The Waterboys | MySpace Music Videos I was hoping to find a decent video for The Stolen Child for some reason, ah to show you all, and I stumbled upon Mike Scott's Waterboys website and saw this video there. It looks like it is done for a bunch of schoolchildren and their parents. Great stuff.
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Which started me on this... A piece of fiction.
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Of course I knew the above song from the radio, but I had never bought the album or listened to any more of their stuff, I don't know why. So much I don't know, things I remember only vaguely. There was a time when my wife and I had been separated for a while and she was living with some nurse friends in Verner St and was just about to head to England to live. There was this farewell party and I was invited, which was OK by me as some of the other nurses were pretty cute, but of course I didn't expect anything, being her husband still and a good ten years older (as was she), but I think that I am joking about that because I didn't shag around. One of her "friends" (I think she was in love with me) confided in me that *she* had done so, but I am pretty sure I never completely believed her. In this house, in Verner St, some time or other, I heard "Fisherman's Blues" playing. I didn't know it was "Fisherman's Blues" at the time of course. It was their latest, at that time. Was it that time? Or another? It was some story similar to this anyway. I was at this nurse's place, where she lived. She was there, I was there. Party? I don't know now. What is this music, I said to break the tension. It was awkward. I really did like the songs. I was in another Irish/Celtic phase at that time - re-reading Shame's Voice, Lemual Bucket, Yates' Visionals, listeneing to The Pagues, yet more Vin Mornington (once her fave), that other band that Enronya used to sing for occasionally, ah Gonnad - (we saw them live once, with my wife sitting on my right and another girl who was in love with me on my left. Now that was awkward. It was a case, strangely enough, of "We Will Not Be Lovers" with the girl who was in, etc... I told you I didn't shag around. Particularly with girls who were in love with me. Still don't. My problem is, was I mean, that my wife didn't love me.) She tossed me the sleeve, or was I already looking on the dark wood shelf for it, and I felt clumsy trying to catch it, not because I can't catch 12 inch slivers of cardboard, but because I felt this unwelcome vibe, this what the fuck are doing here vibe, this you don't belong vibe, and it had me off balance. Where could I step, where could I go, where could I sit? I sat on a cloth couch with a dark blanket over it, and some cushions. I was holding a cushion, tossing it and fluffing it up nervously, that's why I was clumsy, why I couldn't take a clean catch. Did this vibe come from her or from her other housemates, or both - no, that's right, she had invited me. Still, I was an intruder into their female domain. A wary fox in their happy hippy hen-house. Perhaps for some it was their first time living out of home, or of the nurse's quarters. There were happy to be free of men. She told me the music was "The Waterboys" and it didn't ring a bell, until she said you know, from a few years ago, "The Whole Of The Moon". We were sitting on the couch, no, like I said, I was sitting, she was moving around packing her stuff into boxes, lighting candles, I have no recollection, or rather I have too many, of what she doing. I said, yes. Of course, la la, Brigadoon. Brilliant. I myself felt trapped in that time-cursed rain-dirty valley. I asked a question. She wasn't going to come home, she didn't think, she said carefully, like I was an idiot. She was going to England next day (that night?). I mean to Australia, when? Ah. Maybe never, she said looking down to me, until I get to be myself, you know? Yes. Yes, I knew, that was the hardest part. To know. I saw the flashes. Things were looking up for her. I wasn't myself. Ah, that's right, eventually one night, yes, there was a party, her farewell. I recall a party, and I remember the consequences. We all got drunker than we intended, maybe all that port and dope came up behind us and pushed. Was there dope - I don't smoke? I don't fuck girls who love me, I don't smoke dope, what sort of a dick was I, am I? Was there even port? Or just chardonnay and champagne. After the party died, upstairs, we fell in a too small bed (or was that in France? Was this a big bed with lacy white pillows?) and we made love one last time. It will always be the last time now. Next morning she said she wished that *that* hadn't happened. It was in a time capsule, one day in a hundred years, I ought to know 'cause I was there. Secretly I thought she had hated me for months, years, before this time, well she seemed to have been repulsed by me. Maybe it was guilt, on either of our parts, that made it happen. Ridiculous. Maybe she let me make love with her out of pity, out of sympathy, or sorrow, one for the road old chum. Maybe she did like me still, just a bit. Or didn't hate me a lot. It's not like I'd done anything. Or like I had not done something I should have, which is different. Isn't it? Maybe she just wanted to make love, and I was the only guy who had stayed back, and I was a known quantity. Zero. Or maybe she was a bit drunk too. The song that grabbed me most that day, that night, that next morning, was "The Stolen Child." (Was her car broken down again, had I come to jump start it?) I listened to it. She went away. I listened to it. I drew pictures, pasted the lyrics into the pictures. Over and over, I listened to it. That other girl who was in love with me, not the friend, the other, a small not quite perfect girl, something of a changeling, she wept, sweet Jesus she wept. Then she went away also, solemn eyed, with no peace in her breast. There was no peace for any of us, only unquiet dreams.
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BTW, there ARE no decent videos for The Stolen Child.
Lyrics by W.B. Yeats (1889), music by Mike Scott and The Waterboys (funnily enough, 1988).
Physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) is not widely remembered outside Germany — which is a great pity, as his notebooks contain some of history’s most trenchant aphorisms:
* If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called Damn It.
* What they call “heart” lies much lower than the fourth waistcoat button.
* What a pity it isn’t a sin to drink water, cried an Italian, how good it would taste.
* A book is a mirror: If an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.
* The often unreflected respect for old laws, old customs, and old religion we have to thank for all mischief in the world.
* It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: If we sought a universal measure the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.
* Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.
* If walking on two legs is not natural to man it is certainly an invention that does him credit.
* It is almost impossible to carry the torch of wisdom through a crowd without singeing someone’s beard.
* Now that education is so easy, men are drilled for greatness, just as dogs are trained to retrieve. In this way we’ve discovered a new sort of genius, those great at being drilled. These are the people who are mainly spoiling the market.
* Can it be that the evil in the world is in general of more use than the good?
* Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.
The “waste books” were admired by Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud, and even Tolstoy wondered “why the Germans of the present day neglect this writer so much.” He never got an answer.
(This post entirely lifted from the remarkable Futility Closet).
There was great show about the decline of British industry on BBC TV just a minute ago, but on their website they say something else was broadcast. Did I really see it? Did it makes a noise? It certainly did.
The final concept on the show, after all the gloom of walking through the empty shells of extinct (read gone overseas) industries, was 'sustainable capitalism', supposedly based on the lessons of nature!?
It ended with interviews with the managers of several small companies in West Wales (that hub of business innovation) which work towards the optimization of profit and the flexibility that offers, rather than trying to screw everybody tight in order to maximize profits, i.e. to become uber-rich through shares and fantastic bonuses while everyone else becomes unemployed. They say that this latter goal gives big companies no room to move and, it goes without saying (though I'll say it), destroys familiar social standards.
How? One major culprit in this fragmentation, but by no means the only one, is the effects of the global labour pool, of which I too am a participant. Because of this traditional jobs and career paths fall away and the family unit is broken apart when the breadwinners have to move around continually to find work. Not to mention the boom in coolie Asian or East European labour (though I'll mention it).
And then there is the destruction of the environment which is never factored in to these companies' bottom-line equations, and the bringing on of the end of the world as we know it, resulting the bleak choking post-apocalyptic death of our grandchildren (if the No.1 son and GF ever get a move on).
Until our uber-rich bonus-bloated aging CEO of the company that was my first expat posting stood to receive $35m in the deal, enough to fund his retirement home in the penthouse of the Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong, allowed it to be swallowed by the K-Mart of medical giants Philips, the first small(ish) company that I worked for was brilliant, apart from the traitorous CEO obviously. Everyone knew everybody (except the CEO); it was a casual Seattle-based environment; paperwork was minimal; unhelpful "management trainings" were eschewed; things got done through casual requests to the key people; employees stayed in their chosen roles for as long as they wished and therefore maintained a high level of expertise and then thy moved up if they wanted to, through their skill and experience and (for those who could find him) sucking up to the CEO.
Other companies called it "the farm" because of its laid-back attitude.
Everything in Philips was, by contrast, all glass and blue steel, formal and impersonal: they never knew what my skills actually were - REAL manager in an area I knew nothing about? no fucking way! - and the back-stabbing (including by the CEO) and politics was claustrophobic. The only benefit I gained from Philips was that I met some wonderful people, many of whom are still great friends, despite my move to Singapore.
But my current role in this small(er than Philips) Japanese company is much like I had in the farm. Apart from the games I play on my business card (I managed [ho! I must be a manager after all] to get away with claiming a bullshit "manager" role last time), nothing much happens formally except as one would expect within the structural anachronism of the Japanese company; paperwork is non-existent to minimal; they respect my actual skills and try to leverage them and I hope to have this low-stress job for as long as I want it (and the Yen eventually comes down). If my company goes under, it will be because it over-reaches itself in tough markets like Australia and the US, where Philips reigns due to its median-level pricing and the good technologies (all from one great [French Canadian] engineer, actually] that were inherited from my previous company.
It is in the lunge to get bigger that most smaller business fail.
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Or maybe, in the interest of destroying the global labour market from within, I should go back home now, give up my low-stress job and my *immense* salary (no shares, no bonuses) and tax benefits so I can be marginally employed, watch the five channels of Australian free-to-air television, wash down my vegemite sandwiches with VB, pick fights in pubs and argue with the neighbours, in the great Aussie social tradition?
At least they speak English there (depending upon my choice of suburb).
First as tragedy, then as rubbish. One of the issues to deal with when you're living in a tropical island... molds, mildew and fungi.
Damn.
Looks like there have been consequences of a spillage from the small ever-humming wine-fridge several months back.
Due to an oversupply, some of my books are resting directly on the floor, a step below the dining area where my wine-fridge sits. I (someone) had accidentally left the door of the fridge ajar and a considerable amount of condensation resulted. I mopped up the fridge but it looks like some water had trickled down over the step that I had missed.
I have preset the air-con to run two hours a day even when I'm not here to cut back on the humidity at bit so that it sits at around 40% or so, however that's not enough to prevent mould growing in a WET book.
A well-thumbed Juliette and well-thumbed Justine have all their pages stuck together (this time without prostaglandins as glue), Shakespeare is looking tragic, Nicola Barker's "Behindlings" is behind me now, Susan Sontag is going to have to write about mildew as a metaphor (not shown in photo), Roald Dahl has come to twisted end, The Great Labor Schism is not looking so great and, ironically, a tome on book-collecting, "Patience & Fortitude", not worth keeping. A terrifically interesting book on the plague has swollen up and died... (the rat > flea vector was only determined 100 years ago, in Hong Kong, by an independent researcher who couldn't get government funding or support.)
And I probably can't get a replacement for the de Sade in Singapore. Is it banned here? I think it is.
Twelve books are beyond saving. What's that? SGD$250- $300 or so.
Shit, damn.
At least this makes room for some other volumes currently sitting doubled on many of my other shelves.
Or no, perhaps I shouldn't stack books directly on the floor. I have no insurance.
Maybe you recall that E@L has put down several deposits on investment properties under construction (or not) in Queensland, Australia. One is at prestigious Noosa Heads, the other at suspect Townsville.
Both seem to have been hit by the 2008/2009 crunch. The Townsville one stalled before a sod of turf was broken. Sigh. They are still looking for a big investor to get things rolling. It has been about 18 months. My deposit is allegedly in a trust fund, earning interest, so that if they finally give up, I SHOULD get my money back plus some.
The Noosa Heads property did get going, I've stood in the concrete shell that is supposedly my apartment. It has been ready to roll for a while, and indeed the first guests are going in this week.
Funny, because E@L hasn't paid yet. He has the loan approved, has the top-up cash, is ready make the leap back to being a property owner, something he should done years ago. A large chain (Mirvac) is doing the rental management for the development and will be operating the place as "Quay West Resort and Spa", at a 5-star level using the (conventionally) serviced apartments. Apart from the substantial deposit, E@L has already paid for the $25k furniture package, including two 42" LCD TVs, couches, tables, chairs and a couple of bland art-works.
This settlement date was supposed to be in September last year. Then December. Then late January. Then early March. It is now April and - and this is not a joke - a letter from Deloitte arrived by email this morning.
The developers have gone into receivership.
However Deloitte still want my money...
I am emotional, to say the least. Motherfuckers! I could kill them all!
Someone asked me if I was upset that Izzy has left. The answer is "Not at all."
For several reasons.
a) She hasn't left *me* as such - we were never emotionally involved. She has left the flat. The only needs she fulfilled for me were that there was security for the flat for all the times that I was away, and that I had someone intelligent, witty and opinionated(!) to talk with at home. It's OK things are underway to find a replacement. I have had five flatmates (and always a live-in maid, until The Mouse left) in my time in Asia. No big deal to get another nice person. Maybe one not so (in)famous this time?.
b) She has an excellent reason for leaving, one that I support 1200% - she has left Singapore! She is in search of more freedom - of thought and expression personally, politically, socially - she is in search of less judgemental people, of a greater opportunity for employment and, finally, to go better parties...
In fact rather than being upset, I am happy to see her take on the world, to increase the width and breadth of her experience amongst new people. People who have never experienced the claustrophobia of living in what is essentially a fascist state, however benign the tyrants.
More power to her! And it was a brave move considering she has zero money!
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But if she needs a father figure, she can always Facebook me.
Certain of the women on the balconies above struck languorous poses, or stretched out a slender leg as if to straighten a stocking. One idly lifted her skirt as if to check that her underwear was all in order (alas, she appeared to have forgotten it altogether); another forced a breast to bulge out of its hiding and palped it thoughtfully. The Singapore Grip, J.G. Farrell (1978)
Another great book, immensely amusing and informative about the Singapore of old, set in the era of the fall of Singapore.
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The lady on the balcony sans culottes is the first mention I'd heard of that great Singapore tradition, the Sarong Party Girl. Girl wears only a sarong, likes to party, geddit?
The latest incarnation, my flatmate for the past two years or so, is Isabella, Izzy, MissIzzy, or often Bella. She was blogging her sexual exploits (pretty tame actually, but outstandingly brazen for a then 17 year old Singaporean girl) under the SPG moniker back in 2004, maybe earlier. She was getting squizillions of hits during those 'grand old days of blogging' (four or five years ago). I once put up a photo showing her with mrbrown and a few other local bloggers and it was mentioned in a local forum and before you know it I had 2,500 hits for that one post (nearly 400 unique visitors for just one day!) My previous high was around 100.
For a while there Izzy was quite notorious, world famous in Singapore to coin a phrase, creating controversy over posting topless photos of herself (artistic ones, taken by her boyfriend), much to the horror of many other female bloggers, such as XiaXue and Singaporeans in general. She was on TV debating her mid-pacific accent, she was in the papers, she was temporarily writing the sex-column for FHM at 18, she was pretty much everywhere. Then it all died down. She was getting harassed by commentors on the PG site and decided enough was enough.
She started publishing in other blogs for a while, first the now defunct MissIzzy site, then most recently another blog for her semi-philosophical geekery or art related stuff but in the past few months she has needed publicity again in order to gain a new-generation of readers, and maybe some more paid writing stints. So she started blogging about her sex-life again in a new incarnation of the old SPG site.
Any blog-posts of hers that mention me are not sexual in nature BTW!
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It was mid 2007, maybe closer to early 2008, while she was breaking up from her long-term relationship that she needed a place to crash for a while. Ex-blogger(joking) Indy actually suggested she give me a call, and in a trice she was at the door of my 1800sqft (including window-sills) palace pleading with those big eyes... This was not long after the photo below was taken at WalaWala in Holland Village, but I can't be sure.
What could I do? The Mouse (my maid) had left, so I did have TWO spare rooms. Couldn't say no, could I? That crash turned into quite a long while indeed. But there have been no regrets.
We've had some great times in those years, chatting on about nothing and everything from David Foster Wallace to religious history, atheism and political theory. This was usually best after Izzy's spaghetti or something I'd brewed up and a few glasses of nice red wine. That's when the opinions flow. That's when we'd laugh and get all serious, and she'd lean forward and say softly, "What?" She had trouble with my accent you see. And I'd repeat what I clearly enunciated previously. Then when she'd speak, I'd nod my head, smile and say to myself "What?" because I had trouble with her (infamous) accent as well, but I'd usually let her go on. (It's a habit I've developed over the years living in Asia, trying not to interrupt. Making people repeat themselves in a work situation eventually will generate some tension/resentment.) At home though, at the end I'd often say to Izzy, "I'm sorry but I have no idea what you just said."
Our social lives have been pretty much separate, though we've had lots of boozy nights with Indy and others of my friends and unsteady breakfasts ditto, either in (I taught her about Vegemite for hangovers!) or out, often at Epicirious on Robertson. Mostly she'd be pool-partying on KM8 on Sentosa, then carry on at some club with whatever 6-packed geek she could find, I'd be overseas. Watching FTV.
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I think what she appreciated about me, and why we never even had a disagreement, let alone an argument, is that I never judged her or indeed made any indication that I was negative about what she was up to. None of my business. She was a big girl at the time she moved in, 21 or so. Heck, I was married with a kid by that age; don't you think I wish I could have let my hair down then instead of changing nappies, etc...? Whatever.
Live your life, have fun, have sex, just don't scare the animals and don't leave any indelible stains the Persian rug. And I'll call with a five minute warning when I am on the way home from the airport... (She didn't always pick-up in time.)
And of course, as readers would have gathered over the years, I couldn't be holding myself up as a paragon of traditional sexual values, so I knew I was in no position to judge. We talked about her history of escort services (she's mildly disguised in a chapter of Gerry Lim's Invisible Trade II - that's her on the cover), and I asked if she thought I should try it myself! She laughed and told me not to waste my money! She did try to get me onto OKcupid and start internet fucking dating. I think that like my old flat-mate in HK, she was worried about my not having a girlfriend or bringing girls home from some club or from OT (she only ever saw me not alone once - that was funny night) and wondered if I might have been gay. Probably also the fact I never hit on her, even for "rent-money"! Well, I'm not gay, not that there's anything, etc...
In a recent post about her imminent plan to go overseas, postponed until after a hastily planned trip to Thailand and new tattoo, she thanked me "for being the dad [she] never had." Awww. Father figures, young girls... hey, stop right there!
(Her family background is interesting. Best not to speak. At least I think that was dad's rule to himself. But let's not get all Freudian here!)
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She'd come and go at all hours, and I'd come and go weeks at a time. Often as not she had the place to herself. Her family were supplementing her income while she was at Uni doing her design/animation courses (I was never clear on what Degree she finally obtained) and life seemed to be for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
But when her degree was finished the parental ATM seized up and for the last few months she has been looking around for a replacement to that income. Nothing really worthwhile seems to have come in that didn't involve sleazy but rich business travelers...
Naturally I was too nice a guy to kick her out... And no, still no "rent money".
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So the day has arrived. Isabella has flown off to Holland. Her platonic (not gay either) buddy took her to the airport about 3 hours ago.
She has left Singapore, as all young Singaporeans should do, at least they should for a while. But she hopes to have left it for a seriously long time.
I wish her the best of times out of this, not quite the best of all possible countries.
Apart from my feet (which are slightly better thanks to new medication and new shoes) and my oesophagitis, my arse has been giving me grief. I have had fissures before, absolutely the worst pain ever, apart from my kidney stones, and I mentioned the horrible effects of a bladder infection a while ago as well. Now it is just this problematic stuff which has me in the dunny three of four times a day...
The reason I am telling you this extremely personal and disturbing information is that I came across the following line whilst reading Robert Coover's Pynchonesque (or is Pynchon Coover-esque? - I think Coover may be a better novelist actually!) novel Pinocchio In Venice and it had me laughing my problematic arse off:
- "El tempo, el culo e el siori / I fa quel che i vol lori" - Time, one's arse and the moneyed few / All just do what they want to do."
Oh so true... My arse is currently doing what it wants, that's for sure. Irritating Arse Syndrome.
This book by the way is an amazing pastiche of reborn cliches and verbal pyrotechnics, as the elderly Pinocchio falls into decline after a masterful academic career (two time Nobel Prize winner!), slowly turning back into wood in a nightmarish Venice winter of talking animals, puppets and statues. I had read "Pricksongs and Descants" 30 odd years ago, but was not ready for Coover at that time. I'm definitely chasing up more now, but he's hard to find in Singapore. I found this one in a second-hand store in Chiang Mai.
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Changing the subject from my arse, another amusing quote is from the brilliant Patricia Dunker's first novel Hallucinating Foucalt from 1995. So far it's great, rather conventional compared to Coover, but what isn't? Duncker is obviously exceptionally smart, inventive (and well-read), in this book about biography and writers.
The narrator's girlfriend's gay father is wolfing down a huge and unhealthy meal:
- He was clearly fearless in the face of cholesterol.
Another great line! I was wolfing down those Portuguese custard tarts like there was no tomorrow myself - six over the course of the long weekend. When I lived in Hong Kong for six years and being aware of their dangers I doubt that I had eaten that many.
A serious quote I liked from this book is also a quote from Verdi's Don Carlos, I believe (bit of work to find this, but thanks Wikipedia), given by the girlfriend (a scholar of Schiller) in German (though the opera was originally in French!). Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa says to King Philip II:
- So geben sie gedankenfreiheit. (Give us freedom of thought.)
I'm thinking of sending the book (or the libretto of the opera) to a certain Singaporean Minister Mentor.
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From the next writer I have been reading a bit of lately I have no quotes to hand, but if you love completely unreliable narrators weaving great plots you can't trust, from imaginary islands to a "what if" story (or two) of World War II (you'll hate Churchill even more than you currently do), then Christopher Priest is your only man.
I've read "The Prestige" (yes, the slightly disappointing [I read the book first] Christopher Nolan movie with Huge Ackman and Christian Bale), "The Separation" (the WWII one), and "The Affirmation" (which introduces his concept of The Dream Archipelago). Don't believe everything the narrators tell you in these books, but believe me, they are exceptionally good.
Priest is obviously one of the allegedly "Sci-Fi" writers whose speculative works border on the mainstream novel. They are often set in what seems like the real world but they have elements of dream-like imaginations and some unconventional or imaginary science in them. Like Anna Kavan's more experimental stuff, this would nicely fit into that Slipstream stuff which was proposed as a genre for books that transcend genres.
Spike has some terrific photos form the Quote Cathay Pacific/Credit Suisse Hong Kong Sevens Endquote. Or the Rugby7s as most people call them. E@L types them as R7s.
Here is Spike R7's entry where he talks about being a media photographer with a special pass (would do anything for one of those - another friend has one too, she writes about half the R7s stories in the South China Post), and here is his Flickr page.
No photo evidence of E@L as he doesn't have washboard abs like some of those girls! BTW, E@L failed to catch up with Spike on this visit (and a heap of other people!). Next time!
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In fact he missed a lot of things. E@L missed Saturday at the stadium for example. Shame on him. After two nights out to 4~5am in a row, E@L crashed decided to have a little sleep-in until, mmm, 2pm on the Saturday afternoon.
A slow start ensued that day for EvilJ (the host for E@L's couch surfing weekend) and E@L as they imbibed some dim-sum and noodles as a late breakfast. E@L hadn't anything solid down his gullet except an Ebenezer's kebab on Thursday night (oh and Portuguese tarts at the Excelsior on Friday morning). After the food, as EvilJ doesn't do the R7s, they went down to the Maya bar in Lockhardt Doh to sample the new shiraz - by the glass. Four glasses each later E@L twigged it might have been cheaper to buy a bottle. Eh, whatever.
Evidence was bountiful that EvilJ knows EVERYONE in the business. Bar mangers, waitresses, bar staff, door staff and bouncers. As they sat there watching the world go by (before the carnage hits the streets as the R7's closes) EvilJ was getting waves and kisses and conversations almost continuously. His has a big boisterous greeting for people, always a laugh and often a hug, so no doubt he gets planted firmly in their memories. He is genuinely charming bloke, up the ears with jokes and stories, some of them involving E@L's Bruce's escapades, but enough of that...
So a quiet start for Saturday, followed by a quiet finish when E@L pulled the plug about 8pm, after EvilJ had dragged him to the Laguna pick-up bar. Not tonight. Instead he snatched some Japanese take-out and awoke refreshed to a glorious morning.
Despite the temptations in Laguna, EvilJ was a good boy too and came home alone. Reason? His 20 year old Indonesian girlfriend was due early next morning (Sunday - her day off).
E@L was also up early, getting ready for a Sunday at the R7s. Not going to miss the finals! After greeting the girlfriend, (stunning!) breakfast was back to the Excelsior for another coffee and Portuguese tarts (the flaky kind) at Illy's - best coffee in HK, which is not saying much. Why eat out? Because EvilJ has no VEGEMITE in his flat.
E@L headed to the stadium. Beers here, Bloody Mary's there, Pimm's and soda (don't ask) elsewhere, and so the day dragged on, gradually blurring, but thankfully not too much. Then to the post R7s Tent party, where E@L caught up with his flatmate from the old Hong Kong days and bopped in the mosh-pit with her for a while. She's a lovely person, really miss sharing with her.
Later he and other friends were chatting to a group of Village People (straight, from Durham - you meet the strangest people at the R7s) There was some squealing behind us and we turned around to see the Sailor from this bunch on stage at the Jagermeister booth with his trousers round his ankles. He was legless - well his dick nearly hit the ground anyway. One of the other VPs said that his buddy was a "shower not a grower"... But the girls were impressed. Police and Security guards were kind enough not to arrest him as we promised to get him out there and keep his dick in his pants, at least until we got to Wanchai.
We indeed took the VPs to Wancahi as the Tent had wound down. Discretion being the better part of not getting arrested in Wanchai, we instantly packed Sailor Dick into a cross-harbour taxi and off to his Kowloon hotel. The Durham lads had no experience of Wanchai, but this was not the best of nights to demonstrate its unique charms. Thousands of absolute idiots were staggering round the bars, smashing bottles (on purpose), pissing on the street, getting aggro... Ugly, ugly, ugly.
After a few minutes of trying to make sense of this we dropped the Village People into another buy-me-drink bar - what used to be Fenwicks (can't think of the new name at the moment) and E@L headed back to EvilJ's apartment (alone again) around maybe 2am, bit not without pausing for an Ebenezers kebab of course.
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At the airport on Monday E@L's stomach was decidedly queasy from all the beer and all that coffee and very little food over the weekend.
He found a restaurant that served chicken-rice as he wanted to remember the HK version of this Hainanese dish and compare it to the Singapore version.
(From about 2:40)
The main difference is that in HK they give you a milder, rather sweet *green* ginger and spring-onion (small shallots) sauce which E@L hasn't seen in Singapore, where they use plain ginger. Also maybe the rice (at least at this place) isn't quite as strongly flavoured or as moist.
As E@L was finishing this delicious meal, washing it down with diet coke, he began to feel an unwelcome sensation. The food was not going down properly... oh no!
All of a sudden his oesophagus began to go into a reverse peristalsis...
He's had this before. It's an inflammation at the point where the gullet joins the stomach: it swells up after some acute-on-chronic reflux. He'd even had a gastroscope 12 years ago. It seems to come on after a binge week-end (or more) of excess beer and excess coffee. Got a bit of it in Phuket the other week...
E@L grabbed some napkins as his mouth inexorably filled up with frothy coke, chicken, garlic sauce and rice... Waaaah! (It is not vomit as such, because the food had never made it into his stomach. It surges up like a lava flow, not like an explosive stomach cramp...) Another wave of reflux hit him straight away and a chunk of the food overflowed past the napkin - he couldn't hold it all in - and it splattered onto the floor... Gross! But no-one was taking notice of his distress! Amazing! Or maybe not, this is HK after all! He grabbed the shoulder of a nearby waiter (facing the other way of course) who was serving someone else and he managed ask for directions to the toilet! "Down there..." he said, unperturbed by E@L holding the stained napkin to his mouth... E@L pointed to the mess, hunched his shoulders as if to say sorry and hurried away...
E@L grabbed some more napkins. He didn't make it to the toilet in time as more chicken rice came charging up but he got to a nearby rubbish bin just as his mouth overflowed! Some had splashed onto his shirt, as expected, a big stain down his front.
When he found the toilet he washed his face and hands, rinsed his mouth. He looked at himself in the mirror, what a sight! Red-faced, red-eyed, green and white food expulsed across his shirt. Luckily it was a dark shirt so with a few splashes and brushes the muck was pretty much gone. As he stood there with his hands on the wash-bench sighing at himself, he felt another surge rising. He just made it to the bowl, this time with something a real retch... Oh my god, kill me! It wasn't until 10 minutes later as he was walking to the gate for his flight that a good burp rose through the narrowing, telling him the lines of communication in his GI tract were now open and making him feel a little better. He skipped the plane meal.
In fact he hasn't eating anything since, except a few small sips to wash down a Nexium that he had grabbed in Phuket last time and his usual handful of neuropathy and BP medications. They stayed down but he still feels the burning of the reflux, it's like a punch in the diaphragm...
Sorry to leave you with this rather graphic story, but it was most distressing for him and he needed to share (making you all throw up in sympathy would be a good result.) If the inflammation doesn't resolve soon, another gastroscopy might be on the cards for
E@L
(p.s I enjoy putting in links to my old stuff as I think, in the cold light of hindsight, some of it was rather good...)
(also some punctuation maybe off a bit in this long post - I'll fix it tomorrow!)
The week before last I was in Austria, did I mention that? Stayed at the Hotel Immer Essen. Man those Austrians can eat.
Managed to go skiing, not brilliantly, considering my last effort was three years ago and I only did one day then before my recently arthroscoped knee gave out, but reasonably The main issue this year was what we might call a "pulled heart muscle": aka lack of nerve. The confidence was not high. Rather than being eager for the thrill of the slopes, all I could think of was the chance of inflicting hurt on myself. I even drew a graph, not reproduced here because I am on the Netbook with no drawing programs, similar to the supply demand intersecting curves. Age on the x-axis, curve for fun and curve for hurt intersecting at the current skill point. Was told I think too much. Not the first I've been accused of that!
So sitting by entrance to the hotel in my ski-boots waiting for T and Px, with butterflies and anxiety. It was a weird feeling, not pleasant. I'm not normally much of panicky person, but I'm thinking (again!) 'why the fuck would anyone throw themselves 1km down a freaking Austrian mountain, big mother-fuckers they are, all looming and grand and ice-covered'. Also making it tough was that fact that the development at this ski-field is a little bit underdone, with only a t-bar for the main trip up to 1100m. Burning thighs at the end of that, I swear. So rather than dwell on the risk, as two people walked past with wrist in plaster and another hobbling on crutches with his ankle in plaster, I pulled out the Sudoku game on the phone and played that. Great distraction, concentrating on something else. Before I knew it I was up on the slopes having a ball quite a good time.
I did have one relatively serious pringle when I collected a mogul - this guy was standing still in a narrow area and I had no choice but to explode into him. Can't have been that bad a hit because I was the only one to fall over. He and his buddy helped me up and get my skis back on, laughing.
Apart from the t-bar, one of the other limitation to Dientem am Hochkonig is that all the beer and sausage stops are at the bottom of the mountain so you can't rest and generate energy (and nerve) up at the top (and take in the view), you have to get down to get some grub. I guess that's motivational.
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In perpetually buzzing Hong Kong right now for the Rugby 7's, staying at a mates place. Guest friendly. I think I have some old stories from Bruce about this town, I'll have to chase them up. But later. Something to do with Sushi-Adobo take-out, all in the one package.
Time for some Illy coffee at the Excelsior Hotel (just next block) and then off to the stadium...
The Australian Government Department of Immigration and Citizenship (God bless their Aryan hearts) issues a Business Travel Card for the countries in the Asia-Pacific Economic Community (APEC). This gives a pre-approval of any visa requirements for a wide range of peri-Pacific countries. This means I don't have to apply for a visa for most of these places any more, I just rock up at the Immigration Control, choose the Diplomatic/APEC queue and skip the long lines.
Brilliant.
If you're an Aussie expat a frequent traveller from an APEC country and are frequently visiting a lot of other APEC countries (you don't HAVE to be either an Aussie or an expat - my bad, thnx Laurence) and you don't have one of these cards, you're a bloody idiot. I use it when I go to Indonesia to play golf and ignore the $10 visa fee.
My current card expires in August, so at the moment I am filling in the forms for renewal. I just came to this question:
How do your activities, while travelling, relate to trade, investment or business development? If insufficient space, attach an additional page.
Mmm. My activities... Special massages, short-term girl-friends (singular and plural), VERY short-term girlfriends (singular and plural), pole-dancing in go-go bars whilst drunk at 4am, grievous offenses to most civilized sensibilities, generalized unethical and immoral debauchery involving nudity or not, with some nihilistic hedonism thrown in for good measure... Things you wouldn't, as a rule, do in your home country. Surely they know what expats get up to in the post-colonial (though you wouldn't realize the 'post-' part) tropics?
Additional page? I'd need to attach my novel!
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Oh, oh, they mean what I do AT WORK while travelling! Phew, I thought I was going to have to own up to a range of misdeeds and maybe compromise my application, not to mention my reputation!
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- The North Korean's note, scrawled in pen, was simple: 'I want to go to South Korea. Why? To find freedom. Freedom of religion, freedom of life.'
The ex-logger, on the run from North Korean authorities, handed the note over to a South Korean missionary in the Russian city of Vladivostok last week in hopes it would lead to political asylum.
Just before he was to meet Thursday with the International Organization for Migrants, a team of men grabbed him, slapped handcuffs on him and drove off, rights activists in Moscow said Friday. He was spirited away to the eastern port city of Nakhokda, where he is sure to be handed back over to North Korean officials and repatriated to his communist homeland, activists said in Seoul. ...
I'm drowning in a sea of useless receipts. Everywhere I go, everything or every service (well, most) I pay for, they hand over another fucking useless scrap of paper. And I KNOW how much it cost, I just gave you the money, duckey. Is this scrap of faintly printed supposed to constitute proof of purchase should I be accused of shoplifting? Like a 52 year old man with too much disposable income shoplifts. And often in supermarkets they will hand over a bunch of tiny vouchers that allow you to buy your way towards ownership of yet another crappy dinner set or kitchen appliance. No, keep 'em. Give 'em to person behind me, they look like they need a $8 dollar saucepan that is touted as being worth $65. And no I don't need the receipt for parking validation reasons - I have been coming in here 12 times a week for the last 5 years and I have never once answered "Yes" to your question about parking validation, yet you keep asking me! Dude, I don't have car!
I buy a banana for lunch (diet again). Receipt. I buy a Coke Zero. Receipt. For these little purchases, why do they insist on giving me a freaking receipt? Like I'm gonna claim a banana and a coke on my expense account or something.
They're trying to cut back on shopping bags here in Singapore, which is a good thing, yet the shops continue to punch out about 50 million tons of rubbish in the form of useless receipts every 30 secs. Approx.
So today I went to M&S to purchase some thermal underwear for my upcoming ski-holiday in Austria (Dienten am Hochkönig - whereTF?). I found some under-troosers and a long sleeve super-warm vest and bought them.
Mockingly, I tossed the receipt away! Take your silly receipt, I cried, I'll never need it!
~~~~~~~~~~~
The LONG sleeve vest depicted on the package cover is NOT in the package. The SHORT sleeve vest NOT depicted on the package cover is in the package. Sigh.
M&S don't usually take accept returns unless you have the receipt. Ouch.
Wake In Fright is a 1971 quintessentially Australian fillum, despite being directed by Canadian Ted Kocheff, produced by an American and starring Englishmen Gary Bond and Donald Pleasance.
The plot tells of an English school-teacher who is trying to get to Sydney for his 6 week summer holidays but who gets lost in an inescapable Hell - outback Australia in the 1960s. Things are much better there now of course; they have air-con.
The DVD release of this movie has a great detective story behind it.
For many years, the only known print of Wake In Fright, found in Dublin, was deemed to be of insufficient quality to justify its transfer to DVD or video tape for commercial release. In response to this unsatisfactory situation, Wake in Fright’s editor, Anthony Buckley, began to search in 1994 for a better-preserved copy of the film in an uncut state. Ten years later, in Pittsburgh, Buckley found the negatives of Wake in Fright in a shipping container labelled: “For Destruction". He rescued the material, which formed the basis for the film's painstaking 2009 restoration. Wikipedia
More details on the extended search for and the eventual discovery of good film stock can be found on the fillum's website
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Speaking of searches, I had been looking for the DVD each time I was back in Australia in the last six months or so, ever since I heard about the re-release. I had seen the movie on TV a few times in the 70's/80's and its blistering take on Aussie mateship and incessant beer consumption has always had a strong effect on me. I loved it, even more than Nichola Roeg's existential piece, Walkabout. I serendipitously found the DVD down on the bottom shelf of a store in the airport in Melbourne, just as I was despairing of getting myself a copy.
It is my favorite Australian fillum. We had studied Kenneth Cook's awesome and austere novel in high school and discussed it feverishly.
In those days it was fashionable to be critical of your home country. I wish there was more of that attitude around these days actually - all this flag-waving nationalism is the wedge in the door for many social and political evils IMHO, like war for one example.
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So Indiana, GF, Izzy and I sat through Wake In Fright this evening.
From the initial 360deg pan which shows the absolutely flat, ochre-red landscape to the delicious detail of the hands-less clock on the Tiboonda railway siding which suggests both timelessness and eternity, and the "abandon hope" claustrophobia of this desolate, ancient landscape, we were all hooked.
It is a truly terrific and terrifying movie. It is set in an outback (the name for the movie's original overseas release) town called Bindanyabba that is based tightly loosely on Cook's stint as a journalist in Broken Hill, where the film's exteriors were shot.
Here in the 'Yabba, the honest, open, Aussie generosity ("Have a beer mate! Drink up!") of your new, best mate can turn him into your worst enemy when his camaraderie becomes threatening, aggressive, even homoerotic. Or, with an never-ending supply of that beer, your mate's persistence can turn *you* into your own worst enemy.
Here in the 'Yabba, you either succumb and join the beer-swilling louts in their mindless orgy in the ("shut the door, we're closed") after-hours pub and the Two-Up game which are simmering with a smiling violence, or you create your own mindlessness with a carefully aimed rifle bullet. Or both.
A sickening and surreal kangaroo hunt at night, a real dream of the devil, is the centre-piece. Even more surreal is that a real kangaroo cull was filmed and then inter-cut with views of the drunken 'hunters' chasing the poor animals through the dust in their recklessly speeding car...
A frightening wake up call for the Australian image of itself in the 60's; and remember, these people are still out there...
Have a beer mate! Oi, oi, oi.
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"Dream of the Devil and you wake in fright," is the epigram that starts the novel.
I was whingeing on FB about how booking this Melbourne hotel on the interfukt was a mistake, as the booking company had charged me the full week up front and not merely taken a deposit. This meant that if I checked out early I would lose that night's money. Well work is paying but it's the principle, right? Next time, I'll let our travel agent do it.
Tomorrow (Sunday) I have a mid-morning flight to Auckland for some work cleaning out the last habitats of the Tooki-Tooki bird, to get them off the endangered list and onto the extinct list where they belong. Today (Saturday) was a birthday brunch for my sister down in Geelong, an hour's drive south-west from Melbourne.
Smart me thinks well, if I stay the night in Melbourne in order to catch my flight, I won't be able to drink much, and as we are all either good or lapsed Catholics down in the Western District that is not the preferred option. Instead, I'll check out of this lovely historic place in buzzing Chinatown, forfeiting the charge for the night, have a few champagnes at lunch and maybe afterwards and stay at my mother's or sister's place (depending upon where I fall down drunk asleep), then wake up earlier than originally planned and head to the airport clearheaded.
Plan A. Right?
E@L packs his bags. E@L takes his bags to the lobby. E@L gets his parking validated. E@L checks out. E@L goes to the car-park in Lonsdale street. E@L exits the car-park and drives to Geelong.
OK, borzengurs, what did E@L forget? Answer, below.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
No, you work it out yourselves, E@L feels too stupid to admit it outright.
At my mum's place, I found the hotel's number with the robot on directory assistance ("Can you be more... specific?") and asked the hotel if they could hold my room after all. They were happy to let me come back up and use the room, as it had already been paid for.
Suffice to say I couldn't drink (much) at the brunch today... and am now too tired to go out in Melbourne on a Saturday night (for fear of getting bashed up, essentially).
It was as if I had exhausted my way of writing. I became acutely self-conscious and started to question what I had done, what I was going to do next. I glanced at a page at random, and all at once it seemed naive, self-obsessed, trite and uninteresting. I noticed the sentences were largely unpunctuated, that my spelling was erratic, that I used the same words over and over, and even the judgements and observations, on which I had so prided myself, seemed obvious and irrelevant.
Everything about my hasty typescript was unsatisfactory, and I was stricken by a sense of despair and inadequacy.
Christopher Priest, The Affirmation, 1981.
I am going to quote this every time someone (like Dick) asks me how my novel-writing is going.
As well as can be expected given that:
I once thought that the emphatic nature of words ensured truth. If I could find the right words, then with the proper will I could by assertion write all that was true. I have since learned that words are only as valid as the mind that chooses them, so that of essence all prose is a form of deception. To choose too carefully is to become pedantic, closing the imagination to wider visions, yet to err the other way is to invite anarchy into one's mind.
Priest, op cit.
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So what happens when *I* try to write?
I type away on what I think is going to be part of something longer, maybe not a novel as such but some form of discontinuous narrative (easier to envisage finishing) with the plot of a novel but the arrangment of a blog or something, only not, and things are going happily for a while... then I read it back, and it's godawful crap. Strained, over-serious, uncertain, puerile, pretentious. Nothing like the voice of E@L in this blog. Ha ha.
But then doubts arise from a different side of the penny. Is this the voice I really want for a longer piece of writing, the work on which to stick my avatar in perpetuity, or at least until someone buys a copy? Can the E@L persona work as the voice for a longer narrative, and could I sustain the E@L persona that long anyway? (How hard can that be? Everyone tells me when they meet me that I am EXACTLY as I sound in this blog!)
Is there a viagra for writers?
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My reading is doing exceptionally well though. After finishing three (admittedly brief) books on the Phuket holiday (Trevis's "Queen's Gambit", Ana Kavan's "Julia and the Bazooka", Ryu Murakami's "Almost Transparent Blue"), and I polished off Dubus(III)'s "Garden of Last Days" last night. This latter book should have ended about 100 pages earlier than it did, when the enormous tension inherent in the main plot-line was resolved, but I doggedly read on, for what purpose, I am unsure.
Today, theres plenty of Christopher Priest (The Prestige, etc...) to be found in the 2nd hand stores here in Melbourne: he's the man of the moment, as you can surmise from the above quotation.. I have "The Affirmation", "The Seperation", and an omnibus of "The Inverted World" and "Fugue For A Darkening Island"... Excellent, I love that unreliable narrator stuff.
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Oh, did I not mention that I am in Melbourne, cough working cough for a few days?
There has been a great deal trouble for Indians in Australia and in particular Melbourne recently. Serious stuff; knifings, bashings... One of my Singaporean friends who is of Indian heritage was treated fairly rudely in a Melbourne restaurant, she told me, when we caught up here yesterday (haven't seen her for ages in Singers - we meet in Melbourne, WTF?)
Bumped into Internet wünderkind Dick Headley, of all people, here in BKK - he stills seems quite a nice (and clever) guy despite the enourmous drop in his blog's popularity compared to E@L's! They say that Internet stalkers people are often complete wankers, but E@L has had only met nice people so far through this blog. (He has to say that, because chance are they are all reading this post (at least one would hope so!)) One wonders if the people he has meet think the same thing?
E@L thought it was Michael Caine wandering down Sukhomvit at first, a mistake often made according to the rumours, spread predominatly by Dick himself. OK not rumours: when last E@L and Dick met in Vancouver, oh so many years ago, they were disrupted by two girls eager for his autograph! Sir Michael Caine that is, not that relative nobody Dick Headley!
No idea what we talked about this time other than E@L's dramatically resurgent libido. Seriously, no girl within 4.5 inches is safe! Dick and E@L walked on from up near Nana down to Soi Cowboy where he was due to meet some old friends from his time here. Old BKK hands, aware of where to go and what to expect. Thanks to their experienced observations, E@L was able to see very early on that the bars in Soi Cowboy are much more flesh friendly than Nana, which has become rather prudish in the last few years. One of the guys was quite the history expert too, with some dramatic revelations about the true chain of events in the early years of the Thailand monarchy. For example, don't believe in the sophistication of that 'King and I' guy Rama 4 - when one of his 59 wives fell in love with some courtier, legend has it that both the offenders were beheaded. Charming; etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
E@L ventured to ask Dick what his buddy Chuck Woww was up to, but he pretended not to know. We guess Chuck's literary aspirations have gone the way of E@L's. At least he does have several hundred copies of a REAL book sitting in one of those friends' places, while E@L merely has some scribbled plot diagrams in a notebook Mercer Machine gave him for his 50th.
Various girlie bars in Soi Cowboy were assessed and often found wanting. It was nothing to do with the prettiness of the girls as people were talking the whole time not watching those naked gorgeous girls gyrating on stage, but because happy hour had ended at one bar and not the others. After several stops, where E@L was frustrated with the typical "buy me drink" - "I go dancing" routine, the party eventually evaporated (sort of) at Thermae Coffee Shop, where E@L noted that there 80-100 girls lined up along the sides of the bar and no coffee was being drunk in any discernible quantities. Well, at least those other guys (including Dick) went home; E@L wandered down for another hamburger at Nana, and found somewhere suitable for a nightcap on a sidewalk bar just outside his hotel... where he managed to win 7 against 4 in Connect4! Not up to Dr Dan's standards but good enough.
People in the mass are unprepossessing, particularly in hot weather. In summer they go about almost naked, great fat women displaying their mountainous buttocks and dangling breasts without the slightest restraint. The men, fiddling about with their crotches, are just as unappetizing; bandy, knock-kneed; their limbs shrivelled flabby appendages, or else muscle-bound monstrosities; chests grubby white or else matted with sweat-sodden curls; smally fungus sprouting in every axilla. Anna Kavan, The Garden, in 'Julia and the Bazooka', 1970 (posthumous)
Substitute 'grubby white' with 'deeply sun-leathered' and you know that Kavan is right on the money with the unattractively obese tourists (such as E@L) on the fast-track to skin-cancer on Kata Beach in Phuket. Little kids are running around in small togs or even naked in the scorching noon sun. If that happened on Bondi (Sydney), the parents would be arrested, their backs flayed with 40 strokes of the the cat-o-nine-tails, and their kids farmed out to foster homes. As the darker Thai girls from Isaan smear themselves with skin bleach and, with both hands rubbing up and down and around on their faces, apply baby-powder to their dark skin (which ironically, the white EjacIndustry tourists prefer), the Europeans roast themselves to a charred brown unattractive leather on their beach-chairs.
Is it the hole in the ozone layer or what that causes Australians get so much skin cancer? Or the stupidity of the Europeans when they ignore the risks?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Books finished: Julia and The Bazooka, Tevis's The Queen's Gambit, and Ryu Murakami's strange first novel Almost Transparent Blue.
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E@L is chatting (as you do) with one of the prettiest bar-girls he could find as it quietens down again after Chinese New Year, she tells him that the Italians and the Swedish are the predominant Europeans at this time of year. She fiddles with her brief, school-girl tartan skirt. "Now coming low season," she says wistfully and cuddles between E@L's legs. Welsh and Australians maybe in the minority, but they're doing their damnedest to maintain the ladies' cash flow as E@L, blood diverted sharply from his brain by that cuddle, climbs on a chair to ring the bell, thereby shouting all the Italians (no Swedes) and the girls at the bar a round of shots.
"I go dancing," she says after sucking down her flaming B52 and climbs onto the bar-top to commence an entertaining gyration with her 'sister'. It's laughs all round, except that a muscular monstrosity, a young Italian man whose arms and and neck are festooned with elaborate tattoos, is eying E@L and his girl from across the bar in a way that causes E@L's stomach to tighten into a knot. The guy is licking the top of his beer bottle and then pumping it in and out of his mouth as he stares E@L in the eye. Fuck. He wants to blow E@L? More likely he recognizes that E@L is with the best girl at the bar and he is going to come over, beat E@L to a pulp and drag the prize girl away by the hair (after paying the 300Bht barfine)? E@L grimaces in what might be construed as either a smile or moderate gastric discomfort.
Nothing happens at first; the guy at continues to eye E@L's girl until another bar-girl starts to dance with him and he is distracted and happy, happy enough to ring the bell again. Still the tension is palpable, as he dances over towards E@L's part of the bar, parks himself on a chair by the adjacent bar as if exhausted, necks his beer, then leans over to make some drowned-out comment to the 'sisters' as they step down from the bar-top. They laugh and touch the guy's shoulders, one on each side. He has a roaring enthusiastic laugh. E@L feels his face flush, his gut tighten again and wonders what the hell is going on. Ah, but suddenly it is 1 o'clock and E@L quickly barfines her before anyone else has a chance - she has been with E@L for the last two hours accepting lady drinks, so it is unlikely that mamasan would permit her to go with anyone else anyway. And why would she want that 6'4" impressively athletic, energetic and amusing young Italian when she could go with E@L?
Next night the guy is at the same bar again, but this time E@L has a strategy. He defuses the situation early by asking the guy where he is from (Milano) and what his name is (Phil!)... After that fortunate coincidence, everything is cool again. E@L's girl cuddles up and the bell-ringing cycle starts once more...
Observing the number of new hillside apartments facing each other around the island one can't help but wonder what the pre-sale copy might say...
Great chunk of hillside cut away and forest cleared for apartment giving view of great chunk of hillside cut away and forest cleared for apartment giving view of great chunk of hillside cut away and forest cleared for apartment giving view of great chunk of hillside cut away and forest cleared for apartment giving view of great chunk of hillside cut away and forest cleared for apartment giving view of what's left of the hillside and forest.
I spend more time deciding which books to bring on each holiday than I did studying for my Year 12 examinations. My teachers will confirm that I am not joking.
For Kata beach in Phuket, starting tomorrow, let's be realistic. There's no point in bringing more than three from this short list of sixseveneight nine, some of which you might be shocked to see that I haven't read slash finished:
I won't decide till the last minute, probably throw all of them in my backpack anyway, rush out to the taxi, forgetting my passport, or my sunglasses, or my keys, or my golf clubs, or my viagra/cialis. No, not that last one, already packed.
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Mmm. Just noticed that they're all American authors. Need some others voices in there as well.
The hassles I had in Hong Kong with the service to my iPhone last week were, I thought, due to battling Telcos sending out blocking messages. I couldn't get 3G at all and frequently No Service either! Arse.
Then when I landed in Singapore, the same problems seemed to have come along, perhaps in the seat pocket in front of me. No Service all the way home in the taxi and obviously then, no 3G for me to get my urgent Facebook updates through.
I had placed the iPhone in Airplane Mode when I got on, not turned it off completely, as I wanted to watch some porn listen to some music of my own choosing during the flight.
What to do? Thinks. Has this ever happened before? MMm. Yes. Solution. Turn iPhone completely off. Wait. Turn iPhone on...
iPhone Fixed. No doubt if I had thought of this manoeuvre in Hong Kong, it would been fixed there as well. So much for conspiracy theories involving Li Ka Shing and his cronies.
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Whopping headache this morning after DanE's send off to Sydney. E@L thinks he banged knuckles farewell about 2am in the dreaded FHM bar in OT, all of us having been swarmed over by the fire-ant Filipanas - and we were all stung pretty badly.
A nice hot cup of Kopi, with Kaya butter toast (order not mixed up!), seems to have cleared most of it - brain fixed.
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But if last night's assault wasn't bad enough, DanO and E@L are off on an Action-Adventure in Phuket for Chinese New Year. We are staying clear (mostly) of the incredibly annoying hawkers and rip-off tuk-tuk drivers in Patong, but hiding down south by the quiet beach of Kata.
Laying books over our faces in the morning sun as we sleep off the night before no doubt. Also sitting in crowded speedboats for hours on end to get to the crystal waters of the Similans or Ko Phi-Phi, as we blister up on erythema-doses of ultraviolet and nibble on small pineapple jam biscuits. Golf too, though nothing is yet booked at Loch Palm - Blue Canyon just seems a rip-off to me. Girlie bars Quiet conversations with the inhabitants of the area...
E@L can see it all... because he's done it about 100 times already - holiday fixed.
I don't know if this is a good idea or not but for the moment I'm going to link this blog to my Facebook page. Each post will go in as a Note.
I realize certain people will be annoyed, but in order not to swamp Facebook, I've decided to limit the RSS feeds to the abbreviated version. This means if you want to view the whole post, either in your RSS feeder or in Facebook you'll need to follow the link. This will either boost my blog hit rate or decimate it (drop it by a tenth).
Both of these changes are experimental and may be rescinded at any time at the discretion of the capricious warlords who run E@L-GHQ.
Coming off the walkway across Hennessy, as I had exited Wanchai MTR Station on the wrong side of the road, the scraping wail of one of those Chinese fiddles assaulted my ears. The crowds parted as I elbowed my way to the stairs and I saw the young busker. A round-faced, red-cheeked girl in a red cheongsam was kneeling with her back towards the concrete wall above the entrance to the stairway. She ran her bow back and forth across the strings to create that tuneless screech as she stared forward, focused on some invisible middle distance, as if the crowd wasn't there..
I have never seen such a sad face. Forlorn, abandoned, lonely, miserable.
How long had she been sitting there? What cruel parent had made her busk like this, obviously against her will? Or was she an illegal immigrant, 'good daughter' from Mainland China, perhaps supporting a desperately poor family? Why is life so harsh? Why did she have to make such a horrible racket?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Speaking of crowds parting, I'd forgotten how the MTR rush-hour commuters here are even more rude and obstructive than the Singaporean MRT crowds. I was alighting at Causeway Bay (the most crowded square mile on the planet - it's amazing) and had placed myself at the left half of the doors, (sing Mao car goon chair moon - Please stand clear of the the doors) almost at the pillar, as I began to move out.
A man on the platform was trying to squeeze himself onto the train and hoped to come in between myself and the edge of the left (his right) door. In order for him to accomplish this ambitous task, I would have had to move or turn aside - but of course a) I couldn't because of the pressure of the people also alighting on my right and b) I didn't want to. Lose face to this rude prick? No way.
Even though there are now wardens at some of the stations bearing red lightsabres (I kid you not), the log-jam of off-ers and on-ers remains unabated. The culture of inconsideration continues. Well, you want to be inconsiderate? *I* can teach you the hazards of such inconsideration. Don't thank me now.
So I just kept moving forward, relentlessly, one might say if one was of a dramatic bent. He was was actually a step into the carriage when I got to him. I did not turn aside, nor did I slow down. I kept looking straight ahead and I kept moving straight ahead.
I caught about 3/4 of his body and took him about two paces with me, all the way off the train and back onto the platform.
Score 1: E@L.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Gotta go, pack bags, take a dump, get on plane, finish (DH: fast-paced, not) 'Self's Punishment' - one of Bernhard Schlink's early detective novels (Schlink wrote The Reader, you know the movie with lots of Kate Winslett's tits.)
I'm going to be very careful here as I have had a few wines tonight in Wooloomooloo, Wanchai. Several things need to be discussed however.
Firstly, my typing has become progressively worse and worse of late. Hardly a word goes by without me having to correct it. That is IF I even type the word in the first place. Reading back on some of my comments here and on Facebook, I swear the missing words are almost more innumerable [than] the ones I have typed (incorrectly - and I know I waffle on).
I tempted to let a post g thorughon absolute first draft, just youe to see what I mean.
I blame the drugs but then again, who doesn't, right?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Second issue is the phone service here in Hong Kong. Straight away I am feeling the pinch from HK's stressful 3G issues. If I am in a building owned by Li Ka Shing (he also, significantly, owns the huge local Telco PCCW), I can't get 3G. The other Telcos send out blocking signals to ensure that international 3G doesn't work in them, or so I am told - confirmed by a ex-worker for a Telco. WTF? As if this HK issue should become my problem! Fix it, you small-minded mega-billionaire pricks! Of course we know that HK is actually run just by a few of these property and Telco magnate type-guys anyway, and what the public says counts for nothing. THAT makes me feel like I was back home in Singapore.
SMSs. My Godfather! I send a txt message to someone about 30ft away from me, it takes 8hrs to get to her. WTF? This has been going on for ages. In Singapore we are used to SMSs being as instantaneous as Skype, ICQ or whatever. Send, reply, reply back. When I came up to Honkers for the 7s a few years ago I was planning to stay with my old flat-mate. I sent her a txt to Melbourne using my Singapore based phone (she was on holidays in Oz) to say that I was at her building's front door and needed the door-code; she got the txt next day. I only managed to enter because someone was coming out. (She had left the key in the fire-extinguisher cupboard.) Even when she was in HK next day, messages would take hours to reach her.
Maybe it is a Singapore - HK dispute thing, but again, why should I have to suffer for their squabbles?
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Third issue is that Hong Kong girls are looking very attractive to me. Familiarity breeds contempt and absence makes the fart go Honda, as we all know from primary school.
Maybe there are more of the narrower, mainland (Shanghainese) faces to be seen here nowadays, but the ratio of babes to bombs is much higher than I remember. Worry. Have I been wrong all these years, thinking Singaporean women are cuter?
Discuss.
And then I was caught looking down at one of the females Dr's cleavage yesterday at lunch. Well, I am only human, right? I was trying SSOOOOOOoooo freaking hard to keep eye-contact, but there was this mammary cleft in my peripheral vison and for one sub-conscious micro-second my limbic system took over and I glanced down to make sure here bra wasn't getting bleached by the lights, and boom, she sort of caught me. At least I think she did for, as with Lyndal the other week, she subtley brought her sweater up a bit higher.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fourth issue.
There IS no fourth issues.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fifth issue, I was listening to Nick Cave as I was sitting there the Dr's office, waiting, waiting, as is my role.. The man is brilliant. Heavy rotation. Familarity breeds amazement.
(Yes, that is Chrissy Hine from The Pretenders sitting at her guitar, just listening.)
What a stunningly great opening line, who else but Nick would have used this:
"I don't believe in an interventionist God... Into my arms, oh lord, into my arms..."
This one a buddy in Singapore sang at the Prince Of Wales one night - I had to go home and learn the (simple) [chord] progression. Fantastic again.
We talk it about all night long We define our moral ground But when I crawl into your arms Everything, it comes tumbling down...
Your face has grown sad now Because you know the time is nigh When I must remove your wings And you, you must try to fly...
.
Who else but Nick?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sixth thing: Gene Wolfe. Speaking of stunningly good. Never heard of him, right? Brilliant. "Wolf is so good he leave me speechless." Urusula LeGuin Pretty big praise from the writer of the superlative "Left Hand Of Darkness"...
The book I have been reading in the Drs' waiting room this week (while listening to Nick Cave) has been "The Fifth Head Of Cerberus". Swear to god it's briliant. Maybe I'm stupid and am easily impressed. OK, I AM stupid, but ne'rtheless, this is an absolutely terrific triptych of connected novellas. Think Charles Dickens writing the script for Avatar by way of Bruce Chatwins's "Songlines" (actually the psuedo-anthropological studies of TGH Strehlow on which it was based, as Chatwin didn't write his book until 15 years post Wolfe) and you're nearly there. The blurb doesn't go halfway to conveying the power of this book.
"Far from Earth two sister planets, Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix, circle each other. It is said that a race of shapeshifting aliens once lived here, only to become extinct when human colonists arrived. But one man believes they still exist, somewhere out in the wilderness.
In The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Gene Wolfe brilliantly interweaves three tales: a scientist's son gradual discovery of the bizarre secret of his heritage; a young man's mythic dreamquest for his darker half; the mystifying chronicle of an anthropologist's seemingly-arbitrary imprisonment. Gradually, a mesmerising pattern emerges."
I say: Woo hoo! So good!
Recommended, did I not make that point clear? In the first novella, you'd swear it was David Copperfield rewritten.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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