This is the imposing poster for Devil's Disciples. The young hunk on the left is not-so-young 36-year old Kevin Cheng, the stoic loner from the soap The Seventh Day (mentioned in the last post). How he defies the aging process is not known.

Here's Sally's swoonful love, Bosco, picking flowers with his in-show amore, played by Bernice Liu. Looks innocent enough, but wouldn't you know it, her ruthless father is head of the principle bad mutha kung fu clan, and killed off his parents when he was a baby?

Hong Kong fantasy soaps have their own strange conventions. One is that no matter how dramatic things are getting, there is are always a few mechanicals on hand to provide light (if slightly jarring) relief. Also, whenever anyone gets hit with a blow, it's obligatory for actors and actresses to chew on blood capsules and spit out the resulting plasma. In Western cinema, of course, blood spitting is a sure sign of imminent demise. However, in Chinese film it merely signifies that whatever blow was received really hurt.

It's hard to take a soap seriously, and it seemed that even the show's writers had given up trying when, in the final episode's climactic confrontation, there was a bizarre foray into advertisement parody, and even a song and dance number. It was sort of like the Marx Brothers hijacking the end of Braveheart. But it was all in good fun, and justice won the day. And the bad guy exploded. Unconvincingly.

While this may sound a bit like I'm taking the piss, these soaps are pretty tongue in cheek and no one in Hong Kong takes them seriously. And it goes on in the West, too. Watching an old episode of Battlestar Galactica the other night with Andy and Eileen, I realised for the first time that that show wasn't merely terrible, they'd actually meant for it to be that silly. Overly blonded aryan kids pranced around on horses with unicorn horns glued to their heads, and I realised with some surprise that at last I'd found something that made The Phantom Menace seem like Shakespeare.

Anyway, the first of our soaps was 'The Seventh Day', which Sally chose because it features her Sino crush du jour 'Bosco' (rhymes with Rosco) Wong. To give an idea of why Sally is enamoured of this fellow, here's a picture.

I'm told it's his eyes.

The Seventh Day was basically a chick soap (well they all are really) featuring two couples, one serious and tragic, the other silly. I preferred the silly one of course, the tragic one featuring a woman with a gene disorder who gets multiple cancers, and hides it from her rogueish but sensitive boyfriend because he's already looking after his ex-girlfriend dying from Aids (which she didn't get from him). Because a Japanase touris board has thrown money TVB's way, the ex girlfriend happens to be living in scenic Kanazawa Prefecture in winter time (Sally enjoyed this too).

The next one we watched was Marriage of Convenience, where, via a series of ridiculous unlikely events, the married owners of a dating agency divorce but continue to live in the same house (they remain fighting for it), while the husband is forced into marrying a girl from Xinjiang provence who happens to have a brain tumour and is on the run from Triads. By this point I was urging Sally to have a checkup as it seems the cancer rate among young Chinese women is very high.

The husband involved of the titular marriage of convenience is played by Bobby Au Yeung, an actor seemingly genetically modified to have maximum appeal to Cantonese housewives. He's humourous and charismatic, and, with a thick layer of padding around him to ease out any potentially alarming sharp edges on his form, completely nonthreatening. He has warm eyes and a delightful smile. Sort of a cross between a jolly baby and Buddha. In TV terms, he's a license to print money. Dreamy!!!

Okay, so perhaps I am a bit smitten, but if you check out this fan-made vid, you will be too!

(In case you're wondering, I did not make this motion picture.)

Anyhow, I enjoyed Marriage of Convenience immensely. Beats the flaming crap out of Shortland Street anyway.

We've now moved on to a kung fu (with flying and lightning bolts!) soap called Devil's Disciples, also featuring Bosco and the brooding, caring guy from Seventh Day. Both Sally and I are in heaven!

As an addendum, if anyone was thinking of seeing Stephen Chow's latest flick CJ7 at the film festival, best not to if you're expecting anything like Kung Fu Hustle or Shaolin Soccer, or his underrated 1990 classic, Look Out, Officer! featuring Chow being helped to catch some crooks by a the ghost of a policeman. No, CJ7 is pretty much Batteries Not Included set in China, and Chow keeps himself off screen as much as possible. Unless you have children, avoid!

Apparently though there is a sequel coming to Kung Fu Hustle coming in 2010. Chow doesn't have the best of records with sequels (who does?), though in my opinion Fight Back to School II was an improvement on the original. Waiting, waiting...

Our Government takes the view that responses to climate change should come from the bottom up. Or in other words, "you first". That's commitment for you. Alright, there are initiatives like the Emissions Trading Scheme... which has been postponed... well at least we did ratify Kyoto... for all the good that is doing.

And, irony of ironies, we hosted World Environment Day this year.

All up you have self-flagellating zealots on one side of the debate, big-business backed reactionaries on the other side, and governments in the middle going... 'meh'.

It's all so hopeless I refuse to give it any attention. Wake me up when the seas and deserts claim us, frankly. Or as Ice Cube once put it, Fuck all y'all.

Oh, and has anyone seen the new Health Ministry ad about cervical screening that manages to portray Pacific Island women as giggling teenage ignorami? If I were in their demographic, I'd probably prefer to risk cancer than succumb to such patronising propaganda. Mind you, this is from the Ministry who brought us the absolutely dreadful 'no rubber, no hubba hubba'* campaign, so perhaps our pasifika ladies are relieved they got off so lightly.

Finally, found out with some shock that I'd rather my tax cut went to the poor than into my pocket. Of course, if you actually showed me some of the poor people I'd be funding I'd probably want it back. So don't. I may be economically socialist, but culturally I won't be having with all this slackjawed oafery, thankyou very much.

In fact, you can put "Hey arsehole! Read a book!" on my tombstone.

* Which was so lame you'd swear it must have been thought up by some 50-something dear in a cardigan. However, the more depressing likelihood is that the MoH paid an advertising company an awful lot of money for it. Nice work.

When I was a lad, my grandfather told me he had no truck with fiction. The real world was much more interesting, he said. Though I didn't agree with him at the time, as I got older I found myself slipping into a pattern of only reading non-fiction. This has probably been more useful, but I yearn for the old days of a relaxing read.

But... what to read? The only thing I hear about these days are fiction books about People With Complex Issues, Possibly Post-Colonial, and I have no truck with that. Nor with spy books. Have read a few classic 50s SF books, but I can't rely on that forever. After reading Tolkien, and Hugh Cook's revisionist satires on the same I feel like I've Done Fantasy too. So... can anyone recommend me something that's fairly amusing but not whimsical, not too taxing, but fairly intelligent, serious without being Serious, interestingly written without being Academic.

I guess what I'm aiming for is something with the tone of Terry Pratchett's early novels, before he went all fucking Pantomime horse on us.

I'm going to open this post to comments, and trust I won't get abuse heaped on me like I did last time...

Artists are the people chosen by the society to be reckless and say things that are not normally said.

This isn't the first time I've come across this viewpoint from an artist or a critic. I don't believe I've ever heard this view espoused by anyone outside of the arts industry. I think this is probably because society thinks about artists perhaps 1% as much as they think about themselves. And even that might be a generous figure.

But the claim might still be true. Let's look at the first part of the statement. Kureishi says that artists are chosen by society. It is certainly trivially true that popular artists are in a sense chosen by society by dint of the number of people who appreciate them. But almost exclusively these popular artists are writers like Dan Brown, and not the sort of people Kureishi is thinking of (ie people like him). It's hard to see in what sense 'high' artists are ever chosen by society, because their fanbase is limited to the sort of people who read the Listener arts and literature pages - a group that we may reasonably surmise consist of academics, or middle grade public servants (ie thoughtful ones without any ambition), school teachers, and librarians. It would be difficult to claim that this group represents society as a whole, even if all too many of them end up in parliament.

What of the idea that society wants artists to be reckless and say things that aren't normally said? Certainly no one would ever cry out 'please, someone, slay our sacred cows!'. It's artists who have the audacity to choose that role for themselves. Now once upon a time there was a legitimate need for artists in this mode (or so the historical orthodoxy has it). However, progressively all the sacred cows have been slaughtered, and we no longer live in a truly complacent society - or at least a complacent society that lacks for shallow confrontational art that 'challenges' it. In fact it would be more artistically brave and interesting to try to artistically communicate that sometimes, actually, society does work and people are ok.

So there's no room for artistic recklessness because all the taboos that could have been broken, have been. All that's left is for artists to be forced into ever more ludicrous displays (Christs in urine, virgins in condoms, et al, et al) to get pointless attention.

Granted, there are still societies in which Kureishi's words are relevant and applicable, societies where jail time is the least an artist can expect for challenging the accepted order. But Western society is not one of these. Art has a real struggle now to be relevant because the revolution is over and there's little left to say.

As I see it, the only worthwhile artistic project (if indeed there was ever another one) is to provide people with art that conforms to their natural sense of aesthetics (which innate rather than learned, as much as artists might hope otherwise), but also delivers something more intelligent and elevating than natural aesthetics alone require. And do it without satisfying obscure Theory, or self-conscious movements or political ideologies. Then artists would find themselves enjoying a more natural and accommodating place in society without having to demand attention through ridiculous posturing.

Postscript: Having railed against Kureishi I thought I should actually work out who he was. Turned out he wrote My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, which critiqued Thatcher Britain. Good to see that having appointed Kureishi to tell them about their foibles, the British people reformed their country into the green, pleasant, and above all strife-free, country that it is today.

However, Janet Holmes' boring feminist language rants (eg http://www.stuff.co.nz/4526373a1861.html) are really beginning to get me down.

It seems odd that linguists, who normally delight in telling language pedants that their beloved grammar rules are only for stuck-up snobs, and that language constantly changes, still manage to have the cheek to exhort us to use language in a way in keeping with their own political ideologies.*

So, Karl DuFresne's** adherence to the Old Ways may well be dated, but leave him be, Ms Holmes. It's all part of language evolution, remember... can't expect everyone to start using NewSpeak in unison. That would be... totalitarian. No, not to worry, once everyone of his generation (including yourself) die off, no one will offend you by using the word 'usherette'. Surely to interfere as you are doing would shatter the flimsy illusion that your discipline is neutral and 'scientific', rather than a platform for played-out ideological polemics?

And anyway, why do you persist in continuing to think that it's still 1975 and any of this matters?

* Which isn't to say I totally disagree with using gender neutral language, when the statistics support it. I had to laugh at a work colleague's use of the term 'fire person' the other day, when all the 'fire people' present were distressingly, and stereotype-confirmingly, male.

** Love his column, by the way. My dad likes to point out sadly that Du Fresne's view would have been described 30 years ago as 'common-sense', but now need the apologetic label 'curmudgeon' to somehow excuse them.

Then I read John and Mary Gribbin's biography of Richard Feynman. I find Gribbin's writing a bit cloying, but his subject was engaging enough. I'd never really 'got' Feynman; everyone seems to think he's wonderful, but his contributions seemed a bit nebulous. Turns out that he provided a different set of tools for exploring the quantum world, but didn't improve greatly on what was already known. Bit of a character though. Played the bongoes. Dreamed of visiting Tuva.

He also distrusted string theory. On the spur of the moment I bought Peter Woit's 'Not Even Wrong' - the other anti-string theory book written in 2006. I had bought Smolin's book over Woit's because Woit was a nobody in the physics world, a mathematician/spectator on these things, and felt that Smolin, as an insider would have more insight. Turns out that while Smolin's book was valuable, Woit's is probably better.

One thing in Woit's favour is his mathematical perspective, and he provides an account of 20th Century physics being informed by mathematical developments, particularly by Hilbert and Weyl, who used to hang out with Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schrodinger when they were doing their thing. Woit also doesn't pander to the reader; he describes the complex maths in detail, plunging us into the murky world of group theory and SU(6) and other crazy constructs. To be honest I couldn't tell you now what it was all about, but I felt a lot closer to what was going on, and I deeply appreciate Woit's decision not to spoon feed his readers. Mind you, some of the going was pretty dense, and Chapter 10, about recent mathematical/physical discoveries was quite bewildering.

Then we got to string theory, which Woit demolished quite expertly. As a brief rundown, string theory started out as a good idea, which quickly ran into trouble (requires 26 dimensions and faster than light particle, the tachyon). However, they manged to get it down to 9 dimensions, and could remove the tachyon if they included supersymmetry (the idea that the particles we do know about have heavier particle pairs that we don't know about). A couple of decades and several more dubious assumptions later, we have the wonderful model that sucks up so much research money and has yet to describe anything about our world that we couldn't already do with the standard model.

What amazes me is why they didn't realise they were flogging a dead horse from the start. Hidden dimensions? Relying on unproved ideas like supersymmetry? Well, it could be that the LHC does find supersymmetric particles, but string theory has so much crap welded on to it to make it work that even if they can't find supersymmetric particles a model can be conjured up that 'fits' that. The whole business is pointless, but it does keep theoretical physicists in a job for life.

Smolin and Woit advocate returning to the foundations of physics: what is time? Why is quantum mechanics so weird? Those are real mysteries, not the pipe dream fog of brane worlds and 'the landscape'.

Spurred on by my enjoyment of Woit's mathematical discourses, I've returned to Roger Penrose's imposing 1000 page monster 'The Road to Reality', with its promise of describing all of physics in all its mathematical glory for the layman. I bought this book a couple of years ago, and after the first 50 pages I felt I'd bought a $50 door stop. However, this time round I'm taking it easy, not trying to grasp every concept, but instead let the broader themes wash over me. That way, even if I never really understand maths, I'll at least learn something.

I may give you a periodic report on how I'm progressing over the next 6 months...

I haven't seen Soylent Green before, though after all the references to it in Futurama, I kind of felt I had. Certainly I went in expecting to watch something preposterous and have a good laugh. Instead, Soylent Green turned out to be much better than that, even despite Charlton Heston (who I can't watch now without being reminded of Maurice LaMarche's voice performance of the robot actor Calculon, also from Futurama). Edward G. Robinson(!) was the real star. Naturally, soylent green is made from people, but there was also references to Malthus, and, ironically (they knew about it in 1973, yet here we are now?!), the greenhouse effect.

Best bit was the synthetic 'sound design' in the SoyLent factory. More loops for me!

And even Logan's Run isn't as ludicrous as I remember it. Peter Ustinov's first scene wasn't as long and harrowing as I remembered it, though he clearly thought he was in a different film. A film, for example, where people were required to actually act, overstuffing their performance with numerous character tics and quirks (wonderfully observed, but really wasted here). The line "And I call this [cat] Guus", which those I first watched the film with still occasionally quote to crack each other up, isn't actually in the film, but the weird accent is. Oddly, Ustinov comes across eerily similar to ex work colleague J. ("num, num, ah, Michael") Baltaxe.

Meanwhile Michael ("Beck Hanson") York and Jennifer ("my clothes keep falling off") Agutter occasionally try on American accents, only to revert to plummy a second later. Was nice to see that cool, aristocratically saucy Agutter became 'the girl' while pneumatic, bimbesque Farrah Fawcett did not. Justice!

All up, of the 70s SF dystopia flix I have seen (Silent Running, Dark Star, Logan's Run, Soylent Green, Zardoz, Westworld), they're really not a bad bunch. Silly, but not bad. As a callow youth I viewed these films as being irredeemably tacky, and that Star Wars improved things greatly. Yet now Star Wars coming on the scene feels about as welcome as Roland Emmerich gate-crashing a party for German Expressionist film makers, and that the dystopian movies have a bit of integrity, for all the wonky props and acidy wigouts.

My main objection to letting market forces run the country is that it assumes a basic level of intelligence and personal responsibility that is sadly lacking in a good proportion of the population. How would you imagine education vouchers would go down in Mangere? Every general election you read horror statistics in the paper about the number of people who supposedly don't understand MMP, so how can we expect people to have enough gumption to adequately keep up in a market economy? I mean, look at America...

Sadly, if perhaps luckily, kiwis are too soft-hearted to go down this route, but imagine how nice it would be to live in a decent, ordered society like Singapore. Repressive? No. Disciplined and self-reliant. Good citizens. Solid, reliable citizens.

Something that angered me about Michael King's history of New Zealand is that he criticised the charity system at the turn of last century for being directed only at the "deserving poor". To my mind, charity ought to be earned. If someone is hungry, and they don't smoke or booze it up at the pub, help them out. Otherwise, wait till they shape up. It really is that simple. They'll get the hang of it.

The notion of unconditional charity (beloved of turn-the-cheek Christians) saps the soul of initiative. Blanket welfarism has created the underclass we must endure on a day to day basis.

Another piece of bankrupt liberalism is the common academic view that the 18th century deists were being patronising by keeping their closet atheism from the masses for fear that they would lose all respect for authority and run amok. The deists were right of course; the world they wished to protect has been destroyed by the breakdown in moral authority over the past century. Just look at British reality shows: that's a Dystopian hell if ever there was one.

This relativist nightmare we currently call 'society' is an upside-down theatre where hoodies in sports cars are encouraged to believe (by an education system perhaps worse than no education system) that they are the equal of any heart surgeon, where loose morals is considered a 'lifestyle choice' and the law, according to a t-shirt I recently read (perhaps needless to say, on a suitably overlarded gut), is something that is only broken "if they catch you".

Kill all shitheads? If I were in charge...

When the opening credits feature (apropos of nothing) mummified corpses from Mexico, complete with Popul Vuh's usual brooding mellotron choirs, you know you're in for a rare treat. The action is mystifyingly transferred from London to the unbelievably charming Delft, complete with windmills and canals. Meanwhile equally wholesome Czechoslovakia subs for eerie Transylvania, with mumbling gypsy extras playing... uh, themselves. The eccentricity is tending to infinity even before we ever get to Kinski's harrowing impersonation of a naked mole rat. And when the vampyre comes to Delft, Herzog manages to work in (perhaps out of whimsy) a plague of 11,000 rats, scuttling around absurdly on the quaint cobbled streets.

And it's in German (if you rent the right version).

Truly, mere words cannot express the catastrophic mindfuck that is Herzog's Nosferatu. You should see it! It's tops!

So far, so sexist, but as usual with Asian cultures, it's entirely harmless. The cooking challenges tended to involve contestants being presented with live exotic animals (usually arthropods, molluscs, echinoderms plus the odd shark), which they mush first murder then chop up. I've found it's best not to consume dinner while watching a Beautiful Cook trying to dispatch a cuttlefish, who tend to express copious quantities of ink while dying. And who could not feel a twinge of something as a half sobbing contestant took to a sea cucumber with a cleaver only to find it bounced off.

[The real waterworks was turned on by A-list string-bean Gigi Leung, who broke down when trying to off a... I forget the species, but it wasn't plesant. Judge Alex Fong had to step in and do the honours.]

Judging was also hazardous work, as various uncooked, over salted dishes were presented for tasting. Although much was spat out, only doe-eyed crooner Edmond Leung actually had a chunder. In this respect, the show had a distinct element of Survivor and Fear Factor thrown in. You can be sure that the end result was high-charisma, good natured, family entertainment, despite the gore and histrionics.

What hasn't been good-natured and certainly not family-oriented is the recent revelation about the boudoir antics of Edison Chen, the Canadian raised HK 'singer'/'actor', perhaps best known here as the 'flashback Andy Lau' in the Infernal Affairs films. Edison took in his laptop for repair, and the repairman found copious quantities of pics of Edison getting it on with half a dozen well known HK actresses (er, but not at the same time). Beautiful Cooking indeed. After building much steam in the media for most of February, Edison decided to retire from the HK entertainment biz and flee to North America.

In the West, this would all be seen as career-enhancing, but Chinese culture does actually have a sense of values and decency (and a prurient streak a mile wide, natch), so press, police, and general public behaviour has been bad all round. One of the 'victims', Gillian Chung of the 'Twins', had already had the indignity of paparazzo changing room pics of her splashed across the papers (HK people put even less stock in celebrity privacy than poms or yanks do); so this was even more torture. Even worse still, Cecilia Cheung, an actress who, unlike Chung or Chen, actually has some talent, was also involved, and her appearance in the Olympics opening ceremony has already been axed.

My take on it all is that it's just stupid. There will be commentary in HK about how western influences have ruined Chinese youth; there will be commentary in China about how western values have debased Hong Kong, and several careers have gone down the toilet. I'll forbear to comment on the morality of collating and retaining sex pics of your exs* (or the foolishness of allowing the photos to be taken), but the whole business is truly lamentable.

* Other than to say, cad!

... Kiwis are a negative lot. We are conditioned as such by our poor and insular media, by the Maori grievance industry and by the peculiarly Kiwi tradition of not making a fuss. The combination has been acidic of our spirit. We find reasons not to attempt for fear of failure. New Zealanders are pathologically afraid of making dicks of ourselves. Inertia is our inner guidance system.

I plead guilty. How about you?

I guess this view may have something to do with the recent high profile carryon with youth crime and taggers. While the more Winston Peters part of me has enjoyed the 'kill a tagger, die a hero' sentiments from some parts of the community, I can see that short of turning back time and intervening in these children's upbringing, there's nothing much we can do.

I do find the Government's tagger crackdown quite funny. The problem's been around for years, but it's only when a mild-looking middle aged white guy shivs a tagger that the issue is deemed worthy of real action. Still, it's election year and what the populace wants, the populace shall have!

It might be time to confess that I'm thinking of switching from the Greens to National this election. Though given my current mood, I fear that National is too left-wing for me.