Hennessy Sessions: Pet Conspiracy @ Asia One Tower, Chai Wan – 24 May, 2013
http://bcmagazine.smugmug.com/Bcene-photos/2013/Hennessy-Seesion-Pet/29602638_NPRDvF#!i=2532597580&k=nzZXgCC
click on the photo for more images
Category: May
International Soccer Sevens 24-26th May 2013
International Soccer Sevens 24-26th May 2013
While Football Sevens doesn’t roll quite so smoothly off the tongue, the beautiful game has firmly embraced the Hong Kong Soccer Sevens, which returns this weekend to once again display future talent and past greats in another giddy amalgamation of sport and entertainment.
What started as bit of end-of-season fun fourteen years ago has evolved into a fiercely competitive tournament. Stars of the future play in anonymity and stars of the past showcase in person the silky skills admired and cheered from afar.
This year again sees both local and international, UK giants like Manchester City, defending champions Newcastle United and Glasgow Rangers will all be in attendance competing for silverware and a year of solid bragging rights. While local clubs including the HKFA Dragons, Kowloon Cricket Club and a Yau Yee League select will be looking for their moment in the sun with victories against a big name.
Taking place over 3 days, the action is spread between two separate tournaments. The main event sees 16 teams putting forth their best and brightest to fight it out with just enough good nature to keep the event family-friendly (though some obligatory ear-covering may be necessary). While in the Masters section there’s the unique opportunity to see some of the games legends up-close and personal. Still operating with the kind of skill and command of the game that you would expect from past greats such as Teddy Sheringham, Arthur Numan, Jari Litmanen, Darren Anderton, Peter Beardsley, and Aron Vinter, (ignoring the fact that a few shirt sizes may have been upgraded) it’s thrilling and competitive soccer and a true testament to the draw the event has.
If football’s not your thing or the kids need a breather there’s a family fun zone filled with all kinds of games, entertainment and other brightly-coloured whimsy to keep the little ones happy.
The first match kicks off at 7pm on Friday 24th May, with the final at 7pm Sunday 26th May
What: Soccer Sevens
When: 24-26 May, 2013 – Friday: 7pm start, Saturday: 9am start, Sunday: 8am start
Where: HK Football Club
How much: Friday: Free, Saturday, Sunday: $160/day, Weekend pass $300
Enquiries: www.hksoccersevens.com
A festive occasion thrice over, the Eighth Day of the Fourth Moon – 17 May 2013
A Festive Occasion Thrice Over, the Eighth Day of the Fourth Moon – 17 May 2013
A festive occasion thrice over, the eighth day of the fourth moon (or month) of the Chinese lunar calendar is the birthday of Tam Kung, an immortal Chinese sea deity, and also commemorated by Buddhists in this part of the world as the birthday of the Buddha. It’s also the climax of the Cheung Chau Bun Festival.
Buddha Bathing Festival
According to Buddhist legend, when the Buddha was born he stood straight, took seven steps, and declared “I alone am the World-Honored One.” And he pointed up with one hand and down with the other, to indicate he would unite heaven and earth. Buddhists are told the seven steps represent seven directions – north, south, east, west, up, down, and here. While Mahayana Buddhists interpret “I alone am the World-Honored One” in a way that “I” represents all sentient beings throughout space and time – everyone, in other words.
Also according to legend, nine dragons sprayed water to bathe the baby Buddha at birth. To commemorate this, at Buddhist temples across Hong Kong, devotees gather to pay their respects to this revered deity by bathing statues of the baby Buddha, with the right hand pointing up and the left hand pointing down, in bowls of water. The ritual is believed to aid in the purification of one’s soul.
Before and after the Birthday of Buddha, celebrants also eat special green cookies, the cookies are deliberately quite bitter, as eating them represents passing through hardship to enjoy better things.
One of the grandest ceremonies is held at the Po Lin Monastery on Lantau Island, home of the Big Buddha and you can find out more about Hong Kong’s Buddhist culture via a tour of Chi Lin Nunnery & Nan Lian Garden.
Tam Kung
Tam Kung, is a Taoist sea deity worshipped in Hong Kong and Macau. With a reputation for being able to control and accurately forecast the weather, Tam Kung – usually portrayed as an 80-year-old man with the face of a 12-year-old child because he is believed to have achieved wisdom at a young age and learned the secret of remaining forever young – has a following among seafarers and a temple in his honour in the former fishing village of Shau Kei Wan was built in 1905 and renovated in 2002 with the original design carefully restored. On May 17, head over to the eastern end of Hong Kong Island for the annual Tam Kung procession by local residents, which includes unicorn, lion and dragon dancing.
Cheung Chau Bun Festival 12-18 May 2013
Cheung Chau Bun Festival 12-18 May 2013
Who to believe? Some say the Cheung Chau Bun Festival is held every year to placate the ghosts of the victims of pirates who used the dumbbell-shaped island as their lair, while others maintain it a commemorates the liberation of the island’s residents from a plague some 200 years 
ago. What pretty much everyone is agreed on, though, is that it’s a time for one big party! Officially the Cheung Chau Bun Festival falls on the fifth to the ninth days of the fourth lunar month – this year’s festivities go from May 12 to 18, with a Chinese Opera performance every night to May 21 at Pak Tai Temple, starting at 7:30pm. But the festival’s undoubted highlight will be a spectacular parade from 2-4pm and a midnight ‘bun snatching’ competition on 17 May centred around the Pak Tai Temple Plaza and adjacent Football Court.
The complete event schedule is as follows:
| Date | Time | Activities | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12 May | Noon to 6pm | Climbing Carnival • Climbing demonstrations • Game stalls • Variety shows |
Soccer Pitch of Pak Tai Temple Playground |
| 14 May | 10am to 9pm | • Ceremony inviting deities to Pak Tai Temple • Ritual marking start of Bun Festival |
Pak Tai Temple Plaza |
| 14 – 21 May | 7:30pm to 11pm | • Chinese opera performances | Pak Tai Temple Plaza |
| 16 May | 2:30pm to 3:15pm 3:45pm | • Lion and Unicorn Dances • Ritual and Chinese Acrobatic Performances |
Pak Tai Temple Plaza |
| 17 May | 10:30am 2pm Midnight |
• Unicorn and Kung Fu Performance • Bun Festival Parade • Bun Scrambling Competition* |
Pak Tai Temple Plaza |
| 18 May | 2pm | • Ceremony to send the deities back to their temples | Pak Tai Temple Plaza |
Cold Cave Live in Hong Kong @ Saffron on the Peak – 9pm, 18 May 2013
Cold Cave Live in Hong Kong @ Saffron on the Peak – 9pm, 18 May 2013
Wesley Eisold, the man behind Philadelphia’s Cold Cave, is the former frontman for hardcore bands like Some Girls, American Nightmare, and Give Up the Ghost. He was also involved in a plagiarism controversy with Pete Wentz and receives a songwriting credit on a Fall Out Boy album. Not exactly the first person you’d expect to be making beautiful, experimental synthpop.
Cold Cave weaves incomprehensibly distorted vocals with bits of synthetic feedback. But songs like “Love Comes Close”, “Life Magazine” and “Confetti” also come bearing serious hooks. That mixture of postpunk unease and fluid bleep would’ve made Cold Cave fit right in on the early-80s Factory Records roster alongside Section 25 or the Durutti Column.
As with their ancestors, for Cold Cave the synthesizer is as much about mayhem as it is melody. It is a means of conveying, via dissonance, ideas about disturbance and decay as effectively as the harshest guitar rock. Cold Cave strive for balance, between the ugly and the beautiful, between rupture and rapture. The songs on Cold Cave’s albums have an immediacy that belies their sometimes thought-provoking titles like “The Laurels of Erotomania” and “The Trees Grew Emotions And Died”. In this way they look to mark that transitional moment when synthesizer music went from a subversive device for sound collagists to a serious commercial force. They are cerebral and savage, yet sweet and seductive.
And their mainman Wesley Eisold is an absolute new young god of nihilism and despair. His interviews include quotes such as, “I couldn’t understand why people were wearing watches, because they seemed like hourglasses of death, keeping track of how much time was running out”. He talks of his “absolute fixation with nostalgia and the idea of people and loves that never happened, so much that I can’t function properly with the people in my actual life”. And in two pithy sentences – “I dread clubs but I love the music they play in them,” and “I find it all so disheartening, what we hope to find when we leave our homes,” – he strives to capture Cold Cave’s aesthetic: the Morrissey of “How Soon Is Now” wailing over Nitzer Ebb beats.
According to Eisold, if anything, their music reflects what it feels like to live in the present. Eisold, whose baritone is as rich and resonating as that of Phil Oakey, Nick Cave or Iggy Pop, says “Of course we love the lineage of the genre, early experiments with machines to convey human emotion; the marriage between pop and industrial music. At the time it was documenting the early stages of a new world, and we are recording what it feels like to be alive in that world.”
When asked whether there is a set of guiding principles at work here, a Cold Cave aesthetic that runs from the artwork to the music, he answers: “We spend a lot of thought choosing what we do. The artwork is as imperative as the music. It is the only imagery attached to the recording. We judge books by covers everyday and it is my hope to have the sleeves represent the emotion, or lack of, in the music.”
Cold Cave Live in Hong Kong, support Laura Palmer
9pm, 18 May 2013
9pm, 18 May 2013
Saffron on the Peak, 100 Peak Road, Dairy Farm Building
Tickets: $280, ($300 on the door) on sale 3 May from –
White Noise Records, Room 1901, 19/F, 21 Yiu Wa Street, Causeway Bay,
Zoo Records, 3/F. Sai Yeung Choi St South, Prince Edward
The Globe, 45 Graham Street, Soho
Saffron on The Peak
Le French GourMay 2013
Le French GourMay 2013
Le FrenchMay has with an ongoing series of high-quality performances and productions over many years established itself as one of the cultural highlights of the year in Hong Kong. Slightly less well known is the Le French GourMay, now in its fifth year, which promotes gastronomy with a french flavour. Each year the festival chooses a region of France to focus its offerings around and in twenty thirteen it’s Bourgogne a thickly forested region in Eastern France – better known to wine lovers as Burgundy – blessed with south-facing slopes and a moist, cool climate perfect for grapes.
The most famous wines produced here—those commonly referred to as “Burgundies” are dry red wines made from Pinot Noir grapes and white wines made from Chardonnay grapes. Burgundy has a higher number of appellations d’origine contrôlée (AOCs) than any other French region, and is often seen as the most terroir-conscious of the French wine regions. Although archeological evidence establishes viticulture in Burgundy as early as the second century AD, the practice of delineating vineyards by their terroir in Burgundy goes back to medieval times, when various monasteries played a key role in developing the Burgundy wine industry – currently Bourgogne has nearly 28,500 hectares of vines in production, over 100 classified Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (A.O.C) and produces about 200 million bottles annually.
Burgundy cuisine is symbolic of so much that is French and Burgundians are as passionate about their food as their wine – Escargots à la Bourgogne (Burgundy Snails), Boeuf Bourguignon, and Coq au Vin are just three of the famous regional dishes. Food in Bourgogne is filled with danger and death. It is not the gentle, vegetable cooking of Provence dribbled in olive oil. Burgundy cuisine is imbued with garlic, violence and what one daintily names ‘variety meats.’ Beef tongue (langue), sweetbreads (ris de veau) or calf’s head (tête de veau) and kidneys (rognons) are among the region’s favorite cuts. Pork feet (pieds), braised jowls (joues), and pork intestine sausage (andouillette) pop up everywhere on Burgundy menus. Hearty meals these, but the regions chefs have also updated their cuisine to appeal to modern tastes, and there are 29 Michelin stared restaurants, including three with three stars, within Burgundy.
There’s a wide range of promotions throughout GourMay and the full programme can be found here www.frenchmay.com/gourmay. At W Hong Kong in West Kowloon GourMay offers include
The Winederlust Date @ Woobar
10 varieties of Burgundy wine paired with tasty regional cheeses and coldcuts to entice any monsieur or madame. From 8pm to 10:30pm every Wednesday in May, HK$258+10% per person
The Star-Crossed Pair @ Sing Yin
West and East converge as Chef Bryan Lee creates a 7-course wine dinner offering local flavors complemented by selected Burgundy wines matched to each dish. Lychee wood-fired crispy skin chicken is the signature dish of Sing Yin. The chicken is seasoned overnight before being roasted with aromatic lychee wood, cinnamon and premium Longjing (Dragon Well) tea leaves. Fired to a golden finish, the tender meat and crispy skin are laced with flavour. This entree is paired with Louis Latour Savigny les Beaune 2003. Its rich bouquet of red fruits draws out the tender taste of the chicken. The entire menu is available at HK$888+10%. (Wine expert Mark Allen will also be there to share about his winery insight on May 23.)
The Chef’s Passion @ Kitchen
Burgundy’s Two Star Michelin Chef Florian Muller will join hands with W’s Culinary Director Gunnar Kuchenbecker from May 16 to 26, to bring a French flair to the international delicacies at Kitchen. The esteemed Chef himself will even be present during this period to interact with guests and talk about his own cooking experience, engaging all in his amour for food while serving specially created GourMay dishes.
Dinner: Monday – Thursday, 6pm – 10pm; HK$498 per adult, HK$249 per child;
Dinner: Friday – Sunday, 6pm – 10pm; HK$538 per adult, HK$269 per child
*All prices are subject to 10% service charge
Bookings at www.w-hongkong.com
Shrek in Macau!
Shrek in Macau!
They’ve brought smiles to millions and billions to their creators and now you can have breakfast with them, or a birthday party, dinner… even have them wake you up in the morning. Shrek, Fiona, Donkey, Po, Puss in Boots et al are coming to Macau on the Cotai Strip from July. As with films the trailer is but a teaser to the main event and Dreamworks Animation’s announcement of their tie-up with Sands China Limited to create the Dreamworks Experience at the Cotai Strip Resorts merely hinted at the co-promotions and events that will be available as the integrated resort looks to enhance its family attractions.
Dreamworks Experience at the Cotai Strip Resorts opens 1 July 2013 – more details as we have
BollyGood Movie @ Makumba – 8pm, 11 May 2013
BollyGood Movie @ Makumba – 8pm, 11 May 2013
In celebration of World Belly Dance Day Klub Raks is organising a BollyGood Movie charity night featuring the People’s Liberation Improv in a comedy night enhanced with some great belly dancing… In truth we really don’t know what’s going to happen but the contributors individually are great so combined it should be fun and an excuse for a dance and a laugh. If you’re feeling adventurous, then dress up as well!
BollyGood Movie
$200 inc a drink and snacks
8-11pm, 11 May, 2013
Makumba
2/F Ho lee Commercial Building
38-44 D’Aguilar Street, Lan Kwai Fong
Tel: 2810 5300, 9028 7064
www.klubraks.com
