It’s my first Christmas Day in America – memorable enough, even without the 45-minute power outage earlier this evening… The power is now back on, just in time to prevent the looting and pillaging, and so we present, courtesy of a TC reader…

Things You Can (Finally) Do Now That You’re in America:
[And some suitably British comments from me thereon…]

10. See A Clockwork Orange. Decide if it was worth the wait.
Ah, we got this one an unseemly short period after Kubrick’s death, though I’d watched it in Paris some years previously; bootlegs of it had been doing the rounds for years too. And no, it wasn’t worth the wait, and certainly not a ban for 27 years. N.B. Nor has civilization collapsed into anarchy and chaos since its release. Er, well, actually it has, but that’s more to do with Railtrack and the weather than Stanley Kubrick.

9. Buy the “X-rated” version of Linsey’s Lesbian Seduction. See what Linsey Dawn McKenzie has been up to in America.
Again, our beloved censors finally realised censoring videos was pointless when we could all go on the Net or buy a satellite dish and get our fixes of porn elsewhere. Indeed, they’ve generally been lightening up: The Exorcist and Texas Chainsaw Massacre have both been passed recently, and I think the latter even got shown on network TV. Probably be a while before it makes it onto CBS…

8. Buy and drink Samuel Adams, Rolling Rock, Pyramid Ales or Pete’s Wicked. Grudgingly admit to your friends that no, American beer isn’t all bad.
Things have certainly improved since my first trip to America. Sam Adams is eminently drinkable, and widely available too. That used to be the problem: every area had good beers, but move 50 miles away and no-one had heard of them, so you had to start “sampling” all over again. What a pity. 🙂 Leinenkugel’s is my current favourite, but testing will continue throughout the festive season… However, I have had the delightful revelation that most American beer is in screw-top bottles that simply look like they need a bottle-opener…

7. Enjoy a meal at Roy Roger’s, Jack-in-the-Box, or Carl’s Jr. Grudgingly admit to your friends that no, American fast-food isn’t ALL like McDonald’s — bad.
Four weeks here, and I’ve yet to have a McD-burger — there aren’t many culinary areas my vegan ex-housemates and I agree on, but the (lack of) qualities in that chain probably scores. Not tried any of those you list, I admit, but there’s no shortage of non-major-chain fast food, although I guess see #8 for the problems this could cause when travelling. While places like The Jade Palace here in Phoenix exist, I won’t be troubling Ronald McD.

6. Learn to like Taco Bell in place of Indian curries. Fail.
Spicy Mexican food isn’t too far removed from spicy curries; read tortilla in place of naan bread and you’re almost there. My girlfriend remains one of the few people I know who can consume a chicken phal (beyond a vindaloo) without flinching, so there must be some similarity, since she has been living in Phoenix for a decade. On the other hand, feed her horseradish sauce and she bursts into tears (almost literally!), while I smile sweetly and tuck in…

5. Rent unedited XXX-rated films without fuzzy spots or black dots–legally, cheaply, and guilt-free. Hole up in your home for a week.
Legally and cheaply, I give you, but I think we’re a little short of guilt-free, since they haven’t made it into Blockbuster Video yet. They are only carried either in “specialist” stores, or in entirely separate section behind a curtain at the back. I have yet to pluck up the courage to go beyond the veil… If you want truly guilt-free, check out Amsterdam!

4. Buy a pistol and fire it.
Arizona: a state where fireworks are totally banned, yet you can own a gun at age 12… Go figure. This one may take some working up to, despite my gun range session on Valentine’s Day in ’99. However, a friend has offered to take me out hunting, even though I fear I would probably be more of a danger to him than any of the local wildlife…

3. Go to a country-and-western bar. Chat with locals. Ascertain that yes, some Americans have a backwards, antiquated view of English and Europeans dating from the 1700’s.
“We have both types of music: country and western.” Eugh. C&W is not, in my humble opinion, America’s greatest gift to world culture, ranking right down there with McDonalds and most of Disney’s recent output. If I was to enter such a place, I would insist on playing up to their stereotypes, dressing in a frock coat and monocle, while pretending to be an Earl. Possibly on a mission from Her Majesty to investigate the possibility of reclaiming our colony. Bar-brawl, anyone?

2. Enjoy affordable, full-contact lap dances! 🙂
My girlfriend would likely regard this as infringing on her personal territory, and I am more than happy to go along with her on this one! 🙂 However, one of the things I genuinely do love America for is freedom of speech and expression, enshrined in the Constitution. Precisely how full-contact lap-dances fit under this umbrella seems to vary from state to state, but I’m with the ACLU, defending the rights of consenting adults, whether I’d want to follow suit or not…

And the Number One thing you can do now that you’re finally in America…
1. Enjoy your stay and our hospitality! Hope you find yourself at home! Happy holidays to you!
And that is one I’m happy to accept without the need for any further comment at all. Have a good festive season, wherever you are reading this…

Days here: 28. Rainless days: 27. We had some last Tuesday, but not over enough of an area to register on the weather data. Normal service i.e unbroken sunshine, has now been resumed.

This part of Phoenix, a northern suburb known as Scottsdale, does not appear to be big on night-life, in that the restaurants, etc. close at 10 pm, or at the very latest, 11, even on weekends. Coming from Britain, the land of obscurist licensing laws, I suppose I should be used to it, but it does seem a bit odd. Now we’re into the week leading up to Christmas, a lot of the shops in the nearby malls are open every bit as late, or in some cases even later. Indeed, some will be heading onto round-the-clock opening, and we’re talking proper department stores, not just the 7-11s. It could be that consumerism is the main leisure pursuit, particularly at this time of the year.

The cinema is, you’ll not be surprised to hear, a viable alternative for myself and Chris: all the more so when the cost is so reasonable in comparison to London. Prices for matinee shows – which operate every day, not just Monday to Friday – have just gone up to the extortionate cost of $5.00, which is about one-third of what it would be to see the same film (months later, and perhaps cut by the BBFC) in Leicester Square. This is not in some flea-pit, but a fully-accredited THX cinema; and you rarely have to sit through more than one token advert, before getting to the trailers. The only problem is that there is only one cinema which shows the obscure stuff, so whenever Crouching Tiger gets here (and I’m polishing a spot on 2000’s Top Ten!), a trek will likely be required to see it. However, for Hollywood product as it appears, Phoenix has a lot to offer.

There does seem to be a decent live music scene going too; after finding VNV Nation playing here the day after I arrived, another of my favourite bands, The Aquabats, floated through town on Saturday. The Aquabats are kinda like a PG-rated version of Gwar, borrowing a lot of imagery from Japanese monster movies and Saturday morning cartoon shows, while playing a catchy combination of ska-punk. This concert was “all ages”, and did indeed appear to go right down to the low single figures. This meant no alcohol was on sale, which did at least avoid the need for severe ID checking before beer-buying was permitted, as seen at the VNV concert (ID check, wrist-band, alcohol only permitted in a double ring-fenced area by the bar). I think the lead singer must have been a teacher in his previous life, and did a fine job of controlling a boisterous crowd which hurled marshmallows at them, even getting the entire audience to sit down at one point before they’d continue!

Completing this quick sweep through the leisure potential of Phoenix so far, last Friday was the birthday of Robert, Chris’s son, and we had a ten-pin bowling party at a local alley. I’ve not been ten-pin bowling in years, although perhaps the sporting highlight of my life to date was getting four strikes in a row on a previous visit to the Streatham Megabowl. It has to be said that my technique relied more on power than skill, and was on occasion a danger more to pins in the adjacent lanes, but I enjoyed it, even if my thumb the next morning, was doing a solo audition for the Dragon Drummers of Kodo. Much like getting extremely drunk, ten-pin bowling is something which is such great fun at the time, you wonder why you don’t do it more often. But the next morning…

Finally, I ask for your prayers. The ship pictured left, the Hong Kong Senator, is currently shipping my goods across the Atlantic, with an expected arrival date in San Diego of January 14th. I’ll be the one spending Christmas scanning the short-wave radio for distress calls; if you see this ship on a beach near you, please let me know and I’ll come scrape my possessions off the fore-shore.

Who’d Kick Whose Ass?

In the blue corner, out of the (then) colony of Hong Kong, we have The Heroic Trio, reigning three-babe tag-team champions, and queens of femme fatale cinema: Michelle Yeoh, Anita Mui and Maggie Cheung. In the red corner, weighing in at between one and twelve million dollars per movie, we have the challengers, Charlie’s Angels, employed by a guy they’ve never met: Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu. But which of these two teams of action heroines would win in a fight? It’s over to our commentator at ringside for the best of the brawlin’ broad action…

Anita Mui vs. Lucy Liu.

Anita Mui is sometimes known as The Madonna of Asia, but let’s not hold that against her, since they look totally different, and Mui can act. This pits two former Jackie Chan associates against each other, Mui from Drunken Master 2 and Liu from Shanghai Noon. Both are well-known for playing somewhat angst-ridden characters, but Liu gets the edge because of a somewhat disturbing fondness for playing dominatrixes, both in Payback and an odd sequence in CA where she does an S/M efficiency queen. Mui may have had the glorious multiple machine-gun moment in A Better Tomorrow III, but in a bare-knuckle bout, Liu would soon clean up. Winner: Lucy Liu.

Maggie Cheung vs. Cameron Diaz.

Here we have the permanently perky little misses, Cheung and Diaz. The latter won the biggest pay-day for CA (a reputed $12m), while Cheung’s recent career has tended to vanish up its own art-house, with fodder like Chinese Box and the execrably self-indulgent Irma Vep. However, with her back-catalog including such gems as Flying Dagger, that’s a lot of class for Diaz to handle. This is especially true, since her career has been made, largely in “zany” comedies like There’s Something About Mary, though her experiences there with hair-gel mean Cheung will be aiming to keep her at a distance. To her credit, she did look the most competent fighter in CA, and if there’s a rematch in the sequel, this one could go the other way. Winner: Maggie Cheung.

Michelle Yeoh vs. Drew Barrymore.

The luck of the random draw pits the two leaders against each other, in a battle which will decide the fate of the title. And it’s a tough one to call. Both bounced back from down-time in the middle of their careers: Yeoh was married to magnate Dickson Poon, while Barrymore could be found wedded to drugs and booze. There’s no doubt both are on the way up – Barrymore’s role as a CA producer has her power quotient upped, while Yeoh might just be looking at Oscar nominations for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, after stealing Tomorrow Never Dies. By the time this one was over, both contestants would be battered and bruised. But that’s something the utterly hardcore Yeoh is used to by now, so she gains the victory on points. Winner: Michelle Yeoh.

So, by a split decision, the title remains in the Far East, with The Heroic Trio holding onto the belt, despite the strongest challenge to come from the West since they took the title off the Thelma and Louise squad (Davis, Sarandon and Khouri) in a 1992 barbed-wire cage death match.

Days here: 20. Consecutive days without rain: 20…

You’ll be pleased to hear – I know I was, anyway – that I managed to scrape through the first part of my Arizonan driving test, and am now the fully-fledged holder of an instuctional permit, from which my ugly mug is beaming broadly, with a mildly shocked expression. I didn’t actually think it was that tough: the pass mark was 80%, but with only three possible answers for each question, blind luck would have been sufficient to get you a good way towards that total. I had more problems with the eyesight test, which involved you putting your head into a contraption, which then flashed lights at you to test your peripheral vision and screened lines of letters for you to identify. What they didn’t tell you was that you needed to keep your forehead pressed forward onto a contact switch for it to function; fortunately, I realised this just in time to avoid being led out of there with a guide-dog rather than a driving licence.

The Motor Vehicle Division is not exactly the most homely of places, with a depressing and apathetic feel to the place, mirrored in quite a number of the employees. Though I suppose we should be grateful we were talking to liberated citizens: if you phone them up, you are given stern warnings that you must not, under any circumstances, divulge your name and address to a Level One employee. If it becomes necessary, you need to speak to a Level Two employee first. The reason for this is not immediately explained, but we discovered subsequently that Level Ones are actually inmates of local jails. The last thing you want is Bowling Ball Bob taking a liking to the sound of your voice and popping round for a cup of tea and your liver – hence the restrictions.

The next step is, obviously, learning to drive, and I’m pretty glad not have done much driving in Britain over the past five years, since I’m effectively starting from scratch. Chris’s car is really more of a truck, much bigger than anything I’ve dealt with previously; that alone would be enough to cope with, but there’s also things like it not starting when it’s in neutral, and the absence of a hand-brake, as well as obvious things like the gear-stick being on the other side. Our first couple of sessions wisely kept death off the road, by keeping me in the parking lot of a department store late at night, though even this had more enemy targets e.g. other cars in it than I’d have liked i.e none at all. Having acquitted myself these with only the occasional reminder about which side of the road to drive on (and here seems a good point to praise Chris’s patience and tolerance to the heavens – she stayed in the car long beyond the point where I’d have opted for somewhere safer. Such as Chechnya.], I’ve now been permitted to hit the roads.

So far, that hasn’t been too bad – there are probably fewer targets there than in the parking lots, and the streets are generally wide enough to allow me the margin for error which is probably A Good Thing for the moment. Oddly, parallel parking is a major part of the driving test, despite the fact that it’s something you hardly ever have to do in Arizona. Parking space is hardly at a premium in a state which is bigger than all of Britain, with maybe a tenth of the population, and indeed, they have to fake it on the test, with road-cones. But that is a joy which is yet to come, when I’ve got the hang of driving what seems like a monster truck compared to the Renault 5 I used to have. Until then, unwary tourists should probably pay special attention crossing the road in the Phoenix area.

Before I forget: do you remember last editorial, starting off with a lyric from VNV Nation? Well, guess which band played Phoenix less than 24 hours after I got here? Yep, VNV Nation – and I had absolutely no idea until I got here that this was the case, and that they would be taking the same flight as me, the following day. Might have been better for me if I’d been on the same plane, as I got a severe going-over by Customs on the way in, probably since it was my sixth trip to America this year… Explaining fifty copies of TC was bad enough. Explaining the bag of plaster-of-paris (don’t ask!) was even worse. But I imagine the Customs Officer will have got a good beer story out of me at least…

So, here I am in Phoenix, and very pleasant it is too – ten days in, and it hasn’t rained yet. I even had to go out and buy a pair of sunglasses the other day, not having brought a pair with me (“I won’t need them in November” – not in London, no, but in Arizona, they appear to be an all-year-round accessory). It has been, obviously, a period of settling-in, but this has been largely painless and easy: I’ve been busy working on Chris’s web-site, polishing it up, with the eventual aim of adding e-commercy things like shopping-carts, etc. I have been able to do absolutely nothing on the work front, since there is still no sign of the visa – any more than there is any sign of a generally-agreed president. Fine by me. 😉

I’ve been exploring the neighbourhood – on foot, for reasons which the next paragraph will explain, but that alone is somewhat unusual behaviour here. I was pleased to realise that there are shops, and indeed, a very nice mall, within walking distance, so fears about 30-minute drives every time we need a pint of milk, have proven unfounded. But no-one walks. In my lunchtime strolls, it’s not uncommon for me to be meandering around for an entire hour, without seeing one single person outside of a parking lot. In the summer, I can understand this – I’ve been here in July, and you only want to go from air-conditioned house to air-conditioned car – but it’s now down in the 70’s and very pleasant.

However, by the time you see this, I will hopefully have moved one crucial step closer towards embracing that all-American lifestyle: tomorrow sees me sitting my driving test. Or, at least, the written part of it, which is all you need to pass in order to get a basic permit, allowing you out on the roads. I’m somewhat nervous about this, even though it’s multiple-choice, it having been several years since I’ve done so much as sit behind the wheel of any vehicle, and so have been frantically studying the driver’s manual (the US version of The Highway Code) in preparation for the inquisition. I just hope there are no trick questions, like “What side of the road do you drive on?”

I’ve now passed through my first Thanksgiving, an orgy of consumption which is like Christmas without any of the irritating religious trappings. Though as soon as you get Thanskgiving out of the way, Christmas itself does pounce upon you. We only just hit December this morning, but already one radio station has gone onto playing nothing but Christmas music, 24 hours a day. The bulk of our Christmas decorations haven’t quite gone up yet (that’s a job scheduled for this weekend), but we are a long way behind some houses in the neighbourhood there, who mount dazzling displays which must be a threat to low-flying aircraft.

And now it’s almost time to send out for pizza and settle down in front of the television. Fortunately, as yet, the novelty of commercials every 90 seconds hasn’t quite worn off…