Rejected Artists & Transparent Trousers

Ever since I first visited Paris, at the age of sixteen, I've had the ambition to be a Rejected Artist. I wanted to live in a garret in Paris or Soho, paint works of genius like Vincent Van Gogh, then come back from Heaven to see what nice things people said about my stuff long after I'd gone.

Well, here's a rejected artist; Percy Wyndham-Lewis, standing outside the Royal Academy in London, in 1938.

Note:
- the cigar
- the well-made suit (but the awful faux-pas of leaving all three buttons done up)
- the silk scarf
- the patent leather shoes
- and worst of all, the spats on those shoes

And here's the reason for his rejection (only from the RA Summer Exhibition) - his portrait of T S Eliot, one of the most boring and inconsequential poets of all time.

The painting is good:
- the top half plagiarises a few clues from Gauguin (or some Vorticists)
- the middle part is a good portrait, in spite of a useless lot of effort to be Cubist.

But the bottom part? Well, it takes a lot of artistry to paint a famous poet with transparent trousers.

Is this an iconographic signal? Were Wyndham-Lewis and Eliot a little bit more than male friends?

Yes.

Now here is what Wyndham-Lewis was trying to emulate: something like this Juan Gris cubist portrait of Pablo Picasso, painted 30 years before.

Take a very close look at this. Cubism was supposed to be a new way of looking at things; putting three dimensions, and the different facets of them, into two.

And here's why; my own 'cubist' portrait of Percy Wyndham-Lewis (complete with arrogant cigar) executed in about 10 minutes, using the Paint.Net program.

You won't recognise Wyndham-Lewis, but then you won't recognise the young Pablo Picasso in John Grey's portrait, either.

That's not the point. This is Art.

Venus in Blue Jeans

I've been having a lot of idle fun in the past few days, playing with the Paint.Net program. It's fun, it's free, and (I think) it does most of what you might want.

This is John Everett Millais' 'Venus Verticordia' (Venus will turn your heart vertical). It's a winsome, bee-stung lipped nonsense, with slight symptoms of thyroid trouble in her neck.

Here, on the other hand, by Hans Memling, is an old lady who's seen it all.

She ain't going to take shit from nobody.


But this is the best, the Rokeby Venus, by Diego Velázquez.

Truly, Venus in Blue Jeans, and one of the best bums ever painted.

Pano'on - Local Candy - Bromeliad or What? - Part II

I first wrote about pano'on just a week ago, and things have developed rapidly. First I contacted Brandon McHenry, who identified my Dischidia or talikubo for me. He, in turn, suggested that pano'on was not a bromeliad at all, nor a relative of maize, but a relative of ginger, which was a total surprise to me.

Brandon also introduced me to John Mood, a world authority on ginger taxonomy, who confirmed the plant was probably Hornstedtia conoidea, which also grows in Borneo.

Well, I hadn't seen much more of the plant than a few ripening buds and a few leaves, which had made me think it was this: Zingiber mioga - Japanese Wild Ginger, which is commercially-grown in Japan (and now in New Zealand) for its young buds, which are a great delicacy.


The buds are shown here:
(Click photo to go to 'the scent of green bananas blog for recipes)

Well, this really got me thinking. If New Zealand farmers are canny enough to grow this stuff for export to Japan, why shouldn't we do the same here in Siargao? Looked easy to me; it's a perennial, so you plonk it in the ground, and pick a bit idly from time to time.

But if you look at the botanical drawing, you'll see that mioga has a white flower, whereas our pano'on's flowers turn out to have a brilliant deep red flower (top right). And the local people don't eat the buds, although they do eat the unripe berry pods (and so do rats and other forest rodents - we didn't find a single young bud on the specimens Ron brought back, from his second expedition on Thursday).

Ron also mentioned another ginger relative, locally known as kayaskason, which also has edible berries, growing at the top of a long stem, so I asked him to get some of those as well, plus anything else he could find. He came up trumps. Kayaskason turns out to be a species of Alpinia, or even a natural hybrid, and extremely rare. It seems strange that it is common enough here for the local people to give it a name.

Well, that's exciting enough, but this photo shows only the unripe seed pods. We've planted it in the garden, but I don't think I can wait for the flowers to come out, so I guess we'll have to go and get some, to finally find out what it is.

But the third wild ginger that Ron brought back turns out to be a little honey. You can see in this photo the yellow flowers and pink fruit. Here's another photo of the pink fruit.










This one, apparently, is an Etlingera fimbriobracteata.

Now that I know these marvels are to be found in the forests around here, I'll be looking out for them.

Pool Swimmer

People keep on writing to me about why I've lived in the Philippines for all of 12 years and still like it.

Look at the photo above - 'nuff said.

Marang Fruit

Marang - Artocarpus odoratissimus

This fruit is about halfway between jackfruit and breadfruit, and a member of the same family. It grows on large trees (larger usually than jackfruit) and smells wonderful. That, of course is why someone called it 'odoratissimus'.

The skin is made of countless tiny tubules or spines, and you simply cut through it and twist it off, to reveal the individual fruit (actually arils, about the size of a grape). Each one of these has a large seed inside (which you can also eat, after boiling or roasting).

There's not a lot of taste to a marang, but it does smell good.

These are some I photographed in the Surigao City fruit market, going nicely yellow as they ripen.

Actually, there's a superb photograph at MVI~'s photostream at Flickr, which I can't compete with.
You'll also find more information at the ever-indispensable Wikipedia.

Shedney loves them; I am ordered, indeed commanded, to bring some whenever I do a bank run to Surigao City.

(There don't seem to be many exotic local fruit available here on Siargao Island. If people have a tree like this in their garden, it tends to go to the family, and no-one else).

Santol Fruit

I can't do better than to quote The Daley News, an Australian tree nursery, on this fruit:

Fruit Tree of the Month
Santol - Sandoricum koetjape

Native to Asia the Santol is a large fast growing and attractive tree. In their native setting they can grow to around 45 m with a large buttressed trunk and branches low to the ground.
In cultivation they are more commonly seen as a 15 m specimen tree. In Asia the santol is valued not only for its fruits but it is also grown as a timber and shade tree, although the timber is not of high quality it does polish well.

The fruits are large, round and rough on the outside with a thick textured yellowish skin. The flesh is segmented around the 3-5 seeds, they are called lolly fruits as the flesh sticks firmly to the seeds and it is best removed and enjoyed by sucking the seeds clean. Do not be tempted to swallow the seeds.

I find these fruit (or at least the 'lolly' part) to be as insipid as so many other South East Asian fruit, a sort of jellified sweet flesh with a flavour so goddam subtle that I have difficulty describing it. And the flesh sticks to the seeds like slimy cotton wool. However,the orange skin is marvellous; very tart, and solid.

I've used it to make some very, very acceptable chutney, the kind that nearly substitutes for Branston Pickle, the essential ingredient for a genuine cheese-and-pickle sandwich.

Nukos Tinola

This delicious Filipino soup is the kind of thing that Shedney used to make for me when she was trying to impress me.

I won't bother to give an ingredients list, because it doesn't matter very much. This is a dish made at the moment from whatever you have available.

Take the usual onions, garlic, ginger, and so on, plus any spices you particularly like, give them a quick fry, and then throw in some fresh squid (nukos) , and whatever bits of vegetables you have around (this lot included mange-tout (snowpeas - a recently introduced vegetable, but nice, all the same), local cucumber, tomatoes, and some unidentifiable green leaves, probably kangkong (swamp lettuce) - the oval white things are cucumber seeds from the local cucumber; sikwa).

Don't cook it too much. You want the squid tasty and tender, not like bits of boiled rubber.

Then add water. Easy, isn't it? And delicious.

Gecko Corner

This is Gecko Corner, just above the righthand side of my Siargao Island 'home office' at about 7 pm. All of the extended family are out there, and they're patrolling the best bits for tasty insect nibbles.

Actually, there are half a dozen more, to the left side, but they all maintain very careful territories. Sometimes, there's a little bit of a flurry, with a gecko growl and a scuffle; they are quarrelling about sex or territory rights, both of which seem to be prevalent problems amongst most animal groups.

Geckos have evolved amazing abilities for holding onto vertical and even sub-horizontal surfaces. They can stick to anything...sometimes. See: Gecko's amazing sticky feet

and when that doesn't work, they can turn around, mid-air, to make sure they land properly:

See:
Tail 'key' for gecko acrobatics

They are all around my house; and are fairly ambitious.


Sometimes they fall off the ceiling.

When they land, stunned for a moment, you can see the thought, in their eyes 'Where the f*** am I now?'

This one plopped onto my computer keyboard.

Other stuff drops into my evening drink occasionally.

Some mornings I find some poor soused gecko in the glass I left on the table.


This little fellow is trying to eat a moth more than half his body size (excluding head and tail).

He can't bite the insect in half; he'll just have to do the best he can to swallow it whole.



Very occasionally, the geckos stop fighting each other, and have some fun.

I'm going to be very careful about this, because Google might put me on the pornography blacklist if I publish this photo.


But look at their eyes; neither look exactly ecstatic; much like humans, really.

My apologies for the f***ed up layout of this post (and others). Google's Blogger has been giving me much angst today.

Lato Seaweed Salad

I do love this stuff.

Koi-Koi, my neighbour, brings me some from time to time, often together with some tajum, sea urchin roe, and they go well together.

They taste like salty little grapes, bursting in the mouth in the same way as caviare, but they're a lot cheaper.

This kind is my favourite. The branches are like little green Walt Disney toadstools.

To eat them, all you do is collect them straight from the sea. If you haven't got fresh sea water to rinse them in, use a little vinegar. But make sure you do wash them; a lot of tiny crabs and shrimp live in the bunches, and you don't want to chomp those as well.

I also featured another kind of lato at: Seaweeds as Food

The Grinning Bitch

You'll probably recognise this lady, in spite of what I've tried to do to disguise her. In fact, where she's currently exhibited, behind bulletproof glass, she doesn't look a lot different than this. That is, if you can see over the crowd of that day's share of the 6 million gawkers who look at the original every year.

This picture makes her look like a BIG masterpiece. She ain't one of those.
She looks as if she's living in a smallish living-room aquarium, 30" in high by 20 7/8" wide (77cm by 53 cm). That's why I've given her a couple of goldfish swimming past, and a plastic rock to the right.


I've thought about her sometimes over the forty years since I first saw her at her current French residence. I was, at the time, trying to do a 'Five Minute Louvre', in emulation of the late and very lamented Art Buchwald, who never tried it himself , but apparently met a very serious Swede who had actually accomplished: Entry to the Louvre, sight of the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and Victory of Samothrace, in turn, and was out of the back door in five minutes flat.

Anyway, what I'm on about today are the anomalies of that famous icon of womanhood. Look at this picture, and ask yourself just why:

• the landscapes at left and right are completely different; climates, horizon, colours and all. It's just as if Leonardo cut-and-pasted a couple of his apprentices' efforts into his final production. We can all do this now, thanks to Photoshop, but Leonardo had to use very much more basic means.
• the famous smile; it's ambiguous, because Leonardo used an old painter's trick; perhaps he invented it himself. Smudge the ends of the lips, and you really can't tell what she's thinking.
  But look again at the image on this post. Just because I've put a plastic rock right next to her smile, her smile's got a reference point that shows she's definitely smirking.
• the lazy come-to-bed eyes. Well they're part of the whole, but look again.
  The right eye (from your perspective) is a bit higher than the left one. A few millimetres down and she'd look like any dumb peasant woman. And the eyes are looking in different directions. They're slightly away from looking directly at you. They are but they aren't. Another old painter's trick.
• the veil - she's wearing a very, very light veil. It's just visible over her head, and, by inference, over her body. This is is a guarnello, typically used by Italian women of that time, while pregnant or just after giving birth.
  (That's a symptom of the long tradition in many cultures about the uncleanness or untouchable sacredness of women at menstruation or birth - I'll deal with this story another time).
• her bosom is quite ridiculous. No woman has a perfectly straight neck, and no woman's chest flows smoothly, and roundly, down to a pair of hidden milk-and-honey breasts. This part of the picture is pure fiction.
• below the tits, and before her arms, there's a big area of ambiguous shadow. But this shows up Leonardo's deliberate manipulation of normal human anatomy.
  Look at the right hand side. Her veil covers her arms, but is light enough not to stick to them. Her real arms, shown below the veil, are much to short to fit the grand portrait L de V planned for the conventional head-n-shoulders portrait applicable at the time. He should have chopped it off 2/3 of the way down.
• and the arm of the chair she's sitting in; from what little you can see, it's probably something like what we call a captain's chair (without all the swivels and stuff), with horizontal curved arms.
  But that little obscure detail contributes a huge amount to the distance she preserves from you, the observer.

Leonardo was a wonderful painter-trickster. When I've learned a bit more about how to de-re-construct his paintings, I'll show you a bit more of why.

Pano'on - Local Candy - Bromeliad or What?

Pano'on was, so far as I knew, a bromeliad that grows in the local forests. I'd never actually seen one in the wild, so I couldn't say much more about it.

It anyone reading this can identify it for me, please do so.

If I was right, then this was a close relative of the pineapple. If I was wrong, then it's more likely a close relative of corn. Either way, bromeliad or corn, it probably came from South America, so I couldn't work out why it was growing (only) wild here.

It's sought after for its tiny fruit, lined up like a corncob. They taste both tart and sweet, and are very much liked, around here, as sweet snacks.

The pod grows with many arils (?) each of which has a bunch of berries, shaped like a miniature corn cob.
This one is unripe, but it shows the 'arils', and the arrangement of seeds. The part of the 'bud' above the seed pods is full of watery 'nectar'.
















So I asked my 'major domo', Ron, to go out to the jungle and find some pano'on growing naturally, as they are wont to do. And he came back with some wild plants, now in my garden, and some strange photos.

It seems that the buds grow almost straight out of the ground, and are then followed by very tall growths of lily-like leaves.



The last photo here is of a bunch of Pano'on plants trying to survive in my garden.

Perhaps you can tell that I don't have green fingers.

Pako Fern - Lunchtime Salad

This is pako fern; it grows naturally in the forests around here, and is gathered by women for sale in the local markets.

It doesn't rank very high on local food-value scales.

But it tastes wonderful, as a fresh salad, with the usual oil and vinegar dressing. It's crispy and tasty.

Here, it's thought of as an occasional delicacy, but otherwise as a famine food, the only thing you can find to eat after a typhoon or earthquake.

Last year, when exceptional rains, floods and landslides cut Lanuza (opposite my island on the 'mainland' of Mindanao) off from the outside world, this was all they had left to eat.

If the local people could somehow find a way to get this salad into Western supermarkets, they'd have a winner.
It's very cultivable.

Incidentally, when I talk about the 'usual oil and vinegar dressing', I'm not referring to all those fancy Mediterranean virgin olive oils and balsamic vinegars, that cost a fortune. I'm referring to our very own cold-pressed virgin coconut oil, and the vinegar that results from not drinking all the coconut sap tuba wine in time.

No sooner had I first written the draft of this, than I wanted to find more about this wonderful salad. Here is a photo of pako fern being served in a Vancouver restaurant, from vacationtime at Flickr. It looks as if these are the very top fiddlehead buds, braised lightly.

This is not so good; it's like the French, who braise lettuce, for god's sake. The Frogs don't know nuffink about cooking.


Here is the fern, growing wild, locally.

And, finally, here's a recipe for Kerabu pucuk pakis from a feast, everyday, who seem to come from Malaya, and are obviously interested in food, because they call themselves thedroolteam.

Pakis kerabu
2 cups pakis soft tips, washed and cut into 2" length
1 tablespoon dried prawns, washed and soaked

Dressing
1 tablespoon fish sauce
2 tablespoon lime juice
1-2 bird's eye chillies, chopped
sugar, to taste

Blanch the pakis in boiling water for 2-3 minutes; rinse in cold water and drain.
Drain the dried prawns and chop or pound coarsely; fry in a dry pan without oil over medium heat until fragrant and golden.
Sprinkle a pinch of sugar on the dried prawn to caramelise and off the heat.
Mix together the dressing, adjust to suit your taste (our palates lean heavily to the sourish side); toss in well with the pakis and chill. Mix in the dried prawns to serve.

Malay foods seem to be a lot more subtle and interesting, than Filipino foods, and that puzzles me. Perhaps the Malays have a longer and more 'civilised' culture history than my neighbours on this small island?