Jottings from the Granite Studio

I just finished the movie Fearless (霍元甲) Jet Li’s self-proclaimed final wushu film. The movie itself is not bad (Not that I’m much of a movie critic). It’s about equal parts Fists of Fury and Rocky IV (compare the final fight scenes) with a dash of Raging Bull and an inexplicable Dances with Wolves […]

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One of the great time wasters, at least for me, is the Baseball Reference site created by Sean Forman. You see, I was one of those kids with his nose buried in a stack of baseball cards wondering just who was the best player back in 1982 (Robin Yount) and wondering why I had […]

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I passed by this reference on EastSouthWestNorth yesterday but had no idea it was such a cause célèbre until I read Ryan’s posting on his great Suzhou blog.
A young English teacher out of Shanghai has been trysting with the ladies and then posting the rather intimate details on his blog under the […]

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From the excellent people over at EastSouthWestNorth comes this little tidbit of two stores located in Beijing’s Forbidden City with the rather cheeky signs: “只接待外宾、禁止国人入内” (”Only Foreign Guests received, Nationals strictly forbidden to enter.”) While there is no historical proof that the gates to the Shanghai parks in the 19th century really did prohibit dogs […]

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I mentioned him briefly yesterday in my post on art and the amateur ideal, but Zhang Hongtu’s site MoMAO merits its own entry. Three places in particular are worth visiting. His “Mao” and especially his “Material Mao” collection is whimsy in the best sense of that word. More stunning are his recreations of famous Chinese […]

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In the Ming sixteenth-century fin-de-siècle, elite painters clung to an ideal of amateurism in art and painting. Painters such as Wen Zhengming (文徵明 1470-1567) and Dong Qichang (董其昌 1555-1636) among others championed the connoisseurship of the dilettante and disparaged those who painted to make a living. Never mind the constant exchange between literati […]

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I love to complain about France, but the truth is…I kind of like it here. True, I rarely have to DO anything while I’m here. The times when I’ve worked in the archives or watched as YJ tried to find an apartment or negotiate the bureaucracy of the local university makes me really […]

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It is day one of my annual migration to France. With luck and fortune it will be the last of these for awhile. This year fiscal prudence has forced me to abandon my previous habit of flying British Airways business class and turn instead to Icelandair. As a result, rather than […]

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I consider myself one of the least jingoistic of sports fans. In the NBA, I tend to root for teams, like the Suns, who have a large number of internationals on the squad. I have even been so appalled by the sight of American fans chanting U-S-A! U-S-A! while we dismantle Eastern Slobodovecia (pop. 453) […]

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It’s the time of the year to rank the “best” colleges and universities from around the world and as usual UC Davis clings to the top 50 like a tenacious wild-eyed sloth grips a honey-soaked palm branch.
According to US News & World Reports annual rankings UC Davis checks in at number 47 in the USA. […]

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