Blubber Brain

I have been reading Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia for the past weeks. It’s his personal encyclopedia of notable cultural figures, positive and negative, and most are writers. Generally, I read an entry or two in bed, though lately I have taken it out to the living room since it’s so damn good. But it reminds me that I do not read enough. Not even close.

I like to think I am a reader but I am not as avid as I was way back in Grade 2 when I read 28 books in a month to place second to Brian Torgunrood in our classes’s reading contest – the bastard. James’s book illustrates just how wrong my assumption is, and makes me sad about it. The fact that I still love to head to a café and spend a few hours with a coffee and a book doesn’t make me a reader.

A great book, even more than a great movie, makes me content and feeling self-sufficient. It is a boon companion. It can’t replace human contact, but it can be the best conversation you have in any given time. Despite that and the pleasure I get out of a good book, I am lazy, and too often turn to either a TV series or a movie rather than flip pages. I get stupider and stupidest, weaker and weakest.

Reading is the mental equivalent of lifting weights: it builds strength that carries into all other activities. Sure, reading something like “Da Vinci Code” is the equivalent of doing tricep kickbacks with a pink dumbbell while balancing on a bosu ball, but it’s better than nothing. Just sitting on your ass in front of the TV turns your most important muscle to stone – an odd reversal, but to me intelligence is flexible and pulsing, but that may be a result of the Star Trek bumheads. Cultural Amnesia is a shot of adrenalin, a solid whole-body workout that makes you eager to hit the hard stuff, the strength-making stuff: the deadlifts, squats, benches and overhead presses that really measure you out and build you up. The things that get the bellows pumping.

James’s bit about Georg Lichtenberg was particularly inspiring. A writer I had never heard of, Lichtenberg sounds just too awesome. . James makes Lichtenberg seem so exciting and vibrant, living and breathing, which is what a good writer can do when describing good writing. Blessed by the fact that I was in the living room next to my laptop – which was sluggishly downloading the second season of Arrested Development for those weak moments, I was able to put some of his works onto my Amazon wish list.

One of the things I miss here is having a good book store to meander through, but, of course, those things are hard to find in the West, too. The best major bookstore I have ever been in was the Page One in Taipei 101. Beat all the Chapters and Indigo’s back in Canada without even trying, and easily outstrips the ones in Hong Kong. Hong Kong has a few nice independent stores; ones that smell of paper mould and damp like an attic. There isn’t a bad foreign bookstore at the top of the nearby GZ Bookstore, a massive, five storey building crammed with books, but it isn’t the same.

Neither is Amazon, but it is a saviour. When I found out my parents were going to Paris after all, I was able to order some books and have them delivered. It’s great to have when you are reading something like James’s book, with all its references, and you want to check on something. You don’t have to have those moments when you leave a bookstore having spent your budget, then realize you forgot something you really wanted. You don’t need to scribble it down on paper and hope you put it into your wallet. You just have to put in a few words, look through a few pages, and there you go.

I am not sure, though, that if I was in a major city like Toronto that I would need Amazon, or that I would use it. The little thrill of seeing the book show up in a search window is nothing compared to that frisson when you see something on a shelf, perhaps tucked up on its side on a packed shelf, wedged between wood and more paper. The moment when you think that it couldn’t be what you think it is, and the next moment when you realize it is.

It’s similar to leafing through the guide to a rep cinema or something like the Cinematheque and seeing a movie which you had longed to see for years. Perhaps you have seen it already on DVD or whatever, but for those of us with the affliction there is excitement and glee. Like seeing a Dali in the MOMA and realizing not just how small the damn thing is but how vivid and unusual the colours. It’s the physicality of the thing.

Anyhow, I hear that Shakespeare and Co., in Paris is quite good. I am looking forward to a good browse.

Strange Bedfellows

One of the things that was strangest about Taiwan – I lived in Taipei for four years – was that there was so little anger. If you have ever seen Taiwanese traffic, then you will realize what kind of a miracle this is. It took me a few weeks to notice this, and I never really got used to it, though I certainly appreciated it, particularly when I returned to the West for a visit. It makes sense when everyone is piled toe-to-heel, and I imagine that one huge flare up could topple the social order. The madness and anger did have an outlet though, one area where the entire island could go start raving bananas and it did, regularly, and it drove me nuts – politics.

The Taiwanese take their politics – their democracy – very seriously, and value it more than any North American I have ever met. It’s a fledgling democracy, and that could be the reason for the passion. Taiwan was only recently freed from the oppressive yoke of a brutal and immensely corrupt dictatorship. The ruling party built itself into the richest political party in the world – yeah, on an island with 30million people and little natural resources – by standing upon pilfered wealth. The party massacred citizens, detained human-rights protesters, and so on. The usual litany of abuses. This party was just elected to power this past weekend: the KMT – Kuomintang.

It was a source of bafflement to me that people would actually vote for these bastards, or that these bastards had the nerve to even form a party after stomping all over everyone. But they did bring economic reform to the island, and the prosperity of the island is probably due in large part to the hard-handed rule. People are magpies, blinded by the shiny shiny.

Taiwanese politicians were certainly out for the gold ring. For themselves. Corruption was endemic and people saw nothing wrong with electing a politician who had been convicted of embezzlement, fraud, or whatever white-collar crime you have. One top level official of the KMT stole hundreds of millions of Taiwanese dollars (yes, that’s still a lot of money) and what did he do? He quit the party and started up another one. Brilliant. And people voted for him!

Taiwanese politicians are free of shame. And voters don’t seem to give a damn about honesty.

Their parliament rivals Italy’s for colour, minus the porn stars (unless you count sex scandals and secretly videotaped bonking and marital cheating). Fist fights are a regular occurrence. I once caught the lead in for a story involving a man who tear-gassed the house and without seeing anything more I guess it was Taiwan. Yep. A politician came in, announced he was going to tear gas the place, put on his gas mask, and let ‘er rip. A few weeks ago there was a brawl outside of some courthouse between rival parties.

That kind of stuff is carried into the populace, which seems to love to gather together by the hundreds of thousands and march and make noise. Usually it’s just a protest against the other parties – mainly just DPP vs. KMT, but some others may join the pageant – but sometimes it’s about independence or lack of it, or closer ties with China, or what have you. It’s like a very orderly Indian riot, with hordes of people bussed in from all over the country. The organization is astonishing and god knows how much it all costs, all the coloured hats and flags and assorted protest paraphernalia like plastic noisemakers and bats (good idea!). I must admit, though, that at least they get out and make a show of the big issues the island faces, which is a nice change from the placid and boring nature of North American politics.

Individually, it is carried to extremes. Friends fight, lines are drawn, and the eye-daggers come out. Sitting in a room with a group of Taiwanese before an election was akin to being dropped onto a battlefield between two opposing forces: you didn’t know whether to duck, cover, run, or creep out on your belly, so you just sat there mutely, hoping no one sneezed. I got to be good at judging loyalties of the people I worked with, and though usually outspoken and obliviously chatty, I learned to be silent lest the eye-daggers dig into me.

The previous election, the one in which the President was shot (which I thought horrible, unlike that evil fuck – Emily, who was built like some kind of Socialist Realist ideal farm woman, ie., a tractor – at the school where I worked who, upon finding out he had been shot, laughed like a hyena). Friendships were broken during the last election. Of course the KMT didn’t lose with grace and bawled, crying foul, like bullies do when pinned. I can’t believe they won with any better grace; I imagine that some of the first words out of the Ma were “In your face”.

Nasty is the best word for the whole thing.

Shutter Bugs

I love photography, as I think I have made apparent, but there are a few things about it that annoy the hell out of me. It’s not the art itself, but the people and the industry and the sick-twisted organism these two things form because of the technology – you don’t see painters getting all in other’s faces talking crap about using acrylics over oil paints, and some brushes giving you better frackin’ resolution. Or maybe you do. That would be pretty funny.

Anyhow, it’s typical photographer behaviour.

A few weeks ago I was in HK with a friend who was buying a Canon 5D. We were to meet up with a friend of his who had a friend shopping for a camera as well. I want to bitch about two major –well, bitches I have.

Number One

We popped in at the great Tin Cheung camera in TST. A bustling little shop chock-a-block with cool little things to make photo idiots like myself drool – panoramic medium formats, digital Hasselblads, and Leicas. The stuff I can’t afford. So Matthew priced out the 5D there and started looking at lenses.

In forum after forum and post after post writers go on and on about barrel distortion here and pin-cushioning there which, admittedly, can make a difference if you are shooting a building for Architectural Digest or something – if you can fucking see it, that is. I read an audiophile piece in which a bunch of audio weenies (equivalent to photo weenies) couldn’t hear the difference between speakers wire with top-of-the-line Monster cables and a set of cables made with (here’s the beauty and I really need this parenthetical break to give pause for effect) coat hangers. Yeah. Coat hangers.
Now, that’s not to say there isn’t a difference. I am sure if you measured the suckers with some quantum nebulizer in an echoic chamber, you’d see it. But you can’t hear it.

I doubt that all those guys I see walking around with their red-rimmed Canon lenses could see the difference between these super expensive lenses and the cheaper Tokina or Sigma lenses they turn their noses up at. Like oenophiles (another loathsome group, but one that makes disgusting noises then spits – hmm…) they are blinded by a nice label.

Before any of you photo weenies gets all upset, they are nice lenses no doubt. They are well-built and will probably last longer, but don’t go giving the excuse for flappin’ down all that cash that it’s because of the picture quality. I’ll give you a hint: it won’t make you a better photographer at all and it won’t take better pictures than a similar but cheaper lens. Guaran – fucking – teed (off, I am).

All of this falls into that whole bullshit ‘professional’ label that photo companies love to use and photo-weenies buy into like Ahab chasing Moby, only here there are two sets of dicks. Wedding photographers are professional photographers, you idjit, and take a look at what they do. The guy who came to your school and had you sit, cock your head, and smile wanly even as he ‘mistakenly’ stroked your inner thigh then gave you a lolly and told you to suck it, was a professional photographer.
It’s a meaningless term and I really don’t give two shits what most professional photographers use because it is close to irrelevant. Nacthwey uses Canon but I am sure he could take his amazing shots with Nikon, or Pentax, or a freaking disposable camera like Terry Richardson uses.

I could argue this point with most of these guys, if they knew who any of these guys were, but they don’t. I say if you want to take better pictures, study better pictures. It’s like a writer who wants to write but doesn’t read (don’t laugh, I’ve met one), or a filmmaker who doesn’t know anything about cinema (or worse, watched only Michael Bay, McG, or Brett Ratner movies. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde : “watching only bad movies is infinitely worse than watching no movies at all”).

For my nicely used Canon 30D I have two main lenses – a Sigma 28-70 and a Tokina 12-24. Both are just fine, though I like the Tokina a bit more since the manual focus is easier to use (but what ever happened to a nice, easy to manually focus screen, huh? Do we have to use auto-focus all the time?). I have a great Canon to Pentax-M adapter so I can use this fantastic Soviet Helios 85mm 1.5 lens that looks like either a shiny grenade or some Cronenbergian anal probe of pain. But the tone it gives to photos is unworldly. It probably comes from the age and some kind of strange effects this has on the glass. It is a bitch to carry and use, but the effects can be fantastic. Some of the portraits I took of Zhang Laoshi, the bike teacher, were made with this lens.

I love the screw mount (lens, dammit) and now will probably buy another one when I hit the used camera market this weekend. Pentax made a great 135mm (2.8 I think) lens decades ago that is supposed to be fantastic. Now, I could pay a few thousand RMB for a new Canon lens or a few hundred RMB for the Pentax. Will there be a difference in image quality? Maybe, but if there is it will probably err with the Pentax. Clarity is too often rated over tone and quality. Which, I guess, is fine if you aren’t interested in expression.

Number Two

We met up with the woman and her husband when we went to Mongkok to hit another store for a better price on the 5D. She was looking for a Canon 40D. She didn’t have an SLR. When we went into the electronics store she started looking at the 40D and by the way she held it, (she tentatively held the left side by the bottom corner using two finger) I knew she didn’t have a freakin’ clue about cameras, how to take a picture, or why the hell she really wanted to spend all that money on something she didn’t need. This became more apparent as time wore on when she tried to take a picture and was looking at the screen at the back, waiting for some kind of image because she didn’t know she had to look through the viewfinder. And she had to be told everything about the camera by Matthew’s friend. I am sure the sales guy was salivating at this point. She is, what carnies would call, a rube.

Why didn’t she look at the 400D, which would have been more than adequate for her uses since she was, no doubt, going to use all automatic controls, I imagine had something to do with her having heard at some point that the 400D is a beginners camera and the 40D is more professional. The fact that she was a beginner and not a professional didn’t occur to her, or, rather more to the point, was offensive, even though it was the fucking truth as it is for most of the people out there, even that father-son pair I saw in Hong Kong wearing matching Nikon D-70’s (oh, the kid was about six).

She didn’t knew her ass from the aperature, but she dropped at least 11,000 HKD that day on the 40D, some Canon red-rimmed lens because, don’t ya know, it’s professional, and a 50mm lens, even though that was covered by the Canon zoom.

Will she take some good photos? No doubt. Will they be better than photos she could have taken with the 400D and a Tokina lens – no.

Would I like a better camera? Well, not really, I am not sure what that would mean.

I am more than happy with the 30D. Sure it’s only, what, 8 megapixels?, but that’s enough for now. It’s rugged and fast and fits well and, more importantly, I am getting to know how to use it. But what would I get if I were to upgrade? A 40D – nah. A 5D. Nope. Full frame isn’t worth that kinda money to me because I don’t think I would see the difference. An EOS 1d Mark III. Yeah, right.

Actually, I can’t think of anything I would rather have at the moment. I think I’ll buy that used screw mount lens, and maybe a new lens mount cover so I can poke a hole in it and make a digital pinhole camera.

Hong Kong Phlooey!

Like many small city state organisms – which Hong Kong treats itself as, the rest of the billion strong nation be damned, and, perhaps rightfully so (not the damned part, the independence part) – Hong Kong is a little sensitive infections, and sometimes tends to react like Howard Hughes at an unknown doorknob. It goes batshit crazy.

Recently, a few young kids died of the flu. One kid died of something else unrelated. But that’s three kids a little time and that’s enough for Hong Kong’s press to whip everyone into a froth, expecting the next Black Death, forgetting, of course, that the flu kills thousands every year because, duh, it’s pretty harsh. The Hong Kong flu, aka the Spanish flu, aka Bad Motherfucker, killed many many millions, wiping some people out in 24 hours from first sign of contagion. So, I guess, there is a right to be a little scared, which is why the Bird Flu is so feared; we are just waiting for the next big one, brought about by our propensity for fucking things up by living with our food – which is why those things start here and have for thousands of years.

I can see the panic in the streets. Mothers grabbing kids and running for their cars while covering their mouths in those useless paper masks that just get crusty with mucous and soggy with saliva, like a cracker half-in and half-out of some toxic soup.

I lived through SARS in Taipei, where some brainiac politician stumping for time, advocated quarantining the whole city for two weeks. My manager at the time, a sensible woman in many ways, agreed with this insanity, neglecting the fact that SARS was communicated by prolonged close contact with the infected and that by shutting people up you were just providing a lot of Petri dishes for the infection.

So we teachers put up with daily temperature tests and all kinds of stuff to placate people. Everything was stored on a chart and such at the door. If a kid coughed they went to the office for a temperature check, as if this would stop the spread since, by the time we noticed anything, we had all been in contact with whatever evil thing we were supposed to avoid.

And people stuffed themselves with anti-biotics, the devil’s juice, which, of course, doesn’t work on viruses, but manages to turn mild bacteria into ferocious and hungry beasts that render us into those bags that Tyler Durden tossed.

A few of us at the school would always cackle like a hen or crow like a rooster when a kid coughed or something. I think that would be a great disease; when you are infected you start to cluck. No feathers or anything, just clucking and perhaps a little arm flapping. And just before the end you break out into one big chicken dance and that’s it, the final cluck. Now that would be an interesting disease.

Anyhow, I am glad I am not in Hong Kong because I would just get irritated. The whole atmosphere of incoherent fear is so annoying; it’s like flying in America except there are so many more TSA agents.

People should be concerned about the more pervasive health threats here, like breathing air that reminds you of last year’s burnt BBQ steak. Of course, those deaths are much nastier than the flu, which would be mercifully quick. They are also easier to make a show of preventing without having to regulate.

They also sell papers.

I think Edison Chen actually created this disease to finally deflect attention from him and his flaccid…career.

Train Wrecks

From Guangzhou to Shenzhen, just past Dongguan, the factories really start. Blocks of squat buildings, some vacant, some swathed in bamboo rods and green curtains, some obviously busy, some tired. Pressed right up to the train tracks, as we fly by I can see workers on their dormitory balconies: hanging laundry; brushing their teeth, spitting long tendrils; standing and smoking, looking out over the palm trees, dirt roads, and crumbling brick shacks that dot the interstices to the next factory.

Taling ponds lie beside rice paddies, and the thin ribbons of land between them are littered with barrels and rusted out machines. People wade through the ponds, suspenders of their waders just visible on some, others just climbing out and putting on different sandals.

Empty lanes of wide roads go straight down the middle of larger factories that are small towns with thousands of people in identical uniforms. One of the buildings is labeled BLISS in big red letters at the top of its blue walls.

Luxury apartments for the new-middle class rise against the grey quarters of the migrants, brown stains weeping from the windows and ledges, laundry perched out into the fermenting air, the sky a pearlescent dome from horizon to horizon, clutching the nubby hills terraced into immaculately rigid gardens.

Amputated limbs of overpasses stretch out for each other over the tracks, steal fibers bent and twisted, joining the stretches of shattered-windowed-shells of strip malls, with corrugated doors pulled down and locked into the cracked concrete through which grass has grown.

People stand near the tracks, thickly uniformed, stiff and blank, held up by the fabric, unblinking as the train pushes past, suspended on berms made from the chipped remnants of all the buildings that have fallen on the path behind.

Ubuntu Me

Well, thanks to some convincing from my dyed-in-the-wig friend Enid, an open-source proselytizer, I decided to try out Linux on my laptop, on which I had been running Windows XP forever. It wasn’t a purely political or personal (I don’t hate Bill Gates at all, just wish he would dress better) decision but a desire to return to my roots – well, I guess that’s a personal reason. I started out years ago – 1980 to be exact – on a TRS-80 Model 1 computer that my Dad, a gadget geek, had bought the family for Christmas.

16k of RAM. BASIC built into ROM. Cassette Drive. 127 x 47 graphics. Awesome. I began programming right away since if you wanted something you really needed to do it yourself. We upgraded later, the best bit being the ‘green screen’ which was a piece of thick plastic stuck over the monitor. The expansion interface that tripled the RAM to 48k and allowed two (2!) 5.25 floppy drives each storing a whopping 80k under LDOS, a sweet 9-pin dot matrix printer, and a 300 baud modem which, after fiddling with parity switches, word lengths and tons of crap, connected to bulletin boards. I gave BASIC up for assembly language -xors, ands, pushes and pops – writing a few thousand lines of code to draw a map of a dungeon on a screen for that RPG that was going to make me rich.

I went through a few machines since then – a 286, then a couple of Macs, then system I put together myself in Taipei, and I got further and further away from the TRS-80, as Windows put more and more distance between me and the machine. It’s not that I will ever write code again – though I like the challenge – or don’t get frustrated with fiddling with config files and such, but there is a sort of enjoyment that goes with getting it running tickety-boo, even if you end up using the endless resources of the ‘net. It’s like changing the oil in your car or knowing how to replace a fuel pump. I think these are necessities, and there is pleasure in getting your hands dirty, even if it is only figuratively – as long as you succeed. I thank my Dad for that lesson.

So I downloaded a copy of the Ubuntu 7.10 distribution and tried it out, disbelieving that it could run off of a CD-ROM. It looked fantastic and seemed to run without a hitch on the Asus, being even easier to install than Windows. Wireless? Yep. Bluetooth? Yep. Holy crap. I went and pulled out one of the portable drives I have and went installed Ubuntu onto it last week.

It was a busy week of fiddling. Changing this. Getting this. Trying that. Trashing that. Missing some software like Fastone that I really like. Realizing that Skype doesn’t have webcam support in Linux (what the hell is up with that?). Getting dual-screen support so I can watch LOST on my TV (man, are the new episodes every f*ckin fantastic), finding a RAW photo editor, and the all important part of getting the main screen to look just right.

But it was worth it.

It’s one of those “why didn’t I do this earlier” moments. Perhaps because I was brainwashed to believe that what is free cannot be nearly as good as what you pay for (to wit: the fact that certain expensive speaker cables don’t sound any better than wires made from coat hangers), even though I used free software like VLC and Fastone. I really don’t know. But I was wrong.

It’s kind of exciting, working with xorg.conf files and stuff. You aren’t going to hurt yourself like when you mounted that model rocket engine in the wooden race car you made for scouts and would have been up on Youtube file had such a thing – not to mention everyone having video cameras – existed back in the mid 70’s. You feel like you are more in control.

That’s what I felt like when I was fifteen. I told the old TRS-80 what to do, it didn’t tell me, even if those damn blinking CLOAD asterisks ruled my life in 10 minute chunks.

Temptations of Monks

There are things you discover about yourself not in your dreams but in movies. In 1979, I think it was a Wednesday in December, I discovered something as I watched Star Trek: The Movie: I have a thing for bald women. Persis Khambatta was unbelievably sexy with her shining globe and was perhaps the reason I still like the damn movie.

The desire lay dormant for a long time because back then high school wasn’t the place where you worked out all your fetishes. But when I saw Alien III, Sigourney and her Rene Falconetti ‘do had me squirming in my seat with desire to run my hands all over her stubbly skull. That was the moment I knew something was up. The high point of the movie fascination was in Clara Law’s Temptation of a Monk, in which gorgeous Joan Chen has her head shaved with a straight razor (my memory may be mixed in with fantasy because the photos I have seen don’t agree with my image of her topless).

Taipei, with it’s wealth of shaved pate monks strolling about was terribly distracting, especially in winter when they would wear these cute little toques that reminded me of these egg cups we had when I was kid that came with little knit hats (I just wanted to pull the hats off and kiss the heads).

This isn’t some kind of compulsion which drives me to wallpaper my rooms with photos, or endlessly Google “shaved women” (you get something different. Which reminds me of one of the greatest ‘men’s magazine’ titles ever, Shaved Snizz), or walk around with a pair of sheep shears and a few hundred dollars in my pocket looking for women willing to part with their locks, or hang around the numerous salons here with my face pressed up against the glass with my camera recording the snip snip progress inside for me to take home and watch on my flat screen TV. I don’t have a of “Best-of: mixvid sitting in a secret place on my computer. That’d be crazy. Nor have I seen GI Jane (but I must say that Demi Moore looks hot as a baldy, and a bald woman in uniform doing push-ups kinda drives me crazy), and Britney Speers shaving her head just made me cringe.

Now, I am not sure why all of this is, and I don’t really want to delve too deep. Perhaps it’s a desire for strong women, or perhaps it’s really a sublimated desire for Bruce Willis, which would explain both the Demi Moore thing and the fact that Die Hard is a favourite movie, even if that was pre-shaved-Bruce days. Harmless proclivities shouldn’t be worried over too much. If you like licking feet, good for you. Find someone who likes having a sole saliva session, have at it, and don’t worry about it too much.