Movies I’m Watching: The Reader

[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.

Pictures from Yuan Xiao Jie in Shanghai (上海元宵节及老城区夜景）

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！

Should Uighur use the latin or slavic alphabet?

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.

Foreign Policy/AT Kearney 2008 Global cities index: where do Chinese cities stand?

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

Books I’m Reading: Paris: The Secret History

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…

Books I’m Reading: 写给大家的中国美术史

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

Nabel Tiles: occidentalism in China

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.

Adbusters: Hipsters and the dead end of western civilization

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.

Overheard in Shanghai

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!”)

Sex and the Party: Is China ready for a nude island?

The sexologist Pan Hai has called for one of the idyllic islands off Zhuhai–Miao Wan Island–to be turned into a nude island. The blog post, written on July 15, is titled 中国应有裸泳海滩 (China ought to have a nude beach) and lays out some of Pan’s reasons he believes it’s about time for China’s own nude beach. As you might expect from a sexologist, he decries China’s puritanical sex culture, which he traces back to the Tang dynasty. What’s more interesting is what he says the ‘class structure’ behind sexual relations in China today–that is to say, sex can be openly bought, sold, and enjoyed by high officials–including Mao himself–but to do so, while preaching sexual prudishness to the masses, is nothing less than hypocrisy:

尽管统治者（包括我们的伟大领袖毛主席）自己从不禁欲，但他们却严格地限制老百姓的性欲。结果，整个中国社会，千百年来便形成了对于性的“二元化态度”或称“双重标准”。即：统治者可以荒淫无度，可以糜烂奢侈，而普罗大众则稍有“出格”，便会遭受道德、舆论甚至国家机器的制裁。

不是么？贪官污吏使用公款或者借用贿资包养情人（长期并多个），非但不受惩处，反而成为权势者的荣耀；小小百姓花一点儿小钱找“小姐”一乐，却时时受到专政机关的威胁，轻则罚款，重者拘禁——同样性质的男欢女爱，对于不同的国人竟有如此不同的“待遇”。这不仅深刻反映了当代中国“性道德”的虚伪，更反映了中国民主政治建设的一大或缺——缺乏实事求是的态度、缺乏一视同仁的公正！

Specifically, Pan mentions that while corrupt officials use their ill-gotten gains to keep several lovers, the little guy on the street trying to get a little action with a xiaojie gets fined and punished. Pan goes on to rail against that the development of Chinese sexual culture has been all but neglected, and what needs to be done to keep this from further slipping into abeyance is to make sure that “sexual development” get incorporated into official policy and pronouncements, so that people understand they have “sexual rights” and ought to strive to build “Socialist sexual culture with Chinese characteristics”* :

因此，当“以人为本”的理念连续写进最近几次党代会的报告之后，人们有理由要求执政者，重新审视自己的性观念，深刻认识人民群众的性权利，重新制定与性相关的政策法规，把“性文明”与精神文明、物质文明一起，列为人类文明的三大建设领域，与“经济、政治、文化、社会、生态”等五大目标一起，列为“建设小康社会”的共同要求，积极而又认真地打造“中国特色的社会主义性文明”，从而使十七大报告所讲的“科学发展观”，真正能够实现“以人为本”，真正能够实现“全面协调可持续”，真正能够实现“统筹兼顾”——既兼顾资源保护，又兼顾经济增长，更兼顾人的全面自由发展。所以，建设健康型的裸泳海滩，应该没有什么难以逾越的障碍。

Now what makes this island so special? Well, located some forty nautical miles or more from Zhuhai, these little islands are fairly isolated; only a few fisherman families live there. The beaches can be easily isolated so that you can limit the nudity and not be afraid that this strange habit will spread to the point that everyone feels obliged to walk around in their birthday suit.

Of course, there are plenty of priggish people that are opposed to this idea. Some of those who have criticized Pan object to his use of “linking up with the world” (与国际接轨）: just because the French and a whole bunch of other nations have nude beaches doesn’t mean that the Chinese have to in order to prove that they are on the same level. The writer linked to above thinks that the whole idea of sexologist is crazy, and to even make such suggestions is to defile five thousand years of Chinese history and culture. “What is a sexologist anyway? Shouldn’t they be trying to heal infertility?” the writer asks.

中华五千年的文明就这样被糟蹋，被诋毁，中华优秀的传统与作风被亵渎，这专家安的什么心？研究什么“性学”，你怎么不去治疗男女不孕？说什么裸体活动，疯子专家一派胡言。

Personally, I don’t know much about Pan Hai, but he’s definitely been a prolific writer/researcher on all matters sex, so might be worth reading if that’s your thing.

The above picture is from an internet survey on the issue of nude beaches in China. In case you were wondering, I am pro-nude beach, and after I submitted my vote these were the survey results that I received. I don’t know if they are accurate, real-time stats, but in any case, you can see that there is still a healthy margin by which the pro-nude beachers lead the anti-nude beachers.

I have to admit that my interest in this island is piqued: if it really is the Maldives of China, and has been relatively unspoilt by the Midas touch of Chinese tourist development, then I hope to go there before that all changes. The idea of going to a tiny island where there are few people has always appealed to my escapist tendency, but I had never considered anywhere within Chinese borders when fleshing out that fantasy.

*what a fucking mouthful