1. ESPLANADE HOTEL, Remembrance Day 1990
“You know how it is, you want to look and you don't want to look. I can remember the strange feelings I had when I was a kid looking at war photographs in Life, the ones that showed a lot of dead people lying close together in a field or a street, often touching, seeming to hold each other…I remember the shame I felt, like looking at first porn, all the porn in the world.”
Michael Herr , Despatches
2. HOWRAH MAIL 22 nd December 1990
“I wasn't sure which was better; not to be able to see ahead and give up all chance of making a last minute escape, or to forgo this tiny insurance for the relative relief of not knowing at all.”
Jason Elliot , An Unexpected Light
3. THE SALVATION ARMY HOSTEL, Xmas Eve 1990
“Kusa and Lava began to sing …,
They sang ‘Be at your ease, free of your mind from ill-will and all unkindness.
Let go of anger and hear us without malice.”
The Ramayana ( Buck Translation )
4. BLUE SKY CAFE, Independence Day 1991
“It's Calcutta's cliché meeting place – under the New Market Clock. And the time is reasonably reliable, the chimes nostalgic, romantic or hateful according to your assignation.”
Desmond Doig, Calcutta: An Artist's Impression
5. SHAMROCK INN, 21 st & 22 nd February 1991
“It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
James Joyce , The Dead
6. CHUNG KING MANSIONS, 2 nd -27 th November 1991
“I want these letters to be sincere letters, I want them filled up with lots of personal details so there'll be no doubt I mean every word you say.”
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
7. TAIPEI HOSTEL, 28 th -31 st November 1991
“I started coughing a little, and lighted a cigarette to quiet it. I wondered whether I could risk a few drinks to pull me out of my hangover. I needed them. I picked up my two suitcases and headed up the street.”
Jim Thompson , Savage Night
8. THE SAUNA, Third Anniversary, Tianenmen Square
How to Make Your Fame and Fortune in Taipei? (Hamish)
• Teaching English by Telepathy. (Bill.)
• Blonde sado masocistic Amazons serving brandy and crème caramel at the Hostess club pool. (Hamo and Cherry).
• A Penis Extension Device. (Sean and Hamo)
• Shares in a Taipei Racetrack. (Eileen and Angel)
• Assassinate everyone. (Bill and Eileen)
• Taiwan cement.(Sean and Safira.)
(Bar conversation at the Fubar when Hamo posed the 64 New Taiwan (NT) dollar question. The table drank B52s, chilli soup and Tequila slammers. Hamo and Sean swallowed some China black hashish. Angel might have had a tablet but it was hard to know with her.)
9. L2N8, Ghost Month, Seventh Lunar Month
“But a complex pattern of tensions, like the electrical mazes developed by psychologists to unhinge the nervous systems of white rats and guinea pigs, keeps the unhappy pleasure -seekers in a condition of unconsummated alertness.”
William S. Burroughs, Junky
10. THE HOTEL TRAVEL, Last Wednesday, October 1992
"Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation ... the other eight are unimportant."
Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch.
11. CELESTIAL TOWERS, Dragon Boat Festival 1992
“The next morning Bilbo woke up with the early sun in his eyes. He jumped up to look at the time and to go and put his kettle on - and found he was not home at all. So he sat down and wished in vain for a wash and a brush. He did not get either, nor tea, nor toast, nor bacon for his breakfast, only cold mutton and rabbit. And after that he had to get ready for a fresh start.”
J.R.R Tolkien, The Hobbit
12. LOVE FUBAR, Moon Festival 1992
“It's all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.”
D.H Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover.
13. GLOBAL VILLAGE, 12 th December 1992
“The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea in a pretty pea green boat.”
Traditional Nursery Rhyme, The Owl and the Pussycat
14. SHADOW, 15 th January 1993
“POLICE SHOOT-OUT IN SHI DA - Black Bamboo Gangster Charged”
News Story in the China Post
15. YUNG HO CITY, The Rooster New Year 1993
“I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound. It was no wonder that his condition terrified - that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions.”
Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher
16. REGGAE PUB, Ides of March 1993
“I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”
Ernest Hemingway
17. TSIEN TIEN GRAVEYARD, 1st April 1993
“I will squeeze the life out of you,
And you will make me laugh and make me cry,
And we will never forget it,
You will make me call your name and I will shout it to the blue summer sky,
We may never meet again,
So shake your skin and lets get started,
And you will throw your arms around me…Throw your arms around me.”
Mark Seymour, “Throw Your Arms Around Me”, Human Frailty
18. BIRDLAND, 5 th May 1993
“I went to bed full of whiskey and frustration and dreamed about a man in a bloody Chinese coat who chased a naked girl with long jade ear-rings while I ran after them and tried to take a photograph with an empty camera.”
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
19. THE OLYMPIC STADIUM, D-Day 1993
“Of course, there's Hell. Flames and damnation,” he said. “Torments.”
- Graham Greene , Brighton Rock
20. RUA DEL FELICIADALE, 29 th September 1993
“Straightway it will come to pass that she will fix her eyes upon the knight and he his upon her, and each will seem to the other something more divine than human, and, without knowing how or why they will be taken and entangled in the inextricable toils of love, and sorely distressed in their hearts not to see any way of making their pains and sufferings known by speech.”
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote de la Mancha
21. APOCALYPSE NOW BAR, 2 nd October 1993
“I looked at him, lost in astonishment. There he was before me, in motley, as though he had absconded from a troupe of mimes, enthusiastic, fabulous. His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem.”
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
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