Auto-archaeology

Reading your own writing can be interesting as a way of spelunking one's thoughts from years ago.
For me, the City Girl columns in gou-rou.com are a good portal to my brain circa 2006. I used to write them in a single stream of consciousness draft, going back later to fix typos or work in a joke I'd thought of. Originally this was to capture the airheadedness of the persona writing it, but I did the same when the voice switched to the rather sharper Kitty Yip Kee Wah - I just changed the voice.

I happened to read this one today after looking at incoming traffic stats for the website's archive. Not sure what's going on there. About 50% is clearly a parody of American Psycho, I guess kind of an insider hint at a possible future plotline that never emerged.

I'm not sure if the rest of it has a specific reference point or if it's just a character piece. I thought the 'Rosy Dawn' cocktail was obviously a nod to the Aeneid (and Homer before that) but I just googled it, and it actually is a cocktail.

So yeah, I don't know.

Tortoises all the way down

On Sunday afternoon, CK, Leo and I went to Belcher Bay Park and played petanque on the grassy area there. A jolly time was had by all, despite the best attempts of a local toddler to make off with a boule.

The park was full of parents and kids hurtling about, mainly on the playground area. The grass was also host to an under-8s kickabout with a plastic pink ball and - what I found most interesting - two chaps who had brought their tortoises out for a bit of a walk around. They were the sort of creamy yellow colour one associates with the desert (the tortoises, that is) and seemed to be having a fine time wandering about.

The next day, coincidentally, I was listening to Frank Skinner's podcast, wherein he talked about having worked with a tortoise for a TV production. Tortoises are, of course, cold-blooded. So apparently, if you hold one up to your face on a hot day, its breath will be refreshingly cool.

Maybe we should get one. While not being a portable air-con unit, it could hang out with Dr Watson, our rabbit, and sometimes we could get them to do Aesop's-fable re-enactments.

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The far end of the line

I went to the end of the MTR line on Sunday to practise with my band in a rehearsal room housed, as is common here, in a large industrial tower block. Due to reading Burning Chrome at an impressionable age, I viewed what we found there as something Gibsonian, but our guitarist compared it to an episode from the Grand Theft Auto games -- travelling to a fairly bleak location, where behind the allotted door,  one or more larger than life people go about their business.

This place is owned by a family of Russians whose main business is running a recording studio and events company -- apparently the events business run by the daughter is the profitable part of the business, but she is kind enough to subsidise her parents and in particular her father's love of very loud music. There is an eight-person, marble-topped dining table in the corridor outside the studio. I'm not sure who it belongs to.

The studio rooms are a lot like the way I always imagined the back rooms at TV stations to be in the early 90s -  to get from one room to the next you have to squeeze past colossal amplifier stacks, electrical equipment, and all sorts of machines with lots of dials on them. The recording room houses banks of keyboards and a mixing desk with so many parallel tracks - each with its own array of switches, dials and indicators - that it's hard to imagine one person could operate it alone.

The father of the family is a long-haired man in his 50s, with an extensive musical history and the life stories to go with it. "For 15 years I play rock'n'roll, all across Soviet Union. No matter you are playing for 50,000 people, 200 people, always they give you the same ... thirteen rubles. Maybe eight dollars... Then Gorbachev makes Perestroika, opening up, and I say bye-bye, go to California."

Our guitarist texted me the next day. "This man is a legend and will be essential to our myth-making."

We've joined the middle class by mistake. Are you the farmer?

Decent article in The Awl on Class & the 80s, from an American perspective. Despite the disclaimer early on about manners and shared interests being the class gatekeepers for a culture lacking a monarchy to hand down honours, I don't think the situation was or is much different anywhere else.

Towards the end is a paragraph that I found distressingly resonant:

Those of us who cringe at the thought of offending our bosses and slipping off the career track and being unable to pay interest on our student loans are just as trapped and scared and middle class as the legions of company men Paul Fussell described being shuffled around the country in 1983.

The 'career track' doesn't bother me, but I and many others I know find ourselves constrained in unexpected ways by, if not the trappings of class, at least by the fabled lifestyle to which one has become accustomed. "Why don't you go back to freelancing, take it easy?" people sometimes say to me, making the common mistake of assuming that freelance writing is a barrel of laughs.

The fact is, I would, but my wife's permission to stay in Hong Kong depends on me having a work visa sponsored by a Hong Kong company, so I have to keep working for The Man. And one or both of us would struggle to get residency permission anywhere else in the world. Visa questions seem pretty common in determining the life choices of university graduates who fly economy.

So does money, of course. Move to Thailand or Bali? Yeah, why not. It's idyllic(ish), and cheap. But you'll have to stay there or thereabouts, because you won't have the money to move anywhere outside ASEAN once you've settled in. Since, oh let's say the 1950s, class mobility worldwide has been reduced, and so has actual physical mobility for people below a certain income bracket.

The solution, of course, is to be born into money.

An ocean of violets in bloom

Despite the best efforts of bulk-buying scalpers and Ticketek Australia's unusually finicky postal address fields, yesterday I managed to successfully buy a ticket to see Prince in Melbourne on my birthday this year.

One ticket only, sadly, so I would have to go by myself, which is a little discouraging. Still... Prince!

The other issue is of course getting there without bankrupting myself, so I may end up just selling the ticket on.
But let's see how that goes. It would be a nice trip. I hear Melbourne's lovely.

In a fit of Prince-thusiasm, I created an account on prince.org, as I think the forums there might prove useful.
To do so, of course, I needed to choose a username, and I am quite pleased with mine. It has to be said, though, how does any online Prince-based community go for more than a year without the name "Curious Poses" already being taken?

Potrebbe essere stato un errore

It may have been a mistake to let slip that I can read Italian. Now I am getting all sorts of things sent to me from the Beijing office where [large Italian automotive company] have sent them emails and press release edits in Italian that no one can read.

On the other hand, this is the best workout of my Italian ability since I left primary school (where lessons were laid on courtesy of the Italian embassy, for reasons that I was never entirely clear on).

Minor pleasures department - item 3425

Biting open an all-in-one coffee sachet with your teeth, so that you feel a bit like a Napoleonic infantryman loading a musket while making your morning beverage.