Welcome to the online studio of Francisco Mattos, built w/ printed pieces, experiments, souvenirs, personal projects.
-| September 2020 |-
ANTONIO AGOSTINHO
≡| Motorist
|¶|
After the Second World War, Hong Kong took pains to rebuild its transportation infrastructure. Roads were widened and new routes were created.
|¶|
An integrated transportation system came into play, w/ single and double-decker bus service. A tramway running the length of HK island on the harbor side and a second one just for the Peak. Two passenger ferry routes btw. HK and Kowloon and one ferry route dedicated to vehicles.
|¶|
User-friendly driving calmed grateful trucks, taxis and private cars, heeding traffic cops and easy-to-spot stop signs and signals.
|¶|
My father Tony got his driver license when he was 35 years old. The war had ended seven years ago, and having to drive on bald tires became a thing of the past.
|¶|
Tony’s first and only car was a Simca, a Fiat built in France, and he drove it to work every day. He took his wife grocery shopping and his family on regular Sunday drives to every nook and cranny of HK, Kowloon and the New Territories that was accessible by car.
≡| Heir
|¶|
Baby Tony was baptized a week later in the Catholic Cathedral. Two days after that he received registration papers stating that he was a HK citizen. He went to school at 9 and graduated in 1932.
▶ Tony’s Father
|¶|
Tony’s father José was born on February 21 1892 in the parish of Freguesia de São Lourenço, Macau, to Filomena Russurreição da Silva Oliveira (b.1864) and Pedro de Alcantara de Oliveira Mattos (b.1864).
|¶|
He was 21 when he married Cristalina Cristiana Collaço, at that time a minor, at the Cathedral in Canton. Their first child Maria Lucia was born, and five years later my father. They had five more: Regina, Victor, Teresa, Adelina, and Gloria Cristina.
|¶|
José supported his family as a clerk w/ the Asiatic Petroleum Co., a joint venture of Royal Dutch and Shell Oil in China.
|¶|
Then, around 1929, he abandoned everyone, boarded a ship and disappeared.
≡| Graduate
▶ HK Portuguese
|¶|
“The Portuguese in Hong Kong” by Cyril Neves, 2003
|¶|
When the British Fleet dropped anchor and raised the flag at Possession Point [in HK] on a January morning in 1841, the first people ashore were clerical staff from the British trading companies in Macau. Ever since, the Portuguese have woven a rich and splendid thread through the history of Hong Kong. ... Everyone knew what a Portuguese was, but after centuries in Africa, India, the Malay Islands of the Indies, Goa, Japan and China, it was sometimes difficult to explain. Intermarriage over the generations had blurred the lines. ... There were no Portuguese who were not Catholics. ...
▶ Air Travel
|¶|
“China Cycle” by Richard P. Dobson, 1946
|¶|
I filled in forms and collected the necessary visa in a hurry, and by the following dawn was at Kai Tak aerodrome embarking in a Pan-American Clipper. The Clipper was a mighty machine. I reclined in a bunk, and they brought me tea, then sandwiches, then beer. When I arose there were light refereshments and buffet lunch in the lounge, so the passengers were kept happy until after about five hours the distant blue sparkle of the sea gave way to the vivid green of forest and jungle and soon we hissed smoothly in to the naval anchorage at Cavite. ... Everything was expensive. Manila is one of the most costly places to live in that I know—
≡| Adult
¶|
When the Second World War reached Asia, Tony and his family left British HK for neutral Macau. He and his brother became gendarmes -- armed guards on patrol. He left service w/ a tattoo.
¶|
One of Tony’s duties was to stand watch at the border w/ China. Daily he watched as people fled from bullets and bayonets. One day he caught the eye of someone, who must have also locked eyes w/ him because they most certainly began a love affair.
▶ Macau Falls
|¶|
“Birdless Summer” by Han Suyin, 1938
|¶|
The offensive of the Japanese against Canton started on October 12 1938; on the 21st Canton was taken, even though there were 200 Chinese troops there. On the order of Chiang Kaishek there was no resistance, they were withdrawn. The Japanese attacked both by land and sea, 30 warships sailed up the Bocca Tigris, 20,000 men landed. 43,000 Canton Volunteers put down their names to fight for their city, but the officials were fleeing, no one would give them weapons. The bridge which spanned the Pearl River and the city was bombed; on the afternoon of the 21st, Japanese motorized units entered Canton. By this action Japan placed her military power in position for a thrust, three years later, upon the British colony of Hong Kong.
≡| Witness
|¶|
During the war, Tony read history and learned about the world by collecting stamps.
▶ HK Surrenders
|¶|
“Tales of Hong Kong” by Gene Gleason, 1967
|¶|
Two Japanese divisions invaded [HK] from China on December 8 1941, conquered the New Territories and Kowloon in ten days, and crossed to the north side of HK Island at several points btw. Lei Yue Mun Pass and North Point. Outnumbered and w/out air cover, the British, Canadian and Indian defence forces took their main stand at Wong Nei Chong Gap to prevent the Japanese from driving south to cut the island defences in half. The Japanese defeated the defenders decisively at the Gap and pushed forward to complete the cuf-off at Repulse Bay.
▶ Aftermath
|¶|
“Fragrant Harbour: A Short History of Hong Kong” by G.B. Endacott and A. Hinton 1968
|¶|
For nearly four years [HK] remained under Japanese military occupation. British civilians were interned at Stanley in the St. Stephen’s College and Prison area. Under war conditions the Japanese were unable to feed a large population in HK or to maintain health and other public services, so a large number of people returned to the mainland and the population shrank to some 600,000. The war ended in August 1945, and on August 30 1945, British warships entered the harbour and accepted the surrender of the Japanese garrison of 21,000 men. The British once again took control of the government.
≡| Fighter
|¶|
In his late twenties Tony was paying attention to the buzz on a free Angola. He was careless and for his troubles a letter arrived from the British Consulate in Macau:
13th January, 1945.
Sir,
I feel I must draw to your attention that certain of your associations may in future draw the unfavourable attention of British Authorities. I feel I need specify no further since you will be able to know to what I refer. I suggest that for your own good you sever these associations as soon as possible. I am, Sir, Your obedient servant, (H.B.M. Consul.)
≡| Spouse
|¶|
In 1943, police guard Tony married domestic Patsy at St Anthony in Macau, according to and conforming to the Rite of Saint Mother Church Catholic Apostolic Roman. He signed but she did not, “because she could not write.”
|¶|
Tony took a photo of his first-born and captioned it on the back:
▶ Tony’s wife
|¶|
Tony’s wife was born on July 7 1918 in Nam-Hoi, Canton. When war reached her village she left w/ two sisters for the coast and never saw her family again.
|¶| Eldest sister rests her hand on youngest sister. The eldest would open a tucks shop and die in HK, the youngest would return to China to live. Patsy, the middle sister, went to America.
≡| Husband
|¶|
His 1946 passport (no. 241) listed Tony as a British subject by birth. Five feet nine inches, dark brown eyes and hair.
|¶|
By 1958 Tony was a father to five children. He sent a postcard to his eldest, living then in Manila:
|¶|
Tony was living at 51E Wyndham Street in 1936 when he found a job w/ the Hongkong Electric Company to work in its showrooms. Salary was HK$60 per month and hours were weekdays 7 to 5 + Saturdays 7 to 1.
≡| Electrician
|¶|
After the war, he was rehired and by 1957 was a second assistant engineer. Eight years later he was a testing assistant and was issued a War Department Pass.
≡| Petitioner
|¶| By 1966, the Cultural Revolution had spilled over to HK. Red Guards marched to Government House for redressing of past behavior.
|¶|
Tony had gone through one war w/ Patsy they did not want to again, not w/ a family. He sought to immigrate and wrote to his mother and older sister in America.
|¶|
On May 6 1969, Tony handed in his resignation and was granted early retirement so that he could take up residence in the United States.
≡| Emigré
|¶|
In 1969, Tony brought Patsy and their three youngest aboard the President Cleveland, docked in HK. After a stopover in Yokohama, they arrived in Honolulu on June 13, where he declared his intention to immigrate w/ his family to the United States of America.
|¶|
Patsy passed away suddenly in 1973 from cancer. Widowed, Tony filled out a statement of facts for a petition to become a naturalized citizen. He was 56.
≡| Widower
|¶|
Tony worked in a mailroom in San Francisco, happy to be among stamps. Then his work performance suffered, and in 1980 he was let go. After deductions, his last paycheck came to 301.74.
|¶|
Lost in thought, Tony is comforted by his mother.
|¶|
Falling into despondency, Tony moved to the Tenderloin, signing in as “Antonio O. Mattos” and taking Room 303 at the Marlton Manor.
≡| Paterfamilias
|¶|
Tony was 67 when he passed away. Thirty-seven people went to his funeral, incl. siblings Adele and Victor, and all his children. He liked to go night fishing by himself, and was a member of the Hong Kong Philatelic Society (POB 446) from 1950 until he left his hometown.
TONY’S PHONE BOOK
All his children get listed (incl. their old addreses, employers, roommates), his sisters and their families, his ex sister-in-law in Toronto, and his mother.
Tony joined UMA Inc and stayed in contact w/ his HK friends, incl. the Alvareses, Browns, Carneiros, Carvalhos, Collaços, Gregorios, Ribeiros, Rochas, Rozas, Silvas, and Xaviers. He had many Chinese friends back home, new ones in America; there are at least eight New York addresses.
His primary physician was Dr Gerald Roberts and the secretary’s name was Marilyn. How to contact Medicare, Medi-Cal, Neighborhood Legal Assistance, Mt Zion Hospital, and the Radiation Oncology Tumor Institute.
SF’s Arrow Stamp Co. and Sunrise Stamp Co. Library hours. Bus info. Where to get bait. Two bank accounts. Nearby restaurants serving Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, satay, fish-&-chip. Japanese words daijobu, gohan, ichi ban, ofura, sashimi and what they mean.
|-
1 can condensed tomato soup
|-
1 can cold water
|-
1-½ tablespoons olive oil
|-
2 tbsp red wine vinegar
|-
1 tsp garlic salt
|-
¼ tsp cayenne pepper
|-
1 ripe avocado
|-
1 can diced stewed tomatoes OR 1 medium, ripe fresh tomato, peeled and diced
|-
One 3.75 oz can sliced black olives
|-
½ - cup thinly sliced cucumber (hothouse adds a crunchy texture)
|-
2 tbsp thinly sliced green onion (white part only)
|-
¼ - cup chopped cilantro
PREPARATION
|-
Add and whisk water to condensed tomato soup to avoid lumps. Mix all the liquids and spices. Add the rest and refrigerate for four hours before serving.
•
Pasta Boscaiola
ala Peterson
+
INGREDIENTS
|-
bacon or italian sausage
|-
garlic
|-
fresh mushroom
|-
Italian crushed red pepper
|-
basil
|-
salt
|-
crushed tomatoes, one 15 oz. can
|-
black olives
|-
pasta
PREPARATION
|-
Use one or two slices of bacon, crisped then set aside; or, use one half (or more) of an italian sausage, no need to pre-cook, just cook it along with sauce while it simmers. For garlic, use fresh, sliced, or use minced garlic that comes in a jar. For mushrooms, canned will work, although fresh taste better. For basil, fresh is always best, but generally too expensive, so dried basil from the spice rack will suffice.
+
Start by making a sauté w/ a little olive oil, tossing in garlic first, then adding bacon or sausage, then mushroom. After a few minutes of sauté at low to medium heat, add can of crushed tomatoes. (If you don’t have olive oil or don’t like to sauté, you can just start with the crushed tomatoe and simmer the sauté ingredients instead.)
+
When the sauce is simmering, add red pepper, basil, and dash of salt. When the mushroom seems fully cooked, add black olives and remove from the heat.
+
While sauce is simmering, cook the pasta separately. When everything is done, you’re ready to toss’n’dine!
•
Keylime Tart
ala Nomi +
A STORY OF TWO OVENS |- I met Klaus Nomi outside CBGBs and asked him how he could support himself as an artist in mid-80s Manhattan. Having training as a pastry chef before he left Europe, he would make small-batches of sweets in his kitchen to sell to restaurants. Then, when demand grew, he bought a second stove-top oven. |- Watch a video of how to make Keylime Tart.
•
Jook
(Anonymous) +
|-
Chatting with my wife in time free, a rare case that we both agree
|- With the same amount of rice, one meal stretches by twice.
|- When friends come unexpectedly, just add more water accordingly.
|- Don’t you ever complain the taste
is bland and unexciting.
|- Remember, my dear friend, blandness
is a taste everlasting.
|-
Start by chopping some onion & cabbage. Place these in the cooking pot along with ½ of the can of chicken broth. Save the remaining ½ can for the next meal. Add 2-½ cups water & bring to a simmer. Also add lemon pepper. Trader Joe’s sells a very good one that is inexpensive. I use 9 twists of the grinder. Also add 1 tablespoon of olive oil. The olive oil is expensive, but one jar lasts a long time at only 1 tablespoon per batch.
+
When the onions & cabbage are nearly cooked, add ½ can of the garbanzoes; save the remaining ½ can for the next meal. At this point I also add about 1 cup of pre-cooked rice. When the rice and vegetables are ready, add some lemon juice one teaspoon at a time. This is the tricky part: you have to stir & taste as you go, until you get just the right amount of lemon flavor.
+
Pre-cooking the rice can be a hassle, so you might try putting uncooked rice into the soup at the very beginning. I would start with no more than ¼ cup of uncooked rice, otherwise you may end up with congee rather than soup.
“Please pass the cream – yes – that’s enough
(“I knew her years before the war”)
“I’d love some of that sugary stuff”
(“She must be at least fifty-four”)
“I can’t believe your dress is true”
(“He said his lines in an appalling way”)
“It’s almost a delphinium blue”
(“To me he ruined the entire play”)
“The whole thing’s such a terrible disgrace”
(“Surely he was the Duke’s adopted son!”)
“If I were in Winston Churchill’s place...”
(“My dear, you’re thinking of another one”)
“I always loathed the girl, she drinks and swears.”
And everyone was thinking – “Christ! Who cares.”
•
Cold Cucumber Soup
ala Chez Helene +
| Helen and Earl Kennedy’s 1970s version for their Venice Beach restaurant Chez Hélène.
STEP ONE
2 Cucumbers
1 Leek, white stem only, thinly sliced
2 tbsp Butter
Bay Leaf
1 tbsp Flour
3 cups Chicken Stock
Peel and chop cucumbers. Saute gently in butter, leek, and bay leaf for 20 minute, or until tender.
Stir in flour, then add chicken stoc + 1 tsp salt and simmer 30 minutes.
Put mixture through foodmill and divide into 2 portions.
Blend first portion, strain through fine sieve into large bowl. Then blend second portion, and strain through fine sieve into bowl.
Chill in fridge 2 to 3 hours.
STEP TWO
1 Cucumber, peeled, seeded and grated
1 cup Cream
Juice from half a Lemon
1 tsp Fresh Dill or Mint
S&P
Into chilled soup add cucumber, cream and lemon juice. Mix well.
Stir in dill or mint and correct w/ S-&-P.
Chill for 30 minutes before serving. | (Optional: garnish w/ Sour Cream.)
•
Fuzzy Melon, Shitake Mushrooms, Dried Tofu
3-Ingredient Soup +
•
Sacrapantina
“Holy Smokes” +
San Francisco magazine food writer Jack Shelton, “I would no sooner serve a great portion of this delicacy than I would fresh caviar.”:
| In 1990, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors honored baker and owner of Stella Pastry in North Beach, Franco Santucci, as the best baker in the world.
| His prized creation is the Sacripantina, born long ago and in Genoa, where a feast was given by a king in which a dessert was to be the centerpiece. | Conceived by the queen, it stunned the assembled when they tasted this confection of “cream, air and magic”, conjured w/ Almond Powder, Butter Cake, Cream Frosting, Meringue, Simple Syrup, and Zabaglione.
| Here is a similar
recipe to a North Beach classic.
•
Claude Monet
Kitchen +
•
Green Butter
+
•
Watercress Salad
+
|-
1-½ cup Watercress (leaves only).
|- 1 cup chopped and pitted cured Italian Black Olives.
|- Peel and dice 1 Fuji Apple per person, and toss w/ Lemon Juice.
|- Combine well the 3 ingredients and serve in chilled bowls. |- No dressing needed. No S-&-P.
|- Goes well w/ Homemade Croutons (chopped semi-stale Bread tossed in a skillet using 1 tbsp Butter, 1 tbsp Olive Oil, Garlic (1 clove per person), and Black Pepper).
|-
•
Sardines
Party Game +
English author Henry Green (1905-1973) describes a party game called Sardines in his 1940 book, Pack My Bag:
|-
❝The Hunt Ball is always on a Friday night. The guests stay over the week-end. It is difficult to know what to do w/ them in the evenings. Sometimes we used to play sardines, of all games the most simple and pathetic in that one couple can never stay long alone. The rules are that a man and a woman hide and the rest hunt in pairs throughout the house. When the first to hide are found the two who discover them have to crowd into the same hiding-place and so on, more and more pile in, it may be under a big bed, until there is one couple left still looking and they have lost. Lost what? Why the game.❞
•
Andy Warhol Cocktail
+
|- 1-½ ounce Cognac. |- ½ oz. Benedictine. |- ⅓ oz. Lillet Blanc. |- 2 dashes Orange Bitters.
██ Built back in 1932 to act as the backyard to a tycoon's mansion, the Tiger Balm Gardens in Happy Valley is a one-of-a-kind folly. On the steepest hillsides imaginable, inhospitable to real estate development, Aw Boon Haw ("Gentle Tiger") envisioned a human-size depiction of a moral Chinese universe. At the top of all this is the all-white seven-storey Tiger Pagoda, presiding over the phantasm at its base. On the lower right there is a crop of clouds known as the Blue Mountain.
██ The Blue Mountain in this psychedelic park is a sculpted scenario, based on Daoist descriptions, whipped up w/ plaster-of-paris applied to the cliff-like mountainside. Staircases in the clouds and elsewhere act as bridge btw. situations.
██ Natural ledges and spurs were leveraged by stonemasons for passageways and platforms, galleries and lookout points. Artisans working w/ chicken-wire and cement shaped natural forms found only in dreams. Where none existed before, shortcuts and crossings accrue bringing forth altitudinal alcoves, blessed benches, and rooms w/ scenic views.
██ This garden of steep and narrow steps enhances the mystical acts of ascension and descension: to the Shangri-la of heaven or the stockades of Hell . Vistas retreat, and suddenly destinations take on labyrinthean lengths, up and down, from one scenario to the next.
Entrance to the Tiger Balm Gardens, where the first steps already beguile.
██
—|“Dumbbell” Island
|• • |
In the aftermath of the Opium Wars, under terms of a peace agreement, 200 small islands around Hong Kong, and an even larger area on the mainland, were leased to the United Kingdom by China for a period lasting 99 years. One of these islands is
Cheung Chau, 12 miles southwest of Hong Kong Island, nicknamed “Dumbell” Island due to its shape, giving it not one but two cove beaches. In those early times, it was a fishing village, and settled by Hoklo (fishing folk), Hakka, Chiu Chau, and Yue Ca people. Over time the vessel-friendly harbour coalesced into a commercial hub for local fisheries shopping for fishing gear or needing a boat repaired. (Cheung Chau is an isle sandwiched btw. larger islands Lantau and Lamma.) They were soon joined by other island dwellers, running fisheries and small farms, who sailed there to do business. To this day the island (長洲 in Chinese, "long state") pays heed to various cultural practices by putting on full-fledged festivals, showing what it was all about. There are eight.
▶ Traditional Festivals
| 1. |
THE
Lunar New Year Festival on Cheung Chau, held the first day of first month of the new lunar calendar, is total old-school.
| 2. |
NIGHT TIME is when the Lantern Festival gets going, held on the last full day of the new year festivities, and somewhat akin, in symbolism, to Valentine's Day. As the sun sets, folks carrying red lanterns w/ riddles written on them parade around town, in search of riddle-solvers.
| 3. |
MARTIAL ARTISTS GATHER every year to celebrate the
Birthday of Yuen Mo, a high-ranking deity in Taoism (黑帝 Black Deity).
| 4. |
DEITY TO SEAFARERS and a sea goddess in her own right, the
Birthday of Kwan Yin is observed by sailors who know that her miraculous interventions protect them.
| 5. |
A RURAL FESTIVAL w/ Taoist roots. Villagers would wander the island decked out as divines. Inside a contraption depicting their avatars as giants, they would re-enact a ceremony to ward off evil spirits. The lineup always will incl. the goddess of mercy (Kuan Yin), goddess of the sea (Tin Hau), god of the south (Hung Hsing), and a revered divinity named Pak Tai. Together they get to sponsor the annual
Bun Festival, which takes place over four days and three nights.
The original band of prime movers is nowadays attended by a parade of floats, and the majority of them feature children performing acrobatic mojo. The centerpiece of the celebration – and its highlight – is a competition to see who can scramble to the top of a high tower that has been festooned w/ buns, the object being the first one to snatch the very top bun. The core tradition being an example of exorcism, only vegetarian fare is served.
| 6. |
A ROWBOAT RACE happens around Chinese summer solstice and takes place during the
Dragon Boat Festival, to remember a poet and minister, who drowned himself when he was accused of treason. Festival food is a tamale Chinese style: glutinous rice cradling meat and either peanuts or yellow beans, wrapped w/ lotus leaves an steamed.
| 7. |
MODEL OF CONFUCIANISM, present at the Battle of Red Cliffs, a battle that ended the Han dynasty, then after many exploits became fictionalized in prose, and went on to attain immortality as emperor deity of Chinese folk religion. Buddhists and Taoists alike are welcome, during the
Birthday of Guang Gong celebrations.
| 8. |
HARVESTING TIME is when mooncakes, made w/ sweet bean or lotus seed pastes, and only available during this period, are a good way to fatten up for winter. Welcome to the
Mid-Autumn Festival.
And if one can agree that films too are festivals, there once was an on-going one, Cheung Chau Theatre, an
outdoor cinema
.
▶ Today
Fishing still happens, and Cheung Chau is the place to go for seafood. Tourists now know "dumbell island" and its swimming beaches. Ferry from Hong Kong takes 55 minutes, 20 less if its a high-speed, running every 30 minutes or so depending on hour and day. There are no roads to speak of, it's a land of lanes. Walking the one square mile island is easy enough; and bycicles are a common sight.
| Back |
Metal Rat
1-25-2020 – 2-11-2021
▶ Year of Living Dangerously
The year begins innocently enough, then darkens before settling down to a calm at the end. A hectic period when Luck upends everything. Titanic internal conflicts btw. right and wrong occasionally bring out the dogmatic beast in everyone. Showing a taste in fashion grabs the limelight each and every time, and astrology charts become de rigueur at woke social gatherings.
HELLO
Welcome to the online studio of Francisco Mattos, built w/ printed pieces, experiments, souvenirs, personal projects.
• • •
ANTONIO AGOSTINHO
≡| Motorist
|¶|
After the Second World War, Hong Kong took pains to rebuild its transportation infrastructure. Roads were widened and new routes laid out.
|¶|
An integrated transportation system came into play, w/ single and double-decker bus service. A tramway running the length of HK island on the harbor side and a second one just for the Peak. Two passenger ferry routes btw. HK and Kowloon and one ferry route dedicated to vehicles.
|¶|
User-friendly driving calmed grateful trucks, taxis and private cars, heeding traffic cops and easy-to-spot stop signs and signals.
|¶|
My father Tony got his driver license when he was 35 years old. The war had ended seven years ago, and having to drive on bald tires became a thing of the past.
|¶|
Tony’s first and only car was a Simca, a Fiat built in France, and he drove it to work every day. He took his wife grocery shopping and his family on regular Sunday drives to every nook and cranny of HK, Kowloon and the New Territories that was accessible by car.
≡| Heir
|¶|
Baby Tony was baptized a week later in the Catholic Cathedral. Two days after that he received registration papers stating that he was a HK citizen. He went to school at 9 and graduated in 1932.
▶ Tony’s Father
|¶|
Tony’s father José was born on February 21 1892 in the parish of Freguesia de São Lourenço, Macau, to Filomena Russurreição da Silva Oliveira (b.1864) and Pedro de Alcantara de Oliveira Mattos (b.1864).
|¶|
He was 21 when he married Cristalina Cristiana Collaço, at that time a minor, at the Cathedral in Canton. Their first child Maria Lucia was born, and five years later my father. They had five more: Regina, Victor, Teresa, Adelina, and Gloria Cristina.
|¶|
José supported his family as a clerk w/ the Asiatic Petroleum Co., a joint venture of Royal Dutch and Shell Oil in China.
|¶|
Then, around 1929, he abandoned everyone, boarded a ship and disappeared.
≡| Graduate
▶ HK Portuguese
|¶|
“The Portuguese in Hong Kong” by Cyril Neves 2003
|¶|
When the British Fleet dropped anchor and raised the flag at Possession Point [in HK] on a January morning in 1841, the first people ashore were clerical staff from the British trading companies in Macau. Ever since, the Portuguese have woven a rich and splendid thread through the history of Hong Kong. ... Everyone knew what a Portuguese was, but after centuries in Africa, India, the Malay Islands of the Indies, Goa, Japan and China, it was sometimes difficult to explain. Intermarriage over the generations had blurred the lines. ... There were no Portuguese who were not Catholics. ...
▶ Air Travel
|¶|
“China Cycle” by Richard P. Dobson 1946
|¶|
I filled in forms and collected the necessary visa in a hurry, and by the following dawn was at Kai Tak aerodrome embarking in a Pan-American Clipper. The Clipper was a mighty machine. I reclined in a bunk, and they brought me tea, then sandwiches, then beer. When I arose there were light refereshments and buffet lunch in the lounge, so the passengers were kept happy until after about five hours the distant blue sparkle of the sea gave way to the vivid green of forest and jungle and soon we hissed smoothly in to the naval anchorage at Cavite. ... Everything was expensive. Manila is one of the most costly places to live in that I know—
≡| Adult
¶|
When the Second World War reached Asia, Tony and his family left British HK for neutral Macau. He and his brother became gendarmes -- armed guards on patrol. He left service w/ a tattoo.
¶|
One of Tony’s duties was to stand watch at the border w/ China. Daily he watched as people fled from bullets and bayonets. One day he caught the eye of someone, who must have also locked eyes w/ him because they most certainly began a love affair.
▶ Macau Falls
|¶|
“Birdless Summer” by Han Suyin 1938
|¶|
The offensive of the Japanese against Canton started on October 12 1938; on the 21st Canton was taken, even though there were 200 Chinese troops there. On the order of Chiang Kaishek there was no resistance, they were withdrawn. The Japanese attacked both by land and sea, 30 warships sailed up the Bocca Tigris, 20,000 men landed. 43,000 Canton Volunteers put down their names to fight for their city, but the officials were fleeing, no one would give them weapons. The bridge which spanned the Pearl River and the city was bombed; on the afternoon of the 21st, Japanese motorized units entered Canton. By this action Japan placed her military power in position for a thrust, three years later, upon the British colony of Hong Kong.
≡| Witness
|¶|
During the war, Tony read history and learned about the world by collecting stamps.
▶ HK Surrenders
|¶|
“Tales of Hong Kong” by Gene Gleason 1967
|¶|
Two Japanese divisions invaded [HK] from China on December 8 1941, conquered the New Territories and Kowloon in ten days, and crossed to the north side of HK Island at several points btw. Lei Yue Mun Pass and North Point. Outnumbered and w/out air cover, the British, Canadian and Indian defence forces took their main stand at Wong Nei Chong Gap to prevent the Japanese from driving south to cut the island defences in half. The Japanese defeated the defenders decisively at the Gap and pushed forward to complete the cuf-off at Repulse Bay.
▶ Aftermath
|¶|
“Fragrant Harbour: A Short History of Hong Kong” by G.B. Endacott and A. Hinton 1968
|¶|
For nearly four years [HK] remained under Japanese military occupation. British civilians were interned at Stanley in the St. Stephen’s College and Prison area. Under war conditions the Japanese were unable to feed a large population in HK or to maintain health and other public services, so a large number of people returned to the mainland and the population shrank to some 600,000. The war ended in August 1945, and on August 30 1945, British warships entered the harbour and accepted the surrender of the Japanese garrison of 21,000 men. The British once again took control of the government.
≡| Fighter
|¶|
In his late twenties Tony was paying attention to the buzz on a free Angola. He was careless and for his troubles a letter arrived from the British Consulate in Macau:
13th January, 1945.
Sir,
I feel I must draw to your attention that certain of your associations may in future draw the unfavourable attention of British Authorities. I feel I need specify no further since you will be able to know to what I refer. I suggest that for your own good you sever these associations as soon as possible.
I am, Sir,
Your obedient servant,
(H.B.M. Consul.)
≡| Spouse
|¶|
In 1943, police guard Tony married domestic Patsy at St Anthony in Macau, according to and conforming to the Rite of Saint Mother Church Catholic Apostolic Roman. He signed but she did not, “because she could not write.”
|¶|
Tony took a photo of his first-born and captioned it on the back:
▶ Tony’s wife
|¶|
Tony’s wife was born on July 7 1918 in Nam-Hoi, Canton. When war reached her village she left w/ two sisters for the coast and never saw her family again.
Eldest sister rests her hand on youngest sister. The eldest would open a tucks shop and die in HK, the youngest would return to China to live. Patsy, the middle sister, went to America.
≡| Husband
|¶|
His 1946 passport (no. 241) listed Tony as a British subject by birth. Five feet nine inches, dark brown eyes and hair.
|¶|
By 1958 Tony was a father to five children. He sent a postcard to his eldest, living then in Manila:
|¶|
Tony was living at 51E Wyndham Street in 1936 when he found a job w/ the Hongkong Electric Company to work in its showrooms. Salary was HK$60 per month and hours were weekdays 7 to 5 + Saturdays 7 to 1
≡| Electrician
|¶|
After the war, he was rehired and by 1957 was a second assistant engineer. Eight years later he was a testing assistant and was issued a War Department Pass.
≡| Petitioner
|¶| By 1966, the Cultural Revolution had spilled over to HK. Red Guards marched to Government House for redressing of past behavior.
|¶|
Tony had gone through one war w/ Patsy they did not want to again, not w/ a family. He sought to immigrate and wrote to his mother and older sister in America.
|¶|
On May 6 1969, Tony handed in his resignation and was granted early retirement so that he could take up residence in the United States.
≡| Emigré
|¶|
In 1969, Tony brought Patsy and their three youngest aboard the President Cleveland, docked in HK. After a stopover in Yokohama, they arrived in Honolulu on June 13, where he declared his intention to immigrate w/ his family to the United States of America.
|¶|
Patsy passed away suddenly in 1973 from cancer. Widowed, Tony filled out a statement of facts for a petition to become a naturalized citizen. He was 56.
≡| Widower
|¶|
Tony worked in a mailroom in San Francisco, happy to be among stamps. Then his work performance suffered, and in 1980 he was let go. After deductions, his last paycheck came to 301.74.
|¶|
Lost in thought, Tony is comforted by his mother.
|¶|
Falling into despondency, Tony moved to the Tenderloin, signing in as “Antonio O. Mattos” and taking Room 303 at the Marlton Manor.
≡| Paterfamilias
|¶|
Tony was 67 when he passed away. Thirty-seven people went to his funeral, incl. siblings Adele and Victor, and all his children. He liked to go night fishing by himself, and was a member of the Hong Kong Philatelic Society (POB 446) from 1950 until he left his hometown.
TONY’S PHONE BOOK
All his children get listed (incl. their old addreses, employers, roommates), his sisters and their families, his ex sister-in-law in Toronto, and his mother.
Tony joined UMA Inc and stayed in contact w/ his HK friends, incl. the Alvareses, Browns, Carneiros, Carvalhos, Collaços, Gregorios, Ribeiros, Rochas, Rozas, Silvas, and Xaviers. He had many Chinese friends back home, new ones in America; there are at least eight New York addresses.
His primary physician was Dr Gerald Roberts and the secretary’s name was Marilyn. How to contact Medicare, Medi-Cal, Neighborhood Legal Assistance, Mt Zion Hospital, and the Radiation Oncology Tumor Institute.
SF’s Arrow Stamp Co. and Sunrise Stamp Co. Library hours. Bus info. Where to get bait. Two bank accounts. Nearby restaurants serving Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, satay, fish-&-chip. Japanese words daijobu, gohan, ichi ban, ofura, sashimi and what they mean.
|¶| Two separate and interconnected
limestone cave, spanning just more than 5.5 miles. One of the top fourteen finalists for the New 7 Wonders of Nature competition.
✈¦ Japan
OSAKA
|¶|
Night view of Osaka shows the
Yodo River winding through, on its way to Osaka Bay and the Pacific Ocean.
|¶|
The megalopolis of Osaka is a confluence of cities and suburbs in the Kansai region in Japan. With an extensive warren of underground shipping arcades as well as the largest slum in the county, the “nation‘s kitchen” is where 19 million people call home.
✈¦ Western Australia
PERTH
|¶|
Going on 38,000 years, the Whadjuk people have lived on the Swan Coastal Plain in the south-western region of Australia. Today, they share the land w/ an administrative center for the Swan River Colony, set up in 1829 and growing into present-day Perth, the capital of Western Australia and the western-most capital in the world.
Super Moon over Perth.
|¶|
Aerial view of Western Australia.
|¶|
Geode from Mammoth Cave, a limestone cavern about 1600-feet long and 98-feet deep, and first explored in 1895.
• SPANDA |¶|
Outdoor sculpture of carbon fiber by Christian de Vietri, Elisabeth Quay, Swan River.
• PERTH
Yagan Square is a new area built to honor the Aboraginal beginnings of Perth.
|¶|
A repurposed building on William Street downtown, preserving the original facade and building out modernized additions.
|¶|
Plaque on building for
J. Crothers Perth, constructing Western Australia since 1896.
✈¦ Papua New Guinea
PORT MORESBY
|¶|
Harbor view and on the horizon is the Coral Sea, in southwestern Pacific Ocean.
|¶|
Papua New Guinea is a country swept by periods wherein high levels of rape, robbery and murder occur, and Port Moresby is its capital.
|¶|
Amongst a rampant gang culture of the Raskol, PNG’s population cope w/ poor healthcare and poverty. Currently Port Moresby ranks as being the worst capital to live in in the world.
▶ Errol Flynn lived in PNG
|¶|
In his autobiography “My Wicked, Wicked Ways”, the actor Errol Flynn describes seeing Port Moresby for the first time, in 1930: “We piloted our ship into the rather fine harbor of Port Moresby. We arrived during the rainy season and the whole area was brilliant green. The region seemed beautiful to me and I poked around searching its resources. About thirty miles from the port the Laloki River flowed through an emerald countryside. I fell in love w/ it. My partners made their way back to Australia, but I decided to settle there. ... Around me, from Laloki to Port Moresby, was a territory plentiful w/ nutmeg, rattan cane, the okari nut, bananas, mangrove, coconuts, and sandalwood. There was fish in the river, and the natives brought food to my door. For a pence or two I could have the fruit of the region.”
✈¦ Prague
CHARLES BRIDGE
|¶|
Dating to the 14th Century, when it was the only means of crossing the Vitava River, and holding that distinction until 1841.
|¶|
This unique “solid-land” connection made Prague supreme as a city on the trade route btw. eastern and western Europe.
✈¦ Oceania
AUCKLAND
|¶|
The port city as seen from atop one of the numerous extinct volcanoes ringing it. Towards the horizon the Hauraki Gulf shows the way to the South Pacific. Auckland is ocated where the sea route incoming from the Tasman Sea meets the Pacific group of islands incl. Fiji, New Caledonia and Tonga, the port of Auckland has long been regarded as the “hub of waterways in all directions” (-Margaret McClure-).
✈¦
Hollywood
• GRAUMAN’S CHINESE THEATRE
|¶| Designated an historic cultural monument in 1968, but built as a movie theater by Sid Grauman in the 1920s, adorned w/ a fantastical façade of oriental-dream motifs, amalgating several landscapes into an intimate space of spotlight proportions — every step can feel like treading the boards.
|¶|
Gate posts from the sidewalk open onto a forecourt featuring a water feature cascading into a fish pond, a hut, a scholar’s rock. Guarded by a pair of lions at the front entrance, the visitor is ever seduced to be given access to this enduring edifice’s real purpose. ¶ On April 30, 1927, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks placed their hands and feet prints in wet cement at the newly opened theatre, inaugurating a tradition of cement immortality.
|¶|
Two weeks later, the curtains came up for the first time, the projector was switched on, the audience subdued as the lights dimmed and Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings was given its inaugural showing.
✈¦ India
GOA
|¶|
An early photograph (c.1975 or earlier) of the crown of
hippie flea markets, Anjuna in Goa.
▶ Summer Interlude
The year begins innocently enough, then darkens before settling down to a calm in the end. A hectic period where Luck can show up and upend everything. Titanic internal conflicts btw. right and wrong occasionally bring out the dogmatic beast in everyone. Showing a taste in fashion grabs the limelight each and every time, and astrology charts become de rigueur at woke social gatherings.
| Top |
|⁋|
As Government House was being built, on a large parcel 500 feet above Hong Kong harbor, governor John Bowring and Lady Bowring began to putter in their backyard, a slope rising steeply up to meet the Peak.
|⁋|
What is now Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens (兵頭花園) was in the beginning a living victorian laboratory on a barren rock off the South China coast.
Pondering the young science of botany, men and women from a bygone age re-imagined Eden. These eminent victorians set up classifications, devised cages, designed a system for the edification of humankind.
|⁋|
In 1871, a victorian botanical garden, beginning life as the governor's backyard, was opened to the public. Taming the unfriendly slope sweeping upwards to meet the Peak were gardeners, masons and laborers.
|⁋|
Indigenous plants met their tropical and sub-tropical selves.
|⁋|
Banyans were tucked in to create backdrops.
|⁋|
The only india rubber tree for miles around can be found only within this garden.
|⁋|
Into the ground went palm trees from near and far. Ferns sheltered sensitive plants.
|⁋|
The original garden had shady boulevards and flowerbeds, an aviary and a green house filled w/ ferns, bromeliads, orchids, and climbers.
|⁋|
The fountain terrace has a fifty-feet wide ciruclar pond, raised just so to allow sitting, and home to water lilies and a spout.
|⁋|
Nearby a first-gen children’s playground.
British botanist Charles Ford was the first superintendent of gardens, and he began the documentation of local flora and fauna.
- gingsengs on a botany print
- drawing of chinese cloves
- sprig of dawn redwood
- branch of chinese elm on a plate.
- framed drawing of chinese lantern
|⁋|
It was deemed safe enough that late into the evening, dating couples took to strolling between gas-lit paths and shadows, safe in nature and holding hands.
|⁋|
White jade orchid trees, mock lime, orange-jessamine, sweet osmanthus, mingle w/ the scent of “kwai-fah” to swirl the air.
|⁋|
Ferns took to the site very well and produced profusely, offering shade and, more importantly, privacy.
|⁋|
This open air conservatory turned into a paradise for Adamses wanting somewhere to take their eager Eves.
|⁋|
In 1876, an animal house was added to the new garden. Its inmates have rotated over the years.
|⁋|
After a hundred years of shame major renovations were begun in 1976, and beleaguered beasts given new digs and more modern practises.
|⁋|
Reptiles and mammals had separation.
|⁋|
Birds were moved to another area altogether.
|⁋|
Twin programs were established to study captive- as well as conservation-breeding techniques.
|⁋|
Today 900 species live side by side and learn how how to get along in a very crowded city.
At the invitation of the first superintendent of gardens, Jules Verne came in 1865 to help document the life aquatic.
The author was doing research on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and spent six months learning the local language and taking down oral history. Going to the best sources for authentic information on the underwater world of Hong Kong didn’t make it into the final manuscript.
An article on his time in the Far East appeared in the June 15 1884 issue of L’Algerie magazine, featuring artwork by Alphonse de Neuville, Édouard Riou, and Macau-based George Chinnery.
▶ Wartime Hong Kong
Excerpt from “Hongkong” by W.H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems 1927-57. In 1939, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood traveled to China and wrote a book together about it.
TIME TRAVEL
“That Human Wilderness”
LONDON 1908 — The protagonist of H.G. Well's novel, Tono-Bungay, has come up from the provinces to work in London, and here gives an account of his train journey into the city:
“ … I got London at last with an exceptional freshness of effect, as the sudden revelation of a whole unsuspected other side of life.
I came to [that human wilderness] on a dull and smoky day by the South Eastern Railway, and our train was half an hour late, stopping and going on and stopping again. I marked beyond Chilselhurst the growing multitude of villas, and so came stage by stage through multiplying houses and diminishing interspaces of market garden and dingy grass to regions of interlacing railway lines, big factories, gasometers and wide reeking swamps of dingy little houses, more of them and more and more.
The number of these and their dinginess and poverty increased, and here rose a great public house and here a Board School and here a gaunt factory; and away to the east there loomed for a time a queer, incongruous forest of masts and spars. The congestion of houses intensified and piled up presently into tenements; I marvelled more and more at this boundless world of dingy people; whiffs of industrial smells, of leather, of brewing, drifted into the carriage; the sky darkened, I rumbled thunderously over bridges, van-crowded streets, peered down on and crossed the Thames with an abrupt eclat of sound. I got an effect of tall warehouses, of grey water, barge crowded, of broad banks of indescribable mud, and then I was in Cannon Street Station – a monstrous dirty cavern with trains packed across its vast floor and more porters standing along the platform than I have ever seen in my life before.
TIME TRAVEL NOTES:
[ 1 ]
Herbert George Wells was born on the 21 of Stepember, 1866. The cusp of Virgo into Libra, he is blessed by a pair of angels, holding his hands as he sought a possible reformation of society, a "new system of ideas". science + humanity = future. He was born into a poor family, one of four children. Through luck and chance, his father eked out a livelihood while his mother did occasional domestic work.
[ 2 ]
1908 map of London Underground.
[ 3 ]
Excerpt by Tono-Bungay by H.G. Wells, 1909.
[ 4-VIDEO ]
02|19|14 — A Solitary World — Dir: James W. Griffiths – Published on Feb 19, 2014 – Narration adapted from the works of H.G. Wells. Excerpted from the following: The Time Machine (1895) – The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) – The First Men in the Moon (1901) – In The Days of the Comet (1906) – The World Set Free (1914). Director, Producer, VFX Artist & Colourist: James W. Griffiths – Director of Photography: Christopher Moon – Editor: Marianne Kuopanportti – Sound Design & Mix: Mauricio D'Orey – Composer: Lennert Busch – Narrator: Terry Burns – PBS Digital Studios Original Shorts Series Producer: Matt Vree.
The must-dos for brewing a proper pot of tea, and how a constitutional drinking game, made palatable w/ sugar and milk, calmed a nation’s nerves.
C R E A M O R L E M O N —
A steadfastness in dutiful habiting is a core definition of Britishness in all matters related to tea, and it’s now due for a review:
… the official six-page specification for how to make a cup of tea, is officially "under review". But don't panic. It is standard procedure for the British Standards Institution (BSI) to do a "systematic periodic review" of each of its many specifications which, piecemeal, define nearly everything British.
|-¶-|
Belying stereotypes of peremptory rigidity in anyone or anything that officially tells the populace what’s what, the BSI is nice about what it does”. British Standards are voluntary in that there is no obligation to apply them or comply with them," it says. The standards are "devised for the convenience of those who wish to use them". That sentiment appears in the 44-page specification, copies of which are available free of charge.
In 2013, Christopher Hitchens gave an account of the golden rules of George Orwell for making tea:
… Just after World War II, during a period of acute food rationing in England, George Orwell wrote an article on the making of a decent cup of tea that insisted on the observing of 11 different "golden" rules. Some of these (always use Indian or Ceylonese—i.e., Sri Lankan—tea; make tea only in small quantities; avoid silverware pots) may be considered optional or outmoded.
But the essential ones are easily committed to memory, and they are simple to put into practice.
|-¶-|
If you use a pot at all, make sure it is pre-warmed. (I would add that you should do the same thing even if you are only using a cup or a mug.) Stir the tea before letting it steep. But this above all: “[O]ne should take the teapot to the kettle, and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours.”|-¶-|
This isn’t hard to do, even if you are using electricity rather than gas, once you have brought all the makings to the same scene of operations right next to the kettle. It’s not quite over yet. If you use milk, use the least creamy type or the tea will acquire a sickly taste.
|-¶-|
And do not put the milk in the cup first—family feuds have lasted generations over this—because you will almost certainly put in too much. Add it later, and be very careful when you pour. Finally, a decent cylindrical mug will preserve the needful heat and flavor for longer than will a shallow and wide-mouthed—how often those attributes seem to go together—teacup. Orwell thought that sugar overwhelmed the taste, but brown sugar or honey are, I believe, permissible and sometimes necessary.
In 1997, Morrissey was asked in a sit-down interview: Do you ever get sick of drinking tea? Given the moment, he expounded on how this custom is still practised:
I absolutely never get sick of drinking tea. It’s a psychological thing really, it’s just very composing and makes me relax. It’s just so much a part of your culture. ... ‘Oh yes yes, I’m very avid, I have to have at least four pots a day.’ ... For those of us who don’t know how to make a pot of tea, what do you do?
‘Well you really have to put the milk in first which many people don’t.’ Put the milk in with the water, before you boil the water?
‘No you’re confused already no, you put the milk in before you pour the water in or the tea, whichever.’ Well I would do that without even thinking about it. ‘Right and also you have to use real milk you can’t use the UHT fake stuff, you have to use proper milk.’ Okay, so what about the actual brewing of the tea?|-¶-|
‘The brewing of the tea, it’s very important that you heat the pot before you put the water in, if you use a pot. I know most people who just throw a teabag into a cup but in England of course you have to make a pot of tea and you have to heat the pot first with hot water and then put the teabags in – I can’t believe I’m saying this – and then put the hot water in and then just throw it all over yourself, rush to Out Patients and write a really good song.’
| TEA TIME NOTES:
[1]
Excerpt from “The correct way to make a cuppa is being reviewed,” by Marc Abrahams The Guardian 4|29|2013.
2]
“How to Make a Decent Cup of Tea: Ignore Yoko Ono and John Lennon, and heed George Orwell’s tea-making advice” by Christopher Hitchens, slate.com, 7|5|2013.
Buried under sand for hundreds of years, slowly being dug up going on years now, is Qatar’s largest archaeological dig, and a very fine example, preserved, of a merchant town c.1800s. This site is the ruined coastal port famous for its walls and known as Al-Zubarah. Founded by merchants in the late 1700s, this settlement had thrived as a pearl-fishery industry and also as a trading post — it is centrally positioned on the main sea route in the Persian Gulf.
In 1811 there was a successful siege and what remained was abandoned and eventually was covered by sand. The property Al Zubarah Archaeological Site which comprises the 2013 UNESCO World Heritage Site is a fortified town, built w/ traditional Arab technqiues, that faces a harbor, w/ an original sea wall (exists still in part). A second, inner wall came later. The original fort still stands, there is another fort, two more walls, and a canal to the sea.
The largest domestic structure dug up gives a sense of the wealth enjoyed by the town’s richest, and why so coveted by its attackers: Nine inter-connected courtyards inside a building complex, surrounded by a high wall and having corner defense towers. Water fountain features are to be found, incl. ponds where a game played by children, called turtles-&-pearls, takes place underwater. Using a pet turtle, each player attempts to shoot a colored pearl into a row of different-colored pearls, w/ an aim of hitting out another pearl of the same color, all the while not disturbing the rest.
I was once tasked to help deliver a car cross country btw. Christmas Eve and New Year, so when the time came I piled into PC’s SUV, driving Route 66 to move him East for graduate school, ❛❛ … in the full presence of Nature, under the sun, w/ the far-spreading landscape and vistas, or the sea rolling in.❜❜ ❛❛ These carols sung to cheer my passage through the world I see, for completion I dedicate to the Invisible World.❜❜ ❛❛ The main shapes arise! Shapes of Democracy total, result of centuries. Shapes ever projecting other shapes. Shapes of turbulent manly cities. Shapes of the friends and home-givers of the whole earth. Shapes bracing the earth and braced w/ the whole earth.❜❜ ❛❛ After a long, long course, hundreds of years, denials, accumulations, rous'd love and joy and thought, hopes, wishes, aspirations, ponderings, victories, myriads of readers. Coating, compassing, covering -- after ages’ and ages’ encrustations, then only may these songs reach fruition.❜❜ ❛❛ This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done. Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best: night, sleep, death and the stars.❜❜ ❛❛ Here first the duties of to-day, the lessons of concrete: wealth, order, travel, shelter, products, plenty. As of the building of some varied, vast, perpetual edifice, whence to arise inevitable in time, the towering roofs, the lamps, the solid-planted spires tall shooting to the stars.❜❜ ❛❛ And whence and why come you? We know not whence (was the answer). We only know that we drift here w/ the rest, that we longer’d and lagg’d -- but were wafted at last, and are now here, to make the passing shower’s concluding drops.❜❜ ❛❛ I wander all night in my vision, stepping w/ light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping, bending w/ open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers.❜❜
|-
1 can condensed tomato soup
|-
1 can cold water
|-
1-½ tablespoons olive oil
|-
2 tbsp red wine vinegar
|-
1 tsp garlic salt
|-
¼ tsp cayenne pepper
|-
1 ripe avocado
|-
1 can diced stewed tomatoes OR 1 medium, ripe fresh tomato, peeled and diced
|-
One 3.75 oz can sliced black olives
|-
½ - cup thinly sliced cucumber (hothouse adds a crunchy texture)
|-
2 tbsp thinly sliced green onion (white part only)
|-
¼ - cup chopped cilantro
PREPARATION
|-
Add and whisk water to condensed tomato soup to avoid lumps. Mix all the liquids and spices. Add the rest and refrigerate for four hours before serving.
•
Pasta Boscaiola
ala Peterson
+
INGREDIENTS
|-
bacon or italian sausage
|-
garlic
|-
fresh mushroom
|-
Italian crushed red pepper
|-
basil
|-
salt
|-
crushed tomatoes, one 15 oz. can
|-
black olives
|-
pasta
PREPARATION
|-
Use one or two slices of bacon, crisped then set aside; or, use one half (or more) of an italian sausage, no need to pre-cook, just cook it along with sauce while it simmers. For garlic, use fresh, sliced, or use minced garlic that comes in a jar. For mushrooms, canned will work, although fresh taste better. For basil, fresh is always best, but generally too expensive, so dried basil from the spice rack will suffice.
+
Start by making a sauté w/ a little olive oil, tossing in garlic first, then adding bacon or sausage, then mushroom. After a few minutes of sauté at low to medium heat, add can of crushed tomatoes. (If you don’t have olive oil or don’t like to sauté, you can just start with the crushed tomatoe and simmer the sauté ingredients instead.)
+
When the sauce is simmering, add red pepper, basil, and dash of salt. When the mushroom seems fully cooked, add black olives and remove from the heat.
+
While sauce is simmering, cook the pasta separately. When everything is done, you’re ready to toss’n’dine!
•
Keylime Tart
ala Nomi +
A STORY OF TWO OVENS |- I met Klaus Nomi outside CBGBs and asked him how he could support himself as an artist in mid-80s Manhattan. Having training as a pastry chef before he left Europe, he would make small-batches of sweets in his kitchen to sell to restaurants. Then, when demand grew, he bought a second stove-top oven. |- Watch a video of how to make Keylime Tart.
•
Potted Crab
+
|-
Simmer equal amounts Sherry and Wine, together w/ 1 tsp White Wine Vinegar, 4 Shallots sliced, quarter stick Cinnamon. Let simmer and reduce to one-third volume. |- Add quarter stick of Unsalted Butter and simmer 10 minutes. Turn off fire. |- Add ½ pound Crab Meat, 1 tbsp Unsalted Butter, Salt. |- Serve room temperature w/ Hot Toast.|-
•
Jook
(Anonymous) +
|-
Chatting with my wife in time free, a rare case that we both agree
|- With the same amount of rice, one meal stretches by twice.
|- When friends come unexpectedly, just add more water accordingly.
|- Don’t you ever complain the taste
is bland and unexciting.
|- Remember, my dear friend, blandness
is a taste everlasting.
|-
Start by chopping some onion & cabbage. Place these in the cooking pot along with ½ of the can of chicken broth. Save the remaining ½ can for the next meal. Add 2-½ cups water & bring to a simmer. Also add lemon pepper. Trader Joe’s sells a very good one that is inexpensive. I use 9 twists of the grinder. Also add 1 tablespoon of olive oil. The olive oil is expensive, but one jar lasts a long time at only 1 tablespoon per batch.
+
When the onions & cabbage are nearly cooked, add ½ can of the garbanzoes; save the remaining ½ can for the next meal. At this point I also add about 1 cup of pre-cooked rice. When the rice and vegetables are ready, add some lemon juice one teaspoon at a time. This is the tricky part: you have to stir & taste as you go, until you get just the right amount of lemon flavor.
+
Pre-cooking the rice can be a hassle, so you might try putting uncooked rice into the soup at the very beginning. I would start with no more than ¼ cup of uncooked rice, otherwise you may end up with congee rather than soup.
•
Smoked Salmon
ala Hee +
•
Soy Sauce Chicken
ala Cheng +
|- Instead of a whole chicken, this home recipe is for cut-up pieces, making an Cantonese comfort food that much easier to eat:
Rub pieces of cut-up Chicken (leave skin on) w/ Sugar and set aside.
In a deep pot add 4 cups cold Water, ¾ cup of Shaoxing Wine, ¾ cup of Dark Soy Sauce, 2 large pieces Rock Sugar (wong bing tong), 2 Star Anise. 4 cloves of smashed Garlic, and peeled and smashed fresh Ginger.
Cook over medium heat until sugar is dissolved.
Immerse chicken pieces and cook covered for 10 minutes.
Turn heat down and simmer for ½ hour and let stand 5 minutes uncovered.
Remove chicken parts and brush w/ Sesame Oil while still warm.
Sprinkle w/ chopped Scallions.
•
Fuzzy Melon, Shitake Mushrooms, Dried Tofu
3-Ingredient Soup +
•
Cock Ale
Remedy for Consumption +
|- One of several methods, this 17th Century English recipe entails killing and gutting an old Cock (the older the better), placing it in a large stone mortar and then pounding it w/ spices, incl Dates, Mace, Nutmegs and Raisins. |- All the while slowly add in 8 gallons of Ale. |- Finish w/ 2 bottles of good White Wine. |- Stir well and transfer liquid into glass bottles.
|
“Please pass the cream – yes – that’s enough
(“I knew her years before the war”)
“I’d love some of that sugary stuff”
(“She must be at least fifty-four”)
“I can’t believe your dress is true”
(“He said his lines in an appalling way”)
“It’s almost a delphinium blue”
(“To me he ruined the entire play”)
“The whole thing’s such a terrible disgrace”
(“Surely he was the Duke’s adopted son!”)
“If I were in Winston Churchill’s place...”
(“My dear, you’re thinking of another one”)
“I always loathed the girl, she drinks and swears.”
And everyone was thinking – “Christ! Who cares.”
•
Cold Cucumber Soup
ala Chez Helene +
| Helen and Earl Kennedy’s 1970s version for their Venice Beach restaurant Chez Hélène.
STEP ONE
2 Cucumbers
1 Leek, white stem only, thinly sliced
2 tbsp Butter
Bay Leaf
1 tbsp Flour
3 cups Chicken Stock
Peel and chop cucumbers. Saute gently in butter, leek, and bay leaf for 20 minute, or until tender.
Stir in flour, then add chicken stoc + 1 tsp salt and simmer 30 minutes.
Put mixture through foodmill and divide into 2 portions.
Blend first portion, strain through fine sieve into large bowl. Then blend second portion, and strain through fine sieve into bowl.
Chill in fridge 2 to 3 hours.
STEP TWO
1 Cucumber, peeled, seeded and grated
1 cup Cream
Juice from half a Lemon
1 tsp Fresh Dill or Mint
S&P
Into chilled soup add cucumber, cream and lemon juice. Mix well.
Stir in dill or mint and correct w/ S-&-P.
Chill for 30 minutes before serving. | (Optional: garnish w/ Sour Cream.)
•
Sacrapantina
“Holy Smokes” +
San Francisco magazine food writer Jack Shelton, “I would no sooner serve a great portion of this delicacy than I would fresh caviar.”:
| In 1990, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors honored baker and owner of Stella Pastry in North Beach, Franco Santucci, as the best baker in the world.
| His prized creation is the Sacripantina, born long ago and in Genoa, where a feast was given by a king in which a dessert was to be the centerpiece. | Conceived by the queen, it stunned the assembled when they tasted this confection of “cream, air and magic”, conjured w/ Almond Powder, Butter Cake, Cream Frosting, Meringue, Simple Syrup, and Zabaglione.
| Here is a similar
recipe to a North Beach classic.
•
Trifle
+
|- Use a large glass bowl and place a piece of sponge cake on the bottom. | Add in layers from the following: Jellies, Creams, Custards and soft Fruits.
|- Add lashings of Brandy or similar btw. layers. |- Add a unique topping (e.g. candied pecans) and refrigerate for 2 hours. |
A cold English dessert.
•
Haschich Fudge
ala Toklas +
|-
❝Take 1 tsp Black Peppercorns, 1 whole Nutmeg, 4 average sticks of Cinnamon, 1 tsp Coriander. These should all be pulverised in a mortar. About a handful of each stoned Dates, Dried Figs, shelled Almonds and Peanuts: chop these and mix them together. A bunch of Cannabis Sativa can be pulverised. This along w/ the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, and kneaded together. About a cupful of Sugar should be dissolved in a big pat of Butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or rolled into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient.
+
Obtaining the cannibis may present certain difficulties, but the variety known as Cannabis Sativa grows as common as weed, often unrecognised in Europe, Asia and parts of Africa; besides being cultivated as a crop for the manufacture of rope. In the Americas, while often discouraged, its cousin, called Cannabis Indica, has been observed even in store window boxes. It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green.❞
•
Green Butter
+
•
Ice Cream
ala Nick Cave +
2 cups coconut milk (incl. cream)
1 cup pineapple, chopped
½ cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon oil
1 teaspoon cornstarch or tapioca flour
1 or 2 pinches salt
2 or 3 tablespoons whiskey
Heat brown sugar w/ oil, salt, and ¼ cup coconut milk until melted. Stir occasionally w/ wooden spoon. Allow to cool, then blend w/ other ingredients until smooth. Place in an ice-cream maker and let ’er rip. Freeze. If you don’t have an ice-cream maker, whip it in the blender for 5 minutes, then place in a freezer-safe bowl and stir occasionally until frozen like frost from the foothills creeping all around, which will take several hours depending on how cold your shit is.
•
Garum
Traditional Roman Fish Sauce +
❝ … As a result of its popularity, the production, consumption, importing and exporting of garum (aka allec, muria, liquamen) was a not insignificant aspect of the Roman economy. Surviving records tell us that citizens complained about the thick stench of fish parts being liquefied and fermented in a
potent brew of salt and spices; as a result, fish sauce factories were moved to the outskirts of town – and outsourced to places like Spain.… ❞
RECIPE
Mackerel Entrails
Anchovies
Oysters
Sea Urchins
Sea Nettles
Crabfishes
Lobsters
Livers of Sea Barbles
|- Add salt to various combinations of above. Mix well. Store until fermented.
•
Century Egg
Pidan +
|- The crown of Chinese cuisine (pidan) has many names: century egg, hundred-year egg, thousand-year egg, millennium egg and a pine-patterned egg. Salvador Dali has his own recipe:
1 dozen Eggs
1-½ quarts of Water
5 whole Cloves
4 Tea-Bags
3 tbsp Sugar
3 tbsp Vinegar
2 Lemons, cut in 8 pieces
2 Onions
2 cloves Garlic
¾ teaspoon Thyme
Tabasco sauce
First, boil the eggs for ten minutes in salted boiling water. Then take them out, put them under cold running water which will make it easier to shell them. In the same water in which the eggs had boiled, add the cloves, sugar, vinegar, a lot of Tabasco sauce, the lemons (cut in eighths) and thyme. Boil for 15 minutes. Shut off the flame, dip in the tea-bag and let them steep for 10 minutes.
In a jar, put the diced onions and garlic. Add the shelled eggs, and pour the broth so that the eggs are completely immersed. Close the jar and keep it on the lower shelf of your refrigerator.
Be patient for 3 weeks before opening the jar and serving. These eggs go well with cold meats and fish.”
•
Watercress Salad
+
|-
1-½ cup Watercress (leaves only).
|- 1 cup chopped and pitted cured Italian Black Olives.
|- Peel and dice 1 Fuji Apple per person, and toss w/ Lemon Juice.
|- Combine well the 3 ingredients and serve in chilled bowls. |- No dressing needed. No S-&-P.
|- Goes well w/ Homemade Croutons (chopped semi-stale Bread tossed in a skillet using 1 tbsp Butter, 1 tbsp Olive Oil, Garlic (1 clove per person), and Black Pepper).
|-
•
Sardines
Party Game +
English author Henry Green (1905-1973) describes a party game called Sardines in his 1940 book, Pack My Bag:
|-
❝The Hunt Ball is always on a Friday night. The guests stay over the week-end. It is difficult to know what to do w/ them in the evenings. Sometimes we used to play sardines, of all games the most simple and pathetic in that one couple can never stay long alone. The rules are that a man and a woman hide and the rest hunt in pairs throughout the house. When the first to hide are found the two who discover them have to crowd into the same hiding-place and so on, more and more pile in, it may be under a big bed, until there is one couple left still looking and they have lost. Lost what? Why the game.❞
•
Empada
Fish Pie +
|- The only pie stuffed w/ fish. Savory and sweet. Spices w/ spirits.
DOUGH
2-½-lb Flour
1-½ cup Sugar
16 Egg Yolks
2 Egg Whites
13 oz. Shortening
2 tsp Salt
¼ cup of Chinese Cooking Wine (Sheung Jing)
5 chopped Olives
2 tbsp grated Parmesan Cheese
Knead to make dough. Shape dough in pie pan and leave enough for top.
METHOD
Fry quarter pound of Cod (or Sea Bass) w/ Cumin, Coriander, Saffron Powder, S-&-P. When done, let it cool. Then knead into pastry dough.
Let cool when done. Knead into pastry dough, and leave enough for a filling.
Cover w/ dough top and bake in 350° oven for 45 minutes or until brown.
Serve at room temperature. Known colloquially in Macao as Empada de Peixe or just Empada. The version in Fat Rice by Abraham, Adrienne and Hugh substitutes Chinese wine w/ brandy and port, and gives the top a dusting of confectioners’ sugar.
•
Andy Warhol Cocktail
+
|- 1-½ ounce Cognac. |- ½ oz. Benedictine. |- ⅓ oz. Lillet Blanc. |- 2 dashes Orange Bitters.
██ Built back in 1932 to act as the backyard to a tycoon's mansion, the Tiger Balm Gardens in Happy Valley is a one-of-a-kind folly. On the steepest hillsides imaginable, inhospitable to real estate development, Aw Boon Haw ("Gentle Tiger") envisioned a human-size depiction of a moral Chinese universe. At the top of all this is the all-white seven-storey Tiger Pagoda, presiding over the phantasm at its base. On the lower right there is a crop of clouds known as the Blue Mountain.
██ The Blue Mountain in this psychedelic park is a sculpted scenario, based on Daoist descriptions, whipped up w/ plaster-of-paris applied to the cliff-like mountainside. Staircases in the clouds and elsewhere act as bridge btw. situations.
██ Natural ledges and spurs were leveraged by stonemasons for passageways and platforms, galleries and lookout points. Artisans working w/ chicken-wire and cement shaped natural forms found only in dreams. Where none existed before, shortcuts and crossings accrue bringing forth altitudinal alcoves, blessed benches, and rooms w/ scenic views.
██ This garden of steep and narrow steps enhances the mystical acts of ascension and descension: to the Shangri-la of heaven or the stockades of Hell . Vistas retreat, and suddenly destinations take on labyrinthean lengths, up and down, from one scenario to the next.
Entrance to the Tiger Balm Gardens, where the first steps already beguile.
██
| back |
—|“Dumbbell” Island
|• • |
In the aftermath of the Opium Wars, under terms of a peace agreement, 200 small islands around Hong Kong, and an even larger area on the mainland, were leased to the United Kingdom by China for a period lasting 99 years. One of these islands is
Cheung Chau, 12 miles southwest of Hong Kong Island, nicknamed “Dumbell” Island due to its shape, giving it not one but two cove beaches. In those early times, it was a fishing village, and settled by Hoklo (fishing folk), Hakka, Chiu Chau, and Yue Ca people. Over time the vessel-friendly harbour coalesced into a commercial hub for local fisheries shopping for fishing gear or needing a boat repaired. (Cheung Chau is an isle sandwiched btw. larger islands Lantau and Lamma.) They were soon joined by other island dwellers, running fisheries and small farms, who sailed there to do business. To this day the island (長洲 in Chinese, "long state") pays heed to various cultural practices by putting on full-fledged festivals, showing what it was all about. There are eight.
▶ Traditional Festivals
| 1. |
THE
Lunar New Year Festival on Cheung Chau, held the first day of first month of the new lunar calendar, is total old-school.
| 2. |
NIGHT TIME is when the Lantern Festival gets going, held on the last full day of the new year festivities, and somewhat akin, in symbolism, to Valentine's Day. As the sun sets, folks carrying red lanterns w/ riddles written on them parade around town, in search of riddle-solvers.
| 3. |
MARTIAL ARTISTS GATHER every year to celebrate the
Birthday of Yuen Mo, a high-ranking deity in Taoism (黑帝 Black Deity).
| 4. |
DEITY TO SEAFARERS and a sea goddess in her own right, the
Birthday of Kwan Yin is observed by sailors who know that her miraculous interventions protect them.
| 5. |
A RURAL FESTIVAL w/ Taoist roots. Villagers would wander the island decked out as divines. Inside a contraption depicting their avatars as giants, they would re-enact a ceremony to ward off evil spirits. The lineup always will incl. the goddess of mercy (Kuan Yin), goddess of the sea (Tin Hau), god of the south (Hung Hsing), and a revered divinity named Pak Tai. Together they get to sponsor the annual
Bun Festival, which takes place over four days and three nights.
The original band of prime movers is nowadays attended by a parade of floats, and the majority of them feature children performing acrobatic mojo. The centerpiece of the celebration – and its highlight – is a competition to see who can scramble to the top of a high tower that has been festooned w/ buns, the object being the first one to snatch the very top bun. The core tradition being an example of exorcism, only vegetarian fare is served.
| 6. |
A ROWBOAT RACE happens around Chinese summer solstice and takes place during the
Dragon Boat Festival, to remember a poet and minister, who drowned himself when he was accused of treason. Festival food is a tamale Chinese style: glutinous rice cradling meat and either peanuts or yellow beans, wrapped w/ lotus leaves an steamed.
| 7. |
MODEL OF CONFUCIANISM, present at the Battle of Red Cliffs, a battle that ended the Han dynasty, then after many exploits became fictionalized in prose, and went on to attain immortality as emperor deity of Chinese folk religion. Buddhists and Taoists alike are welcome, during the
Birthday of Guang Gong celebrations.
| 8. |
HARVESTING TIME is when mooncakes, made w/ sweet bean or lotus seed pastes, and only available during this period, are a good way to fatten up for winter. Welcome to the
Mid-Autumn Festival.
And if one can agree that films too are festivals, there once was an on-going one, Cheung Chau Theatre, an
outdoor cinema
.
▶ Today
Fishing still happens, and Cheung Chau is the place to go for seafood. Tourists now know "dumbell island" and its swimming beaches. Ferry from Hong Kong takes 55 minutes, 20 less if its a high-speed, running every 30 minutes or so depending on hour and day. There are no roads to speak of, it's a land of lanes. Walking the one square mile island is easy enough; and bycicles are a common sight.
| back |
—|Stanley Prison
|• • |
In the 19th century, on the ample spur of a large peninsula jutting south to the South China Seas, the British government established an ideal military barrack w/ a naval base, on flat terrain. By 1937, it was enlarged w/ steel, concret and stone, and became the Hong Kong Prison at Stanley, its second oldest security site, still in use today.
|• • |
This model prison became renowned as one of the finest in the British empire, w/ six cell blocks behind an 18-foot wall. And, until it was abolished in 1993, the place for executions. During World War II, the Japanese turned this prison itno an internment camp.
|• • |
Today, Stanley Prison has capacity for 1,714 inmates and a staff plus officers numbering 800. It is one of six maximum security sites in Hong Kong, and the largest, housing male inmates serving medium-, long-term, and life sentences.
|• • |
A cell is 80 square feet, and has a bed, desk, chair, sink and toilet; one toilet roll is given out every three weeks. Wakeup is 6:30a, lunch midday, dinner is 4:30p, bedtime 10p.|• • |
One hour of free time every day, and the yard is available. There is no internet access, but letter writing is allowed, as is ten minutes of phone time once a month. ██
▶ Now
In all, there are now 29 security sites in Hong Kong, w/ a capacity for 8,400 inmates. In correctional institutions, half-way houses, and custodial wards in public hospitals, psychological treatments are offered as a part of the care.
|• • |
Inmates who are violent, dangerous or criminally insane go to Liu Lam Psychiatric Centre.
For women there is either Wu Correctional Institution, which is minimum- to medium-security, or Tai Lam Centre for Women, a maximum-security site.
The elderly inmates, those 65 or older and who are of low-security risk, get housed at Tai Lam Correctional Institution.
| back |
‒|Walled City
██
When the Japanese brought the war to Hong Kong in 1941, they commandeered a Chinese military base in Kowloon district, and that was their heaquarters. After the war, squatters began moving in, sparking a territorial dispute btw. China the the British colonial government. Overnight, this six-acre enclave relapsed into the everyday kind of lawlessness of a Chinese life, and British law did not apply. Kowloon Walled City was finally demolished in the 1990s, but not before some 300 high-rise apartments and an estimated population of 33,000 roamed about its rubbish-filled alleys, where sunlight never penetrates.
██
| back |
❝Great cook, talented at crochet, creative, child-like, excruciatingly honest, tenacious, compassionate and sensitive; my mother was all these things.❞ — Jasmine
▶ 5.2.1940 – 5.3.2016|-Pam led a glamorous life as a 1960s airline stewardessfor Cathay Pacific Airways, based in Hong Kong, where she was born and raised. At work she would be pulled into photo shoots when film and television stars flew in. | Chosen to represent the airline, she participated in fashion shows, ad campaigns, and public relations as the face of flight. She traveled around the world, accruing trinkets from all cultures and a lifelong admiration of all cuisines. She traveled to all the airports in Asia, and in her suitcase out would pop magazines from everywhere else. | After landing in America, she struck out to be on her own and moved to New York, abandoning us all here in California. She dated the house photographer at Mad magazine, and lived a stone’s throw from Maxwell’s Plum, a “…flamboyant restaurant and singles bar that, more than any place of its kind, symbolized two social revolutions of the 1960s — sex and food,” located at 64th and First Avenue in Manhattan. Her walk up had a bathtub in the kitchen, sharing a hot faucet w/ the sink. |While helping a friend (wo)man a street fair booth, Pam met many people, including a man who immediately offered some helpful advice. Pam shot back and challenged him to come around to the other side and manage the booth himself, since he “...clearly knew what to do.” Laszlo disappeared and came back w/ two hot dogs and a lemonade, walked around the booth, and sat down next to her; two weeks later they were married.
|Laszlo Zauberer, native of Hungary, was driving a cab in NYC when he met Pam on his one day off. An accomplished painter of the school of naive art, and the love of her life, they remained inseparable for the next 40 years. | After the birth of their daughter, Pam and Laszlo made the move to upstate New York. Never one to shy away from conflict, her generosity, thoughts and sometimes vengeance were doled out as she saw fit to those who crossed her path. Whether it was redeeming a raincheck at a grocery store or haggling over an item at a yard sale, her sense of fairness and authority got her into heated debates. | On the night of May 3 2016, Pamela Rita de Oliveira Mattos Zauberer passed away at home and in her bed w/ Laszlo and Jasmine by her side. In true stoic fashion, she had no complaints of pain. She had just celebrated her birthday the day before, and ate carrot cake, her favorite. She was 76 years old. -|
69 | Benjamin Leung Gok Wing
▶ 2.7.1944 – 9.4.2013|-Ben visited Hong Kong at the beginning of 2013. What he must have thought about his hometown he is not aorund to tell me, but I know it’s the first vacation he’s had in a while. | It was there that Ben met my sister Sylvia, when they were both young and working in the same office. At that time my sister was learning to drive a stick-shift car and for hours and hours after dinner she would be out taking driving lessons w/ an instructor to god knows where. | Ben would also go off on his own as a young man, but where he went you can always find on a map: a local swimming pool, or the nearby basketball court. He left these pursuits behind when he came to San Francisco, and eventually took up gardening: on 44th Avenue, and later out on Bay Farm Island. Both had sandy soil, hard to take care of. | On Bay Farm he had a wisteria in ground next to a loquat tree in a pot. Ben was fearless and grew everything. And those that took to his care, he made green. -|
93 | Regina Maria de Oliveira Mattos DaSilva
▶ 2.28.1921 – 11.28.2013|-
My father’s youngest sister. She ran the concession stand on the Peak, and took the Peak Tram to work everyday, after crossing the harbour by ferry from Kowloon side. -|
87 | Renee Lym Robertson
▶ 8.4.1928 – 1.4.2015
❝I bowed 3 times at the casket of Renée Lym Robertson. Auntie Renée died at the age of 87 in her stunning Nob Hill apartment. She was the daughter of Art Lym, the founder and head of the Chinese Air Force under the Nationalist government. She was born in Shanghai and fled to Hong Kong in 1949 as a refugee after the Communist Revolution. She was a noted beauty in her day and was a fixture in the international Hong Kong society that centered on the Peninsula Hotel; where she caught the eye of Clark Gable and became his girlfriend and lover. I will miss her beauty, her style, those jungle red nails and lips, the jade and diamonds, her stories and her wicked wit and wisdom. Auntie Renée was my Auntie Mame.❞
– Wylie Wong
33 | George Choy
▶ 2.6.1960 – 9.10.1993|- George was rocking a mohawk, so I took a pix, to remember our Passage through a rather brief moment in time. He now has one of the many plaques lining Castro Street. -|
|⁋|
As Government House was being built, on a large parcel 500 feet above Hong Kong harbor, governor John Bowring and Lady Bowring began to putter in their backyard, a slope rising steeply up to meet the Peak.
|⁋|
What is now Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens (兵頭花園) was in the beginning a living victorian laboratory on a barren rock off the South China coast.
Pondering the young science of botany, men and women from a bygone age re-imagined Eden. These eminent victorians set up classifications, devised cages, designed a system for the edification of humankind.
|⁋|
In 1871, a victorian botanical garden, beginning life as the governor's backyard, was opened to the public. Taming the unfriendly slope sweeping upwards to meet the Peak were gardeners, masons and laborers.
|⁋|
Indigenous plants met their tropical and sub-tropical selves.
|⁋|
Banyans were tucked in to create backdrops.
|⁋|
The only india rubber tree for miles around can be found only within this garden.
|⁋|
Into the ground went palm trees from near and far. Ferns sheltered sensitive plants.
|⁋|
The original garden had shady boulevards and flowerbeds, an aviary and a green house filled w/ ferns, bromeliads, orchids, and climbers.
|⁋|
The fountain terrace has a fifty-feet wide ciruclar pond, raised just so to allow sitting, and home to water lilies and a spout.
|⁋|
Nearby a first-gen children’s playground.
British botanist Charles Ford was the first superintendent of gardens, and he began the documentation of local flora and fauna.
- gingsengs on a botany print
- drawing of chinese cloves
- sprig of dawn redwood
- branch of chinese elm on a plate.
- framed drawing of chinese lantern
|⁋|
It was deemed safe enough that late into the evening, dating couples took to strolling between gas-lit paths and shadows, safe in nature and holding hands.
|⁋|
White jade orchid trees, mock lime, orange-jessamine, sweet osmanthus, mingle w/ the scent of “kwai-fah” to swirl the air.
|⁋|
Ferns took to the site very well and produced profusely, offering shade and, more importantly, privacy.
|⁋|
This open air conservatory turned into a paradise for Adamses wanting somewhere to take their eager Eves.
|⁋|
In 1876, an animal house was added to the new garden. Its inmates have rotated over the years.
|⁋|
After a hundred years of shame major renovations were begun in 1976, and beleaguered beasts given new digs and more modern practises.
|⁋|
Reptiles and mammals had separation.
|⁋|
Birds were moved to another area altogether.
|⁋|
Twin programs were established to study captive- as well as conservation-breeding techniques.
|⁋|
Today 900 species live side by side and learn how how to get along in a very crowded city.
At the invitation of the first superintendent of gardens, Jules Verne came in 1865 to help document the life aquatic.
The author was doing research on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and spent six months learning the local language and taking down oral history. Going to the best sources for authentic information on the underwater world of Hong Kong didn’t make it into the final manuscript.
An article on his time in the Far East appeared in the June 15 1884 issue of L’Algerie magazine, featuring artwork by Alphonse de Neuville, Édouard Riou, and Macau-based George Chinnery.
The must-dos for brewing a proper pot of tea, and how a constitutional drinking game, made palatable w/ sugar and milk, calmed a nation’s nerves.
C R E A M O R L E M O N —
A steadfastness in dutiful habiting is a core definition of Britishness in all matters related to tea, and it’s now due for a review:
… the official six-page specification for how to make a cup of tea, is officially "under review". But don't panic. It is standard procedure for the British Standards Institution (BSI) to do a "systematic periodic review" of each of its many specifications which, piecemeal, define nearly everything British.
|-¶-|
Belying stereotypes of peremptory rigidity in anyone or anything that officially tells the populace what’s what, the BSI is nice about what it does”. British Standards are voluntary in that there is no obligation to apply them or comply with them," it says. The standards are "devised for the convenience of those who wish to use them". That sentiment appears in the 44-page specification, copies of which are available free of charge.
In 2013, Christopher Hitchens gave an account of the golden rules of George Orwell for making tea:
… Just after World War II, during a period of acute food rationing in England, George Orwell wrote an article on the making of a decent cup of tea that insisted on the observing of 11 different "golden" rules. Some of these (always use Indian or Ceylonese—i.e., Sri Lankan—tea; make tea only in small quantities; avoid silverware pots) may be considered optional or outmoded.
But the essential ones are easily committed to memory, and they are simple to put into practice.
|-¶-|
If you use a pot at all, make sure it is pre-warmed. (I would add that you should do the same thing even if you are only using a cup or a mug.) Stir the tea before letting it steep. But this above all: “[O]ne should take the teapot to the kettle, and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours.”|-¶-|
This isn’t hard to do, even if you are using electricity rather than gas, once you have brought all the makings to the same scene of operations right next to the kettle. It’s not quite over yet. If you use milk, use the least creamy type or the tea will acquire a sickly taste.
|-¶-|
And do not put the milk in the cup first—family feuds have lasted generations over this—because you will almost certainly put in too much. Add it later, and be very careful when you pour. Finally, a decent cylindrical mug will preserve the needful heat and flavor for longer than will a shallow and wide-mouthed—how often those attributes seem to go together—teacup. Orwell thought that sugar overwhelmed the taste, but brown sugar or honey are, I believe, permissible and sometimes necessary.
In 1997, Morrissey was asked in a sit-down interview: Do you ever get sick of drinking tea? Given the moment, he expounded on how this custom is still practised:
I absolutely never get sick of drinking tea. It’s a psychological thing really, it’s just very composing and makes me relax. It’s just so much a part of your culture. ... ‘Oh yes yes, I’m very avid, I have to have at least four pots a day.’ ... For those of us who don’t know how to make a pot of tea, what do you do?
‘Well you really have to put the milk in first which many people don’t.’ Put the milk in with the water, before you boil the water?
‘No you’re confused already no, you put the milk in before you pour the water in or the tea, whichever.’ Well I would do that without even thinking about it. ‘Right and also you have to use real milk you can’t use the UHT fake stuff, you have to use proper milk.’ Okay, so what about the actual brewing of the tea?|-¶-|
‘The brewing of the tea, it’s very important that you heat the pot before you put the water in, if you use a pot. I know most people who just throw a teabag into a cup but in England of course you have to make a pot of tea and you have to heat the pot first with hot water and then put the teabags in – I can’t believe I’m saying this – and then put the hot water in and then just throw it all over yourself, rush to Out Patients and write a really good song.’
| TEA TIME NOTES:
[1]
Excerpt from “The correct way to make a cuppa is being reviewed,” by Marc Abrahams The Guardian 4|29|2013.
2]
“How to Make a Decent Cup of Tea: Ignore Yoko Ono and John Lennon, and heed George Orwell’s tea-making advice” by Christopher Hitchens, slate.com, 7|5|2013.
Blessed by superb symmetry, taking on its shape five thousand years ago, locus for ascetic buddhism of the shinto blend, standing alone in the center of the country, source of artistic inspiration since the 11th century, Mount Fuji’s conic silhouette has been copied by Japanese potters down through history and in due course has left blueprints on mid-century kitchen gadget design, chockful with its ergonomic effortlessness and sensuous surfaces. The designation by UNESCO of this mountain as the 2013 World Heritage Site Sacred Space Recipient consists of 25 properties including the mountain itself, shinto shrines, five lakes, and a haunted forest.
Shinto has been practised in Japan since at least the 7th century, and its cosmos is populated by a kami (diety) living in every imaginable natural formation unto a blade of grass. Mount Fuji’s kami is the Princess Konohana-sakuya, the shinto embodiment of nature, and you will know of her presence by the sight of cherry blossoms on the way up a very attractive mountain. The fujiko school of shinto adds a soul and believes the mountain to be a being. While all this bonding is going on, the buddhists sit back and regard the mountain as a gateway to another world. The crater is ringed w/ eight peaks and a walk all around takes a couple of hours, could this be what the buddhists had in mind?
The area around Fujisan-konohana-sakuahime (“Fuji causing the blossom to brightly bloom”) also contains other mystical marvels. Five lakes, the Fuji-goko, ring the mountain.
The northwest quadrant is a 14-square mile pine forest, the Aoki-ga-hara-jukai (Sea of Trees), which can be alarmingly dark during the day, forming a half moon around the base. This forest is home to goblins, demons, ghosts, and has been a destination suicide spot for many years.
It has come to pass and for as long as anyone can remember, there is and always has been a choice of only four trails leading pilgrims to the summit. All things here being of a magical quality, these four paths might very well allude to the Four Elements in a cosmic setting: rarefied Air at the summit, plentiful fresh Water within reach, Earth in its proudest seasonal garbs are all visited by the fire goddess Fuchi once a year, taking off her buddhist beads for a powwow w/ the princess. This takes place end of summer at a trail stop in the village of Yoshida, rife w/ rustic rumors insisting on a peculiar religiousity shared by fire festivals everywhere including the most famous, Burning Man,
although it must be noted that the Yoshida Fire Festival is done and over with in a night and the following day, involving ceremonies to conclude the climbing season.
Sunrise as seen at the summit by all-night climbers has its own dedicated name, goraiko, as in “my goraiko was obscured by clouds with rain blotting out the horizon.” For the fortunate ones, though, words like "awesome" and "bright red" and "a figure" readily roll off their tongues when recalling the alpine sight of the sun peeking over a watery horizon, the shedding of darkness around the self, the wonderment that immortals are hovering nearby, a palpable sense of alignment with gravity again, maybe even new eyes for the descent. It has been likened to something we all know happens regularly and “see” but not see; kind of shinto. It is one of Japan’s three Holy Mountains, together with Mount Haku and Mount Tate, and is on the island of Honshu.
Fuji is an active and relatively young volcano 62 miles south-west of Tokyo. It sits on a “triple junction” radiating techtonically down to the Filipino Plate, west to the Eurasian Plate, and east towards the North American Plate, the Okhotsk. It has erupted 21 times, the last was on October 26, 1707 (an 8.4), and destroyed 72 houses and three buddhist temples. It was powerful enough to blow a scoop out at the tip, becoming an actual new crater on the eastern flank. On February 4, 2013, a metereological ticker tape came through the wires:
The volcano remains calm. However, an increased number of small quakes near and under Mt Fuji are visible on our latest data plot of nearby earthquakes (within 30 km radius). While all of these are very small and the number is certainly not alarming, the volcano remains interesting to watch….
| MT FUJI NOTES:
[1]
Four views of Mt. Fuji.
[2]
The Princess Konohana-sakuya is patiently gazing around wondering what is taking so long for her date Fuchi forever to arrive.
[3]
(top left) The Sea of Trees.
[4]
Four photographs taken from the summit at sunrise – a goraiko; anime of a sun goddess by Jayne Aw.
[5]
Mt Fuji in fact and fiction.
| Fujisan (富士山). Names of the five lakes: Kawaguchi, Motosu, Sai, Shoji, Yamanaka. The four trails are Yoshidaguchi, Subashiri, Gotemba, Fujinomiya. Photos by Brian Chu, Daisaku Ikeda + screen captures.
LONDON 1908 — The protagonist of H.G. Well's novel, Tono-Bungay, has come up from the provinces to work in London, and here gives an account of his train journey into the city:
“ … I got London at last with an exceptional freshness of effect, as the sudden revelation of a whole unsuspected other side of life.
I came to [that human wilderness] on a dull and smoky day by the South Eastern Railway, and our train was half an hour late, stopping and going on and stopping again. I marked beyond Chilselhurst the growing multitude of villas, and so came stage by stage through multiplying houses and diminishing interspaces of market garden and dingy grass to regions of interlacing railway lines, big factories, gasometers and wide reeking swamps of dingy little houses, more of them and more and more.
The number of these and their dinginess and poverty increased, and here rose a great public house and here a Board School and here a gaunt factory; and away to the east there loomed for a time a queer, incongruous forest of masts and spars. The congestion of houses intensified and piled up presently into tenements; I marvelled more and more at this boundless world of dingy people; whiffs of industrial smells, of leather, of brewing, drifted into the carriage; the sky darkened, I rumbled thunderously over bridges, van-crowded streets, peered down on and crossed the Thames with an abrupt eclat of sound. I got an effect of tall warehouses, of grey water, barge crowded, of broad banks of indescribable mud, and then I was in Cannon Street Station – a monstrous dirty cavern with trains packed across its vast floor and more porters standing along the platform than I have ever seen in my life before.
TIME TRAVEL NOTES:
[ 1 ]
Herbert George Wells was born on the 21 of Stepember, 1866. The cusp of Virgo into Libra, he is blessed by a pair of angels, holding his hands as he sought a possible reformation of society, a "new system of ideas". science + humanity = future. He was born into a poor family, one of four children. Through luck and chance, his father eked out a livelihood while his mother did occasional domestic work.
[ 2 ]
1908 map of London Underground.
[ 3 ]
Excerpt by Tono-Bungay by H.G. Wells, 1909.
[ 4-VIDEO ]
02|19|14 — A Solitary World — Dir: James W. Griffiths – Published on Feb 19, 2014 – Narration adapted from the works of H.G. Wells. Excerpted from the following: The Time Machine (1895) – The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) – The First Men in the Moon (1901) – In The Days of the Comet (1906) – The World Set Free (1914). Director, Producer, VFX Artist & Colourist: James W. Griffiths – Director of Photography: Christopher Moon – Editor: Marianne Kuopanportti – Sound Design & Mix: Mauricio D'Orey – Composer: Lennert Busch – Narrator: Terry Burns – PBS Digital Studios Original Shorts Series Producer: Matt Vree.
Victoria Harbour. Early 20th century photograph showing Hong Kong’s harbor and the mountain range known as the Nine Dragons, separating Kowloon from China.
I was once tasked to help deliver a car cross country btw. Christmas Eve and New Year, so when the time came I piled into PC’s SUV, driving Route 66 to move him East for graduate school, ❛❛ … in the full presence of Nature, under the sun, w/ the far-spreading landscape and vistas, or the sea rolling in.❜❜ ❛❛ These carols sung to cheer my passage through the world I see, for completion I dedicate to the Invisible World.❜❜ ❛❛ The main shapes arise! Shapes of Democracy total, result of centuries. Shapes ever projecting other shapes. Shapes of turbulent manly cities. Shapes of the friends and home-givers of the whole earth. Shapes bracing the earth and braced w/ the whole earth.❜❜ ❛❛ After a long, long course, hundreds of years, denials, accumulations, rous'd love and joy and thought, hopes, wishes, aspirations, ponderings, victories, myriads of readers. Coating, compassing, covering -- after ages’ and ages’ encrustations, then only may these songs reach fruition.❜❜ ❛❛ This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done. Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best: night, sleep, death and the stars.❜❜ ❛❛ Here first the duties of to-day, the lessons of concrete: wealth, order, travel, shelter, products, plenty. As of the building of some varied, vast, perpetual edifice, whence to arise inevitable in time, the towering roofs, the lamps, the solid-planted spires tall shooting to the stars.❜❜ ❛❛ And whence and why come you? We know not whence (was the answer). We only know that we drift here w/ the rest, that we longer’d and lagg’d -- but were wafted at last, and are now here, to make the passing shower’s concluding drops.❜❜ ❛❛ I wander all night in my vision, stepping w/ light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping, bending w/ open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers.❜❜
| ¶ |
An integrated transportation system came into play, w/ single and double-decker bus service. A tramway running the length of HK island on the harbor side and a second one just for the Peak. Two passenger ferry routes btw. HK and Kowloon and one ferry route dedicated to vehicles.
| ¶ |
User-friendly driving calmed grateful trucks, taxis and private cars, heeding traffic cops and easy-to-spot stop signs and signals.
| ¶ |
My father Tony got his driver license when he was 35 years old. The war had ended seven years ago, and having to drive on bald tires became a thing of the past.
| ¶ |
Tony’s first and only car was a Simca, a Fiat built in France, and he drove it to work every day. He took his wife grocery shopping and his family on regular Sunday drives to every nook and cranny of HK, Kowloon and the New Territories that was accessible by car.
| ¶ |
Then, around 1929, he abandoned everyone, boarded a ship and disappeared.
¶ |
One of Tony’s duties was to stand watch at the border w/ China. Daily he watched as people fled from bullets and bayonets. One day he caught the eye of someone, who must have also locked eyes w/ him because they most certainly began a love affair.
| ¶ | Eldest sister rests her hand on youngest sister. The eldest would open a tucks shop and die in HK, the youngest would return to China to live. Patsy, the middle sister, went to America.
| ¶ |
Tony had gone through one war w/ Patsy they did not want to again, not w/ a family. He sought to immigrate and wrote to his mother and older sister in America.
██ The Blue Mountain in this psychedelic park is a sculpted scenario, based on Daoist descriptions, whipped up w/ plaster-of-paris applied to the cliff-like mountainside. Staircases in the clouds and elsewhere act as bridge btw. situations.
██ Natural ledges and spurs were leveraged by stonemasons for passageways and platforms, galleries and lookout points. Artisans working w/ chicken-wire and cement shaped natural forms found only in dreams. Where none existed before, shortcuts and crossings accrue bringing forth altitudinal alcoves, blessed benches, and rooms w/ scenic views.
██ This garden of steep and narrow steps enhances the mystical acts of ascension and descension: to the Shangri-la of heaven or the stockades of Hell . Vistas retreat, and suddenly destinations take on labyrinthean lengths, up and down, from one scenario to the next.
Super Moon over Perth.
Yagan Square is a new area built to honor the Aboraginal beginnings of Perth.
Al-Zubarah, Qatar
In 1811 there was a successful siege and what remained was abandoned and eventually was covered by sand. The property 
