Rockwell – A Snazzy Adjunct to Noddy Land

We’ve booked in for the three months of our stay into a unit at Manansala, Rockwell Centre, a gated estate in the Makati district – a bit like Beverley Hills in Los Angeles, or Knightsbridge in London.

Now Rockwell is a veritable Noddy Land of a mini-suburb with a boggle (the right group word?) of high-rise apartment buildings at its centre. These luxury towers surround the world’s largest swimming pool cum spa. With a plethora of restaurants and pleasuring facilities fringing ‘the waters’.

All of which extend out to a small forest, in case you wanted to … well, you know. This is the Attendant of Trees:

And here are some of the Denizens of the Forest:

And a typical woodland activity;

Adjacent to the pool complex is a four-storey mall, an old converted factory. The Power Plant has three cinemas, a bowling alley, a super fab serious bookstore, every well-known clothes designer (Salvatore Ferragamo, Kenneth Cole, … ), luxury goods stores of every conceivable kind, restaurants serving the widest range of fare … you could live out of it. A monument to high-end consumerism.

We’re on the 27^th floor of the Manansala building, with balcony views like these:

Now just to give you some idea of the insane level of indulgence here, each intersection has at least two and up to four police to smilingly assist you cross. And any shop in the mall will russle up at least two boys to assist you home with the goodies you purchase.

So after a hard day working your credit card half to death, you can collapse on a chair on the balcony to catch the knock-out sunset:

And gobble down your dins of squid and tocino:

But when the revolution comes and the poor rise up and slit the throats of the rich, we’d better bugger off back to Oz!

Particularly as poor persons impersonating the enemy.

The Pleasures of Small Country Towns - Marilao

Just back in the metropolis after a couple of days visiting Aussie friends in Marilao, a small country town thirty kilometres outside Manila. This bustling little hamlet is an ancient centre of jewelery manufacturing.

The scale of the place is lovely. Small low-rise houses, many in a 1950’s international style. With a sprinkling of well-preserved older houses, some dating back to the C18:

It's on a grid of leafy streets, almost overflowing with orchids, bougainvillea, and bromeliads.

We arrived the day of the annual town fiesta, so lots of parades and processions, rivaling those of Semana Santa (Holy Week). Some of the icons in the church waiting to wend their way through the streets:

So, our arrival:

The welcoming band or, alternatively, the local band in parade for the fiesta:

Miss Earth, 2007 visiting from Chile:

Anticipation of some serious cake work:

Curiously, we didn’t see this guy in Marilao:

Or even this one:

This one is definitely not the Mayor of the town:

And these are not two of his councilors, working on a hard community project:

But maybe these are a couple of tourists, relaxing after a strenuous day's sight-seeing:

Finally, back in Manila, looking over the Bay at dusk:

Tired but happy!

Jane Austen – The Movie

Hey guys.

In the air over the Celebes Sea between Indonesia and The Philippines. More yippie – never get tired of flying out and the anticipation of the trip.

Pigged out on vile airline food. Not an oxymoron – I was just bored. And it wasn’t that bad. Maybe.

And have just seen ‘Becoming Jane’. They’ve run out of novels to translate into movies and are now cannibalising her life for material. But a mix of fiction and fact – the basic outlines are there but racy and fast. Authors can draw on their own lives and, then, to a greater or lesser extent. So it’s interesting the screenwriter/s have put the two together. A kind of what-if autobiography-fiction.

Jane Austen is pursued by a hunting-fishing-fighting-rake type and a dullard. And accepts the latter sort of to avoid the difficulties of the former. But within 24 hours takes up spinsterhood. All with some intense snogging and at a cracking pace.

Not quite the Jane I know, but the film would have been pretty killing if the ‘authorized’ version. Though it must be said of the author that she was not the ‘narrow-gutted’ spinster of D H Lawrence. But aggressively critical of the construction and of the social and legal position of women in early C19 England. For example, giving strong focus in a number of the novels to the laws of inheritance disallowing property descending though the female line.

Bout to land so back later!

Jane Austen's brother (not!):

Off Traveling Through Asia!!!

Hey guys, I'm off traveling for a couple of months in Asia - from tomorrow morning. Yippie!

But am taking my trusty puter so will be posting along the way - I know your insatiable appetite for intellectual stimulation ... and more sensual stuff. And my desire-need-whatever to post it out there!!!

I took this pic in a fishing village in the Philippines a couple of years back. One idyllic morning.


So keep well and safe!

Will get something out in the next few days.

The Art of Japanese Haiku

The haiku is a Japanese form verse consisting of 17 syllables in three units: 5, 7 and 5 syllables. It began in the late C19, and is not to be confused with hokku, a starting verse setting the tone for a potential chain of verses or haikai.

The haiku above reads:

Calm and serene
The sound of a cicada
Penetrates the rock
(Matsuo Basho, 1644-94)

And two others:

I long to meet my parents
as they were
before my birth

The crow has flown away:
swaying in the evening sun,
a leafless tree
(Soseki Natsume, 1867-1916)

Often haiku set two disparate images down, each in some way illuminating and intensifying the other. In the last poem, there are two senses of the 'departed'.

Some haiku may seem whimsical:

I want to sleep
Swat the flies
Softly, please.

For love and for hate
I swat a fly
and offer it to an ant
(Masaoka Shiki, 1867-1902)

Each haiku contains a kigo or season work, indicating when the poem is set. The sound of cicadas in the earlier example would suggest early summer.

Haiku were an important influence on certain types of early C20 European avant garde poetry, such as that of Ezra Pound.

Today, this influence is more directly imitative:

The flap of a bat,
drip drip of monsoon waters.
Ancient image stares
(Phil Wahl)

Behold the ego
Set in glowing emptiness
On the edge of time
(Noel Kaufmann)

through the fingerprints
on my window -
cloudless blue sky
(Paul Mena)

Thought I'd try my hand at one - inspired by the following set of images:

Golden sunlight through bare branches
Blond strands of a man's hair
An erotic darkness

Mmmm ... . Better stick to academia! Or I'll risk a long jail term from the quality literature police.

My defense - it's not as easy as it looks.

Wanna try?

The Trusty Fly Swat

As the poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1888) said, Americanists will hear a fly buzz when they die.

Well, I heard one but determined to reverse the situation. When I heard that fatal sound late last night!

The question was how to achieve this? When suddenly I remembered an almost forgotten technology - the fly swat! So without any possible hope of success, I was off to my local after hours convenience store. And there it was! In the laundry section. Aerodynamically perfect and in a fab green washable plastic. This is a photo of the actual swat!


Now, this ingenious invention has many unspoken qualities.

It's real eco friendly - no more nasty ozone-depleting fluorocarbons.

And a great exercise substitute. Something to vary your upper-body regimen of bench presses, bar raises, and so on. But remember, you need to swap hands half way through your repetitions for balanced development. And there's the added advantage of getting an aerobic work-out. Rep's can be recorded alongside insect fatalities as notches on the handle.

Regular and vigorous swatting has two not-immediately-obvious side-benefits. The improvement of your tennis service. And your spank-the-monkey technique. With both, you'll impress by your new-found ambidextrousness!

Dying

I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.

The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in his power.

I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable, —and then
There interposed a fly,

With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed, and then
could not see to see.

Needle and Thread Cartooning - The Bayeux Tapestry

Cartooning has an ancient etiology. It allows for pictorial transmission of the religious, political, social and other messages of a culture particularly to those not literate. And over the ages has involved various forms from ancient Egyptian temple base reliefs, through Medieval stained glass windows and wall tapestries, to Renaissance frescos and beyond to 'The Far Side' of Gary Larsen.

Now, I wanted to play round for a bit with the justly world famous Bayeux Tapestry, which in fact is not a tapestry at all, but an embroidery of stitched woollen yarns on linen.


Its origins are uncertain - some suggest it was crafted in Kent in England. Now in Bayeux in north west France, it first appears in written records in 1476 as an entry in an inventory of this city's cathedral treasury as 'a very long and narrow hanging on which are embroidered figures and inscriptions comprising a representation of the conquest of England'.

It was probably commissioned by between 1070 and 1080 by Bishop Odo for his new cathedral at Bayeux, the church being completed in 1077. The tapestry was to commemorate the victory in 1066 of William the Conqueror (Ode's half brother) over King Harold at the Battle of Hastings. And to legitimize William of Normandy (in France) as the new ruler of England. The bishop subsequently also became Earl of Kent, hence the proposed origin of the tapestry.

The panorama of scenes of the work (including 11 Hastings battles) is accompanied by a Latin text, and bordered above and below with a band of often symbolic imagery, all of which has helped the rise of an impressive scholarship around the 70 metre embroidery. Each scene can now be identified, along with its actual participants (from the border heraldic emblems). And other iconography can be decoded.


Two of the most famous protagonists are of course King Harold Godwinson and King William the Conquerer, both shown in kingly mode:



With the transferring of kinghood being achieved by the Harold coping one in the eye with an arrow, as in the renowned scene below. Well, famous at least for school persons reading books designed to give the Norman (as opposed to Anglo-Saxon or other) view of history.


This scene is followed by the lesser-known but moving pre-burial scene of Harold:


There are lots of nice juicy battle scenes, which give a clear picture of how such conflicts unfolded, what weaponry was used and what protective armour and other clothing worn and so on - so great for social history:




And heaps of other stuff.

But the one thing I find most fascinating is the recording of the 1066 appearance of Halley's Comet. I particularly love the sense of wonder on the observers' faces (all those down-turned mouths!), as they point towards the heavens in the second image:

So as well as all else, this astonishing object documents the state of scientific knowledge at the time.

This is not to say that the tapestry is necessarily to be taken as an accurate record of all things it portrays. It is primarily a bit of propaganda to write (and re-write) a new Norman history for the island. But with this in mind, it has lots to say about the Romanesque world on the C11.