Leaving Vancouver

This is a personal post I addressed to my friends via Facebook. It might not be of much interest to the general public, but I shall leave it here as a bit of biographical info.

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In my three years since having returned here, I’ve heard that endless complaint – “Vancouver people are so unfriendly!”

I never understood that particular whinge. Meeting friendly, generous, welcoming folks here has not been my problem. Sure, I’ve met my share of difficult personalities, but what place doesn’t have those? And just because we don’t “fit” with certain people doesn’t mean they aren’t friendly. Does everyone have to roll out the red carpet for each other?

I have lived in other cities around the world, and I can attest that it’s hard to find any metropolis where the population appears to be generally happy and affable. My philosophy has been: If you can find five or ten friends wherever you go, you’re set. You don’t need to be on supreme speaking terms with everyone you pass on the street.

But that brings me to my particular problem with Vancouver people, and it’s a good problem to have – I have too many friends. Make ten friends, you meet their friends, get close to one or two of those, then meet their friends, and on it goes exponentially. I had lots of good mates here before I left in 2007, and without trying very hard since my return in 2011, the number has grown considerably.

I think that’s how it’s been for most of my friends and acquaintances. Since there’s a limited number of people we have time to be close with, there are multiples more who we only see at parties and social events – acquaintances we know we could be best chums with, but it’s not feasible. Even so, for all of the “party pals” I know-but-don’t-know-well, I have this to say: You’re all a part of my community, and seeing you around has strengthened my sense of belonging.

And this is why it’s been so hard to leave Vancouver again. Many of you have heard me say, “If I don’t have a job by the end of the year, I’m heading back to Asia.” I said it in 2012, I said it in 2013, and again in 2014. If I were a careerist or more ambitious, it would have made sense to flee long ago. But what kept me here?

My friends.

The kindness and generosity of the people in my life have been my anchor. But the moment has come where it’s no longer practical to stay. Finances are one issue. I’m far from broke, but broke is what I’d like to avoid, so I’m using what cushion remains to resettle in a place where jobs are easier to come by. My state of mind is another issue. The avalanche of rejection from employers has battered my self-esteem to the point where it hurts to keep looking, and it hurts more to keep talking about it. A negative feedback loop develops – the less that goes right in my life, the less I have to share with my friends, and simple questions of concern like “How’s the job search” only open up a litany of complaints. The empathy and caring I’ve received in hard times has been heartening, but I also don’t want the need for sympathy to define who I am and become a permanent element in my friendships.

I don’t want to dwell on my difficulties finding work. It’s something no one can really understand unless one is currently in the same boat. Anyone who hasn’t had to look for a job in the past 10 or 15 years has no idea how Kafkaesque the job market has become. The last time I had to look for full-time work in Vancouver was 1999, and it was a buffet of decent jobs ready for the taking. Today, it’s not just the economy that’s reduced the options, but the attitudes of employers who are engaging in unethical (and sometimes illegal) tactics. There are other factors, too, but I don’t want to dwell on them – my observations on the job market are another subject altogether. The bottom line is, it’s time to move on.

I’ve had some promising leads from companies in Asia. When I enquire with employers in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, I get responses – something I don’t get in my home city. The advice is always along the lines of, “We always have openings. If you’re here, we’d be happy to consider you.” A logistics company in Singapore actually gave me a 30-minute phone interview in preparation for their next hiring intake. What’s clear is that if I’m located in a specific place, the offers are more likely to come.

My plan is to head to Singapore in early February. I will do the job-hunting circuit that I became familiar with on my previous ventures in that city. If a job doesn’t pan out in Singapore, I’ll backpack my way through other parts of Asia in search of sustenance.

Until then, I will be honest – getting ready to leave Vancouver is not making me happy. My previous escapade in Asia was meant to be an odyssey to build up life experience and new vocational skills, not a permanent relocation. Returning to Vancouver to settle for life was part of my plan. But now it turns out that living abroad might have to become a permanent part of my life.

View from room 2502, Denman Inn, 1975

This city is a place I feel undyingly attached to. When I was a child growing up in Toronto, my family made two visits here, both of which became etched in my soul. It was like a playground. The gondola up Grouse mountain, the hotel by the beach, feeding ducks in Stanley Park... I find it no coincidence that I ended up living west of Denman, within the view of room 2502 of the Denman Inn (now the Coast Plaza). The photo I took from the balcony in 1975 shows two of the buildings I’ve since lived in, the building where my dad lived for 20 years, and the park where his ashes are scattered. This is not some dead town I have been waiting to escape from. It’s a place I have cherished and felt rooted in for most of my life.

After those childhood vacations, I begged my parents to move the family here, little knowing that this was their plan. After we arrived, I never took it for granted. I lived in a house at the foot of Grouse Mountain, and my brother would take me hiking up the various trails leading from our back yard (years before the Grouse Grind had been developed). I walked to school through a trail in the woods. Deer, raccoons, and sometimes bears would wander through our gardens. Hang-gliders would soar over our roof, and I would zip down to Prospect Park on my 10-speed to watch them land. It was a dream life far removed from the flat, cookie-cutter streets of Scarborough.

Living in other countries, other cities, was something I longed to do for my own personal experience. I learned more about the world and myself than I would have through any formal education. It’s something I don’t regret. But if I had known that I couldn’t have returned home, I’m not sure I would have decided so lightly to leave when things got rough. The “fuck-it-I-can-always-go-home” attitude was miscalculated arrogance.

Despite how torturous the last three years have been for me, the time here has only bonded me stronger to this place, because I didn’t take any good moment for granted – I knew how quickly it might slip away one day.

A quick rundown of some of the things that have made me grateful to be back in Vancouver:

• Anthony & Donny’s wedding on Vancouver Island. A memorable sojourn in a location a bit out of the ordinary, giving so many of us a chance to connect on a little weekend holiday outside the city. It meant a lot to be included and share the milestone with you guys.

• Camping in Pemberton with a few old friends and many new ones on that first summer back.

• Houseboating for the first time, with friends new and old, seeing parts of BC’s lake country that I’ve never had the privilege to see before.

• Re-joining VGVA volleyball and discovering “Absolutely Badminton”, both at King George Secondary, not to mention all those post-game coffee chats at Blenz.

• Marching in my first (and second) Pride Parade with the volleyball crew at VGVA.

• Getting called back to work at CBC Radio. Unfortunately, the job was dismantling and archiving the beloved record library. Although it was tragic to see the heart of the local radio operation ripped out, I was grateful for the chance to return to my first workplace and reconnect with so many wonderful co-workers from my past.

• Learning to play mahjong with Daniel and his buddies. All those years in Taiwan, China and Singapore, yet I have to come back here to learn the joy of yelling “peng!”

• Summer hangouts with Jacyntha, a Canadian I met in Singapore. Our long conversations during your holidays back home were heartening as always. Those long chats on Ann Siang Hill just joyously flowed on over to the West End!

• All of the Thanksgiving dinners, Christmas meals, New Years parties, birthdays – I was included in so much, and will never forget.

• Finally, getting reacquainted with Wilfred. A chance meeting on a club patio in Singapore continued when we met again on a friend’s patio five years later here in Vancouver. How was I to know, when we were casually acquainted for an evening those years ago, that I would be attending your wedding and then your funeral in my home city. Your calm, sanguine spirit will live in a part of me forever. Your husband and the friends who flowed in from Singapore (and elsewhere) to say goodbye have reconnected me full circle back to that part of the world.

There are many wonderful places on this planet, and I will be perfectly fine wherever I land. But wherever I happen to settle, I will hold Vancouver and my friends here close in my heart.

Interstellar vs. 2001

“I’m not going to say 2001 is a great film just because you explained it to me. If it has to be explained – if the plot is some mystery that only certain people are allowed to get because they read some article about it – it’s simply not a good movie.”

That was the sentiment one friend expressed when debating the merits of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s a film that baffled audiences when it was released in 1968, and to this day it’s often dissed as some kind of esoteric, elitist “art film” that doesn’t make a lot of sense.

For those people, there’s a remake of 2001 that explains the whole plot. It’s called Interstellar. And it provides a good argument in favour of 2001’s lack of obvious narrative. I loved Interstellar, but it also reminded me that sometimes a director is wise to leave some things to an audience’s imagination.

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2001's monolith orbiting
Jupiter, and Interstellar's
wormhole near Saturn

'm being cheeky calling Interstellar a remake, but the parallels are obvious. An alien intelligence of mysterious origin places a “calling card” of sorts near a planet in the outer reaches of the solar system. In 2001 it was the monolith orbiting Jupiter; in Interstellar it’s a wormhole plonked near Saturn. A crew is dispatched by a secretive government to investigate. By the end of each film, a lone astronaut has been hauled into a special-effects laden “alternate dimension” which eventually leads him back home to save a doomed Earth from man-made catastrophe. In 2001, the astronaut was reborn in spirit form as the “star child” to avert a nuclear war (the nuclear bit explained only in the Arthur C. Clarke novel, written in tandem with the director’s screenplay). In Interstellar, it’s a whole other mind-bending phantasma that saves mankind from drought and plague. Both films are an ambitious blending of science-reality and imagination.

2001's orbiting space station

Director Stanley Kubrick intended 2001: A Space Odyssey to be cinema’s first serious science fiction film. Prior to 2001, all depictions of aliens and outer space were only found in cheesy B-movies – laughable exercises in bad taste with titles such as The Man From Planet X or The Brain from Planet Arous (and let’s not forget Plan 9 From Outer Space, the first movie to gain a “so-bad-it’s-good” following). 2001 was the first film to show an audience a faithful portrayal of moon landings and what it would be like to orbit the earth in space stations. Moonwalkers from the original Apollo missions to today’s “rock star” astronaut Chris Hadfield have called it the most realistic space sci-fi ever made. What’s most remarkable is that production of the film was completed before man ever stepped foot on the moon – which meant that 2001’s shot of the Earth from the moon’s surface was seen in theatres only a few months before the real thing was viewed and captured by humans. Both the film and the astronauts’ photos looked nearly the same.


At Clavius moon base in 2001

Kubrick didn’t intend for 2001 to be such a vague and ambiguous film. He and pioneering sci-fi novelist Arthur C. Clarke started off with a more literal story. Their collaboration was intended to result in Kubrick's film and Clarke's novel being released as complementary projects. But Kubrick altered the film significantly during production when certain elements didn’t translate well from page to screen. The original script for 2001 had narration to guide the audience through the action, but this was dropped when Kubrick found the voiceover trite and distracting. The film worked much better, he thought, left in the abstract. Those who love the film would agree.

So now we have Interstellar, which gives us an indication of what 2001 would have been like with every detail explained along the way. And, to be honest, I found myself thinking “huh?!” just as many times as I did the first time I saw 2001. Despite the near-three-hour running time, Interstellar is packed with enough ideas to fill another hour’s worth of movie. Which is funny, because 2001 has a nearly identical run time, but where plot exposition could have been crammed in, we got lengthy, introspective sequences devoid of dialogue (40 minutes of speech in the entire film) – and the experience is far richer for it.

And I’m not dumping on Interstellar at all. It’s a wondrous piece of cinema full of bold ideas and imagery like I’ve never seen in any film before. By its end, I felt completely displaced – mostly awed, partly disturbed – in a way the original audience of 2001 might have been in 1968. In that regard, writer-director Christopher Nolan achieved the ultimate success a director could hope for.

Interstellar’s strengths transcend its flaws. But those flaws are nonetheless distractions. One is its editing; I had trouble at times figuring who was doing what and why. And then there’s the attempt to cram too much explanation into the dialogue. I appreciated that Nolan wanted us to identify with what we were watching. Some of the exposition enhanced the fun of the movie – for instance, the descriptions of why a wormhole would appear as a three-dimensional sphere, or the various ways in which time moves slower when travelling around different types of phenomena in space. But there were many other details thrown at us with such haste that they only created further questions and gaps in logic. Which made me wonder why this approach would have made 2001 a better film. If we still don’t entirely get what we’re watching, then why not just let us revel in the mystery?

From the stargate sequence in 2001

This especially goes for the ending (which I can’t give away, because it’s byzantine and nonsensical). Let me say that the finale of Interstellar was one of the most rapturous, illusory, and enthralling  moments I’ve seen in a cinema. The final act of 2001 had a similar mind-blowing final reel. Nolan’s great achievement is in creating a spectacular view into new dimensions that rivals what Kubrick gave us in 2001’s “stargate” sequence – considered the foundation of special effects in the decades before CGI came about. (One of the reasons Nolan’s cinematic worlds look so inventive, whether in original works like Inception or the comic-book Batman movies, is that he shuns CGI whenever possible).

The only downfall to Nolan’s approach in Interstellar’s grandest sequence is that he employed a narrative device to explain what our astronaut was experiencing in the new dimension. Which wouldn’t have been such a bad thing had the explanation made sense. But when you’re travelling through new dimensions, how can any rationalization be comprehensible? In that regard, Kubrick did the right thing just letting us experience it. In both films we leave the theatre scratching our heads, but Nolan's attempt to translate the action felt silly at best, insulting at worst. Insulting, how? With Interstellar, we feel stupid for not getting all the science thrown at us. With 2001, we can blame the director, if we feel so inclined.

There were many other moments throughout the film where the details and descriptions took me out of the moment. I don’t have the benefit of being able to re-view the film and quote dialogue for specific examples, but, in general, I found that characters were verbalizing particulars and procedures that would have, in reality, been discussed and drilled into their heads during mission training or other appropriate moments. For instance – the fact that the onboard computer, TARS, was programmed with a sense of humour, or that he was programmed to be dishonest when it was warranted and wouldn’t hurt the mission; I don’t think the crew would be discovering this stuff during liftoff. It was just thrown in for the convenience of moving the story along.

Astronaut Bowman doing a little maintenance on HAL in 2001

You could say that this was artistic licence. Then again, Kubrick took artistic licence by not explaining at all that his onboard computer, HAL, sabotaged the mission because of a neurosis caused by being programmed to both be honest 100% of the time and yet lie about the mission’s purpose – a detail only available to those who read the novel. Some would say that unrealistically timed explanations in movie plots are more satisfying than drawing them out in realistic-but-lackluster scenes. It's easier to have Joe Explainer show up on the scene in the form of a detective or long-lost relative to utter, "It's a shame Bob killed his wife for the insurance money, because she had a terminal illness anyway, but he didn't know that, and now he has to spend the rest of his life in jail."

Others would say that Kubrick’s method compliments the audience’s intelligence by creating a sense of wonder and mystery. No human in 2001 understood why HAL took the actions he did, nor did anyone on-screen understand the monolith’s origin or meaning, nor did astronaut Dave Bowman comprehend his transformation in the stargate. To have the reason exposed by some contrived plot convention would have felt false.

I will be honest and admit that I didn’t like 2001 all that much on first viewing, though I was fortunate that my first experience seeing it was on the big screen during a revival in 1980. The fact that I was 12 years old probably contributed to my befuddlement (I grew up with the action and splashy effects of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind).  It wasn’t until the next year that something clicked. Channel flipping on TV, I caught the film at the beginning of the “moon” sequence and was entranced right to the end. I still didn’t entirely get it on a conscious level, but some deeper part of my mind was understanding something. I knew it was leading to that psychedelic fall through the alien stargate and into the surreal bedroom where Dave Bowman would die and be reborn. When the film finished, it was the same feeling I had at the end of Interstellar – stunned by the beauty, but wondering if I’d sleep that night.

Over the years, I came to understand 2001 by reading the novel and delving into all the articles, critiques, and books written about the film – and through countless discussions with fans and detractors, and realizing its influence on the sci-fi movies I grew up with.

The difference was this – after first viewing, I knew I’d want to see 2001 again, but Interstellar, despite its originality and splendor, doesn’t seem to demand a second go ‘round. 2001’s lack of dialogue made me fall in love with its images and ideas, whereas Interstellar’s barrage of verbosity and jam-packed plot will probably make for a tiresome exercise to sit through a second time. I want to see the film again, but I don’t want to hear it.

I’m sure many will disagree with that assessment for legitimate reasons. I know of many people who grew impatient with 2001’s pace (what I call quiet and meditative others call slow and frustrating), and I guess those folks would enjoy delving into Interstellar's dialogue a second or third time to try to grasp all the details.

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"I don't want to [give my own interpretation of the film] because I think that the power of the ending is based on the subconscious emotional reaction of the audience, which has a delayed effect. To be specific about it, certainly to be specific about what it's supposed to mean, spoils people's pleasure and denies them their own emotional reactions."

– Stanley Kubrick interviewed in Eye magazine

(Agel, The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Modern Library, pp. 248-49; date unavailable)

The monolith prepares astronaut Bowman for rebirth in 2001

Why politicians shouldn't sue each other

The headline made my heart sink: Robertson Sues LaPointe for defamation.

While living in Singapore, I made a mental note of large and small differences that set our cultures apart, for good and bad. During the infrequent times I had trouble coping, I looked forward to returning to Canada, where I was convinced certain practices just wouldn't happen. Once back home, though, I discovered that things weren't as ideal as I had thought. For instance, I was critical of Singapore's reliance on foreign workers for cheap labour, a policy that does not allow outsiders to feel any belonging to the country they are contributing to, and only makes locals feel resentful toward newcomers for undercutting their wages. I wrote a long blog post comparing the immigration policies of Canada and Singapore, highlighting how Canada recruited immigrants on much healthier terms. But alas, we have long had a "temporary foreign worker" program that I hadn’t been aware of until recent years, and it has been expanding rapidly. Now I witness a fomenting of the same resentment toward foreign workers in Canada.

Another example was Singapore's lack of democratic safeguards, which in Canada prevent ruling parties from intimidating voters or rigging the system in their own favour. And yet I came home to watch our ruling Conservative party employ disinformation campaigns to prevent opposition supporters from voting, while weakening and disparaging Elections Canada, and dismantling many of the public institutions that keep the citizenry educated and informed.

This morning I awoke to yet another reminder of how misguided I was in my criticisms of Singapore. In that city-state, the ruling party has frequently sued members of the opposition for merely expressing the banal opinions and criticisms that are standard in election campaigns in the West. A Singapore opposition leader was famously sued into bankruptcy and eventually jailed for repeated accusations of ruling-party corruption, and the country's history is rife with stories of citizens and politicians who have had their government use the courts to suppress their freedoms of speech and assembly. "That's not supposed to happen in functioning democracies," I would say to whomever tolerated my rants.

It's one of the unwritten tenets of an egalitarian system of government, and something that everyone who goes into politics learns to accept – to deal with slander in the court of public opinion. It's up to those running for public office to provide their own defence, with the electorate acting as jury and judge. Calling an innocent private citizen "corrupt" should certainly be cause for legal action, but for a politician to hide behind a lawyer and the protection of the law is bad political sportsmanship. Making rivals fearful of expressing legitimate viewpoints only stifles democracy at large.

If you think any given elected official is corrupt, you or any other citizen should have the freedom to run for office and make him or her defend that charge in the public arena.

And yet here we have our mayor, Gregor Robertson, launching legal action against his opponent, Kirk LaPointe, for calling him corrupt. It's the kind of thing I'd expect from the current crop of federal Conservatives, who seem to view democracy as a nuisance that threatens the indefinite power they believe they deserve (the number of times they have threatened to sue citizens and opponents is too rich to get into here).

The reason my heart sank at this particular headline is because these kinds of defamation suits are spreading across the political spectrum, to parties I would expect to stand up for democratic traditions. Earlier this year, the Liberal premier of Ontario, Kathleen Wynne, launched a lawsuit against the province’s opposition leader and one of his backbenchers for suggesting she may have been “possibly” involved in a scandal of her government’s making. And now we have Vancouver’s left-leaning mayor, a former New Democratic member of the province’s legislature, suing his right-leaning rival for digging up that old chestnut – “he’s corrupt!” – which has long been an old trope in election campaigns (and one to which the public pays very little heed. I recall Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien winning two of his three majority terms with the "corrupt" label being flung at him from all corners).

It’s not that LaPointe’s accusation has merit. It doesn’t. His charge stems from a secret recording leaked from a union meeting, in which Robertson’s right-hand man on council promised that the city would not expand the contracting out of jobs at city hall. After he left the room, the union decided to make a substantial donation to Robertson’s party, Vision Vancouver. On the surface, that looks shady – trading political favours for donations. But (as pointed out by the Vancouver Courier’s Allen Garr) slowing the contracting out of services has been Vision’s policy since around 2007. And unions have been legally donating to political parties that favour their agendas for as long as unions and political parties have existed. So there’s nothing corrupt about a political party sticking to its public platform, and attracting donations from organizations and individuals who support that platform.

But if LaPointe stands by his charge, then it can be thrown right back his way. One case in point is the former vice president of the Non Partisan Association, the party LaPointe now leads. Rob Macdonald donated just a few dollars shy of $1,000,000 to his party in the 2011 election, which raises the question – was his vice-presidency of the NPA contingent upon the donation? And since Macdonald himself is and was at the time working as a property developer, was that not a conflict of interest for him to be both in a leadership position and a monetary contributor to the party that could, in turn, favour his property development applications?

It certainly stinks, but it’s legal, and there is enough “corruption” on both sides to call the playing field even. But here’s the thing: it’s Gregor Roberton’s responsibility to lay out the above arguments in public debates. Vancouver’s media can easily blow the cover of bullshit off LaPointe’s hackneyed accusation of corruption. Ultimately, however, it’s Robertson’s job to do that for himself. He had the chance at a mayoralty debate on October 26, but as Globe and Mail columnist Frances Bula noted on her blog, when Robertson was confronted about the union donation, “The mayor could have come up with a number of reasonable-sounding arguments and even a counter-attack... Instead, he flopped and floundered... He didn’t even seem to know that it’s been his own party’s longstanding policy not to add to what is already contracted out. He said there was no iron-clad commitment on that.”

Robertson had plenty of time to formulate a counterattack in time for the debate, because LaPointe made the same accusation in the press and on the NPA website five days earlier. But because he lost a debate he could have easily won, Robertson is now being bitter and petulant, using a defamation lawsuit as a “re-do,” to imply, “I was totally caught off guard by that dirty, personal smear, and now I’m doing the rightful thing.” In reality, it’s his way of trying to silence the topic by legal means (expect all those involved to say, “I cannot comment on a matter now before the courts”) simply because he is unable to silence the topic with facts and intellect.

The public should be disturbed when candidates use lawsuits to hush critics and, especially, rival candidates. Certainly, there should be exceptions. Personal defamation along the lines of drug use or spousal abuse should be responded to harshly. But when debating policy and a politician’s actions in office, there needs to be a wide berth to allow for opinion and criticism. The idea accepted in most Western countries is that speech relating to the performance of government is vital to a healthy democracy. Therefore, holding politicians to the same standards of defamation as private citizens only discourages such dialogue.

In the court of public opinion, political candidates should have the skills and fortitude to be their own defence lawyers. Resorting to the courts mid-election is a sign of weakness, not leadership. But I sense that we’re just going to see more of the “sue-me-sue-you blues” in politics, simply because it’s easy and effective. I remember a time when suing political rivals would have been appalling to the electorate, and would have been a sure vote-loser. Today, it seems to be more palatable, and as long as the public doesn’t scoff at the practice, we’ll see much more of it.

Singapore’s ruling party has held on to power for almost 50 years via judicial threats and intimidation, and I witnessed how the tentacles of that operation inflicted damaging forms of suspicion and paranoia on its citizens. I understand that the few examples I outlined does not put us on par with Singapore's abuse of the judiciary, but we could one day end up being no different if we continue to reward politicians who use the courts to fight their political opponents.

The Beatles & art school

Whether you thought the Beatles were a silly rock band for kids or a group of mature, adult songwriters might have depended on which country you grew up in.

That’s because Beatles albums, especially the early ones, were packaged and marketed in wildly different manners between England and America.

The Beatles’ album sleeves (the British ones) were historic in the way they presented pop music as a legitimate art form. And I’m not even going to mention the music itself. That would be a 10,000-word post in itself; countless others have written about their music in better ways than I ever could, so I will stick with the subject at hand.

Not enough people credit the Beatles as visual artists, and for that reason it was a shame that the American label, Capitol Records, dumbed down the band’s LP sleeves.

To really understand what made the Beatles so great, you have to consider that they had their origins in art school as much as music. They weren’t rebels with guitars – they were intellects who, before they were famous, were immersed in the world of the avant garde. Stuart Sutcliffe, the band’s original bassist, bonded with John Lennon over their love of painting. Sutcliffe was an accomplished artist (a better painter than a musician, the reason he left the band), and later became engaged to photographer Astrid Kirchherr, who captured the Beatles in numerous impressionistic photos, as well as influencing their haircuts and fashions. Then there was Kirchherr’s former boyfriend, Klaus Voormann, a bohemian artist with a classical upbringing, who became ensconced within the clique. Voormann was pitching offbeat album designs to Lennon and Sutcliffe even before the band had recorded a note.

By the time the Beatles released their first album, in 1963, there had already been an established tradition in jazz music to hire painters, designers, and photographers to create album covers that were works of art in and of themselves. In pop music, though, covers were simply products of a label’s marketing department. Record sleeves were designed to grab attention with loud photos and garish typesets.

The Beatles changed that.

As the group’s entire US catalogue has just been released on CD for the first time, there’s a legitimate concern that any commemoration of the American versions of the albums only blurs the artistry of the original UK albums – the only versions that the Beatles themselves crafted and authorized. Let’s look at the differences. (Click on any cover to view them in a gallery.)

Please Please Me: The Beatles’ first LP did not boast a particularly artful cover, being new to the business and not pushing their luck. Regardless, a theatre photographer was brought in to shoot this at the last minute, and despite the repulsive typeset and dayglo colours, the photo has a nice sense of perspective as the band looks down the stairwell of their label’s headquarters. In America, the small Vee-Jay label opted not to use the original cover, going instead for something more staid and uninspiring. A few years later, Vee-Jay re-released the collection with a cover that was more upbeat, but ultimately childish.

With The Beatles: The group's interest in visual arts prompted them to seek out Robert Freeman, a photographer renowned for his work with jazz musicians of the era. For this sleeve, the Beatles were after a cover that was artistic and visually striking. What they ended up with was progressive for its day. The label, Parlophone, initially rejected the cover on the grounds that the boys were not smiling, not to mention the lack of colour. The image went against the norms of pop-music marketing in 1963. But with this cover, the Beatles were making a bold statement – a statement that they were innovators, that pop music could be taken seriously.

At this point in time, the primary medium for rock 'n' roll was the 45 RPM single: one hit song with a throwaway tune on the B side. The Beatles were now telling audiences that when they bought a 14-song LP, they were not just getting a couple of hits plus some filler tracks, they were purchasing a work of art.

In America, though, the suits at Capitol Records were miffed by the lack of a happy, sellable cover, and tacked on blocky lettering complete with tacky colours and an exclamation mark. They also changed the name of the album from With the Beatles to Meet the Beatles! Capitol culled a few tracks and mixed in some singles so that they could create The Beatles' Second Album with the remainders.

The Capitol office in Canada also obliterated the subtlety (above). The 1963 collection was split into two albums, with the second volume, Twist and Shout, appearing with a slapdash cover created from a publicity photo and, apparently, a bottle of nail polish.

A Hard Day's Night: The UK sleeve was clever in its use of film-strip imagery, given that this was the accompanying LP for the movie of the same name. Worth noting that this was the first LP in pop-music history to be written entirely by the members of a band. Thirteen original songs: Side 1 comprising tunes from the film, with Side 2 featuring all-new, non-movie songs. In America, Side 2 was replaced by instrumental tracks, with the rest of the album and some scraps appearing on the ironically named Something New.

Beatles For Sale: Although the cover of the band’s fourth album has a zen-like beauty, some people mock this sleeve as the one with the miserable faces. Probably why Capitol opted to use publicity shots for this collection, which they again split into two records. Interesting how the Beatles had no problem presenting themselves maturely, while the marketers at Capitol clearly found that discomforting.

Help: Again with Capitol's aversion to empty space on an album cover. The blue-on-white made a nice, clean image, with the band forming semaphores to supposedly spell “Help” (though due to the semaphore for "Help" not being so graphically appealing, they tried several poses and ended up spelling NUJV). In America, the cover was cluttered up, and many songs were dropped in favour of the instrumental film score. Meanwhile, Capitol re-packaged a handful of early songs in a tacky sleeve for Early Beatles, once they acquired the rights from Vee-Jay.

Rubber Soul and Revolver: By 1965, the Beatles had enough clout to insist on their original covers being used in America. However, not enough clout to stop Capitol from altering the track list. An executive at Capitol decided that Rubber Soul should be a folk album, dropping four of the harder songs and adding two gentler ones left off Help, while Revolver had three songs pulled. Missing songs from the US versions of Help, Rubber Soul, and Revolver appeared in America on the blandly presented Yesterday And Today. (That compilation actually had a more interesting cover for its first day on the market before being pulled.) Rubber Soul's cover, with the faces slightly elongated and eyes darting into space, hints at a band somewhat dazed and mellowed (by pot, as it turns out), not an inappropriate visual for the more matured sound found inside the sleeve. Revolver is notable for having fulfilled Klaus Voormann's dream of designing a Beatles cover. What came to be known as psychedelic music was invented on Revolver, and this cover certainly heralded a new, surreal version of the Beatles.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band: Rafts of articles have been written about this album and its cover since the record appeared in 1967, but the nutshell version: the most expensive album-cover shoot in the history of music, to accompany the most expensive album ever recorded to date. The band sought a cover that was inspired and special, to reflect the innovation put into the music itself. The sleeve was a bold work of art that became an emblem for that year's Summer of Love. But did Capitol really have to slap that ugly yellow STEREO banner across the top? Notice how that alteration forced the image to be cropped at the left side and bottom.

Magical Mystery Tour: This was the first instance of the American version of a Beatles album supplanting the official UK edition. In Britain, this soundtrack appeared as a six-song EP (pictured left), split between two 45-RPM records in one package. In America, a collection of singles was added to the package to create an 11-song LP. The cover, unfortunately, was turned into a hodge-podge.

The Beatles: The White Album, as it’s unofficially called. The first pop-music double album, 30 songs running the gamut of folk, ragtime, psychedelia, country, sound collage, and some invented genres (“Helter Skelter” may have been the first heavy metal song). The sleeve was as minimalistic as could be: the band’s name was simply embossed in the corner (as shown at the top of this post), and the only ink found on the cover was a tongue-in-cheek "limited edition" serial number stamped on the first few million copies (look for it in the top-left photo, in the corner of the sleeve). The original UK pressing featured openings at the top. In America, the more standard side openings were used.

Let It Be: This one I'm throwing into the mix for fun. Let It Be appeared in the UK and the US with the same sleeve, but since we're talking about Beatles LP covers, here's a bit of historical interest: Get Back was the intended title, using the cover seen on the left. The idea was that the band was going back to its roots, throwing away all the recording techniques they pioneered, to record an album live in the studio, straight to tape, as they did with their first album. Hence the design of the cover, emulating the first record but showing how the boys changed in the ensuing seven years. Unfortunately, the record didn't turn out as planned. After the work was abandoned for about a year, 1960s producer-wunderkid Phil Spector was commissioned to finish it off (without agreement from Paul). Spector, not surprisingly, used strings, orchestras, and other overdubs to put his own touch on the record. As the "live" concept no longer applied, the title and the original sleeve were abandoned, too. Let It Be was released after Abbey Road, and after the official break-up of the band, though the bulk of it had been recorded six months before.

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Abbey Road: There's no reason to include this cover in this particular article, as Abbey Road appeared the world over with the same cover. For the sake of being a completist, though, I must list it. The Beatles admitted that they knew this would be their last album, even if they never verbalized those thoughts at the time. The original plan was to title this album Everest, with the band flying to the Himalayas for a cover shot to match. Instead, having completed the arduous recording, and wanting to get the rest of their duties over with quickly, the band and their photographer marched outside the studio to complete this session in ten minutes.

How I learned to talk politics with the Taiwanese

When I made plans for my first visit to Taiwan, a friend asked if I needed a visa for that country, then corrected himself. “Is it actually a country? What do I call it?” Despite having lived in Asia for several years by this point, I was a bit ashamed that I didn’t know the answer to that question. Now I realize there was no need for shame – not even the Taiwanese can agree on their status.

Most of us in the West are at least vaguely aware that Taiwan is in limbo, terrified that an outright declaration as an independent country could trigger a war with China, which claims Taiwan as a rogue break-away state that will one day be reclaimed. But it wasn’t until I lived in both China and Taiwan that I really understood the history of this complicated relationship.

The first time I was forced to contemplate the matter in any mindful way was in Shanghai during my first job as an editorial staff member. The magazine was in English with a mostly expat audience. We ran an article on meat-eating habits in China, or something of the sort. What I remember most was the illustration that ran with the piece – a cow with its body sectioned off into its various parts. Instead of being labelled shank, sirloin, chuck, etcetera, they were given names of China’s various provinces.

Every magazine in China is assigned a state “publisher”, which is just a noble euphemism for “censor”. At the last minute before publication of the meat item, our censor noticed that the cow didn’t encompass Taiwan. An amendment was insisted upon.

This incident was regaled for days by the incredulous staff as an example of the most absurd of China’s efforts to include Taiwan in its modern narrative. The joke, of course: What part of the cow could possibly represent islands not attached to the mainland? From what I recall, Taiwan was nonsensically slapped onto the illustration to please the authorities. In the end, though, it rather disparagingly looked like a puffy methane cloud emanating from the cow’s rear.

I had to wonder why this rather trivial matter became a subject of outrage among our mostly Western staff – “How dare they try to claim Taiwan! In our pages!” – considering that there were far more egregious instances of censorship that we gladly swallowed in every issue. I didn’t see the point of getting riled up over having to play along with China’s claim on the region, despite my support for Taiwan’s independence. Let China try to claim Taiwan or Antarctica or Micronesia for all I care. On this file, China has been all talk and no action – and when you look at what action they DO take on other files (jailing and torturing political dissidents, for instance), trying to occupy Taiwan by means of a cartoon cow should have been the least of anyone’s concerns. In fact, such deeds only underscore China’s impotence with regards to Taiwan. While the government in Taipei issues passports, prints its own money, delivers health care and other programs to its citizens, all Beijing can do is draw the island on its maps. China’s failure to govern Taiwan would be less obvious if they didn’t make such a big deal of it, especially when it comes to cartoon animals in English-language magazines. But I digress.

By the outrage that spread through the office, I realized what a strong knee-jerk reaction Westerners are conditioned to when it comes to Taiwan. For those of us foreigners living in China, we gladly didn’t mention “June 4” in public, because I suppose the fallout from the Tiananmen Square sock-hop was an internal housekeeping issue that didn’t affect us directly. But Taiwan – Democracy! Capitalism! – is just too close to our hearts. Growing up during the Cold War in the 1970s, we were habituated to recognizing any country that stood up to Communism as a nation of heroes, even if they were being governed by their own autocratic dictators.

It’s one thing to learn about an issue in classrooms or documentaries, or to understand an argument by reading different viewpoints. But I didn’t have any visceral sense of the situation until I lived in Taiwan for a few months and spoke with friends and their families about how the split from China has affected their lives and relationships with each other.

The Taiwanese are fiercely political and will deluge you with their views if you express even the most remote interest. While those in China will simply echo the standard “Taiwan is ours” rhetoric, the Taiwanese positions are more compelling because they face more complex issues about whether to claim independence, re-join China, or live with the status quo. Let’s put it this way: the Taiwanese are just as biased as the Chinese, but the Taiwanese biases are far more colourful.

Here’s the history in a nutshell: China enters a modern age of sorts in 1912, with the end of dynastic rule. After thousands of years of being governed by emperors, Sun Yat Sen and later Chiang Kai Shek become the country’s first modern presidents. In 1949, When Mao Zedong and the Communists take power in a revolt, Chiang Kai Shek, his military, their families, and thousands of followers flee to Taiwan, where they set up shop as the exiled government of China. The idea is that this displaced government – called the Kuomintang (pronounced Gwo-min-dahng) – will one day rule China again when the Communists are defeated. Both sides – the Kuomintang and the Communists – consider Taiwan territory of China. The only thing they disagree on is who the legitimate government of China is.

But now several generations have passed, and the vast majority of Taiwan’s inhabitants have only known life under their own democratically elected governments. Meanwhile, the Communists only strengthened their grip in China and show no sign of budging.

Flag proposed by Taiwan's
independence movement

Taiwan is now split between two factions. If you speak with Taiwanese who are descendants of those who came to Taiwan under Chiang Kai Shek in 1949, they are more likely to tell you that their ultimate desire is to reunify with China – however, not under Communist rule. If you speak with those ethnic Chinese or aboriginals whose families have been in Taiwan for hundreds of years, they might tell you stories of the interlopers who stole from the inhabitants and distributed the wealth amongst themselves. To some Taiwanese, Chiang Kai Shek is a hero; to others, he was just as bad as Mao.

Time has blurred some of the lines between these divisions. It was easier to take a clear-cut position back when China was isolated behind the Red Curtain and cut off from modern economies. In those days, Taiwan and Japan were the economic giants of Asia. But China is now open and fiercely capitalist, and they've been able to choke off a large portion of Taiwan's economy. As a result, a massive sector of Taiwan’s jobs and factories are flowing towards the mainland. Given China’s population of 1.3 billion to Taiwan’s 23 million, this has made Taiwan a deferential partner in cozy trading relationships with China.

As a result, Taiwanese are more likely to consider the practicality of their vote. Although a majority of Taiwanese today are pro-independence, enough of them are so concerned about jobs and the economy that they will vote for pro-China leaders. “No reason to poke the tiger,” one friend told me. On the other hand, for those who come from pro-unification families, enough time has passed that many of them don’t feel as strongly as their parents do about the issue, and tend to think that independence wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

Regardless, divisions still exist, and you still find families whose political leanings run through their blood. One of my closest friends told stories about his family’s land being stolen by Chiang Kai Shek’s men 60 years ago. Yet another friend, this one from a pro-China family, talked about being ostracized in the schoolyard by other children who said he was not a “real Taiwanese.” He told me: “My family came here 100 years ago. Their families came here 400 years ago. So what? We all came from the same place.”

In Taipei, with my ardently pro-independence friend and his father, we watched a movie called Formosa Betrayed (Formosa being the name of Taiwan pre-revolution). It tells the tale of a Taiwanese academic assassinated on American soil to prevent him from completing a book he was writing about Kuomintang atrocities. It’s 1980, and a CIA agent takes his investigation to Taiwan, where he gets drawn into more intrigue and gets a few history lessons literally beaten into him.

My friend and his father paused the movie at various points to add their own anecdotes to the movie’s narrative. “Yes, this is exactly what happened to us under Chiang Kai Shek!” was the gist of their message. The film ends with a closing scrawl: “Because of the events depicted in this film, Taiwan is now a democracy.” My friend teared up a bit and said, “Please show this movie to your friends in Canada so they understand Taiwan.” When I watched the movie later with a Taiwanese friend from a pro-China family, his reaction to the closing scrawl was, “What bullshit!”

What I found delightfully captivating about these types of conversations was that I had never heard my Taiwanese friends in Vancouver speak so passionately and politically. I suppose there was no reason for them to talk shop about their mother country among Canadians like myself. Even when it came to the whole Taiwan/China dispute, it was something that my Chinese and Taiwanese friends seemed indifferent about, at least on the outside. But in Taiwan, it was revealing and somewhat enthralling to witness the political fervour that bubbles on the surface of their daily lives.

There were times when I felt compelled to take a side. Really, though, it was not any of my business as a foreigner, but this is who I am – I like to know a country by planting some roots and embracing as many aspects of local living as possible. That includes understanding the nation’s issues and politics. As the famous phrase goes, “the “personal is political”, and the Taiwanese are a magnificent example of this adage. Understanding a nation’s politics well enough to form an opinion was my way of feeling a sense of belonging and engaging with the country around me, so wherever I lived I'd pick up the paper and start talking about what I read. (Some friends I made in these places admired this penchant; others found it annoying.)

Nowadays, whenever I read an article in the Canadian press about Taiwan, I don’t react with, “Well, that was interesting.” I’m either agreeing or calling “Bullshit!”

The latter category is how I reacted to this article in a Vancouver weekly newspaper. In it, several Taiwanese immigrants to Canada complain about the gutlessness of powerful nations to stand up to China and officially support Taiwan independence. Reading their statements, I was reminded of something one friend in Taipei told me. When I talked about how my Taiwanese friends in Vancouver seemed so different from the Taiwanese in Taiwan, his explanation was that those who leave to hold foreign passports are more inclined to lay low in a safe haven until the dust settles in their homeland. This means being apolitical and a little bit "disloyal to the cause," or so I was told. So when I read these types of comments from Taiwanese Canadians, such as that Taiwan is “virtually an orphan, and this goes on because all the strong nations tolerate that,” I can’t help but think that it’s not just strong nations that are to blame – you could also say that those who abandoned the cause and fled Taiwan are just as culpable.

Many Taiwanese, such as those quoted in the aforementioned article, want the powerful countries of the world to cut ties with China in support of Taiwan. They want our governments to officially open embassies in Taipei, and our businesses to stop trading with the world’s second-largest economy in favour of the nineteenth largest. This is hypocritical, though, since Taiwan itself has formed many rewarding trade agreements with China, and they've done so with the backing of the people – the ruling Kuomintang party has won two elections in a row on a pro-China platform. Even the pro-independence party, the Democratic Progressive Party, softened its stance toward China to win two elections in 2000 and 2004. Why wouldn’t the DPP declare independence, despite that being their raison d'être? As one friend put it, nobody wanted them to “poke the tiger”.

This is where both sides of the Taiwan/China argument ring hollow. I don’t fault the Taiwanese for being cautious with regard to China. But they must also live with the fact that their approach leaves them open to being claimed by a more powerful country, and currently that’s China. If the Taiwanese want other nations to poke the tiger, they must poke the tiger first and make a clear declaration for the rest of the world to rally behind. I’m not suggesting that it’s easy – China’s official position is to attack Taiwan if it tries to secede (I don’t think it would come to that, but who really wants to find out the hard way?). It’s ludicrous, however, to ask other nations to antagonize China while Taiwan continues to profit from their own cozy relationship with the tiger.

Beijing itself is just as full of hot air. If Taiwan belongs to them, then why don’t they send their bureaucrats there to collect taxes, issue passports, supervise the military, print money, and plant their flag on every government building? A country is defined by its ability to control its borders, service its armed forces, and provide for its people. Beijing is unable to do any of these things in Taiwan. So how can they claim it as their territory?

I think it’s inevitable that Taiwan will be forced to re-join China at some point in the near future. Not through hostile means, but economic ones. The more reliant Taiwan becomes on China and its market, the more influence and power China will have in Taiwan’s affairs. Taiwan is already in China’s tentacles, and the merger will be a slow and gradual one. (But I’m also naively optimistic that China will transform over time and adopt some characteristics of a democracy, which would only encourage the reunification.)

For those reasons, I’m uncertain how I’d feel if I were a Taiwanese citizen with a real stake in the game, not just an opinionated foreigner. I would certainly be pro-independence, but I wonder how hard and how loudly I’d fight for it. As much as I’d fear getting too close to China, I’d have the same basic concern about my job and living standard, not to mention a potential war. Although I like to think the personal is political, the modern corollary to that saying should be, “... and the political is monetary”. As governments the world over are taking on more characteristics of being business managers while letting the free market chip away at our social programs, the day may soon come when it doesn’t matter which country we’re a part of. As for China, they're taking a very business-like approach to Taiwan: instead of attacking, they're simply buying them out.

For a better grasp on Taiwan's political realities, this article by Canadian historian Gwynne Dyer, posted just after Taiwan's 2012 presidential elections, gives a succinct and modern perspective on the thinking behind their current relationship with China. 

The meaning of citizenship

I was an editor between 2009 and 2010 for a small magazine aimed at Westerners living in Singapore. Given that it was a lifestyle magazine whose goal was for readers to “join your mates” for “fun, friendship, sports, community,” my editor’s letters were not cerebral critiques. I tried to keep it light, but once in a while a bit of cynicism would seep out. On this occasion, I addressed something that was on the tongues of the expat community for about a week or so. I was expecting a rebuke from the publisher – “Readers would be offended by your stance, this isn't what we're about,” or something like that. But my article was printed and it passed in silence. However, the next month’s December editorial was almost pulled because I said I was indifferent to Christmas. Go figure.

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Is the editor ready to take citizenship?

The government set a few tempers alight when it announced that it would be requiring many Permanent Residents to take up citizenship or risk not having their PR status renewed. Letters flew to the daily papers, and not one PR-holder I knew wasn’t at least a little upset. One correspondent to Today newspaper’s letters section summed up much of what I heard. Peter Wadeley wrote that he has a Singaporean wife and two children, one of whom he said would one day be doing his National Service. But no matter. Even though Singapore is his “home country”, he stated that he "does not feel Singaporean" enough to take citizenship.

That makes me curious. Why not? Well, I can understand. I have been here for three years, and the longer I stay, the more apparent it becomes that Singaporeans in general will never accept a Caucasian as a true-blooded local. I can imagine Mr Wadeley’s son will one day complete his National Service and perhaps speak fluent Mandarin, but will forever be seen as an “expat”. One mixed-race friend of mine, a local citizen who looks Chinese but has a British surname, is often chided by cabbies when they arrive at his call expecting a white guy: “Aiya, you not Singaporean, lah!”

But I can see the other side of the issue. Back in our own countries, those who land on our shores have to abide by strict immigration laws, and are usually given a “love it or leave it” response if they complain about the rules and responsibilities they must comply with. So I can imagine the kind of affront Singaporeans might feel when we prosper from their country’s resources and lifestyle, and then turn around and say that citizenship in their nation is simply inferior to ours.

The unspoken truth is that we want the de facto benefits of dual citizenship. We want the jobs, low taxes and standard of living offered by Singapore, while keeping our birth citizenship as a safety net “just in case.” We want the free (or heavily subsidised) health care offered in most of our countries in case we take seriously ill, and the government pensions due to us upon retirement, and so on. Fair enough.

But so long as we fight to hang on to the best of both worlds, we should accept that this gives our host country the right to define the terms of our stay. Personally, I am unsure that I would become a Singapore national so long as dual citizenship is forbidden. But if citizenship were offered to me, I would feel honoured, not angry, and it is something I would not refuse lightly. Living abroad has helped me appreciate the true meaning of citizenship and the responsibilities of belonging to a country – whether that is here in Singapore or the land that issued my passport.

Note: Two years later, Singaporeans would be forming mass rallies in Hong Lim Park to protest against the influx of foreigners to their homeland. One of their key grievances was related to expats dipping into Singapore's wealth and benefits without having to take part in National Service.