Back Crackin’ Treats

I like my privacy in the bathroom. I hate the trough in the men’s room. The washrooms at People restaurant in Taipei – home to the best Tiramisu ever – were wall to ceiling mirrors, and there is something disturbing about seeing yourself in five hundred places. In fact, just writing this seems odd, but the story is even stranger.

On Saturday night, in the bathrooms at a club here called Hei Hei, down along the Pearl River where these things are grouped, I had a bit of a shock.

As I stood at the urinal in the rather nice bathroom of the club, one of the attendants came up behind me. I could see a bit of reflection in the glossy black tiles, but there’s also that sense. Perhaps it’s some lizard brained remnant, a special awareness when you are at your most vulnerable, which standing at a urinal most certainly is (though Viggo Mortensen might argue a bit – and why the hell wasn’t he nominated, and why is Cronenberg always, always overlooked by the Academy? As if Eastern Promises wasn’t as masterfully directed as his other movies.).

So the hackles went up.

And the attendant began to massage my shoulders and neck. It was weird and pleasant. But mostly weird.

Then he whipped my neck to the left. I swear I could hear the echo of my snapping vertebrae off the tiles.

He motioned sort of, or said something which I could understand given the context. I relaxed and he snapped my head to the right, provoking another echo.

I was still streaming at this point and it’s a wonder I didn’t end up soiling my shoes. That’s multi-tasking for you.

I stepped away from the urinal at last and he motioned again. I turned. He hugged me.
Now, I had never had my spine cracked but I had seen it done and knew what was coming.
He tugged up and it was like a bone xylophone in my body. I think every little knuckle along my back rotated and slipped into place like lock tumblers in a safe, but man, it felt good.

Hot towels followed and a tip. It’s probably a pretty good living for these guys since he ended up getting what was the price of a taxi home, and he didn’t have any of the expenses.

It was the best part of the club, for sure.

Magic in a dark room

I went to the retrospective exhibition of American photographer Jerry Uelsmann at the Guangdong Museum of Art, which is a small but potent place. I had read of and seen photos in books of his work a long time ago, perhaps when studying printing techniques and such. Just as with paintings though, the real piece carries so much more and is usually, but not always, so much more powerful than you would have imagined, as well as so unexpectedly different (I had no idea before seeing them that some Steiglitz photos were so small).

I was overwhelmed by the exhibition – by it’s size, scope, and the images themselves. His technique is stunning and seamless, the print quality beautiful. You must remind yourself of the number of pieces that went in to composing some of the photos. In this day and age of digital gimcrackery, Uelsmann’s control is still unbelievable, but more than that is his uncanny ability to compose the image more like a painter than as a photographer.

What I mean is that I think I can interpret what’s in front of me at that moment and convert it to an image. I can see patterns and structure and how the light will work in the image, whether I am trying to overexpose the image to wisps and tendrils of shadows or taking shots at night looking to do the opposite.

Uelsmann is able to see a totally different thing, built up out of component pieces. He can then flawlessly assemble it, matching exposures and tones and textures. The tone of his work is so unbelievably even. There are few signs of the abundant manipulation that I could see and one image in particular, a sheer rock fact with a standard folded over female nude didn’t catch me until I noticed that on the right side, opposite the nude, was a face, molded into the stone with such precision that I could not possibly separate them in my mind, was simply fantastic.

I don’t think you could do his work digitally: the dream quality of his work, particularly his earlier work which I found stronger, depends on films tonal range and the peculiar and magical interactions of light,material, and chemicals.

The previous night I had been at a exhibition opening at the nice independent gallery, Art 64, on Shamian Dao. It was by an American artist who bases his painting on photographs and who considers himself more a photographer. He had some beautiful digital prints of flower photos (and now I know of a good digital printer in town) and he told me that in China photography isn’t considered a real, valid art because it can be copied so easily (which is a laugh considering the village of Da Fen in Shenzhen which specializes in copies and which is also very strange because good copying is considered a valid art form). This is certainly something you run into, but which is not nearly so annoying as those idiots who think they could make Andy Warhol prints or paint Barnett Newman things like Voice of Fire.

One walk through Uelsmann’s work would shatter those notions.

Lexicon of Love

One of the greatest strengths of English is the one of its greatest problems for those learning it : it’s pillaging of every other language for words. Students would ask me, “How do you say ‘dim sum’ in English” and I would answer, “Dim Sum.” Maybe it’s the only language with the ability to be “-ished”, as in Singlish, Chinglish, though with the growth of borrowings, it may end up being sounding like an “ish” when it isn’t.

That written, four three (I need to learn to count) of my favourite words, which somehow found themselves onto the tip of my brain this morning, perhaps vibrating out from the white noise thrumming in my skull, are foreign:

rambutan

pamplemousse*

baba ganoush*
I am not sure if it’s because they are all food, but they all have that same ooooo that winds up ‘hullabaloo’ and brings a smile to my face without fail.

*Okay, I guess pamplemousse isn’t really an English word, but it should be.

**Yeah, and this is technically two words, but we pronounce it as one. Or I do.

Sex Scandal Sillies

As many of you are no doubt aware, not all that good looking or interesting, and very bad at writing in pseudo street lingo lameness, Hong Kong celebrity Edison Chen is at the not so quiet eye of the sex scandal storm in Hong Kong.

It is quite a tempest in a teapot, but then all things are like this in the simultaneously worldly and insular metropolis. They love their scandals, the Hong Kongers do, as the multitude of scandal rags and other Hush-Hush type publications garishly attest to. It may all be a plot involving the triads an such – of course – and is very soon to be a Hong Kong movie, starring another bunch of nubile sexy starlets who will claim to be innocent and virginal playing starlets who claim to be innocent and virginal but who are stupid enough to let their sex partner photograph and videotape them in the most compromising of positions and then trust him after they inevitably break up because they are sick of his chigger speech – that and the fact that he is uninteresting.

There startling things aside from the sheer stupidity of the celebutards involved– don’t keep naked photos of exes on your main computer, that’s what portable drives are for, stupid – are:

1) the reaction of the press and everything else, which, like so many things (SARS anyone?) in HK (and Taiwan), is puffed up into the emptiest but biggest soufflé of the inane as some kind of effort to maintain the rabid cult of celebrity in this small part of the world.
2) The entirely opposite response to sex tapes in the west, which are used to make – in the case of Paris Hilton – or bolster – in the case of the Gene Simmons (ewwww!!!) – the careers of people who aren’t celebrities of any notable degree. Hilton’s entire and horrible existence in the public eye is due to the mold-vision tape of her being boring in bed – and it’s available at the nearby DVD counters here.

The other amazing fact is that this is really the first time something like this has happened. The celebrity sphere everywhere is rather small and entwined but HK is like the remotest reaches of the Ozarks in its incestousness. The public outrage is all crocodile tears. The sharks are circling like a million Perez Hiltons and will soon disperse, hungry for the next moment that they can erupt into a frenzy over the chummed remnants of a faded culture.

Oh, update! Apparently Edison Chen has called it quits. For ten months as he dedicates himself to charity work. Meaning that he can have a whole bunch of photo-ops to get his picture back into the same rags that caused him all this apparent sorrow. It’s the snake eating it’s own ass, or at least sticking a forked tongue far enough in for a good prostate exam.

The Shadow Knows

The shadows want to speak but they have no voice was what he said at the bar last night, pointing to the faint shapes cast on the wall. He then began to tell me of his idea of his shadow self, the other which he uses as a guide to decisions.

He said it’s as if you are standing at a crossroads. The sun is mobile, and you are like a gnomon on a sundial, marking out your future. You start right, and walk a little ways, checking your shadow. If it’s with you, then continue; you are on the correct path. If it casts off to the other path, stretching out to the horizon perhaps, to infinity as it does when the sun sinks, you erred.

There is flexibility in the system. You may stand and wait for time changes all things, and perhaps what was the wrong move yesterday or even a month ago, may be fine now, as the light has shifted and the ground beneath your feet has whirled about.

He recommended that I talk to my shadow. He said that he talked to his regularly and asked it questions. It never answered but somehow he always knew what it wanted to say.

The next morning, as I left my apartment, my shadow was following me silently.

Safety Last

Last week, Richard was getting a satellite dish installed. He lives on the 12th floor. The installer arrived and quietly got down to work, trying to find a line of sight with the dish. He couldn’t, so he decided to splice into another feed that was across the way. I was inside when I saw his legs disappear over the banister. I looked out and there he was, calmly walking along the tiny ledge then climbing up onto the neighbours a/c unit.

There was not net, no safety belt, just a one-step-wrong-and-you-die journey.

The guy who came to my 36th floor apartment to fix my a/c unit ended up tying a rope around his waist Wile E. Coyote style before clambering out my dining area window.

One thing I realized living in Taiwan and China is that workers and society are not exactly safety conscious.

Guys paint without masks. Construction workers jackahmmer away without any ear protection. I once saw a guy in flip flops climb up a ladder against a power pole to work on some wires. Typical worker clothing consists of some ratty, shiny-elbowed-but-ground-dusty suit and slippery cheap, leatherette shoes if it’s cold, or just a t-shirt with suit pants,the same slippery shoes and a towel if it’s hot. I think if you showed up with full coveralls, steel-toed boots and a hardhat you would get laughed at.

And that’s not talking about the coal mining. Watch the excellent “Blind Shaft” if you want a taste of that. It’s a brutal life and, as I posted earlier, pay seems to be about RMB50 a day for the basic grunt stuff.

The site of the new Sheraton Hotel, which is going up next door and which had better not block my view unless it affords me a look into a luxury apartment filled with nubile women wearing next to nothing at best, is an official jobsite it seems. From on high, the yellow heads are busy at work, safe and sound.

I think this is the future of things, but, like many developing nations, the country is built upon the backs of the migrant poor of which they are many. I see them everyday on the buses and in the street, trundling about with their bags, schlepping from one place to the next, always looking for the better chance.

Then again you get to see how quickly things get done when unfettered by a lot of the ways in the West. In Taipei I could ride my motorcycle home and come back the next day, riding over new asphalt. Here, as I have mentioned, buildings are crawling up hand-over-hand into the sky, and the subway grows at a pace far far beyond what it did in either Edmonton or Toronto, where a simple extension took many, many years.

To make a comfortable and cheap life, life must be cheap and uncomfortable for some. Maybe I have some guilt after all.

Guilty as Charged

I was thinking about guilt today – no, not mine, since I,unfortunately, have little, unless you want to equate regret with guilt, in which case I have a tonne – and realized that Kevin Costner’s “Dances with Wolves” is the ultimate movie example of white guilt (and bad facial hair).

Our societies (white and Western) love to apologize. We apologize for that misdeed hundreds of years ago, and this one decades ago. Yeah, we’re sorry. And we, the generations that follow, inherit that guilt even if our families weren’t in the country to begin with – the assumption is that somehow the country where you were before contributed somehow (unless your German, in which case our guilt over blaming innocent masses who came after takes over and cancels it and you win). We hang our collective head.

“Dances with Wolves” tapped that zeitgeist and unleashed a massive orgasm of guilt, taking it to the top of the heap at the Oscar’s and thereby inflicting us with “The Postman” a few years later – which is something we should really feel guilty over.

And I was one of those suckers. I was even in film classes at the time, but my naïve university sensibilities were outraged, outraged I say, by the injustices the whiteman visited upon the poor and saintly natives.

Now, I feel guilty about liking the movie at the time even though I paid my debt by having to watch Tom Petty try to act. “Dances with Wolves” isn’t a guilty pleasure either, like say “Ten Things I Hate About You”, or anything with Julia Stiles except for that dancing movie, to which depths even I cannot sink.

Generally, I try to avoid films that are geared to riling up those emotions with a clutch of button-pushing moments. I still haven’t seen “Schindler’s List”, partly because of my dislike of Spielberg’s message movies, and partly because I don’t need to put myself through that. Same with “Monster’s Ball”, and that has Halle’s naked berries in it.

I am self-aware, and movie literate, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to get all weepy when the schmaltz is turned on. Those movies are like that sonic device which is reputed to make people shit their pants as an unconscious reaction. Can anyone withstand the last bit of “Old Yeller” or how about the hanging in “Dancer in the Dark”? No, way, or at least it’s a good test to see who’s a replicant. Fuck the turtle in the desert, go with Disney.

Filmmakers know that emotional reactions sell and guilt is a damn powerful emotion and we all have it at some level. Sure, it might not be about genocide, but that is just a good catalyst to stir things up about, like, the time you callously dumped your girlfriend for whatever stupid reason it was, which just might remind you of your last breakup or the divorce of your parents or the time little Jason next door took your Lego and hit you on the head with a shovel so you cut off his right pinky just like in those movies you watched at noon while your mom was passed out from too much vodka. Maybe stuff like that.

Once you push a button, you never know what’s going to happen.

Lockjaw of my Brain.

Managing to integrate both the Roy Scheider and Speilberg motifs of the last few posts, I am going to tell a tale from my past that illustrates just how much my f&ckin’ brain hates me.

When I was maybe 17 I got the sickest that I can remember – I was going to say in recent memory, but, sadly, that is far from recent: high fever, sweats, chills, pain, and open faucets at both ends. It was lovely. Fortunately, I was at home and had my mom to do what she did wonderfully well, pamper me. It is the only time I fainted. I remember being in the bathroom doing what the flu makes you do wonderfully well, and while I was brushing my teeth the room did a few quick loops and I woke up on the floor. I swear the swirls had that whooshing noise with a Doppler shift and all.

But the worst were the nightmares that the fever brought. Super vivid, in Powell and Pressburger Technicolor but with far less sense than either a horny nun or a dead pilot. I still remember them, That’s how bad they were. And I must admit to having severe childhood dreams that had me running around the house in terror before throwing up and going back to sleep. Yes, babysitters loved me. I think that particular dream involved being at a circus and having the fat lady sit on me, which is where my guts or at least their contents, squeezed out of me.

So I was trying to sleep and not having much luck since I kept waking up sweating from the fever and the fear. Staying awake was impossible so I was doing my best to fight off the demons. My mom told me to think of happy things and thus we come to this post some 24 or 25 years later.

My first dream was of Santa, because, of course, he brings happiness and he’s pretty much superhuman. But it was on a beach of all things. A beach of white sand that stretched out to the horizons on the side, and bounded by azure water that was mirror smooth. And the jolly fat man was in the water playing around, his long beard floating out in front of him. Oddly, he was still wearing the red suit, which must have felt like hell, and might not have been a good idea.

So as Santa stood in the water (he may have had a drink, but I don’t recall) the little splashes he was making were suddenly drowned by a big swell and then, in order: water erupted up in a sheet; Santa was suddenly airborne; a foam of blood joined the water; the meanest, biggest, shark in the world tore Santa apart and disappeared into the water.

I am not sure if I screamed, but it wasn’t good.

And I couldn’t stay awake, so I drifted off nervously again.

This time I was in a plane. Perhaps I was flying away from the tropical hell I had just witnessed. Who knows? The plane dropped, those useless little masks dangled down, and we plunged into the ocean. And as we sank to the bottom, and people writhed in their seats, all nicely belted in to drown, that f&cking shark was right there to gnaw through everybody.

I decided A) I watch far too many movies and B) my brain hates me.

Why couldn’t I be in Breathless with lovely Jean Seberg, running my thumb across my lips? No, I was doomed to appear as the sickly mewling fetus in Eraserhead.

Older and Younger at the Same Time

I have a plethora of movie memories that come rushing out when I see a cinematic equivalent of Proust’s madelaines.

Many years ago my mom and my Aunt Arlene (such a wonderful woman) took me and the rest of the clan to the dear old Westmount Cinema, theatre B, to see Raiders of the Lost Ark. Of course I loved it.

What teenage boy wouldn’t? Spielberg, Lucas and Ford were all flying in the stratosphere, and this was definitely the pet project of film nerds, the territory Tarantino has been mining since he started. It still holds up marvelously. I wasn’t a great fan of the ones that followed, and I’m not sure if it’s a result of growing older or that the movies weren’t as good, but I deeply suspect the latter, though I haven’t seen either of the sequels in a long time (or ever again in the case of Last Crusade).

I remember waiting in line at the Paramount (the greatest cinema Edmonton ever had, and where I saw Star Trek, Aliens, and who knows what else and which I ended up managing years later) to see Temple of Doom, but was slightly repulsed by the vague racism in the film. The last one left just a bad and dusty taste of death in my mouth, much like I imagine would remain after kissing Sean Connery, minus the scotch.

So why the hell am I excited about May 22? (1) It’s my birthday I am hitting a prime number, which is a good sign in my books, and (2) what is no doubt and hopefully the last Indiana Jones movie is opening.

Of course Ford and Lucas have descended from their heavenly years – or plunged like Satan if you’re Lucas – but Spielberg is even better at slapping things together with vim and verve if he works quickly and tries to avoid messages which are just clumsy bromides. As long as Lucas isn’t allowed anywhere near the camera or an actor, it could be fine.

The teaser up everywhere plums the motifs nicely and tingles the spine of all the fans out there like me who wished they run out and buy a bullwhip and a fedora immediately after all those Nazi faces melted.

Oh, and Cate Blanchett is in it with a nice Louise Brooks bob, and really, isn’t she always great?

Copying our Pain

Oh sweet Flying Spaghetti Monster, Lucas is making another Star Wars movie, this time bypassing one of his great weaknesses – working with live people – by animating “Clone Wars”. I admire his tenacity, as I admire the fat man who wears a tiny speedo on the beach: they both are completely without self-analysis or self-doubt. And neither man should be doing what he is, which is creating an eyesore that will survive long past death, somehow seared into the retina and smeared down the optic nerve.

When you die, you won’t see the face of your great love (unless that causes you pain) or that fantastic view from the top of that Himalayan peak; no, when you die you’ll be faced with a tree of dancing Ewoks, Jar-Jar bobbling his head, and Jabba the Hut blubbering into the ocean with a titanic mass of cellulite swaying and jiggling on either side of a bright thin thread that has been swallowed up by something that would resemble an ass if it wasn’t dragging on the sand.

Thanks, George. By the end of your run you will have suitably tarnished that glorious moment on July 1, 1977 when I sat in a theatre and saw a small ship race down the screen followed by a never-ending rumbling mass.