Shanghai Vistas

Pudong (east) and Puxi (west), along the Huangpu River
Shanghai, People's Republic of China

The building on the far left is the Oriental Pearl Tower.

reflections on return

Shanghai scared me at first...just the sheer size of the multitude...it knocked me upside the head and it took me a minute to get my bearings. But that was just the transitory first impression, not a fixed judgment, more of an initial shock at how foreign the place felt. It was not what I thought i'd find, and forced me to realize that I'd brought completely unwarranted assumptions and expectations with me to China. I'd hastily cobbled together a cursory knowledge of Chinese culture & history from a really ridiculous set of sources... bad kung fu cinema, the Noble House Saga written by James Clavell, the Art of War, random bits of trivia about chinese medicine, Mao's Little Red Book, and the assorted blowhard opinions of a bunch of economic pundits and narcissistic bloggers... i was seeing China through the eyes of Mao and other assorted dead men, reading about it's past, and trying to comprehend the world i was about to enter by digesting its statistics... but the numbers don't capture the soul of a place, they just point out its position in time and wealth... numbers won't help me make any friends, or connect with any people. And there are people everywhere, hordes of them, spilling out of every doorway and street, each with a story, a journey, a family, and demands and jobs and children... I was not ready for these masses...

masses of people don't scare me...i am, after all, bengali... i'm used to being accosted by dozens of people in that peculiar asian way that immediately violates any sense of privacy you might have... but these weren't the great unwashed i was overwhelmed by, but thousands upon thousands of manicured mall rats, swarming through stores and over escalators and into multiplexes in their trendy threads, with designer bags in their hands and brands in their eyes... a veritable flock of well-heeled fashionistas, plagued with something similar to the sordid subhuman commercialism that's spreading through american suburban brats, the emerging paradigm of an entire generation of teenage girls who were exposed way too early to Paris Hilton & Britney Spears... it's no different in China... the nouveau riche are surfing seams of manufacturing money in a suddenly globalized world, and they feel inclined to show off their new status by spending the spoils of their labor on the hottest shoes, watches, and consumer goods. the Chinese are red communists? maybe by heritage, but the long shadow cast by Chairman Mao, the Cultural Revolution, and the Great Leap Foward has been eclipsed by something new.... the Chinese are gamblers and traders and investment bankers and greedy imperialists, just like the rest of us, hedging their bets and protecting their security and invading and occupying whoever they see fit... and while we were busy declaring eternal wars on a ragtag bunch of neurotic arab terrorists, the world casually ushered in a new age for China, because they manufacture all the crap we like to buy and they happen to finance the silly wars we choose to wage... it's a mindfuck, any way you look at it...

But it's not my place to judge. The beauty and depth of this city's rich heritage eludes my tourists' vision, and all i see are the crowds at the most commercialized corner of the city, where my hotel sits, between People's Square and Nanjing Road... And this spectacle of capitalist excess makes my bile rise, and my liberal guilt twitch... possibly because i am participating, and buying things, spending my money on items with uncertain origins that might further my fashion credentials in Babylon... so the self-loathing surfaces, triggered by a cityscape besotted with shops & stores, screens & facades, a steel and glass neon wet dream…

Yes...there are things here that I don't particularly like... But they say more about me than China. What I don’t like is a reality i have no control over, situations where I don’t feel safe, and conspicuous consumerism with no thoughts as to the consequences. I dislike pollution, public bathrooms that are noticable 50 meters downwind, people smoking in the elevator i'm riding in, and persistent pimps aggressively offering me "sexy massages" at 20 foot intervals along the sidewalk when i walk down the street at night. I don't like piles of pig bones sitting on my dinner table. I don't like being stuck in circumstances where I can only socialize with similarly transplanted souls... I don’t like feeling like an outsider…all of which means…that I need to learn more about this place, to appreciate it, to warm to it like a genial gypsy until it recognizes me and accepts me... i have to learn how to get by in Mandarin, which is a tall order for a linguistically challenged wanker like me, whose sole claim to competence as a traveler is my well documented ability to find good company, bootlegged music, and decent contraband in whatever country I’m currently traipsing through. I can’t even carry on a meaningful conversation in anything other than English, and occasionally, on a good day, painfully labored Spanish. This trip, ensconced in a ridiculously lavish hotel, made me feel like I’m becoming some horrible caricature of the jet set, one of those sad desperate bastards you find drinking to the wee hours at hotel bars, whose only knowledge of the native tongue is 'hello', 'thank you', and the haggling parameters while shopping. I don’t want to be that kind of tourist... i want to be something else...

So what kind of traveler do i idealize? the welcomed kind, i suppose. But am I the gregarious, social butterfly-type, trading quips and stories in every corner of the globe, surfing international circles while befriending everyone with ease & grace? Perhaps…but I am much more the quiet stranger in the corner, observing from afar, scanning the angles and surveying the angels overlooking the ruling families of every community i come across. i am wallpaper boy, the introvert in the black hoodie & tats, the dread in unobtrusive denim with crooked eyes & straight specs noting the scene from the shadows. It’s my choice on occasion to speak softly or through silence. I would rather be loud, and “wave my freak flag high,” as Jimi sings in "if six was nine”...

But there’s a time and place for that kind of freedom of expression, and this wasn’t it. i'm a tourist here, and i'm wary of where i can possibly fit into China…so i stay subdued, and on good behavior, because I don't know what I'm getting into and can't figure out how to blend in. There's nothing more obnoxious to locals than an overbearing tourist, right? So the next time I visit China I intend to exist a little differently, travel lighter, and eat different. I don't want to feel so...corporate, or American even… the truest travelers don’t wear their affiliations loudly on their sleeves, because they carry all stripes & creeds, and their characters can't be circumscribed by something as silly as a border. That's the kind of traveler i want to be, but staying in a cushy hotel for a week eating catered lunches while surrounded by foreigners isn't the route in.... you don't learn to love a country or people you're looking down upon from a skyscraper... a place always makes more sense to me from the bottom looking up...

Chairman Mao Quote of the Day

"How should we judge whether a youth is a revolutionary? How can we tell? There can only be one criterion, namely, whether or not he is willing to integrate himself with the broad masses of workers and peasants and does so in practice. If he is willing to do so and actually does so, he is a revolutionary; otherwise he is a nonrevolutionary or a counter-revolutionary. If today he integrates himself with the masses of workers and peasants, then today he is a revolutionary; if tomorrow he ceases to do so or turns round to oppress the common people, then he becomes a nonrevolutionary or a counter-revolutionary."

Chairman Mao
"The Orientation of the Youth Movement" (May 4, 1939), Selected Works

epitaph...view from afar

Sitting at home typing while The Simpsons, Family Guy & American Dad play on Fox in the background.
It strikes me that some of the heights of American culture can be found watching these shows: satirical animated characters siphoning pop references through subtly subversive commentary, stained with a deep desire to laugh at the caricatures we’ve become in Dubya's America. Self-abnegation as art. Cartoons as windows of self-criticism. A civilization's decadence arrives completely when its best financed artistic endeavors exist to provide self-mockery...

China at the moment is in a much different state of awareness. There is no sense of that despair, in its place is a realization of the raw potential of billions of lives seeking self-actualization. The country has a limitless horizon, growth as far as the eye can see, and a desire to replace 200 years of humiliating colonialism and communism with a vision of a civilization on the ascent. This latest incarnation of China is still forming, still evolving, and they are in a far better situation at the outset of the 21st century than the USA... Next to the Chinese, we Americans look washed up and way past our prime, like Rocky stuttering around after the brain damage he suffered from going 12 rounds with that Russian caricature Ivan Drago, surviving only on a brutish ability to keep taking shots straight on the chin...we're a mess out here in the US...riddled with internal contradictions and beset with carefully orchestrated paranoid campaigns designed to profit from the mental incarceration of frightened people... classes have become stratified, as hypocrisies have compounded. our attention spans are shrinking while our waistbands balloon. we are primed for the inevitable fall from our post WWII perch atop the food chain. Within 10 years, China's economy is projected to expand, until it's larger than the USA's. A 2 billion-strong Chinese nation is right around the corner. It's only a matter of time before we start seeing the world's attention shift accordingly....

…but these are only my feeble opinions, from a progressively jaded man…
…pieces of distorted perspective from the shifting sands on which I stand…

mmmmmm...soup dumplings...

managed to sneak away for a few minutes for some more soup dumplings...goddamn these are good...

Chairman Mao Quote Of The Day

"It is my opinion that the international situation has now reached a new turning point. There are two winds in the world today, the East Wind and the West Wind. There is a Chinese saying, "Either the East Wind prevails over the West Wind or the West Wind prevails over the East Wind." I believe it is characteristic of the situation today that the East Wind is prevailing over the West Wind. That is to say, the forces of socialism have become overwhelmingly superior to the forces of imperialism."

Chairman Mao, 1957

Massage Parlours & Madonna Wannabes

Finished the meeting up midway through Saturday afternoon. Rosalie and I spent a whirlwind hour packing up all our gear, and then headed out to a spa for a massage booked for us by Lou of LB/Shanghai. After watching us work for a week she agreed we needed some R&R, so she was kind enough to book us massages at her favorite spa. It was a nice transition from a long grueling week into 24 hours of free time before leaving the country.... The spa was really nice, an upper crust kind of venue called Dragonfly on Xinle road, but the rub...well, for me it was a little formulaic and didn't even begin to scratch the surface of what was wrong with my body after a week of intercontinental travel, binge drinking, pork knuckles, and typing for 7 hours a day. It's cool, though, it loosened me up, and Rosalie and I found another massage spa closer to the hotel where we got a second one after dinner (two massages in one day! spoiling ourselves, but it was 14 bucks for an hour, and ya can't argue with a deal that good...) the second was infinitely better, or maybe i just needed a lot of work to loosen up the chaotic stresses i fill my body with...


We spent the evening wandering around the Bund, the French Concession area of Puxing that's overrun with tourists, hawkers, and of course, the requisite Armani and Dolce & Gabbana stores. All the greatest retail property in the world seems to be populated by Versace outlets and other high end Italian designers selling their wares... These stores are interspersed with such venerable buildings as the Chinese Customs House, assorted global financial institutions, and glorious restaurants and bars in distinctly European architecture. The Bund is Shanghai's financial district, where the French and others plied their trades in the decades following the hugely humiliating Chinese defeat during the Opium Wars in the 1840's. This was one of the first places opened to foreigners in China, and it's got real character... We wandered around for hours till we finally found the restaurant we were looking for, a great spot called New Heights. Great food, fantastic view, and a serene way to spend my last night in Shanghai. Although that turned out to be a stopping point on what became a progressively wierder Saturday night...

After walking back to the hotel, we figured we'd savor one last cocktail in the Hotel's 65th floor bar before crashing. Ordered up some very tasty Flashbacks (vodka, triple sec, ginger juice, & lemon) and watched a few couples dance to a DJ spinning classic tracks from the 70's and 80's. Reloaded, the night was called, and there was a blackjack table, a sequence of music straight out of the Disco era, and a lounge singer with a hot slit dress singing "La Isla Bonita" by Madonna, inbetween brief moonwalk bits from a Michael Jackson impersonator. strange strange way to close out a week in China...

Chairman Mao Quote of the Day

"Many things may become baggage, may become encumbrances if we cling to them blindly and uncriticaliy. Let us take some illustrations. Having made mistakes, you may feel that, come what may, you are saddled with them and so become dispirited; if you have not made mistakes, you may feel that you are free from error and so become conceited. Lack of achievement in work may breed pessimism and depression, while achievement may breed pride and arrogance. A comrade with a short record of struggle may shirk responsibility on this account, while a veteran may become opinionated because of his long record of struggle. Worker and peasant comrades, because of pride in their class origin, may look down upon intellectuals, while intellectuals, because they have a certain amount of knowledge, may look down upon worker and peasant comrades. Any specialized skill may be capitalized on and so may lead to arrogance and contempt of others. Even one's age may become ground for conceit. The young, because they are bright and capable, may look down upon the old; and the old, because they are rich in experience, may look down upon the young. All such things become encumbrances or baggage if there is no critical awareness."

Chairman Mao, 1944

pork knuckle blues

gonna suck this joint till the juice runs down my chin
gonna suck this joint till the juice runs down my chin
ya gotta pick your angle
if you wanna find your own way in

gonna chew this fat till my jaws can't chew no more
gonna chew this fat till my jaws can't chew no more
lord have mercy
i can taste this in my pores

wanna drop the bone but my hands can't put it down
wanna drop the bone but my hands can't put it down
seems like i got the biggest bone in town....

gonna move right on once the marrow is sucked dry
gonna move right on once the marrow is sucked dry
but more stuff left to come
my oh my
my oh my...

... pork joints, marrow, & gloves...

Started the evening with a few drinks at Barbarossa, a beautiful Moroccan bar & restaurant in the middle of People's Square. Ada & Isabel, our lovely hosts from LB/Shanghai, herded our motley crew of hangovers into a bus to be taken roughly 100 meters down the street. We got off the bus and then had to walk back about 50 meters to cross the street and enter the park that's in the middle of People's Square. It's funny when you're treated as though you're incapable of crossing the street by yourself, but taking a look at the number of people in our party, perhaps they were right... Anyhow, this bar was lovely, standing in a secluded spot amidst trees and a large, carefully landscaped pond filled with water lillies. You couldn't even see the traffic, and it's probably the only place I was in all week where hordes of people weren't milling around...

We had a quick drink inside, amidst piles of cushions in a hookah lounge that was just a little too full to be truly comfortable. But didn't stay long, because our hosts had booked a large reservation for us, to hang out with the LB/Shanghai agency folks, so our group hopped on the bus again and were driven to a restaurant, a Manchurian spot where we were escorted to two long tables, with 12 heads to each side, facing each other. The meal that followed was simultaneously delicious and horrifying, and i've been having flashbacks of it for days... Here's what i can remember (or can't forget...)
Glass noodles
Fried flat corn cakes
fried mushrooms
Pork Knuckles
Fried rice with vegetables
Grilled Legs of mutton
Heaping piles of dried red chilis
Braised beef in Sauce
Deep fried banana fritters
Knotted sweet bread
Fried Bread (parathas)
and much much more... I think the kicker for me were the gloves they gave us prior to bringing out a heaping pile of pork knuckles. The gloves were to pull the meat off the bone, and the fluorescent straw they furnished us with...was to suck out the marrow! The bones were about an 3/4" in diameter, and sitting on a plate all together looked like some godawful medieval scene from a painting of Genghis Khan feasting with his lieutenants. Although I nibbled, seeing as how we were at the discretion of our hosts, I've been harboring a loud Hell No inside me about having to eat Pork Knuckles. it's good to get that out... the legs of lamb that swiftly followed were no joke either...


Vegetarianism has never looked so good...




I could try to describe the rest of that meal to you but I really would rather not. Some parts were delicious, the breads were particularly well made, but i've blotted out some things I ate from my memory, because i don't want to think about them. Suffice to say, when waiters start piling dishes of food ON TOP of one another, stacking them into towers of courses, you know there's something inherently wrong with the meal you're being asked to eat... It was like some perverse adventure in culinary sadism. Although i try to be accomodating wherever I go, what was running through my head the whole time we were there was: "This is so not sustainable." If you've ever come into contact with hardcore vegans or vegetarians, you know that the amount of resources it takes to raise cattle is preposterously high compared to the amount of resources it takes to grow the elements of a vegetarian meal. If you've seen the numbers, and then happen to sit through a single meal where you're served a dozen animals over the course of an hour, it starts to grate on you. There are better, wiser, more responsible ways to eat... I guess that makes me a party pooper, since I'm not all gung ho about piles of food... but i ate all of it, so i don't know what that makes me... troubled in the tract, most likely...
:-( master cleanse here i come...

After the meal (which had a few casualties, as a few of our diners went home sick), we headed over to a bar to have a few drinks and put a final period on what was a really enjoyable and productive week. We saw some great work, some fantastic ideas, and some things that i thought were fabulous. Below is my favorite Burnett ad from 2Q08, a demented spot from my friends in LB/Sao Paulo:




Also spent a few minutes at Mesa, before cutting out early... Nice place...

child-eyed contortionists & belting rock divas

Went to see a traditional Chinese Acrobat show @ a theater near the Portman Ritz Carlton. Must've been a couple hundred people there, watching a series of choreographed performances that completely enchanted everyone present...

A gorgeous partner silk routine, all heightened grace & unrequited romance
a well articulated and elegant suspended aerial dance
Nonchalant contortionists & adolescents bending in demented ways
dancers stacked in pyramids under gel spotlight rays
a woman balances an umbrella in impossible angles on her nimble toes
with each hard to fathom feat my astonishment grows
a girl curved backwards balances 5 towers of glass on each limb & chin
a hilarious man runs around maniacally tending to a dozen plates he spins
a volunteer becomes a stage prop for some casually tossed knives
these folks must have really fatalistic attitudes towards lives
little women basing women in human stacks inverted
over the course of 90 minutes we watch gravity get perverted
into something possibly malleable, or a matter of choice
these folks use their bodies to express a defiant voice
a righteous protest against elementary physics
these acrobats are some kind of sedentary tribe of sadistic mystics
morphing into shapeshifters and angles
it takes a half dozen to let one person dangle
using a magic see saw, two drop from above to make one ascend:
I run with righteous yogis and I still can’t comprehend how these people bend…



….had a beer after the show with a handful of the perpetually hungover crew and went looking for better times after a quick meal. After some careful consultations with a travel guide, my buddy Whit directed us to a bar called Luna and into the waiting arms of a badass cover band, fronted by two hot Chinese women with mad pipes belting out AC/DC covers like “You Shook Me All Night Long” and “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.” They played covers all night long, and me and my crew of drinking buddies sat through a couple fabulous sets filled with GnR, “Taking Care of Business,” Metallica, Nickelback, an old Skid Row classic, and assorted hard rock staples… They were awesome…


After the band played its last set we wandered into a nearby club to check out the scene. G12, i believe it was called... Had about as much lighting as the bat cave, with red fluorescent accents and a milky way design of various sized disco balls laid out on the ceiling. Looped laser projections covered the walls. It wasn't a bad scene, per se, nor was the music particularly bad. It was just a little wierd. Wasn't crowded, and the tech house and vocal trance seemed a bit pretentious. Your usual underfilled club for yuppies and drugged-out borgeousie types slumming in the city's hedonist underbelly. It wasn't too different from any other club, aside from the newness of the fixtures... I'm a bit of a snob when it comes to scenes like this, cause although they may play electronic dance music, they're a far cry from the original rave culture of the 90's that brought these sounds to the mainstream... the sounds from the underground were and remain far better than the stuff in places like g12...

Chairman Mao Quote of the Day

"The history of mankind is one of continuous development from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. This process is never-ending. In any society in which classes exist class struggle will never end. In classless society the struggle between the new and the old and between truth and falsehood will never end. In the fields of the struggle for production and scientific experiment, mankind makes constant progress and nature undergoes constant change, they never remain at the same level. Therefore, man has constantly to sum up experience and go on discovering, inventing, creating and advancing. Ideas of stagnation, pessimism, inertia and complacency are all wrong. They are wrong because they agree neither with the historical facts of social development over the past million years, nor with the historical facts of nature so far known to us (i.e., nature as revealed in the history of celestial bodies, the earth, life, and other natural phenomena)."

Chairman Mao, 1964

Chinese Acrobats- Chair Balance

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmWaYt1ma7w

Nanjing Road Overload

Shanghai’s a colossal mindfuck, any way I assess it;
I feel ignorant here, and not afraid to confess it
Cause it’s obvious I’m out of my element
The language barrier is absolute
My communication skills crippled & defused
What few charms I have inevitably refused
My appearance drawing sheisty hucksters of ill repute
With the mantra I hear every time I step outside, in an endless barrage:
“you wan watch? Shoes? Dvd? Bag? Massage? Sexy Massage?”
26 times in 3 hours on People’s Square
I guess I do look like a sucker…must be the hair…
The skin…the eyes…the tongue…
The churning stomach and the assaulted lungs
The body hasn’t settled, hasn’t slept, hasn’t rested
And suddenly I’m somehow congested:
Everyone smokes everywhere, in elevators, confined spaces,
In banquet halls & restaurants,
Flaunting cigarettes and spewing clouds
In this alternate universe all the smokers light up proud
…..













What a place…
18 million strong and growing
A fluorescent skyline and crowded riverfront glowing
7 story neon coke bottles
Rude self-absorbed assholes I’d like to throttle
Disgustingly large malls and clandestine massage parlors
a country where the ambitious work for less and work harder
Hustlers & pickpockets
Bustling crowds & slick hawkers
New asian aristocracy meets crested western debaucheries
Steel and glass temple facades
In this world I cannot identify the Gods
This crossroads is ruled by powers I don’t know how to petition
I am not entirely capable of fulfilling my mission
What do I document when there’s so much I can’t understand?
The perpetual confusion of the clearly overwhelmed man?
This is the first trip, perhaps just a training
And the next time I’m here I’ll take up what’s remaining
And experience this world ready and willing
Right now these juices are still distilling…

Chairman Mao Quote of the Day

"In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine....

...What we demand is the unity of politics and art, the unity of content and form, the unity of revolutionary political content and the highest possible perfection of artistic form. Works of art which lack artistic quality have no force, however progressive they are politically. Therefore, we oppose both works of art with a wrong political viewpoint and the tendency towards the "poster and slogan style" which is correct in political viewpoint but lacking in artistic power. On questions of literature and art we must carry on a struggle on two fronts."

Chairman Mao, 1942

Group Dinner #1

Lazy susan filled with fried fish heads & heaping hunks of greasy pork
Pieces of ham floating in spicy shrimp broth
Mushroom stems swimming in bright green sauce
Nameless greens in streamers like confetti
marinated cubes of barbequed beef
Dim sum & dumplings
Noodles & fish fillets submerged
Deep brown textured kao fu
A dozen more dishes I didn’t try or can’t remember
Beer and wine
An endless stream of dishes perpetually arriving
No wonder this culture is thriving
A dozen dead animals consumed each meal
Each feast
A testament to unrestrained appetites
Such profligate neon is a waste of light
So many people moving en masse
Everything’s so new here I can’t locate the past
Blank slate of a city high on its own fresh paint fumes
Somewhere beneath all this clean marble old ghosts loom
Amidst mainland mercenaries & imported suits
Scheming Hong Kong traders cashing in on their roots
A certain restlessness stains the air
A mood of transition everywhere
Unfinished & half-gone I catch a cab back to pudong
Cause of a case of billiards blues & a desire to escape the throng
all along the watchtower coolies keep the doors
in a metropolis of polished steel & freshly laid marble floors
nothing here is familiar & nothing is like I thought
gotta start seeing this place for what it is
Instead of thinking about what it’s not…

Chairman Mao Quote of the Day - on Patriarchy

"A man in China is usually subjected to the domination of three systems of authority [political authority, clan authority and religious authority].... As for women, in addition to being dominated by these three systems of authority, they are also dominated by the men (the authority of the husband). These four authorities - political, clan, religious and masculine - are the embodiment of the whole feudal-patriarchal ideology and system, and are the four thick ropes binding the Chinese people, particularly the peasants. How the peasants have overthrown the political authority of the landlords in the countryside has been described above. The political authority of the landlords is the backbone of all the other systems of authority. With that overturned, the clan authority, the religious authority and the authority of the husband all begin to totter.... As to the authority of the husband, this has always been weaker among the poor peasants because, out of economic necessity, their womenfolk have to do more manual labour than the women of the richer classes and therefore have more say and greater power of decision in family matters. With the increasing bankruptcy of the rural economy in recent years, the basis for men's domination over women has already been undermined. With the rise of the peasant movement, the women in many places have now begun to organize rural women's associations; the opportunity has come for them to lift up their heads, and the authority of the husband is getting shakier every day. In a word, the whole feudal-patriarchal ideology and system is tottering with the growth of the peasants' power."

Chairman Mao, 1927

Foot Rubs with R & Lychee Martinis with DJ Jiggs

I spent the day unpacking boxes, wiring up gear, testing things, and setting up before the meeting starts tomorrow. While that could sound tedious, it actually went by pretty fast. The conference room we’re in has a glorious view overlooking People’s Square, with huge windows watching over masses gathered and passing by. Not a bad view to contemplate for a week… there’s massive ads on all the buildings also. There’s a huge Yao Ming poster roughly 50 feet tall, where the image of Yao is actually comprised of other people. The image makes it look like he’s the embodiment of tens of thousands of people... saw another huge building size ad like that, for Nike, with a woman (probably a Chinese Olympian) trying to block, and there’s a sea of invisible people behind her helping her block. It’s reminiscent of a Rivera print, or early communist art where seas of faces explicitly manifest the belief of strength in numbers and solidarity in struggle. It’s an interesting technique and visual style to use in the service of hawking sneakers… but the brands here are omnipresent, deified neon logos offering the Chinese people a tangible form of posterity long denied to them… its quite the spectacle…


After a long day of work I spent the early evening wandering around with Rosalie, until we happened upon a massage parlour offering hour long footrubs for 38 RMB, which is roughly 6 US dollars. That sounded good to both of us, since we each carted about 100 pounds of work-related equipment in our luggage out here, so we walked in and spent the next hour sitting side by side as two very amiable Chinese masseuses worked over our feet. Reflexology is something different from what the folks in China do to feet, but after a hot soak, an herbal application, and 60 minutes of kneading, prodding, and cracking, we both emerged from that boutique feeling renewed. It’s nice to have someone trigger all your pressure points in new ways…



Met a bunch of Burnett folks for a drink at the hotel bar on the 65th floor. Crazy view of the city. Skyscrapers as far as the eye can see. Savored a few Lychee Martinis while catching up with the usual suspects, and then when the DJ finally turned up (to a largely empty bar – this being Monday night), I headed over to the tables to pick his brain and find out where to buy records out here… everywhere I go, there’s different sounds, so I make it a point to pick up a few things that I’d probably never find anywhere else. But not this time… The DJ’s name is Jiggs, a total hipster with a residency at the hotel, but he tells me that everyone gets good music off the internet or from abroad. He’s the fourth person I’ve asked and that’s what they’ve all said. Apparently there’s not much Chinese electronica out here, he tells me that most folks interested in progressive sounds find themselves drawn to the underground rock scene, which is centered around a bunch of righteous rabble rousing Beijing bands playing secret parties. I’d buy some of that, but I have no idea where to begin… It’d be nice to come away with some tracks to spin in Chicago, but it doesn’t look like it’ll happen this time. Still, it was nice to meet Jiggs, DJs are a motley bunch of audio-inclined packrat geeks, and it’s nice to converse with someone 12000 miles from my home turf about playlists, genres, hot tracks & what makes people jump…

Chairman Mao Quote of the Day

"There is an ancient Chinese fable called "The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains". It tells of an old man who lived in northern China long, long ago and was known as the Foolish Old Man of North Mountain. His house faced south and beyond his doorway stood the two great peaks, Taihang and Wangwu, obstructing the way. With great determination, he led his sons in digging up these mountains hoe in hand. Another greybeard, known as the Wise Old Man, saw them and said derisively, "How silly of you to do this! It is quite impossible for you few to dig up these two huge mountains." The Foolish Old Man replied, "When I die, my sons will carry on; when they die, there will be my grandsons, and t'nen their sons and grandsons, and so on to infinity. High as they are, the mountains cannot grow any higher and with every bit we dig, they will be that much lower. Why can't we clear them away?" Having refuted the Wise Old Man's wrong view, he went on digging every day, unshaken in his conviction. God was moved by this, and he sent down two angels, who carried the mountains away on their backs. Today, two big mountains lie like a dead weight on the Chinese people. One is imperialism, the other is feudalism. The Chinese Communist Party has long made up its mind to dig them up. We must persevere and work unceasingly, and we, too, will touch God's heart. Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people. If they stand up and dig together with us, why can't these two mountains be cleared away?"

Chairman Mao, 1945

Le Royal Meridien, Shanghai

The Hotel we’re staying at is a trip. Le Royal Meridien is a Starwood hotel, a classy, 65 story tower located in central Shanghai, about a fifteen minute walk from the Huang riverfront. We were initially going to stay at a boutique hotel along the Bund, which is the famous colonial district that was a concession from the Chinese to the French government following the Opium Wars in the 1840's. Although I’d like to see as much of Shanghai as I can, it looks like I’ll be stuck in a conference room for 8-10 hours every day this week, so I’m not going to get a chance to stray far from this hotel. Lucky for me, this hotel is a universe unto itself, with multiple restaurants and cafes, a bar on the 65th & 66th floors, a huge shopping mall at its base, and we’re right in the middle of a crazy milieu of shops and malls set around the People’s Square. We’re right in the middle of one of the most westernized areas in all of China…. Hopefully over the course of the week I’ll get a better sense of context and where we are. I’m blessed to take part in these meetings, they’re an opportunity to rub shoulders with some of the most creative people I’ve ever met, and to pick the brains of globe-trotting ad men, who Naomi Klein calls “the philosopher kings of capitalist culture.” I’m not gung ho about the unfettered consumerism that drives the world’s economy, but I’m in no position to pass judgments on systems I barely understand. All I’m here to do is write, observe, document, and process… and if the Man happens to send me 12000 miles away to do that in a place I’ve always wanted to visit, that’s not a bad gig at all…. yes…the ad world has definitely been good to me…

Ventured forth outside the hotel to go for a walk and get my bearings straight. Sleep deprived and surrounded by hordes of people, I got disoriented pretty quick. Rushdie has a great passage in “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” (one of my favorite novels EVER), about what it really means to be “disoriented.” Etymologically, “disoriented” means you’ve “lost the East.” You can’t tell which way the sun rises or sets… I lose the East a lot, both literally and metaphorically, it seems to be a recurring theme for Asian transplants working and living in the West. We cease to think about where we come from, or temporarily overwrite our roots, in an effort to function properly in an individualistic state of mind that’s a far cry from the pervasive Asian mentality that’s more group and community oriented. Anyhow, after wandering through hordes of people for 20 minutes looking for an electronics store, I stumbled into a shopping center in the hopes I’d find a battery charger for my camera…

Didn’t find what I was looking for, but wandered around this mall for awhile to people watch and take stock of the scene. How exactly is China a communist country? Two blocks away from the hotel there’s a neon, 3-dimensional Coke Bottle that’s about 7 stories high, flashing its obscenely bright “Classic Coke” logo out into the night in waves of light like some kind of interstellar beacon. Everywhere there’s luxury outlets & designer brands, and given that so much of the world’s good are produced here, I’m having a hard time seeing how this economy is controlled. Where does the socialism fit in? After the death of Mao, Deng Xio Ping loosened the controls of the economy, but what I’m seeing here is a veritable orgy of consumer culture, capitalism gone awry... It’s surreal, and not at all like the China my friends described in the 90’s… I walked into a three story outlet for Nike Shanghai, and stood around looking at the shoes, contemplating my ideas about right and wrong and responsible business practices. I’ve been a supporter of the anti-sweatshop movement for years, and am a strong supporter of unionized labor, fair trade practices, and for holding corporations to account for poor human rights records. I haven’t bought anything Nike since high school, because my pervasive liberal guilt dictates that my personal sense of style needs to transcend the exploitation that so many brands traffic in. Yet standing in Nike Shanghai, surrounded by glossy products and sculpted mannequins, my head started swimming. By not buying these products, who am I benefiting? The people who produced these goods are not going to benefit from me not spending my money out of some kind of self-righteous stand over a market principle. Responsible consumerism is one thing…but there’s a lot of posturing involved when you’re trying to live right and buy intelligently in Babylon… anyhow, I sat staring at a pair of slick Nike cross trainers for about ten minutes, turning these thoughts over in my head, considering the contradictions. If an uber-conscious yogi & spiritual activist like Sean Corn is endorsed by Nike, how bad can it be? If I buy these shoes, what does my aesthetic say to the world? Eventually I walked out, more confused than ever…. How do I use my wallet consciously out here?...This looks to be an ongoing question…

After wandering through a couple of huge, multistory malls, I went looking for some food. Found a hole-in-wall restaurant on the side of the road selling dumplings for 4 yuan, so I bought a couple through a strained interaction with the hostess. I forgot to grab chopsticks, though, so I ate with my fingers, holding onto the dumplings with greasy hands while walking. It was sloppy, absolutely delicious, and I realized quickly that I might be engaged in barbaric stupid-foreigner-behavior, so I slunk off into the shadows of People’s Square to try and eat in private. Made the mistake of putting a whole dumpling into my mouth, which was insanely hot when I bit into it. I hadn’t realized these were soup dumplings, apparently a local specialty. I swallowed that dumpling, burned the hell out of my mouth, and my eyes started watering as I rounded a corner. I think I scared the bejesus out of a couple making out in the shadows, who looked up just as I came into view, with bulging cheeks, tears in my eyes, and soup running down my chin in little rivulets… I doubt they’d ever sPublish Posteen a dreadlocked desi quite so discombobulated as I was at that moment… It’s bad form to be a tourist walking through a city square with food all over you, so I saved the rest of the dumplings until I made it back to the hotel. They were delicious…fried on the bottom, sesame seeds littered on top, hot soup inside, and a hunk of tasty chicken waiting within… mmmmmmmmm…..

The May 4th Movement... (not just a digable planets song...)

historical food for thought from the world wide web:

"The so-called "May 4th Movement" or "new culture" movement began in China around 1916, following the failure of the 1911 Revolution to establish a republican government, and continued through the 1920s. Its importance equals if not surpasses the more commonly known political revolutions of the century. The movement articulated the contempt for traditional Chinese culture felt by many Chinese intellectuals. These intellectuals blamed traditional culture for the dramatic and rapid fall of China into a subordinate international position, and maintained that China's cultural values prevented China from matching the industrial and military development of Japan and the West. The May 4th Movement takes its name from the massive popular protest that took place in China in May 1919, following the announcement of the terms of the Versailles Treaty that concluded WWI. According to the treaty, Germany's territorial rights in China were not returned to the Chinese, as had been expected, but were instead turned over to the Japanese. The outpouring of popular outrage coalesced in a new nationalism with repeated cries for a "new culture" that would reinstate China to its former international position. The way out of China's problems, many believed, was to adopt Western notions of equality and democracy and to abandon the Confucian approach which stressed hierarchy in relationships and obedience. Science and democracy became the code words of the day. "

...post-looptopia, 14 hours flying west...

…long strange flight after a surreal night spent surfing Looptopia and the attention-getting influences of my aesthetically affluent friends, sleepless yogis & fire-spinning fashionistas, beltin’ divas rocking hot mics & House wax, in an imperial room filled with balloon blowing tricksters, dial tweaking projectionists, & spinster-mystics weaving sacred threads through elaborate silkscreens. After a night spent glorying in the community of artists I’m blessed to run with, I headed home, packed in a hurry, and transited to the bleary-eyed limbo that is O’Hare airport. Caught flight AA289 business class to Shanghai, and spent the next 14 hours languishing in the middle seat of the plane’s middle aisle, sandwiched between two beefy midwestern guys on a trip to see their manufacturer, a supplier of steel tools. Good people. Unappetizing airplane food, and lots of small courses at oddly timed intervals. Long strange trip to an unknown nation, a red entity riddled with communist capitulations to capitalist cash flows… a week of contradictions to contemplate…
for some looptopia footage featuring my fire arts troupe Blaze, check out:
http://www.windycitizen.com/node/1250


my colleague Eli at work, who’s been to Shanghai and is quite the globe trotter, handed me a copy of the latest National Geographic edition, which is an issue devoted entirely to China, and has some great photography and articles. I spent the last hour or so before landing in Shanghai flipping through it… pick up a copy if you see it on a newsstand, it’s a great 360 look at a country most of us don’t know much about…

Watched a few flicks on the plane. Finally saw “The Kite Runner”, a glorious film based on the award-winning novel by Khaled Hosseini, documenting one Afghani family’s story over the period of 1970-1996, a look at one bloodlines’ experience of the fall of Afghanistan to the Russians & the Taliban. It paints the most vivid picture of Kabul I’ve ever come across. The film featured gorgeous cinematography, endearing characters, and was well paced and directed from what looks to have been a very effective treatment of the novel. I highly recommend it. Unlike the rest of Chicago’s well-read desi literati, I haven’t read the original book. Perhaps I’ll get to it in time, but for peeps like me who are way the hell behind on their reading lists, the movie’s worth the price of admission…

Also watched “O Brother Where Art Thou” the Coen brother's quirky take on Homer’s “The Odyssey,” set in depression-era Mississippi, starring a motley crew of fabulous actors and featuring the best old-timey music most folks have never heard. Tommy Johnson, in the movie, is played by a leading light of the Baton Rouge blues scene, a man by the name of Chris Thomas King, who I saw at BluesFest in Chicago in 2000. Back then, before this movie came out, he was a rather obscure son of a local Louisiana legend, Tabby Thomas, and he threw down a blistering set that left a really powerful impression on me. He’s one of the guys at the forefront of what he calls “21st Century Blues,” with metal and hip hop influences and a whole strange cocktail of nutty sounds thrown into the mix for good measure. His music is well worth checking out, and he even put out an album called “the Legend of Tommy Johnson,” very reminiscent of Robert Johnson’s stripped down sound, but better produced... Anyhow, if you haven’t seen “O Brother Where Art Thou,” it’s well worth it, and rewards multiple viewings… Good music, a great premise, wonderful acting, and a hilarious script.


Also watched about 6 episodes of The Office. Gottta love an airline that have an entire season of the Office available on your screen… J The flight went by fast, although I didn’t get nearly enough sleep. Jet lag is in order, due to my sporadic sleep habits of late… 14 hours of airtime does a number on your head…