Resistance is futile

for me when I read the back cover of THIS BOOK -

:: Seeking ::

Qualified applicants looking to build their careers on sand.
Requirements: a bachelor's degree worth a fraction of the debt you've incurred.
One to two years of clerical experience working for a harridan who has sucked your very life force.
Fluency in at least two major jargons.
Primary responsabilities include: figuring out just what we've hired you to do; working closely with no one for clients we'll never identify.

Don't you love trashy pop-lit half based on your life?

I'd like to apologize if this blog degrades into a humdrummy rant about life as a lowly radio programme asst. in the near future - ie. the rest of 2004 and 2005.
1.5 weeks and already it's getting to a point where work = life. Hmm.

How Teddy Ruxpin ruined my so-called life

Funny how one of my fav toys from when I was 6 or 7 can ruin my beautiful breezy Saturday morning as a fully-grown adult. Ever since I started my new job as a programme assistant at HK Commercial Radio, I've been needing to dig up long forgotten Hongkie culture trivia for the "Street Smart" game segment of the show. On Friday, the boss said we needed more questions for kids who phone-in, and told us on a whim to look up Cantonese nursery rhymes. Of bloody course no one on the research team remembers any of them in whole. It's easy to say,"Why don't you Google it then?" But we've been verbally banned from using the web - apparently that makes our pea-brains retarded (anyway that's another story)

So at 7 am, Saturday morning finds me (I now work Saturdays too damn it) rummaging through my bro's drawer filled with antique cassettes from the 80's. Ha! I thought... treasure trove filled with nursery rhymes. Off to the cassette deck at home. I open the cassette cases. Teddy Ruxpin on the air balloon. Teddy Ruxpin rescues Grubby the catepillar from the mud monsters. Teddy Ruxpin does this and that. ARRRR! All but two were actually nursery rhymes, but the cassette wheels just refused to move inside the tape deck. Screw my college degree, I now need to dig out lyrics from nursery rhymes.

So, if you happen to live in HK, and are even vaguely curious about what is that I now do (tho not at all well) for a living, tune into FM 88.1 every Mon - Fri 3-5pm for "Yau Yee Banzai" (sort of translates to "Friendship Forever") For those who don't live here, they stream it on the web... sorry, Cantonese only. You might even hear me on air as a super-irrelevant cameo type.

There's bad, but here's worse

They ain't telling tall tales when they say you gotta be careful what you wish for, 'cos you might just get it. A few weeks ago I babbled something to my mum about becoming an apprentice cook to a friend of her friend, a well-known local DJ / food critic / celeb chef / columnist; then all of a sudden, I magically find myself working as a programme assistant at a major HK radio station this morning. Little did I realise how I walked away from a mildly frustrating Office Space type situation at Christie's, straight into radio production hell.

I got myself into this mess, and I can't blame anyone but myself for it. Let's see how, or if, I'd ever get myself out of it. The silver lining to this cloud is that I might, if I'm still alive (not skinned and boiled alive) by April, get to go report about my boss's insane attempt at the Marathon des Sables, a 250 km crosscountry marathon in the Sahara desert. Moral of the story? Blessings almost ALWAYS come mixed.

Growing up and Selling out?

UPDATE: [11/24] Wahaha. Christie's actually retracted their offer and filled the opening with someone else, since I took two whole long weeks to tell them I'd take the offer. *Phew!* I've been spared from corporate slavery!

One reason to make this legit: I put on 5 lbs since I started my intership. Imagine what will happen if I work there for 2 years...-> 80 lbs of extra blubber =o

Want to die at the prospect of having to wear a suit, or any article of clothing that can make me look like an OL (Office Lady) for the remainder of my living years. As of now my alma mater hasn't yet taken me back to the womb of her endless corridors as an employee. Which means I'd have to accept Christie's offer, my one and only in the past 6 months, and stay in HK, servicing people with too much money to know what to spend it on.

Say goodbye to idealism and wave hello to cruel reality, CY.

In uni profs taught kids like me to look forward into the future and do great things that benefit many. Now I'm gonna have to learn to look backwards (as if I don't do that often enough already) and start studying old, antiquated, sometimes dilapidated things that only a small minority appreciates.

Tadao Ando x Louis Vuitton

exhibit at the Mori Art Museum in Roppongi Hills, Tokyo, as yet another celebratory act for the 150th anniversary of the world's most counterfeited monogram. It didn't occur to me that cool architects too, like household-name artists, can collaborate with luxury brands on projects other than flagship store designs. Well worth exchanging that hard-earned mileage for...

Universal Symbol of Brands: Louis Vuitton travels beyond time and space ルイ・ヴィトン 時空を超える意匠の旅

Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Osaka, 10/2 - 12/25;
Mori Musuem of Art, Roppongi Hills, Tokyo, circa 1/21...

Not so Haute anymore?

After Todd Oldham, Cynthia Rowley, Isaac Mizrahi, Matthew Williamson and a whole generation of late 90's UK designers, Karl Lagerfeld too is jumping onto the crossover bandwagon of chainstore collaborations. This November sees a post-diet, Hedi Slimane cladded Lagerfeld dallying with H&M. The result? Sleek silhouettes decked in black and white, reminiscent of 80's New Romantics / androgyny. Not exactly groundbreaking stuff, but good enough for office wear. I have to say the chi-chi ad for the collection is a whole lot dirtier and a hella more exciting.

Update: [12/2] Word has it that KL pulled out, after H&M insisted on producing the line in larger sizes. KL refused to compromise his designs for the non-stickmen population.

The only reason to live in the States. Right now.

Bridget Jones, single working Everywoman, Western femme-dom icon is returning to the big screen on Nov 12th.
How long I wonder, will it take to reach these shores?

Nostalgic for not-at-all-bad Brit food

Am direly craving for a proper Sunday roast after accidentally catching BBC's Food Heroes: Another Helping, hosted by Rick Stein. Why wasn't roast pork with apple sauce so cracklingly good looking back in my boarding school days? Saliva glands continued to work hard as he piped up apple pancakes with custard and cider =d Hmm custard... perfect comfort food.

Will now be haunted by visions of pork chops (note to HKers: of the edible kind), roast beef, lampchops, Yorkshire puddings, roasted potatoes etc until I find a place in HK that serves all the works the proper British way. For tomorrow at least, I'd have to make do with a full-on, full fat, full cholestrol "high fun yeen" [shredded crab feast] at Lau Yuen, as a mini self-consolating gesture for turning one year short of a quarter century old. *deep sigh at the rapid aging process*

Goods of Desire:

Worked till I dropped yesterday & today, as Christie's HK is holding auction previews till Sat., then auctions on Sun and Mon. Being an intern with not much to do (or rather, an intern so inexperienced that she's unfit to handle fired clay worth a cool US$ 2.5 million) I happily sneaked into the 20th c. Chinese art, Asian contemporary art and SE Asian painting sections, rooms that were more my natural habitat. Unaware that art can instill that strong, impulsive desire to own the way designer fashion does, my heart pounded when I caught sight of the works below. Purely love at first sight.

Boats at the Beach by Indonesian artist Srihadi Sudarsono.
This is something I can look at forever, especially at the end of a long day. Rothko meets the Impressionists. And oh so out of my price range. *deep sigh*


Anchang Village, collage sewn with denim scraps by Korean artist Choi So-Young. (Born in 1980?! She's the same age as me!) *feelings of incompetency creeping in*


The Grain - Chest by Korean artist Kim Duck-Yong, collage with wooden blocks and bronze locks inlaid.


Iron wire sculpture imitating crackled celadon ceramics, by Korean artist Cheong Kwang-Ho (Wow I'm "discovering" a whole nation of talents here)
Now I'm tempted to prod / blackmail / guilt trip my dad into buying the cheapest works ("Hey I never asked for a graduation present, and I'm never gonna pass the driving test..."), or even digging into my own savings... *red finance siren lights flashing*

In the name of Art?!

Interning for approx US$ 8 per working day. Either faxing / "film queen"ing by the photocopier / filing / cutting and pasting old catalogue pictures onto cardboard sheets for archival, or worse, polishing windows on knees for entire afternoons before auction previews. Earning less than the Filippino maid at home. All this after spending US$ n00,000 on tuition. *despair*

The trouble with living in a high culture vacuum

is that whenever anything of vague significance takes place, the whole town flocks to see it. This past Sunday, I joined other fellow sheep citizens to see Picasso's Parade, a mofo-sized three-storey-tall painting (or rather, to put it correctly, a ballet theatre screen) , the artiste's largest known work, displayed in all places, at the IFC mall next to a bunch of high end cosmetics and fashion stores. (Seeing how the average HKer never sets foot in a local musuem, wouldn't it make more sense to display it at a newish mall that needs a major attraction?)

Word had it that Pompidou only shows the work once in 20 years, and never before had it been shown in Asia. The queues were long. The tickets for a guided tour were sold out through Monday. The popularity of the event raised my expectations.

I was quickly disappointed. The work is far from Picasso's best; inspite of its size it's definitely no Guernica. It looked like the work of a starving artist, trying to earn some extra pocket money. (Though Picasso couldn't have been too starved, since this was his Rose Period.) The fact that I had to elbow through crowds of people just to see the bloody painting didn't exactly enhance my art-appreciation mood. Everyone had their cell phones and digicams out, snapping away. (Wouldn't a Picasso make a great cell phone wallpaper?) Security guards yelling at people taking pictures with flash.

Damn, have some respect for art people!

Heck, I'm a tourist too.
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The Andrei Tarkovsky Filmfest is on.
And it conveniently coincides with Christie's auctions, the only time that I'd be really busy during my internship. Hope I won't be too dead after work to catch this.

Team America:

As recommended by my bro. Looks like a fun, silly, piss-taking ride.
(Apologies to Stateside folks, I now live in the Land of Narrower Bandwidths: little contact with Internet -> delayed news. Ya know, Fahrenheit 911 is only just released on these shores.)

Sam Hui, the People's hero 許冠傑 人民英雄 :

Thanks to me mate Peaks' generosity, I finally got to see Sam Hui live in concert, 12 years after his retirement. With 40 odd sold-out concerts and a total audience of 420,000 (that's 7% of HK) , there can be little doubt that Sam Hui's still the King / Godfather of Cantopop. And for a 56 yr old singer who hasn't publicly performed in more than a decade, he did a damn fine job, singing almost non-stop for four hours (making this the best valued concert I've EVER been to.) In stark contrast, his 40-yr-junior guest stars Cookies , Cowgirls (wtf?) and his Barbie-like students merely highlighted the fact that HK aint making popstars like we used to.

If Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui were relics from the 80's decadent, lavish excesses, then Sam Hui must be the icon for the 70's tougher times. Sam and his two brothers almost singlehandedly invented Cantopop, with their folksy numbers and cheeky lyrics throughout the 70's and 80's. Their songs about economic hardship, droughts, shanty towns and salarymen's daily grind made the grassroots' voice heard. For a post Asian economic crisis and SARS stricken HK, there is no better soundtrack.

Thumbs Up:

* The whole "family affair"-ness of the concert -
Little did I realise how sorely I missed the Hui Brothers' unique s.o.h. : cheeky without being too offensively crass, witty and smart in their not-too-high-not-too-low way. Even Stephen Chow 's "mo lei tow" movies pale in comparison. Sam's two sons Ryan and Scott are particularly to be applauded for not being embarrassed about performing with Dad in front of a stadium jam-packed with 12, 000 people.

* The goodie bag -
Love the cheap and cheerful small red white and blue polystyrene bag, (the type that amah's and Filippino maids use when they go home) packed with equally cheap thrills: a giant rubber band, glow-in-blacklight paper boat, a miniature Sam action figure, whistle and all.

Thumbs down:

* The guest stars -
They sucked. Groups of 4 and 16 girls singing off pitch does some serious goosebump spiking. And with 16 voices you can't even hear what they are singing. Not even qualified to be backup singers.

* The leopard costume theme -
on a 56 yr old can be a bit strange. Oh well, he's Sam and we HKers love him anyway, however weird his dress sense.

Movie watching... the old skool way

Rewatched Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 classic, Battleship Potemkin last night. This time round, instead of watching the Soviet silent film in a cramped classroom with popcorn being passed back and forth, I watched it in a concert hall with live music: Dmitri Shostakovich's symphonies 5, 10 and 11 played by the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. With heroic bits of brass and drums rolling, the experience was electrifying, to the point of being almost religious. * At the triumphant end of the film I was almost tempted to shout, "Workers of the world unite!"

Wonder if Stalin would turn in his grave if he knew the Communist films he commissioned would be viewed by "bourgeois" concert-goers in an age when consumerism dominates?

* Though my parents thought otherwise - saying that the film was super-Communist (it's a propaganda film to start with) - and sporadically dozed throughout the film.

Gonna stay

in HK till Thankgiving at the earliest, as have decided to do a non-paid internship at Christie's Hong Kong, just to see their upcoming auctions, learn about their operations and what not. Think I'd be working in the Chinese Ceramics dept... not as exciting as say, Fine Jewellery or Watches and Clocks, but it sure beats being unemployed. So I'd be donating myself to the elitist bandwagon, to serve over-priviledged high society types for the next 1.5 months. Just hope my malcoorinated self doesn't break any heirloom-type treasures.

Movie magick:

Woah. Still mildly star-dazed from meeting two heavy-weight names in the HK film industry today. Thanks to Auntie Linda, sister to Vincent Kok Tak-Chiu (comic actor / director / producer) , I got to meet Hai Chung-Man, of art direction / costume & production design fame in hits like Three Extreme: Dumplings, Golden Chicken I & II, and erm... The Twins Effect @_@ [that trashy vampire movie with Twins?! I guess ppl have to make $ one way or another]

Half way through the meeting, Peter Chan Ho-Sun walked in (I was sitting in the conference room of HIS production co. afterall) I was even briefly introduced to the director of Comrades: Almost a Love Story and He'a Woman, She's a Man. I even caught sight of thick scripts for upcoming projects sitting on the table: Perhaps Love, a musical of some sort (wonder who will be the lead singers?), and Waiting. In today's quality-film-starved HK, I'm sure I am not the only person waiting to see these in cinemas.

Hope this won't be the end of the story... when when when will it be my turn to break into the movie-makers' hall of fame?
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Finally.
Gonna see 2046 tonight, as I'm done with mad porfolio compiling, interviewing, making calls and all other job-hunting errands for the day.

For a sneak preview, I hopped over to TST to see some costumes and props used in the movie, on show at a local mall.

Bai Ling's cheongsam, worn by Zhang Ziyi; Carina Lau's paper-like android costume


Props for Mo-Wan's makeshift study in Room 2047

People Mountain People Sea:

Popped up to Guangzhou yesterday. Was overwhelmingly crowded (roughly 3x the flow in Mongkok or Causeway Bay) as it was the National Day long weekend. Being pushed by and shuffled along the flow of a slow moving 10-million-strong human trampede can be overbearing after 5 mins - but now I know why EVERYONE wants to break into that Chinese market.

Irony spotted - A sign at the HK-China border on the Shenzhen side reads: "Let's make Shenzhen a civilised model city for modern socialism." Hmmm... where are the signs of socialism in this skyscraper-cladded, HK-wannabe city?

The jade and antiques market


"Old Comrade" brand tea brick (note: comrade = gays and lesbians in Cantonese); circular tea bricks




The old Guangzhou town center