March 03, 2005
Punks and other vices of Leijonakaupunki
We saw some Leijonakaupunki "underground" culture last week. On Saturday we accidentally discovered a teenage hangout place, brightly lit and air conditioned, not far from popular shopping malls, but underground (in fact it was 1 level under ground indeed, as it was on the way from MRT tunnel). Guys were doing some breakdance moves and there were kids with bicycles. No skateboards as it is banned from non-designated places. It looked so innocent, clean and orderly. And on Tuesday we went to the Blondie concert (yeah!). There were 2 warm-up bands (fortunately we missed the first one) from local undergound music scene. We saw only Zircon Gov. Pawn Starz. It was sad. Seriously sad and bad (don't know if they only can't perform live or was their sound engineer asleep..). It seems that saying the "f" word in public is still such a big deal for them that you could barely make anything else out of their ranting. Oh yeah, something about "media whore.. do your job.. for mediacorp.. (that is THE media company here)".. he he.. so disobedient...
Seeing Blondie after that felt so fresh and rebelious.. Debbie Harry is still such an adorable punker in her (almost) 60s, I didn't expect that she could rock such a big time during the concert. I expected a "mama", but she was a true sexy "punker". She learned some moves since 70s, but in fact didn't seem to have changed a lot since then. She really has a strong and beautiful voice and although I thought that she looks like Patsy Stone from Ab Fab, Kaj said "noooo..." So I believe him.
On the weekend I went to the Asian Civilizations museum and it was an amazing discovery - up until now Leijonakaupunki was kind of hanging in the air, not in any context, not related to anything that I know. Going through (only a very small!) part of the exhibit I got to know a vast amount of things about Leijonakaupunki. I also learned a lot about the history of Asian civilizations alltogether. I was suprised once again to see that crafts look very similar all around the world. This jewelry is from Northern Thailand, but it could easily be an archeological item from around Baltic sea, lets say Lithuania. Hand-made clothes are colorful and pixelated (similar to Sami handcrafts or to the Peruvian people's crafts), red and other bright colors are used liberally, etc.
Some historical facts about Leijoanakaupunki - it was a sleepy village unwanted and unclaimed by anybody until the British colonizer Raffles got his foot on this ground in 1819. He basically built the city from scratch around the Leijonakaupunki river mouth. Soon Leijonakaupunki became an important trade and logistical node in the global trade. Immigrants and foreign workers from China, India, everywhere started flooding here. The main business here was loading, unloading, moving and storing stuff from biger ships that couldn't enter the river. Aparently most of the workers that came to work here were very low skilled and uneducated. As the work conditions were very harsh and Chinese believed that its not good to have women on board while sailing long journeys through the seas, for a long time the city was inhabited by men mostly. So, of course, brothels, gambling and secret societies flourished here. at the beginning of the 20th century 1/3 of the inhabitants were opium addicts (in fact British colonizers and business people were heavily investing in the opium industry). It becomes slightly clearer why the laws are so strange here when you see what was the starting point to build the place. It is pretty amazing that Leijonakaupunki became so successful and made it so far..
It kind of resonates with the current debate about opening and not opening a casino in here. The mojority of citizens (according to the polls) is against that, religious organizations are against, but the goverment is already asking for proposals from different casino developers globally, as they want to lure tourist money+keep the rich people's money in the country (currently they're spending their spare money in the casinos in Bintan (Indonesia) and Macau (China)). Although there's some debate, it already feels that it is a "lost case". Somebody raised an idea to organize a "free" vote about that in the parlament, but it was not accepted. The decision will be made using Party Whip. "The Whips ensure that there are always sufficient party members in the Chamber to support the party's position and that MPs vote according to the party's line. Occasionally, he may "lift the whip" and allow MPs to vote according to their conscience." It means that the vote will be unanimous from all the 98% parlament members that belong to the ruling party (depending on what the party heads will decide about loosening gambling restrictions or not). Although the economical argument is pushed very strongly, people say that it is not only about loss of revenues if the casino is banned from the country. In a way it is a question of values, if the gambling rules are being loosened up, then why not allowing porn (at least nudity) and other vices of the outside (rotten) world?
Other things are happening here too, its still hot and humid, Kaj likes to play Tarzan-Jesus in the forest + they're streamlining operations and productivity at my workplace. That is maybe worth a whole another story. All the public sector organizations (TP included) are going through Best Sourcing exercise (that is basically outsourcing and cutting on "non-core" operations of organzations), some 20% of (mostly administrative) staff wil go (or will be re-deployed, haha). This was a slight surprise - when we heard that the director of HR will talk to us, we feared that they will cut our leave (currently we have 42 days!! imagine that!!) A funny new insight - they introduced a concept of "in-sourcing" (when the skills and know-how is shared within the organization), so lets say in the engineering department there's a guy who knows things about air-cons, he could be asked to help out if the air-cons get broken elsewhere in the TP. I believe this is a humorous interpretation of "in-sourcing", but if it becomes a reality.. hmmm...
Posted by gkligyte at March 3, 2005 07:30 PM