Mar 2 - Mar 19

	Friday, March 19
	Mail Call
	I have no photos for you today. I had the day off and lived like a shut-in, walking around in my faded San Gannaro Festival T-shirt and Hello Kitty flip-flops, excavating my music collection via my iTunes library, since all my CDs are in storage, and now I am filled with nostalgia and NEEDS. So if you have a little free time this weekend, please find it in your heart to pick up a few things for me. After all, wasn't it me who came to New York bearing gifts? (Catherine? Red Gilbert Kavinthy underwear?? I know you are wearing them right now!) 1. A Brand New San Gennaro Festival T-shirt. I know the festival is in the fall, but you just know there is little Chinese woman in Little Italy selling the backstock. 2. Jeff Tweedy. Where is he? What is he doing? I listened to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot for like half the day and now I miss him and need a copy of the "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" movie DVD. I'm assuming it's out, though I haven't seen a copy in China, surprising since the Chinese really rock out to Wilco in legions (I'm kidding). I did some googling and discovered the new Wilco CD, "A Ghost Is Born," is coming out in June and they are commencing a tour later in the year. If I'm not home for that tour I'm getting a divorce. 3. While your DVD shopping, why not also pick up a copy of Happy Accidents? A movie with three things going for it: 1. An inventive, quirky plot. 2. An excellent soundtrack. 3. Vincent D'Onofrio. 4. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera. This is a favorite book and for some reason I did not bring a copy of it with me. I usually read it once a year or so. I guess I was expecting to be home sooner...hence the threat to divorce. 5. Shout Wipes. I got lipstick on the collar of my favorite jacket and and these babies attack stains at the subatomic level. 6. Tasti-D. See if it can be cryogenically frozen and mailed. Maybe it can go by container ship? I mean they get Japanese sushi fish to New York right? How are they doing it? Investigate. Chocolate preferred. 7. Anything else you think I might be interested in. Magazines, books, music I am missing out on. Maybe some of you can get together and organize some kind of care package? Maybe? Though I'm not throwing any hints or anything...If so, I promise to return the favor with a lifetime supply of chicken feet!
	Thursday, March 18
	My Fair Lady

	Every society has their twisted standards of female beauty. In the States, we've got the cult of youth with the ideal of the creaseless face and perpetually perky anatomy. I've seen women (of a certain age) walking around Bergdorf's that actually frighten me. So pumped with botox and silicone, they look like some strange rubberized race of Fem-bots set loose on the city. In Asia, the ideal is a face as lilly-white as, um, china. And the obsession is with "whitening." The drug store aisles are lined with whitening gels and masks--all the make-up brands provide some form of "treatment": Neutrogena, Revlon, Lancome, etc. From the commercials I've seen on TV (ad nauseum), it appears best to have a kind of contourless, white Ziggy-like face, with just eyes, nostrils and lips poking out. It's a little unnerving, since most Asian women have a lovely olive tone to their skin, and it's not uncommon to see the weird results of this obsession, a face several shades lighter then the neck. Of course the cosmetics companies employ shameless marketing tactics. Here's a sample of an ad for Dior SNOW X2 that I came across at work: "The new patented S.N.O.W. 2 Complex acts in the depths of the cell through a synergistic action of two anti-sense biomolecules that doubles the whitening action!" And here's something from Lancome's Blanc Expert Meta NOcx Supreme Whitening Spot Corrector: "Limits the activity of the Messenger NO, a newly discovered stimulator of melanin produced by keratinocytes." Two anti-sensing biomolecules? Messenger NO? Sounds more like evil characters from a James Bond movie with a bad soundtrack by Duran Duran. I can't help but think that somewhere out in some faraway armed Estee Lauder compound there's some guy pouring a bucket of bleach into a vat of aloe vera with Carnation cream.
	Tuesday, March 16

	Spotted in a gallery window. A work by Chinese avant garde artist Chen Yu, showing now at the Schoeni Gallery in Hong Kong. Miuccia Prada, a girl after thine own heart. Has anyone read the profile of Ms. Prada in last week's New Yorker, a magazine which thankfully does make the trip to Hong Kong, but usually a week late. I am so last week! Anyway, it turns out she is wondrously eccentric/neurotic. She makes her entrance in an outfit that would make Little Edie proud: "lime green skirt, mauve cashmere cardigan, short black socks, and a pair of fringed brown wingtips so cumbersome that they seemed like something only a nun or a golfer would wear." And she exhibits that breezily distracted gift for drama that is uniquely Italian, and reminds me so much of my Italian grandmother, who always knew how to work the fine line between melodrama and humor. So in honor of Mark, who sent me a lovely card in the mail and who loves all things eccentric and Italian, I'm sampling some select quotes. Miuccia on her husband, on Valentine's Day: "Thank God he is gone. Because he would have ideas. And, right now if he told me what he thought I would kill him." Miuccia on the nineties: "I was obsessed by trash." Miuccia on growing up: "I was a proper young girl and I was dreaming of pink shoes, red shoes, pink dresses. Exciting underwear." Miuccia on studying to become a mime: "In those years, you had to do everything kind of strange." Miuccia on her marriage: "I am always asking myself if it's good enough. And the truth is, I have to admit, I may hate him and want to kill him, but late at night when he comes home I am always at least a little bit happy."
	Monday, March 15
	More Visitors!

	Leslie and Brian stopped by after their whirlwind trip through Vietnam and Cambodia! We managed to blitz several Hong Kong sites and dining establishments, while still managing to spend quality time with Sedra—who was ready to pack her bags and head home with them to DC...Here are the highlights!

	Hong Kong put on a dazzling and kinda freaky light show, though it was never explained why. Nevertheless, it made for a thrilling sight from the Kowloon ferry terminal.

	Those fishies in the back were still crawling. Note how the yellowish one is making a run from the plate. There's no escape in this town, buddy.

	Imagine the strip of bars you used to frequent in high school, the ones that were always jamming repetitive dance mixes. Now multiply them buy ten, throw in a couple over-the-hill British expats and convert it all to Asia, that is Lan Kwai Fong. Here Leslie takes part in the St. Paddy's scene. Yep, HK loves any excuse to party. Even though there are maybe three Irish people living here.

	Big Buddha's got a Jerry Curl.


	What does it feel like to be in a cloud? Well, like this, up at the Peak. Too bad we didn't get any views.

	Leslie models my brand new stylin Gucci shades—purchased at a steep discount on the famous Nathan Road in Kowloon. Leslie and Brian got in on new sets of glasses too, for cheap! They should be falling apart right about...now.
	Wednesday, March 10
	MMMM Chicken Feet!

	Reason #4,682 to become a vegetarian, see above. These tootsies come express from the United States, which has a toehold on the Chinese market. "In Sichuan, they are pickled with peppers. In Shandong, they are sprinkled with sea salt. Some people believe they are good for your skin, but most eat them for their flavor and for the sport of sucking the tender meat off the toes." Rancid. Photo and story courtesy of Madame Shutterfly, a site I happened upon today that is the work of an American photographer in Hong Kong. It's definitely worth checking out, if only to see what can happen to a Fendi bag while shopping in the notorious Lowu Commercial Center in China...it ain't pretty. Also discovered today...the creative director at the place where I work has a side-gig as a drag queen! Now how cool is that? He's performing next week, so pictures to come (TK for all you magazine babes in New York). AND he is to be featured in an upcoming article in the New Yorker this month on the lost art of local drag in the States. So keep your eyes peeled for someone named Davide! Other than that, I'm missing you all so write to me! Or I might just have to go drown my sorrows in a bucket of feet.
	Tuesday, March 9
	Waking Life
	Anyone who is considering visiting me in Asia (anyone??), should read Pico Iyer's piece in the New York Times Magazine this past Sunday. It's an excellent meditation on jet lag, the quasi state of consciousness that tends to follow you around like a shadow after a crossing through so many time zones. The essay makes the condition sound kind of cool actually. "I sleep, and sleep again, and the dreams that come to me, suddenly and violently, seem to belong to someone else: a Buddhist scholar (whom I have never met in life) is speaking to me about transience; I'm talking of a house burning down; I'm slipping into a back room at a wedding with a long-ago girlfriend. Every one of the dreams, I realize when I wake, is about the dissolution of self." Perhaps it will entice you to come see me...My own jet lag waking dreams/hallucinations have recently featured a small Chinese woman walking through circular windows, saying something to me sharply in Cantonese. When this apparition came, I realized that my home in the world, whether I liked it or not, was Asia. By far, the greatest writing on the weirdness of jet lag has to be in William Gibson's excellent novel Pattern Recognition, and Iyer refers to it in the essay. Here's an excerpt: "Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm. It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now... She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage." The novel also features the legendary Park Hyatt hotel in Tokyo that served as the setting for Lost in Translation. It's out now in paperback, so you should go get it. I cannot stop listening to Daniel Lanois' haunting song "Shine," which nicely complements the nebulous state of jet lag, you should pick that up too.
	Wednesday, March 3
	Really Really Lost in Translation
	Jet lag in Tokyo with Bill Murray is one thing, but syntactical psychosis is quite another. I was helping out a work colleague who edits the company newsletter on a piece submitted by a native Cantonese speaker who penned an endearing little article in English about a recent company outing, and I came across this jewel of babble I just had to share: "Some of our colleagues also tried another exciting game, Ironwalk, by conquering the concrete faces of the Tower with a thrilling stroll up its sides and onto its legs or took the 11 meters high flight with a 70-meter zip line shoot out of the tower leg into a large net, like a “Flying Fox”. BINGO!! " Note the way the author works herself up into a rhapsodic FRENZY which ultimately leaves her on the verge of a sort of post-narrative state of nonsense culminating in the emphatic "BINGO"!!! Also to love are those curious quotations surrounding Flying Fox--is she referring to the flying fox, or merely the signifier of the flying fox? And how on earth do you stroll up the sides of a tower?? Oh one can only speculate... Maybe it's just the slaphappy jet lag, but Bruce and I spent hours giggling about this. (Disclaimer: Though poking fun, I can't imagine what I'd sound like if I tried to write in Cantonese, of which I know maybe three words and even fewer Chinese characters.) And now...pictures of Sedra and her new friend Jules!

	Sedra has developed quite a following in Asia...and we are considering setting up her own Sedra-cam so her fans can spy on what she's doing during the day. Or maybe the way to go is merchandise. She can be the Chinese Mickey Mouse! Here she is with Jules dragging him around the peak.
	Tuesday, March 2
	Lost in Translation
	What time zone is it?? Let me start off by apologizing if I did not get to see you on my frenzied blitz through the continental United States, which encompassed four states! I barely saw anybody...and was in New York for what seemed like only five minutes. As Willy Wonka (a seminal genius as channeled through Gene Wilder) said, "so much to do, so little time." I will definitely catch you next time—that is, unless you get your sheet together to come visit, my little umpa lumpas. Just ask Amy how much fun is to be had! Anyway, here's some shots of life on the road... PS: if I have not responded to your email in a while, it is due to the fact that I have been offline for a couple weeks. Be in touch soon.

	Did you know Ohio is a locus of llama activity? Me neither.

	I think this one was contemplating charging the car. He looked pissed.

	Lauren, my little buttercup. She spotted the llamas.

	Purdy girls Renee and Lisa, with tulips.

	It's hard to be a baby, just ask baby Mass. But isn't he the cutest thing ever!! We all had to be prevented from squeezing him to death! (In a good way, people!)

	Lisa uses her multi-faceted mystical powers to put Massimo to sleep, and we all go "ahhh, put on the reruns of Sex and the City fast!" It's just one of her many gifts. Isn't it about time we all abandoned our worldly possessions and followed her through the desert?

	Holly's Sony Cybershot faces off with my Sony Cybershot. Who won? Well, my HK version is tiny and bright red. I think that settles it.

	Anna determines that Bruce indeed has a rubber head.

	This woman ran a 26-mile marathon in under like three hours and then undertook a seven-week journey through the wilds of Indonesia. What can't she do? It is high time we draft her as a candidate for NYC mayor! Run, Kelli Run! Free the city!

	Home Moist Home. I returned to find Hong Kong showing its tropical stripes. Not only was it 80 degrees, but the humidity was off the charts. Everywhere you go feels like the rainforest, even your bed. The moisture is known to breed strange and outlandish micro-organisms in unusual places, and I've been told to keep dehumidifiers in my closet, lest I want a shoe full of mushrooms. It's great for the bamboo and banana trees, but I am certain that if I left a piece of cheese out on the counter at say noon, I'd return at 6 to find a family of chimps emerging from the primordial ooze. Contact Bruce. Urge him to get me outta here before sauna summer hits pleeease!