Drop what you're doing and watch this, Beijingers. Mark Griffith, a photographer and videographer who used to live in Beijing, has just released the fruit of 15 months of work, "Beijing State of Mind," set to Jay-Z's Empire State of Mind. The project was the brainchild of Andrew Dougherty, an expat who'd lived off and on here for five years. Rapping alongside Princess Fortier (in the role of Alicia Keys), the duo take us on a trip from the Forbidden City to the hutongs to the Great Wall to The Place, and so many other places in between that make our Beijing experience what it is.
This is really awful and despicable beyond words. An anti-corruption whistleblower in Huizhou, Guangdong province apparently made very powerful enemies over the course of the past year, enemies who finally got to him on Monday morning when three men attacked from behind using sulfuric acid and knives, according to Southern Metropolis Daily.
Johnnie Walker Blue Label hired director Joseph Kahn to create an ad, and they got one heck of a finished product, titled "Game Changer." It features Bruce Lee in Hong Kong. Well, CGI Bruce Lee, anyway. As Kahn explains on Vimeo:
A 23-year-old gorilla named Jiaku became famous at Tianshan Wildlife Zoo in Xinjiang for being a "heavy smoker." He was known to perform tricks -- doing handstands, turning in circles, clapping his hands, even performing ballet moves -- to get visitors to throw him a smoke, and would sometimes get desperate without his nicotine fix.
His trainer, however, out of concern for his health, has recently tried to wean him off cigarettes. The method has been to lace his ciggies with chili pepper and to apply an ointment on the end.
Thunderstorms in Shanghai on Friday caused massive flight delays and more than 100 cancellations in the city's two major airports, Hongqiao and Pudong, and as you might expect, tempers boiled over. We don't know how many dozens of arguments broke out in terminals around the city, and how many of those turned into fights, but at least one was caught on camera. It involved -- yes, once again -- China Eastern Airlines.
Okay, this looks bad -- replacing an L with an R in a story about a flight from Asia in which two Chinese teenagers died. But no editor could have possibly done this intentionally, right? Make an L-R confusion joke amid a tragedy, I mean. Spoonerisms really aren't even very clever.
Hi, I'm Morgan. I work at SmartBeijing.com. Quick announcement: hardcore hesher types all over China HAVE SPOKEN and Metallica is playing a second show in Shanghai on August 14. If you live in Beijing and want to get some tickets, visit SmartBeeeej on Monday and we'll have an update for you on the ticket status. It's all being worked out. Seriously, this time though. We got your back. We'll have tickets for sale...
Lottie Dowling is single. How this is, we may never know, considering this Kiwi is smart, cute, and funny, as evidenced by her co-founding of Improv Beijing, the original improv group in China. Here she is:
Another year has come and gone and America continues to noisily barrel on into middle age. The Fourth of July has always been my favorite holiday. It doesn't come with any of the social burdens and anxieties of Christmas and Thanksgiving. The political implications are pretty minimal as well. While it's technically a celebration of the US throwing off the shackles of our tea- and gin-soaked oppressors and their shilling-and-pencing sales taxes, it generally lacks the nationalistic bluster and bravado of, say, Chinese National Day.
The inaugural Color Punch party, organized by Street Kids and Let There Be House, happened on June 15 at Dos Kolegas, and we're still trying to fathom all that drunken gaiety amidst organized lechery. What profligate uncoiling, the body's gasconade against the screwed-up walls of youth. And afterwards, how many more spilled additional colors in a final exhortation of spirit?
