Charles LeDray

Charles LeDray makes installation art - largely in textiles and ceramics – and also in miniature. The pictures in this post are from an exhibition called Mens Suits. Apparently the exhibition is “large amounts of men's clothing - suits, shirts, ties, gloves - all different, all hand-made and intimately detailed, and mostly appearing second hand” which was three years in the making – and made single-handedly. Sort of a thrift shop leaning in the direction of immaculate attire imbued – to borrow a Japanese concept – with a sense of wabi-sabi.

Pink Whirls

Another flower post.

This one is an osteospermum more commonly called "Pink Whirls". Those petals make it seem like a spoon flower though.

Also taken at Mt. Coot-Tha.

In Krungthep

My brother lived in Bangkok aka Krungthep Nagari for awhile, this was written after my first visit. Revisiting my observations of August 2005 induced a great deal of lunch time nostalgic reverie.

Sydney is the Big Smoke of Australia but for an Asian things can seem pretty quiet around these parts. If you spend a year buried in Sydney where the sky has a blue permatint and barring the constant low hum of cars, the loud mobile phone wielders on the local train, the pounding music of the stores and the kaw kaw of seagulls nothing constitutes noise, it may well be that before long you will wish a holiday in more raucous parts of the world. And when you step off in the early dawn into the liquid heat of Bangkok, you know that this city is an antidote to your year in Sydney. A week in the city however merely affords fractured impressions. The river (Chao Phraya) and endless languid trips on a ferry. Fetid and clean klongs (waterways). More water in large pots on pavements housing pink lotus plants. Masses of pale green closed lotuses wrapped in banana leaves and immersed in large buckets of water. Spectacular wats (temples) seemingly serenely afloat on a concrete city. Large photographs of the queen. Shops, stalls, carts, goods, locals, firangs. Clusters of monks in yellow and orange robes, silent and everywhere. Dank Chinese shops (remarkably identical all the way from Singapore to Bangkok). Small perfectly formed eats. Iced coffees in plastic bags to ward off the heat and give a caffeine kick. More entwined pretty boys than Sydney. It can all seem a bit like the pictures of ubiquitous LP editions on Thailand. All of this was enlivened by an endlessly amusing game (for us) that my father and I devised - finding the Sanskrit equivalents of names ranging from Kanchanaburi to Thammasat. Even more endlessly amusing was my father's intrepid expeditions on local buses where the incongruous alchemy of his bad Thai and the commuters bad English magically transported us to desired destinations. Some things remain etched in memory. Wat Arun studded with the porcelain ballast of Chinese ships of the 1800s and looking for all the world like a modern art installation which makes use of discarded objects, an artist's comment on Thai-Chinese history. The emerald green landscape, misty rain and the Khwae river at Kanchanaburi - a stark contrast to the war museum it houses (the bridge on the river Kwai is here). The tranquility of Wat Bowon which is off the tourist track. Like many Asian cities, there is something seductive about Bangkok. Maybe because there is little room for anything else but people, the cities seem to reflect everything from a rarefied, sophisticated existence to the intimacy, squalor and corruption of spaces that coalesce into each other. Just the kind of place where a million stories can be born.

Picture credit: swamibu

MEMORIAM

Over all things brooding slept
The quiet sense of something lost

From IN MEMORIAM, Alfred Tennyson

For my uncle who unexpectedly passed away last year.

For Mistress Camellia Sinensis

For a long time I wrote nonsense verse, most were on my friends (sadly I can write them no more). And for the longest time I drank loads of tea till I moved to Australia and was hard put to find a decent cuppa unless I went to one of the tea shops or made it myself. This poem is from my archives and it's sort of slight and amusing when read now. The title and tone comes from the medieval poets I was obsessed with then e.g. Skelton's poems. The nerd in me went for the botanical names for tea and coffee. Here is the poem below.

Camellia's a lovely lady
Wonderful, totally heady
And I swear by God above
She's the one I truly love.

Sweet Camellia's wonderful colour
the rich honey, the amber pallor
do completely intoxicate.
My love shall never abate.

The fragrance of Camille
makes my senses reel
I long to hold her close
And then my love disclose.

Camellia, I shall never leave her
For I suffer the love fever
Men long for Coffea's kisses
But I wait for Camellia Sinensis'.

Hibiscus

I love the combination of red and green, even through a festive season where they are overused dominant colours.

And I love hibiscus.

Oddly the flower to the left is a hibiscus though nowhere near as showy as its common cousin. And its petals feel a lot sturdier. The leaves look different too. Apparently it is a Hawaiian Hibiscus, though I can't find a link to the exact species.

Picture to the left taken by my brother at Mt. Coot-Tha Botanical Gardens, Brisbane

Two French Novellas

For a very long time my mother had a copy of Francoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse and then it got lost in our travels. For one reason or the other I never got around to reading it but it always carried the suggestion of something quite chic and sophisticated and of course there was the evocative title. I spotted it at Basement Books a few months ago – the book included Bonjour Tristesse and A Certain Smile - and of course ended up buying it. It was a pleasant enough read though I am sure for someone who was young in the 60s, as my mother was, it must have been fairly radical and the kind of book you would carry around to establish yourself as hip, chic, well-read and the like. Sagan was in her teens when she wrote the book and it is full of the ennui of that age. The two young girls in both books are tantalisingly poised between childhood and adulthood and the corrupted kind of innocence that they possess is both affected by and capable of affecting the adult world. Both books have very young heroines who enter the world of an older man/older woman, I am sure there is much to be read in this re attraction to a father figure and betrayal of the mother figure. Sagan writes flawlessly, it is hard to imagine that she wrote this in her teens for the novels are beautifully constructed, airy and spare. But the themes are eventually slight; they are really novels for young people.

Marguerite Duras wrote a few fictionalised accounts of her early life in Vietnam but unlike Sagan’s book, hers are an account of time recalled. Duras reworked the theme, which included her sexual precociousness, in several ways but the most well known is The Lover (thanks probably in part to a soft porn film version of the book). The books are quite dissimilar though both are slight (something the French do very well), well-written and deal with the romance or affection between a younger woman and an older man. Duras’ book is a lot more tough-headed than Sagan’s perhaps because it was written much later in life and has very much to do with memory and recollection. The older man happens to be Chinese so there are also a number of race/colonial connotations to the events of the book. Sagan’s mother figures are good women but Duras portrays her mother in a somewhat negative light though the reader can’t help but feel a little sympathy for a woman raising children on her own on a small salary in a foreign country and ultimately defeated by it. Surprisingly, it is not the erotic content of the novel that registers as much as Duras’ portrayal of being young and poor in the stifling and hidebound society of the French in Vietnam. The Vietnam Duras evokes is muggy, hot and the endless mud flats stretch into the horizon. Eventually Duras escapes it. Sagan’s heroines grow up and are left with a seemingly permanent sense of mournfulness, Duras grows up and becomes a writer filtering her troubled adolescence and reflecting on it through her fiction.

My November Guest

It's been another hot November weekend. Just the time for a late autumn poem:-)

My November Guest
Robert Frost

My Sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She's glad the birds are gone away,
She's glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

mumbai twenty-six eleven

The ABC had a short doco today on the terror attack of last year. Still so incredibly sad, this post is simply in memory of those who died last year.

My cousin, Ramya, was part of a Nat Geo doco on the attacks. She is a Mumbaikar and spent months on it so it must have been an emotional exercise. Given the lack of cable here, it may be awhile before I catch it.

Climategate

Normally I don't post stuff on politics or science though I follow both. So this post is a bit of an exception.

I have been following the news stories on “climategate” (I am using the popular term though attaching gate has becoming something of a cliche), which appears to have first broken at Air Vent, when I can. Outside of a few science and climate blogs, it appears to have been largely covered by the right wing papers (quite naturally) though it does raise reasonable doubts about the conduct of the researchers involved. Most of the press appears to have taken a hands off approach and some have suddenly turned ethical and not published the hacked material. There is a good deal of discussion on the science itself, a posting by a climate researcher and the group appears to be fairly key researchers but I don't mean to get into that as I do not work in the area. The point that got my attention is the bit on the submission of documents in response to an FOI as well as the characterisation of the material as hacked. It all reminded me a bit of Glenn Greenwald’s effective rebuttal of Joe Klein’s rant.

The media publishes all kinds of material, mainly salacious, under the pretext of “public interest” but are apt to invoke privacy when the material compromises them as with Klein. Likewise scientists. In a profession based on transparency and counter-checks, it is odd that the emails actively discuss ways of evading FOI requests. Like the closed clique of Washington politics who Greenwald lambasts in his article, the whole process of influencing peer review, manoeuvering the appointment of editors and creating the Catch-22 of not allowing publication of papers by researchers who come to different conclusions and then dismissing the authors for not publishing in peer reviewed papers speaks of a clique that doesn’t seem to be answerable to anyone, least of all the public (nothing here that you can understand, move along seems to be the general approach). It’s a pity that most news sites and blogs have been dismissive (apart from Monbiot) – their only stance appears to be that it doesn’t compromise the decades of research by many groups on climate change or change anything at the UN sponsored fest at Copenhagen. This may be so but it still doesn’t address some of the issues raised by the emails. Then again, after many years in research, all of this is hardly surprising.