Friday is here and before I head out the door to work I am going to make this promise to myself…today I am going nest a little. A bank account is priority numero Uno since I’ve accumulated a few Hong Kong dollars that need a place to sit but I also want to get myself a calendar so I can be more deliberate about planning my off & on time. I’m approaching the 4 week mark and, though it hasn’t been that long, it’s been long enough to admit that I live here now and I need to stop living out of a suitcase and on take-out. With dear friends on the way here and more on the horizon I want to be a hostess and not a tourist. I’ll start today.
Tonight I settle…tomorrow morning I’ll head to the South side of Hong Kong Island to the Cyberport to shoot a festival called Clockenflap before heading to the airport to scoop up the jet-setting J&D who will grace me with their presence through Tuesday morning. I’m looking forward to friends in the vicinity…
Speaking of friends in the vicinity, I just got confirmation that christmas in Singapore is ON! and it’s looking like Cambodia and Japan are in the ‘almost booked’ pipeline….More on that later
The weekend went by so fast. The upside of that is that the week did too. Tomorrow is already Thursday and I’m thinking about investing in a seatbelt for life since it’s moving so fast. I guess that’s basically a belt and I have plenty of those so maybe not…but hopefully you get my point. I don’t know if its the subways and traffic that are making the world whoosh past me faster or if its age or maybe the new job but, damn! time is flying.
Again, I had grand intentions that dissipated into a blurry swirl of sleeping late, finding food, taking pictures and feeling too tired to do much beyond find a seat and watch the city wash over me. Toss in some hypnotic monkeys, hilarious street art and contemporary laser magic and it all looks like a lot more activity than it was. Here’s a peek of some photos from last weekend. . .
The haze of the weekend burned off like dew in the sunshine. My mental hibernation has been replaced with an acute awareness. I feel a little like a laser beam split between my desire to run barefoot into the jungle to discover my true Oneness with All There Ever Is and Was and Will Be and my desire to climb the corporate ladder to the top and shift the paradigm of international business in a large, multi-national corporation. I’m wondering now if it’s possible to do both. Simultaneously.
I never shared the triumph of my first cover shoot and tonight I’m feeling inspired to do that. MOLE, a new publication in Tirol asked me to shoot the cover of their first edition magazine. When I say the words, “media landscape in Tirol,” what comes to your mind? Most people say something like “mountains” . . . but lest I remind them, a media landscape is not always the same as a landscape. 2+ years in the lovely hamlet produced a lot of cultural richness but a real dirth of commentary about it. Something about the nature of state-funded publications produces a very bland form of coverage. Come on, every German-adapted production of The King and I can’t be triumphant, right? In any case, my job was to consider the media landscape in Tirol. It was my first ’staged’ ‘concept’ shoot and I ended up taking an old cinema called Cinematograph to realize my image “The Most Beautiful Fraud in the World.”
The quote is from the French founder of new wave cinema Jean-Luc Godard. I don’t want to come across as a French cinema snob, ’cause i’m not, but his quote hit home on what I was trying to capture. The media landscape to me was something like a beautiful fraud. The cinema filled with people represents that the audience is present. They are showing up, buying their tickets and entering into new experience willingly, eagerly and openly. The openness of the audience in Tirol to new things always humbled me and helped me find my own portal to openess to new media, culture and art. Its a wonderful thing for a woman who always had the flexibility to carefully curate her sonic landscape (thanks New York!) to find herself in a place where you get what you get. The glasses were made of the 7 different popular media outlets that cover ‘kultur’ in Tirol. The majority are state-funded and, as a result, have a very bland way of covering events that might actually be thrilling. That bland filter is the cause of the audiences obstructed view…the generic coverage and promotion of the kultur essentially alters it, making it similarly moving, similarly edgy, similarly interesting and, as a result, exactly the same as what came before. The added element of the cinema further removes the audience from the experience keeping it both filtered and 2 dimensional.
MOLE is going to attempt to alter the media landscape of the Tirol. Make no mistake, they are also state funded but they are going to attempt to shine a new light and bring a new perspective. The light of the projector is MOLE…hopefully they can be the beacon ,the light, the difference between ‘the filter’ and the unaltered experience. I’m certainly rooting for them. Check out MOLE online or swing by any cultural institution in the Tirol to pick up a copy.
The Most Beautiful Fraud in the World
It was an honor to participate in the 1st edition of an idealistic new magazine and a treat to nab the cover. The team assembled making the print and online editions are excellent, inspired people and I hope our paths cross again.
Each relic I leave behind me feels a little like a bouey…like breadcrumbs in the forest…showing me the channel through which I’ve sailed. I leave pieces of me wherever I go not to show me the way back but to remind me where I’ve been. Like a ship out on the sea… I’ll have another fun commission to share with you in the coming weeks that will live in Austria for a whole year! How wonderful.
36 hours of free, unrestrained weekend time and looking back on it from my couch right now, I don’t have much to say. I was busy futzing around but it was all pretty uneventful…just some settling in, storing boxes, a little shopping and some fun with power point. I had ideas of junk boats or beaches or other fun touristy tings but mostly I just relaxed. I think it was necessary. Gray matter seems concentrated in non-verbal and work-oriented areas so I’m not going to force the prose. Here are some photos uploaded since I last wrote…
Shooting Shows in Asia
These Lights Will Inspire You
Belly of No Beast
Wandering Eye
I also got around to finally editing the last set that I shot in Innsbruck chez Chris…a Bye Bye Beana BBQ. Say that three times fast! Click here for the whole set.
Lone Wiener
Im hoping my words return in the next days…there’s a lot that I’d like to share.
As it turns out *any* band by the name of Live Fast Die can play when I arrive on a new continent….not the specific one from New Hampshire. I might have put that together sooner if I had put any effort into the details at all but, well, I didn’t.
Today was long. I began at 7am with a trip to Guangzhou for work and ended now at 1:11am after a bag of pistachios for dinner and 8 out of 17 bands at a club called rockschool. Im exhausted and wondering where my energy comes from on a day like today. I sat on a corner of the bar and had a decent perspective for watching the music but a pretty lame angle for photographs. I fired off a few but there wasn’t much steam and I don’t anticipate that this is the set that is going to make HK aware that Beana Bern is in town. We’ll see.
Tomorrow…er, later today…12 boxes of life will be delivered to my flat and, except for my geeky camera and computer gear and my ukulele, I have contemplated just not letting them in. Less is more right? If I let the delivery happen as scheduled then my nice, nice apartment is going to full of crap I don’t need. I lined up a storage space in the neighborhood but you know what that means? It means that Beana has a storage space in Hong Kong, Innsbruck, New York and a corner of the attic in both New Jersey and Cape Cod. Remind me to write a “special comment” on what “home” means to me…
I got my passport back this evening after giving it to a colleague 2 days ago. Inside is a Visa that grants me access to China for the next 6 months. How many visits “multiple” means is not clear but I think that I am now flexible with the mainland for a while. Cool.
The frazzledom subsided today and I actually had a productive day. After lunch at a yummy Vietnemese spot in Causeway Bay, a colleague and I headed out to a spot in the New Territories to get me acquainted with one of the many channels with which people in Hong Kong can do business. Tomorrow’s journey to Guangzhou will be even more illuminating…knowing that China is “the worlds factory” and seeing it are two very different things. The ‘understanding curve’ which is a little less tangible than the ‘learning curve’ seems to be going up exponentially every day I go to work. As the understanding and learning come so does the workload. It’s officially on.
On to other news…an uncanny coincidence. When I first moved to Wattens, Austria I found myself alone in a foreign place with no friends and nothing I had to do besides work. If you know me by now, you know that this is not a sustainable situation. I headed to Innsbruck and ended up shooting a band from New Hampshire in a little club called p.m.k. It was the beginning of what turned out to be a wonderful tenure of rock photography at p.m.k. and a reassuring experience that I would be able to live in Tirol without breaking The First Rule of Rocking (um….obvs….”don’t stop rocking!”) The band I shot was called Live.Fast.Die.
Wouldn’t you know that tomorrow night at a venue called rockschool (shout out to Paul Green perhaps?) there is the final heat in a global battle of the bands and a little band from New Hampshire is on the bill called Live.Fast.Die Maybe I am the only one who sees this as uncanny and odd and somehow, maybe meaningful but the first band that appears before me in whatever new land I land in is Live.Fast.Die. Crazy. It sounds like kind of an intense format for the production guys (15+ bands play 8 minutes each) and kind of a great challenge for a rock photographer. Assuming my business trip doesn’t put my ass to bed early I’m gonna go and shoot and see what other peeps seek out noise in this town.
It was smoggy today in Hong Kong. The sun never really made it out from behind the curtain of moisture and smog and clouds and yet, today was the first day when I could see into the distance. Well, not the literal distance but the theoretical distance, the possible future, the likely ‘whats-next.’ Each discussion I have illuminates new perspectives and challenges and opportunities and slowly but surely the scope of my work here is revealing itself. It’s not going to be a small job and it’s not going to be dull. I took a huge leap of faith when I abandoned my nice life in Tirol for this unknown but with each passing day I feel more confident that I knew what I was doing :)
I managed to shave my commute down to 35 minutes from over an hour because I stopped being a dumbass and because a nice colleague showed me the MTR station right next to the office. Duh. Part of the fun is the not knowing and then the next stage of that fun is the eventual knowing. Its my pattern to wait until I’m all-about-the-knowing but by then I’m also usually going…the irony….In any case, my commute allows for fresh air (tram), book reading (MTR) and a (walk) past a (coffee joint). It’s ideal. When typhoon season hits I will only have a few spots where I’ll be exposed to the elements and I imagine that this will also come in handy when the summer comes and decides to steam this island up to unbearable degrees.
My brain is a little frazzled with all the “what-ifs,” “ah has!” and “dude….i totally need to do-thats.” It’s a bit of a treat that I have a 3 day weekend to absorb all the info and ides swirling and try to relax a little. Or at least try to. The cats are finally settled but I feel like there are pieces of me that haven’t quite arrived yet. Like I’m somehow still in transition, that static person shaped blob that isn’t quite beamed up or down yet. I’m getting there but, often throughout my days, I am still surprised to see such a new landscape. My hair and skin are going to need a new routine as well since sticky, humid, salty, smoggy air is a new environ. Lots of adjusting going on here at 2bean…
In honor of the fact that I am just now beginning to see the light…
So it’s bedtime on my first ’school night’ since I moved to Asia. Tomorrow morning I will wake up, get dressed and make my way to the other end of the island to meet my colleagues and get my feet wet. I’m psyched and prepared for this job but I know that, as with any new gig, it takes time to feel smart and prepared. That said, I’m going to absorb what I can and trust the process. My cold is finally subsiding and it was good that I had some days to recoup before getting going. My sleep is still off but I think I’m as ready as I can be.
In the last days I had a burning desire to see the skyline of my new city and a wish to get acquainted with my new neighborhood. Of course, the satisfying of these two desires brought me to new places, eateries and vistas. Below are some of my favorite images from the past couple days…
Central - Hong Kong
Insomnia Goes Great with Neon
Spicy Pork Noodles
I’ve learned that my ‘hood is only in the very, slight beginning stages of gentrification so it is more Chinese than anything else. Shark fin, ginseng and edible bird nests are among the most popular specialties sold here and I am certain that one day I will bring my camera and focus only on those things that I wonder if you would put in your mouth…I even found a crocodile specialty store for all your edible, crocodile needs. It’s amazing. Those slight signs of gentrification on the eastern edge of Sheung Wan are also nice as, today, I found a delicious tuna sandwich and a savory muffin made with bacon, cheddar and apple. I live between the best of both worlds…
Here’s one last photo to help put everything in perspective…
Hong Kong Sparkles
As a side note, I’ll tell you that I did a little research to see if there was hope of some music in my future. What I found not only gave me great hope but booked me for this Friday night…assuming I’m back from my business trip to Guangzhou on time I’ll head to The Cavern to shoot something that I’ll tell you about later…
So far, so good. Wish me luck for my first commute.
Rainbows can be a sign of good things to come or a reminder of good things that have already been. I would like to believe that the rainbow that hungover Cherry Valley on the snow-capped day that I left the Alps was a bit of both. A sweet reminder and a charmed farewell…
Cherry Valley Rainbow - Last Hours in Innsbruck
There was no rainbow or snow-capped peaks when we landed in HK but instead a hot, humid wind and some sun sparkling on Victoria Harbor. I took the fact that the cats came home with me rather than sitting in quarantine for 4 months as a less colorful version of a good luck charm. I can already tell that it is going to take some time to capture this place in a way that does justice to its energy and atmosphere but I did fire off a few photos to give you a taste. Whereas the image above was my neighborhood last week, the image below is my neighborhood this week…
West towards Sheung Wan
I wake up every morning to boats and cranes and construction and ferries on the harbor with the steep skyline of Kowloon in the hazy distance but I haven’t shot the shot that I want to share with you. It’s nice to smell salt air again and to be able to see more than a handful of kilometers in any direction…So I’ve done some limited wandering around the main drags that connect the different neighborhoods here and I am thrilled with my locale. I was concerned that living in the “dried seafood district” would leave me both isolated and smelling funny but dried shark fin and crocodile parts are benign enough and the location is perfect.
Street Cleaning - Sheung Wan
There is less neon in my neck of the woods than in other neighborhoods but the light finds plenty of ways to slither and shimmer here…in the reflections of the wet streets, the mirrored gates, the shop windows filled with live, female crabs or sim cards or the bajillion other things that can be bought or sold in Hong Kong. It’s beautiful in so many ways…though a very different kind of beauty than the pristine majesty of the Alps.
How I Carry My Visions of China
If I’m honest, I can’t yet imagine what my ‘groove’ here is going to look or feel like but with my first business trip to Guangzhou on the books for next Friday I have a feeling it’s going to reveal itself rather quickly. One very exciting aspect to my new routine is the time on the tram and subway to catch up on all those books I skipped while driving to Wattens. Coffee to go and public transportation..two great tastes that taste great together.
My Hood
My Lunch Today
Apartment pix will follow soon though I’m certain they will not do justice to the sweetness of my nest. More images of the metropolis, its surroundings, its people and street art are also forthcoming…
Blu Wave Kinda Like Neu Wave
If you’re curious about more city pix from today, click here. If you want a first glimpse at Hong Kong Street Art, well, click right here.
I keep telling myself that I am going to wait to process my move before I sit down to tell you about it. Tonight is my third night in Hong Kong and it’s clear now that “processing this move” is going to take a while.
I know that most of you are eager to hear about my new reality and you can be sure that I am excited to tell you about it. It doesn’t seem right, though, to jump into Victoria Harbour without sliding out of the Tyrolean Alps. I could wax poetic with the same teary, heavy goodbyes I did for the last 2 weeks with friends and colleagues that I love and will miss or I can cut to the chase. I’ll cut to the chase: Tirol became a part of me in the last 2+ years and I am going to miss living there and I am going to miss the people that shared my days with me. I still have my last few photos I shot there to share with you and some juicy details on the commissions I shot that will linger in Tirol long after I’ve left. I’m sure that I’ll dip into that pool of gratitude and melancholy now and again when thinking of my time in the Alps but not tonight…
I don’t know who of you have arrived ‘home’ to a place you’ve never been before but I did it (again) a few days ago and the sensation of awe and wonder and uncertainty and hopefulness never gets any less powerful. The planning and stress that spun my wheels for weeks prior to my departure was worth it when I got Doozer & Walter through export and import Customs with no quarantine and only some drama. We’re all still shaking off the journey and getting use to the view of Kowloon and Victoria Harbour instead of the Nordkette and it wont be long before I have some pictures to share.
I’ve been racking up days worth of stories as I unravel my life in Europe and brace for the bright lights and congestion of Hong Kong. I will have plenty to share with you in the coming days but right at this moment, I need to “be here now.” I’m staying present for my last days in Tirol, especially so, and that means saving the reflection for when I’m looking back…5 days from now.
