The vision thing

Malaysia, I found on my trip there a month ago, is one of the most pedestrian-unfriendly countries in the world. The traffic is tumultuous; pedestrian crossings are few and far between (and seem to work on absurdly long intervals, when they are functioning at all); and underpasses are even fewer; in many places, there aren't even any sidewalks (the main railway station in Kuala Lumpur is currently surrounded by construction sites, which make it just about impossible to access on foot).

It is, at first, quite daunting. Trying to walk any significant distance can be unduly stressful. Trying to cross a busy road seems a terrifying prospect.

But the thing is.... drivers there look where they are going.  Yes, the roads are packed, and the traffic often moves dangerously fast; yes, drivers are selfish and undisciplined and not always well-skilled in controlling their vehicles. But it's not anywhere near as bad as China. And they look where they're going.

I was quite stunned by this phenomenon when I first recognised it, because it is so very, very different from the situation I have become used to here in Beijing.  I soon found that it was actually surprisingly safe to cross the street in Kuala Lumpur, because, even on the busiest roads, drivers actually look out for hazards ahead of them and take appropriate evasive action. Understanding the use of the brake pedal is novel enough; but it's the noticing obstructions in the road ahead - the way that drivers actually look at you and see you; make eye-contact, and then don't try to run you down! - that I found most astounding after all these years of living with Beijing's homicidal traffic.

One of my earliest posts on here, The Land of the Blind, mused about the possible link between the notoriously poor eyesight of the Chinese and their apparently often limited imaginative vision, particularly in regard to the narrow range of their consideration or compassion for others.

It is on the roads that this failure to pay attention to others is most bothersome, most dangerous; but you see it everywhere - in people dropping their luggage on your feet when they board a subway carriage, in people parking their bikes across doorways, in people constantly walking into you (and then acting as if it's somehow your fault). The Chinese seem to actively avoid looking about them: they look down at their feet, they check their mobile phones constantly, they focus on the point they're aiming for several yards ahead and filter out everything and everyone else around them; they waddle along in trance-like cocoons of self-interest, almost completely insulated from the outside world. resolutely unaware of what's going on in the environment around them. Most of the time, the Chinese really do not look at other people around them; and when they look, they don't see; and when they see.... they don't care.

And it is tempting to derive other metaphors from this, to discern a wider significance in the phenomenon. You speculate that this 'cocoon of self-interest' evolved as a necessary defence mechanism against the oppression and hardship the Chinese people suffered under Mao - and through so much of their history. And it is certainly the thing that is chiefly keeping the Communist Party in power here: so long as there are more people who are complacently satisfied with their increasing material comfort than there are people who are frustrated and disaffected and suffering, then... there isn't much chance of a revolution. Nobody much cares how many lawyers and journalists and academics are thrown into jail, so long as they can save enough money to buy an i-Phone or a flat-screen TV. This really is The Land of the Blind.

New Picks of the Month

Two more picks from three years ago this month....

On Froogville, I was mightily tempted to go for Futility, my definitive rant on why 'Business English' training in China is mostly a waste of time. However, that subject is perhaps of rather limited interest to the layman; so, I choose instead Bali & the ballerinas, a favourite snapshot of my life as a young man (ah, so long ago now, so long ago).

And on The Barstool, I nominate AND.... they're off! - my life summed up as a horse race.

Traffic Report - the blog stats for March

Well, that was one of my most 'restrained' months ever on Froogville (and about time, too - I've been trying to cut back for ages); although I compensated with an especially prolific month over on The Barstool, largely thanks to a slew of posts about my recent experiences in Malaysia.

There were 35 posts and around 9,000 words on Froogville last month.

There were 40 posts and nearly 13,500 words on Barstool Blues.

Traffic to the 'Ville seems to be holding up pretty steadily - despite a massive Internet censorship drive in China this past month, which even floored the formidable Witopia a couple of times, and seems to have driven some of the less spunky VPN services out of the market altogether - with around 150 visitors per day; and the 'lifetime total' (at least, according to the Sitemeter widget in my sidebar) has surged past 75,000. I am getting a tad concerned, though, about an apparent decline in interest in my 'drinking blog' (which I tend to have rather more fun with; so... sod what anybody else thinks!) - only getting 60 or 70 hits a day now, whereas we had been up to a 100 or more a little while back.  However, one of these was a gent (or lady?) from The Seychelles who was led to my door by a Google search on "drink promotion ideas" - which, remarkably, places this fatuous post of mine at No. 8.  Glad to be of service!

Bon mot for the week

"I'm much wittier when no-one's taking notes."

Froog

That's probably true of everyone, isn't it?  Well, apart from full-time epigrammatists like Wilde and Johnson...

Wu Yuren released

My artist friend Wu Yuren, detained on trumped-up criminal charges for more than 10 months, was abruptly released "on parole" this weekend. He was pulled from his cell without warning - at about this time, midnight in China - to be prepared for release, spent the night in a "half-way house" surrounded by police officers, and was reunited with his family on Sunday afternoon.

He is under strict supervision, required to surrender his passport, and forbidden to have any contact with the press, or with other perceived "subversives".  

And, given the extremely harsh and thoroughgoing crackdown on dissent we are currently suffering here - unprecedented, according to many, in the past two decades - we are nervous that his freedom might be arbitrarily snatched away from him again at any moment.

His trial is still not concluded: although the judges finished hearing the "evidence" more than two months ago, no verdict has yet been given or sentence passed.

But, for now, he is a free man again. It is very good to have him back. His six-year-old daughter Hannah, the brightest little girl I know, is especially delighted.

Update:  After less than a week Wu Yuren was "banished" from Beijing - the police insisted he leave the capital and go back to his hometown in Jiangsu province.  It's probably good for his recovery from the ordeal of incarceration to be spending time with his family, and away from the stressful environment of Beijing; although it does mean that he is once again separated from his wife and daughter (they'll go and visit, but can't leave Beijing full-time). And of course, there has still been no clarification of what the terms of his "parole" are supposed to be, or when it will ever be lifted.  We're hoping that his case might be quietly dropped eventually; but for now, he's living under the threat of being arbitrarily returned to prison at any moment.  And with the current wave of government paranoia about possible 'dissidents', this situation could drag on for months.

Further update:  Well, they didn't insist on his permanent removal to Jiangsu. He was able to quietly return after a couple of weeks. He's keeping his head down, and slowly getting healthy again.

Additional (hopefully final) update:  Wu's 'parole' (the basis and parameters of which were, I think, never explained) was finally lifted, and his passport returned to him just over a year after his release, on April 19th, 2012. It seems all the charges against him have been dropped. But, of course, he's never going to receive any explanation or apology for what happened to him.

Film Quiz - Answers

My regulars complained that last week's challenge to identify famous (or infamous) films from their distinctive advertising taglines was... well, "unreasonably difficult", "cruel and unusual", "downright impossible" seems to have been the general consensus. You disappoint me, gentlemen.


Anyway, as promised, here are the answers.

1)  "If he's crazy, what does that make you?"
I can see there being other plausible contenders here (Sidney Lumet's Network sprang to my mind at first), but in fact it's.... One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (Dir. Milos Forman, 1975).

2)  "They're young, they're in love, and they kill people."

JES hazarded that it might have been Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers; and it would have fitted Terence Malick's wonderful Badlands as well; but it was iconic '60s hoodlum flick Bonnie and Clyde (Dir. Arthur Penn, 1967). I had thought this was one of the ones that everyone would get - possibly one of the dozen or so most memorable taglines ever.

3)  "The strangest story ever conceived by man."

Now, there are any number of films that one might say this of - Claude Faraldo's surreal Themroc, for instance, or Nagisa Oshima's bizarre romance Max, Mon Amour, or Jennifer Lynch's excruciatingly awful Boxing Helena, or even perhaps the stupendous oddity of Spike Jonze's and Charlie Kaufman's Being John Malkovich - but in fact (and when you realise, this so fits - both the film and the period) it was the original King Kong (Dir. Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933).

4)  "One man's struggle to take it easy."

JES suggested the Coens' The Big Lebowski, which would have been nice, but - and I thought this would be a gimme for any child of the '80s! - it was Ferris Bueller's Day Off (Dir. John Hughes, 1986).

5)  "Nothing on Earth could come between them."

Except.... an iceberg!! And the over-the-top villainy of Billy Zane and David Warner!!  Yes, this might have been said of any of the silver screen's 'great lovers', but in fact it was Jack and Rose in Titanic (Dir. James Cameron, 1997). Curiously enough, despite the film's huge impact on the popular culture of our times, I confess I don't remember this tagline at all.

6)  "Some called him a hero. Others called him a heel."

Again, I suppose this might have been used of many - any - of the cinema's lovable anti-heroes. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, this was one of the original taglines for Citizen Kane (Dir. Orson Welles, 1941).

7)  "It knows what scares you."

Now, here was one I thought a lot of people would get: one of the best taglines ever, and one that has perhaps achieved more lasting resonance than the movie itself (then again, maybe I'm just ODD in so often remembering taglines?!). If you didn't recognise it and had to guess, I suppose you might have been floundering around in the horror or sci-fi genres for a good long while. It was Poltergeist (Dir. Tobe Hooper, 1982).

8)  "Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water..."

But THIS, surely, was a mark for everyone... maybe the most famous tagline ever; and probably achieving heightened impact because it recalled the original movie which had been such a cultural landmark, even though this sequel was - predictably - a bit of an embarrassment. Yes.... Jaws 2 (Dir. Jeannot Szwarc, 1978). Directed by WHO??  Yep, even my film buffery was defeated by that; IMDB informs me that Mr Szwarc has had a long and distinguished career in American television, but doesn't boast much of a cinema resumé. [I'm sure I recall - though IMDB will not confirm - that Lewis Teague's splendid 1980 spoof of the killer animal genre Alligator (scripted by John Sayles!) used the tagline: "Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the sewers..."]

9)  "Only one man can make the difference."

Yes, yes, I know - this could fit just about any action hero: Bruce Willis in the Die Hard series, maybe, or the John Connor character in the Terminator films, or.... or Jean-Claude Van Damme, or Jason Statham, or Jet Li, or even Jacky Chan.  And perhaps this - or a slight variation on it - has been used in many subsequent movies; but the cliché began with Mel Gibson in Max Max 2 (The Road Warrior) (Dir. George Miller, 1981).

10)  "Mighty miracle show of 1,000 delights!"

Well, it has to be something period, doesn't it, something from the Hollywood 'golden days', when advertising could never be too cheesy? Believe it or not, it was.... The Wizard of Oz (Dir. Victor Fleming, 1939).

11)  "The most dangerous combination since nitro and glycerine."

Any buddy movie action film would fit the bill. 48 Hours? Lethal Weapon? Bad Boys? Rush Hour? No, it was.... The Blues Brothers (Dir. John Landis, 1980).

12)  "Never give a saga an even break!"
A pun like that could only come from the mind of Mel Brooks, couldn't it?  But which film? Young Frankenstein? History of the World: Part I? No, it was Blazing Saddles (Dir. Mel Brooks, 1974).

13)  "I don't smile for pictures."
Another landmark of our relatively recent past - Pulp Fiction (Dir. Quentin Tarantino, 1994). I think the principal tagline for this was "You won't know the facts until you've seen the fiction", but the ad campaign featured a series of posters highlighting leading characters in the story, each captioned by a distinctive line of their dialogue; and this, I think, was much the most memorable - Harvey Keitel's dourly professional mob 'cleaner', Winston Wolfe, refusing to lighten up for a group photograph.

14)  "A new breed of hero."

Oh, I suppose this might have been any old action hero, particularly one of the more quirky, comedic kind. But surely, everyone remembers this??  Well, everyone who was around in the 1980s. No, I've never actually seen the film. But it was such a spectacular, notorious flop that it - and its distinctive tagline - burrowed deep into the collective consciousness. Well, it burrowed into mine, anyway - Howard The Duck (Dir. Willard Huyck, 1986). I hadn't realised the lovely Lea Thompson was in it; I'd watch it for that alone. And I'd like to think that it played some small part in bringing us Duckman a decade later...

15)  "The story of a man who was too proud to run."

I didn't remember this one, I admit; but it makes perfect sense - High Noon (Dir. Fred Zinneman, 1952).

16)  "The next war will not be fought - it will be played."

More wilful misdirection on my part. John Badham's 1983 WarGames was an all-too-tempting possibility; as, perhaps, was 1984's The Last Starfighter. Any other suggestions? In fact, it was the original Rollerball (Dir. Norman Jewison, 1975).

17)  "He loved the American Dream - with a vengeance."

Another mark for everyone, I had thought - one of the three or four most memorable taglines of all time: the movie poster summation of Al Pacino's Tony Montana in Scarface (Dir. Brian De Palma, 1983).

18)  "Bombed out in space with a spaced-out bomb!"

Now, this one I hadn't expected many people to get; but it's a great, great favourite of mine (the origin, indeed, of my blog alias): sci-fi black comedy Dark Star (Dir. John Carpenter, 1974).

19)  "He chopped down the family tree."
Another one where, I admit, the tagline hadn't fixed itself in my memory, but... if you know and love the film - as you should - then it ought to be pretty easy to recognise: Kind Hearts and Coronets (Dir. Robert Hamer, 1949).

20)  "If you don't remember the '60s, don't worry - neither can they."
I never really caught much of an essential period flavour in this (apart from the bit where they're listening to Hendrix, drunk and stoned, on the drive back to London). In fact, I'm not much of a fan of this film. But its celebration of pursuing a life of drunken excess on a zero-budget has made it an enduring cult favourite amongst students in the UK... and it came out while I was a student, so I make a little space in my heart for it: Withnail & I (Dir. Bruce Robinson, 1987).




Did anyone get 10 out of 20?  No??


Oh, well.  I hope you enjoyed it anyway.  Perhaps I'll make the next one a little easier....

Pay slip

I got paid yesterday.

By the Chinese university I've been doing some teaching at for the past month.

Yes, I should be deliriously happy.  Pleasantly surprised.  Mightily relieved.

And I am, I am.

Except that.... the 'payslip' they'd prepared for me (a flimsy sliver of tickertape, which really did not have room for the signature they wanted from me, and which could not possibly have been subsequently 'filed' in anything other than a wastepaper bin) was so bizarrely CONFUSING that I did find myself becoming more than a tad irritated.

I think they spelled my name correctly - that was something.

But they'd forgotten (or lost, or chosen not to use, for some obscure and nefarious reason) the passport number I'd supplied to them, and so had substituted a Chinese ID number (ostensibly that of one of the Chinese members of staff, but, I suspect, entirely made up).

The headline rate of pay quoted was marginally less than I had been promised.  And it did not accord either with the "pre-tax" figure cited, or with the amount they were actually paying me.

It seems that what they had done - to try to spare me the vexation of having "tax" deducted - was to calculate what I would have had to earn in order to receive the promised fee post-tax (not that they actually paid any tax for me, of course; this is all smoke-and-mirrors).  Now, Chinese tax calculations can be pretty abstruse at the best of times; but on this occasion.... well the amount of "tax" calculated was way more than it should have been on standard income tax rates (since the first 1,500 rmb or so of monthly income is supposed to be tax-exempt).  And it was slightly less than the amount they'd actually deducted - according to the payslip (again, the figures did not quite add up!).  And I think even the amount of cash I did receive was slightly different to the headline figure I was ostensibly receiving - they'd rounded up or down or something...

Just to add a little further to the muddle... I'd been told I was only going to be paid for the first two weeks of classes.  And the girl who paid me insisted that I was being paid only for two weeks.  I eventually managed to puzzle out that I was in fact being paid for three weeks.

So, I was being paid more than I'd expected in total (presumably they'll pay me a 'short month' next time to make up for it); but less than I'd been promised as an hourly rate (only a very little less, but bothersome nonetheless, since it quickly adds up when you're doing 4 hours a week; and 250 rmb per hour has long been my minimum get-out-of-bed threshold - I really do not like working for even a few kuai less than that!).

WHY can't things ever be simple in China??

The weekly haiku

Featureless white haze,

Horizon to horizon;

The sky thieves taunt us.

The March-April cusp is usually the prettiest week of the year in Beijing - but it looks as though the next couple of days here are going to be really shitty.  Since I'm probably going to be chained to my computer for the entire weekend, I suppose it doesn't much matter anyway. Sigh.

Three little words

Abbreviations have become one of the special banes of my life.  The Chinese - especially Chinese "academics" - seem to have a particular predilection for them.  And they rarely observe the sensible convention of only using one after using the full name/phrase for which it stands on its first appearance in their text.  And they are, of course, hopelessly dyslexic - or, rather, just astoundingly inattentive and uncaring - in their use of them: you see UNSECO, and you assume they probably mean UNESCO.... but sometimes you have to check, just to be sure (because sometimes they mean UNSCO!).  I spend far more time on Acronymfinder than is good for my mental health.

In the IT industry - in which I have often worked here, because it is one of the few sectors to apply a decent amount of money to staff training - the use of acronyms has got completely out of hand... moving from tic through fetish to incessant compulsion.  Three-word phrases are especially beloved by the computer nerds.  When I worked as in-house training co-ordinator for one big American software developer, I discovered they had evolved so many of the damn things that they actually needed a company directory to keep track of them all - a very substantial volume.

It was called 'The List of TLAs'.  That's Three-Letter Acronyms.  True story.

Season of Dust

The hoped-for spring doesn't quite seem to have arrived in Beijing.  There's still a bit of an underlying nip in the air, the winds are often unpleasantly brisk and coming down from the north, and temperatures fall off dramatically at dusk.  Even during the daytime, despite the bright sunshine, it feels to me as though the temperatures have been a good 5-10⁰ F cooler than the 60-70 we've been regularly promised by the weather websites since last Sunday (75, a couple of them said, yesterday - I don't think so).  One friend reports that some magnolias flowered in her compound last weekend, but all I've seen so far are a few catkins appearing and two trees - a paltry two: one in Ritan Park on Monday, and one just outside my study window this morning - nervously just starting to open their buds... but certainly nowhere near committing to blossom yet.

I wonder if there's some adaptive mechanism by which trees "remember" the viciously cold April we had last year and have set their 'bloom threshold' higher this year.

On top of this hesitant warming and absence of budding, the sky is thick with dust.  Not the apocalyptic dust storms we occasionally get - especially during the windy days of mid-March and October - just a limitless aerosol of fine, dry dirt hanging in the sky.  Apart from two or three light snowfalls late in the season, there hasn't been any precipitation in Beijing since... what, October, maybe September?  That's right - there's been NO RAIN in Beijing for around six months now.  The place is becoming a desert.  And the gritty air scours the throat.

Usually, we get a cool damp spell for a week or two in the middle of next month, with a few 'April showers'.  This year, they can't come soon enough.  Cough, cough....

Now I really have seen EVERYTHING!

Chinese academics purporting to deconstruct South Park!  Top that!!

The latest in the long line of depressingly awful 'academic' articles I've had to edit was attempting to survey the interaction of popular culture with the realm of international affairs. It was, as usual, a ragbag of disparate points, with no overarching structure or original analysis.

It is an habitual problem with these articles that the authors are - quite literally - 'cutting & pasting' long extracts from native English sources, with little or no real grasp of their meaning. Hence, for example, the doltish duo responsible for this latest abomination note the use of the derogatory term 'South Park conservatives' by journalists such as Andrew Sullivan (an Oxford lao tongxue of mine, who was once kind enough to give me a plug on his blog on The Atlantic), but fail to explain what the connotations of this expression are, or what kind of people it is applied to (in their original text, before I clarified it, they appeared to suggest that this was a comment on the show's creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone).

Better yet, they assert that the fact that accidents and disasters in the show are usually Cartman's fault somehow establishes an argument that the theory of global warming is bogus. Come again?

The humour in South Park is so densely layered, so profuse in its cultural references, and so scattergun in its targets that it is scarcely susceptible to analysis at all. Matt and Trey boast of being "equal opportunity offenders" who deliberately avoid adopting straightforward or consistent political atttitudes in their humour: they ridicule anyone and anything; they make jokes just because they're funny, not because of their content or implicit viewpoint. I know that - since I am not an American, not living in America, not immersed full-time in American news and media and popular culture - at least 50% of their jokes go right over my head. But at least I'm usually vaguely aware that I'm missing something. Chinese professors attempting to dissect the show apparently don't have this consciousness of their limitations, this humility.

A brief bit of online research reveals - unsurprisingly - that most of this passage on South Park (and the entirety of a lengthy section on the villainy of Lord Voldemort as a parable of fascism and international terrorism) was lifted word-for-word...... from Wikipedia!! (But the extracts were selected so ineptly as to remove all the crucial linking or introductory sentences which provided the necessary context for any of it to be readily comprehensible or logically relevant to the arguments supposedly being made.)

I find this kind of work often reduces me to tears. And it's not just laughter.

Bon mot for the week

"The obscure we see eventually. The completely apparent takes a little longer."

Edward R. Murrow  (1908-1965)

Particularly appropriate for this month's film trivia challenge??

Film Quiz - taglines

More fun-and-games for my end-of-the-month 'Film List' - this time, a selection of memorable (or not?) advertising slogans.  Can you spot which films they were plugging?

I'll post the answers next week.

1)  "If he's crazy, what does that make you?"

2)  "They're young, they're in love, and they kill people."

3)  "The strangest story ever conceived by man."

4)  "One man's struggle to take it easy."

5)  "Nothing on Earth could come between them."

6)  "Some called him a hero. Others called him a heel."

7)  "It knows what scares you."

8)  "Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water..."

9)  "Only one man can make the difference."

10)  "Mighty miracle show of 1,000 delights!"

11)  "The most dangerous combination since nitro and glycerine."

12)  "Never give a saga an even break!"

13)  "I don't smile for pictures."

14)  "A new breed of hero."

15)  "The story of a man who was too proud to run."

16)  "The next war will not be fought - it will be played."

17)  "He loved the American Dream - with a vengeance."

18)  "Bombed out in space with a spaced-out bomb!"

19)  "He chopped down the family tree."

20)  "If you don't remember the '60s, don't worry - neither can they."

And here's a reminder of what they sound like. It's not "The Voice", Don LaFontaine, who created this style, and these clichés, but died a few years ago.  It's Hal Douglas, still going strong, and continuing Don's legacy.

Answers now posted here.

A man has his price

The other day a friend referred a work prospect to me, a lengthy stint of voice recording.

It seems they were offering only a flat fee of 1,000 rmb. This wasn't really much of a fee, since it seemed the script was going to be rather hefty - probably the narration for a lengthy film documentary (or perhaps a series of 1-hour TV pieces). Solo recording usually pays 600 per hour, even for bog-standard work for the academic publishers; sometimes you can get 700 or 800; rather more for anything vaguely 'corporate' (or, ahem, professional). And this sounded as though it was going to take a minimum of 4 to 5 hours; perhaps substantially more, if it did have to be sync'ed to film.

But, you know, times are hard; I'm pretty desperate for cash right now. The guy giving me the introduction thought they were probably being cagey in their initial offer on the fee and might bump it up a bit. I thought I might give it a go for 2,000 - even though there was a distinct chance I'd be stuck in the studio for 8 or 10 hours, and it wouldn't seem like very good recompense at all.

Further problem: it seemed it was probably going to be some sort of Tibetan propaganda piece. I could just imagine:  "See how happy the peasants are! See how spontaneously they launch into their quaint traditional dancing to express their happiness! See how proudly they fly the Chinese flag from their rooftops!"

My friend pressed me for a firm quote that might enable him to close a deal, wondered if I'd accept 1,500 or 2,000 as a flat fee, regardless of hours required. I told him: "I'd rather quote an hourly rate of 500 rmb.  Or, if it's a propaganda piece, 10,000 rmb per hour."

Haiku for the week

All work and no pay
Anxious days counting pennies
Month's end far away...

Yes, it's been a difficult time these last few weeks. I have, in fact, been extremely busy since I got back from Malaysia at the start of the month, but... a lot of it has been running around trying to set up new jobs; a process which can be hugely time-consuming, and for which, of course, one does not get paid. The one new regular teaching gig I have already started is at a university, so... well, I'll be grateful (and not a little surprised) if I get paid at all. It's quite likely I'll terminate the engagement in a righteous huff before long. It seems their payment system involves paying mid-month, a month in arrears - so they'll give me two weeks' pay after I've done six weeks of classes. Hmm, that's rather a long time to work on trust for a Chinese university! The other stuff I've been doing has all been writing or editing - about 8 or 10k in total, but... I haven't been paid for any of it yet. And when/if I do finally get paid, most of it's going to go into a bank account. And that doesn't feel like being paid at all. It's unreasonably hard to check whether payments have been made (the Bank of China still doesn't seem to have a decent e-banking service; not in English, anyway). And I try to leave that account untouched, as an 'emergency reserve'; I prefer to try to get by on cash-in-hand.

And that works out just fine, most of the time. This month, however, nobody's been paying me in cash. And I've had an unusually large number of 'phantom jobs' that were offered to me and then evaporated: reviewing the English subtitles on a documentary about migrant workers, writing the bid for Beijing to become a World Design Capital (I kid you not - that's worth a post or three all of its own!!), transcribing the dialogue from a documentary about Western supermodels (nice), narrating a film about Tibetan culture...  There might have been another 8 or 10k in that lot. And then, well, regular recording work has been thin on the ground; and the two gigs I did have lined up in the past week - last Friday's was gallingly cancelled/given to someone else (scheduling screw-up!), and this Monday's was postponed a week or so.

I thought I'd done pretty well to get through three weeks on less than 3,000 rmb. I didn't think I was going to have to make it last all the way to the end of the month. But it seems I am. And it's not going to last. In fact, a couple of minor alcoholic indulgences in the first half of this week have left me quite literally FLAT BROKE.

It's going to be a bread-and-water weekend, unless I dip into the money under the mattress....

A conundrum

If someone suggests you come to a meeting at 9.30am out by the airport, and you accept.... who is the bigger fool?

[The meeting in question was accepted on my behalf by a partner; but I was arguably a fool as well to go along with it. I did at least express my reservations. Well, I believe my exact words were: "You've got to be kidding me! How on earth are we supposed to get all the way out there that early? We'll have to leave at 7 o'clock!! And the traffic will be a nightmare."  Call me Cassandra.]

A vision of Hell

Beijing in the morning rush hour.

I do from time to time have to get to early work appointments - but not usually very early, and not usually in the CBD. It's four years now since I last had a job that required a regular early-morning commute.  I reflect that whenever I have had such a job in Beijing, I have become homicidal/suicidal within a month or so.

And this, four, five, six, seven years ago.  Things are so much worse now.

I had been blissfully unaware of just how much worse.

The subway lines - between 8am and 9am - are jam-packed.  We don't yet have liveried attendants pushing people into the trains as in Tokyo, but we do occasionally get enterprising - impatient - punters trying to take on such a role themselves.  Even Line 10, which is relatively short and has rather limited connections to the rest of the network, nevertheless, because it serves the CBD, is - in the eastbound direction - absolutely heaving.  The line 10/Line 5 interchange is so overcrowded - and the connection between the two lines so poorly designed - that the station staff, in order to ease congestion by opening up separate entry and exit points for the Line 5 platform, have to disable the ticket barriers so that transferring passengers can, in effect, leave the station and come back in again. It is utterly daft. And a woeful indictment of the massive underestimate of the number of users the city's subway planners have evidently been guilty of.  Yesterday, at around 8.25am, people were queueing twenty or thirty deep to try to get on to an eastbound Line 10 train, and they wouldn't get to the front of the line and be able to board until two or three trains had come through. I very nearly gave up and left the station - to get a gulp of fresh air.

When I did go above ground - which I did twice, at Dongzhimen at around 8am, and at Sanyuan Qiao at about 8.40am (I was trying to get to a meeting out near the airport) - I found eastbound traffic at a virtual standstill and NO CABS FREE.

So, I began yesterday by spending nearly two-and-a-half hours trying - and failing - to get to a business meeting, fully two thirds of that below ground, being compressed by a smelly mob.  I did not, in fact, manage to get more than a few miles from my home in all that time.  The airport, a tantalising fifteen or so more miles away, might as well have been in another country.

As is the invariable way of the world, I finally located an available cab just as I'd given up and started to head home. By that point, I was probably going to have been at least half an hour late; with heavy traffic on the Airport Expressway, maybe an hour or more. And it was going to be a completely bloody pointless meeting, anyway.

Beijing, ah, Beijing - Beijing is a city in crisis. Its transport infrastructure has completely melted down. The roads are so congested that the CBD - and, as often as not, pretty much the whole east side of town, and the airport too - is effectively inaccessible during the working week (other than via the oppressively overcrowded and not terribly efficient or comprehensive subway network). The city is ceasing to function. And I don't think anyone's got a clue what to do about it.

An incredible journey

New blog-friend and commenter Cedra Wood is a talented painter. She's very excited about having an opportunity to go on an amazing field trip to Australia this summer with some fellow New Mexico artists - but she could use a little help with the travel expenses.  Please check out the great video about her work below - and follow this link to her Kickstarter appeal if you'd like to contribute something.  You can find more examples of her work on her blog, Lights All Askew In The Heavens.

Salt of the Earth

There's been panic buying of sea salt in China these past few days - in the belief that the iodine in it is some kind of magic talisman against the risk of radiation sickness or cancers from possible Fukushima fallout.

I didn't really need to buy anything myself, but I thought I'd look in at my usual supermarket, just to see how crazy things were getting. Indeed, two whole aisles had been given over to varieties of salt products, and there was a mighty throng around them, snatching up the last few remaining bags.

One old granny was hovering diffidently - or perhaps with amused indifference - at the edge of the crowd.  A younger woman noticed her, asked if she could help grab a bag of salt for her.  The old lady replied, "I think I'm all right, thank you. I've still got 10 kilograms of the stuff I bought during SARS."

[Me - I'm working on a home chemistry kit to extract the iodine, so you can ward off the thyroid cancer without fatally overdosing on salt. My next million dollar idea... if only I can get it to market quickly enough.]

Bon mot for the week

"Chaos is order to which you do not have the key."

Robert Derr - who appears to be a sculptor

Equanimity (?)

It's been a rather stupidly busy week - mostly unpaid, but hectic - of fixing up appointments and then having them shifted all over the place, doing 'demo classes', attending pitch meetings... and, yesterday, enduring a job interview.

One of the most important job interviews in my life.  Possibly the most important - in that it is a very good job, and (hopefully) will provide a steady and reasonably lucrative (but, above all, steady) income... at a time in my life that has come to seem to me particularly precarious... when, indeed, I have seriously questioned whether my position in China is any longer tenable.  I've had two-and-a-half very lean years since the world economy collapsed.  A steady job now - especially a job that's only 'half-time', but for a rather prestigious employer - could prove to be a life-saver.

This is one of only a handful of 'serious' job interviews I've ever attended in my life, and only the second in China.  (I was actually successful in that previous one; but the job imploded within 6 months.)

I should, by rights, be quite nervous about my prospects.  I should have been keyed up about attending the interview.  I should be obsessively reviewing the pros and cons of my performance.

But I'm not.  I don't think I've ever felt so blissfully indifferent about something important (not without the benefit of powerful painkilling drugs, anyway).  I don't think I'm quite ready to make the step up to being a bodhisattva.  But I've experienced something this week that gives me an insulating sense of perspective, something that reminds me that a job isn't that important at all.

Ah, they said 'NO'. Or rather, 'NON' - with a Gaullist dismissive hauteur. I am trying very hard to be disappointed, and even a little pissed off - but I just don't have the emotional resources at the moment. Instead, I shrug and sigh and think... Kismet... plenty more fish.... their loss. I am a duck's back.

Recently, on The Barstool...

The stultifying 'suspension of normal life' we endure for a month around the turn of the Chinese lunar New Year, followed by a 10-day break in Malaysia, has meant that I haven't done one of my intermittent roundups of recent highlights from my dark side 'drinking blog' in quite a while - but perhaps there hasn't been that much of note happening over there lately.

One of the posts I most enjoyed doing was this disparate assortment of videos of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, culminating in a remarkable cover version by American 'rockgrass' band Hayseed Dixie.

Other music offerings have been Tom Waits's marvellous love song Hold On and - for St Patrick's Day yesterday - The Pogues' riotous singalong Sally MacLennane. [And, speaking of P-Day, I just indulged in an epic curmudge against my younger "countrymen"...]

On a further St Patrick's Day note, I posted my favourite Father Jack moment (you might as well just follow this YouTube link, since embedding of Father Ted clips is comprehensively prohibited).

I've also issued a call-to-revolution against the ridiculous level of pricing we now suffer in Beijing's bars (a call thus far largely unanswered - you know how that goes in China!).

And a run of posts about my Malaysian jaunt prompted me to collect my various more exotic drinking experiences (non-UK, non-USA, non-China) under a new tag, Around the world.

Lots of entertainment for you there.

The weekly haiku

One day more than all,

More than birthdays or death days,

Connects to the past.

St Patrick's Day is becoming a dangerous time.  It holds too many great memories from the distant past for me, too many rather glum or unsatisfying ones from more recent times. Nostalgia jumps out and beats me with a great big stick.

Oirish llamas!!

Well, who would have thought it? I only tried Googling "St Patrick's Day llamas" in a moment of idle jest, scarcely imagining that I'd turn up this....

... and this....

... and this...

However, the most intriguing discovery from this half-hour wasted on the Net this morning (access from China is SLOW at the moment) was that there are at least 10 people called Patrick Llamas in Southern California. Not surprising, really, just intriguing.

[PS   I just posted a little musical treat for Paddy's Day over on The Barstool.]

It depends what you mean by...

This past week or so, I've been going through quite a little whirl of job applications, interviews, negotiations.... 
frustrations.... disappointments.

It's become a bit of a spring ritual for me: I emerge from my hibernation of 'no work from December till March', realise that I'm not going to have any work for the rest of the year unless I do something about it, and start desperately cruising around all the 'situations vacant' online bulletin boards until..... after a month or so, I remember why full-time employment and I are destined never to enjoy a long-term relationship.... but by then, usually, with a bit of luck, a raft of part-time positions have materialised out of the ether to keep me vaguely solvent until the end of the year.

During this annual frenzy of pretending to try and find a regular job, it's the repeated collisions with vapid HR-speak that most vex me.

I get particularly irritated with companies who boast that their rates of pay are 'competitive'.

That word can be interpreted with widely differing nuances.

I'd like to think it might mean: "We're keen to hire the best people, so we pay a little bit more than most of our competitors."  ('Competitive' in the sense of wanting to win.)

More realistically, you might suppose, it would usually mean: "We pay about the same as everyone else; no more, no less."  ('Competitive' in the sense of not wanting to be out-competed by everyone else; not really 'competitiveness' at all, more a sort of de facto cabal.)

And, sometimes, it seems to mean: "We pay the 'industry minimum'. Well, yes, we pay less than everyone else; but it's not that much less that you'd dismiss us out of hand. We like to think we're still just about 'in competition'."  ('Competitive'.... in a bottom-feeders do OK for themselves way.)

I've recently been in contact with a company whose pay scales are 'Type 3' competitive.... and I'm in no hurry to get back to them. In fact, I'm tempted to dismiss them out of hand. 10% less than anyone else's minimum rate? Really?? You dare to call that 'competitive'??