The week comes to an abrupt end as I am working on a grand Special Hong Kong 20th Anniversary Handover Celebration Festivities Souvenir piece for these guys.
Plus I am still slightly jet-lagged from my overseas tour. (For example… Yesterday morning I passed by a building next to the Mid-Levels Escalator and noticed a business with the website address ‘handsomefactory’. Obviously I shouldn’t have, but out of curiosity I looked it up, and found a hipster retro men’s hair stylist place offering such banalities as ‘beard trimming’ and Coconut Cool Grease Superior Pomade at HK$280 a jar. And last night, in my dreams, I was in a Japanese (Jusco-like) mega-store wrangling with an Appalachian cousin over whether we should go to watch a pretentious demonstration of a hyper-expensive ‘wet shave’ by such a trendy phony ‘gentlemen’s barber’ scissor-operative.)
More reasons to avoid long-haul travel, and indeed be thankful to be in Hong Kong for all its faults, are flooding in this morning. One of my vacation photos of Strange Products on Special Offer seems somehow appropriate to dedicate at this moment to UK Prime Minister Theresa May…
Gin is the big seller in Britain this year. It has broken all records. A sign of Tory barbarism and frustration.
I have been up watching the BBC since 6 am. Socialism is now established again in the UK. The next election will see it victorious.
You always miss the important point about Hong Kong with your 1970s analysis. The working class is growing here as more and more people are economically disenfranchised. Like the UK, all that is needed is the reestablishment and awareness of this fact. All political struggles are class struggles. There is no neoliberal classless society in Hong Kong. Get with the real facts. Stop writing this sub-ECONOMIST discourse please. Have a gin.
For the weekend.
In this strange world, there are men who get a kick from being lifted up and carried by women. There are videos for them.
This video is relevant, I hope, because it seems to have been filmed in, of all places, the outskirts of a Chinese ghost town.
The video is unobjectionable. But it is on a pornographic website so some people may prefer not to go there. https://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=ph572cd230a6885
or search for “pornhub china lift9”.
China Lift
Here she comes, on the dusty hillside
With dainty steps, and lingers,
Poses, smiles, walks up to the camera,
Coyly wags her fingers.
Here he comes, an ordinary young fellow
And steps up on a boulder.
She stands below and slowly, carefully,
Hoists him on her shoulder.
He lies there, feet in front, head behind,
Like a rug, limply,
While she walks, with slow and stately steps
Quietly and simply.
She smiles a little; nothing else occurs,
But we hear the sound
Of her high heels as they gently tread
On the dusty ground.
Then they pose, just like a nice young couple,
Smiling, hand in hand,
On the track across the devastated,
Wasted, blighted land.
Behind them lies a barren plain of stones
And dust and mud and rocks,
And then the ordered, serried rows of concrete
Blocks and blocks and blocks.
Perhaps not finished yet, but who will live there?
It is deathly still.
Living human beings do not come.
Perhaps they never will.
Did I see a bus? Or hear machines?
Or only hear the wind blow
Across the empty, ravaged countryside?
An eerie place. I don’t know.
Once, they say, there was a revolution,
Bold and pure in spirit.
Boldly now, they kill the land and build.
Only ghosts inherit.
Ghosts assemble in the empty town
Which living people shun.
The sages of the past observe and sigh,
“Alas, what have they done!”
My giddy aunt, Knownot. You do move in interesting circles.
A most informative link and a wontedly well-turned verse, for both of which I thank you.
The usual shite from Adams. What a wanker.
Ho hum.