Palette pimp: Riding in the hood with red

This is my essay on the colour red, which was a lot of fun to research and write. Thanks to the splendid 'eight' magazine and Ink Publishing for asking me to contribute it. These kind of 'think pieces' off the top of your head are always a bit daunting, but the most rewarding, often, when they are done. 

The colour red is crazy. Insane in the membrane. A few crayons short of a set, and not the sharpest pencil in the box. Call the men in white jackets, tell the asylum to get its padded cell ready. Poor old red – ready or not, here it comes, the loony tune of hues, the crime of passion, the time of your life, a twisted melon: lover, fighter, sinner, saint.

The pimp of the palette, the paint box pantomime clown and the visible spectrum's biggest show-off, red clamours for attention, the hue that cries. Red is the most visible and arresting colour for humans in daylight hours, capable of causing discernable shifts in mood and arousal and stirring appetites, passions and emotions. Sporting teams that sport red tend to win more, as do boxers and martial artists. Women wearing red are judged more beautiful and desirable than those in other colours. Men with redder faces get more mates.

Yet red clings precariously to the edge of the visible spectrum, the first or last shade on the rainbow, bleeding into its mysterious and invisible cousin, infrared. Just a few scant nanometres of wave length are the difference between celebrity and anonymity.

Simply red? It's complicated. Red is the colour of confusion and contradiction, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Red is a conundrum, pigment as palimpsest. Red runs thought the fabric of our lives, splashed across literature, staining the vernacular. In a world where red can mean almost anything, does its sound and fury in fact signify nothing?

I was caught red-handed and left red-faced painting the town red when my red letter day saw me walk the red carpet, only to find a red herring. That was a red rag to a bull, the red mist descended and I saw red. That got me red-carded so I hopped on the redeye, drank a red bull and got into a fight with some rednecks.  

Red is life and death, love and hate, sickness and health, hurting and healing, headache and heartache, oppression and revolt, bureaucracy and anarchy. Red is the capitalist, the communist and the fascist, the sailor's dawn warning and afternoon delight. The Red Army marches in Red Square. The crimson gape of the Grand Canyon. Uluru, the big red rock in Australia's parched red centre. 

Writer Saul Bellow - now there's a fellow who knew a thing or two about red's starring role in the grand opera and farce of life. In The Adventures of Augie March, his protagonist sears this image into the consciousness with colour: "The door opened; a woman sat before me in a wheelchair, and in her lap, just born in a cab or paddy wagon or in the lobby of the hospital, covered with blood and screaming so you could see the sinews, square of chest and shoulder from the strain, this bald kid, red and covering her with the red ... She and the baby appeared like enemies forced to have each other, the figures of a war."

Red means danger and evil in the Middle East, macho men in Greece, female reproduction in Japan, Christmas in the West, but in China the East is Red. Red means sackcloth and ashes and mourning in South Africa, and sex for sale in Amsterdam. 

Drugs, thugs and bugs: Stranded on the Proud Highway with Dr Gonzo

From the Vaults: It is a surreal moment in any scribe's life when you are asked to review the work of one of your heroes. It was with trepidation, awe, fear and, yes, a modicum of loathing, that I prised open the weighty tome comprising Hunter S Thompson's first volume of collected letters, and it was with shaking hands and abject humility that I pecked out my unworthy review for the books section of South China Morning Post. Here's my road trip up The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, but I suggest you take the journey for yourself. Buy the ticket and take the ride. RIP Hunter S. 

COOL HUNTER 

The very name Hunter S. Thompson conjures up a bizarre mixture of images: a drug-fuelled booze-monster sitting naked on an Aspen porch, firing at small animals with an unfeasibly large firearm; a rangy frame and a shiny cranium, bashing away at a typewriter, making a strange kind of sense from crazed sojourns on the wilder shores of politics; a redneck tempting fate on a massive hog, howling like a werewolf through the twists and turns of California's switchback coast roads; an iconoclast; a sage; an irascible court jester; purveyor of bitingly eloquent hyperbole; and undeniably, inescapably, the eye of Typhoon Cool.

Anyone who has hung on for the crazy ride that has been Thompson's literary life - from his Hell's Angels stomping, to being out near Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs kicked in, to his fear and loathing-laden forays into the dark heart of the American dream - is in for a treat with the publication of this work.

FAME HUNTER 

It is the first volume (two more are promised) of his collected correspondence. These twisted epistles span his formative years as a writer: from a talented if wayward student in Louisville, Kentucky, to his 1967 breakthrough publication, Hell's Angels.

Perhaps the most striking thing that emerges from this collection, compiled by Douglas Brinkley, director of the University of New Orleans' Eisenhower Centre for American Studies, is Thompson's unswerving sense of destiny. Even as an 18-year-old, he was keeping carbons of his prolific correspondence, confident of his emergence as the next F Scott Fitzgerald.

Not the Messiah: the careless unmaking of Elvis the man

From the Vaults: This is a book review I did for the South China Morning Post of Peter Guralnick's Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Aaron Presley. Along with Greil Marcus, Guralnick is one of the more thoughtful and prescient writers among the pack of hacks contributing to the ever-swelling annals of Elvis literature. Watch this space for my own excellent Elvis adventure, when I followed the Hong Kong Elvis Presley Fan Club to Graceland and beyond for the candlelight vigil and assorted other bizarre rituals and commemorations of the King's death.

KING CRIMSON: CARELESS LOVE
AND BLEEDING HEARTS 

Much has been made of the elevation of Elvis Aaron Presley from mortal to royalty and, eventually, deity. Many a writer has found a rich furrow to plough, comparing the King and his sad fall from grace (and from Graceland's toilet) to a Christ-like sacrifice; describing the antebellum mansion and its surreal surrounds as the Stations of the Cross for the ever-swelling army of acolytes. The Candlelight Vigil as Midnight Mass. The jump-suited, fuzzy-chopped impersonators as a weird, wobbly bottomed priesthood.

How refreshing, then, to witness this rare and tender resurrection performed over more than 700 pages by Peter Guralnick - the resurrection of Elvis the man. No easy task, this, reclaiming Presley's life from under the crushing weight of supermarket tabloid history. Guralnick acknowledges the challenge in an author's note: 'Elvis Presley may well be the most written-about figure of our time. He is also in many ways the most misunderstood, both because of our ever-increasing rush to judgment and, perhaps more to the point, simply because he appears to be so well-known. It has become almost impossible to imagine Elvis amid all our assumptions, amid all the false intimacy that attaches to a tabloid personality . . .' Impossible for a lesser writer, perhaps, but in Guralnick's patient and capable hands Elvis lives and dies anew. This is the second part of his painstaking project, the first being Last Train To Memphis: The Rise Of Elvis Presley.

Divine secrets of the Bootylicious Sisterz

Greatest hits from the vault dept: Some years back, I dashed down to Phuket to interview Destiny's Child - well, let's be honest, to interview Beyonce. Imagine my surprise at finding her incapacitated by a respiratory bug ... 

SINGLE LADIES, TO THE LEFT, TO THE LEFT

She's a survivor, sure. A diva, definitely. But Beyonce Knowles is also a super-trouper. While the merest tickle in the back of the throat is enough to send most pop stars swooning off in search of a health farm, leaving a trail of cancelled gigs and shattered fans, the brains behind this year's biggest female act on the planet, Destiny's Child, has proved she's made of sterner stuff.

Despite a severe upper respiratory tract infection which had literally left her speechless, Knowles refused to stay home in Houston and flew instead to Thailand with bandmates Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams.

The trio had been set to wow Asia's media and record company bigwigs with a showcase of their bootylicious ditties and hip-hop confections after a sell-out concert in Japan. Then the bug bit Beyonce (pronounced Beyon-say) and their gigs bit the dust.

Defying doctor's orders and unable to sing a note, Knowles hopped on the plane for the southern Thailand resort island of Phuket anyway. She's been told she can't say a word for three weeks, Rowland explains, as Knowles - usually the undisputed Child-in-charge - can only waggle her eyebrows, nod, frown, toss her hair and hold her thumbs aloft in agreement.

'It's been very hard for her. She did not want to miss the Asian trip, she was so excited about it. We were all ready to go, our crew was on the plane, we were about to get on board, but we had to get her to a doctor fast, because she couldn't say a word. It was right after we'd finished a very important concert and the doctor just said be quiet if you still want your voice.'

Prophet and loss: In the hall of the White Dragon King

WHITE MISCHIEF: THE  DRAGON KING
 TRIES CRANIAL SCREW-TOP ENTRY 
IN RARE CELEB LOBOTOMY

It's amazing what a bit of self-belief and snappy patter can do for your prospects. Chau Yum-nam started out as a jobbing electrician in Pattaya before plugging in to a different power source which would see him become the unofficial prophet of Cantopop and the high priest of Hong Kong show business as the self-styled White Dragon King.

When Chau popped his white dragon clogs earlier this month, more than 5,000 fans and disciples gathered for the funeral. This who's who of Hong Kong showbiz royalty included businessman Albert Yeung, movie director Meng Yao, Cantopop king Andy Lau, movie stars  Shu Qi and Tony Leung Chiu Wai. Thailand's King Bhumibol even sent some 'holy mud' for the burial. 

The White Dragon King was still at the height of his powers when I visited his lair  seven years ago for a brief and deeply weird audience. 


Hours before dawn they begin to assemble. Buses and cars form an orderly queue, disgorging white-clad figures who drift about like ghosts in the gloom. As dawn's fingers clutch at the bruised sky, a spark of excitement jumps from vehicle to vehicle. A small, bent figure has emerged from behind the spike-topped red gates and silently passes from group to group, handing out numbers.

At exactly 6am, the gates will be thrown open and this pale cavalcade will proceed along a winding driveway, stopping in the shadows of an impressive Chinese temple topped by two huge, bejewelled dragons rampant. The true believers will be ushered into an anteroom, where they will trade the number assigned their vehicle for individual numbers for each of their group. They will shake incense sticks at grotesquely rendered deities and purchase amulets and charms. They will quaff coffee and greasy, fried cakes. Then they will sit patiently and wait for their allotted minute or two with Thailand's most eccentric sage, an illiterate former electrician who has a growing portion of Hong Kong in his thrall, including Cantonese pop and movie royalty. Enter, if you will, the lair of the White Dragon King.

I had stood before the same red gates two days earlier, oozing sweat under a violent Pattaya sun. 'I'm sorry,' said the voice that answered a telephone number emblazoned on a sign by the fence. 'The master doesn't give interviews.'

WHITE  TANG CLAN: THE GURU
WILL SEE YOU NOW

I pleaded, stammered and grovelled, explaining I'd driven all the way from Bangkok and my editor wouldn't take no for an answer. 'I'm sorry,' said the voice again. 'No interviews. Ever. But you can come back on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday and wait in line with everybody else. The master might decide to speak with you.' And you would be? 'I,' said the voice, 'am Mr Lo.'

And so it is that at 4.30am one Friday I find myself waiting with the rest of the devout in the White Dragon King's driveway, dressed in my least-stained white T-shirt, whey-faced from lack of sleep. The mysterious Mr Lo, I had learned, is no faceless lackey: he is the master's right-hand man and translator, the chap who decodes the Dragon King's pronouncements for his Cantonese, Putonghua and English-speaking supplicants.

Indeed, it was Lo whom the Dragon King sent to the fatal shores of Hong Kong during the height of the Sars scare to bestow a blessing on the 'camera-cranking ceremony' to mark the commencement of filming Infernal Affairs 2, the $40 million prequel to the smash hit starring Andy Lau Tak-wah and Tony Leung Chiu-wai. 'The master wanted to come, but he was worried about catching Sars,' revealed a spokesman from production company Media Asia at the time.

The White Dragon King had blessed the first instalment of the planned trilogy, and it went on to become the year's top-grosser, collected countless awards and is soon to be remade by Hollywood hunk Brad Pitt.

Fine dining's crisis: too many pairings, no full house

A FRUITY ITALIAN WITH LEATHERY TOP NOTES 
AND A LINGERING FINISH OF BURGER,
FRENCH FRIES, AND MOTOR OIL.

Sshh: That sound you can hear, that faint wooden rattle under an Evinrude's rudeboy roar, is the sound of The Fonz putting on The Skis so he can carry another fallen hero or epic failure on the now immortal waterski jump over The Shark. 

The latest fad du jour to jump the shark is wine pairing, which went from champagne supernova of cool to self-sucking sharknado of stale faster than you could say 'degustation menu'. Second raters and bandwagon jumpers cannibalised  the concept, and almost daily it descends to a new nadir.

You know the drill: Would-be or fading hotspot announces wine pairing menu, celebrity chef or sommelier is summoned to make the culinary couplings. If it's a hit, some quick PR buzz and celeb cachet rubs off. If it misses the mark ... see 'sharknado'. 

Done first, it was genius. Done well and with style, it had staying power. But the concept now is overcooked, burned and due to be scraped into the skip, and each breathlessly trumpeted new instance of this culinary charade is now haunted by the shadow of The Fonz as he soars overhead, legs akimbo, outsized wine balloon in one hand, huge rack of ribs in the other, and the towrope between his teeth.

It's clear things have gone too far when in certain Californian establishments, sommeliers spend their days investigating which fine wines work best with Pringles, Cool Ranch Doritos, KFC cole slaw, California rolls and pumpkin pie.

The entire industry is pretentious, drunk on self regard, bloated with hubris, and ripe for a reality check, if not a good stomping.

WINE PORN FOR
CONSENTING PAIRS

Some of the most celebrated wine tasters can't tell their eiswein from their elbow. The evidence is in: in a recent study, blindfolded wine experts given the same wine three times in a row delivered wildly fluctuating ratings on the same wines.

And pair that with this: A 2006 study, published by the American Association of Wine Economists, found that most people can't distinguish between paté and dog food.

For dessert, consider this critic's crash landing on the outer banks of wank: His 'principle flavour profile' for one bottle listed "red roses, lavender, geranium, dried hibiscus flowers, cranberry raisins, currant jelly, mango with skins, red plums, cobbler, cinnamon, star anise, blackberry bramble, and whole black peppercorn'', among others.

A king tide of pomposity and pretension is running, but this oenophilic onanism must have just about reached its high water mark. Soon, the ebb tide will begin its sucking scour. When grown men want to make a study of which Chilean chardonnays go best with what colour of M&M, it's time for change.

E is for Entranced

This is my original South China Morning Post magazine piece from 1996 on Hong Kong's exploding rave culture and what police were touting as an 'ecstasy epidemic'. I was standing on the outside looking in when I wrote it. I've resisted the temptation to edit some of my youthful exuberance or correct a few inaccuracies (Graeme Park playing Trance? I think not. 110 beats per minute? Puh-lease.) If memory serves (and it frequently doesn't) I had actually dropped my first E a week or so before I wrote the story (by myself, for some inexplicable reason in Joe Bananas, which was never one of my haunts pre- or post-rave scene). I liked it. I just wasn't brave enough to make such an admission in the story. Neptunes, the much-loved, short-lived centre of Hong Kong's 'Summer of Love', such as it was, makes a fleeting appearance. Next week, I will travel back to Hong Kong to look at this moment in time through the prism of the 15th Anniversary of the Hong Kong handover, and a resurgence of interest in Neptunes via a Facebook group (and 'secret' group) that exploded in recent months. Love or hate Facebook, it reconnects people, and it has been entertaining and quite moving seeing the people who were there get back in touch and begin sharing the tunes, stories and memories of a very heady time. I'll update this with the magazine cover and some images when I dig them out of a box. 






Ah am f***in' well fed up because there's nothing happening and ah've probably done a paracetamol but, f*** it, you need to have positive vibes and wee Amber, she's rubbing away at the back ay ma neck and saying it'll happen when this operatic slab of synth seems to be 3-D and ah realise that I'm coming up in a big way as that invisible hand grabs a hud ay me and sticks me onto the roof because the music is in me around me and everywhere, it's just leaking from my body, this is the game this is the game


and ah look around and we're all going phoah and our eyes are just big black pools of love and energy and my guts are doing a big turn as the quease zooms through my body and we're up to the floor one by one and ah think I'm going tae need tae shit but ah hold on and it passes and I'm riding this rocket to Russia . . .

Thus enthuses Irvine Welsh, the high priest of heroin chic, who has recently turned his attention to the drug du jour in his imaginatively-titled tome, Ecstasy. It is probably as good an attempt as any to document the weird, seductive fusion of music and emotion and chemicals embraced by millions of people every weekend.

Perhaps each of the recent decades has had one drug above all others which has coursed through the nebulous veins of the zeitgeist, in which the hopes and fears and foibles of a new generation are reified. In the 1950s, it was the dope-shrouded dharma bums of the Beat Generation; in the 1960s, trippy hippies were taking electric kool-aid acid tests; the needlepoint netherworld of heroin clouded the 1970s; and in the 1980s, greed-charged yuppies did their best to hollow out their septums, tethered to the twin comets of the stock market and cocaine. As for the 1990s, a brief false dawn heralded a time of jaded, grungey slackers who had tried everything and aspired to nothing. As the decade wears on, however, the so-called Gen-Xers seem to have been well and truly subsumed by a rave new world.

Amid an avalanche of conspiracy theories, tabloid beat-ups and ugly ignorance, the symbiotic circus of house music and ecstasy is slowly but inexorably penetrating the mainstream of youth culture. Far from being an evanescent late-eighties experiment, the dance-drug scene continues to gather steam as the end of the millennium looms.

The literary world is also just waking up to the ecstasy experience. In Welsh's wake comes a host of E-xploitation books, including AD Atkins' Sorted and On One and Julian Madigan's The Agony of Ecstasy, which seek to explain the highs and lows of pharmaceutical life at the business end of the 20th Century. Rave culture has even percolated into the lair of the lad - the latest character introduced to readers of Viz magazine is Ravey Davey Gravy, who is prone to break into dance steps at the merest hint of a thudding, repetitive noise (in one adventure, he mistakes a jackhammer for a "jungle and ragga trip") and is given to orotund pronouncements such as: "I like larging it to techno and house!"

While debate rumbles on about the risks and effects of the drug and government departments stumble around in a haze of denial, buck-passing and apathy, the Hong Kong judiciary, at least, has made up its mind where it stands on ecstasy.

Magistrate Henry Brazier jailed finance brokers Sean Dullage, 27, and Dominic Way, 28, for 16 and 15 months respectively for selling one tablet of the drug at a rave at Jimmy's Sports Bar in December, shocking even police who made the bust with the severity of the sentence. The pair had been approached by an undercover officer asking where he could get some "stuff". Way's girlfriend had not shown up, so he offered the officer her tablet for $300 - towards the greedier end of street value.

In the High Court last week, Mr Justice Arthur Leong cut their sentences by four months, before launching into a tirade against the perils of ecstasy, branding it a killer and a threat to Hong Kong youth. He decided Brazier had erred in that the basic starting point for an ecstasy trafficking sentence should be 18 months, not two years. This, according to Way's lawyer, Alexander King, puts ecstasy a bit lower than heroin, for which trafficking sentences begin at two years, but above opium. "This ruling
means one tablet can get you 18 months inside. You don't even have to sell it - even passing one on is considered trafficking," says King.

Take a random sample at any Saturday night dance party in London or Sydney or Hong Kong and you will find stockbrokers and doctors and construction site labourers united by their blissed-out grins and saucer eyes, chests thudding to the commanding rhythms of methylene-dioxy-methylamphetamine (MDMA) and 110 synthesised beats per minute. In fact, take a recent Saturday night at Jimmy's Sports Bar at the Hong Kong Stadium, where DJs Graeme Park and Tom Wainwright from The Hacienda - something of a Manchester institution - have arrived to dispense their diet of Trance, Handbag and Happy House ...

It is ten minutes to midnight and the bouncer's booming voice slices the steamy summer night. "There's going to be cops on the floor tonight. They've said if more than two people are busted, they'll close it down." He is built like a masonry outhouse, has a bristling goatee and mohawk and looks meaner than a chapter of Hell's Angels. He draws a stertorous breath and continues ominously: "So if you've got anything to take, take it NOW!" The small queue of early arrivals giggles nervously. Bottles of Evian
and Volvic are uncapped and hands slide surreptitiously up to mouths. Surprisingly, those keenest to get an early start are not red-faced, bristle-headed expats but young clusters of Chinese slathered in chic and slinky designer clubbing gear, with the odd daub of Fetish Fashion.

Inside, more bulging neanderthals turf out the last of the football crowd, as local DJ Joel Lai conjures some preliminary thumps and squeaks and growls from the fearsome array of technology spread out before him. In the toilets, a raw-boned youth chuckles resignedly to his mate that it won't be long till he's forking out $300 for a dog-worming tablet. At 12.10 precisely, Lai stops tinkering and gets down to business. The beat kicks in - and will not cease until well after 6 am. With an evil whisper, smoke
machines shroud the floor in fog and the lights transform the place into a swirling neon maelstrom.

By 12.25, the first Es appear to have made their way from the stomach wall to the brain. The bar is lit up by a sudden recrudescence of inane grins and a couple of blokes make the first tentative forays onto the dance floor. As I'm standing there, trying hard to look the part in the latest Nike trainers, jeans and gently psychedelic t-shirt, I overhear a young Australian accent whingeing to his mate: "I can't believe it. I necked it an hour ago and I still can't feel a bloody thing. Bastard must have sold me a f***ing aspirin or something." I stifle a giggle at how life is mirroring Welsh's art. But he moves off, lost in the rapidly swelling crowd, and I never do find out whether that invisible hand ever grabbed a hud of him and put him on a bowel-churning rocket to Russia.

It's now 1.30, and the place is heaving. From the flashing teeth and random hugs, it does not seem unreasonable to assume 70 to 80 per cent of the crowd are sorted and on one. Nearby, three long-legged beauties have suddenly become one amorphous, amorous tangle of limbs. The floor seems to be bouncing up and down in unison, peopled by everything from gaggles of topless Chinese boys with torsos by Michelangelo to one chronic case of Saturday Night Fever, complete with acres of lapels, a gold medallion and what appears to be a thatch of snap-on chest hair. Drugs are changing hands in shadowy handshakes, but the promised police presence seems decidedly low-key; the threatened busts have thus far not materialised.

Jack is the committed raver's worst nightmare. Until a recent transfer, he was a senior officer in the police Narcotics Branch and the agent who had the dubious honour of arresting Dullage and Way. "We had one agent who had been undercover in that whole scene for six months or so, who was familiar with the rave scene in the UK, got to know who was involved here. But we didn't want to blow his cover, so myself and other officers would attend these events and the agent would point out potential dealers.

That way, he wouldn't have to appear in court if anyone was arrested," says Jack. "When Dullage and Way were asking us what they were likely to be facing, we told them most probably it would be a suspended sentence. We had no idea they would get such a harsh sentence."

He is unexpectedly candid about the difficulties of policing the ecstasy trade. "We definitely do not have a handle on how it's coming in, whether it's just a lot of individuals bringing in small amounts or a big, organised syndicate.

"One recent development seems to be that the Chinese heroin traffickers are now showing some interest in ecstasy. It's quite profitable: they can buy it in Europe for $50 a tablet and sell it here for $300. So especially with a growing number of locals now getting into the scene, they are looking to cash in."

He says the easiest way to get the drug into Hong Kong is literally by E-mail. "Sending tablets through in the post or by a courier service is pretty safe - the chances of it being seized are small." Most ecstasy sold in Hong Kong is manufactured in Europe - usually Frankfurt or Amsterdam.

If Way and Dullage are one type of ecstasy casualty, another is Jane O'Riordan, who was found dead last year, with ecstasy in her bloodstream, in the bed of her friend, RTHK radio presenter Harvey Crump. Her name is often trotted out as Hong Kong's answer to Leah Betts, the ecstasy victim who became a household name in Britain after the "Sorted" campaign, featuring a stark mugshot and the rubric "just one ecstasy tablet took Leah Betts". Indie band Chumbawumba countered with their own campaign, pasting up parodies of the poster proclaiming: "Distorted. Statistically, you're just as likely to die from swallowing a bayleaf than from taking an ecstasy tablet."

The dangers of MDMA can be enhanced by the various nasties it is cut with, including LSD, dog-worming tablets, decongestants and horse tranquiliser. It was first synthesised in 1912 by a German pharmaceutical company for use as a diet pill. It resurfaced in the US during the 1970s, and was used by psychotherapists as an anti-depressant until its growing popularity as a recreational drug saw the Food and Drug Administration ban it. It induces feelings of affection and closeness, even among strangers, by making the brain pump out neuro-transmitters known as serotonin and dopamine, which stimulate happy and loving feelings and suppress pain.

One government agency which appears to be expert at the suppression of painful realities is the office of the Commissioner for Narcotics. In reply to a request for information on ecstasy use and its effects came a one-page hand-written fax proclaiming the enlightened news that the reported individuals abusing MDMA in 1994 and 1995 numbered a big fat zero. It's obviously some time since the Commissioner and his cronies popped down to Jimmy's of a Saturday night.

The lack of apparent official concern may partly be due to the fact that ecstasy use is part of a youth culture based predominantly on interior feelings and self-absorption, whose adherents get together once or twice a week to get happy and hug each other a lot. It hardly seems a jagged threat to the very fabric of society, in the way the angry posturing of punk might once have appeared ("E? I'm on ego," a renascent Johnny Rotten sneered recently). Its substitution of sensuality for sexuality must also prove an attractive option for those who have grown up in the shadow of AIDS - many users say they are perfectly happy to end their night in love with the world, but alone in their beds; a kind of instant safe sex pill.

There seems little relationship between dosage and fatalities. People have died after taking one tablet (the ecstasy-related death toll in the UK is now nudging 70), while in one case, someone who took 42 tablets over 24 hours got away with a fast pulse, high blood pressure and a nasty hangover. The level of MDMA in his blood was 70 times higher than in people who have died from the drug. One theory on ecstasy deaths is that a small percentage of the population may be deficient in the enzyme that breaks
it down.

Some people die from overheating, as the surge in serotonin raises body temperature, which can be exacerbated by long and frantic bouts of dancing. This can be avoided by listening to your body and drinking plenty - but not an excessive amount - of water. In rare cases, including that of Leah Betts, death was due to water intoxication. Under the influence of the drug, some people drink so much water that the brain can swell up and be crushed by the skull. Recent research on squirrel monkeys suggests use of the drug can cause long-term brain damage. Nerve cells damaged by the spurts of serotonin tended to grow back abnormally, effectively re-wiring the brain.

Peter, 22, an advertising copywriter, and Donald, 25, a musician, are two friends who are immersed in the club scene and intent on rewiring their brains. Peter reels off the "brands" of E currently on the market in Hong Kong, selling from anywhere between $200 and $300 a tablet. "At the moment you can get Barney Rubbles, Thunderbolts, Swans, Apple Macs, Hammer and Sickles, and Snowballs," he says. They are so-called because of the designs imprinted on the tablets. The effects of different types may vary, depending on how they have been cut, but generally pills of the same batch will produce fairly consistent effects.

Peter: The pushers always, always keep pills aside for the big club nights, which kind of reflects the whole idea of the ecstasy culture, to have a focus. They want you to have a good time on the night. In England, the people involved with the clubs are often also involved in the selling of E. And here, there are, like, affiliations, definitely.

Donald: Obviously, there's an element of being wary of strangers when you're trying to score at a club, particularly when you know there are going to be undercover cops. Most of the cops are pretty f***ing obvious. You can just tell, they don't speak the same language, they're not clued in.

Peter: Ask the DJ! (laughs) Usually you are there with a bunch of your friends and someone always knows someone who knows a dealer. That's one of the best things, it's this grass roots kind of thing, you are all there taking care of each other. If you're on a pill and everyone else isn't, you're not going to have a good time. The best nights without a doubt are when everyone is flying high, not just you and your friends, but everyone in the room. You're smiling at people you don't know, it's a really
transcendent experience.

Donald: I must say, the last couple I've done didn't do that much. I wouldn't say it was disappointing, but I haven't felt it as strongly as I've done in the past. I think it's a combination of a build-up of tolerance and the novelty factor goes.

Peter: What surprises me, though, is when you talk to [rave] organisers and they spout this anti-drugs attitude. It's just complete hypocrisy and contradiction. I mean, the music is designed for people on E. Even the way it's played, there's breaks, and there's like bursts of euphoria, and the best DJs are the ones who understand a crowd that's on E and they give you spaces and journeys - I mean, that's what they call it, a journey.

Donald: The worry, though, is you just don't know exactly what you are doing to your brain. People say that in Britain, it's the perfect drug for the masses from a politician's point of view - it's relatively affordable, you accept everything, you are amiable. You start to wonder if it's more radical not to take drugs. After a while you start to think, does it actually take something out, do you have a store of happiness in your body and can you exhaust that? We've had weeks where we went mad on the weekend, and until Wednesday, you're just depressed and really moody and you think, right, I've got to chill out now and not do it for a while. Then the weekend rolls around, and you're back on it. When it gets to that point, that's when you have to tell yourself, well, I'm just being young and stupid.

It's 3 am now and Jimmy's is full of people just being, well, young and stupid. The sweat is flowing as freely as the $30 bottles of Evian, coursing down gyrating flesh in varying states of undress. It is hard to say whether it is hotter inside or out, and little eddies of bodies buffet each other in the quest to find out. I am drenched in sweat and have finally surrendered to the relentless, hypnotic beat. The DJ is dropping rapid-fire depth charges which shudder through my gut and my hips begin to sway of their own accord. Some punters are already on the way down and lie sprawled around the fringes of the venue. But the floor remains packed, partly due to a constant stream of new arrivals and partly due to chemical replenishment. Danny, a mid-20ish Chinese lad, is feeling rather more relaxed now, having dispensed of the dozen or so pills he risked bringing in to sell on discreetly to friends for $300 a pop. With a wad of cash bulging in his wallet, he glances round then necks the last one himself.

Another two hours and the sun's first rays are struggling through the smog outside. Judging by some of the weird contortions taking place on the dance floor, the squirrel monkey theory doesn't seem too far off beam. There is some serious synchronised hugging happening, spreading out through the crowd like Mexican waves. By 5.30, a mantra strikes up, gathering volume: "See you at Neptune?".

Local DJ Lee Burridge has already fled Jimmy's for the subterranean Wan Chai haunt half-an-hour earlier, where the last of the pot-bellied, greying gweilos and amorous amahs have made way for the hard-core ravers. Burridge will continue to spin his steel wheels until the sun is nudging the yardarm. I arrive shortly after six, and the place is already filling up. Unlike many in the rave "industry", who publicly espouse "Just Say No" platitudes knowing full well a goodly slab of the punters are eccied to
the eyeballs, Burridge is refreshingly sanguine. "There's no two ways about it, E goes hand-in-hand with the dance scene. I'm playing in clubs most nights, and you see a lot of people who arrive in town, cane it for three months, then have to get off it for a while, before their wallets or bodies give out."

By 8 am, it's all starting to seem horribly surreal. One body - that attached to my drum-and-bass-befuddled brain - is definitely about to give out. Some are still bopping vigorously on the dance floor, looking as fresh as when they arrived at Jimmy's eight hours earlier; some line the walls, looking like extras from Night of the Living Dead. And some are just wandering the streets, as that hollow feeling grows and grows, afraid they can never go home because they seem to have left an important part of
their brain in a club in Wan Chai.

Tetchy Mutant Ninja Genius

A recent piece for the South China Morning Post's Rewind column.

WAS THAT SISTINE OR SEVENTEEN SIBYLS?

When I was a kid, my parents had an impressively hefty coffee table tome purporting to contain all the world’s artistic masterpieces. I would pore over it for hours, drinking in the visceral horrors of Brueghel the Elder, the chiaroscuro canvases of Rembrandt, the luminous Renaissance art of Titian, Raphael and Tintoretto, and the unequalled imagination of Leonardo da Vinci. But time and again I was drawn back to the stunning fold-outs of the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo Buonarroti.

For something separates his art from the rest, and even though he considered himself a sculptor not a painter, his frescoes on the soaring vaulted arches of the Pope’s private chapel stand alone as perhaps the greatest single creative masterpiece the world has ever seen. What at first looks like a confusion of writhing flesh reveals itself to be a peerless tableau of human emotion, from the unsullied innocence of creation to the eternal agonies of the fall from grace.

AND GOD CREATED ADAM,
AFTER WATCHING ET

Watched by a profusion of prophets and sibyls and biblical notables, the central frescoes depict in Michelangelo’s inimitable style the travails of Noah, God dividing the light and dark, the heavens and the waters, the sun and the planets, and of course the most iconic image of all, God creating Adam, fingers outstretched, at once impassive and impassioned, white beard swirling like storm clouds, somehow seeing all the pain ahead for his beloved creation.

A far more flawed creation is Carol Reed’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, a sprawling epic starring Charlton Heston at his craggiest and grumpiest as a Michelangelo beset by dark nights of the soul and a rocky relationship with the bellicose Pope Julius II. Reed attempts to lay bare the creative process of a genius, and partly succeeds.

Heston’s tetchiness might partly be ascribed to the inch-long chunk of rebar he wedged up his hooter in an attempt to ape the Florentine’s famously twisted nose, broken by a jealous childhood rival. As many critics have noted, the film is as generous with the agony as it is mean with the ecstasy.

OVERARCHING
AMBITION 

 
The film spans the heyday of the Renaissance, perhaps the greatest flowering of creativity the world has ever seen. We meet Michelangelo’s rival Raphael, depicted here as an insipid figure waiting in the wings for the great man to fail, and some of the Medicis, the period’s great secular patrons.          
 
When his first attempt at the ceiling ends with him drunkenly destroying two apostles, Michelangelo disappears into the hills of Carrara to work with the marble miners. The Pope mounts a massive manhunt, and the artist flees higher into the mountains.

LOSING HIS TEMPERA 

It is here that the most powerful scene in the film takes place, one which should be laughably cheesy but somehow achieves a transcendent beauty. Stumbling out of a vaulted cave with swirling ceiling shapes which hint at the artist’s sinuous bodies, Michelangelo is confronted by an amazing cloud formation which we see form itself in his mind’s eye into God creating Adam. With the swelling score and some slick cinematography, we are transported for a moment onto the highest plane where genius dwells.
 
Alas, from there the film becomes a rather drawn out affair, all spilled paint pots and dodgy scaffolding and interminable rows with the Pope. After the scene with the clouds, the final ‘reveal’ of the ceiling is almost an anticlimax .
   
Creativity is an ephemeral and elusive thing. Most artists know it for the briefest of seasons. Michelangelo was blessed – and perhaps cursed – with a full live lived at the headiest heights. This film affords the briefest glimpse of his genius, and for that we can be grateful.

Trout masks and beef hearts

The South China Morning Post has come up with an excellent wheeze for its Sunday pages: a column called Rewind, in which a classic movie, album and book, all of which tie into a theme, are reviewed. Here is my first contribution to the column, a scary encounter with Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, for a Rewind themed around madness.

WARNING: MAY CAUSE BRAIN DAMAGE
IF TAKEN IN LARGE DOSES

When Tom Waits leaps into print to give you props for bringing the crazy, you know you’ve reached some transcendental level of lunacy. Not that anyone would have dared to tell the late and very large Captain Beefheart, who once pushed his drummer down the stairs for refusing to "play a strawberry", that he was nuts.
    Madness and genius have been inextricably linked down through the ages, not least in the arts, and most especially in music. You have to be a hamper short of a picnic, the thinking goes, to get synapses short-circuiting to produce bursts of pure creativity. But there’s music by tortured geniuses and sad broken poets, and then there’s Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band (Straight) 1969. This is some seriously nutty stuff from a real whack job. Listen to it too often, or for too long at once, and you might begin to call your own mental health into question.
    Warns Waits: "The roughest diamond in the mine, his musical inventions are made of bone and mud. Enter the strange matrix of his mind and lose yours." The song titles alone gave me pause: Dachau Blues. Hair Pie Bake 1. Pachuco Cadaver. China Pig. Ant Man Bee. Neon Meate Dream of A Octafish. Only a madman, or someone trying to impersonate one, could cough up such frothing nonsense. As a Beefheart neophyte, I felt nervous. What if I didn’t get it? Worse, what if I did? Anyway, I sonically tip-toed past the point of no return and realized with relief that anyone who claims to ‘get it’ is a big fat bare-faced hipster-wannabe liar. You can’t ‘get’ this level of virtuoso deranged chaos any more than you can ‘get’ a tornado or a serial killer. You can only stand back, knock-kneed and awestruck, humbled with fear.

SGT PEPPER WAS JUST A DABBLER 

    "My smile is stuck, I can’t go back to your frownland," he warbles through werewolf teeth on Frownland, the opening track. And for 28 songs he sinks those fangs into your brain and chews. You feel for The Magic Band, and boy, they must have been to have even remembered which bit of what song comes next. The tunes jump about like hyper kids with Ritalin grins. Tunes? More like attention deficit symphonies. Mad chattering rhythms, a dozen different time signatures in a song, random bits of blues, rock, folk and assorted musical perversions I couldn’t begin to categorize. Random guitar wails. Gratuitous sax. And over all of it in his importuning multi-octave growl, the insistent babbling insanity of the Captain’s stream of incontinence, all fast and bulbous squids eating dough in polyethylene bags, lipstick Kleenex and mice toes scampering, girls named bimbo limbo spam, and dank drum and dung dust.
     I gave Trout Mask Replica the recommended five listens. I still couldn’t hum a single tune. Although one song that got wedged in a loose flapping fold of my brain was The Blimp, which features a hysterical loudhailer voice intoning "The tits, the tits, the blimp, the blimp, the mothership" over a demented, repetitive hurdy gurdy riff.

RANT MAN BE

    Beefheart buffs will know the legends. How the Captain, aka Don Van Vliet, had his musicians rehearse for a year to translate the simmering visions in his skull into something approaching actual songs, then recorded 20 of them in one day. How he wouldn’t let them eat or sleep or leave his house. How he made them wear dresses and subjected them to endless hours of group therapy. How he brought Frank Zappa in as producer, and how Zappa recognized instantly an evil genius at work, and how he basically left Beefheart to get on with making his magnum opus of madness. You wonder how the band put up with his abuse, but would you mess with a man who could hit High C while simultaneously blowing on two saxophones?
    Whether the Captain was a real deal loony tune, crazy like a fox or simply, as Lester Bangs suggested, ‘the only true Dadaist in rock’ doesn’t really matter. Trout Mask Replica stands alone, a jabbering beacon at the far edges of our universe, pulsing its arrhythmic logorrhea through bursts of static, warning of the epic weirdness and flights of madness that lurk in the human mind.
    "The tits, the tits. The blimp, the blimp." The horror, the horror.

Moby Dork and his excellent whaling misadventures

MOBY STICK: POLE-VAULTING IS FOR WIMPS
Photo: Palani Mohan

Sometimes you get to live out your dreams. I adore this kind of story, a no-commissions take-no-prisoners risk-fest, setting off for some far flung corner of the world where weird people still do strange stuff. Moby Dick has long been one of my favourite books. I love Melville's dense and compelling prose, his flights of fancy (see The Whiteness of the Whale) and his general storytelling genius. So it was absolutely mind-blowing to find myself in a flimsy craft with some very rugged chaps paddling after a large and increasingly irate sperm whale just like they did in Melville's day. The whole enterprise was so very nearly a bust. Photographer Palani Mohan and I had been languishing in the little village known as Lamalera for nigh on a month without the sight of a single sperm whale and were about to call it quits when on our last full day on the island of Lembata, I ventured out with one of the whaling crews mainly out of sheer boredom. As you will see with what follows, the boredom didn't last long. Of course the demise of the great fish was heartbreaking, but for the villagers, among the last on the planet to practise true subsistence whaling, it was just another day at the office. Here's the story. And some awe-inspiring images.

When the first spouts were seen and we bent our backs to the oars, I began to wish I'd left Moby Dick undisturbed in my bookcase. For we were paddling out to do battle with leviathan, armed with needles and pins, in a boat made of matchsticks, and my mind was awash with the nameless terrors of Herman Melville's white whale.

"Hiva! Hiva!'' shouted the crew, calling on their ancestors, asking that courage not fail them. Each stroke brought us closer to our prey - an 11-metre, 20-tonne bull sperm whale churning lazy circles in the warm blue sea, proclaiming his presence with each misty roar of his spout.

Half an hour earlier, the unforgiving equatorial sun just past its zenith, the Tena Puka had been creeping back towards the Indonesian village of Lamalera, on the far eastern island of Lembata, where for more than three centuries men have gone down to the sea in wooden boats to hunt whales. The barest hint of a breeze luffed the woven palm-frond sail. Men dozed in a palm-wine torpor. "No whale today,'' said the captain, Sipri Demon, half-asleep at the tiller.

Two other boats, known as pelendangs, had been out with the Tena Puka, describing fruitless tacks across the Savu Sea since sun-up. Not a single spout had been descried since early April, more than six weeks ago, when a smallish sperm whale calf was caught. Meat was running low, and a palpable despondency was beginning to settle over the hunters and their families.

 "Clan trouble,'' Captain Demon explained that morning, shaking his head, as we pushed the boat down the glittering black beach and out through the breakers. Lamalerans believe any disharmony in the village will keep the whales away. The night before, in a noisy public meeting, a simmering feud over the division of meat from the last catch had finally been put to rest.

I settle into a sweaty trance, the Tena Puka pushing half-heartedly against indolent waves. We're half an hour or more behind the other pelendangs, who have almost gained the shore, when we hear the first shout.

MOBY TAIL: I AM JUST OUT OF FRAME,
REDECORATING MY BOXER SHORTS
Photo: Palani Mohan 

"Baleo! Baleo!'' There she blows! One of the youths who keep vigil on the hilltop has seen the telltale puffs of a sperm whale spout and raises the cry.

We scramble for the oars. Captain Demon is dancing a little jig as he swings the prow seaward. He grabs my shoulder and gives me a shake. "Paus!  Paus!'' he hisses, eyes suddenly full of blood and thunder. It means "Pope fish'' in Bahasa Indonesia. (It is taboo for the hunters to speak the whale's "real'' name - "kotakelema'' in their native tongue, Lamaholot - while at sea.)

"Hiva! Hiva!'' we chant, blistering our palms as we pull. Elias the harpooner is unhurriedly honing his barb on a whetstone. "Wocka wocka'' sings the steel as a gleaming edge replaces dull rust.

Each minute seems to stretch out interminably as we cut a foaming wake towards the whale. Suddenly the wet blasts sound close now, very close, and I put my oar down for a moment and turn to face the front of the boat just as the whale - not five metres in front of us - flings its flukes skyward and disappears into the depths. The tail is at least three metres across, terrifying and beautiful, sprung with an ineffable tendinous strength.

For five minutes, maybe more, there's calm. Then, off my side of the boat, a roiling disturbance and a rising black shadow, and the beast's huge block of a head bursts from the blue like a submarine that's just blown its tanks, covering us in acrid spray with a bellowing snort from its spiracle.

Curious, or befuddled, it floats there, spouting and eyeing us. It could easily outrun the boat but doesn't, and Captain Demon leans on the tiller as we row furiously. Elias fits the harpoon into its bamboo shaft, and with unerring balance dances onto his platform; thick bamboo sticks lashed to the Tena Puka's prow. Slowly the whale starts to swim, undulating its flukes. Elias crouches, his dart cocked.

At last the whale senses something amiss, and starts to churn the water into white curd. It lists like a stricken ship, giving Elias what he's been waiting for - a clean shot at the vulnerable spot behind its flipper. Noiselessly he leaps: burying his barb into blubber, flailing as he slides off the broad black back.

MOBY BLOWS: THE 'WHALE STONE' 
AND HUNTERS' LOOKOUT

 In a chaos of foam the whale begins its panicked run, and the rope jerks tight, quivering and humming with a wild electricity. Elias scrambles back into the boat as we take off on what Yankee whalers called the "Nantucket sleigh ride''.  In front of me, Franciscus, one of the "matros'', or crew, loops the line around a timber post to increase the drag and stop it whipping about. The rope is a constant threat; when the whale sounds it can cut through flesh like butter, or drag a careless hunter down to a watery grave.

Minutes of this, being pulled about like a toy, then the whale slows. Gathers its strength. Regards us with a baleful eye. It hoists its flukes into the air and smashes them down two metres from where I'm sitting. There's a blast like a thunderclap. Dion, another matros, shoves my head none too gently below the gunwhales, shouting “down, down!’’.

My ears are ringing and I feel like my bowels are about to fail me. "Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it,'' wrote Melville of the sperm whale's tail. "No ribs of man or boat can withstand it.'' The whale wields its flukes like a gladiator's mace again, further away this time. Spray flies. Then he sounds, and rises under the boat, knocking us off our perches with a great thump. The timbers quiver and groan. "Santa Domingo,'' cry the crew and I'm jabbering away in tongues, summoning half-remembered prayers from strange cobwebby places.

Elias, fearless, leaps upon the beast again, embedding another harpoon. The whale rolls and roils, tangling the ropes around its thick torso. The two other pelendangs, Java Tena and Demo Sapan, are scudding toward us, sails flapping, oars flying. Both manage to get harpoons fast to the whale, then back off, swiftly paying out rope, leaving us to face the brunt of the whale's mounting fury. 

IT is hard to imagine a more apt setting to hunt sea monsters than Lamalera. The village, about 900km east of Bali, oozes portents; beyond the steep green hill that divides the twin communities of Lamalera A and B rear volcanic peaks, including the active, smoke-belching Ale Ile. On clear mornings you can see across the Ombai Strait, a sperm whale breeding ground, to Timor.

The beach is dotted with bleached whale bones, and the restless earth leaks a sulphurous stink, lending credence to the fire and brimstone sermons each Sunday (the Catholic mission has been established for more than a century and most of Lamalera’s 2000 inhabitants are Christians). A strong streak of animism survives, however. On April 30, the day before the official six-month hunting season begins, elders plod up the mountain to the whale stone, a panoptic perch that resembles a sperm whale, and offerings are made to the whale god.

Only toothed whales, such as sperm and pilot whales (as well as manta rays and dolphins), are hunted by the Lamalerans. Plankton-eating behemoths like the blue whale, regularly sighted in the Savu sea, are sacred - the islanders believe their ancestors arrived on the back of one. Lamalera is the last place on earth where sperm whales are regularly harpooned from traditional wooden vessels – and after May’s acrimonious International Whaling Commission meeting, it may for some time be the only place in the world where subsistence whaling of any kind occurs.

In a move spearheaded by an angry Japanese contingent smarting after losing their battle to have the ban on commercial whaling lifted, subsistence whaling by native american and aboriginal tribes in the United States and Russia was banned. The tribes, included Eskimos and the Chukotka people, hunt the more docile plankton-eating bowhead and grey whales.

MOBY DOCKED: LET THE STENCH BEGIN
Photo: Palani Mohan

The Indonesian government tolerates the hunt on Lamalera, viewing it as true subsistence whaling (in any case, Indonesia is not a signatory to the IWC). In a good year, 20 or 30 whales may be caught; in a bad year, none. The meat is eaten and bartered with hilltribes for grains, fruit and vegetables, while the oil – both the valuable “spermaceti’’ from the head and the lesser stuff the drips from strips of blubber - is used to fuel lamps.

Like the Quakers who dominated the Yankee sperm whale fishery in the latter part of the 19th century, Lamalera's whale hunters believe God is on their side.  "Faith is very important,'' says Papa Ignatzius, 48, master boatbuilder and the grizzled harpooner of the Demo Sapan. His beachside house bears testimony to successful hunts; huge vertebrae form fretwork above the doors and the bleached arches of ribs decorate flowerbeds.

"When you're about to jump onto a whale, you aren't thinking about your wife or your kids or whether you remembered to kick the dog that morning,'' he says. "You are praying to God with all your might to guide your harpoon.'' No small measure of faith is invested in the pelendangs, which take a beating during the hunt. Crafted by hand from a local timber similar to teak, the boats are held together by an elaborate system of wooden dowels and pegs. They measure about 10 metres in length, weigh around a tonne and carry a crew of eight to 12. Twenty-five of the craft sit under thatched huts on the beach, but fewer than half of them have active crews. Lamalerans believe their pelendangs, named after ancestors, are invested with an immortal soul. Eyes are painted on the front so the boat can see. 

"If I make a mistake of even one millimeter when building a boat ... disaster,'' says Papa Ignatzius. "We call the sperm whale the "doctor fish'', because he is so smart. If there is a mistake in the boat, a weakness, then the whale will strike it in exactly that place.''

None of the villagers know just how long ago their ancestors arrived at Lamalera, or when they first summoned the nerve to harpoon a whale. But a Portuguese document dated 1624 describes the hunt in some detail. If accurate, it means the Lamalerans had the business down to a fine art two centuries before Melville conceived Ahab and his monomaniacal quest.

How much longer the hunt will continue is open to conjecture. While the elders say that as long as there are Lamalerans, they will hunt whales, you can't help noticing many of the pelendang crews are a bit long in the tooth. The younger generation have largely opted for less risky occupations.

MOBY WHO? A WHALE HUNTER OF LAMALERA
Photo: Palani Mohan 

"I don’t know what the future holds for us,'' says Noel Beding, 24, a computer studies graduate from a Bali college who now helps run his father's homestay in Lamalera B. "We want to keep our traditions alive, but maybe in the future we can make our living from tourism. I don't want my kids to have to hunt whales. I want them to have electricity and television and a good education, to see the world.’’

His father, Abel Beding, hunted whales as a youth. "I'm too old for that now,’’ he says. “It’s a hard living. You’re either sitting in the boat bored stiff or worrying you’re about to die.'' These days he makes a living renting rooms to the trickle of tourists who make their way to Lamalera. “Things are changing here,’’ he says. “Lamalera is waking up to the modern world.” A couple of years ago, he bought a generator and a television. Children gather in front of his house each night to gape at Sylvester Stallone movies.

Clouds are gathering on Lamalera's horizon. Lembata Island, until last year part of Flores district, has now been made a separate district, which means more funds from Jakarta. Local officials are keen to exploit the tourism potential of the whale hunters, and have begun construction of a new road that would cut dramatically the travelling time from the main port of Lewoleba - currently a five-hour, bone-jarring vertiginous odyssey in an ancient Land Rover.

The barter economy has been disrupted by the modern world’s intrusion. Tourists are welcome to go on a whale hunt, provided they pay. "I think people got a bit greedy after a Japanese documentary crew was here four or five years ago,'' says Abel Beding. "They splashed lots of money around.''

A day out on a pelendang is 35,000 rupiah. If a whale is caught and you want to take photographs, the fee is 150,000 rupiah, or 700,000 for video. You can make your own sacrifice at the whale stone, but it will cost you 500,000 rupiah. The charges seem fair, considering the uniqueness of Lamalera and the very real risks whaling poses to life and limb. But if the hunt becomes a  gory tourist bloodsport rather than true subsistence whaling, public opinion - generally sympathetic - may turn against the whale hunters.  

  

MOBY DEAD: HUNTERS
AND THEIR PRIZE
Photo: Palani Mohan

The sperm whale, also known as Physeter macrocephalus, or the cachalot, is the grand prize for Lamalerans. The meat from a big bull can sustain the village for months. Adult males can reach lengths of more than 20 metres long and weigh 50 tonnes. Females rarely exceed 13 metres.

Sperm whales have the largest brain of any animal in earth's history - six times the size of a human brain – and a penis as long as the average NBA player is tall. They are covered in a tough layer of blubber up to a foot thick, and their four-chambered heart weighs as much as two grown men.

Their main source of food is the giant squid, which lives in deep ocean trenches. Sperm whales can dive to depths of three kilometres, staying under water for up to two hours. They have the largest head of any animal, up to six metres long and three metres high. The top half contains a case filled with spermaceti, a fragrant oil prized by the Yankee whalers for its clean-burning qualities and use as a lubricant. Below the case is a waxlike honeycomb structure believed to be used in echolocation, pinpointing food in the inky depths, and regulating buoyancy. Ambergris, an ash-coloured, sweet-scented substance found in lumps in the sperm whale's intestines, is still prized as a fixative for perfumes.

A full-grown bull's lower jaw may reach five metres, studded with more than 50 curved teeth up to 15cm long, which fit into holes in the upper jaw when the mouth is closed. Sperm whales are generally social animals. Pods consist of females and calves, and "bachelor schools'' of young males. Older bulls are solitary, but will engage in fierce battles with rivals for the right to mate (this is accomplished by swimming upside down under the female). They can live as long as 70 years, and since the ban on commercial whaling in the 1970s, a population which some scientists believe dipped as low as 200,000 worldwide, is beginning to recover.

Melville, who went whaling for several years, found inspiration for his classic novel Moby Dick in the true story of the whaleship Essex, which was charged head on and sunk by an enormous, enraged bull sperm whale in 1820.

   

MOBY GONE:
FAREWELL TO LEVIATHAN
Photo: Palani Mohan 

WHALING is without doubt a risky business - just ask Benedictus Demon. Like a modern-day Ahab, he hobbles about on one leg, the other a wooden stump. A matros on the pelendang Kebakopuka, the 52-year-old recalls a huge pod of whales being spotted one June morning in 1996.

 "Two other boats had already harpooned whales, and about 8am we fastened onto a big one, about 13 metres. I was the harpooner's assistant, so my job was to pay out the rope and make sure it didn't get twisted. Well, the whale was putting up a hell of a fight, and I didn't notice the rope had become looped around my leg, below the knee. When the whale dived, the rope cut right through my leg, even the bone. It took six hours to get to the hospital. I thought I was a dead man.’’

Three years earlier, the boat was dragged more than 80km, almost to Timor, by a massive bull. “After a day and a night, we decided to cut the rope,’’ he says. “We drifted for three days, with no food and hardly any water. We were all nearly dead when a cruise liner picked us up near Komodo.''

Marcelinus Ratu, a 28-year-old matros on Demo Sapan, could be forgiven for hating whales, for making revenge his quest. When Marcelinus was still in his mother's belly, his father was smitten by a whale and died instantly. But there are no hard feelings, he says. "It’s just a job. I’m not out for revenge. Actually, I like and respect whales, but we need to feed our families.’’

Cowering in the Tena Puka as the flukes fly, I can’t help pondering his father’s fate. The whale wheels around, using the featureless expanse of its head as a battering ram. “Santa  Domingo,'' cry the crew, baling furiously as water seeps through the straining timbers. Between flurries, the crew haul on the rope, getting us up alongside the whale, then they lean out with sharp knives and furiously stab into the blubber, trying to get at the vital organs. One of the crew manages to stick a gaffer hook deep into the whale's spiracle, prompting a savage burst of tail-swatting. Knife clenched between his teeth, Franciscus swims out to the raging fish and opens up a cut behind its hump. Fresh gouts of blood stain the sea.

He dog-paddles back to the boat, just as the whale coils and unleashes the full power of its tail, snapping off the harpooner's platform and staving the inch-thick planks of the prow like so much balsa wood. The hole is just above the waterline, but the boat has been fatally weakened. Rope is paid out until we are at a safe distance from the whale, and the Demo Sapan charges in to take up the fight. “Scared?’’ laughs Franciscus, as he dives overboard and strokes off to continue the fray.

Scared scarcely begins to cover it. After nearly an hour in a half-flooded boat being battered by a big angry fish, complete and abject terror would be a more accurate summation of my mental state. The crew are laughing at me and making loud spouting sounds. Franciscus has somehow straddled the back of the whale and works his knife up and down, effectively hobbling the deadly flukes. Each time it tries to hoist its tail, the gash gapes wider, bleeding crimson. “Baleo!’’ someone shouts, as more spouts are spied. Half a kilometre away, five or six sperm whales have stopped to investigate the commotion. They lift their heads out of the water, swinging them from side to side. They circle us, stop, and swim slowly away.

It takes three more hours until the great fish expires, jaw horribly agape, spouting clots of gore in its final agonised writhings. At last its island bulk lies still; the pool of blood thinning, mingling with the pinks and oranges of sunset.

MOBY BONE: LAST
 OF THE WHALE HUNTERS?
Photo: Palani Mohan

It's almost dark by the time the corpse is towed back some 5km to shore, hauled into the shallows and secured with ropes. The entire populace seems to be on the beach, hopping and babbling beneath flaming torches. In the fading light, a massive blue whale is sighted, cruising just 20m offshore, spouting its towering spout. A good omen, the villagers agree.

At sunrise, butchering will begin. Great chunks of rich meat will be divided up, according to strict and ancient formulae. Spermaceti will be ladled into buckets. Women will pad about, squares of blubber balanced on their heads, dripping oil down their backs. By midday, a sickening, pore-deep stench will have settled like a blanket over Lamalera.

But tonight belongs to the whale hunters of tomorrow: they howl and cavort on the beach, terrible naked imps bathed in blood and torchlight, leaping from beached boats to hurl slivers of bamboo at imaginary monsters.

   
 

My life in tights

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MEN IN TIGHTS

I knew that eventually I'd have to go shopping for a pair of proper ballet tights. What I hadn't figured on was the attractive assistant at the dancewear store twirling an elaborate jockstrap around in front of a bunch of suburban ballet mums and their daughters, bellowing: 'You'll be needing one of these. What size are you? Medium … or small?'.

'These' were supports, elastic contraptions devised to hoist the family jewels out of harm's way as the male dancer plies, jettes, pirouettes and attempts other potentially nut-cracking manoeuvres. The support accounts for the lumpy bulge you will no doubt have noticed about the nether regions of male dancers. You may also have noticed that some boys are bigger than others … although it was not unknown for cheats to resort to stuffing their support with a sock or two. Such were the initiation rites awaiting a boy bitten by the ballet bug in the back of beyond.

I grew up in Townsville, North Queensland, by all accounts a very pleasant seaside burg these days. Back then it seemed like a bit of a shithole. I'd gotten into ballet on a lark, and as an arcane way to impress a girl. Donald, a school mate of mine, was keen on one particularly tasty Grade 10 girl. I fancied another.

And as sophisticated men of Grade 11, we figured a surefire way into their leotards was to impress them with our graceful terpsichorean prowess. Unfortunately we couldn't just talk the talk; we had to dance the dance. And so we signed up as extras for Cinderella, the annual gala performance by the North Queensland Ballet, now bolstered by a couple of ungainly galahs. 

SILLY, BILLY 

Even as extras, we had to take classes at the leading regional ballet school so we wouldn't flap about like total spastics. The first few times we wore shorts. We began to learn the basics, how a ballet class unfolded. You began at the barre, and progressed through a sequence of bends, twists, glides and stretches. Then you moved to the centre, and the tough stuff began.

Naturally, we were terrible. We fudged and fumbled, groped and giggled, gawky, uncoordinated fools that we were. But from those first faltering steps, I also felt the stirrings of something I couldn't quite put my finger on, that quivering, queasy tingling that marks the start of an infatuation. After a couple of classes, it was whispered in our ear that proper male dancers - or danseurs if you wish to get technical - wore tights.

Pulling on your first pair of tights is a weird moment in the life of a relatively normal suburban small town Australian boy. It felt dangerous. Subversive. And likely to earn me some painful schoolyard taunting, if not a beating. At my high school, the real men played rugby, and possibly a spot of cricket. Also-rans like me opted for soccer (and boy, did I suck). The nerds and geeks fiddled about with Vic 20 and Commodore 64 computers or joined the chess club. Ballet was so far removed from anyone's imagination that it had no real place on the totem pole, but doubtless it was so far beyond the pale as to be underground. Basically, I was Billy Elliot.

Dancers wear tights to highlight the unadorned beauty of the human body and the purity of line ballet requires. The sheer clinging nylon prevents attempts to hide faulty technique from the hawklike gaze of the ballet master or mistress. I pulled on my first pair in the studio's little-used male changing room with trembling and trepidation.

But like some lithe Narcissus gazing into his pond, I slowly raised my eyes to the full length mirror and noticed that my legs looked rather fetching clad in navy cotton lycra. It turned out that I'd been blessed with the right kind of body for ballet: flexible hips, long legs, tapered torso. I had flat feet, but exceptionally loose ankles (which would cause me no end of heartache later but made my toes look freakishly pointed, another highly prized asset by ballet's strange standards).

But this was Australia's far north, you understand, the antipodean answer to America's deep south, where men were men, cows were cautious and sheep were scared. Townsville in those days was a hard army town with a thriving yobbo culture and an undercurrent of violence simmering beneath the surface. A town where the local weekly free-sheet once splashed with the headline: 'Poofs in the Park'. Just re-reading this paragraph makes me cringe and whisks me back to a heady, hormonal and very confusing chapter in my life. 

RUDOLF, I SAID,
POSE VAIN DEAR

Over the next few years, I would watch my father struggle with alcoholism, locking myself in my room to study so I wouldn't have to witness my parents' marriage teetering on the brink. I'd see my dad resurrect himself from the edge of suicide with born-again Christianity and I'd give it a whirl myself, joining the happy-clapping hordes who flocked each Sunday to church. And I'd take to ballet like a swan to water. I became obsessed. I pored over ballet books, watched countless films of the Royal Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet and other legendary companies, and attended class compulsively. Our neighbours must have thought I was nuts as they watched through slats in the fence as I practiced my leaps in the backyard.

My twin heroes were Rudolph Nureyev, a coruscating genius with a magnetic stage presence who would meet a tragic end with AIDS, and Mikhael Baryshnikov, the other Russian defector, technically Nureyev's superior and captured at the height of his powers in The Turning Point, a movie I watched and watched until the videotape wore out. Much to my parents' displeasure, I would also turn down the chance to study law at the University of Queensland to take up instead one of the dozen or so spots handed out to boys each year at the Australian Ballet School. 

MIRIN BRAH? OOPS,
WRONG STORY

Donald and I didn't win rave reviews for our clumsy waltzing and precarious presages in Cinderella. But we did get to enjoy a bit of rough and fumble - or 'full crumpet' as it somehow became known - with our shapely ballerina crushes in the back of the bus as the show went on the road weekends to a succession of country towns. I was also offered a year's paid traineeship with the North Queensland Ballet (which was in the throes of becoming a proper professional outfit as Dance North. These days, it sports the trendier moniker dancenorth and enjoys a reputation as one of Australia's most innovative contemporary dance troupes).

Part of the funding came from the Queensland Arts Council, which meant we had to embark on a succession of school tours to some of the most remote outback towns and rugged mining outposts imaginable. I was teamed up with Trevor, fresh from a stint with Sydney Dance Company, short, floppy-fringed, acid-tongued and enormously doe-eyed, possibly the campest thing ever to flounce out of Oxford Street, and Susie, a small but perfectly formed ballerina who was sex on well-defined legs.

There were bigger performances with the full company but the arts council odysseys account for my most vivid memories. We would roll into town, locate the school, set up the stage and get our costumes ready. Then we'd slap on some pancake and ham it up in front of the bemused and wide-eyed students, and repeat the whole process one or two more times before calling it quits for the day. 

GAGZILLA, QUEEN OF THE
DESSERT CART

Now in towns like Mt Isa, Richmond, Hughenden, Cloncurry, Longreach, Winton, Blackall, Barcaldine, Charters Towers and Ravenswood, and many others besides, there wasn't a great deal to do at night. You drank, or you slept. So we would find ourselves in some local pub or other, where the locals congregated in sweaty wifebeaters, Stubbies shorts and thongs (the kind you wear on your feet, not the kind Trevor sported beneath his flamboyantly multicoloured overalls).

The men didn't dress up either. They would ogle Susie over their pots of XXXX beer, and she took a twisted delight in twisting her pretzel limbs into impossible shapes just to watch them pant. But they would also shoot dirty looks at Trevor and I, arty outsiders and no doubt poofs, and therefore to be reviled if not bashed.

Unfortunately, the filthier the looks became, the more outrageously Trevor would camp it up. You could see it in their eyes; torn between paroxysms of lust over Susie and the urge to beat down on Trevor and I. On more than one occasion we had to hightail it out of town at peril of grievous bodily harm, sprinting for our battered van as the lynch mob formed. This was pre-Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, but the shoe certainly fit.

The Australian Ballet School was another adventure, not necessarily from the Boys' Own oeuvre. In my day, it hadn't yet taken up residence beside the Yarra River in the posh Performing Arts Centre; rather, it was accommodated in a converted tyre factory on Melbourne's Mount Alexander Road. I was lodged in a mouldy ground floor flat in North Melbourne, near the Queen Victoria Markets and amidst a burgeoning Vietnamese community. My flatmates were Brett, a second year student beset by worries about his acne, thunder thighs and child-bearing hips (his descriptions), and Bruce, a talented fellow first year, and a lovely bloke from the outskirts of Adelaide.

I MEAN TO HAVE YOU
EVEN IF IT MUST BE BURGLARY

The School, as we called it, attracted a certain species of ageing queen which couldn't resist the bulging legion of young men in tights. I suppose they fancied themselves as patrons of the arts, but patrons of the arse would be closer to the truth. They would offer meals and lodgings to young fellows who were down on their luck, with an unspoken agreement requiring payment in kind.

My circumstances were fairly exigent in those days but I eschewed the importuning of these 'Uncle Monty' types and managed to make ends meet working in a succession of Melbourne's grand old hotels at night, prowling the corridors doing turn-downs, pilfering wine, cheese, chocolate and the odd bathrobe, and almost nightly managing to barge in on people mid-bonk. As I was still a virgin at the ripe old age of 17, this turned out to be a handy crash course in sex education.

One of the most active patrons was a gravel-voiced old luvvie named Maximilian, Max for short, maximally interested in the contents of one's boxer shorts. Maxmoid, we called him, if we called him at all. Why, I have no idea.

In his wisdom, he sometimes saw fit to donate his swanky South Yarra pied-à-terre to the school's students for parties. I remember my first. A callow lad straight off the bus from Townsville (literally - a hellish three day trip that nearly ended my budding ballet career before it had begun), still settling into the big city, I overindulged in spirits and became tired and emotional.

In those days I was a pretty young thing, and in between fending off the unsolicited ministrations of Max, managed to capture the attention of a third year man-eater with the unlikely name of Cherie Dick, a willowy sexpot with big breasts and a creamy olive complexion. It was a nailed-on dead-set cert, and my best opportunity yet to rid myself of my virginity. Instead I burst into tears and demanded to be taken home. Brett was only too happy to oblige and tucked me into bed, listening to my sobbing litany of suburban dislocation and teenage angst. Our briefly flowering friendship was to end when some hours later, I thickly awoke to find him trying to wrestle my trousers down.

DON'T YOU STEP ON MY
RED POINTE SHOES

It wasn't to be my last brush with Brett. He became obsessed with me, and I took to spending as little time in the flat as possible. I'd loiter after class, practicing my spins and leaps. I'd dawdle at the hotel, drawing out my shifts as long as possible. Things finally came to a head about eight months into term, when Bruce and I heard a faint rustling in our cupboard. Smelling a rat, I put a finger to my lips and crept out of bed. I put my ear against the door and discerned a muffled groaning. I grabbed Bruce's cricket bat and flung the door back. There, with his hand down his pajama pants and a stricken rictus on his face, crouched Brett. I screamed. He curled up into a catatonic ball, star of his own fetal attraction. A week later, Bruce and I moved out.

I shacked up with Joanne, a lissom, Barbie doll blonde who would later become my wife. I'd study diligently and make good progress but somehow my infatuation was running out of steam. I'd have the opportunity to see the stars of the Australian Ballet up close and personal, extra-ing in performances of Swan Lake, Giselle and Don Quixote. I'd meet a doddering Sir Robert Helpmann, impossibly frail and literally on his last legs. I'd witness my favourite teacher and one of the best danseurs of his day, Kelvin Coe, wither away from AIDS. And I'd win the favour of Maina Gielgud - 'Mainly Feelgood' as we called her - the company's artistic director and niece of uber-thesp Sir John. After I announced my intention to hang up my tights, passion spent and beset by niggling injuries, she'd pen me a lovely letter, urging me to reconsider.

MAINLY FEELGOOD

Some time in second year, I would finally lose my virginity, fumbling beneath a fluffy doona to the crooned strains of Julio Iglesias (Joanne's choice, not mine). I'd also have one more run in with Max, in the toilets of an inner city shopping mall. Pants around my ankles, going about my business, I suddenly felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise and was seized by the conviction that I wasn't alone. I raised my eyes and leering over the cubicle wall were the beady blue eyes and Father Christmas eyebrows of Max. A grimace of recognition swept over his features and, no doubt, my own. I leaped from my porcelain perch, arse unwiped, and burst from the stall like a racehorse erupting from the Melbourne Cup gates. As I threw open the bathroom door, grabbing at my pants, the last thing I heard was a stupendous crash and an anguished moan from Max.

Two months later, I found myself in Brisbane, ballet bug cured, pondering just what the hell I would now do with my life.