I think I mentioned this before. Everytime I travel, I forget one thing. If it was the same thing each time, that would be easy, I could come up with a system. But it’s a different thing each time. And since I do an average of about 20 trips a year, well, one would think I’d be better at it by now, but I’m not.

I have a packing list and last night I checked off everything against that list. Feeling confident.

Now, the street where I live, you can’t get taxis until well after 9:30 in the morning, unless you’ve called to book one in advance. Every taxi coming up my way has their off duty sign on display – they’re on radio calls. And there are lots of people in the streets hoping for that one stray empty taxi. No busses but we have minibusses but they are usually full by the time they get anywhere near me.

And I’m a little late getting out of the house because I decided to do a quick usenet check before leaving. Oh spit, there’s a clean copy of Hot Fuzz, which I’ve been dying to see. So I gotta download it and get it on the PMP before leaving so I can watch it on the plane (which I do – maybe it’s not quite as wonderful as Shaun of the Dead but it’s still splendid and has some great lines … one roughly “if we don’t crack down on the clowns we’ll be up to our balls in jugglers.”)

Which is to explain why I decided to drive to the airport. So I’m in the car, get about halfway to the western tunnel, and I realize what I forgot this time – my mobile phone. I’ve got my blackberry but I don’t give that number out. And all my notes and shopping lists for the trip are synced to the phone.

Now I’m in this peculiar maze around Sheung Wan and environs west where there are no U-turns, no right turns, no easy way to get back to my street. From the time I realize I don’t have the phone until I can get back to my building is at least 30 minutes. The clock is ticking. Flight time is approaching.

Now it’s way past 9:30. I could park and get a taxi. And probably get stuck with some 80 year old guy driving 20 kilometers per hour, stuck on Queens Road heading to the airport express station. That doesn’t seem like a plan.

So, drive to airport. 150 kph in 80 kph zones (except for the tunnels). I’m chain smoking, speeding and having a heart attack at the same time. I’m mentally trying to work out options if I should miss the flight (I already know that the other flights today are full, this is the only one).

I haven’t driven to the airport in a long time. Signs indicate that the covered car park that’s right next to the terminal is now short term only. I have to get to P2 for long term and I miss the turn off and have to come back around. And finally get to the lot where you don’t just grab a ticket out the machine, some security measure they have, there’s some guard there who first confirms that you want long term and then slowly writes your license plate number on your ticket and on a sheet of paper. Quick grab a spot.

Now I gotta run through the parking lot, through the brand new bullshit terminal 2 (which has no actual gates, just more shops – oh, the CX magazine on the plane has a write-up on this new terminal. They mention that the restaurants feature “authentic Italian food such as New York pizza.” Exsqueeze me?)

Well, somehow, I make it to check-in with half an hour to spare. I even have time to go to duty free, the magazine shop and smoke one and a half cigarettes before boarding the plane … which then sits there for half an hour before we take off.

Well, I’m here now, I’m relaxed now. Thank fucking goodness. And I like Singapore. I don’t live here so I don’t have to put up the bullshit, I get all of that in HK. Here all I see are the good bits – clean, safe, people speaking English and the women, oh yes, let’s not forget those.

Meeting Expat@Large tonight. He’s rounding up a couple or few other bloggers and I’m sure I will have a nice evening. Anything will be better than my Saturday night, my Sunday night and my Monday morning.

P.S. Okay, gotta share this with you though it’s not the sort of thing I’d normally post any more. I did write about how bad Saturday night was, yes? Now, what about Sunday?

See, there’s this Filipino girl, and she’s gorgeous but I’m sure she’s lying to me about absolutely everything. She seems to have some hidden agenda, something else going on beyond what these girls normally have. And she’s been bugging me for days to see her and I’ve been putting her off, if for no other reason than I don’t want to let her get too close and I don’t want to start developing any feelings for her. Since I’m not meeting anyone “normal” right now and have the patience of a 5 year old, I’m well aware that I could get into another relationship along the lines of the one with T if I’m not careful.

But she says Sunday is her last night in town, it’s my last night, so I tell her I’ll meet her. Meet a friend for dinner first. She says she’ll wait for me in Laguna. I get there, she’s not there. She says she’s “leaving now” and then a few minutes later she says she’s “walking over.” After half an hour I don’t see her, I send a message that I’m leaving. She says I should wait, she’s there, but I don’t see her anywhere. My friend and I leave.

Now especially after Saturday night I’m not in the mood for games, especially from a working girl. And I’m convinced that at one point she was in the bar waiting for me, got grabbed by someone else for a short time, and was hoping to get out of the love hotel and squeeze me in as well. I don’t need this in my life and it’s a reminder of why I’m happy now that I’m going to Wanchai less and less – it’s not completely off the menu yet but it is lower down, believe it or don’t.

Monday I have an SMS from her. You ready? “Oh darling, last night the battery on my phone ran out. Have changed my flight to tomorrow because I have to see you before I go.”

Now, on top of everything else, she’d told me she only got 4 days when she arrived here, and she said she arrived on Tuesday. Based on that, she should have had to leave on Saturday, no? I don’t ask her about this, it just tells me I can’t believe a single thing she says and she’s stupid enough to think she can play these games with people who live here as opposed to some guy here for the first time for a convention who would be so blinded to her youth and looks (and large breasts, did I mention she had large breasts?) that he’d believe whatever she says. I like to believe everyone is honest. I hate it when they’re not. Naive? So fucking what?

Wow, this post is running long, ain’t it? I’m one verbose mother fucker. Well, I gotta head out and meet the krewe soon. More on this later, possibly.

Decision made, bookings made, Monday morning off to Singapore. Armed with the video from when Bourdain ate there for Cook’s Tour and with a copy of Makansutra to be purchased on arrival, I plan to attempt a good deal of eating, a little bit of shopping, some sitting by a pool and reading and, well, you know me, probably up to no good at night.

Will return on Thursday and hoping to organize some friends for some food/drinks celebrating the day my mother gave birth to me, which was immediately followed by the doctor pointing at me and telling her, “don’t do that any more, ok?”

Well, no, it wasn’t quite paradise and I didn’t go near there for the last 20 years, but doing a big of googling to kill time brought me to this bit of news:

Vinylmania Records Closes Its Doors

Vinylmania was a piece of NYC music history which was also an important spot for me for about a decade. Opened on Carmine Street in Greenwich Village in the late 70s, in the 80s it was known as the shop where all the DJs shopped and at least one guy who worked in the shop, Manny Lehman, used it as a springboard to fame himself.

See, just like every other Greenwich Village record shop, it was getting by on selling promo copies and UK imports. I would stop there every Saturday to shop, bought more than I could afford each week, and got to be friends with owner Charlie Grappone and his staff.

Charlie soon opened a second store down the street selling 12 inch singles. The legendary Larry Levan of the Paradise Garage, which was just around the corner, was a big customer. Every DJ in NY shopped there and their fans followed them there. Madonna did her first in-store appearance there. By 1986 or so, they’d even started their own label.

Around 82 or 83, I ended up driving a taxi cab and not being happy about it. Charlie went partners with another guy to open a video rental shop nearby and asked me if I wanted to work there. It got me out of the taxi, so I did that for the next 2 or 3 years, until I had the idea that a record store selling only CDs might work.

So Charlie and I became partners and in 1985 we opened the Vinylmania CD Shop on Carmine Street, across from his 12 inch store. It was tough going for the first six months but then my import business started to take off, eventually doing so well that I was selling wholesale to shops outside of New York City. I had steady customers coming from as far as 90 miles away on a regular basis. I’d also introduced the notion of buying and selling used CDs. Basically anything I could do to compete with Tower, which was just a few blocks away.

But those were the days of parallel imports and the RIAA got wind of the shop – we always suspected it was via a rival shop owner who didn’t have the sources I had and so he couldn’t get the imports as quickly or sell them as cheaply. Threatened with legal action that we couldn’t afford to defend, we stopped the import trade and business fell overnight by 2/3rds. Without going into any details, the partnership fell apart soon afterwards and I helped start the CD Hotline along with two of my customers.

I wish I had known about this sooner, because the closing came about a week after my most recent NYC trip. Had I known it was coming, I would have stopped down there for a bit of nostalgia and wool gathering.

Anyway, that’s what happens when you get older, chunks of your past disappear.

Up until 4 AM, I would have said I’d had better nights, I’d had worse nights. After that, things went rapidly downhill.

I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go out tonight. But finally, bored and restless, I set out around midnight. After a stop for some food, I looked around, thought about it for a bit, and went into Neptune although I soon realized I wasn’t in a Neptune mood.

I just kinda sat there, looked around, had a drink or two and said, well, maybe I’m in a crappy mood but I’m wide awake, might as well stay here, listen to the music, enjoy the view.

At some point, some guy came up to me and asked if I was Spike. I didn’t ask how he recognized me, just said yes. He said he was a reader and occasional commenter and said something about how he liked my taste in music and my lifestyle. Fair enough.

Some other guy admires my Ramones t shirt and says too bad there aren’t more people wearing this shirt in HK and I agree with him. But then he adds that it’s too bad they’re not playing gigs anymore and I say that could be because most of them are dead.

At 3 I went into Joe Bananas, vaguely dying down. At 3:30, I went into Amazonia, but unfortunately it was the last few seconds before the band was taking a break. Amazonia’s a weird place but I do like the bands that play there – Filipino cover bands but with a harder edge than in the surrounding clubs.

So after 15 or 20 minutes, I head out and walk down the street towards Fenwick, not sure if I will go in or just get in a taxi. I see this guy and girl walking down the street and all of a sudden the girl starts calling out my name.

She’s a local girl, F, she used to work with my ex-wife. I have not seen her in about 10 years, so she doesn’t know we’ve split up. F and I have some history – not exactly what I know you’re thinking but in that vein. The fact that she asks me for my number right in front of the guy is not a bad sign, either. And I’m thinking, the fact that we did like each other and we’ve run into each other after all this time could be meaningful.

The guy she’s with has picked her up in Carnegies. I let the two of them drag me into Mes Amis. Now at 4 AM, the guy is telling me his life story and the entire business model of his company. He’s someone who has been here for two years and I suppose has swallowed all of the worst aspects of the HK lifestyle.

F is drunk, clearly. She says that she never thought that my wife and I would split up. She asks me what I’m looking for now. She says she’s out drinking because she’s lonely. She says she wants to get married and have kids – as many as she can and she knows I can afford it because I’m rich. (Yes, clearly drunk.) At some point, F starts talking about god! She says my wife told her I’m not religious and I have to go back to god to find happiness.

When she asks what I’m looking for and I say I’m looking for a girlfriend, she says she doesn’t want a one night stand, she wants something permanent. I tell her I’m looking for something permanent too because she is really pretty though the whole god thing is putting me off. There is little doubt in my mind that if I felt like exerting myself, I could pull her away from this guy. And like I said, she is really pretty but the god thing …. well, I decide not to exert myself.

F lives quite far from Wanchai and I tell her, as a joke, that if she wants I can drive her home. But finally after god and business plans and drunk yuppies crashing into me, I’ve had all I can stand. I ask her if she’s okay if I leave her with that guy, she says yes, and I head home.

I’m not home 5 minutes when I get an SMS from her asking if I would come back and get her and drive her home. I reply, asking if she’s serious and she replies that she’s “begging.” So I say okay, 5 minutes, grab the car, drive over, park outside Mes.

I call, tell her I’m outside, she says she will be out in a minute. I don’t go in because I don’t wanna have a scene with Mr. Businessman. Two minutes later an SMS that she will be out, she promises. Two more minutes, I walk over to the bar. They’re closing, they won’t let me in.

I call, she doesn’t answer. I look in through the window, some guy has his arms around her and is putting the moves on her – hard. I don’t see her fighting him off. His arms are around her, his hands on her thighs, pushing her skirt up. Now I’m getting pissed off. I call 2 or 3 more times, finally the phone is answered but by the guy who says, “is this Spike?” I disconnect the call.

I go back to the car. Two minutes later, she comes out of the bar with the guy, his arm around her. And they walk down the street and turn the corner towards Neptune.

Now I’m thoroughly pissed off. Who needs this shit? But I’m not going to go into Neptune, I don’t need some confrontation over this dingbat. So I head into Fenwick, take a look around, sit, realize I can’t drink because I’ve got the car, have a smoke, come home.

Now, if I can possibly clear my head, I will go to sleep.

Have not gone out yet. Having trouble getting started. Just that kinda day.

5 days till my birthday.

Last year on my birthday I reached 200,000 hits. (Page hits, not unique visits, of course.) Then I dropped most of the sex stuff from here, readership dropped by around 50%, I stopped looking at the hit counter. Just took a look, seems like I’m closing in on 400,000 now.

Why the fuck am I being so indecisive on this whole vacation thing? Seems like Bintan ain’t gonna be what I want, or only partly so, and do I really wanna go to Singapore for a few days just cause I like a bookstore and the food there? There are worse reasons to go somewhere, I suppose. The alternative now seems to be Thailand – a few days Bangkok, a few days elsewhere – I do have an idea for a new tattoo, might have mentioned that before.

Last night watched a movie worth recommending somewhat – Exiled. Directed by Johnny To, it stars one of my HK faves, Anthony Wong Chau-sang, and a few others I like – Francis Ng, Roy Cheung, Simon Yam. Josie Ho looks properly bedraggled as Ho’s wife and also nice to see Ellen Chan (and one of her breasts) looking great in the role of Hooker. It was nominated for a Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival.

I was a bit nervous at the start because the opening credits didn’t include one for a writer. At the end, screenplay was credited to two writers plus “Milkyway Creative Team.” Movies written by committee are never a good idea, and Exiled has its share of lapses and poor logic, as one might well expect.

It’s set in Macau in 1998, just prior to the handover. But you won’t see any casinos or nightclubs here. This is a very different, back streets kind of Macau. As the story opens, two hitmen from Hong Kong knock on a door, looking for a guy named Wo. Then another two hitmen show up, in order to keep the first two from killing Wo. And then Wo shows up. In typical HK movie logic, it turns out that all 5 are childhood friends.

Simply put, the opening 20 minutes is almost pure Sergio Leone, which is not a bad thing. When the action starts, you’ll see elements of John Woo and Ringo Lam and the end borrows in many ways from the Wild Bunch. To has breathlessly winked at, cited, homaged, borrowed and stolen from so many directors that the more you know about cinema, the more you’ll love it.

I suppose it would be worth spending a bit of time on the political implications here – setting this in Macau in ’98, characters who for various reasons have left Hong Kong. But I’m feeling lazy, haven’t done that. The film is rated Category III, presumably because of its depiction of triad activities, lots of violence (most of the blood is CGI) and a brief flash of nudity.

Well, that’s it, gonna head out, do a spot of shopping, walking, usual Saturday crap.

Kinda thinking now that if I split a trip between Bintan and Singapore, that’ll give me both ends of the spectrum – something resort-y plus a chance to spend an afternoon at Borders Books and several meals in Singapore’s great hawker centers. Have been to Singapore dozens of times, have never been to Bintan at all. Any tips?

Previously I knocked the SCMP’s coverage of that killer cop story.

Today I clicked over to an article on Asia Sentinel, in part because it’s written by someone I met once, in part because of what he wrote about it himself on his own blog, and when reading the article, I learned something important that I did not already know:

Thursday’s lead headline on the front page of the South China Morning Post summed it up: “Jury finds Tsui unlawfully killed three.” But nobody bothered to mention that an inquest jury has no place ‘finding’ such things at all. The purpose of a coroner’s inquest is to determine when, where, and how a person died, and who that person was. What such an inquest cannot do is apportion blame or denote liability. That is the arena of a criminal trial.

The jury’s verdict in this inquest wasn’t just unusual – it was unheard of. This was the first time in Hong Kong that an inquest sought to identify a killer.

Read the entire article here. See if you don’t get upset about yet another underhanded game being played in HK by the powers that be.

(And I want to add, Asia Sentinel has been in my RSS reader almost from their inception. There has yet to be an instance where I’ve clicked over to read the full content of an article and been disappointed. It’s a great alternative news source – and it’s free!)

So far I have never met Warren Lieberfarb, who was president of Warner Home Video for about 27 years and can be co-credited with coming up for the concept for the DVD. Back then, there were also going to be two competing formats, but such was Lieberfarb’s standing within the industry that he was able to get everyone to agree on a single format.

Warren was no longer president of WHV when the Hi-Def battles started. It’s hard to say if he would have been successful in avoiding a format war a second time. I’m sure the other studios have had some degree of jealousy watching all of that DVD patent money flowing in to Warner and Toshiba.

Of course now we are stuck in a Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD format war, which only serves to confuse consumers who are already unsure if they should go the High Definition route. Sony/Columbia is only releasing Blu-Ray, Universal is only releasing HD-DVD, the other studios by and large are supporting both formats equally. It’s a mess for the studios and for retailers that will not be resolved for some time.

Warren is a visionary in his field and I always find what he has to say worthwhile, so here are some excerpts from a current interview with him in Variety:

In the world according to Warren Lieberfarb, the schism between the two next-generation disc formats shouldn’t have happened.

In Lieberfarb’s view, the right aggressive moves could’ve prevented Blu-ray and HD DVD from befuddling consumers when those formats hit store shelves last year with two separate offerings.

“It was clear to me that a cartellike consortium was being created for the purpose of forcing a de facto standard on other manufacturers,” Lieberfarb says.

Lieberfarb had hoped that all of the parties working on next-generation DVDs would continue collaborating on standards within the DVD Forum, a group that had been created in 1995 to foster discussions among studios and electronics makers.

Lieberfarb was so concerned about the activities of Sony, Matsushita and Philips that he asked Time Warner’s outside antitrust counsel to explore strategies for getting the U.S. Dept. of Justice to launch an inquiry. But Time Warner had other priorities, and at the end of 2002 Lieberfarb was axed.

He says that if the studios had been less focused on creating bulletproof copy-protection and more fixated on getting the discs into the market more quickly, the work being done on HD DVD within the DVD Forum would’ve proceeded more quickly.

And with that, HD DVD might have beaten Blu-ray to market by an even wider — and perhaps definitive — margin. (As it was, HD DVD rolled out in the spring of last year and Blu-ray during the summer.)

“The studios were in denial or ignorant as to when DVD was going to reach maturity and when the growth rates would significantly slow down,” Lieberfarb says.

Now that Blu-ray equipment is duking it out with HD DVD equipment in the market, Lieberfarb sees only one potential solution to the conflict: aggressive price discounting.

But consumers’ confusion could prevent high-def discs from ever gaining the kind of foothold DVD has enjoyed.

“The longer these guys battle now, the more that Bill Gates, networked media, personal video recorders and satellite become the rival format to high-definition DVD,” Doherty says. “Hard disc drives and fast network connections win in that scenario, not HD DVD or Blu-ray.”

By the way, while the only Hi Def discs available in HK up till now have been imports, two of the local companies are going to start rolling out local Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs next month. This will force the local affiliates of Hollywood studios to follow suit. Which should mean we’ll start seeing cheaper discs available locally in the very near future.

However, I think analyst Richard Doherty may be on to something in his comment.

I have said many times that the reason CDs succeeded over LPs and cassettes is because when you went in the store, they looked drastically different from those other formats. People would go “what’s that?” and you could give them the sales pitch and demo to get their interest.

The same could be said for the victory of DVDs over VHS.

SACD and DVD-Audio both failed in the marketplace because 1) the qualitative difference over CDs was not that drastic, 2) they required the consumer to purchase new hardware to use them, 3) there were no computer drives for these formats, and 4) they did not look any different from regular CDs, so the mass public was never even aware they existed.

HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are doing a bit better. There are computer drives and game machines that play them and a lot of money is being spent on marketing. But the marketplace itself has changed. Downloading from the internet and streaming to your TV as well as over-the-air HD broadcasts (in most civilized countries, but not in HK of course, not until Li Ka-Shing figures out how to get a piece of the action) combined with hard disk recorders could be the consumer choice for the future. Not to mention the fact that DRM is a horrendous invention that is only hurting honest consumers (recent Sony DVD releases such as Casino Royale that featured a new attempt at DRM wouldn’t play on a large variety of DVD players in the US – this after Sony infested millions of computers with viruses after putting some vile DRM on some CDs a year or so back – they never learn).

I don’t think we’ll see a change where the #1 consumer format becomes atoms instead of bytes overnight, but I do expect to see it within what’s left of my lifetime.

Wanna know how to take a multi-billion dollar company and make it look tiny and petty? Here’s how:

British Airways cut a cameo by Richard Branson from its in-flight version of the latest James Bond film and blurred out the tail fin of a Virgin Atlantic plane seen in the movie. BA’s entertainment team cut a cameo appearance by the Virgin Atlantic chairman that appears in the original version of “Casino Royale,” a spokesman confirmed Saturday. In the original film, Branson can be seen turning around after walking through a metal detector at Miami Airport.

Are they thinking there’s no such thing as bad publicity? Do they feel that the general public is so fed up with Branson that the pledge of a Branson-free flight will increase business?

Does the phrase “shit for brains” come to mind? Why, yes!