Posts Tagged ‘Blogs’

(images courtesy: Matt Logue, TrendHunter)

I don’t consider myself much of a photographer, though I do have a good eye for the kinds of stuff I like and am not bashful about trumpeting other shooters’ consummate talents.

Lately, I’ve been spending long evenings in front of the laptop clicking through slideshow upon slideshow from the various collections of several pro- and amateur snappers I’ve been fanning over the course of several weeks.

Today’s post is more of a fanboy thing. So I promise not to be slinging any controversial ideas or making any bombastic statements about China, North Korea, Bam Bam, or the state of race relations in the Golden City of Prague. Just some good old-fashioned (and not so old-fashioned) art, a dollop of good fun, and a lineup of very gifted craftsmen and women who really know what they’re doing when they pick up a camera.

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(Um…right…a nice exaggeration?)

Yep. I was pondering this very thought while straining my muscles at the gym this morning (no hot chicks present, alas): we’ve somehow forgotten what bothered us at this time last year.

But why? Didn’t it really mean something last year? All the lofty pronouncements. All the negative fallout from New Year’s oh-nine. All the epithets cast our way. All your violent threats. Your absurd allegations and accusations. Your gloom and doom predictions of what would befall the ones accused of gross criminal behavior and negligence. The fire and brimstone poop storm which would be the due of those with the such gall to unleash Christmas chaos onto the planet. The waves (and waves and waves, yikes!) of poisonous vitriol. The month-old abandoned Sarajevo grocery store-like putrescence. The knock-knock-knockin’ at the fortress door shouting accusations of the most heinous “atrocities” known to man, saddling them with the most vile and cunning intentions.

What?

What?

What?

Well, summer 2010 is in full bloom. All jiggly and busty and delicious and sexual. So does anyone even remember how bad it was? Nope. Does anyone even remember what happened more than a year ago? Nuh-uh.

They just don’t.

Does anyone remember this?

(you definitely don’t want to send this to mom)

Right. I didn’t you would…

A Yogi-ism would apply here: It’s déjà-vu all over again.

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Yesterday, I wrote about the Ten Things I Absolutely Dig About Czechs. Today I thought I’d bring you the ten things I just can’t stand about Prague’s locals, as a way of rounding out the picture.

(the Czech Republic’s finest?)

1) Czechs love to blindly adhere to rules, thereby avoiding creative solutions: And creative solutions, incidentally, don’t necessarily involve illegal maneuvering or otherwise breaking the law, my dear local friends. Creative solutions are all about looking for angles where none seem to exist. About finding cracks in the wall where there are “sleeping sentries,” where you can force your way – either by sheer wit, charm, or cleverness — into the gilded fortress. In a nation where such tremendous fear permeates the whole society, as in the Czech Republic, rules serve to keep its people firmly in line and in a perpetual state of stunned unquestioning servitude. That the locals don’t actively seek out creative solutions to their otherwise very soluble problems is indicative of a societal tendency to blindly follow rules. Sorry, but that makes you Germans, dear Czechs. And following the rules never got anyone anywhere…look what happened to the Germans. ;-)

2) Your personal space will be constantly violated in Prague’s public domain: Try walking down a busy Prague street and observe how (you won’t have to, since it will be up in your face constantly) hardly anyone’s gives you any quarter. You can’t build up a good head or steam as you walk along a cobbled sidewalk because people (of all ages!) will constantly cut you off as they go about their business, flying out of building or shop exits with zero consideration for who might be already prancing along their merry way, or suddenly stopping on a dime to check their cellphone display or look at something without considering who might be following in their wake. It belies a degree of selfishness, if you ask me, and I admit that I bump into people intentionally to prove my point. I let my momentum smack right into them, and I wait for the blows to fall, but they never do. ;-)

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(The Astonishing ADM, this time with long locks, standing sentinel on Prague’s Charles Bridge on the way to Lesser Town – damn, I’m so money!)

There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see and sees it, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more. He is constantly comparing what he sees to what he wants, so he sees with his mind, and maybe even with his heart, or tries to. If his peripheral vision gets diminished – so that he quite literally sometimes can’t see what’s coming at him from the suburbs of the place he looks at – his struggle to adjust to the country he looks at to the country he has inside him at least keeps him looking. It sometimes blurs, and sometimes sharpens, his eye. My head was filled with pictures of Paris, mostly black and white, and I wanted to be in them.

– from Paris to the Moon, by Adam Gopnik

Now that I’ve been videoblogging regularly once again over at ADMTV (hooray end to annoying group creativity!), I’ve picked up several new viewers along the way. Thank you to you all.

As my public profile has received a welcome punch-up over this past month from my irreverent ways, I’ve noticed a corresponding spike in my incoming email as people send me their questions, curious about my geographical location, my professional background, my sex life (none of your business, however!), my daily rituals, and why I’ve chosen to make Prague my European foxhole.

(ADMTV on Vimeo.com)

So I thought I’d address ten of the most common queries I’ve been fielding of late in the form of a “pro/con” list.

This way, I’ll hopefully manage to cover some of the more notable items I’ve been asked recently and perhaps in so doing, you’ll learn a thing or two about the lovely Golden Burg (aka, Prague). It might even convince you come on over to visit me one of these days?Except one isolated case for reasons unrelated to my guiding expertise, I haven’t had a guest here yet who didn’t enjoy my hospitality. So please come for a visit!

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Steve Weiss of Zacuto USA is the mother of all mensches! Of course, Weiss is the main man from here and here, where you’ll learn more about filmmaking, cinematography, filmmaking trends, and good wine from the twin shows of Filmfellas and [ critics ] than you will from weeks of book reading (given how titles are dated from just about the moment they go to print).

No, but seriously, Steve is a truly colossal dude.

Several months ago he Express UPSed (!!!) me a comp hardcover copy of journeyman filmmaker Tom Reilly’s memoir-cum-tell all, The Big Picture: Filmmaking Lessons from A Life On the Set, a work detailing veteran Tom Reilly’s entire life experience making flicker pictures alongside industry gods like Woody Allen as part of practically every on-set job that exists: First AD, Second AD, line producer, production assistant, camera operator, producer, director. In short, if a role exists for something taking place on a film set, chances are Tom Reilly’s played it at some point during his storied career.

Expect to sail through this title from start to finish as it’s not written in the traditional (read: boring) “how-to” style.

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(yay! imported Chinese fans for a recent North Korea soccer friendly – and I kid you not!)

 
(our glorious football squad, presently pitying the world’s “other” soccer teams in Johannesburg)

Alright, so we lost our first Group G match yesterday, 2-1 against the mighty single-named Brazilians and their wonderful piece of Kaka. Hey, this is the group of death, kids, so can you even blame us for taking a few shots in the gauntlet?

Yet we showed considerable pluck throughout the 90 minutes. We battled like ancient Koryo warriors. We galloped up and down the pitch like the horsebacked drawers and water and hewers of wood, just like our holy ancestors did in Ancient Koryo, before we were defiled by foreigners. During the game we were duly inspired by the uplifting dreams of the delicious white rice and nutritious meat we might eat – if our Dear Leader considers us worthy enough of the privilege — back in our glorious socialist motherland at the foot of our Great Leader’s statue on Mansu Hill upon our return to the DPRK from this roiling capitalist cesspool, the inheritor to the imperialist apartheid state of South Africa.

(glorious Kim Il-sung pointing at incoming turds over on Mansu Hill)

Here’s what our brilliant, gifted, 100% Korean with-nothing-else-added coach, Kim Jong-hun said about the results of the Brazilian tussle:

The fact that [our] players scored a goal against a strong team like Brazil gives me a lot of pleasure. We didn’t win but we gained valuable experience. We’re going to be more confident, we want to win our remaining games and get through to the knockout stage. Throughout the match the players followed our gameplan and defended well. We were very well prepared and we got some good shots in on goal. I think we fought bravely and with a little bit of luck we could even have got a better result.

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(the Dear Leader demonstrating his most sultry, open-mouthed ingénue pose – are you turned on?)

The time is soon upon us when Bam Bam will pass onto the next world. Yes, that “other” supernatural Paradise, but this one high in the sky, and not his beloved North Korean “Paradise On Earth.”

His possessions will be inherited by the North Korean state for posterity and rumors will eventually fly about the true nature and secret life of the leader of one of the most cloistered, inward-looking punchy statelets in the world. Speculation will brew as news of the Dear Leader’s private life becomes the sole obsession of Koreans of all stripes, on the net, on the news, and in the private conversations of bar- and cafe-frequenting Koreans, both north and south of the DMZ.

I got to thinking about the more popular items in the Dear Leader’s personal collection which scholars may wish to study and analyze for clues as to Kim’s personality. Items which will provide insight into the North Korean despot’s foibles, mannerisms, and affect, providing hints and clues about his leadership style or manner of governance. Items we’ll be writing about in books about the Dear Leader’s life in due time, the sorts of doodads and other tschotschkes which’ll fill the pages of books well into the next decade.

So which sorts of items, exactly?

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At the Foxhole, Keeping “Careful Watch”
Approximately 15h CET
If you give me anything, give me a deadline and my publikum…

(the German marquee poster – note the gore and blood which is absent from the US version)

 
(a much more saccharine US version of the same poster)

Don’t ask me to tell you the news, kids – you likely already know there have been ten tragic deaths at the Foxconn component assembly facility in Shenzhen to date, with no apparent signs of stopping. A quorum of innocent lives snuffed out, just like that.

Like those harrowing scenes in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, young people seem to be defenestrating themselves – a phenomenon more suited to Czechs, mind you – or committing other forms of suicide to call attention to the devastating situation which is going inside the “city within a city” down in the former Special Economic Zone.

So what in sheer blazes is going on here? Is someone threatening these kids with death? Is there something wrong with the food in the canteen? Can the pulsing desire to want to earn money for one’s family overtake basic personal safety concerns?

Someone recently sent me a transcript of a suicide note that seems to be making the rounds of the Chinese blogosphere (not the Chinglosphere!) which pretty much tells this entire story in a nutshell. I have no idea where they got it from, but I’m going to continue investigating its source – with an attempt to track down the original Chinese – and maybe together we can figure something out here.

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Kai Pan, a member of the always hot ‘n spicy china/divide, assembled a nice scribble up the other day about my initial post decrying the weed-like spawning of “cat blogs” in the Chinglosphere (aka, the English language Chinese blogosphere, a godly genius phrase coined by brat-pack author Raz Elmaleh of the Holy Sliver (aka Israel) ).

In it, I devised a number of potential remedies for how to cut down on the endless array of essentially dead ringer China blogs: offering carbon-copy fast-food-like fare as they collectively take pot shots at almost the very same China news dish.

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(North Korean Embassy, Prague, Czech Republic – naw, just kidding, but almost got you there!)

On the Road in Germany, Admiring Fritz and the Mighty-Might of the World’s 4th-Largest Economy
Dreaming of the 1920s When Things Were More Normal In These Parts
13:30 CET
Grooving to Stevie Wonder on Michael Ruetten’s Soul Searching

Lions and tigers and bears and…North Koreans in Prague?! Who ‘dat?

Yeah, you read that correctly. Pyongyang maintains a robust diplomatic presence here in the Sketch Czech Republic, a legacy of its previous snuggle bunny relationship with the former Czechoslovakia. A partnership that stretches back decades, long before such cute little annoyances like 1989’s Vel Rev (aka “The Velvet Revolution”).

Ties between the DPRK and today’s Sketch, oops, Czech Republic remain, much to the patchouli-daubed showerless protesting crowd’s chagrin, alive and well thankyouverymuch, chugging headlong into the 21st-century as the glorious Korean “Paradise on Earth” seeks to resurrect the DPRK’s old comradeships with its former Central European Cold War stalwarts. All this in advance of a proposed peninsular all-or-nuttin’ takeover, as per Bam Bam’s recent statements to the media.

Are you afraid yet?

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