i have links.
blogs i am reading now:
danwei: extremely observant critique, reporting on the triumphs of citizen media in china.
city of sound: i just got back into reading this. i especially love reading the archives of its blog-within-a-blog on shanghai.
supernaut: a choreographer
design related:
cube residential building: it reminds me of my very first project in shanghai. except it's not ironic, and it's getting built!
what's wrong with the ipod: my sentiments exactly.
visualberlin: a conference for video jockeys. (pictures)
yotel: a kubrick-loving capsulist's wet dream.
that's all for now.
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5 comments:
thanks bunches for posting these. i'll keep referring to this list, and eventually begin referring them to others. :p
just took a peek at Dan Wei's. very "relevant" (there's a better word, but there's only so much i can scratch my head). very significant (ditto).
i'm watching much more chinese news on the television in l.a. the taiwanese segment is improving, but still unprofessional. the P.R.C. segment is straight CCTV. total propaganda. it sickens me to see the BBC's take on chinese-tibetan relations one evening, and then to catch CCTV's shiny, silver praise of the P.R.C.'s..."renovation"... of Lhasa the next evening. sick, sick, sick.
the same attitude towards general culture is what sickens me about Chen Kaige's latest film. it was purposely released in the last wedge/week of 2005, so that it might be considered for the next Academy Awards, as the P.R.C.'s official entry into the foreign-language-film category. it plays only in l.a. for only one week in only one theater (a bad one, at that).
and it's really bad. "tu". "suqi". as if it were too rouged and clothed with too gaudy clothing, as my mom puts it. it probably appeals to my dad because of its huge hoopla and its production. the costuming is over the top, and the crew travelled to yunnan to shoot scenes in the wilderness. there are 1 korean actor and 1 japanese actor in the lead roles. the japanese actor speaks excellent mandarin, and the korean actor's is passable.
but the storytelling is horrible & piecemeal- the story was written by Chen himself. in "concept", it's very similar to "crouching tiger, hidden dragon", but 1/3 as subtle and 1/3 as great. it's lots more like watching a Batman movie or one of the later Star Wars episodes. plus, this is at least the 2nd time Chen put his wife in a major role.
when Zhang Yimou's big epics were released- "Hero" & "House of Flying Daggers"- they spoke for themselves. this film? watching it is like sitting right in the face of a loudspeaker. it's a big lesson about what the P.R.C. thinks of itself, these days. :p
enough typing!
in my mind, one of the best quotes to sum up the PRC's condition is that one you mentioned earlier in your blog -- something equivalent to "rules are created from the top, but people live below ..." (okay that's probably a tad off, but ...) do you remember what the saying is, in chinese?
yes! that quote is as yet the best thing to come out of my UCB classroom education!!!
in pinyin, it's "shang you zhengce; xia you fance".
put it into google/fetch, and = wheee!
you know how the chinese are: there must be millions or billions of similarly-phrased chengyu. if not similarly-phrased, then similarly-posed. those chinese. their wisdom is but worth a dime a billion.
i would type it again in hanzi, but i'm unable to do so at this computer. i don't want to spend the time figuring it out, especially now that mozilla firefox is already starting to frustrate me.
but no worries. go to zhongwen.com! learn hanzi while getting paid by the technological man!
oh the irony.
i'm sorry jean. your day in the sun ("..of justice", i mean)
will arrive someday. i am not sure when it will arrive but look at it my way:
shijie ribao reports that Chen Kaige's "Wuji" received
hooooooooooooooooooorible reviews in the P.R.C.
who cares if the whole F***ing she-bang was a staged
stunt, in the manner of the california governor's recent
moto-accident.
if it didn't begin as a stunt but as an accident, the whole messy incident certainly instantly meta-morphosed into one. into a stunt.
what a train wreck waiting to happen. sorry to be so rude on your blog, but it's things like this that really make you wonder about chinese media.
welcome back, watergate.
but, goodbye, dependence on oil and economic depression. goodbye, 1970s, hello, world! :p
p.s.
"F*** the ipod" needs to be spread Faster Than Foucault.
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