A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image. - Joan Didion
*** On my last morning at Ninja HQ Montana cooked up blueberry pancakes, I made Cameronian tea, and John brought out his guitar so I could hear Johntana's cover of the song "Waikiki". I hate leaving this town and these people, my town and my people.
***This machine at Broadway & John has offered "mystery" sodas (at right) at below-market prices for more than a decade. Our most recent visit yielded a slightly spooky cherry coke.
If any of you are relying on this sadly neglected blog in order to meet all of your media needs, you may be forgiven for being unaware that the 29th Modern Olympic Games are currently underway here in Beijing. One of world history's most impressive build-ups has finally broken and all the dozens of Olympics clocks scattered around Beijing that have been counting down for the past several years are now stuck at 0000 days 00 hours and 00 minutes (you can see one above near the Olympic green and the recently completed "Olympic flame" skyscraper). Some of them are being replaced by countdown clocks for next month's Paralympic games, starring the saddest mascot ever:
I haven't been able to take part in as many of the Olympic good times as some people (on account of being embarrassingly busy), but I've been very lucky to attend a few events. On Friday I joined Mark and a bunch of old classmates to watch the opening ceremony on the big screen at one of the designated viewing areas in Ditan Park. An impressive statement. I'll say nothing more, except for qi lai! qi lai!
The next afternoon Mark and I headed to the Olympic Green for his favorite sport, handball. Here are some pictures:
I trusted Mark's recommendation and was pleased to find that Handball is indeed a very entertaining sport. The first match we watched was between Romania and Kazakhstan and was dominated by the Romanians, despite cries of support which may have gone unnoticed by Kazakh athletes unable to recognize their names in Mark's screams of "PIKALUNA! C'MON" and "GO NEAGU!" Our section, at the very least, was much entertained, not to mention enriched by having perhaps the single attendee who understood the rules of the sport. After the first game we snuck into better seats, but I kind of missed our rowdy British neighbors who managed to teach several hundred Chinese how to do "the wave".
The second match up was between South Korea and Russia. Below you can see the Korean coach advising his team on strategy during a time-out. He used a little board with magnetic pieces that proved very effective in bringing his team from an 8 point deficit to a 29-29 tie with Russia. The Russian coach spent the entire game turning beet red at every goal made against his team, berating all of his players, and constantly taking them in and out of play.
During this game I learned that those inflatable tubes that people wave at games make a horrible tinny noise when banged together and also that the Olympics is the very best place in the world for both making outlandish jokes about geopolitics and history and for extrapolating vast cultural generalizations from the strategies and attitudes of national sporting teams.
And then there were the Fuwa, whose halftime show with the la la dui (cheerleaders) was totally worth the price of admission.
Here they are waiting to enter the arena before the end of the 1st half.
In action: Yeah, its pretty clear that I play favorites, but you should all know by now that I can never resist a panda. Besides, the human inside of the Jingjing costume was hyperactive and really fun to watch. He seemed to take pleasure in mocking the cheerleaders and in messing with the short fuwa who didn't have much use of their legs or arms (as below). He ruled.
Here's a video (jingjing is freaking out to the right for the first few seconds and on the left for the last few seconds -- also notice the tiny blue beibei flapping his flippers in apparent delirium):
Fuwa & cheerleaders Olympic halftime show from Le Kougre on Vimeo. There was no fuwa halftime show at the swimming event I attended on Sunday, but it was my first opportunity to get an up close look at two of Beijing's most famous pieces of Olympic architecture, the National Stadium (or bird's nest), with its newly lit Olympic flame:
and the National Aquatics Center (or water cube):
where I met a very special friend:
who totally tried to cop a feel (jk China! you know I LOVE the fuwa!)
The water cube is really quite a bit better looking than it appears in the Beijing haze, and the interior is all cool and spacey.
Although we couldn't see it from our seats, I'm betting the athletes were loving the ceiling of the main competition hall.
What we could see from our seats was limited. I spent a lot of time gazing dumbly at the national flags hung around the perimeter and wondering how I missed flag week in elementary school.
We could see the pool fine but there wasn't really much to see aside from blurs in the water. It was hard to keep track of the numbers of the lanes and the athletes that were swimming in them.
I spent some lot of time watching the big screens which had lots of close-ups and many of those amazing underwater shots you see on TV. What being there had over watching at home was all the excitement of seeing world records get broken (twice!), cheering for Michael Phelps, and watching all the little pockets of national supporters spring into action. Maybe your house is different from mine, but I rarely have a cluster of South Africans to my right, Canadians in front, and Japanese across the way all with flags a flurry.
By the time the races were all over it was dark and the rain had started up again in force. People wearing free plastic bag raincoats that glowed purplish from the lighting inside the cube waited outside for the shuttle bus to take them to the subway.
Some kids played in the fountains in front of the glowing red bird's nest.
I walked to the bus stop in my poncho thinking about all that has been said, done, built, and promised in the name of the Beijing Olympics and about what a vast disconnect exists between that and the reality of the games, with all the empty seats, confusing rules, excitement and hope, and pleasant conversations with international neighbors.
Then I went home and ate Totoro.
He was tasty, though the eyes were a little tough.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. Last Sunday, strict new clean air regulations went into effect in the capital, requiring that all construction within the city temporarily cease and that heavily polluting factories on the outskirts of the city temporarily close their doors. Approximately half of the city's private cars have also been taken off the roads through a system which allows odd and even numbered license plate holders to drive on alternating days.
Unfortunately traffic still isn't great and the air, while certainly better, is still not so very good. I took this picture from my bedroom window one morning last week. This smoky grayness with blunted sun is how it looks like this most of the time, making the rare blue sky days almost unsettling. I'd already been living in this new place about a week and a half when I realized for the first time that my bedroom faced east. I had woken with an uncomfortable start and immediately felt disoriented and overheated. Had I overslept? Something seemed wrong. What had in fact happened is that one of the government sponsored rainstorms had rinsed all the pollution away the night before and in the morning the sun was able to shine directly into my room and sear my tightly closed eyelids. Naughty sun.
I'm still rooting for the clean air regulations to have their desired effects and they might yet. Beijing has undergone massive transformations over the last 11 months (and certainly since well before I arrived) and while the changes approach exhausting they are undoubtedly impressive. More than two weeks before the opening ceremony of the Olympics, blue-shirted volunteers appeared in every subway station, on every large street corner, and in all sorts of places in between. Security has also been amped up to the highest degree. I discovered this on Tuesday when I found that I couldn't go to the post office on the BLCU campus because all universities are now sealed off and open only to ID-carrying students and employees. This is most likely happening in lots of other places but I don't get out much so I haven't noticed. So much for giving Mark a tour of my school.
Speaking of which, United States municipal and federal regulations explicitly state that Mark Siano and I are not to reside in the same city for a duration of any more than a week. I think most of us know what kind of calamities violations inevitably result in. But apparently China doesn't know. Mark got himself a plane ticket and will be arriving from the south on Monday afternoon. Beijing had best get ready to be rocked, softly.
Last weekend we took a little in-city school field trip. The destination was 798, the former site of a massive munitions plant which is now the city's most famous art district. One of my favorite memories of Taipei is of a day when Fiona and I visited a modern art museum and tried, with our mutually limited language skills, to talk about art and ideas that aimed to transcend language. I hoped to have a similarly enriching experience this time around and was excited for the opportunity for some off-duty time with some of my favorite teachers.
Zhao laoshi at the Ullens Center:
Song laoshi at the 798 Photo Gallery:
798 has been growing at breakneck speed in pace with the Chinese art market -- even I noticed big changes since the first time I visited last November. Rents have gone up, cafes have gone upscale and there are undoubtedly grounds for all the criticisms I've heard of the place. Still, I think its pretty great. I've always had a twisted affection for the factory aesthetic (I blame Mister Rodgers) and consider the juxtaposition of smokestacks and airplane hangars with giant red dinosaur sculptures and other fruity modern art to be one of the great weird surprises of reform-era Beijing. It also happened to be an awfully nice day.
The re-purposing of the former production and storage facilities at 798 makes for some great spaces to show art. Most galleries are large and bright, with concrete floors, brick walls, and old pipes and exposed building components. The team of East German designers and engineers behind the plant built some of China's only true Bauhaus-style architecture, making its current incarnation all the more appropriate, and also making the grumblers all the more irritable about the Disney-fication of the place, seen in such things as cafe doors filled with coffee beans,
(but check out the sweet rooftop terrace!)
and kooky, cutesy bathroom signs:
Geez people, don't you know art is SERIOUS?
I think these people understood.
We were all waiting in rapt silence for the sudden lurching movement of a large trash bin, which rolled across the space at intervals to crash into the structure at left.
Inside the structure, lifelike renderings of old men were lurching and jerking and crashing into each other's wheelchairs.
The piece, by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, was part of an installation at Galleria Continua called Unmoved. It made me giggle. It also made me think back to the moment many years ago when I decided that I would not be intimidated or bamboozled by contemporary art. I was visiting Carly in Portland and we went to the museum one day and encountered a piece which involved animal costumes, a low stage, and some cheesy club music. The viewer was instructed to don the animal costumes and then ascend to the stage to dance. Done and done. I remember the artist's statement and could appreciate its reason, but I remember the experience itself far more intensely. I liked that it was playful and accessible and weird and that it stimulated thought and conversation. This piece with the trash bin and the old men in wheelchairs did the same, even if I found it extremely difficult to try to express what I thought it said in Chinese.
I saw several fine pieces on our field trip, bought some good books, and had ample opportunities to use my electronic dictionary to look up things like "conceptual" and "shock value". Much of the best work was at 798's only museum, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. There I saw Wang Luyuan's "W Bike", a bicycle that looks like any other except for the fact that it can only ride backwards, Lin Yilin's "Our Future", a large wall being breached by a ferocious dragon, Feng Mengbo's "Game Over: Long March", a depiction of the CCP's glorious Long March across China as a video game, and Lu Hao's "Peng Peng Cars" (bumper cars), in which small remote controlled cars carried either shiny new skyscrapers or small structures representing historic Beijing.
So I suppose that the moral of the story is that if you want your art to be successful in the Chinese market it should involve crashing, breaking, bumping, or other dangerous circumstances. Also, dinosaurs are very hot.
Mexican food, Radiohead, mountains, prosthetic limbs, wedding, party, Puget Sound, party, romance, Mexican food, chickenbag, rain kebabs, thrift shopping, ferries, tea! rain, rain, sun, rain, love, Mexican food.
***
On my last morning at Ninja HQ Montana cooked up blueberry pancakes, I made Cameronian tea, and John brought out his guitar so I could hear Johntana's cover of the song "Waikiki". I hate leaving this town and these people, my town and my people.
