Each year, a carefully chosen committee scrutinizes lifelong brilliance, then, after a tortuous process, proclaims individuals worthy of being conferred membership into an exclusive, rarefied fellowship deemed to have made crucial contributions to the Philippine arts. Emily Abrera—chairman emeritus of McCann-Erickson Philippines—with her vast network (and the incomparable counsel it affords her) breaks down how, in 2009, the process cynically broke down.

Hollywood’s got its big blood-and-guts flicks with ghastly finales. Asian cinema has its quiet, sinister narratives. Philippine horror, meanwhile, is quite a different story: we’ve diversified and mutated the genre in dizzying proportions—from mayhem to humorous to the totally implausible. But as anthropologist, teacher, and cultural commentator Michael L. Tan argues, the Pinoy horror film still has a few nasty surprises to offer at every turn. If the mania is the message, then we’re in for a tingling read.

An artistic crucible dwells in the spiritually energetic Cordillera Islands—an 87-year-old lady named Fang Oud. The last of the original artists in the area, she has solely preserved a forgotten Kalinga rite of passage: the art of tribal tattooing. After traveling to the Cordilleras to meet the cultural icon, Swiss-Filipino traveler Raphael Kiefer narrates how he has come away changed forever.