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In a repurposed garage in a city not very far away (Cebu), Johanna Velasco Deutsch, Mark Deutsch and their team make stuff.

Such as their rendition of a certain seat of power. Instead of swords melted by dragonfire and surfaces so sharp they caused the derrieres of kings to bleed, they fashioned a comfy chair from old action figures, toy cars, Lego bricks, Viewmasters, and plastic animals.

They do animation, design, illustration, painting, sculpture, toys and photography. Coming up: an alphabet book in Bisaya.

Under the glass are 364 pictures they took, one a day, for a year.

They pay tribute to our feline overlords and encourage people to drink better coffee. Their work is delightful without being self-consciously cute.

Visit them at Happy Garaje.com. You can also check out their work for the Four Seasons Marrakesh and Raffles Seychelles.

Naturist: Greens, warm wood tones, reds. So you can see the forest beyond the concrete. (Do you ever look through swatches or crayon boxes just to read the names of the shades? We do.)

Avant-Garde: Bold reds, blues, yellows, greens. For your inner superhero.

Kinetic: Cool greys and blues, intense tangerine. You move fast.

Perfectionist: Subdued colors. Your house is your retreat.

Boysen introduced its color themes for the year last week at SMX. Color Trend 2015 was created in collaboration with the Nova Paint Club and a global color research company. Look here.

Give science-fiction the respect it has long deserved and been flagrantly denied.

And give her books better covers.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

To the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks, from the heart. My family, my agents, my editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as my own, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice in accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who’ve been excluded from literature for so long — my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination, who for fifty years have watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.

Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book 6 or 7 times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this — letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.

Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

Thank you.

Copyright © 2014 Ursula K. Le Guin

The Spiral Staircases of Budapest

These images would’ve come in handy in James Marsh’s melodramatic Stephen Hawking biopic, The Theory of Everything. Read our review at InterAksyon.com.

Visit Versailles, the former royal palace, 30 minutes from Paris on the train.

Noel, it makes you look like a minimalist.

Seeing how the absolute monarchs of France lived while their people starved is more effective and visceral than any history book. Sheesh, we’d cut off their heads ourselves.

The ridiculously wealthy (and those who wish to be identified, however mistakenly, as such) ought to think hard about flaunting their possessions in society magazines and other media. The people might get ideas.

Indigenous weaving traditions that have survived the centuries (and the onslaught of cheap factory-produced synthetic textiles that will turn into trapo faster than a naive “idealist” politician) are showcased at the fourth Likhang Habi Bazaar on October 24 to 26 at the Glorietta Activity Center in Makati.

Our cats love abel iloko and will spend hours rubbing their faces on it. Exfoliating?

If you’re attending the Philippine LitFest at Raffles, you can just cross the street.

The bazaar will feature fabrics from all over the archipelago, including Inabel from the Ilocos region and La Union, Cordillera weaves from Banaue and Benguet, T’nalak from Lake Sebu, Piña from Aklan and Palawan, Hablon and Patadyong from Iloilo, Mangyan textiles and baskets from Mindoro, Yakan weave from Basilan, and mats from Samar and Bukidnon.

These weaves have been made into clothes, bags, tablecloths, bedcovers,lampshades, scarves and other wearables.

Likhang Habi is organized by Habi, the Philippine Textile Council. This year’s bazaar will feature a dazzling array of banig, as well as fabrics from Myanmar.

For information and inquiries, contact Eleanor Moldez, noriemoldez@yahoo.com, or post your question in Comments and we’ll forward it to the organizers.

Drogon on a banig