Neil Young’s been working on and talking about his “Archives” series for longer than Axl Rose worked on Chinese Democracy. Now “Archives Volume 1: 1963-1972″ is finally coming out on January 27, 2009.

Young has never been a fan of CDs (let alone MP3s) so he’s decided to release this set on DVD and Blu-Ray. Each is a 10 disc set.

List price for the 10 disc DVD set is US$345.

List price for the 10 disc Blu-Ray set is US$432. $43.20 per disc.

I find myself wondering what color is the sky on Neil’s planet?

There are at least 3 people from my company staying at the Taj Hotel in Mumbai right now. Two of them were in the lift standing next to the Japanese businessman when he got shot. I cannot even begin to imagine how I would react if I was to find myself in that kind of situation.

Not entirely true. Someone did pull a gun on me once. And it wasn’t someone I knew. And he wasn’t joking. But I gambled that he wasn’t going to use it. And he didn’t.

Still … imagine, standing there, nowhere to turn, nowhere to run, the guy next to you gets shot, I’m relatively certain I’d need new pants after that.

Fake New York Times here. Looks just like the real one but the date is July 4, 2009. And the headlines include:

• Iraq War Ends
• Ex-Secretary Apologizes for WMD Scare
• Court Indicts Bush on High Treason Charge
• Nation Sets Its Sights on Building a Sane Economy

and an op-ed piece from “Thomas Friedman” that begins

The sudden outbreak of peace in Iraq has made me realize, among other things, one incontestable fact: I have no business holding a pen, at least with intent to write.

=========================

Two new restaurants opening up near my office. They are both very depressing.

The first is Epoch, which bills itself as a “coffee bar and desserterie.” Though they have sandwiches and salads on the menu.

The second is a Japanese place that has decided to call itself Miso Cool. Mentioned this to a friend of mine and he said that made him think about Jar Jar Binks. Not something you want to think about if you plan to keep your food down.

Via Idolator, the Brit music magazines are now posting their best of ‘08 lists. It’s only November, I haven’t given it much thought myself!

Mojo
1. Fleet Foxes [Wasn't excited after 1 listen]
2. The Last Shadow Puppets, The Age Of The Understatement [not bad but hardly original]
3. Paul Weller, 22 Dreams [seemed all over the map after 1 listen]
4. Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago
5. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!! [liked it]
6. The Hold Steady, Stay Positive [I still don't get them]
7. Glasvegas
8. The Week That Was, The Week That Was
9. The Bug, London Zoo
10. Neil Diamond, Home Before Dark
11. Portishead, Third [loved it]
12. Don Cavalli, Cryland
13. Drive-By Truckers, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark [weaker than the last one]
14. British Sea Power, Do You Like Rock Music?
15. Eli “Paperboy” Reed & The True Loves, Roll With You [promising but needs better songs]
16. Erykah Badu, New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)
17. Sigur Rós, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust [weaker than earlier stuff]
18. Pete Molinari, A Virtual Landslide
19. Beck, Modern Guilt
20. TV on the Radio, Dear Science
21. Amadou & Mariam, Welcome to Mali
22. Mercury Rev, Snowflake Midnight
23. Elbow, The Seldom Seen Kid
24. Fucked Up, The Chemistry of Common Life
25. Randy Newman, Harps and Angels [loved it]
26. Peter Broderick, Home
27. M83, Saturdays=Youth
28. Neon Neon, Stainless Style
29. Yeasayer, All Hour Cymbals
30. The Night Marchers, See You in Magic
31. Duffy, Rockferry [liked it a lot]
32. Seasick Steve, I Started Out With Nothin’ and I Still Got Most of It Left [really good]
33. Kasai Allstars, In the 7th Moon, the Chief Turned Into a Swimming Fish and Ate the Head of His Enemy by Magic
34. Fuck Buttons, Street Horrrsing
35. Our Broken Garden, When Your Blackening Shows
36. MGMT, Oracular Spectacular
37. Gavin Bryars & Philip Jeck & Alter Ego, The Sinking of the Titanic
38. Goldfrapp, Seventh Tree
39. Abe Vigoda, Skeleton
40. The Black Keys, Attack & Release
41. The Fall, Imperial Wax Solvent
42. Juana Molina, Un Día
43. Aimee Mann, @#%&*! Smilers
44. Goldmund, The Malady Of Elegance
45. Metallica, Death Magnetic
46. James Hunter, The Hard Way [recommended]
47. Flying Lotus, Los Angeles
48. AC/DC, Black Ice [not bad]
49. The Neil Cowley Trio, Loud… Louder… Stop
50. Oasis, Dig Out Your Soul [about half is yawn-inducing]

Q
1. Kings of Leon, Only the Night
2. Fleet Foxes
3. Coldplay, Viva La Vida… [snore]
4. Vampire Weekend [oh please, really?]
5. Glasvegas
6. Duffy, Rockferry
7. TV On The Radio, Dear Science
8. Elbow, The Seldom Seen Kid
9. The Raconteurs, Consolers of The Lonely [yes]
10. Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!!
11. Sigur Ros, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust
12. Keane, Perfect Symmetry [huh?]
13. MGMT, Oracular Spectacular
14. Kaiser Chiefs, Off With Their Heads
15. Lil Wayne, Tha Carter III
16. Hot Chip, Made In The Dark
17. Adele, 19 [not bad]
18. British Sea Power, Do You Like Rock Music?
19. Goldfrapp, Seventh Tree
20. The Gaslight Anthem, The ‘59 Sound
21. Razorlight, Slipaway Fires
22. The Killers, Day and Age
23. Beck, Modern Guilt
24. The Last Shadow Puppets, The Age of The Understatement
25. Metallica, Death Magnetic
26. Conor Oberst
27. Neil Diamond, Before Home
28. Paul Weller, 22 Dreams
29. AC/DC, Black Ice
30. Portishead, Third
31. Black Mountain, In The Future
32. Oasis, Dig Out Your Soul
33. Hercules & Love Affair [one play was enough]
34. Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago
35. The Hold Steady, Stay Positive
36. R.E.M., Accelerate [???]
37. Lykke Li, Youth Novels
38. John Mellencamp, Life Death Love And Freedom [really?]
39. Santogold
40. My Morning Jacket, Evil Urges
41. Lindsey Buckingham, Gift of Screws [should be higher on the list]
42. Liam Finn, I’ll Be Lightning
43. Joan As Police Woman, To Survive
44. Black Kids, Partie Traumatic
45. Jack Johnson, Sleep Through Static
46. Jenny Lewis, Acid Tongue [should also be higher on the list]
47. The Verve, Forth [one third of a good album]
48. Randy Newman, Harps and Angels
49. Emmylou Harris, All I Intended To Be [yes]
50. Dido, Safe Trip Home

Guess I’m skewing old these days.

This Friday is Underground’s last event at Club Cixi. For some reason, Cixi won’t be hosting future Underground shows. There will be one or more bar managers attending this event to determine if their bars should host future gigs, so a big turnout on Friday night will help. Starts at 9 PM, $100 ($80 for students – do I have any student readers?) gets you six bands spanning a variety of genres, you can’t beat that with a stick!

Fenwick’s will not be closing or moving after all. They’ve managed to negotiate a deal with the new landlord, who probably took a look at the current economy and realized that the space could end up being vacant for a long time (just like the renovated floors above, which have been empty for years).

Bought a barbecue grill last week. As luck would have it, one week after buying it, not one but two ads go up on Asiaxpat for used grills. Fortunately I didn’t feel the need to splurge on something super expensive. This Saturday will be cooking for about 15-20 people. Hopefully all will survive to tell the tale.

Can anyone tell me what the English portion of this ad in the MTR is supposed to mean?

Sunday night, dinner at one of those places that never seems to get reviewed in any English language HK guide (at least none that I know of). Actually there are tons of restaurants along Jaffe Road on the Wanchai/Causeway Bay border that are well known yet seem to escape most of the English language guidebooks and magazines. Most of them are places doing crab.

On Jaffe Road between Marsh and Canal, Hee Kee has been in business since 1965, but not always at this location.

This is two doors down from Hee Kee.

Both places have windows filled with photos of the local celebs who’ve eaten there.

This place is across the street from Hee Kee:

Of course, along Canal Road and Lockhart Road are four places all called Under Bridge Spicy Crab (but, I am told, different owners and different names in Chinese), all specializing in Typhoon Shelter chili crab. One has Anthony Bourdain’s photo in the window – probably the reason I always choose that one. (No photo of that today, sorry.)

Anyway, last night we joined a couple of friends and ate at Mr. Fish, 392-402 Jaffe Road.

This place stays open till 3 AM! Its specialty is hotpot, though they also offer some barbecue and some sashimi. Inside, the place is a little fancier than most. Check out the glass table, glass pot for the soup, glass plates. The walls are lined with fish tanks and the sashimi is on display in a glass counter towards the back.

It’s a small place, holding perhaps 40 or 50 people tops, and at 9 PM on a Sunday night, it was full. I can only guess at how busy they are on other nights but booking is essential here if you plan to go during normal dinner hours.

We had so much food …. lobster, prawns (raw and cooked), fish, squid, crab, clams, beef (raw and cooked), fish balls, dumplings, veggies, eel, assorted sashimi, lots of beer and coke, I can’t even remember what else. Everything tasted very fresh. We asked for “ma la” sichuan style soup for the hotpot, asked them to tone it down just a bit, so it was on the borderline of spicy for me. They also provide crushed red pepper flakes, garlic and ginger to mix in with your soy sauce. We stuffed ourselves silly and the bill for four people came out to $845.

Mr. Fish has an English menu and English-speaking staff and I will return.

Last month in NYC, ordered a bunch of stuff from Amazon. Including this Nikon lens cleaning thing in the shape of a pen, it was about 8 bucks and kinda neat.

Today got an email from Amazon recommending accessories that would go with my accessory.

A shower enclosure? For washing my digital camera, presumably. And a twin burner propane tank for setting the whole damned thing on fire if I’m not happy with my pictures I guess.

Warning – some movie spoilers ahead.

We went to see Burn After Reading last night. I was really tired and ended up sleeping through some of the movie – not so much because I was bored, I simply sank into the big comfortable chair at the AMC Pacific Place and couldn’t help myself. I know from reading some of the reviews after watching the film that I completely missed some key scenes. I’m glad the DVD comes out in a couple of weeks so I can watch it again and see the bits I missed.

Now, the Coen Brothers are movie making gods for me, and not merely because one of them went to the same school I did at roughly the same time and it’s even possible that I knew him. Hard to tell because my freshman Intro to Filmmaking teacher encouraged us to do lots of mescaline, saying it was “essential to understanding the film experience.” So I don’t recall a lot from those two years.

Regardless, the Coens have made some films that I’ve not only enjoyed watching, I’ve enjoyed watching them over and over again, each time discovering new details, uncovering new layers, seeing something different each time. Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou?, The Man Who Wasn’t There, No Country for Old Men. I’ve enjoyed those films so much that I forgive them for The Hudsucker Proxy, Intolerable Cruelty and that undefendable remake of The Ladykillers.

But …. remember the end of No Country? Lots of people hated that ending – Tommy Lee Jones just sitting at a table talking, the bad guy not caught (I never read the Cormac McCarthy book so no idea how that compares).

And the end of Burn falls off the face of the earth in a completely different way. It goes along for 90 minutes or so at a very Lebowski-like pace. And then it’s two people sitting in a room going, oh, here’s what happened to this guy, here’s what happened to that guy, here’s what we should have spent another 20 minutes putting on screen but I’m just gonna talk you through it.

The final scene only works because the dialogue is between two masterful character actors – J.K. Simmons (the dad in Juno) and David Rasche (whom I mostly remember for playing the lead role in occasionally wacky TV series Sledge Hammer 20 years ago). As one reviewer put it, Simmons doesn’t have many lines but each line is a punch line – this is a guy who could read the South China Morning Post and make it funny. (Oops, perhaps it already is.)

But this is not how you end a movie. You don’t just come to a dead stop and have someone say, “oh, that character you’ve been watching and enjoying for the past hour was killed offscreen.” Granted the Coens have generally been willfully, almost gleefully bizarre, but still, come on!

Well, the Coens have four films in the works, including an adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

And I’ll get the DVD of Burn After Reading and decide if it’s a Lebowski Achiever or an act of Intolerable Cruelty.

==============================

Ever since I went to the Billy Joel concert and saw the guy in front of me with a video camera, I’ve been vaguely obsessed with the notion of getting a pocket sized video camera. I didn’t need the best, just good enough for me. Figured it would be good for music, the dogs, even sitting outside a bar in Wanchai and watching the nightlife go by. Right or wrong, I didn’t believe that getting a “regular” digital camera with video capabilities would yield the results I wanted.

After reading a bunch of reviews, settled on the Sanyo HD1010. Sony has a similar sized one that features possibly better image stabilization and other features, but it only records to memory sticks (costs much more than SD cards) and I’d come across some very negative comments about video artifacts.

I knew the Sanyo listed for $6980 and that Broadway was selling it for $5980. At the Wanchai Computer Centre, the grey market version is selling for $3680. At that price, couldn’t resist.

Naturally, going out last night, the video camera was in my pocket. And it belatedly occured to me that I was going to a movie theatre with a video camera in my pocket. I was even mildly tempted to take it out and shoot a few seconds off the screen just to see how it would come out. But I managed to resist that notion ….

Anyway, the images look really nice on the camera’s 2.7 inch screen, haven’t tried hooking it to a big screen yet to see how it really looks.

But it’s the right size and relatively intuitive to use. So far I’m happy.

Hot pot dinner with friends tonight. Time to make a movie.

I read reviews

My attempt to upgrade my iPhone to the latest software version 2.2 failed, leaving the phone a brick. Attempts to restore it met with “unknown error.” In my experience, Apple is unique in issuing software updates that render the updated device unusable. Several reboots of the PC, removing and reinserting the SIM card, various unspeakable acts of black magic later, the phone is in the process of restoring and recovering from the most recent back-up. Sigh.

Oh, if anyone was planning on buying me those 5 double disc New Order reissues for Christmas, please don’t.

But alert fans quickly complained of about 300 errors, mostly relating to poor sound quality on the bonus discs. The pops and crackles on many of the tracks suggest they were transferred directly from commercially available vinyl recordings rather than from the original master tapes.

The discs were released in Britain last month, and music magazines there, such as Q and Mojo, did not mention any of the technical shortcomings in their rave reviews.

But Peter Hook, the bass player with the defunct group, said on his MySpace page that the reissue project was a “mess.” He blamed the label for not sending out advance copies so that he and his former bandmates could do some quality control.

Despite the discontent, Rhino released the discs in the United States last Tuesday, and U.S. fans noticed the same problems. Rhino, an affiliate of Warner Bros. Records, plans to reissue the reissues, and will allow fans to exchange their dud CDs.

Yes, that’s right, they need to reissue the reissues.

Last night after the concert, more tired than hungry, so plans to grab some food on the way home were forgotten and once home right to bed. No dinner, no food since lunchtime – which I suppose is something my waistline needs.

This morning, watched the latest episode of Top Chef. Coliccihio basically says that all of the food was disappointing, so I could watch in comfort.

And then I read this. And looked at the pictures there.

Holy crap I’m hungry now. The only solace is I doubt that there is anywhere in HK that serves satay even close to this. Finally a reason to go back to Jakarta?