A return to yesterday

I'd always had a hard time letting go of the CBC. Like a first relationship, I always remembered this job as my first and fondest. Bouncing around various departments on temp contracts for eight years was a wondrous experience. You see, the CBC was a vital part of Canada's identity for its first 60 years or so, and growing up in this country meant being influenced by the broadcaster in some shape or form. Even when the CBC wasn't being Canadian, it was not Canadian in a very Canadian way. The fact that we could watch British sitcoms and arty US films on a major network, for instance, set us apart from the Americans. And when we watched Sesame Street, we knew if we had tuned into an American channel or CBC based on the second-language skits – Americans had Spanish-speaking puppets, we had Kermit le Frogge.

During my broadcasting course at BCIT, I started to feel more disinterested and unresponsive to commercial radio, and my dial drifted toward CBC Radio more frequently. CBC Radio, unlike the TV side, was one of those things I had neglected pretty much my entire life. It was such a revelation just to hear interesting people talk every day without obnoxious commercials and loudmouthed sportscasters. When I mentioned to my BCIT instructors about my choice of station on my drives to and from school, I was told, “Get your mind off CBC right now. You'll never work there. They're unionized, and they do things very differently from the stations you're going to work at.”

Upon graduation, I submitted only one job application – to CBC Radio. As luck would have it, they had a temp opening in their "tape supply" room. Now, where else would anyone get a job splicing used, heavily edited recording tape into fresh product? Or spooling new, un-encased tape into empty reels? Or fast-forwarding miles of used tape through a reel-to-reel to check for quality? Twice a day, I'd make my rounds, through the newsroom, the current-affairs studios, producers' offices and edit suites to collect used tape. It was a surreal job, and I got to take my breaks hanging out with David Wisdom as he produced his uber-cool after-midnight show Nightlines, or in the back of the Studio 5 control room on my lunch hours watching Fanny Keefer host Almanac.

When that temp contract ran out, I was shuffled into other jobs as vacancies demanded – program assistant for Vicki Gabereau for a year, music programmer for a few shows, and even picking up freelance production work on weekends. But the one area of CBC Vancouver where I was assigned the most was the record library.

While the work in the library could be tedious and wearisome (lots of data entry and re-shelving), it was also one of the most stimulating parts of the building. The library was a salon of sorts. Production staff from a wide variety of shows, from current affairs to pop to classical to news, would randomly flit in and out of the library, roping us into a wide gamut of conversations. There'd be the Afternoon Show producer who'd come down and say, "We're interviewing a UFOlogist, so, can you think of any good songs about flying saucers?" Or the news guy who practically busts the door down in a panic: "Jim Henson just died. Where are the muppet records!?" And the languid Gabereau music guy who never needed any help, because the show was pre-taped and no one was in a panic there.

The library was the heart of CBC Radio. It was our community centre, our church, our confessional. It wasn't where the shows were made, it wasn't where the action happened, but it was the only place in the building that brought everyone together, and always in random, serendipitous ways. When someone had something to get off their chest, whether office politics, world affairs, union politics or just a bit of gossip, it was we librarians (and whoever else was in earshot) who became their sounding boards.

And there was music around. Always. Whether it was a producer skimming tracks in a listening booth, or head librarian Judy sampling the programming in her office, or soon-to-be-head librarian Johnny pulling out an old easy-listening record at the end of the day, this library was not a shhhhhh zone.

Fast forward through 15 years. I'm laid off due to deep government cuts. I land work with Health Canada and become the accidental medical case manager (work I never imagined doing, let alone being good at, but it broadened my mind while paying the bills). Ten years after that, an itch to get back into media and do some travelling found me working as a magazine editor in China and Singapore, with a brief stint studying in Taipei.

You'd think that with all that life experience, now being in my 40s, I would have put the CBC of my 20s well into my past. But there was something about the place that always called me back. During my work for the feds, I freelanced on-air for the occasional pop-music show. When the feds went on strike a couple of times, I found some work back in the library covering for holidays. When I came back for the Olympics between jobs in Singapore, I got a couple of days of grunt work for some of the live special programming. I could have thought, “Magazine editor, overseas resident … why am I running to Staples to buy Jian Ghomeshi coloured file folders?” Because I never, ever got over that CBC feeling from when I was 21. The CBC still felt, as it always had, like a very egalitarian place, where people (for the most part) worked collectively on projects they were proud of, and less like a hierarchy of individuals.

When I returned from Singapore for good in 2011, word got out that I was looking for work, and Johnny (now the lone librarian after several years of cuts chipped away at the large staff) called me up with an assignment. The good news – he needed someone in the record library for a few weeks. The bad news – the job entailed dismantling the collection of records and CDs, and archiving the valuables before auctioning the rest of it off.

These few weeks were full of emotions surreal, beautiful, sad, and poignant. From the time I left the CBC at age 29 to being called back at age 45, I was certainly a changed person. Not just more mature and with enhanced skills, but having been both scarred and bettered by new careers and exposure to different parts of the world. This part of my past should have been well behind me. Coming back to work amongst the stacks of records and compact discs, doing the work of my youth – it should have felt like one grand backward step. Instead, it felt otherworldly. This institution was deeply embedded into my identity, seamlessly flowing through childhood, my student years, and my working life. Of course it was devastating to see the library taken to pieces, just as most of the CBC building on Hamilton Street had been transformed through the years. Yet, no matter how much of a mistake I believed it was to dispose of the library, I'm glad I was back for its final days.

How much this place, this room, had haunted me. Stepping back into it, after all I had been through in my life, was almost illusory. There was my handwriting still on the signs and shelf-tagging. The desk, a bulky thing probably handmade by the TV stagecraft department, still had all the same scratches and pen marks indelibly etched into it. The chairs hadn't been replaced. The clutter in the drawers and cubby-holes hadn't changed. The same tattered recycling box was still under the desk. Funny how things like scrapes or dents or recycling boxes are not meant to make any impression whatsoever, but the memories that come back when you see them again after 20 years! Even the phone still had my voice on the outgoing message, back from the day in the early 90s when voicemail came to the building.

A couple of my friends in Singapore responded to my Facebook posts that I was demeaning myself by doing menial labour, or "janitor" work, as one of them put it. Of course, they knew me as the well-off magazine editor. Now they were seeing me sitting on the floor, sorting through stacks of musty records. But their comments only underlined the reasons why I left that country. The Singapore work culture is ruled by kiasu, a local term that roughly means "fear of losing face". Meaning, if you're a professional, you're not caught dead doing minor tasks or manual labour best left for a secretary or cleaner. For instance, going for lunch with sales staff at one magazine I worked for, we could not find an empty table at the food court, except for one cluttered with dirty dishes. To their horror, I picked up the dishes and wiped the table with a napkin. "Don't do that!" one of them said. "Let's find another spot," said another. Although we ended up with a clean table without waiting, one colleague said I had made a spectacle by doing "the uncle's work". That's just one of many illustrative stories of kiasu that I came home with.

I was not the only former employee to be brought back for the library project. Two retired producers were also brought on board for their expertise, both of them well-regarded not just at the CBC, but in the local arts community. So here we all were: a former librarian, one of the city's top recording engineers, and a respected jazz producer, all using our respective expertise in pop, classical and jazz to select prime specimens for archiving, mucking about in stacks of records and having a blast. This is how my work abroad enhanced my appreciation for life in Vancouver – I was now back in a place where I didn't have to fear for my social status based on the job I did or how I appeared to others. Sitting on the floor of the library, rummaging through old records, not only was I happy to be back "home" in the CBC, but I was also relieved to be amongst familiar colleagues who could be both professional and laidback.

Our jobs required us to look at every single record on the shelves, a collection going back to the early 1960s. You can imagine, all of us music lovers, finding massive distractions amongst our work. I ended up volunteering a few hours or days here and there to make up for the time spent listening to weird discoveries in one of the listening booths.

All of us who worked on this sad project lamented the mistake of disposing of such a massive library, yet our attitude was: "If it's a done deal, then glad we're the ones doing it." On the one hand, I could see the corporation's reasons. With so much of the library's contents digitized and accessible to studios across the country on their Virtual Music Library, the physical libraries were becoming largely redundant. On the other hand, it was only the compact discs, dating back to about 1990 or so, that had been ripped into the VML. It wouldn't have cost the corp much to have a librarian spend a year digitizing some of the rare vinyl. Instead it was boxed up and shipped to CBC Toronto, where, we surmised, the collection might likely sit untouched for several years.

The value of this "redundant" library was underscored while I was boxing up a stash of local discs by Vancouver bands. There was some labour trouble brewing in our transit service, and a producer came down looking for a particular song he remembered about a bus strike in the 1980s. A few North Vancouver kids had released a single called "Stranded in the Park", sung to the tune of Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark". (Flip side: "Born in North Van".) I just happened to have that single by Boss and the Bandits in pile in a listening booth, after having given it a spin myself. The occasion prompted one technician to grab some of the collection and digitize it himself before our local treasures ended up in an inaccessible box a few thousand miles away.

The items we selected to save barely scratched the surface of the entire library. When we finished our project, the reason for the corp's haste became apparent – after the collection was auctioned off to the highest bidder, the library was converted to retail space. When the CBC Vancouver “bunker” was built in 1971, it was on the far outskirts of downtown, where there was no demand for real estate. Today, it's on the edge of trendy Yaletown, and every part of the building that can be sold off or rented out has been converted and parceled out. The parking lot is now a condo called TV Towers. The library was just the latest casualty. One day soon, I suspect, as programming continues to get cut and become centralized in Toronto, the entire building will be gone.

But where the parking lot was not missed – nor the plaza that became a sandwich shop, nor the cafeteria replaced by private offices – the library was the unofficial heart of the radio operation. Now that it's gone, I can finally put the CBC behind me. While I would go back if I had a chance, I no longer feel any calling or attachment to the place.

After all the transformations made to the building and the culture of CBC Vancouver, the loss of the record library is the last straw that renders the place unrecognizable to me.

The pen and where the buck stops

Every journalist knows to do a bit of research before heading out on the beat and covering a story. My shortcoming as a magazine writer was not doing my research on the industry I was getting into before delving into it. I knew well enough that it was advertisers who paid the piper, but I was naïve about the little bones that publishers would throw to their patrons.

Depending on the magazine and its own ethics, some of those bones would be small and insignificant (say, a product mention in the tech pages), or they could be quite large and meaty (a two-page article extolling the quality service at a dental clinic in exchange for a free emergency root-canal, which actually happened at one place I worked). I was aware that many magazines operated this way. Where I was oblivious was in thinking that there were many other publications that didn't scratch the backs of its advertisers in one way or another.

Much of this back-scratching happens in those "About Town"-type of items you see in the front of publications – 100-word blurbs about celebrity sightings or interesting factoids that don't warrant a full-blown story. This is where even the most ethical of magazines usually spit their loads after servicing their paymasters. For instance, that photo of J.K. Rowling at a book fair sponsored by Borders isn't really a celebrity sighting, but a little sucking up to the book chain, which is a "preferred advertiser".

I was fortunate enough to do my internship at that's Shanghai magazine, which, at the time, kept a firm line between advertisers and content. But even they had their "about town" pages, and one of my first assignments was to head into the city for a cocktails event one night.

This is what I filed:

City Scene

Caran d’Ache product launch party

146 Words

When the invitation for the Caran d'Ache product launch at the Shanghai Concert Hall landed on our desk, we were intrigued. If we hadn't known that Caran was the Swiss producer of absurdly expensive pens for those who wouldn't be caught dead with a Bic, we might have assumed they were watchsmiths. It was that vague.

We showed up for the mystery event promptly at 7:30 and were treated to an empty, flood-lit runway for 50 minutes. We passed the time wondering, how do you launch a pen on a runway? Finally, three sumptuous models took the stage to play air-violins to loungy classical chill-out tunes.

After their little dance-and-dash, we were again left with an empty runway and cocktails. Ten minutes passed before our curiosity was snuffed and we decided it was time to go. Life’s too short, and after all, it's just a pen.

Needless to say, my snide little masterpiece was not printed. It's worth noting, though, that it passed in silence and I continued to get assignments. I would have been fired had I filed that kind of piece with the Singapore magazine I worked for the following year. Although I had wised up somewhat, I found my non-consumerist mindset to be my Achilles heel in the magazine business. When I edited my company's annual Travel Guide in Singapore, I was tickled that the weak economy prevented the sales team from lining up enough advertisers to turn a profit for the publication. With hardly any ads, I got to stuff the glossy journal full of articles and photos with wanton abandon, and there were no PR hacks on my case to cut the Cambodia article in half so they could paste in an ad for diet pills. It was a dream come true – Conde Nast meets Foreign Affairs.

I sense now that my overall nonchalance toward the people who made my paycheque possible is what spoiled my relationship with that publisher, who ran the company's magazines like advertising catalogues. It was not my job to sell ad space, of course, but my indifference must have been palpable. The previous year, I had written an article about Singapore's cycling culture and quoted a bike-shop manager as part of my research. During that issue's post mortem, the editor questioned why I was giving free publicity to a non-advertiser. Perhaps if I had said, "Sorry, next time I'll check with sales first," that would have smoothed things over. What I did say – "I was just trying to write a good article" (with a shrug of the shoulders and face that probably combined puzzlement with disgust) – set me up for harsher consequences when my naïveté stirred trouble.

My aversion to advertising probably stems from spending my formative working-years at CBC Radio from age 21 to 29. When media is unmolested by the agenda of advertising dollars, its power to bring communities together and stimulate meaningful dialogue is unparalleled. Once you're a part of it, you never forget it. So when I had the chance to shape the content of my own magazines, my only goal was to make them as stimulating and interesting as possible. By the time I was working in Singapore, my ethic was so embedded that I had blinders on. Not only was this my first time working in private media, but also a first for me to be in non-union environments. Combined with the lack of labour laws and the different ways of doing things in a new land, these were more significant elements of culture shock than dealing with day-to-day minutiae in a foreign country.

Back to that's Shanghai. After my little disaster with the pen company, the section editor sent me on another City Scene mission, this time for a TV network. She gave me some gentle counsel: "Be nice to these people. They’re connected with the government."

The event was in a little tea-house, where a table setting had a card with my name on it … and a delicate red envelope containing three 100-yuan bills. Perhaps I’m the type of person who needs things spelled out for me, because, reminiscing on this particular instance, the little bribe made this bit of marketing feel so effortless. I even enjoyed making up the quotes!

The butcher on Hastings

As the owner of more than one hard-to-find Beatles record, I know a good deal (or a bad one) when I come across it. But rarely do I come across a deal that's blatantly suspicious. For instance, the other day, when I found myself staring at one of the rarest LPs in the world – one I have seen stickered at $4,000 and had to travel all the way to Tokyo to see – for $34.99. Yes, the decimal was in the right place.

There it was as I strolled into Beat Street Records on Hastings Street, the legendary "butcher cover" staring at me from the front of the Beatles rack. I knew something was fishy even before I saw the price tag. First of all, anyone who owns one of these doesn't stick them for sale in a record bin. You hold onto it at home and advertise for the highest bidder. And if you're the owner of a record shop looking to show it off to customers, you keep it locked in a glass case behind the counter. And if your shop is on Crack Row (Hastings Street), around the corner from Blood Alley (real name), you don't keep it in the shop at all.

So it was no surprise when I saw the "cheap" price tag, because I had already surmised that this was a reproduction. The only question left: was it an official repro or a fake?

This was the first time I had encountered any form of the butcher cover in Canada. In Japan I saw three. Strangelove Records in the Shinjuku district had a butcher cover behind the counter. It wasn't for sale, but the clerk took it down and let me hold it. That alone was a thrill. Vinyl Records nearby had a prime specimen on the wall, going for C$4,000 (the shopkeeper wouldn't let me photograph it). The RecoFan outlet in Shibuya had one with a big rip through John Lennon's face (pictured), a sign that this was a "bad peel job", as they call it in butcher-collector circles. Some of the butcher covers had been "corrected" by Capitol records by pasting the new cover over the old one. Those who bought a paste-over inevitably would try to steam or peel it off, usually ruining the product altogether, but not to the point of making it worthless – this "peel job" in Shibuya was being offered for C$2,500.

Capitol's recall letter; click to enlarge

I should back up and tell you what makes this cover such a prize. To begin with, this wasn't even a formal Beatles record. The group had always taken great care in sequencing the songs on their British LPs, giving good value for money with 13 or 14 tracks. However, the American label that had rights to the songs on this continent – Capitol Records – would issue the LPs a few tracks short, then collect the missing songs onto compilation records, of which this was one. When Yesterday and Today was ready to hit the American marketplace in June 1966, Capitol called up the group's management to request a cover. This is what they got. The fact that Capitol even used the image was out of character, as the American label had a habit of tarting up and dumbing down the arty British covers by adding garish colours and simple-minded photos to make them more consumer-friendly. Capitol realized their "mistake" on this one and recalled the album after only a day on the marketplace. The fact that some retailers refused to stock the record helped them with the decision. Those who actually bought this one-day-only record landed themselves a rarity.

The album was re-released the following week with a new, innocuous cover, one showing the boys huddled around a steamer trunk.

Many fans theorized that the submission of the original cover was the Beatles' way of protesting Capitol's "butchering" of their records. That would have made a great story had it been true, but sadly this wasn't the case.

At Beat Street Records, I approached the gangly, middle-aged clerk at the cash desk. I don't want to knock the guy personally, but, although he fit right in with a Hastings five-and-dime, this wasn't the font-of-all-knowledge used-record-store-clerk I was familiar with. I'm used to bantering with record-shop clerks who regale me with stories about whatever piece of vinyl I approach them with. Sometimes these guys are entertaining and informative. Sometimes they're pricks. (See the film High Fidelity for some hilariously piercing portrayals.) Either way, these guys know their stuff.

Except at Beat Street.

"This is a reproduction, right?" I asked.

"Uh, yeah. That's part of the catalogue re-mastering they just did."

No, the recent catalogue re-issues comprised all the British LPs, not the American ones, and certainly not with this out-of-commission cover. So I explained the history of this particular record.

"Yeah, I can see that," he said, starting to grimace. "I never really looked at it, but yeah, it's kinda weird, right? Like, what does all that have to do with the title? Like, Yesterday and Today and slabs of meat? That's just demented, man."

I took the LP out of the sleeve for examination. Not only was it in beautiful condition, without any evidence of being pre-owned, it was on 180-gram, marble-blue vinyl – the kind of refined touches marketed specifically to collectors. So, for the moment, a seed was planted that this might be an official re-issue of some kind. Bootleggers would never go to such lengths, would they?

Despite how much I loved the record, though, I was apprehensive. I put it back in its place and left to do some online research. No official pressing for sale on Amazon. Nothing on the Beatles collectors' websites. Googling "butcher cover re-issue" and such came up with evidence of a limited re-pressing in Japan (on red or sky-blue vinyl, not the marbled light blue I saw), but this was just unofficial chatter on message boards, and others were replying that the Japan pressings were unofficial. Regardless, I figured I'd go back to Beat Street and pick it up. The mystery made it more appealing.

A different clerk this time, someone more High Fidelity and less straight-outta-rehab, but still not all that up to speed on his stock.

"What's the deal with this record?" I asked. "Who re-issued it?"

"I dunno," he shrugged. "It was in the last shipment from the distributor."

"Yeah, but is it an import? Did it come from Japan, or what?"

"I dunno. It was in the box the distributor sent."

I was taking the evasiveness as a sign that I was likely about to purchase a fake. But it's a beautiful fake. Despite the flawless sound, there is one giveaway upon playing the record that this is not a genuine article. The sound mix is in mono, as the label states. However, the manufacturers of this piece used the stereo mixes and folded them down into mono, rather than using the original mono tracks. (The backwards guitar on "I'm Only Sleeping" differs between the mono and stereo version, a noticeable tell for collectors.) An unfortunate oversight, as the mono tracks have been readily available on CD since 2009.

I'll chalk it up to kismet that I discovered this just a few blocks from Vancouver's east-side institution, Save-on-Meats – an ideal locale to find a butcher cover for only $34.99.

~~~~~~~

Here's what to those who knew best had to say about the most infamous album cover in pop-music history (quotes from Anthology, published in 2000, with a wee bit of paraphrasing):

George: An Australian photographer called Robert Whitaker came up to London. He was avant garde. He set up a photo session which I never liked at the time. I thought it was gross and stupid. Sometimes we did stupid things, thinking it was cool or hip when it was naïve and dumb, and that was one of them. It was a case of being put in a situation where one is obliged as part of a group to co-operate. Quite rightly, somebody took a look and said, "Do you think you really need this as an album cover?"

John: By then we were really beginning to hate photo sessions. It was a big ordeal and you had to look normal and you didn't feel it. Robert Whittaker was a bit of a surrealist and he brought along all these dolls and pieces of meat, so we really got into it. I don't like being locked into one game all the time, and we were supposed to be sort of angels. I wanted to show that we were aware of life, and I really was pushing for that album cover, just to break the image. It got out in America. They printed about 60,000, and then there was some kind of fuss, and they were all sent back or withdrawn. Then they stuck on that awful-looking picture of us looking deadbeat.

Paul: We'd done a few sessions with Robert Whittaker before and he knew our personalities. He knew we liked black humour and sick jokes. I don't know really what he was trying to say, but it seemed a little more original than the things the rest of the photographers were getting us to do.

Ringo: I don't know how we ended up sitting in butchers' coats with meat all over us. The sleeve was great for us because we were quite a nice bunch of boys and we thought, "Let's do something like this." What was crazy about that sleeve was that, because it was banned, they glued the new sleeve over it and everyone started steaming it off. They made it into a really heavy collector's item.

The Eno record I owned without knowing

Brian Eno changed the way I listen to music. His 1974 record Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy) was my first foray into his large body of work, and music hasn't been the same for me since. (Must be said that this introduction came in the early 1990s; someone as avant garde as Eno wasn't exactly on every teenager's Walkman when I was in high school.) 

What makes Eno such an engaging figure, and what makes his music so inventive and inimitable, is that he pays attention to the way music is changed by elements not related to the music itself. That could mean the shape of the room it was recorded in, the mood of the artist creating it, the mood of the listener, the quality of equipment the record is being played on, accidents and happenstance with the instruments being used. Even the titles and the album artwork affect our perception of the sounds inside the package. Eno is known as the pioneer of ambient music, but even in his straightforward pop compositions, there's a sense he's more interested in the sonic nuances rather than the craftsmanship. Eno once offered up a method of jerry-rigging "surround sound" before the concept was even marketed, except his technique only involved a third low-fi speaker and a bit of wire. The instructions he gave on the back of his album sleeve were simple to follow and I still use his method today.

We know how certain songs are coloured by our memories of the times and places where we first heard them. What if someone could record an album that has those discretionary emotions built into it? It's that sort of question that Eno would ask and then attempt to pursue in his music.

Here's how Interview magazine put it: "If humans were able to hear light and parse the poetry of the spectrum, then perhaps there would be no need for Brian Eno, who seems to do it effortlessly. While the rest of us are generally content to hear sound, Eno can clearly see it. How else to explain the elaborate sonic color fields and glowing soundscapes that he creates, which feel as much like floating shapes and waves of light as they do music?"

It's not that I was never aware of these qualities in music, but now I was thinking about them in more active ways. Getting acquainted with Eno gave me a deeper appreciation for other artists who pursued music with a similar ethic – The Beatles, for instance, when John Lennon asked his engineers to make him sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a Himalayan mountaintop in "Tomorrow Never Knows", or Brian Wilson trying to capture the mood of lost innocence on Pet Sounds. While Eno's approach to music isn't entirely unique, he's been able to pursue his ideas further than any other pop artist by eschewing commercial expectations. (As inventive as The Beatles were, for instance, they still had to churn out singles for radio airplay and abide by contractual obligations.) You listen to Eno's body of work over the past 40 years and it's hard to find anyone comparable who's created such a wide-ranging catalogue of music that is exhilarating in its invention, both cerebral and unpretentious, all of it having miraculously found its audience with no mainstream radio airplay.

And I heap that praise without really liking most of his work. The albums I do enjoy are just that much more special, because I approach them with no expectations, ready to be grabbed (or sedated) in unlikely ways. The albums of his I don't particularly care for are regardless full of wonderful ideas that are likely to be inspirational to someone else with a different perspective.

I vaguely recalled that Eno pulled the name Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy) from the English translation of a famous Chinese opera, which brings me to the ostensible point of this post. Having held this and other Eno albums in high regard, it was hard not to smile when I serendipitously discovered that I have actually had the original Chinese opera in my collection for the past six years – and I had, in fact, written about it on my blog a few weeks ago, completely unaware of the connection. A friend, with my previous blog post fresh in his mind, sent me a link to a record-collector website where he had been browsing for Eno rarities. My pal stumbled upon an LP that looked a lot like one from the collection of Chinese revolutionary operas I picked up in a Shanghai antiques market.

While the covers were distinctly different, the painted figures on both were alike, with their capes and pistols and feisty poses. The title, though, took me aback:Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy: Modern Revolutionary Peking Opera. Looking carefully at the Chinese writing on both this cover and my own, it looked like I had a match. I just had to figure out if the writing was indeed the title, and not something generic found on all Chinese records at the time, such as, "Another fine platter of clanging and caterwauling presented to you from Chairman Mao's personal collection," or "Stereo, also playable mono."

A bit of crowdsourcing on Facebook confirmed it. A couple of the translations offered up by friends were Taking Tiger Mountain by Wisdom and Taking Mighty Tiger Mountain by Wit.

Realizing that I now had both Tiger Mountain records, I pondered that aspect of Eno that makes him and his work so admirable – his authenticity. His own experiences and dreamlike perception of the world are at the heart of all his music, and I like to imagine that his own story of coming across this title might be as memorable as my own. 

One video, two songs: "Under" (1993), "Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy)" (1974):

China at 33⅓ revolutions per minute

It was while browsing the antiques market in Shanghai that I found a new way to marvel at the invention of the vinyl record.

LPs have captivated me since infancy. I was making futile attempts at playing records before I could walk, throwing Beatles 45s like Frisbees into the console player, and of course forever ruining them. When I became successful at crawling up on a chair to watch the turntable spin, I'd stare enraptured at the needle as it gradually made its way across the spinning black plastic. I noticed the shiny bits of the vinyl where the music would go quiet, and the blacker patches where one could expect a song to explode into cacophony. I could tell so much about the tracks by looking at a record album in my hands. That song is short and loud. That fat one that goes dark at the end must be Hey Jude.

To this day I admire how simple but mysterious a record is – how there are rich, human voices and glorious sounds buried into the near-invisible grooves on a plastic disc. Even when the speakers are off, spin the record with your finger and put your ear up to the needle just to hear the clanging guitars and miniature people shouting "She loves you, yeah yeah yeah" from the flimsy surface. It's physics doing its thing before your eyes and ears. Try getting an iPod to do that with a dead battery.

It wasn't until I found myself staring at a wind-up gramophone in Shanghai's Dong Tai Lu street market that I saw this simple contraption as something more profound. Here is an invention from the 1880s, a time we'd think of as a technologically primeval era. Electricity and the lightbulb were perhaps the major innovations of the time. And here I was looking into the horn of this beautiful gramophone and imagining the era in which it might have been constructed. Virtually none of the technology we have today was around at that time, and yet the sounds of entire orchestras could be captured and reproduced.

This must have been a more surprising achievement than some of history's greatest breakthroughs. Manned flight, which came about 15 to 20 years after the gramophone – that was predicable. The principles of aerodynamics had been obvious since da Vinci dreamed up the helicopter 500 years ago. But recorded sound – who would have guessed that its future would lie within microscopic bumps embedded in wax? If sound recordings hadn't been possible by the time computing technology had been developed, surely people would have been able to foresee a time when digital information would be able to reproduce sound. But these wax cylinders, and later shellac and vinyl LPs, came decades before we envisioned computers. And for that, I find the invention of the phonograph to be one of the most offbeat and unpredictable of any modern advancement that we enjoy today.

Calling Dong Tai Lu (or Dongtai Street) an "antiques" market is a bit of a stretch. It's filled with Mao kitsch, trinkets, and all sorts of musty memorabilia. There are antiques to be found, for sure, but even then you have to beware of the plethora of counterfeits. For me and my friend David, Dong Tai Lu was one of those curious things we had to see, but without any intention of buying anything.

Until I saw the records.

As anyone who knows me is aware, I love records. I'm not the world's most avid collector, but I do enjoy coming home with some rare and novel vinyl pressings from wherever I visit. I didn't expect to find any extraordinary Beatles LPs, as you might in Japan or Europe. Given how closed off China was during the most interesting parts of the 20th-century (not to mention that pop music was just plain illegal in the Communist bloc), there was no chance of stumbling across an obscure pressing of A Hard Day's Night on some defunct Beijing record label.

But I was dumbstruck by what I found in the cramped little shack beside the stall with the gramophone. Here the old vendor had piles of 10-inch records containing operas from the Cultural Revolution. It wasn't the music I was after. It was the covers that were astonishing – vivid and dramatic paintings of revolutionaries and army soldiers striking heroic, inspiring poses. When it comes to collectible vinyl, here were items I would not find at my local used record store in Vancouver – or anywhere else in the world, for that matter.

What makes an antique precious is how much it tells us about ourselves and our own time outside of the object's own history. Any collector of old things will not just be able to regale you with tales of where his collectables came from and their worth, but what his own relationship is to the antiques. Yes, these old records contained a story about China in the 1960s. The unexpected story that struck me, though, looking at the propaganda records and the gramophone outside, was how important and universal this technology was in shaping the world on both sides of the Red Curtain.

In the Western hemisphere during the 1960s, you had the vinyl LP emerging into an art form. No longer just a medium for distributing frivolous pop songs, comedy sketches and radio shows, The Beatles (along with the folk singers who preceded them, and Bob Dylan as their contemporary) legitimized pop music as a way to express complex, personal ideas, sequencing songs on each album to fit themes and moods. Not to credit The Beatles and Dylan for everything, but together they created an environment that made it safe and commercially viable for other musicians, singers and rock bands to take stands that were both personal and political, and to influence the way an audience  thinks. The Summer of Love and a revolution of sorts were in the air.

While The Beatles were singing a song called "Revolution" in 1968, Mao's Cultural Revolution was happening in the Eastern hemisphere. At that time in history, nothing of significance about China was really known to us in the West, and it was obvious that however fast our own society was changing through the sixties, nothing about our culture really was known or shared with the Chinese, either.

Seeing these records in the Dong Tai Lu market, however, suddenly made one thing obvious to me – we may not have shared the same music, but the same technology played a vital part in how our societies were shaped. We all listened to records. The vinyl LP was essential in disseminating the propaganda of hippies and the avant garde on one side of the world, and the propaganda of the political elite on the other side. We all had our lives influenced by records.

Ruminating on all this while flipping through the loot outside the merchant's shack, then going inside and displacing stacks of 10-inch vinyl around the cramped shop and stirring up decades-old dust and mould, I picked out a few specimens to purchase. This is where things got a bit sticky.

The stall owner, a spry old man whose deep wrinkles were like the history of China etched into his face, pulled out his calculator to type in the price (easier than speaking English). Five records, 500 yuan (C$80).

Every guidebook I had picked up, every "old China hand" that I spoke with, even the helpful Projects Abroad staff who helped with the logistics of my Shanghai work assignment, all of them had one essential piece of advice for shopping on Dong Tai Lu – Bargain! Do not pay the first full asking price of any item offered in the market. Haggle, pretend to be disinterested if you must, but never, ever pay the hyper-inflated asking price of any of the merchants. We were guaranteed by all sources that we could haggle down as much at 75 percent.

So I grimaced, hummed and hawed, and put the records down. I took his calculator and presented a counter offer. 300, I typed in. I thought I was being generous, considering all I'd heard. I expected the shopkeeper to say 400 yuan, and that would be that. But no. He typed back 500. " Tài guì le!" I cried ("Too expensive!") and walked away. I was anticipating the old man calling me back to negotiate. But I kept walking. And walking.

Could I not afford $80 for this extraordinary find? At this point it wasn't a matter of what I could or couldn't afford. All things considered, 500 yuan was well worth it. But if everyone from Lonely Planet to the crazy auntie at the pirate DVD table outside the supermarket were screaming for me to BARGAIN! in Dong Tai Lu, well, how am I supposed to feel when the old man in the metal shack with all the old records won't play ball? Despite their value to me, I was starting to imagine that this collection of old Cultural Revolution operas – from a painful time in history that most Chinese would rather forget – was the Shanghai equivalent of a flea-market stall full of scratchy Captain & Tennille records. Seriously, $80 for five Captain & Tennille albums?

Having spent the afternoon in the market, David and I were ready to leave. But I wanted to back-track. I tell David I'm making one more pass at the records. The old shopkeeper is sitting outside. I walk by slowly, hoping he call me over to make a sale. We make eye contact. I nod. He smiles and nods back, arms crossed. I'm desperate and I want to make a fresh start and just hand him five 100 RMB bills, but I'm too ashamed to lose face.

Some days later, I realized my folly and found my way back to the market on a rainy night after work. In the darkness and pelting showers, I found the shop. I flipped through the stacks and picked out five records. Some were the same ones I selected before, others I didn't recognize, but I liked them all. "Duōshǎo qián?" ("How much?") I asked. If he wasn't going to haggle before, he had no reason to negotiate now – I'm the one who returned. 500, he typed on the calculator. I swallowed my pride and considered writing a letter of complaint to Lonely Planet.

On my way out, happily carrying my new purchases in a plastic bag, a merchant across the way noticed my interest in the old records and called me over to look at some of his own. I hadn’t noticed this stall before. Now, it might make a funny ending to the story to tell you that he had a much better selection that he was willing to part with for pennies. But in fact this guy didn't even have the facility of a metal shack like his competitor. This collection was in a box under a table, covered poorly by paper bags, half exposed to the rain and soaking. They were ruined. I shook my head and walked away.

The only other question I thought about when considering the purchase was: Are these records real or counterfeit? Considering how much it would cost to press a vinyl record and re-print its cover, and then fake years of wear and tear, it would likely be more profitable to find and sell the real items, which I'm sure circulated in abundance.

Back in Canada with my loot, the first order of business was putting one of these platters on the turntable. The noise from the scratches and decades of grit that accumulated in the grooves was the real music to my ears. Sure, the crunchy sound prevented unadulterated enjoyment of the shrieks and clangs of opera as only military propagandists can write, but that's what made these records authentic. The music tells one story, but the surface noise tells the tales of the generations of families who mishandled these records. Maybe one of them was a little boy who tried throwing them onto the spindle of his father's gramophone.

Chinese characters and the link between language and culture

Written in 2011, while I was studying Mandarin Chinese in Taipei:

Learning to write Chinese was not my priority when I came to study in Taipei. My purpose in learning the language (or what little of it I could absorb in three months) was to converse; to speak some Chinese and develop some listening comprehension. The intricate characters themselves just seemed too dense and problematic to put any real effort into. I thought this aspect of the course, learning to read and write the characters, would have to be tolerated but would provide no joy.

Somewhere along the way, perhaps in the first week of my course, I felt my interest shift. Writing Chinese characters, which I first thought would just be a pain in the ass, has been an enriching and emotional experience. Not to say that learning speaking and listening skills hasn't been meaningful. But, despite how much time is required to memorize the characters, I've found a certain meditative peace in reading and writing, whereas the other aspects have provided as much frustration as reward.

Much has been written about the connection between language and culture, and certainly the best way to understand that connection intimately is to learn a language that uses a character-based system. Compared with the grace of Chinese writing, the alphabet used in English and other Western societies feels downright clinical.

Learning to write Chinese characters (I know about 300 now) has infused me with certain cultural predispositions in ways I couldn't have predicted. Specifically, having learned Traditional characters has now created a bias within me against Simplified characters. But there is no way to develop an affinity with either Traditional or Simplified without also forming attachments to the cultures in which they're used. Consider this: the Simplified system was developed primarily (though not completely) by the Communist regime of mainland China to improve literacy rates. The Taiwanese have proudly held on to Traditional characters as much for cultural as political reasons.

Those who are from mainland China would counter that Chinese characters have been evolving through different forms for thousands of years, and that Traditional writing is simply an arcane system that is impractical in the modern world. Considering that those who use each system are from specific geographic areas with their own political sovereignty, for me to express my own preference for Traditional script is bound to imply that I also carry certain political or cultural biases.

And it's somewhat true. As I think about continuing my Chinese studies in Vancouver, the one aspect I dread is that I will have to re-learn my characters in the Simplified format. The thought of abandoning the style of characters that I've been steeped in is offensive. The culture that has passed this knowledge to me has done so with a certain pride and appreciation. For me to abandon Traditional characters for Simplified would feel like a betrayal of sorts, not just to the culture that taught me, but toward my own attachment to the characters, whose strokes have left indelible impressions on my psyche.

These 300 characters that I know are 300 little pieces of Taiwan that are in my heart. But as the personal is also political, certain other biases start to creep in. I write the character for "Love", for instance, knowing that each part is related to love – the top represents "accept" while the middle is a "heart" and beneath it "perceive". However, the heart is omitted from the Simplified form. Leave it to the Communists to have no heart! And there I go, letting my love for the writing transfer some of its cultural and political biases. It's one thing to just prefer one script over another, but try to defend Simplified to a Taiwanese, or Traditional to an average mainlander, you will be in for an exchange of heated words rooted in homeland pride.

It's obvious that I have my preference. If I had learned Simplified first, I'm sure I'd be loyal to that system and would feel relieved that I didn't have to go through the hassle of learning the more complicated, repetitive-strain-inducing Traditional characters. But it didn't happen that way. Every traditional character I write is now infused with a fragment of a memory – of sitting in the NTNU library for hours scribbling in my notebook as I prepared for dictation tests, of my teacher, of my classmates, of overcoming my struggles, of the friends and people who helped me study, of practicing my Chinese with Tzuching's family, of my daily life in Taiwan. Each character is like a Rorschach inkblot, conveying its own personality and significance.

Anyone can make a good argument that Simplified characters are more logical, easier to write, and that the Traditional system is full of redundancies. But if the moment comes that I have to write 喜歡 as 喜欢, or 電視 as 电视 , it will not be a relief but a sense of loss.

If I feel that way after only three brief months of study, it gives me a flicker of understanding about how deeply, significantly personal these writing styles are within the people who were born into them.

Both the Traditional and Simplified systems have interesting arguments for and against their usage. For a better understanding, read here: Wikipedia: Debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters

How Singapore helped me love Joni Mitchell (more than I already did)

One of the sweetest memories from my earliest days in Singapore involved finding a connection to my Canadian heritage in the room where I first stayed.

Having landed in Singapore on a friend’s invitation, I arrived at the family estate and was shown my way to the room of my host’s brother. The absent family member, working abroad, left behind enough personal effects to give my lodging a refined sense of home. This was no mere guest room.

The ledge that lined up alongside the bed held books, family portraits and personal photos; the shelf above the desk stacked with cassettes and CDs and musty issues of Vogue going back through the 1980s, all of which imbued a bit of the personality of the missing tenant. To this day, he’s the only member of the family I haven’t met, but I’m grateful to him for the room and the chi he left behind. For my first taste of a new country, feeling the surroundings in a local home was impressionable.

This was my first afternoon in Singapore, fresh off an 18-hour journey and a taxi from the airport. I’d barely unpacked when I found a copy of Joni Mitchell’s Hejira among the compact discs. Nothing should have been surprising about it, but it did seem out of place to the child in me – the child who grew up in the frozen Toronto winters, hearing Joni’s tunes drift out of my sister’s room on a winter’s afternoon, thinking of the singer as a distinct personification of Canada.

The Canada of my youth, from my perspective in suburban Toronto, was still just an idea – the loneliness of the prairies, the mountain towns of the Rockies, skating on a river at Christmastime, tapping a maple tree in a snowy forest. For most Canadians, those of us who lived in cities rather than the towns and villages of our folklore, it was a country more evoked than seen. It was our artists more than our experiences that gave us our sense of place: the Group of Seven painters, authors like Margaret Atwood and Mordecai Richler, CBC nature documentaries, the poetry of Pauline Johnson… and our singers, foremost among them Joni Mitchell.

Now, to imagine the Peranakan descendants of Chinese emigrants having their imaginations touched by the same soundtrack to my own snow-covered Canadian childhood, it was all so contrary.

I slipped the CD into the multi-disc player and listened to Hejira for the first time. Blue, Court and Spark, The Hissing of Summer Lawns; those albums I knew. This one, though, was not one of the Joni Mitchell records in my sister’s collection all those years ago. Hearing it for the first time so far from the landscape it depicted – the coyotes and motel rooms and seedy jazz bars and the long lonely roads stretching across a frozen prairie – it was as all so incongruous with the heavy tropical air and the cicadas whistling outside the window.

Hejira provided a pleasant solace during the vacation, in those quiet moments between making plans and doing them. What was special was how the album brought back memories as if it had always been part of the backdrop to my own childhood, as if it had been something heard a hundred times before. It became a little slice of home to comfort me throughout the day. Yet, despite how unmistakably Canadian this music is, it eventually impressed upon my memory the humid, languid days among the colonial shophouses and tropical greenery of Singapore. 

Today it wells up a melange of emotions and memories from both my Canadian childhood and my Singaporean adventures. As someone who is often guided (and misguided) by emotion, the sound of mid-1970s Joni Mitchell records now cross the wires of reminiscence, calling me to return "home" to a Singaporean childhood that exists in a false memory, a time of my life that I can sense, even though it never existed.

I will always treasure the way Hejira conjures impressions of the endless cycle of hot days and warm nights that were unconstrained by seasons; the palm trees and the pool outside the window; the sound of Joni singing about the Bay of Fundy and the “refuge of the roads”, with her voice echoing through the large but modestly furnished room, surrounded by foreign books and faded photos of the Peranakan relatives.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized that Hejira has almost no percussion. Its beauty and passion emerges simply from layered, jazzy guitars and a melodic bass. What a peculiar soundtrack to a Southeast Asian holiday. But then, maybe certain lyrics called out to me, foreshadowing the life that this impressionistic vacation would inspire me to follow:

The drone of flying engines is a song so wild and blue

It scrambles time and seasons if it gets through to you.

Then your life becomes a travelogue of picture-postcard charms…

People will tell you where they’ve gone, they’ll tell you where to go

But until you get there yourself you’ll never really know.