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 the position to speak his real mind about things, and yet he was stupid enough to open his big mouth anyway. Oh well. Here are the last two paragraphs of this blogger’s criticism, which I liked and have translated for your edification.

成龙公然为剥夺人民群众的话语权、知情权、上访权、参与权撑腰。他在香港、台湾受到狗仔队的追踪，不胜其扰，由此他当然十分感激在大陆作为“中国电影家协会副主席”享受的副部级待遇与特别保护，“慢慢觉得”很有必要“管”一下举报腐败、维权上访、追求国家正义与自由的“添乱之人”，认为只有这样国家才很“和谐”。但是我要问的是：如果成龙的亲人遭遇冤屈无法伸张，如果成龙受到打击伤害无处讲理，如果成龙家的房子土地被人强征而没有什么补偿，如果成龙是弱势群体，不能享有经济权利、社会权利、文化权利、政治权利，举报腐败会被迫害，网络揭露地方乱象会被千里抓捕，上访会被送进精神病院，他还会这样嚣张与猖狂吗？当然，这些仅仅是假设，他成龙事实上是强势群体，是权贵，是既得利益者，他在大陆以爱国主义、民族主义的歌曲作伪装，日进斗金，实际上是在歌唱强者对弱者的蹂躏。
一位缺乏最起码公民意识的影星居然成为成千上万民众崇拜的偶像、成为中国人的“代表”，一位奴才的丑陋表演竟然赢得台下工商领袖们的热烈掌声，大陆中国人该反省一下了，该加入到抵制成龙的行列中去了——为了捍卫大陆的自由、香港的自由、台湾的自由。

[Jackie Chan has openly joined the forces of those that would deprive the people of their right to speak, to know (i.e. to have information), and to petition. Since he’s always getting hounded by the papparazzi in Hong Kong, he must really enjoy the special treatment that he receives as vice chairman of the CHina Film Association, and thus gradually has come to believe that it must be better to control all the troublemakers that report corruption, defend their rights through petitioning, or attempt to achieve some kind of justice, because only then can society be “harmonious”. But there’s something I’d like to ask: if it was his family that were wronged or the victims of injustice, and if it was them who had nowhere to seek redress, and if it was him that had his home and property forcibly taken away without any recompense, and if he was a member of a disadvantaged group, that didn’t have much by way of economic, social, cultural, or political power, and was attacked for reporting corruption or arrested for exposing the crimes of local governments, or taken into an insane asylum because he went to petition, would he still be this arrogant? Of course, these are just assumptions, because in reality Jackie Chan is one of the privileged few, a member of the social elite, the establishment and its vested interests–and he comes to mainland China, singing songs of nationalism and pride, making money hand over fist–but what he’s really singing are songs that celebrate the triumph of the strong over the weak.

That a celebrity who lacks a basic understanding of civil society and the rights of citizens could become the idol of millions, and “represent” China, that a slave’s shoddy performances could so delight and entertain the captains of industry and business leaders ought to give pause to all the Chinese people and make them reflect on whether they should join the ranks of those who will boycott Jackie Chan–for the sake protecting the freedoms of the PRC, the freedoms of Hong Kong, and the freedoms of Taiwan.

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[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 sure, challenging. There wasn’t nearly enough about the “banality of evil” after you discover that Hannah (played by Winslet) was a former Nazi concentration camp guard who knowingly sent thousands of Jews to their deaths. Perhaps we don’t need to rehash these arguments or reinvestigate this psychology because of most of what is worthwhile of saying about this subject perhaps already has, in far more eloquent terms than can be managed by a mainstream movie.

As usual, Ralph Fiennes is a bit insufferable, but what can you expect, for the most part, he’s got a monopoly on these stiff upper-lip, handsome man of many secrets and mysterious past type roles. The bits with his daughter are not that moving, but then again, you know where most of the drama lies–in the parts about his youth and romance with Hanna–the rest is stocking stuffer.

The bits with the law students talking about the Nazi trials is also a bit stiff and didactic, again, maybe perhaps the subject has already been talked about ad infinitum.

Winslet’s performance is quite good, and does remind me, in a ways, of her role in Revolutionary Road–in both she’s been a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It’s not surprising that Hannah commits suicide at the The Reader–was she like that character in Shawshank REdemption, that couldn’t adapt and cope with the outside world? NOt really, she never even made it out. No doubt she was afraid, but perhaps she also felt like she did not deserve to be out, to regain her freedom–as long as she was in prison, she was still, in effect, doing penance for her sins.

These characters should have no problem winning our basic sympathy, but there isn’t really much to them beyond that–I prefer characters of the mysterious, unpredictable, and beguiling type–and none of them were that.

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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, many of the other Central Asian Turkic languages have already transliterated their languages into Latin and Slavic alphabets, which facilitates the spread and accessibility of the language. This increase in cultural fecundity is good for the obvious reasons that most of these ethnicities have or currently are part of larger political formations such as the USSR or China, and often find their cultures subsumed, especially during the age of ideology (latter half of the 20th c.). However, some people are against it, because they argue that continuity is quite impt, and they remark that the reason why Chinese people have sustained that contact with their ancient culture is precisely because they are using essentially the same characters as they did thousands of years ago. They are afraid of the cultural rupture that might occur if this language “reform” is too radical–and eschewing one type of alphabet for another might certainly qualify as radical.

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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, at #8， while in the other aspects it didn’t too well, which, at least by their standards, makes sense: Shanghai has attracted a certain creative class to it, both local and foreign, but it’s not like they really wield that much influence. Don’t get me wrong, there are some good creatives here, meaning painters and poets, ad industry people, filmmakers, musicians, etc. etc. but maybe in terms of GDP they aren’t amounting to much yet at least compared to New York, London, Chicago, LA, etc. Cultural experience has improved, with more festivals and biennales and international galleries opening up branches here. Rock stars don’t think it’s altogether that strange to insert a Shanghai or Beijing dates into their concert tours. But as far as cultural experience and political engagement, Shanghai is not going to do that well, for one, Beijing is going to wield more political clout for obvious reasons.

The next few pages present some different groupings. Open cities have a free press, open markets, easy access to info and tech, cultural opportunities: and of course you get NY, London, and Paris at the top there.

Lifestyle centers: where you enjoy life: Toronto and LA. As mentioned before, in terms of best cities to do business, Shanghai ranks 8th and Beijing 9th. A shout out to my bruthas in Taipei–you made it in the top 20 (#19). You guys could learn a thing or two from the communists about how to do business. Technorati Tags: london, beijing, politics, lifestyle, culture, business

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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. cannot be understood without the historical context in mind, meaning the incredible, mind-boggling political tumult of that century. Dotted with revolutions and restorations, burgeoning capitalism and urban planning, riots, battles, and all out international war, many of the figures of this century are larger than life, in a way that somehow, in my mind at least, exceeds those of the last century.

Regarding the flaneurs: Here’s a passage from the book:

One of the new pleasures avaialble to those city-dwelling bohemiens, who, like Gautier, sought the strange, the uncanny, the poetic and the mysterious that lay around them, was the art of wandering pointlessly through the city. This activity, termed flanerie — a word that dated back to the sixteenth century and which had originally been used to mean ‘wander’ or ‘drift’ — was already apparent in the seventeenth century…

The author then talks about Balzac and Baudelaire as flaneurs par excellence: and of course this had to do with the hugely transformative nature of Haussman’s new design for Paris…the urban landscape changed, opening up new potentialities for how people interacted with physical urban space and how that urban space constrained and made possible new forms of (collective) social interaction. Back to flanerie: there are times when I wonder whether or not street photography for me, is at base, just a form of flanerie. I believe the spirit and impulse is the same, at least in the way that in lives in me. There’s another telling phrase in the book: the flaneur is always “detached from hte pleasures that he observes and takes part in.” That phrase was perhaps more striking than anything else I had read about the flaneurs. Because the stock definition leaves you thinking that a flaneur is a kind of hippie, dandy type person that believes in creativity and art, not 9-5, pensions and mortgages. Their lives and their art–if, that is, amidst all the debauchery they could sustain the effort it takes to make lasting art–were conjoined and were, to put it a bit too crudely, a fart in the face of the bourgeoisie. However ephemeral it was, there is something eternal about that, but at least to we who have come into the world so much later. Sure, we all love cities, but the fascination must have been different for them, for modern urban planning, and that entire ethos of rationalist, scientific, Enlightenment progress was gathering steam and changing things in a way that we could not have imagined. They were at the brutal front lines of that epochal shift in human history.

Sure we have our own epochal changes: the rise of megacities, the BosWash thing, southern CA, the Pearl River Delta Region, Lagos, Mumbai: all of this suggest that flanerie ought to be alive and well. Though we might be well-advised to engage in flanerie from within the safe confines of a bullet-proof SUV, where we can cautiously gawk at people, our glances and stares masked by a tinted window.

Maybe this is how we ought to describe urban rappers (and I mean Tribe Called Quest, not Ice Cube or 50 cent) and street photographers. There is, in their respective mediums, a restless search for something in the streets, the nooks and crannies, desolate parking lots and anonymous malls, parks with their anodyne family sculptures, etc.

Street photography is attached, via some unseen umbilical cord, to my visual hunger for a place. A new city offers that kind enticement and that kind of fascination. The city itself might not be inherently beautiful or unique, but I am just fascinated by the fact that I have not seen it before. There is copious room for investigation, which you do with your feet, mostly, and your eyes. And the camera is almost ancillary, it just becomes a capture too, albeit one that you try to use artistically and intentionally with the hopes of some aesthetically pleasing result. Unfortunately, I realize now, after years and years in Shanghai, that I thrive on this kind of stimulation, you could even say I’m addicted to it–and that must explain why I am constantly on websites, looking up travel deals and checking airplane ticket prices and planning in my mind the next great escape.

Traveling and wandering seem, to me, much more “natural” a mode to be in. I think it might just be this heightened aversion to boredom, this constant thirst to see things, explore. There is a phrase in this book or perhaps somewhere else, that springs to mind: “reservoir of electricity”–I think many people who come to Shanghai feel this kind of “buzz”, this ineffable quality that somehow swims above and around and can’t quite be expressed by economic indicators. Even when markets take a dive: there’s still that buzz, that creative license to follow your own gods, make your own identity, shape your own destiny. That’s a romantic view of Shanghai, no doubt, and it’s very subjective because half of the time I don’t feel it at all; I think that this place is hopelessly crummy and inferior, very noveau-riche. Sometimes it feels like everyone is a benighted bumpkin and other times they strike me as arrogant parvenus. And sometimes they just appear as regular people getting on with their lives. Of course, it’s not that they are in someway chameleonic, this is just, in psychobabble terms, what I am projecting of myself onto them.

Cafe life’s intimate connection with politics, satire, revolution, literature, cabaret and general licentiousness in Paris is fascinating for me. What do the sociologists call it? The third space? Well it was alive and kicking in the Paris of the 19th century. I don’t know if I feel any electricity anymore, anywhere: in Paris there were cafes that were popular with journalists and actors, while other groups flocked to other places. This milieu was actually many micro-milieus, niches, and I don’t know if anything analogous really exists here in Shanghai. I keep thinking it must because it is, or ought to be in my mind, some kind of invariant of human social life. These are niches that you bury yourself in, and by doing so embed yourself in history, live history, not outside it. And somehow that is connected to the idea of authentic living, or just really living. Because although we all live in history most of the time it seems to me to be more like a truck whizzing by you very fast that you have to jump out of the way for lest you get flattened by it. The flaneurs are somehow removed the pleasures they observe and indulge in. They are participant-observers. Some of them are quintessential outsiders (in Colin Wilson’s sense of the word).

In any case, as exciting as it is to read about these things, there is always the collateral cost of reading any kind of history: the heightened sense of ephemerality of things, and the analytical impasse that the mind comes to when it reaches beyond the author’s guidance. That is to say, when you take the author’s writings and analysis as a point of departure for your own thoughts about that period in history or worse yet, meta-reflections in history itself, you feel disoriented, lost. You don’t have the moorings that historical facts (or what we take for fact at present) give you. There’s the Faustian hope that if you know enough, you will have solved the problems and saved your own soul, but you’ve got a sneaking suspicion that this is just flat out impossible. For example, what can we extrapolate about France and the French from its illustrious 19th century cultural history? So many of the great writers, novelists, poets, intellectuals, and painters of the world all walked the earth at this time, and to be specific, walked the boulevards and alleyways of Paris. That’s just plain anomalistic by any standards, and reminds of me that famous line from Carol Reed’s The Third Man, where Harry Lime (Orson Welles) says to Holly Martins that the tumultuous years under the Borgias produced Michelangelo and the Renaissance greats, while 500 years of peace and democracy in Switzerland produced…the cuckoo clock. It’s a great monologue, for one, but it does make one think about how these unusual and intense bursts of cultural activity happen…highly nonlinear for sure.

More as I come up with more…if anyone is even reading…

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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, and then you have the idea that they are not just painters, but men of letters, scholars — you see it in the development, during the Song and Yuan and afterwards, of paintings that have poems written on them. The written word and the image are, thereafter, wed both in art and artist. It seems that they loved to sing and play various instruments as well.

Jiang Xun mentions that now familiar trope in Chinese high culture: the men of letters that go into seclusion, the wandering (and often drunk) poets, they of considerable talent who, for whatever reason, refuse their services to the new regime, preferring the consolations of nature and poetry.

What follows next might alienate some people (if, that is, anyone is actually reading this): I sometimes think of myself in this light. I might not be completely fit for that lifestyle, but given my druthers I would spend more time wandering, and more time writing than I do now … the parallel interests in writing, poetry, painting and music also seem to describe me. Of course, related to this apposition of various arts is the spiritual crisis or drama of alienation: of course these poets from a millennium ago could not really have experienced the anomie and alienation of we moderns: but there is, of course, much we have in common with them as well, perhaps a certain intellectual aloofness and even disdain from both masses and elites. They are not one with them. They are not for these types of games. They want an exit strategy from the mess, an escape route that can instantly take them far from the madding crowd.

In times of great turmoil or rapid social change, their ontological security is in our intellectual/artistic lineage, our belief that we are part of a loose collection of individuals and groups over human history that have shared this particular orientation. Outsiders, to use Colin Wilson’s concept anachronistically. They offer succor and sustenance to each other, through the centuries.

Grandiose, perhaps. Pompous, arrogant, poncey, overwrought, etc. It’s nothing I use to puff my ego up, to big myself. It’s just a small thought that somehow, for whatever reason I mean, gets me through the day a little easier and gives much-needed rest to the frazzled neurons that are, like those myriad background processes in any computer operating system, constantly eating up my mental and spiritual resources, insidiously and invisibly making the task of making it through the day just that much harder.

2008art, aesthetics, books, literature, chinese, china, culture, history, tang, song, writers, durkheim, jiang xun

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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 mistranslations and misunderstandings of the West by the East (or again, non-white or non-western peoples in general).

The phenomenon in China is quite apparent in those housing developments, like Thames Town, where luxury townhomes in the suburbs of big cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, etc. attempt to replicate the look and “feel” of Western homes. What you get are these strange simulacra, california duplexes, White Houses, Swedish towns complete with church, etc. The other place you notice occidentalism is in theme parks where again, you have architectural simulacra, as well as in Tv/film, especially in those dramas set in the 19th and early 20th c. featuring that de rigeur avatar of Western imperialism, the colonialist white man with the sketchy stache and the goose-bump raising laugh of pure, unadulterated, cultural evil.

I was watching the Olympics and have seen the above Nabel tiles commercial several times. I remember Nabel because they have a huge lighted sign/billboard somewhere in Shanghai which you see from one of the elevated roads. I don’t remember where it is, but I don’t usually see it unless I am on said elevated road, which is not often.

I always thought it interesting: they use this name, associated with dynamite, science, and the lofty ideals of Western intellectual achievement—to sell tiles, of all things. Their English website has the following introduction:

Established in 1992, located in the west suburb of Hangzhou city (which is 200 kilometers away from Shanghai), Hangzhou Nabel Group Co., Ltd, is one of the leading manufacture of the ceramic tile industry in China.
Nabel is a foreign invested enterprise with registered capital of USD 11,610,000

First of all, their Chinese name is still the translation of “Nobel”, but their English name is Nabel. I don’t remember for sure, but I think that at some point in the past their English name was Nobel, perhaps until someone notified them of how unkosher this was.

The commercial above is classic occidentalism: you get these people out of Georgian England—or are they extras from some production of Dangerous Liaisons—bringing in the tiles on trays into the home of some generic Chinese middle-class family. Then they painstakingly lay each tile in. This, of course, demonstrates that in do the values of mass production and economies of scale diminish the attention of craftsmanship and artisanry that you’d expect from these inheritors of the European tradition.

Yes, I know it’s all harmless fun, and it’s TV, why take it seriously. I just find these tropes interesting. Otherwise, there would really be no point in ever turning on Chinese TV.

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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, as he points out, to advertising—it’s bourgeois and consumerist at its core, even though the people involved often scorn capitalist labor and slum around.* More importantly, it is a subculture that is not really for or against anything, unless you count being “for fun” as a worthy cause.

And it’s true, to a extent, that point the writer makes about not having really lasting loyalties and affiliations: I think that in America and Europe, they are going to tend to be on the left, politically, but there might not be anything amounting to real, sustained, lasting engagement with the political. They are likely to boo George Bush, and to nod in agreement when Al Gore talks about the impending
environmental disaster, but they don’t really have an urgent need to change the world: in fact,
since that reminds me of Marx’s 11th thesis on Fuerbach, one could say that they don’t even bother much with interpreting the world, much less changing it. The hipster likes his fun as much as the rich man, he just prefers to have it with people who share his particular tastes and aesthetics in party, music, cigarettes, etc. People who know the joys of slouching in bed with a laptop, and playing around with Lomos and gasp, even iPhones.

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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 everything down. It’s hard to find business after 11. It’s getting to be like the Cultural Revolution. The Communist Party really ought to have more confidence in itself…”
(现在很多地方都被关掉了，过了十一点中就很难做生意了，搞得像文化大革命。共产党也太没自信了吧!”)

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