Posts by Chris Waugh
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Hard News: Friday Music: Partners in Vacancy, in reply to BenWilson,
I think you tried to quote something different for your first point. I found the article made no attempt to generalise beyond the borders of the USA – and a fairly strict definition of those borders that includes DC but excludes any of the territories. I’ll leave it up to somebody more familiar with the USA to comment on whether its generalisation extends to the entirety of US society or is largely limited to a middle-class to affluent, mainstream, largely white portion of the USA.
I am personally more likely to look to China for future ideas.
Me too, but I guess that’s fairly obvious. I already linked to Cui Jian, who’s a pretty interesting musician, starting off as a trumpeter in the Beijing Philharmonic like his dad (you can here some of his trumpet playing on this song – and watching that and reading the lyrics (his voice is rough to the point of often incomprehensible to my ears), it’s no bloody surprise he’s had so many run-ins with the authorities), then getting turned on to rock through the cassettes that started flowing in to China with reform and opening up, he’s continued to experiment musically over the decades. There’s plenty more interesting stuff going on in Chinese music, I’ve heard some cool modern, experimental Kazakh and Mongolian folk (ETA: can't remember band names off the top of my head, sorry), for example, and heavy metal with a touch of ancient China （春秋/Chūnqiù《山海间》(Shān Hǎi Jiān), though I should point out their music generally tends to be a lot louder). And I dislike hearing so many Chinese complain about how shite Chinese film is, because there’s lots of good Mainland cinema being produced. Of course, a fair bit of it runs foul of the authorities, but still, it’s there. Literature, well, everybody who knows seems to think contemporary Chinese literature (i.e. stuff being written now) is crap and it was the moderns of the late Qing and Republic years (Lu Xun, Lao She, Eileen Chang (whose chosen English name sounds very much like her Chinese name), Qian Zhongshu) who wrote the best of the baihua literature, many point to money being the root of this particular evil, others suggest the censorship I’ve already alluded to, but then again, Mo Yan (or at the very least, Howard Goldblatt) is good enough for a Nobel (of the three Nobel literature laureates born in China, he’s the only PRC citizen). Some dislike his style, but I quite enjoy what I’ve read of him. And I don’t know what Twitter looks like now, I just don’t miss it enough to bother jumping the GFW, but when I signed up for Weibo it was offering a vastly superior (bar the censorship) service.
Anyway, enough for now. I’ll just leave with a link to this site I’ve linked to before for those who may be interested.
Oh, nearly forgot:
but with shoes for men, it’s like some last bastion of one’s connection to being a creature of the great outdoors.
My slip-ons comment wasn’t meant to be taken seriously, but still, interesting point. That’s not a factor that’s important in urban China, but ease of getting shoes on and off in a society that requires you to swap shoes for slippers or jandals when you enter somebody’s home is. In rural China it’s the opposite, though. Not some “outdoorsman” thing, more the practicalities of old-fashioned peasant-style agriculture, and so shoes stay on when you enter a village home.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Partners in Vacancy, in reply to BenWilson,
And I use Win7 at home, but I'm stuck with XP at work. And if I want to show my students anything online, I either use the IE5 installed on the classroom computer or install a modern browser before class starts. The differences are astounding.
Fair point on the SUVs, but I still disagree on the stasis in car design.
I think you'll find a lot more shoelace-free friends up here. Slip ons are quite popular in China.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Partners in Vacancy, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Faye Wong
The real Faye Wong-Wong Kar Wai connection is also a cover, but comes from Chungking Express, 《梦中人》, otherwise known as Dreams by the Cranberries. Doesn't work quite as well for me as Sandy Lam's Take My Breath Away, but then again, Chungking Express, much as I love it, isn't quite as cool a film as As Tears Go By.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Simon Grigg,
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Hard News: Friday Music: Partners in Vacancy, in reply to Chris Waugh,
and Faye Wong’s Take My Breath Away from Wong Kar Wai’s As Tears Go By
Dammit, far more likely to have been Sandy Lam than Faye Wong. Still Cantopop at its best, though.
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Capture: Spring Breaks, in reply to ChrisW,
I see some more resemblances from April.
And one in pink.
And this must've been late in the afternoon.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Partners in Vacancy, in reply to Russell Brown,
Just the machine stuff.
And there, I think, is your problem. The machine stuff is to music what McDonald's is to food.
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Sam Crane applies Sunzi to Syria. Now I should think about lunch...
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And just because somebody somewhere mentioned nostalgia, Cui Jian/崔健 《一无所有》__yìwúsuǒyǒu/Nothing to my Name__ – Mandopop in its youth – and Faye Wong’s Take My Breath Away from Wong Kar Wai’s As Tears Go By – Cantopop at its best, and in my opinion vastly superior to that American version from the film with fancy aeroplanes.
ETA: How many films has Andy Lau survived? I can only think of one, God of Gamblers, in every other film I can think of he's killed.
ETA again (my memory seems to have gone the way of my summer holiday): Hope those two vids are not geoblocked, and sorry for the long ads if you can watch them.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Partners in Vacancy, in reply to Kumara Republic,
This Vanity Fair article points to technological advances – particularly the Internet – as a major reason for such cultural stasis.
And I'm calling bollocks on it.
Well, I think he has half a point here:
So as the Web and artificially intelligent smartphones and the rise of China and 9/11 and the winners-take-all American economy and the Great Recession disrupt and transform our lives and hopes and dreams, we are clinging as never before to the familiar in matters of style and culture.
And here in China there are certain trends like soap operas set in the Qing-dynasty or early-80s and people expressing nostalgia for the good old days when life was simple and stable - and sometimes I want to say, "Yeah, because suddenly finding yourself the subject of a struggle session when you wound up on the wrong side of the fickle political winds or your neighbour wanted to get vengeance for some perceived slight 20 years ago is so much less chaotic than rapid economic growth," but, y'know, sometimes it's better to bite your tongue. Anyway, it does seem to be a reaction to the rapid economic and technological changes of the last 20 years, and is quite understandable. A bit of nostalgia gives you something solid to hang on to.
But:
One reason automobile styling has changed so little these last two decades is because the industry has been struggling to survive, which made the perpetual big annual styling changes of the Golden Age a reducible business expense.
Yeah, it couldn't possibly be that like civil aviation, the car industry is getting so closed to the aerodynamic ideal that massive style changes are impractical and, well, stupid.
If blue jeans became unfashionable tomorrow, Old Navy would be in trouble.
Then Old Navy shouldn't be in business. Who wants to bet they manufacture nothing themselves, that's all done off shore? And how could their designers not come up with something to meet the new fashions then have the contractors probably here in China or perhaps somewhere even more third world make them? And how hard would it really be to change colours, materials, and patterns?
And I think everything he complains about as an example of stagnation is in fact the exact opposite. For example:
anyone anywhere with any arcane cultural taste can now indulge it easily and fully online, clicking themselves deep into whatever curious little niche (punk bossa nova, Nigerian noir cinema, pre-war Hummel figurines) they wish.
How is that not innovation?
And raising the spectres of Empires Past.... The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Sartre, Camus all appeared as their empires were collapsing. Not just reaching the top of the hill and beginning to walk down the other side as the USA seems to be doing now, but actually falling apart (where and when was Camus born, FFS? Oh, Jean Reno and Marguerite Duras fit in there, too). As I believe somebody pointed out in the Syria thread, Britain and France carved up the carcass of the Ottoman Empire (gee, thanks, guys...), but Turkey still produces some pretty cool films. And Orhan Pamuk.
Conclusion: Just more of the adolescent navel-gazing wank that seems to be published far too readily in the US.
