Cubao
Chus had to drop by the gallery to see his painting hanged so we tagged along.
Cubao always reminds me of the opening of school—my folks used to take me shopping for black school shoes at Gregg’s or Shoemart back when it was a shoe store and not the megamall chain. Shopping for shoes was always a fraught occasion because I never liked any of the shoes I tried on, my mother always lost her patience at me, my father lost his patience at both of us, and my parents carried on like characters in Russian novels while I watched them with entomological interest and thought, “I’ll never be an adult.” Cubao also meant the cinema (Before the age of the multiplex my parents used to take me to those standalone movie houses along Aurora Boulevard: Coronet, Remar, and Diamond), the Xmas display at C.O.D., the record stores near Rustan’s, and Fiesta Carnival with the train that went into the tunnel of horrors that scared no one.
All these places are gone. Now I associate Cubao with the first Bellini’s. When I first ate there it was literally a hole in the wall with plastic chairs; now it’s four times larger and movies have been shot there.
When we got to Sining Kamalig (Level 4 of the Gateway Mall, come to the opening reception tonight from 6 to 9), I was pleasantly surprised to find that Chus had painted my portrait.
The detail on the left is from the shower murder in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
Kris Soguilon painted this homage to Ishmael Bernal’s Himala.
On the way out we dropped by Fully Booked to see the most literary floor in town: The Prince is on the tiles. I wonder how Machiavelli would feel about people treading on his prose; then again he was Mr. The End Justifies The Means.
Afterwards I suggested a trip to Cubao X at the old Marikina Shoe Expo because I was under the impression that the vintage stores and art galleries stayed open till after midnight. I was wrong: the bars stay open till late, but everything else is closed except for the comic book and toy shop that sold
The Holy Grail!
The other open store had vintage furniture, chandeliers that remind me of the unfinished Death Star,
and these brilliant earrings.
My other mistake was thinking that stuff in Cubao X would be cheap. Ha! Ha! Ha!
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
February 22nd, 2010 at 22:04
What I remember of and miss about Cubao is the “Bibingka” place called Ferino’s, and the Ma Mon Luk (?) with the biggest bola bola siopao I’d ever eaten.
And of course, the Araneta Coliseum where as a kid, I tagged along with my grown up siblings to watch “Holiday on Ice” and much later on, the basketball games.
Cubao was where “Peyups” students hanged out when classes got suspended – back in the ’70s.