The Philippine Online Chronicles

The Shopwise logo leers like a crooked smile, a snobbish smirk to all the assembled walking to and from its doors. In the middle of the logo is a great white peso sign, sans serif, potent sigil for its singular magic. It’s almost a crucifix set against a setting sun, or the ☧ of Early Christianity, the monogram of the first two letters of the Greek word for “Christ,” and alternately, marginal marker for remarkable passages in ancient Greek manuscripts.  Only  here the criss-cross lines are untangled and made parallel horizontals trisecting the pregnant hump of the "P."  It’s the most honest logo ever conceived, the most simple-minded, the most direct, the most shameless: this is a place where money is priority, the be-all end-all of things, its religion and calling, what it’s all about.

I wrote about this place five years ago. It had a burger place and a bookstore both too expensive for Cubao’s working class natives. It was bright and cool and shiny like a brand new fridge – you could very likely eat off the floor and not pick up anything vile. There were bars and restaurants and the occasional fast food place that were all too bright or too cool or too shiny, all trying hard to impress rather than welcome. There was a magazine place with wall-to-wall shelves that were up-to-date to the very last minute of global monthly publication. I parked my ass on one of the chairs in the burger place and wrote about its condiments and potato wedges and overall overlit ambience. It was an intruder a long time coming in Cubao’s plebeian rustic-hood, later turned into an omen, the shape of things to come.

I walk inside Shopwise for the first time in five years. It’s like walking into a three-year old strip mall in Pangasinan – it has seen better days, all now behind it, forgotten. All the colors are either faded or currently in the process of fading, all the shine and polish now dull and unimpressive. Its corridors are an underlit hospital’s, and smaller than I remember even when it’s actually emptier than before. There are less shops, less food kiosks, less tables and chairs. On one side is a makeshift chapel with the aesthetic appeal of a Channel 13 noontime show studio backdrop, empty and cordoned-off from the people. On another side is a hole-in-the-wall pet shop. On top of one terrarium are two dozen red and blue fighting fish, each in their own mini-aquarium improvised from disposable plastic cups and bottoms of used mineral water bottles, all bathed by a wet market blue-violet blacklight fluorescent lamp.

The grocery interior is confusingly designed with hopscotch abandon. No clear transitional logic occurs between the electric fans and baby wear and potato chips and bathroom cleansers. There are sacks of sugar and rice in sporadic intervals down the main aisle. The space between shelves is too small, the shelves themselves too tall. The items are never where they ought to be, the attendants a ten-year-old rumor. The area of top priority is found further down, a dramatically-underlit rotunda, fancier than the rest of the grocery, fancier than it ought to be. This is where the mother lode is: the gourmet meats and cheeses as revered as wine and caviar, the wine and caviar revered more than one’s own progeny; the fruits and vegetables bountiful and garden-fresh and ready to munch if paid for in the counter with all the other snack places in the middle of the rotunda, Shopwise’s novelty – a grocery with a picnic food court in the middle for your convenience: shopping while you're dining on what you’re shopping. Is it so one can save time for the other things in life? Look around and see that all the shoppers here already have too much time in their hands, already mealing between meals.

This is Shopwise’s idea of wise shopping: one can consume as one plans for future consumption – the only time being saved is the only time worth saving: the time for further shopping and eating and shopping and eating.

I wrote about this place seven years ago, on its last legs as the three-decades-old Fiesta Carnival. The Eraserheads shot a music video here once, the carrier single from their Christmas album. It begins with Raimund Marasigan waking up in a bed beside a scraggly tree along Aurora and ends with a slapsticky jam session with the Carnival’s blind musicians. Ely Buendia plays the role of a pavement prophet handing out end-of-the-world fliers to the Carnival’s passers-by passing by in time-elapsed blurs, later arrested by a cop played by Francis M in a superstar cameo walk-in, later walked out exactly one whole year ago today from leukemia.

There used to be a statue of a lion in the middle of the Carnival. My brother has a photo standing beside it eating his ice cream. There used to be a towering orange hadrosaur overseeing the whole interior, the toy train passing between its legs at 30-minute intervals. There used to be a carousel here, and a toy store, and a video arcade. There used to be a go-kart track looping on the second floor, lined by used tyres, the concrete floor smelling of diesel. I’ve been told that the old Carnival murals of clowns and balloons and animals and candy can all still be seen on the walls of the Shopwise parking lots. Is Nostalgia our only viable transgression against Modernity? I walk out of Shopwise and cross the street. Outside, the Shopwise logo leers like a crooked smile, a snobbish smirk to all the assembled walking to and fro its doors. I leer back at it. I smirk.

Photo:  "Shopwise" by the author. Some rights reserved.

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