Hockey morning in Taipei

This is Dave Hartwell. He's on a 50cc scooter called a Sniper. The light is on, and the left-hand mirror is twisted. Behind him is the restaurant across from his Taipei apartment where you can get good peanut-sauce noodles.

“One of my favorite local dishes is huo tway dan,” Hartwell says, breaking into fluent Mandarin. “Mmmm, hao chr!” he laughs.

Then he translates: “Ham and egg sandwiches: good.”

Dave's not worried that the Vancouver Canucks will be eliminated from the NHL Playoffs tonight, in Game 5 against the Anaheim Ducks.

Okay, he's a little worried.

(Hartwell's profile at Canucks.com: "Cheers from Far Away.")

Parkour

David Belle, the protagonist of Alec Wilkinson's "No Obstacles," vaulting through London.

Below: the vertiginous, parkour-inspired opening chase of "Casino Royale," starring Belle's childhood friend, Sébastien Foucan.

Go tell it on the mountain

Not sure why I chose that title: the song brings to mind my sister's squinted-up face at a Christmas party somewhere in East Vancouver, singing because the adults asked her to. It just came to me.

Good news: I've shifted the pile of schoolbooks on my floor—the ones I had to triple-jump through to get to bed. Twenty-one of them have to go back to the UBC library by June 15, and I can only find 18. The cleanup has excavated several magazines, most of them New Yorkers, all bent open to random pages.

Apparently, I dropped:

• a Walrus in the middle of an article about an overcoat made of aluminum window screening;
• a New Yorker in the middle of Denby's review of "The Wind That Shakes the Barley," a film I'd never heard of;
• a New Yorker at the outset of one of those high-spirited Patricia Marx pieces ("Emotional Baggage") in which she prices everything;
• and a New Yorker just at the end of that profile of Gordon Ramsay, the English chef who's sublimated his raised-on-a-council-estate class fury into truffle and morel preparations. (This one I remember; it's taken me three pre-sleep reads to this point.) What the hell is a morel?

I did read Adam Gopnik's gun-control screed this week, and, fan though I am, I did a thick swallow after his last line—something about how oh, the cell phones of the dead Virginia Tech students are ringing still. Brrr.

Also, Malcolm Gladwell on The Colbert Report: I wanted to listen to one man or the other, not both. Malcolm was a touch earnest, and Stephen kept cutting him off with ersatz jokes like "What, you need a degree for that? A piece of paper?" although he did get in a good bit about honorary degrees. I give it a six point seven.

Describing: Jeff Koons

Koons, who is fifty-two, looks very much the same as he did at thirty—trim and boyish, with neatly barbered brown hair and the sort of unfinished features that seem to be peculiarly American. He was eager to show me around.

—Calvin Tomkins, in "The Turnaround Artist" (Apr. 23)

Jeff Koons (b. January 21, 1955) is an American mixed-media artist noted for his use of kitsch imagery. His works are among the most expensive in the world for a contemporary artist.

Describing: Gunter Sachs

Only liquids were consumed. I celebrated with him. The last thing he said to me, at five o'clock the next morning, was that I was a girl, a coward, because I insisted I had had enough.

Hundreds of eager young men tried to emulate Rubi's manner, accent, and way with women. No one observed him more closely than Gunter Sachs, a hollow-eyed German with a protruding lip and a cowboy gait."

—From "Princes, Playboys, and High-class Tarts," by Taki Theodoracoupolous.

Fritz Gunter Sachs (b. November 14, 1932) is a German mathematician, photographer, and multi-millionaire industrialist.

Morning breaks on the newsroom

Backlog of three New Yorkers to read, plus the one retrieved from Waterhouse's car. Huge paper on 'representations of masculinity in the media' due Monday. I'm drawing a line from a colonial pamphlet, The Boys' Own Paper, to modern-day lad-mags like Maxim. While I'm spouting sociologica all weekend, I want you to do something that makes your cheeks ruddy.

Father taught French

Check out my new links section—Where the Wordy Are.

Bloody irony

I went to my first ballet

Yesterday, on the very day I was carping about men's clothing with Stephen Connolly, an invitation to the ballet flung me into the great generational sartorial divide—What belt goes with what?

Me, showered, in a navy suit and white shirt: "Help, everyone, I'm a little confused about belt selection."

Girlfriend, on the phone: "Don't listen to your father—black never goes with blue. Wear the oxblood belt and shoes."

Father, truculently: "If I took you to any men's shop in the city in a blue suit and that belt, they would think you'd walked off a farm."

The ballet? A thrill ride for the ages.

The clothes? I split the difference—black belt and oxblood shoes—and tried to keep my jacket buttoned. Wrong, I know: you shouldn't compound error with indecision.

I'm leaning toward dressing the way that young women prefer it, but I think it may set a bad precedent.

Glad for any guidance here.

(JJB Photo: "Bag.")

On Tarantino

I think the issue I lost contained a review of "Grindhouse"—that new double feature by Quentin Tarantino and the other guy.

I'm working hard on an article about funeral music (by the way, you can still vote for your song), but I'm going to go and seek the review out later, and treat it like a sorbet for my brain. In my heart, I hope it's by Denby, and that he does Tarantino a little ultraviolence, but I'm willing to accept another result.

Having seen the TV commercials for "Grindhouse," though, I'm bracing for another queasily masturbatory homage to a 1970s schlock-action genre. I've never resented a director so much as I did Tarantino, after watching "Kill Bill I."

Anyone disagree with Denby that "Kill Bill" was "what’s formally known as decadence and commonly known as crap"? Taipei Davey?

(JJB Photo: "9 Alma.")