Monthly Archives: April 2010

All Kinds of Stuff

It’s taking me days to catch up with the backlog in my RSS and I’ve skipped over tons of stuff in Twitter. Clearly once I start working again I’m going to have to figure out a better way to manage the tidal waves of information coming in my direction. Anyway, some stuff that’s caught my eye.

Neil Innes is touring the US. An interview and a career retrospective as Innes talks about the Bonzo’s relationship with the Beatles, his work with Monty Python, the Rutles and more.

M.I.A.’s new video was yanked from Youtube (by Youtube, apparently) but you can see it here.

From the SCMP a couple of days ago, some guy goes to Thailand from HK. He gets an offer from 3 for unlimited data roaming on his iPhone for “only” HK$138 per day. He accepts that offer. He comes home 3 days later and gets a HK$29,000 bill for data roaming. For 3 days. Seems 3 neglected to tell him it was only $138 if he stuck with a specific carrier and of course every time he stepped out of an elevator his phone switched carriers.

PhotoPad – a photo editing app for the iPad that allows you to adjust color, tint, contrast, saturation, chromaticity, plus crop, filter, lots more. All with one finger. I knew stuff like this would be coming and expect to be seeing a whole lot more. Almost forgot to mention, this is a free app. I’ve got the iPad camera connection kit now and looking forward to using this app. I also have the official Apple iPad case and it’s kind of nice and kind of sucks at the same time.

Via CNNGo, S. Pellegrino’s annual list of the world’s 100 best restaurants. Top restaurant in Asia is in Japan of course. HK has 5 restaurants on the list, but the highest placed is Robuchon at 53. El Bulli drops to #2, some place in Denmark is now #1. Denmark?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation publishes a brief timeline of Facebook’s rapidly eroding privacy policy. This is scary stuff.

If you’re a Nikon DSLR user (like me), Thom Hogan’s seriously definitive guide to when you should use VR – and, more importantly, when you shouldn’t.

Jon Stewart takes on Apple and the whole Gizmodo 4G iphone thing. ”You guys are busting down doors in Palo Alto while Commandant Gates is ridding the world of mosquitoes. What the fuck is going on?”

As you may have seen elsewhere, HP has just purchased Palm for US$1.2 billion. I think if they waited another six months they could have picked it up for $20 at a garage sale. How many years ago was it that the Treo was the cutting edge of smartphones? I can’t remember, but I had one and loved it. And then followed a series of egregious failures as they squandered all sorts of opportunities to build on its success. Books will be written how the world was knocking on Palm’s door but they were passed out on the sofa in front of the TV and couldn’t be arsed to open the door and let the world in.

Avatar is now the best selling Blu-Ray disc ever in the U.S. This despite the fact that the disc contains no extras, not even a trailer and it’s been widely publicized that a four disc deluxe edition will be out in November. And also despite the fact that the heavy DRM on the disc is rendering it unplayable on many Blu-Ray players (hello Samsung!).

Grateful for small things

Today is a day that I’m grateful that there’s a 7-11 on almost every street, that they sell umbrellas really cheap and that (I think) they don’t jack up the price on them when it rains.

I suppose that the total lack of comments on the previous two posts (despite a relatively normal number of page loads) is your way of letting me know what you think of the new “user must be registered and logged in to comment” policy. So okay, back to “anyone can comment.” But a warning that some bogus comments may slip through and please be careful about clicking on links in comments.

I’m home from Manila, btw. Lots to do before I start the new job on Monday …

Pump It Up

So one reason I’m in Manila is to return to the Asian Hospital and finish up stuff I didn’t have a chance to complete two months ago, including the virtual colonoscopy. I’ve never had one of these, virtual or otherwise, but they tell me I’m of sufficiently advanced years that I need to get it done.

So a couple of days of fasting and purging later, weight down to just 160 according to the hotel scale, there I was this morning. For those of you who don’t know how this is done, here are the deets. First they shove a catheter up your butt. Then they inflate a small balloon at the end of it to ‘anchor’ it inside. And then they pump 2 liters of air “up there.”

To say that this is extremely unpleasant is an understatement. Imagine the worst stomach ache you’ve ever had and multiply that by 7.42. Then you lie on your back and get slid into the CT scan machine for five minutes. And then repeat everything, this time lying on your belly. “Did it hurt a lot?” the doctor would later ask. “No, my second divorce was much more painful.”. But it does hurt quite a bit and if you screw up somehow (like fart) or they screw up somehow, they gotta do it all over again. Fortunately, everything went well and it was finished on the first attempt.

The rest of my time at the hospital, I asked everyone I met, nurses, doctors, orderlies, if they could show me that special room in the basement where they store the brains. “You know, come on! I read on the Internet you got a room, shelves floor to ceiling, glass jars with brains for scientific experiments?” They all pretended not to know about this. I wonder if any of them will ask about it at their next status meeting?

With a couple of hours to kill to wait for the results of this (plus some other tests), after I’d finished getting that 2 liters of air out of my body (guess how?), we went to a nearby mall and camped out in a wifi-less Starbucks. I think the homogeneity of Starbucks is starting to bug me. They’re almost all exactly the same, down to the last focus-grouped test-marketed detail. We’re in Alabang and it’s exactly the same as if we were in Taikoo Shing or Burbank. Then again, buy two small drinks, settle into those comfy chairs, recover for a couple of hours, it didn’t suck either.

Anyway, test results came back negative and the doctor said I could go a few years before enduring that again. A 20 minute taxi ride to the hospital at 7 AM but a 75 minute ride back to the hotel at 1 PM and finally my first full meal in almost two days.

Tonight was a low impact night at popular hang-out Cafe Havana at Greenbelt 3. We weren’t very hungry but I noticed they had “Cuban pizzas” on the menu – Cuban in name only, of course, but not horrible and something light to munch on while we sat outside under the full moon, letting the night go by.

Time for a bit of shopping tomorrow before flying home tomorrow night.

In Manila on an iPad

So here I am in the hotel, possibly my first trip in 15 years without bringing a laptop and everything seems to be working okay. I knew in advance that this hotel doesn’t have in-room wifi so I brought along an old Asus pocket wifi router that I had sitting in a drawer. Getting the connection going didn’t work and I needed to call support – which in this case meant Docomo, they manage the hotel’s Internet services. Gotta say, the guy wasn’t at all fazed when I told him my hardware setup, took about 5 minutes and then he did the Internet sale/authorization for me and since then it’s been smooth. Email, web, Facebook, etc. all good. Only thing I couldn’t do for some reason was download a free app from the iTunes app store. Most importantly, I was able to get mail from my future employer, open and view the attachments. Of course i don’t need to edit them at this point; haven’t purchased the ipad ersatz-Office apps so can’t tell you if they would do the trick or not. Now I’m posting via the iPad WordPress app while I’ve got some music playing. So in summary, my backpack was much lighter and everything is pretty much working okay!

Comment Registration

Okay, I didn’t want to go this route if it could be avoided but at least for the time being, anyone who wants to leave a comment will need to register and login.

The reason is simple: the spammers are getting more clever. Some days I get zero spam comments, some days I get more than a hundred. Up till now, it’s been easy to figure out what’s spam because those comments generally fall into one or more of several categories: links to crap that are probably masking viruses, Russian (and other non-western) alphabet, things that have nothing to do with the post that the comment appears under, blatant advertising.

But now I’m getting multiple comments that look reasonable. They have a reasonable looking email address, reasonable looking web site URL and are relevant responses to posts. But many of them are cut-and-paste jobs from previously approved comments.But click on those URLs and they lead to weird pages, like a blog but with no content. I don’t know if these sites have viruses or not (I think I’m safe because I’m running Chrome and anti-virus software) but I can’t figure out any other purpose for them.

The end result though is that I can’t tell a valid comment from a spam one unless it’s coming from a source I recognize. So I’m going to do this for now and see what happens.

If you feel strongly against this and don’t want to register to leave a comment here, I hope you’ll take the time to send me an email at hongkietown at gmail dot com and tell me why.

Photos From Last Night

Not that many. I’m generally not the kind of photographer who will push people aside or stand in front of someone else in order to get a shot, so it wasn’t easy finding good spots and angles. But I think I got a few good shots of 3 of the bands.

First up is A Roller Control, live at Time Out’s Big Night Out at Grappa’s Cellar in Hong Kong, April 24 2010. Very 80s sounding dance pop. Unfortunately, the only times the lead singer (2nd from right) did anything visually interesting, he wasn’t under any of the spotlights. But take a look at how serious these guys are. I think the guy 2nd from left is trying to be Brian Eno. (They were one of the acts that opened for Peaches a week ago in Macau.)

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Here’s DP, also at Big Night Out. Okay, you’re looking at the bass player and the drummer and asking where’s the rest of the band? Nope, that’s the whole band, two guys, bass guitar and drums. White Stripes taken to an even further extreme? Actually they were far better than I expected.

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Finally, Killer Soap at Rockschool. I like these guys a lot. As previously mentioned, I voted for them at the 2008 GBOB and was happy that they won. Lead singer Rocky has a terrific voice and he’s very charismatic on stage – arena moves in a small club.

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Pythonesque

A couple of days ago I finally caught up with The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. I suppose most people checked it out since it ended up being Heath Ledger’s final film; I viewed it because I’m a Terry Gilliam fan. The fact that Gilliam co-wrote this with Charles McKeown, his collaborator on Brazil and Munchausen had me feeling optimistic.

Visually, the film is Gilliam’s best looking work to date. Throughout his career, one of his specialties has been getting things to look like a million bucks on a ten cent budget. Here, with a full palette of CGI effects, the results are gorgeous. If only Gilliam could tell a story, then this might have been something a whole lot better than it turned out to be.

Basically, you’ve got Christopher Plummer, very Munchausen-like as the immortal Dr. Parnassus, proprietor of a rickety traveling show who can’t stop making (and losing) bets with the devil, played by Tom Waits. There’s Lily Cole as his beautiful daughter, the subject of one of the wagers. And his assistants, Mini-Me Verne Troyer and Andrew Garfield (from the Red Riding trilogy). Heath Ledger shows up hanging from a bridge, a mystery man with amnesia.

That’s one of the problems of the story for me. I think it might have played better had we known more upfront about Ledger and less about Parnassus. As it is, the big “reveals” about Ledger’s past carry little weight. As you may or may not know, Ledger died before the film was completed. He’d done all of the major sequences but is replaced in the fantasy sequences by Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell. The way this film plays out, it means that the weight of the climax is on Farrell’s shoulders instead of Ledger’s.

It’s a partial return to form for Gilliam after a series of disasters. I might watch it a second time and see how it plays now that I know where it’s going.

I noted a trailer on the Blu-Ray disc for something called Not the Messiah: He’s a Very Naughty Boy. ”From the creators of Spamalot.” Post-Python, Eric Idle’s recent career mainly consists of keeping the Python flame alive. Or, if you prefer, plundering the old stuff because most of his non-Python stuff didn’t set the world on fire. (Which is a shame really, when one considers how wonderful The Rutles was.) Spamalot was successful as a Broadway show. This is obviously an adaptation of Life of Brian and seems to take the form of an oratorio, performed live at the Royal Albert Hall with full orchestra and chorus, soloists and guests. Other Python members – including Gilliam but not Cleese – apparently show up as well. The US release date for the DVD and Blu-Ray is June 8th. I’m sure I’ll watch it but I’ll be approaching it with very low expectations.

Quick Break

Off to Manila on Monday, back on Wednesday – no, not a celebration of the new job as some might think, just need to get a few things taken care of before I start work the following week.

This will also be a test of sorts as I’ll be bringing along my iPad and leaving my laptop at home. The hotel we’re staying in has broadband but no WiFi; fortunately I’ve got a pocket-sized router sitting in a drawer here and it’s working fine with the iPad at home and hopefully it will work just as well from the hotel.

Last night we went back to Guru for dinner, I wanted my gf to try it out. I booked one of the outside tables and it was very relaxing – and if anything I enjoyed the food more on the 2nd visit than the first. Still went with the blue mango chat salad and tried their very nice grilled tandoori salmon – light and moist, they told me they spice it, sear it on the grill and then put it in the tandoori for just a minute. Even better, a prawn curry (think it was bhuna) was a seriously good curry, packed with the complex combination of flavors that I love in Indian food. This could be a new favorite.

My next stop was Time Out’s Big Night Out at Grappa’s Cellar and they had a really good turnout there. I stayed for about two hours, long enough to check out 3 bands who were, um, interesting. Would have liked to stay longer for Chuchukmo and Poubelle Int’l but wanted to show my face at Rockschool for Underground’s release party for their third CD. My timing was great because I got to see Killer Soap. I first encountered them when I was a judge at the Global Battle of the Bands in 2008 and thought they definitely deserved the first place spot that they got. The lead singer’s got a great voice, the band is tight and some of the material is strong (and some isn’t). It was great to have two events like this although a shame that they were both on the same night! Possibly some photos later.

False Prophets

From Boing Boing.

I lived in NYC for almost 40 years and rode the subway almost every day … wish they’d had this sign back then.

Is the Song Singing You?

When it comes to American music journalism, Greil Marcus has very few peers. I’ve been a huge fan of his writing for decades and books like Mystery Train were highly influential on my own subsequent interpretations of music. He’s got a new book out on Van Morrison, When That Rough God Goes Riding, and is himself interviewed on Pop Matters. There are so many wonderful ideas and quotes here, it’s tempting to just clip the entire thing but of course I won’t. Here are some excerpts that stood out more than others (but I suggest you read the entire piece).

And he says something that really dovetails with the way I’ve heard music for many, many years when he says, “The question is, is the song singing you?” When that happens—when the song is singing the performer—that’s when the most extraordinary discoveries and a sense of revelation can be passed on to the listener. That’s what I was looking for.

People who listen to Bob Dylan’s songs and want to know if this song is about Joan Baez and exactly what incident in his relationship with her is it about—this is just a way of keeping the song away from your own life.

I don’t know if this is a particularly recent phenomenon or if it’s much older, but over the last twenty years I’ve noticed more critics and commentators of all sorts saying, essentially, “You can’t fool me. I won’t be fooled. I know what this is about. I see the man behind the curtain.” A willingness to be fooled, to be taken into someone else’s imaginary world, to believe in something that didn’t happen when you’re reading a book or listening to a song—that’s how you connect with art, by being willing to be fooled. It’s that old phrase about the suspension of disbelief; that’s what the arts are supposed to enact. And it just shocks me to see so many people saying, “I won’t suspend my disbelief. You can’t make me.” That’s not a good approach.

When you have nothing to sing about, but you have a career, you have bills to pay, you need to maintain your own self as someone who matters to other people, you’re going to keep doing it. If you’re lucky, you’re going to break through. You could easily say Dylan and Van Morrison were trying to lose themselves, and really succeeded.

And over the years, I’ve not just become dubious about the notion of authenticity, I’ve become really angry about it. It’s caused tremendous destruction with people believing that once they were authentic and now they’re not, that there’s some grail you find that’s going to bring back your true spirit, that it’s something objective you can hold in your hand, or that some people are born authentic because of their racial or cultural or class background, and that some people are born to be inauthentic because they’re just walking commodities.

And so sometimes writing out of a sense of confusion, with humility, is a way of raising the stakes. Saying “I don’t know.” That’s something very few writers in any field are willing to admit. But it’s important.

Usually when someone announces the death of the novel, it’s because they’re incapable of writing one and they feel inferior because of that.

In my case, I’m not 10% of Marcus or Lester Bangs or R. Meltzer or those other critics I admire. I let them inspire me and instruct me but I don’t try to do what they do. I simply try to convey my enthusiasms and place things within a historical context and try to get the word out about people you may have missed, forgotten or never knew about in the first place.