More blatant voyerism

And how about this girl, eh.

Cup with curved rim and qingbai glaze, Northern Song, 11th century, Jiangxi, or perhaps Fanchang county, Anhui, height 7.3 cm.

The word used in the business for a perfect shape like this is "finely potted"; and she is: she shows off that which is best about Chinese porcelain (thanks to the world's best kaolin): it is very pliable when soft and extremely hard once fired, making it possible to produce very thin, fine shapes.


The catalog:

Qingbai wares were made over a fairly long period of time, from the early Northern Song period to the middle of the Yuan period. Their evolution follows a trajectory familiar for many types of wares: the earliest examples are finely made and take their inspiration from already popular wares made at other kilns (...); then there is a period of growing confidence, when the potters develop and perfect their styles -- the classical period; then attention turns to maximizing profit and methods of improving production, such as upside-down firing; and, finally, quality starts to drop off and an attempt is made to cover the deficiency with extravagant decoration and novelties.

Of course, art historians of Chinese pottery are interested in this trajectory model because its automatic application helps them "date" pieces (rather dubiously, I should think); but there is something convincing about it: it may seem to fit many other art forms -- consider the trajectory of Italian painting between 1400 and 1750. There are probably important psychological and economic reasons why this should be so; it bears thinking about, does it not.

But enough theorizing. Look here: the superiority of porcelain over plastic no longer lies in color and shine; but it still lies in the feel of things (porcelain is heavy, hard and cool); and -- in texture. If you look closely at the piece you can just make out (despite my bad photography) that the color of the qingbai glaze is not as smooth to the eye as its surface is smooth to touch. Rather, if you look very closely you will see that the color looks like curdled milk: with more or less uniform-sized fat bits of white swimming in a somewhat darker shade of white. (Click to enlarge).



In this, qingbai is like Lucknawi emrboidery: white on white. (You see a fellow in a shirt and it looks kind of crumpled, like he forgot to iron it. But then you look closer and -- oh my god -- it is covered with a field of tiny flowers!) There is a moment of wonderful surprise; and the pleasure of knowing that we have seen something most will never do.

Dancing pork bellies

I don't know who Francisco Capelo is, but the man sure has taste. Wow. Taste most commensurate with his (obviously) pretty ample financial firepower, too: the show of his Chinese pottery collection at the Madre de Deus (a.k.a. Museu Nacional de Azulejo)-- that would be Mister Tile Museum to you -- is a merciless progression of take-no-prisoners masterpieces.

Through this magical forest the (very) occasional French, German or Spanish tourist marches briskly with barely the time for an occasional snapshot.

I carried away 450 photos. Here are five.

This piece is a tripod censer with a purple-splashed jun-ware glaze, Jin or Yuan dynasty, ca. 13th century, 7.3 cm high. It is also a meibutsu, having once been owned by the Moris of Hiroshima.

Look at the detail of the crackle (and, as they say on porn websites, "click to enlarge yourself"):


The mouth is a kind of blunderbuss -- it's pure pornography, really -- :


And look at this lady's stubby feet jammed into the world's pointiest stilettos:

Would not these tiny trotters make the world's most delicious pie-de-cochon?

And do be my guest, go ahead, take a prurient peek (in the privacy of your cabin) at her incredibly erotic belly (no, love, please, never lose a gram of weight, do not, I repeat, do not change a thing):

*

Jun wares -- writes the catalog learnedly, if ungrammatically -- are among the most fascinating and controversial Chinese ceramics. Unlike most greenish- or bluish glazed wares, which rely for their color on mineral oxides, it turns out to be very difficult to understand how the typical thickly-bubbled Jun glaze generates its characteristic opalescent blue color. Current theory holds that it is generated by a phenomenon called "liquid-liquid phase separation" in which glasses in the glaze separate out within other glasses during cooling. When light strikes the glaze, it is scattered by the glass-like particles in the glaze and produces the same sort of effect as when light from the sun is scattered by the atmosphere and appears blue to our eyes.

There, fellows, the girl wears the sky for a dress.

*

The Francisco Capelo of the collection is probably not this Francisco Capelo, but I rather liked the idea that he might be: "Yeah," his collection set by side with his portfolio would be telling us, "I sell this stuff because I can -- God only knows why; and also because I just don't want to keep it around the house (I mean, would you?); then I use the proceeds to buy something of universal and eternal value whose quality I could not hope to match in a thousand years. For me, it is a win-win situation."

(In financial markets, this would be termed arbitrage).

Lisbon, 7 A.M.

Not really Qing, but pretty all the same

From the people who brought you the tobacco leaf reproductions, here is a mug in a style called Qing.




Not really Qing, but pretty all the same.

Gaivota

I have spent many years crying over this song, never knowing what it means, not caring what it means:

Se uma gaivota viesse
Trazer-me o céu de lisboa
No desenho que fizesse,
Nesse céu onde o olhar
É uma asa que não voa,
Esmorece e cai no mar.

Que perfeito coração
No meu peito bateria,
Meu amor na tua mão,
Nessa mão onde cabia
Perfeito o meu coração.

Se um português marinheiro,
Dos sete mares andarilho,
Fosse quem sabe o primeiro
A contar-me o que inventasse,
Se um olhar de novo brilho
No meu olhar se enlaçasse.

Que perfeito coração
No meu peito bateria,
Meu amor na tua mão,
Nessa mão onde cabia
Perfeito o meu coração.

Se ao dizer adeus à vida
As aves todas do céu,
Me dessem na despedida
O teu olhar derradeiro,
Esse olhar que era só teu,
Amor que foste o primeiro.

Que perfeito coração
No meu peito morreria,
Meu amor na tua mão,
Nessa mão onde perfeito
Bateu o meu coração.

For years I felt that I knew enough: Lisboa, gaivota, coração (Lisbon, seagull, heart) -- one understands enough, no? Certainly enough to cry in one's cups in the hour before dawn.

And now, willy nilly, I find that Portuguese is rubbing off on me -- undesired, unbeknownst -- and that I now know what the song says -- and, guess what, no, I don't, no, not really.

For it says this:

Oh that a seagull could come
And draw for me the sky of Lisbon
In a drawing he sketched
In that sky where to look
Is to be like a wing that fails to fly
Faints and falls into the sea.

Oh that a perfect heart
Could beat in my chest --
My love in your hand --
This hand where it fit
So perfectly, my heart.

Oh that a Portuguese sailor,
Wanderer of the seven seas,
Who knows just the thing
To tell me first of all that he has discovered,
Oh that a gaze at the new brilliance
Might become ensnared in my looking.

Oh that a perfect heart
Could beat in my chest --
My love in your hand --
This hand where it fit
So perfectly, my heart.

Oh that saying goodbye to life
All the birds of the sky
Could give me in their farewell
Your last gaze,
That gaze that was solely yours
Love that oh were it could have been the first.

Oh that a perfect heart
Could beat in my chest --
My love in your hand --
This hand where it fit
So perfectly, my heart.

Which is what I had known for years already: Lisboa, gaivota, coração. All this time here, all that stealthy, unplanned for linguistic progress amounts to a single gain: the image of one's gaze cast into the liquid sky of Lisboa dropping down into the sea like Icarus, like a seagull which has fainted on the wing, fainted on the wing with pleasure.

I will leave my beloved Lisboa soon to go to other lands, other sea coasts, and when there I will remember (whenever I see a sea gull) to say to myself: oh that that sea gull might bring me a piece of the sky of Lisboa.

(Sniff).

Guardar o rio

One really nice thing about lisbon is the nature of her graffiti. Most places in the world the graffiti say something like

***

or

###

or

$%#!

but here it's mostly... poetry. On my walk yesterday I saw a poem by pablo neruda and this morning this --

(I'm quoting from memory, I have no Portuguese grammar, and my computer refuses to type Portuguese diacriticals, so this is probably jumbled up in more ways than one, but still I am sure you will be able to figure out and correct the mistakes and will still get it:)

It graces a wall overlooking the river and it says

e tao dificil guardar o rio
cuando il corre dentro de nos

And you turn your gaze towards the river and you think to yourself:

E verdad.

In the forest of porcelain

One of the wonderful images in this production of Stravinsky's Rossignol is a Forbidden City built of gigantic jars of porcelain. In the Gulbenkian there is a forest of gigantic jars of porcelain:



Wondering through it -- or rather circumambulating it -- one can snatch different glimpses of this jar:








It is about 2.5 ft tall and is decorated in exquisitely painted and flawlessly fired famille verte. The topic of the decoration are auspicious birds -- cranes, phoenixes, peacocks, hawks, etc. -- and each symbollizes a different virtue. I am guessing it was produced to celebrate an important anniversary of an important figure -- its recipient -- and was meant to suggest that he possessed all the virtues represented on the jar.

Manoel does it again

The one film career which I have followed longest (since Os Canibais, 1988 -- a wonderful opera with a delightfully odd libretto), that of Manoel de Oliveira, has delivered another of its usual short, quirky, otherworldly jewels: Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura . Based on a short story by Eça de Queirós, Portugal's better-than-Flaubert, the film's action is firmly set in the nineteenth century bourgeois ethos (boy loses employment with his uncle when he develops a fancy for a girl his uncle disapproves of; quits the family business; undertakes a colonial venture; returns home to marry her, but rejects her upon discovering that she is inclined to... shop-lift) -- but also set in modern Lisbon's realities -- restaurants, euros, traffic, neon lights.

It's as if the heroes were ghosts still living out their great tragedy a hundred years later, oblivious to the fact that they have died, time has passed, and everything has changed around them.

The film's otherworldliness is only increased -- and rendered more delightful -- by a kind of fanciful, dream-like jumbling up of the city: the house where the boy works is in a recognizable street in Chiado, though the view from the storefront is onto the market hall in Principe Real and at 11 o'clock one hears from it clearly the bells of... the Basilica de Estrella -- at the top of Lapa, of course. Etc. A kind of know-your-lisbon test for her lovers.

The recurring view of Castello and the Graca hill (where I now live) is, by the way, not from the Miradouro, but from the terrace of Hotel de Chiado.

I failed one of the test's trick questions: in a certain scene a bell strikes one on a church tower with a handless clock; there are trees in front of it, possibly jacaranda. I could not identify it. Santos-o-velho? Sao Antonio? Sao Mamede? Or -- does Carmello have a tower? I will spend the next week walking with my eyes raised up to gaze at the city's clock-towers -- until I find it.

One thousand words' equivalent, or, another maginificent Lisbon building

Cheers.

Ministry of Strange Buildings

You are of course familiar with the Ministry of Silly Walks. But I am sure you have never heard of the Ministry of Strange Buildings.

The reason why you have not heard of it is because it is one of the seven Invisible Ministries in my new country, carefully hidden from the public eye (and Brussels), of which the others are:

2) Ministry for the Prevention of Rampant, Ill-advised and Potentially Harmful Economic Development (MPRIPHED),
3) Ministry of Good Food and Wet Lunch (MGFWL),
4) Ministry of Confusing, Misleading and Downright Wrong Signs (MCMDWS),
5) Ministry of the Good Life (it has been rumored to be on the verge of merging with MGFWL these past 27 years but has had a life too good to get around to do that),
6) Ministry for the Preservation of Delicious Pasteis (MPDP, and boy are they delicious),
7) Ministry for Undoing Everything That Everyone Else is Busily Doing (MUETEBD);

and

8) ? one more ministry which has not as yet defined its name or writ, having spent the last 27 years trying to work them out.

Now, the principal job of the Ministry of Strange Buildings is to strangeify Lisbon's wonderful (and whacky) architecture. Permits are issued by a committee which is likely to ask of the architect challenging questions like: do you not think there is too much symmetry and balance in the facade? And: is it not possible to tilt that tower somewhat off the vertical to shake up a bit this same old same old? Or, indeed: where is your tower?! (If you have no tower, then, well, where shall you lock up your princesses and what will the noble knights attempt to capture?)

At the top of this post is a ohoto of a building which has recently (1902) passed the Ministry's inspection. It is commendable, in my opinion, on account of the architect's honesty who, instead of designing a twelve story building in which every story had exactly the same kind of windows, designed a four story building in which each story had a different kind of windows. (He was, in other words, delivering value for money).

Below is a building whose inspection and permitting has not as yet been completed, but whose permit is expected to be granted in the near future on the same grounds: the architect is honest and the building is strange enough.