Tuesday, October 07, 2008 Niñal: The cube that saved the 80s By Lorenzo P. Niñal Insoymada
WHEN I read the headline ‘Gabby Concepcion Comeback Confirmed!’ early this year, my first reaction was to pinch myself to check if I was awake. I don’t really have problems with caps and exclamation points in an entertainment headline. They can even use the ZapfDingbats BT font for all I care.
But it was Gabby Concepcion. He’s got the words PINOY EIGHTIES stamped on his forehead. His sudden reappearance only meant one thing: he’s broke.
No, seriously it meant the 80s is officially making a comeback, and Mr. Concepcion is broke. And have you heard that the Friday Group is reuniting?
I found it cool when another comeback artist Louie Heredia tripped and fell, like a dumb ramp model, while singing “Can’t Find No Reason” in a noontime show, and survived to tell the tale. A true 80s hero.
It’s not difficult to imagine the 80s back again. We’ve been through a lot of embarrassing moments as a pop-crazed people, so that theoretically, it’s not impossible for today’s youth to go gaga over spandex, padded shoulders, Boy George, break dance, Michael J. Fox and Olivia Newton-John like their stone-washed parents before them. The 80s was the decade taste brutally forgot; its comeback will prove there’s justice in this world. I don’t want mine to be the only generation to suffer spray net.
So I forgot about Gabby Concepcion, until last week when on a jeepney ride I saw a high school student tinkering with something that looked familiar. I inched closer to a vacant seat near him for a better look. He was tinkering with a little box. No, it was a cube, made of even smaller colored cubes. And the boy was twisting the poor thing, as if he was trying to disassemble it…. Oh my God, it’s… it’s… the Rubik’s Cube!
I was teary-eyed. I suddenly missed my classmates who wouldn’t let me borrow their Cubes even if I offered to write their ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation’ essays. I remembered how I cried copious tears in the CR because I didn’t have toys. I remembered how girls ignored me because I didn’t have a skateboard. I remembered how I was jailed for stealing siopao from the canteen because…
OK, where were we? Oh, the Rubik’s Cube. Now, if there’s one icon that makes me proud of the 80s, it’s the Cube. This brilliant puzzle saved the 80s.
The Cube is the 80s’ proof that it was a thinking, mystery-solving, cube-twisting, siopao-stealing generation.
Although the Hungarian sculptor Erno Rubik invented the Cube in 1974, it achieved its icon status in the 80s. Rubik didn’t intend to invent a puzzle. He was only interested in the structural design problem. He asked, “How could the blocks move independently without falling apart?” So 80s. It’s like Michael Jackson saying, “How could I improve my nose, my lips, my skin without looking like Elizabeth Taylor?” Then he transmutated into the wacko that he has become.
My first time to see a Rubik’s Cube was in the popular soap opera ‘Flordeluna.’ In the scene, Reneboy (played by Herbert Bautista) gets a scolding from his father (played by the late Dindo Fernando) because he’d rather solve the Cube than study his lessons. Reneboy eventually yields, goes to his room, leaving the Cube in the sala. The father, after making sure the boy is gone, picks up the Cube, stares at it, starts twisting it, until he finds it impossible to stop. The father mutters something like “Ang hirap pala nito” as Reneboy emerges from his room. Hiding his embarrassment, the father sternly tells his son, “This thing stays with me until the end of school.”
There, this column’s done. Now leave me to my Duran Duran collection.
