The current Hong Kong local postage stamp is one of the most beautiful I’ve seen. For just $1.40 (20 US cents) you can have a tiny work of art, suitable for framing. The great thing is that if you send it to somebody as a present, it pays for its own postage. It’s the gift that sends itself.
It’s also one of the biggest stamps I’ve seen – you’d be hard-pressed to fit it on a small postcard. While I was poking around in my files, I also found this fun stamp.
China is so big and varied that a lifetime is probably not long enough to experience it all, much less understand it. I didn’t have a lifetime to spare, but 17 days was long enough to see, do and eat many strange and interesting new things.
First up, we flew from the hustle of Hong Kong to the bustle of Beijing. Like all tourists, we were there to see the Summer Palace, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, and so on. These we duly saw, and they were wonderful – I would happily have spent a day or two looking around the beautiful and peaceful Summer Palace. We also saw Tiananmen Square in a very unusual state – it was empty. (There was apparently to be some sort of race, related somehow to the 2008 Olympics.) It was funny seeing such a big empty space in the middle of a city – living in Hong Kong, you forget what such things are like.
We spent an entire weekend in Hong Kong Stadium watching rugby, as the world’s best teams (and several of the world’s mediocre teams) competed for the coveted HK Sevens Cup. England were the hot favourites, having won the Sevens for the last two years and the Rugby World Cup last year, but New Zealand are always highly fancied, and Argentina were looking good too. Of course, I was supporting New Zealand – it’s something to do with my genetic make-up. (Though I don’t usually wear make-up.)
Actually, I had another reason for hoping England wouldn’t win – their fans like to sing, and their enthusiasm is matched only by their tunelessness. And why do they choose “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” as their theme song? It has as much to do with rugby as it has with inorganic chemistry. I guess they’re not called the Barmy Army for nothing.
The Sevens rugby games are played by teams of seven, in two seven-minute halves. This makes for a pretty fast-paced game. The first day’s games were all “pool matches”, designed to sort the teams into grades for the finals. There were lots of one-sided games between big fish (NZ, England, Australia, South Africa, etc.) and minnows (Chinese Taipei [sic], Singapore, etc., and of course the hosts Hong Kong). There were quite a few scores in the 50-nil range, with no unexpected results.
This was meant to be nothing more than a concert featuring three local Hong Kong singers. But it turned out to be lots of fun, if often incomprehensible, and had more strange, unexpected moments than you could shake a stick at, unless you’re really good at shaking sticks at strange, unexpected moments.
As a nod to the independent pop music scene in Hong Kong (such as it is), the Arts Festival included this show, featuring three local singer-songwriter types performing with a four-piece backing band.
Continue readingThe quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
This fun novel is also a puzzle and a fairly impressive display of linguistic virtuosity. The book is a progressive lipogram – it starts off normally, but its alphabet shrinks as the story goes on. It’s not too hard to write without using Z, but things get more interesting as letters like D, A and even E vanish. We see more and more creative synonyms being used and invented.
This book consists entirely of letters written by the characters to each other. I like the way the sentences are written – the story is set in a land that esteems words and literature above all, and it shows in the way the characters play with language.
With the cute story and clever wordplay, the first half of the book is a delight. A little after this, the author cops out a bit as he has fewer and fewer letters to work with, and it all gets a bit harder to read. The story continues though, as the characters work against the clock to save their country – by solving a word puzzle.
I really liked this film. Affecting performances, likeable (but not too likeable) characters, and lots of funny, strange moments. A pretty accurate evocation of how Tokyo can appear to the newcomer. Ah, those were the days.
I got this jazz saxophonist’s album Rites years ago, so I was glad to finally see him perform with his group. Some say his playing is evocative of vast snow-covered plains, but I think they just say that because he comes from Norway.
Most of their pieces were build from soundscapes made by the four players, with a healthy dose of the extended solos you’d expect from a jazz group. Frequently, during a solo, the other players would chat to each other or wander offstage for a few minutes. But always the flow of the piece remained unbroken.
The percussionist, Marilyn Mazur really stood out – her rack of instruments looked like a huge version of one of those baby’s toys strung across a playpen, and she did seem to have a lot of fun. She was the only one of the four to smile much, and she definitely had more zip, vim and vigour than the other three all put together.
Legend has it that Art Pepper, in the midst of one of his habitual drink and drugs binges, picked up his saxophone for the first time in months and recorded this classic album with Miles Davis’s rhythm section.
Maybe not true, but a great story. Certainly his playing seems pretty sharp, but still you can imagine there was maybe the odd bottle of gin around during the recording. I’m certainly no expert, but this is an album that’s hard to dislike – good jazz standards with a mellow feel, by top players. It’s fun to listen to this and remember that the man who played this pleasant music had a lifestyle that would put Ozzie Osbourne to shame.
Beautiful, yet slightly unsettling, late-night dreamy sounds. Her languid vocals and the Twin Peaksy music just surround me and make me forget about everything else.
This album goes perfectly with a quiet midnight, dim lighting, and half a bottle of red wine. It evokes the disorienting moments of calm when you return home after a long night out. I could just get lost in it.
Lisa Germano used to sing with a group called OP8. They were good; this album is great.
This is a great CD. The Pancakes music is somewhat minimal, and the lyrics tend towards the bittersweet, but I just can’t get enough of these catchy hooks and fun melodies. It’s cute, but not at all too cute.
The Pancakes is a one-woman band: the music shows a great DIY ethic, mostly just voice, synths and guitar with no production trickery at all. It might be a bit lo-fi for some, but it all fits the lyrics and delivery beautifully. And the song Martin has been playing on endless repeat in my head for the last two weeks.
This CD comes with a second CD called Friendcakes, consisting of cover versions of Pancakes songs by other, even less well-known performers. I haven’t yet listened to it because I don’t want to take PCP out of my CD player…