The Picasso Exhibition

HK is currently showing a retrospective of Picasso's work out at the Sha Tin Heritage Museum.  You aren't allowed to take photos, naturally, so I don't have any to show you but let's see if I can find my absolute favourite out there in cyberspace:

This is "Reading the Letter" about the death of the poet Apollinaire - from Spanish Flu in 1918 - and I find it completely extraordinary that whoever wrote the Wikipedia piece in the link above doesn't know that.  Pretty much all they say about it is "According to the Picasso Museum in Paris, the painting was discovered during the inventory of his studios after his death. It had previously been unknown. It was given as part of the estate to the French nation, which placed it in the care of the Picasso Museum."

So it was one of the paintings that Picasso never sold because it meant a lot to him. Apollinaire was very dear to him.  I mean they even stole The Mona Lisa together, didn't they?

 And I have to tell you that this painting's completely extraordinary up close.  It looks like it's etched ... no, I'll tell you what it looks like.  You know those silk paintings where you draw around the shapes you want with those raised inks and after it's dried you block in the colour inside so it doesn't bleed into the rest of the fabric?  Well, it's done like that, but from the distance it all comes together so you don't notice.

That was the thing I noticed about most of the rest of the Picassos.  They are magic from a distance and the further away you stand the better they look, however in close-up, standing where Picasso had to have stood to paint them, they are really quite crappy.  Seriously!  So how did he know whether or not the painting was working? He must have spent ages away from them and just staring.

BUT here's an inside scoop: something big happened to him in the early 1950s, because suddenly he's painting these exceptionally wonderful paintings when you're standing close, but they don't look like much when you're away from them.  Most odd and quite possibly it was because he was needing glasses and wouldn't admit it.

This exhibition also had a few of the paintings from when he was a Mozart-like prodigious little boy, blowing away audiences with his fully developed talent before he was even into his teens. However they didn't have the ones from when he was about ten; paintings which I find really masterful but entirely creepy in their dire sentimentality.  Like, how many ways can you paint dying children being wept over by distraught parents?  You know, even if children can paint that well, they really shouldn't be allowed to choose their own subjects, should they!

As for the rest?  Well, I found it kinda odd that there's those weird pointillist dots in the paintings right when his children would have been old enough to paint weird pointillist dots and if you go in close, you can see there's a different and more careful mind and hand putting them in.  I think someone should ask his kids about this matter.  Afterall, didn't Picasso complain his whole life about how his artist father used to make him paint "the boring bits" back when he was a winsy little kid?  And aren't 'the abused' meant to go on and abuse in the exact same way?

And I can tell you for definite that after the 1970s, Picasso didn't care about art anymore and was definitely - 100% sure about this - only in it for the money.  These later paintings are derivative, repetitive, trickster-ish and entirely crap.  I'd even go so far as to say they show a deep hatred and contempt for whoeveritwas who would have purchased such complete rubbish.

Had to laugh about that because it was around this period that Aunty Irene bought her Picasso paintings (she also had lots of his pen-and-inks from his Minotaur period she'd bought earlier) (oh, and she also had that portrait of one of her many husbands done during Picasso's early Fauvist period which was rather special) which I always thought were unmitigated crap - although there is always something very special about famous paintings that you're permitted to take down off the wall and waltz around with, so you HAVE to love them - and I always guessed from her stories of visiting him at his studio that he truly detested her and everyone like her.

Tee hee!  (If you knew her, you'd snigger too.)

What else? Oh, when Peter asked me what my favourite Picasso Period was, after thinking about it long and hard I decided it had to have been in the mid to late 50s when he (in my mind he'd finally got those glasses he needed and could see properly again) was playing with the imagery in The Great European Masters and subverting and deconstructing other Masters' masterpieces.  Those were exceptional because they showed what was clearly a very clever mind at work and an artist at the top of his game. I especially loved the paintings where he shows he can exactly duplicate Rembrandt, say, right before he whizzes the style out into something completely different.  Like, "See, I AM as good as you, you burke, and here's what I think of you."  Much like Sir Edmund Hillary taking that contemptuous piss atop Mt Everest!  Or, ooops, is that something we're not supposed to talk about!


And the very best bit of the day?  That would have to be this: finally reaching the  front of the 10,000 long queue only to find this ...

Galleries full. No more tickets issued that day!

... and instead of having to kill everyone around us, we simply flashed our Museum Passes and voila ...

Dah dah!

... immediately we're handed our free tickets.  Gosh, those Museum Passes are wonderful things to possess!  If you're living in HK, I can't encourage you enough to get your own.

And if you now want to see this exhibition, the details are HERE.  And I do recommend you go because never before in my life have I ever been allowed to get in so close to really really look at how a painting was constructed - except Aunty Irene's ones and she wouldn't ever let you touch her good one - so this exhibition is worth seeing on those grounds alone.

Lady Gaga's Clothes. For Joa.

Nicola Formichetti, Lady Gaga's stylist, has brought out a range of clothing in HK and Lady Gaga has kindly lent a selection of her outfits to celebrate the opening.

 Me and Gaga-style!

Naturally I was there to check them out.  I mean, Lady Gaga's clothes?  How can anyone resist? Anyway, I took lots of shots of them and was thinking "Who do I know who'd love to see these?" and then remember Joa James, the wonderful young clothing designer in Singapore, so I wrote and asked if he'd like to see them and he wrote back saying he'd seriously love to, thus this post is for him:

 Rubber wear!

I wouldn't advise making 

that hat.  I'm sure the fumes

would be toxic.

 This is beautiful, but I think it would 

set off my rust allergies.

 Body suits.

 Absolutely the most beautiful dress

in the most extraordinary fabric.

Check out the heels on those shoes!

 The hair body suit!

Channeling Zaphod Beeblebrox

but in gorgeous fabric. 

 And the wedding dress!

Nick is obviously a very clever and original designer and I really only found one piece a tad derivative.

 Vivien Westwood during her "Sex" phase, 

back in the 70s, yes?

And knowing how much you adore shoes, Joa, how about these ones:

I'll leave these larger so you can really check them out:

And here's a quick glance at Nick's own "Lady Gaga Collection" that we can all buy for ourselves:

Love?  Anyway, Joa, enjoy!

Joske's Thumb

For those of us homesick for home, there is a single image that always makes us go "Awwww!" in the most plaintive and poignant of tones.

It's this:

 Jon's photo of Suva Harbour.

Can you see it there?  That mighty thumbs-up in the sky?

Awwwww!

Yup, nothing says "Suva" like that twisted mountain we call Joske's Thumb.

Want another look?

 Awwwww! 

Yes, I know I've shown you these photos before, but they're just so beautiful I know you don't mind seeing them again.




"Who was Joske?" I asked my mother when I was about four years old.

"He was a tailor in the early days of Suva who had the most enormous thumb." my mother replied.

I never had reason to doubt it. That was indeed the official story, and that's what we all believed.

However it's all a lie.

Even Wikipedia doesn't tell the real story:  JOSKE'S THUMB

I don't know what the Fijian name for this mountain was, but in the earliest days of Suva it was called "The Devil's Thumb" ... but then the scandal broke and Fiji discovered local wealthy mill and store-owner Paul Joske's secret life.  It was all so sordid and twisted and vile everyone in Suva started calling him "The Devil Incarnate" and almost as a joke The Devil's Thumb was nicknamed Joske's Thumb ... and it stuck.

Thus, this joking nickname has been in common usage ever since and I think it may even, in default of the real story being known, have devolved into the official name and hence Suva remembers a bad bad bad man who would have been better off forgotten.

How I know this? Well, it's an interesting story.

In Townsville in North Queensland of all places, a bunch of us from Fiji were sitting around the kava bowl on the veranda at Tui's place having a deep talenoa (that's Fijian for 'chat') about a wonderful old house in Suva that had just been pulled down to make way for high-rise.

It was a granite Greek-style courtyard house on the corner of Toorak Road and Suva Street that had long been on my radar because for most of my life it had been a run-down relic, sub-divided into housing for the poorest of the poor, and looked so very sad I'd always wanted to own and restore it.

Too late.

But what made this wonderful house so intensely curious was that all around the eaves were luscious carvings that you'd have expected, given the style, to be of that Greek key-pattern design but were instead ... swastikas.  Yup, long rows of Nazi-style swastikas.

Odd, right?

"Who on earth would have built it?" I said to the group.

"I know." said Tui and he vanished into his house.

Minutes later he came out again carrying an old old manuscript.  "Be careful with it," said Tui as he handed it to me.  "It's my greatest treasure."

I was entirely blown me away.  It was a history of Suva written, at a guess, in the 1930s.  There was no name on it anywhere so who knows who wrote it.

 "The story is in here." said Tui.

And it was too. An entire chapter containing the story of how the house came to be built and what everything meant and why the swastikas were there (they were Hindu, only done the wrong way round, and not Nazi at all) and all about the man who built the house and his affection for Fiji's Girmitji (Indian indentured labourers) and how, as a kindness, he used to bring out unmarried women from India to be auctioned off as wives for the Indian labourers.

Say wot?

And that was only one of perhaps thirty stories in this old type-written manuscript.

 "Where did you find this?" I asked Tui. 

"It was just lying there in a cupboard in an old empty house we were once playing in."

Greatest treasure indeed; beautifully written and full stories about Suva life from the 1880s onwards to the 1930s.  "Can I borrow it to photocopy?" I asked.

"No." said Tui.  "I've never even shown it to anybody before and I'm certainly not letting it out of my hands. I'm even now sorry I showed it to you."

So there you go.  I only read about five of those stories, with my fingers in my ears to block out the talenoa, before Tui said I was being rude and demanded it back, but I couldn't help myself because every one of those stories was a gem.

And one of those stories was about how Joske's Thumb got its name.

I keep telling old friend and alumni Jon Apted that his gorgeous photos of Suva MUST to be used in a coffee table book called, appropriately, "Suva" ... and wouldn't it be just amazing if Tui's wonderful manuscript provided the text.

Rupert Brooke in Fiji

Just love Fiji Museum.  Was trying to find English poet Rupert Brooke's poems about Fiji without success so I wrote to Fiji Museum to ask if they knew them, and they didn't just send me poems, they even sent me extracts from his letters. 

Let me share a couple of these extracts and throw in a few of old friends Jon Apted and Johnson Seeto's photos so you can see for yourself if you too think the "Forever England" fellow nailed it:

 JON'S VIEW OF THE MOUNTAINS

 

  Jon's photos of Suva Harbour

JOHNSON'S VIEW OF THE MOUNTAINS

 

Johnson's photos of Suva Harbour

 

RUPERT BROOKE'S VIEW OF THE MOUNTAINS

"Fiji's ... more macabre (than Samoa). Across the bay (in Suva) are ranges of inky, sinister mountains, over which there are always clouds and darkness. No matter how fine or windy or hot or cheerful it may be in Suva, that trans-sinutic region is nothing but forbidding and terrible. The Greeks would have made it the entrance of the nether world—it is just what I've always imagined Avernus to be like."

Fun, huh!  So let's do another one:  this time Rupert Brooke talking about Fiji sunsets.

JON'S VIEW OF FIJI SUNSETS

 

 

 Jon's photos of Suva Harbour sunset.

JOHNSON'S VIEW OF FIJI SUNSETS

RUPERT BROOKE'S VIEW OF FIJI SUNSETS

"The sunsets here! The colour of the water over the reef! The gloom and terror of those twisted mountains! and the extraordinary contrasts in the streets and the near country ..."

I was planning to do another part on Suva Harbour by moonlight but getting more photos will have to wait.

JOHNSON'S VIEW OF FIJI MOONLIGHT

 Johnson's photo of the Transit of Venus.

RUPERT BROOKE'S VIEW OF FIJI MOONLIGHT

 "I shall go out and wander through the forest paths by the grey moonlight. Fiji in moonlight is like nothing else in this world or the next. It's all dim colours and all scents. And here, where it's high up, the most fantastically-shaped mountains in the world tower up all around, and little silver clouds and wisps of mist run bleating up and down the valleys and hillsides like lambs looking for their mother ... And then among it all are the loveliest people in the world, moving and dancing like gods and goddesses, very quietly and mysteriously, and utterly content. It is sheer beauty, so pure that it's difficult to breathe in it—like living in a Keats world, only it's less syrupy—Endymion without sugar. Completely unconnected with this world."

So what do you think?  Has the "Forever England" wordsmith captured our world with his words or not?

 I have actually seen more amazing photos of the mountains taken by Jon and Johnson but I simply can't find them.

Oh, and btw, both Jon and Johnson are putting their names on their gorgeous photos these days because they are cross at how many folks are stealing them, so please don't.

Seolleung & Jeongneung

Although I haven't really found my photographs of the tumult mound burial mounds in Seoul, I'll try to find the raw downloads to put in here in the hopes they suffice.

I've already explained the importance of these tombs in my larger scheme of things, but they are worthy of exploration in their own right. In fact, they're great. And the stories about them are great too.

King Seongjong's Burial Mound.

According to the guidebook, Seolleung is the royal tomb of the 9th Joseon Emperor, King Seongjong (1457 - 1494) and his third wife Queen Jeonghyeon (1462 - 1530).  Seolleung became King when he was 12 and died young.  Very Tutankhamun, yes?

His first two wives aren't buried with honour in this park however.  First Wife died young and childless, second wife - who sounds fascinating - the powerful Lady Yun was deposed and disposed in circumstances not explained, and thus he picked his Third Wife from among his harem of concubines and it seems it was third-time-lucky although it was Lady Yun's son Yeonsangun who inherited the throne, although not for long because he was couped out of power by Third Wife's son, Jungjong.

All so very Byzantine, these Joseans Emperors, aren't they!

 King Jungjong's burial mound.

Anyway, the 11th Josean Emperor King Jungjong (1488 - 1544) is also buried in this park but it was such a long story getting him there.  His first tomb was well away from his parents in an entirely different area, chosen by him so he was next to his beloved late Second Wife Janggyeong (his First Wife Dangyeong was disposed of during the coup that got rid of Yeonsangun, and I'm guessing it was because she chose the wrong side of the dispute, but she was reinstated as Queen after her son came to power) however long after he died his Third Wife Munjeong decided she wanted to be buried next to him instead and so kept saying the current burial site wasn't propitious and the gods wanted him moved ... and thus the tomb was moved to a new site ... which constantly flooded but Munjeong wouldn't let him be moved back again.

And after such mean-spirited machinations you'll be pleased to know that after her death no one would bury her alongside her husband and today no one knows where she is buried.  Yayyyyy!

So that's the story of these tumult burial mounds, but let's now see the best of our photographs, if I can ever find them.

 Totem Guardians.

 Our new friends.

These are the entirely gorgeous gentlemen we met in the deepest forest who all spoke excellent English and were telling us all about the history of the burial mounds, including how the Japanese during their invasion and occupation dug up these mounds and took all the treasures from them and it was something that Korea had never been able to forgive ... and they said that on the very day that Japan told Korea that if North Korea's latest missile went in South Korea's direction they were all set up and ready to shoot it out of the sky for them.  And when I said that to these lovely gentlemen I was told it wasn't enough and they'd never forgive Japan until they got the Josean Treasure back.

It's very difficult downloading photos this way so I'll go through them all later and decide if there's any you'd really want to see.  For now, I'm off.

However I do have to say that seeing these tombs was a genuinely lovely hike through the forests when the trees were just starting to burst into bloom.  I'd recommend it as a great way to spend a day in Seoul.

MABO!

How wonderful this is!  "Mabo" has been made into a film, but not just any film:

Look at that!  It's starring my very dear friend Deborah as Bonita, Mabo's wife.

If you don't know who Eddie Mabo is, nor his vast significance to Australia, look here: MABO.

I never knew Eddie but I did meet Bonita several times. When Eddie got ill with cancer, the amazingly wonderful human rights activist Bobbi Sykes gave them a house in Aitkenvale in Townsville, which happened to be down the back from our friend Anita's house, and Bonita and I had several chats over the back fence while I was helping Anita organise her garden.

And so I can tell you first hand that Bonito was a gentle-souled darling lady who was actually very funny - I recall a hilarious conversation about Noel Coward's song "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" where we decided that since neither of us could call ourselves Englishmen we'd have to settle for being Mad Dogs - and now The Mighty Debs gets to play her in this film.

I can't be happier.

Oh, and let me tell you a very funny story:  Many years ago, in downtown Townsville, I was in a street cafe in The Mall with a dear old friend, an actor from Brisbane whose name I won't tell you because he won't like this story associated with him.

Anyway, he's looking around, most contemptuous and says "I cannot believe that someone like Eddie Mabo was able to do what he did in such a little town like this."

I said "I assure you that he couldn't have done it anywhere else!  The Mabo Legistlation grew out of the realities of this place."

"Oh nonsense!" says Old Friend.  "He could have achieved so much more in one of Australia's real cities."

"I disagree." I said, and then I noticed "Oh look, there's Eddie's wife Bonita.  Why don't we ask her?"

Old Friend looked around, entirely astonished. "Where?" he says. "Where's Bonita Mabo?"

"Right there!  Outside Dick Smith Electronics. That's her.  Pushing the pram."

"IT IS NOT!"

"It is too!!!"

"But she's alone."

"She's not alone.  Her daughter is inside the shop and she's outside minding her grandson."

"But it can't be her. Where are her body guards?  Where is her posse?  Where are her followers? Why is no one mobbing her to get photos and her autograph."

"Because we don't do things that way.  Monica Lewinsky was hiding here in town doing a scuba diving course when all that fuss was going down in America.  We left her alone too. And whenever Bill Clinton is in town, we leave him alone too.  We're remarkably sophisticated up here in the North."

And right then Bonita, her daughter and grandson passed us and Bonita gave me a wave and a smile in passing.

"You know her?"

"Of course I know her.  It's a small town."

"But she's like Australia's own Coretta King.  She can't just know people in a regular way.  That can't be Bonita Mabo."

"I assure you," I said "I've met her many times and that is indeed Bonita Mabo."

"But someone so famous and historical like her shouldn't just be allowed to carry on with her life living like normal people."

"And that ..." I said "... is precisely why Eddie Mabo could only have done what he did in a place like Townsville."

"Hhmmmph!" said Old Friend.  "I'm sure you were just joking.  I'm sure that wasn't really Bonita Mabo."

And since you can't argue with idiots, even when they're dear old friends, I left it at that.

Random Post!

I have found a download of photographs in a different area on my computer, but I cannot see what they are.  Because I've put away this time to blog today, let me go in and select one at random, and - usual rules - I'll tell you about it if it's interesting.  If not ... well, I'll go do something else instead:

Ah, this is interesting.  This is a photo of Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna, Founding Father of Fiji. He's a totally amazing man, and one of the few men EVER who, no matter how deeply you dig into his life, you can never find anything that isn't honourable, decent, clever and good.

I have long wanted to have an Op Art Andy Warhol style portrait of him for my Wall of Heroes but I could never find a photo of him I liked enough.  This one, however, I found at the National Archives of Fiji and I'm thinking this could be it.

I've written to the National Archives asking if there is any reason why I can't use this photo for this purpose and have yet to receive a reply from them ... and thus if they're not saying no I see no reason why I can't proceed with this plan.

Although I already have a lot of oil paintings of my various heroes already on my walls, my current plan is to have three Op Art portraits - Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Ratu Sukuna - to hang together as a group.  Sounds great, yes?

Ah, Dafen!  How much do I love having a village of wonderful artists practically on my doorstep! Anything you can think of, they can execute for you and surprisingly cheaply too ... and it seems such a shame to NOT take total advantage of that, doesn't it.

Later: Am not at all happy with any of the Op Art programs currently available on-line. 

Decided to do my own version of the photo above so I could tell our friend Annie in Dafen exactly what I wanted done, but the old version I used to use and love is no longer anywhere to be found, so I've tried some of the others:

Don't like any of these and no matter how much I fiddle I can't get anything I'm happy with.

No Can Do!

Was planning to blog on the Tumult Mound Burials of the Josean Emperors of Korea today, except my awful husband appears to have lost all the photos. 

It's his attempts to tidy up my computer that will one day be the death of him!

And that's a threat, my dear!

Korean Votive Offerings

At Seoul's magnificent Museum of History ...

 Kudos to Korea for their respect for history!

... there was a special exhibition of the "votive offerings" found down wells right across Korea.

Votive offerings, as you probably already know, are special objects either destroyed by fire or thrown into water when you make a request of the gods.  It was a prayer-ritual performed in ancient times by Romans, Greeks, Celts, Spartans, Scythians among others, and still performed in parts of South America and the Mediterranean today.

The fact that it was also meant to be done in Korea is one of those "mmmmm, strange" mysteries I've pondered over the last decades so it was something we were very fortunate to have the opportunity to check out while we were in Seoul.

Let me show you a few of the Korean votive offerings:

 A water pot!

 Lots of water pots!

A truly ancient pot and necklace beads!

 Cowbells!

 A toddler!

 Pots, beads and a fairy!

It's all a little too strange, isn't it!  These were all found deep in ancient wells.  Water pots? Necklaces? Cowbells?  Are those all items that you'd expect gods to be offered or items you'd expect fall accidentally into wells over the course of millennium?

And a child or two?  Yes, I can see small children falling into wells.  There were also a great many skeletons of various animals and the only thing I could think was "No one sane deliberately throws anything that decomposes into their own water source, no matter how deeply they're praying for something." 

Even the Ancient Celts threw their human sacrifices into water well away from their own drinking supply, usually waaayyy out in the wilderness someplace.  It's a simple fact of life that no one will deliberately taint their own water supply with decomposing flesh, yes?

Think about it?  We did and the conclusion we reached was "These are NOT votive offerings." The archeologists have simply misread the evidence.  This is just stuff that's gone in by accident.

So there's our conclusion: Koreans did not do votive offerings into water.  Or if they did, these aren't the objects.  

However, before we go there is one thing we glanced over and you may not have noticed.  I'll show it to you again only larger:

All this was found down a single well.  Lots of different stuff. But can you see it there?  A tiny little adult-skulled human barely a foot tall.  This little person entirely blew my mind and I spent an entire week scrambling around looking for Korean myths and legends trying to find if they ever had a mythic little people.  Nothing.  I did discover there are 80 families in Korea who carry the gene for dwarfism (they register in exchange for only paying 8% of any medical bills) but that's the full extent of anything I could find to do with Korean little people.

So how on earth do you explain that tiny little human?  S/he's an adult so would have been around for at least twenty years, so how is it possible that there's no folk memory of him/her? All I can think is that s/he fell into this water source many many millennium ago before the Korean people ever arrived.

And also that here is someone who requires a great deal more investigation because s/he certainly has me asking questions.