Damn, it's nice outside today, eh? So happy to be stuck at a computer writing this!
Anyways, so this sick, turbo awesome funk soul band called LMT Connection snuck into Temple bar last night to kick off their China tour -- it's the "Great Wall of Funk Tour," of course -- and the three-piece is traveling back and forth between Beijing and Shanghai and a few outlying neighboring cities spreading the word. The word of the funk, son. Bopping people with their bop guns. They were pretty incredible. They are pretty incredible.
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...
Most of my students are studying at an English training school with the intention of enrolling in a Master's program, or at least attaining a Bachelor's degree from an American university. During my time here I've had a soul-enriching load of students accomplish just that, as they've gotten their IELTS scores (a British-Australian test to measure English language proficiency in both general and academic English) and entered various BA, BS, MA and MA programs across the country.
But while some of their success can be attributed to my instruction, most of my best students came in (and exited) my class with amazing study skills and positive attitudes toward learning.
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.
At the start of this POV video taken at Wednesday's protest near Jingwen Shopping Mall in Beijing's Fengtai District, the people chant kangyi, "protest." As a collective they rock back and forth, like a wave. It surges in fits and starts, apparently toward uniformed officers. There is safety in numbers -- civilians outnumber cops -- so individuals feel little hesitancy to shout whatever they please.
But there is also a kind of muted chaos.
A massive police and paramilitary presence has descended upon Fengtai District around Jingwen Clothing and Apparel Shopping Mall, the scene of either a suicide or murder last Friday.
On May 3, a young woman from Anhui province fell to her death from the Jingwen building after allegedly being gang-raped. Police hastily ruled her death a suicide and refused her family's request to see the surveillance footage.
This afternoon, thousands (edit: possibly only "hundreds") of people -- many who are migrant workers from Anhui -- gathered in a planned protest between Jingwen and Yongdingmen, a gate just south of the Temple of Heaven on Second Ring Road (a few kilometers north of Jingwen). Hundreds of police have shown up in turn, many in riot gear. Traffic is reportedly backed up for miles.
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.
Okay guys, shelve the jokes. Who among us has handled live explosives and knows the special feeling of a shrapnel-packed weapon ticking down to our doom? Adrenaline gushing through the veins of our throwing arm, would our toss be guaranteed a certain distance, the ideal trajectory, so that the projectile -- shrapnel-packed, explosive -- doesn't bounce back at our feet, as it does here, in this video, to the poor female recruit and her two companions?
What is a public space? Who belongs? And what are the things that one can do in this place?
Poop?
In this video, a middle-aged woman, on an elevator in Shenzhen's Subway Line 3, suddenly feels the call of nature, so she drops trou and takes a dump.
Her companion, a middle-aged male, stands beside her and holds a button to keep the elevator doors closed. Neither clean up the mess, because, you know, who cleans up their own poop, right?
