craft beer – FOOD, FILMS 'N' TINGS

Manchester, Hong Kong and Jamaica

The soundtrack of this seminal Jamaican film was produced by Leslie Kong

ESEA Contemporary is an art gallery in Manchester in the North of England that specializes in presenting and platforming artists and art practices that are informed by East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) cultural backgrounds. It is located in an award-winning building in the Northern Quarter part of the city and it is home to a diverse range of exhibitions, events, and educational programs that explore the unique perspectives and experiences of ESEA artists. ESEA Contemporary was previously known as the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, but it underwent a major rebranding in 2022 to better reflect the diverse range of cultures and identities represented by the artists it works with.

Manchester has a significant Chinese community, and it has been a hub for Chinese immigration to the UK for many years. The city’s Chinatown is one of the largest in Europe, and is home to many restaurants, shops, and cultural institutions. The Chinese community in Manchester is very diverse, with people from different regions of China and different generations, and they have made a significant contribution to the city’s culture and economy. There are also several Chinese community organizations and cultural events, such as the annual Chinese New Year celebrations, which help to promote Chinese culture and traditions in the city.

Chinatown in Manchester under the grey skies

In addition, there has been significant Chinese investment in Manchester in recent years. China has been looking to expand its investment in the UK, and Manchester has been one of the key targets for investment. One of the largest investments has been in real estate development, with Chinese firms investing in luxury apartments, office buildings, and mixed-use developments in the city. Chinese companies have also invested in infrastructure projects, such as transportation and renewable energy, in the Manchester area. There has also been investment in the education sector, with Chinese companies supporting local universities and colleges.

There had also been a significant influx of people from Hong Kong settling in Manchester in recent years. In fact, Manchester is now considered one of the top destinations for Hong Kong migrants in the UK. The UK government has also created a new visa scheme specifically for Hong Kong residents which has made it easier for them to move to the UK, including Manchester and other parts of the North West such as Liverpool, bringing their culture and art with them and enriching their adopted homeland accordingly.

Dinu Li is an artist who was born in Hong Kong and who currently lives and works in Cornwall, UK. He graduated with a degree in photography from Liverpool John Moores University in 2001. Li’s work often explores the intersection of personal and cultural histories, and he works across a range of media, including moving image, photography, installation, and performance. He is particularly interested in how history and memory are constructed and how they can be reinterpreted through art. His work has been exhibited internationally, and he has had significant artistic recognition for his work.

Li is currently exhibiting at ESEA (‘A Phantom’s Vibe’).

The exhibition’s guide pamphlet provides the following background information:-

Li’s work in the exhibition, combines autobiographical allegories with a tapestry of cultural influences. Visitors are taken from the night markets of Hong Kong to the blues parties of Hulme* and Moss Side* via Jamaican recording studios, owned by the descendants of Chinese indentured labourers**. The reggae classic ‘Always Together’ *** runs through the heart of the exhibition, where music becomes a medium for cultures to meet, mix, and become hybrid.

As a child wandering through the working – class districts of Hong Kong, Li overheard ‘ Always Together’*** by Stephen Cheng mistaking it for a Chinese folk classic. Years later, this song, unexpectedly, repaired, like a phantom at one of the inner–city blues parties**** Li frequented during his 1980s, Manchester youth, and decades after that, the song once again re-emerged on YouTube. The song soundtracks Dinu Li’s exhibition.

It wasn’t until much later that Li learned that the song was actually recorded in Jamaica in 1967, in one of the small number of Chinese recording studios*****, some of which helped shape the sounds of key artists such as Dennis Brown and Augustus Pablo. Through his work tracing the history of early reggae, Li’s exhibition,’ A Phantom’s Vibe’, serves as a means of unearthing, the underrepresented history of the Chinese in Jamaica, subverting mainstream cultural hegemony.

*Hulme and Moss Side are districts of Manchester where many members of the city‘s Afro-Caribbean community live.

** Chinese people first started coming to Jamaica around 1850 when they arrived on the island mostly as indentured labourers, brought by the British from China to work on the sugar plantations to replace the unpaid labour of the island’s black population following the end of slavery. Indentured labour is a form of debt bondage whereby the labourer ‘agrees’ to work for no pay for a number of years to pay off the cost incurred in their migration to the Caribbean.

*** ‘Always Together’ is a reggae record recorded in 1967 in Jamaica, by the Chinese singer Stephen Cheng (misspelled as ‘Chang’ when the record was released). The song is unusual because although the title is in English, the song itself is sung in Chinese with the lyrics originating from “Alishan Girl,” a Taiwanese folk song, which dates back to the 1940s. The track was put together by Stephen Cheng and the Jamaican musician and producer Byron Lee (himself of a Jamaican Chinese background) when Cheng visited the island from his home in New York.

**** after hours parties often playing reggae in peoples homes or basements etc.

***** several Jamaicans with Chinese roots played a key part in the development of the island’s beloved popular music, reggae and it’s older sister, rock steady. They established some of the first record shops and studios on the island, providing a platform for emerging reggae artists to record and distribute their music. Jamaicans of Chinese origin in the music industry included Vincent and Patricia Chin who created the influential VP Records, Leslie Kong of Beverley’s Records (the producer of the legendary soundtrack to ‘The Harder They Come’), Herman Chin-Loy of Aquarius records (who produced what was arguably the first dub album, ‘Aquarius Dub’ in 1974) and the Hookim brothers who owned Channel One studios where they created the radical ‘rockers’ sound which dominated the Jamaican music scene in the late 1970’s.

The Hookim brothers at Channel One produced this rockers classic in 1976

Herman Chin-Loy created arguably the first ever Dub album in 1974

The installation highlights how the music and culture of reggae have been adapted and reinterpreted in Hong Kong, and how they have provided a means for people to express their identity and resistance in the face of colonialism.

The Harcourt bar in southern Manchester is named after Harcourt Road in Hong Kong. This road is in turn named after Sir Cecil Harcourt, who was a British colonial administrator in Hong Kong in the early 20th century. The bar is inspired by Hong Kong culture and cuisine, and the menu features authentic Hong Kong street food. It has picked up justifiably rave reviews.

The bar was created and opened by a married couple from Hong Kong, Priscilla So and Brian Hung. They were inspired by their experience working in the craft beer industry, as well as their love of Hong Kong culture. The bar is designed to be a modern take on a traditional Hong Kong-style pub, with a focus on craft beer and Hong Kong-inspired food. The bar offers a variety of Hong Kong-style dishes, including bars snacks prawn toast and smashed cucumber as well as a wide selection of craft beers.

Before opening the bar, Brian took up a position as a barrel ageing manager for the independent Manchester based Cloudwater brewery. The bar wisely stocks, a range of award winning Cloudwater beers (see https://cloudwaterbrew.co).

The influence of emigres from Hong Kong on Manchester’s food scene continues apace with the likes of Popchop Curry House in the east of the city. Popchop serves up Hong Kong style curried meats and rice to a fanatical clientele. The owner came to Manchester from Hong Kong a couple of years ago, His recipes are based on his father’s renowned restaurant Sun King Yuen in the Wan Chai district of Hong Kong which is which is famous for its curry dishes.

And turning to the Caribbean influence on food culture in the city we must mention Miss Jackson’s Drinks Company, a relatively new venture based in Manchester which was set up by two sisters.

Their website at https://www.missjacksonsdrinks.com comments:

‘The story starts with us, two Jackson sisters from South Manchester. Inspired by our Caribbean heritage, we sustainably source the bright flavours of Jamaica and shake them down with premium spirits’

The sisters have created and marketed two liqueurs to date, Duppy Gyal Zombie and our favourite, Blouse and Skirt Sorrel.

Duppy Gyal Zombie is a combination of different rums with limes, pomegranate juice, pineapple and bitters.

Blouse and Skirt Sorrel is a combination of different rums, ginger, lime juice, cane sugar and of course, Sorrel. In Jamaica, ‘Sorrel’ are the dried flowers used to make a type of sweet hibiscus tea commonly made from the Roselle flower which is popular throughout the Caribbean and West Africa where the ‘red tea’ made from the flowers originates.

‘Take her to Jamaica where the rum come from

The rum come from, the rum come from

Take her to Jamaica where the rum come from

And you can have some fun’

Munich, Art and Beer

The Haus der Kunst (‘House of Art’) is a contemporary art museum located on the corner of an intersection where Von-der-Tan Straße becomes Prinzregentenstraße in the city of Munich. Whilst the museum exhibits art of the present, the museum building itself dates from 1937 being originally built under the Nazi’s to house work that regime considered true ‘German Art’. Hubert Wim, a pro-Nazi artist explained at the time that the latter exhibition was about the “representation of the perfect beauty of a race steeled in battle and sport, inspired not by antiquity or classicism but by the pulsing life of our present-day events”.

In reality the Exhibition staged the kind of pompous, sterile rubbish beloved of fascists everywhere. Meanwhile across town at the Institute of Archeology in the nearby Hofgarden, the Nazi’s staged a counter presentation of work the regime hated, work which they felt evinced the ‘moral decay’ of the Weimar era. That exhibition was of ‘Entartete Kunst’ (‘Degenerate Art’) and it featured work drawn from the modernist spheres of Dada and Surrealism. The Exhibition’s raison d’être was the mockery and denigration of the avant-garde by linking it’s concepts with an alleged Jewish-Bolshevik plot to undermine the ‘wholesome family values’ of the Nazi state.

The exhibits at that exhibition were a small portion of the 16,000 art works seized at the time which the State deemed ‘degenerate’. Many of these works were then sold by the State overseas for “hard“ cash“ whilst some 5000 were burned in Berlin, mirroring the ritual destruction of thousands of literary works in book burnings across Germany a few years previously.

Paintings by artists of the calibre of Otto Dix, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Emil Nolde, George Grosz went on show at the exhibition. The works were deliberately hung askew on the walls with adjacent graffiti mocking the artists and the subject matter of the paintings. The idea was to rubbish the art by presenting the paintings as morally and artistically worthless.

Portrait of the journalist Sylvia von Harden, 1926 by Otto Dix

Unsurprisingly, given the quality of the artists whose work was on involuntary display, the Exhibition of Degenerate Art attracted significant crowds of visitors whilst across town the dismal counter event of the Nazi approved Great German Art Exhibition drew a far smaller crowd

Today, the Haus der Kunst looms somewhat forlorn and sullen on the Prinzregentenstraße in the centre of the city where it stands as a space for contemporary modern art, the exact opposite of it’s original function. In its interior it’s cool, spectral rooms and corridors eventually end up at the surprisingly elegant and atmospheric Golden Bar. The murals in the Golden Bar date from 1937 and it’s centrepiece chandelier came from the Hotel Savoy in Zurich.

Beautifully renovated in 2010, the Golden Bar opens out on to a terrace whose columns are crowned with a lengthy banner of Yiddish slang, Meshugener, Alter Kocker, Pisher, Plosher….The banner is an art work named ‘The Joys of Yiddish’ by the American artist, Mel Bochner and it is now a permanent fixture, having originally been exhibited in 2013 and then reinstalled in 2021. The banner’s text is rendered in yellow letters on a black background, the same colours used for the ‘Star of David’ patches and armbands worn to identify and denigrate Jewish citizens.

Modern Art survives in splendour in Munich and of the city’s many galleries a special mention should be made of the Pinakothek der Moderne, one of Europe’s largest collections of contemporary design, architectural and artistic installations.

Classic designs at the Pinakothek der Moderne

The museum exhibits include a favourite of ours ‘Sledge’ by the artist Joseph Beuys as well as a reproduction of the iconic image of that artist titled ‘La rivoluzione siamo Noi’ (The Revolution is Us) produced for an exhibition in Naples 1971 featuring Beuys striding towards the camera in his trade mark fedora and fishing vest.

According to Beuys, his art was shaped by his experience as a Luftwaffe pilot during WW2 when the plane he was flying was attacked and shot down and he crashed into a Crimean landscape peopled by nomadic Tartars who saved him from freezing by wrapping his body in a heat retaining mix of felt and fat before taking him to safety on a sledge pulled by dogs. A wonderful story indeed and one upon which Beuys built his mythology. Nevertheless, as influential on Beuys though it may well have been, the story is probably little more than fiction.

‘Patti Smith 1’, a large scale painting by the Swiss born artist Franz Gertsch also hangs at the Pinakothek der Moderne. The work is the first in a series of five paintings of the American poet/musician by Gertsch dating from 1977. Four of the five paintings in the series were created by Gertsch from a poetry reading Smith gave at Galerie Veith Turske in Cologne in 1977 on the anniversary of the death of Arthur Rimbaud. An illicit recording was made of the performance and later released on a cassette tape. An article Smith wrote for ‘Hit Parader’ magazine about her visit to the city at the time can be found here http://www.up-to-date.com/bowie/heroes/smith.html.

Around the corner from the Pinakothek der Moderne is another modern art gallery, Museum Brandhorst with it’s distinctive ceramic exterior.

The museum has a permanent exhibition of the work of the late American artist, Cy Twombly, one of the largest collections of work by the artist in the world. In fact, the entire first floor of the museum is dedicated to his work. This is not so surprising as Twombly had a special relationship with Munich, a city where he exhibited frequently and of which he was exceptionally fond.

Behind the Brandhorst and back to the grounds of the Pinakothek der Moderne we found a welcome collection of food trucks and a hopeful dog at a cheese stall.

The dog should have made it’s way to the Viktualienmarkt a daily food market in the center of Munich near the St Peter’s church! Dating from the early 1800’s the market has over a 100 food and craft stalls as well as the city’s most central beer garden.

There is also a smaller beer garden at the ever popular Kleine Ochs’nbrater with its organic sausages, pretzels, fried potatoes, cabbage and, of course, wheat beer from the local Landshut brewery. Much as we loved the food, beer and busy ambience at this café, we felt that overall, the curry wurst in Berlin is generally better than the same dish in Munich.

….but if beer is your drink of choice, you have come to the right place. Munich is indeed a beer drinkers paradise with some of the best breweries in the world within its environs. Our favourite ‘staple’ is the Paulaner Münchner Hell, a classic light beer dating from a brewery first established in 1684.

Modern craft breweries are also making their mark on the Munich beer scene with the Schiller brewery particularly noteworthy. The brewery is housed on their premises on the Scillerstraße which is near city’s main railway station. Their copper mash and brewing tuns are housed at the front of their premises whilst their beer is served with very traditional local food in the restaurant behind. Their beers range from light and dark brews to a classic wheat beer. Food includes sour vinegar dumplings, schnitzels, pork and potatoes.

Finally, we will let another poet , T.S.Eliot, an influence on both Patti Smith and whose poem ‘The Waste Land’ was of particular interest to Cy Twombly. Elliot mentions two Munich locations in the extract from the poem below.

“April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. “

T. S. Elliot, “The Waste Land,” 1922

High Peak to the World’s End

The village of Tintwhistle lies in the High Peak district in the county of Derbyshire in Northern England. The High Peak area is the more elevated section of the Dark Peak which is made of moorland and bogs. It’s limestone foundation is covered in sandstone and shale. In winter, with heavy rainfall and snow, the soil is almost always saturated with water and ice.

The countryside around the village is attractive but not a little wild and the fairly bucolic pastures soon give way to the moors themselves.

The most notable former resident of the village is the fashion designer and activist Vivienne Westwood. Westwood grew up in a row of stone cottages known as Millbrook located just outside the village on the main Manchester road. The village of Hollingsworth lies to the West, the town of Glossop to the South.

Westwood was born Vivienne Isabel Swire in Glossop. Her father was a storekeeper, her mother worked in the local cotton mill. The Millbrook cottages and the surrounding countryside was her playground. She went on to become the arguably best fashion designer (and certainly the most innovative) the UK has ever produced.

“Millbrook Cottages were at the bottom of an old quarry and from the earliest age my mother lifted me over our back wall to play in a dell where bluebells grew. As I grew up I was free to wander in a countryside which was beautiful and intimate until you got to the moors. After that it was wild and a little frightening”.

Although the city of Manchester (with its music clubs and art galleries) was not too far away, the Pennine area Westwood grew up in would have seemed culturally remote in the monochrome 1950’s.

“I lived in a part of the country that had grown up in the Industrial Revolution. I didn’t know about art galleries until I was 17. I’d never seen an art book, never been to the theatre.”

Westwood moved with her parents to London when she was 17 and she has lived in the city ever since. It is London, or rather her shop premises at 430 Kings Road, Chelsea that is for ever associated with her daring designs. From its rock’n’roll, fetish wear and punk roots in the 1970’s, the shop that was initially known as ‘Let it Rock’. It them became ‘Too Fast To Live, Too Young to Die’, then ‘Sex’, then ‘Seditionaries’ and finally ‘Worlds End’ as it is still known today. (World’s End is the name given to this eastern part of the district of Chelsea in London where the shop lies). With the changes of name, the designs and very nature of Westwood’s creations would abruptly change.

Worlds End storefront with the 13 hour clock face

In this year of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee and her recent death, it is worth looking back at Westwood’s attitude to the Monarchy.

Initially, you could be forgiven for taking the view that Westwood was an out and out Republican. One of her initial designs featured a screen print of the famous Cecil Beaton portrait of the Monarch with a safety pin through her lips.

Her shop at 430 Kings Road helped clothe the Sex Pistols who stormed the UK music charts with their ultra controversial hit single ‘God save the Queen’ at the time of the latter’s Silver Jubilee in 1977.

Westwood herself was arrested and detained on the day of the Jubilee celebrations in 1977 following a very infamous boat trip with the Sex Pistols and various luminaries on board. The group belted out their songs as they sailed along the Thames until they passed the Houses of Parliament when their boat was detailed by a flotilla of police officers who promptly arrested all and sundry, including Westwood.

Nevertheless, Westwood is very much a monarchist who holds the Queen and the Hereditary monarchy in high regard.

“ The Queen performs a national service. She holds the country together. She is a figurehead of international diplomacy. We all owe her our gratitude’’.

‘’I think that it is important that our Royal family is hereditary, the family members learn diplomacy by osmosis and develop a sense of duty to our country and the world.’’

Westwood is very much an Anglophile and monarchist in her designs and she has often use royal images and traditional materials ranging from a Harris Tweed collection to worsted’s, tartan kilts and bondage jackets and to the choice of an Orb logo for her business logo.

Her notorious 70’s rubber clothing was stitched and assembled by obscure fetish wear manufacturers in the North of England who had been making garments in the material for their specialist customers for many years.

Westwood was born in Glossop, a town just South of her home in Tintwistle. Glossop is where she went to school. There was talk a few years ago about building a museum in the the town dedicated to her life and work but the idea was apparently rejected. A local graffiti artist, Deggy, recently created his own mural in the town in honour of Westwood.

Glossop is a handsome town with loads of character and it is certainly worth a visit in its own right. Our favourite place is The Globe pub on the High Street

The pub is a well known music venue and it serves an exclusive Vegan menu of super cheap and very tasty bar classics. Recommended.

When it comes to beer, the local Distant Hills brewery and tap room is also a good bet.

In 1992 Westwood received an OBE from Queen Elizabeth II. The Queen made her a Dame in 2006.

LIQUEUR, WITCHES AND BLACK CATS

Burnley, a town in the county of Lancashire in the North West of England is not the sort of place that you would regularly find in the Financial Times newspaper. Usually the ‘FT’ reserves its comments to the wealthier parts of England, usually in the South of the country and usually in London. Nevertheless it was pleasure that we came across a fascinating article in a recent ‘FT Weekend’ on Burnley and the town’s reputation as the biggest market in the UK for the French liqueur, Bénédictine. The article is behind a ‘paywall’ and so are unable to link to it here. Nevertheless, we were fascinated to learn that this Northern industrial town was of so much importance to the French producers of this drink.

The French company has an international market for its product in France, the UK, USA and, of course, Singapore where it is a constituent of the famous ‘Singapore Sling’ cocktail.

When the war finally ended, the soldiers of the East Lancashire Regiment brought their taste for the drink back to England and two towns such as Burnley where it is immensely popular usually in the form of a ‘Bene and (h)ot’, Bénédictine mixed with hot water and a slice of lemon. So popular is the drink that the Burnley Miners Club in the town apparently orders around 1000 bottles a year when most bars might order one or two in that time (unless they serve a lot of Singapore Slings of course!).

The venerable old football club, Burnley FC (who play at the delightfully named ‘Turf Moor’ ground) serves ‘Bene and ot’ to its match day fans making it (probably) the only League club where supporters are real enthusiasts for the French liqueur.

Burnley is also the home to several breweries, our favourite being Moorehouse who are based in the town. They have been brewing for 150 years. They produce a superb range of core, craft and small range beers some of whose names (Blond Witch, White Witch, Straw Dog, Black Cat, Pendle Witches Brew) refer to the legends and tales of the nearby Pendle Hill.

Pendle Hill is an eerie and haunting old hunting ground of mystery and infamy.

The Moorhouse website quotes the following lines about ‘Mystical Pendle’:-

‘When the mist rolls in, as it often does, the hill is enveloped in a veil of secrecy and intrigue. It is this atmosphere and eerie presence that still lingers on and can be felt across the moorland and woodland alike. Especially when the mist lingers, or in the dead of night, that this land of rich myths and legends comes to life.‘

Pendle is known as one of the most haunted parts of Britain and it is forever associated with the Witch Trials of 1612 and the execution by hanging of 10 local women accused of the craft.

The names of Moorhouse’s Blond Witch, White Witch and Pendle Witches Brew beers clearly refer to those infamous trials but the names of two of their other core ales, Straw Dog and Black Cat are worth a further explanation.

Straw Dog is the name the brewery gave to a quality golden ale referring (as their website explains) to the locally infamous Demdike, the colloquial name of of one of the alleged witches, Elizabeth Southerns, ‘who gave her soul to a devilish hound, which would carry out her devilish deeds’.

Our personal favourite, the dark mild Black Cat with its luscious overtones of chocolate and mocha, is quite low in alcoholic content, 3.4 ABV (a shock to any Belgians reading this!). It is therefore ideal as a ‘session beer’ i.e. one to enjoy in quantity with your friends over a long winter’s evening without slurring your words as a result! As for its name, once again the Moorhouse’s website explains the connection with the Pendle Witches by noting ‘still guarding Malkin Tower, the Black Cat patrols the ruins, warding off insolent travellers to protect its master’s estate’. Malkin Tower was the home of Elizabeth Southerns aka ‘Demdike’.

The following is an interesting link on Malkin Tower :-

http://www.pendlefolk.com/malkin-tower-rachel-and-andrew-turner-on-their-quest-to-find-the-witches-house/

The name Malkin itself is derived from ‘Grimalkin’, an archaic term for a cat. Cats themselves were thought to be the Witches familiar.

‘I come, Grimalkin’ says the First Witch in Macbeth.

Madam Malkin was the name of a witch in the Harry Potter books.

Above, the 16th century St Mary’s Church at Newchurch in Pendle where the tombstone known as the Witches’ Grave and the “Eye of God” are to be found. One of the accused at the Trials was alleged to have desecrated graves in this churchyard to collect skulls and teeth.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: