Cheng 11.) Kaisie del Carmen, Globe Platinum Head; Coco Domingo, Globe Telecom VP and Head of Emerging Strategic Business; Lisa Gokongwei-Cheng, President Summit Media 12.) Andrea Sambar, Brand Manager The Dalmore; Adam Knox, The Dalmore’s Resident Whisky Expert; Marsha Guzman, Globe Platinum Acquisitions & Partnerships Head; Ina Arabia-Garcia 13.) Maryliz Lirio, Dennis Tan

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INJAP IS BEST KNOWN FOR BEING THE MAN BEHIND MANG INASAL , ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL FILIPINO BRANDS RANDS IN MODERN BUSINESS USINNESS HISTORY.

Life Principles

by Injap Sia

With a foreword

by Jollibee Foods Corp. founder and chairman, Tony Tan Caktiong

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N OTE S&E S SAYS

ESQUIR E | AUGUST 2017

EX ITS

M A R I TI NA MO R E LL

SARG E LAC UESTA

C IRILO F. BAUTISTA

TIM SERRA NO

“G O O DBY E T O CI VI L I T Y ”

“T H E AFTE R M AT H ”

“S I X S ON N E T S F R OM A 1 5- S ON N E T C YC L E”

“U N TITLED”

EDITED BY

SA R G E L AC U E STA

N OTE S &E S SAYS E SQU I R E | AUGUST 2 017

GOODBYE TO CIVILITY MARITINA MORELL I trusted him blindly. He took care of the money.

By the time I had decided to make a clean break, I found out about the unpaid bills and credit card debt he had incurred in my name.

I FELT A LOT OF GUILT WHEN I LEFT MY HUSBAND. MORE GUILT

than I think was warranted. Since I was the one doing the leaving, I tried to make things as easy as possible for something that was so heartwrenchingly painful. It didn’t matter that I saw text messages to other women on his phone. It didn’t matter that he lied about everything from finances to feelings. I was guilty because I was the one who ended it.

I felt that I didn’t have a choice: To be with him meant that I would never feel safe, it meant I would forever be wondering where the next paycheck that could keep us afloat would be coming from. Thirteen years of this, of us, and I was done. For the sake of my sanity, I had to end it.

Guilt is a funny thing. I wasn’t guilty because I was leaving him—that, to me, made perfect sense. I was guilty because I didn’t know how he was going to survive without me, without the money my allowances brought.

He no longer had a day job and being the guitarist to a few bands with even fewer gigs was all he had with which to make a living. To assuage my guilt, I gave him things to help him as he moved into a new place. A mattress with beddings, a chair or two, a microwave, plates and cutlery… hell, even the shower curtain and weighing scale he had were bought by me, with the meager amount of cash I had left (our bank accounts were always on the verge of going underbalance). I trusted him blindly. He took care of the money. By the time I had decided to make a clean break, I had found out about the unpaid bills and credit card debt he had incurred in my name. Hundreds of thousands of pesos wasted on late fees, non-payment, and interest charges—such stupid carelessness only done by someone who didn’t value the money he is given. Incensed, I asked him, “Where did all the money meant to pay off bills and credit cards go?” All he could do was shake his head and shrug. He couldn’t even come up with a halfassed explanation. But still, I was willing to keep things quiet, to keep a civil tongue in an almost vain effort to avoid going to war against each other.

“Give it time,” a friend once said, in the sage, definite tones of a woman who’s gone through a touchy divorce. “You’ll hate his guts eventually.” I refused to believe that I would end up like her. I wanted my breakup to be different, for haven’t I tried to be open and honest about everything?

At the beginning of the end, I was still optimistic—naive, really. I kept hoping against all odds that this would be a relatively neat breakup, something that didn’t require screams and anger and lawyers. “I’m leaving the PS3 with you,” he tells me before he moved out. He had bought it for his man-cave using my credit card. I pointed out to him that I paid for the PS3 myself. He looked annoyed, I was trampling on his perceived magnanimous gesture. “Can’t you just say ‘thanks’?” He snapped. So I said thanks, not willing to create another argument over something as silly as a video game console.

I agreed to keep quiet about the other reasons, instead donning the guise of the aggrieved wife who found incriminating texts on her husband’s phone.

I agreed to protect his reputation, to never mention how many fiscal failures we had to face due to his complete lack of responsibility. But about a year into the breakup, I started hearing whispers and rumors about me, about us, as told by him. The lies were never-ending, a Gordian Knot of he-said/she said, and “I suspect...”. I’ve given up trying to untangle them all.

“He says he left the car with you,” another friend said. I laughed out loud, almost bitterly at this one. He irreparably crashed his car years ago.

I sat with him in the emergency room as an ER attendant stitched him up.

The car in question was not his to give. The car’s papers were under the person who bought it: the company I worked for. Who on earth was he trying to impress with these lies? The new girl he was living with? But she wasn’t new. She had been around since she was a baby. The daughter of his

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one-time best friend. By the time I learned of their relationship, my world was already abuzz with the story. The affair had been going on for years— just how many affairs did this man have during our marriage?—it’s just that no one knew how to break the news to me. Two friends came to my house to do it. Each friend took a hold of one of my hands. It took me a moment to form a reaction. “Yaaaaaaak!” I exclaimed. My friends laughed, relieved that my reaction was one of disgust more than despair. One simply doesn’t date the children of friends. It may not be illegal (she is of age, after all) but it certainly is distasteful. He kept silent while all of this was raging. Silent... after he begged me to let him know myself if I should find someone else to love. He wouldn’t be able to stand learning about it from someone else. He promised to do the same for me. Promises, promises.

He used me, he used his friends. He would spin a sad tale to friends of how I had kicked him out with nothing, to gain pity and the odd amount of cash since he refused to get a day job (though numerous friends tried to help find him work), preferring instead to rely on his pseudo-rock star status to get what he wanted. Were we all just cash cows in his eyes?

Sometimes I feel like reaching out to that poor girl who must be supporting him. She is so young—as young as I was when he and I first met. The last time I saw her was when her father dropped her off and into the care of my ex and myself for an afternoon. Babysitting, my ex said, but now I wonder if it was some sort of twisted way for them to see each other. She shared the potato chips she had in her bag with me. I’m sort of hoping she will read this and begin to understand the trouble she’s in. He hasn’t changed, and by most accounts he has gotten worse.

Very few of our old friends talk to him anymore. They washed their hands off him after getting burnt by the lies he wove and the number of unpaid loans he’s gotten out of them. “He left you daw with everything,” a friend said. “Sure,” I replied. “He left me with everything including massive credit card debt.” He also left me with a fear of sharing my life with another person, of being completely open and vulnerable. I thought our marriage would be different because I hid nothing from him from the moment I said “I do.” I kept saying that honesty was the foundation of our marriage. How embarrassingly wrong I was.

In the end, it wasn’t anger that I was left with, but embarrassment.

I cringed to admit I married someone like him. I was saddened that he didn’t have the balls to cop to his failings, to give people the real score. I resented that I had to explain what’s what to those who asked. Shouldn’t the truth—our truth—be universal?

He messaged me a few weeks ago. It had been two years since he last tried to get in touch with me. “It’s Ruffles’ birthday today,” he messaged, referring to my beloved cat. “Is she still alive?” It was callous and slightly confusing. Why was he touching base now? I never replied to his text.

It’s probably for money again, such as that time I just returned from abroad after a quick trip and he messaged my friend asking if I would be amenable to talking to him. “Why?” my friend asked. He wanted money.

My friend was incensed. “After all your financial fuckups, you want to hit her up for more money?!” she texted back angrily. He never spoke to her again, but tried to gain sympathy by repeating a version of the story to another friend who immediately shot him down, saying she knew that he tried to borrow money again. He stopped speaking to that friend too, going as far as blocking her on social media accounts.

Still, I am stuck. I cannot break free until the annulment is over and done with. Whenever a court hearing comes up, a cold wave cascades down my spine. What if the judge forces me to stay married to this man? I really don’t know what I would do if it came to that. Why does the judicial system have a say about my life when I have done nothing criminal? How can my bid for freedom, to cut ties with a man who has ill-used me be socially immoral in the eyes of the court? Annulment is a soul-sucking, spirit-crushing process that does little to protect the sanctity of marriage, much less the sanctity of husband and wife. Since we split up, my ex has done nothing but show his lack of scruples, morals, and even civility. I remain in this limbo until the judge rules otherwise.

Maritina Morell Ex-housewife

August 2017_Esquire 43

N OTE S &E S SAYS E SQU I R E | AUGUST 2 017

THE AFTERMATH SARGE LACUESTA The idea of a rock n’ roll band had perhaps achieved an archaic, anachronistic meaning: why rent equipment and hire a band when you can play music off a CD all night long?

IN THE LATE ’80S AND THE EARLY ’90S, a grand decade after EDSA and before the Internet, I sang lead in a rock n’ roll band. We called ourselves Aftermath—without the The, we decided, after a long discussion. We also decided we would write our own songs and also play the songs we liked, among them Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle,” Faith No More’s “Everything’s Ruined,” and a lot of Rush, that Canadian prog-rock outfit mulleted and overweight video-gameplaying nerds everywhere seemed to love.

Aftermath had one radio hit. It charted as high as no. 3 on the LA 105.1 countdown, holding that position for all of three weeks. We made that song in a single marathon session that lasted 10 hours from lay-in to mix-down, under the supervision of a legendary producer.

He passed away many years ago, but I still remember that recording session. We put a gated reverb on the drum and I recorded two sets of vocals one octave apart, and a third set doing the harmony.

It may all sound special, but at the time, having a rock n’ roll band was no big deal. Everybody and his brother seemed to be in one, and they were playing all over the city. There was a gig to go to every night, and everywhere we went there was always something playing live and loud, never mind that it was a lame derivative or a note-for-note cover.

We settled into a playing routine that was built around a pwesto of three sets a night, three nights a week at a bar called Cabooze that was attached to Whistle Stop restaurant, that great stalwart of 24-hour dining along Libis Avenue. We played a handful of nights a month at the original Club Dredd just off Tomas Morato St. In between were the various one-off gigs and guest appearances at various basements clubs, bars, and bistros.

At Cabooze, we played alongside Francis Magalona. Freeman and Happy Battle, his eclectic, rock-infused, video-game-influenced albums had just come out, in one-two succession, and they added to the mounting wave of original sound and sense that the Eraserheads had helped build with Ultra Electro Magnetic Pop. We also shared certain nights with Advent Call, whose lead vocalist Karl Roy’s renditions of everything from Kiss to Modern English helped us understand exactly what rock n’ roll meant— and why we desperately wanted to be playing it.

At Club Dredd, we were happy to take whatever slot they gave us, because on any given night, everyone was there in attendance: Colour It Red’s Cooky Chua, who liked sitting on whatever car was parked out front, suckling a San Miguel Beer Grande; owners Patrick Reidenbach and Robbie Sunico, who seemed to us the most magical people alive at the time; and the riff-raff and the groupies and the wannabes—people like us who went to university and had day jobs, and who dreamed of one day having the guts to give up everything like everyone had seemed to.

We got paid in gate receipts and straight talent fees, and what it all amounted to was money for dinner and a couple of beers, but we didn’t drink much because it was all about the music and not much else. When we weren’t playing we were practicing, at band leader Emil Buencamino’s house, where his incredibly supportive parents had set aside room for a small studio.

To my parents I was an absentee, coming home at two or three in the morning from gigs and rehearsals, and up again at eight to catch the bus to work. My father grudgingly allowed me my liberties after I let him hear a bootleg recording of one of our gigs. “Why don’t you make songs like the Eraserheads?” he asked in the middle of the playback, and sent me on my way.

Maybe my father thought it was a phase, and that we were going

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to fizzle out soon, but in the true spirit of rock n’ roll we defiantly continued playing, at shopping malls and charity fundraisers, at campus fairs and variety shows.

Someone booked us to play a set at a Halloween party at an exclusive village. It was going to be the highlight of their trick or treat activities. They had reorganized traffic so that kids and their nursemaids could walk the wide streets around the gated subdivision. The kids wore costumes; their nursemaids wore uniforms. The organizer filled up the auditorium with smoke in the spirit of the season. When the smoke cleared, the audience had long since fled the venue and we found ourselves playing to exactly no one.

We got booked the first set at a big jazz bar in Makati and the

manager told us to play what we liked. We decided to play our most agreeable music—stuff like U2 and Red Hot Chili Peppers. A clutch of yuppies came to the bar, in shirts and ties and tailored twinsets, looking to take the edge off their working day. They had one drink and left. By the end of our set we had the bar all to ourselves, and almost no gate receipts to share. As a consolation the manager told us to order whatever we wanted from the bar, and in true rock n’ roll fashion we asked for their most expensive cognac, and to hell with the fact that we’d never tasted cognac in our lives.

I don’t recall what year this was, but by this time Cabooze had closed down and Club Dredd had moved to a new location.

People were starting to go to raves and chillout lounges. They were listening to new music and taking new drugs. The live scene was

returning to its ’70s staples of show bands and retro bands.

Toward the end of our musical life we played at a food plaza, an open-air all-day food park in the middle of the old Malate district that held a loose collection of grubby fastfood joints and carinderias.

It was a Sunday, and the late-night audience was a mix of exhausted families on their way home from their weekend outings and activities, construction workers at the end of their shift, burnt out taxi drivers, and GROs from the clubs down the street.

This is our crowd, I thought. This is why we play.

They cut off the high-energy pop music they’d been blasting from the rented PA system and turned on the lights on the makeshift stage where the second-rate equipment was huddled under a dirty tent in case it rained. The host went up and took the rusty mic.

“Ladies and gentlemen, up next is the Aftermath…band!”

It was only right that we would be introduced that way; after all, the band was nearing its final days and we deserved that kind of comeuppance. Furthermore, the idea of a rock n’ roll band had perhaps achieved an archaic, anachronistic meaning: why rent equipment and hire a band when you can play music off a CD all night long?

But we played anyway. As had been our practice, under the advice of an ex-manager of ours, I let them play out the intro first and mounting the stage right at the moment I was going to sing. Our first song was “Roxanne” so my entrance came with a nice chord and a sizzle on the cymbals. By that time Sting had had a long solo career and I’d actually met some people who didn’t know he had a band called The Police. I remember sort of looking down on them because The Police was when Sting was good because it wasn’t just him, it was also Andy Summers and Stuart Copeland.

About a minute and some into “Roxanne,” right after its chorus— where Sting repeatedly sings “Turn on your red light!” over his pulsating bass, and Summers cries out “Roxanne!” while he plays power strokes on his guitar and Copeland is beating out a four-onthe-floor like it’s nobody’s business—not even disco music’s—everyone shouts “RO—” and the three-piece band leaves the audience hanging returns to its opening dynamics. In between, there is a moment of hanging stillness.

In that moment of stillness, as I gripped the mic like it held mother’s milk and held the gaze of a random audience member, I heard a shout above me. I stuck my head out of the tent and saw a man in his 50s, bare-chested and with a belly like a pregnant woman’s, standing on his fourth or fifth floor balcony, pointing a finger at me, throwing down expletives at us. I held his stare with my rock n’ roll stare; behind me, the band did not skip one beat and played on, louder: I love you since I knew ya!

The man retreated into his apartment and returned a few seconds later dragging a large black appliance onto his balcony. He switched it on and turned some knobs and loud, sick, distorted music came out: Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday, happy birthday! Happy birthday to you!

The audience looked up; I heard children bursting into panicked tears and women tittering. I caught an old taxi driver, his soiled pale blue uniform half-open over his sando, looking at me with a glazed mixture of kindness and understanding.

Later that night, he would sit with us and make drunken promises about having the right connections and a demo session. He knew the rock n’ roll lifestyle and would take us around the world to play and cut an album. He would pay for our beers and our trouble and disappear into the night.

The band would end up falling apart, not because of “musical differences,” but because I felt my life was not in music. I don’t remember the last time we played or if we ever said goodbye to each other. Francis Magalona died in 2009 and Karl Roy died in 2012.

After my father died, my mother told me that he had gone to watch us play at Club Dredd without telling us, and that he had given cassette tapes of a rock anthology album that had that one song of ours to friends and family as Christmas gifts and remembrances.

Sarge Lacuesta Lead vocalist, Aftermath August 2017_Esquire 45

N OTE S &E S SAYS E SQU I R E | AUGUST 2 017

FIVE POEMS FROM “SALT CROWN,” A 15-SONNET CYCLE C I R I L O F. B A U T I S T A The gold is divine, the life is your own Salt is food for the dead or the living, toasted or melted for mushrooms and cabbage, the threat for looking back at a village where your gold hides in a hole under the floor, where the flower vase on the window gleams and glimmers in the morning sun. O poor victim of love’s sick entanglement whose sting pushes men to war and great defining schemes, belief is a matter of conviction not of fear, whose end reposes in this— the unsteady hand, the unfocused vision

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toward the brownish hill to spell out ‘bliss.’

So what if you crumble into softest bone— the gold is divine, the life is your own The gold is divine, the life is your own despite days of trembling with pricks of spell, you’ll harvest the thunder whose bolts you have sown and gather salt and God’s mercy as well.

And if on your legs the white particle grows then fairness works—the village will not know— slumbering after threshing the common grains— that unspoken faith gives strength through the night, or angels conspire to shape what remains of human longing into passion and spite.

Tell the dog, the bird, the cow, the waterwheel the plain unspoken facts that cannot conceal secretive houses carved in old fearing of tribal decline, of floods fast nearing.

Of tribal decline, of floods fast nearing the mind catches the hint, a lookout on the tower scanning the vale and the breeze,

and in the square a few people sit, hearing a dirge as it climbs over the wallside, rolls over the fields to a meadow where trees stand in straight somberness: many here have died protecting sheep and crops, the shrubs about the grass a trampled witness to blood and shame, yours and mine, mine in my dream, in the name your parents want of clarity, clarity, though clarity is not an issue of the throne, and that redundant flower, charity, blooms last in corners where the dust has blown.

What blooms last in corners where the dust has blown may spark a kindness that will put to a test the fruition of grapes in the changing valley, speak, for the red trips the pragmatic and the best, and yellow plucks the vine from what is known as tillage of the soil. We marry and fill the porch with toys and running feet, we fall and we regroup, we bury our dead in holes in the ground, we say what must be said to comfort us more than them, in pain we meet

in their remembrance but not too long and not in quietude. Perhaps a song about mansions to warm their journey but not a speech for what can be mercy.

Not a speech for what can be mercy.

But today the talk around the table, with boiled potato and fig and wine, examines a supposed conspiracy to raise the value-added tax on swine hauled in from the hinterlands. This we call abuse of office, we’ll put up a blockade and drive them back. No need to start up wrong, hide the lamp in the bush, suffer what belongs to us to stay with us, paid or unpaid, of sex and the meadow, bear as best as you can the load of fickle fate like a faithful man.

How can they know as they sing in drunken tune of a slaughter to come with a darkened moon?

Cirilo F. Bautista National Artist for Literature

August 2017_Esquire 47

N OTE S&E S SAYS ESQUIR E |AUGUST 2017

ESQUIRE FOR SAMSUNG

Before The Big Screen: A Quick Chat with Director Paul Soriano THE ACCLAIMED DIRECTOR TALKS FAVORITE FILM GENRES, ALTERNATIVE PROFESSIONS, AND WHAT IT TAKES TO MAKE AN ICONIC MOVIE.

:

We owe the current resurgence of quality local cinema to a new crop of independent directors like Paul Soriano.

As head and founder of a boutique film production company based in Quezon City, Paul is one of the creative forces that fuel the push for better cinema. And with nine films to his name plus another one in the works, he’s also actively and directly contributing to that effort.

But when Paul isn’t hard at work making movies, he also takes time off to kick back and watch them. Every great director must also necessarily be a great connoisseur of film, after all, so it’s important that Paul gets to appreciate a good movie every once in a while. When he does, it’s usually at home.

Paul has made it a point to curate his own entertainment experience to suit his tastes, his needs, and his conveniences as both director and cinephile. This is why Paul watches films on the Samsung QLED TV. Apart from its awe-inspiring display capabilities, the TV has several features that

impress a more discerning viewer like Paul.

The One Remote, for instance, integrates all key functions into just one controller.

The TV, cable box, media player, even the audio system—the One Remote can control them all, so he’s no longer burdened by the array of remotes that always seem to get lost in between the cushions and under the furniture. Paul never has to pause a movie just to look for a specific remote to perform a specific function—he just needs to keep the One Remote within arm’s reach, and by extension, everything is too.

When Paul has to put on two hats, that of a filmmaker and film enthusiast, he can turn his TV from entertainment hub to workstation. All he does is go to the Smart Hub, an interface that allows him to search, access, and share content to and from the Internet with ease. This is especially important for a director like Paul, who finds that watching a truly good movie often ends with him doing research about it, or taking down notes that he can use in his work.

Lastly, Smart View lets Paul customize his viewing experience by turning his mobile phone into a personal remote. The feature brings videos, photos, and music from mobile device or computer directly to the TV screen. This means that if he’s particularly engrossed by a movie on TV, but needs to leave the couch, he can easily take the movie with him, so his viewing experience remains uninterrupted. This is crucial for reviewing important scenes and picking them apart, which filmmakers and connoisseurs are inclined to do.

This is why watching films on the Samsung QLED TV affords Paul Soriano an array of luxuries that are priceless for the man who truly appreciates good cinema and entertainment.

THE SOPHISTICATED MAN’S HANDBOOK TO MATTERS OF SOCIETY, STYLE & CULTURE.

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LoVE Photographs by Francisco GUERRERO

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TURTLENECK

BY SAMANTHA RICHELLE

the

LaST LETTeR

WE DON’T REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME WE WROTE A LETTER TO A WOMAN WE LOVED.

It was so long ago we aren’t sure anymore. The only thing we’re certain of was that it was at an age we worried over pimples and BO. But that first love letter was most certainly to someone we hardly knew: they caught our eye at the high school fair, sat in on our poetry class and somehow knew all the answers, was a friend of a friend who wore an incredible smile and who smelled good. We saw them once, maybe twice. No photos to flip through and no footage to freeze. After first contact, loving them was an act of pure memory. That was as good as it got. We had wanted to speak to them, but we found courage only afterward, and thus, and then, only to write.

S a r g e L AC U E S TA The letter was how we got to know them—by letting them get to know us first, and gradually. We introduced ourselves by the paper we used and the way it was folded, by our penmanship and our language. We thrilled to the inevitable formality of beginning with “Dear” because to us it meant so much more, and we hoped they knew we knew it. We groped for an opening in the form of a joke or an anecdote, hoping it would call attention to our grasping wit, or a kind of promising wisdom. We fed the body of the letter with a personal narrative that we wished would be pleasing enough without looking desperate.

We learned the art of style: to tease and intrigue, to talk about ourselves without calling attention to ourselves.

We learned to close with a cliffhanger that would double as a call to action. When we wrote our own name it was the first time we ever wrote it on something that was not a test paper or an application form. But it was nothing like her name, which may have been as deceivingly plain as Anne or Angel, or as immediately allusive as Tweetie or Zsa Zsa. Written out twice—inside and outside—her name wanted to be written again, and again, practiced on the backs of notebooks and on the tops of school desks, and in the next letter, and the next.

There were times—many—the women never told us at all if they’d read them; the letter was a one-way ticket, a blind missile aimed into the heartland. When we saw her again, she would smile at us as if seeing us for the first time, as if she never knew our agony. There would be another letter, and another, each a model of terrible writing and heroic restraint. Early on, we learned how to keep our desperation tightly held, reserving it for that final moment when the woman we loved finally deigned to reply.

It almost always came folded, tightly as a secret they never ever wanted the world to know, handed over by a designated drone in the form of a disinterested relative or, if we were lucky, a conniving common friend. She had folded that notebook page herself, it was her hand that had pressed it into her homely cousin’s. When we opened it, it was her perfume that exploded from the folds of paper—and her handwriting that graced the page.

That was her handwriting, never mind the fact that it was in the institutional cursive Catholic school nuns taught. And that was her talking to us, telling us things, never mind that it was about a most ordinary day that they had spent with their homely cousin. We spent hours reading it over and over again, reading between the sentences, reading the first words of every line, reading our future with them. We would marry them, grow old with them; they would be still enough for us to paint them and take photographs of them, for us to remember how they sat and how they smiled.

The women we loved, they were supermodels, torch singers, celebrities, movie stars; they were ageless and they belonged to no age. They appeared as representations and would grow into them. They would flesh themselves out, holding our gaze, looking past it.

The women we loved, we would always love them. But for now, and before all of that, there was that letter. They had written our name. It had crossed their mind and spelled itself out long enough, and we had the paper to prove it. We folded the paper back into its shape and opened it again, as if seeing our name for the first time.

In our future, there would be furtive phone calls. There would be conversations, meals, day-long dates. There would be fumbling in the back seat and the couch. There would be a marriage. Kids, conveniences, concessions.

The Internet. The world would be instantly familiar and known. There would be video calls and viral posts, footage from hidden cameras, and venting and ranting on forums and threads.

We would grow old and we would forget certain things: When did we write that first letter? When did we write that last one? We would not remember anymore. We would learn to thank the Internet after all, with its connections and its images, with its thumbnails and its memories: of her, of them, of us.

For Luis Katigbak, who loved women, and who was loved by them.

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AnNE

CUrTis

The challenge was to show Anne CurtisSmith as she had never been seen before— and it was a challenge, no doubt, because you’d think that you’ve seen every conceivable side of her by now: Anne hosting noontime shows, Anne starring in movies, Anne belting out a song in front of a live audience, and certainly, Anne posing for magazines. She is, after all, likely the biggest of today’s local A-list celebrities, if not only the most-followed on Instagram.

You know her. Your parents know her.

Every person within a kilometer of where you are right now knows her. Because after twenty consistently successful years in show-business, her name and her likeness have grown to such that you almost can’t go a day in Metro Manila without encountering her in some way.

But it is when you actually meet Anne Curtis-Smith that you are reminded that you don’t really know her—that your idea of her is either incorrect or insufficient.

She is taller than you might expect, for instance; and her lips, while full and shapely, are not quite as prominent as her eyes, which will light up several times throughout a conversation, eclipsing even her most famously fetishized features.

Because of the ease with which Anne poses, smiles, and laughs in front of the camera, you’d think that these are rehearsed aspects of her beauty, perfected over years of being in the business. But they are truer to her than you would expect, because the real Anne Curtis-Smith will flash an even brighter beam of a smile, and will let out an even heartier laugh than you’ve seen in pictures or on TV, without the cues and prompts and flashing lights.

She will tell you that she appreciates the little things—that despite being accustomed to the grandiose, Anne Curtis’ love is earned by small gestures.

And if you ask her, she will think hard about the craziest thing she’s done for love, but will hesitate to tell you what that is. Instead, she will give you what she says is a safer answer: waiting a month after her engagement to announce it publicly, in deference to her fiance (which is not exactly crazy inasmuch as it is uncharacteristic of her). You will know then that she’s done something crazier, but also that because she is Anne Curtis, you will never know more.

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AnGeL

AqUInO

The power of the supermodel lies in her angles—she knows them and knows when and how to show them.

Angel Aquino’s angles begin with her eyes and her cheekbones, which respectively gather light and emit it, in an eternal loop that is interrupted only when she breaks her stare and strikes another pose. The angles continue: Her jaw points here and a shoulder points there, the line of a drawn leg inscribes itself as if determined by an immutable formula.

But that is only the beginning. The rest of her, despite her name, and despite every outward appearance, is perfectly human. The inner Angel is survivor and eternal student, celebrity and devoted mother. She’s seen some things and been through things, adopting a Generation-X outlook that paints a broad and blurry line between careful and carefree. One moment she’ll tell you about a childhood spent going to the wet market with her father, and in another she’ll give you unbidden and unrestrained details on a recent relationship. But she’ll be smiling all throughout, which is something supermodels don’t ever do.

The truth is that she has been an actress far longer than she was ever a model. She’s been in more than a few Lav Diaz films and a handful of soaps. She’s played the young mother, the crying lady, the virgin whore, and the contrabida. It’s the way she looks that deceives you: improbably young for her age (which she’ll tell you) and incredibly innocent for all the lives she’s led.

This, perhaps, is Angel’s most powerful angle, inscribed by an almost invisible line that marks the surface but doesn’t break it: the impossible joining of the outer image and the inner self. —SL

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BUSTIER BY SEFRA

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AgOT

IsiDRo

Few of a woman’s attributes can be quite as sexy as her selfassuredness; and Agot Isidro is a woman who has it in spades.

She will show you as much in the way she carries herself: Agot enters the room and, without needing to make any overt pronouncements or gestures, will immediately make her presence felt. It’s a strength that she exudes, no doubt, but also a sort of grace and graciousness that can only come from a woman who is as accomplished as she is, and as confident in her own view of the world.

The same was especially apparent about her when, almost a year ago, she decided to take a strong and clear political stand on social media (which, let’s face it, can be one of the most difficult things to do in these times, perhaps especially for a celebrity). And despite the foul retaliations that she’s had to face as a result, Agot’s convictions haven’t waned.

Even as the trolls continue to bedevil her, she remains as steadfast in her opinions and as decided in exercising her right to express them, because she knows she can.

And the same is apparent today, with Agot in front of the camera: Every pose, every gentle smirk, every glance toward and away from the camera is completely natural, unforced, and as if arising solely from her innate self-possession. There are no traces or shadows of doubt in her projection—just her being herself, looking incredible. —ME

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B O DYS U I T BY LO C A ; C OAT BY T W I N K L E N O R T E

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TwEETie

dE LeON

Tweetie saunters into the room with the earnest femininity that only a mother of four—and a woman who is completely self-discovered—can possibly possess. She is calm in her approach and very gentle when she speaks, but once positioned in front of the lens, a sensuality takes over, and she is at ease in her body, how to move it, how she wants to be poised. Her years working as a model, actress, and lifestyle personality allows to shine in the spotlight—and her self-assurance breaks through her more delicate demeanor.

“Maybe at this age it’s not so much the definition of confidence that I have—its more like I know who I am, I know what I’m good at, I know what I’m lousy at—and I’m okay with all of those things. When you have gone through many things in life that only comes with a certain number of years here on earth, you learn so many things about yourself and how to relate to the world and to others.”

Today, she allots most of her time for herself and her family, and runs her onewoman jewelry business that gives her that creative fulfillment she’s looking for.

It is her understanding of herself that is enviable and attractive—that a woman knows completely what she wants is someone who is a pleasure to be with, and Tweetie is no exception to this fact.

“As a young individual, you’re always challenging yourself, pushing yourself— which is good, that’s what you should be—but I just learned to relax because I used to be like that, and eventually things will settle down.” —KARA ORTIGA

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TOP BY CHARINA SARTE; SKIRT BY SAMANTHA RICHELLE

TOP BY TWINKLE NORTE

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ZsA zSa

PAdiLLA

A true icon, Zsa Zsa Padilla’s contribution to the local entertainment industry is undeniable. In a room, her very presence commands everyone’s attention even when she doesn’t utter a word.

She doesn’t have to. Her authoritative demeanor and unimposed regality will do all the talking for her. At first glance, it is a bit intimidating; in front of the camera, she is so in charge. But slowly, when the minutes pass, her warmth begins to radiate. And out comes the mother, the loving wife, the many roles she held in her life.

Anyone who grew up with Zsa Zsa’s music will vouch that her anthems reflected the story of their lives. But this Divine Diva proved that beyond her music, she was a hell of an actress, too— proving her mettle in both comedy and drama films, and taking home awards for some of these roles as well.

Today, she continues to prove that a paragon like her never loses its twinkle— hardworking, she carries her name with pride, maintaining the integrity of the career she has built and maintained for decades. And from what it looks like, there’s no stopping this superstar. —KO

STYLING MEG MANZANO S T Y L I N G A S S I S TA N T S C A R L A D E L O S

R E Y E S & K AT H R I N A C A B A S C O GROOMING MURIEL VEGA PEREZ FOR CLINIQUE HAIR JEFF DE GUZMAN H A I R A S S I S TA N T K E N M E N D E Z

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08. 17

ThE MaN WHo BouGhT thE

2 4 H o u r s w i t h “G ov ” C h av i t S i n g s o n

by A u d r e y N . C A R P I O Photographs by Jason QUIBILAN

IT

WAS

CHAV I T

S I N G S O N ’ S B I R T H D AY. H E H A D S P E N T H I S

actual birthday celebrating in Hong Kong the week before, but come Monday, he was back at the office of First Global Transit, an online payment solutions company and one of his newer business interests, and the team wanted to show their appreciation. Three attractive women in stilettos led the procession to Singson’s corner office, singing “Happy Birthday” and carrying a Jura coffee machine box topped with a bow (if you were wondering what to get the man who has everything).

The women each gave their boss a buss on the cheek, and he proceeded to unnecessarily unwrap the present, which was obviously a Jura coffee maker, one or more of which he already owns in one or more of his houses.

The man known as Governor was in a good mood. He had just turned 76, survived a recent heart attack, a helicopter crash, as well as seven attempts on his life throughout his storied career in politics. Despite his name being attached to numerous controversies over the last two decades, his latest headlinemaking exploits were mostly positive, concerning the successful, if not costly, mounting of the Miss Universe 2016 pageant.

Presently, he is the municipal councilor of Narvacan, Ilocos Sur (pop. 44,000), having maxed out his terms as Governor of the province for a total of nearly 29 years. Some say he wanted to take control of Narvacan, which was ruled by the Zaragoza political clan, but Singson insists he only wants to help the poor town, which he claims has not prospered despite receiving millions from the tobacco excise tax. He has filed a plunder case against

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the Zaragozas for misappropriating said funds.

Chavit himself was charged back in 2002 with three counts of graft for allegedly diverting P26 million in tobacco excise taxes (auditors would later find P1.3 billion unaccounted for), but years of delay in the investigation led to the dismissal of the cases—yet another lucky escape for the Gov with nine lives.

Singson took us to lunch at Dario’s, a new Italian restaurant he owns in Serendra, BGC. Maybe he thought it would be profitable to get into the restaurant industry, or maybe he just really liked the food at Caruso and wanted to fund the co-founder’s breakaway restaurant.

In any case, it’s always a good idea to have an entire restaurant to yourself when you need it.

“Don Corleone!” Dario Gardini, the chef and co-owner, greeted Singson warmly. Singson sat down at the center of a long table next to the three attractive women he calls his Angels. I learn that two of them work at the office and while the other one was “on call,” meaning she shows up to events as needed. They are just a part of the revolving entourage that Chavit rolls with; he is never by himself, and he is never not making deals. On the side, he met with his daughter Richelle, an officer in his holding company The LCS Group, to talk finances and sign checks. A group of Chinese businessmen were waiting at another table to propose a possible investment in a car manufacturing plant. Dario would come and serve courses of vongole and ravioli while discussing plans about the restaurant he and Singson are setting up in Vigan. He too will be flying with us to Chavit’s hometown after lunch; it will be Dario’s first time to inspect the

facilities, which will be right in the middle of Singson’s famous private zoo.

Lunch over, we follow Singson’s black Hummer to the hangar where, to our mild disappointment, we’re told we won’t be taking his private jet, which is kept on standby for the President. We board his private propeller charter, whose extra seats were opened up to public passengers. From the Vigan airport— built in the style of a heritage house, by Singson, of course—we were whisked away to Baluarte, a 100-hectare property where wild deer roam and at least 12 (14? 16? “More than 10, less than 20”) Bengal tigers are kept.

There are ostriches, zebras, camels, and wallabies scattered about the area, with more to be brought in, using whatever extralegal method required to transport protected species from their homeland (he informs us that two giraffes have already died in transit). But the real spectacle of Baluarte is his museum of dead things, or his hunting trophy room called the Safari Gallery, housed in what appropriately looks like a mausoleum from the outside, with its Roman pillars and hammered copper mural depicting the wild animals of Africa on its facade.

A polar bear, standing ferociously tall; a lion posed to look like it is attacking a buffalo, a black bear, looking more afraid of you than you are of them, a black rhino, nearly extinct; several types of antelope, their heads mounted on the walls; a hippopotamus, its enormous jaws propped open wide, and a beautiful little leopard, which Singson says he is not satisfi ed with because of its size— these are all of the animals he has shot and killed, and as far as hunting bucket list goes, he has killed them all. In a convoluted way, big game hunting is reasoned to help in animal conservation efforts, as the fees for these limited hunting permits, which only the very wealthy can afford, are meant to go back into the community to help maintain the rest of the wildlife that aren’t earmarked for execution. Singson paid $200,000 to hunt the elephant in Zimbabwe. He also spent another $50,000 to have it stuffed—or “preserved,” in hunting parlance—plus more than that combined to ship it back to the Philippines.

Glenn Gale, a veteran columnist, social insider and buddy of Chavit, noted with amusement that “the biggest attraction in the gallery is Chavit himself,” when visitors spotted the Governor and started swarming around him with selfie sticks. Whether they see him as a hometown hero, powerful warlord or just a wildly successful entrepreneur, Singson’s repute certainly carries more cachet than your run-the-mill celebrity.

Among the trophy photographs hung on the walls of the gallery were the odd paintings, and I mean odd: Chavit as a centaur, and a 2D painting of a tiger whose head manages to holographically morph into Chavit’s. Two framed newspaper clippings commemorate a different kind of hunt—the attempt on his

life in 1972 by way of hand grenade. In the photograph, the dazed 30-year-old newly elected governor lay in a hospital bed looking at his bloodied barong. The caption to the AP wire photo reads: Singson was injured in a hand grenade attack killing 17 persons and injuring nearly 100 in a crowded town square. The attack was attributed to political feuding and relatives say it was the fifth attempt to assassinate since election last November. “I was dancing with a fat lady,” Singson says. “She shielded me.” The lady did not survive.

Singson, by all means, seems like a man to be feared. Aside from the political turf battles and gangland brutality that comes with being a provincial ruler, there are the other stories—like the alleged beating of his former wife Rachel Tiongson and her lover, after they were caught in flagrante.

It was widely believed, but never proven, that while he was deputy National Security Advisor for President Arroyo, Singson or one of his henchmen mutilated the man’s penis and even kept photographs of it. To the media, Singson would alternately confirm and deny that he abused the couple, but he was not terribly convincing with statements like, “They should be thankful I didn’t kill them,” or “They deserved to die.” Tiongson, the mother of five of his children, eventually dropped the charges against him, her

reputation destroyed as she was painted as a gold-digging adulteress who deserved to be smacked around, never mind that Singson himself was a hardcore philanderer.

Which makes his patronage of the Miss Universe competition somewhat problematic, although people seemed to conveniently forget the allegations in favor of the glitz and glamour that Singson rained down on the candidates. It was ironic, or perhaps fitting, that the Miss Universe Organization asked Singson to cough up another US$1 million for their “Women Empowerment” program.

To be fair, Singson pulled off what was heralded all around as one of the most successful and well-produced pageants ever, bringing it back from the precipice of cancellation when the MUO pulled out after President Duterte’s Hitler remarks and “putang ina” reference to President Obama. William Morris Entertainment, the company that owns MUO, is headed by Ari Emanuel, the Hollywood superagent (and Jewish American) whose brother Rahm happened to be Obama’s former Chief of Staff. The organization offered $US3 million in settlement, but Singson’s August 2017_Esquire 77

lawyer said they were entitled to US$10 million for the breach of contract, since they had paid the deposit in full.

“I wrote them a letter: ‘you can cancel it and I won’t file damages. But I hope you reconsider.

You will lose credibility,’” Singson says. “I showed them I was not interested in money.

After a month, they agreed to come back.”

Singson had also sent his Israeli business partner, a friend of Emanuel’s, to convince the organization to change their mind. He then made sure that the candidates’ every need was catered to, buying a new yacht, a plane, and 30 buses to tour them around and show them a good time, spending an additional US$1 million on private security.

The staging of the pageant fell to him like many of the other businesses he’s involved in— people just come to him with ideas, schemes, and propositions. He passes them down to his CEO to study before he makes a decision. This is partly how he’s come to have such varied and wide-ranging interests from tobacco, construction, mining, transportation, and hotels, to financial services like remittances, banking, microfinancing and online payments, and random ones like the restaurant, Miss U, and a sporting goods store franchise. Is there any industry he’s not dipped his paws in? Singson pauses to think. “No….almost everything. Lahat.”

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Sur dropped the A-bomb that his longtime drinking and gambling buddy Erap was the “lord of all jueteng lords.” He accused the President of collecting P5 million in protection money from jueteng operators every month— he would know, because he was the bagman.

He also blew the whistle on Erap’s partaking of P70 million from the tobacco excise funds of his province (we’ll get back to this tobacco tax later), which led to the impeachment trial, which led to EDSA 2, and the rest is… subject to revisionist history.

“They were going to kill me,” Singson explains. “I did it for survival.” The Governor had gotten word that he was about to be targeted by Estrada’s goons. On Oct 3, 2000, Singson’s vehicle was stopped by several policemen for running a red light. Sensing an ambush, Singson somehow managed to escape. (The ousted President later denied that he would do such a thing to his friend).

However, all’s well that ends well—when Erap’s mother, Mary Ejercito, died at 103 years old in January 2009, Singson decided to show up at the funeral. “Nagulat sila,” he recounts.

“Everyone parted, parang suklay. But I wasn’t guilty, so I had nothing to be afraid of.” The old pals reconciled, they began attending each other’s parties again, and Singson even had his starring role edited out of Erap’s conspiracy video—the film the former president makes all his house guests watch. He laughs at the memory. Good times with Chavit Singson.

IN

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stories high. It used to be Singson’s “hideaway” when he wanted to lay low in Vigan, but he’s since built a more understated villa, one not sheathed like a glittery disco ball. We tour the circular building starting at the rooftop bar, which has sweeping views of the province, with the West Philippine Sea to the west and the Cordilleras to the east. The bar area is fashioned like a cave carved from sandstone, but it’s all made out of plaster. On a lower level is Singson’s private suite, where a bronze tiger head hangs in lieu of a doorknob. The room is everything you would expect from a largerthan-life figure like Chavit—leather couches, shag carpeting, first-class cabin massage chairs, cowhide, shiny marble surfaces, and yes, a hot tub that can fit “eight Brazilian models” (I don’t remember who exactly said this, but it was said). Prominently displayed on the nightstand is a framed photo of Singson and Paris Hilton, who he says was one of the first guests to party at his pad.

Singson is proud of the things he’s built.

“This pillar cost P2.5 million,” he says, pointing to a massive post encrusted with mother-ofpearl. There were four of them in the lobby.

Baluarte is free of charge, anyone can come in

to look at the animals, dead and alive, and if you’re lucky you could probably have an ogle inside the golden citadel. We also checked out the new Safari Lodge where Dario’s restaurant was going to be located. When completed, guests can stay at the lodge, with its South African-inspired cottages fronting Singson’s savannah. LED palm trees dot the grounds, probably to remind you that you’re not really in Africa, but in Chavit’s world of pure imagination.

We were billeted at Chavit’s Vigan hotel, the lovely Hotel Luna, an architectural hybrid with one part being a restored ancestral house that connects seamlessly with a completely new structure. A collection of artworks from Philippine masters like BenCab, Napoleon Abueva, Juan Luna, Ramon Orlina, Araceli Dans et al makes it a museum destination in itself, but you’re more likely to waste time figuring out the high tech Japanese toilet inside the bathroom. Before dinner, we walked several blocks down cobblestone streets to Plaza Salcedo to catch Vigan’s second most bizarre attraction: the dancing fountain show.

Conservation purists would probably balk at what transpires nightly at the plaza named after the founder of Vigan city. But the locals seem to enjoy this modern addition to their UNESCO Heritage Site. At one end of the plaza stands the haunting Vigan Cathedral, where Floro Crisologo, Singson’s uncle and political foe, was shot dead while kneeling for communion back in 1970. The P10-million musical fountain with Korean technology was installed in 2013, a gift to the town spearheaded by whichever Singson kin was in charge at the time. We went up to a special airconditioned viewing box to watch the show.

Lasers projected a silhouette of the Governor on a fine mist of water that surrounded the obelisk in the center of the plaza’s reflecting pool. Hydrotechnical madness ensued: From K-Pop to Beyonce to “Twerkin’ Like Miley” to Celine Dion, water squirted, sprayed and splooged in time to the music and pulsating neon lights. The choreography—if you could call it that—was

mesmerizing, with the glowing liquid rising and falling rhythmically like water sprites. I think I lost my mind in those 30 minutes.

After that little slice of Burj Khalifa, we made our way to BarTech, which, needless to say, Singson owns. Dining al fresco among a mix of authentically dilapidated buildings and carefully reconstructed ones certainly has its charm, bringing to mind other colonial Hispanic towns where all the action happens on the streets. And a street dinner hosted

by Chavit for visitors wouldn’t be complete without a cultural show. A cultural show in Chavitland, however, involves a troupe of female performers, also called Chavit’s Angels, who dance to the latest Bruno Mars hits in tiny shorts. The males are just called Chavit Dancers. They’re all scholars from Ilocos Sur who entertain at fiestas around the province, and get busy particularly during campaign season. After their set, the girls lined up to give Il Padrino a kiss.

Tonight, Singson brought out Dayo, his black panther. The man known for his obsession and identification with tigers was showing a little love for one of his other cats (his leopard and white lion will have to wait their turn). A black panther is actually a leopard with melanism, I learn. “Manong Chavit has always loved animals,” Germaline Singson-Goulart, his younger sister and current mayor of Caoayan, Ilocos Sur, tells us. Collecting wild animals on one hand and trophy-hunting big game on

the other constitute a rather unique kind of love, one would think. A dish of freshly shot wild duck adobo was served. Singson had once gotten flak for hunting the apparently endangered Philippine wild duck, but he argues that wild ducks are plenty in supply, to the point of infestation. “Kinakain namin,” Singson says. “Pero minsan,” he chuckles, “may naiiwan na bala.”

Germy, as the mayor is known, recalls the time when the troubles started: “The Crisologos put up a tobacco blockade in the ‘60s. Tobacco grown here is sold in places like Pampanga and Tarlac, but the Crisologos started their own redrying plant and monopolized the trade. Tobacco farmers couldn’t sell their leaves outside the province anymore.” Floro Crisologo was a Congressman while his wife Carmeling was governor; the family acted with typical warlordesque impunity. Their private army of saka-saka burned two Ilocano barangays to the ground simply for supporting opposition candidates.

A few months later, Floro was shot in the cathedral, after, according to one author, he threatened to expose President Marcos and General Ver for grabbing the lion’s share of the proceeds from the tobacco monopoly.

It was in the midst of this turmoil that Singson came to power. Singson was Floro’s nephew, and had been appointed by him as Vigan Chief of Police at the age of 21. Singson’s parents already owned a tobacco plantation, and the entrepreneurial Singson soon became the biggest shipper of tobacco in the province.

Naturally, he opposed the blockade, and soon the two families turned against each other, often violently. Ilocos Sur was the Wild West, and blood ran down its streets at alarming levels (Singson, a trained mortician, also happened to own the local funeral parlor. And people wonder how he got rich?) Someone had to stand up to August 2017_Esquire 79

the Crisologos and their reign of terror, and for the long-suffering residents of Ilocos Sur, that person was Chavit Singson. “I put an end to the killings when I became governor in 1971,” Singson says. He had confiscated some 7,000 guns, dismantling the saka-saka.

Of everything he’s done, he considers his most significant achievement to be the creation of Republic Act 7171, a law Singson authored during his only term as a congressman from 1987-1992. The Tobacco Excise Tax Law returns 15 percent of government tax collected from the tobacco industry back to the Virginia tobacco leafproducing provinces: Ilocos Norte, La Union, Abra, and Ilocos Sur, which grows 60 percent of the yield. In theory, it’s a great law intended to improve the lives of the farmers through funding infrastructure, agricultural and cooperative projects. “Ilocos Sur used to be a fifth class province, one of the poorest in the country. Now it’s a first class province,” Singson says. With such an immense purse, however, graft and corruption are never far behind (Ilocos Norte governor Imee Marcos is the latest official to be embroiled in a tobacco funds misuse scandal). During Estrada’s impeachment trial, Singson admitted that he “agreed to be used by a corrupt president,” when he allowed Estrada to embezzle the tobacco revenues. Just that one time, though, he added.

The next morning, we prepared to leave Vigan, armed with several kilos of longganisa and bagnet courtesy of the Governor. He had a dental appointment to catch, after which he’ll take us on a quick spin on his new superyacht, the M/Y Happy Life. At the back of the plane, I tried to sneak in a nap (balling with Chavit was hard work), but the ruckus up front kept me from dozing off. Singson was playing a hand of cards with the flight attendant, who shrieked and laughed hysterically. Glenn Gale would later say that this was one of the rare moments he’s seen Singson truly relaxed.

On the boat, which was docked at the Manila Yacht Club, we were joined by Singson’s doctor and family. It is apparent that Singson hates being alone—he says he feels lonely. We inspect the P600 million, 42.5 meter Italian yacht—the largest in the Philippines—with eight cabins, beautiful wood detailing all throughout, and a karaoke room with a colorful tent-like ceiling. Glenn informs us that the boat’s previous owner was an Arab tycoon, hence the Bedouin touches. Singson has yet to sail it outside the Manila Bay, but let’s be honest, this is a party boat first and foremost. Singson most recently entertained a dozen ambassadors aboard the Happy Life; I wondered if he also made them, as well as the Miss U candidates, take their shoes off and put on rubber slippers to protect the plush white interior carpeting.

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I had to ask, weren’t the ambassadors afraid of the Governor given his reputation, and their possible miscomprehending of local politics?

Glenn, who has observed a lot of Singson’s social maneuverings, says that there were a couple who rebuffed his invitations, but he eventually won them over, and even introduced them to women whom they ended up marrying. Singson likes to keep people on their toes, though—I can imagine the uncomfortable laughter at quips he makes about feeding his tigers: “one hundred kilos of chicken; sometimes, my enemies.” His associations with the emissaries are mutually valuable—they make Singson look like an upstanding citizen, while they get access to arrangements that could benefit their home countries. Recently, Singson opened the Vigan Banco Internacional with branches in Mexico, Puerto Rico and Los Angeles upon a tip from one diplomat concerning the huge demand for remittance centers among Latino migrant workers.

“It’s not yours unless you spend it,” Singson likes to say. “Alam ko di ko madadala eh.” Like his pal Pacquiao, he’s very generous with his wealth, but unlike the Senator-Boxer, he’s invested wisely and widely (he attempted to give a heap of money away to deserving people on his TV show Happy Life, but he says most of them squandered their award.) With over a hundred firms in several countries and none of them listed, save for one mining company in Canada, we can only estimate how much he’s really worth. In one Entrepreneur article, Singson put his net revenues at P120 million a month, but judging from the reactions of his cohorts, that’s likely a lowball figure.

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be surrounded by beautiful women, play a few games of chance, and spend his hardearned cash. After all, he raked in his first millions from the tobacco trade at a young age, half a century ago. When he was in his early 20s, he made enough money to purchase the Vigan electrical plant, and he continues to acquire profitable businesses to this day. At 76, any plans for retirement are off the table. “Kakalawangin ka,” he says. He’s still wheeling and dealing, putting stock in future operations, and buying up most of the Philippine coastline where black sand beaches will be mined for magnetite. This could be an environmental disaster in the offing—think large-scale erosion—but the Governor begs to differ, saying responsible mining would keep it in check. Singson may be admired and feared for the things he’s done in the past, but the truth is, he’s only just Vigan.

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THE FORTUNE HUNTER

08 . 17

by

Patricia BARCELON

Illustration by Lala GALL ARDO

I s i t a t op my be d su r r o un d ed on all sides by paper— tra ns c r i p t s o f h o u r s of conve rsati on on the subject of the self. To be more sp eci f i c,

Onc e again, as l ife d ictates, I am at a crossroad s. B e i n g s o m e o n e who l i ke s to strate g ize, formin g battle p lan s an d con ti n g en cy ma n eu vers, i t shoul dn’t come a s a surprise that I would tr y ever y aven u e ope n to me to analyze my next move s. mys e l f.

But even with all this attempts at organizing my world, I’ve never had a life plan. Dreams, perhaps, but never a plan. The never-ending manic phase that was my twenties ensured that plans were simply dreams; forgotten in the greater scheme of my life, where everything was a reaction to the misfiring pulses in my brain. I was lost in a haze and it took me a while before I could find my bearings and begin to navigate with some modicum of clarity.

“Life and living are a vast ocean, so just keep swimming,” I keep telling myself whenever I’m feeling a little bit aimless. If I just keep going, I’m bound to find something that takes me to what I’m supposed to do next. But what if my ocean was nothing more than a glorified fishbowl and I’m bound to swim around in circles repeating, regurgitating, never resolving or…? Insight. I need insight.

We seek advice from our elders, those we consider wise. We seek counsel from friends, family, priests, and psychiatrists. So is it too far a stretch to seek guidance from those who seem to have a line to something beyond the veil? Has our empirical view of life so narrowed that we refuse to believe what we cannot see?

When did trying to understand the intangible become lumped together with fairy tales and myths? From before the time the Oracle sat at Delphi to the present, divining futures has always been a human pursuit.

Emperors, kings, and pharaohs who wanted a clearer, more direct line to the Great Beyond went to oracles of the ancient world: high priests, shamans, and soothsayers. This isn’t New Age. This is isn’t even old; this is ancient.

But as the world progressed, we began to have less use for mystical interpretations. Empirical thinking tuned us into a whole new, wholly different Age of Enlightenment. We have the new gods of science, mathematics, logic.

We’ve forgotten how to keep in touch with our spiritual selves.

Spiritualism is more than organized religion.

I believe in God. I believe in the strength of faith. I believe in the power of prayer. I also believe that there is much more out there that we cannot even begin to comprehend, and that some people are better at understanding these unknown forces than others.

I believe, for in belief there is faith; and where there is faith, there is the will to move forward, to persevere, even if it is largely 84

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considered to be just a bunch of hocus-pocus.

I don’t know when the art of prophecy became more akin to a parlor trick, but once upon a time everyone who was anyone checked in with those who could conduit for the divine.

I must digress: this wasn’t supposed to be my story. I picked up this story when the original writer gave it up. By the time I decided to take on this tale, I had pretty much decided on what I was about to do with my life—but a second, even third or fourth opinion wasn’t a bad idea.

And why not try a different path to clarity?

My cast of characters are as varied as they come, except for one thing: they were all women. But women were always the prefered oracle to the gods, the Pythia, high priestess of Apollo at Delphi, being the most famous of them all.

I F I RST S P O K E TO P R I N C E S S, T H E M E N SA-

certified genius who runs the Yin and Yang Shop of Harmony in New World Hotel with her mother. Talking to her is like taking counsel from the Buddha himself—she is so calm and collected, even when she is trying to help prevent disaster stars from affecting your future. The feng shui reading went a lot more different than what I had expected.

After some calculations based on the time and date of my birth (it’s Year: Earth Horse, Month: Wood Tiger, Day: Wood Rabbit, Time: Wood Rooster, for those who are wondering), Princess looks up and says, “You’ve got a lot of wood in your life.” I refrain from making a dumbass frat boy joke and ask if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Princess smiles and tells me that there is no such thing as good or bad, it is simply who you are.

Sandy from Cubao X’s Reading Room also tells you who you are, which may or may not be what you want to hear. She introduces herself as someone who uses a deck of cards called Soulcards to look into people and see who they really are: who they are at the moment, who they may have been before, and what they might become. From her, I gained energy. The truth of who I really am and what I am poised to become is inspiring. And daunting. And freeing. And terrifying. I’m not quite sure, but the stress of it all may have caused me to have my first ever bout of full-on, crawling-on-thefloor, wishing-I-could-have-a-head-transplant

vertigo. Okay, I exaggerate, but it did cross my mind considering the vertigo started a few hours after speaking to her. Nothing she says is truly surprising, for deep inside I know what she says resonates within me. Whether I like what she is telling me is another thing altogether. But this is what I asked for: a light shone into the subconscious recesses of my mind. And that is exactly what I got. Going to Sandy is like going to a psychiatrist; the tough love kind of doctor who gives you exercises to do at home.

When I was in Madam Rose’s home, however, I got a different reading altogether.

It was the more traditional way of divination— more what we would now call fortune-telling.

She told me about loves I’m soon to meet (two, this August, the second of which shall be “The One”), the future we’re supposed to have (she sees us living our retirement years abroad), and the children we’re supposed to raise (twin boys, yeezus christ!). This sort of specific predictions unnerve me. Though Madam Rose exclaimed, “Why are you consulting with me?

Your cards are fantastic! You have a great life ahead of you.”

She read my palms, too, showing me faint lines and thick lines that corroborate what she saw in the cards; crossed lines and broken ones too, giving insight to paths I have lived and paths I have yet to walk. I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of fear. It’s easy to know the endgame when consulting with psychics, but choosing which play to make in order to achieve it is what worries me.

“Ah, I don’t like it when psychics tell you too much,” Tata Mapa says. “It’s not good for you.”

I agree, the information, whether or not what she sees is true, shouldn’t give one the feeling of being overloaded because life isn’t a done deal until you’re six feet under. A decision here, a turn there can change a future. Throughout my journey to part the veil, I’ve had my own Virgil in Tata. An ex-Summit editor, she’s well known in the office for “saying things that freak people out.”

Close your mind!!!! Tata can read minds!!! Sasha Lim Uy, managing editor of Esquiremag.ph, messages me after she connects me with Tata on Facebook. It’s true. You don’t have to believe it, but I do. A lot of us here in Summit do. Tata messaged our editorin-chief, Kristine, a little bit before she officially joined Esquire. News of Kristine taking over was still under wraps, but Tata

had already messaged offering her services (you can see a few of her essays in previous issues of this magazine). When Kristine asked how she knew, Tata simply replied, “I’m Tata, remember?”

It was through Tata that I began to see the value in seeking out people like her. It was through their intuition that we access knowledge that might somehow be blocked in our subconscious for one reason or another.

We have a conscious mind and a subconscious one, that much we can all agree on. But whereas a psychiatrist treats our conscious mind through therapy, the subconscious can be treated by people like Tata through what is called “clearing.”

“Clearing is when you get rid of what blocks you from attaining your goals, desires, and happiness,” Tata explains. Imagine how great it would be if you could clear the past traumas that block you from wanting to commit to a relationship, for example. You can clear negative beliefs, such as “money is the root of all evil,” and be able to attain better financial success. “Many of us regularly clear blocks on a surface level such as when you decide to stop hanging around a negative group of friends,” Tata continues. “But what makes energy healing so effective is that we are able to go into the subconscious to clear hidden blocks you might be unaware of.” So if going to therapy clears out the conscious mind, the mind that remains active and at the forefront of our thoughts, going to psychics like Tata helps deliberately draw out those subconscious issues that keep us from achieving our goals. You know those goals: the ones you deliberately try to achieve but always fall short. These include those objectives that always seem thwarted by outside forces no matter how hard you try.

Tata sent me to her friend, Tin Jacinto, for consultation and clearing. Tin—who came armed with a deck of tarot cards and a small pendulum—intrigued me the most. Her face is bright and open, welcoming. She begins with the pendulum and the cards, swinging it back and forth between her fingers, her eyes closed, eyelashes fluttering. “What happened to you when you were 36?” She suddenly asks. I think back and I reply. This question repeats itself twice more. “What happened when you were 27?” The issues surfacing were buried deeper still. “What happened when you were 19?”

Three big blocks were revealed through these three questions, and those were the blocks that Tin intended to help clear. Again, she used her pendulum to help the process along, swinging it between my fingers above my open palm.

Tin whispers invocations, asking for these blocks still hanging around me to pass. I can’t help but close my eyes and pray along with her. Please, God, help me find the next path I must take. Please, God, help me heal the hurt and pain.

Please, God, help me let it go… let it gooooooo…

That song annoys the hell out of me. I snap my mind back to the present before I start

singing out loud. Tin is looking at me slightly bemused. I wonder if she could hear the song in my head.

The last psychic I visited is the famous Ms. Stargazer. She’s become a celebrity in her own right, counting among her clients the likes of Kris Aquino. She struck me as a tough cookie, the kind that won’t stand for BS. “Why are you here?” She asks immediately after offering me a seat.

I explain that aside from wanting to hear what she has to say about me, I’m writing a story about fortune tellers. She looks at me triumphantly “I knew that there was something else. You can’t lie to me because I’ll know.” I’m not allowed to record our conversation because the energy that she emanates tends to fry electronics. Her airconditioner, she says, is always on the fritz because of it.

Ms. Star (as she is often called) picks up a pastel crayon and starts coloring around a photocopied sheet of paper featuring the outline of a human form. She is using the pastels to show me the color of my aura. I’m surprised to see my aura is basically yellow and orange, two colors I’m not very fond of, but Ms. Star picks up yet another color, a flat yellowish-beige and begins to color over the yellow and orange, creating a muddy mustard color. It looks sickly, almost jaundiced. I never get to ask her what that means because after a little more talk, her eyes light up and she

Wh en did tr y in g to u n ders ta n d th e in ta n g ibl e b e come lump e d tog e th e r w ith fa iry ta le s a n d my th s?

From before th e tim e th e Ora c l e sat at Delphi to the pres ent day, d iv in in g f uture s h a s a lways b e e n a h uma n p ursuit

smiles, stating that my aura has changed as I spoke, the orange and yellow, leaping up and around like flames. Apparently, I am happy, I am energized, I am excited by my plans. She pulls out another photocopied sheet of paper and shows me the current color of my aura. It was pure yellow and orange, with small sparks of orange flashing at its borders. I feel better, reassured. Ms. Star also uses my birthdate to foretell my life path. My life path is a four, which for all intents and purposes is a great number to be filed under. Those who fall under the number four are strong, organized, enduring. But then I remember that in feng shui four is a most inauspicious number.

Though in feng shui four also means being grounded and having strength and protection, it is commonly known as a bad luck number because the Cantonese word for it sounds similar to the word for “death”.

And therein lies the uncertainty of having your fortune told: who do you go to? Who’s the most reliable? Whose words do you follow if predictions begin to contradict? Yet another ancient question. Croeseus, that very wealthy king from Lydia, tested oracles from near and far to see who was the most accurate by asking each oracle what he was doing at a specific time. (For the curious, the winner of the test was the Oracle at Delphi, who correctly predicted that the king was making a lamb and tortoise stew.) Lacking the resources of a crazy rich Lydian, I begin to amalgamate the prophecies these women have laid out before me. From Ms. Star, Sandy, and Tin, I got insight into my subconscious. From Madam Rose, I got a forecast of what is to be. From Princess, I got understanding of the energy that surrounds me and how to harness and attract the positive around me.

At the end of this journey, I realize that whether or not I truly believed, I felt better because of the experience. In our progression as humans, we must stop eschewing the esoteric. Clearing the clutter created by the past is always a good thing. This is KonMari for the soul.

Because I write for a men’s magazine, people keep asking me how this can help men. I simply cannot understand the question.

Can’t this story benefit everyone? What if this so-called fortunetelling is nothing more than the conduit from which we see a different aspect of life? The life that we, because of whatever life hangups or traumas inhibit us from becoming the whole, productive, and engaged humans that these women see?

Whether you believe in the mystical or not, all these women say the same practical thing: clear the clutter in your head, open your mind to possibilities, make peace with your past issues. To live an exclusively empirical life is to deny a world so bright with imagination and possibility. Beliefs can create the blueprint for your life. It drives your priorities. It’s the jumble of unresolved issues and traumas that get in the way.

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I’m writing to you now from Paris, the last leg of my trip. I got back to my flat at Le Marais at around 5 a.m., from an excellent first time at a swingers club, and it turned out to be a cultural and philosophical experience, aside from it being social and sexual, of course. To paint you a picture: the venue is on Île-Saint-Louis, straddling the middle of the River Seine. Couples are screened at the entry; you leave your coats, phones, and inhibitions upstairs, and proceed to a lavish cove of hedonism down below.

The place was intimate, seductive, refined; couples were amiable, respectful, and cerebral. Paris is the perfect place to indulge in the libertine lifestyle, and I simply can’t imagine something like this existing in Manila unfortunately, for religious, moral, public health, legal, entrepreneurial, and etc. reasons…but I digress. I’m running on little sleep, but I’ve tried to organize my thoughts for you.

AS VIOLET WRITES TO ME IN SOLEMN, P OETIC , verses from Paris, detailing the intemperate realities of her sex life, I am staring wideeyed into the screen of my computer in Manila, astonished that the orgies captured cinematically by Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut, turn out to be, after all, an accessible reality. Apparently, the club privat or club exchangiste, as they say in their local parlance, is rooted on the culture’s traditional penchant for kink (Marquis de Sade, I’m looking at you…). I mean, Yelp.com has a list of the best swingers clubs in the city.

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Violet spent a few weeks in Europe for vacation, passed through Vienna and Ibiza before her final jaunt in Paris. Although her itinerary was filled with occasional sightseeing, engaging in some kinky proclivities was a part of the plan: play sessions booked with playmates, fellow BDSM practitioners, who she connects with via the social network FetLife.com.

“Recently realized that an uncommon kink that I have is being a label whore,” reads her profile on FetLife. “Call it materialist, consumerist, or even Marxist, I indulge in

luxury labels and love to strut around and play in designer duds. Can’t resist Christian Louboutin shoes, YSL leather outfits, Kiki de Montparnasse lingerie, Agent Provocateur lace blindfolds, Hermès collars, etc. I like being tied up with Chanel silk scarves and ribbons, get spanked with Dior leather belts, slapped by a hand wearing Patek Philippe or Jaeger-LeCoultre, and fucked in nothing but my heels and jewelry. I also enjoy using these implements on partners even if they literally don’t know what’s hitting them. Please leave your entry-level Louis Vuitton and Rolex at home. And take this part of my profile with a grain of salt.”

Identifying herself as a “heteroflexible princess by day, slut by night,” when Violet is not cracking her whip on a titillated sub—she works as a sales, PR, and marketing associate six days a week, and maintains a moderate social life. Having only started with FetLife late last year, Violet says it has since become a great place for her to learn more about herself and have some fun.

“I’ve always been a curious cat and had a relatively early sexual debut. I accidentally read a headline about orgasms in Cosmopolitan when I was about seven, and tried to ask some adults in the family what the ‘Big O’ was! Sex and the City was on TV when I was nine; pop charts were churning out songs suggestive in nature; and the Internet was revealing itself to be a place where you could find just about anything.” Raised in a girls’ Catholic school where virginity was taught to be “the best gift you can give to your husband,” Violet set off to explore sexuality on her own—a reality that rings true for many teens who are left with numerous unanswered questions. “They barely touched up on holistic Sex Ed in high school, so I had to research about protection, diseases, and the physiology and psychology of sexual interaction. So at an early age, I had an inkling about the concepts of pleasure (sex) and romance (love), but also knew that one could exist without the other.”

She was around 16 when she first began to explore her carnal desires with other

people. “One of the first few times I had sex involved circumstantial exhibitionism, and that was exciting for the both of us.” In the first semester of her freshman year in college, she had her first three-way, and shortly after that, started exploring with female partners.

By 21, she was meeting up with men casually, engaging in one-night stands. By 24, she was dating someone 12 years her senior, and when that ended, she had a phase of “wanting to fuck only men who were younger.” Then that got exhausting too, so she went back to dating within her age bracket and lifestyle. “As you may now deduce, I’m quite liberal sexually and otherwise, and definitely have experimental phases,” she says. “Being an only child to a single parent, I always joke that my ‘daddy issues’ manifests in Freudian slips in and out of my sex life—but with the appropriate education, necessary cautions and proper partners, I enjoy sex very much.”

In her earlier sexual encounters, the kinks came in the form of mental foreplay, subliminal triggers, blatant moves or total performances. Some of her partners would be open to it, others, not so…which is why “communication, respect, and trust” are key to the practice, says Violet.

“That being said, I am not immune to bad sex and bad people. I’ve had a few sexual encounters that ended comically (at best), uncomfortably or even tragically (at worst).

Even though you’ve known someone for years, you can’t always predict the outcome of your interactions or gauge their true intentions. One relationship turned out to be ultimately traumatizing, demoralizing and damaging. As a result, there was an entire year or so that I had completely no appetite for sex.”

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She overcame this period by rehabilitating herself, and slowly regaining control of her sex life. “BDSM actually helped a bit,” she says.

Signing up for FetLife opened that world to her, and allowed her to play a power position, which re-instilled an innate sexual confidence.

E N T E R T H E D U N G E O N FetLife is like Facebook for the kinky— you can “add” friends, and there are online communities you can participate in. Once active on Tinder, Violet traded out the infamous dating app for this libertine one, preferring it because there was less guesswork involved. “It turned out to be a better medium to meet like-minded people because of the profile format, where you can indicate at once your orientation, fetishes, limits, etc.”

The initial sign-up process asks you to determine what category you fall under in the BDSM scale, and when I once thought there were only two (a dominant and a submissive), I was surprised to click the dropdown box and see that there were 66 options. From a straightforward Dom, through all iterations of “Spank” (Spanko, Spanker, Spankee), to Sensualist, Sissy, Leather Man, Leather Boi, Primal Predators, Preys, Big, Middle, Little, and Pup… signing myself up, I opted for the second to last option: Undecided—and then realized I had no idea what the hell I was getting myself into.

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Violet sent me a voice note: “You are right, it’s a very intricate world. There are so many new terminologies that I didn’t understand. So again, it’s really about self-discovery. I noticed that most people on their profiles had the results from this BDSM test...” she sends me a link to bdsmtest.org, “so I took the test as well and there are a lot of questions where you have to rate how much more likely you are to do something, versus not [doing it].

I think it’s a pretty good measurement of exactly how deviant or obedient you are in the BDSM chart.”

LET’S TEST THE KINK OUT OF YOU, exclaims the opening page of the link in big, bold, letters. I got excited: am I a slave or a voyeur—I wondered, eager to see where of the 66 labels I fit the most. Only to find that the test itself requires you to identify with yet another string of labels: the choices for sexual orientation goes up to eight, including heteroflexible, pansexual, or asexual. While I’ve always been a believer that there is more to gender and sexuality than just black and white—when the spectrum of colors are laid out in front of you to choose from in a dropdown box on a website—I never thought that I could be so… black and white. “Strictly heterosexual” I click, sheepishly.

I like to be dominated, especially in the bedroom, reads the first question. I click the circle that’s the brightest green: Absolutely agree.

I like receiving pain during sex and seeing the

results of it (marks/ bruises, makeup running caused by tears, etc.) afterwards.

Hmm… I ruminate over this thought.

Disagree, I click.

I enjoy being kept as a pet: in a cage, eating out of a bowl, being petted/caressed, etc.

I don’t hesitate: Absolutely disagree.

I enjoy people seeing me being naked or having sex, even (or especially) when they didn’t intend to do so.

I start squirming in my seat: Disagree.

As the test gets longer, it also gets deeper and darker, and I kind of wish I made a mental briefing with my subconscious to prepare for this. From wanting to know if you like to be “verbally degraded or called humiliating names,” to asking whether “sexual torture turns you on,”—I’m definitely no square, but this was intense. When my results come out, I am not so surprised: 100% Switch (someone who likes being both top and bottom), and 99% Vanilla (someone who is not into BDSM).

I am also a little bit disappointed in myself… that was anti-climactic. Interestingly enough, though, the test does reveal that I am 99% non-monogamist (into open relationships), 76% Experimentalist (wants to try it all), and 47% Ageplayer (daddy/daughter or mommy/ baby role play, not necessarily incestuous in nature)...still, Marquis de Sade is not impressed. I understand now why BDSM is a form of self-discovery: I don’t actually really know what I like and what I don’t like—I’ve never tried them...the burning question was: am I willing to find out?

Violet is 95% Switch, 88% Brat (a submissive who acts up), and 80% Rope Bunny (enjoys being tied or bound). She is also part Degradee (someone who enjoys being sexually degraded), Dominant (a person who exercises control), and Masochist (a person who enjoys pain). “I’m a woman of many tastes and eccentricities, and until now, it’s still a journey

for me to find out what I like and don’t like, and I’m mostly up to try new things,” says Violet. “I do have limits—soft limits and hard limits—but again, it depends on what it is and who I’m doing it with.”

R E A D Y T O P L A Y For people who are curious about getting into BDSM, munches are great place to start.

A “munch” is a community event where local kinks regularly meet to talk and share knowledge. It usually takes place in a vanilla setting, during the daytime, and no playing is involved. First timers are encouraged to join, actually, to see what kinds of fetishes exist, and also to understand from first-hand stories that there are lines that can and can’t be crossed; that there are precautions, too. Which is a relief to hear, in fact, because a subculture

based on sex and violence is bound to have its shortcomings. Some dominant men can become abusive to unknowing submissives, mostly girls who readily assume the role because it is the norm they play in society.

Then there is also the extreme and dark side of BDSM: gunplay (including actual or simulated firearms), scat play (a.k.a feces play) and cock and ball torture (self-explanatory).

Violet chimes in on her limits, “absolutely nothing involving shit, animals, children, near death, or the dead.” I’m not even surprised anymore that the categories (some illegal, by the way) exist. But the pillars of BDSM is that everything must always be done in a sane, safe, and consensual environment—otherwise, there’s no place for it in the community. In which case, if all goes well, and two mature, consenting, adults agree to their own limitations, one can imagine (or at least try very hard to understand), it can be fun.

“There are many different aspects of BDSM that I enjoy,” says Violet, who begins to tell the story of the time she spent one weekend training a slave. She has the Polaroids to prove it: In one photo, she is elegantly clad in lingerie and knee-high stockings, legs hung over what looks like a king’s throne. In another, a man is seen on his hands and knees on the floor, and a glass of juice is propped on his back. “FYI, I’m usually attracted to AFAMs [a foreigner in Manila],” she says, laughing. “I don’t know, it’s a preference that I have. I met this Italian,” she says, referring to man on all fours, “and when I checked out his FetLife profile, it turned out he was a sub.

I hadn’t been playing with a male sub for a while...I’m a huge Game of Thrones fan, so I would always make subs address me as, ‘my lady’ (laughs) just for fun. Normally, I don’t like to go to seedy motels, I like hotels—but then I thought, why don’t we go to the Game of Thrones-themed room cause I’ve never been, and I was super living the fantasy. He was butt-naked the entire time, and he wasn’t allowed to stand up,” she says laughing. The man actually preferred that Violet do all the decision-making: when to go, what to eat, what to wear. She made it clear that there would be no sex involved. “He was there at my service only. He said the session was quite intense as I was ‘so cruel,’ but he deserved it and liked it… by the way, he came into his own mouth (laughs).”

“I think the fun part is the power play— seeing this big white guy just crawling in front of me, doing whatever I told him to do. He wasn’t allowed to stay on the bed—I’d let him lie on the floor, or in the bathroom, I guess it’s a little sadistic. I think it’s actually more sadistic in a mental sense than a physical sense.” Violet references comedienne Ali Wong’s standup special Baby Cobra to describe the rush of the mental power exchange. “[Wong] likes it when a white man is eating her out, because she says she feels like she’s absorbing the white privilege. And I think that’s how I feel

also when I’m with white men, you know, and they’re like in between my legs, or beneath my feet. Like yeah, that’s your place,” she snickers.

After playtime, which doesn’t always involve sexual intercourse, comes the aftercare, or the time after the scene when the two participants step out of their roles, calm down, discuss, and reflect on what just happened. “You try to come back down to earth and assess your feelings. Because imagine being thrown around, slapped, and essentially punished—to make you feel safe and sane again, you need an aftercare session. There could be cuddling, or hugging, basically to make you feel normal again.” In some BDSM relationships, aftercare includes caring for the wounds that may have been inflicted during the scene. And it is during this time, says Violet, that the human aspect becomes most important. “I think for BDSM, and I read on this as well, you have to have a deep understanding of human interaction to be able to properly participate.”

To truly grasp the concept of BDSM without making it just about the sex and the violence, “it is such an intellectual lifestyle, so you can’t just go blindly into it. And again, the aspects of respect, trust, honesty must be there.”

E R O T I C E X H I B I T I O N S She admits, “I’m not as active as the people who regularly do play dates or workshops… a lot of them actually devote a lot of their time to BDSM. I’m not by any means a pro on the issue, but I like to talk about it with other people because I want them to understand that we have to be open-minded to different desires and personalities. You’re also challenging what you already know. For me, BDSM has been a gateway into discovering more of myself, regaining control of my sex life, and an outlet for me to explore the different sides of my self versus my day-job-vanilla-self. I don’t know if I’ll be doing it for the rest of my life. But at this stage in my life, it’s been fun.”

It’s six hours behind in Paris, and Violet is just about to start to her day—she is excited to wear the latex suit she just purchased from designer William Wilde, who also makes the outfits for the likes of Kylie Minogue and Rihanna. She has a scheduled play date with a cosmopolitan Parisian at a beautiful neoclassical hotel called Maison Souquet, which used to be a pleasure house, and is a minute’s walk away from the Moulin Rouge. They will grab dinner and stroll along the Palais-Royal. And then, at the end the night, they will drop by Les Chandelles, a chic Parisian swingers club that Vanity Fair reported themes its Tuesdays as “Politicans’ Night.”

I imagine her strolling the streets of the city in her thigh-high boots and cheeky b u s t i e r— m e a n w h i l e, a t t h e b l i n k i n g fluorescent afterglow of my office computer, I click the link back to the BDSM test …

Being treated with little or no respect during sex arouses me. I click…

August 2017_Esquire 91

Bulletp Starring international man of mystery Karl Glusman

Photographs by

proof!

Ture Lillegraven

Jacket, shirt, trousers, and loafers

by Louis Vuitton.

Car: 2017 Aston Martin DB11.

And featuring suits to carry you through any situation, from client meetings to dodging assassins Styling by

Nick Sullivan

In acting, they say you have to commit—to a gesture, a characterization—the point being there’s no time to half-ass anything. Every move counts. Karl Glusman could give a master class. You can see it on camera in movies like Nocturnal Animals, but he’s been going all in since college, when he switched his major to acting on the strength of one public-speaking award. And at 19, when he realized this could be his future, he thought nothing of moving cross-country from Portland, Oregon, to New York City to go and get it.

What came next was a riff on the story of any starving striver.

He joined an actors’ studio and spent hours watching taped performances in the library at Lincoln Center. He was an elf at Macy’s Santa Land and played a junkie for med students in training.

He slept in a crawl space above a toilet in Chelsea with a curtain for a wall. He felt like a cliché. “In this business, it’s about how you’re introduced,” he says. “How do you start if no one’s going to give you a break?” Then he got one. And in the grand tradition of actors like Sly Stallone and Jackie Chan, it was a very adult debut.

Glusman was at a club in Paris when he met a girl who was friends with French-Argentine provocateur Gaspar Noé. Glusman and the girl got close, and a few months later, Noé gave him a call. The director didn’t so much ask Glusman to be in his next film: He asked how he felt about performing a whole lot of sex scenes in his next film—no body doubles, no simulations. Never one to waver, Glusman decided he was up for the, uh, exposure. cont inued

94 Au g us t 2 0 17_E s qu ire

Jacket, shirt, trousers, and tie

by Dior Homme; shoes by Paul Andrew. Opposite: Suit and shirt by Prada; shoes by Tod’s; socks by Pantherella.

Jacket, shirt, and trousers by Bottega Veneta; sunglasses by Givenchy. Opposite: Suit, shirt, and tie by Ermenegildo Zegna; shoes by Bruno Magli; belt by Burberry.

cont inued In the resulting movie, Love, Glusman plays a morose young man reliving a series of past sexual encounters in vivid coital flashbacks. It isn’t porn—not really. If you had to call it that, you’d still have to admit it’s very, very highbrow smut. Reviewers called it “hardcore,” “romantic,” “wistful,” and “squelchy.” Whatever you call it, it got Glusman a lot more of those introductions he wanted. On Noé’s recommendation, Nicolas Winding Refn cast the young actor as a photographer in glam gorefest The Neon Demon. After seeing Love’s Cannes premiere, designer-director Tom Ford snagged Glusman for a role in Nocturnal Animals, in which he plays one of three vicious Texas malcontents. Together, those two films have raised his stock and rounded out an IMDb page that’s heavy on graphic content, whether it’s sex or violence or both.

His latest project, Gypsy (out now on Netflix), may not get quite so . . . squelchy, but it’s a dark drama just the same, one that adds him to an A-list team with actress Naomi Watts and director Sam Taylor-Johnson (one of the most profitable female directors on earth following her work on Fifty Shades of Grey). Watts plays a therapist who gets a little too involved with her patients’ lives, and as one of those patients, Glusman explores a new kind of character. “It’s an opportunity for me to showcase a side of myself that I haven’t before,” he says. “I’m playing this emotional, articulate guy who has dropped out of work because he has a broken heart and he can’t get over it.”

In real life, the 29-year-old actor’s about as far from heartbroken as it gets. He’s got a girlfriend by the name of Zoë Kravitz. (You may know her from Big Little Lies, or Rough Night, or for her preternatural beauty.) “I’m madly in love with her, and she loves me back,” he says.

“It’s like a dream.” We’re talking on the phone just before he catches a flight from L. A. to meet her at their apartment in N. Y. C. “I can’t wait to see her. I’m gonna get back to the house at two in the morning.

I’m gonna wake her up and start ringing the bell and smashing the lightbulbs with my shoe.” Like we said, the man isn’t afraid to commit.

—Jon Roth

Month Mon onth on t h 201 th 2 01 7_ 20 7 Es squ q u ir i re ire e 97 97

Jacket and trousers

by Lanvin; shoes by J. M. Weston.

Opposite: Jacket, shirt, and trousers

by Salvatore Ferragamo; belt

by Burberry; sunglasses by Dom Vetro.

Produced by Thea Arthen for Bauie Productions.

Casting by Emily Poenisch.

Grooming by Hee Soo Kwon for the Rex Agency.

CLOSING TIME 100

Esquire_August 2017

PHOTOGRAPH BY JASRELLE SERRANO

this Way Out:

08.2017