The smell of fresh laundry

It’s been old and stale and mourldering here lately, and to anyone who checked in, I apologize. I just got tired of the whole proxy thing and, like slipping into bad habits or out of good ones, I stopped posting. I wrote new ones. I just didn’t post them. Because I got lazy.

To solve that problem, to spend money, and to go under the wall, I set up my own hosted site. I have been fiddling over the past week, dealing with my old, blocked domain, indfusion.net, and getting a new, accessible one, indfusion.com.

This here blog should be available shortly at http://www.dragonslair.indfusion.com. There isn’t much there now, not being a gifted webmonkey, so give it time.

Thanks for looking.

A Question of Privilege

I have been wanting to write about the class structure here. Not about the peasants and migrant workers but about the privileged elite who flaunt their flouting of the laws: the police (off-duty), the military, government officials, and party officials. I have written about the traffic here and the lack of enforcement on even basic laws, but the people with the special white plates do whatever they choose with impunity. Drive the wrong way, drive on the sidewalk, park the wrong way, park on the sidewalk, run red lights…it doesn’t matter because they will not receive any penalties. There has been an obvious police presence and I have seen parking tickets being given by actual police officers, not humble parking officers, but the special people are still excluded from this.

Today Richard and I were walking to a nearby restaurant for lunch. We saw one person receiving a ticket. Just up the street from this car sat another one, facing the wrong way on this one way street, and without any license plates. This is another thing you see a lot of: unregistered vehicles and, no doubt, drivers without licenses. The officer rode his motorcycle up to the car. The driver rolled down his window and did the FBI badge flip. I saw a picture ID and the window rolled back up.

A car here is a sign of prestige and power, and those white plates, or the ability to drive around without one at all, are another badge of honour. It reminds me of the scene in A Tale of Two Cities when the French nobleman runs over a peasant child and gets angry. These guys could do with a history lesson.

Old Dreams

I got a batch of 120 back from the lab last week, and one roll was from a trip I took last September to Emei Shan in Sichuan. It was a lark of a trip and had far too much travelling—plane, taxi, bus, bus on Saturday then the reverse on Sunday—but it was good to get out of The Lair and see something else. It is a beautiful place, but not exactly the same type of mountain hiking as Canada. Pavement and lots and lots of stairs. My friend Matthew and I found a nice cheap hotel where we had a fantastic meal. The hike back the next day was better, and near the end we walked by this mist shrouded lake.
I didn’t have my 30D at that point, just a Sony point and shoot, but I had brought along my Moskva V 6×9 camera which is simply awesome. It’s a lot of fun to use and still in pretty good shape. Focussing is a hit and miss thing and I am not sure about the accuracy, so it’s sort of like a cooler Holga or Lomo. I think these two photos captured the dreamy mood of the area.

Monster Lunch

I don’t mean a big lunch that necessitates a belt-loosening. I mean a lunch that makes you feel like a monster.

Cafe de Coral (which I was always mispronouncing as corral, probably because of the feeding frenzy), a Hong Kong-based fast food chain with outlets here, offers a delicious and fat-dripping roasted chicken lunch—a whole, beautiful, reddish-gold skinned chicken– for RMB 35 (about $5). It comes sitting pretty and sizzling in a basket, the paper doily underneath tantalizingly translucent. It also comes with two plastic gloves, a half-cob of corn, and a drink. It should come with a Patrick Bateman axe-murderer ensemble, or at least a bib and some screens for the people next to you.

Ripping into this is all kinds of guilty pleasures, but you must be careful lest a patch of skin be catapulted through the air, hitting anyone who is unluckily sitting next to you. And there’s always someone next to you in this place at lunch. Airplane manners–and I mean cattle class—are the order of the day.

I crave this sometimes. Not just the food but the act–the brutality of it. I feel like grunting. It’s food to be eaten naked. It’s regressive, eating this or foods which declare their animal origins outright. Wile E. Coyote found out you can’t tofu your way to a whole chicken (well, he had sand, but it’s about the same). Oddly, but thank Godly, for here, it doesn’t come with the head or the feet.

It’s satisfying on so many levels.

The Dragon’s Turn

Following the previous post on the articles in the Telegraph which featured great photographs by Alec Soth, here are parts 3 and 4

Part four is timely, concentrating on the Olympics and all that they have brought and will bring to all of China, not just Beijing. We were given August 8th day off and I’m surprised it’s not a national holiday. I am sure that it will be a day of insanity and nationalism, and insane nationalism, but I want to join in at my peril. The government will probably have a massive screen set up in Tian He park, which is close to both work and my house. The Olympic Torch procession here brought in god knows how many tens of thousands to the area, and I imagine it will be much the same next week.

No matter what people say or wish to decry it, politics has been part of the Olympics for many years, but it is certainly on the forefront this year. It marks a turning point. It doesn’t matter if China wins the most medals this time (though it is likely); the fact is that the US will probably get fewer, a decline that will be extended to its economic and political might.

I’m not sure if this is true, but looking around me and looking again at Part 3 and Soth’s photos of the concrete towers and swirling overpasses, it’s hard not to believe it.

21st Century Place

Paris is a nineteenth-century city, New York a twentieth-century city, Hong Kong a twenty-first-century city.

Picture the movie models of future cities imagined since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: they are canyons fringed by towers, blocks, and spires. In Bladerunner, the massive industrial places are dank complexes, forever dark and brooding, hemmed in by man-made cliffs. In The Fifth Element, the city is buzzed by traffic, the ground choked in smog and detritus where no one lives. These are three-dimensional places, where people live up as well as out. Likewise the gleaming and clean places of Minority Report and I, Robot.

Paris is street level. From the Pompidou you can see for kilometres, and it’s only five stories high. New York has its famous skyscrapers, but beyond the few buildings, all the action is on the street. These cities spread.

Hong Kong and newer Asian metropolises like Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou climb, embracing the idea of the future city with fervour. The Chinese cities don’t need to: there is plenty of space, but they do.

Flat land gives way to erupted blocks. High density older dwellings like the hutongs give way for neutron dense housing blocks, fitting a small North American town’s worth of people into a footprint the size of a small mall’s parking lot. Massive overpasses fly through the buildings nestled right next to them.

Look up in the new city; it lives over your head.

I am not sure how I feel about all of this. I loved Paris. Human scale (though the Louvre is on a grand scale). Liveable. Central Hong Kong is a place to visit, a wonder of bustle and money, but I was glad to live on Cheung Chau, on a corner only remotely tethered to the financial fjords of Hong Kong. Manhattan was a compromise. Guangzhou encompasses all three centuries, reaches back past the 19th and forward in the 21st. It is a place in transition, which is why it so entrances and frustrates me.

Self-Inflicted Stupidity

As I wrote before, I like stupid action movies. But they must be cohesive, not just as cinema (which takes out Michael Bay) but as a physical and ethical place. This is where Wanted disappoints.

It starts out very well, setting the rules of a superhuman universe, and then introducing our main character, another narrator from Fight Club, whose Tyler Durden super-ego is a leading super assassin. His father was a member of a band of elite killers, an ancient clan of assassins. The targets for this merry band are written in the weft and weave of the fabrics from a magical loom, The Weaver of Fate. In ASCII, like magical punch cards. Like I said, stupid, and unfortunately the movie tries to reach Matrix heights of mumbo-jumbo by having a black leader, Morgan Freeman, speak in a sonorous voice, reciting the history and meaning of the fraternity.

Neglecting the fact that this loom wasn’t smart enough to pick out the names of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or any number of psychopathic dictators, this merry band of highly-tuned killers has kept balance in the world by following its code, killing only those who deserve it. Without that code they are merely hired mercenaries.

So blah blah blah happens.

The director keeps the comic-book style coming, not quite maintaining the heights of the opening sequence, but giving us gravity defying car chases as our meek Clark Kent becomes the assassin who bends bullets. He becomes a hunter who quickly believes that he is following a law far beyond human law—he has become an instrument of fate.

So blah blah blah happens.

Now, I’m fine with all of this, though it is stupider than the Transporter films. What gets me is near the end of the second act where our hero meets his nemesis, a rogue agent who supposedly killed his father in the kick-ass opening. Of course, the agent is his father and it was all a deceit (see, his name is Cross, and his son is another, so that’s a double-cross. Ha!).

The problem, though, is that it all happens on a train stuffed with people. Innocent people, whose names, I doubt, are part of some fantasy rug. They all die as the train is sacrificed for the spectacle. Naturally, of course, the train suddenly seems empty of bodies as it hurtles down, or maybe we are to suppose they all got out.

The problem is that the movie is inconsistent with its morality. It seeks to establish an honourable law (killing the one to protect the many, that lovely, logical, Star Trek code which Kirk just can’t abide) to justify murder, but then calmly forgets it all as the movie slaughters thousands in order to have a cinematic moment.

Like many, it seeks to have its cake and eat it, too. The Matrix films have this problem, as well. Morpheus and the rest want to free humanity, but in their quest to do so any cops or other authorities, and gloriously dispatched. And as we were plainly told, if you die in the Matrix, you really die. Sure, the cops and security guards were working for The Man (I always think of Robert Altman when I see him, which is somehow fitting), but they were actually trying to protect people. It’s not that their killing may not be justified in the Machiavellian sense; it’s that no one gives any thought to it. “Hey, we are killing a lot of people here? Is what we are doing right?”

We get far more discussion over these things on Battlestar Galactica (Apollo and the destruction of the ship, the whole season on the planet with the suicide bombers and all) and, thankfully, The Dark Knight (which I can’t get away from these days it seems).

Stupid movies should never try to be smart. They only end up shooting themselves.

Talky Talkies

The last two books I read were murder mysteries: Death of a Red Heroine, by Qui Xiaolong, set in Shanghai (and GZ!) during the reformist 1990’s; and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, by Michael Chabon, set in the fictional Jewish state of Sitka, set to revert back to Alaska a la Hong Kong in 1997. Chabon’s book shows the difference between someone who understands and appreciates language and someone who merely writes.

Aside from the fact that Qui (and his editor) lets one of my bugaboos into the book (misuse of ‘comprise’), the language is flaccid, and devoted to the plot. It serves the action and just moves things along. It’s like much popular writing, which is why it’s easy to read: it doesn’t really involve complex ideas or metaphors that demand you pause and consider them. It’s all stock except for the setting, which provides most of the intrigue, and near the end even the mystery tapers off. It’s not a bad book, but I wouldn’t read it again and I am hard pressed to recall even one standout sentence.

Chabon’s writing thrums. Sentences levitate off of the page and circle about your brain. You pause as you think about some of the images, but not too long because you must keep reading. And though the writing certainly rockets the plot forward, the language exists for your pleasure. You read to find out what happened, and just to read some more of the delicious sentences. Chabon doesn’t go to the far end, either, letting the plot and story go to hell for the sake of a perfect sentence. He stays well within the hardboiled genre, with the taut structures and descriptions—though not parsing it down to the piano wire terseness of recent James Ellroy, who seems to have dispensed with whole sentences in The Cold Six Thousand. I can’t recall any exactly right now, but I know that I was stunned probably once per page by Chabon’s writing, and I would pick it up again right away if I didn’t have something else to get to.

The difference is similar to that between The Dark Knight (still fresh in my mind) and, say, any Tarantino film. This is not to say the Dark Knight is badly written, for it isn’t, but there isn’t a line of dialogue that isn’t explicative—not in the Steven Spielberg, talking-head-gives-the-plot mode, but still purposeful and obvious. It’s a hardboiled detective story (Batman is certainly a hard man walking down a hard road in the Chandler sense), but you wouldn’t read the Dark Knight script the way you could read The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep . Tarantino’s dialogue also moves things along—rather nicely in some spots—but it exists on its own, too, which makes it much more like stage drama, even in something like Deathproof. It’s that literariness (for want of a better word) that distinguishes much of film from stage.

On Saturday I watched The History Boys, which is pretty much a filmed play. Norman Jewison’s Jesus Christ Superstar, which I love, is as well (okay, so it’s a filmed opera, but whenever I can talk about just how fabulous it is, I will) but uses its locations cinematically, whereas Hytner’s The History Boys doesn’t. That’s where a lot of literarily languaged films and TV shows fail: they have the words but they lack the show. But when they succeed, you get things like Tarantino’s movies—come on, they all stand out from crowd from the first syllable; David Mamet’s movies, though American Buffalo screens like a play, which isn’t due to it’s limited location since Fincher’s Panic Room is definitely a movie, but something in the way that the camera and people relate to the space; and great shows like Deadwood, in which foul words tumble like golden dice in a crystal glass; and, just thinking of it now, Serenity.

I love good dialogue, and though a movie certainly doesn’t need any of it—just see Sunrise or The General—words crackling and spitting up rather than being dying embers just add to the joy. Batman’s dialogue smouldered along. It would have been amazing to see such a great cast delivering lines that sparked up the screen.

The Darkest Knight

I came to Hong Kong to see the Dark Knight.

Yes, it’s really good, probably the best comic book movie made, and yes, Ledger is really good as The Joker, but amidst it all the man who is getting least praise is the man who deserves the most–Christopher Nolan. He co-wrote it and he directed it, and it is he who should be lauded.

Nolan has easily also made the darkest, bleakest superhero movie yet, one which actually does plum the depths of the soul.  It’s not the bleakness of Se7en, but it’s close.  The movies are stunningly similar in important ways, not just because of stolid and moral Morgan Freeman.  But where Brad Pitt fails John Doe’s test,  Batman passes the Joker’s, not succumbing to the Joker’s machinations, and the people on the boats pass in sacrificing themselves, which is something Batman does as well. But rousing moments of glory they are not, buried in the dark photography which rivals Khondji’s work on Se7en, and buried in the torment which the tests have brought up.

Watch Nolan’s movies, from Memento on up. They are all about human nature and tests and what we can do. But watch them for more than that. Watch them for how he works with the actors, which is why I think he deserves a lot of the credit for Ledger’s performance.

The performances, all of them, from Carrie-Ann Moss’s in Mememto, to Robin Williams’s in Insomnia, to Hugh Jackman’s in The Prestige, are top notch, and from people not noted for their acting ability. Hell, he even tames Pacino’s Godzilla like scene munching. Nolan knows how to direct his actors and get exactly what he needs.

The peformances are nuanced and subtle and he knows where to put the camera and what lens to use. Watch Ledger walk out of the hospital. A lovely shot that pulls back to a full height mid-shot that shows his socks and shoes and all the akimbo posturing of Ledger’s Joker.  This skill to show us the actor seems to have been forgotten in the race to proclaim Ledger’s performance one for the ages. It is not. It is a great one and a great counterpart to Nicholson’s careening psychotic.

Nolan and Ledger’s Joker is more like the riddler, an enigma like John Doe. He comes in and leaves the movie as a mystery. Unexplained. A force of chaos more than a man, but a chaos of meticulous planning and execution. Of course, we are enthralled with such clever and diaobolical people. We love the criminal mastermind, particularly one which is the true rebel, beholden to no organisation. But we also like the ones who have their own code of laws, their own honour, and the Joker has none of that, just his raging misanthropy, which is why we reject him.

i don’t wish to take anything away from Ledger, who, again, showed us that he was an uncannily subtle actor, and i think even without the make-up he would have been unrecognizable. But I think the movie really worked because it all did and if the rest of the movie hadn’t been as determined as it was, Ledger’s performance would not have worked at all because it would not have had anything to work against. And that falls to Nolan.

I wish I could see it again before I leave. It deserves another watching. This time I could watch Gary Oldman a little more.  It’s hard to play good, upright, stolid and normal and he was awesome.

I Can See Clearly Now

I needed new glasses. My last pair, a year old, were looking ratty, with the plastic veneer peeling off over the nose. Back in Canada this would have been a major production: tests, many stores to visit to find a pair, waiting, then paying a lot. But I am in Guangzhou, where they have streets for everything. So I headed to Ren Min Lu, just south of the Children’s Hospital, for eyeglasses street.

I rode down after the gym and headed in to the building I go which has two stories of tiny stores. I didn’t venture far, finding some cool stuff at yingxu optical, where, fortunately, Lina, one of the clerks, spoke great English. The store is a closet, but a nicely designed walk-in closet, where their thousand or so frames are all neatly and nicely arrayed. They had these super cool faux-wood frames, which were why I stopped, but they were only wide enough for rodents, not for pumpkin headed people like me.

But I found a great pair of aluminium frames that swoop to match my eyebrows, and got a pair of nice plastic frames for sunglasses. I blew my budget though, doubling it to RMB 850, but the frames are better quality than the last ones. And it’s still below half of what I would spend in Canada. Lina told me that I would have to wait a while, but could I come back at 3pm? It was 1pm. I had my camera, and there’s plenty of stuff to see, so I said sure. She called in about ten minutes to say it would be five, but still, two pairs of glasses in four hours? I am not complaining.

So I got on my bike and rode away. Between then and picking up my glasses—which were ready bang on time—I saw the usual variety of usually unusual things you see in Guangzhou, including a group of people swimming in the Pearl.

After getting my spanky new frames another of the usual variety of things: sudden thunderstorms and pelting rain; people running; people waiting; people scrunching up under umbrellas; clear skies; workers resting on rubble in front of buildings adorned with glorious socialist realist friezes.

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Another great day in the Lair.