Kicks like a mule

I was emailing my friend D today about Malaysia, in a wide-ranging discussion about religion, cultural mores, Schapelle Corby, the death penalty for drug-trafficking, and bribery, prompted by a story in today's paper about a Malaysian government official's proposal to require all young Malaysian women leaving the country to carry letters of authorisation, Middle-East chaperone style, to prevent them from becoming drug mules - which they would all otherwise obviously do - and was reminded of my favourite loony cult, the Teapot Cult of Malaysia (see this unreliable source for a contemporaneous report). What I didn't tell him about, but should have, was my other favourite Malaysian story (at least, of those which don't involve me, of which more some other time): the carjacking gang who were wont to force drivers of luxury cars out of the driver's seat at gunpoint at the traffic lights. On encountering the immobiliser in a Mercedes which needed a fingerprint to start it, they cut out the middle man by chopping off the owner's finger and taking it with them.

Wicked, I know, but I have this irresistible image of the scene back at the carjack gang's hideout shack:

"Anyone got the key to the SLK?"
"Hang on a minute -" (rummages in jar of formaldehyde, before triumphantly holding finger aloft) "Here it is!"

On a more serious note: clearly this measure is an attempt to curb women's freedom by the back door and is to be deplored.

Sugar rush

My friend E brought me back a little green box of Laduree macarons from Paris. The ones shown above are the best: it's a crisp shell filled with an extraordinary burnt caramel flavoured ganache, and the sensation of biting in to a melting toffee morsel is indescribable ... I don't have much of a sweet tooth (give me a cheese and onion pasty any day of the week), but the macarons are a little piece of heaven. I like Laduree's aesthetic too; even the website is decked out in tasteful shades of green (the green of the walls of shuttered apartments) and pink (the delicate pink of satin ballet shoes). I usually like the idea of cakes more than the reality, but this time I was completely won over. Perfectly matched with a cup of tea and feet up on the sofa watching true crime.

But then

there are shoes like these, by Celine.

A word in your ear

There's a John Updike poem called "Furniture" which begins:

To things we are ghosts
Soft shapes in their blindness which push and pull
A warm touch tugging on a stuck drawer...

I can't remember the rest (except the last two lines, which are "his life a blur/A dark smear on the unchanging stone" - about Victorian daguerreotypes, which captured the still better than the moving because of the length of the exposure time), and I can't find it anywhere (I think Mr Updike or his publishers must pursue breach of copyright with alacrity). But it came into my mind when I was thinking about impermanence. And "life's too short", or something like it.

A clean sweep

I was intrigued by the story of a Japanese girl who committed suicide using household cleaner - a phenomenon known, apparently, as "detergent suicide". I hate to be cavalier about something as serious as this, but although suicide has never even crossed my mind as an option, I am quite fascinated by it: for instance, did you know that the number one method of committing suicide in Hong Kong is by, er, throwing yourself from a tall building? The second one is by burning charcoal - a modish method which is very Asian in style and which led to calls for bans on the sale of barbecue charcoal in garages, and which Hong Kongers seem to have copied (like Bathing Ape, and Hello Kitty, and other infantile trends) from Japan, after a spate of similar suicides there.

This raises one of the central issues about new reporting of such events - it often seems to serve pour encourager les autres, and no doubt even now desperate teenagers of every nationality are frantically searching the Internet to find out how this 14 year old managed to pull it off in such spectacular style using ingredients found in the bathroom cupboard. So: report the details, perpetuate the problem.

I was led in the end to a most peculiar Wikipedia page on suicide methods - which seemed to be to be nothing more than a "how-to" guide for those looking for an easy way out. The strange nature of this entire entry, which lists different methods in alphabetical order starting with "Beheading", is illustrated by the following entry under the distinctly American-sounding "vehicular impact":

"Jumping in front of a fast-moving vehicle, especially a large one, such as a truck or train, can prove fatal. A classic example of suicide involves one tying oneself to railroad tracks in order to be run over by an oncoming train. The self control required to stay on the tracks as the train approaches can be quite immense, and the result quite traumatizing to the driver of the vehicle."

Thanks for that! I had no idea!

Forbidden collars

After all this talk about fabulous dresses, here's the antithesis: in the window of Jil Sander, on the corner of Queen's Road Central and Lan Kwai Fong, a garment non pareil, which can surely only be described as a salmon pink house coat.

Dressed to kill

I admit, I am looking at dresses at the moment with the idea in my head that the perfect one is out there for me - think Lauren Bacall, think the 1940s, Hollywood glamour, whatever silly idea might come into my head (why do I put myself through this?). I'm going to be 40 this year and in my shallow fantasy, I am wearing a perfect dress, which makes me look fabulous.

So, I am looking at the dresses on Net-a-porter. And I don't think I can possibly be mis-stating this: none of the dresses there are less than GBP1,000/US$2000/HK$15,000. How can that possibly be just or meaningful in any way?

This is a world where hedge fund managers like John Paulson are making US$3.7bn profit for themselves in a year. So it makes money seem meaningless, right? But it's not meaningless. If you make US$3.7bn on gambling on the sub-prime crisis, that means you're making money on people losing their homes. If you buy a dress that costs more than GBP1000, then you are spitting in the face of people who don't know how they are going to afford to eat because inflation has forced up the price of rice.

Am I wrong about this?

Revenge is a dish best served cold

My favourite story from the South China Morning Post last week:

"A woman escaped onto the balcony of her flat after her 70kg St Bernard turned on her and bit her arm and back. Chan Yuk-fung, 43, was playing with the 4-1/2-year-old male dog in the first-floor flat in Hung Shui Kiu Main Street, Yuen Long, when it turned nasty. Firemen used a ladder to rescue the woman. She was lowered to the ground on a stretcher and taken to hospital. The Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department is investigating."

The lot of a dog in Hong Kong - particularly a big dog like a St Bernard - is not a happy one. Cooped up in a tiny flat, often dressed up in risible outfits for the amusement of its owners, feeling the heat, and taken for "walks" by the helpers who walk desultorily to the corner, sit down and get on the phone/smoke a fag/chat with their friends while the poor dog looks longingly at the expanses of road and hillsides and places to run.

I would say I'm sorry she was bitten, but in actual fact I have no sympathy whatosoever for her. What the hell is a 70kg dog doing in a tiny flat anyway? I think the poor St Bernard had finally had enough - he drank the keg of brandy, lay in wait for his silly owner, ran amok round the flat when she came home, and then laughed as only dogs laugh as she frantically signalled for help from the balcony.

Still holding a torch

The recent fiasco over the Olympic torch was probably all too avoidable: had China not exacerbated the recent protests in Tibet by, er, kicking protesters' heads in with extreme prejudice, then no one would even be thinking about Tibet. Who remembers now that Steven Spielberg resigned as artisitic adviser to the 2008 Beijing Olympics over Darfur?

But clearly the Chinese authorities feel they have no choice: if they let secessionist movements go unchecked, word spreads and trouble breaks out everywhere. What with rising food prices, and corrupt local cadres seizing villagers' land to build prestige apartments for, in the words of one advert, "cozy nobles", and amazing wealth alongside extraordinary poverty, and apocalyptic weather, it's amazing they have managed to keep a lid on it thus far.

It's enough to make anyone quail at the thought of the Olympics. Happily, today's South China reports that domestic flights in mainland China have just banned people from carrying cigarette lighters on board. Only now they thought of this?

The past is another country

When I was 14, my class at school went to Chur, Switzerland, on an exchange trip. We were all parcelled out to what we rather facetiously called our "Swiss mothers" in different houses around the town, and attended the local Steiner school.

I was quite new to the class, having only joined the year before, and already rather unpopular for having been given (how dare I be) the role of Miranda, the only female appearing in The Tempest. In Chur, however, I was cast into outer darkness by the entire class for saying that the two popular girls, Laura and Tara, only bought clothes at a trendy shop in town, Globus, because it was trendy, and not because they really liked them. (This was the early 1980s so we are talking fluorescent batwing t-shirts here.)

This throwaway, bitchy remark, of course, may have been true, albeit rather cruel, and was given in a moment of madness to Olwen, a nasty little washed-out sneak fond of wearing lipstick the colour of bubblegum. Of course in an instant it became a classroom sensation (I can even remember the news passing like a Mexican wave through the classroom as one person whispered it to another); the fatwa was issued; and I was a wretch, to whom it was forbidden to speak, from then on.

Laura and Tara had been invited for lunch at my house, but the news broke the day before and they didn't turn up. My Swiss mother had cooked a splendid meal and I was unable to explain what had happened ("sie kommen nicht... sie kommen nicht") and cried copiously into my pasta. They were forced by our teacher to come round and apologise with flowers, a humiliating act which made them hate me even more.

My problem was compounded by the fact that my own mother had volunteered to come along to help the class. So I was not only a cast-iron bitch, but a teacher's pet as well. I avoided school as much as I could, and stayed in my attic room watching poorly dubbed Lee Majors series ("Ein Colt fur alle Falle") and reading an American magazine about how to get your "fanny" into shape and why Karen Carpenter's death resonated with us all. The view from the little window is burned into my memory forever.

Years later I shared a flat with Tara at university and she apologised to me for the way they had behaved. I wasn't ready to be magnanimous then: it was the biggest, most devastating event of my life so far. The rest of the trip I've pretty much blocked out. By the green shores of impassive Lake Lucerne, I redeemed myself slightly by losing at spin the bottle, in a late night game in our youth hostel, and having to run across the room naked. So I thought, but when we got home and the photos from the trip came down from the wall of the classroom, having been displayed there fora few weeks, I discovered that someone scratched my face with the point of a compass in every picture I appeared in.

Ethics women

Following a move to a somewhat smaller flat I have become unusually conscious of the amount of waste which most of us generate: not least the number of clothes I have which I rarely, or even never, wear. Living just across the border from mainland China it's hard to forget that the most wasteful practices and environmentally unsound processes are taking place every day, churning out cheap fashion for high street stores - and we are breathing in the results.

There seems to have been a dramatic increase in the number of ethical fashion websites - perhaps they are still treading a queasy line between excess and abstinence, after all do you really need another t-shirt, even if it is fair trade and organic? And what are the implications of having a fair trade dress shipped across the Atlantic? But if you're going to buy something from here, then at least you are thinking about it.

Here are some of the best.

Tecasan

http://www.tecasan.com/

Sadly the one area where ethical fashion often seems to fall down is shoes. But Tecasan, who feature Natalie Portman modelling a lovely pair of cherry-red heels on their website, seem somehow to have crafted vegan shoes that look just like leather - not like cornish pasties, but like real, desirable shoes you'd want to wear.

Poppy pewter faux-calf shoe, above.

Adili

http://www.adili.com/

Nice selection if a little dull. The Edun range is available here (much as I hate to promote anything to do with Bono, this is his wife's ethical line, the t-shirts are really very nice, and they are the only ethical clothes Lane Crawford stock, so the star power must be worth something).

People Tree, Garbo jacket, above.

Fashion Conscience

http://www.fashion-conscience.com/

Attractive bamboo knickers and interesting dresses (although in some cases frustratingly poorly photographed, for example the sequinned kimono dress: what happened to see before you buy?). Best for jewellery ("organic, vintage, recycled and any materials that can be legitimately deemed certifiably sustainable": nouveau vintage dragonfly cuff, above)

They seek him there

The Sartorialist was a fashion insider in New York who now takes photographs of people he sees on the street (as a result he has received quite astonishing accolades: his eye is acute, his vision perceptive). He commented that it was all too easy to take pictures of people looking bad in their clothes. He could have been talking about Hong Kong, where what you could call neo-infantilism all too often seems to govern the way women dress, with lace frills, Hello Kitty, naive jewellery, and unintentionally funny garbled t-shirt slogans often featuring heavily - see for example:

TOO ORANGEY FOR PORN

I AM FULL STOMACH

SUNNY DAY HE IS WAIT FOR BUS

or

I AM PERFECTLY FLOWER

all of which irony-free statements I have seen on the streets of Hong Kong. Far harder, though, to find people who look good in their clothes.

His photographs are wonderful; the choices are sometimes interesting, occasionally perplexing, but always thoughtful and often accompanied by succint observations. He's currently featuring amazing pictures from a recent trip to New Delhi. Definitely worth a look.

I'm a marionette

It's all too easy to mock Victoria Beckham, and this photo from the Marc Jacobs ad campaign, to be seen on an uncomfortably large scale on a building near you, tells you all you need to know: Marc Jacobs (presumably) thinks he's being ironic engaging VB for this ad campaign, and VB thinks she's being ironic doing it (apparently she "trusts Marc's vision", so happily at least one person does), and Juergen Teller is... being paid to take photographs, and so on and so on, fashion eats itself ad nauseam... The clear sighted view, however, is simply that these adverts are a joke. Not ironic: just a joke.

Putting on the Ritz

In a typical story of Hong Kong extravagance and wastefulness, the Ritz Carlton Hong Kong, which opened in 1993, has closed and is relocating to Kowloon where the new hotel will open in 2010. The "old" building will be demolished and a sky-high new development put up in its place. So far, so depressing. But what is truly amazing, especially in the wake of the Edison Chen sex photos scandal, is that prudish Hong Kong has countenanced the erection (sorry) of a full height advert covering the whole of the south face of the old building and featuring statuesque actor Djimon Hounsou wearing nothing but a pair of white Calvin Kleins.

I was walking innocently along to a lunch meeting when I bumped in to a client who was walking the same way. Just as I said hello we both clocked the advert and were struck dumb with astonishment. "That's a very big ... advertisement", I said, and we both laughed and averted our eyes.

Leaving New York

A friend who saw my pictures of Minnesota and New York, below, said they looked cold and lonely. It's certainly cold, and I think my vision is probably lonely (although as the inimitable Roddy Frame said , "they call us lonely when we're really just alone"). I've enjoyed many things about this trip. I liked Washington, if only for the novelty of the board games in my hotel (AKA rooming house, a shabby, glorified B&B presided over by a perpetually delighted Eastern European man with a shock of black hair and a disconcerting squint), with the White House just down the road, the sharp contrast of bitter cold and blazing sunshine, and the (black, middle aged, highly educated) taxi driver telling us he'd probably vote for McCain; Minnesota was an experience, from the ice storm at the airport which nearly prevented us landing, vertical shards of white dashing past the plane windows on either side as I said to myself they do this all the time, they do this all the time, and the question I always ask myself when I travel somewhere new (especially somewhere as monumentally undistinguished as St Paul), how do people end up here?; I've enjoyed getting to know New York, walking down Madison Avenue thinking about Kirsty McColl's song of the same name, buying Kiehl's products in Bloomingdales, passing the Empire State which is currently in a state of renovation, following the Pilates session on the TV in my hotel room and feeling silly lying on the carpet trying to connect my legs to the earth, and visiting the jawdroppingly enormous New York HQ of UK law firm Clifford Chance (the largest law firm in the world, both by number of lawyers and revenue) for a happily coincidental meeting arranged by one of my Hong Kong clients, who hadn't realised I was in New York, the night before.

The thing I don't like about travel is the fact of it. The weariness, waking at 4am with thoughts running round my head as insistent as a headache. Not knowing where I am, what time it is, and whether I should eat. When I've been in meetings I have had no trouble at all. Outside of that temporary adrenaline rush, though, it's been like walking around with several sheets of bubble wrap tightly wound around my head.

What I have positively disliked is the fact that the clothes in every shop I go into seem to be "Made In China". Having just moved house I have an unusually powerful distaste for buying anything, but I feel particularly averse to the idea of buying anything made in China; to China it shall not return, at least not in my luggage. Viewed in this perspective, even the most technically desirable dresses are nothing more than landfill futures.

Sunburst and snowblind

The view from the somewhat dirty window of the Holiday Inn SoHo, Lafayette Street, Manhattan, New York, March 3, 2008

Flying out of St Paul airport, you could see for miles and the whole country seemed perfectly flat and white with snow as far as the eye could see. I don't think I've ever seen so much snow covering such an expanse of land. Today in New York the sun was shining and the sky was a perfect blue, though it was bitterly cold (as I walked along Broadway I thought of "You promised me Broadway was waiting for me" and "The wind blows right through you, it's no place for the old" from Fairytale of New York). I met an old friend from Hong Kong in an Asian cafe called Rice, on the corner of Lexington and 28th Street. She's been in New York for two years and says it's a tough, and toughening, place to work, and people will step on each other to get ahead; but much better than Hong Kong for a single woman looking for a relationship (in Hong Kong, this attractive, intelligent woman had begun to wonder if there was something wrong with her).

In the afternoon I had a facial and a massage at a spa called Eden. Both therapists were Chinese, one from Hunan and one from Fuzhou; the latter, Sandra, was about the same age as me, had an 11 year old daughter (it's amazing what you can find out from someone who's wrapping a hot towel around your chin) spoke Cantonese as well as Mandarin and was delighted with my few hamfisted phrases. I lay on the massage table listening to, apparently, the music which wafts from the speakers of every spa I've ever been to worldwide (the CD is, I think, Now That's What I Call Inoffensive Tinkling 55) and thinking about the circumstances which led a Scottish-born Hong Kong resident and two Chinese born New York residents to a spa on Broadway on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

Mississippi God Damn

The Mississippi, from the Crowne Plaza St Paul Riverfront, February 29, 2008.

Minnesota feels like it typifies the US in so many ways: a land of giants and giant spaces, where everyone dresses down and looks down. Jeans to the office? Sure! Dirty snow in huge drifts. Huge cars, huge roads.The worst hot chocolate I've ever tasted from the vending machine in the office kitchen. Kids in the hotel hallways, here for some wrestling competition, with nothing better to do than stand by the lifts staring. At every restaurant we're served huge, somewhat tasteless portions, larded with butter. So much food... US flags everywhere and bumper stickers saying "Support [or Pray for] our troops". Everyone is friendly, up to a point. Public as well as private spaces are massive and bland. Only the sunshine relieves the atmosphere. The TV adverts are all for drugs. The CNN newsreader says "Communist China".

St Paul is not a city you could walk around. Without a car you'd be nothing. Everyone drives to work. They drive between buildings on the office "campus". We drove to lunch and back. It's second nature to be driving a car: how will Americans ever give that up? The entire infrastructure is predicated upon driving.

My taxi driver has a black beret and John Lennon blue specs and is playing freeform jazz on the car stereo. He barks at me "I'm going to Lexington because it's quicker". I say "OK". He asks me if the reason I have a crease in the middle of my brow - just there, and he points in the mirror - "is because it's frustrating dealing with the Chinese". Straight faced, he says the people in Hong Kong eat rats.

The Mall of America is near the airport, but I can't quite bring myself to go there. 40 million people visited in 2006 and it's the most visited shopping mall in the world. All very good reasons for me to avoid it completely.

But sitting at the desk in my hotel room, watching the sun go down over the Mississippi, with clouds of smoke puffing in the cold, I have to admit it's beautiful.