Posts from October 2006
October 29, 2006
It tastes like chicken!
The Cantonese eat everything. Literally. Walk through a market in Guang Zhou and you will begin to understand the variety of animals they eat.
If you are wondering what cat or rat or bat or some other not so savory creature might taste like, you might be interested in this article by Joe Staton at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard.
"Why do most cooked, exotic meats taste like cooked Gallus gallus, the domestic chicken?"
October 22, 2006
Go Wide young man
Andy Kessler wrote this interesting article on Recognizing That There Is No Difference Between A Media Company And A Technology Company.
Geez, I wish Chinese VCs would read this. I've been trying to sell them this for 10 years. I've had this same discussion over the years with telecom companies, record companies, internet companies, TV companies, and have mostly gotten a lot of glazed looks.
October 19, 2006
Weather nose
I can tell exactly what the weather is like every morning in Beijing, subconciously even before I'm awake.
When it's about time to wake up my nose and eyes will tell me what's going on outside by either of three symtoms:
1) nose congested, with slight sore throat, eyes OK
2) nose dripping, snot in throat, eyes scratchy
3) wake up sneezing repeatedly, feels like i got hit in the nose by a basketball, eyes watering.
If symptom 1, I will open my eyes, look out the window and see a hazy transparent sky, with white fuzz along the horizon. This is a standard "decent" day, happens maybe once or twice a week.
If symptom 2, I will open my eyes, look out the window and see a cloudy no sky foggy day (remember though, it's not fog). This is the standard "polluted" work day, happens three or four times a week.
If symptom 3, I will open my eyes, look out the window and see nothing much. It almost seems as if it's about to snow. I can barely see the trees in the park 300m away, and I'm afraid to go out because it feels like nuclear winter. This is the "bad pollution" say, happens once a week.
October 12, 2006
A jog in the park
It was a nice day and we decided that we should take a jog, so I called my friend James, visiting from Taipei, to join us. I didn't bother telling Jason that James used to be on the Olympic track team years ago, used to be a cop, and had legs up to our elbows. When James gets out of the taxi in his tight running gear and cool sunglasses and bulging muscles, Jason looks at me and says "JFC, you didn't tell me you were inviting an Olympian!"
We circled the perimeter of Chaoyang Park which was probably 5 miles, and Jason made the gallant effort to keep pace. James was sort of shuffling along so he'd have someone to run with. I eventually dropped back about 100 meters happy to have been able to make the loop without dropping dead.
Now I know that if I'm out in the woods and someone with a chainsaw is chasing me trying to kill me, I can at least run 5 miles without looking back.
October 08, 2006
Beijing Air
Dirt and smog, cough cough
Burning eyes, sore throat, nose hurts
How can people live?
October 06, 2006
Disseminating culture
Jason and I spent the afternoon looking for art in the 798 Factory District, which is now the upscale trendy art district of Beijing that used to be a huge electronics factory. Aunt Liu came with us and told us that 35 years ago she spent 3 months working there as a student under a mandatory work/study program assembling radios. The area is very cool, with lots of space, and about the size of a college campus.
I have a sort of jaded ambivalence towards commercialized art, though I admire and repect the individuals making their creations, I'm put off by the people who package and sell it, and the hanger ons who want to be arty, but can't. I don't know how this buried animosity occured since a lot of my college days were spent in the MFA studios with grad students and my friend Homare Ikeda. I even bicycled up to Maine to hang out for a few weeks with rising art stars at an invite only art retreat.
I think it has to do with the gallery/agent factor of the art business and the similarity to the music business.
It's like this: Agents are needed to get into a good gallery, and you need to get into a name gallery so people can say your art is "good." Once your art is "good" it can command a price, and the agents and gallery get the lion's share of the profits. As for the similarity to the music business, you can have a young hit songwriter, but unless he gets to the right agent, which signs him to the right publisher, the song can't get to a name artist. Then it needs to get on a hit album so people can hear it and say the song "good." Once the song is "good" it gets royalties which the publisher and agent take the lion's share of.
While I was thinking about all this, Jason says, "Hey I know that guy." (Jason's mom by the way is a big time art dealer in NY) We walk over and meet Rob, who's made a killing shipping modern Chinese art to galleries in NY and turning a huge profit. We talk for a while, and I say "So you're essentially a venture capitalist for artists, right?" The undertone of this statement is: You invest in someone, and take all the profits, right?
Rob smiles a big art dealer smile and says, "No, I prefer to think that I'm disseminating culture to the rest of the world."
Yeah right.
October 05, 2006
Busted!
"Yes, that's right, I said take off your pants young man!"
October 02, 2006
Making sense of English
I was reading CNN.com which is like my daily newspaper update, and saw this ad on the side. It didn't make sense to me.
"In 10 years time most of the world's car will be manufactured in China."
I am assuming they mean "world's cars," but then I started thinking, hey, this is a huge media organization, and they probably don't make mistakes like this. So maybe they are talking about a collective car owned by the entire world - the world's car - sort of like a college car owned by a bunch of roommates.
If that's the case, can I borrow it on Thursday?
October 01, 2006
Old guys on a roof
Last night I went over to Ritan Park to attend a friend of a friend's birthday gathering. It was a really relaxed evening, offering a nice rooftop view of the trees in the park, and a great start to the upcoming holidays.
The host loved to play guitar, so there was some picking going on, and it felt like we were all in college again, except with wives and kids and mortgages and job pressures and life stress and obligations, etc., but all that was forgotten for a while while we sipped wine, talked, and listened to music. It turned out that all the guys there were 41. That rarely happens, where a group of people get together and are all the same age. I'm usually the oldest in a crowd as I tend to hang out with younger musicians, and my staff are all much younger. But last night it was just a bunch of old guys on a roof in a park in Beijing.
Afterwards Tif suggested some punk music over at D-22, which is way across town in student-ville, so we picked up road brews, spent 30 minutes in a cab and caught the last set of an all girls band called Hang On The Box doing some weird stuff. The lead singer was done up in thigh high baby doll stockings, a froofroo puffy miniskirt, and yelped in a semi-erotic animalistic way which was enthralling if not a bit unsettling. The drummer looked like a condensed version of the Duke's Chinese girlfriend, Honey, in Doonesbury, and she yelped a lot too, while she banged. The bassist got overlooked due to the singer's thigh high stockings, and the banging, but I think she yelped a bit too.
Evan and Sahil were bummed since there were no women to approach, and I pointed out that young female indie college rockers were also women, but they were more interested in Suzie Wong style approachable women who will sleep with you even if you are old, so we got back in a cab, spent another 30 min back to the east side of town so they could get some phone numbers at Suzie's.
Luckily this place is across the street from my apartment, so after a beer and a couple of boring laps around the bar, I left the two bachelors in bachelor land, and went to bed.
I've never figured out whether it's pronounced "Moe's (like owned by one of three stooges) or Moss (like that guy out of Bonanza), but the one down the hill from me is open until 2am most days, which means that if I get out of the club early enough, I can catch the best burger in town, the muo si la bao or the Spicy Mos Burger. They have lots of jalapenos and 
