Love, wherever one finds it
Love and marriage, family tradition and history, relationships, the struggle to excel, find love, and pursue one’s dream these are just some of the themes of today’s three novels. Wonderfully rendered, the three are a potent reminder of how penetrating and absorbing good fiction can be.
The Vices by Lawrence Douglass (available at National Book Store). Enjoyable, this is a highly stylized novel, reading very much like a modern day Gatsby replete with doomed, destructive love. Also central to the book’s theme is reinvention, how we revise our past to suit our needs, but how doing so also lays consequences on those it encompasses. Narrator of this story is the best friend of one Oliver Vise, a professor in a small Ivy League college. When our narrator meets Oliver’s family that reeks of Europe, old money, and an unhealthy relationship between mother and her two sons, suspicions slowly rise regarding how truthful the family lore truly is. A sardonic sense of humor is what gives this novel its special patina.
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (available at National Book Store). Best known and celebrated for his previous novels, The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, this new novel of Eugenides does return to a campus (Brown), but has loftier ambitions than being classified as a novel about student love and the academe. If the saying goes “love is blind,” Eugenides would have us realize that blindness also comes in different guises. It can be not seeing what stands in front of you, just as much as it can be heading into territory one knows is fraught with disaster. At heart a love triangle between students, and extending to their lives as young adults, this is one that scrutinizes with passion and precision.
Panopio Jewelers present their Baroque pearl with amethyst set in silver and dipped in gold, in a unique setting. Photo by Paolo Ruiz The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach (available at National Book Store). Set in a small Michigan college, this acclaimed first novel delivers! On the surface, one may consider it a baseball story and a campus romance, but while it is those two, the novel also takes on deeper issues. A true prospect for the majors, a teammate who has sacrificed his own career mentoring said prospect, the college president who’s thought of as a Lothario but now finds himself in dangerous homosexual love with one of the college baseball players, and the said president’s daughter who comes back from a failed marriage with a tail tucked between her legs. A heady mix about love’s many faces that should be savoured and read.
From Pale Pilsen to pale fire
Working as a brewery’s brand manager for beer may seem a strange provenance for a jeweler, but that’s exactly the business training Vicky Panopio underwent before taking that “leap of faith,” and joining her sister full-time in developing the Panopio Jewelers. Vicky is one-half of the sister team, with Bea Panopio-Tongco forming the other half, that has turned this first-generation retail jewelry establishment into one of the more exciting and innovative forces working in the industry today. They have a boutique at the basement arcade of the Peninsula Hotel and share a GB 5 store with Ana Rocha’s Bijou on the second floor. They also export to Australia.
Just recently, they unveiled their new collection at GB 5, followed by a small thanksgiving party at Prive, and part of the night’s activities was the unveiling of the stylized photographs of Paolo Ruiz. Perhaps it comes from being a first generation entity, with no parents looking over your shoulder, screaming tradition and conventional in your ears; but I loved the whimsy and playfulness that were imbued in the conceptualization of the photos, in how pieces of jewelry were displayed and highlighted. This whimsy, subversive humor for something as High Street as jewelry can also be found as Vicky recounted how she originally wanted to call the collection, “Baroque, Don’t Fix It” a reference to one of her favorite animated films, a quote from Cogsworth in Beauty and the Beast.
Modelling her own line, Vicky Panopio wearing a Carnelian with Baroque pearl set in precious metal. Photo by Paolo Ruiz Bea is the one with the diploma course in jewelry design from G.I.A. (Gemological Institute of America), while Vicky surprisingly studied design at Parsons. But with that design background, Vicky is an avid student of history and culture, and draws inspiration from this formal approach to design, believing it can apply to jewelry, as well as fashion. While viewing the collection, I was talking to Bea and guessed that the more formal, geometrical designs were hers, while the more organic, free-flowing, asymmetrical pieces were Vicky’s and I was right! Great for their clientele, as they get the best of both worlds, two distinct design philosophies in one collection.
While the alahera culture still thrives here in the Philippines, it’s the likes of Vicky and Bea who exemplify the young, emerging new face of Philippine jewelry design. Respectful of tradition and heritage, they also want to inject something new in the process. In fact, one of the things Panopio Jewelers love to do is have clients bring in their old sets of jewelry and instead of opting to melt them down, allow Vicky and Bea to suggest how they can be recast, reinvented to look fresh and new. “Fire” when used in jewelry refers to the brilliance, rainbow-type colors, that are sometimes found within a stone and it serves just as well in describing the kind of spirit and passion that the Panopio sisters bring to their chosen field.
