"My whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm, jumping from stone to stone. Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the swirling mainstream of life, but I always find myself drawn inexorably back towards the chasm's edge, and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall into the abyss."
Spend several months in full-time Chinese studies, culminating in an immersion experience and a failed attempt to pass the HSK
Discover that you can learn all the Chinese you will ever need from taxi drivers
Start dating a Chinese girlfriend/boyfriend, and find yourself railroaded into marriage in under a year
Invest in a bar or restaurant
Have your bar or restaurant stolen out from under you by your Chinese business partner
Divorce your Chinese spouse (who was probably your errant business partner, or one of their relatives)
Open a t-shirt shop (as being the only kind of business small enough for you to have a chance of being able to set it up without a Chinese partner/spouse)
Forget almost all the Chinese you ever knew, apart from the swear words (which provide most of your t-shirt slogans)
Make enough money to retire back in your homeland, but then find that revaluation of the renminbi has taken 30% off the value of your savings (and/or that the bank has frozen your account because, as a foreigner, you have no truly valid form of ID in China)
Get yourself arrested on your last night in China for some minor drunken indiscretion such as spitting in public or urinating in public, and spend another big chunk of your savings bribing the police to release you
I've been consulting on a new boutique hotel here, to be called simply The Inn.
It's going to have a number of bars and restaurants, including a Japanese-style whisky/cocktail lounge, styled with a teahouse vibe. I've suggested that they have occasional performances of traditional Japanese theatre forms like Noh, Kabuki, and Bunraku.
Just so that we can call it... Noh Room @ The Inn.
I'm sorry. This is the kind of thing that teems through my head as I rise from my fever dreams. Not well at the moment.
I can't believe I hadn't posted this before. Could have sworn I did years ago. Ah well, better late than never.
Here's The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me); Tom Waits letting his hair down with one of his more humorous numbers - although the imagery is as clever as always ("the newspapers were fooling, and the ashtrays have retired"): the greatest lyricist of our times, and also, as he demonstrates here, a comedy genius.
This is a marvellous 1977 performance from Fernwood Tonight, a short-lived spoof of a talk show on a local TV station that starred Fred Willard and Martin Mull as an inept pair of presenters. These are two major comic talents, but Tom more than holds his own with them.
You can also listen to the original version of the song from his 1976 Small Change album here(one of my very favourite albums of his, one that I played incessantly during my last year at university).
And this is an inspired rambling riff on the number from a Dublin concert in about 1981, later released on the Bounced Checks anthology album.
In recent years I have found - with a vague sense of shame - that my favourite 'Christmas songs' are these two bad taste classics from the South Park Christmas special.
Here are Satan and Adolf getting festive down below.
And here's Mr Garrison displaying his cultural sensitivity.
Nearly a year ago, I mentioned in passing that I had once been involved (behind the scenes rather than onstage) with a school band called Ded Lemming. I wrote most of their lyrics; but, seeing as it is over 30 years ago, I have - perhaps fortunately in most cases - forgotten nearly all of them now. I can't even remember many of the titles or subjects.
Only two of these songs still persist in my memory. One was inspired by a Classical reference (I specialised in Ancient Latin and Greek in the 6th Form, and at university - a quirk of my personal history which has come up on here before once or twice). The celebrated Athenian playwright Aeschylus died, according to legend, on a visit to one of the Greek colonies in Sicily in the 450s BC, when he was quite elderly. It is said that the eagles in those parts were especially fond of eating tortoises, and would break open their shells by carrying them high aloft and then dropping them on to round stones. Aeschylus's bald pate was apparently mistaken by an eagle for a suitable tortoise-cracking rock. Oh boy, I found that a compelling image, and I had long wanted to try to write something (I probably originally aspired to something far more serious and poetic!) about a great writer's brains being dashed out by - and mingled with - the squished innards of a tortoise. When my friends briefly formed this punk band, I found myself penning a jauntily manic number for them on this theme. I'm sure nobody but the handful of Classicists in the school had a clue what it was about; most people just thought it was an engaging nonsense song. The chorus (I don't think there was much to it apart from the chorus) went:
Never thought that I would wind up lying out here dead,
Lying in the baking sun - with a tortoise in my head,
Tortoise in my head, tortoise in my head, tortoise in my head!
You think that's grotesque?! Well, that was as nothing to our 'greatest hit'. I created a sort of catalogue song which imagined a situation most of my mid-teen schoolmates were familiar with - being left at home alone for the first time by our somewhat mistrustful parents, and being given a long list of rules we shouldn't break (which, of course, we tended to find unduly provocative, and would often treat more as a list of suggestions). I think the idea started off as a fairly straight depiction of this parent-teenager confrontation, but then I started taking it in a wild and surreal direction. The verses had a two part structure, beginning with two lines from a nagging mother issuing prohibitions (our singer did a particularly good - vaguely feminine - anxious whine for this), and then another two of her bratty son sarcastically mimicking her with more bizarre examples of the creatively evil things he might get up to if left unsupervised (the singer did an even better mocking sneer for these bits). The distinction between these two parts became blurred, as the mother's anxieties escalated, and she began to imagine more and more terrible things that her son might do (and her son found it harder and harder to outdo her in his perverse responses). I wish I could summon this back from the void of oblivion; I have a feeling that it was one of the best things I have ever written - in any genre.
Anyhow, I remember the chorus (very catchy!):
Be a good boy, Johnny. Now, see you behave.
And don't put kitty in the microwave.
Don't put kitty in the microwave, don't put kitty in the microwave.
[After a while, we recorded the 'ting' of a microwave finishing its programme, and started using that to give the song an abrupt ending.]
For a final entry in this 'Music Week' (although I'm still playing catch-up after a week of problematic Internet access, hoping to insinuate a few more posts into empty slots earlier in the week - so keep an eye out lower down the page), I thought I'd review some of my slightly more left-field enthusiasms, the musical predilections that people tend to find a bit surprising about me.
A Top Five Unexpected Musical Weaknesses
5) Early rock'n'roll
And the cheesier, the better! I'm not quite sure when I developed this vice. I suppose I must have had some exposure over the radio when I was a kid, but there was none of this good stuff in my parents' record collection (their tastes were very, very middle-of-the-road). I imagine George Lucas' American Graffiti must have been an important influence; that soundtrack album was probably one of the first (of many) '50s/'60s anthologies I acquired over the years. The Shangri-Las Leader of the Pack epitomises all that is so wonderful - and terrible - about this area of music: cheesy as all hell, yet an utterly irresistible singalong. Here's a 1964 TV performance of the song - ropey sound quality, but worth it for the visuals, especially the hilarious depiction of Johnny the motorcycle rebel. [You can listen to the album version here.]
4) Henry Rollins
How can anyone not like Henry Rollins? He's so loveably crazy! But sensitive and literate with it. I like quite a lot of American music out at the more punk-ish edge of things (Dead Kennedys a favourite during my college days), but Rollins' work has more depth to it than most of these. Here's the Rollins Band doing Next Time. [Audio only, unfortunately. You can also check out a live video here: terrible picture quality, but a fun performance.]
3) Country & Western
I mentioned my susceptibility to this yesterday (although I try to keep it hidden around my buddy The British Cowboy, because he proselytises a little too hard). It can be trite and cheesy, yes. But accessibility is not a bad thing. And, thanks to its folk roots, it is distinguished more than most other genres by its tunefulness and its lyrical craft. Hey, beyond just liking C&W, I actually like Canadian C&W. Well, I had a lot of exposure when I lived in Toronto for a year back in the '90s. And the dedicated TV channel there (CMT, I think it's called - Country Music Television) is way better than its American counterpart GAC. This, She's Got The Kind Of Heart That Breaks by Chris Cummings, is one of those earworm songs that got permanently lodged in my head during that year of watching CMT (The Cowboy probably wouldn't even admit this to the C&W fold; too poppy for his taste!). And it's a lovely little video too - a bit of a Gregory's Girl thing going on, with the goofy boys bewitched by the pretty girl who also happens to have superior skills on the hockey rink (so Canadian: they really are all obsessed with ice hockey!). [It's a pity it's such dreadful picture quality (transcribed from a VCR??), but this seems to be all that's available on YouTube at the moment; and likely to be pulled shortly because the record company are such fascists about their videos. As a back-up, here's a nice live performance from 2008.]
2) African music
Like most Brits of my generation, I got my introduction to this field through the wonderful Sowetan township sounds that Paul Simon incorporated into his Graceland and Rhythm Of The Saints albums in the mid-1980s. That led me to start checking out some compilations of '70s and '80s township bands, as well as, of course, the wonderful Ladysmith Black Mambazo choir who had performed with Simon. A little later, Peter Gabriel's Real World record label started introducing me to people like Youssou N'dour, Geoffrey Oryema, Daby Touré, and the Kenyan nyatiti master Ayub Ogada. And a guy I became friendly with while backpacking around Fiji in the early '90s later sent me a CD of Missa Luba, another tremendous choral record by the Muungano National Choir of Kenya. However, the fountainhead of modern African music - as I only started to discover in the later '90s, not long before his death - was Fela Kuti, the mercurial Nigerian who pioneered the 'Afrobeat' sound, a heady brew of jazz, funk and psychedelia infused with native African rhythms. Here's one of his great instrumentals, Expensive Shit.
And here's a live performance from some time back in the '70s. [You should also check out this great little excerpt from a 1971 documentary about him, shot by legendary drummer Ginger Baker.]
But the top spot today goes to....
1) Michelle Shocked
I'm sorry - I'm an über-fan. I was completely blown away by her 1988 debut Short Sharp Shocked, and have bought everything else of hers I can get my hands on since. I saw her play live at the Apollo Theatre in Oxford (unaccountably renamed the New Theatre a few years ago) round about 1990, and it was one of the most enthralling shows I've seen (actually, not wonderful all the way through; she was experimenting with a 'big band' sound that didn't really suit her, and wasn't entirely winning over the audience; but then there was an interlude in the middle where the band left the stage and she played three or four songs solo on her guitar - and that was a shivers-down-the-spine experience). She is, I think, possibly the greatest female singer-songwriter of my generation - and certainly the ballsiest, the most politically engaged.
This song, Come A Long Way, is a particular favourite of mine, one that I often play to pep myself up before heading out for the evening. The beautiful tune gives it a very upbeat feel, although the subject - riding around the soulless streets of Los Angeles all day on her motorcycle to try to avoid having it repossessed - is actually rather downbeat.
An autobiographical anecdotal postscript: In a bar I used to drink at quite a lot during my Oxford days, the student Beer Cellar in New College, they had an entire Shangri-Las album. This was just after CD jukeboxes had started to appear (so, I suppose it must have been during the early '90s, when I was working back in Oxford for a while, rather than when I was an undergraduate in the '80s). I wasn't a member of this college, but a mate of mine had been the elected student Bar Steward there for a while, and I'd hung out drinking with him so often that most of the staff had got to recognise me - and come to assume that I was a member of the college (it was stricter than most in trying to limit access to members only). I was still able to get away with this four or five years later, when I started hanging out there again - this time, in pursuit of a girl! On one occasion, I even managed to persuade them to grant admittance to two of my Oxford Union drinking buddies of the time, passing them off as my father and my younger brother - a somewhat implausible blag, since their ages were ten years either side of mine. But I digress....
Yes, I was fascinated to discover a whole Shangri-Las album - none of which I'd ever heard before, apart from Leader of the Pack, of course. I wasn't sufficiently fond of the group to check out many of the other songs, though. And other punters in the bar were apt to be intolerant even of my frequent selection of Leader of the Pack; I might have provoked a riot if I'd cued up any of their more obscure tracks. Once, I did a bad thing: I succumbed to a sudden mischievous impulse to feed pound coins into the machine until I could select the whole album, 10 or 12 Shangri-Las songs back to back. I never heard them myself, of course; I fled the scene of the crime as soon as Leader of the Pack had finished. And I didn't dare to go back to that bar for quite some time.
Blue Cowbie - a very palatable local brew with which I quenched my thirst down in Zhenyuan - on my trip to Guizhou province last month. The logo is a crude rendition of John Wayne.
I can't think how this can have escaped my attention for so long, but... it wasn't until I visited Guizhou (way down in the far south-west of China) a few weeks ago that I discovered that Yanjing, Beijing's local beer, is an official sponsor of the Chinese effort to reach the Moon.
Does this mean astronauts will be taking beer on the spaceship with them???
Some years ago, I stumbled upon in a DVD store here in Beijing The Best of The Old Grey Whistle Test, Volume 3.
I never got around to watching it. Partly, I think, I was distracted by my vexation at never being able to find any of the other volumes of the series. But mostly I was a little afraid of the tsunami of nostalgia that it might unleash in me - I was waiting for a 'special occasion' to revisit this highlight of my 1970s childhood, one of the best TV music shows ever (I've mentioned it on here before; it used to be on BBC2 on Sunday nights, after M.A.S.H.), and to wallow in the melancholy that this was likely to induce.
I finally found such an occasion a couple of months ago - and the selection did not disappoint. Well, there was a noticeable falling off in the standard of the last few entries from the 1980s (although it was nice to see the great comedy band Half Man, Half Biscuit included, with their warped childhood anecdote All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit), but the 1970s stuff was pure gold.
And in amongst this consistently high quality (Steppenwolf, Humble Pie, Supertramp, David Bowie, Jackson Browne, Stealers Wheel, Freddie King, B.B. King, Janis Ian, Joe Jackson, The Jam - gobsmackingly good stuff), the absolute standout - a shivers-down-the-spine revelation for me - was this acoustic performance of the exquisite love song, A Heart Needs A Home.
Richard and Linda Thompson, I now learn, have been giants of the English folk scene for over 40 years - but they had completely passed me by. I am belatedly quite smitten with Linda; not only does she have a compelling voice, but she is here just radiantly beautiful too (the hippie headscarf notwithstanding). This performance (introduced by the notorious 'Whispering' Bob Harris, an inspiration for John Thomson's Louis Balfour character, the low-talking host of the Jazz Club segment in The Fast Show) is from early in 1975 - a year or two before I started getting into the show, I suppose.
No, the winner of that prize is surely the breakfasts.
Many hotels surreptitiously slip a wad of breakfast vouchers into your keycard holder and levy an additional charge - anything from 15 to 100 RMB per day - without telling you. Check. Complain. Refuse. Even 15 RMB is not worth it.
One of the problems is that Chinese cuisine doesn't seem to have much in the way of specialised breakfast foods: apart from zhou (a very runny rice congee, usually completely tasteless), youtiao (fried dough-sticks that, alas, rather too often taste unpleasantly of the very old and contaminated oil they've been cooked in), and a few types of mantou (steamed buns: inoffensive, but stodgy and desperately bland), you just get the same old stuff you'd eat for lunch and dinner. I love noodles and dumplings - but I can't face them three times a day.
Another problem is that Chinese hotels will almost invariably try to offer a few token Western breakfast dishes (to pander to the fetish-with-the-foreign of their Chinese guests; most of them don't see a Western visitor from one month to the next), without having any real understanding of or sympathy for this genre. Chinese 'breakfast sausages' are peculiarly disgusting, and best reserved for possible emergency use in the poisoning of a dangerous dog.
The real problem, though, seems to lie in the perennial deficiencies of the Chinese service culture - and the associated lack of quality control or effective management supervision. Large-scale buffets are rarely much good, anywhere in the world. But in China, where the staff very often quite evidently don't give a flying fuck, they attain spectacular levels of AWFULNESS. And the breakfast service - where presumably the kitchen staff resent having to be at work so early in the morning and so do a particularly half-assed job - is the nadir. The hotplates and warming trays, of course, never function very well. But Chinese chefs on the breakfast shift seem to take a perverse pride in cooking everything at least half an hour before the service begins, just to make sure that even the early bird guests who arrive on the stroke of 7.30, or whatever, won't be able to find any food that's anything more than tepid.
To set the seal on the unpleasantness of this start to your day, you usually also encounter at least one of those mindfuck oddities of Chinese taste - like mystery fish (fried to the point of carbonization), or fruit salad presented with a selection of mayonnaises.
The only consolation I found on my recent travels (particularly valuable on the morning I was to run a marathon!) was that - presumably in response to this ubiquitous shortcoming of hotel catering - there's almost invariably a very good noodle shop almost next door to a Chinese hotel.
Exceptions prove the rule. At the hotel where I stayed in Shanghai last week, the breakfast was included in the basic room charge, and was really pretty good. The Western options were a particularly pleasant surprise (apart from the sausages, which were the standard-issue condom-filled-with-E-numbers): self-made toast (disappointingly pale; but at least it was good, plain bread, not the sickly sweet stuff you're commonly given in China), decent and very plentiful bacon, and eggs fried to order (though I couldn't persuade the server to add some cherry tomatoes to her pan, so I had to eat those uncooked). A nice experience to end my trip, except... well, the one fly-in-the-ointment on this occasion was that the dining room provided no cutlery. Bacon-and-egg-on-toast is really NOT a chopstick-friendly meal!
I suppose I should have got another slice of toast and made myself a doorstep breakfast sandwich. But bloody-minded pride demanded that I show off my chopstick prowess to the Chinese guests. It got messy.
I have been tempted to enrol Ms Bankhead among my 'Fantasy Girlfriends' over on Froogville, but my attraction to her has only bloomed relatively late in my life, and is based upon what I have learned of her personality rather than her looks - although she was rather striking in her appearance, and she did have an imposing and distinctively husky voice. (I must have seen her in Hitchcock's 1944 film Lifeboat when I was a boy, but that encounter left no enduring impression on me.)
A flamboyant personality, and extravagant in all her appetites, she delighted in flaunting her many vices: she was an outrageous vamp, a chain smoker, a heavy drinker - and completely unrepentant about any of it. In the 1920s, while working on the London stage, she caused consternation in British government circles through rumours that she was sexually corrupting boys from the nearby Eton College, the country's most exclusive private school. On leaving hospital after suffering near-fatal complications from a dose of venereal disease, she quipped to reporters, "Don't think this has taught me a lesson." Her dying words - many years later - were supposedly, "Codeine... bourbon!"
Here's a good brief biography of her. And this fan site includes a complete recording of one of her '50s radio shows, which gives a nice demonstration of her wonderfully 'lived in' voice, and her fine comic delivery.
Yes, there is something about the artificiality of the hotel environment, the exaggerated orderliness and cosseting isolation of the hired room, that incites mischief and debauchery.
No telephone and no Internet make Froog go MAD!!!!
I've had some sucky Thanksgivings in the last few years, but this is way down there with the worst of them. I find I am developing an unhealthy appreciation for Shanghai's "international" TV station (which is, to be sure, way better than the China Central TV one - but that's not high praise). How I wish I had the range of indoor amusements The Statler Brothers found to enjoy!
"I'll stick to gin. Champagne is just ginger ale that knows someone."
Benjamin Franklin 'Hawkeye' Pearce (as played by Alan Alda) in M.A.S.H.
He was, if I recall, turning down the offer of a drink from his snobbish tent-mate Charles Winchester (David Ogden Stiers). I was reminded of this line when in New York a few months ago (it was on a chalkboard outside a bar), and it once more struck a powerful chord with me. Does anyone really like champagne? Really?? I think we have come to like the rituals of celebration associated with it, that it is an emblem of success and happiness. Many people are also no doubt seduced by the cachet of exclusivity: it's too bloody expensive for the hoipolloi. But, honestly, does anyone like it all that much for itself? Or do you find yourself, like me, sucking down one or two glasses as hastily as possible - just for appearances' sake, just because it's free... - and then looking forward to a real drink?
I am no longer a big fan of wine, and I don't much care for bubbles in a drink (I make an exception for tonic water), and I hate snobbery and affectation, and the brainwashing of branding; so, I have a low susceptibility to champagne. But even within this unappealing category of drinks, I think many cheap sparkling wines taste much pleasanter.
Champagne is just a big French scam! Give me a bottle of Cava any day.
The health kick I've been on for the last few months has been ruining my social life. I've lost 20lbs, but I'm also in danger of losing most of my friends.
As I've noted before, vices provide motivation. Without them, life is rather flat.
Every bar is a memory.
And all the memories huddle together for company, so that in my mind it often seems as though every bar I've ever been in is on the same street, or at least in the same neighbourhood; every great drinking session I fondly recall happened on one night, or over the course of one weekend; and everyone I've ever drunk with fuses into a single person, the idealised Drinking Companion.
Sometimes it seems to me also that the melancholy that infuses so many of these memories had but a single cause, an idealised Lost Love.
Some of these memories I will now try to share with the enormous, faceless, blog-munching world at large.
These, then, are the mental voyages of the boozehound Froog; his many-year mission to seek out new drinks and new places to drink them in, to write The Meaning Of Life on a napkin.... andnotlose it on the way home.
Froog is an escaped lawyer - but there is no need for alarm; he is only a danger to himself, not to the general public. An eternal wanderer, he now lives in an exotic city somewhere in the 'Third World' *, where he is held prisoner by an unfinished novel (or, more precisely, an unstarted novel). He spends a lot of time running, writing, taking photographs, and falling in love with women who fail to appreciate him. He also spends a lot of time in bars.
[* OK, I'll come clean: I've been living in Beijing since summer '02.]
