The Squidboy

Some recent pix and random thoughts.

When I was in university many moons ago, no one I knew travelled to Asia. Being in the Midwest didn't help, but...the idea of "going overseas" was the cliched summer trip to Europe. The paradigm of Asia was, I dunno...Kurosawa movies. The inevitable Godzilla flicks. Delivery of MSG-laden cornstarch-gunk in paper-containers with wire-hasps. Peapods in it.

Later, kung fu flicks dubbed in bad English and all that, and once, a student-organization rented an exhibition hall on campus and showed what must have been a Shaw Brothers film, one I've never been able to track down...they advertised it with mimeographed posters cello-taped to phone poles and I went. Although it amazed me, there was no way of tracking these films and I just concluded it had come from another planet or something—besides, I had other interests at the time.

Never did it occur to me that a person could live and work in a Asian country.

Well, now I lead what must be an exotic life in Asia...but naturally it's filled with the humdrum: bad coffee and stellar lunches and the vicey-versey, work in a cubicle, surrounded by the warp and woof of the culture that spawned that flick "from another planet" and while it's not perfect, whose life is? I'm solvent, I don't have a "hormone imbalance," I'm getting older, I go to the gym, I work too hard, I have fun with my co-workers, I study history, I read and watch flicks and sometimes even sit down and Think About The World. And I take holidays, and come back to my flat sixteen stories above the King's Road in eastern Hong Kong and do it all over again. I'm not perfect, but I'm doing well, thanks.

So, here's some snaps from my latest trip, and these are of Bangkok's international airport, which was occupied by protestors in early December. The shots were taken later that month.


The departure area. Standing room only.


OK, well there's someone having a snooze.


No queues at the shops.


Moving walkways to transport the hordes.


Aha, signs of life: a billboard with happy "diversity in Thailand." Kind of speaks for itself doesn't it.


Half the taps in the men's room have been shut down. Diversity AND water-saving.


No information at the info-kiosk. The repairman will doubtless arrive shortly to fix this high-tech marvel.


Note: this is a series of departure lounges, at a fully functioning international airport, in the middle of the day, during high-season.

Back in Hong Kong, I was idly surfing the Net on a Sunday when noise percolated from the street below. To my surprise, hundreds of marching bands and ensembles were parading down the King's Road in support of Falun Gong.


The Blue & White tide revs up against Big Red.


Jammed: King's Road is a main traffic-vein for cars/buses/trams.


The dull red/gray building marked "Shama" is a new serviced-apartment building opened just last year. The area will also see two new large semi-boutique hotels opening soon. But there is still plenty of local ambience, although we seldom get marching bands.


Anyway, dis my 'hood.

And here's some shots of the newly repainted exterior ot the building: salmon with pink stripes.


For those with vertigo: I'm hanging my arm, with camera, out my kitchen window. This isn't "my view."


Nice to have that bamboo gone after all these months.


This is looking east at my building and down, down, down...

OK, time to wrap up this buncha snaps with a pic of six people in interviewed en masse: people who've worked for Hong Kong's flagship Cathay Pacific Airways for over 25 years. They all worked in technology and had interesting tales and anecdotes. The Englishman in the center, Edward Nicol, is the CIO and told me that Cathay convinced Rolls-Royce to improve their jet engines so Cathay could run transoceanic flights.


The DC-3 they're posing with was sourced in Africa and flown to Hong Kong a few years ago to decorate their enormous facility at Chek Lap Kok Airport: Cathay City. Among other things, CC has a staff-only hotel which tailors room logistics for changing timezones: if you're transiting between North America and Europe, you'll get artificial daylight/blackout curtains to suit the timezone you’re adjusting to, and breakfast at midnight or whenever.

Although the DC-3 seemed flightworthy, Nicol told me the crew carried parachutes just in case!

Wonderful people, wonderful stories. Just another day in exotic Asia, where the McDonalds are open 24 hours and you can even get a decent avocado at the supermarket. Sometimes anyway.

Happy New Year everyone! We'll get to those scuba-fishies, but first, flashback to mid-December...

'Twas time for our annual Questex Xmas party. Certain traditions are upheld, like the "silly gift": you draw the name of a co-worker out of a hat and must buy them a gift, the only rule is that the price may NOT exceed HK$20 (about US$2.50). Often you draw the name of a co-worker you don't know well, so you've got to get creative, but the recipients aren't named. Gifts MUST be silly in nature.

Generally office-Xmas parties are a bore, but I have a lot of fun at the Questex variety. Hope you enjoy the fotos!

We've got a lot of employees now so a Hong Kong-style barbecue at a local sports club was on. I've seen 'em in movies, and I know the drill, but ironically, this was the first Hongkie BBQ I'd participated in.

There are protocols. A typical Hong Konger would find an American-style BBQ (with indirect heat, long cooking times, cold side dishes and a sense of order) peculiar.

OK, here's what you need:

You need a big ol' BBQ, either a concrete pit or in this case, half of a 55-gallon drum.


Yes, the stool is covered with tinfoil cuz it's gonna get messy later.

You need a stack of meter-long wooden-handled BBQ forks with two tines.


"Be careful—you could poke yer eye out with one of those!", your mother might yell. She's right.

You need stuff to spear on those medieval implements.

Members of Questex Media Asia inspect plastic tubs of spearables.


You need a BBQ-dude who gets the charcoal started.

Flamin' up! We're ready to get this party started.

Love the "BBQ" charcoal bag here.


Cannis and Candace have speared pieces of plain white bread and are toasting them cutely, CUTELY I say, over a (nonexistent) fire.


Teresa demonstrates a classic HKBBQ technique: brandishing speared tubes of meat-emulsion, ready for a-roastin'!


Get down!! The first things to hit the flames are hot dogs (the round things are fishballs) while everyone sits around sizzling theirs and chit-chatting in Cantonese.


Close-up of the mayhem. Some tinfoil-wrapped packages sit roasting in the pit, inside (individually): eggplant, mushrooms, sweet potatoes.


If your hotdog isn't charring quickly enough, you can always brush honey on it. Seriously. Hong Kong supermarts sell these jars of "barbecue honey" complete with disposable yellow plastic brush.


Someone wanted their tube-steaks fantastically charred.


The Michelin guide doesn't have enough stars to rate a banquet like this.


Once the flames die down a bit, people skewer marinated raw chicken wings and start sizzlin' those. And yes, people are still toasting white bread.


Ever mindful of culinary hygiene, Dick Wong wears a clingwrap-plastic glove to hold the raw chicken wing while he rams a BBQ fork into it.


It's chickentastic.


Folks at another BBQ went mainstream and put a grill on to cook corn, porkchops, lambchops, and yet more chicken wings and hotdogs.


Now this is sheer genius: Agnes our web designer brought Sara Lee pound cake, cut it into chunks and toasted it over the open fire.


All-Butter Sara Lee pound cake toasted right next to raw meat. The slab of beef at left was Teresa's concept. Innovation like this is what makes Hong Kong one of Asia's centers of excellence!


Agnes shows off a perfectly toasted cake chunk.


Aftermath...who needs linen napkins when you can rip off wads of industrial-grade bog-roll?!


Time to start getting silly.


The bowling teams were demarcated by brightly colored accessories. Here's Dick and Michelle modeling their outfits.


Yes folks, working-life in Asia really is different. Now, let's destroy some pins.


Jessie waits for her ball to return...


...and demonstrates how to bowl while wearing a fake hula skirt.


Yes, that's me, wearing my "Vito's Loans, Brooklyn" bowling shirt with its snarling shark logo, my size 15 orange/black bowling shoes and an absurd headdress, hurling a 13-pound bowling ball towards an array of helpless pins. Oh yeah, I picked up the spare...what, u kiddin'?!


Pauline gets ready to chuck an 8-pound lime-green ball down the lane.


Lookit them scores! Lookit them smiles! Lookit that hula skirt on Agnes, who's checking to make sure all her strikes are properly recorded.

The Xmas lights glimmer across Victoria Harbour from Kowloonside. Some crew of young'uns is doing a fashion shoot out here, out at the North Point Outdoor Cinema, six seats, no popcorn, a wall of slick graffiti as backdrop. Their strobe-flashes pop to my left, cutting the yellow sodium-vapor streetlights. I was able to capture that look in my most recent shots by cranking the digital ISO to 400 and trying to hold still. I'd like a better camera.

Not in the budget. My budget's been cut to bare essentials—things I might normally consider affordable, now ain't. Ironically, I'm flying to Bangkok on Saturday for Xmas holiday, but it's something that was planned and booked (and paid for) months ago. I'm meeting my pal Rico Flan and heading down south to Ko Lanta for some quality chillout time. Canceling and seeking refunds was an option, but as Rico is good-to-go and I have a reasonable expectation of successful transport (short-haul flight on the national carrier, enough lead time to evacuate most of the stranded tourists).

Roll that around the ol' noggin for awhile: "evacuate the tourists." Of course, all air travel to/from Bangkok was suspended for over a week, and the insane level of self-damage Thailand has managed to accomplish THIS time is incalculable. It's odd to have a beach holiday booked and feel ambivalent—few things are as serene as the Andaman Sea in winter, and we're assured of uncrowded conditions—in sharp contrast to the last time I visited Lanta (last Xmas).

In chilly Hong Kong, where I live and work, there are no yets. I'm hitting the road and hope to regain stride and grace. This week is for tying up loose-ends, packing my wetsuit and other essentials and flying into the Cobra Swamp airport, recently occupied by a bunch of...

Well you probably read about it. But if you didn't read the most recent Economist articles...well you're probably not concerned about Thailand anyway. Were Rico and I to cancel our plans, we'd be joining the growing legions who are crossing the tropical nation off their vacation-list.

Hong Kong news was dominated by Thailand last week, largely because the HK government initially declined to charter airplanes to fly its citizens out. The Macau SAR chartered planes, the mainland did as well—they went into evacuation-mode. Hong Kong, citing a lack of bloodshed, did not. A laissez-faire move which, with 20/20 hindsight, nailed the "fail" button.

Fate turned the ace of spades: a minivan carrying stranded tourists from Bangkok to Phuket (where Hong Kong's Dragonair had scheduled extra flights for evac) crashed enroute. Among the casualties was a young pair of Hong Kong citizens: the woman made it, the man didn't. Immediately after this incident the HK government began operating charter flights, some to the beleaguered U-Tapao airbase: a former US military airbase in Sattahip, near Pattaya on the eastern seaboard.

Too little/too late for public opinion, which has been loud and vitriolic. At first the govt tried to stick Secretary for Security Ambrose Lee with the blame, but before long, Financial Secretary Henry Tang (this post is generally considered #2 in the HK govt executive branch) was out there apologizing. No one will resign over this, but it's not gone down well with the HK public, who often take holidays in Thailand.

Or did, anyway. The past tense is going to be used more often in talking about The Kingdom of Siam in the months and years ahead. If you're interested you should be reading The Economist, the BBC site, Asia Times (atol.com), the IHT, even AP and Bloomberg. Things which would never be published even a month ago are now a matter of record on reputable media. You either get me, or you don't.

Anyway, I'm off soon, and hope to be able to post an entry or two from the road. Holiday-season, let's party, people!

Well of course wedding banquets aren't normal meals. I was planning to write about the "ghost char chaa teng"—a basic "greasy chopstick" dish-'em-out eatery that makes a wicked beef hor fun—but then the GCCT went and screwed up Chee's "Singapore noodle."

Naturally, your typical HK CCT Sing-noodle doesn't resemble anything you'd get in Singapore, but sometimes you want one, and not something else. So when Chee opened his ricepod and found, I dunno what, he swore a mighty oath and went back to the GCCT and had them re-do it. And this is a guy who speaks fluent Cantonese, and repeated his order more than once. So the GCCT gets marked down. Maybe I'll blog about it later, maybe I won't (it's not that photogenic).

We still go there, but they can't even get the chili sauce takeaway-packets right, and how are you gonna eat an HK CCT beef hor fun without chili sauce? Their lack of competence in condiments drove Teresa and me semi-batso one day and she went off to the local market and bought a bottle of chili sauce—we keep it in the fridge so we can chilify the GCCT ricepods.

I digress. Our associate publisher Simon got married last Friday, at a hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui East, and virtually the entire office attended. I was running late and it was unseasonably warm/humid for mid-November, so I got a bit sweaty when walking to the place and arrived late—stopped at the reception desk and before they could even tell me my assigned table, I heard the booming voice of Dick Wong at the microphone: "Stefan, please come to the stage immediately." The entire work crew is up there having their photo taken. I walk up, say hi to the bride (hadn't met her before—lovely woman named Rity), pose, flash flash and then go sit at table 11.

Hong Kong Chinese-style wedding banquets aren't everyday fare, but they're formulaic. Instead of giving possibly-useful stuff like blenders or espresso-makers, guests give definitely-useful envelopes of cash (the "red packet," and I've learned a few things about red-packet-etiquette over the years, so if you're interested, drop me an email or add a comment and I'll expound).

The early hours, when grandmas and kids are likely to stop by, are typified by impromptu mahjong games. Entertainment ranges from multimedia presentations with vintage snaps of the newly married, often with additions or commentary. Emcees may give jocular discourses on their quirks (all in Cantonese of course, but Simon & Rity's emcees were professional and well received).

The Questex crew did some impromptu foto-shoot'n:


Top row: Edmund our new Webmaster, Jonathan Bigelow (the Big Boss, who replaced Rob), Angela, Candace and most of Agnes. Bottom: Me, and much of Dick the Wonga.


Edmund, Angela, Jonathan, me, Candace, Agnes...me and Dick. The "pistol-L" gesture is one I use a lot but ironically am NOT doing in this shot: it's a face-frame thing, very Asian, good for a quick laugh. Don't ask me what gesture Dick is attempting. He's like that ALL the time, believe me. There was funnier stuff too but I couldn't foto everything.


It goes without saying that every Chinese wedding banquet starts with an immaculately disassembled roast piglet.


Roast pigface. A shop down my block sells them, and for awhile I thought of having a Halloween party, buying a few and making some party-altars. But my flat's dinky and inviting-people-over just isn't a Hong Kong type-of-thing.


Rectangles of roasted piglet. They're crispy, greasy and yummy: sort of the ultimate medieval bacon rind, except processed "bacon rinds" taste like desiccated air-puffed kerfuffledoodle and these delectable morsels taste like essence of pig.


Chee models the pig-rectangles but needless to say, they didn't last long.


Angela salutes the piglet while Agnes snaps away with her Canon and Dick pretends he's not wearing an Italian-restaurant-tablecloth and yaks on his mobile.


Angela and Agnes: could they possibly be any cuter?!


Yes.


Food (abalone and veg).


Connie and Kitty!


More food (broccoli is sai lan fah in Cantonese in case you were wondering).


Angela's shoes—this shot was taken at the office earlier, and yes, she wears stuff like this often.


More food (scallop/squid/green bean thing).


"Come on Agnes, just eat it, errr, OK, Angela..."


More food (whole fish steamed with soy/ginger/onion).


The fish head, with fin-garnishes (you knew this was coming).


Fruit attack! Teresa makes like a psychokiller with the fork while Allie looks on and our office manager Rebecca gives the "oh those wacky kids" glance.


Folks at our table were absolutely stuffed but co-workers at the other table, pragmatically, swiped our fruit platters—the platters at lower left have small ball-shaped sweets, one's a sort of custard-filled pastry and the other is a sesame ball filled with lotus paste. Or something like that. Delicious but after nine courses...Pauline is assaulting the fruit while Cannis finds the whole thing highly amusing.

A good time was had by all, and Simon & Rity are off on a one-week honeymoon in Japan.

Author Tim Hallinan has a great blog-comment-thread going on over at http://www.timothyhallinan.com/blog/?p=233. He wondered who should perform at Obama's inaugural ball and spawned a fascinating string of comments and speculation. Of course I weighed in with my choices, kinda heavy on the Mo-Stax, give me Martha Reeves or Mavis Staples over some dingbat wearing a baseball cap incorrectly and gesticulating over material possessions.

I recall the bewilderment of Dubya's inaugural in January 2001—pundits suggested that cowboy boots and Stetsons would be trendy. But like everything from "My Pet Goat" to his recent faux-congrats to the President-elect, 'twas naught but a crock of Bush dung. Spoonfed by the media, folks back then attributed good-ol'-Texan characteristics to Dubya. The jury was still out on the Bush Junior.

Not any more. Sludgebucket's currently running an approval level of less than 20%, lower than any president in history (but still higher than those sudden weird headaches that crop up when you drink a milkshake too fast). The twerp is making Nixon look like FDR. January 20 is starting to look like the 4th of July.

So who should perform for Obama? Someone suggested ZZ Top, and I like that. There's something about ZZT that represents my America: a place where people work hard, pay their debts and can find Mexico on a map. The growls and squeals of Billy Gibbons's guitar work as soundtrack to red dust flying off a beaten '77 Dodge pickup truck on the way to the drive-in cinema, that's the America I know. A place where people say: "Hang on just a second there, champ, just what is IN this thing you call 'The Patriot Act'? You best not be stepping on our civil liberties, because as you know, liberty IS civil."

Still, if I were granted Godlike powers for a moment (now there's a scary thought, but...just this once), I know who I'd put on that stage. I'd reach back into 1967 and call forth: Otis Redding. Backed by...well, do you need to ask? Guys named Steve and Booker T and Donald "Duck" Dunn. Turtlenecks, straight-leg pants, Beatle-boots, and Kustom amps, turned to an appropriate Big-Deal-Wash-DeeCee volume.



Redding would never have made it in the MTV/American Idol world. His earnest but horse-faced mug wasn't made for the living-room glow of the Haunted Fish Tank.



But oh could he sing, the power of black American gospel fused with barely controlled blasts of ball-lightning, mythic yet real simultaneous, it seemed at times as though his body could barely contain it. Listen to his cover of Sam Cooke's "Shake"—recorded live—where at times the microphone seems to be trying to dodge bullets as the crowd fires back. Although best known for his plaintive hit "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay," Redding's too-short oeuvre is a mix of body-shots, jabs and show-stopper uppercuts. Of all the great Stax-Volt acts, only the wicked Wilson Pickett approached the ferocity of Otis (not to diss Aretha, Sam & Dave and Rufus/Carla Thomas: they too are part of My America, and I've got a double-sawbuck that says Dubya couldn't name a single Stax-Volt title).

Well heck, as long as I'm playing Master of the Inaugural, let's bring Pickett out for a few numbers. Imagine Barack and Michelle shaking it to "Land of 100 Dances."



Hey Tim, this is fun, thanks again!

Here's a bit of Otis Redding trivia: if you've ever wondered why his reading of "Satisfaction" is so transcendent and eccentric, here it comes. Although the Rolling Stones original was a huge worldwide hit...

Otis had never heard it. Someone gave him the sheet-lyrics, Cropper cranked the riff and Redding just...sang it the way it seemed right to him. Who knows who came up with the horn parts, including that wicked baritone-sax bellow...Cropper basically lived in the Stax-Volt studio during those days, so he probably knows. But covering a pop hit you've never heard, from a culture an ocean away...about the only things that Redding and Jagger/Richards ever had in common were a love of the blues and knowing what it means to be poor and live on either Grandma's cooking or pork pies (respectively).

And yes: the election of Barack Obama has, even from my tiny vantage point on this rock in the South China Sea, changed the status of the USA in the world's eyes. As he said when discussing his choice of family dog: "a mutt like me," and while purebreds may lounge around waiting for their daily shampoo and freshly scrambled eggs, mutts roll up their sleeves and get to work. Obama has a hell of a lot of work to do, and while we're all pitching in and practicing fiscal conservatism (financing that new bling-bling SUV not so attractive now, eh?), there's no reason why he can't kick off his presidency with a feisty celebration. Put your hand, on your hip, c'mon. And let your backbone slip.

Shake.

Get used to that delightful phrase, folks.

President G "Dubya" Bush congratulated President-elect Barack Obama today on his victory. How nice.

How customary. When the first US prez named George voluntarily surrendered power to John Adams in the late 18th century, Europeans were flabbergasted. That just wasn't how powerbroking was DONE, dontcha know. Around the same time, the French Revolution showed that new systems of government were in fact viable.

None of this should obscure the opinion, shared by many, that Dubya is a lying sack of whale turds. Wait, let me rephrase that...

Dubya is an incompetent stooge who's managed to not only launch the nation into two disastrous and expensive wars, raise deficit-spending to levels a million crackheads could not collectively achieve, preside over an Investment-Banks-Gone-Wild environment which has blowtorched the global financial structure, but managed to drive his own political party into the ground. "A sack of whale turds"? Far too kind.

Please allow ME to congratulate Mr Obama, for unlike Turdya, my praise is sincere. Never have I been prouder to be a native Chicagoan. And never have I been so pleased to see anyone elected President.

Comparisons to Martin Luther King are inevitable, but unlike King, Obama is best described as "African-American" (I don't want to wallow in semantics or offend anyone here, but with one African parent and one American, he epitomizes the term...by the same standard, I'm Polish-American or perhaps Belarusian-American). Fine. The USA has significant infrastructural/political/financial difficulties at present and what's needed is leadership, discipline and intelligence. These qualities are abundantly clear in Obama, and I credit my fellow Americans for recognizing competence when they see it (Obama won Nevada. He won Colorado. He would have won a national election in at least a dozen countries).

He's already referred to "the enormity of the task ahead" so he's not as delusional as, for example, Turdya (who still has ten weeks of lame-duckness and let's not see any Mideast-Gulf-of-Tonkin shenanigans out of YOU, scumbag). Obama knows he must deal with the pork-barrel spendthrifts in his own party who've been rubber-stamping "emergency" spending bills for Halliburton/KBR mercernaries (I'm talking to you, Nancy Pelosi), not to mention the now-way-minority-party Republicans, phalanxes of lobbyists and special-interest groups, and all the baggage of hardball realpolitik. The Repubbos are already gearing up for the elections of 2010 and 2012 (although somehow I don't think Moose Mom is gonna get thrown back in the sandbox, but thanks for the conversation with "President Sarkozy," ma'am, omigawd you can't possibly be dumber than a pile of laundry...or can you?) and now they get to whinge about the economy and blah blah blah.

But forget all that and bask in the moment. We have a President-elect who proves to the world that we are not a nation of Dubyas. In a surreal moment, Obama's opponent (I forget his name already, some white-haired dude) accused him of "eloquence"...I mean, what the hell do you say to that?! "How dare you, sir! Next you'll be hurling poetry-slurs and accusing me of being 'well-read'!"??

Yes, Obama's eloquent. He's also disciplined, and, it seems, principled. He's not Ivy League, not in the Skull and Bones Society, he seems to have a distaste for pandering, and definitely has the charisma that the chief executive USA sorely needs at this point. I know he's inheriting one hell of a mess, but I'm hoping he surrounds himself with good people, rolls up his sleeves and gets to work.

You probably already know this, but Obama is incredibly popular overseas. Just not-being-Bush would be a plus, but Barack Obama will take office with with great global goodwill already secured. As for his character, I turn to an excerpt from Greg Torode, a journalist for the South China Morning Post, who wrote in today's paper:

"An old acquaintance who knows Senator Obama and has been helping him on foreign policy offered a strong description. My friend also knew former US president Bill Clinton. But when the chance came to help Senator Obama early on during his primary battle against Hillary Rodham Clinton, the choice was easy (despite considerable pressure from the Democratic establishment).

"Like Clinton, Obama has these stunning personal qualities ... he listens and he talks so well, delivering common sense and nuance in a compelling way. He's clearly highly intelligent, and he's just great at absorbing situations and problems.

"But with Bill, I never really knew where Bill Clinton ended and `Slick Willie' began. There was always something missing that nagged at me. Obama's got everything Clinton had and more ... but from the first minute you meet him, you can sense his integrity. He's got it in his bones. I just hope that it is something he never loses."

Can't wait for January. Most US citizens are good people, and we deserve it.

The Economist, published continuously since 1843, comes up with a cover every few years that knocks everything else out of the box.

Here's this week's:



The accompanying essay:
http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displayStory.cfm?source=most_commented&story_id=12516666&goback=%2Eho
is well worth reading. But I excerpted a few bits:

"Back in 2000 America stood tall as the undisputed superpower, at peace with a generally admiring world. The main argument was over what to do with the federal government’s huge budget surplus...The Economist does not have a vote, but if it did, it would cast it for Mr Obama. We do so wholeheartedly: the Democratic candidate has clearly shown that he offers the better chance of restoring America’s self-confidence.

At the beginning of this election year, there were strong arguments against putting another Republican in the White House. A spell in opposition seemed apt punishment for the incompetence, cronyism and extremism of the Bush presidency. Conservative America also needs to recover its vim. Somehow Ronald Reagan’s party of western individualism and limited government has ended up not just increasing the size of the state but turning it into a tool of southern-fried moralism."

'Nuff said. It's Time.

During my first year living in San Francisco, I purchased a motorcycle. The weather, terrain and difficulty-of-car-parking made a two-wheeled vehicle an ideal choice. I'd never owned one, but a co-worker who was a bike enthusiast advised me...I went down to the local dealership and bought a large-frame straight-up Honda. What the heck, I thought, it seemed to fit. I knew how to ride a bicycle and drive a stick-shift, how hard could it be?

Soon I enrolled in a motorcycle-training course. It taught me the basics, but daily commutes on San Francisco's steep terrain taught me what driving a motorcycle is about.

Since most people haven't driven one, you can't freely use motorcycle-metaphors in writing, which is a shame, because bike-metaphors are fertile, trenchant, and so slickly apt that you wish you could slide one into a tale, slick with pale oil, torque it tight and sweet between your phrases and tauten your prose. Motorcycles are fun, dangerous and sexy. But as analogs...well, you just can't count on the proper translation. I once read an interview with a female celeb I'd never heard of, the topic turned to her fave bikes and she purred about how much she loved her "Yamaha crotch-rocket." Oh yeah: motorbikin'.


Five gears and overdrive.

There is one thing you learn from driving a bike on San Francisco streets and California freeways: you learn (at your own pace) to control certain types of instinctual panic. A bug slaps your faceshield at 55 mph, you think: "so that's what that feels like," and continue in a straight line. A crosswind on the Bay Bridge forces you to lean sideways to stay in your lane, you think, "well, this is kinda messed up," and continue in a straight line.

But my favorite phenomenon (other than the airborne split-second i could win by gunning it straight up Pine Street between Kearney and Stockton, but that's another story) was the triple "rumble-strips" just prior to arrival at a toll-booth—in a car, you just get a "rrr-rrr-rrr" sound and reach for the toll-fee. On a bike, those rough pieces of asphalt judder your handlebars like an invisible orangutan grabbing the front of your hog and tussling with ya. The first coupla times, you think the bike's gonna disintegrate, your front tire's shredded, any-millisecond-now you'll be tasting the pavement, Armageddon in a heartbeat.

And you think: "hmm, wasn't expecting that" and continue in a straight line. Because that's an important motorbikin' skill: don't panic. The learning of how to not-panic is up to you, but if you Just Keep Going Straight, you'll most likely be fine.

Right now is one of those times when it pays to Just Keep Going Straight. For example, in two days last week, the stock-price of Citic-Pacific (the Hong Kong-based arm of a state-owned mainland Chinese corporation) fell off a cliff. Revelations of dodgy trading in foreign exchange were revealed earlier this week: someone was getting cute with large sums of Australian dollars, a currency which, like many, has plummeted in recent months (you don't want to be heavily vested in Hungarian forints just now). C-P dropped 55% in one day and the next day it opened up and bled another 25%. It's an interesting case as the mainland likely doesn't want to see a Hong Kong subsidiary (the C-P bigwigs are in Beijing now, hat-in-hand, asking the mothership for a US$1.5 billion loan to try to save their collective patoot) fail.

Why should Americans care? Hmmm...who do you think is financing the US FedGov's debt? You know, that pesky deficit, bumped by "emergency spending" bills for Operation Iraqi Freedom and now by a "bailout" plan, let's add it all up, darn, the calculator's run outta digits...so who's picking up the tab? Did someone say: primarily, investors in China, Japan and Russia? Now put yer arms/in th' air/an' wave 'em/like you just don't care! Let's party like it's 1999!

I wonder how many Americans still don't quite grasp the concept of globalization. One thing that's immediately grasped: discretionary spending, unless you're stinking rich, is no longer discretionary. That jet-fresh lobster, that new MacBook, that cheap plastic thingie from the toy factory in China's Pearl River Delta...no longer seem quite as essential. Few are insulated from the pain.

Like Howard Beale (the "mad prophet of the airwaves" from the exquisite film NETWORK (1975)), I'm irked. I'd like to hear some of the millions who re-elected President Chimpo in 2004 explain publicly what they thought of his regime then and what they think now. Operation Iraqi Freedom is still costing the FedGov, what, US$12 billion a month? Anyone getting frequent-flyer miles for that?

So, it's bad. It's painful. But remember the motorcycling analogy: Just Keep Going Straight. Yes the handlebars are juddering, the invisible ape seems almighty, it's pelting rain and the wind is blowing sideways. Lean, just a little. Treasure your humanity, and help others in small ways if you can. Hope is the most precious commodity we have right now. Preserve that spark.

Rants don't end, they just stop. Which means: time for more pix!


Not every Vegas-visitor is a mook. But how else would you describe this gent, posing with a shiny 70s 'Vette?


The poignancy of my neighbors' post-whatever room-service-cart debris is enhanced by the freshly ripped-open packages of over-the-counter pharmaceutical products.


Deepest darkest mysterious Asia, replicated in plaster.


Some people will do anything if they think a stranger is going to send them stacks of money via Western Union.


They really will.


Online scammers will still be in business in 2009, but this moron won't be.



Ben Bernanke action figure! Now YOU can drop money out of a helicopter!!



"AND HE KNOW WHAT IS EVIL IS." Like...whatEVER.

Well, color me impressed. My complaint about not-feel'n-the-luhhhhv in the blogosphere was repudiated by a flurry of emails and even a few on-blog comments from friends I deeply respect. Thank you all.

My "key takeaway": oh yeah, I feel-the-luhhhhv and aw shucks and thanks and all but most importantly..."Stefan, quit whingeing and keep posting." OK, you got it.

Still, what happened last week would likely have catapulted me back onto these backlit pages: at the age of 81, Rudy Ray Moore passed away.

Moore was unique. Being white, I was never supposed to know about him: he was an LA-based comedian who created a number of characters whose salty tales, delivered in Rudy's nonpareil ghetto-fabulous patois, were recorded on vinyl and in low-budget films—mostly in the 1970s. The characters—Petey Wheatstraw, Hurricane Annie, Pimpin' Roc, Shine, and Rudy's most famous, Dolemite—were loosely based on fantastic tales told in "prison toasts" in earlier times, and Rudy became them all, sometimes more than one in a single story.

The comedy was raw, vulgar, hilarious—Moore served up steaming plates of verbal smothered chicken with greens, black-eyed peas and a garnish of Crystal hot sauce and if you dared not to clean your plate he'd likely look you right in the eye and call you a "no-business, born-insecure, rat-soup-eatin' MUTHAHFUKKAH!"

Rudy Ray Moore took prisoners. And I know, because I saw him live.

In the late 80s, the Strand cinema on Market Street in San Francisco ran a series of interesting live events, and if Jim Morton ever does Trashola Deluxe I'm sure he'll chronicle the re-enactments of William Castle gimmicks (and Jim, I'd be delighted to contribute). In 1988, the Strand (which had a stage in front of the movie screen), presented Rudy Ray Moore in performance. It's a night I'll never forget.

I arrived early to get a front-row seat, knowing that Moore would rip into me. However, a few seats away, front and center, was another white guy, and he weighed about three hundred pounds. This guy KNEW he was going to be royally ripped.

The cinema showed PETEY WHEATSTRAW: THE DEVIL'S SON-IN-LAW (1977) as appetizer, and after the closing credits, a white spotlight flamed on, a trapdoor in the stage opened and Moore, wearing a jaunty nautical sailor's cap, popped his head up to wild applause.

I'll not take space to relate his comedy routines, many have been recorded (he even did a concert-video called simply RUDE), but Moore's live delivery was intense. He would literally bend backwards when delivering lines like: "Dolemite said, BEEEEEEEEEEEEEYATCH!" After spinning numerous toasts and tales he proceeded to take on the audience...

On that night Rudy Ray did not take kindly to any sort of slight, imagined or real. When the spotlight-operator slid in a red gel, Rudy tore him a new orifice: "Get that red light offa me, muthafukkah, and put the bright one back ON. I want people to SEE me, goddammit!" He complained about the empty seats: "I don't care if you charge two dollah, bastards, I want every seat FILLED!"

Then it was Fatso's turn. "You are one fat muthah, you know that? If this place was on fire and someone tole you to HAUL ASS, you'd have to make TEN TRIPS!" The guy loved it. He got more.

Moore only said one thing to me: "And you, muthafukkah, look the kind of asshole with one hundred pounds of nuts and NO DICK." To this day, I have no idea what he meant.

Then he went into the audience, followed by the now-obedient spotlight-operator, lit up like a traffic accident scene as he got in the face of some of his fans (most of whom were white). There was no mercy. He recited one of his famous lines: "My name is RUDY an' I'm lookin' for..." and stuck the mike in the face of a fan, who dutifully completed the couplet: "...some good hot booty." Rudy snatched the mike back with a look of horror: "WHAT?! You rat-soup-eatin' muthahfukkah! Did I hear someone say somethin' about A-I-D-S?! ASSFUKN-IS-DANGEROUS-SHIT!" If anyone reading this is offended by the profanity, tough: Moore used it like Van Gogh used a trowel and oil paints, and in this instance he was not only testing his fans but tearing them down publicly. He looked the guy straight in the eye and said "My name is RUDY and I'm lookin' for...A GIRL NAMED JUDY!" Then he went on the next victim. I can't remember it all. It was like watching the world's greatest sermon...inverted.

Afterwards, he and his minder from LA (a surly, medium-sized black guy who said little) sold items from a folding table in the lobby, but by the time I got there, most of the stuff had been sold. But I heard through the grapevine that a guy named Davey Swan who used the name "Dog" was planning to have Moore on his public-access cable-TV show ("The Doghouse") the next day, so of course, I showed up.

Waiting in the wings, standing next to Moore, I was struck by how frail he seemed. He was much thinner than the stocky stud with the raging kung fu skills in films like THE HUMAN TORNADO (1976) and DISCO GODFATHER (1979), and shuffled when he walked. But when he stepped in front of the mike it was like an Almighty Switch was flipped and he became Dolemite, the baddest mofo on the planet, a man born to perform.

Mindful that he was on TV, Moore told some truncated PG-rated jokes and said if anyone watching wanted to catch the real deal, they should see him perform at a nightclub in Oakland later that night (an acquaintance, Doug Wellman, told me he actually went: he and his friends were the only whites in the packed nightclub and Rudy certainly, uh, sported with them). Then he sat down for a civilized chat with the host. The thing that sticks in my mind is when Dog referred to "blaxploitation" movies and Moore promptly and politely said he didn't like that term and preferred the term "black action" films.

As a black American born in 1937, it's easy to understand why Moore didn't care for his art to be labeled as "exploitation," even in praise. I wanted vinyl and VHS videotapes, so after the show, I approached him, introduced myself and explained that while I'd enjoyed his show at the Strand, I hadn't been able to purchase copies of work. "Well," he said, "I've got some in the trunk of my car."

So Rudy Ray Moore, his minder and I went down to his car, parked on South Van Ness Avenue. He popped the trunk and I started selecting items as Rudy and his minder stood by watching me.

Now, I grew up on the South side of Chicago, in an area where the local gangs (the Disciples or "Ds," and the Blackstone Rangers) routinely tagged buildings with spray paint. Elijah Muhammed, head of the Black Muslims after Malcom X was assassinated, lived about a mile from us: we'd pass his house after dark and it was illuminated with spotlights, with a blast-wall along the driveway. The husband of my third-grade teacher, a wonderful woman named Mrs Moore, was gunned down in an alley in what was reckoned to be a politically motivated slaying (he'd been a black activist and this was the Chicago of Mayor Richard J Daley, with a police force made infamous by the 1968 Democratic Convention).

I'd grown up around black people and the tension I felt from Moore and his compadre as I was fishing around in his trunk was palpable, and unlike anything I'd felt before. I'm sure he's received more than his share of racial abuse from people who looked like me. But whatever. I knew I had to say something to break the tension, whatever its cause, whatever its reason or lack of reason.

I straightened up, looked at Rudy and said...and I know how prosaic and juvenile this sounds, but I said: "You know, Mr Moore, white people like your comedy too."

It worked. He laughed heartily, even the other guy laughed, and Moore said: "You want me to sign these, or what?"

I bought all his movies on VHS, several vinyl albums, and Rudy signed them all. I asked Rudy to sign one to a friend in Dallas and mailed it to him: he framed it and put it on his wall (where I hope it remains). We totaled the bill, I handed him cash, shook his hand and thanked him for his wonderful, unique comedy. By now he knew I was sincere, and for this, I'm grateful.

Since then, when I'm on a long train trip or something I sometimes play a fine RRM tale and revel in the richness of America's cultural creativity, and how fortunate I am to enjoy such evocative language. Rudy's gone now, but (although regrettably, most of what I bought was later stolen in a warehouse break-in in San Francisco) I still have his recordings on my iPod, and in the intervening years, more people have discovered Moore's unique talent.

There are other black American comedians working the genre, but there was only one Rudy Ray Moore. He's now relaxing comfortably in his luxury suite in Hell, tricked out with fake zebra-skin and 70s ultra-tack, surrounded by topless vixens with afros the size of beachballs and making the Devil laugh and laugh with endless toasts and insults: "Hey Lu! (the moniker of the Devil as portrayed in PETEY WHEATSTRAW). You look like the kind of guy with one hundred pounds of nuts and NO DICK!" Satan doubles over with laughter and has his minions mix Rudy another daquiri. R.I.P., Rudy. When the good lord made you, he broke the mold.

The remainder of this post: emails from friends who shall remain unnamed, but are thanked again, and shots from the "cinema": a sliver of harborfront in Hong Kong where I go to watch movies on the laptop: I was working there this weekend during the day to catch sunlight and chase away the jetlag.


"I enjoy reading your blog. I do. I don't often comment because, well, I don't. My advice -- the whole blog thing just can't be contingent on getting feedback. You gotta do it because you want to publish it. You are, IMHO, bound for disappointment if your happiness with the blog depends on whether people reply to it."


"I always, always read yer blog. And sometimes I revisit entries. I don't always comment, but I always look forward to new entries."


"I understand if not getting feedback makes you think "what's the point?". But at least you know Tim and I are reading. The personal satisfaction of writing good stuff, and knowing two folks are reading, enjoying and inwardly digesting it might not be enough for you to keep at it, but I hope it is!"


"Out of a thousand people who visit, VERY few actually will comment or give you any kind of feedback whatsoever...yet that doesn't mean that you aren't reaching people, enlightening people or helping to shape their perceptions.

Part of the reason I started my blog was because I felt like I wasn't using part of my brain. I have insights about things, but no one to share them with. Plus my blog chronicles my life in some ways.

I've always thought of your blog as your creative outlet, where you can rap about things outside of the scope of your weekday writing.

If you're not feeling it, then take some time off. Come back recharged with some new stories. It's an interesting, entertaining, well written blog and you should keep it up."


"I always enjoy reading your stuff so know its being read even if you're not getting comments. I'll try and write you some correspondence soon but life is hectic and I'm a lazy man."


"The blog is great. You keep your writing light under a shade too much anyway, keep doing the blog."


"Don't take it to heart. Even WIRED this month has a piece on the death of the blog. Too many bloggers, the whole thing corrupted by professionalism, etc. etc. etc. It's not that yours is boring, it's just that it's hard to bring traffic to anything that's not completely nerd-oriented or pornographic. If you wanted to become an online tech columnist, focusing on really obscure developments, you'd probably have a following. And sell ads, etc."


"We're reading, we're reading. And the pics are groovy, too."


"It's noise-to-signal ratio. There are currently more blogs than there are people on earth. How are people supposed to find one, even a great one?

You're too good a writer not to share the product, so to speak, once in a while. Jesus, I'm currently posting a new novel, one I'm writing, a chapter at a time in real time, so it's a chance for wanna-be writers to read and ask about a published writer's first-draft process, and I'm getting like one or two comments. I get 30-40 times as much traffic on the Writer's Resource area of the site, which I never change.

Anyway, take pity on us. There aren't many guides to the surreal who are half as good as you."


"Well, I read every single one. So there! Keep writing, asshole!"

NOTE: thanks to Tim for his wonderful comment on my previous Vegas entry. He was the only one to post a comment...got a few sentences in emails, but seriously, why should I continue this blog? It provides a measure of personal satisfaction but...if no one's reading it, because it's boring or everyone's too busy or whatever, perhaps I should find other pursuits.

Anyway, the Vegas stuff was written on the planeride home so here goes. Hope you like it. Or at least read it!
---------------------------------------------------------
DAY 2: Event begins! Giant hall of industrial breakfast! Lots of white guys standing around yapping! Oh yes, it's a Big Tech Conference, and there's only one way to kickstart th' muthah: a big booming multi-keynote-speaker presentation, rockstar-concert-lite.

People get on stage and say all sorts of nice things. Some are focused, some gush.

At coffee-break time we bolt for the pressroom. Time is passing slowly at this juncture, I feel it's a byproduct of jetlag but not entirely sure. Boredom slips its slippery tentacles into my nervous system. I have the tubes of the Internets handy, so I source bits of info flotsam and jetsam. Minor bits of helpfulness are passed between some of my correspondents.

One of the female Russian tech journos is distinctly cute. The other, equally female, looks like a human refrigerator.


Trio of water-spewing plaster elephant-heads.

LATER: chatted up the cute Russian, she turns out to be a vendor-employee who's handling the Russ journos...lives in Moscow, good analysis of Eastern European tech ascension.

Back to the event: a guy from a big China telcos. His presentation was barely comprehensible, from his garbage-English slides ("We are on the hot sit" was his first item, yeesh) to his rambling style and flat jokes. He was pleasant and made sense in person, but in terms of what was promised, fell far short.

Met J for an evening meal, walked through Boutique Alley at Mandalay Bay to the Luxor (pyramids-phinxopolis), which has a series of mall-type eateries tucked away behind the glitz. It's good to get off the M-Bay beat even though whatever meal you purchase in this part of town comes with a price-tag geared towards dumbass tourists, which, of course, we are. Sort of.

Back at the hotel room, I flip on the baseball game and try to get some tasks done online. Jetlag is present but on simmer...the Dodgers lose, and I sack out.


The monorail passes in front of gargantuan eccentric structures.


THEhotel near sunset, with reflections coming from the hotel I'm in. No processing on this pic other that auto-correcting.

DAY 3: The usual pre-dawn awakening, but I'm feeling more human today. starting to figure out where things are...and in a Vegas hotel you can walk 10-15 minutes to get to, well, anywhere.

Another day of interviews but the Austrian guy who wrangles massive amounts of data for eBay is one of those rare types who gives you actual information. I excerpted a 400-word story from my notes and turned into a stand-alone story for the Net.


So, where would YOU take The Devil for dinner?


J-pop Sushi? How many years did I yap about "J-pop" knowing that few people knew what it was....now it brands a standalone eatery on a Las Vegas casino floor, surrounded by slot machines. J had dinner here one night, said he had sushi and a couple of beers and dropped US$43.


The most demonic eatery at M-Bay. Most of these noodle/rice dishes we consider "normal meal": cooked up fresh and flavorful from overworked Hong Kong short-order cooks, they cost US$3-4. Here...well, you see the prices—yes, these are in US$, not including tax/tip/operation charges. My co-workers are going to hit the floor laughing when they see this.

FINAL DAY: The timeframe required by Amazon has been knocked sideways. The US Post Service has come up with something called "Media Mail" which seems to mean, "move this item as slowly as possible," so the time-windows that formerly sufficed for used items delivered via Amazon's aggregate of goods-sellers now require more lead-time, which, as I was relying on the organizer to confirm my hotel locations, I didn't have. Drat.

This means the used books I ordered (copies of a book I, uh, wrote) will end up being read by the hotel staff. Or maybe they can use the pages to shore up the thin walls, the hole punched in my room's wall by the doorknob (a previous occupant), or use them as incentives to get the staff to fix J's sink, or the elevator-button on the ground floor, or whatever. "This is a two-star hotel masquerading as a five-star," I mused on the second day.

But as you stroll the corridors of M-Bay past the real-expensive eateries, and the Wedding Chapel (I mean, who wouldn't want to get married here?), past streams of shiny happy people, as J remarked: "You would never know that economic underpinnings are crumbling like blowtorched marshmallow paste."

Well that's not exactly how he put it, but I was wondering the same thing. Speakers allude to budgetary problems and speculate on how long the bad times will last, but the captain's speed-wheel is cranked to Full Speed Ahead and no one seems to care. They're "on-message." They've had their decaf latte enemas and they're so happy to stream their PowerPoint slides across the giant screens and march up and down on the stage, talking about...extremely important things.

These things involve jargon which, it is assumed, every person parked in one of those generic hotel-conference-room chairs is intimately familiar. Slides are cute, slides are obscure, slides are illegible...no one cares. "Little pieces: make them bigger," said the analyst giving the presentation just now..."OK?" No, it's not OK. What does he mean? Some of these guys brutalize the language worse than American sports announcers.


OMG, another pic of me. In front of the M-Bay entrance, the mythical creature at left is a gryphon. But then, you knew that.

Our exfil is just before midnight, but our hosts allotted us an extra night at the hotel, which is civilized. I spend the day working, take a shower and head to the airport. Make sure all the tiny bottles of nefarious liquid are in the check-in bags. Shave. Make myself presentable for the surreal streaming reality of being slung halfway around the planet.

Another trip, another handful of receipts, another bunch of stories for the mag, another blog-entry. Are you reading? Or am I just throwing vowels and consonants into the cybervoid?

Stefan Hammond
Descending into Hong Kong International Airport
Friday, October 17, 2008


THEhotel at twilight. A helicopter chops the air upper-left. By the way, THEhotel is part of the M-Bay complex. All rooms in this gilded thing are at least 750 square feet, or about double the size of my Hong Kong flat.

It's a bit disingenuous to refer to dim sum as a "normal meal" in office-terms because it's a restaurant-thing. As a worker-drone in the Hong Kong hive, I usually eat lunch at my desk, fishing up bits of salty Net-chatter to go with the savory detritus swimming around my rice-pod.

And dim sum's hit the mainstream of the outer circles: asteroid-belts of world-savvy diners who know the best places for har gau or siu mai in...wherever.

Still, dim sum is one of Cantonese cuisine's peaks. I can even take my pal Gordo (a confirmed Cantochow-disser, and with the eateries he's taken me to in Beijing and Macau, I take his point) to dim sum. Hong Kong has the finest dim summaries I've ever slurped cheong fun in, and if someone comes to visit me here I make sure to take them to a dim sum parlor—the noisier and more massive, the better.

Dim sum at peak times is like dining in a war zone. Bring a squad, lest you end up sharing a table with strangers (although now that smoking is banned in Hong Kong eateries, that's no longer as onerous).

Expect the waitron to immediately inquire about your choice of tea—the default gwailo brew is heung pin (fragrant jasmine) tea, which goes well with dim sum. The sau sin (chrysanthemum) is more flowery/herbal, while the boh leh (aka pu erh) is an earthy brown tea that brews strong in the pot. With any of these teas, you will probably get an additional pot of hot water to either dilute or drink straight if you're avoiding caffeine (yes, plain water is often served hot in Hong Kong and China).

This is all Tea 101—there are more exotic blends, but if you know about them you know more than me. Pour tea for your companions and if someone fills your cup, tap your forefinger and middle-finger on the table as a sign of thanks. If you're running low on water, slide the lid back and one of the uniformed fast-moving wait-staff will snatch it and refill it for you.

In years past, old ladies to trundle trolleys between the tables, shouting out their wares. Loud, fierce and wonderful, they would compete to empty their trolley fastest and push bamboo steamers of dumplings in your face—if they scored, they'd stamp your "scorecard" (bill) with their round-chop mark. This custom is regrettably dying, and more typically you'll mark your choices on a computerized menu card and hand it to someone who'll take it to the kitchen. Dishes arrive when prepared, so sometimes there are two rounds of ordering: the savory dishes and then dessert, it varies. Cantodesserts...yeah, I can skip 'em. But if you really want to try walnut soup, go for it.

Classic dim sum items—dumplings, rice-flour rolls with meat/shrimp filling, pork buns, beef meatballs etc—are steamed and often served in their round bamboo steaming-containers. You can order side dishes like vegetables, rice or noodle dishes. Dim sum is labor-intensive, so a typical restaurant will serve seafood at dinnertime and dim sum from morning until late afternoon. You'll likely walk past tanks of live sea-critters. I wouldn't take a vegan to dim sum, although...frankly, I don't know where you would take a vegan, maybe to some bloody gangster movie.

Although pork is prominent in dim sum, I used to work with a highly entertaining Islamic guy named Ismail who would often join us for dim sum. Ismail is from Mauritania, a brilliant computer tech who'd eat steak every Friday night with his Chinese girlfriend. At dim sum, Ismail would go for the beef meatballs, and we'd order extra, plus vegetables and whatever else. More pork for us!

And yes, they do serve chicken feet (fung zhao): stewed until the skin is soft and infused with the orange, garlicky sauce which sports a few salted black beans. You sort of chew/slurp (chlurp?) off the webbing and spit out the bones. I like 'em.

I'm hoping people will chip in with their favorite dim sum dishes, so I'll list some of mine:
NORMAL:
har gau, siu mai, cheong fun, fung zhao

SPECIAL:
Naturally this varies...I love it when I go to dim sum and am confronted by a dish I've never seen or heard about. Lately we've been going to the place across the corridor from our office, which has deep-fried fresh tofu which they dust with a spiced-salt mixture: crisp on the outside, creamy on the inside.

They also sometimes have dumplings filled with a garlicky corn-and-egg-white mixture which may sound off-putting, but is delicious. Recently they had some dumplings with chopped green beans as an ingredient: dynamite. And often they have a dish filled with pork dumplings swimming in "Szechuan" sauce, which is spicy-hot and topped with spoonfuls of minced raw garlic.

You never know precisely with dim sum, which of course is why if you come visit me, we're going to one of these places.

And you're gonna eat...


Har gau. These translucent shrimp dumplings are a benchmark for testing any dim sum place. When done properly, they are angelic mouthfuls.


Fung zhao. Steamin' away...you're either down with the chicken feet, or you're not.


Siu mai. These are the premium variety, made on-premises...streetside stalls all over Hong Kong sell "OEM" siu mai on wooden skewers so the dim sum parlors must make more distinctive pork dumplings, often jazzing them up with tobiko (tiny cruncy orange flying fish eggs, dunno what the Chinese name is but they use them a lot in sushi, so I think of them as Japanese).


Cheong fun. It may not look glam, but these steamed rice-flour rolls with savory soy-based sauce are yummy. This one's stuffed with minced spiced beef but you can also get whole prawns, chopped BBQ pork and even scallops.


Getting the sticks stuck in with Rob, Hong Kong's premier motorcycle-racer and lizard-enthusiast. The dim sum selection is offbeat: that's a fish/vegetable/rice dish at left and "deep fried squid beard" just in front of the Motorbike/Lizard King.


Overhead shot of dim sum detritus: Gordo's 'sticking some pork, you see the depleted mustard dish, teacups awash with boh leh, white porcelain askew, the fish/veggie dish largely untouched...one of our party declined any meat-based delectables so we stuck him with the bill, heh heh heh.

Yes, we have elections in Hong Kong. You may recall last year when I dissed Ol' Broomhead (Regina Ip, click on http://squidboy323.livejournal.com/8626.html for that saga), who went down in hissing defeat to veteran Hong Kong politician Anson Chan.

They don't come much classier than Anson, who decided to retire from politics, having reached the age at which rational people turn to less-stressful pursuits than the ongoing-bitchslap that is realpolitik. I guess things are different in the USA nowadays, where rationality seems in short supply (Keep waving that flag! Algebra is a conspiracy! Long live the star-spangled bikini!).

Regrettably, "Broomhead" Ip, the queen of sewage works on Hoi Wan Street, graduate of the same university as Condi Rice but not even half as smart, a woman who seems to have difficulty writing, speaking or even thinking competently, seems assured of victory. The flipside is that she'll be more on-the-record, and considering some of the nonsense that's come out that woman's mouth, there should be some entertainment in store.

Election HK-style: a minivan with loudspeakers parks in front of an eatery during lunch, the candidate pops up and starts pitching herself via microphone, while aides wave big goofy plastic hands with the candidate's number on 'em. I took this pic right across from our office building this week.

I'll briefly attempt to explain Hong Kong's loopy electoral system: there are geographical constituencies, which most Westerners are familiar with, and functional constituencies, where candidates represent an industry-sector. In laissez-faire HK, where the private sector is expected to demonstrate competency, this makes sense. But it also means that there's a seat in the Legislative Council for a LegCo member representing the accounting sector (that doesn't mean the head of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority is elected--he's appointed by the Chief Executive, there's also an executive branch). The FCs are not open to the general public, but to a subgroup of industry professionals. The entire election process is supposed to be open for universal suffrage by 2017, the central authority in Beijing promises. It's not perfect, and neither is Hong Kong, but it's a place that by-and-large works well. There's poverty and social problems as in any big city, but taxes and crime are exceptionally low.

Hong Kong's politicians are often characterized as "pro-Beijing" or "pan-Democrat," but that's not of great importance. Since its reunification with China in 1997, both Hong Kong and Beijing have reinforced their symbiotic relationship. The former is important to the latter for many reasons, which is why the mainland's proscriptions aren't found in the HKSAR. Journalists and dissidents of many persuasions live here. We don't have Internet filters because, then the service wouldn't be working properly now would it, and Hong Kongers expect things to work properly—occasional outages are acceptable, but ongoing malfunctions are protested, and concerted efforts to squelch expression are intolerable. A minimum standard of competence is mandatory on this Darwinian rock.

An election of this scope is my only chance to play political-journalist on my day job as editor of Computerworld Hong Kong, and here's my editorial (http://www.cw.com.hk/article.php?id_article=2035) on the FC election for the IT LegCo seat. The candidates are Charles Mok and Samson Tam, and it's interesting that we have a LegCo seat held by someone representing the technology sector (Sin Chung Kai, who wrote a column for CWHK for six years, is stepping down after ten years as Legislative Councillor for IT). Imagine Silicon Valley execs serving in the US Congress!

The election is this Sunday, after a six-week campaign, and then it'll be on to Normal Meal #2, until then, a few more Hong Kong food shots to keep y'all salivating.


Dish it up!


Squid or something squidlike, condiments in foreground.


Midnight snacks.


I cheated: these are garlic prawns from Singapore...yummy.

I prefer to avoid US politics as a topic of thought or discussion. Until they start putting referendums on nationwide ballots for authorization of overpaid-mercenaries, or the media start publishing the actual annual tax payments of large US corporations, I view political showmanship as extroverted chicanery. PT Barnum chortles with delight from his VIP seat in Hell.

But I admire Barack Obama. And while USA citizens (via an archaiac electoral college system, alas) will be voting for the next US Prez, the rest of the world is so ready to be rid of Bush...and so interested in Obama. Co-workers and people I interview ask me about him frequently. Nobody asks me about the other guy, that "white-haired dude." He's like a re-run of some lousy monster movie on late-night TV.


Just another Dick "Shot-my-buddy-in-the-face-and-waren't-even-hardly-DRUNK-har-har-har fantasy.

And Stateside, uniquely, we don't have two white guys veering desperately for the middle of the road. Oh yeah, I've noticed that Obama has a bit of a tan. But you'd have to be deeply racist and/or abysmally stupid to deny the man's charisma. Some people possess natural leadership qualities, and Americans like myself want our primary global representative to speak well, highlight the good aspects of the USA. We're proud of our country and after years of high-profile abuse by the mumbling, ghastly Shrubya Regime, we deserve better.

How bad has it been? Ask any American who's traveled overseas (or better yet, lives outside the USA). Spread out a map of Europe or Asia with the countries unlabeled and ask an American college student to write in the country-names for you.

Or, let's flash back to 2003. Let's do that. Operation Iraqi Freedom. Anyone interviewed the Dixie Chicks lately? Remember that? How about the photo-op of Chimpo strutting around on that aircraft-carrier wearing a flight-suit?

Donald Rumsfeld referring to Germany and France as "old Europe"? Ahmed Chalabi being groomed as new leader of Iraq? How much did a gallon of gasoline cost then? How many US-homeowners caught in the subprime negative-equity trap in 2003? What was the US federal deficit? What about the Pentagon budget?


Cover of UK newspaper, November 2004.

OK, so 2004 rolled around and the Democrats trotted out a senator who might have been a good administrator, but was described by one columnist as a "moaning tree" and had little more appeal than that charisma-anti-magnet Al Gore. The last good candidate the Dems fielded was a guy so unskilled in Fed-level politics that he didn't know he had no chance to be Prez. He was promptly elected and put in eight solid years.

But in 1994, the year after he was inaugurated, Bill Clinton was unpopular. In that off-year election, Republican candidates tried desperately to tie their opponents to the commander-in-chief, while Democrats tried to fend off endorsements. Well the shoe's on the other hoof now ain't it—it will be amusing to watch Repubs contort themselves to avoid the reverse-Midas-touch of Shrubya this time around. "Yeah, well I met him at a fundraiser, we exchanged small-talk..." ha ha ha.

Of course, no matter who's elected in November, the USA faces severe, endemic problems. Over 1% of the nation's population is in prison. Drugs, both illicitly peddled (and don't think the Taliban can't add—they've upped their market-share in the poppy game) and dispensed legally by the Medical-Industrial-Complex, eat up resources and souls.


Billion-dollar leeches.

Military spending, both for the traditional armed forces and the private "contractors" from Blackwater/KBR/etc, is obscene. The next president will inherit a raft of problems (and if it is Obama, Shrubya's puppeteers may well come up with another Operation Restore Hope, and I know you don't remember that one, so perhaps you should Wiki-whack it...here's a hint: it was spawned by lame-duck Bush #1 as a "gift" for Bill Clinton).

But so what. Americans need and deserve Obama as chief executive. Ironically, the term "African-American" is entirely appropriate in his case. He doesn't look like the presidents on the banknotes. If you asked my opinion of his phenotype, I'd say Mauritanian (I worked with a Mauritanian guy once, he was a top, top guy and one of the better tech-support people I've ever met).

But who cares what Obama looks like. The USA has suffered from years of ghoulish leadership: no other adjective describes the Abu Ghraib photos, the depravity of detention at Guantanamo Bay, the corrupt underpinnings of the world's largest economy which can find bales of US$100 banknotes to fund mercenaries but can't help its own citizens during a 2005 hurricane-disaster.

And now they've fielded a presidential candidate who keeps referring to countries that no longer exist, consorts with lunatic-Xian preachers and despite being tarred-and-feathered by Shrubya's goon-squad during the 2000 campaign, kept right on gluing his lips to Chimpo's posterior and saying yessir Mister Cheney, whatever you want, sir.

Oh and while we're at it, let's revisit the "weapons of mass destruction" thing. Anyone ever find those?


This caption was an accident. Definitely.


Can he beat Herbert Hoover?


"Help me, Ma!"


"Yer expendable, sonny, I spawned a buncha ya's!!"

Writing an in-depth analysis of my own semi-cracked film philosophy a coupla months back, and confessing to being a "film snob" earned me a couple of comments and a few emails (they were nice: my cousin Fede wrote this great memoir of seeing E.T. at the cinema as a youngster, speaking no English but understanding and relishing the film). But maybe I should be blogging about less cerebral stuff, eh?

Like, what I ate for lunch. The weather (hair-drying hot alternating with heavy weather, whacking us with some upper-shelf typhoons in August). Work (last month was all about the DNS, check www.doxpara.com and ask your ISP if they've patched their damn servers yet).

Working in an office brings the inevitable "what's for lunch?" question around 'most every day. Sometimes I think: I used to get into my Dodge Omni, which I knew would start because I'd crammed a space-heater on its hottest setting in front of the car's grill the night before, because it would never start otherwise, then drive half-an-hour to work along frozen Minnesota roads, to a windowless workspace where often the only chance I had to see sunlight was during lunch hour, which would involve more driving, sometimes to the one "Chinese" takeout nearby, where we could at least get exotic rice dishes with MSG added. It's hard to believe I used to live like that (then again, I used to think the "cure" for interminable gloomy winters was massive doses of alcohol, and trust me on this: It. Doesn't. Work.).

Then again, there was Tokyo, when sometimes I would go to KFC for lunch just so I can eat meat off-the-bone. Unless fish was involved, Japanese lunches are essentially free of bones, cartilage, or other natural lunch detritus. Tokyo culture: a poisoned metal fist inside a marshmallow glove. Everything was soft and processed and melodic and predictable, while the people ground themselves up in the corporate machinery, pummeled their livers with subsidized-rotgut and every so often, threw themselves under the instruments of transport that carried them to/from their painful employment: the trains. Which looked so beautiful at night, sometimes I would walk along the Arakawa river and admire them as they slid along their tracks at precise intervals, filled with mannequin-imitating humans whose eyes rarely left the floor.

But in Hong Kong, you can get a wide variety of lunch dishes. Awhile back, our favorite HK-style eatery put out a signboard advertising a new line of dishes. I asked Teresa what they were, her offhand reply has since become a staple around the office: "normal meal."

We have different types of "normal meal" here in Hong Kong, so I think it would be fun to describe some of them. This is one of our standard "normal meals": what our big boss Rob calls the "smelly noodle."


Nice normal meal: soup noodles.

OK, they are aromatic: the broth is made with flounder and as it bubbles all day in a cauldron lined with beef brisket, tripe, tendon, intestines and who knows what, it does have personality. But when you're getting a bowl of noodles that costs US$2.50, where all the ingredients are homemade, broth-personality is critical. We go to THIS shop because another shop nearby sells the same sort of noodle-bowls, but their broth tastes like reconstituted bouillon.

There are other plusses for our fave noodleria. I should mention here that we don't use, or even know, the names of these restaurants. They're in Chinese and they're prosaic: an eatery may be called something like "New Beautiful Noodle Place" in Chinese. We tend to name them after our favorite dishes, a cute girl who works there, or even more arcane ephemera.


Chee and Teresa check the menu.

No one cares about the name of the noodle place. The Chinese invented pasta and Marco Polo brought it to Italy, the story goes (if so, the world's first fusion-food?). What you get here is simple: choice of noodle, in broth or braised "dry", choice of additional ingredients, a side dish or two. They have a steamer full of steamed rice-dishes in front, but if we want rice, we usually go elsewhere.


This sun-faded sign shows the varieties of fish products on offer.

Another plus is the friendly young guy who speaks good English. He remembers how I like my noodles: no teaspoon of fried garlic atop, and a small bag of red vinegar instead of chili (I'm not opposed to either per se, it's just not the way I like my soup-noodles. The place makes their own fish products, including fish-paste shaped into balls, or fried triangles, or long rectangular blocks which are fried and sliced. You can get any or all of those, plus sliced beef brisket, the "guts" or pieces of boiled-tender spiced tendon, and of course wonton. The classic dish here is probably "wonton min"—thin egg noodles with pork/shrimp dumplings—but lately I've been getting the fish-ball min which includes a coupla slices of fishcake. It's a classic.

If feeling frisky, I'll get a US$0.80 bag of fried fish skin, the Cantonese equivalent of pork rinds. These are anarchic snacks that go well with the noodles.

Rob used to complain about the "aromatherapy noodles" and tried to get the office manager to dock our pay if we brought them into the office. We told him he was a fascist and threatened to mutiny. We've also offered to buy him a bowl (their aroma is distracting unless you're eating them, when it makes sense) but so far he refuses—although he has eaten local fare before. I think he's afraid he'll find out what we already know: Normal Meal #1 is a banquet in a bowl!


Behind the steamy glass, a bubbling cauldron of mystery.


Closeup of the treasure-trove: chunks of flesh await the cleaver should you desire them. You must see the cooks guys slice/swirl/pour/garnish during a lunch crush...fluidity and economy of motion, graceful and efficient.


Here's the Coca-Cola view of Normal Meal #1. Ha!


Chee is clearly indicating...this place is Number One!


Streetside view.

I've spent the week committing journalism. The backstory is convoluted, but essentially: aided and abetted by Chee Sing Chan, Yusuf Goolamabbas and Richard Stagg, and others unnamed and unindicted co-conspirators, I helped force Hong Kong's dominant ISP to patch their DNS servers.

Whether you understand what I wrote above, or are utterly confused, please do read this article: only Richard Stagg could have written it (although I did write the headline):

Hong Kong ISPs: patch your servers against DNS-exploits now!
http://www.cw.com.hk/article.php?type=article&id_article=2018

I work for a trade magazine and the opportunity to leverage press scrutiny and a well informed security consultant for the purposes of good. I have no proof that the ISP (named on page two of Richard's story) applied the patch as a result of the story, but I was testing it throughout the day and the vulnerability status on www.doxpara.com flipped to "safe" soon after they were informed that press coverage was forthcoming the following morning. Coincidence?

But of course, all ISPs are at risk and all need to be patched. In regions that are ranked lowly on, for example, the press-freedom scale of Reporters Without Borders (http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=19388), the press has woeful leverage compared to a wealthy ISP. As the exploits are ongoing, anticipate ISPs running unpatched servers to experience...well, it's hard to say how this will play out. Stay informed, and do click "Check My DNS" at the doxpara site—Jim Kaminsky, who operates the site, also keeps the text updated. He's technical so it's good to also check mainstream tech-security media for updates and explanations (again, Stagg's article gives an excellent overview).

In a phrase, the exploits that leave ISPs open to DNS-cache-poisoning can cause serious Internet security problems, and the nature of these security breaches is such that no security measures on YOUR part (using a Mac with Firefox or Safari instead of Windows/IE, using a firewall, etc) will make a difference. One of my journalistic abettors this week suggested a conference call with the ISP during which he would demonstrate exactly what could be done to a website hosted with that ISP, i.e. hack it. I demurred—I understood his reasoning and I've seen such demonstrations before, they get your undivided attention rapidly. I just wanted to ensure the patches were applied, and, mission accomplished.

So, heaven reigns again on earth (cue the angels, who laughingly pee on the head of sulking Old Scratch, his brimstone reduced to faint wisps of smoke by now). Which means, u guessed, more Internet pix!


Got a small cut or scrape that needs protecting? Slap on a disposable/sterile bandage that looks like a strip of BACON!


Hong Kong skank-rag Apple Daily runs computer-generated images of news events. This pic shows their rendition of a 65-year-old crank kicking former Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bien in the butt.


Hong Kong politicians kick off an election campaign by spraying champagne all over a couple of roasted pigs.


There are two kinds of people in the world: those who know about www.419eater.com, and those who don't.


"Hello Kitty Black Wonder": the new live-action role-playing game in Hong Kong. If you don't find this weird, better pray your mom doesn't rummage around in your sock-drawer.


A metro (subway) station in Pyongyang, North Korea.


Chairman Meow: obey the kitty!


Olympic cheerleading squad. Go Big Red!


Hong Kongers celebrate Canada Day by wearing cowboy hats and chugging maple syrup in party district Lan Kwai Fong.


Logo of one of my current fave bands: Rabbit Junk.


Zhang Ziyi. Just because.

When you get your first tattoo, there are three people are in the room: you, the devil, and your mother.
— apocryphal tattooist motto

[In the mid 60s] tattooing was resolutely not "trendy," "cool," or accepted at all in mainstream culture. It was a hermetically dark and, to most people, intimidating or frightening world run by a small handful of closed-mouthed loners who had seen a lot and didn't give a shit about polite society. This aura of piracy, combined with the hypnosis of the compelling imagery and difficulty of craft, rendered it irresistible to me.
— Don Ed Hardy, 1997

Hi Mom. It's been decades since your son become an adult, and at some point, I decided on skin upgrades. You may have guessed, and you may disapprove, but ultimately, it's my skin. That said, I don't believe in the devil, but I'd be a churl if I failed to thank you for helping create that skin in the first place. Gracias por la vida.

I digress, but my mom does read the blog, so there's no way to post fotos of yourself displaying inked skin without disclosure. And since the most exciting thing to happen this week in Hong Kong was the closing-party (held at some club called CLIQ) of the SKIN:INKS exhibit, I had to hit it.

I seldom go out in Hong Kong (Crowded bar? Cigarette-haze toxicity? Too-loud music? Dullsville? Been there, done that, loop/repeat: wasted more hours pursuing drunken idiot "fun" than I'd care to count). But this shindig converged enough interests to force me out to Lan Kwai Fong (the gwailo drinking district near Central where Hong Kong's expat community gathers in force to inhale each others' cig smoke, get batfaced on overpriced cocktails and bitch about their jobs/lives/each other).

Some resident gathered members of Hong Kong's disparate tattoo community and gave them literal blank canvases with human models, and carte blanche on design. The resultant paintings were displayed at a local gallery and auctioned at the party, which also featured some of the artists buzzing away on live victims. And the proceeds of the sale benefit the KELY Group: a local organization I've known about for years who genuinely cares about helping HK's teenagers, organizes activities and offers support. This exhibit received more attention than any tattoo event in Hong Kong, ever.

UPDATE: An anonymous commenter posted this link, and check out the video : interviews with local tattoo artists, the promoters, and film star Michael Wong as celebrity auctioneer. The Cantonese-speakers are subtitled in English and the English-speakers subtitled in Chinese...nice job!


Blog rule #1: add a foto. With Joey Pang at the event.

The Hong Kong event showcased a new global trend in media: tattoo-superstars and tattoo-babe superstars. I like to keep up with the times but sometimes, my friends, my response is a bemused chuckle. I must digress again: when I was young and wild, I associated with the most out-there people I could find, people so outrageous they alienated my more-normal friends IMMEDIATELY. Yet in this counterculture milieu I found inspirational, almost no one was tattooed. Anyone I knew with a tattoo had exactly that, ONE. I mean, a unicorn on the shoulder or something. There were no vatos locos in my universe.

When I moved to San Francisco and discovered "Tattootime" magazine, a book-a-zine glossy published by RE/Search Publications and authored by Ed Hardy, you guessed it: paradigm shift. There were no unicorns in TT. Hardy (who'd apprenticed in Japan in the 70s and started San Francisco's first appointment-only tattoo studio, Realistic Tattoo, in '75) presented things I didn't know you could DO: combinations of monochrome geometric Maori designs with traditional Japanese dragons/snakes, astonishing minimalist stuff as body-highlights, designs the clients invented, sometimes based on real-life events. It was rough, elegant and gorgeous.

But even then, San Francisco in the mid/late-80s, few of the hipsters actually got inked. Every so often you'd go to a party at Mark Pauline's warehouse/workshop, and someone would have a black tribal design (a style, by-the-way, created by Hardy and Leo Zulueta, who researched the designs of his Polynesian ancestors and designed the thing—while Hardy was carving it on, they joked about how it would become trendy and all the kids in the future would sport curvy/spiky black tattoos...this is TRUE) running up a forearm or something. And when RE/Search's "Modern Primitives" came out in 1989, most of SF's tattoo community were featured between its pages, dozens of which comprised an exhaustive interview with Hardy.

I got to know Ed in October 1990 when he was renting an anonymous room in Tokyo's Shinjuku district and tattooing Tokyo's rockabilly-fueled hellion-wannabees. I'd rented a monthly room in a "gaijin house" in Tokyo and while hanging out with Ed in SF was impossible (by then he'd vowed not to tattoo anyone he hadn't previously tattooed, he just didn't need or want to deal with it—he ran Tattoo City in North Beach which featured a talented crew and if you wanted to get inked, you could go there), in Tokyo he had time and he knew the city. Sometimes joined by my friend Leslie, we toured Shinjuku and other fun districts of Tokyo.


In the Golden Gai ("Street of Gold"), a hideaway of invite-only bars in an obscure part of Shinjuku. Tokyo was magic to me back then.

And one mad evening, I took the train down to Yokohama to the studio of Horiyoshi, an old-school Japanese master who later opened a tattoo museum in that port city. Ed and I, plus English scholar John Stevens and his adult son, marveled at his studio and hung out for awhile.


Horiyoshi, Hardy and Stevens at the Yokohama studio, 1990.


Hardy Marks Publications had just published a book of Horiyoshi's tattoo "flash" (designs).


Me and the master...yeah he's not that tall but he's a lot more comfy sitting on tatami than I am!

Then we went to a local izakaya where we ate and Horiyoshi drank about twenty-seven shochu-based beverages, his English "improving" with each one. I had gone far-beyond-unicorn at that point.


Bring me some grilled skewers if you please, garçon.


Mrs Horiyoshi at the izakaya.


Ooooh, here come the raw clams!!

And when I lived in Tokyo from 95-96, I collected souvenirs. Some I carry with me to this day.


Everyone gets everything they want.


Tokyo 1995.

So I've spent time in a few studios and meeting people on the scene: Hideo Uchiyama of Magic Tattoo in Shibuya, Tokyo, Doctor Lakra in Mexico City, an ever-changing cast of characters in San Francisco. But, Hong Kong? Ricky Lo, of Ricky's (formerly Ricky and Pinky's) Tattoo in Wan Chai has been in the same shop for 40 years—I got a small tattoo from him around Christmas 1993, ironically while my mom was visiting me in HK. But Ricky's flash (tattoo designs) are designed for visiting sailors: lots of topless mermaids and goofy sharks.

I was delighted that Ricky was invited to participate in the SKIN:INKS project, as he is a Hong Kong institution. But in terms of advancing the canon, it's not up to old-school guys like Ricky.

So onto the tattoo-babe-superstars, best exemplified by Kat Von D who stars in "LA Ink"—one of several tattoo-centric reality TV shows served up by the Discovery Channel. Every time I see the trailer of Kat and her crew of babe-pixies preening and flashing their tats for the camera, I get the bemused chuckle. Of course, if I was a twenty-something babe with an urge to break skin and a talent for line-and-shading, I'd be in that racket. What else: middle-management at some middleware vendor?

And Hong Kong's own TBSs: the charming Joey Pang and the lovely Sze-C. Both were featured in a local documentary on the exhibit and (not unsurprisingly, given the paucity of Hong Kong tattoo-savvy), both trained in Thailand for years, before opening studios in Central. I knew with certainty I would meet Pang there, and sure enough, after me and my compatriots Dick the Wonga and Da Slamr had blagged our way in, she was right behind me in the elevator, I greeted her in Thai and we'd exchanged bizcards before we even entered the place.


Dick and Joey...I was lining up the shot and she just stuck out her tongue: FLASH!

Yet the crowd consisted of just-your-typical-tourists—most untattooed. I ran into someone I knew from the publishing world and we had a nice chat despite the music. I asked Joey to come over and take some fotos with me and Dick. Her calligraphy work is excellent, check out this and this. And this shows her working on a calligraphy "scroll" which was based on the client's father's calligraphy (and reminds me of old Shaw Brothers movies!).

Still, it was a crowded smoky bar full of tattoo-tourists. They gawped at the live tattooing, much as mugs decades-back would stare at the "Lobster Boy" on the carnival midway. We got bored quickly and left, but in all, it was a fun evening: preceded by a great meal at an upscale Cantonese teahouse with terrific dumpling-noodles, and including a gift-pack with T-shirt/exhibit-book/CD/poster for a $50 donation to KELY.

I've gone on long enough so here's some more tattoo-fotos:


A triptych of my one-and-only tattoo-by-hand, 1994. The artist, Horiwaka, is a Japanese guy who was working out of Tattoo City in San Francisco. The stick has needles embedded in the end—the tattooist lifts the skin slightly and pushes the ink/pigment in with the needles—all outlining and shading is done by hand, as it has for centuries. And it hurts like a bitch.


This maniac, Kenji, worked at Pink Dragon, a rockabilly-hipster shop in Tokyo's Shibuya district. He and I posed for this shot in 1990. His tie is beyond-description, but that's an old-school Casio Databank watch on my wrist...it's a toss-up.


The cute l'il devil is "Hot Stuff": a popular American tattoo icon from the 60s. Kenji insisted on the gomi-Eigo ("Engrish") explanation: "NOTHING CAN BOTHER ME BECAUSE MR. SUMI IS ALWAYS WITH ME—WE ARE BROTHERS UNDER THE SKIN." Sumi is Japanese for "ink."


I forgot this guy's name...he also worked at Pink Dragon and absolutely had to have a tattoo. But his dad was a COP. He told me Tokyo Police-dad would kill him if he got a tattoo. But Hardy came up with a great workaround: UV-sensitive ink which is invisible once it heals, but glows under black-light. Magic!


The guy with his galpal, who stopped by to watch her squeeze enjoy some controlled bleeding. Damn, I wish my hair could do this.

This trip started with a work-stint at the upstate-New York facilities of a well known tech vendor. The journey was good value for knowledge and networking. In-room Internet access meant I could keep in contact with the Hong Kong office via email, instant-message and Skype, edit copy and file stories.


Residence Inn Marriott, Poughkeepsie, against storm-clouds (we had hail at one point, one of rural North America's highlights).

The voyage also brought me to eastern North America. Here's the deal: I have these relatives in Montréal who I only discovered recently. Why and how is a story for another time--the key is that I had strong motivation to visit what everyone describes as Canada's most dynamic and interesting city.

So after a few days of being driven around and living off suburban-industrial food augmented by self-catering from the local airplane-hangar-sized supermart (just can't survive without fifteen kinds of refrigerated pre-made hummus, dontcha know), I took the train to Montréal.

I love trains. Was I going to be driven two hours into NYC, queue up at JFK airport with all my liquids in a separate portable-tabernacle, squeeze into a dinky airplane seat and wait to be delayed, or the alternative: book online at amtrak.com and hop on The Adirondack headed north? Poughkeepsie to Montreal: US$61. No-brainer!


Poughkeepsie Station interior.


The" Ichabod Crane": why they'd name a train after a mythic headless horseman is beyond me (this isn't the train I took).

I rocked up at Poughkeepsie's gorgeous 1914-built train station and clambered aboard the train when it pulled in. Plenty of room for bags, legs, snacks. A 110-volt AC power outlet at the seat. I plugged in my MacBook and wrote/rewrote/edited copy as the train chugged its way through New York farmland and towns that reminded me of Superior, Wisconsin (I'm talkin' to you, Albany).

Polite Canadian immigration officials boarded the train at the border and went seat-to-seat to check paperwork. "Bonjour mademoiselle" I said to the officer, and continued, in French: "My French is in a regrettable state of disrepair." She responded, also in French, "Well then perhaps we should continue in English" and shifted gears effortlessly, as I would find many Montréalers can easily do (but don't be fooled: French is the prime language here). A short and polite conversation followed, she inquired about my baggage to make sure they belonged to me, and wished me a pleasant stay. The drones of Homeland Security could learn a few things from these folks.

The train arrived on time at the Gare Centrale and I was met immediately by José, who married my cousin over four decades ago. I hadn't met him since I was about ten, but recall both him and my cousin Ada--brief, succinct memories which never faded from childhood.

As I write this, in a coffeeshop near McGill University in downtown Montréal, I haven't decided how much to say about José, Ada, and their grown children: Federico and Victoria. For now, I'll say that they are four of the more remarkable people I've met as an adult, and all for diverse reasons. One thing they have in common is that they've all been involved in showbiz/photography/filmmaking/art, often in uncanny analog to my own interests and activities. The synergy with film (specifically Asian, horror and Hong Kong film) and photography, as mentioned, is remarkable, but the equation's more than the sum of its parts.

Another person I was also delighted to meet on this trip is my sister Lara, who flew in from Chicago and met her friend Kim, who lives in Boston. My life these past few days has revolved around socializing, chatting, and examining large quantities of photographs and newspaper clippings related to the past with the first-cousin-generation. With the once-removed generation, it's been more about the future.

And my own history features notches cut by instinct and circumstance that support various parts of the puzzle. Before I unilaterally decided to move to San Francisco in the 1980s, I had no concept of Latin culture, little knowledge of Hong Kong film, and lacked the wisdom to communicate effectively. Now, I've built imperfect paradigms that function in these areas, and am beginning to explore my eastern European heritage. Being skyrocketed into an environment with people who are trilingual (and more) by nature and have compiled impressive accomplishments yet remain grounded/humble was exhilarating. There will likely be more on all this later, but let's get to some fotos.


Extended-family portrait June 2008: (L-R: Victoria, Lara, Jose in foreground, me in the back, Ada, and Federico).


Fede and his son Damian.


José made these huevos rancheros for me from scratch. OK, he bought the tortillas from a place that makes them fresh, but he made the salsa, eggs and refried beans. Cubes of Honduran queso duro at right. By far the best huevos rancheros I have ever eaten. It has been proven by top scientists and chefs that Spain's victory in Euro 2008 was directly related to this excellence of this specific plate of huevos.


My father Kazimir smoking a pipe, early 60s. Whoever sees a resemblance, please raise your hand.


My sister Lara the doc. She can take your kidney out. She totally rocks.


Fede and his daughter Talia.


Talia having fun in the Montréal summertime--I gave her the neon-colored tennis ball, which she promptly repurposed for amusement purposes.

Victoria's site:
http://www.victoriasanchez.com/

The site for Fede's latest project:
http://www.annexmediagroup.com/elsa_web1/index.html

FantAsia (Montréal's premier film festival):
http://www.fantasiafestival.com/2008/en/

The Nikkatsu section for FantAsia 2008. If you're in Montréal or anywhere near, oh yeah, any late-60s Nikkatsu on the big screen is worth the effort:
http://www.fantasiafestival.com/2008/en/films/spotlight.php?id=1

POSTSCRIPT:
The rant that follows was ripped out of my subconscious at JFK Airport. Fortunately I got a decent amount of sleep on the plane and arrived just prior to a Signal 8 typhoon in Hong Kong that gave the entire city a morning-off, and produced the photograph at the end of this rant. The chaos produced by the storm pales in comparison to my internal focused chaos...I wasn't sure whether to run this unedited brain-blast but my pal Rico said, RUN IT.

So here 'tis. Cover all flammable material...

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

What is the DEAL with the shoes?
Sitting here at JFK Airport in one borough or another, steaming like one of those franks they sell on carts in the city. Or maybe used to sell, until the Department of Motherland Insecurity made the hot dog salespeople take off their shoes and put them in a plastic tray, because...

Because, why? What is the DEAL with the shoes? Why on earth do we have these polyester-jacketed people stacking plastic trays so little kids can take off their pink My Little Pony shoes and run them through an X-ray unit? I'm not saying, let's get rid of airport security (on this trip, I'm reading Bruce Schneier's excellent "Beyond Fear"--Schneier uses a simple five-point assessment for security situations and applies it to a bunch of situations, HE could deconstruct the scrutiny of My Little Pony shoes from button-cute seven-year-olds), I'm saying, when I am exhausted from getting up at 0355 for a one-hour flight from Montréal and have just walked what seems like five kilometers (likely no more than 1-2) across travelators and London-tube-length escalators and upward-sloping corridors, stopping to interrupt the chitchat of a trio of salesgirls...

- Where is "TM7"?
- What?
- TM7?
- Is that a flight?
- No. this is your airport. You work here. I am a traveler, looking for Cathay Pacific flight CX 831, which is listed on your video terminal over there as departing from "TM7." So, where is TM7?
- (Random confusion)
- OK. Is there a terminal seven at this airport?
- This is terminal eight.
- OK, so there IS a terminal seven??
- Yes.
- How do I get there?
- You take the air train.
- And where is that?
- Over there.

...and on we go to more escalators and corridors and onto a monorail which takes you to a street crossing that leads to terminal 7, where you follow the signs to Cathay Pacific past the British Airways signs (HATE that airline) and once there, show the printout of the online checkout that explains you can just use the kiosk to print out your boarding pass but are told instead to backtrack to the British Airways area where a hidden Cathay Pac counter staffed by a woman who vaguely resembles a cross between Macy Gray in TRAINING DAY and Mr? Billie McAllister issues your boarding pass and...

And...yes that question-mark was intentional, imdb.com-whack Rudy Ray Moore or Mr? Billie McAllister and quit asking those punctuation questions, I'm having trouble finding the right song for this rant, Green Day's "American Idiot" was perfect but ended too soon, Slipknot seemed indicated but Rabbit Junk's "In Your Head No One Can Hear You Scream" now fills the bill. And...

- Do you have a bag checked in?
- Yes. It's an ugly one.
- A heavy one?
- No, ugly. It's a joke.
- You mean it's like twenty...(she paused, maybe she was searching for the word "kilograms")
- No, it's about ten kilos. It's a normal bag, it's just bright yellow, that's why I said it was ugly.
- Oh, so you can spot it easily when it comes out.
OMG, A GLIMMER OF INTELLIGENCE.
- Exactly.

She hands me my boarding pass.

- You need to go to the yellow, I mean, gray area.
- You were thinking of my bag! (big grin)

Not even the glimmer of a return smile.

But it's my black carry-on bag that's been crushing my deltoids and trapezoids as I've hiked all over this depressing, poorly organized airport with its idiot zombie-staff, made all the worse in comparison to the switched-on, polite, helping-you-before-you-ask bilingual staff at Montréal's Dorval Airport I had just departed. If Americans want a crash course in staff training and customer relations they don't need to hire some pogue consultant, just do a bit of traveling north of the damn border.

So I ended up in the gray area, stuck behind a mom and her delightfully cute kids, who dutifully deposited their shoes in the correct trays once the logjam of regular-drones putting their laptops, bagged liquid unpleasantries and other heinous items, battleaxes and flails and knouts and brass knuckles and Japanese police truncheons and shoes in the correct gray plastic trays in the gray area, long after I'd deposited my black bag on the ground to avoid more neck/shoulder pain.

Visiting the USA has its advantages, but please oh please, if there is an Airport God, please o lord of aerodromes replace this facility (and that utter horror in Los Angeles, the Thomas Bradley Torture Chamber) with something either like Dorval or Singapore's Changi Airport.

Thanks to Samsung for the electricity, and Green Day/Rabbit Junk/Sex Pistols for the noise. And now I'm going to make my way to my flight, which, to add to the overall experience, is running half-an-hour late.

HONG KONG A DAY OR SO LATER:


Dismembered tree branch on my street-corner.

Everyone's howling for more foodie shots, maybe I'm missing my calling as a vittles-shutterbug. But the original entry, written while I was in The City, was on "SF Blue": as in sky-color.

Oh I'm sure you could find a Pantone equivalent, but not with the deep glow. There's a specific shade of blue that occurs at a certain point in San Francisco's twilight when skies are clear. I only remember seeing it in Union Square, but it may well manifest in other parts of the city (the Bay Area, with its microclimates, is mercurial in meterological manifestations).


OK you chowhounds, here's my breakfast—huevos con jamon: eggs scrambled with bits of ham, black beans, a bit of melted cheese and rice. This pic was snapped before I removed the useless garnishes and smacked it up with guacamole and salsa.

The Blue is spectacular, and while I could attempt to photograph it, don't see the point. This color only exists in a San Francisco sky under specific conditions—I've not seen it elsewhere. Perhaps high-definition television could reproduce it—HDTV has replicated shades of blue I'd previously only seen underwater, with their innate glow—but if you're planning to be in SF and the skies are clear, check the sunset time and head out in Union Square or the Financial District.

I wandered around there in the afternoon, the sun throwing high-contrast shapes against iconic buildings, searching for shots with my box-brownie Canon digicam. Weather a bit warmer, and the brilliant slanting sun amid the high buildings created some interesting shadows, although naturally dictated photographic angles as well.


Feast on this—huevos rancheros: the eggs are fried and buried in chunky tomato sauce.

Another day, another big crashing keynote-session. Humans (mostly Caucasian males) pack into rows of industrial hotel chairs, clutching cylinders of weak and wimpy Suxbux industrial java jive. I always note the music played at these things, so far we've had "Vertigo" by U2 and "She Blinded me with Science" by...oh who cares.

Blinded by science. There's always an element of that at these tech-vendor shows. Marketing guys go acronym-simple and/or spew on about the tech processes involved, regardless of whether the attendant journalists can follow the stream-of-whatever. Our Hong Kong PR is doing her best to make sure people show up, but when the Aussies are out drinking until the wee hours, no, they're not going to show for early-morning interviews.

A lot of folks treat these trips as excuses to party-hearty: fine with me, I've learned not to depend on appointments. But I'm useless in the evenings going Asia-California...I skipped last night's organized dinner and was glad I did. I got some interesting shots, another glimpse of The SF Blue, another feisty burrito, and a reasonable night's sleep. Much mo' bettah.

OK, here's one for you food fanatics:


Now, you either know what you're looking at, or you don't (and frankly, why would you?). So if you don't, please do me a favor: I enjoy assembling this blog but like any blogger I crave feedback in the form of comments. If you don't have an LJ account, please leave your name...unless of course you prefer anonymity. And...thanks.


Yeap, Java Detour: get your massive caffeine fix without unbuckling your seat belt.


Macbook acting up? MacMedic to the rescue!


Get your car washed AND stolen at the same time. Love the palm trees, but this is not "San Francisco Blue": this is a daytime shot.

Getting out of town on a vendor trip (or "a jolly" as our Big Boss calls 'em), is always a double-edged sword. On one hand, you get a more complex/insightful view of said vendor, not least from chatting with people who actually use their products. And you get a trip to some destination, in this case, San Francisco.

The downside: you get a trip, crammed into an aluminum tube then disgorged straight into the maw of US Immigration. My Immig officer seemed a wisecracking young guy, tossing off one-liners like "you have any alcohol, tobacco or food?" to the previous entrant, who laughed, grabbed his blue passport, and headed off to the States. I rocked up with my new RFID-enabled passport, using it for the first time in the country that issued it.

Fun-boy Immig officer pops the document in the reader and scopes the screen. "Do you have a Russian passport?" he asked me.

What do you say to that? "No." Fun-boy scrutinizes the screen some more. "Have you ever been a Russian citizen?"

I'm standing there jet-lagged wondering...WHAT? Is this nonsense the guy's idea of fun? But of course, you don't joke with these people.

You can't. As columnist Ted Rall recently put it (after watching a 20-something vet of Iraqistan with dual prosthetic legs being harassed by HomeSec minions): "HomeSec was giving him the whole treatment: arms stretched out, the wand, stern expressions and stupid questions. The wand beeped and beeped. The TSA guy scowled. 'I've got titanium all the way up my spine,' the kid explained...I bit my tongue. Here in the land of the twee and the craven, I know when to shut up. That's what we do now. Airports are nodes of high-intensity fascism in a nation settling into authoritarianism lite."

So I just said: "No."

He continued to stare at the screen, so I briefly said that the spelling on my first name is common in eastern Europe and Germany. He just grunted, probably trying to suss out my inexplicable resemblance to Mikhail Gorbachev or whatever mania was going on underneath that crewcut.

"You have any alcohol, tobacco or food?"

"No." (People to whom I've related this mantra suggested a cornucopia of waggish answers, along the lines of "No but I've got half-a-kilo of rockin' ganj and a really sweet Heckler and Koch submachine gun").

Crewcut-buddy drew a red line on my customs form and sent me off into the California sunshine (the line seemed to have no significance to the custom-guy, who was far more normal than Mister Russia).

First day, I thought I would run around doing a lot of shopping, but it was hella windy/cold so I just bought essentials, and spent a few waking hours online and chatting with SF pals. Strolling out for my evening burrito from Can-Cun Taqueria, I wore two shirts, a jacket and a knit cap and was bloody freezing. American television channels are mostly high-def now. The burrito was great. Slept ten hours.

Some shots, mostly Financial District in brilliant sun:


Looking into SOMA along 5th Street, the blue building is the brand-new Hotel Intercontinental.


Who said the Commonizts were the only folks who built big weird metal statues?


The bear of the California Republic flaps amid the architecture.


The triangular Phelan Building on Market Street. I loved this mix of sun-glare, silhouetted street-signs and jet-contrail.


Cheetos: chile and lime flavor. Oh yeah, we'll get to the Mexican food, and it won't come out of an industrial bag...stay tuned...

My birthday coincided with Easter Sunday, when the world's most famous dead guy is supposed to have risen from the dead, much like Christopher Lee in a Dracula film from England's Hammer film studios. When I was a kid, I was schooled in neither, but found the latter far more interesting.

When you're a kid your birthday is a wondrous thing. This ceases when you get to be about twelve or so, then birthdays are benchmarks for When You Can (drink, vote, drive, become eligible for the draft). I no longer do the former three and the latter was never a possibility, which is a good thing as I'm a wimp and would not have enjoyed basic training, let alone any of the other Armed Forces rituals.

I went off to university and didn't take it seriously (regrettable as I now have a much keener sense of education's importance), but I did become a rock critic. For two years I wrote weekly for a supplement to the University of Minnesota student newspaper—nominally not too impressive but the U had 50,000 students and I achieved a certain degree of notoriety. What I learned: deadlines, working with editors, proofing, self-editing, what I could get away with and what I could not. It was later when some of these lessons (and new ones) began to flourish, but at that time I was more concerned with getting drunk, slam-dancing, and messing about, as you do when you're young and stupid.

I haven't been shooting many fotos of late, but when birthday-time rolls around...aww, why not, here's some shots of me as a tiny tyke, but-a-young-lad, etc.


Very young, very cold.


Stylin'! Age six.


Proof that I was a geek before geek was chic. This shot was voted Dork of the Century by the Greater Chicagoland Dork Association.


Photobooth pix of me and "Janet Planet"...age 20.


Posing at work in the Master Control room, Group W Cable Television.


Just Being Weird...Minneapolis, 1980s.


Next to a meat-smoker full of succulent pork. Port Wing, Bayfield County, Wisconsin, 1980s (on the shore of Lake Superior, which resembles a wolf's head. Bayfield County is in the "nostril" of the wolf.


With Japanese rock star, Harajuku, Tokyo, 1990.