All of Hong Kong

One Immensely Long Post on Hong Kong… written mostly in the air between Vancouver and Calgary… trying to catch up with my life here…

Arrived in Hong Kong to a series of gorgeous days. What an amazing city.

We went between two hotels… one a total budget place run by the Sally Ann in the Kwonloon side of the city, and then splurged on two nights (Xmas eve and Xmas night) in a plush Marriot on the Hong Kong Island side. If we hadn’t gone for the budget hotel I’m not sure we would have spent as much time on the Kwonloon side and I’m so glad we did…. (Ayiee… slightly distracted here as I’m writing this in Vancouver airport and the nightmare screaming kid is sitting across the aisle… two young parents literally on their friggin knees begging and desperately negotiating with the totally confused little boy to persuade him to drink a warm milk from Starbucks… nothing like watching the modern dysfunctional family playing out its games right in front of you)

Anyway… Kwonloon is total beautiful madness and also a poorer part of the city (the higher you go, the more breeze, the less pollution, the richer the houses…)



We wandered the streets, visited the night market, ate fried oysters and green onions on the street, visited the fisherman’s temple with its hanging coils of incense, walked down towards the port and then suddenly and completely ran out of energy, overstimulated, confused and exhausted (kind of like the little boy across from me) in the huge lobby of the Hong Kong scouting association, bizarrely enough sitting under an immense picture of Baden-Powell…











The pollution is kind of terrifying – We got the ferry across the next day and the lovely blue mist obscuring most of the city is actually throat biting smog. Both of us had a scary coughs by the third day there. I don’t know if its heavy industry, or the cars, or the immense harbour or what… but it’s a huge physical aspect to the city… like the rain in Vancouver, or the cold in the Yukon… it feels like something you really have to learn to cope with. Though, everyone else seemed oblivious… so maybe you just learn to ignore it… maybe that would be the healthier option mentally… otherwise it would just scare the hell out of you…








I didn’t expect to feel so comfortable here. But maybe its simply leaving Japan and arriving in such a mixed up, multi-racial, changing city. Although Japan never ceased to amaze me, and the almost every single interaction I had with the Japanese left me delighted, still, I left with the feeling that it was a very alien culture: the streets full of drunken salary-men at 10pm, the red light districts squeezed in between the historic neighbourhoods, the lack of many nationalities (saw about 5 black people in 6 weeks there). Hong Kong, like NYC, has everyone in it and every language on the streets. And, also a bit like NYC, everyone there seems plainly dedicated to making money. So perhaps it all made a little more sense to me. And, ultimately, any city that builds 80 story buildings with Bamboo (bamboo!!!) scaffolding is mad enough for me….






On the 2nd day in Hong Kong we realized that there is really not much to ‘do’ in the city, but an incredible amount to see. So, I had the excellent idea of changing our tour schedule to focus not on sights and historic monuments, but on really great great great restaurants…. for the next three days we were guided by a couple of food guides to the city, and by our own noses, to series of amazing food temples…. Schezuan, Cantonese, Dim Sum, Congee, Noodles, Dumplings, Street Food, Classy Food, Fast Food… I think our best meal came in a tiny 3 table restaurant where there was zero English and my ordering technique consisted of a great deal of smiling and pointing at amazing looking things being delivered to tables around us…. Luckily that seemed to result in both amusing the waitress immensely, and having piles of food arrive from the tiny kitchen…








It was a great trip, the view from our last hotel was spectacular





and on one of the final nights we wandered around looking for some where to have a drink and stumbled into an Australian Bar (dedicated to the criminal Ned Kelly) and caught the last set of the South China Coast Jazzmen… looking mostly Indonesian, these guys were headed by the 80 year old trumpeter (and in this video dancer/percussionist/singer/rubber chicken player and all around party animal) Silverio Yaneza, who is dancing up a storm in the back row. They were pretty loose (but hey, it was the last set of the night and they’ve been playing there for 20 years) but still he rocked and gave us a great send off to an amazing trip…

all over

the tour finished a week ago, but couldn't resist posting Lisa's picture of the final number from the show..just before the lights dim and the spots come up. Did two shows at the immense Tokyo Hall (where U2 performed) in Shinjuku.





I'll miss the sparkle and glitter of Broadway ... and look forward to starting work on a few of my own projects in Toronto...

Kyoto Temples

Was lucky to be in the huge Buddhist temple, Chion-In, in Kyoto when one of the monks was chanting. Don't know enough about Buddhism to say if he was praying, or reciting, or asking for good fortune or what... but it was very very beautiful, so I clicked my camera to record and that's what on the backing track for this walk through of the temple. The centre was founded in the 1200's... the main building dates from the 1600's.. the formal garden from the same time... it's just amazing...

Wackyhabira

Walked a long way through the insane Electronics district Akhihabira. The shop fronts literally scream at you as you walk down the street with high pitched 'look at me', 'look at me' voices and sounds.

We were sort of vaguely looking for the prices of used laptops. But based upon some kind of attractive noise Lisa wandered into a store which turned out to be a holy mecca of geekdom. 7 floors of insane Manga figurines, statues, icons, do-it-yourself projects. Lisa bonded with the large Gerbera (star of many cheesy japanese 50's movies... he must have destroyed Tokyo many times over)





the strangest floor was the dolls... hundreds of obsessive perfect dolls of superheros, children, people, and naturally manga girls with massive breasts and outrageous weapons.













The boxed up ones were strange enough... but the hundreds of DIY packets lining the aisles were strange and somehow very sad, waiting in their little plastic packages to be given some kind of life.

Japan seems to encourage a lot of fetishistic behaviour... I won't begin to speculate much why... I'm sure there are a lot of post-grad thesis written about it... and the whole floor of dolls and fetish objects (some that come with a Birth Certificate!) seem to sum it all up... The store was filled with single lumpy, mostly male but not all, japanese geeks poring over their preferred obsessive object.

Art Heaven

When I headed off to the Mori Museum of Contemporary art I didn't realize exactly where it was - I had the address but when they lead me into a hallway and opened an elevator door I didn't realize I was going to the 53 floor of the brand new skyscraper. Typical Tokyo... playing with your mind and your expectations at every possibility... It's an amazing building, made all the more amazing by a monumental sculpture by Louise Brooks that faces the entrance: it's called 'Maman'. Somehow oddly appropriate, to have this huge pregnant spider in front of a building that houses mostly international law and finance offices...





I saw an exhibition of new 'avant-garde' (whatever that means... surely they're basically the same thing now) Japanese art. Some absolutely extraordinary work. Perhaps its something to do with the Japanese character, but the work that most impressed me was the work that seemed very based on craft. A photographer had constructed the most beautiful tiny objects - a series of slides of related images that were placed one a top each other. They were lit from beneath and you would stare down into these tiny constructions of layers and layers of transparent photographs.... incredibly tiny, but a quality of depth and time that was remarkably beautiful, reminded me of the English landscape artist, Andy Goldworthy.





along with the entrance to the museum came a walk around the viewing platform on the floor below. Tokyo is an awe inspiring, and rather frightening sight... it just stretches out to infinity... oddly, and I'm not sure the video captures this, around the tower are several tiny graveyards wedged behind new buildings... Brian Eno seemed to be good choice for a soundtrack for the view

words words

so now I'm sure these bastards are just playing with my mind....ya wander through Tokyo for hours and and there's nonsensical english everywhere and they lull you into the idea that nobody here really speaks the language much, and they throw it up right left and centre in these absurd ads... and then suddenly 'wham' they hit you with these....

this is the sign for a restaurant in Shibuya district,(click on the image to read the fine print) and the next is the name of a high end jewelry store...






cunning devils they are...

Sonic City...

they build 'em big over here...





and this sucker is tucked snugly into the immense Sonic City centre in Tokyo...





a great show... after weeks on tour finally nailed the damn tap number... smile fixed to my face, heads up to back row... clicking my little heels across the tap floor... didn't fall over not once... even at the new rather blistering tempo... t'was a good night...

Some of these Days

and one more clip from the concert in June. Thierry Tardieu on drums, Benoit Gil on guitar, Remi Amblard on piano....

tokyotokyotokyo

So we're back in Tokyo at the Crowne Metropolitan again. 3 weeks on the road went incredibly fast, and now I'm back in the same hotel with the bizarre feeling of coming home to a place that seemed so incredibly strange 3 weeks ago. Tokyo is soo incredibly insanely big. Big doesn't seem to describe it... it just goes on and one and everything is huge and everything is immense. And for some reason as we drove in there was an immense fireworks display over the highway. It was kind of a 'lost in translation' moment as we drove in on the 2nd down level of a three level highway that is actually built on top of a river, so the legs dig into the water and overhead, or at least what we could see over head, there were spectacular fireworks going off...

..greeted at the door with a 'Welcome Back' from the doorman and we all wandered out to our favourite restaurant in the neighbourhood. (Sesame ramen noodle soup with roast pork and spinach...yeah!)So I'm home... strange how quick the strange becomes comfortable. We even arrived on the same night as the two buses of Russian Opera singers who we ran into in one of the smaller towns touring a production of Carmen... so the hotel is overrun with neurotic Broadway singers and dancers and even more neurotic Russian opera singers.





Today was in the immense hall at Yokohama. So I finally managed to get to Old Yokahama... it doesn't actually look that old anymore...




but it has amazing docklands and if we'd had more than 15 minutes before the show to check it out, perhaps we would have found the oldest largest chinatown in Japan and the old foreigners graveyard from the 1800's.





The show was great!... packed hall and many encores... the tap number was particularly invigorating... we asked the conductor to pick up the tempo a bit since we know it quite well now... so it moved along at quite a clip..

obligatory

did a show in the shadow of Mt. Fuji...

Vacant Lot...

So Lisa arrives in a couple of weeks and I've been trying to describe how for every 13th Century temple there is also a whole city that frighteningly resemble a not very glorious suburb of Toronto or Kansas City... It's odd: the modern Japanese city seems like almost an absence of architecture... but on the other hand they do urban living spectacularly. The urban spaces are populated and busy and clean and exciting. These ugly buildings might be taken over by 6 different restaurants and clubs - each taking up one floor. So the actual components of the urban space can be really ugly...but they all work really well together... so... here are a few photos for Lisa of Nagoya in all its glory...





Nagoya was bombed flat in the war and they replaced it with this sort of anti-city... most of the downtown streets have shopping malls built beneath them (even thought the climate is pretty mild) so the streets are basically deserted at all times, but malls are packed... it's very odd (there's that word again)
and then they have the mega-projects...







honestly couldn't get out of Nagoya fast enough... but it was very interesting...

fuzzy big hall

Had time to take two terrible pictures from the stage of Japan's third largest theatre - the Sakai Shimin Kaikin Centre in Nagoya - before my camera battery ran out.





amazing space and great show... though, to be honest, I still find it unnerving how well behaved the audiences are. A packed audience and they are so quiet and still during the show and then at the end they go wild, sort of 'on cue'. We've been told to wave goodbye to them so the cast all wave goodbye and you have two thousand people out there waving merrily back... kind of heart warming, kind of odd....

I seem to use the word odd a lot in these blogs from Japan...

The Best Noodles in Hammamatsu

green tea ice cream in a tube... it's cool... ish

tatami dressing rooms in Nagoya

Again, a hot night in June

finally getting around to editing some video footage Lisa shot of the concert with my quartet at the 7 Lezards in Paris last June. This is the lovely ballad, 'Again' taken from a rather seedy gangster movie of the 40's. It's a gorgeous tune but not too well known... it hit the top 10 three times in the 40's and 50's...

Puns or parody

At first I thought the Japanese were just doing daft things with the English language, but after wandering by clothing stores with names like 'Double Standard Clothing', and 'Injeaneas' and the cocktail bar called 'Bar:ah'ghe' I'm now wondering who is playing semantic mind games with whose language... I may never know... here's a few of my favourites so far...

first the fine 'girl about town' store....



the wonderful and tempting sports drink...



the pickled tidbits store



possibly my favourite and possibly most inexplicable...



nothing much to say apart from 'me too'



and who can argue that when it comes to advertising canned cold coffee that two Tommy's are better than one