Ridley Scott’s new “final cut” of Blade Runner is screening in New York and getting lots of press attention in advance of the 5 DVD set coming out in December. Here’s an interesting quote from an interview in the NY Times:

He created this world from what he saw around him. “I was spending a lot of time in New York,” he said. “The city back then seemed to be dismantling itself. It was marginally out of control. I’d also shot some commercials in Hong Kong. This was before the skyscrapers. The streets seemed medieval. There were 4,000 junks in the harbor, and the harbor was filthy. You wouldn’t want to fall in; you’d never get out alive. I wanted to film ‘Blade Runner’ in Hong Kong, but couldn’t afford to.”

When I knock the republican party or George Bush, conservatives think I am automatically boosting the democratic party. It seems that if they are capable of thought at all, it is only binary.

My father set the example for me: he never missed voting in an election but he almost never voted for either republican or a democrat. For me, the democratic party mostly represents the lesser of two evils. Summed up this picture:

as well as this essay by someone named Stan Goff:

When I suggested that everyone vote in Democrats in 2006, I said at the same time that this was no endorsement. I said that without their minority status to fall back on, they would be exposed as co-imperialists with the Republicans to all who still bore Sisyphean hopes for that agglomeration of political oxygen theft.

They just overwhelmingly authorized a resolution declaring the armed forces of another sovereign nation to be a terrorist group. They have consistently authorized pantopticon surveillance. Now they are in unison saying the war will last for ten, maybe 20 years, and they will not stop it even if they are in power.

Wanna hear the funny part? The Republicans are going to beat their asses in 2008, and a lot of us aren’t going to lift a finger to stop it from happening.

I still believe that a Waring blender would have been a better president than George Bush, and that a ‘64 Chevy Impala could do a better job than either Giuliani or Thompson.

And last for tonight, finally getting around to offloading the memory card onto my PC, so a selection of photos going back several weeks ….

First, Tokyo, Shibuya, standin’ on the corner watchin’ all the girls go by ….

Taxi TV

Tokyo Tower – 13 years of going to Tokyo an average of 4 times per year and still have not gone to the top.

Next, Seoul, partial view of the room at the Park Hyatt.

I just loved the stone wall in the bathroom.

At Incheon Airport:

Last, Shenzhen, the central interior of the Luo Hu mall is a literal riot of color:

I didn’t get a specific shot of this sign but was able to crop this image from a wider shot, hence the soft focus. If you can’t see it clearly, it says, “Monopoly: Crystal, Jade Article, Jewelry, Ornament, Pearls & Queer Stone.”

And the best sign in the mall, “Mending Bowls With Cramp”

Two minutes ago, I received an email notifying me that my iPod Touch has shipped. Expected delivery date is now October 4th instead of 3rd! Well, if the commenter was right that shops won’t be getting their stock till the 2nd, I guess I won’t feel that bad. Plus it gives me extra time to try to figure out what I’m going to fit on there.

Right now I’ve got abot 65 gig sitting in iTunes. I copied my iTunes library to another PC so I could play around with it. After deleting down to something that I considered minimal, I had 25 gigs there. Hmmm. Now down-converting everything to 128 AAC. That’s gonna take awhile. Second computer is slow.

Catching up on the news, I see that Apple released updated software for the iPhone on Thursday. The results are as expected – along with new features and bug fixes, it relocks and sometimes even bricks unlocked iPhones. This is now going to be a weekly event. Apple releases new software. The hackers release updated hacks. Apple releases new software. It’s not a rat race that I care to take part in. I’ll stick with my Sony Ericsson P1i.

It’s now 2:30 AM. I seem to recall that Armin “A State of Trance” something or other is at HITEC tonight and the ads say the show runs till 6 AM. Guess I still have time to catch his set. Maybe not. Grandmaster Flash is at Dragon-i on Wednesday night. Guess if I go, that would make two people from Da Bronx in da house.

Things have been hectic as hell in the office. Lots of out of town visitors the next couple of weeks as we proceed to do yet another round of reviews of the 2008 budget.

So it seemed natural for myself and a co-worker to start the long weekend early and relax in Shenzhen. The events of the day ….

12:30 off the train and through immigration. I had to go to the foreigner line, of course, my friend didn’t, and coming out on the other side, the usual crap of some guy offering to be my guide. No thanks.

Off to the Luo Hu shopping mall for some dim sum. The place we wanted to go to, Laurel, had a 40 minute wait for a table, so we chose another spot on the top floor – not great but as always, the cost of the food there more than makes up for it. We had a Singapore-style fried noodle, a rice noodle roll with char siu, char siu bau, har gau, some veggies, tea and a coke and the bill came out to RMB 140. A sign on the wall advertised an entire crispy fried chicken with vegetables for 45.

Some quick browsing through the mall after lunch. My friend couldn’t resist getting a pirate Tag Heuer watch though he was subsequently quite surprised to find out that it relied on being wound rather than having a battery.

Heading into town, walking past the Shang, fighting through the usual crowd offering cheap hotel rooms, funky massages and worse. Over to the hidden pirate DVD shop. I wasn’t really looking for current movies and I know they always have an astonishingly eclectic selection. Stuff I picked up included Agnes’ Varda’s Cleo From 5 to 7, Herzog’s Aguirre The Wrath of God, Bad Lieutenant, a 3 disc collection of 7 Jean Renoir films and some Ayumi Hamasaki because she’s so easy on the eyes.

We tried a new (to me) sauna called Peninsula, near the Dongmen area. Huge and clean, two hour massage with tips worked out to around 150 RMB each (actually I went for an oil massage and tipped a bit higher, so my bill was probably around 180 – but how could I not give a good tip after both girls lied so well and said I was so handsome?). We finished at 6 and they offered us dinner at the free buffet but we skipped that and took advantage of their free car service back to the train station since we had a dinner reservation there.

The car dropped us off in a section of the station that I’d never been to before. It’s a pick-up drop-off spot for all the saunas in town. They have girls standing there with brochures (only in Chinese of course) and one or two of them even have small store fronts. Some place called Queens Spa seems to be the most deluxe – I was told you pay them a flat rate and that includes massage, dinner and assorted other activities – game room, movie lounge, etc. Anyway, the point is, you get off the train and if you want a sauna, no need to go walking through town, no need to take a taxi anywhere, get free car service to the sauna of your choice.

Back to the top floor of Luo Hu, where this time we only needed to wait 10 minutes for a table at Laurel, the most popular restaurant there. The food is quite nice and the prices are almost silly – an entire Peking duck with all the trimmings for 140 RMB? Well, it didn’t make sense for just two people to order that, but everyone around us seemed to be getting it. I watched the server carve up a duck for the table next to us, one of the waitresses saw me watching and happily exclaimed, “Crispy Peking Duck!” Oh, that skin was just glistening and I might have been drooling a little. And there were stacks of pumpkins everywhere – they were doing special Autumn-themed dishes with pumpkin.

We had a plate of steamed prawns. A huge bowl of spicy bean curd. A third dish reminded me of a cowboy/campfire sort of thing – some kind of beans fried up with very fatty chunks of pork and some other vegetables. Some xiao long bao (not great but cheap!), some rice and bean curd dessert. The bill was way under 200.

So many of the staff at that restaurant could speak at least some English, and walking around the mall after dinner we were taking notice of how many of the people in shops could now really talk and joke with me. Yeah, there were still a few of the “DVD! Watch! Bag! DVD Pussy!”

One thing that I never really took note of until today …. there are certain items that I tend to only shop for in Bangkok, usually at MBK. I saw all of those items at Luo Hu and all at cheaper prices – because most of it comes from China, right?

Tons of knock-off ipods everywhere you look (mostly the 2G nano), bushels of cheap memory sticks, of course every sort of designer jean and top. Actually I probably could have spent a few more hours there, covering each floor in more detail, but I didn’t want to try my friend’s patience too much and my backpack was getting full anyway.

Home by 10 PM. Had every intention of going back out tonight but it’s 1:30 and I haven’t made it out so far and I think I’m gonna call it a night soon.

I ordered the iPod Touch from the HK Apple online store on September 6th.

Today, September 28, is the release day.

And apparently that means today they will ship mine to Hong Kong from their factory in China by truck. I will not receive it until next Wednesday.

5 days ago, the online status of my order was “prepared for shipment.” That means that 5 days ago it was boxed up and sitting on a pallet waiting to go.

Meanwhile, it will probably be in HK stores today.

In return for being one of the first people in HK to order it, I have to wait 5 days longer than anyone else.

I will never order from the HK Apple store again. What’s the fucking point?

I may have mis-read the size of Jacky Cheung’s apartment (previous post).

Fuser – I have 3 gmail accounts, 3 yahoo mail accounts, and assorted others. Here’s a free web app (in beta) that consolidates all your email from multiple accounts (including POP3 as well as web-based) PLUS your messages from MySpace and Facebook. I think I’m gonna love this.

Net Tools – 175 mini apps in a single download. Everything from ping to anonymous emailer to password unmasker to force reboot to cookies analyzer to google page rank analyzer to … well, like I said, there’s 175 things in there.

Amazon’s digital music store is online now. 256k downloads with no drm, variable pricing, only for customers with U.S. credit card/billing address.

Along the streets of Wanchai, you will often find a group of well-dressed Filipino women who are ostensibly raising money for charity. They flash these little envelopes at you for donations. I don’t know if this is real or if it’s a rip-off.

What I do know is it’s one thing for them to go up to you on a street corner but an entirely different matter when I’m sitting in a bar, eating dinner, and they walk up to me and stick one of those envelopes in my face just as I’m raising a forkful of food to my mouth.

This happened last night and, without pause, I shouted “NO!” at the woman. She did pause. She gave me a look that said, “I curse thee!” I could not figure out the details of the curse but it might have something to do with my being denied sex and in that case it certainly was effective last night.

The current events in Myanmar are fascinating to watch. How soldiers can fire into a crowd of their own countrymen, monks and nuns peacefully protesting, is beyond my understanding. And while it seems that China seems to be giving support to the dissidents, Russia has shown its true colors by declaring this an internal matter for Myanmar’s tyrants to deal with.

The Phil Spector trial has ended in a mis-trial. The district attorney says he intends to re-try the case.

Cantopop star Jacky Cheung has been blacklisted from hiring any more Filipino maids after firing 21 of them within 3 years. One of the fired maids reported that they were expected to work from 6 AM to 1 AM 6 days per week and on Sundays were only given 11 AM to 7 PM off. All this for HK$3,200 per month. Multi-millionaire Cheung lives in a 4 story penthouse measuring over 20,000 square feet.

Something from last week that I missed – and I didn’t see references to this in any other English language HK blogs, surely this should have been picked up by Hemlock? It seems that Stanley Ho said, “The state has not yet prepared for universal suffrage [in Hong Kong]; any efforts to set the date at 2012 are useless. Beijing will [give a date] at a suitable time … when most of you are patriotic and love Hong Kong.”

And then he went on to say, “Is democracy good to Taiwan, Malaysia or Indonesia? Universal suffrage may not be a good idea and we should not rush towards that.”

For once, I’m speechless.

One of the Big Lies of modern American politics is that Republicans are fiscally conservative while Democrats are “tax and spend.” In fact, Republicans have always brought us record deficits due to their combination of unrestrained military spending and tax cuts for the wealthy, whereas the Democrats spend money on social services for the poor and middle classes and then attempt to balance the budget. The Republican party once consisted of fiscally responsible leaders like Eisenhower; now they are merely about helping the rich get richer and keeping the poor poor, but manage to attract the votes of the very people they disenfranchise by playing to the religious right. They are very good at this.

The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Economic Crackpots by Jonathan Chait.

Review here:

… what Chait does is to examine the tax cuts on their economic merits. The debate is not new, but Chait’s tale is enlivened by his account of how the G.O.P. evolved from a party of strait-laced budget balancers to extremists who resemble old-time Marxists in their rigid adherence to doctrine … Chait is particularly good in describing how the press, wary of seeming partisan, simply reported the claims on each side rather than analyzing them. The problem with this approach, he argues, is that the relationship of the two political parties is no longer symmetric … Chait overlooks that this reflects a weakness of the left. Four decades after the Great Society, liberals have yet to agree on a coherent new economic policy. Conservatives have — even though, as Chait points out, the lucrative favors they dole out to the business lobby undermine their claim to being pure free-marketers. Their real agenda, he writes, is “expanding the wealth of the very rich.” But this is too simplistic; the conservatives I know seem to genuinely believe that tax cuts are good policy … the rightward revision hardened into dogma and itself badly overreached.

First chapter here:

I have this problem. Whenever I try to explain what’s happening in American politics-I mean, what’s really happening-I wind up sounding a bit like an unhinged conspiracy theorist. But honestly, I’m not. My politics are actually quite moderate. (Most real lefties, in fact, think I’m a Washington establishment sellout.) So please give let me a chance to explain myself when I tell you the following: American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right-wing economic extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a few of them possibly insane. (Stay with me.)

The scope of their triumph is breathtaking. Over the course of the last three decades, they have moved from the right-wing fringe to the commanding heights of the national agenda. Notions that would have been laughed at a generation ago-that cutting taxes for the very rich is the best response to any and every economic circumstance, or that it is perfectly appropriate to turn the most rapacious and self-interested elements of the business lobby into essentially an arm of the federal government-are now so pervasive, they barely attract any notice.

The result has been a slow-motion disaster. Income inequality has approached levels normally associated with Third World oligarchies, not healthy Western democracies. The federal government has grown so encrusted with business lobbyists that it can no longer meet the great public challenges of our time. Not even many conservative voters or intellectuals find the result congenial. Government is no smaller-it is simply more debt-ridden and more beholden to wealthy elites.

…..

Things have gone about as badly as they could have in George W. Bush’s second term. A Republican administration started and lost a major war in Iraq; presided over an economy that has failed to deliver higher wages for most Americans; contributed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the near-wipeout of a major American city; launched a failed assault on Social Security, the most popular social program in the history of the United States; and saw its members suffer an almost unprecedented string of sexual and financial scandals. Still, Democrats find themselves holding only the slimmest of majorities in the House and Senate. Even if they hold their majorities in Congress and win the White House in 2008, the structural forces in Washington will make it nearly impossible to roll back any significant chunks of the Bush tax cuts, let alone take on crises like global warming or the forty-five million Americans lacking health insurance.

Marcel Marceau is dead.

I had the great privilege of seeing him perform in London in 1972 at a theatre in the West End. (Yeah, I’m really old and I’m probably going to die soon, too. Bite me.)

While I can’t recall the specifics of the performance, what I do remember is that we were sitting in the very last row of the very top section, I think the ticket price was 35p and he was so good that I forgot I was 5 miles from the stage.

And of course, one of his best moments on film came in Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie – his one word was the only spoken dialog in the film, a wonderful joke.

There’s a million mimes out there, most of them giving mime a bad name, hence the title of this post, which hopefully you recognized as a quote from Spinal Tap. I don’t know if there is anyone out there today who approaches this level of artistry.