Dive into the archives.
- The Beijing Caucus
Sexy Beiijing is an online TV show hosted by an American girl called Su Fei. It’s basically sociology meets Sex and the City, and mostly inlvolves Su Fei roaming the streets of Beijing asking local people for advice on how to find a man.
In this episode she’s looking for advice on who to vote for in the presidential primary.
Awesome.
Popularity: 4% [?]
- HOW TO NOT MAKE MONEY: good conversation with the head curator of Beijing’s first non-profit art center
One of the coolest things about being in Beijing at this point in history is watching the ways that the city processes the huge amounts of new cultural information that enter it each day. On its surface, Beijing’s cultural identity seems pretty fixed. It’s the PRC’s symbolic center, and it needs to look the part. But if you look below the surface, you see a city passionately seeking out and soaking in new forms of life and living. For the past few months, I’ve been interviewing some of the people who seem to be at the front of this process. I’ll post up some my favorites as time goes by.
For the second installment, here is a conversation I had last week with Colin Chinnery, the deputy director and head curator at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art , China’s first not-for-profit art center. As you’ll see, the project is blazing several trails at the same time….
Quotables:
“I think, without a doubt, there is not single person in this team who has had this amount of freedom, or could possibly expect to have anything like this amount of freedom in an institution in the West.”
“It’s a little bit like social engineering.”
“This money from the market and the speculators is a tidal wave, and a hell of a lot of artists are going to be washed out to sea.”
“The French called the Americans and the Americans called the Chinese, and both the French and Americans said, ‘This has to come down!’”
Popularity: 8% [?]
- My ass went to the Shenzhen Biennale and all you got is this lousy recap
This weekend was the opening of the Shenzhen Biennale (also known by its ultra sleek ceremonial name The 2007 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture) - a three-month festival of city life, staged in an old industrial complex. The enormous show was curated by my friends Charlie Koolhaas & Qingyun Ma and featured the work of a bunch of other friends, so I went down on Saturday to support and check it out.
I’d planned to do a big, full-bodied post about the biennale, since there is almost no online evidence of its existence. But then I got there and realized my camera had no memory card, then I arrived at the site and things got all hectic with helping people move shoes and find extension chords, and reuniting with old friends, and everyone was drinking and delirious from not having slept properly for days, then it was the opening ceremony and I had to get my shit together to DJ at the after party, and, in the end, I left the place having taken five photos with my phone. For the record:
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The two other photos I mentioned were blurrier versions of those guys playing with the rubik’s cubes. So, that’s not much of a record. But even from these three I think you can sense the casual, participatory vibe that makes the biennale really fun and radically unlike the typical architectural affair.
But I don’t want to shortchange an event that my friends spent so much time and money and mental health points working on, so, like any good party crasher, I’m going to boast about what I took home in my gift bag and in the process name drop! Now then:
1. Biennale in a box
The biennale’s catalog is basically an enormous pink brick filled with black & white posters, one poster for each of the 200+ exhibits. I haven’t really looked in it yet but, like Mount Rushmore or Britney Spears’ pre-nup, I admire it for the sheer quantity of labor that went in.
2. Cool newspaper that the printer fucked up
The biennale organizers created a list of ten questions about cities, with the idea of urban regeneration and expiration in mind especially. They got a lot of interesting responses and painstakingly arranged fragments of the best ones into a series of meditations of cities and life itself. They formatted it as a newspaper with the intention of distributing them free throughout the biennale. Then the printer flaked out and somehow showed up with boxes of two separate pieces with non-sequential pages. China.
3. Rumpled print by Lok Jansen
My friend Lok is an architect and illustrator in Tokyo. A set of his pieces were printed on light boxes and hung up along a concrete wall, and everybody loves them. I don’t have a picture of that, of course. But I’m sure he will. Check his site out here.
4. Inflatable tower packaged to look like a condom
My roommate for a night Andre Schmidt has produced a blow-up version of the Berlin TV Tower. It’s cool and incredibly phallic. That doesn’t bother Andre one bit, as is evidenced by this promotional video he’s hooked up for it:
For more info on what it is and where to buy, go here.
5. You by Dynamic City Foundation
This is a very beautiful little book about, among other things, the dreams of everyday Chinese people. Truthfully speaking, I didn’t get this book at the biennale. But it was available at the biennale, so I want to bring it up because its creator Neville Mars produced one of the most beautiful exhibits and, of course, I don’t have any photos of that. But in this case, that doesn’t matter so much because Neville has painstakingly documented it all here. Neville was also rinsing it out on the dance floor at the after party so he gets extra props for that too.
6. With/Without
This is a book about Dubai edited by my friend Shumon. I haven’t had a chance to look through it yet, but need to because I really don’t know much about Dubai.
7. Reineke Otten’s business card
Reineke produced by all accounts a very beautiful and smart exhibit on her World Skin Colors project. But half of it was removed by the Shenzhen government, because it didn’t properly identify Taiwan as part of China. One of those cultural mistakes that’s very very easy to make when you’re not in China and impossible after you’ve been here for a while. Reineke’s also a gifted photographer. Check out some of her work here.
8. The new issue of Urban China magazine
My peeps Urban China also had an exhibit at the biennale and it also was censored. They seemed to take it in stride, and gave me their latest issue about Chinatowns and it’s excellent. If you can read Chinese or are feeling adventurous, check them out here.
9. The new issue of Too magazine
Too is a good new magazine made by a crew of people in different parts of China. They made a special issue for the biennale that focuses on Shenzhen and includes a bunch of funny and fascinating portraits of people there.
10. The new issue of Prophecy magazine.
Prophecy is a magazine based in New York with a very good sense of style and the type of international spirit that I always get behind. I was introduced to its publisher Kevin and he hit me off with this. Check out the Prophecy site for more info and some very good mixes.
Last and least I have a clip of part of my set at the after party. It was described by the biennale’s head curator Charlotte Koolhaas as “music for a 12 year old’s birthday party” and includes back-to-back-to-back hits from Michael Jackson, back-to-back Britney, Chris Brown, Usher, Nina Sky, Kevin Little and some more I forgot. It gets cut off abruptly because the authorities ended the party by shutting off all the power without warning. China.
DOWNLOAD
right click & select ’save link as’ (mac) or ’save target as’ (windows)Popularity: 8% [?]
- Nice up the Republic: a conversation with Beijing’s ambassador to reggae
One of the coolest things about being in Beijing at this point in its history is watching the ways that the city processes the huge amounts of new cultural information that enter it each day. On its surface, Beijing’s cultural identity seems pretty fixed. It’s the PRC’s symbolic center, and it needs to look the part. But if you look below the surface, you see a city passionately seeking out and soaking in new forms of life and living. For the past few months, I’ve been interviewing some of the people who seem to be at the front of this process. I’ll post up some my favorites as time goes by.
To start, here’s a conversation I had a couple weeks ago with Robin Liao. Robin owns Together Bar, Beijing’s #1 (and only) reggae spot. I hope you enjoy….
Quotables:
“Reggae in China is like blind people touching an elephant.”
“If you put Bob-anything in the internet, you get Bob Dylan.”
“Sometimes an opportunity just falls down from the sky - like a pie in the sky. But sometimes it is really a pie.”
“I’m a Gemini so I always jump.”
Popularity: 10% [?]
- Book Buildings
Lately I’ve been doing research for a project on the future of the book. The topic is warming up here in China ever since a popular horror writer declared that he’d no longer make his work available in print, only online, saying books were too wasteful and environmentally hostile. But, in a classic STFU moment, a few days after his announcement the largest bookstore in the world opened outside of Beijing. I went for a visit this weekend.
It’s called Beijing International Book City.
As you’d imagine, it’s huge. 300,000 square meters, housing over 500 state-owned publishers and an estimated 300 private and overseas publishers, including Random House and Penguin. But anyway, you could learn any of that from a press release.
What’s really amazing about the place isn’t the quantity of books but the ways they’re displayed. I basically spent the first hour I was there running around, dodging security guards and taking as many photos as I could:
Then after all the running around and breathing in all the (probably toxic) new-building-smell and new-book-smell I became semi-hallucinatory and started seeing buildings that I recognized from around Beijing…
In the end, all that scurrying around left me too tired to actually read any books, so I bought the littlest one I could find.
It’s a conversation book for students of English, and amongst its many variations on introduction, food ordering, and family description, I found this highly compelling passage:
Popularity: 5% [?]
- Baby’s first handgun
Silk Street Market, BeijingPopularity: 5% [?]
- A day in the life of a Chinese architect
Earlier this week I visited Taiyuan, the capital city of Shanxi, a province in central China renowned for its mineral wealth and extreme pollution. I was playing a role that I’ve become accustomed to since coming to China - the token foreigner. My friend had been asked to design the masterplan for a new real estate development there, and so I went along to support and impress the client with my abundant whiteness.
There’s a lot of speculation among my western architect friends about what it’s like to be an architect working in modernizing China. There are so many crazy statistics floating around about the rate of building here that it’s hard to choose one, but my personal favorite is this: Between the time that Beijing was announced as host of the 2008 Olympics and the opening ceremony later this year, the equivalent of 3 Manhattans will have been added to the city.
So with all these opportunities to build, one might assume that being an architect in China is a thrill ride, but, from what my friends here have told me, it’s actually pretty bleak. The trip to Taiyuan only confirmed this for me, so I decided to make a little photo essay about the trip, so that those of us on the outside can get a better sense of what it’s like in the Fastest Urbanization In World History™…
You exit the terminal to find that the airport is unfinished. There are no workers anywhere. A bad omen?
You are whisked off in a German car. A DVD of Chinese vaudeville plays from inside the dashboard.
As you approach the city center the air perceptibly grays.
You arrive at a generic business tower and are led up to the client’s office, a large room with a huge desk and an encyclopedic collection of talismans - laughing Buddha, golden crocodile (with mysterious marbleized sphere in its mouth), cactus, 1 meter-tall bullet, James Bond villain globe, porcelain vases of various sizes and shapes, ceramic statues of ferocious animals emasculated with decorative bows and ribbons, enlarged snapshots of various dinners and jubilant signing ceremonies….
After a brief overview in which the client explains that there is already a scheme for this project - designed by a nameless “Canadian” firm - but that nothing (including the program) has been decided, you are brought to the site. It is in the middle of nowhere. On the drive over the client might say something like, “People say we won’t be able to get buyers for this, because it’s 25 minutes outside of the city, but I don’t think so.”
You are shown some hand-painted billboards that depict the scheme that you’ve been told to ignore and are encouraged to imagine a 21st century industrial-office-residential wonderland teeming to hip, prosperous people.
Then you turn around and face this.
You head off into the wilderness.Popularity: 6% [?]
- The week in photos
As the saying goes, bloggin ain’t easy. I think one of the trickiest parts of this type of thing is how to incorporate anecdotes from your daily life without seeming like some sort of attention-hungry child. I’d like to avoid the vanity and exhibitionism that ruins most of the personal blogs I’ve ever checked out, but, you know, fingers crossed…
Last week I happened to do a bunch of things that involve taking photos, so I figured why not string a few together into a little recap. Let me know if you think it’s worth doing this sort of thing. I’ll take no comment to mean dumb-struck fascination and begging for more.
Monday:
As final effort for the MAD Dinner book that we’ve been working on, my friend Shuyu and I ran around Beijing looking for the perfect image to express “Realizable Utopia,” one of the book’s themes. I liked this one, but it got nixed for an image of couples dancing outside of an Outback Steakhouse.
Tuesday:
These were taken during my first trip to one of Beijing’s many many many home furnishing depots. Home decoration is an obsession here and the general aesthetic vibe is upscale Hong Kong psychiatrist’s office meets 18th century French aristocrat’s country home. Many of the vendors are so adamant about the German, Swiss, French, Italian, or Britishness of their goods that at times the market had a feeling not unlike what I imagine filled Europe immediately before the start of World War I. Except that everyone’s Chinese. There were so many funny shop names that I couldn’t even decide which to include. But I guess my favorite is Big Wig. And Kingliness. And, for some reason, Boloni.
Wednesday:
On Wednesday I relaxed. But not as hard as this dude.
Thursday:
This is taken from the top floor of the CCTV Headquarters now being built in Beijing. I was there with my friend Tomas who’s filming it for a documentary. This is really an amazing building and a heroic feat of construction, and I’d love to include more, but there are some controls on the images released. In fact, I may have to take this one down. Let’s see.
Friday:
Friday Tomas and I traveled to Shenzhen, the irregular heartbeat of China’s Special Economic Zones. Shenzhen is basically the epicenter of a design style that you see throughout China, especially in clubs, karaoke bars, and all-night spas. If I was going be to pretentious, I could make up a name for it like Baroque Modernism, but whatevs.
Saturday:
We were in Shenzhen filming for a video art piece called Green & Grey by my main woman and Tomas’s sister Charlie. The idea for the piece is to capture the strange mixture of nature and construction that you find everywhere in the city. Shenzhen has a subtropical climate with the jungle foliage to match, but it’s also home to tens of thousands of factories that power the city economically and wreck it ecologically. Towards the end of the day it started raining. Tomas was wearing a white t-shirt and when the rain drops hit it they left black and gray stains. According to government estimates, acid rain is falling on 30 percent of China. Shenzhen is part of the dirty 30.
Sunday:
Sunday I came back the socialist market stageset that is Beijing and, for the first time ever, remarked on how clean it felt.
Popularity: 5% [?]
- What I learned in the youtube blackout
Happy Halloween.
I haven’t cared much about this holiday since I grew out of candy in high school, but this year is special since it coincides with the return of my beloved youtube. As I mentioned earlier, since the opening of the People’s Congress in Beijing, youtube has been blacked out in China. But today, All Hallow’s Eve, a day when, according to witches and goths and librarians, a portal to the underworld opens up and the spirits of the dead are allowed to return the physical world, China’s omnipotent Net Nanny has allowed Tay Zonday, Bas Rutten , Reh Dogg, and all my friends to return to the Middle Kingdom.
Popularity: 6% [?]
- GET ME OUT OF HERE: the all-nighter mixtape
A couple days ago we wrapped up work on MAD Dinner, the book I’ve been making for the past couple months.
As in any publishing project, the end of MAD Dinner production involved a lot of long nights. I’ve had this experience a lot of times and it’s disturbingly similar every time. So I thought why not make a little diary of how it went this time. Then I realized that would be pretty boring, so I decided to set it to music. The result is below - Pain Release 2007 - an all-nighter in mixtape form….
Below is a tracklist and hour-by-hour account of the last night of design. Each song sets the tone for my emotional state….
18:00 Shaun Escoffery - Let it go (Jazzanova remix)
State: Unrealistic Optimism
I arrive around 6 knowing it will be a long night of labor and misunderstandings. As I enter the graphic designers’ studio I give myself a silent pep talk. No matter how dysfunctional things become, I say to self, I must, like the man Shaun Escoffery says, “Let it go.”
19:00 Da Lata - Ronco da cuica
State: Productive hubris
Before I can start editing the texts, a lengthy negotiation takes place. The designer insists that he make all the changes, knowing full well that we can barely communicate. I explain that I can easily make the changes myself, thereby saving us both lots of time and frustration. “This will be the easiest night of work you’ve ever had!” I say good naturedly and then demand that my words be translated. He kind of smiles awkwardly and counters with a series of new concerns. Had I ever used Indesign before? Yes, well this is a Chinese version. You can figure it out? This is a mac, have you used a mac?… Eventually he went to use the toilet, which I took for a sign of surrender. I celebrate by working hard and foolishly predicting that I’ll be able to go home “a lot sooner than I thought…”
20:00 MIA - 20 dollar
State: Unproductive irritability
After an hour or so of work, one of the designers’ girlfriends arrives with a kitten. This is taken by all (apart from me, the animal-hating anti-social foreigner) as a cue to stop all work and bullshit for the next hour. I continue, but feel weirdly hostile.
21:00 Crime Mobb - Knuck if you buck (instrumental)
State: Bummed-out incomprehension
As the kitty-inspired break stretches on past an hour, I become slightly despondent. The scene takes on surreal qualities as I watch men who have tons and tons of work to do - as they so often point out when I suggest making changes - flipping through magazines and reminiscing over cell phone photos. I feel strongly inclined to get my workaholic parent on and go tell the kids to break it up, but remind myself of my commitment to “let it go”.
22:00 Damian Marley w/ Stephen Marley, Capleton, Drag-on - It was written
State: Half sad, half soothed
The designers have come back to work now. I know that the last hour of free time will have to be made up, most likely in the early hours of tomorrow, and I’ll probably have to stick around for that. But at least we’re making progress. Who knows?
23:00 Dennis Brown - Slave driver
State: Perseverance in the face of tedium
The day before it was explained to me that, when romanizing Chinese characters, it makes more sense to break up words by their characters. For Chinese readers, it seems unnatural to for instance write Mao Zedong, since it’s 3 characters. Mao Ze Dong or Mao ZeDong makes more sense. The logic seems good to me, and I noticed that, especially for longer, less familiar Chinese words, breaking it up phonetically makes them less intimidating to read. So I figured why not, and decided to handle all of the romanized Chinese words in this way. So I set about going through all the texts in the book and changing them according to this system.
24:00 Rankin Joe - Slave driver dub
State: Depressed deja vu
While making changes to an interview with a city official who repeatedly mentions Beijing and Shanghai, I realize that if I follow the new system and change the words to BeiJing or Shang Hai, they look totally ridiculous. In great pain, I abandon the grand punctuation experiment and go back to the typical, less readable way. The next hour is spent retracing my steps and painstakingly re-changing all the changes that I’d spent the hour before making. The most painful part is I have no one to blame for this enormous waste of time.
1:00 Eek-a-mouse - Long time ago
State: Caffeine & sugar serenity
Around one everyone agrees that they’re hungry and someone offers to go to McDonald’s. I ask for a cheeseburger. It arrives with a coke. I never drink coke. In high school I worked at a burger king and part of my job was to replace the bags of black syrup that fast food restaurants dilute and serve to the customers as coke. Since then I just don’t fuck with it. But everyone has a drink, and it seems rude to reject it. So I drink about half. The impact is immediate and pleasurable. I suddenly feel more positive, more hopeful, invigorated and affectionate. I start making random small talk with no one in particular. One of the designers suggests we fire up the Wii to work off some of these calories. I’m absolutely psyched by this idea and spend most the next hour losing at tennis.
2:00 Kool and the Gang - Summer madness
State: Sweaty disorientation
After all that passionate Wiing, I’m sweaty and a little light headed. I know I have to get back to work, but can’t concentrate. Some of the caffeine-fueled tranquility remains, but I can see a comedown on the horizon. I finish the coke.
3:00 Handsome Boy Modeling School w/ Cat Power - I’ve been thinking
State: Exhaustion
I finally get back to work. I feel very tired, particularly when I think of how much more has to be done and how little coke remains.
4:00 John Mayer - I don’t trust myself (with loving you)
State: Floating
I finally finish the section I’m working on. Before I can start the next one, I need to wait for the designer to finish the layout. This takes about on hour. During this time I’m mostly resting on a bean bag chair. Big shout out to bean bag chairs.
5:00 Anthony Hamilton - Do you feel me?
State: Inexplicable emotionalism
As dawn approaches I am overcome with feelings of sadness, affection, nostalgia, and fatigated euphoria. A few times while I’m making sure the punctuation is consistent and there aren’t any widow or orphan lines, I feel like I might start crying.
6:00 Platinum Pied Pipers - The light
State: Redemption
The sun rises, and I start to think about this night actually being over. There’s not that much more work for me to do. Barring some sort of catastrophe, we should be coming to the end. I feel stronger for having made it through the night. I feel something like what Gandalf must have felt after surviving his bout with the Balrog of Moria.
7:00 Common - I want you
State: Satisfaction and longing
I’ve finished my stuff and feel pretty good, but I need to wait around for a few things to be finished before everything can be signed off and sent for a test print. I ask if they have a dancing game for the Wii. They do not.
8:00 Spank Rock - Chilly Will
State: High on life, low on patience
Been waiting around for over an hour, so I start to pressure the designers. They don’t appreciate this, understandably. I’m just trying to get out of here. Just show me the stuff I need to check and I am out of here. You can color correct all you want once I’m gone.
9:00 Club Kings - Boy don’t waste my time
State: Forced finesse
I am doing my best to stay cool, but inside I feel like I’m going mad. I feel like a hostage. Nevertheless, I maintain a kind of chummy, sympathetic demeanor when asking (for the 50th time), when I’ll be able to finish up and move on.
10:00 Club Kings - Wanna fuck you
State: Angry happiness
When the time finally comes, the designer acts like he’s going me a favor. “I’ve still got so much to do,” he says, while getting up out of the seat that I’ve been hovering around for 2 hours plus. I am so happy and tired that my hands are twitching while I give everything a final check. These are moments when you have to somehow find a way to maintain your discipline and be thorough even though you’re tired and want nothing more than to get the fuck out. I still haven’t managed to find a way to do that though, so I just kind of quickly read through, hit apple+S and I’m out!!
11:00 Rod Lee - Dance my pain away
State: Post-traumatic, pre-grimey
I leave the office to the hustle and bustle of Beijing’s CBD. It is impossibly bright. I briefly consider getting a massage, but I’m sure I’ll fall asleep. I put on my ipod and head home, looking forward to the drunken dance floor action awaiting me that evening.
The End
Anyway, in a moment of sleep-deprived, thank-you-jesus-it’s-over euphoria, I blended it all together into a single mix. I think this captures the ebb and flow of sanity better… Please listen and let me know what you think.
You can download it HERE. Just right-click/ctrl-click the link and choose “save target as” (windows) or “save link as” (mac).
Popularity: 6% [?]
- The revolution will not be televised
There is so much that can be (and has been) said about China’s special brand of liberal authoritarianism.
Some say the approach is unsustainable, that economic reform without political reform is impossible in the long term. They predict that, as soon as the economic growth from which the Chinese government derives all of its authority slows down, people will start to demand more, and without elections, a free press, etc. there will be no way for these grievances to be addressed without violence. Others counter that a project such as the one in which China is currently engaged (bringing in, going out, coming together, raising up…) is too complex to leave to the instability and short-sightedness of electoral politics. Maybe down the line, they say, we can think about opening up the leadership, but for now, everyone has to sacrifice for the good of the nation.
Not being Chinese, I’ve never felt obliged to contribute much to this kind of discussion. That’s partly because I’m generally turned off by foreigners who dictate from a distance what China “needs” to do. Also, I know very well that my opinion (as well as theirs) doesn’t mean jack here.
BUT I now realize that my reticence is also partly due to the fact that I haven’t had a cause behind which I can put my self-righteous all. Well, that more innocent time came to a crashing halt two days ago when I learned that the Chinese government decided to block YOUTUBE.
Surfin’ the Web can be an exasperating experience in China. It’s not at all that the CPC has a complete lock down on all would-be offensive content. Certain high-profile sites like BBC news and Wikipedia are inaccessible, and for a long time all Blogger-hosted blogs couldn’t be accessed unless you used a proxy server or a site like anonymouse.org. But a huge number of similar sites - like IHT or Answers.com - are freely available.
And this is what I find so frustrating. The system seems so arbitrary and ad-hoc. One minute you’re sailing along smoothly, looking at all sorts of pornography, Tibetan freedom blogs, and Tian’anmen tank images and then suddenly google shorts out or an image you want to save can’t be accessed. It’s a kind of blue balls for the information age.
As one would imagine, the Chinese censors are more thorough when it comes to Chinese content, but with over 24 million Chinese-language web pages to monitor, only so much ground can be covered.
Perhaps that’s why the Beijing Public Security Bureau recently appealed for greater public participation in limiting personal freedom. In August it released a virtual police unit comprised of uniformed cartoons who roam the cyberspace beat, encouraging China’s hardy netizens to narc on one another. According to China Daily:
A Beijing netizen need only click the two cartoon police if he or she wants to report malicious information or pornographic websites. Then the netizen shall fill in a form to end the whole reporting processing, Beijing police said Tuesday at a press conference.
This idea of a self-policing internet has uncomfortable parallels with the informant system that was used to control and terrorize the population during the Cultural Revolution. It’s not of the same severity, of course, but it’s part of the same snitching tradition that the government has encouraged for decades.
But if you hear from the government itself, virtual censorship is virtually non-existent. From another China Daily article:
Regulation of China’s Internet is fully in line with international practice, and the country welcomes foreign Web businesses to provide lawful services, a top cyberspace regulator said yesterday (February 14) in Beijing.
In trumpeting the openness of China’s net, the regulator, Mr. Liu Zhengrong, employed another favorite weapon of the officials here (as well as many other countries) - the criticism deflector shield:
Liu said “It is unfair and smacks of double standards when (they) criticize China for deleting illegal and harmful messages while it is legal for US websites for doing so.”
He was referring to the policies of sites like the New York Times to edit or delete comments left by users. That’s a fair point. Unfortunately, it’s also misdirection, since what most people criticize China for is not deleting the odd offensive comment, but instead for deleting, say, 18,401 websites in the last five months.
According to a story published in Shanghai Daily last month:
A total of 9,593 unregistered Websites were shut down while 8,808 Websites were closed for disseminating pornographic, illicit or fraudulent pictures and information on the Internet, said Miao Wei, deputy general manager of China Telecom, the country’s biggest telecommunication carrier, which was involved in the campaign.
Which brings me back to youtube, apparently one of the gang 18,401.
There are alternatives you might say. And it’s true that metacafe and liveleak are still up. Not google video though, that’s never been up as far as I know. Not dailymotion either, so forget that. There are of course local alternatives like tudou that run a lot faster here, but illiteracy prevents me from making any meaningful explorations of them. Plus youtube was my first love. It opened up a world of concert footage, teen exhibitionism, low budget documentaries, and TV bloopers that I literally can’t image going without now. So I can’t just start using some shit like ebaum’s world like it’s no problem.
The question now is what’s to be done? Having been woken from my apathetic slumber, what do I do? What does a 29-year-old foreigner with a tourist visa and poor grasp of the language do to induce radical change in an emerging superpower? I’m totally open to suggestions. But, just to be safe, better post them in code. I’m not trying to get shut down.
Popularity: 7% [?]
- VOTE FOR THIS MAN!
The baller pictured above is my father, James “Coach” McGetrick. He’s been living in Beijing for a couple years teaching and raising funds for a school for the children of migrant workers who, due to China’s policy of fixed residence, aren’t legally allowed to go to school is Beijing. It’s a noble cause, and if you’d like to learn more about it, check out this site
made by Compassion for Migrant Children, a local NGO.But that’s not what this is about. What this is about is my father’s quest to be one of eight foreigners chosen to carry the torch as it makes its way to the Beijing Olympic Stadium (now under construction) for the opening ceremonies of the Summer Games in ‘08.
He’s written a short text to explain why he’d like to carry the flame. You can read it and vote for him here.
Please vote. Apparently there’s a one vote per IP address rule, which, frankly, has made it much harder for me to undermine the fundamental principles of democracy.
Popularity: 5% [?]
- The Tooth Hurts (Episode III)
The final chapter…
We’re redirected to the appropriate facility, a smaller, similar-looking building in the same complex. I’m whisked through and have an x-ray taken. There’s almost no pre-procedure wait, but a long post-procedure wait. This is perhaps for the best, because the vibe in the x-ray waiting room is considerable less assuring than in the last one. The old pleather waiting sofas have been replaced with wooden and plastic benches, like you might find in a country church or long-distance bus station. There is a TV, but it is off. The walls are concrete, coated with a lifeless pastel in the Socialist tradition. Along the far wall, brown streaks traceable to asbestos-laden pipes (?!) upset the critical balance of new and old, clean and unhygenic. Still, it smells and otherwise looks clean. Perhaps due to the absence of ominous electrical sounds, the atmosphere is calmer and more social. People are stretched out napping, others caught up in boisterous conversation. There are more children. Many are chunky little emperors, and I realize that fat Chinese boys are actually mini middle aged men - proportionally the same, with the same protruding belly, same slow, duck-like waddle. These thoughts are stupid but distracting; gradually my paranoia dissipates and I start to enjoy the wait.
At least for a while. In the end, the x-ray takes an hour to arrive. This is not really a big deal, since I still have two more hours to wait til the doctor will see me. Xiao Mi has to go meet someone for lunch, so I’m left to my own devices - those devices being specifically my ipod, mobile phone, and notebook. I spend the next hours in a media cocoon of my own creation. I have almost no memory of this time.
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- The Tooth Hurts (Episode II)
After a rundown of my condition and a brief look, the dentist pronounces my 2/3 tooth terminal. Nothing can be done to repair it, she explains, it will have to be crushed to dust and replaced with a fake. I consider the verdict. I remember the golden teeth on the waiting room poster. A full set of gold teeth - like Trick Daddy - would be too much, certainly. But a single golden tooth - like Dr. Teeth from the Muppets - could give me just the edge I need to take my aesthetic to the next level. A flashy souvenir from a checkered past to which I can refer in fictional nightclub conversation. Plus, I’d always have something to pawn when money gets tight… This new development is a win-win as far as I’m concerned. Where do I sign???
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