Just water, falling down from the dark sky. Beneath my skin.
Soundtrack of Hong Kong:
- J. Cash
- 坂本 龍一 or Sakamoto Ryūichi
- Chavela Vargas
- Nat King Cole
- Andreas Scholl
- The Shins
Liveablitity score (1-5)
Sustainability: 1
Sociodiversity: 2
Public transport: 3
Creativ Index : 2
Hong Kong @ October 2010
While clouds are sinking down to earth at early night and are touching tiny high rise buildings; is Hong Kong the most beautiful.
Hong Kong @ October 2010
Chung King Mansion in District Kowloon
You remember the movie #Chung King Express #, and #Fallen Angels# made by Wang Kar Wei some years ago, depicted by genius cinematographer Christopher Doyle? The "Chung King Mansion" exist and exist merely as a farce, vegetating in the heart of Kowloon. A monster, sleeping calm and breathless in between of luxurious shops and buildings on a main boulevard. The surface is dark in the night and colorless during the day.
The real is always a farce and sometime even a tragedy. Chung King Mansion is a conglomerate of infinite single existences, Chinese to African men, Indian gangsters and Pakistani ex-policemen and many others, condensed and involuntary compiled because of their poverty, fatelessness, lack of any past and certainly lack of any future: smart, bad, realistic, hopeless and persistent. They should be many of rooms, rented for people as residents (residents of hell, mentioned above) and dozens of young visitors from overseas: naive, good, romantic, adventures and fleeing. While Maggy Chung is killing unselected anyone she met, the other killer in the movie is just doing it by extreme selection. Even for Wang KarWei were these people just material: Schlachtmaterial, as Heiner Mueller would express it smoothly. The signage of the walls and doors and almost all faces are saying nothing to us from outside. The movie had helped us to know that this hell of an house is existing in the belly of the beast.
A closed BOX, beyond signifier and significant.
Hong Kong @ October 2010
District Kowloon
Two aspects of this insular archipelago are from specific interest today:
First, Hong Kong is passé !
Why ?
The illusions of future, inherent in mind of its residents, and the notorious futurism, proclaimed in political calls of the local "money elites", both, are the obvious prove of the decline of HK. Neither the future will come, as it is expected by the old residents *the new residents from mainland China have none* as a figure of unlimited prosperity, richness and happieness, nor the apoplectic futurism of the old money elites, which have always been socially calm, historically deaf, politically blind companions for the colonial British power, will be realised by means of nostalgic repetition or media based replication.
It is over.
The very material and substantially economic eschatology of the COMMING times, which inhabits in a virulent way brains of old HK residents has got no historic background. Mainland China , the very big brother, the shadow of skies, will determine the fate of HK by his economic forces, by his cultural penetrance and by his immanent superiority. There is no chance for HK to stay as a regional player under the wings of China, it will for the near times just a kind of reservoir for capital, it is already the offshore place for Yuan. Thus it is the geography which protects HK. China will use HK for accumulation and distribution of almost endless amounts of money and this implies some extra conditions for the "special zone" status, which HK has yet. Some day, it will be over.
HK is merely a museum.
The notorious futurism of the old money elites, ignored by the central government, has all those basic streams of a nostalgic call, which comes, when good times are over. It is paradoxically clear, that the obscure horizon of a politically and culturally unique entity HONG KONG induces more fantasy and produces a lot of hope in HK 's money elites and , at same time, in residents; that it might be understandable for outsiders.
A melange of old and new greed and avidity and of historic blindness and politicall mutism has no future.They really hope to be something special again, as they have been under the colonial rules of UK: a bit out of history, busy making money, money and some bad C movies.
Second, Hong Kong is YESTERDAY.
Not just the limited geography is a factor of historical and political limitations put on HK, as such, but the lack of anny political will or ambition is an issue. The lack of "das Politische" (as discussed by Hannah Arendt) generally, is making HK's futurism and illusions vulnerable, if not free of any sense.
A small region will be, independent of his potenial or reel economic potency, not for sure a real player in the region without having discussed substantially the implications of power and politics. Especially implications of politics of identity. The political silence of HK residents and the opportunistic games of the money elites is not expressing any political will/ideas, which fit to the contemporary Realpolitik. HK has given, till today, no signs of a population based, politically forced discourse on its future.
So, there will be no such future.
