New tea (ad)venture

the store site

After a great deal of mostly secretive work, I have finished and launched the two websites for Phoenix Tea: the online store for Phoenix Tea Shop and the more informational site for Phoenix Tea House.

Phoenix Tea Shop will sell tea and teaware and other tea-related products. It will also endeavor to locate special tea items for customers by request. It is not intended to replicate any of the existing companies or stores already in existence, because that wouldn't be interesting for us, and there's no need for it.

the tea house site

 Phoenix Tea House will eventually have an actual physical location. It will be a place where people can come drink, buy and learn about tea. We also intend to present special events in the tea house, including tea ceremonies from various worldwide traditions, and educational seminars and classes. It will also house Phoenix Tea Museum, which will not be a formal museum per se, but will be an ongoing display of tea-related objects with information and identification accompanying each piece. Unlike the objects on display in most museums, the teaware in our museum will be for the most part still usable, and will be brought out for demonstrations and special occasions, or for the purpose of discussion and examination.

There's always further refinement to be done in all of this, but for the most part I am very pleased with the way the online and offline presence looks and the way the different parts of it function. I got a great deal of satisfaction out of doing the design work. I'm glad that this group of projects has its own very distinctive look and feel, one that I feel confident presenting to the tea world.

If you want to keep up with what we're doing, "like" our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter.

Birds and Stones and Lyric Essays

I just discovered Anthony Doerr's writings through a curious set of circumstances and connections. I really enjoy writing of this type, and his is particularly powerful and evocative.

"To know what is still here is difficult enough. To know what was once here is basically impossible. Who is left who can envision the United States with its original populations of bison, salmon, and whales? Who can imagine the Atlantic with the great auk, or the South with the ivory-billed woodpecker, or the Midwest with its billions of passenger pigeons? How many oysters filtered the waters of preindustrial New York Harbor? How many beavers stitched together the ancient wetlands of Connecticut?"

- excerpt from Phantoms and Prey
OnEarth Magazine

"The lesson of rocks, of course, is not a lesson in permanence but rather the opposite. Change, that’s the only music a pebble (or person) can count on, and in the lifetimes of stones change comes in relentless concatenation on scales so large our brains aren’t quite evolved to understand them.
...
If these kitchen-counter pebbles had memories, if they could unpack their lithic histories and unroll them across the floor like scrolls, they’d show us flashes of heat in the crucible of the Earth, epochs of darkness, the heavens spitting snow, then rain, then light. On those scrolls would be wildernesses of silence so vast that to dwell within them for a fraction of their length would make us insane with terror and loneliness."

- excerpts from Cloudy Is the Stuff of Stones
Orion Magazine

The illustration above is of a pair of now-extinct Passenger Pigeons by John James Audubon.

These two animals generally avoid each other.

This is an amazing level of synchronicity, posted in the order the photos were taken. I don't know what they were looking at. (Incidentally, both of them are adults and the same age. The small one, Natasha, is tiny but fierce.)

Discovered? Are you sure that's what you wanted to write?

Last week I read this on the Weyerhauser web site for The Pacific Rim Bonsai Collection, which has been closed since Spring, 2009, and will be reopening this Spring for a temporary exhibit.

"Did You Know?
U.S. soldiers discovered bonsai in Japan during World War II."

I hope that I don't need to explain to anyone now reading this what is wrong with that statement.

I do like these two unusual bonsai that are part of the Weyerhauser collection, though.

Ketjak, the Ramayana Monkey Chant

A tangent related to something I was looking for led me back to the Ketjak, generally referred to in English as the "Ramayana Monkey Chant." Balinese Gamelan has had a profound influence on Western academic music, which is understandable given its complexity. There's something pretty fabulous about the compelling rhythm of those metallophones and gongs...

While the ketjak is a creation of this century, it is descended from something much more ancient — the trance dance, the dance of exorcism called sanghjang; its ancestry is clear. Ostensibly, the ketjak is a reenactment of the battle described in the Ramayana epic — in which the monkey hordes came to the aid of Prince Rama in his battle with the evil King Ravana — complete with a chorus imitating monkeys, as they chant the syllable tjak.

Music from the Carpathian Mountains

This CD, which I picked up this morning to listen to while I was working, is quite curious. On the cover it is called, "Pan Pipe Songs and Dances From Transylvania (The Land of Dracula) and Other Mysterious Regions," but in iTunes it is called "Greetings from Hungaria Part 1 - Traditionals." I don't where the country of "Hungaria" is, and the liner notes say:

Transylvania is legendary as the home of the vampire Count Dracula, based on the exploits of a Romanian noble, Vlad the Impaler. But the mythical ghouls have been the least of the problems endured by this Eastern European region, which was invaded by barbarian tribes, Hungarians, Mongols, Turks, Hapsburgs, and Soviets.

The region known as Transylvania sweeps southeastward from the present-day Hungarian border to central Romania. It is bounded on three sides by mountains. The first record of its mane [sic], which means "beyond the forest," appears in documents from the 12th century. Because it is a fertile area and was crossed by important trade routes, rulers of many lands wanted to control Transylvania.

I don't know as much as I'd like to about the history of this region, but the music sounds very much like Hungarian folk music, or at least it would if there were only the hurdy-gurdies, fiddles, hammer dulcimers, and vocals without the bagpipes. The track titles are in Hungarian:

1. Szigetközi Dudanóták (Pipe Tunes of Szigetkoz) [2:15]
2. Zörög a Cidrus (The Citruswood Is Whispering) [1:32]
3. Bonchidai (Slow Lad's Dance) [3:21]
4. Eleki Román Táncdallamok (Dance Tunes of Elek) [3:21]
5. Dráva Menti Horváth Népdalok (Folk Songs of Drava Valley) [3:19]
6. Széki Keserves (Lament of Szek) [2:09]
7. Szépkenyerúszentmártoni Köszöntó (Greeting Song) [1:52]
8. Amerikás Dal (Hungarian Song from the American Emigration) [3:42]
9. Lassú Csárdás és Bertóké Verbunk (Slow Csardas and Bertok's Dance) [2:46]
10. Udvarhelyszéki Dalok (Songs of Transylvania) [3:57]
11. Széki Verbunk (Szek Dance) [1:30]
12. Bánat, Bánat, de Bánatos Vagyok (Sorrow, Sorrow, I Am Sorrowful) [1:53]
13. Lónal Keserves (Lament of Lona) [3:19]
14. észak-mezóségi Tánczene (Dance Music of Northern Transylvania) [3:42]
15. En Az úton (On My Way) [2:01]
16. Székelyföldi Táncok (Dances of Szekely) [3:04]
17. Azért Vagyok Lenvirág (I Am a Flax Flower) [0:24]

In spite of its incredibly silly title, the music is fabulous, like Hungarian folk music.

Snuff Bottles

I've always found snuff bottles to be curious little objects. The artistry in some of them is quite impressive, but I never really took the time to learn much about them. This article has some good general information about them. Excerpt:

Chinese snuff bottles were only made in the Qing Dynasty, which started in 1644 and ended in 1911, and contrary to what some people think, they were used only for holding powdered tobacco, usually with some herbs and spices in it, which was inhaled through the nose. They were never used for opium; that’s a totally different thing.

They actually started in the imperial court. For the first hundred years of their existence, pretty much throughout the 18th century, tobacco was exceedingly expensive in China, so taking snuff was a habit. It was definitely something for the upper crust of the imperial family and the influential minority of China. It wasn’t until the 19th century that you see a diffusion to the general population.

I own two Chinese snuff bottles myself. One is layered and carved glass, given to me as a gift from a friend. The second is an inexpensive, porcelain, recently created (and therefore not genuine) bottle in the form of Tang Dynasty tea scholar Lu Yu (陆羽).