Poo Coffee

The idea sounds less than appetising: feed ripe coffee beans to a civet cat, collect what comes out the other end and make coffee from it. If you did this you'd be producing the most expensive coffee in the world, kopi luwak. It is expensive for good reason: it's rare and it's delicious. Having had a cup of it recently in Bali, I'm a convert. It was strong and very, well (try not to think too much about it) very smooth.

An Asian palm civet, known in Indonesia as a luwak.

Civet cats are not cats but species of mammals that live in rainforests in Africa and Asia. The coffee-makers of Indonesia are Asian palm civets. They eat the coffee berries and, somehow, the defecant, when later washed, dried and roasted has changed. Coffeeologists disagree on the reason for this. It could be the action of enzymes in the civet's gut that changes the coffee or maybe civets are just very selective about the coffee berries they eat.

The coffee beans as they come out of a luwak.

Sometime in the 17th Century some intrepid soul, walking through a forest in Indonesia where there were coffee bushes, and dying for his morning cup of java (actually it would have been in Sumatra, which is where the Dutch introduced arabica coffee from Yemen) must have spotted some civet droppings and thought (you coffeeholics will relate to this) what the hell, any port in a storm, and picked it up. The rest is coffee history.

This woman is grinding coffee beans with a large mortar and pestle.

We'd heard about kopi luwak but never tried it till we were touring an agritourism venue near Ubud in Bali. Our guide showed us various plants and trees that produce some of Bali's produce---jackfruit, longans, anise, lemon grass etc---and there, in some cages were civets. We were given cups of various teas, coffees and other herbal drinks. For kopi luwak there was a charge but at only $ 5 per cup this was a bargain we couldn't refuse.

On the left is a burner heating a copper beaker and on the right, the kopi luwak in a  parfait glass-like flask.

The coffee was brewed in what looked like chemistry equipment from Marie Curie's laboratory. I'm only sorry I didn't get a better photo before the water boiled over into the gummy mess that was to be our coffee. We drank it black with a bit of cane sugar. It may have been crap but it was very tasty.

100 grams could be yours, in Bali, for $ 50, which by world standards is dirt cheap.

Heads of state give each other valuable gifts on state visits. On his last visit to Indonesia, Barack Obama was given a sizeable quantity of this coffee. If it was a ploy to get him to come back, it worked: he'll be at the APEC conference in Bali in October, undoubtedly holding out for a bottomless cup of kopi luwak.

We have qualms about coffee. While our Balinese driver said that the world demand for the coffee had been a boon to civets because they had been endangered and now there are lots of them, the idea of consuming a product from an animal that's kept in a small cage is not for us. "Wild" civet coffee is commercially available at an even huger price and there is a movement to apply ethical standards to the trade but if it's hard to sort out which locally produced hen's eggs here in Australia are produced in humane conditions it will be even more difficult to do the same with kopi luwak from Bali or Sumatra. So, for the time being, we'll stick to
Fair Trade coffee that, we hope, hasn't spent any time in the gut of another animal. (Don't believe the rumours about Monsanto's civet breeding program.)

There are other coffees yet to try. One is monkey parchment coffee what is chewed and then spat out by rhesus monkeys in India. We might give that one a miss.

 

We had thoughts of making home-grown poo coffee but Jasper was unmoved.

Mirror: The Art of Jeannie Baker

Jeannie Baker is the real thing. She's an artist, illustrator, author and film maker of great vision and dedication who over the past four decades has produced a series of wonderful picture books. The reason for this blog post is that those of us in Sydney have the rare opportunity to see the original artwork for Jeannie's book, Mirror.

These days picture book artwork usually begins as drawings or watercolours on paper or, more often, computer files created electronically using a digital art software package such as Corel Draw. In contrast, Jeannie makes meticulous constructions which are then photographed for the books. The books are wonderful but seeing the original artwork, quite literally, adds another dimension.

About her technique Jeannie says: "Where I can I like to use textures from the actual materials portrayed ­ such as bark, feathers, cracked paint, earth, knitted wool, tin so that their natural textures become an integral part of the work. The vegetation used is often natural. Using plants was a problem at first but I have learnt how to preserve them so they last and I add permanent colour."

The exhibition of the Mirror artwork is at the Blacktown Arts Centre till February 2nd. It's been touring Australia for the past two years and this is the end of the road. Don't miss it.

Mirror was published in 2010 won the 2011 Children's Book Council of Australia's Picture Book of the year, among other prizes.

Full credit to Walker Book Australia for tackling such a non-standard book

The book's unique design is really two books in the same cover. Open the cover and there is a book on the left, reading from left to right, and another, that reads from right to left. The wordless stories are of the lives of two families---one in Australia and the other in Morocco---as they go about their days. Turning one page at a time we can follow their parallel lives, one commuting through city traffic by car, the other going to the market on a donkey.

Sorry about my ham-fisted photographs. The works are in acrylic cases and, because of reflections from everywhere, haven't done them justice. Also some of them have lights built in and...well, seeing them in the flesh---and feathers, bark and fur---is the only way to see them.

Jeannie Baker signing a book for a young fan

Donna Rawlins and Jeannie Baker

At the opening of this final exhibition, editor and author Donna Rawlins summed up the unique place that Jeannie Baker's work holds today and why it will for many years to come. Don't miss the exhibition! If you liked the book you'll love the original artwork.

Photographs with permission from Jeannie Baker.

Okay, but is it art?

Sydney's 18th Biennale has finished. This year it was at four venues: Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the NSW Art Gallery, and Pier 2/3 at Walsh Bay. Children's Book Week has kept me on the hop but I did manage to see almost all the Biennale artworks. 

With over 100 artists represented from forty countries there was a lot to enjoy but of course not everything was for everyone. Okay so not everything was for me. Do bricks and leaves on a floor, or cloth hanging in a vast room, or some decrepit furniture on a platform qualify as works of art? I'm not hard to please. I just want works of art to make me feel something---other than exasperation---or works that make me think. It's also important that works of art pass the I-could-do-that test.

I'm afraid that these rocks scattered around a room didn't pass the I-could-do-that test. At first I didn't think that it was one of the entries but then I noticed the sign on the floor that said "Please do not touch the artwork".

How about this midden of oyster shells and tea cups? If you knew that it was the work of young Aboriginal artist, Jonathan Jones, who wanted us to think about the oyster middens of pre-European contact days with today's detritus---sort of a meeting of the middens---would that make a difference? Interesting but is it art?

How about a collection of tents in a vast warehouse. Inside the tents are television sets showing images of people in Cairo talking. This is Susan Hefuna's "Celebrate Life: I love Egypt." There is a lengthy explanation of the artist's intentions and a statement about the tents having been made in Cairo.

How about Fujiko Nakaya's fog sculpture, "Cloud"? The kids seemed to love running in and out of it. Are real clouds themselves or only artificial ones?

One of the problems for me was the written explanations of the artwork. One artist used "irony to create empathy" another "employs everyday objects and materials, de-constructing them to reveal their underlying codes". Another artist "overturns the relations between the work and its space". The artistic directors said that "the artworks gathered here engage with new models of reciprocity". New models of reciprocity? 

I gave up reading the explanatory material.

Things began to pick up for me with Canadian Artist, Cal Lane's "Domesticated Turf", a sculpted shipping container made to look like some kind of European gingerbread house. Clever and a lot of work sawing out all those bits of steel to liberate the cottage within. I was impressed.

And I loved New Zealand artist, Peter Robinson's, huge Styrofoam chains draped over some of the old rusting ship-building machinery. I didn't read the description of this installation but the internet tells me that Robinson "pursues multiple formal trajectories in his use of polystyrene, as if with its associations of disposability the possibility exists for any number of sculptural experiments to be tested, cast aside, reworked, reconsidered". Better to just look at it and enjoy it, I say.

For me the most impressive work at Cockatoo Island were Maria Fernanda Cardoso's Museum of Copulatory Organs, reproductions of reproductive organs. These much magnified---thanks to electron microscopy---models of male and female insect genitalia were not only wonderfully realised but quite beautiful simply as sculpture. Does an accurate reproduction from nature qualify as art? I think so. Certainly photos or paintings from nature can be art. Here science and art overlap. 

Back on dry land I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art at Circular Quay in Sydney to see the both the new wing and the Biennale exhibits there. Yeesookyung's Translated Vase, the Moon and Park Young-Sook’s Moon Jars easily passed the I-could-do-that test. 

And, by the way, don't tell everyone but the MCA has a cafe with the best view in Sydney. (See heading photo above.)

Liu Zhuoquan, Two-Headed Snake was the stand-out for me at the MCA at least as a technical feat. Using an old Chinese technique of painting inside bottles the artist made the bottles appear to have snakes in them. There were a huge number of bottles and the detail was quite breathtaking. Art? Well I felt something.

Also at the MCA, Alwar Balasubramaniams Nothing From my Hands. For me these are unknown shapes pushing out from behind a wall. (Click on his name and it'll take you to a talk by this fascinating sculptor.) 

Most moving of all for me was Judith Wright's installation, A Journey. (For a better view of it click here.) This is a haunting work, displayed nearly in darkness. Whatever it's "about" (and here I did read the artist's explanation) I found it moving. It's not a great technical feat but, well, for me it works and that's all that should matter.

This Judith Wright, by the way, is not the late Australian poet but a former ballet dancer, now a a visual artist living in Queensland.

From the Museum of Contemporary Art I went to the Art Gallery of NSW. Those are paper bags from designer shops that you can see in Perspex cases on the wall. the top of each one has been intricately carved  in such a way that the carved bit, hanging down but still attached to the top, forms a tree.

These are the work of the Japanese-born New York artist, Yuken Teruya. These have both beauty and a definite wow-factor. They were hard to photograph. To see his work properly click here.

The Sydney Biennale is over but there's still so much on the internet, including videos of the artists, that it can still be enjoyed from a distance. But if you're in Sydney and want to see a small but wonderful collection of contemporary art from China, you might want to go to The White Rabbit Gallery. It's a private collection but, as with the MCA and the NSW Art Gallery, there's no entry charge. Here it's important to read the descriptions and to talk to the very helpful gallery attendants. This show is called Double Take for a reason.

The White Rabbit rotates its collections about every six months and the present show opened at the beginning of September so you have time to get there in you're in or around Sydney.

Here's a taste to get you in:

Above is Zhang Chun Hong powerful calligraphy-like drawing of a long braid on a scroll that stretches down the wall and across the floor.

Taiwanese artist Ah Leon’s Elementary School days. This deceptively simple wooden table and chair are not what they seem but I won't spoil it for you except to say that Ah Leon is a ceramicist. There, I just ruined it for you.

Above and below is/are Li Hongbo's Paper, two identical figures sculpted from honeycomb paper, one of them with it's head beginning to ravel and the other stretched all around the floor. Li Hongbo was one a a few artists represented at the White Rabbit who also had works in the Biennale.

My favourite of the trompe-l'oeil works was this one. I inspected it closely and was about to walk away when a museum attendant stopped me and explained that this wasn't two chunks of a log connected by chains. This is two chunks of wood with the connecting piece of wood carved to make the "chains". No matter how closely I looked, those chain links looked like metal, not wood. A definite wow factor but is it art? 

Absolutely. Well I think so anyway.

Buddha's Birthday

No longer just the home of "football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars" Australia is now a multicultural country. When I say this to friends overseas it's greeted with mild suspicion. It doesn't fit with their pigeon hole of what Oz is really like. Pigeon holes are a good way of reducing a complex world to bite-size digestible chunks. But maybe it isn't suspicion I sense from them but confusion. That could be from dropping in that quote while singing it to the tune of the old Holden TV ad. Of course then I have to explain that "football" here (Australian Rules Football) is nothing like their football(s), that meat pies aren't sweet and that Holden cars are made by a subsidiary of General Motors. I should stop singing that ditty.

Multiculturalism has brought us, among other things, wonderful food.  What took me to Tumbalong Park at Darling Harbour last weekend wasn't the food but Buddha's Birthday Festival. The food did play a part in my going because I was invited by vegan friends and the food stalls at the Festival had vegan food. But there was a lot more to the festival than food stalls. By the way, the festival is free, everyone is welcome and there are two days of events of all sorts.

Nan Tien Temple organises a Buddha's birthday Festival every year. If you live in or around Sydney you've probably seen, or even visited, Nan Tien's huge temple ("the biggest Buddhist temple in the Southern Hemisphere") on the hillside just south of Wollongong.

Buddha's actual birthday is celebrated around most of Asia on the eight day of the fourth lunar month, that is on April 8th although this year's Sydney festival was held on the 12th and 13th of May.

I'm not a Buddhist but a bit of a fellow-traveller. It would be hard to disagree with Buddhism's Three Acts of Goodness:

     Do good deeds
     Speak good words
     Think good thoughts

(I'm a bit weak on the third one.)

So put it in your diary for next year and check your local listings. It's good family fun and a welcome break from eating meat pies. (Does anyone actually eat the old gravy-on-cardboard any more?)

Some lovely singing ((in Chinese) from a talented young performer.

Irish dancing might seem out of place but the Festival welcomes many cultures

Bathing the Buddha

To any of you who signed up for Selby, Emily Eyefinger and my fabulous, (free!) Newsletter: there's another issue coming very soon; just as soon as my cold lets me finish it. If you're a kid and you haven't signed up already, what are you waiting for????