The information that follows was compiled by BJC editor-at-large RFH after a chat with the shadowy Tan Guan, whose position at Global Times is unknown. All views expressed below are to be...
A certain article in a particular newspaper has caused some people on the Western Internet to debate so-called “virginity values." Yesterday, even the WSJ China editor chimed in on Sina Weibo: “How was a misogynistic article like this published?” this person asked.
This week we introduced the 2nd annual Beijing Cream Bar and Club Awards (VOTE HERE), with 20 categories divided into four groups. Here's Kelly Mason, a good foreigner, with a closer look at the group Mr. Laowai.
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.
It’s 8:40 pm on a Friday. We’re lined up at the China Eastern Airlines counter a full ninety minutes before takeoff, and I have everything I need for a great, just-quit-work weekend: passport, check; cleats, check; Frisbee, check; baijiu-Fanta mix, check. But just then, China decides to remind me where I am. Ahead of us in line, an argument begins to stew, froth, and bubble. The verbal combatants are an elderly couple, possibly from the countryside, and two overdressed, overly made-up, and apparently overconfident young women.
The initial dispute is over whether a luggage cart bumped into an ankle, but it gets ugly fast: one of the girls taunts the old man's ability to speak standard Mandarin Chinese. Airline employees break up the verbal sparring as quickly as they can, but the tone for the evening has been set. At the counter, a friendly but frazzled attendant tells me my flight doesn't yet have a gate, and I already have an idea of what I'm in for.
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.
On top of everything else, Ai Weiwei is a barber. A good one?
Hm. Maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's start here: exactly what kind of haircuts does he give?
“The kind that will make you want to cry," he said.
“Just don’t make it boring,” I told him.
“It won’t be boring.”
~
We were sitting on outdoor benches on Wednesday evening at the restaurant Fodder Factory in Caochangdi, a tiny urban enclave whose intimacy and absence of pretension has attracted some of the city's more self-motivated and independent artists, filmmakers and celebrities, Ai Weiwei included...
Ed's note: The Good Doctor and I attended the 3rd annual Beijing International Film Festival on April 23 at the China National Convention Center. You can read my write-up here. The following is The Good Doctor's work.
Jay Chou performs at the closing ceremony of the Beijing International Film Festival. I was lucky enough to be able to film, though I wasn't very close to the stage. Enjoy the spectacle as Hollywood collides with the Chinese Film and Television industry.
Last week I got an invite to roll with some musician buddies up at Midi Festival and decided it’d be a great opportunity to grab a camera and capture the people and fashions that only “the biggest rock festival” in China can provide.
Undeterred by the lack of a fucking functional website, the promise of awe-inspiring traffic, and the threat of hours of shitty metal, I took a whiskey-soaked ride up to the Beijing Yuyang International Ski Resort and brought back photos from the Pulp Fiction/Sid and Nancy/The Last Waltz/skate video some kids from Ohio would make/Betty Boop/Hot Topic Lookbook fever dream that was Midi Festival 2013.
BJC contributor Chris Clayman attended the Dali Erhai World Music Festival in Yunnan province from April 29 – May 1. His dispatch follows. A Cop with a Weird Haircut We’re standing near the fortune teller when Lin Dan shows us something. “I’m a cop,” he says. He pulls out his wallet and holds it close to... Read more »
Many fans of Chinese rock music have heard of the band Rustic, the members of which became stars on the scene only a few years ago when they unexpectedly won the Global Battle of the Bands competition in London. They play a catchy blend of cock rock and old-school punk, and their show antics make... Read more »
