Singapore

We went to Singapore for a couple of days at Easter. As it happened the hotel we wanted wasn't available and we ended up at the Carlton, which is right next to the new Singapore Management University. This was of interest only because a few years ago me and a classmate, Connie Chu, won a competition to design an art installation for the SMU Library which was funded by Li Ka Shing.

We were originally set the competition brief as an assignment for a typography course and after we had completed it we thought we might as well submit it to the competition as we had already done the work anyway, and we won.

The original design was a large-scale interactive installation (the competition theme was 'Knowledge Reshapes Destiny') where people walking onto the space generated ripples of knowledge in the form of quotations which floated down to reshape the cityscape. The design was technically ambitious and would have been expensive to implement so it was no surprise that when we met the representative of the competition organisers (a well-known HK artist) he said that they liked our design but wanted to explore some alternative ways to implement it. Weirdly, he suggested a mosaic, which is perhaps the dumbest way to implement an interactive installation you could imagine.

Anyway, we went away and spent a lot of time researching other ways to implement the installation that overcame the technical challenges and were low maintenance but retained the interactive element. Most of them were cheaper than installing a mosaic. At our next meeting Mr W asked straight away to see 'the mosaic'. It became clear that the decision had already been taken that the installation would be a mosaic and he wasn't at all interested in the other designs so we rattled off a mosaic design and hoped that we would be able to meet the real decision makers at the site visit we had been promised and change their minds. Of course the site visit never materialised, we never met the organ-grinder, and after some time the installation size and location was also changed at which point I lost interest in the whole thing and pretty much forgot about it.

So when I ended up in a hotel next to the SMU I thought I'd wander over and have a look. Four things struck me about the completed installation:

1) Yes, it's a freakin' mosaic.

2) I guess you could get some limited sense of the original intention of the piece if you step onto the 'ripples' but of course they have put pot plants at either end of the mosaic to discourage even that limited 'interaction'.

3) They have, of course, changed many of the quotes we had originally suggested (in fact, we had originally suggested that there be an input terminal so that students using the library could input their own quotes but we knew that was never going to fly in Singapore). The quotes were from famous thinkers and philosophers but only three thinkers were deemed to be sufficiently important as to warrant more than one quotation, the great thinkers Aristotle, Einstein and ...err, Li Ka Shing, sponsor of the library.

4) The mosaic is pleasant enough but could have been done by any interior designer; why did they bother inviting people to create artwork if that's all they wanted? They could have saved everybody a lot of wasted time by just asking an interior designer to make a mosaic for them in the first place.

HK-Live

C went to China for an exchange trip so me and the missus took the opportunity to make one of our periodic attempts to recapture our youth and went to HK Live at the Fringe Club. There are usually three bands at a HK Live gig and of course you can usually count yourself lucky if one of them is any good but I have to say that this time it was a pretty solid event with three contrasting but excellent bands; Poubelle International, local band The Lovesong and The Bigger Bang from Beijing.

Poubelle were a good contrast with the more serious Lovesong, playing a tight, relatively lighthearted set of short, crisp songs. Lovesong were excellent and more intense and serious. Although I couldn't make out what he was singing (you know what these young people are like) the lead singer was clearly concerned about something and it was good that he got it off his chest. Gratuitous sarcasm aside, they were great. Last up was the Beijing band The Bigger Bang. Somewhat charmingly, the young lady on vocals was so nervous about her first appearance in Hong Kong that she had gotten completely pissed before coming on stage (don't Beijingers know that nowadays we're the ones who are scared of them?). Anyway, they took a little time to get going but by the end had got into their stride and even managed to get the crowd sufficiently excited to get a bit of what I believe the young people call a 'moshpit' going, led by the young lads from local band Inisfallen if I'm not mistaken.

Yes, we have no cojones

This quote is from our President top business tycoon, Li Ka Shing, in today’s SCMP:

"Hong Kong needs to be strong," he said. "Don't waste energy on unconstructive things for Hong Kong. For Hong Kong, the most important thing is that we have the support of our mother country. The individual visit scheme from the mainland has contributed greatly to Hong Kong. Whatever our country can do for us, they have done so."

“Unconstructive things” here of course being shorthand for troublesome ideas like democracy, anti-cartel legislation and anything else that might stop Ah Shing and his mates stitching up Hong Kong for their own benefit which is then followed by the usual brown-nosing towards Beijing.

I’ve never been able to understand the mentality of shameless brown-nosers like Li Ka Shing, Alan Zeman etc. I have no problem with the fact that they’ve made a bob or two, fair enough. I also understand that they might have been tempted to do a bit of brown-nosing in order to get business deals early on when they were starting out (unseemly though that is). What I don’t understand is how there doesn’t come a day when they say to themselves, “I’m doing OK. I’ve got $x billion in the bank, my family is provided for, I’ve got more money than I can ever spend, surely I don’t need to publicly shame myself with incessant toadying anymore, it’s time for me to be a man! And if I don’t get the next backhander construction project from Beijing, fuck ‘em, I can afford it!”

But no, however many billions they amass they keep on sucking up to the powers that be, slagging off democracy and publicly disgracing themselves so they can have a few billions more. What is that about? What is the point of having all those billions of dollars if you still can’t even afford to buy yourself a pair of balls?

Advertising

A year or two ago I had to knock up a quick TV commercial as part of a media course I was doing and the TVC below for a book retailer was the result.

Walked into Dymocks the other day and this was playing on their in-store TV, pretty much the identical concept.




Either a case of great minds think alike or small ones never differ I guess.

The Trouble with Bob

I've been listening to well-regarded musicians whom I've never really been into and trying to listen to them with fresh ears so I've listened to some of Bob Dylan's stuff recently, in particular the albums The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. Whilst there are undoubtedly some great songs (see music player below) I find it really difficult to listen to more than one or two Dylan tracks in a row. This is not so much because of the voice, but because of his phrasing. He has this annoying vocal mannerism of stretching out one word in a line (usually the second last or last word). Whilst this is fine for a single song; repeated song after song as it is on an album like Blonde on Blonde (regarded by many as Dylan's greatest album) it quickly becomes tedious in the extreme. Try as I might I just can't get past being fundamentally annoyed by Bob.

Chomsky & Foucault

I read 'The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature' several months ago and meant to post something about it but never got round to it, so I'm probably a bit hazy on the details by now, but the idea is the same.

The main section of the book is basically the transcript of a discussion between the intellectuals (for want of a better word) Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, followed by some further related articles and interviews. Chomsky and Foucault have some superficial similarities, they are both intellectuals of the left who seek to engage in politics, but the discussion in fact shows how fundamentally different they are in important respects.

The debate starts with their respective backgrounds in linguistics. I'm no linguistics expert but Chomsky's view, extremely simplistically, is that people have innate language abilities. Foucault on the other hand is from the French Structuralist tradition which prefers to see language as a structure which limits and determines the thought of individuals rather than something that individuals use creatively to express their ideas. Structuralism is in this sense the philosophical grandparent of the PC movement. This leads into their views on human nature, with Chomsky believing that people have innate creativity and Foucault sticking with his structuralist framework. Whilst the discussion remains about linguistics and human nature the differences seem primarily to be about technical intricacies but as soon as the discussion moves onto politics the discussion becomes more heated as the implications of these philosophical differences become clear.

The political differences can be shown clearly in this exchange.....

FOUCAULT: But I would merely like to reply to your first sentence, in which you said that if you didn't consider the war you make against the police to be just, you wouldn't make it.

I would like to reply to you in terms of Spinoza and say that the proletariat doesn't wage war against the ruling class because it considers such a war to be just. The proletariat makes war with the ruling class because, for the first time in history, it wants to take power. And because it will overthrow the power of the ruling class, it considers such a war to be just.

CHOMSKY: Yeah, I don't agree.

FOUCAULT: One makes war to win, not because it is just.

CHOMSKY: I don't, personally, agree with that.

For example, if I could convince myself that attainment of power by the proletariat would lead to a terrorist police state, in which freedom and dignity and decent human relations would be destroyed, then I wouldn't want the proletariat to take power. In fact the only reason for wanting any such thing, I believe, is because one thinks, rightly or wrongly, that some fundamental human values will be achieved by that transfer of power.

FOUCAULT: When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite possible that the proletariat will exert towards the classes over which it has triumphed, a violent, dictatorial, and even bloody power. I can't see what objection one could make to this.

For all Chomsky's faults, and they are many, he starts from a fundamental position of valuing the human individual. For Chomsky, unlike Foucault, individuals have an intrinsic value, they are not just blank pieces of paper to be shuffled, re-arranged and re-written in a structuralist re-arrangement of society, not to be valued or despised purely because of their position within a theoretical social framework.

Although the book is subtitled On Human Nature I think it is a recognition of human value rather than a particular view of human nature that is important. Indeed, a rigid view of human nature, and an attempt to re-shape human society and the individuals within that society to conform to it, can be one of the more dangerous political positions, whether it is Hitler's view that some people were naturally masters and some naturally slaves and we'd all be much happier if we just accepted this, or the Marxist closed society where individuals can be free and happy only if they conform to a constrained view of human nature.

It is the valuing of the human individual that, for me, is of fundamental political importance, rather than the old-fashioned differentiation between right and left. Connections can be made with people who have innate respect for individuals wherever they may be on the political spectrum. Avoid the people-haters, on the other hand, at all costs, whether they be of the left or right.

The Dog

It's always a sign that a blog is going downhill when the writer starts posting photos of their pets, but there you go.

For years my daughter pestered me to get a dog but I always refused - our flat is too small, it's too much trouble etc. - but a couple of years ago I finally relented. I have to say that now there are few things more pleasant than taking the dog for a walk up Mount Parker on a Sunday morning. When I don't have time to go up the hill I now take the dog to the new dog adventure playground kindly provided by Swire outside their new office block development in Tai Koo Shing, complete with open strips of grass and swimming facilities.

Of course, dogs are not actually allowed there as the facilities are just for looking at but we usually get about 20 minutes of entertainment for both the dog and passers-by before we get kicked out, and with a cheery 'See you tomorrow!' to the security guard, we're off home.

Astronauts, Judges and Feckwits

Wasn't in the best of moods today and then made the mistake of having a look at the front page of the South China Morning Post which was a veritable smorgasbord of feckwittery.

First up was the main headline "Astronauts confident HK can weather financial turmoil". Hard to know what aspect of this headline is worse. Is it the fact that the CCP sees fit to insult our intelligence with the kind of 'patriotic education' that the astronauts' visit represents (patriotism of course meaning for the CCP our continued acceptance of the rule of a bunch of corrupt fascists rather than the more common meaning of love of one's country)? Or is it the idea that we are taking economic advice from freakin' astronauts? Or is it rather that the SCMP is so far up the CCP's arse as to go along with the idea that this kind of PR bullshit represents some kind of news story?

Next to the astronaut story was the story about your friend and ours, Judge Pang, chairman of the Electoral Affairs Committee and also chair of the Advisory Committee on Protecting Institutionalised Corruption (or the Advisory Committee on Post-service Employment of Civil Servants to give its official title) recently in the news for approving the former housing director's application to work for a property developer he had made some rather unusual arrangements with. This time he made a ruling in favour of overturning a magistrate's conviction against a manufacturer for operating unsafe machinery and then forgot what he had ruled in his written summing up and argued for the opposite. The key sentence in the article was "It said no action would be taken against Mr. Justice Pang." We're surrounded by feckwits I tell you.

Under the article sharing the sage words of the rocket-driving economists was an article praising the fact that Beijing was moving towards a free market because it was using a slightly different system of price-fixing for fuel.

Finally, the page was completed with an advertisement for a freakin' watch with the tagline "Introducing the first talking watch from IWC: it says everything about its owner." Now don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against people buying nice things but the idea that buying an expensive watch says anything about a person other than "I've just bought an expensive watch" requires a particularly shallow and simple-minded kind of feckwittery. So if you wish to purchase a watch that says "I'm a stupid feckwit" IWC would seem to be the brand for you.

Here endeth today's rant, I feel much better now.

Stevie Wonder

I've been on a bit of a music binge recently and have been exploring some musicians that I've never really been into and trying come to them with fresh ears. First up was Stevie Wonder. I've been listening an album of his early stuff and three of what are widely regarded as his 'classic period' albums; Music of My Mind, Talking Book and the double album Songs in the Key of Life. His upbeat, positive stuff is great. He can take something as seemingly cheesy as a paean to his new-born child -Isn't She Lovely- and make it work where for anybody else it would collapse under the weight of it's own schmaltz. Other songs like I Love Every Little Thing Thing About You and Sir Duke are similarly upbeat and effective. And of course he can do proto P-funk stuff like Keep On Running with his eyes closed (so to speak). Where it all goes a bit pear-shaped is when he tries to 'educate' us and it all gets a bit pompous and bogged down in tracks like Love's In Need Of Love Today, where Stevie reveals that he has discovered that love is a good thing and is really much better than evil, which I'm sure comes as a revelation to us all..

City Speak IV

I went to the forum City Speak IV the other day and gave a bit of spiel about Freedom Ball which seemed to go OK. The forum was organised by Paul Zimmerman at Designing Hong Kong and was particularly interesting as they managed to get a diverse range of speakers discussing issues around the regulation of public space, including representatives from the government, hawkers, market traders, academics, activists and street performers. Part of the reason for the forum was the upcoming review of hawker licensing by the government.

One of the things that struck me about the debate was the number of times that the discussion started to revolve around whether we should support or discourage different 'kinds of people' (hawkers, street performers, etc) rather than direct discussion of the issues and problems that might or might not need regulating. This was particularly true of the government discussion paper which talks about the types of problems that hawkers (and particular types of hawker) tend to cause, with the resulting recommendation that licenses be granted/phased out for this type of hawker.

Personally I feel that when we do need to regulate then the regulation should be as minimal as necessary to get the job done and should directly address the issue rather than dealing with generalised groups. For example, the government feels that hawkers tend to create hygiene problems and uses this as a reason not to issue hawker licenses in general. If hygiene is an issue then it would, in my opinion, be better to draft legislation that directly addresses hygiene and apply this to everybody equally whether hawkers, restaurants or five-star hotels.

Another issue, which I've posted about before, was the contradictory way the Hong Kong government expects people to take responsibility for themselves rather than relying on government handouts and a welfare state in the economic sphere and yet regulates them to death in other areas.

Room Full of Mirrors

I've been reading Charles R Cross's biography of Jimi Hendrix; Room Full Of Mirrors. As a biography it's OK, it's pretty detailed and does what it needs to do. As you read it you realise just how short Hendrix's career was. Hendrix released his first album (Are You Experienced) in 1967, two more studio albums (Axis: Bold As Love and Electric Ladyland) in 1967 and 1968 respectively and it was all over on 18th September 1970.

Are You Experienced? was no.2 in the UK charts that year (the year I was born). It was only topped by Sergeant Pepper, regarded by many as the greatest pop album ever, so I picked up a copy of it. Quite frankly, it's a bit cack really. I mean, there are some nice jingly-jangly little compositions and all, but nothing of the power and emotional impact of other great pop artists recording during that era like Hendrix, Marvin Gaye etc. Then again I've never really understood what the appeal of The Beatles was, all their stuff is pleasant enough and there's a lot of it but there's nothing that really grabs you by the balls.

Reclaiming the streets

I went up to Sham Shui Po to visit Cally and her friends doing their letter writing project the other Sunday. They write letters and draw for people to help reclaim public space for non-commercial use and to give people in the community a chance to communicate and have their stories heard. Their project touches people in a way that is deeper and more personal than many social activist projects.

Cally also suggested I have a look at a community-based exhibition in an abandoned building in Sham Shui Po whilst I was there. The exhibition was organised by, for and in the community. There was lots of information about individual people and families in the neighbourhood but one of the common themes that stood out for me was the way that the government often just negatively impacted on peoples' lives and livelihoods. People who weren't asking for help but who were struggling to look after themselves and their families had the rug pulled from under them by government officers obsessed with 'tidying things up'. From changes to hawking regulations, refusing new licences for dai pai dongs etc the government on the one hand says that people should look after themselves, which to some extent is fair enough, whilst at the same time taking away the means for the poorest to do so. At the same time of course it uses large amounts of public funds to subsidise and 'support' its friends in big business and in particular the large property developers.

One example of this spiteful approach to the poor is the story of a man who had previously lost his job and home. He ended up on the streets but he managed to construct a small plywood box to live in in a backstreet. Government officers came in and destroyed it whilst he was at work, took his few belongings including octopus card etc, left no contact details so that he could reclaim his possessions and offered no assistance in finding alternative housing. A purely negative impact on a struggling person's life. If they can't or won't do anything constructive they should at least leave people the hell alone to get on with their lives.

More balls

The SCMP have said that they will run an article about the Freedom Ball project in the Sunday paper tomorrow so pick up a copy!

Freedom Ball

Just a quick link to the Freedom Ball project I've been working on recently. If you want to get involved in challenging the rules that Hong Kong parks and other public spaces let me know!

Freedom Ball