Palin comparison

Two eXile-related snippets today that help us better understand the sewers of American politics.

First, a viciously wonderful excoriation of the joke candicacy that is Sarah Palin, courtesy of Matt Taibbi (ex-eXile, now Rolling Stone):

Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she’s the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV – and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.

And secondly, a mischevious could-be-true accusation that Cindy McCain is a thieving junkie, courtesy of Taibbi’s former partner in grime, Mark Ames:

As any drug counselor or drug cop knows, when you see eyes like Cindy McCain’s, the first thing you do is throw a blanket over her, cuff her, and haul her off to the drug lab. And once you’ve got her name and license, the next thing you do is find out if there is a history of opiate abuse.

Welp, it just so happens that there is. Back in the late 1980s, at the height of the “War On Drugs,” our future First Lady was deep in the throes of junkiedom.

Forget Newsweek and Time; these are the journalists you should be reading to get a clear insight on the Presidential campaign.

Hong Kong cultural heroes

Okay, so it’s maybe a conflict of interest, but I can assure you the total revenue I get from this blog is precisely $0.00. And Time Out Hong Kong is paying me nothing to post this. I just happen to think that the magazine’s new Heroes feature on its website is especially cool. Click on the names to see the fun, and don’t forget to add some comments if you disagree with the magazine’s choices.

Goodbye to a great thinker

Today I read for the first time some writing by David Foster Wallace. My friend Chris sent me some links to DFW’s work following his suicide. I read two pieces, and both impressed me deeply. Let me excerpt two passages that were particualrly meaningful to me.

First, from his speech to graduating students at Kenyon university in May, 2005.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

And this passage, from an essay published in Gourmet magazine titled Consider the Lobster, written after DFW attended the Maine Lobster Festival, helps to explain why I’m a part-time vegetarian.

The more important point here, though, is that the whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue is not just complex, it’s also uncomfortable. It is, at any rate, uncomfortable for me, and for just about everyone I know who enjoys a variety of foods and yet does not want to see herself as cruel or unfeeling. As far as I can tell, my own main way of dealing with this conflict has been to avoid thinking about the whole unpleasant thing. I should add that it appears to me unlikely that many readers of gourmet wish to think hard about it, either, or to be queried about the morality of their eating habits in the pages of a culinary monthly. Since, however, the assigned subject of this article is what it was like to attend the 2003 MLF, and thus to spend several days in the midst of a great mass of Americans all eating lobster, and thus to be more or less impelled to think hard about lobster and the experience of buying and eating lobster, it turns out that there is no honest way to avoid certain moral questions.

There are several reasons for this. For one thing, it’s not just that lobsters get boiled alive, it’s that you do it yourself—or at least it’s done specifically for you, on-site. As mentioned, the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, which is highlighted as an attraction in the Festival’s program, is right out there on the MLF’s north grounds for everyone to see. Try to imagine a Nebraska Beef Festival at which part of the festivities is watching trucks pull up and the live cattle get driven down the ramp and slaughtered right there on the World’s Largest Killing Floor or something—there’s no way.

I’m sad that DFW took his own life. And I’m sad I only discovered him today.

Groom service and how to enjoy Macau

I just learnt how to groom males. Or I assume that’s what the male grooming workshop I attended was all about. Wine? Cigars? Shaving? I got the inside story. And I didn’t even have to change out of my T-shirt. It was for work. Stay tuned to find out more.

I also got some free wine.

Speaking of which, I totally pwned the MGM Grand Macau on Sunday night. Ostensibly my two mates and I made the trip to Sin City to check out a one-day music festival. When that turned out to be an exercise in patience-testing mediocrity, we decided to hit up some local food and gambling instead.

First I dominated on the roulette table — dropping a lazy HK$500 and walking away with a cool, crisp HK$1,350 — and then my friend and I milked the free booze system while playing the 20-cent slots. I lost $80 on those but earned three glasses of white wine and a whiskey. Meanwhile, my friend fought back from a humiliating $200-in-two-bets loss at roulette to break even on the night, thanks to some major pay-out from Blazing Sevens.

Gambling pays — I got lots of these things just for putting little plastic discs on a table.

So, here are my tips for a good and, more importantly, cheap night out in Macau (even on a Sunday):

1. Enter a casino
2. Go straight to the 20-cent slot machines (which are, I’ll point out, a step up from the 10-cent machines)
3. Only spin one line at a time, ensuring that $20 gets you 100 turns and maximum gambling time
4. Order wines repeatedly, until the servers stop coming to your part of the room
5. Repeat at another casino

The way I see it, you’re paying for cheap wine and getting to gamble for free.

A series of handsome elections

Apologies for that last post. It was, in retrospect, rather offensive. I will never subject my readers to Cantopop again without prior warning. All I can say is that I was under the influence of alcohol at the time of writing.

For readers outside of Hong Kong, that song — if we can be so bold as to call it that — has been dominating the pop charts and in-bus televisions for weeks now. It is typical of the prefabricated, soulless, offensively bland, paint-by-numbers tripe that passes for music in this city, which on the whole is too lazy, too conservative, and too willing to just do what it’s told to seek out anything different.

In saying that, rogue lefty politician and irrepressible man of the people Long Hair unexpectedly won back his LEGCO seat (again for non-Hongkies, that’s the elected part of the quasi-democratic government we have here) seat in fine style last night, while seeing the demise of the Tycoon-friendly Liberal party’s leader James Tien. So perhaps there is hope.

On the subject of elections, it is a rather exciting year for me. Not only can I watch with obsessive fixation as the vile Sarah Palin, just two years ago a librarian-tormenting mayor of a village the same size of my petit home town, and her aged crony Mr McCain take on the glorious saint Obama, but I can also work up an academic excitement about a New Zealand election that is somehow becoming a real fight, just when everyone thought the ruling Labour party were done for. And to complete the awesome foursome of my chief places of interest, Canada will go to the polls soon too.

Crank up the geek, baby.

Ladies nite, that’s celebration

If you only have three minutes and 19 seconds left to live, spend it watching this video.

Didn’t we just go through eight years of this?

It is a vile lot who draw joy and inspiration from the lowest trough of humour in the human mind at a time when there are world leaders to elect. But if snarky Sarah Palin can only throw stones at Obama with grade-school sarcasm, without bothering to discuss policies (but perhaps that’s because she has such massive ideological differences with her eminently more reasonable running mate), then I can only look forward to seeing her flailing on matters that actually require the engagement of the brain during this campaign.

Lamma, I loved ye once

Soon after moving to Lamma in July 2007, I wrote a story for Asia Sentinel singing the sleepy little idyll’s praises. The following paragraph from that story sums up the extent of my delusion at the time:

To step off the Yung Shue Wan ferry from Central is to be forcibly relaxed. The gentle breezes at the pier carefully brush off the stresses of the city, the waterfront seafood restaurants offer the best and freshest in the SAR and the many accessible trails take walkers and cyclists to quaint villages, pretty beaches, and summits that afford views of vast stretches of ocean and skyscrapers on Hong Kong Island.

I’ve come a long way since then — all the way to Sham Shui Po, in fact, where I now live in the middle of urban cacophony, negotatiating slow walkers and construction sites after I disembark the crowded MTR on my way home. For the past two months, I have been living in a place that costs twice as much to rent, is in a building with a lift, and from which, sitting here comfortably in my bed, I can hear all grinding gears and heavy wheezing of the taxis, the buses and trucks bustling along one of the city’s main arteries.

Strange that I should feel such relief, then, to be free of the carless, carefree, quiet and cheap Lamma Island.

Lamma to me was like a girlfriend that was never meant to be. Things were great, as long as I saw her only on weekends. In those heady moments, we would nuzzle each other’s necks, gently bite each other’s soft flesh, cradle each other to sleep. We would get rioutously drunk together, only to wake up in the morning and walk off our hangovers in the hills, overlooking the vast promise of the expansive blue ocean as the breeze blew soft whispers in our ears. We would canoodle by the seaside, cavort on the rocks, splash in the shallows — and even play with puppies at the animal welfare centre.

But slowly it fell apart. As the days slipped by and we became too comfortable with each other, we started to discover sides of each other we weren’t so keen on.

The ferries: How disheartening is it to end your work day by boarding a slow boat with sloping-down, hard-plastic seats that only serves to take you further away from most of your friends? (Thank goodness for those who remain that this problem has been partially rectified with a more sensible ferry timetable that has cast the hard-seated ferries into oblivion.)

The age difference: Where were all my young, spritely counterparts, full of energy and ready to embrace Lamma’s natural wonders? (And no — they weren’t at the pub either.)

The drinking problem: Why should it be a matter of course that the same five men can be found snogging a pint outside the Tinhead every day after work during the week? Why is it considered normal to walk past the Spicy Island at 9am to see men drinking Skol at a table while they watch the morning ferry crowd march off to work? And shouldn’t we at least once question the wisdom of the pint-plus-one rule for the homeward bound boat every day?

The rumour mill: How can it be that in a city of 7 million, there still lives an enclave of depravity where an elbow touch can turn into a hug can turn into a kiss can turn into a fuck can turn into a full-blown affair? I grew up in a small town where everyone knew everyone and fell into the same, predictable routines while feeding off the romantic notion that it’s wonderful to know your neighbour (and even more fun to know about their dirty laundry). I don’t want that for adulthood. At least, not yet.

It’s at this point that Lammaites can rightfully start slinging shit my way. Many on the island are still so enamoured with her many charms — her relaxed disposition, her free, giving ways, her natural beauty (despite some farily ugly, chimney-esque blemishes), her way with children — that they’re happily oblivious of her unbecoming side. Fair play to them. As I said, I was in love with her too, once. She just turned out to be the girlfriend who was never meant to be — and I’m happier to be free of her.