Jottings from the Granite Studio

YJ is out running around the city as Tianjin’s answer to Brenda Starr, I’m here in The Studio with CCTV on the television, NBC on the Sling Box, and a fridge full of diet coke. I was thinking of wandering out of the hutong to join the madness, but I decided to bunker down and [...]

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Beijing-based artist, Granite Studio friend, and occasional anonymous commentator Helen Couchman has been winging around the world this past month promoting her new book Workers.  Last December, Helen snuck onto the construction site for the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube and offered to take the portraits of any worker who wished to have his [...]

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There’s a scene in the movie Animal House, where Dean Wormer informs the Delta Chis that the fraternity has been placed on “double secret probation.” I now know how that feels. There’s been a lot of talk in the pubs and online about what some have dubbed the “No Fun” Olympics.  Restaurants and bars are closed, [...]

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 ”100 Years of Humiliation.“ It’s a phrase so common, I think most people have unfortunately stopped listening.   An essay by author Lijia Zhang in The Guardian contains this quote from 67-year old Beijing resident Xie Fengzhi: “I want foreigners to see what China has achieved. We were called the ’sick man of Asia’. Now we are [...]

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I haven’t read the book in years, so memory might fail, but I seem to recall a line (perhaps the opening line) from William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer: “The sky was the color of a tv set turned to a dead station.”
Such is Beijing.
Beijing has announced ’special environmental measures’ that can be implemented on an ad [...]

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Well after one week of odd/even traffic restrictions, I stood on the pedestrian overpass on Chao Nei Dajie and looked west.  On a good day, you can see Xiang Shan and the Western Hills.  Today you could see about 200 meters and then the street dissolved into a smog bank so thick it was positively [...]

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Author Kerry Brown has an essay up at OpenDemocracy looking at China’s tumultuous 2008 and the cycles and contingencies of history.  Brown reminds us that despite China’s rise, the unity of the modern PRC nation-state is something which can’t be taken for granted, as China’s leaders are all too well aware: the PRC, as heir [...]

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Many, if not both, of my regular readers know that I am both a history geek AND a bit of a sports nerd, and one of the biggest events of the year for sports nerds was last night…the NBA draft.  As part of the tradition, ESPN columnist Bill Simmons does an annual ‘running diary‘ which–if [...]

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And it has come down from on high…the Beijing municipal government today unveiled its long anticipated if not especially eagerly awaited Olympic traffic plan. Odd number. Even number. It won’t matter. What does matter is that we can forget about getting a cab on a weekday downtown. Just start walking now, you’ll get to where you’re going eventually.

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I’ve written a post over at The Peking Duck on the BBC’s decision to broadcast protests should they occur during the Beijing Olympics.  Feel free to join in the free-wheeling discussion/online shouting match which is sure to ensue.

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