What does a false start and a censor's curse get you?
An opening that is kind of terrible.
Django Unchained, after its premiere was unceremoniously pulled and indefinitely delayed last month, returned to mainland theaters on Sunday, five days after it was supposed to. It earned 3.7 million yuan. Not US dollars... yuan.
Beijing expats may as well have been brought up in a magnificent castle, driven thence into this wonderland of partying and booze. Like all who emerge from relative privilege into physical decadence and spiritual morass, we are a self-centered lot, and so it is that we need a bar and club awards to tell us what we really want to know: where can we hang out with the kind who share our patois? what should we avoid due to the old sots and risk of disfigurement? where to get laid?
Yes, it's awards season time, when the city's very best are honored via reader vote, alongside the pretty good and the somewhat bad and all the rest. In that spirit, the 2nd annual Beijing Cream Bar and Club Awards honors 108 bar/club nominees (we've combined Punk/Mesh, Mix/Vics, and GT/Coco Banana) across 20 categories split into four groups.
We talk about censors as if they weren't real, but SCMP serves us this useful reminder that the people deleting your videos, expurgating articles, handcuffing artists, destroying the TV and entertainment industry, and -- the of course of "of courses" -- blocking porn, are made of flesh and blood, with intellectual capacities, however stunted, and human desires.
Well, some used to have human desires, before they were forced to watch porn all day. Desensitized, sex is but gymnastics with bad theatrics, something to pass the time, like a run on the treadmill.
Amulet Mok, you cheeky bastard. If that is your real name!
You ever have that very moment when every single cell of your body was aroused and your body was open for anything?
Oh dear.
Surveillance footage has surfaced purportedly showing 22-year-old Yuan Liya entering Jingwen Mall in south Beijing on the night of May 2. She would fall to her death several hours later -- not seen on tape -- in what police have ruled was a suicide.
Authorities reportedly blocked Yuan's family from seeing this footage last week, which was one of the reasons cited for an unusually large protest in front of Jingwen on May 8 that caused gridlock and an increased police and paramilitary presence through the city center.
Guijie, the prominent dining street on Dongzhimen Inner Street in Beijing, was the scene of a terrifying brawl on Sunday around 5:30 pm, according to the description on the above video, recently uploaded by Ai Weiwei. There are scant details, but the description also says the fight was between Han Chinese and Tibetan street peddlers/stall-keepers. There are lots of projectiles.
Welcome to Three Shots with Beijing Cream, where local personalities get drunk with us for some reason. Produced and directed by Gabriel Clermont and Anthony Tao.
Our guest this week is the loquacious and smoky-eyed Nestor Santana, a longtime expat with the expat's trove of stories -- many of them we can't tell here. It doesn't mean we can't ask about them though.
Nestor is the Asia manager for an ad and marketing company and has lived in Beijing for eight years. You'll have to catch him at one of the city's bars, of which he is a habitué, for fuller scoops.
![Evidence That Diaoyu Islands Really Do Belong To China, On Nicholas Kristof’s NY Times Blog [UPDATE]](http://beijingcream.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Diaoyu-Islands1-150x150.jpg "Evidence That Diaoyu Islands Really Do Belong To China, On Nicholas Kristof’s NY Times Blog [UPDATE]"){kind=small}
