Craftspersonship

We got home from a dinner party fairly late on Saturday night, I popped in my earplugs and was down for the count --Filippo was woken up by the sound of 'something exploding' in the middle of the night, and true to form as my Brave Protector, went straight back to sleep.

It wasn't until I wandered into the kitchen to cook up some coffee on Sunday morning that we saw the source of the noise: six tiles had come loose from their glued spots on the wall and crashed down onto the floor.

"Six?" you say, "But that wall looks completely naked!"

Oh yes; as we talked to neighbours who had experienced the same destruction and poked at the wall a little bit, loose tiles started falling into our hands --so we decided to strip all the wiggly ones rather than have them fall and smash at their leisure.

While cleaning up the big mess, why did I still get a thrill from seeing Made In Italy stamped on the back of every diabolical tile? It's not the fault of the tile designers that the muratori used cheap glue to fix them to the walls; my longstanding love of Italian art and craftsmanship (craftspersonship?) helped to keep me smiling while I swept, stacked, vacuumed, scrubbed and did it all over again as more tiles came tumbling down... To be honest, Filippo's freakish ability to sing and dance around no matter how ugly the situation had me laughing for a good part of the day.

Speaking of craftspersonship, two of my favourite girls in the world (and their respective boys) will be joining me at the Venice Biennale next weekend --every two years since 1895, the Venice has hosted contemporary artists from all over the world, organising works by country-themed pavilion in the two main venues: the Arsenale and the Giardini. Anju and Charlie will be there for 3 whole days, while Esther, Pablo and I are only darting out for the Saturday; I will have to spend this week working out a sophisticated Visit Plan because there are an insane amount of events sprinkled around town, and I want get the most out of our short visit.

I really hope they offer AudioGuides because I tend to have a hard time wrapping my brain around contemporary expression... Either way, I look forward to discussing everything with the girls --art appreciation is in Esther's genes: her mom works at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and we always got to use her free passes to visit the most exciting exhibitions in town. She once helped me debrief after my mind-blowing Mondrian encounter: I had gone to the Albertina to see "From Goya to Picasso", and with a few hours left on my admission, dragged myself down to see Mondrian --who up until that point I hated, and particularly associated with L'Oreal hair gel packaging.

My wrath increased as I came down the escalator into the exhibition hall, and heard the AudioGuide explain that the ideas behind the diamond-shaped painting hanging before me caused the end of Mondrian's lifelong friendship with painters in the De Stijl group --he dropped out when Theo van Doesburg dared introduce a diagonal line.

But in the end, Mondrian turned out a somewhat extreme version of my kind of guy: he was confident in his own principles, and trusted the ideals that guided his art. We should all be so lucky to have that kind of self-assuredness.

The point of that tangent, I guess, was to illustrate that I'm learning to search for meaning behind all pieces of art that are strewn across my path, and most importantly, am keeping like-minded friends close to help guide my process of discovery.

One Post for Burma

A BBC news report caught my ear on September 22nd: hundreds of Burmese Buddhist monks were on their fourth day of marching against the military dictatorship in Rangoon. I learned that the public unrest had actually been escalating since February, though the original purpose of this particular protest was to seek a government apology following the beating of three monks who had been protesting a 500% overnight increase in gas prices imposed in August.

Since then, I have been checking the news three, four, five times a day; wanting to hear more about what's going on, hoping for a peaceful resolution to the problem. The BBC has been my main source not only because they seem to devote more attention to international goings-on than other networks, but also because they consistently do an amazing job of contextualising their stories; please do visit the Special Report: Burma page they have constructed specifically to help inform interested readers.

You might remember that I have a special personal interest in the suffering of the Burmese people: my friend Judy and I were among 20 volunteers who spent two weeks over Christmas (2001) helping at an orphanage for abandoned Burmese children and refugees in the Thai border town of Sangklaburi. To jog your memory, take a look at my old-skool album on Flickr (available only until Nov 5) --the photos are very low resolution because they were scanned-in, but you'll get the idea.

That trip was a shocking exercise in academic interest vs. practical experience; we had spent four months prior to the visit studying, fundraising and preparing, so I 'knew' what I was in for...until we arrived and came face-to-face with people more desperately poor than I could've ever imagined. Each of the 120 kids at the orphanage had his/her own sad story, and the whole town was barely scraping by at a subsistence level due to its volatile composition of unwanted refugees, hilltown rivals and ethnic Thais.

In such a tragic setting, our volunteer group couldn't believe the serenity of the kids and caregivers at Baan Unrak; all were up for yoga practice at 5:30 every morning, and the daily routine was handled smoothly by all orphanage inhabitants --tasks delegated according to age and capacity. The four Buddhist nuns and monks were models of patience, acceptance and dedication; they paid individual attention to each of the children while keeping an eye out for potential newcomers and helping impoverished Sangklaburi residents. I'll never forget watching Dada Adi apply juice from an aloe leaf to a little girl's wounded leg; it was clearly infected and required antibiotic cream at the very least, but they simply didn't have any. We immediately donated all the expensive medical supplies our volunteer group had brought along --and I realised how much these four adults were expected/expecting to do with so few resources.

Today, netizens have agreed to write One Post for Burma --and this is mine. I continue to pray for a nonviolent handover of power from the military dictatorship to a democratic government of Burma; I pray for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, and for her appointment as rightful leader of this struggling country; I pray for the continued energy and strength of the nuns, monks and all the heroes.

If you'd like to learn more about what's going on in Burma and/or at Baan Unrak, please do take a moment to follow these links:

Baan Unrak: House of Joy

Volunteer in Thailand or Burma

Campaigning for Human Rights and Democracy in Burma

Amnesty International's 2007 Report on Myanmar

BBC: The hardship that sparked Burma's unrest

Facebook list of Burma Resources