Blogger Hu Xingdou calls for a boycott of the Jackie Chan’s May 1st Beijing concert in light of Chan’s controversial comments about Chinese people and their need to be regulated or controlled. In some way i am sympathetic to Chan, because an intellectual he’s not and he really doesn’t have either the brains or [...]

[spoiler alert] Kate Winslet, as well all know, has had a big year with Revolutionary Road and The Reader. Both are decent films that I really would like to cheer for, though they never seem to reach beyond the B+ range; they both just fall short of being excellent. The Reader role, was, to be [...]

前天晚上去了豫园看灯会，观摩的主要是人海，但是喜气洋洋的，感觉还是不错。后来跟朋友在老城区溜达，久违的灵感也终于回来了，当然，这也跟我带新的相机出去也有关。谢谢长辈的提携以及各位朋友的支持！我要坚持拍下去！

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That’s the debate going in one of the bbs threads on uighurbiz and something that i am altogether not familiar with. Of course I don’t know much about what happens in that region at all, but that is what informative sites like New Dominion are for.
According to the posters, who are writing in Chinese, [...]

This recently published ranking is supposedly measures overall globalization, taken as some kind of composite of business activity, human capital, information exchange, cultural experience, and political engagement. New York, London, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong were the top 5. Beijing made it at #12, and Shanghai at #20.
Shanghai’s highest ranked aspect was business activity, [...]

I looked up the word “flaneur” in the index of hte boojks and skipped straight to it: I’d heard this term first in books by and about Walter Benjamin, and the idea of these urban wanderers–poets, wastrels, misfits, outsiders, rebels–was always appealing to me. The rich cultural life of Paris in the 19th c. [...]

Something’s been running around my mind since I started reading this book: the idea of the scholar-painter. Each of the early Chinese dynasties had court painters, but its during the first centuries AD, after the fall of the Han and during the successive Wei, Jin, Tang, Song, Five Dynasties that you have individual “artists” emerging, [...]

Most students of cultural studies, Middle Eastern studies or the humanities in general are bound to be familiar with the concept of orientalism, the title of the late Edward Said’s watershed explication of the West’s images and discourse of the east and other non-white peoples. There is also a “mirror-image” phenomenon called occidentalism—the cultural [...]

Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters via kwout

OK so this writer lays it on a bit thick, but I think he/she does have a very valid point. He doesn’t see any subculture with cajones, and he/she is right because there is nothing of that sort. Hipsterdom is very much connected, [...]

Some (questionably) funny snippets of life in Shanghai:
1. A boy riding a bike circles around a family of three black people walking down the street.
He says “three black people! Three black people! Oh what fun! Darlie Toothpaste!”
(三个黑人，三个黑人，真好玩！黑人牙膏）
2. Taxi driver, talking to me about things getting closed down in SH because of the Olympics.
“They are closing [...]