a baker’s dozen

I will soon be going to the UK for the summer, and I thought that posting some of the thousand or so photographs that I’ve taken in Hong Kong since last October would be a worthwhile exercise. The original intention had been to select ten photos, but I couldn’t decide which three of the thirteen photos below I should leave out. I’ve already posted some photos taken during this period to illustrate other articles, but the images below are unconnected to anything posted during the period in question.

All these images have been enhanced in some way, by cropping, increasing the contrast, boosting the colour saturation and/or changing the tonal balance, and each block of text below refers to the immediately preceding photograph.

Wayside shrines are a common sight in the Hong Kong countryside, but most are more substantially built than this one, which does seem temporary. It is located opposite the road junction shown in the fourth photograph in Journey to the West: Part 3. I cannot name any of the figures.

Herons and egrets on the Kam Tin River. I deliberately tried to make this photo look like an ‘artist’s impression’ of an upmarket housing development. The low buildings closest to the opposite bank would be the most expensive, followed by the mid-rise buildings immediately behind (note the penthouse apartments). Those proles who have been persuaded that home ownership is a good idea live in the high-rise blocks to the right of the photo.

A decent sunset is a rarity in Hong Kong nowadays. The sun usually disappears into the murk 30–60 minutes before it is due to set. This photo was taken from the roof of my house, which is located a short distance to the east of Fanling.

update: 13/05/14
Torrential rain isn’t always an entirely negative event, although driving on the expressway was a nightmare earlier today. However, the rain also washed the accumulated filth from the atmosphere, resulting in a much more spectacular sunset than the one I originally posted:

This photo shows mainly lesser egrets on the bank of the Sheung Yue River (there are two grey herons and one greater egret towards the left of the lineup).

I spotted this caterpillar on a concrete post behind the Tang Chung Ling Ancestral Hall. If anyone can identify the species, I would appreciate their feedback.

A bronze dragon and phoenix on the top of a joss stick holder in front of the Tin Hau temple in Sai Kung. In this arrangement, the dragon represents the male principle and the phoenix the female.

This picture, taken on the Kam Tin River, shows five black-winged stilts, but the bird on the left appears to be a different species. However, if it really is a different species, why are the other five birds standing with their backs to the interloper?

I’ve found cycling along ‘the frontier road’ to be quite a surreal experience this winter, with almost unspoiled signs of nature in the foreground and a wall of modern buildings in the middle distance along the entire length of the road (this is Shenzhen, on the other side of the frontier). I had always thought that herons were solitary birds, but there are thirteen in this picture in close proximity to each other.

This is the descent from the footbridge leading to the snake path (Journey to the West: Part 4). It could also be a gateway to another dimension.

Question: are these cattle, oxen, or buffaloes? There is one that Paula and I always look out for at the head of the Shek Sheung River as we cycle home. It appears to have been left to its own devices, and although plenty of grazing is available, we more often see it wallowing in the mud in the river. Anyway, We started referring to it as a buffalo, and that’s what we still call it.

We encountered this pair mooching about in the undergrowth on the side of a relatively quiet road during the Kam Tin section of one of our ‘journeys to the west’. Initially, I assumed that they must have strayed from unfenced land behind them, but note the wall. These guys must have reached their photographed positions along the road. I’d love to have been there to see how they handled the ensuing traffic chaos. They do look friendly though.

Chinese New Year. The big bang at the top of a string of firecrackers. Say no more.

I take no credit for this one. I must have ridden past this graffito, on the side of the brick wall surrounding a Drainage Services pumping station at the confluence of the Kam Tin River with one of its main tributaries, dozens of times, admiring its simplicity but not stopping. Until I did, it had never occurred to me that it had all been done with a spray-can. I thought the anonymous artist deserved a wider audience. I wonder why he did it here though. We routinely ignore the sign that says ‘private road’, because it provides the best view down the estuary, and there is often something to photograph, but not that many people pass this way. Most use the road that bypasses the pumping station, a choice that the ‘private road’ sign obviously encourages.

This is another one from ‘the frontier road’, a large fishpond with Shenzhen looming in the background. If you look closely, you might just be able to make out the head of a cormorant (more obvious if you click the picture to enlarge it). Unlike ducks and swans, cormorants don’t sit on the water. The only parts that stick out are the head and neck, so it takes a lot more effort to get airborne, because cormorants are big birds. There were a lot around this year, both along the frontier and in the Kam Tin River. Because they have to propel such a large body out of the water and into the air, their wings slap the surface of the water up to ten times before they become fully airborne, so even one taking off is a spectacular sight. We sometimes set off several at the same time, not intentionally of course, but cormorants are so easily spooked that merely cycling past them in the water is a signal to switch on the afterburners.

That’s why I stopped to take this picture. I’d spotted it from a distance and had sneaked up on it, camera at the ready, and I thought that once it was aware of my presence, it would quickly take off, and I might get a good picture. It ignored me.

sockbridge english dictionary

The small hamlet of Sockbridge lies about three miles southwest of my home town in the UK. It doesn’t have a shop, or a church. Or a pub. But it does have a trout farm, and it is also home to a small publishing house that specializes in recording changes in English-language usage in modern times. It does so via the medium of its little-known English-language dictionary, the latest edition of which I’ve been assured will be published soon.

“We’ve set as a tentative date for publication the 29th of February in the next year that ends with a double zero,” said managing editor Pete Bogge.

Meanwhile, I’ve been given exclusive access (i.e., a press release) to new definitions of old words that will appear in the new dictionary. Here are some examples:

abandon live entertainment.
accompany affirm.
address female adder.
adultery what grown-ups get up to when they think nobody’s watching.
baccarat support a rodent.
becalm do not panic.
behalf accept a partner.
capsize cranial capacity.
conscience creationism.
contemplate blueprint for successful fraud.
deliberate imprison.
excrement opposite of increment.
express retired journalist.
furbelow pubic hair.
hospice equine urine.
hundred morbid fear of horsemen from the east.
impale beer drunk by pixies.
incite visible.
inquest search for overnight accommodation.
noble short and to the point.
pecan type of crude urinal.
penitent cheap item of camping equipment.
plaintiff routine argument.
prelate early.
propagate entrance that is fit for purpose.
seedy obsolescent format for recorded music.
shampoo fake shit.
stairwell look closely.
suppress initiate litigation against a newspaper.
worships scrap metal.

The editors can also confirm the following:
An island is land; and
The Holy Land is wholly land.

“We’re accepting advance orders now,” said sales director Bill Borde.

never mind the bollocks

The year is 1978. I’d just returned to the UK from four years in Hong Kong, and for me the popular music scene was an alien landscape. I’d heard about punk rock, of course, but even though as TV critic for a local listings magazine in Hong Kong I probably knew more about what was happening elsewhere in the world than the average for listeners in the territory, I hadn’t heard any examples of what had already taken over the US and UK charts. When I did finally hear a few pertinent examples, I hated it.

This wasn’t a surprising reaction, because part of the political subtext of punk rock was a derisive attitude towards the kind of music I had been listening to at the time, typified by the overblown flatulence of Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans. By 1977, so-called progressive rock had lost its way, and the high point reached by Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Jethro Tull’s Aqualung had become a distant memory. Instead, fans were being offered pretentious rubbish such as The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis, a prime example of the then-fashionable ‘concept’ album. My only excuse is that with albums in Hong Kong a mere third of the price charged in the UK, I was often buying them unheard.

What would have been a surprise in 1977 is being told that thirty years later I would be listening to, and enjoying punk rock, although I remain unmoved by some of what other commentators have described as quintessential examples of the genre. I even have a punk rock compilation CD in my car that I haven’t changed since we moved to Fanling six years ago, although this lack of change does have something to do with the limited amount of driving I do nowadays.

Nevertheless, I thought that it might be interesting to compile a list of what I regard as the top ten punk rock records. Unlike my Sixties Music: The Top Ten, in which I tried to identify the ten most significant records of that decade, this is merely a list of my personal favourites, with a few comments thrown in about why I like them. I should add a caveat before I begin, because when I arrived in the UK in 1978, punk rock wasn’t the only new thing around; it was merely part of what was, at the time, labelled ‘new wave’. This included reggae-influenced bands such as the Specials and art-influenced bands such as Talking Heads. The Police also appeared around this time, and the band’s name and apparently minimalist style made it easy to mistakenly label them ‘punk’, except that this apparent simplicity disguised a complexity that went well beyond the three-chord stereotype. Finally, there were strange records that defied categorization, such as Devo’s Jocko Homo, which appeared to me to be an attempt to combine gay culture with religious experience by a band that believes the human race is de-evolving (hence the name). None of these records make the list, which is in no particular order.

Clicking on each title will bring up a YouTube video.

1. The Clash — I Fought the Law (1979)
Although the Clash are best known for their political songs (e.g., White Riot, London’s Burning, Career Opportunities), I have selected this song mainly because it is a brilliant rendition of a little-known classic from an earlier era, the 1960s. The Bobby Fuller Four version was not the original (it had been written in 1958 by Buddy Holly’s replacement in the Crickets), but it was the first to be a nationwide hit, and it was the Fuller version that members of the Clash heard during a visit to Los Angeles and decided to cover. The Clash’s version is much heavier than recording technology would have allowed in 1966, and to that extent it is an improvement.

2. The Stranglers — Nice ’n’ Sleazy (1978)
What do you do, as an emerging band, when the zeitgeist emphasizes nihilism, limited musical competence and contempt for establishment values? The answer? Name your band so that it fits in with other bands emerging at the same time. I’ve included my favourite Stranglers track in the list, even though it isn’t easy to identify the band as a punk outfit, even though they made all the right noises (No More Heroes, Peaches, etc.). For a start, keyboards feature prominently in their music, and no casual listener is likely to identify Golden Brown or Strange Little Girl as ‘typical punk’.

This track is also atypical, with a lyric that would not have seemed out of place in one of Rick Wakeman’s extravaganzas of a few years earlier, and a melodic bass line that would have been out of place in anything by any other punk band.

3. Sham 69 — Hersham Boys (1979)
This record could almost qualify as romantic nostalgia, from a time when inner-city gangs wore uniforms (‘laced-up boots and corduroys’) and were more likely to be football hooligans than out-and-out criminals. After all, how many modern gang members would describe themselves thus?

That’s right guv’nor, Jack the Lad
Know what I mean, eh? Know what I mean?

While this is in most respects a typical punk record, the instrumental break is straight out of a western barn dance (‘They call us the Cockney cowboys’). I think they were taking the piss.

4. The Skids — Into the Valley (1979)
This also sounds like a typical punk record, except that the lyric deals with the death of soldiers in battle; the title is a clear reference to Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade (‘Into the valley of death rode the six hundred’). Listening to the guitar solo reminds me of the Drifters’ On Broadway (‘I can play this here guitar’), because what starts as a basic, repetitive riff is concluded by a short but flamboyant flourish that echoes the Drifters’ sentiments.

5. The Ramones — I Wanna Be Sedated (1979)
It would be difficult to overrate the influence of the Ramones on the wider punk scene, at least until Phil Spector became involved in recording the band. I could have chosen several other tracks for this list, so the selection of this one is entirely arbitrary. Good rockin’.

6. The Members — Sound of the Suburbs (1979)
It may be a myth that so many punk bands hailed from small provincial towns or the suburbs of large cities, but this track articulates perfectly the point of being in a punk band:

Johnny’s in his bedroom sitting in the dark,
Annoying the neighbours with his punk rock electric guitar.

7. Iggy Pop — The Passenger (1982)
Iggy Pop was a punk long before punk rock was a recognized genre. His confrontational style is right out of the punk playbook, but this record shows another side of the singer: as a passive observer of all that’s wrong with modern society. It’s an interesting concept: the passenger can look out of his window but is in no position to influence what he sees (cf. George Orwell, Inside the Whale).

8. Wreckless Eric — Take the Cash (1978)
Wreckless Eric and I have at least one thing in common: neither of us can sing. However, unlike Semaphore Signals, where the vocal is excruciatingly out of tune, the singing on this jaunty number won’t set your teeth on edge. And it does offer some sage advice on financial matters:

When they say they’ll pay next week,
You know they never will.

9. The Boomtown Rats — Lookin’ After No. 1 (1977)
The band that brought Bob Geldof to national attention was another whose musicality went far beyond what was required, and it’s probably not a coincidence, given Geldof’s later charity work, that its name was lifted from Woody Guthrie’s autobiography, where it described a gang of street children. I don’t necessarily agree with the sentiments that are expressed in this song, but I do like it.

10. The Sex Pistols — Pretty Vacant (1977)
At the other end of the spectrum, what the Sex Pistols lacked in musical talent they more than made up for with their provocative attitude. This track encapsulates that attitude perfectly:

We’re so pretty, oh so pretty, we’re vacant
…And we don’t care.

And I don’t care either. Having lugged around a social conscience like a ball and chain for most of my adult life, I’ve now reached an age where, although the human race may be going to hell in a handcart, I feel no urge to try to do anything about it. Like the song, I’m pretty vacant. At my age, schadenfreude is a wonderful thing.

photographic abstraction #10

Welcome to the latest instalment in my abstract photography series, which has been delayed by a week following the disturbing news that was carried on this blog a week ago. It may or may not be obvious what the real subjects of these photos are, and you may want to try to work these out for yourself, but you should bear in mind that the original images have been cropped, and contrast, tonal balance and colour saturation have been altered, in some cases quite severely, to obtain the effect I wanted.

You may also want to suggest alternative titles, because my titles are merely a personal response to what I see, and I would expect most viewers to see something different. If you don’t want to see my titles before suggesting your own, then you can click on the first photo to start a slideshow.

remembrance of times past

fairyland

meandering

nuclear winter

walk like an egyptian

other posts in this series
Photographic Abstraction
Photographic Abstraction #2
Photographic Abstraction #3
Photographic Abstraction #4
Photographic Abstraction #5
Photographic Abstraction #6
Photographic Abstraction #7
Photographic Abstraction #8
Photographic Abstraction #9