Movies I’m watching: Bill Maher’s Religulous

I suppose that BIll Maher’s ego has gotten the best of him and he decided, that he just HAD to make a movie and somehow contribute to the demise of organized religion, which he believes is one of the greatest obstacles to human progress. So he goes around, skewering religious types, ranging from the truck stop evangelicals to your hapless, un-media savvy imam.

Part of the film is autobiographical, in that Maher talks about his own upbringing: his mother is Jewish and his father Catholic, and he was raised a catholic.

Maher’s real beef is with literalists, those whose insistence on various dogma handed down to us from our ancient forebears in the Promised Land impedes the adoption of more liberal and, Maher would say, modern, normal, outlooks and values. Maher knows the Bible fairly well, and of course, he’s a “skilled debater” of sorts, that is, he knows, from being both a standup and TV personality, the art of rhetoric. However, Maher ends up being something less than the Socratic gadfly: He is interested in the truth, yes, but there are greater truths that he is missing out on.

What I mean is this: Nietzsche, for example, was well aware that while organized religion, and in particular the Lutheranism of his father and compatriots, was perhaps a crock of shit, opiates for the many mediocre people of which society is formed, but he knew that humanity’s *religiosity*–was not something that could be so easily jettisoned, replaced by a smirky, Maher-esque Enlightenment reason. How does Maher, for example, think about death: he believes that there is nothing after life, and that at best we ought to remain skeptical about the grand questions. And that attitude is fine, but that begs the question, I think–the religiosity is always going to rear its ugly head, and you can’t expect everyone to just take Maher’s attitude. Not many people, in the history of humanity, have been satisfied with his answers.

Organized religion versus mysticism: this is a theme that i’ve run into a lot recently. I saw a documentary about sufism in Pakistan–a country more known as being, in certain areas at least, a hotbed of militant, retrogressive Islam. And then there was a quote from the French philosopher Henri Bergson, where he said that organized religion was (and here I paraphrase) that which cools what was poured, white-hot, into the soul of man. That is to say, that mysticism is not just a “non-mainstream” type of religion, a la sufism, but is, in fact, the very core of humanity’s religious instinct.

People need to know how to deal with death, and with the issues of meaning.

I don’t mean to entirely negate Maher’s movie just because I think books do a better job of navigating these issues, but hell, they do. And here are the books that I would recommend, having just read or re-read them:

Andre Comte-Sponville: The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality
Henry David Thoreau: Walden
Ernest Becker: The Denial of Death
Christopher Hitchens: God is not Great.

These books run the gamut but, I think, give a good basis for why we ought to be skeptical of organized religions (especially when it becomes the last refuge of charlatans and scoundrels) while remaining, at our core, profoundly religious, mystical, etc.

What is amazing about Yao Ming

What is amazing about Yao is that someone that tall and goofy can even play basketball at all. I was watching
some basketball highlights at Windows Scoreboard tonight, and at the end they go through the top 5 moves
of the last few games from around the NBA. And there are, as you’d expect, some stellar moves. Vince Carter spinning in the air, twisting from one side
of the basket to the other. Steve Nash dishing it to his teammates for windmill jams. That kind of thing. Of course, the number one
move was Yao Ming: he gets the ball low in the post, near the baseline, gets fouled and throws it up with his back facing the basket,
and miracle of miracles, it goes in. So the basket counts and one.

Of course it wasn’t at all spectacular. If you’ve watched Michael Jordan play you know that this is a special genre of Jordan moves:
the ones where he get fouled and just puts it up so that the foul is made in the act of shooting. But the difference is that those moves
are elegant, beautiful and involve that masterful agility for which he is known. So this Yao “move” is nothing special, and I doubt it
even deserves to be called a highlight. And compared to the other moves, where you see people flying high above the rim, dunking rebounds and
getting some major hang time, Yao’s move seems positively pedestrian.

But he is Yao Ming. And this is China.

Wentworth Miller shils for Me & City

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.

77d7640a8307a127b0351d2b.jpg (JPEG Image, 717×568 pixels) via kwout

The following is a youtube vid of WM making the commercials for this line.

Could the Chinese rip off Bon Jovi to sell sneakers?

Sure, why the hell not. Like Frank Yi said they copied his way.

I mean the publicly listed Chinese fashion sportswear company, Xtep, whose recent commercials during the Olympics caught my attention because of the music used. The song is called “It’s My Way” and it doesn’t take a New Jersey-born fan of 1980s hair rock to know that the song is a rip off of Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life”…I don’t know who the singer of the song is, but you can tell that they are going for the same kind of vocal style as well.

The commercial features some of the hottest youth stars from Taiwan and Hong Kong, including Nicholas Tse, the Twins, Jolin Tsai, and Wilber Pan, most of whom I thoroughly detest. From what I can tell on the commercial, their shoes look like shite too, but nonetheless, they are still a fairly big player in the China sportswear market, where they are still behind Anta and the now household name of Li Ning. And apparently they are also part of the Carlyle Group’s portfolio, which given the affiliations behind that group make me incredibly cynical about the world and reinforce an outlook which could be summarized thus: some shit capitalists are out there making shitty derivative products, and yet there are some powerful and elitist capitalists out there making sure that the former succeed for their mutual benefit.

Here’s a vid of the commercial, this one meant for the Olympics in particular:

and here’s the whole song:

A couple of thoughts on that commercial: firstly, it always get my goad when Taiwan and Hong Kong stars shil for mainland based products, just because if you are famous and from those parts of nominally free China, I somehow feel you ought to shil for some better brand–I mean what does it say about you that these shoes cost 150-300 RMB? On the other hand, I know that they’d never be remotely considered for brands like Nike and Adidas, who go for the real top-flight athletes. In that sense, Xtep is smart because they go for the youth demographic, for the fashion sportswear market, sell the image, sell the lifestyle. It’s not and has not been about the specs of the shoes for a long time.

It’s also ironic because the commercials plays on those common Olympic tropes of “1.3 billion people’s dreams and hopes”, which nauseates me to no end, and again, makes me wonder why Taiwanese and HKese stars would go for that. Oh yeah, maybe they are proud of the Olympics, and maybe they are getting paid a fuckload of money. Oh well Peijin, hold your nose and look the other way.

Last thought on this is the Wilbur Pan’s role in the commercial, where he plays the role of a street basketball player—that cheesy layup at the end and his knife across the neck motion—it’s like he’s some bad-boy gangsta baller, but I bet he’s a weakling on the actual basketball court. I doubt he really plays in the streets of anywhere, not even Taipei, where, if you know where to go, there are some ballers wid skeels. Wilbur is basically a pretty boy that likes to appropriate the tropes of hip-hop and b-boy culture to sell his image, which he can then parlay into record sales and concerts, sportswear and soda commercials. There is no need for him to be anything other than what he is. It’s one unified image, and all he’s selling are the various products that help him realize his lifestyle, one which, provided you outfit yourself with the same shit, you can have too.

Unfortunately, that’s another aspect of greater Chinese pop culture that I detest too—and I know that there’s no point in crying about the commercialization of hip-hope or black culture, that’s been the status quo for years and it’s not going to change. It’s just that to me, it’s even more meaningless when it comes from Chinese people. I know pop culture has an easy, lowest common denominator type universality to it, but somehow there’s a very atavistic and inchoate impulse towards Chinese purity that I cannot quite explain. It’s not that everything has to be traditional, it’s more that I was hoping that one day even in the realm of popular culture and lowbrow consumerism, Chinese people might do something that at least strikes people as having one or more iotas of originality.
Li Ning vs. Nike and Adidas, Lenovo vs. Apple, Baidu vs. Google—the west has a head-start and a superior advantage. Mimicry is a form of flattery. I talk of inspiration and originality, while these Chinese brands are locked in a fierce to the death battle for every percentage point of market share they can get.

Not sure what to think from here. Maybe better solution would be to put on some Bon Jovi, which always reliable source of low dosage escapism:

How to be an Chinese Olympics sports commentator

I was watching the Australia-China women’s basketball last night and listening to the commentary, I finally snapped: I’ve just become to sick of hearing them say the same things over and over. Most of the time it’s stuff along the lines of:

我们在跟世界一流的队的对抗中可以发现自己的不足。
我们跟世界一流的篮球对还是有一定的差距。
亚洲人不能光靠速度取胜，外国队也很灵活的。
经过跟世界一流的队的对抗我们可以不断提升我们各方面的素质、水平。

yadda yadda yadda. It’s like they barely talk about the game. They don’t try to be funny. Some commentators do, and I appreciate that, but that sure was not the case last night with the Australia-China game. Whenever China is really far behind—Australia had a twenty point lead most of the game—they have to talk about why this is, they have to take on this developmental perspective which is fine and valid in itself but really detracts from the viewer’s (or should i just say MY) appreciation and enjoyment of the spectacle (game+commentary) as a whole.

And it’s been repeated throughout the Games, and forms the standard interpretation of events at any sporting event where China loses or gets its ass kicked by another team. In that sense, it’s nothing new and why I’m yammering on about it is beyond me, and perhaps beyond you as well. It just irks me.

While I’m in the mood for getting things off my chest, I might as well add that I hate the whole “1.3 billion” (十三亿）business, which usually modifies something like “dreams of”, as in “the dreams of 1.3 billion people” (十三亿人的梦想）or in “the Olympics of 1.3 billion people.”

I’ve been traveling to China throughout my whole life, starting in 1980 at the tender age of three. I’ve been around Chinese people my whole life, though not necessarily mainland Chinese. And yet, because I grew up in America, where the individualist ethos is so strong and ingrained (the pioneers and explorers are part of our cultural-historical narrative), I simply just cannot fathom this collective ethos, this insistence on the unity–indeed, homogeneity—of the group. Everyone is their own person, their own individual, but somehow when you get to these public announcements, like ads on TV or the speeches of China’s leaders, you have to adopt this “1.3 billion” rhetoric, snap your fingers and somehow they all fall into line into some intellectual phalanx formation. I just think it completely laughable for anyone to speak of the entire nation as one. I would find it insulting. Even in the aftermath of 9-11, when we were all New Yorkers, this kind of rhetoric was not present. There was a kind of national unity and solidarity, but that was in response to attack and tragedy. You could never imagine anything like “the dreams of 300 million people” intoned the same way it is over here.

As I write these last sentences, I am watching a Toyota commercial where the audience is told: “You are no like no one else. But you have to have your own style.”

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.

Businessweek on what is wrong with Lenovo ads in the US (and a collection of Lenovo ads)

Lenovo’s Olympic ads – BusinessWeek

I think they use completely different ads here in China. The sumo wrestler/Xpad 300 ad is this one:

Here’s even more bleeding edge avant-garde one for the Z60:

And here’s a Chinese one featuring Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi from way back when:

This Xpad 300 one is rather tepid by comparison:

Here’s another Chinese one that is snazzy but not quite as avant-garde as the newest ones:

Here’s yet another dated, sports-related one from China:

You can tell the Chinese ones and the US ones are quite different in style. I suppose that reflects a change in their marketing strategy, maturation of the brand, and perhaps change in commercial production personnel…anyway, Business Week thinks that these are perhaps too edgy for the Olympics and are better suited for the Superbowl…

So this is how we talk about Tiananmen Square

I was just reading through a blog post from the Phoenix TV reporter Lvqiu Luwei (闾丘露薇) writes about the changes that occurred in Beijing as a result of the Olympics. She hopes that the changes, whether it be better signs and transportation to more polite people and better service attitude, will become permanent. Fair enough. Then there’s a paragraph where she mentions the issue of foreign media broadcasting live from Tiananmen Square during the Olympics. It seems they are allowed to as long as they submit and receive approval. She says that perhaps some Chinese people will not understand why it’s such a big deal that they be able to broadcast from the Square. Her answer: because no skyline, however magnificent, could compare to the visual impact of the square, and broadcasting from there would make viewers understand that China has changed, become more open—because this place is a “complex” and a “symbol”.

I don’t know if there is anything really worth pointing about this. Of course, it’s more than just a symbol. It’s a place where history was made. It’s the unofficial national stage, where a great many national dramas are enacted. And it’s a place where people died. There’s almost no point in even writing this–what does one expect? There are clever ways of skirting the issue, and in any case, the blog post is not about the square per se. We can’t be clear about the real historical significance of the place and hence its value to western reporters who want to be able to broadcast live from the square. But to say that it’s a “complex” and a “symbol” is an accurate and fairly innocuous way of putting it. Here’s the original paragraph in Chinese:

虽然中国政府已经同意，经过申请的外国媒体可以在天安门广场进行直播，但是还是有不少的媒体在抱怨，限制太多，比如限制直播的时段，这样让和中国有时差的欧洲国家，没有可能利用天安门作为背景进行直播。也许很多人不明白，为何外国媒体如此执著于天安门广场，这是因为，再多的高楼大厦，再完美无缺的开幕仪式，都比不上外国记者，站在天安门，为自己国家的观众发回报道造成的视觉效果更加强烈，人们会因此而感受到中国变了，更加开放了的，因为这个地方，是一种情结和象征。