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The tutorial began with show and tell: the ancestors of the Olympus E-P1.

Grandpa Pen

Father Pen

And the family picture.

And here’s Cousin Lumix.

(Ironically these photos were taken with a camera phone as I was engrossed in the dimsum.)

People crack jokes about the inordinate attachment of the Japanese to cameras. There’s the stock character of the Japanese tourist with three cameras hanging around his neck. Uro says their love of cameras has to do with recent history. After World War II Japan was in shambles, and the production of cameras helped them to rebuild their economy. Their parents and grandparents worked in camera factories; those cameras literally kept them alive. Today many Japanese buy vintage cameras because these may have been put together by their ancestors’ hands. Uro recalls going into a camera shop in Tokyo where the old proprietor examined his vintage camera, exclaimed that he had that same type of metal pin, took it out of a drawer, and presented it to the customer with tears in his eyes. (True, as a writer and camera fanatic, Uro may be sentimental about other people getting sentimental about cameras.) Cameras are not merely gadgets, but artifacts that create artifacts.

Uro’s photography club is giving a series of workshops at Silverlens.

FABRICANA, new works by Leo Abaya which previewed this last weekend at Britania Gallery, is all bout the notion of things being made. The maker emphasizes that the pigment-on-surface processes in works with expressive, symbolic intents such as painting is materially the same as the mechanical processes used in the production of practical everyday things such as fabrics.

The idea of manufacture is linked with the belief that while history is about people, it is constructed by people through some form of medium. Since it is impossible to fully recreate the past, history like all constructs is worth examining again and again.

I asked Leo to talk about this particular work, Dormido al lado de la Pasig. Que hacemos? As mentioned in this blog some weeks ago, Fabricana was slated to be part of the 2009 Philippine Art Trek, a visual arts festival sponsored by the Philippine Embassy in Singapore. Abaya’s exhibit was pulled out of the festival because of the painting above. An embassy official told the gallery representing Leo that the Philippines is more democratic, and unlike Singapore does not censor work…but the embassy could not be seen to be presenting and supporting (this) image.

We love irony.

I always enjoy talking to Leo because I feel like I’m getting free tuition. He’s the person to whom I usually direct the question, “Art ba yan, o niloloko na tayo?”

“This is my look at history. I took old photographs and translated them into line drawings. The large image is appropriated from Goya’s Los Caprichos, “The sleep of reason produces monsters,” one of the iconic images of the Romantic age. And many of us are asleep.

“Now what if I put that with an image of Malacanang Palace? It looks very much like the 19th century toile de Jouy—you have a vignette. This is my version of the classic toile. The image of the reclining woman I appropriated shamelessly from Velasquez, a painter I really admire. That is a male model I photographed last year, and I found the two naked images could be combined into an Adam and Eve. They’re in chains, but they seem to be perversely enjoying it. I changed the mirror into a regency-style mirror, the type used often in American colonial art and furniture.

“One illustration shows how the Chinese were punished in colonial times—they were made to stand in wooden cages for days with only their heads sticking out. Another shows American businessmen, prospectors, living off the fat of the land. Malacanang being the symbol of power, who else would be there but the president? It’s just because she happens to be the current occupant, it’s not personal. If I’d painted it ten years ago, it would’ve been Estrada; if Loren Legarda were president, the image would be of Legarda.”

Fabricana opens in Singapore next week, outside of the Philippine Art Trek.

Photo: Armour of Henry VIII at the Dressed to Kill exhibition, Tower of London. The large codpiece was propaganda for Henry’s virility. Of course one of Henry’s successors had the biggest brass balls of the period. Her name was Elizabeth I.

Hilary Mantel has won the 2009 Booker Prize for Wolf Hall, a historical novel about Henry VIII’s most trusted adviser/fixer Thomas Cromwell. According to broadcaster Jim Naughtie, who chaired the judging panel, their decision was “based on the sheer bigness of the book, the boldness of its narrative and scene-setting, the gleam that there is in its detail.”

There’s an excerpt from Wolf Hall in the New York Review of Books.

Guardian interview with Hilary Mantel: “I accumulated an anger that would rip a roof off.”

In other Tudor news: Anne Boleyn was accused of adultery with five men, including her brother. Was it a stitch-up or was there some truth in the charges? Jessie Childs reviews Alison Weir’s The Lady In The Tower in Literary Review.

Ige Ramos compiles the Top 10s of filmmaker Joey Gosiengfiao, singer-songwriter Yoyoy Villame, and radio announcer Kuya Cesar. Paalam Manash, Bai, at Koyang.

BananaQ, KamoteQ. Photo by Ige Ramos.

Yoyoy Villame had a stronger claim to the title of National Artist than most of the actual awardees. His oeuvre includes Butse Kik, Granada, Diklamasyon (Magellan vs. Lapu-Lapu), Laban-Bawi (That noontime show better be paying royalties to the Villame estate), Kuratong Baleleng, and what’s the title of that song that goes, “And every afternoon at three o’clock I read your letter ahay. . .”

Emily Blunt as The Young Victoria

Queen Victoria has gone down in history as a fusty prude, and ‘Victorian’ usually means ‘repressed’. As played by Emily Blunt (The Devil Wears Prada) in The Young Queen Victoria, she is not that fusty, prudish, or repressed. One doesn’t assume the throne at such an early age and then hang on to power longer than anyone before or since by clinging to outdated ideas. Her ‘arranged’ marriage to her cousin Albert (Rupert Friend, Wickham in Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice) turned out to be a real love match, confounding the plans of her scheming relatives.

Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée and written by Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park), The Young Victoria is the story of two people raised to be obedient pawns in the power games of the monarchy who learn to think for themselves. And while it is a love match, the movie hints at the contests of will that took place between the royal couple. The movie also stars the reliable Jim Broadbent as Victoria’s dotty uncle the King of England, Miranda Richardson as her scheming mother the Duchess of Kent, Mark Strong as the man who controls her mother, Thomas Kretschmann as her calculating uncle the King of Belgium, and Paul Bettany as the Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, who tries to control the young queen. Sandy Powell did the costumes.

Q. Aren’t Emily and Rupert too good-looking to play Victoria and Albert?
A. It’s a movie.

The Young Victoria opens today at Glorietta and Greenbelt 3.

The weather is broken, Metro Manila is underwater, and the floodwaters are still rising. While the government scrambles to find someone else to blame for the flooding, the inefficient disaster relief, everything, here’s something to take your mind off the rising waters for five minutes.

The Most Controversial Magazine Covers Of All Time, in Web Designer Depot.

From the elegant

to the dead-on hilarious.