Big Smog

The 2010 Man Hong Kong Literary Festival is underway! We attended our first event this afternoon: an open discussion with Indian novelist Vikram Chandra moderated by Chris Wood, editor of the Asian Literary Review. The Fringe Club theatre was sold out and alive with that warmth and reverberatory sense of collective rumination that only a public arts talk provides. Chandra was as genial, witty, and an eminently articulate as one could possibly expect.

Some observations:

Vikram Chandra holds himself to a regimen of writing roughly 600 words per day. He usually writes in the morning and if he breezes through 600 words and feels that he has another thousand in him, he abstains, knowing from past experience that exceeding his daily limit will leave him with an inspiration hangover that will make the following few days a struggle.

Bombay has an energy that he finds both invigorating and exhausting - like nowhere else he's ever been. While getting away regularly is something that he feels is, if not necessary, very sensible, he soon finds himself missing the city terribly.

In researching Sacred Games, his sprawling critically acclaimed novel of 2006, Chandra befriended a great variety of Bombay gangsters and policemen. Occasionally while writing he would contact a gangster with a specific procedural question, such as how one actually goes about rigging an election, and would receive startlingly detailed instructions regarding cost, man hours, and the various itemised requirements of the job, all of which knowledge obviously derived from regular practice.

Chandra acknowledged that corruption at every level of Indian civic life is so thoroughly institutionalised that it will take decades, if not hundreds of years to eradicate. Or perhaps in some form or another, he said, corruption is simply an ugly attendant of our humanity, impossible to ever truly expunge from the realms of politics and power. He also noted that he's interested in what distinguishes "corruption" from "lobbying", other than legal definition, and went on to illuminate whole fields of grey zone in western political practice.

When asked to give a reading from his book, he admitted with a laugh that his 900 page novel is too big even for him to bother lugging around, and casually unsheathed a Kindle from his backpack and read the opening pages of his book from the device. Hopefully no one in the audience was cynical enough to assume that he had been persuaded/lobbied/greased by Amazon into making public appearances with their flagship e-reader.

The talk closed with a warm round of applause and all left smiling.

You may have heard rumours recently (yes, rumours largely spread by us) that Two Door Cinema Club are coming to town. Well, we can now confirm that the awesome up-and-coming electro-pop outfit are going to make the trip from Northern Ireland to Hong Kong in August.

We reckon they're gonna be one of the big revelations of this year, with their just released debut album Tourist History garnering rave reviews almost across the board. 

Details:

Two Door Cinema Club, Tuesday August 10
HITEC, Rotunda 3
Stay tuned for ticket details.

 Want to hear some Two Door action? Check out this 

The 2010 Hong Kong Arts Festival is under way, and so is our coverage. Check our website daily for new reviews.

Here are two reviews to get you started.

Animal Farm (theatre)

Cafe de los Maestros (tango music performance)

This weekend, features editor Hamish, his girlfriend and I headed out to the Sheung Luk Stream in Sai Kung to revisit the waterfall at Kap Man Hang (which we've covered before, here). Unfortunately, the water was low and there wasn't much in the way of water falling. The river level was below the concrete slab at the top of the waterfall, so we decided (read: I convinced my friends) to continue up the relatively dry riverbed to where it meets up with a trail I spotted on a map earlier in the day (I swear, I really did see it).

The trail is rough at points, there are a few spots where we found ourselves clinging to brush to cross over water, hence a regular line of questioning of, "rate your anger on a scale of 1 to 10" to my friends. There was also the unspoken fear of snakes.

As it may seem like you're wandering out into nothing, the closed-in valley and rough trail, most of which is jumping from rock to rock in the river bed, makes for a really great hike.

Unfortunately, the last bit ends with climbing up the 30m waterfall by the reservoir, which isn't difficult in dry weather but you'd be screwed if it was wet.

The last bit is relatively easy: keep scrambling up and follow the concrete access stairs on the south side of the river and you'll be delivered back to Sai Kung Sai Wan Rd after a short hike up and over a hill.

As for us, a great time was had by all – as shown in the photo below.

Thanks to Chris Lusher for the photos.

Attracting an eclectic, yet vibrant crowd of suits, international school kids, locals, expats and general lovers of treadmill geeks, OK Go played a sold out first-time gig in Hong Kong last night. As soon as the band took to the stage, the energy at Grappa’s rocketed; one enthusiastic youngster got so excited he climbed onto the stage twice to crowd surf, only to end up eating floor both times.

OK Go kept the crowd happy with their geeky charm, with frontman Damian going into the crowd to serenade us, and even inviting one lucky girl to rock out with them on stage.

The crowd went mad when the band played Here It Goes Again (sadly, sans treadmills) and other hit singles Get Over It and Invincible, which came at the end of an extended encore.

Other memorable moments included What to Do, performed with hand bells, and an audience-sing-along rendition of new single This Too Shall Pass. There were no awesome dance moves, treadmills or marching bands, but the band kept it geeky by donning LED blazers and laser-emitting, feather boa-ed guitars for the spectacular encore.

A great, intimate gig. Let’s hope they’ll make a return visit soon.

Update: Oh, and we should have mentioned -- OK Go were brought to Hong Kong by the excellent folks at The People's Party.

[This post has been update with pics]

Ed's note: We've invited the friends from our Date Our Friends feature to post to this blog in order to help you learn more about them. The first person to take up this opportunity is Amai Tran.

Date Amai Tran!

Amai describes herself as a simple girl who enjoys a simple life. She's looking for friends first but is hoping to start a family one day, too. She was born in Vietnam to Chinese-Vietnamese parents but grew up in Spain before moving to Hong Kong two and a half years ago. She speaks Spanish, English, Cantonese and Mandarin.

She's into socialising and interesting conversation, and loves music, friends, karaoke, cooking, personal growth, languages, cultures, travelling and dancing. Says Amai, "I like doing different things, and learning how to do them well. I am passionate about what I do, if I do it, because learning with the openess of a child is what makes things in life beautiful. Life is just a game, and I like enjoying it!"

Favorite quote: "What you focus on, expands!"

Her perfect match is (and she knows it's a long list!) someone who is: active, energetic, playful but serious (depends on what we are talking about), positive, with deep thoughts but easy going, reliable but independent, understanding and affectionate, family oriented, responsible, sincere, honest and with similar values, well educated, international, versatile, healthy (taking care of his soul and body), open minded, someone who knows himself well, and how to improve, or be willing to.

Date Amai Tran!

The speed pounding record was brought down hard and fast today as mochi master Mitsuo Nakatani got his hands under the hammer and gave it his best. The fruit of Nakatani's labours was a soft kusa mochi in the shape of the Chinese character "fu". The green deliciousness was spread around the crowd, offering all a taste of the mochi master's hard achievement.

Master Nakatani's record today was a beating of 0.5 seconds, pounding the previous record of 1 second. The Japanese pounder founded the cake shop Nakatanidou (in Japanese), that delivers goods so delicious, "that customers in and out of the country are greatly attracted."

Here's the man in action

Ed's Note: Our resident Super Bowl expert presents this blog post about his favourite aspect of the annual sporting spectacular.

For those of you that follow that other kind of football (you know the one that actually allow the use of hands), then yesterday was your Holy Grail. Super Bowl XLIV came and went with the Drew Brees-led New Orleans Saints defeating the juggernaut of Peyton Manning and his Indianapolis Colts 31 to 17. The still recovering city of New Orleans gets its first championship while Manning might have hurt his legacy by yet again choking on the biggest stage after throwing a costly interception that was returned for a touchdown.

But just as important as the game itself (maybe even more important to some) are the ads that run during the game. These 30-seconds spots are heavily coveted by advertisers as the game is watched by an estimated 150 million viewers. So it’s easy to see why they cost millions of dollars. This year, the advertisements ranged from the funny to the thoughtful. There was a scare of a nationally televised commercial against abortion starring superclean, college football superstar Tim Tebow that turned out to be nothing more than but his mother talking about her famous son. Without further ado, here are the best of the bunch from this year.

The Google Search ad

The Bridgestone ad

The Dove for Men ad

The Bud Light ad

The Tim Tebow ad

Fun fact: Although companies spent as much as US$3 million (HK$23.4 million) for an ad in this year’s Super Bowl, that’s not even close to being the world's priciest advertisement. That distinction goes to the 10-second slot just before midnight on Lunar New Year Year’s Eve, during China’s Spring Festival Evening Gala, which costs a ginormous 52 million yuan (HK$59.2 million). In other words, almost HK$6 million per second.

It's Friday evening, so you don't care that this isn't relevant to Time Out or Hong Kong. It is, on the other hand, relevant to awesomeness. These photos were taken from space by astronauts. Rad, no?

The Maldives

Earth and the moon

Mt Kilmanjaro

Follow the astronauts astro_jose and astro_soichi on Twitter!

See more at io9.

The gentleman pictured above is speed-pounding. This is a practice we were unaware of, until receiving a press release that stated the following:

Yata Department Store welcomes Master Mitsuo Nakatami (中谷充男), founder of Nakatamidon (中谷堂) in Nara, Japan, for a mochi speed-pounding performance on 9 and 10 February, 2010. Master Nakatami is to perform a special demonstration at 12 noon on 9 February. Free tasting samples will be given out then.

And here we were thinking speed-pounding might be something else...