With Christmas just around the corner, unique gift-giving ideas are always going to be helpful; and a launch I recently attended was just the “ticket.”
I was fortunate enough to be invited to the event highlighting the new collection of young jewelry designer Tim Tam Ong at her shop at the LRI Design Plaza on Nicanor Garcia St., Bel-Air II in Makati City.
In her previous collections, she was inspired to make use of our own carabao horn. And in another, it was jade that was the predominant element. This time, with the collection called the Prism collection, it was Tim Tam’s love of the sea, and how the two faces of the sea — the sense of serenity and the turbulence of its waves — could both be reflected in the vivid prism of colors, in the same way we see it in nature as light hits water. With such vibrant hues as cyan, crimson, lemon, saffron and honeydew, the luminosity of the sea finds purchase in the wonderful pieces that make up this Prism collection.
Using unique semi-precious stones in a variety of shapes, sizes and designs, these stones are set in silver dipped in 24K gold. Sapphires, tourmalines, topaz, rubies and quartz are just some of the stones that come to “aquatic” life in Tim Tam’s designs. Transforming the sea’s flora and fauna, one design that caught my eye was a peridot-and-amethyst ring contrasted against an oxidized setting and looking like a sea flower in full bloom. Similarly, a set of drop earrings had stones that recalled the incandescent scales of exotic fish.
Tim Tam’s passion for jewelry design began when her husband gifted her with an intricately sculpted stone and excavated bead from his home country Burma. The stories behind these pieces became part of their intrinsic magic and allure. And from there, it was a hop, skip and jump to her own creations that uniformly possess “modern femininity and subtlety, with elements of old-world charm.”
As Tim Tam always is proud to explain, most of her pieces are one-of-a-kind designs, seeking their “true owners” — fated to imbue said ownership with their own story. This is one great aspect of Tim Tam’s collections, that while semi-precious and not obscenely expensive, each piece is unique, and one will not be running into another person at an event or function, wearing the exact same piece.
As can be gleaned from the “husband who originally hails from Burma” anecdote, Tim Tam’s mother-in-law is Wyn Wyn Ong. And when I joked Tim Tam about whether she cooks and does Burmese stew as well as her mother-in-law, she smiled broadly, asking how it was I had come to sample that fabled dish. Mentioning that it was at one of the original ICanServe’s Pink Kitchen culinary events from some four years ago. Tim Tam laughed, recalling that she would help and be one of Wyn Wyn’s assistants during the event. That was one great coincidence! A visit to her store is truly worth the investment — affordable, one-of-a-kind pieces of jewelry that celebrate design that’s innovative, yet very respectful of tradition and the stone’s provenance.
Blurred lines
The unique quality of these three novels is how they blur the lines between fiction and reality. The Lagercrantz novel continues the exploits of Salander and Blomkvist; while Boyd brings a real person, photographer Amory Clay, to life. Special mention for crime novelist Batacan, as she hails from the Philippines, now published under Soho Crime in the US.
The Girl in the Spider’s Web by David Lagercrantz (available at National Book Store) It may sound like a sacrilege to the memory of Stieg Larsson that this book project was even considered. But while it is written by an established Swedish writer/journalist, it is also a tribute, and you can sense Lagercrantz’s respect for what Larsson has meant to contemporary Swedish crime fiction. In this story, the aspect of Salander as hacker extraordinaire is given full rein as she hacks into an American security system, leaving them with clues as to who in the upper echelons of the organization have gone to “bed” with criminal elements. An AI (artificial intelligence) professor and his savant 10-year-old son get caught in the crossfire, and it is left to both Salander and Blomkvist to bring the boy to safety after the professor is murdered. A worthy successor to Larsson’s Millennium trilogy.
Sweet Caress by William Boyd (available on Amazon.com) Written in the first person, this is some writing feat for Boyd. He takes a real-life person, female photographer Amory Clay, and turns this novel into what could have been Amory’s autobiography! And what a life it is. Straddling a good part of the 20th century, Amory’s life is one that finds punctuation marks in the major conflicts of the century — from how World War I affected her father, to Amory’s own role in World War II and on to the Vietnam War. In between, we have her first photo exhibit of Berlin’s night life as set up in London, but shut down on obscenity charges. And there are the men in her life — from her gay uncle to a US publisher, to a war-damaged Scottish Lord, and on to a much younger Australian war correspondent. As Boyd’s previous was a Bond thriller, this is some turnaround!
Smaller and Smaller Circles by F.H. Batacan (available at National Book Store) With an excellent sense of time and place (Payatas in 1997), Batacan gives us a crime novel that has two Jesuit priests from the Ateneo moonlighting as private investigators. Is there or is there not a serial killer, snuffing out the life of 12-year-old urchins who scavenge around the infamous dump site? And why the ritualistic evisceration? When the NBI seems to be stumped and ask for a helping hand from Fathers Saenz and Lucero, we join them as they are thrust into a world of petty politics, corruption, incompetence and poverty. With stark realism, Batacan gives us both social commentary and a page-turning police procedural. Having copped numerous literary awards here in Manila, it’s good to see a foreign publisher recognize her talent.