By Rex Catubig I went to school in our barrio for my primary grades—from grade one to grade four. Kindergarten was unheard of. Upon reaching seven years old, you are automatically grade one. Which for me was an unsettling experience. Suddenly, I was thrust into an unfamiliar environment, thrown…
By Rex Catubig IN what could be life’s pathetic irony, we are actually strangers to the people closest to us. We are photoshopped images or AI of what they perceive us to be. It is perception that is made up of biases and expectations that remotely resemble reality. On…
By Rex Catubig IT is said that the last to go as one approaches the final round, is the sense of hearing. While the body may have given up the fight, it is claimed that one could whisper into the ear of a dying man and he could hear it….
By Rex Catubig THEY were called midnight screenings. The showing after the regular screening hours of “oddball, unorthodox films at midnight”. In contrast to the matinee or morning to early afternoon shows which were usually priced cheaper and drew an older audience, the midnight movies, commonly noted for notoriety,…
By Rex Catubig I GREW up in the movies. And the post of Herencia del Filipinas of a vintage movie house purportedly in Dagupan, awakened a montage of dormant fleeting memories of the silver screen. As a boy in the barrio, the blaring announcement by a roving caravan of…
By Rex Catubig IT’S where everything merges and converges: the Grand Central of street food, produce, and a motley assortment of goods and merchandise. And at five o’clock in the afternoon, Galvan street flanked by the old MacAdore and Malimgas market, becomes a veritable market goers’ convention hub —…
By Rex Catubig THEY are the calamity staple. Once referred to as “relief”, they have since mutated into the colloquial “ayuda” as food aid is called—a package consisting of a bag of rice, canned goods, noodles, coffee sachets, and the like—depending on the local government’s resources and “diskarte” or…
By Rex Catubig THE first time I watched my free movie as a senior citizen of Dagupan City was before the pandemic. And it harkened back those childhood discovery moments when you got feel-good freebies like ferris wheel ride, tinapay with ice cream, pancit at the Chinese resto–and going…
By Rex Catubig IT’S a question of chronology: Which came first– the Music Warehouse in Perez or the UPS in MH del Pilar? What was certain was they ushered in the revival of the dance club–called disco in those days– at the break of the year 2000, and filled…
By Rex Catubig AS the monsoon month gives way to longer rainless afternoons, at around three o’clock in our tranquil barrio of Calmay, across the river from baley, we kids are routinely roused from our mandatory nap by the sonorous shout of an itinerant vendor. The old woman whom…
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