Posts Tagged ‘beijing’

(Bam Bam clinks grape juice glasses with Chinese President Hu during their “secret” May meeting in the PRC)

It has lately been my opinion that political punditry is rarely best dispensed immediately following a monumental bilateral event. This is doubly true especially when trying to second-guess the inner-workings of the Asian political mind.

Given how contentious high-level Asian confabs often tend to be — resulting in fatal blows delivered weeks – often months – down the track, Asian punditry and political analysis – very much like revenge – is best served stone cold. The optimal time to re-examine these events is when they can no longer be heard in the echo chamber.

In this case, I’m referring to the much-heralded meeting between Chinese President Hu Jintao and North Korean supremo Kim “Bam Bam” Jong-il (pictured above), a tête-a-tête which took place during the Dear Leader’s hasty swing through the PRC aboard his custom-designed bulletproof locomotive. Billed as Kim’s “secret trip,” the North Korean dictator’s sudden arrival in China was likely a sloppy combination of a previously scheduled bilateral affair and the unexpected necessity of an 11th-hour rush job, brought about by the untimely sinking of the South Korean navy corvette, Cheonan, that lead to 46 South Korean sea deaths.

For the purposes of today’s post, let’s avoid an assignation of blame for the ship’s mysterious sinking. Given how the UN has already announced the results of its crack team’s investigative report on the incident, blaming the DPRK, it’s rather pointless, don’t you think> With the blame placed firmly at Kim’s feet, coupled with how, quite naturally and expectedly, the UN, South Korea, and their various allies have joined the loud chorus of anti-DPRK boos, while China – ever the wily Middle Kingdom, and crafty Middle Broke – hovers safely at the sidelines in its purgatory-like state of falling neither here nor there when it comes to vilifying Kim, I question the point in adding my voice to the ruckus. I’m sure you feel the same way.

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(Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag, by the late James Brown)

At Foxhole Number 2, Staring At the Marble Wall
Around 13h-ish (I Should Have Checked)
Drinking Coffee and Channeling My Inner Bloggitude

Alright kids, Funtime Friday today at ADM.com. Time to have a little fun as the weekend quickly approaches.

So I’ve been spitballing lately: what are the Top Ten things Kro Bauer might get his hands dirty with now that he’s looking for a brand new gig? I suppose this is going to be another one of those “summary” posts, concatenating the plethora of great ideas I’d read at the various posts sprouting up since The Kro’s Nest affair shattered the Chinese blogging airwaves a week ago.

And while this may seem like a stab at ADM humor, my tongue set so deeply dans la bouche that I just might gag on it, you’ll instantly notice there’s a bit of method to my madness.

Hey Kro – if you’re reading this – let me know what you think!

(UPDATE: For those of you who have no idea who Kro Bauer is, you’ll want to bone up here first).

So without further ado…and not necessarily in any kind of order.

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Thanks again to the good folks at Chinese indie film distributor dGenerate Films, I finally had the chance to catch Liu Jiayin’s (pictured above, far left) cute “no-budget” flick Oxhide this past weekend.

Sipping on several tall Gambrinuses, I was amazed at how such a puny little film succeeded in making its splash on the festival circuit, given how Oxhide’s plot unfurls via a truly novel – and potentially unsettling — series of long static takes. Director Liu’s small DV cam doesn’t creep an inch from its fixed focal point, sequence by sequence, once we get settled in the scene. It’s a technique which normally blares “student film alert!” yet thanks to a combination of strong Czech beer and the tale’s emotional crescendos and swoons, I was pulled in mightily by the picture’s first quarter-hour.

Normally, I don’t appreciate this kind of artifice, though in Liu’s case – again, unsure whether it was due to the lingering effects of those brewskis I drank — I liked how Oxhide’s message crept up on me like that, drawing me in gradually. It made me admire director Liu’s clever use of her camera to mask the obvious budgetary shortfalls which would otherwise permit her to decorate her sets more lavishly and convincingly. Instead, whether we’re staring at a printer-adorned desktop or at a fixed position towards the family couch, for instance, the action takes place well away from the camera and we’re forced to listen intently for clues and cues. Liu’s long, sometimes twenty-minute, exposures draw us magnetically into Oxhide’s story by forcing us to rely – most unusually for a film – upon our ears rather than our eyes. It takes a while to get into, yet once your brain acclimatizes itself to the unchanging reality that her camera will never track along with her characters – Liu (as Bei Bei), mother (Hui Lan), and father (played by Liu’s real parents) — you drop all annoyance and begin to enjoy the story. You sharpen your listening skills and imagine the things you might not be seeing behind camera rather intently.

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It was an audio sort of evening last night as I got up to listening to several archived podcasts from Beijing’s recent Bookworm International Literary Festival (BILF), an engaging event which took place earlier this month (thanks to Derek Sandhaus of Earnshaw Books for the tip!) at The Bookworm.

Jonathan Tel’s pod, recorded at the shop, stood out for me. He’s the author of that snazzy cover you see hanging in the image above, a unique anthology of “semi-fictional” (i.e. not altogether false) short stories that has garnered quite a bit of play since the collection’s publication last summer (full disclosure: I haven’t read the book yet, so I’m not going to even comment on the content until I do so).

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Okay, so now that we’ve got that windbag blog title out of the way (how did I do, folks?), let’s get down to the brass tacks of the matter: the iconic and often-imitated-rarely-duplicated cinematographic marvel which was once Zhang Yimou’s Hero/Ying xiong, the 2004 swashbuckling flicker picture that dazzled and titillated, yet somehow didn’t intellectually connect.

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I enjoy ziboy’s occasional photo updates. Here’s today’s series of shots, what life’s like at a Beijing hospital.