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I saw this too late to include it in the Friday Happy Hour but it’s worth posting. In a fabulous profile of Red Sox outfielder Manny Ramirez in this week’s New Yorker, Ben McGrath quotes the man-child slugger as saying: “I like to travel, man,” he said. “I been to Europe—you know, Spain. Dominican, Aruba, Costa Rica. Just to learn about different cultures. You know where I want to go? I want to go to China. I want to go and see—it’s a city that I don’t know how to say the name. It’s the Prohibit City?” He meant the Forbidden City, in Beijing. “I saw it on the History Channel. They do a lot of tours over there.””
God love it. Manny in Beijing. As if the locals didn’t think lao wai were crazy enough…
The always surreal China Daily brings in noted economist, and Song Dynasty official, Su Dongpo to weigh in on the risks inherent in China’s current economic boom. “Indeed, who would not feel dizzy a little as both wings of the economy–the GDP and the stock market index are flying to ever higher altitudes” quoth the China Daily staff, paraphrasing one of Su’s more famous poems. (How I wanted to ride the wings of the wind/To the Jade Moon Palace if only I could bear/the unbearable cold in the high air.) This just in: China’s economy is growing too quickly with potentially unstable bubbles forming in the stock market and urban housing prices. Film at 11. Joseph Kahn has a good piece in today’s New York Times on the internal debate within the CCP over “democratization.” It’s not quite what you think. After all, as Kahn points out, CCP leaders, “claim that the one-party state has long practiced democracy, in the sense of governing on behalf of the people, and they show no signs of preparing to cede any political power.” But I think any kind of opening of the process to include more actual voices and meaningful votes–even if
Our friend from the bayou Mike J. hooked YJ and me up with VIP seats to The Roots concert last night. He called us the first day tickets went on sale and asked if I wanted him to pick up a few for me…Hell, yeah. I figured I could explain later to YJ why we’ll be eating ramen for the next two weeks.
First off: The band was tight. Serious musicians all, they could be among the best ‘technical’ musicians I’ve seen live since Phish disbanded. And it was a party. It started a little slow–some very slight technical problems and a quiet crowd (at first) made for an awkward beginning, but the show picked up momentum and by the end the Star Live club was popping. Fabulous time. They even pulled out a few classic rock and disco chestnuts for us geezers, quoting “Immigrant Song,” “Jungle Boogie,” “Rock and Roll, Part 2″ and “Iron Man” in between funky sets of originals. Picking out high points would be tough…but Captain Kirk’s guitar work was amazing–he did a bluesy solo number in the middle that recalled some sort of unholy alchemy of Albert King, Jimi Hendrix, and Prince. ?uestlove’s backbeat was
I have a secret. A horrible heroin-like addiction to the sounds of 70s singer-songwriters. Seriously. A surprise visit to my house will yield only heartbreak and the sight of a grown man rocking out to the sax solo on Gerry Rafferty’s immortal and timeless “Baker Street.” There must be a support group for things like this…
Last week was hideously busy–mostly with the inane crap that passes for bureaucracy here in the Middle Kingdom. In some ways your average Chinese bureaucrat and I are pretty simpatico: They don’t want to deal with me and I don’t want to deal with them–and we work together to make sure that this is exactly what happens.
Needless to say, this pattern makes YJ crazy. For example I just switched my visa over which means a trip to the local police station to change my residency permit. (Welcome to China–Your Life in Triplicate.) YJ: He’d like to change his residency permit.Police: Why? We can’t right now.Me: See honey, they can’t right now. Let’s go get lunch.YJ: (Staring daggers at me, speaks sweetly to the police officer): Why not? We have all the paperwork.Police: Lao Wang handles this. He’s not here.Me: Of course. We’ll come
Via Danwei comes a report that inclusion of the Cultural Revolution film “Though I am Gone” (我虽死去) has resulted in the cancellation of the Yunnan Film Festival. The film, available in 10 parts on YouTube, documents the horrific killing of Bian Zhongyun, the principlal of the Girls Middle School attached to Beijing Normal University. Her students, many of them the daughters of high ranking officials, beat Bian to death with wooden clubs spiked with nails. Bian, one of the first casualties of the Cultural Revolution, was killed in August of 1966. The film is not easy to watch but really is a must-see. Let’s hope that the powers-that-be eventually display the courage to allow this story to be told. Andrew Leonard, writer of Salon’s How the World Works blog, discusses the question of how Taiwan became Chinese. Leonard, a former English teacher in Taiwan who admits to a “Taiwan fetish,” looks at a recent book Tonio Andrade in which he argues that it is the Dutch who bear the responsibility for the eventual incorporation of Taiwan into the Qing empire. According to Andrade, Dutch policies encouraged the first major wave of Chinese colonization on the island and it was
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