Drinking with the Manchurian Hairdressers

In Shanghai I stayed with my friend Tim, who has got to be the perfect host. However, there was a price to be paid for his hospitality, he warned me. "We have to go drinking with the barbershop guys."

I thought this seemed like a fine idea. I'd met the hairdressers last year, the staff of the barbershop where Tim gets his hair cut. Apparently they're always bugging him about when he's going to bring some of his American friends by. They are quite a colorful bunch, mohawked, streaked and dyed hair, fancy embroidered jeans and Renaissance-style shirts. All of them are from Harbin, in Manchuria, though the Boss (e.g., "Laoban") has lived in Shanghai since he was a kid.

I wasn't sure why the occasion had an element of dread for Tim, since he likes the guys a lot. Plus, we were only going about a half-block from Tim's apartment, to a restaurant across from the barbershop.

I started to get an idea when I saw the amount of beer involved. "Harbin" Brand, naturally.

There were five of them, and Tim and me, and we started with a case of large bottles - I don't know metric well enough to tell you how large, but they're big. Everything seemed to require a toast, and toasting is "Ganbei!" - meaning you have to drink it down.

Well, I'm a girl, right? I figured I had to be exempt from some of this.

I figured wrong.

"Lisa," Laoban would say. "Nide yanjingde yanse zhen piaoliang." - "Your eyes are such a beautiful color." Now, the Boss is probably a good 10 years younger than I am, a stocky guy with the sides of his head shaved and somewhat bloodshot eyes (he'd already been out drinking today, he informed us, and his head wasn't feeling very good, but such was the importance of this occasion that he made the sacrifice of drinking more. Much more). This did not stop him from being a real flirt. Laoban liked my eyes, told me I should wear bright colors more often and not so much black, and all the guys liked my standard Beijing accent. I told him that I was way too old for him. He insisted this was not the case.

Then, somehow I ended up with a new husband, the kid Tim had nicknamed "Mozart" because of his hairdo, which could certainly be described as baroque. Mozart looks like he's about 18, with delicate good looks and a high-pitched voice - if they were still casting men in the female Peking Opera roles, he'd probably be a prime candidate.

I can't remember quite how this happened, because I think we'd finished the first case of beer by this point. After that, it was never one more bottle, it was always two. Laoban insisted.

Then we had to sing. This is one situation where all those years of singing in a rock band pays off. I belted out a couple of verses of "Hang On Sloopy" (something I can manage regardless of degree of drunkeness). The guys were surprised and impressed. If you are going to find yourself in the role of performing dog, it helps to know the tricks.

But like Tim said, he wouldn't go along with the barbershop boys if it weren't in good fun and good spirits. The next day, I had two text messages from Mozart, addressed to "Beautiful Friend," asking how my day was going.

Beijing/Shanghai

Much has been written about the differences and rivalry between Beijing and Shanghai. In the past, I've always come down on the Beijing side. How not? The time I spent in Beijing in '79 had an inestimable impact on my life, even if it had its traumatic aspects. Besides, I didn't actually visit Shanghai until 1993, for the first Shanghai International Film Festival. At the time I was too jaw-agaped with the vast changes in China to even absorb much about the character of the city.

When I visited Shanghai again last year, I came away with a much more positive impression.Shanghai may be a chaotic mega-opolis, but it strikes me as more pedestrian-orientedthan Beijing - at least there are more neighborhoods that you can easily walk, especially along the Bund and the French Concession.

Shanghai people have a reputation in China as being, well, a little stuck-up and unfriendly. I didn't find this to be the case. For one thing, there are so many "New Shanghai People" - "WaiDi Ren" from outside of the city - that the character of Shanghainese has changeda great deal. You don't hear nearly as much Shanghai dialect as you once did,which used to be a way of excluding outsiders.

Northerners are considered more uncouth, but also more friendly and genuine. Why citizens of the cultural capital of China are regarded as somewhat uncivilized, I couldn't say. I will note that taxi drivers in Beijing are almost universally Northerners (many with near-impenetrable Dongbei accents - so "rrr" ladened that they would be prime participants for "International Talk Like A Pirate" Day). The shopgirls that work in places like Silk Alley and Hongqiao Market are almost all from the South. These are the kinds of shopping areas where you will get ripped off right and left if you aren't careful, end up with counterfeit bills, pay far too much for fake brands, even if you do speak Chinese and are therefore "a friend of China, so I give you the special Chinese price!". I ran into plenty of girls who gave me that speech. I also had some of the nicest encounters of my trip, chatting with some of these women, the ones who didn't try to rip me offor treat me like a cash machine on legs. One, another person born in the Year of the Boar, immediately tied a second red string around my wrist, just to make sure I had enough luck to get through the trials of my animal year. If you didn't know this, your animal year can be a very good year or a really bad year - there's a lot of energy and challenges you have to deal with, apparently, and it can go either way. I figure I need all the luck I can get.

Anyway, I always feels a little silly making blanket generalizations about millions of people, even if Chinese themselves tend to do it.

One thing I'm pretty sure of, however. Beijingers swear more than Shanghai people. My friend Tim, a long-time Shanghai resident, tells me that Shanghainese consider expressions like: "ta ma de!" pretty strong stuff. I'd always heard that "ta ma de!" (literally, "his mother!" but used like, "son of a bitch!" or "dammit!") was very mild and even used in mixed company. Certainly it's nothing compared to what I heard in a Beijing net bar the other day. This was one of the dumpier netbars I've ever been to, off Jiu Gulou Dajie - that's Old Drum Tower Street for you waiguoren, probably one of the most picturesque areas left in Beijing. This bar is down an alley, up three flights of stairs above some weird-ass department store selling cheap shoes. Dimly lit, painted beige and third-world green, sagging and dusty gold curtains, upholstered metal chairs with gaping holes in the seat, the only decoration occasional posters of warrior chicks in armored bikinis. A smoke-filled room with "no smoking" signs on the wall. Row after row of young Chinese guys played online games - maybe three women in the place, other than the workers, and one foreigner (me).

The gamers were a rowdy bunch. The guy next to me was particularly intense, with a friend coming over now and then to perch on the arm of my chair and offer advice on killing attacking demons. Everyone was cursing like crazy, shouts I could hear from the other side of the room. Stuff that Chinese friends had taught me and expressions right out of one of my favorite books, "Outrageous Chinese - Beijing Street Language." Stuff like: "Wo c**!" "Sha b*!" "Ma b*!" and, I believe,"Shou c** ni ma b*!" which is far too nasty for me to translate on a public forum.

The guy's little elf avatar must have really gotten nailed by one of those demons...

I found this whole scene incredibly entertaining. For one thing, how often do you get to have your spotty knowledge of Chinese obscenities confirmed? For another, I had used Chinese netbars as frequent settings in the novel I just finished, the one I submitted to the First Chapters contest at Gather.com. I got mostly positive responses from the opening chapter of my submission (that's all that has beenposted so far), but one complaint I had from a number of readers was the amount of profanity. I'd thought the language appropriate to the tone of the book and the narrator's voice, but apparently this really flips some peoples' switches.

Now I'm thinking, "Hah!" Because if a gamer next to me in a netbar says stuff like "Wo c**!" and all that talk about some guy's mother's hoo-hah every five seconds, I figure I pretty much got it right.

"Great Firewall, Oh How I Loathe You!"

I'm here in Beijing, in a net bar off Qianmen Dajie. Qianmen is the street that runs from the end of Tiananmen Square, on a straight southern line leading out of the old Imperial City. I hadn't been to this part of Beijing in a few years, and like everywhere in this construction-crazed mega-city, things have changed.

The entire length of Qianmen itself is covered by giant, two story high temporary walls with murals on them that say, more or less, "The world loves Beijing. The world will love Qianmen! Welcome Great Olympics!" or words to that effect. Qianmen, it appears, is getting its Olympic facelift, leaving the avenue for now no sidewalks, no storefronts, just walls blank save for the ubiquitous slogan.

I walked a ways down Qianmen until I saw a path between the scaffolds, leading into a narrow lane where hawkers set up adhoc stalls selling shoes, clothes, phonecards and toys. Following that a ways I found myself on Dazhalan Street, a traditional shopping area of teashops, restaurants and small department stores - the kind of place that looks more like the China in your imagination than the one that actually exists, for the most part.

This is one of the last remaining areas of hutongs, the old alleyways and courtyard homes traditional to Beijing, left in the city, and it's impossible to tell from the decaying condition of many of the medieval buildings whether the intention is to repair them or knock them down. Everywhere you look, some monolith skyscraper goes up, some of them taking up entire city blocks. Beijing is not a pedestrian friendly city; in spite of its monuments and historic sites, it has few public spaces for its residents to gather. Most everything of that sort is behind walls, through gates, and in a way Beijing's new development is a new iteration of that tradition. Inside these massive new buildings are shopping malls, offices, restaurants, net-bars, gyms, luxury apartments - huge interior spaces, mazes where people do their business and live their lives.

I'm staying in Chaoyang, in a small hotel off Tuanjiehu, a place that looks more like Beijing's past than its rushing present. The area is hard to navigate, with its narrow lanes, low-slung - no skyscrapers here; the tallest buildings theold-style brick apartment blocks, six stories at most. Across the alley from my hotel are a little laundry, a small convenience shop, a place that sells purified water systems. There's an elementary school up the street. I don't need an alarm; the kids wake me up every AM promptly at 8. It's a pleasant place, quiet most of the time, except for around 3:30, when the kids get out from school and their parents come to pick them up, and that kind of noise is the sort that's mostly joyful.

I like it here, in Beijing. I find it oddly comfortable, in spite of the fact that it's a far from omfortable place. Oh, there are definite downsides. The Great Firewall, for one - the internet censorship system that restricts the flow of information. It's oddly arbitrary - I can read Salon, the New York Times, the Washington Post - until suddenly I can't, because some article or another was deemed threatening or unsuitable.

The night I got here, I was delighted to find that blogspot was no longer blocked, at least not in Beijing. I could access the blog, log in and write a post. However, I couldn't publish the post. Damn you, Great Firewall! You tease me with this pretense of openness!

But I figure it's just a question of time. The Great Wall didn't keep the barbarians out; the Great Firewall can't stop the blog-hoards forever.

Getting the Hell out of Dodge...

Argh. Well, for all my promises of increased blogging, I can't say I've returned to any sort of productivity. Right now I'm getting ready to go to Beijing for a couple of weeks. This is something like my ninth China trip, so it's not exactly a big adventure at this point. I know my way around, I see that dorky statue/construction in the Beijing Airport that looks like a combination of Tinker-Toys and something from the late, lamented Disney Monsanto ride, and I feel oddly at home.

In any case, it's not traveling that stresses me out. It's getting ready to go. I always have a million things to do and not enough time, and even if I did have enough time, I manage to procrastinate to the point where I'm up all night before I go throwing crap in a suitcase without a lot of planning. My house is a mess, I need to do laundry, bills to pay, and then there are the cats, I have to make sure their cat-sitter is on board, gotta leave my office in some semblance of order, and what to do with my car, thanks to street cleaning regulations? Passports, visas, e-receipts, drugs, books and gifts, and I always forget something.

But hey. Tonight I did my taxes. I used TurboTax online and opted for automatic deposit of my refund. I actually did the Snoopy dance after I hit the button for "file your returns."

Cat-food, purchased. Books, ditto. Gifts, not yet. Bills still to pay. And much laundry to do.

I deal with my odd anxiety about flying, the sense that I've picked the wrong day, the wrong time, the flight that will fall out of the sky at random. I worry about my elderly cat. Will she be okay without me? Will my cat-sitter give her the proper meds and lap time? I wonder if my staff will fall upon each other with teeth and nails in my absence. I print up a list of my bank accounts and debts and put it in my desk cubby-hole, just in case.

Sometimes I think, who needs this aggravation? I could just take two weeks off, sit on my couch in my pleasant Venice house, write, take walks, eat out, go to the gym. Why fly halfway around the world, dragging an ill-packed suitcase?

The moment I reach the airport, it's all okay. All the stress falls away, like a heavy coat shed in the sun. I find a bar and have a microbrew. I'm on vacation. Drop me just about anywhere, and I'll be okay.

I'm baaack....

I've been completely consumed with life, work and a novel-writing contest at Gather.com. There is much I could say about the Gather experience, but it's late and I'm tired so I'm going to stick to the positives: I "met" some really cool people.

One of them has inspired me to make some of my band's music available on one of those internets. I don't know that you can post music on Blogger, so I've put it up on my Vox blog.

"Sheraton Arms" is a song that I started writing during the Reagan years and finished during Bush 1. The last time I sang in public, I sang this song, at an anti-war fundraiser the night before Bush 2 started bombing Baghdad. It pisses me off more than I can say that this song is more relevant now than it was when I wrote it.

Why I haven't been blogging....

I've been totally consumed by gather.com's First Chapters contest for unpublished novelists. Gather has been described as "MySpace for the NPR set." I'm not so sure about that. I've pretty much only dealt with the contest, which is being sponsored by Borders and Simon & Schuster. The prize is a book deal, and money.

So far, Gather has received something like 1700 entries, illustrating both the notion that everyone indeed does have a book inside of them, and that not all books should ever come outside. It's a real mixed bag. A lot of truly wretched stuff, a fair amount that's mediocre, a smaller percentage that's competent, and a few really good submissions.

I have an entry in the contest. I'm not going to post the link here, because I'm not into spreading my identity around the web. If you'd like to check it out, drop me a line at my gmail address listed above. I'd love to get your feedback.

Heckuva Job, Brownie!

Why does this not surprise me?

Brown told a group of graduate students Friday that some in the White House had suggested the federal government should take charge in Louisiana because Blanco was a Democrat, while leaving Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a Republican, in control in his state...

..."Unbeknownst to me, certain people in the White House were thinking, 'We had to federalize Louisiana because she's a white, female Democratic governor, and we have a chance to rub her nose in it,'" he said, without naming names. "'We can't do it to Haley (Barbour) because Haley's a white male Republican governor. And we can't do a thing to him. So we're just gonna federalize Louisiana.'"...

...Blanco reacted sharply to Brown's remarks.

"This is exactly what we were living but could not bring ourselves to believe. Karl Rove was playing politics while our people were dying," Blanco said through a spokeswoman, referring to Bush's top political strategist. "The federal effort was delayed, and now the public knows why. It's disgusting."

Every time I hear something like this, I'm reminded of how a former Bush Administration official once characterized the Bush White House:

"There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus...What you’ve got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

Everything is political. Nothing else matters. Except maybe marketing. Think back to Sept. 2002, in the run-up to the 2002 midterm elections, as the Bush Administration made its case for the Iraq War. Why now, some asked, eleven years after the Gulf War, with Saddam Hussein's regime crippled by sanctions, kept in a box by no-fly zones? White House chief of staff Andrew Card had the answer:

"From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

What? No lattes?

A Starbucks outlet in the Forbidden City (or the Palace Museum, if you'd prefer) may be forced out, after a CCTV anchorman declared the coffee house "undermined the Forbidden City's solemnity and trampled over Chinese culture," on his blog.

Unlike all those souvenir stands, "art" exhibits and snackbars, which clearly exemplify the highest flowering of the Qing Dynasty.

I'll admit, I was pretty appalled when I first heard that there was a Starbucks on the Imperial City grounds (though the article says it opened in 2000, I swear it was there in Dec. 1999, my first trip back to Beijing in 20 years). But when I actually saw the store, I couldn't get too worked up about it. If you haven't been there, the Starbucks is tucked into a small, traditional gallery, and is actually rather easy to miss.

Besides, it was freezing cold that day, and yeah, I had a double espresso, and I liked it.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

So, President Bush proposes to not only "surge" in Iraq but expand the war to Iran and Syria.

Because, you know, things have gone so well so far.

The staggering hubris and stupidity of this "plan" are difficult for me to put into words. Here's a Los Angeles Times article that provides a little perspective on how this is going over in the region (though the title, "Mideast shaking its head" seems a bit of an understatement. "Shaking its head"?!).

Keith Olbermann has a few words as well. If you can't access youtube, try this crooksandliars link.

A few other words do occur to me, words from John Kerry, who was not always as verbally obtuse as he is now. You've probably heard them before.

"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

We had to burn the village, etc.

Don't Call Us...

Okay. I'm a good liberal. A progressive, even. I'm "PC" in that I believe one should err on the side of politeness and respect. I think globalization is inevitable, and I heart immigrants.

I'm a multi-cultural kinda gal, you know?

But as the Animating Spirit of the Universe is my witness...

I HATE OVERSEAS CALL-CENTERS!!!!!

Really.

It's a combination of things. Poor language skills, lousy phone lines, and a lack of cultural fluency that generally turns what should be simple transactions into bizarre and frustrating parallel monologues, often compounded by the fact that "Justin" and "Sophie" are reading from canned scripts that only sometimes match the situation you've called about.

I once refinanced my mortgage because the bank I'd been using outsourced their customer service overseas. Maybe it's just me, but I'm not comfortable discussing my property taxes with someone in Bangalore who I'm not sure understands what I'm trying to do and what I need.

Two recent examples.

I wanted to bundle my phone and internet service and keep both my old phone number and my email address. My email provider said they could do that and save me something like seventy bucks a month. What's not to like?

Well, for starters, there would be suddenly not being able to receive calls and getting a robot "Extension (your phone number here) is not available" message if you tried to call me. My service had been switched without warning, but only halfway.

I spent about two hours on the phone trying to straighten this out, to a call center that I'm guessing was in India.

The first representative told me that my phone service had been switched, but not my DSL, and that according to their IT engineers, they had to be switched at the same time. Therefore, my options were:

1. Change my phone number.
2. Switch my service back to my original provider, and then put the order in all over again, and make the switch in 4-6 weeks.

My response was: "Unacceptable. I am not changing my phone number. Unacceptable. I don't know how long it will take for my current provider to make the switch. Unbelievable. I don't understand why the voice and DSL can't be switched at separate times." And, further: "You created this problem, not me. I am your customer. You are not giving me confidence in your service. You need to fix the problem for me."

Her response boiled down to: "I am very sorry for the inconvenience." Repeat ad infinitum.

After going around and around, even getting on the phone with my old service provider and confirming that I couldn't even talk to anyone until Monday, and it would be a new order, I finally said: "I realize this isn't your fault, but I want to speak to a supervisor."

More time on hold to the canned strains of Vivald's 4 Seasons. Eventually, a supervisor "Vivian," came on the line.

Now here's where I make an exception to my loathing of overseas call-centers. Vivian was really good. She explained the situation, what had actually happened (I won't bore you with the details) and that the DSL switch was scheduled for January 15th.

"Ah-HAH! So you CAN switch them at different times. I knew it!"

So I asked if there was any way to access the voice mailbox and change the message to let people know that my phone was wonky and to call me on my cell. She thought maybe that could be done. She also said that she could have my calls forwarded from my land-line to my cell phone until the problem was fixed.

We couldn't change the voicemail message, but Option #2 worked like a charm.

Credit where credit is due - Vivian, wherever you are, you rock!

But apparently, that's why she's a supervisor, and it took two hours of my time to find her and get some help.

Here's another example. This just happened tonight. I was booking my plane ticket to Beijing on the internet. I got a great fare, on sale. The sale lasted through Jan. 9. I selected the flight, the seats, clicked to purchase, and all of the sudden, my ticket was $100.00 more.

This cannot be, said I. I refused to accept it. I called the airline.

Somewhere in Bangalore, "Jonathan" took my call.

"Maybe the fare is over," he suggested.

"No," I insisted. "It was $667.00 when I chose it and selected my seats, just now. Then I went to purchase, and it was $775. The sale goes through January 9. It is still January 9 where I am."

"You have to call web support. I cannot see the information. I will transfer you."

After sitting on hold for ten minutes or so, I decided Jonathan's solution was b.s., hung up and called Reservations again.

This time I got someone in the States. She was extremely helpful. She looked up the flight and said, "Oh. That should be $667.00. I don't understand what the problem on the web was, but I can book it for you."

The whole transaction took maybe ten minutes, and it only took that long because I was so pathetically grateful to deal with someone who could actually help me achieve my desired outcome, and I told her so.

"I'm not really allowed to say anything negative," she told me, after hearing my tale of woe. "But we hear this all the time. And I'm just sorry you had to go through that."

Let me be clear about this - I blame American companies who think they are saving money by outsourcing customer service overseas. Maybe they are saving personnel costs, but they are costing me, their customer, time and a considerable amount of goodwill, and they are creating aggravation and anger at a level that has prompted me to change whom I do business with. Oh yeah, Capital One. I'm talking about you! Citibank, you too!

One more.

I was trying to find a business I'd used in the past in my area. The number on the web now belongs to a private individual. So I called information to see if I could find an updated one.

I got an operator in freakin' India.

"There is no listing for this business in...("hiss!" "crackle!") Santa Monica."

Here's the thing: back in the day, if you called an operator, they frequently were people who lived in your area. They might even know something about the business you were trying to find. They were local! Neighbors!

Okay. I know that there's a price to be paid for a 24 hour world. I was dealing with my phone problems on a Friday night, from 9 PM until after 11. Maybe in the Olden Days I just would have been S.O.L. until more normal business hours.

But it's like I said to the second airline customer service representative. I expect language barriers when I travel overseas. That's part of the package. And if I don't understand what's going on, that's pretty much my problem.

But when I'm sitting on my couch in Los Angeles, California, trying to get some help with whatever it is I'm dealing with, I want to deal with someone who is at least on my continent.

Five Things...

Boy, there's a whole lot about these intranets that I just don't know. For example, blog memes or meme tags. This is kind of the blog equivalent of a chain letter, except nobody promises you riches if you tag 12 of your friends and doom if you don't. In this case, I was tagged by Lao Lu, who got tagged by Richard, who got tagged by China Law Blog, and before that, CLB can tell you if you want to know.

Anyway, "5 Things You Didn't Know About Me." Now, I have some issues with this. Some people who read this blog will know just about any 5 things that I'm willing to share, so I guess it's really "5 Things That Most Of You Didn't Know About Me And Why Should You Care?" But be that as it may...

1. My first attempt at a novel came when I was five years old at most. It was to be an ambitious epic about two cats who went camping. The problem was, I did not know how to spell "camping," and my mother was on the phone while I was trying to write the first chapter and wouldn't tell me. Thanks, Mom. I hope you realize the loss of this masterwork for the ages is on your head.

2. I manage to combine an obsessive/compulsive streak with a short attention span, meaning: I can focus on long, complicated projects on the one hand and get dreadfully bored with many things on the other. This might explain how I ended up with six minors, no major, enough units for a masters and no undergraduate degree (the minors, for the record, were: writing, visual arts, political science, German, Chinese Studies, and music literature. I think).

3. I turned 21 in Kunming, China, during a total eclipse of the sun. To be completely accurate, the eclipse was on the day after my birthday in China, but I figure in the place of my birth, San Diego, CA, it was a day earlier, and therefore my actual birthday. I sort of vaguely recall that a solar eclipse is supposed to mark the death of the old and the beginning of the new, a rebirth of sorts, and indicate major changes in one's life. While I'm disinclined to take such things too literally, being in China at that age completely changed the direction of my life, for good or for ill (I still haven't figured out which).

4. If you've read this blog from the beginning, you already know that I used to be the singer/songwriter/bassist of an LA-area band. We got some good reviews in the local music press, and pretty much no actual success. We did however play together for over ten years and have a really good time doing so. I'm still friends with those guys (hey, one of them is my sister) and spend nearly every Christmas Eve with the guitar player and his family and friends (and then there's drummer Todd's "Last Monday Before Christmas Musicians' Party, which I never miss either).

Way back at the beginning of my so-called music career (not counting the cover band I had in college), a guy who used to be one of the main engineers for Motown told me I had talent, but if I wanted to succeed, I needed to make some choices. In the immediate future, I needed to ditch the guitar player I was working with at the time or at the very least, not do any of his songs. The band needed to be about me, and I had to be the only lead singer. Both of those things ended up happening. He also gave me a football metaphor for life: "You can't make them throw you the football. But you can be ready to catch it if they do."

To this day, I don't know if they never threw me the ball or if I just dropped it.

Anyway, even if you knew I had a band, bet you didn't know that I'm left-handed, but I still play the bass right-handed. So there.

5. In the movie Undercover Brother, there's a karaoke scene where Eddie Griffin and Denise Richards sing "Ebony and Ivory." The backup vocals for the karaoke track were done by me and my friend Christy, who was music coordinator for the film and begged me to go with her to the studio and arrange and sing the backups. I don't know how well you can hear our efforts over Griffin and Richards (I never did see the movie), the results were pretty magnificantly cheesy on our end. The three of us, Christy, me and the producer/engineer, laughed our asses off after nearly every take. The downside: for weeks afterwards I had that stupid song embedded in my brain. All of the back-up vocals, the orchestration, the cheesy lyrics...I would wake up every night around 4 AM with "Together A-LLIVE!!!" echoing in my head. It wasn't pretty.

Now I have to pass the pain on to some other poor bloggin' slobs...Here it goes...

Zhadi, Redzilla, SusanUnPC, Real History Lisa.

Hey, if any of you guys don't wanna do this, I totally understand.

Just remember. Edgar P. Collingsworth broke the chain. Two weeks later, his business partner embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from their firm and ran off to the Cayman Islands with Mrs. Collingsworth, leaving Edgar alone, penniless and afflicted with a severe case of gout.

Things fall apart?

British writer Will Hutton began research for his upcoming book on China's astounding economic and political rise believing that "China was so different that it could carry on adapting its model, living without democracy or European enlightenment values." In the course of his research, he changed his mind. After detailing the staggering growth of China's economy, the global reach of its political power, the abandonment of anything resembling Maoist doctrine, Hutton concludes:

But for all that, it remains communist. The maxims of Marxist-Leninst-Maoist thought have to stand, however much the party tries to stretch the boundaries, because they are the basis for one-party rule. Yet the system so spawned is reaching its limits. For example, China's state-owned and directed banks cannot carry on channelling hundreds of billions of pounds of peasant savings into the financing of a frenzy of infrastructure and heavy industrial investment. The borrowers habitually pay interest only fitfully, and rarely repay the debt, even as the debt mountain explodes. The financial system is vulnerable to any economic setback.

Equally, China is reaching the limits of the capacity to increase its exports, which, in 2007, will surpass $1 trillion, by 25 per cent a year. At this rate of growth, they will reach $5 trillion by 2020 or sooner, representing more than half of today's world trade. Is that likely? Are there ships and ports on sufficient scale to move such volumes - and will Western markets stay uncomplainingly open? Every year, it is also acquiring $200bn of foreign exchange reserves as it rigs its currency to keep its exports competitive. Can even China insulate its domestic financial system from such fantastic growth in its reserves and stop inflation rising? Already, there are ominous signs that inflationary pressures are increasing.

Hutton goes on to discuss China's environmental crisis, which has been covered here on so many occasions that I don't think it's necessary to restate it now. His basic argument is that "it is the lack of independent scrutiny and accountability that lie behind the massive waste of investment and China's destruction of its environment alike."

Enterprises are accountable to no one but the Communist party for their actions; there is no network of civil society, plural public institutions and independent media to create pressure for enterprises to become more environmentally efficient. Watchdogs, whistleblowers, independent judges and accountable government are not just good in themselves as custodians of justice; they also keep capitalism honest and efficient and would curb environmental costs that reach an amazing 12 per cent of GDP. As importantly, they are part of the institutional network that constitutes an independent public realm that includes free intellectual inquiry, free trade unions and independent audit. It is this 'enlightenment infrastructure' that I regard in both the West and East as the essential underpinning of a healthy society. The individual detained for years without a fair trial is part of the same malign system that prevents a company from expecting to be able to correct a commercial wrong in a court, or have a judgment in its favour implemented, if it were against the party interest.

The impact is pernicious. The reason why so few Britons can name a great Chinese brand or company, despite China's export success, is that there aren't any. China needs to build them, but doing that in a one-party authoritarian state, where the party second-guesses business strategy for ideological and political ends, is impossible. In any case, nearly three-fifths of its exports and nearly all its hi-tech exports are made by non-Chinese, foreign firms, another expression of China's weakness. The state still owns the lion's share of China's business and what it does not own, it reserves the right to direct politically.

Hutton believes that the world cannot afford a China that dominates the globe without achieving some form of democratic transformation. From what I can suss out about him, he's no neocon; he's also no cultural relativist and makes a strong case for the superiority - and universality - of Western enlightenment values, which he believes China desperately needs to achieve its stated "peaceful rise":

Britain and the West take our enlightenment inheritance too easily for granted, and do not see how central it is to everything we are, whether technological advance, trust or well-being. We neither cherish it sufficiently nor live by its exacting standards. We share too quickly the criticism of non-Western societies that we are hypocrites. What China has taught me, paradoxically, is the value of the West, and how crucial it is that we practise what we preach. If we don't, the writing is on the wall - for us and China.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this. Nowhere in Hutton's piece does he make a case that certain traditional Chinese values might be advantageous or even virtuous in the modern world (in fact, quite the opposite). I can't help it - I'm a good liberal, and this makes me uncomfortable. I'd venture, a little tentatively, since this is only a small excerpt from a much longer work, that this lack and even downright dismissal of 5,000 years of cultural traditions somewhat undercuts Hutton's larger argument.

I will say, however, that my first time in China, back in the beginning days of Deng Xiaoping's reforms, gave me an appreciation for the American Constitution, Bill of Rights and the rule of law that I'd never had before. And also, as Hutton states, the absolute necessity of following our own values.

As for China's future, Hutton concludes:

My belief is that what is unsustainable is not sustained. Change came in the Soviet Union with the fifth generation of leaders after the revolution; the fifth generation of China's leaders succeed today's President Hu Jintao in 2012. No political change will happen until after then, but my guess is that sometime in the mid to late 2010s, the growing Chinese middle class will want to hold Chinese officials and politicians to account for how they spend their taxes and for their political choices. What nobody can predict is whether that will produce another Tiananmen, repression and maybe war if China's communists pick a fight to sustain legitimacy at home or an Eastern European velvet revolution and political freedoms.

So what do you think?

Power Outage

Last night we had a really hellacious windstorm in Venice - strongest and most prolonged winds I can recall in my nearly two decades of living there. I really thought my little shack by the sea was going to blow away. It survived intact, but the power went down around 9 AM and as of this writing is still down. I had a couple things I wanted to post, but I guess they'll have to wait.

Happy weekend, everyone.

Stop me if you've heard this before...

Howard French has a new piece on the contradictions of modern China. These are all familiar themes, mostly of the "beneath the glittering surface lurk serious problems" variety, but French summarizes them well. The key graphs:

The intent here is not to slight China's economic achievement, which in the past quarter-century has truly been all but miraculous. The point is to say that so much remains to be done here, including most of the hard work.

China's outstanding tasks tend to be of the kind that evade quick and simple measurement and will certainly not loom large in the calculations of the graph paper and ruler gang.

The people who inhabit the world's oldest unitary state have a common nationality, but they have yet to construct commonly held bonds of citizenship, which allow for the sharing of other people's problems and of each other's dreams.

The road thus far for China has been built on an official religion: the cult of GDP growth. China has built roads and buildings in dizzying quantities. And at the individual level, Chinese people are acquiring things just as fast as they can, but there seems to be little other rhyme or reason to life here for the time being.

The predominant reason for this is the government, which reserves for itself the right to proclaim causes and strikes down anyone who insists on articulating a different agenda too loudly. Similarly, it tightly controls the right of association, meaning that any group of any size must be organized under the government's aegis.

The result is an atrophied sense of the individual and of civic participation, from which the country and its people are just now awakening, and not a moment too soon.

Sounds about right to me.

Wow...what a game

My not-so-secret shame...I love football. For one thing, I find football the perfect accompaniment to cleaning my house, sorting papers, doing laundry - all the mundane stuff I hate to do. There's plenty of breaks, and if you miss something, they'll show it again.

There's things I don't like about football - the violence & injuries, certain aspects of the surrounding culture - but I love the game, the athleticism, the strategy. Football is a smart game (in fact I keep meaning to buy a copy of "Football for Dummies" to help me understand it better). And it's a drama, with its four-act structure, reversals of fortune, characters and storylines.

Which is a roundabout way of asking, "Holy shit! Did anyone watch the Fiesta Bowl tonight?!" Non-BCS underdogs Boise State beat one of college football's elite teams, the Oklahoma Sooners, 43-42, in overtime. One of the best football games I've ever seen, with jaw-dropping plays that looked like something you'd see in a movie. A fifty-yard touchdown play to tie with seven seconds left in regulation, on 4th and 18, with a pass and a lateral? A fake throw and a Statue of Liberty (really!) for a two-point conversion to win (oops - that was the play that tied it in overtime. The winning play was even weirder. Oops again. I had it right the first time. Here's a better recap). Unbelievable.

And the star running back proposed to his head cheerleader girlfriend live on national television.

'Twere well it were done quickly

Happy New Year. It seems we've rung in the new by hanging Bush's bete noire. Ding-dong, Saddam is dead. New Year coincided with an important Muslim holiday as well, Eid Al-Adha, celebrating the end of the hajj, in the last month of the Islamic calendar:

The Festival of the Sacrifice commemorates the God's gift of the ram in place of the biblical patriarch Ibrahim's (Abraham's) son Isma'il (Ishmael). (In Judaism and Christianity, the child in this story is Ishmael's brother Isaac.) During the festival, families that can afford to do so sacrifice an animal such as a sheep, goat, camel, or cow, and then divide the meat among themselves, the poor, and friends and neighbours.

I suppose you could look on Saddam's execution as a sacrifice of sorts, but for what, and to whom?

Morbid curiousity led me to the cell-phone video of the execution. I watched up to the point of the hanging, and stopped. It is a profoundly depressing piece of history. A number of commentators have remarked on its similarity to the Al Qaeda beheading videos, and I would have to agree.

Saddam's execution takes place in a small, dark cell, cement walls, dimly lit; according to one account I heard, the floors are still stained in places by the blood of those who had died before him, by his orders. The guards and executioners wear ski masks and civilian clothes. At the end, they taunt Hussein. There are shouts of "Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada!" in support of Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shi'ite cleric and militia leader.

God knows how many times this video has been seen by now. Enough to inflame the Sunni Arab world, furious at the shabby, degrading way a Sunni former head of state was dispatched. Enough to demonstrate the degree to which Shi'ite militias have infiltrated the government of "New Iraq" - or are the government, more accurately.

Enough to show the proportion of justice to revenge.

There's been a considerable amount of debate on the culpability of American authorities in this execution. Our government claims to have had nothing to do with the decision. I've heard credible accounts that American officials were suprised by the haste of the whole process, the speed with which the execution was conducted. And on the one hand, it's hard to understand why American authorities would encourage an action certain to provoke more sectarian violence. On the other, the cynical part of me wonders if more violence was needed to justify the "surge" in American troops the Bush Administration so very much wants. As well, one should never underestimate the extent to which the Bush Administration can utterly fuck things up. And the conspiratorial aspect of my nature wonders about the secrets Saddam takes with him. After all, he was our man in the Iraq/Iran War before he was our Hitler d'jour.

In the end, I'm not sure it matters. The perception will be that America was behind Saddam's execution, and perceptions are as potent a fuel as realities, it seems.

Yeah, he was a brutal dictator; he murdered thousands of people, and I'm not blind to the poetic justice of his being put down like a dog in the same execution chamber where he'd had people slaughtered in his name. But this was not the kind of justice I want done in mine. Blood spilled over blood, staining the hands of us all.

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgement here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return,
To plague the inventor; this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips.

Great Moments in Wing-nuttery

Now is the time of the year when we see a lot of "Top Ten" lists of all sorts. Here from Media Matters (via the Daou Report) are the Top Eleven (thanks to Ann Coulter) Most Outrageous Comments by right-wing commentators:

Right-wing rhetoric documented by Media Matters for America included the nonsensical (including Rush Limbaugh's claim that America's "obesity crisis" is caused by, among other things, our failure to "teach [the poor] how to butcher a -- slaughter a cow to get the butter, we gave them the butter"), the offensive (such as right-wing pundit Debbie Schlussel's question about "Barack Hussein Obama": is he "a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where will his loyalties be?"), and the simply bizarre (such as William A. Donohue's claim that some Hollywood stars would "sodomize their own mother in a movie")

Given the stunning repudiation of the Republican agenda in the midterm elections, I'd like to hope these voices will be somewhat chastened in 2007 - but I'm not betting on it.

Okay, I have a ton of presents to wrap. Hope you and yours are enjoying the holidays, whatever you celebrate - I'm a Yuletide person myself...

Law of Rules

So, say you have a government that doesn't allow any direct political competition but is still in need of a legal system in order to develop a modern, globalized economy. The country's citizens, having endured many years of arbitrary authority, centuries, in fact, see themselves as having certain rights, and many begin to use this legal system in order to settle disputes and stand up for their rights when they are being abused. Even political protestors have rights according to the country's constitution, and they too use the developing legal system to defend themselves. This puts the government in somewhat of a quandry. How can they build a rule of law and yet maintain their monopoly on political power?

Well, here's one way - require defense lawyers to cooperate with the government. A Human Rights Watch report released earlier this week charges that:

the rule of law in China has been sharply curbed by regulations approved in the spring by the All-China Lawyers Assn., which is in effect the nation's bar association.

The regulations require that lawyers representing political protesters be "helpful to the government," share otherwise-confidential information about their clients with prosecutors, and be of "good political" quality, generally a euphemism for dedication to the ruling Communist Party.

The new rules are "restricting access to justice, and access to justice is really a make-or-break issue for China today," said Nicholas Bequelin, the China researcher for Human Rights Watch. "You're shutting down the pressure release valve that's very badly needed in a one-party system."

Bequelin said the so-called Guiding Opinion on Lawyers Handling Mass Cases was approved by the lawyers association March 20 but was only officially published a month later and was all but ignored by the Chinese press...

As described by Human Rights Watch, the Guiding Opinion makes it clear that lawyers' first responsibility is to society, not their clients. "During these important times," the rules say, "correct handling of cases of a mass nature is essential to the successful construction of a socialist harmonious society."

"These regulations," Bequelin said, "spell out rules that are simply incompatible with carrying out your professional duties as a lawyer." He said they negated "the principle that is consecrated even in Chinese law, that the lawyer's duty is to his client."

Oh, and one more thing:

The rules also warn lawyers not to "stir up the news," and to take special care with international media.

I know! Talk about the Olympics!

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

I love the holiday season - the festive decorations, the carols and songs that can't help but evoke nostalgia, parties with friends, gatherings with loved ones...the Bad Sex in Fiction awards...

Readers, this annual Literary Review award is a veritable cavalcade of wince-and-giggle inducing awfulness. Keep in mind, these aren't trashy supermarket novels but recognized works of "literary" fiction. Finalists have included such noteworthies as Thomas Pynchon and Tom Wolfe. The lucky (?) winner receives a statuette and a bottle of champagne - but truly, isn't everyone chosen for this contest a winner?

I call your attention to the following examples:

'You're a sexy lady, know that?' Stan whispered as he unzipped her pants.

She had no answer; she kept her eyes closed and sank into the music. His naked penis, when she felt it against her bare skin, was a shock, mostly for the desire it beckoned from Saga's marrow.

'So touch me, Story Girl,' he said...

...And then before her inner eye, a tide of words leaped high and free, a chaotic joy like frothing rapids: truncate, adjudicate, fornicate, frivolous, rivulet, violet, oriole, orifice, conifer, aquifer, allegiance, alacrity ... all the words this time not a crowding but a heavenly chain, an ostrich fan, a vision as much as an orgasm, a release of something deep in the core of her altered brain, words she thought she'd lost for good.

Or this (the listing of random words and images seems to be a theme this year):

Images went off in her head like little fireworks. The smell of coconut. Brass firedogs. The starched bolster in her parents' bed. A hot cone of grass-clippings. She was breaking up into a thousand tiny pieces, like snow, or bonfire sparks, tumbling high in the air, then starting to fall, so slowly it hardly seemed like falling at all.

He waited for a couple of minutes. 'And now,' he said, 'I think it's my turn.'

Please god, no.

I'll leave you to discover the rest for yourself. The complete nominated passages can be found, in all their dubious glory, here.

Malled

For many years, I've had a sort of phobia about shopping malls. It came from growing up in San Diego and watching previously undeveloped coastal sage lands disappear into a morass of parking lots and franchises. Aside from hating what they did to once beautiful scenery, malls made me nervous. You could go to one and find the same things at another several states away - the same stores, the same products, the same muzak. Where was the creativity, the originality, the expression of culture? Is everything reducible to a commodity, and is that all we value? And even if so, what happened to all those quirky little businesses that were one of a kind? Was every form of commerce doomed to that which could be replicated on a mass scale?

So this kind of scares me:

With 30,000 stores crammed on four sprawling floors, International Trade City — about 200 miles south of Shanghai — is the largest wholesale mall in the world.

The S-shaped building, painted orange and pale yellow, is 18 million square feet. That's about the equivalent of 350 football fields and about six times the size of Costa Mesa's South Coast Plaza, one of the biggest shopping centers in the U.S.

You won't find any cinemas or food courts here, but Yiwu officials boast that the market sells 400,000 different items. Situated in bustling Zhejiang province, the giant 4-year-old mall illustrates the power of China Inc. today: enormous scale and specialization, driven by ambitious private entrepreneurs...

..."This place will make you crazy…. It's like rows and rows and rows of the same thing over and over again," said Glenn Thain, a New York insurance agent who moonlights as a distributor of exotic alcohol drinks in China. The 39-year-old was shopping here for key chains, lighters and other trinkets to give away as promotions to his salespeople and customers.

He was also doing a little Christmas shopping for his niece. He clutched a fistful of sheets of fake tattoos that he bought for pennies each from a merchant who also sells retail. "It's amazing," Thain said...

...Merchants say most vendors seemed to be doing all right, but nobody knows for sure. Turnover is low. Rents range from $6,000 a year for the typical 10-by-15-foot stall in faraway spots to $60,000 for larger spaces in better locations. The mall's S layout imitates the shape of a dragon. The stores are arranged by product categories in districts A to H, with some districts separated into a dozen streets.

Red lanterns and gold stars hang from the ceiling. There are free Internet cafes and smoking rooms. On weekends, the shopping center is a magnet for tourists and schoolchildren.

Zhejiang China Commodities City Group, the developer of the market, is planning to invest $600 million to nearly double the size of the mall and add tens of thousands of grocery items and other consumer goods to the center's "sea of commodities."

Yikes.