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Drogon ponders the idea for a play that he will dictate to his human.

The VIRGIN LABFEST YEAR 12 is now open for script submissions! The Virgin Labfest is an annual festival of unpublished, unstaged, untried and untested works for the theater held at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. This festival is a partnership project of the Writer’s Bloc, Inc., Tanghalang Pilipino, Inc. and the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

This year, the Virgin Labfest will choose twelve (12) new one-act plays.

The Virgin Labfest accepts submissions of qualified written works:

1. one-act plays or short plays with a maximum running time of 40 minutes

2. All submitted works must NOT have previously been
– published in book form;
– staged commercially for more than two (2) performances (staged readings, one-time workshop productions are allowed);
– awarded any literary or drama recognition in competitions and the like

3. works may be in Filipino, English, Cebuano, Hiligaynon or Ilocano. (Cebuano, Hiligaynon and Ilocano works must have accompanying Filipino translations.)

The festival is open to various themes and genres.

Submission Deadline is on FEBRUARY 29, 2016

Submissions may be sent online:
1) in .doc or .pdf FORMAT ONLY to the following e-addresses:
rodyvera@gmail.com and/or nikkigtorres@gmail.com
OR

2) hand-delivered or mailed (two hard copies) to CLOTILDE LUCERO or NIKKI TORRES, Performing Arts Department, Upper Basement, Cultural Center of the Philippines, Roxas Boulevard, Pasay City

Mailed deliveries should be postmarked on or before the submission deadline date (February 29, 2016), Submissions should indicate full name and contact address of the playwright.

We hope to hear from you!

SHERLOCK fans are among the most patient fans on earth, and they have to be. Since the BBC series created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss premiered in 2010, there have been exactly nine episodes, 10 if you count the one-off holiday special that aired last week. The fans have used the time between episodes to create endless tumblr pages and memes featuring Sherlock stars Benedict Cumberbatch (Check out the one demonstrating his resemblance to an otter) and Martin Freeman, write fan fiction about Holmes and Watson, organize a worldwide army (Cumberbitches), and report on every move made by Cumberbatch and Freeman. I would probably not stalk the Cumberbatch, but I might consider replacing my library if he were to record all the volumes as audiobooks.

Read our column The Binge at BusinessWorld.

Thanks to Ricky for the alert.

Oscar Shmoscar, the best picture of 2015 is Mad Max: Fury Road.

We think of these three as the Western Torture Porn Trilogy of 2015.

The Revenant. Leonardo DiCaprio crawls through the spectacular wilderness in terrible torment for two hours and 36 minutes, periodically interrupted by mumbling Tom Hardy. Para n’yo nang awa, bigyan n’yo na yan ng Oscar, baka ano pa’ng gawin niyan. Wasn’t it enough that he crawled on his face in The Wolf of Wall Street? Hardy is continuing his experiments with unintelligible speech that began with Bane in Dark Knight Rises (or even earlier). Was that rampaging bear a film critic?

Bone Tomahawk addresses the crying need for westerns with cannibals that we thought had been filled by Ravenous. Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson, Richard Jenkins and Matthew Fox saddle up in pursuit of troglodyte Native Americans who have abducted some white people. For dinner. When we were not laughing out loud we were wincing with disgust. Of the rivers of blood and guts shed in this movie, the image we cannot unsee is that of someone chopped in half. Oh and Patrick Wilson limps across the dry and scraggly wilderness in terrible torment for half an hour.

The Hateful Eight. It’s The Bad, The Ugly, and The Very Ugly. In his previous films Quentin Tarantino set the bar for gore, violence and offensive language very high, and here he vaults over it with ease. Is it worth it? Set in post-Civil War USA, it’s a clever commentary on race relations in contemporary America. Structurally it’s very similar to one of Tarantino’s early films, Reservoir Dogs. It’s often hilarious, but we felt guilty for laughing. Kurt Russell has cornered the market on western roles; he is joined by Samuel L. Jackson, Demian Bichir, Bruce Dern, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Jennifer Jason Leigh who should be compelled to appear in more movies, Walton Goggins from Justified, and Channing Tatum, whose arrival we greeted with “Ay! May artista!”

There was a collective cry of disappointment the other day as George R.R. Martin announced that the next book in A Song of Ice and Fire is not finished and will not be out before season six of HBO’s Game of Thrones. And the expected shrieks of fury from people who use the books and the TV series as a substitute for their lives. This is how they looked when they heard the news.

While we are slightly bummed that The Winds of Winter won’t be hitting the shelves soon, we believe that George R.R. Martin can do whatever he wants, and that includes not writing another word. He is not your bitch. In fact he is the writer you are waiting on, which means you are his bitches hahahaha. So the book’s late. We’ll live.

Here is GRRM’s statement.

THE WINDS OF WINTER is not finished.

Believe me, it gave me no pleasure to type those words. You’re disappointed, and you’re not alone. My editors and publishers are disappointed, HBO is disappointed, my agents and foreign publishers and translators are disappointed… but no one could possibly be more disappointed than me. For months now I have wanted nothing so much as to be able to say, “I have completed and delivered THE WINDS OF WINTER” on or before the last day of 2015.

But the book’s not done.

Nor is it likely to be finished tomorrow, or next week. Yes, there’s a lot written. Hundreds of pages. Dozens of chapters. (Those ‘no pages done’ reports were insane, the usual garbage internet journalism that I have learned to despise). But there’s also a lot still left to write. I am months away still… and that’s if the writing goes well. (Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t.) Chapters still to write, of course… but also rewriting. I always do a lot of rewriting, sometimes just polishing, sometimes pretty major restructures.

I suppose I could just say, “Sorry, boys and girls, still writing,” and leave it at that. “It will be done when it’s done.” Which is what I have been doing, more or less, since… well, forever. But with season 6 of GAME OF THRONES approaching, and so many requests for information boiling up, I am going to break my own rules and say a little more, since it would appear that hundreds of my readers, maybe thousands or tens of thousands, are very concerned about this question of ‘spoilers” and the show catching up, revealing things not yet revealed in the books, etc.

Read the whole statement on George R.R. Martin’s blog.

This Monday Morning Vent was written by the valiant Momelia. Warning: Some violence and gross household imagery.

Necronomicon from Ash Vs Evil Dead

How to Deliver Your Self from Evil
by Momelia

If Evil were a foot and a half long, scuttled on four short legs, coated in fur as black as corruption, with a leathery tail as long as its body, then I woke up to the sight of it on my kitchen floor. It wasn’t doing any scuttling this time because, to my mounting horror, Evil was half-trapped in a glue board. A part of me was convinced that it wasn’t sticking around to make friends. Half of Evil’s horrible length, from its lower feet to some of its tail, was stuck to this glue board that I got in Puregold for fifty-five pesos.

Evil was not moving for the time being, like it was calculating a pandemic, and it was truly the most disgusting thing. Meanwhile, that glue board was the most amazing thing, and I elected to purchase more of it if I lived through this ordeal.

I was frozen on the sofa I slept on. I stood up, and Evil tried to scamper a few inches towards the open kitchen door. That slight movement paralyzed my courage all the more, because it meant I was not making all this shit up. “There’s this adult rat that’s half-trapped on this glue board on my kitchen floor” shoved the sleep off me, and I armed myself with a purpose. I cannot allow, I will not allow Evil to live. It will return with an infernal appetite and an infestation of other Evils, and I will not live with that. Evil would triumph if a good gay like me did nothing, and besides, what would Jesus say?

The fading sunlight of that afternoon betrayed Evil’s true form. The hair on my arms prickled. Evil was plump like gluttony and its scraggly coat of hair, not fur, was black as sin. Its gray tail was the whip that scourged people who take hourly selfies for all of Eternity. I saw that Evil’s bottom legs and maybe four inches of its tail were caught on the glue board, and this explained Evil’s restricted movement. I will not be able to unsee this oppressive image, it is now tattooed on my brain, but I imagine that Evil’s nuts were glued to the board as well, and that would make things tolerable because it is funny.

H.P. Lovecraft wrote a short story, The Dreams in the Witch-House, where the antagonist had a curious familiar. It was a large rat with the face of a man. Brown Jenkin teleported, was fluent in taunts, gnawed on human flesh with relish, and was altogether a mean little freak. He had nothing on this thing of Evil, however.

I remembered we had a hammer in the garage. And a box of sandwich bags. I decided that I had some smiting to do.

I stood up and walked towards the locked screen door, my eyes glued on Evil on my kitchen floor. A sharp click issued when I undid the lock, but what happened next was as alarming as the lack of standards in this report. I heard cardboard scrape across my kitchen floor at the same time the lock was released. Terror grew in my heart. The kitchen floor had been exorcised of the presence that possessed it a few seconds back. Where was it? I knew that I should be relieved, but I committed myself to cleansing my house once and for all, so I braced myself and walked towards the open kitchen door.

What I saw next nearly shocked me unconscious. And I wouldn’t have lived through this awful turn of events were it not for two words: “Glued Nuts.” You see, Evil’s panicked scuttling caused the whole length of its plump black form to stick on the glue board. And it was far more revolting because I was now seeing it up close. Evil was now as completely helpless as it was hideous on the glue board. It was now entirely stationary, except for its small, scheming head that moved left and right as it contemplated its circumstances. I crossed myself for protection. Glued Nuts.

I rushed back to the garage to where The Hammer was. It’s nothing more than a used claw hammer, really, but it would serve. I wrapped the business end of The Hammer in two sandwich bags. Things would be particularly messy, there would be blood, and you would not catch me scrubbing rat brain off the head of some claw hammer.

My feet trod with caution because Evil, trapped as it was, grew in size with each step I took towards it. My heart was on the verge of collapse as I squatted next to this helpless abomination. I was then a foot next to Evil stuck in the glue board. I paused, and with what little measure of courage I had about me, I squatted down. I gripped The Hammer in my left hand. Time slowed down. Imagine the smell of an adult rat.

I raised The Hammer two to three inches above Evil’s hysterical head, made one upward swing, for practice, took a deep breath, and then I closed my eyes. I repeated that trajectory in my head, and (Editor’s addition: with a cry of “Thor! Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston sandwich!”) brought The Hammer down in one thunderous wallop. Whackkk!

The air was still, and everything was silent save for my heart beating in my throat. Did I miss? I have good aim, usually, but I had smitten Evil on the head with my eyes closed. So there was a chance that my Hammer of Good had fucked up, and I might need to hammer Evil on the head one more time for good measure.

I opened my eyes. The glue board, to my mounting anxiety, was now flipped over, and all I could see was four inches of Evil’s leathery tail sticking out. It wasn’t moving. I let go of The Hammer, carefully. My heart resumed its rightful place in my chest, and I was breathing more easily. And with this resurgence of confidence, I tapped the glue board with my left foot, and it twitched.

The glue board shivered with the still-living Evil trapped below it. And it shuddered again. Evil lived, Evil survived my smiting, and it mocked my courage. Indignation coursed through my veins as I decided to…No, I was too exasperated to think straight (not to mention too gay), so I stomped on the glue board, twice, with every fiber of frustration in my person. And then it was still.

I tapped the glue board one more time, and it was lifeless. I left it alone for a minute, and it remained utterly still. So I took a garbage bag and heaved the glue board into it. A small pool of blood marked the scene of my triumph. I could have bled that pool myself, for I had never killed anything larger than a cockroach before this day.

(Editor’s note: Blood is not easy to scrub off. Next time, spread a sheet of plastic on the floor.)

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Telcos, banks, government institutions being a pain in the ass? This city murdering your will to live? Email your Monday Morning Vent to saffron.safin@gmail.com.