Books, Guitars, and Theatre

Saturday I got up early, ate breakfast, and spent the morning relaxing in my room. Maybe its advancing middle age that finds me napping on a daily basis. Maybe its vacation. Maybe its simple exhaustion. Maybe it’s the heat, humidity and sunlight that I go through for hours at a time here while wandering the city. Who knows?

Sad, really, how little I know. Or should I say how much I don’t know.

Which makes it especially odd for me, at times, to be in a position of being seen as a learned person. I spent my morning with Binevon Loric, AnD member and all-too-rare member of the Young People Who Want to Learn Club. We went looking for used books at the Bras Basah Complex, a collection of used bookstores and guitar stores. I ended up buying a rather large number of paperbacks.

I am sure there are such places in Hong Kong, I just have yet to find them. Considering they’re probably in Central or Stanley, no wonder I remain ignorant of their whereabouts.

I bought Binevon some books, having resorted to shameless perjury to overcome her objections.

Simple truth: I have no children (and she is young enough to be one), I have what my father calls ‘discretionary income’ (i.e. spending money to burn), and I will resort to any means necessary to further the voluntary intellectual development of young people.

We ate ice cream, and then lunch (it was a matter of geography; we were near the ice cream store before the lunch store). During lunch I presented her with a book I had brought with me from Hong Kong.

Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is one of the most important American novels of the 20th century. Others have said that, not just me. It is also a clarion call for anyone who has caught even a glimpse of the man behind the Wizard’s curtain. I told her that a lot of the things in it may confuse her, including the details, the characters, and the narrative.

But I also told her that Thompson’s prose is among the most mellifluous, graceful English she will ever read. Too many people get caught up in Thompson’s subject matter, i.e. drugs, violence, and a social critique so savage that it makes me seem comparatively benign. His writing is technically magnificent, and is such a pleaseure to read that I have even read volumes of his correspondence.

Yes, roll that through your brain again: Sean reads collected correspondence.

So for me, F&LiLVis a book I am always happy to bestow/inflict on people. It changed my life when I read it the first time. It rarely fails to do likewise for the people I have given it to.

After a long (but fun) afternoon of talking about books, movies, and guitars, I returned to my hotel for my now-standard nap.

Thanks to Binevon’s kindness (and my failure to write things down on the other), I managed to find the address for an AnD sponsored event being hels last night: Seeds – A Series of Underground Art. It was a collection of performances emcompassing theatre, poetry, film, and music.

I really enjoyed it, if for no other reason than it was nice to see people questioning things that, frankly, I don’t see being questioned much in Hong Kong (or a lot of other places). All of the performances were competent and more importantly (to me) thought-provoking. I enjoyed myself immensely and met a lot of young, creative people. I also caught up with Jeszlene Zhou, which was ejyoyable as well.

I returned to my hotel room around 11, took a shower, and went to sleep.

Today I am purportedly going to catch up with Zoe Lee, assuming her family’s road trip to KL has come to an uneventful conclusion, and this evening I am supposed to be getting my hair cut by D’in Cheung.

And thank God for that. This moronic organic q-tip on my head is becoming not only unmanageable but embarrassing. I am still trying to work through the paradox of my hair getting longer having the strange effect of highlighting, rather than minimizing, my receding hairline.

Hopefully after today, at least in terms of coiffure, I will no longer look, as I have been told, as if my barber and tailor are having an affair.

That would be nice.

Speaking of nice, here’s photos of my hotel room: