Bottling the Spirit of Old Indochine
For all the horrors of Southeast Asian colonialism, we’ve somehow romanticized the idea of the 5pm cocktail hour: safari-suited revelers trying to alleviate the humidity with a stiff gin-and-tonic in the former British and Dutch enclaves, or something rum-based in French Indochina. While such traditions soon melted away in the wake of independence — there are […]
Making Waves in Fukuoka
You’ll see it pull up on most evenings. As dusk settles in the city, a small van putters its way along the same backstreet path it’s driven for decades. Parking on the main road, the driver unloads her wares: a metal-rod frame snapped together to form a small hut, a canopy flung over the top, […]
Pi (1998)
Can a filmmaker be considered a genius? It’s a question film theorists have often debated, and one that’s especially important, considering the fickle nature of movie critics. Directors Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock seemed to have gone from being viewed as pretentious to being considered film masters overnight. Few modern filmmakers fit that love-hate bill […]
Tommy Chan
For all the praise about our city’s rapidly growing music scene – the regular international acts at AsiaWorld-Expo, the weekend-long festivals at West Kowloon, the cult DJ favourites at underground clubs – few remember that it all started with a few humble music stores. After years dominated by the major music chains and their underwhelming […]
Growing Prominence of Whisky Investing
With volatility across traditional financial markets, whisky investing is on the rise. But, we ponder, is this a case of liquid or fool’s gold? They call it “liquid gold” – and as an investment, whisky is starting to live up to the name. Last May, at Bonhams Fine and Rare auction in Hong Kong, two […]
Ho Chi Minh: Centre of Energy
For all great cities, there was that moment of relentless growth and fast change – and the future looked blindingly bright. That’s where Ho Chi Minh City is now, as it develops its startup scene and modernises amid a rich cultural heritage. London in the swinging ’60s. New York’s punk-driven ’70s. Tokyo in the ‘greed […]
Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972)
The movie world has often portrayed rivers as ominous beasts. Big-screen boat rides often signal existential dread. Apocalypse Now is an obvious example a snail-crawl journey through the horrors of Vietnam and beyond, while Deliverance‘s fishing trip gone wrong revealed the dark side of Americana. Lesser recognised, but no less powerful, is Aguirre, the Wrath […]
DJ Janette Slack
From the comfort of the dance floor, the art of DJing looks easy enough: a press of a button here, a turn of a knob there. But anyone who has attempted the life knows it isn’t that simple. Janette Slack is one of many Hong Kong-born, internationally educated youngsters who have tried their hand at […]
Vietnam’s ‘New Wave’ Filmmakers
After taking home a special jury prize at Germany’s Berlinale in May for “Taste,” a film about a Nigerian footballer living in Vietnam, director Le Bao expected — at the very least — a warm welcome back in his home country. Instead, Vietnamese authorities slapped him with an officious fine — ostensibly for lack of […]
Hong Kong: Off the Beaten Path
There was once a time when Saigon and Hong Kong were rivals in the exotic east, both jostling for the cultural title of “Pearl of the Orient”. With British colonialism on one side and French on the other, during most of the 20th century, the two went head-to-head in an allure-filled battle as the go-to […]