Some months ago I was approached by the people at 20er about shooting their 2010 calendar. The theme was “Asyl und Arbeit” which loosely translates into a study on the plight of asylum seekers in Tirol. The topic is an important issue in Austria and the notion of shooting 12 black and white images for their calendar was also appealing so I agreed.
The majority of research that I did on the topic was via the internet…the United Nations, Caritas and other organizations dedicated to moving, housing and integrating refugees. Just about everything I found began to reveal to me that the situation for asylum seekers in Austria is not such a good situation. People wait for years in state sponsored ‘camps’ in hopes that they will be given citizenship. While they wait they are not allowed to work and have only limited opportunities for language courses keeping them isolated and poor. It’s not good for the country and it’s not good for the refugees and it’s amazing to me that things carry on this way.
In addition to research I also had the opportunity to visit one home for asylum seekers in Innsbruck. A dear friend volunteers German classes so I wandered the halls and talked to some inhabitants while she taught. They were eager to show me their deteriorated living conditions and to offer their stories. You need to visit your local 20er sales guy to pick up one of the limited edition calendars to see all the images.
What I hoped would be an optimistic picture of untapped potential ended up being a pretty isolated and sad perspective on people that are kept separate and in a kind of purgatory. It was a challenging and important assignment and I was honored to participate.
Saturday night and i’m contemplating my options. I finally managed to get through the Clockenflap edit. It was only last weekend but, for some reason, it feels like forever ago. Something is strange about time here in Hong Kong…it sneaks up on you incredibly quickly and when you look back on it in retrospect it still zooms, but it seems to stretch too – like the credits in Star Wars.
The Cyberport in Pok Fu Lam was home to a 2 day music festival last weekend with the strange and, perhaps unfortunate, name of Clockenflap. I scored a media pass and spent the better part of Saturday seeing how the indie culture in Hong Kong lives and hearing some new music. The crowd was dressed for the occasion and well-behaved and, generally speaking , it felt like a family affair. Soft, short grass in tiers down to a big stage it was the perfect combination of awesome, big production with the down-home feel of a little show. Really a nice combination.
Indie Pop 'aint Noise Pollution
If i’m honest, theres’s only 2 bands that I will say something about of the 10 or so that I photographed. It’s entirely possible that they were all amazing and noteworthy (well, probably not all) but there were two that really caught my attention – Chochuckmo and the all-powerful, electro clash machine that is Pet Conspiracy.
Chochuckmo is a rock band that has the full support of Time Out Hong Kong so it’s been hard not to hear about them here. Considering all the hype, they still brought it. The lead singer is definitely a rock star and the music was good. Im not sure what they were singing about per se but perhaps I’ll pay more attention to the lyrics when I go see them again next week. Here are a couple of my fav shots of them though feel free to check out my whole set right here.
Chochuckmo @ Clockenflap
Chochuckmo
Chochuckmo
Shortly after these guys left the stage the sun started to go down and with it, any doubt that Clockenflap would come and go without leaving me rocked. Pet Conspiracy is an electro clash band from Beijing and from the moment their set started to the second it ended, every minute was charged. They were totally awesome for lack of a better word. The crowd lit up and by the end of the set there was a beer pouring, crowd surfing, body-slamming Chinese disco party in action. I have since checked out all their videos on YouTube and downloaded the latest ep. None of it is bad but it doesn’t touch what they do on stage. Here’s a pretty tame and sweet track called ‘Love is Dead’ but don’t let that fool you….They are smart and sophisticated and brimming with awesome. I can’t wait to see these guys again and if the gods are smiling on me than it will be a double bill with their American evil twins Heloise & the Savoir Faire.
Pet Conspiracy
Pet Conspiracy @ Clockenflap
Pet Conspiracy
Pet Conspiracy
Sex Machine - Pet Conspiracy
Pet Conspiracy
Pet Conspiracy
Pet Conspiracy
As I write their song ‘What Do You Want’ is playing loud and I’m wondering why I didn’t post that one for you…oh well. Maybe another day. If you’re curious to see more of the hot, hot Pet Conspiracy click here for more images and here for their MySpace page. I’ve said it before and now i’ll say it again, Beijing rocks!
Alexis Taylor from Hot Chip was the poor purple-clad fool who had to follow an act that is hard to follow. I’m not dialed in on whats cool with the DJ set thing but i’m pretty sure this wasn’t it. It was all a little fragile sounding to me and lacking any real meat. Maybe that was the point, i’m not sure. In any case, he was wearing a rad purple suit so you’ve got to give that to him. Click here to see that nice blazer i’m talking about.
Alexis Taylor (Hot Chip) - Clockenflap DJ Set
There are more images and more stories to tell for sure but that’s what I feel like sharing. Click here to peruse some more rock and ambiance shots if you’re so inclined…
At this very moment I am supposed to be packing my camera for a night of Swedish hip hop at Fringe Club but my motivation is lacking. Im feeling cozy on my couch and reliving Clockenflap has proved nourishing enough to satiate my need for rock.
I’ve been considering how to go about sitting down to the blog for the last week and every opportunity slipped away…due mainly to a need to focus my eyes on something other than a computer screen and any form of responsibility. I’m finding myself still very much immersed in ‘work mode’ and have to trust my instincts when my mind says, “veg.” Last week and weekend were jam-packed with goodness and I want to share some of that before this weekend rolls in and deflates the memory.
Clockenflap was an adventure on Saturday and I imagine that I will be able to share the images from that festival along with some gratitutious raving over Pet Conspiracy sometime this weekend. I met some new people and found some new music so, all in all, it was a worthy excursion. Late in the evening, full of rock and salt air, I scooped up Domenica and John for another couple days of visit and fun. Friends in a new flat or town have the wonderful effect of making things feel like home. Food, fun and laughter that is still rattling my soul were had in plenty. Here are a few photos I shot on our adventures around Hong Kong. If you’d like to see them all, click here.
Meat Me - Sheung Wan Market
Spring Onion Cake - Spring Deer Restaurant - Tsim Tsa Tsui
Stanley - Hong Kong
Dark Light - Sheung Wan Market
J & D are now off roaming around Viet Nam and I am in the midst of plotting some of my own adventures in South East Asia. Next week I will be in Macau and the Mainland for work which is a little adventure. The winter holds the promise of Yunnan Province, Singapore, Bali and Japan. Friends are radio’ing in left and right and its clear this winter will be full of fun. More details on that as things become solid….
I have another cover shoot and photo commission to share with you which I will try to do this weekend between yoga classes and the editing and sharing of Clockenflap :) Hooray for Friday!
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. . .
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.
