Subconscious?

When I was preparing for the construction crew to come in and work on my house last month I had to shuffle a bunch of objects around for safety reasons, and while the siding and walls were being worked on and pounded on I had to take all of the art off of the walls. After that phase was completed I put things more or less back where they had been, although I switched a few paintings around. About a week later I looked at the corner of the dining room as shown in the photo above and was struck by the fact that the three prominent pieces of art all featured pretty much the same color scheme, with very similar shades of blue and rosy reddish-orange. The tea cabinet that Lu Yu is sitting on has similiar colors also.

The consistency was entirely unintentional. I definitely didn't notice it when I put things there. The fact that the three individuals pictured are Lu Yu, Saint Cecilia and Marcel Duchamp also reveals a great deal about me within a small, concentrated area of my house.

Ceramic statue of Lu Yu, Tang Dynasty writer of 茶經 (Cha Jing, loosely translated as the "Classic of Tea").



Borderline kitsch print of a painting of Saint Cecilia, the Patron Saint of Music. (The painting is not distorted the way the photo is.)



Painting/Collage of Marcel Duchamp, by Max Estenger. The small bit of text says, "le style, c'est l'homme."

The 5 Edible Bats of Good Fortune

Last weekend I bought some Ling Gok (Trapa bicornis), also called "water caltrops," "devil pods," and ten thousand other names. I've never seen them available in the store before, but I believe that they are part of the commonly consumed foods for Lunar New Year. I like that the seed is lucky because it looks like a bat, which is lucky because its name (fú, 蝠​) is very similar to the word for good fortune (fú​, 福). I bought seven of them, and I don't intend to eat them because they're too awesome looking. They feel nice in my hand and make a nice dry rattling sound. I gave two of them away, so now I have five, but I just remembered that bats are usually in groups of five anyway, so it was fortuitous.

Water Caltrops with Butterfly

by Australian poet Jan Owen

from the May 2000 issue of Quadrant Magazine

"Things answer our gaze": Bachelard

The caltrops are too stale to boil with salt.
Posed on a Chinese plate, dreaming of flight,
they are black grotesques of primitive art,
bat fetish, owl mask, shaman horns.

Real wings are frayed red gold: the butterfly
was snagged on the balcony stucco yesterday.
I set it down on the same plate to die.
Already its tongue was a slack watch-spring

and its legs intending something feeble and fine
like a Chekhov heroine…

Peking Opera costumes

These two costumes were on display at the Peking Opera performance I attended earlier this month, which was partly a new year celebration, in spite of not being held very close to Lunar New Year. But it was also an opportunity to hear Wu Rujun, who was at the beginning of a tour. Up close the silk and embroidery were quite fabulous. The closeup of the dragon is the sleeve of the red costume.

The concert itself was performed without the elaborate costumes since it was not an actual staged opera, but it was great. The performance/celebration was held in the enormous ballroom of a restaurant on the bay at sunset, and the light was terrible for taking photographs, so these are not great.

Tea Business

I'm working on a tea business idea which I think will be quite good. I'm not ready to reveal too much about it yet, but I'm trying to get all of my ducks in a row. I've built the small network of social networking pieces and parts of the website already. At times I wish that I had a business partner, or maybe even two, but I don't see that happening any time soon.

Chinese Tea Culture

I'm fascinated with the range of yixing sculptures that are used in gongfu tea, but some of them are really tacky. I particularly dislike the chubby, naked little boys who pee when you pour water or tea over them. There are also some questionable nude female figures, although I've not seen them in use so I don't know if they have a similar gimicky thing about them. I do like the turtles and money frogs, and especially the mythical creatures and lions.

Puzzling

This afternoon while I was at lunch I stopped into Pema Kharpo, the Tibetan shop on Greenwood. I've spoken with the owner (whose name I can not spell) before, but not about tea. I was looking through the books and found some things I was looking for, including a basic Tibetan-English dictionary. I knew that he probably didn't, but I asked him if he had any books that talked about Tibetan tea. He didn't, but he said that he had some tea. The "teas" that he carries in his shop are Tibetan herbal medicinal teas, which I wasn't interested in. He asked me why I was interested in information about tea, so I told him that I was researching and writing about Tibetan tea and tea culture. I tried to talk a little about Tibetan butter tea, but there was a bit of a language barrier. He asked me about tea ceremonies and said that Sakya Monatsery a few blocks away performs them frequently, which was a very useful piece of information. He also asked me if I knew about "Zendog" which is also nearby. I said I'd heard about it but had not been there. He told me that the person there performs tea ceremonies all the time in his teashop. I was quite curious about this because I had heard something about the place but did not know that it had any connection to Tibetan tea. When I got back to my office I looked it up. It's basically a Chinese tearoom and art gallery, having nothing to do with Tibet. The person there serves tea gongfu style. I find it a little surprising that a Tibetan would be so loose with his cultural identifiers, but at least he's not biased against this man who is Chinese. Perhaps he's Taiwanese. It seems a little odd to me that a Chinese place would be named after a very Japanese school of buddhism also.

Intro, or perhaps a redirection

This blog may be used for discussions about aspects of Chinese and Tibetan culture that are not entirely tea-related. Anything I write that is really mostly about tea will be on Gongfugirl.com.