Vintage Daughter - a little shop in Malacca

With such an illustrious colonial history – Portuguese, Dutch, British – and a host of ethnic syntheses – Chinese, Malay, Arabic – Malacca, a city at the crossroads of east and west, is understandably rich in antiques. The centre of the old city, Jonker Street, is rightly famous for small vintage stores that very commonly are also cafes. Here you can find a myriad of old oddments and collectables, in some instances going back centuries. The city has been a bridge between cultures since well before the times Europeans ventured to south-east Asia in pursuit of spices and trade. It remains so today: it features as a trading hub in modern China’s plans for a new maritime ‘silk road’. Tourism, of course, brings its own degradations, as always - and so will Chinese money - but the spirit of the old city (one of the great historic cities of the world) still lives in the little shops in the laneways and ‘jalans’ away from the tourist traps. There are treasures to be found and bargains to be had.

One of the true delights waiting to be discovered is a café/collectables upcycle shop called ‘Vintage Daughter’. It is run by a Miss Ling and her family, with her father doing the cooking. It is the best of its type. It is a welcome journey into another time and another world. The pictures on this page are all of Miss Ling's cafe. It is a capsule of old Malacca - not the Malaccan heritage dressed up for the tourists, but genuine old homewares and bits and pieces of an authentic past. 

The Chinese came to these parts beginning in the Xth century, but arrived in numbers in the XVth to XVIIth centuries. Those that settled became known as ‘Peranakan’ (perra – na – kan) and developed a distinctive language, cuisine and culture. They prospered, especially, by becoming intermediaries between the colonial rulers and the local Malays. In particular, they found common cause with the British and Peranakan culture was Anglocized up until the arrival of the Japanese during WW2 and Malaysian independence thereafter. The British, of course, imported the paraphernalia of British culture wholesale – books, furniture, artifacts, household items, all the trappings of the mother country. These are now floating around in the secondhand trade; beautiful items of the British colonial era, along with their imitations. The Chinese (Peranakan), too, devoted their prosperity to items of fine taste and domestic leisure. Malaysian independence (and Islamic ascendancy), along with the pervasive tastelessness of later modernity, has brought much of that rich past to a close, and so stores are replete with Chinese odds and ends as well. Miss Ling loves to surround herself with all of this nostalgia. You can immerse yourself in her café and listen to jazz and The Girl from Ipanema and enjoy cups of thick, dark black nanyang kopi.

The past has a warmth that nourishes in a way that the shiny new cannot. (This is a theme of 'Out of Phase', after all.) Nostalgia is not an empty sentimentality. It is a positive commitment to continuity, heritage and ancestry. It is funny, is it not?, how places such as these attract Bohemians who otherwise shun conservative creeds. It is the same in Australia from whence comes the present author - leftist radicals congregate around the 'heritage' regions, buy old homes and collect antiques. (Conversely, so-called 'conservatives' fund and cheer the bulldozers that wipe away the past to replace it with shopping malls of steel and glass and crass Americana. Such are the paradoxes of our political divides.) 

We need hardly mention that family and ancestors are essential Chinese values. 'Vintage Daughter' is a family business in the richest and most immediate sense. The deep presence of a past when life was full of fine things - even when life was comparatively poor and hard - is everywhere. This is, of course, the meaning of 'upcycle'. What the shallow modernist would cast away as junk has been rescued and restored to a present virtue. This is very much the philosophy of the store. Miss Ling has ventured into the commercial worlds of Perth (Australia) - she studied media at Murdoch University - and the brash hurly burly of Kuala Lumpur, but she prefers (by philosophy and temperament) the quiet creativity of Malacca. It is her home, but she is inspired by its historical soul. This is reflected in the way she photographs all the items in her store. The photographs are, firstly, to record the items as they come in and to put them up for sale on-line, but they are also small works of art in themselves. Most of the photos on this present page are hers. (This post is as much about her photographs as about her cafe.) 

There is intellectual nourishment, as well as the warmth of pre-loved things. 'Vintage Daughter' features a wide selection of old books, most of them in English or Chinese. There are a lot of textbooks whose only value now is their age, but there are also some lost treasures to be found by dedicated bibliophiles:

And you can smoke! (Malacca is yet to succumb to the puritanism that has blighted the West, although UNESCO ties its 'World Heritage' funding to smoking bans in cities such as this. In Georgetown, up the Malacca Straits from here, UNESCO has made it a condition of funding that citizens of the town are to be forbidden from smoking not only on the streets and in the cafes, but in their own homes!!) 

And then there is the food. Beautiful food, presented beautifully on beautiful crockery with beautiful utensils. It is a small family cafe with a limited menu located on Jalan Bunga Raya - around the corner from Little India, not on the main paths of the tourist trade - but the charming Miss Ling gives perfect attention to every element of her presentation. 

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Photographs of photographs. The store features an extensive collection of old photographs (and maps too!) 

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Yours, 

Harper McAlpine Black

Old Roses Renamed - the Cis Binary Rosarian

Before the modern nonsense of naming hurricanes and tropical storms after men, when they are most obviously female phenomena, rose breeders succumbed to gender dysphoria and started giving roses - the most feminine of flowers - men's names. It's an absurdity. Let us be explicit on this matter from the outset lest there be any confusion: the entire symbolism of the rose (and by extension most if not all flowers, but certainly the rose!) alludes to the female part, the floral similacra of the female sexual anatomy. One would think that rose breeders and rose lovers would be conscious of this simple fact even where they are too polite to mention it. A rose by any other name. The rose, indeed, has a rich symbolism and a myriad of meanings, but behind them all is this one anatomical reality - the flower resembles the vulva, the cunnus. There is no escaping it. Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with both marvels of nature - roses and the sexual organs of women - should know this. It is therefore a travesty, a perversion, a grotesque malformation, to name a rose after a man. Do men have vulva? No. It is as simple as that. 

The rose vulva. How explicit do we need to be? 

The present writer, being an enthusiast of old (or so-called 'heritage') roses, and having once - in more halcyon days - had a large garden replete with them, has been offended by many of the masculine names in his collection over the years. Often we have a beautiful, deliciously feminine rose and yet tasteless - and no doubt sexless - rose breeders have blighted her with the name of some half-witted and undistinguished buffoon with a moustache. It is like naming a gorgeous girl 'Thomas' or 'John'. Why would they do this? On the whole, of course, our roses are named appropriately. The great majority of them have women's names, even if inelegant ones - 'Frau Dagmar Hastrup'. But some have been given men's names, and it is, frankly,  irksome. The present writer, at least, subscribes unashamedly to old fashioned "cis binary" (as they are called) gender categories and when it comes to roses of the equally old fashioned type will not abide by anything less.

The following is a short catalogue of lovely roses that were originally mislabelled with masculine names. The present author has taken it upon himself to rename them and hopes that rose breeders will in future take note and learn from their mistakes: 

MADEMOISELLE JOSEPHINE MARCUS

Americans, as we all know, are appallingly sentimental about their Presidents and often treat them as a cheap substitute for royalty. This very popular American rose, famed for its intense red colour and deep fragrance - a very image of feminine passion - was named 'Mister Lincoln', one of the great travesties of rosarian nomenclature. There is nothing about this rose that in any way suggests any aspect of the life or character of the drab and colourless and chaste Mr Lincoln. More happily, it has here been renamed Mademoiselle Josephine Marcus after the lover of Wyatt Earp.

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IMPERIA LA DIVINA

This hybrid perpetual, circa 1868, - a brazen floosy - has formerly been known as the Duke of Edinburgh! A less rose-like appellation for such an exhibitionist can hardly be imagined. She has been been recast here as Imperia La Divina, Imperia the Divine, the title given to the famous XVth century Roman courtesan.

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QUEEN ZUBAYDA

The damasks are the most fragrant of the roses and evoke the sensuality of the mythic East. This rose, once called Baron Prevost, is in fact a hybrid perpetual, but has retained the intense oriental fragrance of her forebears. Accordingly we have chosen to bless her with an oriental and aristocratic name, Queen Zubayda, this famous woman being the wife of the great IXth century Caliph (of Arabian Nights fame) Harun Al-Rasheed.

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ASPASIA

Another fine old rose scarred with an ecclesiastical title. She has been known as 'The Bishop'. This shy creature, who flowers but once a year, and arrived on the scene some time in the late 1700s has he striking deep mauve coloured flowers with bright yellow stamens. She is one of the present writer's favourites, and he has renamed her Aspasia after the famed seductress of philosophers and lover of Pericles. 

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MARION HALL BEST

If there is one thing worse than naming roses after military men, it is naming them after clergy. It is a sheer act of perversity to name a flower that is emblematic of erotic love after a clergyman! This lovely semi-double rose of creamy white flowers with golden stamens, dated 1926, was blighted with the name 'Bishop Darlington'. She has now been relieved of this burden and renamed after the famous Australian interior designer Marion Hall Best, 1926 being the year she was married. 

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FRAULINE AMELIE BEESE

Introduced in 1886, this rose has large, fleshy loose petals of a bold pink colour that is often described as "tinged with copper" or as having "copper undertones" - a somewhat 'metallic' pink, in any case. It has formerly been known as Dr Grill. (Who Dr Grill was and why he deserved having such an overtly feminine flower named after him we may never know!) With hindsight, she has been renamed Frauline Amelie Beese after the German aviation pioneer - one of the first women to fly - who was born in 1886.

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NAOMI EISEN

Named 'Sir Thomas Lipton', purveyor of junk teas, this cross between R. rugosa alba and the polyantha 'Clotilde Soupert' is a scented bush rose ideal for hedges and dated 1900. She is now known as Naomi Eisen, named after a lovely young woman, gardener and tea drinker, of the present writer's acquaintance.

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LIANE DE POUGY

A double cupped bloom of pale blush flowers striped with crimson - what a sight! This sweet scented rose, originally misnamed as 'Ferdinand Pichard', is described as "the last of the Bourbons" but is technically speaking a hybrid perpetual. Introduced in 1921. She has been named after the notorious French courtesan Liane de Pougy, famed for her marriages, lesbian affairs and for the time Sarah Bernhardt  advised her that, when on stage, she ought to "keep her pretty mouth shut."

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PRINCESS ADELHEID

This light pink hybrid rugosa, introduced in 1899, is intensely fragrant but, for some reason, has been cursed with the name 'Conrad Ferdinand Meyer'. No longer. Henceforth she will be known as Princess Adelheid. Her Serene Highness Princess Adelheid of Schaumburg-Lippe, wife of Friedrich, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg died, aged 78, in the summer this charming and aristocratic rose was introduced.

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EVE

The introduction of the repeat blooming Tea roses in the first half of the XIXth century revolutionised roses forever: it is the line of demarcation between the modern roses and those of the ancien regime. This rose, of 1838, with salmon-pink blooms and a touch of apricot here and there, is regarded as the first of the modern breed, and therefore they named her 'Adam'. Good God! Gender dysphoria of Biblical proportions! We have here corrected that eschatological blunder and named her 'Eve' as she should of been from the start.

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MISS SALLY WHIPPLE

Rose catalogues will sometimes say that this rose, once called 'Henry Nevard', and introduced in 1924, has "masculine qualities". Hardly! (Some of the nonsense written in rose catalogues beggars belief.) As readers can see in the photograph below, she is all woman. She is described as a scarlet/crimson hybrid perpetual with cupped petals and a strong, heady fragrance. Masculine? We have chosen to call her Miss Sally Whipple after the name of the main character in the 1924 film An Average Woman, the name in this case being ironic (because this woman is far from average!) 

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MISS JESSICA MILROY

William Lobb is assuredly one of the ugliest names ever imposed upon a rose. We have rescued this moss rose from that infamy and renamed her Miss Jessica Milroy after a lady of the present writer's acquaintance. The moss roses are a special class; strange, mystical, unusual. This one features dark purple semi-double flowers that become darker with age. The flowers are perfumed but like all the mosses the 'moss' feature on the buds is deeply camphorous, almost like lavender oil. 1855.

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PHRYNE

Captain Thomas? What sort of name is that for a rose? This pale yellow climber, bred in 1935, with its dark stamens contrasting with its soft and delicate yellow single petals, tending to fade to white, was for some unfathomable reason named after a military man. Here, though, she has more deservedly been renamed Phryne, a nickname signifying "yellow" given to the famous Greek hetaera (whose real name was Mnesarete.)

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MARIE-SOPHIE

It ought to be a iron-clad rule - indeed, there ought to be a law - that no rose should be named after bumptious military figures. This very fine rose of 1853, first of the repeat flowering hybrid perpetuals, and historically speaking the very first long-stemmed cut rose, was unfortunately named 'General Jacqueminot'. The blooms are shapely and dark red, the fragrance sweet - surely not qualities for which the General was known. So why? We have renamed this fine flower Marie-Sophie after Mademoiselle Marie-Sophie Leroyer de Chantepie with whom Gustav Flaubert corresponded concerning the classic realist novel Madam Bovary.

Harper McAlpine Black

Sydney Long and Australian Paganism

 

The spirit of the Australian bush landscape is notoriously illusive and has been especially so for artists trained in European traditions. Though many have tried very few have managed to capture the spirit of the land. Indeed, the history of Australian art might largely be characterized as a constant struggle to capture or define the spirit of the land and, by and large, it is a tradition – barely two hundred years old, admittedly – that is somewhat undistinguished in this regard. Other artists, despairing of this, have given up the quest and have instead turned back to more European or simply urban, cosmopolitan preoccupations without further pretense. Much the same is true of writers. One thinks of the poet Christopher Brennan who said, famously, “My poems could have been written in China” so unconcerned was he with any dreary requirement to be authentically “Australian”. It took a genius of the calibre of D. H. Lawrence – who was only in the country for a few brief months – to write anything profound about the place. There are passages in his tour de force novel Kangaroo that are unsurpassed as evocations of the Australian bush.

In the visual arts people typically refer to the so-called Heidelberg School – misse en plein impressionists - as the first real attempt to come to terms with the quality and true nature of both the light and the landscape. This may be so, and painters of the school are still loved, but it was a limited endeavour. As in Europe, impressionism was quickly exhausted and opened into the multivalent by-ways of post-impressionism and beyond. In Australia, modernism had a difficult and unhappy birth and, in fact, came to very little. Artists routinely travelled back to Britain or other European sojourns in order to escape the isolation and limitations of the great south land and its 'tyranny of distance'. In the best cases they brought back fertile currents of European culture to synthesize with local habits. 


A particularly interesting synthesis – although much maligned or neglected today – was what we might call Australian Paganism. This imposed elements of classical mythology upon the Australian landscape, sensing a deep pagan spirit (as opposed to the indigenous ‘primitivism’ which remained alien to Europeans) in the land. Several important artists worked in this vein, although their insights were not pursued after the rupture of the wars and even more so the recent rise of a cringing anti-Eurocentric bias in progressivist (politically correct) thinking. Accordingly much contemporary art is pseudo-aboriginal and actively shuns the European heritage. But such paganism was not at all unfounded. As evidence its truth and depth was reiterated profoundly in 1975 by Gheorghe Zamfir’s soundtrack to the celebrated Peter Weir movie Picnic at Hanging Rock. If the visual and literary engagement with the land has been problematic, the Australian musical heritage has been utterly undistinguished. Zamfir, a Romanian, captured it. He brought together the pan flute and the deep sonorous qualities of the organ framed by the realisation that the organ is nothing but a pan flute writ large. In this, he brought out both notes that resound in the Australian bush: a crisp, strange whimsicality with a forbidding mysterious vast 'geological' antiquity. The pan flute – in its two extreme registers – was exactly the instrument to evoke a true music of the land. 

Similarly, the figure of Pan featured in visual evocations of the landscape among Australian Paganist painters. By far the greatest of these was Sydney Long. His paintings and etchings are regularly described as “incongruous” now because he places Pan and nymphs and other pagan mythological elements into Australian bush settings. But why not? Like others, he travelled to England and Europe to live and study and brought back with him new sensibilities and techniques; in his case he started as an impressionist of the Heidelberg School but with the sundering of impressionism thereafter took up the concerns of the so-called ‘Symbolists’ and much of the aesthetics of Art Nouveau. Indeed, he must be counted as Australia’s foremost representative of the Symbolist movement broadly defined. His solution to the problem of engagement with the land found little support, however. One of his earliest paintings – By Tranquil Waters – already shows his concerns as well as the difficulties he would have. It is a painting done more or less in the Heidelberg impressionist style, but he adds to the landscape a paganesque eroticism which his contemporaries found scandalous. Here already we see the haunting playfulness of Pan. It becomes explicit in his later work. 

He was himself a difficult character. As time went on he became more and more in conflict with younger Australian avante garde artists. As modernism descended into the depravity of abstract expressionism and the barren anti-art of conceptualism his work was deemed more and more 'old fashioned'. He did not take this well. Those who knew him described him as a lonely and bitter figure who resented the many ways in which he was snubbed by the art establishment. Although he won several prizes, he felt passed over and neglected. This was on top of his personal insecurities. A very short man - indeed elf-like - he often wore a tall top hat to give himself extra stature, and in his later years he habitually claimed to be much younger than he in fact was. He resented a younger generation of modernists who increasingly regarded his work as irrelevant to their concerns.

Perhaps his most famous painting - certainly the most often reproduced - is the one below, entitled The Spirit of the Land:

It is not "aboriginal" enough for contemporary progressive tastes (and no doubt it will be deemed 'sexist' and all the rest as well nowadays?) but it remains one of the truest renderings of the anima of the Australian land. It is an image of the soul of place. It does not pretend to be 'authentic'. It does not valorize the "rugged Australian" or anything of the sort. It is, it is true, an amalgam of the European and the native, but, again, why not? It demonstrates how Mr Long brought an Art Nouveau sense of line to the task of capturing the spirit of the great southern continent- and indeed his line is superb. The present writer, at least, (himself an Australian) regards it as one of the few truly successfully spiritual evocations to be found in Australian art. It is one of the finest examples of Australian Paganism.

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The paintings and etchings below give readers of these pages a representative sample of Mr Long's work; both his more conventional landscapes (the gum trees etcetera one expects of Australian landscapes) and his explicitly pagan impositions. Sydney Long (1871–1955)is a major Australian artist whose solution to the problem of rendering the Australian landscape through the vehicle of a European artistic vocabulary was not misconceived. The other artist of this persuasion - now thoroughly out of favor - was Norman Lindsay - Australian Pagans of the first half of the XXth century.

 

Harper McAlpine Black