“It gets cold here in late September”—I dont remember the rest of the song anymore. It was the autumn of 1999, probably around late September or early October. The place: the main cafeteria at the University of Washington, Seattle. I had just moved there to start graduate school in applied mathematics. I was quite happy to be in the coffee capital of the US, where everyday was a battle to see if you could restrain yourself from spending too much on coffee. The cafeteria had musicians come in and play. I remember this woman’s voice, though I have long forgotten her face. “It gets cold here in late September” was the refrain, and for a reason unknown to me it has stuck in my mind for the last nine years. It’s the way that it was sung–the fragility of a girl folkie’s voice–that somehow mesmerizes you. Obviously there was more than just metereological iufnromation being conveyed: it is the sense of passing, the sense of the seasons changing. The poignancy is in the way that it’s stated, so simply, almost obliquely, like a passing remark, said by a woman standing by an open window, pulling a sweater out of her closet and onto her body. That summer, I had taken an extension class in songwriting. From then until now, I’ve written many songs, but none of have been like that song. They are sometimes plaintive, but much more heart on your sleeve. “It gets cold here in late September”, on the other hand, is so much more rich than the lyrics that I have written. Somehow, for me at least, it just captures and explains much more about life than anything that I’ve ever written. (more…)
Lately, I’ve been noticing some fairly huge poster ads in the Shanghai subway of heart throb actor Wentworth Miller, most notably of the Prison Break series, which is wildly popular in China. Featuring WM in some snazzy threads and with the words Me&City stenciled across, At first I thought that this was the name of some new TV series that WM was in, and was disappointed b/c I thought this implied that Prison Break had been canceled or else put on the backburner. However, what these are just new ads for a Chinese clothing line that WM has decided to represent.
In Chinese, Wentworth is commonly known as wenshuai (温帅）or mishuai （米帅）– the first takes ‘wen’ the first character of his first name in Chinese and adds to the end the character ‘shuai’ which means handsome, while the latter does the same using ‘mi’ which is the first character in the Chinese translation of his last name.
Such nicknames are usually reserved for boring Mandopop boys du jour, like the awful Wilbur Pan of Taiwan/Canada. So you can imagine just how popular WM is in China. Prison Break is so popular that English textbooks use dialogue and elements of the series to teach English as a second language, and its legion of die-hard followers in China are what lead to some someone to think of the bright idea of spawning a Chinese version of the show, set sometime in the early or mid-20th century, which I have had the unfortunate experience of watching for a couple of minutes in my life. As usual, I am not being fair to the show, but I will stake my reputation on the claim that, regardless of whether you’re a fan of PB or not, that the Chinese version can’t hold a candle to the original. It also makes me wonder, as I have so many times on this blog, whether or not Chinese people will, one day, be the ones contributing high-concept shows to the world that will inspire emulation in other countries.
Anyway, here’s one of the pictures for the new clothing series: 2999 rmb for that leather jacket. That’s about 300 euros or over 400 US dollars. Not quite couture, but it does seem that Meters/bowne is aiming for something along those lines with this new series.
The following is a youtube vid of WM making the commercials for this line.