a little break.

Sorry for the lack of updates. My grandmother passed away late last night and I’ve had family and friends come to town. I will be flying to Shanghai for the next few days and then back to Canada for another week. When I’m back in the Middle Kingdom, the entries will continue! For now, there’s a great article in the New York Times about the fledgling experimental music scene here in Beijing — after the recent debates in the comments section regarding good and bad international press, I think this article is a perfect example of the “good kind”, the kind that this country needs.

Doug Kanter for The New York Times
BEIJING — Down a short alley in the sprawling, tourist-mobbed 798 art district here — a complex of 1950s-era military factories converted into galleries and studios — is a tiny shop that serves as one of the centers of China’s small but thriving experimental music scene.

The store, Sugar Jar, is barely big enough to accommodate a half-dozen customers, and one wall displays all the essentials of the genre, from discs of abstract electronica and brutal noise-rock to anthologies with bold titles like “China: The Sonic Avant-Garde.” Playing samples from his stock, the proprietor, a lanky, soft-spoken man named Lao Yang, noted proudly that his store is one of the only spots in all of Beijing to buy much of this music.

Like Sugar Jar, avant-garde music occupies a minuscule niche in Chinese society, overshadowed by the larger and vastly more lucrative world of contemporary visual art. Only a few dozen musicians around the country make up this circle, but their work has begun to attract international attention, and over the last several years a steady stream of Western musicians, including Brian Eno and the New York guitarist Elliott Sharp, have visited and given their blessing…. continue reading.

rascist “drug bust” in sanlitun.

The international media is just starting to pick this story up, but here in Beijing, local blogs and web forums are blazing with reports of a racially motivated drug bust in Sanlitun on Friday night. About 20-30 men of African or Caribbean descent suspected of selling drugs were detained and beaten in the popular bar street area by Chinese parlimentary police, and there are various reports currently floating around the web by witnesses stating that the troops “targeted anyone on the street with black skin”.

A search of various online blogs finds no concrete photographic or video evidence of the bust, but a user on the popular Beijing web forum The Beijinger who was on site during the arrests posted on the thread relating to the incident, stating “It was a complete blanket arrest, the guys who knew they were not guilty of anything didn’t run away just stood around watching what was going on/chatting/having a drink and then bam, they get arrested.” Another user posted “A friend of mine was at Bar Blue when they went in on Friday. She was there on a date with a guy from Cameroon who was amongst the folks that were detained. She called from there all shook up because they came in with dogs and just dragged 5 people or so at random…. she’s still freaked out about the whole thing!”

While it is a common known fact that the Sanlitun area is a popular place of business for drug dealers of African descent, the arrests of Friday night seem to have been at random; many of the men picked up were tourists, or students and a few of the men were later released without charge. From the news source quoted on the forum thread: “Some of the men were later released without charge. The Grenadian ambassador’s son was sent to hospital with a concussion. “Obviously I’m very angry,” the ambassador said. “My son was arrested and beaten for no reason whatsoever. I will be taking this up with the authorities and looking into the matter.” A police officer at Sanlitun station said that the incident was part of an anti-drug operation.”

According to the story currently posted at Reuters Africa, The Ministry of Public Security and the Beijing police both declined immediate comment.

i know you know the festival.

This Saturday September 15th from 11am-10pm, come down to Gulou’s Nanluoguxiang Hutong (See map) and get jostled in the crowd at their 1st annual International Street Festival. Set in one of my favorite neighbourhoods in town, there will be local bands, live food demonstrations, what I assume will be predictably awful “live graffiti”, kiddie games (in the good way), dj sets, international food stands, cheap duds and my favorite; a “100 Metre Dash” fashion show put on by the guys at Plastered. The show, “inspired by the fact that there is only one year to go until the Olympics”, will feature new t-shirt designs as models “dash” down the runway

Come around 6:30 and see a fan dancing team and fire dancers prance their way around the street, or come bright and early and immerse yourself in Beijing’s most awesome street. Seriously, this is going to be fun!!

(The after-party will be at SALUD, on the same street. I don’t think it’ll be fun, but I’m sure the drinks will be good?)

life (in beijing) is a highway.

 

With nearly three million cars, trucks, vans and buses cluttering Beijing’s ever frustrating road system, it’s hardly big news that traffic is a problem. Driving anywhere around Chaoyang’s bustling business district during regular working hours (and afterwards) is enough to turn even the sanest person homicidal, and regularly getting stuck on the 2nd, 3rd or 4th ring road during rush hour can make even the most ardent China lover want to book the next ticket home.

The recent four day traffic experiment, which was as much to do with pollution controls as it did traffic solutions, saw nearly half of the vehicles in Beijing taken off the roads, has been applauded as a major success in most of the local news reports, but that’s only to be expected in the wildly falsified, nationalistic climate of Chinese journalism. Danwei, one of my favorite websites for news in China, has an interesting article on what Chinese bloggers are really saying about the experiment.

What confuses me most about the countless articles written about Beijing’s traffic problems is that none of them seem to address the underlying issue of Beijing’s drivers. While it’s true that there are just too many damn cars, the other fact remains that, to put it simply, most of the people on the road simply shouldn’t have licenses.

After over a year of living in Beijing and after 11 months of frantic home to work daily commutes (of which take up at least two hours of my day), the most obvious flaw seems clear. The majority of people on the roads don’t follow the rules, and aggression and road rage are standards to be maintained. There is no courtesy or common sense, and the car horn is liberally used. During my drive to work this morning down the 4th ring road, I counted over 120 cars who weaved in and out of traffic without bothering to turn on their signal lights. While I won’t ask the obvious question of why Beijing drivers feel the need to change lanes every few seconds, I found that over half of the aforementioned drivers didn’t seem to think it was necessary to even check if there was room to change lanes, instead choosing to hurtle themselves over the white dotted line and hoping for the best. The minor chaos that this simple, inconsiderate act alone created lengthened the trip time and left me cursing and holding my breath, all the way thanking the powers that be that I hadn’t died along the way.

Why is there so much disregard for simple traffic laws? Why can’t rules be enforced? I understand that there are alot of cars on the road, but how does the city expect anything to change when the very basics of driving safely are ignored? At the risk of sounding imperialistic, solving the traffic problems in Beijing have as much to do with the culture as it does with the logistics – teaching people to follow the rules, to watch out for their fellow drivers, to think rationally and to cherish safety will do as much for the roads as the elimination of cars.

Next week at SundayLovers… “Why the fuck is “Stand right, walk left” such a difficult concept” and “How to enter and exit an elevator/subway train without pissing off the whole world.” Until then, ciao for now!

heavy hearts, until we meet again.

One of our best friends is leaving China today to enter the PhD program in International Law at the University of Geneva. He’s already got a million MBAs and an LLM and all sorts of other academic blowjobs, so we think this will set him up nicely for when he becomes President of the World.

We bought him a bottle of Glenmorangie and went out to a fantastic Thai restauraunt last night, followed up by a poor performance at Bar Blu’s weekly Pub Quiz, hosted by the hairiest man I know and Time Out Nightlife Editor Ross Goulding. This week was a special Simpsons themed quiz, and our team, Fuck Shelbyville, came in a very disappointing fifth. I blame the poor atmosphere and shitty venue for our loss. I overheard someone on our team who said “I’ve been wanting to come to Bar Blu for a long time!” and it almost made me fall over in my chair.

Goodbye Mitch, and see you soon!

the return to beijing, beginnings, et all.

Stills from Blake’s “Winchester” series.

Currently, I have 12 Scrabble games in play on Facebook, and I don’t think I’m winning any of them. I’ve been playing online Scrabble like a fiend and it’s never going to get old. After a 26 hour journey and on our return to Beijing last week, we spent the next four days drinking into oblivion and wasting our days on a backwards theme. Sleeping in the mornings, dancing in the nights, karaoke at 5am, Korean bar-bques at nine. It’s such a surreal feeling being back in this country and after nearly a month of watching the cars whiz by in England, it is now terribly disconcerting to have to watch incompetent Chinese drivers navigating their way down the chaotic ring roads of Beijing, and on the wrong side of the road, no less!

I’ve been following the Theresa Duncan/Jeremy Blake story quite closely, reading what I can on the internet about all the various conspiracies and assumptions. There’s a touching eulogy written by writer Glenn O’Brien at Duncan’s blog, The Wit & The Staircase, there’s countless articles, there’s even a blogger out there claiming that their deaths are in fact the final stage of an alternate reality game. I wonder what it is about these kinds of stories that captivate us so? I suppose it’s the fact that they seemed so in love, so promising. It’s the hook, line and sinker for most of us and the harshest cynics relish the fact that they’ll never hit their peak, the secret romantics sigh and shake their heads.

I’m still testing the waters with this new WordPress account, so bear with me while I find my feet. If you’re up for a laugh, go to the Tag Team Records site and read up on their excess bloggage. Kyle’s tour diary is especially hilarious, and Time Out Beijing’s music editor and general muckabout Ian Sherman writes an epic on this summer’s CH+Indie music festival.