Chimes of Freedom is a new 4-CD set released to benefit Amnesty International on the occasion of its 50th birthday.  4 CDs, 73 tracks, selling for $18.99 on Amazon right now.  If you buy the digital version from iTunes, it’s $19.99 and includes 3 additional tracks.  Not sure with the physical CD version but for the digital one, $11.90 out of the $19.99 is donated to Amnesty.

The disc is a multi-generational, multi-genre tribute to the songs of Bob Dylan.  It is quite obviously one of many albums over the years that highlights Dylan the songwriter, the universality of his themes, melodies and of course lyrics.

If you look down the list of tracks and performers, you’ll see many names you know – including a few that might make you go WTF? – as well as some you don’t.  Here’s just a partial list of who appears on this album, it’s pretty impressive:

Johnny Cash, Patti Smith, Pete Townshend, Bettye LaVette, Diana Krall, Ziggy Marley, Gaslight Anthem, Sting, Mark Knopfler, Lenny Kravitz, Miley Cyrus (!), Billy Bragg, Elvis Costello, Jackson Browne, Joan Baez, Adele, Pajama Club & Neil Finn, Bryan Ferry, Carly Simon, Joe Perry, My Chemical Romance, Nils Lofgren & Paul Rodgers, Sinead O’Connor, Ke$ha, Kronos Quartet, Maroon 5, Jeff Beck & Seal, Taj Mahal, Mick Hucknall, Dave Matthews Band, Lucinda Williams, Kris Kristofferson, Eric Burdon, Marianne Faithfull, Pete Seeger and one track from Mr. Dylan his own self.  The 3 bonus tracks are from Outernational, Silverstein, Daniel Bedingfield.

Haven’t had a chance to hear it yet and I’m sure some artists will fare better than others but I figure it’s for a worthy cause and worth supporting.

By the way, due out next week is Old Ideas from Leonard Cohen.  It’s his first album of new material in 8 years. I’ve heard it – it does not disappoint.

By now all of you, or at least all of you who live in Hong Kong, have heard of Kong Qingdong, the Beijing professor who called Hong Kong people “dogs” and said that the Rule of Law is only needed in trash societies like Hong Kong and Singapore.  Very indicative of how tempers have flared in the aftermath is this column in Asia Sentinel by Alice Poon – not so much for what she has to say as for the extreme racism and misogyny in the comments on her editorial.

So, my take?  Who the fuck is Kong Qingdong and why should I give a shit about what he has to say?  As near as I can figure it, he’s China’s answer to Rush Limbaugh – a big bag of gas who says whatever he thinks will land him media coverage, whether he believes it or not.  I mean, come on, if Hong Kong is a trash society, what about a place that practices extreme censorship, puts people in jail without a trial for expressing their opinions, puts melamine in milk powder or builds schools out of cardboard in earthquake zones?  Strike all that.  How many people does China execute every year?  China has the rule of law, too, it just doesn’t enforce it equally across all walks of life and classes of people.   Kong says he’s a direct descendant of Confucius, by the way, 73rd generation.  And what should that count for?  I mean, after 73 generations, I think the bloodline might have thinned out a little bit.

The whole tempest in a teapot comes on the heels of the D&G photo mess, which presumably started because some rich mainlander didn’t like having his picture taken in their shop.  It’s all a slap in the face to Hong Kong, which is now seriously dependent on mainland policies and mainlanders for much of its economic survival.  Remember back in the 90′s?  Damn, HKers loved to make jokes about mainlanders, how they dressed, how they acted, how they spoke.  It was hard to say who was lower in HK eyes back then – mainlanders or white people.

So now the tables have turned.  HK needs mainland money.  HK needs mainlanders to come here and buy over-priced shitbox flats and LV bags and Rolex watches by the bushel to keep the economy going, never mind how that money managed to illegally cross the border.  There is a divide – a cultural divide as well as a language one – between Hong Kong and the rest of China.  Anything that attacks at that divide, that tears down the wall, gets people upset.

Am I being harsh here?  Some will say yes, others will say not harsh enough.  Maybe Hemlock or others will take it further.  All I can say is this: who the fuck is Kong Qingdong and why does anyone care what he says?

Maybe the answer is that people are afraid that what he’s saying may not be true but that it represents, at least to some extent, the thoughts and feelings of the ruling class in China – otherwise why would he be allowed to say it and not be tossed in jail afterwards?  And if that is indeed the case, what happens to Hong Kong?

Both sides are wrong.  Both sides are right.  What’s next?

Here are excerpts from some of the comments that Ms. Poon received:   ”A coward old b!tch whining about mainland.” “her degenerate and prejudiced opinions” “Wannabee White’s like this Alice Poon are disappointed that she longer has the priviledge to asskiss the Brits.” “she is a neo-liberal hell-bent on trying to propagate the so-called western values like demoncracy, human rights, free speech etc. unto HK in particular & China in general That is alright if she balances her such admiration of the white man’s ideas with the darker sides of these same western bullshits which now prove so disastrous economically humanity-wise with equal zeal.”  ”I think Alice Poon is whitewashed” “This Alice Poon like so many Hong Kongers are traitors.”

Pleasant stuff, eh wot?  Maybe I’ll get some “you white piece of shit how dare you comment on China like that” kinds of things.

Every year when they announce the Oscar nominations I get excited.  Don’t ask me why; it’s not something I can easily explain.  Sure, once upon a time, in a different century, I had dreams of being nominated and I’ve sort of figured out by now that’s not likely to happen.  I know the Oscars are political, I know they’re driven by mass opinion and by advertising dollars and I know that in many years the most deserving often didn’t win.  Nonetheless ….

Best Picture – 9 nominated films this year – Tree of Life, Moneyball, Midnight in Paris, The Help, Hugo, Warhorse, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, The Descendants, The Artist – I’ve seen 5 of the 9 so far.  I’d love to see Tree of Life win; not that it was the best picture but it was the most wildly ambitious and partially succeeded.  The Artist (which I watched last night) probably doesn’t stand a chance.  Maybe Spielberg’s Warhorse, which I haven’t seen, or the feel-good mush of The Help or a nod to Woody Allen’s film – it is the top-grossing film in his long career.

Best Director – Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Alexander Payne, Michel Hazanavicius, Malick.  They won’t give it to Hazanavicius for The Artist simply to spare the presenter from having to pronounce his name.  I love Payne but haven’t seen Descendants yet.  It could come down to a New York war – Scorsese vs. Allen – each of their films set in Paris, Scorsese’s a love letter to cinema, Woody Allen giving advice to Luis Bunuel on film-making.

Best Actor – Demian Bichir (A Better Life), Jean Dujardin, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Gary Oldman.  I think it’s Clooney’s year. I haven’t seen A Better Life so I can’t say about Bichir but all the other nominees did really strong work.  Actually I don’t know who Bichir is and I think most people were expecting Michael Fassbender to get nominated here.

Best Actress – Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs), Rooney Mara, Viola Davis, Meryl Streep (her 17th nomination!), Michelle Williams.  I’ve only seen 2 of the films here and it does seem to be Ms. Davis’s year.

Best Supporting Actor – Kenneth Branagh, Nick Nolte, Max von Sydow, Jonah Hill, Christopher Plummer.  I’ve only seen 2 of the films and thought that both Hill and Nolte gave great performances, Nolte’s all the better because no one thought he had anything left at this point.  But all the attention is going to Christopher Plummer who is old, has been good for decades and I think never won.

Best Supporting Actress – Berenice Bejo (The Artist), Melissa McCarthy, Octavia Spencer, Jessica Chastain, Janet McTeer.  Two noms for The Help might cancel each other out.  I absolutely loved McCarthy in Bridesmaids and could have watched another hour of her.  But I fell in love with Bejo in The Artist.

Original Screenplay – Midnight in Paris, The Artist, Bridesmaids, Margin Call, A Separation.  Bridesmaids won’t stand a chance because most voters will think it was mostly improv.  Margin Call was an exceptionally strong piece of work, balanced and nuanced.  But this one is a sure win for Woody.

Adapted Screenplay – Moneyball, The Descendants, Hugo, The Ides of March, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  Not having seen The Descendants, I think it’s a strong contender here.  But Moneyball has names that Oscar likes – Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian (and Stan Chervin).

Foreign Language Film – Bullhead, Footnote, In Darkness, A Separation, Monsieur Lazhar.  Everyone is going to say A Separation.  All I’ll note is that the only Asian films nominated this year come from Iran and Israel.

Animated Feature – A Cat in Paris, Chico & Rita, Kung Fu Panda 2, Puss in Boots, Rango.  I don’t even know what the first two films are.  I’m hoping for Rango.

Okay, there’s 14 more awards, but not going to run them down here.  But here’s the scoreboard:

Hugo – 11 nominations

The Artist – 10 nominations

Moneyball & Warhorse – 6 each

The Descendants – 5

Midnight in Paris – 4

Studio-wise, Sony did the best with 20 nominations.

So what are your picks for the winners?

With the weather so depressing outside, we spent the day cooking … and eating.

My gf dug out the Julia Child cookbook and went for chicken ragout and I must say it came out rather nice.  It’s a sort of rich, dark stew with a very deep and flavorful sauce.  Can’t complain about her getting more ambitious in the kitchen.  I think one reason for the ambition is that I recently got some new pots and pans, German stainless steel, 50% off sale in Hang Hau.

I was vaguely less ambitious.  Salmon.  Quick and easy recipe grabbed out of Bittman’s How to Cook Everything.  Cast iron pan.  Little bit of vegetable oil.  Salt & pepper.  Salmon, skin scored.  A minute or two on each side.  Then used Bittman’s “5 Minute Drizzle Sauce” – extra virgin olive oil, garlic, lemon juice, salt & pepper, heated up in a sauce pan, poured over the salmon.  The salmon was Alaskan sockeye salmon, scored from The Porterhouse.  I gotta say, they’re not a cheap, but some of the stuff I’ve gotten from there has been seriously good.  Their Angus burgers (8 ounces each, 6 for about $200) are the best I’ve ever had at home.

We also prepared something to marinate overnight and cook and eat tomorrow – suon nuong, or Vietnamese style pork chops.  These are the ones we had on the street when we were in Nha Trang and I can still remember how damned good they were.

I found this recipe in Saveur Magazine and a friend of mine asked me to post it on the blog so here goes, more or less:

You start with thin pork chops, no more than 1/4 inch thick.  Then you need:

• 1/2 cup + 2 tbsp sugar
• 1/3 cup thinly sliced shallots
• 1/4 cup thinly sliced lemongrass
• 2 tbsp peanut oil
• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• 1-1/2 tbsp fish sauce
• ground black pepper
• 8 garlic cloves finely chopped

Heat the 1/2 cup sugar in a saucepan until it turns to liquid caramel. Remove from heat, add 1/4 cup boiling water, return to heat, cook till the caramel dissolves in the water.

Put this in a food processor or blender along with the rest of the sugar, lemongrass, shallots, oil, soy sauce, fish sauce, pepper and garlic. Puree until smooth.

Put the pork chops in a pan or dish, cover with the sauce, cover and chill anywhere from 1 hour to over night.

Cook the pork chops in a cast iron pan about 2 minutes till cooked through and charred in spots.  Serve with rice and chili-garlic sauce (we have lots of bottles of Sri Racha sauce at home, I can’t live without it now).

Richard, let me know if you try it out yourself and how it comes out.

(Many of you will no doubt find the following post pointless.  But many people seem to like when I post this sort of stuff.  Feel free to skip it if it ain’t your cup o’ joe.)

It’s been a week of ups and downs for me, probably more downs than ups.

It was, for starters, the week that we lost two giants of music – Etta James and Johnny Otis.  It was also the week that the feds shut down file sharing site Megaupload.  It’s estimated that this site earned US$175 million in revenue over the past six years and the reported lifestyle of its founder, Kim Dotcom, certainly would seem to support that.  (What’s funny is that the SCMP insists on calling Dotcom a “Hong Kong man” despite the fact that he was born in Germany and essentially bought his New Zealand citizenship (which is where he was arrested) because he did live in Hong Kong for awhile, apparently in a suite at the Grand Hyatt.  How odd that the media is so strenuously trying to claim this guy as one of our own.)  New Zealand police, cooperating with the US, apparently not only raided his house but had to break their way into the armored safe room somewhere in the house where he was hiding.

I haven’t been feeling very well for quite some time but was just letting it go by.  I don’t want to be labeled a hypochondriac and as a result I tend to not go to doctors unless I’ve been shot or lost a limb.  Then we watched this movie, 50/50.  It’s writer Will Reiser’s semi-auto-biographical work about a 27 year old guy who comes down with cancer and how his best friend supports him through it and how he reconciles with his mother, blah blah blah.  Actually, it’s not great but it’s quite okay.  It stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the cancer victim, Seth Rogen as his best friend, Anjelica Huston as his mom, Anna Kendrick as his shrink, Philip Baker Hall and Matt Frewer as a couple of other cancer patients.

The thing is that JGL discovers he has cancer because he has this persistent back ache, so he goes to the doctor, gets an MRI, discovers he has this rare form of cancer on his spine.  I watched it and thought to myself, “Hmmm, I would never go to a doctor for that!”  And then I thought about the way I’d been feeling lately (and the fact that despite the best of intentions I remain a heavy smoker) and went to the doctor.  Maybe this does make me a hypochondriac after all.  I then had a few days of extreme nervousness and lack of sleep waiting for the results.  In the end, it was nowhere near as bad as I was dreading.  No cancer but something that I used to have has returned.  Actually, back when I had it, there was no Wikipedia so I couldn’t read up on it, now I can and I see it’s something that once you have, you pretty much have it for the rest of your life (and no, it’s not an STD).   At least now I know and I know how to deal with it and I expect certain things to improve relative to the good ol’ “quality of life” thing.  So I have that.  But I now also have a lot more tests to undergo and weekly doctor visits for the foreseeable future.

Without going into a hell of a lot of details, I’ve been seriously considering buying something in the Philippines – a flat or a house or something.  I’m not sure what and I’m not sure where.  Do I want to stay in the big city, which means Manila, which probably means Fort Bonfacio since that’s my favorite part of Manila?  Do I want to look a couple or a few hours away from Manila?  (I didn’t much care for Clark/Angeles, haven’t been to Subic.)  On an island like Boracay – a place I really like but a pain in the balls to get to and from since you have to take a boat to get to the nearest airport?  Some other island or beach that I’ve never been to?  I’m planning a trip there in March, in part to take a bit of a look around.

Of course, it’s now Chinese New Year.  Last night we went over to the malls at Hang Hau for dinner.  Around 9 PM, much as expected, most of the shopping mall was empty.  However Taste, a vaguely upscale supermarket owned by Park & Shop, was packed.  People were going pretty crazy buying the sorts of things that Hong Kong people buy in anticipation of CNY – presents to give when visiting family & friends, food & drink for when friends & family come to visit them.  There were huge stacks everywhere of deluxe gift boxes of chocolate, cookies, cakes (yeah, I know, how did I manage to go out without a camera? just my mood relative to my health I guess).  What struck me as odd about this is that most of the stuff being bought seems to have been boxes of western sweets – things that most HKer’s don’t really go for.  (Krispy Kreme lasted just a year in Hong Kong because local people found it way too sweet.)  Gift boxes that contained Cadbury Chocolates and Pepperidge Farm Cookies?  And some of these people were buying like 10, 20, 30 boxes of this stuff.  Gift cases that contained XO sauce and other Asian sauces seemed to make more sense to me.  The wine section was packed with people – probably in no small part thanks to a sale, buy 6 bottles and get an extra 15% off.  Yes, I was planning on buying 1 or 2 bottles and I bought 6.  Anyway, 10 PM Saturday night, every register open, lines 10 deep at each register, each person with a shopping cart stacked up to the ceiling.

Also traditional for Chinese New Year in Hong Kong – shit weather.  The skies are grey, the clouds are low, the temperature has dropped.  It’s 11 degrees in Sai Kung and that’s probably where it’s going to stay for the next 3 or 4 days.  Thanks to the visit to Taste and a delivery from The Porterhouse, there’s plenty of food in the house.  Then I had this idea – that I could speed up the performance of iTunes on my PC if I moved the drives (two drives, RAID 1) from an external USB box to the inside of my PC.  So I figured, okay, move those two 2 Terabyte drives and then buy some new ones to shove into the soon-to-be-empty external RAID box.

So I put the two drives into the computer, booted up, checked the BIOS, made sure they were set up as RAID1, all good.  And put two new drives into the RAID box, booted up, brought up disk manager, formatted the drives, or so I thought.

Because what actually happened is that when I put the drives into my computer, some resource conflict blew out my USB 3.0 ports.  And what I thought was the new disks was actually old disks sitting in another external box that I had inadvertently left powered up and for some reason the computer decided these were new disks.  So I reformatted hard disks that contained close to 2 Terabytes worth of MP3 files.  And not just any MP3 files.  This was the A-J section of my collection.  Just losing the B’s alone would be a disaster – every noise the Beatles ever made down to belches and farts; every wheeze that came out of Bob Dylan’s nose, every Bruce Springsteen concert and outtake from the 1970s.  Because this stuff was stored RAID1, I didn’t bother backing it up to Backblaze.  Because this was RAID1, when I reformatted one disk, I reformatted both disks.

The only thing that saved me was the fact that after mistakenly reformatting these disks, I hadn’t done anything else to them.  Which means they’re recoverable.  I tried out a few different bits of software, finally went with one that was recommended to me via Twitter, GetDataBack. As promised, it is able to not just recover the files, it can recover the long names and the directory structures as well.  It allowed me to run the discovery process against the drive (which took ten hours) before deciding whether or not to buy it, so that I could evaluate how successful it was going to be first.  It looks as if 100% can be recovered and it’s now in the process of copying the files from the accidentally reformatted drive to a new drive.  One file at a time.  I think it’s going to take a couple of days to complete this.  I’m spot checking and the files are there and they can be played but it looks as if all the tags have disappeared.

Just posted by the SCMP.

For renewing my NOW-TV contract, I get a HK$100 supermarket coupon.  Someone calls me to tell me that in 4 to 6 weeks, they will mail me a redemption letter so that I can travel to their redemption center to collect the coupon.  ”So, you are going to mail me a piece of paper that says I can go somewhere to collect a piece of paper?  Why not just mail me the piece of paper?”  ”Uhhhhhhhhhhh ….”  ”Yes, I know, you are just the phone person and you don’t set policy and have no control over this but will  you at least agree with me that this makes no sense?”  ”Uhhhhhhhhhhh ….”

I might as well have asked them why the porridge bird lays its eggs in the air.

They say (whoever they are) that the third Monday of January is the most depressing day of the year.  Something about post-holiday blahs and, I’m guessing, usually pretty shitty weather (in the Northern hemisphere at least).  I don’t know if they’re right.

There’s no shortage of songs written about Monday.  Blue Monday.  Stormy Monday. I Don’t Like Mondays.  Monday, Monday.  Manic Monday.  Rainy Days and Mondays.  (Of course there was also a band called Happy Mondays, a damned good band at that, and I guess their name was meant sarcastically.)

Sweet Tuesday Morning.  Tuesday’s Dead. Tuesday’s Gone. Tuesday Afternoon.  Ruby Tuesday.

Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting. Wednesday Week. Wednesday Morning 3 AM.

Thursday’s Child.  (Thursday) Here’s Why I Did Not Go to Work Today. The group Sweet Thursday that featured Nicky Hopkins.

Friday I’m in Love. Friday On My Mind. Love You Till Friday. Black Friday.

Saturday Night. Met You on a Saturday. One More Saturday Night. Saturday in the Park. 10:15 Saturday Night. Almost Saturday Night. Drive In Saturday. Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting. Saturday Afternoon. Treat Me Like a Saturday Night. Book of Saturday. Saturday Come Slow. The Saturday Kids. Baron Saturday. Looking For the Heart of Saturday Night. Saturday Night in the City of the Dead.

Just Another Sunday. Sunday Girl. Sunday Sunday. Blue Sunday. Sunday’s Best. Sunday Kind of Love.  Young Girl Sunday Blues. Sunday Morning Coming Down. My Sunday Feeling. Sunday Papers. Sunday Bloody Sunday. I Met Him on a Sunday. Pleasant Valley Sunday. Lazy Sunday. Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon. Sunday Street. Sunday Will Never Be the Same. Everyday is Like Sunday.

And many more.

All’s I’m saying is I’m feeling pretty crappy for a Tuesday.

My first musical pick for 2012 is singer Lana Del Rey. After reading about her in various blogs, I decided to check her out via Youtube – her Born to Die video has had over 11 million views in one month.

I was expecting a Lady Gaga/Britney Spears clone but instead I found a 25 year old woman with Mick Jagger lips and a soulful voice smoldering her way through a track that, well, I like.  Her lyrics fall into a grey area between cliche and promising.

Come and take a walk on the wild side
Let me kiss you hard in the pouring rain
You like your girls insane
Choose your last words,
This is the last time
Cause you and I
We were born to die

Video Games, which came out in October, has also done quite well on the internet, but nowhere near as well as Born to Die, getting “just” 1.7 million views in 3 months.  Lyrically, it covers similar ground, with the same strengths and weaknesses, but at least it indicates a consist approach.

It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you
Everything I do, I tell you all the time
Heaven is a place on earth with you
Tell me all the things you want to do
I heard that you like the bad girls
Honey, is that true? It’s better than I ever even knew
They say that the world was built for two
Only worth living if somebody is loving you
Baby, now you do

Her album (her second, her first sank without a trace two years ago) comes out in a week or so and should do well.  This past weekend should have been her triumphant moment because she became one of very few singers to appear on SNL without an album available.  And she blew it.  She stank up the place.  She’s now famous for having possibly the worst musical performances in SNL’s history.  She was clearly nervous, noticeably off-key multiple times and just plain bad.

NYC newspaper Newsday reviewed the performance by writing that she was “so awful that it could easily have been a Kristen Wiig skit, maybe one where she impersonates a Fiona Apple wannabe.”  Over on Twitter, actress Juliette Lewis got more attention than she has in years by tweeting, “Wow watching this ‘singer’ on SNL is like watching a 12 yearold in their bedroom when they’re pretending to sing and perform. #signofourtimes.”

Spin got it right, I think. “All the attention will only help sales of her debut album Born to Die when it comes out on January 30. … a bunch of casual music fans who tuned in hoping to see Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe got exposed to a couple of catchy-enough songs they might end up wanting to own on disc, and here the rest of us are talking about both SNL and Del Rey. Social networking didn’t change the old rule that all publicity is good publicity.”  Hit the Spin link to see videos of her performing her two songs on SNL (the videos are hosted on Hulu but seem to be working for me without use of a proxy).

One performance, even a relatively visible televised one, will not kill a career.  I think the lady’s gonna be a star.

The Golden Globes is the most bizarre awards show year after year.  It’s the awards given by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and there are less than 100 voters, allegedly influenced in their voting by perks and junkets, and since these are the men and women writing about films for foreign newspapers and magazines, they are perceived to wield a lot of influence.  But every year, many of their choices are just downright bizarre, the most famous being when they voted Pia Zadora as the best new actress or talent or whatever.

Not even having seen all of the nominees nor some of the winners, some of the results this year are wacky.  Meryl Streep for her impersonation of Maggie Thatcher over Viola Davis’s outstanding performance in The Help (a movie I didn’t care for but she’s amazing) or Rooney Mara for Girl With the Dragon Tattoo?  Okay, Christopher Plummer is 83 and never won one of these awards so if they’re going to give him one rather than Albert Brooks for Drive or Jonah Hill for Moneyball, I’m not gonna complain too much.

Here’s the one that strikes me as the oddest.  Best actor in a TV drama series. The nominees included Steve Buscemi for Boardwalk Empire.  Perennial Emmy winner Bryan Cranston for Breaking Bad.  Jeremy Irons in The Borgias.  Damian Lewis for Homeland (I’ve never watched this – is it something I need to catch up on?).  The winner?  Kelsey Grammar for something called Boss.  Really?

And now let’s look at best performance by an actor in a TV comedy series.  Was it Alec Baldwin for 30 Rock?  David Duchovny for Californication? Johnny Galecki for Big Bang Theory?  Thomas Jane for Hung?  Try Matt LeBlanc.  Seriously.

Anyway, best drama film was The Descendants, best comedy film was The Artist, best animated film was Tin Tin, best foreign film was A Separation.  As the Globes go, so go the Oscars?  We’ll know soon enough.