Remains of the Day

Hong Kong

Slimming Centers in Hong Kong

While riding on moving walkways and escalators in the subways of Hong Kong, I couldn't help but note the many posters featuring attractive female models in bikinis smiling cheerfully, rather than seductively, back at me (though I didn't snap any photos of them, modesty being one reason, and my disinterest in fishing my big camera out of my bag in the extreme humidity being the other; my way of combatting the humidity was to stand as still as possible in an effort to sweat as little as possible). I didn't recall such ads the last time I'd been in Hong Kong, I remarked to Esther.

"They're for slimming centers," she explained. She was right. I looked closer at the fine print on the ads and noted, in small print among all the Chinese text, the English words "Slimming Center".

This shocked me because of one important fact, and that was that I didn't recall seeing a single obese person in Hong Kong. I mean that literally. I did not see one person in my three and a half days in Hong Kong that appeared significantly overweight. In fact, most of the women I saw were thinner than even the models in the slimming center ads. In fact, my week of travel through Hong Kong and Tokyo convinced me, finally and unequivocally, that the United States is the fattest country on earth. When my sister Karen and I spotted our first obese person in our travels, a huge guy in Tokyo, we couldn't help but shoot each other a wide-eyed glance of acknowledgment and surprise. Of course, he could have been a sumo fighter in training in which case I'm not sure if he'd count as a naturally occurring specimen of obesity.

There are many possible reasons for the disparity between the U.S. and other countries, but a few seem most plausible to me:

• Having recently finished Michael Pollan's fantastic two book series, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, the high volume of processed food in the American diet is highly suspicious. The government subsidizes corn, and so a huge portion of the American diet is corn or corn products like high fructose corn syrup.
• Hand in hand with that is that in the rest of the world, more of the diet consists of what Pollan, in In Defense of Food, calls real food, that is, things your grandmother would have recognized as food, like vegetables, fruits, and meats. One of Pollan's healthy eating rules of thumb is "eat ethnic food." He notes that the citizens of almost any country other than the United States, subsisting on their country's base diets, remain slim. In the U.S. we've tried to reverse engineer Mediterranean cuisine or Japanese cuisine to try and find some magic health bullet, like olive oil or omega-3 oil from fish, but Pollan says the real solution is likely some complex interaction of many things which can't be pinpointed to one substance that can be reduced to some magic pill. Instead, he urges people to just eat more ethnic food to try and benefit from all that brings, from the lighter reliance on processed food to any magical interactions among the ingredients of that cuisine. I was glad to read that; it's one more justification for my love for eating my way through my travels, Hong Kong and Tokyo being two of my best cities in the world for indulging that weakness.
• Portion sizes in the rest of the world are not just a little bit smaller than those in the U.S., they're much tinier. This was especially noticeable in Tokyo where the plating itself is often so elaborate, each plate like some miniature assemblage by Joseph Cornell. Calories are cheap in the U.S., but eating cheaply is not the same as eating healthy.

Of course, I could be misreading the correlation and causation equation here, and it's possible that the slimming centers were the source of the successful nationwide weight management, but I doubt it.

H1N1

The fear of swine flu is much higher in Asia than in the United States. Even on the flight over, I noted many Asian travelers and several flight attendants wearing microfiltration masks, On my arrival into Hong Kong, I had to fill out a health form noting if I had any of the symptoms, a cough, a headache, a fever. The attendant scanned my head with some sort of thermal imaging device that looked like a handheld barcode scanner.

In elevators throughout Hong Kong, elevator car button panels were covered with saran wrap and/or marked with signs indicating how often the panels were disinfected, the lowest frequency I saw being every two hours. One night, I went with my hosts Jae and Esther to the Kowloon side of the island for dinner at a restaurant called Hutong, and before we were allowed into the elevator up, we had to pass another thermal imaging checkpoint.

Given Hong Kong's urban density and the sheer number of its people who cross paths each day on subways, on streets, and through one of its many retail centers, it makes some sense that they'd take H1N1 more seriously than we do on this side of the Atlantic. Still, the heightened paranoia was such that I felt apprehensive any time I had to so much as sneeze or blow my nose in a public place.

What's more, many in Asia view Americans as irresponsible for traveling abroad as possible carriers of H1N1. Jae and Esther took me to get a foot massage after a long day on our feet sightseeing, and my masseuse, realizing I spoke Mandarin, struck up a coversation with me. Though I felt more inclined to dive into an English-language celebrity gossip magazine I'd found on the table next to me, it felt rude not to indulge someone who had to sit there kneading my sweaty feet.

She asked where I was from, and when I told her, she immediately noted, "Ah, that's wear the swine flu comes from." But she named it in Cantonese so at first I didn't know what she was saying. It wasn't until I heard a snippet that sounded like "H1" that I realized what she was referring to. She asked if I knew anyone who had swine flu or had died from it, and I told her that I did not. I tried to explain that it wasn't really as bad an epidemic as the news had made it out to be, but she may have interpreted that as one more sign of how irresponsible Americans were for treating something so serious with such casual disregard.

The effect of the swine flu scare in Asia much worse on my friend Mike, though, who, on a flight to China, sat a row ahead of someone who had swine flu. As soon as they tracked Mike down, he was put into quarantine, and thus began an ordeal that he, for our entertainment benefit, chronicled in a series of fantastic blog entries that made him somewhat of a press celebrity once the local bureau chiefs picked up on them. He received a link from James Farrows of The Atlantic Monthly and did an interview with the LA Times.

Highly recommended:

• Welcome to the Hotel Quarantine
• Life in the Big House
• The Seven People You'll Meet in Hotel Quarantine
• 3 Down 2 to Go

Books I'm looking forward to

First is Tyler Cowen's Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World. I have no idea what this book will be about, but I suspect it will be like his writings on Marginal Revolution, spanning topics from culture to food to the internet, all with strong opinions as befitting an economist. It's when economists write about macroeconomics that my eyes roll, but on topics I have more knowledge their thinking is instructive. Releases July 9.

Bill Simmons The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy. Sports Guy fans have had to live with fewer columns for quite some time now, but this promises to be our reward. Releases October 27.

Chuck Klosterman's Eating the Dinosaur. In a recent podcast with Bill Simmons, Klosterman described this book as similar to Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto in format, that is, a series of essays. As I enjoyed that earlier essay collection, I've already placed my order for thisone. Releases October 20.

David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp. It has been a long time since his last graphic novel, an adaptation of Paul Auster's City of Glass. Releases July 7.

Clarence Thomas and Saving Private Ryan

This week's New Yorker includes a humor column riffing off of this remarkable fact:

Justice Clarence Thomas has not asked a question from the Supreme Court bench since Feb. 22, 2006. . . .

“I have on many occasions or a number of occasions when things were becoming particularly routine gone down to my basement to watch ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ [Thomas] said. “I can’t tell you why that particular movie, except we have it and it’s about something important in our lives—World War II.”

—“Reticent Justice Opens Up to a Group of Students,” in the Times, April 13, 2009.

It's tough to argue against Clarence Thomas as the worst Supreme Court Justice in my lifetime.

Anna Netrebko

The Asian leg of my vacation is complete, and I miss Hong Kong and Tokyo already. It's never a fair comparison, pitting the hometown where you've spent years living and working versus the places you visit for just a few days with an itinerary set to plunder the destination's peak offerings. The allure of the new and mysterious almost always overwhelms the mundane and the familiar, especially given how many vacations come after long stretches of work which have whittled your creative energy down to a nub.

I had many more days of exciting discoveries left in Tokyo. It's such a massive city that my four days there were just enough for me to feel comfortable there at the exact moment I grasped, in a very physical sense, its sheer density and magnitude. I left with a feeling that there were more things I hadn't visited that I would love than I had crossed off the list. That's rare for me, being somewhat of a travel completist.

But more on Asia later. Today I come to speak of the Russian Anna Netrebko, widely considered the world's greatest soprano and its preeminent diva, that term being a great compliment in the world of opera.* I heard Netrebko this afternoon in the final performance of her short run with the San Francisco Opera performing the role of Violetta Valery in Verdi's La Traviata.

I will preface my thoughts by saying I am no expert on opera, so those looking for a review of the finer points of Italian diction and an assessment of where she took her breaths will be disappointed.

I first heard of Netrebko from a friend who'd seen her perform early in her career, and then I lost track of her until a cover story profile in the NYTimes Sunday Magazine. She was most well-known for two things, not often paired in an opera singer: her voice and her beauty, both sensual and captivating. If you were a baseball scout grading her voice on the traditional 20-80 scale you'd give it a 75. As for her looks, I showed some friends her CD covers today after the show and one compared her to Monica Bellucci, an apt comp in that she does recall in many ways the full-bodied Italian starlets of old.

I don't often go out of my way to see certain performers live, but I make an exception for generational talents: Michael Jordan, for example, or Roger Federer, and in this case, Netrebko. When I saw her calendar for 2009 included two stops in the US, one in NY at the Met and one in SF performing La Traviata, I snapped up tickets almost a year in advance for a weekend date of the later and knew I'd plan some way to attend. As I noted before, I'm at best an opera dilettante, but I far prefer a good opera to a musical, and that makes me a rarity among my generation. I'm just as susceptible to being bored to slumber by a pondering German opera, but the best of the ones I do love have an otherworldly musical beauty that lifts me up in a way no musical can.

One of the problems with opera, and one reason I think it struggles to connect with a younger generation, is the deadly pairing of plot implausibility with wooden acting. The cartoon parody of opera, not entirely inaccurate, is of an overweight woman in a Viking helmet, her diminutive male counterpart barely the size of her thigh, screeching so loudly that windows shatter, said immense woman playing an ageless young beauty despite sporting the looks of a fifty-something housewife.

It's a gross objectification and simplification, but I have left many an opera wondering what would have been lost by closing my eyes throughout and just listening considering that the stage choreography consisted mostly of a singer walking to and fro on stage, all facial and bodily expression an afterthought in the pursuit of accurate diction and musical phrasing.

Netrebko arrived on stage in style, in the backseat of a classic Buick. She is a bit heavier now than in photographs I've seen of her, but that's understandable considering she had a baby not too long ago. The voice is still the voice. What's amazing to someone like myself, who can't sing along to more than a few songs at a concert without losing my voice, is how effortlessly she can generate a massive, rich sound. At times she barely appeared to be opening her mouth and yet filled the house with her voice. The ease of her vocal power was such that if I didn't know who se was I'd think it was some odd form of lip synching. This incredible vocal power is a huge advantage when acting out more tender emotions. A lesser singer who'd have to contort her body and strain her face to generate the same output is much less likely to convey emotion than sheer physical exertion.

Netrebko actually matches her vocal expression with acting. No one will confuse the work that can be accomplished while vocally navigating passages of coloratura with the type of method acting Meryl Streep accomplishes in a close-up shot, but Netrebko makes it easier for those who don't understand Italian to understand what she's feeling. There were several moments where I missed the text on the prompter because I was peering through binoculars, but as long as I kept my eyes on her I never lost track of the emotional or plot throughline of the scene.

Having just arrived back in U.S. timezones less than 24 hours earlier, I was worried I'd succumb to jetlag during the show, this being a Sunday 2pm performance that was 6am Tokyo time. But a quick powernap and a rare espresso before the show, combined with the excitement of seeing Netrebko live in a fast-moving La Traviata kept me sharp throughout.

I've never seen La Traviata live, and my lack of knowledge of the finer points of opera preclude any other thoughts on this particular rendition. Two other memorable moments from the performance: at the first intermission, I saw a sign that said Netrebko would be in the lobby after the show signing her CDs and DVDs. At that precise moment I knew that about half the cash in my wallet had just been lit on fire, and I felt a pang of regret that I'd left my SLR at my friend's apartment and would have to rely on my iPhone camera in the underlit lobby. Second, at the end of the performance, when Netrebko came out to a standing ovation, she put a hand over her heart in appreciation and blew kisses to her adoring SF fans, here at the site where she'd made her US debut many years past. As the curtains fell for the last time, just as they were halfway down, she suddenly threw inhibition to the winds and hopped up and down like a young girl, waving her arms frantically overhead, as if sending off departing friends from summer camp. It was a youthful, exuberant expression of joy that I just couldn't picture coming from someone like an Angela Gheorgiu or a Jessye Norman, for example.

I waded through a crowd in the giftshop and picked up some $70 worth of Netrebko CDs for the signing, then jumped into a long line that wrapped around the corner of the lobby inside to wait for her to appear. After twenty minutes in which I saw opera house staff running back and forth with some distress, I felt a hand pull me sharply back to clear a gap in the line to a side door to the orchestra seating of the hall. I looked up to see an older man with a staff badge, and who should walk up from behind him than Anna herself, a young female assistant in tow. The old man rushed to open the side door to give her a shortcut through the hall to get to the autograph table in the lobby, but Netrebko took one look at the door, discerned his intentions, and turned away without breaking stride to walk down the hall past her waiting fans instead.

The old man finally popped back out, puzzled as to why she hadn't come on through. By then Anna was halfway down the hall, waving and clasping hands with fans as they greeted her with shouts of "Anna!" and other phrases in Russian and a variety of other languages.

The line did not move quickly, and while we waited a woman from the opera house came walked down the line with a post-it note pad writing down patron names in block capital letters so we wouldn't have to teach Anna how to spell our names. Good idea, but when she came up to us she also said that we could only give Anna one item to sign. Having purchased four CDs at significant price premiums to what I could have paid on Amazon, I was not pleased. If it were an opera I would have burst out into a fiery aria.

But Anna had already defied the opera staff once, and so I held out hope that she wouldn't adhere to such arbitrary house rules. As I turned the corner and saw her, I understood why the line wasn't moving more quickly. While the staff tried to hustle her fans through, Anna would look each fan in the eye, listen to what they had to say to her, respond, often in their native language (I heard her speak in English, Spanish, Russian, and French to various fans), pose for photos, and sign each CD or DVD with the same deliberate pace.

When I reached her, I chose a double disc set of her performance of La Traviata from Salzburg as the item most worthy of her signature, and she signed it right on the cover of the case. I mumbled something about having been honored to hear her sing, and she thanked me with a warm smile. I turned to leave, but then she saw the other CDs in my hand and reached out her hand.

"Here, let me sign those for you," she said, grabbing the stack. She signed each of them on the cover, but when she reached the last CD, she paused, furrowed her brow, then opened the case and signed the back of the paper insert instead. Then she grabbed the CD of La Traviata back from me.

"I am not sure if this will stay,", she said, rubbing her finger across the ink of her previous signature on the plastic CD cover. But the ink had already dried and did not smear.

"Oh, it is okay!" she beamed.

I usually dread meeting famous people, especially those I admire. The imbalance in relationship of worshipper to hero is so severe as to lead to disappointment more often than not. What can be conveyed in a single autograph line encounter of any substance or genuine emotion between a fan and a celebrity who doesn't know that fan as much more than one of an adoring throng of millions? The usual exchange of pleasantries:

1. Fan expresses admiration for celebrity.
2. Celebrity thanks fan, then asks what the person's name is and what they'd like to have signed.
3. Celebrity signs item while fan perhaps gushes a bit more, perhaps elaborating on the earlier admiration to name a specific moment or instance of the celebrity's work that particularly struck them.
4. Celebrity thanks fan for that more specific example in which his/her work has touched the fan, hands back the autographed item, and then turns to the next fan.
5. Rinse, repeat.

I've just recently met two celebrities to have items signed, one being another classical music performer I've followed for decades now, and the other being one of my favorite movie and music video directors. In both cases, the celebrities were brusque, borderline cold, and the encounters left me feeling like a silly fanboy who'd wasted their time by forcing them to indulge in such banal and forced interactions with the ungifted masses.

What Netrebko conveyed in our short encounter was subtle but, given my previous two hero encounters, momentous. She showed genuine appreciation for my appreciation of her work, and she displayed a thoughtfulness that, amplified by the previously noted disproportionate one-way admiration that is typical of fan-to-hero relationships, bordered on genuine intimacy. This ability to convey a genuine warmth and caring in short interactions with complete strangers is something I'd only read about from skilled politicians like Bill Clinton. Netrebko has it in spades, and one has the sense that if she could spend even more time meeting her fans she'd have a relationship with them that not opera critics or vicious opera bloggers could mediate. She can be the people's diva, and more than that, she seems like a genuine person, and so she brings a realism to the flawed operatic heroes she plays on stage.

My friend who was with me said afterwards that Netrebko's charms seemed particularly tuned towards men, but I didn't hear her at first, I was so engrossed in flipping through my stack of autographed CDs with a big smile on my face. If opera is to survive and thrive in the next generation (I could not help but notice, once again, that the median age of this crowd was likely in the late 50's), there is something to be learned from the Netrebko's of the classical music world, and it is not about selling out with sex appeal or crossover albums.

* The term prima donna comes from Italian. Prima is the feminine form of primo--"first"--and donna means lady. The prima donna is literally the first lady of an opera troupe. It's not a coincidence that the term is more often used in English to describe a vain, temperamental person. But the operatic sense of the term looks at the glass half full and connotes someone able to fill the seats of a massive opera hall and satisfy patrons paying hundreds of dollars for the privilege of witnessing a performance from someone with a personality and stature to match the ticket prices in scale. At least that is my layman's interpretation.

Antichrist...Rated E for Egad

Hot rumor of the day is that Lars Von Trier's controversial movie Antichrist, which caused the biggest ripples at Cannes this year, will be made into a PC-only videogame. Yes, the same Antichrist which features onscreen genital mutilation, said genitals belonging to one Willem Dafoe, and aforementioned mutilation occurring courtesy of Charlotte Gainsbourg. The Wii jokes are so obvious that they were stale even before they wrote themselves.

I thought Von Trier didn't like animation. Do videogames not count?

I may need to reinstall VMWare Fusion just to give this a whirl.

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Court jester of the art world Banksy gets a legal exhibit at a museum in Bristol. You can see peruse a few of the pics. Always amusing.

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NYTimes Magazine profile of Rafael Nadal.

“Every tennis lover would like, someday, to play like Federer,” Philippe Bouin told me. “But every man wants to be Rafael Nadal. Which is different.”

This profile was written before Nadal officially withdrew from Wimbledon, but that fits with its thesis which wonders if Nadal's style of play will cause him to break down physically. Very sad for the sport that he won't be there. Tennis needs Federer to face his foil.

The future

MLB.com to stream full games to the iPhone. The first one is the Cubs-Sox game this afternoon.

I always thought this day would come, when I could watch Cubs games live on my phone, but it's still a thrill to have that day upon us.

Wine tip

Many of us should be drinking our white wines warmer and our red wines colder to maximize appreciation for their character. This is one reason people are often surprised when they go to a wine tasting at a winery and find the reds served cooler than they're used to.

Twilight

xkcd today was brilliant. Score one point for Stephanie Meyer.

On the other hand, the fact that Twilight won every award at the MTV Movie Awards made me feel out of touch, old. I suppose the awards at that ceremony are really just filler until the next prank or joke.

Funny quote

White House economic spokesperson Austan Goolsbee, on a panel, responding to Jack Welch's opinion that Barack Obama's budget is "from the moon":

The budget is from the moon, Jack is from Mars and Joe [Stiglitz] is from Venus.

Look, we enter the government essentially in a hotel that is on fire. We’re throwing people from the windows into the pool to save their lives and this is the evaluation of the Olympic diving committee: Well, the splash was too big.

I am no economist, but neither are most people who want to debate the economy with me. I don't know if what's being done is right, but I'm not sure anyone else does either, so when people complain, on either side, I just tune out. It's like discussing the weather.

Clinton

In the NYTimes Sunday Magazine, a profile of Bill Clinton post-presidency. What was most interesting to me was a passage covering his ability to convert enemies to friends.

Yet if Clinton has a powerful memory for slights, he also has a remarkable capacity for reconciliation. He is likelier to find peace with people who hate him the most than with friends who betray him. He focuses his considerable charms on seducing the person in the room he finds most resistant.

...

Richard Mellon Scaife, the billionaire publisher who financed Ruddy’s investigations and other anti-Clinton activities, is now a contributor to the foundation. So is Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman whose Fox News was a regular thorn in Clinton’s side. Clinton over the years has also made peace with other former adversaries, like Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich. The elder George Bush told me he now considers Clinton “a real friend.” When I asked what changed his view, he wrote in an e-mail message: “I didn’t know him personally back then. I knew him, but not up close and personal. Now I do.”

It reminded me of one of the 48 Laws of Power:

Never put too Much Trust in Friends, Learn how to use Enemies

Be wary of friends-they will betray you more quickly, for they are easily aroused to envy. They also become spoiled and tyrannical. But hire a former enemy and he will be more loyal than a friend, because he has more to prove. In fact, you have more to fear from friends than from enemies. If you have no enemies, find a way to make them.

Sports Guy, we love you

Eric (our CTO) and I are both card carrying members of Sports Guy Nation. So it's extra special whenever he posts any reference or link to Hulu.

He tweeted about an episode of Miami Vice on Hulu:

Go to the 42-minute mark of this Miami Vice clip: http://tinyurl.com/lkfome ... Has there ever been a better use of a song in TV history?

With over 100K followers on Twitter, he has some influence, and so that ep of Miami Vice is creeping up our Most Popular Videos list, up to page 4 at last check, which is pretty strong for a random library episode of a show that isn't new to the service.

Here's a direct link to just the music reference he mentions:

This song was used later to end another TV episode to great effect, the "Two Cathedrals" episode of The West Wing. That was actually the season finale of the second season of the show. It's one of my favorite West Wing episodes.

Here is a reciprocal link for Bill Simmons: his new book on the NBA comes out this fall.

Sunday

I saw Up in 3-D at the El Capitan last night. It's the richest, most moving script from Pixar yet. Animation lovers will love the references to Howl's Moving Castle and Castle in the Sky.

I will be curious, when it comes out on Blu-Ray, to see it in 2-D also, but this is probably the most polished 3-D movie I've seen to date. There is a level of control with digital animation that allows the 3-D effects to be extremely precise, with much less of the distracting blurring that makes other 3-D movies feel like gimmicks.

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So, did Susan Boyle win in the finals of Britain's Got Talent? Go see for yourself.

I keep forgetting you don't have to sing to be on that show. The finals are like America's Best Dance Crew vs. American Idol.

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Last survivor of the Titanic dies. I knew she was ready to pass on after she dropped that blue jeweled necklace into the ocean.

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Nadal loses at the French Open. Massive upset. This makes Robin Soderling the future answer to a trivia question. Djokovic is out, too. Federer, the door is open. This is your best, and maybe last chance, to walk down that red clay carpet and on through.

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In the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert reports that we are likely in the midst of the sixth mass extinction in Earth's history. By the end of this century, nearly half of Earth's species may be extinct. The suspected cause is the pace of human activity.