Artificially Sweetened

One more week

2009-08-08T16:00:00.000-07:00

One more week and I've yet to clean up the heroin stains in my sink from all the tar I smoked and shot.

Wonder if those stains would get me high.

Bollywood to Battersea

2009-03-16T05:01:00.000-07:00

It's a long long way from Bollywood to Battersea

and Hollywood to Brattleboro

300 in 6 + 18 or 9 + 15.

LA Brewery Raw Jeans Art Exhibit idea

2008-08-07T00:40:00.000-07:00

Well since all of our raw denim jeans have different looks after a while, I think they reflect pretty well what we ourselves went through during the time. My pair of New Cures, for example, after a year and half, have blood stains, broken stitches, holes, and all that shit. Im sure some of you guys can do better. In any case, I want to do an art show at a space we have at the Brewery in LA - an art colony - since I know a bunch of kids living there. But I only have three pairs of raw denim and that aint gonna fly. I do, know, however, that you guys are probably the people I am looking for to borrow some gnarly, fucked up jeans for a weekend for display.

Im not going to have too much text explaining the thing. They will be hung on a clothline, lit, in a large room, with tags saying location of where they are from, time they were worn, brand/fit, and owners name. They wont be for sale (unless you want to, I guess), its sort of an experiment to see if jeans themselves en masse could be art.

This might take more planning than I can handle before November 1st (art walk time) here in LA. We might have to do this in the spring, but Im just doing an interest check to see who is down for this. I need maybe 15 - 20 pairs, the more worn the better. Im gonna throw my New Cures into the mix because theyve been in Boston, China, Vermont, LA, Chicago, Montreal, and a bloody incident in Hollywood (long story). If you guys have comments or suggestions, it would be great. It might look a bit boutiquey, but I will try to let the jeans make their own statements. Tell their own stories, that kind of stuff. I cant imagine too many people doing something like this (dont steal my idea please haha).

Oh yeah and Im borrowing the jeans, so you ship them to me and Ill ship them back. I dont want to wear your jeans anyway. Interest check? Comments? Suggestions? I dont have a picture of the place (left my camera at work) but it is a very large space and we can get some very decent lights Im sure. We might even do some photography of the jeans to sell them to make some money back since all this would be free.

Art Walk link: http://www.breweryartwalk.com/index.html

Spring one is in April.

What do you guys think?

There comes to a point

2008-07-25T05:53:00.000-07:00

There comes to a point where at 5 in the morning, after two consecutive attempts at defeating the night-terrors that consumed much of your limbs and left you paralyzed, that you seek out for the bottles of prescriptions laying perilously close yet agonizingly far from your cot on which you have set up in the room for the express purpose of convenience. This, of course, also comes about 20 minutes before Jamba Juice opens.

Then you realize that both your Lorazepam and Alprazolam bottles are empty and your Alprazolam refill is nowhere to be found - another room, perhaps, but this is no time for an expedition. You search for the last known resort - Diazepam powder.

The problem with Diazepam powder comes in two forms: A) it tastes like crystals. I have tasted Valiums, of course, any self-respecting benzohead (as this blog in the past two years can attest to) have tasted their elixir of choice in that manner, but the powder is different. It also does not resemble Alprazolam powder, which is far more fluffy and, well, if you need to eat enough to KNOW the texture of it, you would be gone for weeks and I am not kidding because I have personal experience (ever wake up in China working for the Chinese government when your last entirely coherent memory involved you sitting in a cabin in Vermont? Yeah) Fucking Hell, huh? Since you need a tenner of Diaz and not a .5er of Alpraz, it becomes a lot easier to, well, figure shit out, so to speak. Dab your finger in the bottle and just get a bit, which comes to the second problem:

B) No scale, and shit, I started with 630mg at some point, at some point 24 hours ago when the package arrived. Now, fuck knows. White powder in white bottle I mustve been the president of fucking MENSA when I decided that. Shit. So now I have no idea what I dosed, and my mouth tastes like shit, and if I survive these four hours, I can find a way to maybe even find my real prescription of Alprazolam and figure. shit. out.

Every year this time I break down it seems. I am taking Roz to Daves birthday party but I should have asked Roz whether she does drugs or not because it might be problematic if she doesnt, but she seems like the type whod do a line without too much fuss (oh god if you read this and this is wrong I am fucked and not literally, am I?)

Although the influx of cute British girls into my work is a pleasant change, although they really need to leave numbers on notes they leave me so I can, you know, contact them.

Los Angeles Metro Day Pass fucks over part-type graveyard types

2008-07-21T12:57:00.000-07:00

And yes, I am a part-time graveyard type.

Today I was rudely awakened on the Blue Line and asked to show my ticket, for the first time. I showed the Day Pass I bought at 11:30pm the night before, out of good faith. Graveyard makes me live on an inverted schedule, so I pretended like 11:30pm was 11:30am and when I got off work at 6, it was like 6pm, like everyone else.

The Metro Policing lady didn't quite think so. I was left with a yellow, not unlike a traffic-ticket, sheet telling me to go to the courthouse in Compton. She even told me to go today, but of course, it wasn't on record yet. My deadline is September 22, by then I would be in Vermont for sure and I was also threatened with a arrest warrant.

I guess it would bring some excitement into the sleepy little Brattleboro apartment building to see me get taken down for a Metro ticket violation, but really, the policies are pretty retarded, and while on the outset it seems to work for most normal, 9 - 5 folks or even daytrippers, consider that I start work before midnight and end work at 6, with two transfers (3 single tickets) one way, it would mean that I either have to purchase two day passes for $10 or six single tickets for $7.50, while most day laborers get to enjoy the five dollar unlimited transfers. Oh, and I still need to drive from Norwalk back home, a 10 - 15 minute drive sometimes. At least showing up at 10:30pm means you get the primo parking spots.

But really, the question is, why the fuck don't we have a system like Boston's or New York's. We barely have a subway, but at least it's new, so get it right. CharlieCards and CharlieTickets shouldn't be hard to implement. I pay. Card goes into machine. Go. That's it. The current system undoubtedly encourages people skipping out on fares, and I am certainly guilty, but not because I don't want to pay for it, but I consider that my 'day pass' is good for my workday, so fuck paying double.

Another solution is the time limit set on each purchased pass, kind of like the single-ride limit. From the moment I buy the ticket, I get 24 hours of use out of it, no matter when. 3AM to 3AM? Noon to noon? Fuck yeah. That can't be hard to implement, since it's already half implemented. Does anyone really use all 24 hours of a day pass, straight from 12:00AM to 12:00AM? It's ridiculous that such a scheme would lock the mass-transit users of LA into a situation like this. LA doesn't flip a page at midnight and everything starts anew, why bother?

And the funny thing is, if I'm working three days in a row, I would just buy the day pass for the middle day and hope they don't check, but since now gas is like 4.29 and my car gets 23 - 25mpg, it cost roughly the same for me to drive to work. Parking could be a bitch, but if I go early, it wouldn't, and no matter what, it is a lot more convenient than the metro. The Green -> Blue -> Red transfer is pretty shitty, sometimes the trains take fucking forever to come anyway. Sure, LA traffic sucks, but know the right surface streets and a channel with traffic reports and it normally works out okay. The only problem for me is that if I drive, I can't be drunk at 6AM, like I could with the metro, but shit, 45 minute drive home or an hour and half of transfers and gruff ladycops who doesn't understand good faith? Gimme some credit for buying a day pass at 11:30pm, I could just wait 30 minutes and get a whole extra day.

A test

2008-07-15T00:03:00.000-07:00

Im reading Thomas de Quincey and decided that laudanum and junkies have been written to death in the past 200 years but nobody ever writes about benzos.

I was once told that a good relationship depended on desire, not need, lest it becomes too needy, clingy, and ultimately co-dependent. This applies certainly to interpersonal relationships - and I, myself, have of course been involved in quite a few tortured ones teetering on the edge of mutual-consumptions - but relationships eventually fade, as I believe it. The women I have loved, though we remain friends or acquaintances, would fade out of my daily, constant desires and wants in due time. The memories, or in some cases, daydreams masquerading as memories - of tenderness, ecstasy, and the highs of love and being loved in return would avail itself to a grey sheath of apathy. Yet, while the depths of human emotion could easily be placated with the withering of time and the passing pleasures of new experiences, friends, partners, and raucous party-rooms of keg beer and libidous glances, an addiction to something completely of another sort, at least to me, have proven to be far more difficult to throw off and place within the realm of ex-lovers that one keeps in the back of his or her head until the discovery of a box of love letters on a rainy day in a wet attic or other such mementos when one becomes of an age to appreciate such with a sigh of sentimental joviality instead of sentimental maudlin.

In truth, my addiction is tranquility, but not the usual kind. Not the Waldenesque solitude that one would imagine, although by all accounts, his hermit-esque existence was one of misinterpretation anyway - only his thoughts and writings were in solitude, and no more. Having spent much of my past three years in the great New England wilderness, far more isolated than Walden Pond, might I add, I had grained no love for the solitude and the seven-month-winter a Vermont hilltop afforded me. The grand pre-Victorian house that I occupied with three of my close associates - friends seem too generic of a word, as we associated freely in words and ideas - became sometimes a prison, other times a refuge, from the cold, shrill winds of a February blizzard or the mere notion that an outside world existed. I sought tranquility, but not away from people or thoughts. I reveled, as anyone close to me would know, in the company of all, but especially the personages of the more voracious, tireless partysome types. We challenged deadlines with wine, cheered achievements with song and more wine, and drowned our sorrows in the best pleasures a White Powder Society outside of the mountains could offer, courtesy of the modern highways and a few intrepid souls willing to take the risk. We were all cosmopolitan people, smart certainly, and perhaps too clever yet too unwise for our own good. In short, we had a good time, as simple as that, but that soon became dependent, as the second semester of my college career started, on my quest for this mystical tranquility, the gathering of which quickly became an obsession and remains one to this day.

The name of it sounds absolutely chemical and esoteric to most: benzodiazepine. As a history instead of a chemistry student, I dare not explain the details of its workings, even though I have a pretty good idea how it creates and destroys the most lapses of sanity and insanity indiscriminantely and heavy-handedly at the best of times. There are large swarthes of my memory that remain blank or largely blank, from the period between February of 2006 to the present, during which I simply have no recollection besides second-hand tales told my friends and concerned on-lookers.

Part 1

2008-05-06T02:10:00.003-07:00

My flight, a decidedly modern Airbus, landed roughly on the runway in Pudong International Airport after the 13 hour flight from Los Angeles. I gathered my things as the entire plane seemed to have stood up before we parked at the taxi gate. As I walked down the jetway, my first impression was the size of everything. The arrivals hall was huge, bright, and empty, on Chinese standards. All the signs were bilingual. All the fluorescent lights worked. The air didn’t smell like cigarette smoke or gasoline. It was the new face of China. The color scheme was white and silver and it looked like something out of a sci-fi movie for a second, and then we took a turn down an escalator into the deep underbelly of the airport and into customs. There were two lines: one for citizens, and one for foreigners. I took the line for citizens.

The customs officer asked for my passport. It was red. She pondered over it for a second, and asked for my Green Card.

Already, China was eager to have me leave.

The last time I was in China, it was 1999, a hot and muggy summer before the millennium, when Y2K was still the buzzword of the year and Rollercoaster Tycoon just arrived on the scene. My internet was a 56K modem that buzzed loudly and uncontrollably and somehow had an on-off switch. I was 12. I still spoke more Chinese than English. I’ve been in America for a mere two years and found myself spending the summer in a Spartan apartment my father obtained from his new job in Shenzhen, across the river from Hong Kong, half a country away from my hometown, Suzhou. I remember watching TV and not understanding a single word of Cantonese. We shopped for pirated software in the bazaar that frequently got raided for television purposes. There was a laughably strange Pizza Hut somewhere downtown amidst all the construction that didn’t use real cheese whose name translated to something like “the guest who must win”. I rode taxis and talked to strangers in the park who were amazed at my bilingual fluency in reading epic novels that weren’t fairy tales. I played catch with my father in the park with a baseball and two gloves while puzzled onlookers watched every morning. We visited the strange tourist attractions – a park full of miniaturized landmarks of the world and a park full of miniaturized landmarks of China next to each other. The air smelled of smog. Halfway through the summer, the Falun Gong was cracked down and the news broadcasted little else, and I rooted for the police, knowing that one of my uncles was a chief somewhere. In the end, though, the heat, the foreignness – being in another part of China was far less familiar and comforting to me than being in a whole other country – and the boredom got to me, and I remember getting on the plane in Guangzhou, in a crowded old terminal where the lines stretched out onto the sidewalk and the AC didn’t work, and thought “good riddance”.

And then, eight years later.

My uncle – my mother’s brother – picked me up at the airport. He drove a Buick and owns some sort of plastics plant, which seemed ubiquitous. We took the highway out of Pudong and around Shanghai en route to Suzhou. It was dusk and the city was lit up like a million stars all gathered for a closeup. The highway was new, or at least, new to me. There were three lanes and toll booths, chugging trucks and zippy Mercedes’. I tried to recognize things and couldn’t, save for the signs on the side of the road spelling out vaguely familiar towns that we used to drive through when we went to Shanghai, usually for the airport but also when my grandmother broke her hip in 1996 and received a titanium one in replacement. Back then, the drive took two hours down shoddy surface streets surrounded by fields of cotton and rice, and somewhere along the way, I saw a Volkswagen Santana wrapped around a tree in a terrifying yet comical manner, while on fire. The image was scarring. My cousins and I used to count the number of bridges and graves we could see off the side of the roads. I always counted the graves. I always lost count. But now, there weren’t anything except high rises, and then, darkness in the suburbs, but it took less than an hour to reach our exit, also in the middle of nowhere, save for the impossibly well-lit boulevard that seemingly stretched into nowhere.

Along the road, we passed one monolithic metal-and-glass gargantuan after another, flanked by young trees and odd metal sculptures. Everything had a metallic shine, from the stoplights to the median. Yet, at the same time, tricycles, called yellow-bull carts for some reason that never was explained to me, passed by, loaded with migrant workers in straw hats and plaid shirts. My uncle explained that they worked in the factories around here, virtually all jointly owned by Chinese and foreigners. They came from all over China and probably didn’t speak any of our local dialect. We suddenly started passing rows and rows of villas, then rows and rows of apartments, all identical, all reminiscent of Los Angeles or Orange County, except even bigger. We arrived on the outskirts of the city, and my uncle turned into a small gated community guarded by a man in a military uniform, who promptly saluted the car. He was security. This was home.

One of those dreams

2008-04-26T09:13:00.000-07:00

It's one of those dreams that happen late in the morning that feels brilliant and groundbreaking in an unexplainably bizarre kind of way. I think I had the Big Lebowski on the whole time during the thing. I was playing some sort of broomball except there were three small goals within a big goal and it was one on one and for some reason I was playing Ariella whose shirt said something like "page not found" or something equally inexplicably nerdy. Then I was sitting on a curb outside my old elementary school, watching some sort of basketball game where one team came back to win in the last 30 seconds, when all hope seemed to be lost, and kids started pouring out everywhere and Ashley was behind them, and I followed her into a convertible, and it started to rain, and she said it would be okay.

An exercise in automatic writing

2008-04-13T22:50:00.000-07:00

I am delirious and therefore the best time to attempt this is now lest my more sober and less diseased state ruin the passageway to my thoughts. Perhaps none of this would turn Rimbaudian after all. I feel like death. There's something dangerous about living in extreme discomfort. The sense of hellfire and hallucinations are on the edges of my vision, waiting to pounce on the animals trapped in their steel claws that are all about. The other night I dreamed of a paper and jails and terrorists and I hope it would not be something I remember. I think I told Jeff Koch about my melatonin-induced barbituate-laced dreams, summer of 2006. It's disconcerting. The cough sounds coarse. Coarse, coarse, coarse, a mine in Colorado, rocks, silvery rocks, desert and sand, but not really, higher up than desert and sand, a bit of red and a lot of yellow, blue skies, never see snow in those kinds of visions. VLC is not helping my sanity tonight. My cough is dry and entirely not productive. Should I wait it out to the morning? The longer I sit on this couch the more I wonder how I'm going to be found. There's a certain sense of doom in Brattleboro, something about the dying piles of snow, and yes, the white dotted with black is UTTERLY death, it is the personification of death in nature, much more than death itself. You see mangled flesh, yes, what does that mean? Could be mangled flesh as well as death, but snow bespeckled with dirt, it by itself is meaningless, but its representation is utterly death-inducing, mortally shocking, and everything else. That and the mud, mud of my childhood, are entirely terrifying. Brattleboro. Brattleboro. The end of the world. The end of my world. Certainly the dullest and self-important town possible.

Sedition sedition sedition monarchy what. Think about the Dutch. The Dutch. The Dutch. De Ruyter. De Ruijter? De Ruijter. An age where giant-killing is possible. Like the FA Cup. If I get sicked enough I'll get my drunk back which is awesome. I haven't gotten my drunk on for reals since probably summer. OR since the time Matt Lynch bodyslammed me into that hill. DEspotism to liberty on a feather bed. No, it cannot done, it can only done with an iron fist, irony. Irony. Parliamentary system? Questionable, in a nation too large, but a two party system is far more problematic. My health is failing.

Eric Blair? Fuck that.

2008-03-31T14:14:00.001-07:00

To be honest, my childhood ambitions didn't involve fashion design, flying passenger jets, managing air traffic at the local airport, or being a magnificent alcoholic rock star... well actually, it did, but really, I just wanted to write biographies of people who didn't really matter. It turns out, George Bickers beat me to the punch and wrote a great biography about R.M. Tinkler, who was apparently just a policeman in Shanghai back in the 30s. How wonderfully pointless. I'm also reading it out loud with my best Neil-Oliver-from-Glasgow-but-yet-still-on-the-BBC accent that Daphne liked so much the other night.

Hey, at least it's more interesting than the thing about mappurondi or whatever the Indonesian thing is that Seth Harter had us reading.

6 more weeks fuck fuck fuck i won't survive this.

http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Made-Me-Robert-Bickers/dp/0141011955/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206998401&sr=8-1

Speaking of childhood dreams, I always wanted to grow up to be Serge Gainsbourg. To be honest, who didn't? http://youtube.com/watch?v=ozmBA88Q0EA

Spring Break

2008-03-24T01:42:00.000-07:00

I was sitting on my couch watching every episode of Skins in order with Ariella and Lex and Chris. There are pizza boxes and two cases of beer on the floor. Evan and John Thorson are stopping by. Kevin is somewhere across the river. Tim just dropped me off. Eric is sick across town. All of a sudden I realize that this might not be the Rules of Attraction but it's pretty much exactly how I want my college life to be, sitting on a couch watching cheap British soaps drinking beers and waiting for the days to go by without worrying about the 25 books I need to read sitting in a box next to my bed.

Then I left.

2008-03-11T21:09:00.000-07:00

If my plan was a pie, I just had to enter it from the top and go around, really. That made no sense, but when my plan is done it will be awesome, if it's every done, the hundreds of pages and translations and all that jazz.

I'd say I want to be loved but it's a lie because I like to push people away in that situation, so I guess I like it a lot more when I'm secretly in love with someone who marginally cared about me?

Quitting drugs is the worst idea in the world and I can't believe I did it for like 5 months. Certainly it's not healthy but normalcy is for normal people and terrifically dull. I haven't been to class since February 29th and haven't really interacted with anyone outside of Will Chris James Ariella Katherine and a few Howland kids and I kind of like it. Every late February through April I stop talking to people and it's nice, actually. Can't do that from September to December for sure.

What else is new

2008-02-13T09:57:00.000-08:00

My driveway is a slurpee, Canal St. is a canal, there's at least a foot of snow outside of my door with more coming. Power went out on campus. I'm cold, and why aren't my clothes dry yet :(

Broomball et al

2008-02-05T14:45:00.000-08:00

Broomball sucked. Power went out. Marlboro kids no longer know how to party and neither do I. 18 credits is killing me slowly. I'm becoming a senior that nobody sees anymore.

Allison :)

One Laptop Per Child

2008-01-28T07:25:00.000-08:00

Last night John Whelan and Miranda came by with an XO-1 from One Laptop Per Child (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child)

The specs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO-1

Besides the gripes I have about not having the infrastructure in third world nations to support a rollout of technology such as these, and the reallocation of funding from more essential and basic forms of aid and development, this little gadget was actually pretty sweet.

It took us ten minutes to figure out how to open the damn thing, but then we were on easy street. The internet was slow as hell so of course we wanted to try out the features so we jumped on a porn site and it loaded well. Games didn't go to great, so we looked up some bomb instructions, then we went onto PerezHilton and proceeded to crash it. Within 30 minutes.

I can foresee the lucky children of Uruguay (first people receiving this) enjoying this.

F/W 08 Recap

2008-01-27T12:33:00.000-08:00

Now that we got most of the shows out of the way:

Wilfried Mayer

Enjoy the flush, minimal look. Colors are really subdued, and the details are too, so there's a fairly distinct, say, Jil-Sander-under-Raf-Simons look, or maybe not even quite as much. It's certainly derivative of 2003ish Jil Sander, I think, in a great way.

Louis Vuitton

Who cares if Marc Jacobs doesn't *actually* do the men's collection? It is worthwhile to check out the shearling, and the strange blue-green color scheme.

Ute Polier

See, now that's what a winter collection is all about. Flush, high-collared jackets and boots to match. Bonus points for epaulets.

Attachment

Wearable? Fuck no. Awesome? Fuck yes, and not just because I'm a history major. There's this inherently intricate and intimate way of layering the Victorians have that we don't. Their ensembles, and I think the statement extends to the Edwardians and Georgians after them or even the Regency before them, demand a certain sort of order that becomes much more exciting when you punctuate it with colors that don't entirely belong in the same palette. These guys could be my new Cloak (RIP :()

Gucci

Not as cool as Iggy Pop, but at least they tried, and it turned out okay, especially for the coat.

Commes des Garcons

Kilts! Channeling mid-80s Gaultier and a bit of McQueen somewhere? This isn't exactly Highland Rape but you know, it's actually wearable and for men.

Dior

Van Assche isn't necessarily *ballsy*, or even really close to Hedi Slimane's sense of bravado back in the good years around 04ish, but the detailing are, still, very nice, and streetworthy.

Alexander McQueen

An infinitely more wearable version of earlier Galliano Homme. It just looks so good.

Lanvin

Cropped jackets look awesome.

Ann Demeulemeester

Ann Demeulemeester is most certainly the queen of details and the details on the purple part of the collection certainly look fabulous.

Raf Simons

Everybody copied Raf Simons. Raf Simons is a genius. Long live Raf Simons. Very flush, minimalist work, very lean silhouette. Very wearable.

Yves Saint-Laurent

YSL, as usual, went the conventional route, to a certain degree. The prints are very nice, and not entirely following the blue-black scheme with others (or even purple, a lot of purple this season for all involved, it seems). Instead, we have more grey, more brown, and more earthen tones than a lot of other collections, most certainly. It's a bit Dior-esque but it seems to work fairly well. Pilati is most certainly a worthy successor to YSL - Ford - et al.

Maison Martin Margiela

Martin Margiela just debuted the most awesome ring ever.

Losers: Galliano, for the furries.

Face Tattoo

2008-01-26T06:00:00.000-08:00

At lunch yesterday in the bookstore Kevin Cabrey swore to put a couple of Blake's Art Tattoos on my face, I suppose for not getting a Howland tattoo at the end of last semester. Went to class, hung around, for a bit afterwards and ended up going food hunting with Jeff Bristol and Mike Macher. We ended up on Putney Road (but not before going to see the peacocks and... chickens Jeff was keeping) at Mama and Papa Z's Family Restaurant where we were served some massive calzones by a Greek Orthodox priest who supposedly built a church by hand at some point. In any case we went to the Flat Street Pub where the conversation turned depressing but ended up convincing Melissa to drop by which was nice, even though she was fully engulfed in working with the toddlers. Went to the North Party with some really gnarly port and Andre but all Marlboro parties end up sort of the same so I hung out with that new Caitlin girl and we ended up high-tailing it back to Howland where apparently everyone but me was tripping, but by now I was pretty tired and passed out on the blue couch and at some point realized that Cabrey or someone put two temporary tattoos on my face, then my dreams melted into reality a bit and in the morning there were four guitars in the room and Macher can't find his shoes.

Hitchhiking in Vermont in the Winter

2008-01-25T08:43:00.000-08:00

Campus was dead last night so I went to the Metropolis, but I never seem to behave too well with the older crowd. Some point around 1ish they stopped serving and I think I ended up saying "I need another one, because everyone here is ugly." Anyway, karma bit me on the ass because when Wyatt was getting me a ride this morning to campus his truck breaks down and James Evans and I ended up hitching a ride from the lady who owns the Deli at the corner of Williams St. and Route 9. Good times.

How to fit Intro to Exotic Dance into my schedule

2008-01-23T08:22:00.000-08:00

I've always wanted to be a stripper, and I lived next to Toni Baldi for a semester (unofficially, but I never ever officially lived next to anyone except Boynton and Larsen) so I know that she's a pretty good one. Now she's offering Intro to Exotic Dance and I might just have to ditch Tim Little/Dana Howell's Uses of History and somehow scrounge up two more credits (1 from Tim, easily, the other... oh god, Tango? Way too gay, even if Jim Mahoney's teaching it). Maybe screenwriting? That'd give me a class every day plus two tutorials, which would probably in some way kill me by late February, since 11 credits for two tutorials can easily kill a grown giraffe (it has been done!)

I might have to work out a little to be a hotter stripper but I think the long hair helps, besides, sitting around all day writing papers and drinking cheap wine and playing SNES or learn belly dancing? Interesting choices, I have to make.

Boston - v2

2008-01-20T04:37:00.001-08:00

I woke up at an unreasonably early hour - 8AM - and decided to cook scrambled eggs, but since I'm retarded I had to run and get more eggs, and butter, and god knows what. My first batch was even burnt but everyone here seemed to have enjoyed it. Veronica's roommates seemed pretty nice and interesting people. After much talk about fashion and whatnot we ended up taking the T to Kenmore where we had some Italian food - mostly mussels, and some Martinis, before heading off to see Cloverfield, which wasn't as good as I thought it could be but fun nonetheless. On the way back there was a show at Great Scott which is exactly across Comm Ave from Veronica's place so I went, 10 dollar cover, didn't know any of the bands but didn't really care. The opener was The Peasantry and actually the only band I remember. All the girls looked way too indie and way too hipster and all too not-Ashley so I chatted up the band instead. The bassist, Jeff, was really cool and could tell how trashed I was from the cheap drinks. He left me a phone # and an address to an afterparty. I don't think I went because I had no idea how to get around Boston and I went about a block out before saying "fuck it", but I did end up with their EP which was cool. Somehow I spent like 60 (well, more like 40 after the cover charge, the T, this Vitamin Water I got at some point, and all that) but now I'm broke and somehow I need to get Lex to take me to campus for and not starve on 10 dollars. Fun times. Then I move into 76 Canal. Never a dull moment with Jim, that's for sure.

Boston

2008-01-19T07:00:00.000-08:00

This time of the year I'm always in Boston. It's a tradition, except I'm 21 now, so no more scurrying around Marty's Liquor at the corner of Comm Ave and Harvard St. waiting for my booze to be bought. Nooooo sireee. This time I dont need to sneak into Evan's scorpion bowl to get riled up enough to throw a condom onto the stage at the Comedy Club in Cambridge (that, surprisingly, did not get me kicked out). In any case, I flew in at 4PM, a bit pissy from the flight, the 7AM ride to the airport, but it's all mostly a blur since I've done nothing but flying it seems since 1994. The landing was rough and worried me a little because of the British Airways incident. We ended up going to a Chinese place in Chinatown that was once a strip club, and it was, indeed, gradiose to the max, and I mean gradiose. Food was okay, drinks were hella strong, and I mean, hella strong. The waiter wouldn't tell us what the ingredients were but at that stage I'm okay with that. We then took the T to Allston where Veronica lived and it turned out it was literally 50 feet away from Evan/Veronica's old place. Her roommates were a blast. We went wandering around until we hit the Sunset (http://www.allstonsfinest.com/) where there were 112 beers on tap and the beer menu is: http://www.allstonsfinest.com/. It's a fucking doozy, we couldn't figure out what the fuck was going on but everything came out was nice. My preferred beers are Belgian Witbier and although you can't get real Witbier in the states easily, it sufficed, it sufficed. There were at least 300 beers available. And then hard alcohol. What the fuck, right? Tonight we're gonna go see a show or something, maybe for free or mad cheap, because we're broke, and Lex is fetching me to the airport. I tried to scramble some eggs but Veronica didn't have any so I might have to do a Supermarket run. The closest one is a Chinese one, actually, the Super 88. Veronica is a great cook and a good bartender too, but then again, I'm the only person to buy her painting so far, so, yeah. I enjoy Boston. I enjoy cities. then again, I haven't had to live on one of these since.... November 1996, so, shrug.

Inconsequential Tidbits About Marlboro

2008-01-15T09:30:00.000-08:00

Here I answer questions no one asked about all the little things about Marlboro I happened to find out when really bored.

Q. What's behind Marlboro North?

A. A random dog house, a pond, a lot of woods, and Church Hollow Road, which wraps around the back of the property and connects Route 9 near Town Hill Rd. to... well, Route 9, next to the Spiral Shop.

Q. What's the deal with North Pond?

A. Everyone knows where South Pond is (interesting fact: I almost drowned in it once), but North Pond? It exists. It's also on Church Hollow Road, right behind where the Spiral Shop used to be before it picked up shop and moved out overnight. It's fairly peaceful but that goes without saying. The water is entirely unsuitable for swimming - I've tried. A lot of reeds, marshes, and all that shit. There's a bizarre looking house with a gravel parking lot overlooking it from a hill on the other side of it, and also, there's a circular house somewhere within walking distance of Marlboro North backyard

Q. Where does Lucier Road lead to?

A. Hale Road, which, in the end, leads either onto Hinesburg Rd which connects Green River/Jacksonville/etc and Ames Hill/Greenleaf/Route 9 next to the 7-Eleven or back onto Cow Path 40, which also ends up on Ames Hill. This also answers the often asked question "Where the fuck does Cow Path 40 actually lead to?" The answer: nowhere spectacular.

Q. What is Neringa?

A. Neringa, off MacArthur Road on Route 9, is I guess a nun retreat or something similar to it. I've seen a flier that advertised some sort of course being taught there that helped you find your "inner warrior" or some shit like that. It's pretty quaint and looks like a summer camp, although it does have a big ass wooden cross that looked really ominous.

Q. Where does Moss Hollow lead to?

A. Green River Road, which would take you either to Brattleboro/Guildford in the long way or to West Halifax and to Greenfield the other. Follow the paved road, because the backroads suck, and try not to drive into the creek because there ain't no guardrail and the bridge is one lane.

Q. What's the story about Black Jesus?

A. Black Jesus was the big ass framed watercolor painting of Jesus, black and in dreadlocks, in various poses throughout his life, which I found at the Salvation Army in Worcester, MA for $10 and just had to take home, during the Spring Break of 2006. Of course, since I was living on the first floor of Marlboro North at the time and didn't really have any proper walls to hang it up, I pulled out a chair, propped it up in the foyer, found some bottle rockets and a really old bottle of rye that even Ryan Larsen or Johnny Ya-ya wouldn't drink, and wrote "All hail Black Jesus
, Savior of Marlboro, Protector of Marlboro North" on a piece of paper I stuck to it. The first night it was set up, a bunch of Jehova's Witnesses somehow decided to hike all the way up from Brattleboro, no easy feat considering that it was snowing outside, and leave copies of Watchtower in front of Black Jesus. The next week, the same thing happened, prompting us to relocate Black Jesus to the Howland Bathroom, conveniently covering the creepy ass "RED RUM" graffiti on the wall. Unfortunately the poster was last seen in Cameron Campbell's apartment, Valentine's 2007, and if only we still had it, it would probably be the mantlepiece over Howland's fake fireplace.

Q. Was there really an E. coli warning at Marlboro?

A. Yep. November 2005, over Thanksgiving. Thankfully, nobody was around except me, I think, because I've seen exactly three people on campus while the warning was in effect, and I'm sure the other two have long since passed into Marlboro lore (Murple was one of them, and there was definitely some 5-Meo-DIPT involved in that weekend that I didn't do). It turned out that we didn't really have E. coli in the water supply after all, but melting snow for water wasn't terribly fun, especially with 2 feet of snow dropped on us over that weekend.

Q. Why does the Dining Hall people hate you?

A. I'd eat for free and charge it to John Sheehy.

Q. How did Seth Harter almost set the DH on fire?

A. Seth decided that since a group of Asian scholars were visiting for the mid-Autumn's festival, it would be nice to light up little lanterns with candles inside and float them on Fire Pond. There was a problem - the lanterns were paper, so somewhere in between lighting them in the Dining Hall and bringing them over to Fire Pond, he ended up dropping a few on the stage of the Dining Hall. Not much burned though, just some ugly black marks on the stage and somehow in the end Seth had to fish out a lot of burned lanterns out of the pond with a kayak.

Plan!

2008-01-10T02:53:00.000-08:00

I'm officially on PLAN.

Holy fuck.

Well, saw it coming, of course, that's why I'm at Marlboro, right?

The one paragraph plan summary, at the moment, (no my final plan app isn't in it, thank god, actually I don't even know if my prelims are in either, haha), is:

An exploration of administrative, military, and social decisions and concepts that created and shaped the British colonial system in the Far East after the Napoleonic Wars, with an emphasis on the colonies of Singapore, Hong Kong, and the International Settlement of Shanghai. Furthermore, a comparison regarding the post-colonial statuses of the aforementioned colonies and an examination regarding their successes and failures would be conducted.

It's not very well worded but I don't get to talk to Seth and Tim about this until probably the 22nd or 23rd so I'm good for now, I'm sure.

I have lost my Hong Kong paper, however, which is a bummer, but it's only 20 pages and it sucked I'm sure.

The Singapore paper is still here, the Shanghai paper haven't been written yet, there's a tie-in paper about India, and an independent project of translating the tongmenghui system in Shanghai which will probably make me kill someone. So far, Hong Kong should be about 30 pages, Singapore can be reduced to 30, Shanghai would weigh in at 30, the tie-in would be 25, the translation.... fucking hell, god knows. 115 pages plus independent actually is probably undercutting it. Actually I might interweave all the papers together and make it a grander project. So, start with colonial attitudes as a whole, policymaking, etc, then move onto individuals from Clive to, say, Minto? (Yes this is mostly pre-Napoleonic) Then the late period of Company rule and then from Raffles to Clementi, and do late period with Curzon to Mountbatten, ending up with Lee Kuan Yew and whoever else is his contemporary. Somewhere along the line the nativist organizations (secret societies? I haven't figured out the wording yet) need to be seriously covered. The Dutch needs to be mentioned (I've only studied Daendals and Jan Willem Janssens - actually I wrote Janssens' wiki article from scratch hehe), although anything after van der Capelen is... pointless and silly, the Dutch sucked, haha.

I'm running the problem of having too broad of a scope. I've had this problem before, in fact, and Seth/Tim both know about it. I want to cover all the way back to Bombay and Amboyna, but it's not happening. I also, way in the back of my head, think that I should've done German/Austrian history instead, something about mediatisation or something, perhaps. I'm really, really good at mediatisation, not that anybody cares nowadays - and call me a monarchist if you wish - and of course, it's far more fun to talk about something people get riled up about, and nobody, I mean, nobody gives a shit about the Saxe-Altenburg/Saxe-Coburg/Saxe-Coburg-Gotha/Saxe-Coburg-Eisenach drama (not that I care, either, I just happened to know). Also, it turns out that the running joke of my academic drunktalk, Wedgwood's Thirty Years War, is a terribly unreadable book. I also think I probably should've went with the film route, because I'm actually passionate about that, but everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, have told me to stay away from Jay Craven, and the 4 people whose advice I heed the most - Lynch, Schwenterly, Melissa, and Sonia - have not approved of such, so yeah.

If I remember correctly, as late as May 2006, I had a decent singing voice. What the fuck happened to that?

I'm moving into new digs - still on Canal, a few numbers up, on the other side of the only tenements in town. Brattleboro is fucking ghetto. I'm in a house with Will Mees, Chris Odegaard, and James Evans. It should be fun. I don't shit where I sleep though, so parties are still on campus for all who are concerned. I don't know the street number yet but I'm across the street from the one bar I'm not banned from in Brattleboro. Actually, since Jesse works at McNeil's I'm sure I'm not banned from McNeil's either. Actually, since Ostrow spins at Metropolis, I'm probably still allowed there too. Haha, connections. Oh yes, and for your information, I'll be at every Alex Ostrow event unless otherwise specified, kind of like in March - May 2006 in Montreal, or something.

Pledges:

Hang out with Melissa and Sonia more, again, since it sucks not hanging out with them now, but since I'm 21 it's all good.

Hang out with Ostrow before he graduates.

Hang out with Miranda because she's finally back from Sunny-tan-land.

I should still hang out with Liz Emmer even if she dropped out.

Hit up Chicago at least for the first part of Spring Break, although crashing for 10 days might be a bit too ridiculous.

I want to talk either Seth or Tim into letting me lecture a course. Surprisingly I don't think T, Lynette, or Amer hates me even for the rampant terribleness of the shit I did in their classes.

Stop sleeping in a fucking common room.

Hopefully not spending too much time in bars, but Brattleboro is depressing when you're not a hippie or over 50.

Lose 15 pounds (did it last Spring, with Jeremy, but that was... not the way I wanted to do it, to be honest, and it's not about being fat it's about looking exactly right, because I'm not fat but I don't look exactly the way I want to look)

Anyway,

here we go

Singapore paper as of January 2007 (NOT PROPERLY CITED SINCE FOOTNOTES DONT WORK HERE)
----

n a world of problem-ridden post-colonial nations that proliferated during the first decade of the 21st Century comes to a close, remain aid-dependent and largely off the radars of investors of the western nations, the nation of Singapore stands in stark contrast. A former British colony that gained full independence in 1965, its history reads, in part, very similar to the histories to the myriad of former British possessions around it - Malaysia, Brunei, Burma, India - and even the wave of colonies in Africa such as Nigeria or Ghana that saw independence brought to them in the same nationalistic drive after World War II that engulfed virtually all former colonial possessions of the great empires. However, there are very few nations today that can boast the achievements of the Singaporean state.

In the first quarter of 2007, the Singaporean economy grew by 7.2 percent, a figure that surpassed market analysts' predictions of a 4.9 percent growth . However, this kind of growth is hardly shocking, as the island nation of only 693 square kilometers boasts a per capita GDP of $30,900 as of 2006, roughly 30th in rank amongst the nations and territories of the world, placing it between France and the UK. Its neighbor and largest trading partner, Malaysia, in comparison, ranks 59th at $12,700 . According to the World Bank's "Doing Business Database", Singapore jumped to number one in "overall ease of doing business" in 2006, up from second place in 2005. The nation's economic numbers complement its rankings in other fields. The nation's corruption level is ranked number five out of all nations in 2006, according to Transparency International. UNDP's Human Development Index has ranked Singapore 25th of 177 countries. While the majority of its fellow post-colonial nations have been mired in problems from unemployment to water pollution to coup d'états in the past fifty years or so, and indeed many nations continue to suffer these problems today, Singapore has joined ranks with the developed world in virtually all fields, despite its humble beginnings as a breakaway Malaysian province in 1965.

Singapore's meteoric rise since independence, an achievement mostly visible statistically in the field of economics, have been attributed by its leaders, especially long-time Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, as a result of the work ethic and culture of the Singaporeans. Singapore today is a diverse state, encompassing a large ethnically Chinese population, but also includes significant Tamil, Malay, and European minorities . The policies instated by Lee and his successors were largely attributed to the "Confucian" ideology that the nation followed, according to the leaders. However, this discounting of the work of the British colonizers in the over one hundred years prior to the independence of the nation can hardly be considered fair. While the new, Chinese-led administration proudly attributes the progress the nation has made on the "Asianness" of the nation, culture, and government, by virtue of Occam's razor, it would be a lot simpler to attribute most of the governmental policies to either a direct continuation of British policies or a reaction to British policies of the century prior. The legacies left by the British and the age of Imperialism continue to be a defining factor in Singaporean policy making, even today.

Several significant areas of modern Singapore can be used to showcase the connection between the colonial policies and modern implementations. Singapore's diverse yet orderly society, under the overarching government that emphasizes on "good governance" over freedom as well as its focus on expanding international trade and economics as well as an ardent backing of free trade amongst nations can both be directly traced back to its colonial origins .

Singaporean Free Trade and Economic Self-Control

British Colonial Rule

Singapore's role as a high tech center of commerce in Asia have been solidified as it overcame the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-1998 and remained a strong player in the international market. Its policies of encouraging foreign investments and the official encouragement for free trade had always separated itself from its neighbors. Singapore's specific policies in encouraging trade and foreign investments since independence differed greatly from the policies of its neighbors such as Malaysia and Indonesia, both post-colonial nations unable to attract the same level of foreign investments like Singapore. Singapore's overwhelming disregard for protectionist policies can indeed be attributed in part to its small size and lack of arable land or ability to foster large scale manufacturing as well as the lack of local investment capital - there simply weren't local businesses to be protected by tariffs and protectionism . At the same time, Singapore's strategic position at the crossroads of the India-Asia trade and trade with the Spice Islands during the 19th Century required it to historically provide a favorable policy for traders for it to compete with the established colonies of the day, especially the Dutch, whose grip on the Spice Islands made it one of the wealthiest nations in the world in the early days of imperialism.

Singapore's founding in 1819 hardly marked the first attempt by the British to establish a presence in the lucrative Southeast Asian market. The British East India Company, based out of Calcutta, had, for nearly two hundred years, attempted to establish a stable trading presence in the Spice Islands, dominated by the Dutch East Indies Company - Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC - since 1602 . While the English during the time period focused largely on America and Africa, the Dutch fought to control the Far East trade against the Portuguese and Spanish. By the end of the Seventeenth Century, the Dutch monopoly in the area over the commodities of sandalwood, mace, nutmeg, and cinnamon was complete. A trading empire based out of Batavia on the island of Java stretched from the Cape of Good Hope to the Moluccas and New Guinea and became the dominant force in the Malay world.

The British East India Company - EIC - was founded at a similar time, in 1600, but its focus was largely on the Indian subcontinent. An English presence was established in Amboyna as early as 1609, but the twenty men under the employment of the EIC were massacred by the Dutch in 1623, in the Amboyna Massacre, an act that proved to be the end of British ambitions to dislodge Dutch power in the area for the greater part of the next century . The British later founded Bencoolen, on the island of Sumatra, in 1685, for the pepper trade . Unlike Amboyna or the rest of the Dutch East Indies, access to Bencoolen from India did not require passage through the two major waterways controlled by the Dutch that led to the Far East, the Strait of Malacca to the north and the Strait of Sunda to the south. The allure of the Japan trade, which at the time the Dutch held a monopoly over in Nagasaki and involved not only Japanese goods but Chinese goods as well, motivated the British to establish a presence in Canton, modern day Guangzhou, in Southern China in 1711, but trade was limited in part due to the lack of a British port in Southeast Asia .

However, by the late 1700s, the British started to gain the upper hand in the Asia trade. The loss of the American colonies to independence enabled the government to focus more resources on the expansion of authorities and power of the EIC, and the aggressive policies undertaken by the company during this period of time, starting with the ousting of the French in the Seven Years' War in 1763 and the consolidation of the subcontinent by the end of the Anglo-Mysore Wars, allowed for the British to make a serious attempt at dislodging the Dutch from their monopoly in the Spice Islands. The first such step was the establishment of the colony of Penang, in the Strait of Malacca, in 1786 by Captain Francis Light . Although a foothold was established, the location of Penang, towards the northern end of the Strait of Malacca, was not as advantageous as Light had touted it to be, and it failed to seriously challenge the Dutch presence. An English presence was established in Malacca in 1795, as Dutch interest in the area faded to focus further on the southern part of its empire, and the colony served to facilitate the burgeoning China trade, now encompassing the officially illegal Opium trade to Canton, but the presence in Malacca was disputed with the Dutch. A permanent, British-only alternative was sought, and as the Napoleonic Wars loomed in Europe, the British finally had the chance to dislodge the Dutch from their stronghold in Java .

As Holland was annexed by the French in 1811, the Indian government launched an attack on the poorly defended island of Java, capturing it in forty-five days. A previously inexperienced EIC clerk, favored by the Governor-General Lord Minto for his fluency in Malay, was installed as the governor of Java. This marked the first significant post held by the future founder of Singapore, Thomas Stamford Raffles .

Raffles, despite his inexperience, managed the newly-acquired colony with care. His policies were not only entrepreneurial, but also humanistic. His abolishment of slavery and the assimilation of both the existing Dutch civil servants into the English system were largely unheard of and alarmed the authorities in Calcutta . Further in contrast with the aggressive militaristic style of colonial management of the EIC in India and surrounding territories, Raffles negotiated with the local sultans and Temenggongs to accept his rule, and allowed for a large degree of self-rule to proliferate in the poorly-manned colony . The change of style ultimately ended in his dismissal in 1815 after the incursion of massive financial losses in an economy suddenly freed from a long-standing slavery-based plantation system, and the colony was returned to Dutch rule at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, but his knowledge of Java and the subsequent publication of A History of Java earned him a knighthood and popularity in England.

While the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814 delineated in part the division of British and Dutch colonial possessions in the area, its ambiguity was the source of conflict between the two former allies in the years immediately after the Napoleonic Wars. Raffles was sent to Bencoolen as the governor-general, but he found the colony unprofitable and sickly . The economy was focused on little more than the exportation of pepper, which placed the colony's economic fate at the whim of the unstable markets of the product. It is at this time Raffles convinced the Indian government, under Lord Francis Hastings, to launch a survey mission in the islands immediately south of the Malay Peninsula, basing it on a positive report regarding negotiations between Major William Farquhar, the British resident at Malacca, and the Sultan of Johor who nominally controlled the area, including much of modern day Malaysia, the Riau Archipelago, and the island of Singapore. Raffles had explicit instructions to not provoke the Dutch, who still claimed the Malay Peninsula under its sphere of influence .

Raffles and his party, which included Farquhar, landed on the island of Singapore on January 29, 1819. After ascertaining that no Dutch presence was on the island - the island was populated by no more than small bands of Malay and Chinese fishermen numbering only in the hundreds - he established it as a free port and left Farquhar in charge of the nascent garrison . The establishment of a free port, open to any vessels but retaining a British garrison, was a first in the region. Raffles perhaps drew inspiration from the failed model of monopolized trade in the region practiced by the Dutch and later in his rule of Java and Bencoolen, and despite the fact that Singapore had few natural resources, its strategic advantage was evident from the start . It was located at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, which allowed it access to both the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea.

The initial problem with the establishment of Singapore was largely diplomatic instead of commercial, as the free port almost immediately attracted a large number of traders plying the lucrative trade between Canton and India, mostly Chinese and sailing in junks . Farquhar, who was named resident as Raffles returned to Bencoolen, largely allowed the port to grow on its own, without a central plan or a comprehensive set of legal codes. The Dutch protested fiercely both in Europe and in India, and even force was threatened, but the Dutch presence in the area was still weak from the ravages of war and the bankruptcy of the VOC in 1800, and the war of words amounted to little as the colony quickly grew to the size of 5,000 by the end of May, 1819, when Raffles returned to Singapore . His policy of non-interference in trade continued, although he enacted a rudimentary segregation of the European and non-European parts of the settlement, and encouraged the development of churches and native schools.

The new colony stands in stark contrast to the previously dominant pattern of European Imperialism, exemplified by the colonization of the Americas. Instead of the drive to assimilate or wipe out the local population as was the case in the Americas, Raffles allowed the "local population", in actuality almost all recent arrivals from Malaya, China, and other surrounding regions, to freely practice their own religions and use their own languages. This was perhaps done out of practicality, as the European presence was small and amounted to little beyond the cantonments, but it also reflected a trend of encouraged a limited amount of self-determination that gained popularity on the heels of the American and French revolutions. Raffles also did not encourage any monopolies, as the colony was founded to counter the Dutch monopoly model that had ultimately bankrupted the VOC as the spices previously only found in the East Indies began to be cultivated around the world, driving down prices and making the one-commodity economies of the Dutch factories unprofitable . Continuing a trend started by the early EIC representatives in India, treaties were negotiated with the local rulers, although Raffles did this much more earnestly than many of his contemporaries. The founding of Singapore did indeed secure the claim of Turku Long, a pretender to the Sultanate of Johor at the time of Raffles' landing, but Raffles was not in favor of direct and heavy-handed British involvement in local politics, an act that in India caused over a hundred years of wars against the princely states and later spilled over into Burma and ultimately caused the disastrous British involvement in the First Anglo-Afghan War of 1839 . In fact, as Farquhar started to engage in local politics, Raffles ordered his replacement in 1820 by John Travers, an act openly defied by Farquhar and soured the relations between the two former friends and caused a rift that was to cause a minor scandal after the retirement of both in England.

Singapore remained a testing ground for many new policies, and in the early years, not all of them were successful. Raffles early on attempted to start a series of public works such as the building of roads and schools, but it proved to be prohibitively expensive and unfeasible as the bare-bones colony had little reserves of funds. Raffles was to spend the two years after the founding of Singapore in Bencoolen, and his last and longest visit in Singapore came as he headed home in 1822 .

By 1822, the three-year-old colony was already shaping up to be the regional center of trade, but it was disorganized, much to the dismay of Raffles, who thought Farquhar as incompetent and took over the reins of city planning. He quickly enlisted the advice of the engineer Phillip Jackson in designing a planned city that was to carry Jackson's name . The Jackson Plan called for a segregation of the races, gridded streets, and allotted the best land to the European settlement, displacing many of the already established Chinese or Malay traders. Codes regarding settlement were drawn up and even included some land previously thought to belong to the jurisdiction of the sultan, and a police force as well as a magistrate were set up. Finally, Raffles enacted a land registration scheme that asserted ultimate British control over the colony. Satisfied with the establishment of an orderly society, Raffles started the first steps towards a Malay language college in Singapore, putting $2000 towards the effort, and encouraged the preservation of local flora and fauna, as he had long been a keen naturalist. Before he left Singapore for the last time, Raffles drafted a rudimentary constitution and a code of law, specifically preserving the multiethnic culture of the colony by forbidding laws criminalizing race, and established a basic set of criminal codes . As he sailed home in 1823, John Crawfurd, the renowned Orientalist and close confidant of Raffles was placed as the resident. Crawfurd and his successors were to largely follow the basics of Raffles' policies: that of maintaining order without sacrificing the economy and allowing for a limited governance of the people throughout the first half of the 19th Century . In modern Singapore, at least half of Raffles' policies can still be seen, notably in the free-trade and nonexistent tariffs that have made Singapore a regional hub for trade. The "good governance" and "positive economic policies" that Lee Kuan Yew proudly enacted and attributed to his government certainly can be seen, albeit in slightly different form, in Raffles' plan for Singapore as well.

Singapore's development economically have been largely one of "salutary neglect", a term used by Edmund Burke to describe the British policies towards America but could also be applied to Singapore . The Singaporean colonial government featured a series of civil servants of the EIC who were more intent on keeping order and largely followed the blueprint set up by Raffles and his immediate successors rather than enact dramatic changes, and as Raffles had neither the funds nor the ambition to set up a sweeping government that would immediately delve into civil projects at the cost of high tariffs and taxes, the residents and later, governors of Singapore largely followed suit . There was a distinct lack of communication between the upper crust of Singaporean government and the large masses of the population - within ten years of its founding, more Chinese than Malay, and while European firms gradually took hold and grew to prominence, including some agency houses and trading firms that still exist until today, business was largely a matter of a complex ad hoc system outside of direct control by the government . The government even allowed economic practices such as the slash-and-burn farming techniques employed by the gambier and pepper farmers to continue, despite the damage it caused to the land and ultimately made Singapore wholly dependent on trade instead of native agriculture . Although in hindsight this proved to be beneficial as Singapore was forced to expand trade and allocate more resources, land, and attention to shipping, trade, and high-tech manufacturing, at the time this lack of action by the Singaporean government in regulating the limited agriculture as colonial governments in primarily agriculturally-based colonies elsewhere would have done was certainly a shocking divergence from traditional imperialist policies of the day.

Singapore took on the principle of free trade as almost a sacred cardinal rule, and the few European merchants who were able to vote and influence governmental policies in the early years of the colony vehemently rallied against any change to the free trade policies . Of course, while the colony and the individuals involved in the trades were able to profit from the lack of government control, the government itself hardly had any income at all from this prosperity. The government, therefore, was unable, in the initial years, to provide even basic social services or hire a large number of administrators . Social services such as the police force were at least partly funded by subscription, as were the education system during the 1800s, especially the English schools . The schools of other languages were entirely private ventures without real uniformity and had little intermingling with the European educators. Even hospitals were built with private funds in the first part of the 19th Century, and as trained doctors were a rarity, mortality rates were high.

Ultimately the source of revenue for the government became centered on the taxation of vice, but even this was not a centralized government venture . Instead, the right to excise taxes on items such as opium and spirits were auctioned off to wealthy local merchants, who paid the government and enacted a series of middlemen and ultimately created secret societies explicitly for the purpose of revenue collection . The informal hierarchies and Chinese societies were to cause enough havoc in the colony so that by the end of the century, the government was forced to step in to prevent violence between the different societies to wage out of hand, but such steps were taken only in times of absolute need. The freedom of the economy and taxation based on vice and consumption remains a hallmark of Singaporean policies until today.

After the demise of the EIC in 1858, the governance of Singapore remained at first in Calcutta, and finally becoming a crown colony in its own right in 1867 alongside the Straits Settlements of Penang and Malacca. While previous administrators have remained largely anonymous figures, merely following the guidelines of development set by the colonial founders and encouraged by the powerful, wealthy merchants, the new colonial administrators, starting with Sir Harry Ord in 1867, were more intent on exacting direct changes upon the Singaporean government and system . Ord's reign was earmarked by the unpopular remarks he made to the legislative council regarding the suggestion that a direct taxation scheme might be needed to raise revenues, which created an immediate negative response amongst the merchants of the colony. However, at the same time, the opening of the Suez Canal created a boom in trade for Singapore during his reign as well. The merchants of Singapore, still following the strict adherence of non-interference in matters that would create involuntary expenditures, balked at the idea of having a partially funded military garrison in Singapore, showcasing a sentiment for a bare-bones government free of any slightest bit of unnecessary costs that would be incurred upon the population that would potentially place burdens on the funding of trade .

The first real reforms to the completely laissez-faire policies of the government came in the 1870s with the creation of a Chinese Protectorate . As the new generation of governors became more fluent in Chinese and the desire to interact with not just the European sectors of the economy but also the large Chinese portions as well, ordinances that were obviously financially disadvantageous to the Chinese merchants but were enacted on humanitarian grounds such as the attempt to stop the coolie trade were enacted to little protest from the European population, many of whom by now have seen the troubles caused by the stratification of the Chinese society as well as the social problems caused by the continuous influx of poor immigrants . The regulation on the coolie trade was viewed as a humanitarian effort instead of an earnest attempt in restricting free trade. An increasingly evident pattern by the late 1800s and early 1900s was the usage of Singapore as a warehouse facility as well as a shipping depot for raw materials coming in from the surrounding regions - petroleum, rubber, and tin took precedence over spices and exotic goods, and Singapore almost struggled to catch up with the increasing trade, with new port facilities only completed in 1917 . Prosperity was followed by an allowance for the government to finally expand its abilities to finance reforms, such as the construction of new buildings, which came in the 1920s during the boom years.

The world experienced a universal slump in finances by the late 1920s and early 1930s, and Singapore certainly was affected by it. The government initially attempted to curb unemployment by starting public works projects, and then as the slump continued, cut back on expenditures and increased taxation, a grossly unpopular move coupled by the protectionist trade policies that were being imposed upon Singapore by the British authorities in London . Quotas on textile imports were placed and preferential tariffs were imposed to give precedence over British trading. This also led to a decline in the amount of capital available for the Chinese, especially the middlemen dependent on the comprador system for profit, as the decrease of trade volume also decreased their profits . As a side-effect, this led to the expansion of the banking system as the Chinese were now more inclined to save money rather than sending remittances back to China .

Up until the outbreak of the Second World War, the free trade and free economic policies of Singapore have been largely secured by tradition and rule. The lack of centralized control came as a result of both the unwillingness and the inability for the government to exert control, but it certainly worked in making Singapore a powerful economic force in the area.

Post-Independence Policies

The trauma of Japanese occupation was still being felt by the Southeastern Asian nations in the 1950s when Singapore first reached self-rule, followed by a dramatic forced removal from the Malay state in 1965. The nation's economic situation looked dire. The British, despite maintaining a military presence in Singapore, was planning to pull out of the area under Prime Minister Harold Wilson's "East of Suez" Policy in 1971 . The closing of the British shipyards, the cornerstone of the economy at the time, would've exacerbated the already serious unemployment problem, which reached double digits at the time of independence .

Singapore was left in a particularly disadvantageous position by the sudden independence. Unlike its sizable neighbors, Singapore had virtually no arable land left, leaving the convenience of cash-cropping to increase hard currency out of the question. Singapore was in a similar situation as several other British dependencies that were given independence such as Malta in 1964, as the war drove out the consistent stream of investors present before the war, and the newly achieved independence under an inexperienced government certainly did not aid the investor confidence .

Singapore's pre-war success in large part was due to the overwhelming investor confidence that the colony would be administered with little government interference, at least in the financial sector. Without the British military presence securing its independence and existence in the area, especially during a time when Indonesia and Malaysia were engaged in an undeclared Konfrontasi which by mere virtue of distance also involved Singapore, a new way to assert its ability to sustain its own independent military presence was paramount . Just as the investors relied on the inability for the Dutch to challenge the British authority in Singapore in 1819 as a stepping stone to grow, the need to assure domestic security was the first step the Singaporean government undertook after independence, creating quickly a small but comparatively well-equipped military, trained by Israeli commandos and following similar doctrines adhered to by Switzerland and Israel in the ability to mobilize the nation quickly . The Singaporean government also attempted, during this time, to actively alter the perception from the Chinese population regarding the undesirability of military service, and instead started a national movement to make national service appear desirable and "patriotic" . By the time the British pulled out in 1971, the nation had a rudimentary army and air force, with tanks purchased from the French, which even the neighboring Malaysians did not have . Quick defense arrangements with regional powers such as Australia and New Zealand, followed by a leading role in joining ASEAN to promote regional cooperation, certainly cemented the position of Singapore's status as a nation secure from outside interference, even without an active British military presence.

Indeed, the upheavals caused by WWII and the subsequent independence movements have almost given Singapore a tabula rasa to rebuild an economy on its own terms, terms Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew attributed to the hardy Asian work-ethic that rebuilt an economy from scratch based around light manufacturing of high-tech goods, a shipping industry, and a finance sector that became the center of the Southeast Asian financial world at a time where the loss of the British presence represented a loss of 20% of the nation's GDP. While the work-ethic of the Singaporean people cannot be discounted as a part of the financial success of the nation, one must also recognize the parallels between the independent Singaporean success story and the policies of the British colonizers.

With the investor confidence slowly rebuilding as the region returned to peace and Singapore asserted itself as not merely a pawn of its neighboring nations, Singapore was able to take advantage of one of the main advantages of the long colonial legacy - a trained workforce. Unlike colonies that relied on cash-crop agriculture as the main form of income, the cash-cropping days of the gambier and pepper plantation ended over half a century ago when independence was achieved, and instead, the British shipyards employed a large amount of the population, a population already in some ways proficient with both skilled, technical work as well as the English language . The existence of such a class of workers was a boon to the economy, which set it aside from a vast majority of post-colonial societies in economic development. The existence of an English-speaking and technically proficient workforce certainly aided the introduction of the first international investors in the early 1970s, mostly in the semi-conductor business. Conversion of British assets to civilian use was also a key, especially in the warehousing and shipping facilities, but also the creation of tourist facilities as a way of diversifying the economy . The economic slumps due to the overdependence on the exportation of natural resources in the early parts of the century certainly were actively countered by the encouragement from the government to create a multi-faceted array of businesses in the nation. The government's neutral stance in the international arena, showcased most prominently by its willingness to service ships of all nations in its shipyard facilities, also aided its international status as a nation unwilling to take specific sides during the Cold War, yet at the same time, took full advantage of its strategic position on the international shipping routes, much as it has done during the colonial times .

The Singaporean government also actively attempted to create an atmosphere favorable to foreign investment and joint ventures, as to not become overly dependent on foreign capital. The government protected some of its small businesses, especially low-cost home-based businesses run by local businessmen, but larger, more financially substantial ventures were encouraged by creating favorable taxation schemes for multi-national corporations (MNCs) . This was a dramatic departure from the popular sentiment that MNCs were exploiters of Third-World nations and their resources, but Singapore's unique position of having no natural resources to exploit but merely infrastructure and a trained workforce allowed the leaders to disregard such claims. Furthermore, Singapore's prosperity was certainly started by prototypical MNCs in the early part of the century, and the encouragement for MNCs to invest in the development of Singaporean infrastructure and facilities was a natural extension of colonial policies . Tax-free status was given to companies for five years in 1970, and by 1975, the tax-free status was expanded to ten years .

The proliferation of the MNCs represented a transfer of technology that spearheaded a drive for Singaporean businesses to grow, as well as the capital to do so. The Singaporean banking industry that started before the war almost as a necessity now allowed for its expansion into a premiere financial center of Southeast Asia . Singapore's high rate of savings coupled by the influx of work opportunities from the MNCs allowed for the creation of joint ventures, the modern version of the interactions of the agency houses, except now at a more even level. While the agency houses of the colonial era relied on native support mostly in a pragmatic way, now the joint ventures saw Singaporean sources funding these businesses as well. Just as a class of rising Chinese investors were able join the ranks of the European elites by saving and wise investments by the late 1800s, the Singaporeans were able to take advantage of the economic opportunities provided by the MNCs to invest and stake a piece of the prosperity for their own .

One major difference from the underfunded and virtually neglected Singaporean colonial government of the 1800s is that the new government needed money to provide funding of basic social needs such as schools, hospitals, and infrastructure. The government was able to start corporations that, while technically being owned by the government, were given leeway to enter into joint-venture agreements with privately-owned corporations . At the same time, government subsidies were low, both due to a fear of allowing the corporations to become unprofitable and overdependent on subsidies as well as the more pragmatic reason that the government was in no position to offer high levels of subsidies when tax rates on the MNCs that dominated the economy in the 70s and 80s were so low .

The government also maintained low income taxes and tariffs, much in the tradition of the colonial policies. While the initial years of independence saw a rise of taxation, the government gradually reduced both income and corporate tax levels by half between 1965 and 1996 . Estate duty was also reduced to between five and ten percent. While the colonial government was unable to levy high taxes due to public pressure, the new government consciously lowered taxes to repeat the personal prosperity that the colonial government was able to achieve.

The wealth of the individual Singaporeans ultimately have allowed the nation to invest in other nations and create joint ventures of other nations. One of the most prominent examples of this was the experimental Suzhou-Singapore Industrial Park in Suzhou, China, funded by Singaporean investors in 1994 and was slated to become a focal point of foreign investment under the guidance of Singaporean experience. The experiment, at least for the Singaporean side, was a failure, even though after Singapore sold its stake to native investors, the complex was able to pull a profit . The ability for Singapore to expand beyond mere participants and followers in the international market and retake its position as an important economic power once again, under the principles of free market and cooperative investment and taking full advantage of the nation's meager resources, is an impressive example of post-colonial success not widely seen in the world today.

The Quest for an Orderly Society and Social Control

Unlike most post-colonial societies, the nation of Singapore seldom makes headlines for riots, social disorder, and severe, violent political upheaval. The policies of Lee Kuan Yew and his successors are certainly not without its critics, but its merits are at the same time, evidently successful. While Lee's reforms, in the aftermath of a period of riots between ethnic groups during the post-war era and the union with Malaysia, certainly were in part a response to the tensions between the Chinese, Malay, and Tamil populations of the nation, the ethnic complexities of Singapore extend have historically extended far beyond the more clear-cut ethnic groups based on nations of origin . The Chinese, especially, were a fragmented society that had been out of touch with the European administrators during the colonial times, and the divisions amongst it followed by the European attempts to make the smorgasbord of Chinese cultures legible was the precursor to the current, Chinese-led government's attempt to keep order and peace amongst the different cultural groups today. The Singaporean government's attempt to maintain a unified Singaporean identity, instead of the separate and often conflicted identities based on places of origin, also dates from the British colonial system. The overreaching hand of the Singaporean government today to unify the Chinese community under the roof of an official government dates back to the confusing Chinese social structure and the conflict that it caused the British authority during the colonial days and a conscious reaction to the chaos that was the informal colonial society that the British had to contend with during the colonial era .

The British Colonial Government and the Informal Colonial Society

In the early days of the colony, the appointed British administration in Singapore, including the resident and the judiciary, was virtually invisible to the masses of the immigrants due to both the lack of fluency in local languages and the small size of the administration itself until 1867 . The great majority of the immigrants were ethnically Chinese, a trend that started almost as soon as the colony was founded, despite the fact that the colony was geographically firmly located in the Malay world. However, the proliferation of Chinese traders in the "Nanyang" trade in the region since antiquity made the feature less surprising as one might expect. As the unfavorable Dutch policy of monopoly in Java was superseded by the freer trading policies present in Singapore, the Chinese junk trade, although officially illegal, quickly made Singapore the regional hub of a network that linked the Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Fujian with trading colonies such as Penang and even India. Many ethnic Chinese in Singapore today, including Lee Kuan Yew, are descendants of the Chinese fortune-seekers who came during the British administration .
The presence of merchants of other nationalities certainly existed in Singapore. The Malay presence as well as Tamils from India and Arabs who shared a religious connection with the Malays were present in large enough quantities early enough so that the British designated areas of early Singapore to them, but their numbers, compared to the Chinese, paled in comparison, and even the native Malays were surpassed by the Chinese presence within ten years of the founding of the colony and soon was outnumbered by Indians as well. The European presence, British at first but encompassing many more nationalities especially after the end of the EIC monopoly over the China trade in 1833, was also an important minority, especially in the fact that the Europeans were virtually the sole participants of the official government of Singapore for a great majority of its existence as a colony and at the same time, provided much of the initial investment and operating capital in the colony. Yet, the Chinese community undoubtedly made up the most complex and most significant group socially and by sheer economic influence in Singapore from the start.

Even the Chinese community could not be considered a singular, unified entity. The Chinese community consisted largely of persons from the Guangdong and Fujian provinces in China, but even between these provinces, several mutually unintelligible dialects existed and their allegiances were more towards their places of origin and their clans than the concept of "China" . Furthermore, there existed a class of Chinese who were already in Southeast Asia by the time of Singapore's founding and had in some part, intermarried with the locals and classified as the "Baba Chinese". These Chinese served as interpreters between Malays and Chinese and even Europeans, yet their cultural and linguistic differences separated them from the rest of the Chinese population .

Further separating the Chinese community was the hierarchal structure based on wealth that developed within the community. The Chinese engaged in several fairly specified industries in the colony during the first part of the 19th Century: the pepper and gambier plantations, the only viable agriculture in the colony ; opium farms, government-issued mandates allowing the sale of opium; and the majority of the labor forces operating the entrepot economy, filling roles from dockworker to interpreter to warehouse workers . The newly arrived immigrant from Asia typically joined the ranks of the lower class laborers while many of the Chinese moving from other British colonies such as Penang sometimes had enough capital to invest and quickly gain status and operate from the top of the hierarchy . The hierarchy played prominently in Chinese secret societies that dominated Singapore for much of the 19th Century.

The secret societies were typically organized by dialect, family name, and/or place of origin . They appealed greatly to the newly arrived Chinese immigrants who usually lacked financial resources, personal connections, and linguistic knowledge to communicate with a great deal of others in Singapore. However, the secret societies also were an avenue of opium distribution as well as an occasionally disruptive social and political force that engaged in violence in a largely lawless Singapore in the early years . The societies transformed over time to different social and economic conditions, but their function as the representative of the Chinese Diaspora remained a constant dominating factor until 1889, when all such societies were outlawed by the colonial government . The transformation of the societies during this period of time, due to their dominance, also showed the progression of the Singaporean society and how it influenced the Singapore of today.

The first form of the societies were the kongsi, which would be directly translated into "company" or "corporation" but in Singapore represented a far wider array of activities than a traditional western-style corporation would entail . The kongsi was, like corporations, an economic cooperative, but the cooperative nature differs from the western model. The kongsi started under the model similar to a collective - the members enjoyed profit-sharing and leaders were at first democratically elected . The kongsi became the primary method to access the largely illiterate Chinese labor force, and the leaders of the kongsi quickly became wealthy and somewhat connected to the westerners. Their ability to communicate with foreigners and Chinese alike gave them the advantage to hold sway over both how the Chinese laborers were represented to the westerners and used by the westerners. In the early days of limited agriculture, the kongsi also maintained a tight grip over the little arable land in Singapore, in the forms of pepper and gambier plantations . The agricultural aspect of the Singaporean economy was short lived, however, as slash-and-burn tactics used by farmers quickly depleted the land and made much of the island unsuitable for any sort of agriculture, and the economy quickly reverted to a trade-based one, with the merchant class holding much of the wealth and power. The kongsi adapted to the change by exploiting the most valuable commodity in the Chinese society at the time, opium .
The opium trade was certainly one of the main causes of the British establishment in Singapore, as a way-station to penetrate the Chinese market. Although opium was outlawed in China, the EIC, starting in the late 18th Century, obtained a monopoly and traded with virtual impunity in southern China. The loss of the EIC monopoly on the opium trade in 1833 gave many merchants the opportunity to partake in the trade, with the Chinese being the largest consumers. Opium became not only a valuable commodity and nearly a way of life for the Chinese in China, but also in Singapore . In the early days of the colony when hard currency was limited, opium was used as a substitute by the Chinese population, a problematic arrangement as the value of opium fluctuated greatly and affected the Singaporean economy as a result in drastic fashion. In an age where the developing colony had few exports and few sources of income, the opium habit of the Chinese majority dictated a large part of the functioning of the economy in Singapore . Singapore represented a market which although lucrative, the westerners lacked direct access due to the Chinese market, especially the burgeoning underclass. The kongsi was the logical and convenient middleman in tapping this market, and the addictive nature of opium ensured a steady customer base and income for both the western merchants and the kongsi captains .

Furthermore, the status of opium as the main source of revenue for the government quickly became recognized. The government, unable and unwilling to collect tariffs or duties that would restrict the flow of free trade, had a long history of turning the vices into a source of income. Following in Raffles' crusading footsteps, excise farms allowed the collection of revenue from even parts of the population that had no direct contact with the government and focused on vices such as gambling or liquor . However, it was the opium farms that ultimately became the most important source of revenue for the government and source of both power and conflict between the kongsi. All the other farms had a combined income of only one-tenth of the revenues produced by the opium farm, and the precedent of taxing consumption continues in Singapore until today. The farms, started in 1823 by Crawfurd, did not become abolished until 1910 . Until then, up to fifty percent of the yearly revenue of Singapore came from the opium farm .

The farms changed hands by the process of bidding. While the government described the farms as being owned by "a farmer", the actual winning bidders were actually the heads of the kongsi, and the process of transferring a farm from one kongsi to another occasionally caused violence to erupt . The kongsi were most significantly split amongst the Hokkien speakers from Fujian and the Teochew speakers from Chaozhou, two coastal areas that had a history of competition. By the 1840s, the two groups have formed their own syndicates to participate in the opium farming business. Their conflicts extended beyond merely the issues surrounding opium farms. The cultivation of gambier was done by Teochew speakers in the early years, and the sale of gambier was an enterprise significantly populated by the Hokkienese. The Hokkienese began to enter the gambier cultivation business in the late 1840s and 1850s. Friction between the two groups in both the opium farms and the gambier cultivation industry caused several secret society riots, such as the Chinese Funeral Riots of 1846 and the Hokkien-Teochew riots of 1854, all kongsi conflicts over economic rights but ultimately became widespread enough to garner British attention . The revenues of the opium farms were intricately connected to the well-being of the gambier and pepper plantations as the main consumer of the opium was the Chinese cultivating the cash crops. As the prices of gambier and pepper fell dramatically in the late 1840s, the values of the opium farms also decreased accordingly, as the peasants with less income were unable to legitimately purchase opium . The smuggling of opium during this period of time also came onto the British radar, and undoubtedly also affected the price of opium and in turn, the revenues of the opium farms .

By 1851 the disputes have grown to include a riot between the Christian and non-Christian Chinese, one of the few early conflicts over religion in Singapore . However, the conflicts were still relegated to within different factions within the Chinese population, and still over the cultivation of pepper and gambier, now a far less profitable venture than before. The establishment of plantations in neighboring Johor further eroded the profitability of the basic commodities that kept the kongsi profitable. After the smoke cleared, the tenuous balance of peace was maintained largely by the financial clout of a new generation of kongsi leaders who joined together and with profit in mind, started the opium syndicates that were to dominate the opium trade and Chinese society alike. Building upon the gambier and pepper cultivators at the base of their hierarchy, the syndicate held a private monopoly over the opium farms in the 1850s, essence controlling the main economic sector of the government and leaving the European-based merchant houses behind in revenue . However, the hold was certainly short lived - the issues over the farms in Johor ultimately separated the farms of Johor and Singapore, and the smuggling of opium from Johor to Singapore followed soon after. Violence between the two syndicates soon started and spilled into the streets, even garnering the attention of the Straits Times, the leading English newspaper in Singapore, which described the fighting as a "chronic disease" in 1861. The fighting that waged across the border between Singapore and Johor had become an international incident .

At last, the British governor of the time, Orfeur Cavenagh, who had largely stood by silently since he took office in April 1861, attempted to take action. His solution was to rejoin the Johor and Singapore opium farms, and force the two farms to maintain the same rent to prevent smuggling and further violence over the discrepancy . However, the deal between him and the Temenggong of Johor collapsed, as it did not involve the Chinese farm owners in the negotiations, and Johor would have lost a valuable way to obtain profit, albeit covertly and against Singaporean laws. As no further negotiations were undertaken in earnest, the conflict between the opium farmers expanded to include the spirit farmers - a far less lucrative but also a part of the vice taxation scheme implemented in the early days - as well, and soon embroiled the area in an all out diplomatic conflict between Johor and Singapore . It was not until 1866 that British and individual Chinese pressure finally allowed the Temenggong of Johor, Abu Bakar, to allow for the joining of opium farms on Singapore and Johor. Perhaps the 1865 creation of the union of pepper and gambier shopkeepers in Singapore which had considerable economic clout to influence the gambier and pepper based economy in Johor became too much of a threat for the Temenggong to continue his anti-Singaporean policies .

The 1867 switchover of the colony from the EIC to the Colonial Office also marked the change of key persons in administrative positions. However, the new governor, Harry Ord, inherited not only a growing trading hub, but also one with violent conflicts within and against Johor. Ord once again in 1869 made the conscious decision to place the Singaporean and Johor opium farms in the hands of separate owners, in an attempt to end smuggling. By 1870, the farms in Singapore, Riau, Malacca, and Johor were merged into one, and formed the largest syndicate ye t. The sources of the smuggled opium were now under the control of one group, and the monopoly made illegal many competing secret societies that now had no chance of gaining control of the farms and remained only as virtual street gangs. The monopoly's legitimacy was unprecedented, as the previous attempts at monopolizing the surrounding farms were uninvolved with the British government for the most part. The new colonial government had made a monopoly out of the largest source of revenue in a port where free trade was the founding principle and a lauded quality.

The downfall of the kongsi system was heralded by the downfall of the agricultural system in Singapore. The manpower-intensive plantations were dependent on both a steady supply of new members as well as the agricultural output. In a colony with limited land for agriculture, the land by the late 1800s had been spent, and with revenues of the kongsi diminishing, their usefulness also decreased. Furthermore, smuggling under the monopoly began to seriously undermine the profits of the opium farms, as opium coming in from neighboring Johor and even Penang started to undercut the set prices in Singapore. While the colonial government was able to actively fight against smuggling, it had no such authority to control the internationalization of capital that was flowing into Singapore . A distinct Chinese upper-class, with wealth from the Nanyang trade, were able to buy up revenue farms even though they were not based in Singapore, and the loyalty system based on origin was undermined by the loyalty towards money, especially as the money was coming in from sources outside of the kongsi and the secret societies. As the Twentieth Century began, a serious anti-opium movement started to take shape, ending in the abolition of the opium farms in 1906 . The abolition brought down the informal organized Chinese secret societies at last, and the British colonial authorities were able, for the first time in almost a hundred years, to exert direct control and power over the Chinese masses it ruled over. By then, however, Singapore's main need for manpower resided in the shipping business, especially as rubber and tin from British Malaya, made it once again a bustling port, now no longer specializing in exotic wares but bulk export of produce . Opium production itself did not cease, as it merely have been completely taken over as a state venture, but its significance reduced as other forms of commerce took center stage.

By the turn of the century, the Europeans have asserted their authority over the Chinese and greatly expanded their presence. Certainly, they're still numerically a minority, but their interactions with the Chinese and other minority communities steadily increased. The large Chinese workforce was needed for the European-funded and sometimes joint-funded enterprises to grow and the incorporation of the local workforce into these enterprises became a priority.

The increasing sentiment of viewing the Chinese community as a unified entity was a response to the lack of Chinese representation in the upper society of Singapore . A drive to learn a common language, heritage, as well as English to communicate with the Europeans was started and showcased in the increasing number of schools that taught Mandarin or English. Mandarin was seldom if ever the first language of any Chinese immigrant, but its status as a neutral but still Chinese language that didn't favor one of the major Chinese groups in Singapore gave it the advantage of acceptance, especially by the straits-born Chinese. The Chinese response to the increasing separation of the Overseas Chinese community was the establishment of consulates in Singapore, and although this did create more cultural links to China amongst the Chinese, it also divided the loyalties in the populace . Ultimately, when the spirit of revolution arrived in Singapore, the majority of the Singaporean Chinese were cautious in providing support, and no extensive revolutionary activities broke out. The wealthy aligned themselves with the English, while the poor had no resources to fund the revolution and rather work and rise through the ranks than funding a revolution . The distance between Singapore and the mainland ensured that politically, it remained largely stable during the 1912 revolutions in China, although the success of the revolutionaries saw an increased amount of funding going towards the cause in the end.

The increased wealth of the Singaporeans allowed more government supported but privately funded schools to form, such as the Edward VII Medical School. The rise of government-subsidized English schools also took place during this time period. The government-sponsored education scheme, however, did not extend to the Malay, Tamil, or Chinese language sectors, the start of a language divide that would be one of the main concerns of independent Singapore .

Throughout the 19th Century, Singapore was a post staffed by few Malay and fewer Chinese staffers. The result of that the Singaporean authorities could only contact a few of the bilingual interpretations, most of them the likes of Whampoa, who had a stake in the businesses ran by the Chinese . Such impartiality was merely an example of the diversification of the society between the ruler and the inhabitants of Singapore. English schools, as a result, were subsidized and encouraged, with graduates going to prestigious schools such as Oxford and Cambridge. The Singaporean elite who were present during the independence were mostly graduates of such institutions, and the British education system undoubtedly had a significant impact on the viewpoints and actions taken by the Singaporean leadership . The institutions of other languages were largely privately funded, and created a divide that, as independence loomed after the Second World War, demanded closure and the establishment of a national identity.

As the colonial era came to a close, Singapore became a significantly more orderly society than that of the 1800s Singapore. Unlike Hong Kong, no major or crippling strikes regarding the growing Communist/Nationalist split occurred. The distance from Mainland China certainly had a role in keeping this order, which is not to say that unions and even a communist presence was not established, but their involvement in Singaporean politics became the focal point largely came after WWII.

The Orderly Post-Colonial Singaporean Society

Modern day Singapore lacks a similar sort of an informal system, and the orderly government have been attributed to the Confucian emphasis on an orderly society . However, while correlation cannot prove causation, many administrative decisions made by the Singaporean authorities since 1965 seems to be enacted to consciously avoid the pattern of disorder of the 19th Century, especially since the Chinese administration today can trace its roots to the Chinese informal society of that century. The present-day policy of taxing consumption over income is also a similar sort of policy that can trace its origin to Raffles' plans and Crawfurd's execution of said plans. Although the specific targets of taxation have changed, the concept of using taxes or other similar sorts of fiscal restrictions to curb "unwanted" activities such as the complicated process of bidding for a permit to operate a vehicle is similar in idea to the government-sanctioned monopoly on the opium trade . Furthermore, the chaos caused by the opium trade, especially upon the Chinese population, resulted in a serious and draconian policy against the drug trade in general. Today, Singapore imposes the death penalty on the possessor or manufacturer of many drugs, with a particular focus on opiates and opoids, under its Misuse of Drugs Act .

The Singaporean government is also notoriously intolerant of dissidence, and any challenge to the legitimacy of the government is heavily rebuked and censured by the government . The official line in Singapore, in essence, is the only stance, and in a nation ruled by the same party - the People's Action Party (PAP) since independence, the democratic nature of the nation have came under intense international scrutiny and criticism. This certainly at least in part can be attributed to the desire for an orderly society in contrast to the out-of-touch British administration that allowed for the secret Chinese societies to flourish and ultimately come into violent conflict with each other. Despite having an overwhelmingly Chinese society, the government of Singapore have emphasized on the inclusion of at least one or two Malay and Tamil representatives in the cabinet, the most prominent possibly being Sinnathamby Rajanatam, Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore from 1980 to 1985 and a member of cabinet from 1965 to 1988 . To avoid ethnic conflict and tension that plagued Singapore during its union with the Malay states, an active policy towards encouraging English, a neutral language, as the language of communication between the different races, much like the conscious attempt to use Mandarin to encourage a unified Chinese identity . While nationalist drives in other post-colonial societies have emphasized on using the language of the dominant ethnic group to assert national unity, Singapore's attempt to use a neutral language have been nearly uniformly positive, as no language is actively suppressed, and the increased communications between the ethnic groups have avoided the ethnically-related conflicts that became prevalent in post-colonial nations elsewhere. Even though distinct Chinese, Tamil, Malay, and other identities do exist in Singapore, a unified Singaporean identity, at least some distance away from their nations of origin, now exist, and despite the Chinese majority, Singapore can hardly be called an extension of China or a puppet state by any means.

However, Singapore receives its greatest critics from the international community in its intolerance of oppositional voices. The trend started in its active suppression of the Communist Parties at the outset of independence, and resulted in the active jailing of many prominent communist leaders . More recently, any dissenting voice accusing of voting fraud or corruption have been countered with libel suits and active censoring. Singapore itself today is largely a corruption free society in its bureaucracy, a result of an active measure undertaken in the 1970s to boost investor confidence, and completed with a great deal of success, and recognized by the international community . The anti-corruption scheme, accomplished via different levels of oversight, have been cited as an example where only societies focused on collective interests can join together in preventing corruption, especially in small nations such as Singapore . At the same time, the lack of dissenting opinions allowed by the Singaporean government can be seen as a troubling sign as one would hardly know whether the perfect image Singapore projects and the widely sensationalist claims of corruption from the few dissenting voices were to be believed. Regardless, Singapore prides itself today on its orderliness and participates in the "Asian Values Debate" as a forerunner in the advocacy of "Asian Values", claiming that Western values cannot be applied to nations with no similar tradition of democracy, dissent, and the check and balance systems present in the western systems of government .

The PAP had made numerous arguments for "good governance" in Singapore, especially by its more senior ministers. Rajaratnam have stated that "Given a one-party government, the capacity of such a government to act far more independently than if it were harassed by an opposition and by proxies, is obvious. In the game of competitive interference pawns which can behave like bishops and castles and knights can in certain circumstances be extremely inconvenient and very irritating." Cherian George, the Arts and Photo editor of the Straits Times, the de facto official newspaper of the Singaporean government, in a speech made in 1998 at the University of California, Berkeley, further stated that:
"PAP power is hegemonic power, in the Gramscian sense: it is a perfect blend of coercion and consent. If the first two levels represent control through coercion, then this third level is the consensual side of the hegemony coin. Call it self-censorship, call it internationalisation, prostitution, enlightened self-interest, or, as some of my editors do, call it intellectually-honest journalism. Whatever you call it, the inescapable truth is that Singapore's newspapers are, at least in part, willing partners, of the state."
Whatever the case, the Singaporean government has held a monopoly on the press. Without an active dissenting press, oppositional factions such as the Communists have been unable to establish a strong following since independence. Although heavily criticized, the stability that an uncontested one-party system that follows a market economy principle is one that is virtually unseen elsewhere in the world. The policy of a unified press can also be seen as a continuation of British colonial policies, as very few oppositional newspapers to The Straits Times were able to survive during the colonial days, and the government ran mostly on the opinions of a majority voice. It was only during the ascent of the dissenting groups such as the Communists after WWII that serious rioting and social disorder came about, and the current Singaporean effort in curbing that would be a clear attempt at avoiding a repeat of such disorder.

Singapore's emphasis on "good governance" certainly encompasses the ideal of a "collective good" over the individual. Some defining features of Singapore include the Central Provident Fund (CPF), which acts as a social security system, except it features more as an investment rather than a pure savings scheme. Whether the desire to save can be considered as an "Asian value" is debatable, but the CPF is certainly now an integral part of the Singaporean system of governance . In a way, the CPF's role of using the income of Singaporeans to fund public works projects and nationalized enterprises mirror the subscription-based system of funding public works that started with Raffles and continued throughout colonial Singapore. Of course, this comes at cost as the CPF, despite the fact that it is funding public housing and other public facilities, remain a system managed not by the contributors but by the appointed few in the government . While the enforcement of the CPF in creating a high savings rate might seem paradoxical, it would be easy to link it to the British attempt monopolize the opium farms in the late 1800s in order to keep a consistent system of currency circulation within the colony, without having too many individual investors investing in foreign ventures taking precedence over the investments over domestic enterprises.

"Good governance" certainly goes beyond merely financial terms, however. Lee Kuan Yew have controversially encouraged the marriages of the educated elite as early as 1983 , and more recently, the ban on chewing gum as well as the caning of American teenager Michael Fay in 1994 for vandalism brought Singapore's policy under more criticism . Despite international concern and outrage in some cases, however, Singapore continues to use the indisputable facts such as its stability and economic prosperity as examples as to why it remains a successful post-colonial state today. The extreme measures of the Singaporean government in suppressing any activities contrary to its official line seems to be a direct response to the British inability to assert effective government control in the face of oppositional Chinese informal societies and the chaotic state the colony fell under afterwards.

Bibliography

Bracebridge, Charles H. "Notes on Self-Supporting Dispensaries, with Some Statistics of the Coventry Provident Dispensary." Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 1858: 460 - 463.

Broek, Jan O.M. "Man and Resources in the Netherlands Indies." Far Eastern Quarterly, 1946: 120-131.

Burke, Edmund. The Works of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke. Joshua Reynolds, 1834.

Central Intelligence Agency. CIA World Factbook. 2006. https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/.

CNN. "Singapore 'top executioner'." CNN International. January 15, 2004. http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/01/15/singapore.executions.reut/.

Eckle, Paul E. "Challenges to Dutch Monopoly of Japanese Trade During the Wars of Napoleon." Far Eastern Quarterly, 1942: 173 - 179.

George, Cherian. "Newspapers: Freedom from the press." Singapore Window. April 2, 1998. http://www.singapore-window.org/80402cg.htm.

Han, Bernice. "Singapore Grows Strongly Q1." Agence Presse English, April 10, 2007.

Kee Jin, Ngiam. Coping with the Asian Financial Crisis: The Singapore Experience. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2000.

Lee, Kuan Yew. From Third World to First: 1965 - 2000. Harper Collins: New York, 2000.

Low, Linda. The Politial Economy of a City State. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

MacDougall, John A., et al. "English Language Competence and Occupational Mobility in Singapore." Pacific Affairs, 1976: 294 - 312.

Prestwich, Menna. "Diplomacy and Trade in the Protectorate." The Journal of Modern History, 1950: 103-121.

Rajaratnam, S. Trends in Singapore: Proceedings and Background Papers. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1978.

Stephens, H. Morse. "The Administrative History of the British Dependencies in the Further East." The American Historical Review, 1899: 246-272.

The World Bank Group. "Economy Rankings." Doing Business Database. 2006. http://www.doingbusiness.org/EconomyRankings/.

P.S. Richmond, NH voted for Ron Paul! HAhahahaha!

Oops

2008-01-03T15:54:00.000-08:00

Don't drink and drama

I'm going bar hopping for my birthday. We're starting at the Minibar Lounge on Cahuenga at 5ish. They don't card. IM me if you want to join.

Zoe

2007-12-30T00:49:00.000-08:00

Written in late September/early October 2007, for John Thorson, Lily Sage, Evan Taylor, and the literary magazine, but somehow I never ended up emailing. Yes, Dave is Dev, but Marlboroites are terrible at foreign names. Otherwise it's all real because only real stories are really fun.

She told me her name was Zoe, even though her friends called her Karla. She’s short – 4’11”? – and had dark hair and darker eyes. This would sound far more like the start of a Penthouse column if weren’t for the fact that when I picked her up at the parking lot gates of Electric Daisy Carnival I also had two of her friends, two of my friends, and a guy tripping on acid in a leopard-skin suit crammed into my Acura. An hour ago I was tripping on a healthy dose of mushrooms when some guy from San Diego thrust an ecstasy pill into my hand. Some point along the line both of my friends took the pills. Now the rave was over and the cool desert night was flooded with confused cars and more confused police looking to direct us out. My friend Dave had an address to an after-party at a local Best Western although my Thomas Guide only went up to the LA County line and we’re at least 15 miles into San Bernardino here, so we drove around for what seemed to be hours on the mostly deserted and shoddy looking streets of the Inland Empire. Zoe sat on the lap of the guy on acid in the front because we didn’t have any room. Some girl who I liked who liked me who didn’t approve of my partying ways called me, I passed the phone to Zoe, she asked if it’s my girlfriend, I said no, they have a conversation about parking lots, because that was the most prominent thing we’ve been seeing. My friends in the back started to roll. Some impossibly dull song was on the radio and it seemed to be on repeat. How did I end up being the sober driver? We drove by a homeless man at a stoplight asking for a cigarette. We gave him one and asked where the Best Western is. He told us where but it was a lie. We followed his directions and only found the highway. On the verge of giving up we took the next exit looking for gas and it turned out to be exactly where the Best Western was. We find the room of the after party but some guy at the place had a seizure and the ambulance was taking him away. Dave ran off and came back saying there was a room unlocked and unoccupied. There were a few more people looking to party in the parking lot – namely a couple from Santa Barbara smoking heroin in their car. The guy told us that he was on probation. We invited him into our newly found room. It was three in the morning and I break my pill and give half to Zoe. Forty minutes later everyone was half falling asleep and the TV was on and I start to roll and Zoe takes off her clothes and if weren’t for the MDMA flooding through my veins my eighteen year old hormones would’ve probably blown through the ceiling. Instead she talked about underwear and I talked about my graduation the week before and she talked about being homeless. I did a double take but all I could think about was the maharajah of Mysore and she asked if that was an STD. Dave chortled in his half-sleep. The guy on acid saw the whole thing but was still recovering from an ego-loss and so played unwitting voyeur to the first time I thought I fell in love. She had polka dots on her black panties and dark stockings. She had black eyeliner on. I wore way too much white and I'm sure we looked like a tuxedo together, or something ridiculous. Her skin was smooth, her lips were crimson, and the colors bled into my dreams for months if not years to come.

Sunrise came unreasonably quickly and the crew somehow packed all the pillows, bed sheets, toiletries, and the remote control into the trunk of my car, which happened to be sandy because of a recent grad party on the beach. The guy on acid in the leopard suit wanted to go home to a halfway house in San Fernando, while Zoe and her friends needed to go to Palm Springs, about a hundred miles the other way or something ridiculously like that. My debit card was almost in the red so I asked the guys for gas money but asking a crew of drug addicts and cracked out parole-jumpers seemed like a lost cause. The compromise was to take the rag-tag crew to Venice Beach where they'd beg for change and then I'd take them home. Along the blinding sunlight of a Sunday morning on the 405 I somehow ended up calling every one of my friends on the phone, extolling the virtues of my new found chemical friend. The leopard-skin-coat man lived in a halfway house next to a set of railroad tracks in San Fernando and we couldn't pull up to the driveway because his housemates would've suspected. The rest of the lot I took to Palm Springs, to a street corner. They drifted in an out of sleep, but my amphetamine-fueled sensibilities bested me. Zoe kept up, and talked, talked, and talked. She was sixteen. She ran away from home. Her friends were her family. She wanted to be loved. I nodded while at the same time I felt that I couldn't possibly penetrate into her life, it was so opaque. We arrived after two hours of hard driving in the carpool lane and they left without two words. I realized a few minute later in a gas station that they left a whole set of bedsheets and pillows in my trunk. Getting onto the freeway in Palm Springs, the winds of the desert blew so hard that I thought there was an earthquake, and the streetlights shook in an awesome show of defiance towards gravity, as if I'd disturbed the universe.

Dianetics!

2007-12-28T02:56:00.000-08:00

Winter is kind of boring, so Jeff and I decided to go see P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood. The only place showing it right now is the Arclight in Hollywood so off we went!

The end of my street! Happy Birthday, Jesus!

And if I didn't pirate music that'd be a good place to get some.

MACHINES!

On the way out we headed to Fred 62 on Vermont in Los Feliz for late night diner action and instead on Sunset we ran into this.

DIANETICS!

For the whole family!

In case "L. Ron Hubbard" didn't ring a bell for ya (the place was on L. Ron Hubbard Way)

and it bordered hospitals on three sides!

Lobby! Shame it was locked.

It does have a gift shop, however.

And a Christmas tree. Do Scientologists celebrate Christmas?

At least they're keen with the decorations.

Then we drove by this sketchy looking coffee shop

And finally! My fish and chips and breakfast burritos!

Oh and the movie was really good.

Fuck Travel - Part 1

2007-12-22T23:41:00.000-08:00

Fuck traveling.

I'm sitting in the airport at LAX and it's ridiculously crowded and I'm sick of traveling for once in my life. Considering that I've lived in 8 different places this year, I've gotten around a lot, a whole fucking lot. Since the only other traveling I might be doing would be hanging out with Sam Heller down in SD or something it'll be a good retrospective on a fucked up year. Consider my itinery this year:

Jan

Los Angeles -> Chicago -> Boston -> Marlboro

Feb

Marlboro -> Boston -> White River Junction -> Marlboro

Mar

Marlboro -> Burlington -> Manchester NH -> Montreal -> NYC -> Marlboro

Apr

Marlboro -> Saratoga Springs -> Burlington -> Saratoga -> Marlboro

May

Marlboro -> Hartford -> Los Angeles -> Shanghai -> Suzhou

Suzhou -> Changshu -> Suzhou

Jun

Suzhou -> Shanghai -> Suzhou

Jul

Suzhou -> Shanghai -> Los Angeles

Aug

Los Angeles -> San Diego -> Los Angeles

Los Angeles -> Santa Barbara -> Los Angeles

Los Angeles -> NYC -> Marlboro

Sep

Marlboro -> Boston -> Marlboro

Oct

Marlboro -> Boston -> Chicago -> Albany -> Springfield -> Marlboro

Dec

Marlboro -> Boston -> Los Angeles

Los Angeles -> Santa Cruz -> Los Angeles

January

Hung around home for to start and finally ended up taking a train out of LA on the 14th of Jan to Boston. Sixty-six fucking hours across the most boring terrain America has to offer, not the least because of the snow. Met some cool people - the steward Anton who I apparently have met before without ever knowing that he worked for Amtrak and Candice who was a dance student at Columbia College who said I was a lot less LA in person. Somewhere around Rochester a train derailed. Arrived in Boston wearing a pinstriped suit to meet the only other properly-dressed man in the house - Evan Schwenterly - who was still living in Allston on Comm Ave with Veronica although their French roommate Cedric who I've met the previous September seems to have bailed. The next few days were spent in total drunkenness and cold and maybe some psychedellics were involved because I ended up with not only $300 worth of hard liquor for school (and boxed wine, actually), I also went to school with Veronica's painting. Eliot, Miranda and Melissa picked me up late on the 19th for school and I was so trashed I couldn't give directions - to be fair, neither could Evan at the time. I arrived on campus to find that despite thinking that I was rooming with Gabriel and Zach in ATW, I really was to room with Kevin and Nate in my old room in Howland. The joy of a junior in a triple.

Februrary

Went to see Razorlight in Boston at the Middle-East while in retrospect perhaps Kaiser Chiefs were a better selection. Johnny Borell wore all white but the setlist sucked and so did the opener. Coming back the same night because Schwenterly moved to Arizona for the time being I found that the bus stops in White River Junction and drops off the Brattleboro-bound passengers off for 4 hours at 2AM. Luckily out of all people Tina and her boyfriend were also on the bus and we share a table in the deserted bus station in fuck-all Vermont for 4 hours.

March

Spring break was a madhouse mostly because the two week odyssey started with Matt fucking Lynch (but of course). Went to Burlington with Sonia and Jeremy to see Matt. Eliot came along too and in my opinion Melissa and Miranda should've came too. Alas, there was a good crew operating out of Burlington at the time. After playing pin the tail on the donkey with Katherine and co (she ended up punching Nick at Matt's for spilling wine, hah) we followed Matt and Nick to a house party full of UVM students. Matt proceeded to ditch us all at the party while he hooked up with some chick who worked at Bruegger's and I think I ended up on Nick's couch after one of his roommates tried to seduce Sonia with the pretense of "showing her his puppy". Some wild shenanigans in the blizzard that was blowing past and two feet of snow were dropped while the party was raging but Burlington was a depressing city and the only pleasurable surprise outside of Matt's place and his crazy roommates was the smell of pot that never went away on Church St. After the crazy three days in Burlington, I took a bus to Manchester to hang out with Miranda in her apartment up the craziest flight of stairs in the world. We ran out of food at the snow was way too bad and we didn't have a car at hand really so we ended up eating Hoisin-sauce-and-Ramen burritos. I think I burnt some pasta as well. Did a lot of reading and also watched a lot of TV. At this point I had an assload of molly on me but didn't end up doing any with Miranda or Melissa who visited with Ryan (pre-breakup). Then I took a bus to Montreal to couchsurf with Faye who lived at Snowdon/Chemin Queen Mary and ended up going to Vinyl alone like in the old days and blacking the fuck out yet somehow making it back to Faye's all the way across town. Should've called Prince Arthur but I was also carrying molly at the time. Then I crashed with Nicholas on Jean-Talon for a few days and went to a jazz bar and drank a lot of port while we discussed French politics since he was French. Finished a lot of reading for Seth. Took a train to NYC looking for Lindsay but she wasn't in and as I settled into the hostel on Amsterdam and 103rd apparently I only had 20 dollars left. The next morning I took a train back to Brattleboro where Jeremy picked me up and we lived off Vienna sausages and apples Sonia's family grew for the rest of the week while stuck at Married Student Housing 2 with the fire alarm going mad in Persons and nobody to stop it.

April

For 4-20 it snowed and I certainly wasn't about to go down to UMass Amherst again after the previous year's shenanigans with Ryan Melissa and Tarryn, so Miranda, Eliot and I went to Burlington via Saratoga Springs because Heather Reed was seeing someone at Skidmore who had an 818 area code. Got way too stoned and didn't know what happened on the way there but Eliot laughed at me a lot. Hung out with Lynch and bought a lot of molly off Nick. I think I ended up cooking for the whole house at some point. Went to an Earth Day rally in Matt's SUV but nobody really noticed the hilarity. Saw No Soap Radio with Graham, Rooney, and Hall and they were pretty good. Met up with Katherine again at the bar and she got me drinks and thankfully did not slam my head into the wall this time. Didn't actually smoke a lot of pot as far as I remember in Burlington but with Matt Lynch alcohol is all that's required of a good fucking time. On the way back to pick up Heather we stopped in Saratoga Springs to meet up with Rain and Eric who seemed to be doing pretty well and got invited to see Eric's band but couldn't make it. Hung out with Rain and her crew and ended up doing molly in a park with Miranda so ultimately when everyone got off work we went to the sulfer springs and a lot of kids sniffed sulfer. Coming back we smoked a whole lot of pot with Rain's neighbors who had a six foot bong and at some point sat on their roof while Heather desperately told us to come pick her up and around midnight-ish we did and drove back to campus the next day. Certainly missed T's class the next morning but I think we were discussing H.D. anyway.

May

School went out and got a ride from Jeremy to Avon, CT before heading to Hartford to crash with Aimee. A lot of acid was consumed in the process and I think I ruined a puzzle-in-progress before leaving a poem and a DVD (Bright Young Things with Michael Sheen and James McAvoy) on the TV. This also, incidentally, was the last time anyone has seen Jeremy alive, as far as we know. The next day I took a flight back to LA but I had about four days in LA to pack and hang out - I think all I did was to go out to dinner with Amanda since nobody else was home yet - before heading out to Shanghai and Suzhou. Flight took 13 hours and the highways in China were all well-lit and fixed and I felt like I was in a sci-fi movie for some reason. China got ridiculously developed in my absence. A couple of days later went to Changshu and it only took 20 minutes to the ancestral home although last time I went in 1999 it took 2 hours, although the main thing was that the ancestral home wasn't there anymore and now it's a galvanized steel factory.

June

Went to Shanghai alone with no purpose other than going to Shanghai. Stayed near the Bund in a hostel. I think I wore the Dior Homme cologne the whole time there for no particular reason. Drank at Bar Rouge, talked to some French chick who gave me a card to buy hash from a shady street-corner in the suburbs and ended up getting a quarter for $30 from a Middle-Eastern guy called Abdul who ran a kebab stand. Smoked up with some Irish guy in the hostel but not before doing too much Xanax and getting too drunk on the way back and stopping at some club and drinking some really overpriced beers while listening to terrible Chinese house music. On the way out some girl dressed like a bar of soap gave me samples of hair gel even though my hair was clearly too long for hair gel. The taxi driver got to hear me rant about the benefits of opium in the backseat and I somehow smoked a whole pack of terrible Chinese cigarettes during the course of the night. The train ride back took twenty minutes and I had a weird conversation with the guy next to me about education schemes in China and the merits of privatized education. People thought I went to see Jay but he was certainly in Shenzhen at the time with Stephanie. Oh and for the old crowd, he's actually I guess my uncle instead of my cousin, but it's a bit hard to explain how that works. I did drink a whole lot of bai-jiu with his uncle my grand-uncle though, mostly because he was my mom's drinking buddy for a long time back in the early 90s.

July

Somewhere along the line the drama and pressure got to me and no amount of Klonopin or Xanax could fix that, even with a legit script. Booked an early flight home after buying a ton of illegal DVDs and quitting both jobs in a flurry (fuck ball bearings). Got to the airport and ate Japanese food and drank whiskey with my uncle and cousin - mostly them watching me drink in awe - popped a few Xanaxes and turns out my flight was delayed six hours. Spent all my remaining currency on gin and cigars. I felt extra-hedonistic so ended up buying way too many martinis at the airport bar and don't remember much of the flight except I had Stars' In Our Bedroom After the War on repeat for most of the 13 hours.

August

Got stir-crazy sitting at home and went to San Diego every other night, kind of like March - May 06, except San Diego wasn't as far away as Montreal. Did a lot of coke with Jeff P at some point. Katherine came to visit so we went to Santa Barbara and at first we planned to camp because we didn't have reservations but we found that the whole mountain was all burned up so we got a hotel room and tried bar-hopping but I didn't have an ID since I lost my wallet at Club Scarlet in Suzhou with both my driver's licenses and my insurance card in it. Ended up drinking a lot of bad gin and eating Italian food and Katherine did a lot of coke but everyone around me seemed to have done a lot of coke during August. Went home and had a Motel party with Joe Andy Chris and the gang (some girls showed up but can't remember who I was pining for at the moment). We filled a bathtub full of ice and put Coronas in it and it was a pretty good idea I picked up from Jeff's birthday party and before that possibly Drew. Speaking of Jeff's birthday party everyone got really drunk but no noise complaint so it wasn't terribly exciting. Ran out of Xanax and Klonopin on one of the trips down to SD and ended up having a seizure while on acid watching the meteor shower with Jeff K and that was the end of that. Booked a flight to NYC and a train ride to Marlboro a few weeks before school started to settle in but the town was awfully boring with only Meliss and Sonia in town - Ariella and Lydia and Bobo and Matt Feingold and Alex Hunter and Mike Hamby and Tony Gross and Olivia and Noah turned out to be around too after a few. Fresh off the ridiculously long train ride Melissa Jake Sonia and I bought a hundred fifty bucks worth of Sushi and didn't knew what to do with it. By we I mean I paid for it.

September

Schwenterly moved back to Boston and so I went to see Interpol and had a spare ticket for Schwenterly but he had to work. Hung around Boston but Allston wasn't anything special or new so instead hung around Harvard Square where Schwenterly lived and drank some rum before taking a bus back the next day. Melissa picked me up and it was all good.

October

After the crazy week/weekend I decided to visit Schwenterly and Lynch for reals this time and found myself in Boston over Hendricks and saw Stars at Berklee but since I drank way too much rum with Schwenterly I ended up not making my flight and after hanging out with Evan all day watching QI and whatever fun things he had to offer I ended up finding myself with no credit cards and no cash and in the bus station trying to beg a ride back to Marlboro. Ended up spending a night with a goon in Jamaica Plains on the south end of the Orange Line of the T. The next day caught a train out to Chicago via Albany and it took ages with some weird gay redneck hitting on me on the train but once I got to Chicago and found Lynch during his Arabic class everything turned out to be okay and his friends such as Rod and Sam and Rich and Andrea and Ruthie and Evan were all pretty wild and crazy to be fair. Was planning to stay until Thursday so we went to a few parties including a frat party where I showed my passport in lieu of a U of C ID and pretended like I didn't speak English. We went to their basement but the people weren't too interesting except this Asian guy with thick glasses doing yoga on a couch alone and Rod dared me to copy him but before I was drunk enough to do that a beer pong game started. At this point it was Matt, Rod, Jeff and I and we gathered like 6 bucks and got 6 cups of really bad beer and played beer pong with these crazy Asian girls who seemed like they had sand in their vaginas. All in all Matt and Rich kicked some ass but when the game finished there were exactly two girls left. We went to this Dive Bar - Jimmy's - but somehow we got kicked out in like 30 minutes because they closed and Rich decided to go home. Matt wanted to hook up with the other girl so we followed them back to their place where I made awkward conversation with the girl "assigned" to me because she wasn't terribly interested or interesting or hot and she was an anthropology major which I didn't really care much for. They did have a cool cat though. The next day we went to Harold's, the sketchiest chicken place in Hyde Park where plastic bags cost money and there were four drink vending machines in the lobby instead of soda fountains. Matt got food poisoning from it. We bought Johnny Walker from the liquor store next door but it got bricked and I thought it was hilarious but Matt was pretty sketched out by the whole affair. We drank Johnny Walker on the street and hung out in the pub where Matt worked as the doorman and had some gnarly hot wings while Matt hit on these two girls by telling them about the esoteric interpretation of Islam. At some point there was a Ween concert that sucked. Also hung out with Scotty who I've met earlier in Brattleboro with Matt with whom I got banned from the Flat Street Pub for cursing the bartender's team out (Fuck Manchester United!). We went to a bar and somehow got past the doorman and Family Guy was on the TV and Matt tried to hit on this girl Heidi with dreadlocks who was sort of hitting on both Matt and I but really wasn't because her boyfriend was around but Matt went for her anyway. Later we went to a much swankier pub downtown but we were too drunk and hung out with some of the most vapid girls I've ever seen in my life which is a lot considering that I used to work in Hollywood and fashion. Scotty's girlfriend slapped me at some point but it was all in good fun because she tried to tackle me but I ended up tackling her instead. We took a long cab ride back and the cabbie was from Ghana and really cool. The next day I had to fly out back to Burlington but when I got to O'Hare it turns out that my ticket got cancelled so after all that jazz including Matt taking a picture of me jumping in front of the big bean downtown and calling the picture "Chinese Jumping Bean" I got back to Hyde Park and went to a Halloween party dressed as "clothing line" with a lotta clothing pins on me. The party was at Andrea's and somehow I ended up hanging out with Evan Ruthie Rod and the bunch in the trunk of Ruthie's roommate Melissa's car drinking cheap beers while Rich dressed like an Arab since he was in Yemen for a year and got yelled at because he had a 12 inch sword tucked into his belt. I'm not entirely sure what happened the rest of the night since I ended up talking to a guy dressed like Winston Churchill completely with cane and monocle with Rod in a Dunkin' Donuts at 3AM. The next day Matt was sick so I went with Rod and Evan to some party in someone's apartment outside of the traintracks where I almost talked this film student whose name I can't remember but looked like this girl I knew in high school to bed except she insisted on coming to my place and I had to break it to her that "my girlfriend was sleeping at my place". Matt high-fived me for that. The day after I took off and flew to Albany after buying a ticket in cash first thing in the morning and got a real good patdown - also I had a Qur'an on me since I needed to do the reading. Then it was a long wait in the bus station in Albany while the cabbie I had tried very hard to justify the war in Iraq and later I called Lydia to pick me up after realizing I haven't slept in ages and was in no shape to walk back to my apartment from the bus station.

Hey Evan

2007-12-22T13:44:00.001-08:00

http://img404.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bw5fo9.jpg

Schedule ahoy!

2007-12-22T01:24:00.000-08:00

Here's to another shitty semester. Although now that I'm a senior I'm on plan, but since both my sponsors are here and ready to give tutorials it shouldn't be too bad.

Anticipated courses:

CONCEPTIONS OF TIME AND SPACE IN ASIA - HUM978
4 CR MTh 1:30 - 2:50 D21 Intermediate
Faculty: Seth Harter

Interestingly enough once upon a time I've read Arthur H. Smith's Chinese Characteristics and he addresses this fairly explicitly. It would also be interesting to see how Marlboro time and Asian time converge, because Marlboro times makes less sense than Asian time for sure. This is certainly a course with more focus than a semi-racist half-rambled unscientific work written by a missionary a hundred years ago. I guess it would help me more if I took MODERN CHINESE HISTORY AND CULTURE - HUM1075 but a) I'm not getting up at 11:30am to take a class with Seth, as much as I love the guy, and I can sort of teach that class at this stage.

Seth is teaching all his classes in his office now, what the fuck.

USES OF HISTORY - CDS555
4 CR F 1:30 - 3:50 Appletree Intermediate
Faculty: Dana Howell , Timothy Little

It's Tim's class! End of story! I was in 20th Century World (with Sonia and Miranda during the semester where we just hung out at North and didn't go to class ever) and I remember namedropping... Marinetti I think? Anyway Dana was very impressed but Tim certainly didn't buy my shit - he never does, which is why he's so awesome. He's been touting for me to take this class for a month and I guess I can have another evil stare-down day with Dana every week.

Tutorial on INDIA/AFGHANISTAN AFTER 1842 - Tim Little - 4CR

Tutorial on SHANGHAI BEFORE 1945 - Seth Harter - 6CR

Oh fuck plan tutorials aka instant death :/ Seth once quizzed me, on my last 6CR tutorial with him, about exactly only one page out of a 600 page reading for a 5 day period, but I think I enjoy Wakeman and Fairbank - in a sick and masochistic way no doubt, especially Wakeman wtf - to be okay with taking another 6. Also some readings in Chinese which would be hilarious and possibly tragic depending on how much Seth's Chinese have improved in the past few months in Sichuan. As for Tim, well, Tim's Tim and if I don't disappoint him and if we don't end up talking about spaghetti in Japan or Mussolini's swimming trunks or how he roomed with Judge Mills Lane at Middlesex or how he knew Bill Richardson when he was still white (etc etc etc) it would be fine, although the Mutiny and Afghanistan are both huge CLUSTERFUCKS (what topic isn't in History) that I didn't cover very well last semester so yeah.

Marlboro courses are pretty bad in general though, thank god Tim and Seth can give me 18 credits total.

Marlboro Dorms, a guide

2007-12-09T13:58:00.000-08:00

Howland - Walls are thin so you can hear people howl when having sex.
*Howland East - How Easy, because it's especially easy to get laid and get fucked up on the east side
*Howland West - How Wheezy, because of all the pot

All-the-way - Girls here go all the way

Halfway - Girls here only go half way (except for Miss Do You Wanna Make It With A Halfway Girl ahem ahem)

Hendricks - Elitist Dicks for having the newest dorm

HaPpy Valley - HPV, because you'll get it the second you step in

Random North/South - Random sex with people you don't see elsewhere on campus, the campus glory hole if you will

Schrader - See American Gigolo, but it does sound like someone who can't get laid

Out-of-the-Way - Girls here go out of the way for you because, well, most kids don't even know it exists

Trailer - No condoms but a lotta wifebeaters

Marlboro North - Fuck that, too far off campus.

Sooooo high when this was written.

Semester Recap and Christmas

2007-12-09T12:23:00.000-08:00

Semester: Not a complete bust.
Parties: Lots
Housing: Unsettled
Drugs: Surprisingly low
Funds: Surprisingly lower
Classes: Not too bad
Papers: Killer (and the apology wasn't too bad either)
Religion: Boring
Politics: Ludicrous
Freshmen: Mostly lame but not all
Chicago: Awesome
Vermont: Lame
Weather: Absolutely shit
Women: One's all I want/need
Music: Fantastic
Administration: Can go fuck themselves
Coming back: Definitely

Christmas want list:
The right tutorials for Spring (Finally Seth is back!)
Tickets to Roskilde
iPod (maybe this one won't be stolen)
New glasses and shoes, Chelsea boots
New jeans (ACNE/Nudie maybe)
A car in Vermont would be nice
Ski lessons from Kjetil Jansrud (haha)
Well, my apartment could use a TV
You know who

Would love a new cat too :)

I have nothing bad to say about Ashley Beursken

2007-12-01T10:20:00.000-08:00

I have nothing bad to say about Ashley Beursken.

Just sayin'.

Travel made easy

2007-10-18T18:05:00.000-07:00

It's all in order

The plan:

Brattleboro, VT -> Boston, MA October 19
Stars in Concert Berklee Performance Center

Boston, MA -> Chicago, IL October 20

Chicago, IL -> Burlington, VT October 24

Burlington, VT -> Brattleboro, VT October 25

Packing:

1 x Jeans (APC)
3 x Shirts (Prada, Ted Baker x2)
1 x Sweater (YSL)
1 x Coat (Armani)
1 x Boots (Reiss)
Boxers / Socks
1 x Belt (Dior)
1 x Tie (Dior)
1 x Scarf (Fendi)

1 x Laptop (IBM)

4 x Books
* The River War, Winston Churchill
* Warren Hastings, David Gilmour
* Principia Discordia
* Qur'an

1 x Pocketwatch (Maoist)
1 x Notebook
1 x Pen
0 x Cell phone
1 x Wallet (Gucci)
Checkbook
Money
0 x Credit Cards
1 x Vintage Chinese Air Force Aviator Goggles

Toiletries

1 x Smith Corona Typewriter Case
1 x Messenger Bag (Banana Republic)

Planned acquisitions:

1 x Jeans (APC @ Stel's)
+++ x Booze

600 Frequent flier miles
Enough Amtrak miles to get me a free ticket

Ready to rock 'n roll

2007-09-29T05:39:00.001-07:00

On April 25th, 1707, in Almansa, Spain, the army of the Duke of Berwick defeated the army of the Marquis de Ruvigny in a decisive battle of the War of Spanish Succession. Yet, the victor of the day was the French, not the British, for this battle marked possibly the first and only instance of a Briton leading a French force defeating a Frenchman leading a British force.
How did this happen? It was over 100 years before the French Foreign Legion was formed in 1831, allowing non-French citizens to serve as officers in a French army. At the same time, by 1707, Great Britain and France have been on-and-off enemies for the better part of 700 years. One can’t help but ask about the strange circumstances surrounding the two men and their world that somehow led to their clashing on a Valencian field in Spain, fighting against his own countrymen.
The Duke of Berwick was born James FitzJames, the illegitimate son of King James II of England. His uncle on his mother’s side was the great English general John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, making him related also to Prime Minister Winston Churchull as well. His already impressive noble, albeit illegitimate, pedigree at birth was augmented by marriages to the widow of the Earl of Lucan and the daughter of Henry Bulkeley, the Master of the Household of both Charles II and James II. Being the son of the king, he was granted a series of high posts such as the Governor of Portsmouth and the Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire, as well as being made a Knight of the Garter, one of the highest awards bestowed by the king. At age 18 in 1688, his life was looking rosy and easy. The dukedom of Berwick, a town on the border of England and Scotland, was actually created specifically for him by his father the year before, and he even gained some combat experience serving in Hungary.
However, his privileges and honors were taken away in a flash when James II was ousted by William III in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. While Berwick was able to cut his teeth in battles fought by supporters of his father in Ireland and later, the continent against the new King of England, James was unable to recover his throne in the end after devastating losses to William III. Surprisingly, his new allies came in the form of France. The French were certainly eager to see that a fellow Catholic monarch would gain power over the Protestant William, and while in exile, Berwick joined the French Army.
While the French Army haven’t quite gained the stereotype of being a bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys just yet at the end of the Seventeenth Century, Berwick’s initial service in France was inauspicious. In fact, in 1693, during the French victory at Landen, he was captured by the English and was finally released in a prisoner exchange.

Loot, as of July 6

2007-07-05T20:27:00.000-07:00

The following DVDs have been acquired at about one USD each, sometimes less:

Motorcycle Diaries
Punch Drunk Love
Lost in Translation
Match Point
Kingdom of Heaven Director's Cut
Laurence of Arabia
A Very Long Engagement
Good Night, and Good Luck
Walk the Line
Irreversible
Love Actually
Bleu
Blanc
Rouge
Le Double Vie de Veronique
Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
American Psycho
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Cache
Radiohead Live in Glastonbury 2003
Caradiru
The Doors
La Veuve de Saint-Pierre
The Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus
Trainspotting
Full Metal Jacket
A Clockwork Orange
Wings of Desire
Pulp Fiction
The Barbarian Invasions
Capote
Kontroll
Lola Rennt
Closer
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Bad Education
Me and You and Everyone We Know
Party Monster
Welcome to the Dollhouse
Four Feathers (2002)

The Complete 3.5 Seasons of the OC

Selling term papers for money

2007-06-29T00:08:00.001-07:00

I'm a sell out and I love it. I'm not selling exclusive rights to anything plan-related, but T had us write so many papers, one might as well.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/join.html?refer=90206

Unemployment and Engrish

2007-06-28T19:40:00.000-07:00

"Don't Drive Me Crazy, Drive Me to Bingo"

I spot the shirt for a couple of bucks and it'll be on its way to Bedford, NH in a few days.

Unemployment is actually pretty fun. I don't have money to go out, but I just bought the entire collection of The O.C. for like $30 so I'm gonna watch the whole thing again. Actually my unemployment ends tonight. Tomorrow I start tutoring again.

I think I'm going run a Engrish t-shirt gig out of my Canal Street apartment in Brattleboro come September.

Let's recap my week, other than seasons 1 and 2 of the OC (and watching Johnny Depp movies in bed until 12).

---
I quit my job on Thursday morning and bought a standing room ticket to Shanghai where I stayed at a youth hostel a block from the Bund. Smelling like Dior Homme even though I started the day with Eau Sauvage I wandered around colonial buildings and low powerlines in the tenements in a Yves Saint Laurent sweater and APC Jeans that have now properly been worn in and at some point decided to pass out for a bit until I woke up just in time for drinks at Bar Rouge at 8PM - Mango Mojitos, just like last summer - before buying hash from a kebab stand and ending up at dkd where I somehow scored a bag of... hair gel? The DJ was atrocious and at this point I'm craving a Mimosa but instead I buy a cigar and hum David Bowie to myself as I wandered back in the shadows of dark alleys in the whore of the orient before getting on a train back to Suzhou the next morning.

John Sheehy and Geraldine and T would kill me with that little paragraph there.

"Oh the cot is so cold it feels like no bed at all!"

Headache Grey

2007-06-20T20:31:00.000-07:00

I'm quitting my job tomorrow. I'm convinced of it.

I'm on 16mg of Klonopins and I feel nothing.

I'm broke and it's okay.

It blows my mind

2007-06-18T08:18:00.000-07:00

It blows my mind that not only I saw the new We Are Scientists CD pirated in China, it came with a CD with no songs by them.

Same goes for Placebo, actually.

Some things I learned in China

2007-06-12T05:19:00.000-07:00

Day 2 of Internship:

1. In America, you're their bitch if you're an intern. In China, you get paid to facebook all day

2. But in China, you get paid $120 a month.

3. Taking the taxi takes longer than the bus to get to work, and taking the bus requires me to get up at 6:30.

4. The bus stop is 45 minutes from where I live on foot. Go development!

5. Sometimes, there's no running water

6. Will Mees, if you read this, Steve Bielinski has out gayed you.

7. Why the fuck can't I get mint or limes here is beyond me.

That's all.

A Pub Crawl and an update from China

2007-06-08T18:08:00.000-07:00

I hope this doesn't read like a Bret Easton Ellis novel.

I get off the car on Shi Quan Jie in Suzhou and I hit up Pulp Fiction (400th block). It's full of foreigners. I guess I'm a foreigner. I chat it up with the Welsh bartender whose name I can't spell but it means Stephen apparently. They make Mojitos and I caught happy hour and you know what that means.

The Pulp Fiction Mojitos were a bit too sugary, a work in progress, but I spent a summer at Minibar and O-Bar and Mark's and Citizen Smith and the Ritz and fuck knows where but my Zagat's frazzled to hell. Also, their glasses are too small, but it's okay, I appreciate the effort very much already. Definitely a place to hit up. You can also graffiti the walls. I also wrote some Eliot and Yeats for a waitress called Jojo before chatting up a German-American (father from Boston and she's going to a wedding from where Lydia my "oh I don't do coke but can you get me an eightball" apartment-mate came from) from northern Bavaria called Sonia, but her friend/guide Julie was the cockblock and I didn't have a wingman, blah. Left her my Marlboro account. She left me a random pack of cigs.

Then I hit up Scarlet briefly. It sucked. Sweaty Asian men and over-made-up Chinese girls and expensive drinks and 30 yuan to get in? Fuck that noise. The music sucked too. Fairly unpleasant for a bar that size. If anyone spill any of their "Oh my god it's Johnnie Walker" on my Dior tie I'm going to have to open a can of whoop-ass on them. Ah, fashion, when there's nothing else to be proud of, be proud of the brand name. Anyway it was a mess and somehow 70 yuan later I dont think I'm going back. Also, Chinese people dance to steal wallets. Fucking chinks, not that I'm not one myself, but I come out of Inglewood and we got respect, you know.

Next door is Whiskey Jack's but it was full of doughty old men, which was, to be honest, depressing as fuck, like, seriously depressing as fuck. Didn't stay there for very long.

Went for some street food (pics will be on www.deathbyunicorn.com in a bit as soon camera is charged.

Strangely I woke up with a 10 yuan bill somewhere but now I can't find it in my room, but I have 100 1 yuan coins stacked here with a few hundred dollars left. Also, I lost a condom, or used it, I don't remember. I also misplaced my driver's license but that could easily be arranged.

As an addendum, not on a Friday, but let's recap the other bars in Suzhou:

Thursday: The Pub Bar, not too many people, a few Austrians. I've been playing a lot of Fussball lately with Jay and Stephanie. After they left I flirted a bit with the waitresses (I think I've flirted with way too many waitresses) and I smoked too many cigars for a Thursday night. At least they were Cuban. Drinks are nice, but the place is small and I'm not sure what the scene's like on weekends. Got a tad sick for some reason and drunkdialed Lynch (twice)?. It happens.

Wednesday: Hung out with Steve, who's from Scranton but more Chinese than I am. We sang some really terribly patriotic and anti-Japanese/American/Everybody songs, which was hilarious. Finally making friends. FINALLY. We also took a pretty wild ride and ate some crazy food.

Tuesday: Harry's, not on Shi Quan Jie. Live band is pretty good, none of that Karaoke shit (not that I don't enjoy it or I wouldn't be bugging Melissa to bring her machine over). Friendly staff, all thinks I'm Singaporean. I think I'm gonna get a pattern going. Oh and free pool.

Monday: Shamrock 700th Block of Shi Quan Jie. Guinness (Malaysian :() on tap. Did some open mic, friendly place, the girls were a bit shy, but what can ya do. The pints were a tad expensive. Free pool and Fussball.

I've already taught two bartenders how to make Micheladas and I'm not even Mexican. Random fact: I met two waitresses named Lily already. Also, lots of Germans here.

My family commented that I was too reserved and quiet. If only they knew the ribaldry that goes on, heh.

More to come, I'll be here for a while.

My plan: Hit up some happy hours on weekdays after work, obtain Xanax (or Valium, I'm on a combo of Estazolam and Xanax right now. My tolerance is through the roof. This must be remedied. There's a seizurous feel to everything already.

Over and out if I don't seizure.

Headache Grey

2007-06-06T17:55:00.000-07:00

I just moved my Suzhou pictures blog to www.deathbyunicorn.com so that's where all the pictures are. If you're really bored feel free to read this, however.

I'm running low on money. Last night I convinced a bartender to make me an Michelada, which I learned from GQ. The recipe is as follows (June 2007, GQ, 84)

Michelada

Make 1 drink:

Coarse salt
Ice Cubes
12 ounces of Mexican Beer, like Negra Modelo
Two dashes of Worcestershire Sauce and 2 dashes of Tabasco
Juice of 1 - 2 limes
Highball glass

Directions:

1. Salt the rim of the glass
2. Fill the glass with ice cubes and about two fingers width of lime juice
3. Add a splash of Worcestershire Sauce and Tabasco
4. Pour in beer and add more as you sip

Okay now we got that out of the way, I'm in Suzhou, China, so to get a Mexican beer (shit, I haven't even had a burrito in like half a year, what the FUCK) is a challenge. So at Harry's Bar last night, Lucy the Bartender and I worked out an interesting version of this delicious Mexican delicacy:

Michelada de Suzhou

1 Beer Mug
Lime Cordials
1 Bottle Corona
Coarse Salt
Ice cubes
Sriracha (aka Cock Sauce for you Americans)
Two Lime Wedges

Directions:

1. Salt the rim of the beer mug
2. Add in ice
3. Slather Sriracha over ice
4. Add in lime cordial, about 1/3rd of the way
5. Fill up to top with Corona
6. Garnish with lime wedges

Result: It's a bit coarse, Tabasco has a much higher viscosity than Sriracha so you get a layer of Sriracha at the bottom when you're done, unfortunately. The beer mug was an interesting touch. I'd prefer a slightly darker beer than Corona but it worked out okay, just spicy enough to counteract the melting ice, and everyone was like "What the fuck". If we can perfect the recipe it would be great, since making my own Mojitos to the book last summer is getting kind of boring.

At some point I drank a bunch of Johnny Walker and drunk dialed Lynch.

In further news, China still smells like SHIT so I've been wearing the following in rotation:

Dior Higher
Dior Homme
Eau Sauvage
Le Male

Reading List: Robert Bartlett's The Making of Europe, Trainspotting, Arthur Rimbaud

Manifesto on the Improvisational Piano

2007-06-01T02:02:00.000-07:00

Why do we go to concert halls and hail great pianists, making their work worthy of preservation on vinyl and CD? What separates the performances of Rubenstein, Gould, Arrau, or Zimmerman from the performances of any competent pianist with a few years of rote training under their fingertips? It is not perfection that we look for in the performances, but rather, imperfections from the written music. We listen to the pianists as they interpret the composer's work in the performances, sometimes changing the tempo, sometimes deliberately or humanly make errors in the performance. We hear the performer as well as the composer in great performances. A perfectionist would abhor the muttering and whimperings of Gould in his Bach, but any machine and computer can play the music as it is written and inputted, but only one pianist can play it as he or she have uniquely imagined what the music would be played, and the uniqueness of this, the human element of music, is the siren's call from the concert halls to the connoisseur's ear.

Then, what about improvisational piano? What is improvised would be the culmination of both composition and performance, the combination of two creative forces in one mind. Yet, even traditional improvisational piano have been summarized and locked into certain conventions. There's jazz, whose soul was based on interpretation, now locked into a step-by-step phenomenon practiced by lots and even written down. The greatness of Miles Davis and Charlie Parker being taught? What separates that from Bach and Ravel? Merely the style. The true improvisational piano must not be able to be replicated, a true one-off work. Surely, it can be based upon the tenants of piano or music in general - major or minor keys, tempos, et cetera, but the actual music that flows out of the pianist's fingers must be unique and for this occasion only. Truly unique music, improvised and the most human and a culmination of creativeness in music, cannot be replicable in form, only in theme and gist.

How does a pianist achieve this? One must have intent as one plays the music, or it would be a wandering, rambling mess - although one cannot rule it out, as a wandering, rambling mess might be just the intent of the musician - yet structure that makes written music would make the music too replicable and too mechanical to fully express the impromptu emotion of the pianist. The pianist must have the right mindset. The mindset should be chosen from the most nebulous and disorderly of humanity - relationships and conflict. One can hardly ever predict the exact course of conflict, and it is this tension and uncertainty that makes it so human. Conveniently enough, unlike the violin or the trumpet, the pianist is gifted with two hands to engage in his act, two independent perspectives upon the keyboard on which to express two separate melodies. The two hands are actors in a human drama, and they must act as if they're engaged in a play or even better, a real relationship or conflict.

I must here clarify that relationships as we know are full of conflicts, but conflicts also embody greater forms - wars, negotiations, diplomacy - they can all be expressed by the improvised piano because the two hands - actors as I shall refer to them from this point - must have some sort of form of independence in their interactions. The music would almost be incidental, a product of how the interactions between the two actors have been acting, and reflects the nature of either conflict or cooperation. A sense of tension, then, would be everpresent in the music, which would make the music far more intriguing than a planned, pleasing piece prearranged and over-practiced. The music would change tempos, rapidly scale up and down, sometimes adding a sharp or flat where there shouldn't be one. There would be no more absolute "should"s in the music, as anything that can be explained and interpreted as a reflection of a progression of a conflict can be a part of the music. The only prerequisite of the music - and the separator of it from non-music - would be how the music progresses. The music must start at a point, a recognizable point, and progress to a recognizable end point, whether it be a harmonious one or one that is an entangled mess. Anything in the middle, the progression, would be up to the improvisation. To express a serious sense of terror or disgust or the carefreeness of light can easily be done by altering the keys and tempo, sometimes in a slow progression and sometimes in a sudden mood change, a swing worthy of a psychiatric patient. Music should no longer be limited to the conventional sanity of structured sonatinas and symphonies, but the madness of humanity that we repress but are ever-present nonetheless.

The pianist's emotions - or the emotions trying to be expressed, not necessarily as the pianist's own but merely as his creation of the tradition (see T.S. Eliot's suggestion for the depersonalization of the artist - a viable alternative but not an exclusivity in my opinion for the creation of art, but I digress) - should be able to be interpreted by the audience, but none is necessary. A play without an audience is still a play. The improvisation is raw emotions expressed on a keyboard. The hurriedness of retreat in a vie for dominance can be expressed via the quickening of the hands' advances on the scale and the fingers can even physically touch - a truly physical representation that turns a shouting match into a physical fight, creating a cacophony, not necessarily rational, as arguments and conflicts aren't either. Humans don't have to be rational, and neither does the music. The improvisation is based on a spur-of-the-moment expression, and it can be as outrageous as humanity allows it. The piece can be long and drawn out, overtiring, self-referential, or it can be short, to the point, and classical in all but the fact that it is only expressing a classical sentiment and not an classical piece.

In the end, really, improvisational pieces should create a specific mood. It's much easier to create discord, but harmony can also be created this way. The keys can change as quickly as the tempestuous mind of the pianist, and it makes for a wonderfully unparalleled and unique form of music. We can eschew obvious themes of music in the traditional sense, accomplished by repeating the same notes - by creating themes by creating the same sentiment to reinforce the meaning under a piece. Certainly, this freedom and raw humanity leaves open a lot of room for music that have too much tension and discord to be bearable by the listener - what we call bad music - and when this is unintentional, it would not be music but mere trash. However, when done properly, the combination of drama, emotion, humanity, and all the best elements of theatrics with the already graceful and expressive capabilities of the piano can make improvisational piano the most meaningful and intriguing form of piano. One should not merely shoot for "good" music, as music should aim to incite an adjective more than merely "good" or "bad" or something akin to that. Music can incite a revolution, create peace, change the mood of the listener. The humanity of the pianist in improvisational piano have already provided the groundwork, and with practice in how to express such emotions, improvisational piano, in my opinion, would be the most appropriate and applicable as well as the most enjoyable form of piano music.

- First Draft May 29 2007 - Los Angeles
- This version June 1 2007 - Suzhou

Home, if only a week

2007-05-22T17:56:00.000-07:00

I'm "home", or is Suzhou my home? Fuck knows. In any case, another flight next tuesday. Tonight is Amanda at Mark's after some shopping. Mark's redux should be fun, hopefully no carding. White pants might do the trick. I desperately need a Prada skinny tie.

Death By Unicorn

2007-05-12T19:31:00.000-07:00

I registered Deathbyunicorn.com and redirected it to this site. I hope to set a non-blocked blog for my adventure in China before everything's over, but now I still have work to do :(

I'm thinking about starting a music/movies blog. This whole Asian Studies thing is not that fun. Maybe a history thing? But I think Damn Interesting have that covered.

Oh, here's the Stars set at Morning Becomes Eclectic - 02 - 29 - 04
http://www.sendspace.com/file/u7b2xr

Setlist (Heart era):

1. The Vanishing
2. Heart
3. Your Ex-Lover Is Dead
4. Interview
5. What the Snowman Learned About Love
6. Elevator Love Letter
7. Life Effect

It's not my fault you have an open directory full of music

2007-04-29T04:29:00.000-07:00

I suppose you have an oink account too then?

http://notfine.com/muse/

Insanity... and movies

2007-04-29T03:09:00.000-07:00

After 60 pages of writing, 4 straight all nighters, a whole bunch of pharmaceuticals, and not seeing more than three people for a whole week I think I passed (barely) international law and politics, if only on the merit that I wrote SIXTY FUCKING PAGES in a week. Only 16 will be turned in, of course, the other will just be "appendices" to show that I did something this semester, even if it's a rambling history of the balance of power in Europe... twice over.

Anyway, during the time I've watched some great movies in the background. While I was unable to watch the Wes Anderson movies in a row on acid, I did end up watching and loving:

Zwartboek (Black Book) by Paul Verhoeven, starring Carice van Houten;
A Cock and Bull Story by Michael Winterbottom, starring Steve Coogan;
and The Wind that Shakes the Barley by Ken Loach, starring Cillian Murphy.

Amazing what kind of craziness can happen at 3AM in the woods. One down, 2.5 more papers left, but that's only 38 pages of real writing. Then again, who the fuck knew a planned 20 page paper turned into a 60 page extravagant write-a-thon of epically fucked up proportions?

Anyway I still need to find a place in Marlboro or Brattleboro for the next 3 semesters. Fuck :(

Travelling: in exotic fashion

2007-04-18T18:48:00.000-07:00

Fuck planes. Seriously, fuck planes. My father was a pilot and admittedly when I was much younger the romance of the skies captivated me for a long, long time, until I realized that I was flying from LAX or LGB to BOS or ALB or SFY 4 or 5 times a year at least. No go, no go. Flying the same routes out of the same airports suck ass, and economy, well, plenty of other people have put it much more eloquently. Air travel has become way too commonplace, and even more so when I lived in Inglewood when I lived DIRECTLY UNDER A FUCKING RUNWAY. Fucking A. However, I have had some pretty memorable and exotic flights, such as:

Shanghai Hongqiao -> Kunming, 1995, on Shanghai Airlines, and then Yunnan Airlines from Kunming to Xishuangbanna. The approach to Xishuangbanna was amazing. Tropical rain forests? Elephants? Holy shit. It's pretty amazing.

SHA -> LAX. Did this a few times almost a decade ago. Admittedly, every approach into LAX at night is amazing. Same for LGB. However, it gets old when you point out your house five million times.

However, everything else kind of sucked in terms of flying. I think I'm gonna do some train and possibly boat trips. My oceangoing experience, for coming from a long line of ship captains on my father's side, is pretty unimpressive. I've taken a long, long ferry in Norway, and a cruise from LA to Ensenada. That's pretty much it. Fairly lame. One of these days I'll hop on a freighter to Liverpool or something crazy like that, I hope.

I mean, LAX -> LHR -> AMS and back or LAX -> NWR -> CPH and back were pretty fun and all, but a berth on the QM2 from NYC to Southampton seems like the way to go, really. Service, man, service. I want to go to dinner in my Zegna jacket and look properly dressed instead of hopeless overdressed. That's the way to travel.

Meanwhile, let's talk about trains. Trains are awesome. The first time I ever rode a train they almost didn't let me on, but I was four so, yeah, they were assholes. However, taking the train from LA to Chicago to Boston was awesome. Great service, interesting scenery, and people to talk to to boot. All in all an interesting experience that I would not mind repeating. If only I can do it on the way back home.

But really though, with my current citizenship status, I don't see why I can't just hop on a train in Shanghai and end up in Moscow or London. That would be fucking epic. FUCKING EPIC.

http://www.seat61.com/Trans-Siberian.htm

Some sort of update

2007-04-12T20:44:00.000-07:00

It's still god damn snowing. It's April. It's almost halfway through April. Vermont sucks. Another foot and I'm gonna die.

And it doesn't help that every one of my classes and tutorials seem to demand a ridiculous paper. Actually I wouldn't mind if all I had to write were 2 x 40 pages for 2 tutorials that I love and maybe one 10 pager for a class I like, but it's 3 classes I don't care for and a tutorial I love. Necessity is the mother of pain.

I'll be in China this summer. They block blogger but facebook should probably work. Maybe.

I wish my computer's DVD player still worked. At least I'm back on the easynews wagon.

If the weather improves so will my mood.

Speed kills. Long live speed.

Playlist: The Postal Service, Joy Divison, Stars, Razorlight, We Are Scientists

For kids in SoCal

2007-02-12T18:50:00.000-08:00

It's motherfucking cold and snowing.

Top 5 - Addendum

2007-01-03T16:46:00.000-08:00

Top 5 Albums I shouldn't be listening to yet but fuck the po-lice:

Bloc Party - A Weekend In The City

The Colour - Between Earth and Sky

Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Air - Pocket Symphony

The Shins - Wincing the Night Away

Top 5 Old Albums I can't stop listening to:

The Libertines - Up the Bracket (2003)

The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground and Nico (1969)

Stars - Nightsongs (2001)

The Dresden Dolls - The Dresden Dolls (2003)

Interpol - Turn On The Bright Lights (2002)

Top 5 Bootlegs

Pete Doherty - The Freewheelin' Pete Doherty

The Libertines - Legs XI

The Velvet Underground - April 1966 Scepter Studios Mix of TVU&N

Editors - Live @ Paradiso

The Rakes - The World Was A Mess But His Hair Was Perfect

Top 5

2007-01-03T16:25:00.000-08:00

Out of boredom, top 5 albums of last year in my opinion, not ranked because of my whimsicalness.

Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not

The Fratellis - Costello Music

Dirty Pretty Things - Waterloo to Anywhere

Cold War Kids - Robbers and Cowards

The Decemberists - The Crane Wife

Top 5 concerts of last year

Radiohead (San Diego)

The Rakes (Troubadour)

Arctic Monkeys (Paradise)

Starlight Mints (Troubadour)

Infected Mushroom (EDC)

Vermont, be prepared for The Jim

2006-12-22T19:13:00.000-08:00

Hello Vermont. Hello New England. Hello Montreal. Once again. See you in mid-January.

I'm still the same person. A bit more low key maybe, and on plan, but still.

Party hard. Life is to be lived.

And drank the milk of paradise.

Violet

2006-11-24T20:36:00.000-08:00

Good eats are hard to come by when you have a shit job and spends half the day in rehab, especially when drinking is out of the question at the moment. However, my new residence on the west side (technically, I'm on the west side... right?) affords me some access to all the fun destinations along the 405, well, only when the traffic isn't deadly.

Violet

Okay, so the interior isn't actually violet-colored, but it's no problem. Interesting dinner menu and certainly showcases how far the New American cuisine can take traditional receipes. I'm mostly talking about the new Macaroni and Cheese, baked with ham and leek. The veal meatballs are not bad either.

In other news, I can't wait until next month when things might actually clear up.

Making the best out of a bad situation

2006-10-08T19:23:00.000-07:00

I just bought a pair of APC New Cure raws from Stel's in Boston and a pair of boots from Reiss.

If glamour is criminal, at least let the handcuffs match my watchstrap

2006-09-19T02:53:00.000-07:00

One can still try to be glamourous in Vermont, and my roommate definitely has potential, as do some others on campus. I like the Freshman class this year.

Current scent: Pi by Givenchy, citrusy, woodsy, floral, heavy but nice for the nights here in Vermont, a bit old but it's okay, I'll stick with it until I get some Bond 9 or something. I've received several compliments already. Fuck its reputation, even the bottle looks fab. Maybe I really need to start the Marlboro Vanity Society. The scent is fairly sweet but it will work excellently in the winter I think. A lot of vanilla too, but it settles.

Then we have this fabulous editorial from Italia Vogue by Steven Meisel. Supposedly came from theFashionSpot but couldn't quite find it or be arsed to find it there. It's also, in higher resolution, at this Livejournal which I found on Superfuture.

It's so Glamorama it hurts. In 2002 - 2003 I attempted to adapt the novel into a screenplay that never went beyond page 55, and Roger Avary has the rights to the movie. I do think that Kip Pardue would be an excellent Victor Ward, but Allison Poole and others, well, I don't know, maybe someone more scandalously sexy.

In any case,

I wish my John Varvatos shirt wasn't ripped, but I think in time I'll be able to afford a few more casually wearable ones for the right occasion.

One must admit that my luck recently have been rather shit but you know, things will turn around, hopefully, once I get somehow to a bank or something. A new car would do nicely as well, alas. This is Vermont. I'll just have to find like-minded people or something, like last first semester.

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Wants: A pea-coat or Chesterfield, navy or black; a new belt, black; something Belgian (van Noten, Margiela - or does he still count?), possibly another shirt or another pair of jeans that fit, speakers, headphones, bigger hard drive, and all the rest.

Playlist: Oasis, Johnny Cash, The Dresden Dolls, Radiohead (only Kid A), The Fratellis, the Sunshine Underground.

Fall Bookbag

2006-08-23T13:09:00.000-07:00

First, no haircut pics this time, I'm terribly lazy and I need to fix the proportionality of my glasses.

But yeah, despite my expressed need for a Jack Spade bag I went around South Coast with Catherine my sister and decided that I couldn't find a Jack Spade bag and I wasn't about to drive up into LA to find one at that time... so it's back to Banana Republic

Improved over my last bag from them. The absense of the annoying plastic clips that kept chipping when abused is very nice, but the lack of a carrying handle on top sucks, even though I guess it balances the bag out nicely. I haven't carried a heavy load in it yet - just my laptop and a book yesterday, but it seems to hold up pretty well. Trip report from Vegas - when i'll end up living out of this thing - should be a good judgment on how well their next generation of nylon bags are.

I should've went to McGill or something, damn this outdoors thing :|

The Xanax Challenge

2006-08-12T03:00:00.000-07:00

It's a bit hard to do an actual object comparison, but I think the generic Serbian 1mg IR (blue, round) Alprazolam pills are equal in quality to the Belgian 1mg IR (purple, Upjohn Football, Bevelled), except the Serbian ones are a tad more fragile.

Rivitrol is still weird to me. It works, but it kind of doesn't, but I know I'll pop one more and wake up 3 days later.

P.S. Kob is not a scammer.

Nic's

2006-08-04T02:34:00.000-07:00

Nic's Beverly Hills: Note to self, check out the Vodbox next time. Braised duck was fantastic, drinks were nice but not heavy enough. Pretty colors though. The Argentinian waiter was hot. LA brings out the gay side of me (but Vermont sends it right back in).

Canon Dr. is a bitch these days. Random firetruck sighting, and Valet sucked. Thursday night, what can you do.

One day I'll be able to sleep with no chemical aid.

Happy Birthday

2006-08-02T15:36:00.000-07:00

Happy birthday, Mr. Larsen. May your spirits find nirvana where they belong.
May 2006 - Eternity.

A story of 4, maybe 5 Mojitos

2006-07-31T17:02:00.000-07:00

A good Mojito is hard to find. A good place where I don't have to cough tip cough the waiter 25 bucks to make me one without any questions asked is, well, actually surprisingly not too hard.

So armed with a lovely dinner date and a bundle of completely undeserved cash I've been strolling around West LA and all that, looking for a good drink (and a good place that doesn't card) for a good Cuban infused splash this summer before I have to go back to the dreary windswept plains of New England.

minibar on Cahuenga - A tad strong, but delicious, the muddled mint was a tad too muddled, if that's even possible, but it was nice nevertheless. The sugar cane was a nice bonus touch.

Mark's on La Cienega - Probably the strongest Mojito, but also, largest single portion. Kudos to the hot waiters, coming from a straight guy.

Chadaka Thai on San Fernando in Burbank. Deliciously fruity Mango Mojito with Mango syrup, made just right, and a good collection of other drinks as well.

O-Bar on Santa Monica. My lovely date considered it the best drink she ever had, a Mango Mojito with Mango rum, serving size for 2. However they have no valet on Sunday nights and they carded so I don't think I'll be returning. Fabulous dishes too, a shame they're prickly on the ID issue. Next time, maybe I'll go back to the tie and shirt look.

So I've been making my own Mojitos. Mango ones (because the local Ralph's guy didn't know what straight syrup was and Tina could not stop ranting about how nice the Mango ones were). My receipe was (mostly adapted from the GQ receipe a few months ago):

1/2 large lime, cut into four wedges
6 or 7 large mint leaves
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 1/2 ounces vodka (Svedka, only thing I had here)
1 ounce fresh-squeezed lime juice
1 ounce mango syrup
Ice
Club soda

Muddle the lime, mint, and sugar in a cocktail mixer, muddle until the sugar dissolves and everything is kind of... muddled, then add ice, vodka, lime juice, and syrup, shake vigorously for 20 seconds, pour the whole thing into a glass, top it off with some club soda, and enjoy.

I think I might have added too much brown sugar though, will tweak the receipe, especially since now that I'm out of gin, no more gin & tonics.

Cabazon, End of July

2006-07-26T14:44:00.000-07:00

It's fucking hot.

So it's perfect weather to go sweater shopping. Cabazon's Desert Hill Outlets are awesome but unfortunately a) I'm too poor to buy one of those fabulous shearling jackets from Gucci and b) Dior there doesn't have any Dior Homme. Actually, finding my size is a fucking chore as well. A waist size of 28-29 and an inseam of 30-32? Too popular for the outlets, dammit. I wonder what kind of person with a 36 waist would wear Nudies and get away with it anyway.

In any case luckily I was able to score some nice items anyway.

V-neck by Yves Saint Laurent. It fits a tad funny without anything under it though.

Shirt by John Varvatos, although their small is still a tad big, it's a nice fall color I think.

Extra preppyness with the combination woot!

Ted Baker shirt, fits pretty well, like the dark one I usually wear.

Vermont, New Hampshire, and Montreal, for the uninitiated

2006-07-15T16:59:00.000-07:00

Playlist: The Paddingtons, Radiohead, Placebo

I tell you guys what it's like to be shrouded in snow and fog and everything barren for half of the year, but it's nearly impossible for words to be adequate, especially for the SoCal born-and-bred suburbanite, so, I'd like to show you, in pictures, what it's like to spend 8 months out of the year in the upper reaches of English North America.

(Images clickable for full size)

My beautiful 1997 Acura TL 2.5, leather seats, California plates, sunroof, blown-out speakers, non-working CD player, in the parking lot of my dorm. Note the lack of... pavement in the parking lot of my dorm, but at least my dorm has a parking lot where I won't get ticketed, which can't be said for any other dorms on campus.

Route 9 in New Hampshire... on a good day. No snow, traffic not too bad, etc. In snowy weather this road is hell, but Route 9 in Vermont is even worse...

Farms, farms, hot hot hot farm action! Yep, this is the countryside of the Connecticut river valley, from the New Hampshire side. I had to drive to Keene to buy an Atlas because the Brattleboro bookstores aren't open at 9AM on a Sunday morning. You can see Vermont in the distance, not that there's much to see.

Off the I-91, up near St. Johnsbury. Remember that movie Super Troopers? Awesome movie, but obviously not shot in Vermont, meow, is it? Vermont is a lot drearier and the state troopers are a lot less fun :(

Lancaster, NH. Typical. This is what happens when you take the long way to Montreal. It's so post-industrial and apocalyptic, makes one wonder why T.S. Eliot needed to go to Europe to write The Waste Land. I also had the fortune of getting lost in a bunch of half-deserted factories and railyards here. I suppose growing up in Southern California provides me the opportunity to not realize that the rest of America waxes and wanes to the fortunes of industry.

I was told that consecutively numbered highways don't meet up very often. At least in California the only place that does is probably PCH (CA-1) and Route 2 (Santa Monica Blvd). There are no Interstates in Northern NH, so this is as road-y as it gets.

Montreal, mon amour! Coming in from Pont Champlain onto University, right into the heart of downtown. The Jewel of Canada, it's definitely one of my favorites.

Civilized food in Montreal! Pho and a Tsingtao.

And this is just bizarre. In Trois Amigos, apparently THE Mexican place in town (I came here three times with three different people I knew in town who didn't know each other), they had St. Patty's day decorations up... in a French-Canadian Mexican restaurant. Je voudrais un burrito carne asada sil vous plait, monsieur, avec une Magarita was just a little bit weird.

With my cousin Melanie in front of "the ugliest building in McGill". She's now working for Merrill Lynch in Hong Kong. Fabulousness runs in the family, but success, alas, didn't get passed onto me. This was also the last snowstorm of the year, I think.

Montreal always has cute houses, this is I think on Berri, even with the construction shit around.

-----
So that would really explain why at school, we do this:

Before

After!

(Jello Shots for the win)
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Bonus: Why I might want to work at Disneyland this summer

Introduction, then Spring and Summer men's fashions

2006-07-07T00:35:00.000-07:00

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Playlist: The Rakes, Air, Dirty Pretty Things, The Libertines, Forward, Russia!, Spinvis
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It's that time of the year again where we can poke fun and/or gaze at the fabulousness or fucked-up-ness of what people will be wearing this time next year.

As usual the bell curve proves correct. A lot of mediocre shit, a few brilliant pieces. I'm definitely in a minimalist mood lately - too many stripy/glittery shit around my wardrobe certainly, and some "bland" but more basic pieces would definitely be nice additions. It's nice that Spring/Summer offers a chance for lighter and brighter colours to flash, even if sometimes it goes way overboard and ridiculous. The solemnness of winter - especially a terrifying New England one - is, thankfully, still a ride away.

As usual, as a first post, I'm no expert and all this is just egocentric rambling of my tastes. I hope the drabness of Marlboro haven't dulled it much for my brief tenures in Los Angeles and whenever possible, Montreal, NYC, and Boston. Hopefully next summer, Europe as well, before I jet off to Hong Kong for a mandatory exile in the art of writing useless crap.

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Looks that I'm liking a lot so far

Rykiel

Muted colours seem to be rather in (I'm looking at you, Christopher Bailey). Polka dots but not serious, always a plus. Beautiful peaked lapels as well. I'm not a big fan of cardigans, but there are a few interesting pieces in it as well.

Dior Homme

I can't say that I can pull off this look, but it's definitely minimalist, just the right amount of androgyny, and it's... just very Hedi Slimane. It's nothing new, but as we've seen in the German National Football Team, don't change something that ain't broken. The bracelets I'm a bit wary of but otherwise, minimalist, yes, and I guess it fits my body type at the present moment as well. Elsewhere in the collection, ties get skinnier (which I'm not too fond of), jackets get shinier (works sometimes). Fitted suits, especially jackets, two buttons. Primary colors are silver and black. Leathery stuff I'm not too sure of, but it does look good on the models, and the vague military influences in some of the jackets, I'm gonna have to come back to later. Meanwhile, one more, fabulous double-breasted jacket from Hedi:

He's moving away from Bowie and Jagger with the velvet and whatnot and into Pete Doherty and The Rakes and what, which isn't exactly unexpected I suppose. Can Dior let him take over the women's half too? I've never taken Galliano seriously and still don't, but that's a whole other discussion for another day.

Raf Simons

Raf did some beautiful jackets for his own line. I'm not too keen with the solid bright raincoat/trenchcoat thing he's doing with Jil Sander, but his own line, beautiful, narrow lapels. I'm not usually a fan of that, but this is winning me over. He has some oversized sleeveless t-shirts and white/multicoloured short sleeved collared shirts. Not stuff I'd wear. The jackets though, oh my god. Some nice shorts too, but I'm not about to switch over from my jeans cycle. Swim trunks are as shorts as I go. Some very sexy white pants/khakis for work I see floating around too, but again, I think almost any pants would go with those jackets. Just, wow. I do, however, own a turtleneck from Hugo Boss that looks strangely similar to some of the ones he showed off this season, except mine's 3 years old and from the Holt Renfrew outlet in Toronto... hmm...

He did a more boxy look with Jil Sander this season. It's shocking. It's even wearable. I just can't dig wearing a red coat like that.

Ann Demeulemeester

There are too many good pieces but I can't pick out one that stands out above the rest to put up here, so that will have to do, because it really stood out. Very Belgian, but also in the same vein as Slimane in the skinny silhouette. Beauty within chaos. The layering with the pinstripes worked out magnificently, and the necklace, a nice touch. Margiela's pieces for his own line doesn't seem very good to be - an ugly shade of olive drab that reminded me a lot of old school Communist propaganda that I grew up with. The shoes - especially wingtips - were awesome, but the big picture doesn't look too great.

Louis Vuitton

Ok, so Marc Jacobs doesn't actually design menswear to go with the women's lines he does for LV and MJ, but fuck it, who cares. Paul Elbers does this one. Who's Paul Elbers? Apparently, he used to design for Margiela. I can't exactly say that this collection screams out Margiela. Nice and simple stuff here. I'm sold anyway. The entire collection is very solid. Despite the insane logo-chasing that happens at the LV boutiques (at least the last time I was at South Coast... the Koreans, my god), their bags are also very solid. It's probably the most wearable collection I've seen. LV is not trying to be Alexander McQueen. It's just trying to be LV, and it's doing a very, very good job. Show in SWF: http://www.louisvuitton.com/media/images/video/fashionShow/SSM/video/2007_SSM.swf

Yves St. Laurent

Another series of fabulous jackets, and neckwear too! The jacket looks like one that I wanted to wear to prom from Zegna, but ended up settling for a rented tux (Dior, but still, rented) instead. I guess I should be happy that I got through a no-tie look with a Burberry shirt and jeans from Banana Republic (hey I just turned 18, give me a break, first pair of jeans ever). Stefano Pilati certainly does elegance well. After LV, definitely my #2?

There are probably (definitely) more collections that I want to mention, but I think the top looks are all there. Well, top wearable ones. McQueen took my breath away but... shit, Alexander McQueen, what can I say, I'm not fit to wear it his stuff. Prada and Gucci were weird. Armani is more of the same. Valentino is still trying to be young, but really, his best work is still the good ol' blue blazer.

Overall, some really nice jackets to look forward to, because I need new jackets, and hopefully when I get my job back, everything will be in its right place. Monochromatic minimalism is definitely still alive, even in these spring lines.

I still need to pick up some new shirts and possibly a new tie too. Mmmm, summer, money, shopping, motivation.