Misalignments between Menu and Cutlery - The Spaghetti Tree

Firstly the image here does not match the text. The piece of street art with its Mexican Day of the Dead look about it, that strange uprising of black lines, which don't seem to be related to each other have nothing to do with the misalignment of menu descriptions and cutlery, other then being a non-matching set - a metaphor of misalignment.

As a rule, I if go somewhere where the food fails I don't care to revisit it in words: if it is forgettable I forget it. But The Spaghetti Tree in Bourke Street Melbourne, a place with the kind of carpet patterned with time and grease spots that constitutes a warning in itself,  has a serious disjunction between the menu and the cutlery which gives it the restaurant equivalent of stepping on a three-corned jack.

Eschewing what is probably a once in a lifetime opportunity to check out the duck risotto with parmesan and hoisin sauce, I take my chances with one of the specials - lamb shanks "the meat falling off the bone" with avocado gremolata.  There is some discussion around the table about avocado gremolata, gremolata with its idea of sharp piquancy and avocado which has neither. Still, it is dinner time. Now if the lamb shanks had fallen off the bone it might have been around the time they were severed from the rest of the lamb as there was certainly no falling off of any meat, it was coupled to the shanks as if by a powerful electro-magnet.  That the kitchen had a fair idea of the meat's disinclination to fall off the bone was underlined by the dish coming out with a steak knife. You know a dish looks plain unattractive when you hear yourself sigh seeing there are two of something instead of the usual one. On the upside the staff were fine.

Taking to Melbourne with a spoon - The Food Report

Three and a bit days in Melbourne gives quite some scope for eating out. My first stop was Hu Tong Dumpling Bar.  I had never heard of this place but coming along Market Lane, one look into the window at No 14  at the steamer baskets was enough to convince me we should go in. We get a tiny corner table under the glass window looking into the kitchen, the rythmical theatre of the dumpling makers ensues.  With their hands on auto-pilot two of the kitchen staff dumple on the double. The Shao-long biu dumplings which are the house specialty, get made, again, and again and again. There is a gracious economy to the dough rolling, the thin rolling pin stretching out tiny circles, packing the mixture, which must be part stock, and stretching , pleating and twisting the dumpling top. Once steamed these dumplings exude a rich soup, so the trick is to take a little bite to drink up the soup first, or ease it back into your bowl, so you can spoon up the soup later, before you properly waylay your dumpling.  There are shreds of ginger, not quite raw and not quite pickled to go withe the soup dumpling. These excellent dumplings I only order on my second visit.  The first visit had me fall for the wonton dumplings with chilli sauce. These are the kind of food that you eat, and soon find yourself plotting to eat again.  Perfectly silky dumplings in an aromotic sauce, lively with schezwhan and chili, spring onion, a little oily so the flavour holds on to everything in just the right way. That we went back the next day speaks volumes. Might I recommend a  slight hangover to go with the palliative Tiger Beer, a plate of chilli wontons, the shao-long biu ( my spelling no doubt is dodgy) a pot of tea, pork dumplings and turnip dumplings? Yes!

A Room with Three Views

Well, three is an understatement, or more precisely an under-number. There were any number of views from level 13 of the Paramount Apartments on Exhibition Street.  While there is no doubt that the interiors of the Paramount Apartments are tired but functional, the location on the edge of china town and the corner of Bourke Street delivers a number of delicious food options. That ramen is now the food of the moment and book shops an endangered species was clearly demonstrated as what was the Mary Martin Bookshop Cafe around the corner was refitted over the weekend into a Yasu  Ramen (sorry the name is approximate) and bustling with noodle slurpers by Tuesday.

PS In case you are wondering about the title, the image is three layers of the view, two photos and a watercolour pencil sketch, showing how well Melbourne integrates, art, day and night.

Exhorting you to be a better person? Melbourne Duckboard Place

 

Like regulations and public opinion,  street art is overwritten as quick as a shake of the spray can. Like the oyster, Melbourne accretes a lustre of art work on its many  inside surfaces. The hectic overlay is part of its charm, the competition for wall space, the palimpest's time honoured effect. The too-much of everything at once, the gestalt and energy of it are convincing.  If the the walls don't have ears they certainly  have voice.

Readers might have noticed I've been away.  There is a bit of catching up to do  from my Melbourne notes.

A Thousand Moons, a million years [ squared] - brought to you by the Big Bang

Mid-winter Melbourne, and Federation Square is anything but. [Square that is.] The Light in Winter, modern festival of the campfire and homage to the candle, brings you a 'Light Hearted', a thousand moons of light, shades, poems, knitted decals, ripped fabirc, neon built scaffolded into a pyramid.  Depending how dizzy you want to be, you can spin the light into a carousel of coloured bars with a simple twist of your feet or hold steady and focus on the cold clear constellation of  these winter night lights.

De- Okratisation at Work

This double take on okra  might just be mumbo gumbo. Up close, really close, the okra are reminiscent, in form only, of chokos.  Careful observers of de-Okratisation at work might notice that here are two different pairs of Okra, the sketched in Okra having made its way into last night's dinner, thickening the pot as it were.

Writing on the Wall - Commentary on the Economics of Publishing

I photographed this stylish stencil in Lisbon in 2009, just near the Elevator. If the economy in Lisbon - and Portugal - has gone to the dogs, the walls have been taken over by street art.  Is there a relationship between economics and street art?  I think the author/artist may have hit on something here.

Sign Here - Twilight at the Urban Icon

 So, coming around the corner of the Esplanade boardwalk, just after Queenscliff Bridge I spy this sticker poster, which is trademark Shepherd Fairly.  This is the fourth of these posters I've seen pasted up the North Shore. Does it mean that Shepherd Fairly dropped by for a bit of past up fun or have these gone viral?   The top sticker made me notice the very naff sticker below. What is that fellow's head made of?  An angry stapler?  Finding interesting stickers posted up makes the outdoors into a lottery of al fresco art.

Keirle Park, 20 June 2011, A Quiet Still Flows Out

The longest Monday night and least light ever at 5.30, evening really, as afternoon is gone. For the time it takes, ten minutes, to put down this wash of colours there is no-one in the park that I can see, though I can hear, off to my right at the end of the carpark the last of the skaters talking, one last skater rumbling over the bowl in a skerrick of street light.

Muddled in Translation - -Capa -tulation ?

No doubt I am still in the clutch of my Capa phase.  In my translating process these people average out, the quirky become less so, the gaunt get more flesh on their bones, the gorgeous babies become just babies. Here the lovely detail of the child twiddling the button of his father's uniform, is unreadable, I couldn't manage the fingers and the button.Still the point is paying attention in the first place.

Alternative Uses of the Common Cold

Mostly one would be inclined to feel that having a cold, being under the weather - as the saying goes, is not an optimal state. Sneezing, for example, can be both tiring and disorientating.  Headaches can take the edge off getting on with things. But there is something nearly narcotic and indulgent about that sleepy euphoria of  a cold, a pleasant disconnection with the pace of what is going on. One slips from being a protagonist to being an observer, albeit one that has things to do. Some people take drugs to get this effect, and while I would not want to be wrapped in rhinovirus euphoria often, sometimes one might sit back and enjoy being under the weather.

Seriously Prussian Blue: Engagement with the Camera

 

The temptation is to just sit down and keep sketching from the Phaiton's Definitive Collection of  Robert Capa's work till I use up all the 40 pages in this sketchbook. The Prussian Blue is sterner, cooler stuff than the previous sketches I've made from Robert Capa's collection in Cobalt Deep Blue.  It seems this man looks straight through the camera to the viewer, and then there is that odd angle of the hand and wrist, nearly a question mark.

How the Outside Works at Night

Does it seem odd the disconnections between visible things on dark nights, or is the continuity of objects that daylight gives stranger but being diurnal we are innured to it? This, the scrappiest of sketches, documents the disjunction and spaces between objects,  appeals to me for some reason I have been trying to figure out since last August. Nothing like slowly wittlingly away at an idea.

Headlights, clouds, a host of Catachans.... Oh dear what is Happening to Bart Brassica

If this looks like a bit of nightmare for Bart Brassica, the ground as soft as underdone marshmallow, and him staring into a dazzle of headlights, that is because it is a nightmare. Those Warhammer Catachan fellows that Frank Winkler was painting at lunch time  the last time he worked for Bart seemed to have combined with a batch of Mavis Eggwhistle's Curried Tuna Casserole, a sure fire recipe for indigestion as all of Mavis's friends know, to produce a graphically bad night's sleep for Bart Brassica.

Winter light the colour of rain and clouds

Shadows in winter seem colder, here it is almost as if these daffodils had forgotten their sunny colouring, the one coloured daffodil, looking on from the margin, an interloper and afterthought. 

Time you thief, who loves to get sweets on your list

In a mischiefous misappropriation of a line from Leigh Hunt's famous poem "Jenny Kissed Me", the title of the blog really subverts Hunt's list to the many jobs of  both time and DNA. These lollie watches have been configured with more than a nudge towards that helical hard working molecule, the home of both the body clock and the genetic time-bomb that sees must of us off.

Something Fishy about the Bananas

The underlying enquiry in this double-take on bananas, of what is more real once a copy and an original are copied is a question that continues to intrigue me, with its implication about the realness of both visual and written work.  There seems to be differential value, sometimes we want the picture of the real banana, and sometimes value more its representation, though naturally if you're hungry the thing itself is the thing.

Brusselling with Winter - How to Succeed when Trying

The Brassica family are something of a recurrent theme on Show Me The Treasure, though, and this is an entirely personal view, I am not quite sure if Brussel Sprouts are treasure. An indicator species for winter, a diminuitive satire on the cabbage,  these two speciments packed an olfactory punch well above their weight, a condition  I had time to observe while scribbling away on their portraits. The problem is how to cook them, to avoid any repetition of the overboiled, water laden khaki bags with mush pink hearts that are too easy to recollect from childhood.  A quick look in that reliable  Doyen of Cookbooks, Time Life's The Good Cook/Techniques and Recipes - Vegetables show only two recipes. To put this in context Kohlrabi gets three and potatoes 27,  making the Brussell Sprout something of an outsider vegetable.  One recipe starts off with boiling, which I would avoid, the second with braising and a 4:1 ratio of sprouts to butter, which seems to defeat the purpose.  My friend Ingrid once served them to us stir fried, the compact cross sections still holding up, with that slight,desirable singed edges to the slices, and a little garlic - slivered and golden brown from stir frying, and I may be imagining this, toasty  flaked almonds, a method which avoids all of the pitfalls of over brussellling.

A Stunning Result for Bart Brassica

You may recollect that the last time we saw Bart Brassica he was head-high in his Daffodil Crop, suspended not by his britches but masking tape to a bamboo pole.  Hetty Egg had been watching Bart through what all her family call her Spy Glass, which is a $45 brass and faux woodgrain SkyMaster telescope she bought from the Innovare Catalogue.  She has told some of her younger and more naive great nieces this telescope belonged to her Great Grandfather who was a Ship's Captain sailing cod boats out of Boston.  Mavis Eggwhistle, on hearing this while making up poesies, says CodsWallop. Anyway, Hettie had completely forgotten her vow to make Bart get down from his pole by 4pm sharp the day she had noticed him taped up to the bamboo pole. Not that her cherry picker would have started. as the ignition went in it about six years ago. She was telling Mavis this on the phone about 6pm that evening, adding that in any case Bart had dissappeared. Mavis could not figure how Bart got taped up there and went straight over, found him head down in the Daffs, and, well, stunned may overstate it but maybe slightly daffy. What happened next neither of them is saying. As Mavis hid Hetty's SpyGlass, she can't either.

Further Capa- talisations with Gary Cooper

Yes, one has to use quite a bit of imagination but the model for this really did come from Robert Capa's  photograph of Gary Cooper, nimbly making his way across a fallen tree fording a stream (not of consciousness). A few posts back there was one of a racing track official in a Gogol-esque coat. Now the puzzle for me is: was the fishing rod a prop or was Cooper really fishing?  The vagaries of translating the image off one page and onto another with a broad brush has given Cooper's coat more movement, where one ( well, make that me)might imagine that he is hying off after the fish on foot, remonstrating with them about how he can offer them a better deal, even a speaking part, if they come across.

Keirle Park, June 2011, Voyage of a Beagle

Winter in Keirle Park, the trees at the edge are charcoal green and the sky more black than blue. These two smaller boys, under the impression they were in charge, followed in the scratch and sniff wake of the beagle.

Daffo- downs and the Dodgy Elevation

Bart Brassica is trying out a new crop of Daffodils, which has the one half of the neighbourhood talking about just what set off this rush of interest in daffodils, and the other half, his Farmer friends, saying what the dang hell is Bart doing working up high, his head way up in the blooms, taped to a pole? If you look closely you can just see an edge of what looks suspiciously like masking tape is keeping him strapped to that bamboo pole and up in the air, hardly a safe work practice.  He has been up there for some time now and while it is a perfectly lovely day, and undoubtedly the outlook is very pleasant, his neigbour Hetty Egg is thinking about starting up her ancient Cherry Picker and driving right over there if he is not down by 4pm sharp.

Plumbing Fixtures and False Cognates of the Physical World

This tap at Moore Park Tennis Courts had a neat edge of moss. I am not sure if my prediliction for taps and hydrants is because they are inherently interesting and often overlooked, or more prosaically don't involve landscape and perspective and are therefore easier to draw. The paving pattern here added that element of perspective which very quickly got away from me. At Rawson Park Tennis Courts there is a tap with a slow leak on one corner of the mod grass court that illustrates a paradigm that I am always on the lookout for.

False Cognate of the Physical World

The tennis court tap
that drips
the mod grass greener.

Cobalt Blue - After Robert Capa

Sketching people in photographs must be cheating? The Phaiton complete works of Robert Capa is mesmeric and sketching things from it a way to see the images more clearly. Setting off with an oversize brush, Cobalt Blue Deep, (why don't Winsor & Newton say Blue Deep Cobalt?) and new "Draw & Wash' Art Spectrum 210gsm paper ( I love this paper, perhaps in a past life I was a silver fish?),  allowing about 3 minutes a page, is a fine way to Capa-talise on Endre Ernő Friedmann's opus.

The Crab Series - Ibsen-esque & Under Water

This scanned collage is from The Babies series.  The people in the local fish shop needed a bit of convincing as to why I wanted that dimunitive crab but it seems, like the gelati cups, once you say 'For art.' they go a little blank, like perhaps you have said you've a loaded gun in your bag, and give it to you. This image with the hand of the maker appearing like some ghostly puppeteer may suggest some kind of argument for determinism, but I don't think so. Perhaps its about the plastification of the ocean?  The intersection of the still and moving image? Genetic engineering? The eeeriness of childhood?   A take on Ibsen's The Doll House? Having toys to play with? The temptation to retrofit some theoretical framework is nearly tempting but all too silly.

Mr Midas's Dream Girl - Ms Goldi Locks

You might remember Mr Midas, similarly brought to life from an assemblage of peanut flavoured, peanut shaped, chocolate sweets? Ms Goldi Locks is the result of Confection Currents, and in her past life actually was Mr Midas, giving an illustrated example of how sooner or later, using a cosmological time scale, everything is merely a remix of shiny ex-stellar atoms, or as here, sweets. Sadly Ms Locks proved just as unpalatable as Mr Midas.

Two Sided Eggplant - or Aubergenetics

What happens when you cross an eggplant with a pencil?  The answer might be 'colouring in" or as in here, a kind of pugnacious egg fruit, rotund with colour. Under the varied purples ( in case you're wondering, it rhymes with whirlpool) you can see the egg shell white peeping through. Tomorrow night this subject will reappear in ratatouille.

Beanie & Gold Longhorn on a Bolo

There was a sense of occasion in this bus traveller last Saturday, his wheelie bag, black suit jacket and bolo tie with its golden longhorn cincture,  implying that he was going somewhere special. The beanie was pulled down past his ears, a little over his forehead, and he was wearing what I call Steptoe gloves which might be more politely known as mittens. The express sketch is the bluntest of blunt instruments, more a prompt for remembering than any sort of facsimile. Wherever he was going I hope he got there safely, no doubt he would arrive quite a bit too early.