That's Beijing dropped a bombshell yesterday, reporting that Galaxy Soho's management apparently doesn't want the city's LGBT Center to have an official presence at the Craft Beer Festival this Friday and Saturday. Specifically:
After (beer festival organizers) submitt[ed] their festival proposal – which included a description of a LGBT Center booth to the Galaxy Soho management, they were informed that the Center’s representatives would not be allowed access to the venue’s premises, over concerns that LGBT members would not fit with the the site’s architecture ("和我们的建筑 不太吻合").
Hong Kong is a city unlike any other, its buildings rising up out of the hills like ridged obelisks, its waters rippling with cargo ships, ferries, and buoys, its mountainside painted the shade of roiling green, its alleys stacked upon one another with overpasses and skywalks crisscrossing as in an M.C. Escher illustration.
I'm in Hong Kong at the moment, and to try to capture a bit of the wonder of this place, I made the above video. Hope you enjoy.
It's difficult -- it really is -- to say Chinese soccer has reached a "new" low, considering its history of match-fixing and utter, abysmal, unmitigated failure on the international stage (its only World Cup appearance coming in the year when two other Asian countries had automatic bids into the tourney). But after losing 5-1 to a mostly junior Thailand team on home turf on Saturday, more than a few fans are saying this is the bottom. "Disband the national team" has become something of a commonplace chant, as meaningless as "black whistle" when refs screw up, but the rallying cry attained something of a feverish tone of urgency on Saturday. Can it get worse? If so, it's only because we're talking about Chinese football here.
Last May, lawyer-activist Chen Guangcheng was a media darling and international hero. His dramatic escape from the village of Dongshigu, where he was held under house arrest, made headlines around the wrold. After the US granted him asylum, one magazine recognized him as "rebel of the year." He was later honored with the Lantos Human Rights Prize.
But as time went on, something changed. Or rather, Chen failed to. With each video, each interview, we heard more of the same, the same not-so-subtle name-drops, the same message, with phrases such as "the red terror envelops the nation."
That was quite the collective experience, Beijing.
An hour ago, a dam in the sky broke. Rain turned into pellets of ice, the sound of its steady assault only interrupted by thunderclap that set off car alarms. One imagines Qu Yuan sitting somewhere with his feet propped up, enjoying the show.
As quickly as the storm came, it departed -- but not before the sun shone out of a hole while the clouds were wrung dry. Now it is quiet, the singing of birds and rustling leaves beginning to fade amid the resumption of human activity, vehicles, construction.
Global Times is running a neat feature on its Facebook page (yes, Global Times has a Facebook page) in which it posts sample questions from China's National College Entrance Exam, i.e. gaokao. Its headline asks:
So you think you’re smarter than a Chinese high school student?
Oh hell no, no one thinks they're smarter than Chinese high school students. We're all reeling from years of alcohol abuse and our heads are no longer filled with facts.
But even if we were smarter, would we be able to answer labyrinthine questions such as...
Over the last week a number of people have asked me about Internet trolls leaving defamatory comments on this website and others. Even though common sense tells me to ignore them, here are responses in the form of an FAQ:
Do you know who’s leaving these comments? Yes...
Hello Beijing Cream readers. My name is Josh and I work at this other website called Smart Beijing, where I write tl;dr music articles on a weekly basis. The Tao is outsourcing these Friday Musical Outros to my comrade Morgan, but he's doing some other shit right now. So you're stuck with me.
Here's a taste of this Saturday's show by Shanghai's Friend or Foe. This video was shot by homegrown, straightforwardly-named blog/burgeoning media empire Live Beijing Music.
The Economist has a bizarre regional cover this week. Never mind that it’s tasteless and will surely be interpreted as homophobic by many of its critics. NEVER MIND THAT. Let me isolate the cover-line jokes for you, see if you find them funny:
He Stole His Heart
(And Then His Intellectual Property)
Hmm.
