Sudden stopping

Following on from that last post, the other common behaviour of the Chinese that is especially irritating on the subway is suddenly stopping dead in your tracks, for no very good reason, in the midst of a dense crowd of people.

I say 'no good reason'. There's a reason of some kind for everything, and after all these years of 'China-watching', I have divined some of the most common ones.

"I must check my mobile phone for messages the instant I get off the train. Hmmm, I can't possibly do that without STOPPING dead in my tracks."

"Woo-hoo, I have received a text message. I'll STOP dead in my tracks to read it."

"Stairs! I always find these unfamiliar, confusing, and dangerous. I'd better STOP dead in my tracks for a moment or two while I try to remember how to ascend them. Now, do I start with the left foot or the right?"

"Oh, the top of the stairs! This is even worse. I can never get used to walking on the flat again. I'd better STOP dead in my tracks for a moment or two while I gather my thoughts."

"Oh, I'm directly in the middle of the train doors this time, and I'm the first person to get off, and there's a whole bunch of people behind me waiting to do the same. This would be a great time to STOP dead in my tracks."

"Oooh, there's a fast-moving foreigner just behind me. Wouldn't it be funny to STOP dead in my tracks now?"

Awareness of space

Or the lack of it.

Yesterday, while purchasing a subway ticket, I encountered the common - but slightly more subtly irritating - corollary of the infamous Chinese tendency to ignore queues and barge in at the front; when they do queue, they often get ridiculously close to you.

As I turned to leave the ticket-window, I bowled over a young woman who had been standing all of about 3 INCHES behind me. Now, if you have grown up without any concept of personal space whatsoever (as seems to be the case in this country) and you think it is OK to get that close to someone, at least commonsense would dictate that you might step backwards and/or sideways a little when you see that person is ready to move away, wouldn't you think? No. Probably she was so close to me that she couldn't see that anyway. Maybe she just couldn't see.

I was right up close to the ticket window myself (you have to do that, to discourage the queue-jumpers), so she wasn't really leaving me any choice but to edge out sideways before turning round. That is, if I'd known she was there. She had come up behind me in complete silence and stationed herself a few inches off my bum. I was completely unaware she was there at first, because she was tiny - barely reaching above my navel. All I knew was that, as I began to take a half-step backwards with my left foot, my heel caught against something. Not thinking at first that it could be a person, I half-turned to look over my shoulder - and clocked the stupid woman across the side of the face with my elbow.

Maybe it was a prank. Maybe she wanted to make me fall over and look stupid, for the amusement of the other early morning commuters. Maybe, in another few seconds, she would have been properly in position, crouching on her knees directly behind my calves. Yes, perhaps that was it.

More childhood guilt

Another piece I have used in my teaching for similar purposes to (separately or in conjunction with) the Ivor Cutler anecdote I posted last Friday is this song by Michelle Shocked, from her superb debut album Short Sharp Shocked. It's a recollection of her childhood in a small East Texas town, playing with matches, earning the censure of her local Volunteer Fire Department (VFD). Quite brilliant.

VFD

Me and my friend and this boy named Eddie,
We was bored one afternoon.
We was sitting in the hay,
'Twas a hot Texas day,
And we was playing with matches, like some kids do.

We would throw our matches in the high, dry grass;
Close our eyes and count to 10;
And then race the burnin' field,
We'd do the toe, we'd do the heel;
We'd die laughin';
We'd do it all over again.

I’m singing, "Where's there's smoke, there's sure to be a fire.
Ready, steady, go! It was down to the wire.
We was racing Inevitability.
We was makin' trouble for the V.F.D."
[That's the Volunteer Fire Department, now]

Oh, I'm sure that you know how this story goes.
Our little fire ran out of control.
Somebody called for the V.F.D.
It was not me.
It weren't me, Jack!

Ah, they drive from 15 miles away,
So when they arrive, I'm sorry to say
That the field was black
And the sky was grey...
...And you know those barns they store hay in?
The volunteers all shook their heads,
And then I recall one of them said,
"This fire was no accident.
No, this fire started with a match."

I slowly backed into the crowd.
Me and Eddie, we looked at each other:
We never mention it to this day;
But my friend, she went and told her mother!
Ah, Jesus, can you believe that?

She said, "Where there's smoke, there's sure to be a fire.
Ready, steady, go! It was down to the wire.
We was racing Inevitability, Ma.
We was making trouble for the V.F.D., Ma.
We was raising insurance premiums, Ma.
We was spreading fear of arson,
We was spreading fear of arson - all around Kelsey."

A continuing story....

I've added a brief postscript to my story about the Midi Music Festival last week, concerning the peculiarly pointless and vindictive government 'ban' currently imposed on the rock band Carsick Cars. Do go and have a look.

I will keep an eye out for more information on this: it's a story that particularly interests me, and looks set to go on for a while.

Another excerpt from 'The Third Policeman'

Today was another gorgeously sunny day (and the last day of the week-long Labour Day holiday), so I went for a long afternoon of idle dawdling and work avoidance. I took my favourite, fabulous Flann O'Brien book with me for a bit of dipping, and was entranced by this lyrical passage about waking on a sunny morning. Perhaps a narrow second favourite to the bicycle ride through the country in the dead of night which I posted on here last month, but still wonderful. This is the kind of stuff that makes me throw up my hands in despair and abandon all foolish hopes of becoming a 'real writer' myself.

I lay back and took to my habit of gazing out of the window. Whichever day it was, it was a gentle day - mild, magical and innocent with great sailings of white cloud serene and impregnable in the high sky, moving along like kingly swans on quiet water. The sun was in the neighbourhood also, distributing his enchantment unobtrusively, colouring the sides of things that were unalive and livening the hearts of living things. The sky was a light blue without distance, neither near nor far. I could gaze at it, through it and beyond it and see still illimitably clearer and nearer the delicate lie of its nothingness. A bird sang a solo from nearby, a cunning blackbird in a dark hedge giving thanks in his native language. I listened and agreed with him completely.

This week's bon mot

"Trouble is like urine in a swimming pool: sometimes the only way to keep other people's away from you is to make a little of your own."

A few years ago, my utterly lovely Canadian friend Linda (one of the great unrequited loves of my life!) sent me a CD by a group called Three Dead Trolls In A Baggie (go check out their stuff at www.deadtroll.com). One of the skits on it involved Oscar Wilde on his visit to the American West getting involved in a duel of aphorisms with a saloon bar tough. The cowboy actually got most of the best lines, like the one above.

The Canadians seem to have a special knack for eccentric naming. Another comedy band I discovered when I was living there was called The Arrogant Worms - always loved that name!

By the by, in reference to my musings on the issue of digital piracy the other week, it's worth checking out the 'rants' on this subject by Wes Borg of the Dead Trolls on their website.

Funky dancing

I turned this up on the website of a little outfit called Red T (well, maybe not so little any more - I thought they were a small laowai promotions company dealing mainly with art events, but it seems they are branching out into music too: they laid on a great open-air party called 'Gloaming' in Beijing's Ritan Park last week).

It's a video by a Norwegian pop duo called Kings of Convenience. Great name! Not such a great song, to be honest: shallow, instantly forgettable pop, with vocals that are so thin as to be almost inaudible. It is, however, a very cute video. Enjoy.

Time stands still

We've often heard that expression, used particularly about key moments in the experience of a love affair, about the impact of a kiss. It has become devalued through overuse, an easy cliché.

It is a commonplace phrase, but an extremely uncommon phenomenon. I had begun to doubt whether it ever existed at all, whether it was not just another fanciful poetic fiction. But then it happened to me. With The Poet. I think it probably happened with previous great love, The Evil One, as well, although that is a little long ago to remember clearly now.

That feeling, one of the strangest and most intense I've ever known, inspired me to write this little thing - an attempt to redeem the 'stopped time' image from clichéhood. (By coincidence, The Poet later revealed to me that she was fascinated with the scientific concept of the 'singularity', and was playing with some ideas for including it in a poem of her own. She has never told me if she did or not.)

Singularity

Time's arrow
Loses its point
Is stilled in mid-air
And all the material clutter of the Universe
Recedes to irrelevant elsewhere

The moment extends
In all directions, everywhere

No past, no future, no self:
The kiss is everything
Infinity

Another gem from Ivor Cutler

This is probably my favourite episode from Ivor Cutler's faux childhood autobiography Life In A Scotch Sitting Room, Vol. 2, which I quoted from on here a month or two ago. It is one of the best evocations of a child's guilt I know, and, when I was a schoolteacher (a distant life that seems now) I found it very useful in prompting revelations of dark secrets from pupils in my creative writing classes.

After Ivor's death last year, Radio Clash put together this tribute podcast. I think much of his work benefits from his delivery of it in his charming Scots burr. Highly recommended.

One Monday I rose early and went through the three kitchen dresser draws. In the one below the wireless set I found Mother's old handbag. Blushing, for it was a sin, I unsnapped the clasp and peeped inside. The brown moire lining felt and smelt of a creature impossible to know. The purse held two pennies - a fortune!

I ran to the school bookshop. For one penny I bought a ruler. Sharply marked, it had fan-shaped scratches on the back with exotic numbers like sixty and seventy. They were degrees, but the only degrees I knew were MA, which teachers had, and FEIS, which Peter McDougall the headmaster had, and which we all knew meant Fattest Elephant In Scotland.

The other penny bought a white rubber which you could chew.

"Where were you?" asked Mother.

"I was in a hurry to get to school to play," I choked, each word the flavour of sick.

"Don't miss breakfast tomorrow," she murmured, preoccupied.

The following morning I made straight for the handbag. To my astonishment there were five pennies in the purse: Mother never used that bag any more. A hardened criminal - I was nine - I ran to the sweetie-shop and blew the lot. Honeycomb crunch which glued sweetness to the teeth, liquorice straps, nail rods, sherbert suckers with four biscuits, ogo pogo eyes, cough-no-more toffee, cheugh balls and a large caramel over which one could barely wrap the lips.

Money appeared daily. Breakfast was not mentioned. I lived like a king, accepting the weary hour in the playground all alone, picking paint off the railings, cheeks like balloons.

On Friday Mother caught me. She never said a word, and I never touched her purse again.

Road sense(lessness)

I mentioned yesterday that Chinese people seem to have no road sense whatsoever. You may think I exaggerate. NO.

One particularly common vice here is what I think of as the Wrong Way Bicycle - bicycles will very commonly turn left on to a main road (it's a drive-on-the-right regime) and blithely pedal away against the flow of traffic. This might be understandable, even tolerable, if they were only going a few yards, but often these guys will complete their entire journey on the wrong side of the road. And they don't generally stop, or even slow down, much less look about them before pulling out into the main road against the flow of cars and other bicycles like this. And they don't seem to pay any attention at all to anything in their path: it is as if they have an invincible belief that it is everyone else's responsibility to avoid them. This is, I think, the single greatest hazard to pedestrians crossing the road. If you give all of the your attention to the murderous traffic coming from your left, you are going to get blindsided by a Wrong Way Bicycle. An ignominious way to go! Years of exposure to Beijing traffic have made me hyper-alert to such dangers now: I have "eyes in the back of my head". But even now, I still suffer the occasional close call. (Curiously enough, things don't seem to be nearly so bad on the roads in any other Chinese city I've visited. Utter disregard for the rules of the road or basic common sense does seem to be primarily a Beijing phenomenon.)

Yesterday, I encountered an alarming first - someone doing the Wrong Way Bicycle trick in a car. Yep, a car emerging from a side street without looking, and then proceeding to drive a few hundred yards down a very busy main street on the wrong side of the road. And I didn't think driving standards in Beijing could get any worse! That'll teach me.....

Delinquent

The reason there have been no new posts for two-and-a-half days is not only that I've been out rocking and partying all week (though that would certainly be enough to explain my silence), but because I managed to get my phone (and thus also my ADSL Internet link) cut off for non-payment of the bill.

I may have commented on this before in one of the disguised 'China rants' of the my old 'Where in the world am I?' strand. You don't actually receive a telephone bill in this country: you're just expected to know when the bill is due. It's quite hard to remember, because they are extraordinarily inconsistent as to how much leeway they will give, sometimes not cutting you off for two or three weeks after the final due date, other times cutting you off ahead of the due date! It's quite mystifying. My unscheduled trip back to the UK in January further deranged my usual monthly schedules. And in fact, the last two months I have been so busy that I asked one of my former students to pay the phone bill for me. So, that's why I forgot this time. Mea culpa.

At least paying the bill went remarkably straightforwardly this time. And I was reconnected within a couple of hours. Woo-hoo!

It is not always thus. There's still no mechanism for the easy transfer of money in this country. As far as I'm aware, there is no such thing as a personal cheque. And credit cards are still something of a novelty, and really available only to the hyper-rich. No, the vast majority of transactions are still done with cash. Including paying your utilities bills. Since the banks here don't really offer any worthwhile banking services, the facility to pay household bills through them is about the only thing that keeps them in business. At times, it keeps them very busy indeed. The queues at my tiny local branch of the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China often snake out of the door and into the street. Ah, but on a Friday lunchtime at the end of a holiday week, the place was nearly deserted. Hurrah! It still might not have been a swift or easy operation. Sometimes the clerks, for devilment, will ask a lot of idiotic questions, they'll try to insist that you prove your right to pay the bill, they'll ask for all sorts of corroborating details about your address, how long you've lived there, what your landlord's name is (I feel sure one day they'll even ask me what his ID number is), sometimes they'll even try to get you to fill out a payment form (entirely in Chinese) yourself. Deep breath. "Look, I've come in here at least 20 or 30 times before. You know me. You know I don't speak much Chinese, and I don't read or write it at all. Could you just take my money and give me a receipt? Please."

This is the essence of the China experience, the reason why a lot of expats living here get so stressed out: even the most simple, everyday tasks can be unexpectedly, needlessly, infuriatingly difficult. But then, the flip side of that is that sometimes - like today - things turn out to be not as much hassle as you'd expected, and for the rest of the day you have a song in your heart and a skip in your step.

A nostalgic haiku

I first visited China in the spring of '94. Back then, it really was still a 'country of bicycles'. There were bikes in their millions in all the big cities, and they pretty much had the roads to themselves. The number of cars on the road in Beijing is now well over 2,000,000 - it's nearly trebled in the time I've been living here. There are still very large numbers of bicycles, but not so many as a decade or so ago, and they no longer seem to dominate. Now, bicycles on their own can be quite hazardous enough to pedestrians - since nobody has any road sense at all! - but there's something about the interaction between bicycles and motorized traffic we have now that seems to generate new and special hazards. It's a jungle out there!!

Ah, but when bicycles ruled the earth, everything seemed to get along more smoothly, more harmoniously. It could be a magical spectacle at times. And I felt a lot safer.

China Traffic
(in the 'old days')

A collective will,
Synchronous as schooling fish:
Sea of bicycles.

Traffic Report - blog stats for April

Well, we've hardly slowed down at all.

A total of 68 posts on Froogville this last month - and a whopping 25,000 words. I suppose 'coming out' about my being in China gave me quite a few new topics to write about. And discussion of my Net censorship problems here also generated a lot of posts early in the month.

I've really got to cut down a bit, though - this is killing me! This month, I really will try to limit myself to 40-50 posts. Feel free to chastise me if I overdo it. (Tulsa??)

Site visits seem to have recovered after a downward blip (perhaps largely the result of visits via some proxy servers not registering on my counters), and are now back at around 150 per week (although I wonder how many of those are Tulsa and me!!). And last weekend we passed the momentous landmark of our 3,000th visitor - not too bad in only 7.5 months.

Midi misadventures (and a moral dilemma)

My first attempt to experience some of Beijing's open-air rock extravaganza, the Midi Music Festival, this week was a bit of a disaster.

I had to work all morning and part of the afternoon, so was later than I would have liked to be setting out. My taxi driver didn't know where the place was. Nobody she stopped to ask knew where it was either. (It's one of the many characteristic quirks of Beijing's street nomenclature that things are often not called what they are supposed to be called. Streets change their names quite unnecessarily every few blocks. Often the street will have a commonly used name that is quite different from its official name. Often building addresses will keep the old name of a street that has since been re-named, or will confusingly take the name of another street in the vicinity rather than the one they actually face on to. Although the Festival venue is 'officially' known as Haidian Park, nobody uses that name for it. I haven't worked out what they do call it, but it sure as hell isn't Haidian Park. Still, you'd think, wouldn't you, that a taxi driver would be able to work out that it was a park and that it was in Haidian district? Er, no.....) I showed her on the map, but she wasn't very good with maps.

Traffic in the University district was gridlocked, so we took an impromptu - very pleasant! - detour through the parkland campus of Peking University (curiously, the only institution that still favours the old Wade-Giles romanization). Progress was SLOW, but the weather was dazzling, and I had a couple of tins of cold beer with me.

Eventually we got to the park (having overshot it by a mile or two on our first pass), but I was dropped off at the wrong end. And it is a HUGE park. And I don't recall if they did this in previous years, but this year the rock festival is only in the northern end, and the park has been partitioned by a long wall of metal sheeting. I followed this temporary wall for the best part of a mile, hoping to find the entrance to the festival - and guess what? I had forgotten that the park only has two gates - the one I had entered, and the one being used for the festival. Thus, when I reached the end of the wall, there was no exit from my half of the park, no entry to the festival. I couldn't be bothered to retrace my steps all over again, so climbed over the park fence out on to the main road (a slightly dicey procedure - I'm not as limber as I once was). I probably should have hopped over the wall (slightly higher, but a firmer and easier climb) to get into the festival for free (I used to be quite a seasoned Ball crasher during my Oxford student days) - but I didn't want to be that cheap; I found, when I reflected on it, that I approved of the event and actually wanted to support it financially.

Not that it needs my humble contribution. When I finally got to the main entrance, the queue to get in was snaking around the block for upwards of half a mile - and was moving forward only fitfully. I figured it might take the best part of an hour to get in, maybe longer - and I just couldn't be arsed. Queueing is just about top of the list of things for which I have no tolerance at all.

A combination of better publicity this year, a burgeoning number of foreign students in the capital, and an outstanding weather forecast for the week has pushed attendance through the roof. I hear that the 4-day tickets are all sold out, and that there are only a limited number of single day tickets left. I guess I'd better try and get over there early in the morning if I want to go on Thursday or Friday. That's if I can't scam some kind of 'pass' off one of my connections in the biz.

I gather most of yesterday's bands were pretty sucky (I'm looking for consolations here), but I was still sorry to have missed it.

The thing is, several of my friends were there yesterday. And they all dealt with the problem of the long queue by simply ignoring it, and hustling straight up to the ticket windows. Outrageous! Have they been assimilated into the local 'culture'?! I don't think I could bring myself to do that. Or could I? Well, I hope not. My moral fortitude on this point may be sorely tested if I encounter the same problem again. I must ask myself, "What would Zoltan do?"

Watch this space.

Update: In fact, I only went to one day of the Midi Festival - the best day, Thursday - although I did also catch a number of the after-shows. A brief rundown of my week can be found over on the Barstool here. Attendance, though still robust, was a little less crazy after Mayday itself; and I took the precaution of arriving early - to beat the queues, and to spare myself the moral dilemma of whether to queue-jump (or wall jump!).

I also note in passing that the 'banned' Carsick Cars appeared at the D-22 party last Tuesday (though not at the Festival itself). Or rather, an anonymous 'session band' that just happened to be composed of the same personnel and performing the same music. The mechanics of banning a rock band are complicated! Michael Pettis, the American owner of D-22, tells me that he is confident saner counsels will soon prevail at the Ministry of Culture, but for a while Jeff Zhang & co. may have to resort to such petty subterfuge whenever they want to play.

April showers

Usually April is a bit drizzly. Not a lot, just a bit. This year it had been pretty much bone dry. Until last night, when it absolutely pissed down for 3 or 4 hours.

Beijing does not cope well with rain. There are very few storm drains, and those that there are almost immediately become blocked with sand, garbage, bits of tree - the universal detritus of this city. Recently re-layed roads and sidewalks sag and split as the earth beneath them turns to quagmire. Standing water fills these undulations within minutes - these are not so much puddles as small lakes, quite a few inches deep in places, and stretching more than halfway across the road.

The storm drains and the sewers share one system (at least, until recently - it's one of the things that is supposed to be changing before the Olympics); and that system (at least, until recently) used to empty into the moats and canals in the city centre. A few years ago, we had a particularly heavy day of rain one Saturday in early summer that led to flash floods and the collapse of a number of hutong homes. Large sections of the moat had been drained for rebuilding and refurbishing projects and the storm drain outlets into them accordingly closed off; but no adequate alternative routing had been arranged, and so the sudden downpour quickly backed up the whole system and large sections of the city flooded with sewage. Or so I heard.

Reflections such as this take much of the joy from puddle-sploshing.

However, it is still a very refreshing change. I walked through the rain for 40 minutes to a favourite bar, and decided not to bother to put my umbrella up. Rain is one of the few things about England that I miss. We often go for weeks or months at a time without any significant rainfall here in The Big Dusty.

I don't like monkeys!

I don't like, I don't like, I don't like monkeys.....

My favourite corpsing moment during another marathon session in the recording booth today. (The Boomtown Rats were one of the musical highlights of my childhood; it all started going to shit rather after that, with synth-pop and the 'New Romantics'.)

Ah, and the other high point was the section where students were to be asked to differentiate between "True or Falsies". What larks we have behind that microphone!

A little bit of politics

Following up on my post last week about the last-minute prohibition on local band Carsick Cars doing the warm-up for Sonic Youth when they played in Beijing 7 days ago, I have now learned that the Chinese government's beef was not - as I had idly speculated - with the Cars at all, but with Sonic Youth.

Apparently, the Ministry of Culture belatedly found out (via a post on their BBS!) that Sonic Youth had played at the big 'Free Tibet' concert in San Francisco 10 years ago, and were not at all happy about that. (Had they really not done their due diligence on the band's application to perform here? Would they have remained in blissful ignorance but for some 'anonymous informant'? It seems absurd, but.... this is China.) They didn't feel able to deport the band or cancel their scheduled Beijing and Shanghai shows (that's progress of a sort, I suppose), but they did wish to express their displeasure somehow - and Jeff Zhang's little band was in the firing line.

It looks like this could be a continuing problem for them: I am told that the Carsick Cars have also been banned from appearing in the same venue this week (one of the satellite shows accompanying this week's open-air Midi Music Festival; I'm not sure if they're going to be able to play the festival itself during the day).

I very much doubt if Jeff and his bandmates had any idea of Sonic Youth's views on the Tibet issue (as, indeed, it seems the government itself did not until the 11th hour); and it seems amazingly petty to discipline them merely for having the temerity to seek to share a stage with a well-known American band who they regard as an important musical influence. But then, The Ogre is petty, very petty indeed.

Hrabal - who he?

Bohumil Hrabal?

The writer responsible for this week's bon mot is a Czech satirist (aren't all Czechs satirists??), perhaps best known for 'Closely Observed Trains' (which was adapted into a very highly acclaimed film 40-odd years ago). Last summer, while visiting friends in the States, I read a short novel of his called 'Too Loud A Solitude', from which the quotation is taken.

Great title! Intriguing concept, too: it's a Kafka-ish fable about a man who has spent his entire working life in a damp windowless basement compacting waste paper and books in a hydraulic press. There are rather too many books, of course, what with government censors withdrawing titles from circulation on a whim and anti-bourgeois sentiments condemning countless private libraries to destruction. The discarded books become his life. He hands on selected titles to various collectors - underground academics - that he's met. He smuggles thousands of them home for himself (the huge weight of them on a precarious platform above his bed nightly threatens him with obliteration - a sword of Damocles). He makes his bricks of compressed paper into art works, with specially chosen books hidden like pearls in the middle of them, and reproductions of Old Master paintings wrapped around the outside. He even saves up his money to buy the press for himself, so that he can continue this work after his retirement.

You might say the man has an unhealthy obsession with crushing and being crushed, and it's not too difficult to guess how it ends. It's a slight thing, very short, and with no real 'story' to speak of, but it does linger powerfully in the memory.

And - as with John Banville, the Irish writer I've quoted on here a few times - the richness of the language is a constant delight.

I particularly liked this summation of the joy of reading: "I do not so much read as savour the words. I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck on it like a fruit drop."

A literary bon mot this week

"Men are like olives; only when crushed do we reveal what is best in us."

Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997)

Is piracy BAD?

Gar!!!

Here in China, piracy is rife. IP piracy, that is. Particularly DVD piracy. In fact, you hardly ever see a legitimate DVD anywhere, and they are so ridiculously expensive that I can't imagine anybody ever buys one.

I don't have too many moral qualms about taking advantage of this. I am too much of a film-lover to pass up the opportunity to build a library of classics (I had nearly 600 titles the last time I bothered to try to count them, and have inherited quite a few more from departing friends since then), whatever the legal or ethical implications.

And, frankly, I am not too concerned about 'stealing' from the Hollywood studios. Those guys are mega-rich and mega-greedy, and I don't see them going out of business because of me. I suppose I adopt the same kind of argument I did with that 'Home Taping Is Killing Live Music' campaign of a decade or two ago. Patently bogus logic! Home taping, for most people, was an addition to purchasing music (and attending concerts), not a substitute for it. By sharing music with friends, we were actually helping to increase demand for the product in stores; people got to know about stuff that they otherwise wouldn't have, and would occasionally want to go out and buy it. But, for most of us, we couldn't possibly afford to pay for all the music we wanted to listen to. It was unrealistic of the record companies to presume to control all dissemination of their material, unreasonably greedy of them to view every instance of home taping as a loss of income to them.

Of course, things have got a lot more complicated with the explosion of online streaming. Record companies are now facing a situation where they struggle to control any of the dissemination of their material, and might soon see their income dry up almost completely, unless subscription downloads can be made into an effective business model. Well, I wouldn't be shedding too many tears if the record companies go under. I'm not sure that we need an 'industry' around popular music. Good bands will always be able to make a decent living by playing live gigs. Their creativity might even flower brighter and for longer, they might avoid burnout and craziness if they weren't doomed to become multi-millionaires. You know, they might actually focus more on the music, rather than the 'rock'n'roll lifestyle'.

The music industry depends almost solely on mass reproduction of its product, so the new technology has left it up shit creek. The film industry does not depend on mass reproduction. Until 30 years ago there was no market for individual home consumption of films. For a few decades the film industry was spoiled by having this additional revenue stream open up for it. Those days may be coming to a close. Get over it. The major sources of income for the film industry have always been, and should remain: cinema screenings (there really is no substitute for the live experience of a big-screen film), TV rights, and merchandising (these days, often the biggest earner of them all). And the studios may be able to develop some subscription download revenue as a replacement for the moribund video/DVD arm of their business.

If the film companies really wanted to establish a market for legitimate DVDs in China, they'd have to get aggressive in their marketing; they'd have to be prepared to sell close to or a little below cost for a while, to drive the pirates off the streets. Pirate DVDs are often flawed (I find there's usually about a 20%-30% failure rate, even from the better stores), rarely have all, or any, of the 'special features', and sometimes don't even have proper subtitles. I'd be prepared to spend, say, 50% or so more for a legitimate DVD that I could be confident was fully functional. But, at present, they cost 3 or 4 times as much as the pirated product, so there's no competition.

Do the film companies really care about the piracy in China? I don't think so. They could lobby against it with the Chinese government much harder if they wanted to. They could fight against it much harder in the marketplace if they wanted to. I think they have greater concerns here at the moment: the relatively small cinema market in China (growing, but still pretty tiny; despite the vaunted economic growth, few people have any disposable income to speak of, and the cinema is still a very expensive night out), and the very limited access to that market granted to foreign films (the numbers go up year by year, but it's still a pretty tight quota - and, of course, only 'approved' films; i.e., pappy blockbusters).

DVD piracy can't really be said to be hurting the film companies at the moment in China, because there simply is no market for legitimate DVDs - no-one can afford them. At least the cheap pirate copies are building the Hollywood brands (people who've never been to a cinema in their lives know who Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts are from seeing them in pirated DVDs; don't tell me the film companies are unhappy about that), adding to the groundswell of demand for more foreign films to be shown in cinemas and on TV. And they support the market for merchandising as well. McDonald's tie-ins for films like 'Finding Nemo' have been hugely successful here. Hardly anyone saw those films in the cinema; they saw them on pirate DVDs.

So, the next time you hear somebody whingeing about how hard done by the film studios are, and how immoral and irresponsible it is of you to buy pirate DVDs, just tell them to FUCK OFF. Film studios get plenty of money from bums on seats. They get plenty of money from T-shirts and toys. They shouldn't expect to be able to also milk us when we want to watch a film again at home afterwards.

No Poetry!

My career in poetry has been very intermittent. I only started dabbling in it for the first time towards the end of my undergraduate days, and my approach was very jokey. I lapsed for a while, starting up again when I was teaching high school, where I had the advantage of spending a lot of time reading poetry (that's when the haiku fetish began). Then I had quite a long fallow period, until the great doomed love affair with 'The Evil One' gave me something to write about: I had an intense period of productivity that year, but then fell out of the writing habit once again. It was the second great (failed!) love affair of my life last year that started me off again - but this time, for some reason, I have kept going.

Anyway, I haven't posted one of my pomes for a little while now, so here's one of the older ones I've recently rediscovered. Poetry did prove an effective aid in wooing both of my lost loves; but with The Evil One, I was worried that I might be overdoing it, I imagined that she might one day complain that it was an illegitimate tactic, too potent a means of manipulation. Hence.....

No poetry!


"No poetry!" you'll say.
"Poems are unfair."

And what is poetry anyway?
The desire to say things better
Because we feel them deeper -
They call that poetry.

"No poetry! Poems are unfair."

But the unfairness seems to me
That you can be a poem
While I can only try to write one.

Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead

This film seems to keep cropping up in my mind just lately. I've mentioned it a couple of times on my blogs and once on someone else's in the last few weeks.

It seems to be something of an unregarded gem, barely 10 years old yet largely forgotten.

It's a marvellous script, full of teasing paradoxes, and excellently played by a top-notch cast. The lead character, Jimmy 'The Saint' (one of Andy Garcia's best roles), seems too good-hearted to be a gangster: he is revered by everyone for his decency, loyalty, and kindness. Yet a gangster he is, or has been: beneath the charming, affable exterior you occasionally glimpse the steeliness of purpose, the ruthlessness, the capacity for sudden, effective violence. He has retired from the criminal world and is now running a legitimate business making videos of old or terminally ill people in which they can leave last messages and life wisdom for their loved ones. Rather as in 'When Harry Met Sally' the film is interspersed with snippets of these videos, which comment obliquely on the unfolding story, and which are often very touching; indeed, they do seem as if they might be genuine 'last testaments' of the dying rather than scripted elements of the film.

Jimmy's loyalty proves to be his tragic flaw. Recruited to carry out one more - rather unusual - 'action' by the local crime boss (a wonderfully sinister Christopher Walken), he reunites his old 'crew', an eccentric collection of losers, because he realises they need the money. When the job goes horribly wrong, the wrathful crime lord (a quadriplegic, known only by the nickname 'The Man With The Plan') orders a hit on the whole lot of them as an example. Jimmy has the chance to flee town, but sticks around to try to warn his friends - so he and they become like the clients of the video business, people who suddenly know that their days, hours are numbered. When you know you're going to die, your life comes into perspective, you realise what the really important things are. It's a wonderful premise, an unexpected examination of some very serious themes. For a film that is predominantly quirky and humorous, almost at times a black comedy, its lingering impression is very sombre.

There are so many delightful oddities in this film: it's set in Denver (Has any film ever been set in Denver before, let alone a gangster film?); the nameless godfather is still running his criminal empire from a wheelchair; Jimmy's 'HQ' is in a soda shop rather than a bar, and a nostalgic narration is provided by one of the elderly regulars there; Jimmy and his land-locked colleagues share a fantasy of a sundrenched retirement in the Florida Keys; the superhumanly efficient assassin - known only as 'Mr Shhh', because he's so soft-spoken - called in to wipe the boys out proves to be a nerdy, dishevelled Steve Buscemi. (Here's an interesting aside - Has Steve Buscemi ever been in a bad film? I can't think of one.)

It's chock-full of brilliant, quotable dialogue. Garcia's chat up of Gabrielle Anwar is probably the best seduction ever placed on film. And then there's Critical Bill. Critical Bill is the reason everything goes wrong. He's wildly unstable, a bit of a psychopath (he has a job in a funeral parlour, and works out by using cadavers as punchbags); and yet - as brilliantly played by Treat Williams - he's also a strangely sweet, vulnerable character, and you can sort of understand why his friends tolerate his dangerous unpredictability. At one point he ambushes an enemy, leaping out from behind a door and whaling into him with a baseball bat while screaming, "I am Godzilla, you are Japan!" My favourite battlecry!!

IMDB annoys me. It's the democracy of the imbecilic. (HOW can twee, manipulative, predictable, overlong 'Shawshank Redemption' be the highest-rated film??) So far, 'Things To Do In Denver' has only 8,000 ratings on the site and a ridiculously low average of 6.5. It should be at least 1 to 1.5 points higher than that. ('Shawshank' on the other hand has a 9.2; should be about 4 lower!) A call to action, my friends. Right this wrong. Watch 'Things To Do In Denver' and then go and give it the rating it deserves.

The last word on the cat-dog controversy

Following up on my consideration of the comparative merits of cats and dogs the other day (prompted by my discovery of a poem about cats by Pablo Neruda), I offer you this - courtesy of my good friend The Choirboy. It's quite an old thing, been doing the rounds on e-mail for a while now, but it bears reprinting - good stuff.

A DOG'S DIARY

7 am - Oh boy! A walk! My favourite!
8 am - Oh boy! Dog food! My favourite!
9 am - Oh boy! The kids! My favourite!
Noon - Oh boy! The yard! My favourite!
2 pm - Oh boy! A car ride! My favourite!
3 pm - Oh boy! The kids! My favourite!
4 pm - Oh boy! Playing ball! My favourite!
6 pm - Oh boy! Welcome home Mom! My favourite!
7 pm - Oh boy! Welcome home Dad! My favourite!
8 pm - Oh boy! Dog food! My favourite!
9 pm - Oh boy! Tummy rubs on the couch! My favourite!
11 pm - Oh boy! Sleeping in my people's bed! My favourite!




A CAT'S DIARY

Day 183 of my captivity.

My captors continued to taunt me with bizarre little dangling objects. They dine lavishly on fresh meat, while I am forced to eat dry cereal. The only thing that keeps me going is the hope of escape, and the mild satisfaction I get from clawing the furniture. Tomorrow I may eat another house plant.

Today my attempt to kill my captors by weaving around their feet while they were walking almost succeeded - must try this at the top of the stairs. In an attempt to disgust and repulse these vile oppressors, I once again induced myself to vomit on their favorite chair - must try this on their bed. Decapitated a mouse and brought them the headless body in an attempt to make them aware of what I am capable of, and to try to strike fear in their hearts. They only cooed and condescended about what a good little cat I was. Hmmm, not working according to plan.

There was some sort of gathering of their accomplices. I was placed in solitary throughout the event. However, I could hear the noise and smell the food. More important, I overheard that my confinement was due to my powers of inducing "allergies." Must learn what this is and how to use it to my advantage.

I am convinced the other captives are flunkies and maybe snitches. The dog is routinely released and seems more than happy to return. He is obviously a half-wit. The bird, on the other hand, has got to be an informant and speaks with them regularly. I am certain he reports my every move. Due to his current placement in the metal room, his safety is assured. But I can wait; it is only a matter of time.

My local 'Nail House'

Jiugulou Dajie - 'my' street, The Street, the 'street of dreams' where I lived for my first year in Beijing and have hung out in the vicinity of ever since - used to be a da jie ('big street'; i.e., a boulevarde) in name only; it was really little more than a hutong, one of the web of narrow alleyways interlacing the grey, single-storey slum housing that is characteristic of 'old Beijing'. At many points it was scarcely wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other, which made for some particularly horrendous traffic congestion in the rush hour (it was, bizarrely, a main artery linking the city centre to the North 2nd Ringroad, and home to a major bus route). In the summer of '04 it was all abruptly bulldozed: all the shops and restaurants - and the people - that had defined my life for nearly 2 years were swept away in a matter of a week or two. I was heartbroken.

However, I have to admit, for once they didn't do a bad job of the redevelopment. We now have a genuine da jie, a broad 4-lane* thoroughfare elegantly lined with new buildings in the faux Qing Dynasty architectural style (which is tiresomely de rigueur in the city these days, and often very tackily done; but here it's been quite well executed).

There is one rather conspicuous exception to this enforced gentrification of the street. Near the north end, just a couple of hundred yards from the subway station, is this isolated reminder of the picturesque squalor that is still ubiquitous behind these modern 'Qing' facades. I must assume that it is our very own 'nail house', home to a stubborn resister hoping to wring a better compensation deal out of the developers.

I think it's bound to be removed, one way or another, before the Olympics roll around next year. But I hope it remains for a while longer yet: I cherish it as a memento of the 'good old days'.

* I noticed that it's actually a 5-lane road. 5? Go figure. More people leave the city than go into it?? Only in China. And two of those lanes are in fact 'bicycle lanes' - not that you'd notice, because cars drive in them, and park in them, with impunity.

WITH tears!

Another gem from the Christmas Crackers anthology of literary oddities I mentioned the other day is this extract from a Victorian reading primer, which the author of the collection claims to have used himself in childhood to good effect. As a graded reader, it is perhaps a well-designed learning aid. The content, however, is, well, dark.... macabre.... potentially traumatizing.

This excerpt rather calls into question the aptness of the title, 'Reading Without Tears, or a Pleasant Mode of Learning to Read'.

Will-li-am climb-ed up-stairs to the top of the house, and went to the gun-pow-der clos-et. He fill-led the can-is-ter. Why did he not go down-stairs quickly? It came in-to his fool-ish mind, "I will go in-to the nur-se-ry and fright-en my lit-tle bro-thers and sis-ters."

It was his de-light to fright-en the chil-dren. How un-kind! He found them a-lone with-out a nurse. So he was a-ble to play tricks. He throws a lit-tle gun-pow-der in-to the fire. And what hap-pens? The flames dart out and catch the pow-der in the can-is-ter. It is blown up with a loud noise. The chil-dren are thrown down, they are in flames. The win-dows are bro-ken. The house is sha-ken.

Mis-ter Mor-ley rush-es up-stairs. What a sight! All his chil-dren ly-ing on the floor burn-ing. The ser-vants help to quench the flames. They go for a cab to take the chil-dren to the hos-pit-al. The doc-tor says, "The chil-dren are blind, they will soon die."