Enough already

It really pisses me off to see how right wingers and idiots are holding up the differences between the fires in San Diego and Hurricane Katrina as some kind of proof that, well, white people are more civilized than those black folks in New Orleans.

Tbogg, The Rude Pundit and Steve Lopez of the LA Times put this better than I could (even if I did have time to write a proper post), but just to be really clear about things, you simply can't compare the fires, which burned in the suburbs and left the city center and infrastructure intact, with a hurricane that pretty much took out everything.

Further, far from an example of Republican efficiency at work, the fires in San Diego were made worse by a tax-cutting mentality that refuses to do what's necessary to create a county fire-fighting force and the developers and the bought politicians who have run the city for years building in places where they shouldn't (e.g, combustible chaparral-covered hillsides and canyons).

I do think California handles disasters better than Louisiana. Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm not an expert), but Louisiana does not exactly have a reputation for good, clean government. California, meanwhile, has a lot of experience in dealing with large-scale disasters. We have these huge fires nearly every year and a big earthquake every decade or so. We should have a better idea how to cope.

California Burning

Horrific day today in Southern California. Much of my hometown San Diego is on fire, including local landmarks like the Wild Animal Park — the smaller animals, including cheetahs and condors, have been evacuated to a fire-resistant shelter on the premises; the larger animals, the elephants and lions and giraffes, are left to their savannah-like habitats, which have large ponds they can escape to if necessary...but still...

Visualize San Diego County, up against the ocean. Picture the city proper, surrounded by a crescent of suburbs and back country. Nearly that entire crescent is on fire or under threat, with fires threatening to burn to the ocean in places.

Solana Beach, Leucadia, Del Mar, being evacuated. I can't picture it.

I grew up in those beach towns, back when that's what they were — unpretentious surfer havens. Cheap Mexican restaurants. I've never been able to fully accept the changes there, the condos, the housing tracts, the influx of money. Seeing these places in recent years makes me feel like a refuge in my own hometown. I'll never go back. I wouldn't be able to afford it. And I no longer want to.

But watching these fires, I feel the pull of where I was born. This was my place. This is where I came from.

Here's San Diego for you: Qualcomm Stadium has been pressed into service as an evacuation center. That's home of the Chargers, former home of the Padres (who moved to much nicer digs downtown).

So many volunteers showed up at Qualcomm with pizza and sandwiches that the authorities are telling everybody to wait until tomorrow to come, because they have too much food, and it will spoil. Meanwhile, some of the concessions at the Stadium have opened up to feed the refugees.

Meaning, fish tacos will be served. Because you can't go to the Q without having a fish taco.

We do pretty well in California with disasters — sure, we had the LA riots in '92, but look how well we handled the Northridge Quake in '93.

The corruption and incompetence of San Diego government in recent years could fill several books, but there still seems to be some basic ability of the government to function and for people to feel that they have some connection to each other. Yeah, there's folks looting the burnt-out shells of houses in Rancho Bernardo; there is righteous anger over the lack of coordination, of fire equipment — why the hell isn't the Navy out there with their infrared-equipped helicopters? No one seems to have a good answer.

But there will be fish tacos.

UPDATE: And massage therapists. Only in California....

Back to the salt mines...

Or the chain gang...or whatever lame metaphor you'd like to use for going back to work on a project that never seems to be finished.

Yep, it's a new round of rewrites for the Book that Ate My Blog...and it may sound like I'm bitching, but I'm really not. It's an opportunity, and my only real worry is that I won't be up for the job, because I've got a lot of work to do, and some of it won't be easy.

A lot of the stuff I normally blog about — China, the staggering crimes of the Bush Administration, stuff like that — has been subsumed (is that a word?) into this novel (which I nonetheless promise is NOT didactic!). So I haven't been as driven to blog about it. But I'll try to at least put up pointers to great articles you might have missed while I once again lose myself in rewrites.

Creative transfusion, STAT!

I'm baaack....kinda

Okay, so my hiatus was a tad bit longer than a couple of days...but the novel I've been complaining about is sort of like a vampire. It's sucked nearly all of my creative energy dry. Not that I'm complaining. Much. I'm still working on it, and it's getting better.

I just need a couple transfusions before I'm back blogging again...

Back in a couple days...

Yelapa Beach
Originally uploaded by Other Lisa

The book is done (for now); the query sent, and I'm taking off for a few days of beach and margaritas. Enjoy your week!

Must Read

I'm still working on my book (see, the thing about novels is, well, they're novels, and just because you finish a draft or three doesn't mean you're done) but wanted to call attention to a truly excellent piece by Peter Hessler (author of River Town and Oracle Bones at National Geographic. It's called "China's Instant Cities" and is a fascinating look at the nearly unimaginable pace of development through the life of a project near Wenzhou, in Zhejiang. Wenzhou people are known throughout China for their enterprise and resolve, with towns in the region specializing in everything from shoes to zippers to cigarette lighters. In this lengthy portrait, an aspiring Wenzhou businessman stakes his fortune on...the little rings that adjust bra straps.

H/T to China Law Blog for finding this gem.

My kind of car!

Now this is what I call sustainable energy:

SHINANOMACHI, Japan (Reuters) - Japanese motorists may one day pump their cars full of sake, the fermented rice wine that is Japan's national drink, if a pilot project to create sake fuel is a hit with locals in this mountain resort.

The government-funded project at Shinanomachi, 200 kilometres (124 miles) northwest of Tokyo, will produce cheap rice-origin ethanol brew with the help of local farmers who will donate farm waste such as rice hulls to be turned into ethanol.

"We want to present the next generation a preferable blue print -- a self-sustainable use of local fuels," said Yasuo Igarashi, a professor of applied microbiology at the University of Tokyo who heads the three year project.

Year of the Pig

More bad news about the safety of China's food supply and the willingness of the Chinese government to share necessary information to the rest of the world:

A mysterious epidemic is killing pigs in southeastern China, but international and Hong Kong authorities said today that the Chinese government is providing little information about it, or about the contaminated wheat gluten that has caused deaths and illnesses in other animals...

...Because pigs can catch many of the same diseases as people, including bird flu, the two U.N. agencies maintain global networks to track and investigate unexplained patterns of pig deaths.

Hong Kong television broadcasts and newspapers were full of lurid accounts today of pigs staggering around with blood pouring from their bodies in Gaoyao and neighboring Yunfu, both in Guangdong Province. The Apple Daily newspaper said that as many as 80 percent of the pigs in the area had died, that panicky farmers were selling ailing animals at deep discounts and that pig carcasses were floating in a river.

The reports in Hong Kong said the disease began killing pigs after the Chinese New Year celebrations in February, and is now spreading. But state-controlled news outlets in China have reported almost nothing about the pig deaths, and very little about the wheat gluten problem...

It's not just about pet food

Sorry for my silence. I've been working on my book, and I owe various people reads on their projects. But the New York Times has a story up about the pet food contamination scandal that claims adulteration with melamine is an open secret in China, and that it's been in the human food chain for a long time:

Workers at the Shandong Mingshui Great Chemical Company say they commonly add the chemical melamine in the process of making animal feed. Melamine appears as protein but has no nutritional value.

For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly supplemented their feed with the substance, called melamine, a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests, even though it does not provide any nutritional benefits, according to melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.

“Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed,” said Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company, which sells melamine. “I don’t know if there’s a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says ‘don’t do it,’ so everyone’s doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren’t they? If there’s no accident, there won’t be any regulation.”...

...The pet food case is also putting China’s agricultural exports under greater scrutiny because the country has had a terrible food safety record.

In recent years, for instance, China’s food safety scandals have involved everything from fake baby milk formulas and soy sauce made from human hair to instances where cuttlefish were soaked in calligraphy ink to improve their color and eels were fed contraceptive pills to make them grow long and slim.

For their part, Chinese officials dispute any suggestion that melamine from the country could have killed pets. But regulators here on Friday banned the use of melamine in vegetable proteins made for export or for use in domestic food supplies.

Yet what is clear from visiting this region of northeast China is that for years melamine has been quietly mixed into Chinese animal feed and then sold to unsuspecting farmers as protein-rich pig, poultry and fish feed.

"If there's no accident, there won't be any regulation..."

It's no surprise to anyone who's followed contemporary China closely that unscrupulous business owners cut corners to lower costs and increase profits. But I place the blame on our own cutthroat, corporatist system as well. Where was the FDA? What happened to food safety?

Remember how Ronald Reagan helped to demonize the government? What was that cute joke of his, "the nine scariest words in the English language — 'I'm with the government, and I'm here to help." So we've cut services, privatized, outsourced, basically allowed the agencies that are supposed to be working for our benefit to be gutted and co-opted, to the point where the state of California had to sue the Environmental Protection Agency in order to regulate tail-pipe emissions...and poisoned pets, contaminates in the human food chain, are just one result.

There's something deeply wrong with the current logic of globalization, when the United States, one of the world's agricultural powerhouses, is importing substandard food products from China, simply because they are "cheaper."

"Cheaper"? What are the real costs here? To our health. To our environment. The amount of fossil fuels burned to transport this stuff here alone should give us pause.

It's past time to start factoring in the social and environmental costs of doing business when we consider the definition of profitability.

H/T to SusanHu of No Quarter and Itchmo

UPDATE The FDA announced that it will limit the import of certain Chinese food products until they can be proven safe, to include "wheat gluten, rice gluten, rice protein, rice protein concentrate, corn gluten, corn gluten meal, corn by-products, soy protein, soy gluten, mung-bean protein and amino acids" - ingredients found in everything "from noodles to breakfast bars." They've also confirmed that pet deaths are in the thousands, not the few dozen they've insisted on, against all evidence.

Stay tuned.

Back Online

With a zippy new computer and a fast DSL connection. Posts to follow.

Stoopid Internets

I've been having one computer/internet issue after another. No internet access at home - no computer at home! So my blogging hiatus continues. More soon...

End of the line

My last day in Beijing, I decided to check out a wine bar some friends had told me about, in a hutong by the Lama Temple. The Vineyard Cafe is charming, with a decent selection of wines at (for China) decent prices. I spent a while chatting with one of the owners, Will, and promised that I would bring in a bottle from California next time I was in town - California wines don't seem to have the market penetration in China that the Australians and South Americans do.

I didn't have wine, though, since I was returning to California the next day and would have plenty of that soon enough. Instead I tried an imported British ale, Abbott. It was very good, fresh, and compared to the Yanjing and Qingdaos I'd been downing, strong.

Which might explain my decision to ride the #1 Subway line all the way east to the end. Yes, including the Ba Tong extension.

You ride the #1 subway line west, you're heading in the direction of some of greater Beijing's prettier scenery, the Fragrant Hills. I was tempted to go that way, to the end of the line at Pingguoyuan, catch a taxi to the temples there. But after that beer, I was more in the mood for something weirder. I mean, who knew what was out at the eastern end? Some place called "Tu Qiao." Nothing in my "Lonely Planet Beijing" about Tu Qiao, or anything out that way (though when I briefly emerged at Shihui East to transfer to the Ba Tong extension, I saw signs for a "Red Sandalwood Museum." Next time).

I noted that one of the stops on the Ba Tong was called "Tongzhou Bei Yuan" That was sort of intriguing. A lot of artists live in the countryside around Tongzhou, though not right off the subway, from what I knew. I could have made arrangements to go and see some of the studios, but I'd already visited a number of artists' communities and galleries. It's not the art that interests me so much as the environments in which it operates, and there isn't supposed to be a real scene out there - a lot of artists have moved to Tongzhou to get away from those kinds of bohemian distractions.

But if Tongzhou Bei Yuan is any indication, this is a pretty post-modern version of the scholar or Daoist's retreat to the countryside.

"That area has got to be the butt-end of Beijing," one of my friends remarked later. "It's where depressed urban professionals live to commute to their boring jobs in the city." I don't know about the degree of depression of the residents, but it's true that the scenery is not exactly inspiring.

A couple of stops before the Ba Tong extension, the subway emerges from underground. The landscape that passes by the windows is flat, featureless, the ranks of apartment blocks and malls and older white tile fronted businesses wrapped in a grayish yellow haze. The area didn't strike me as impoverished; there are plenty of new, glassy buildings, but at first glance there's absolutely nothing to distinguish this place from any other part of modern Beijing, any other part of modern China, for that matter. Sometimes, you could see what it had been like, before Beijing swallowed it up: remnants of red-brick commune buildings and factories, the occasional temple surrounded by restaurants, travel agencies, laundries, appliance stores and netbars.

It's the kind of place where, you look out the window around Tongzhou Bei, and see some new, upper-middle class type apartment buildings, solid, stocky constructions of rusty brown slabs and marble trim, and the buildings are called: "Rotterdam," "Toronto," "Marseilles," "Bordeaux," and "Seattle."

I mean, why "Seattle"?

Why not, I guess.

Otherwise, the most notable moment of my ride to Tu Qiao came when a female dwarf tried to cheat me on the price of an English-language Beijing Tourist Map.

A day in Beijing

In all of my recent trips to China, I've gone someplace I've never been - or at least haven't seen in 25 odd years. Except this last trip. I had some vague ambitions - visit Kaifang, maybe, or Putuoshan - but I justed ended up going to Beijing and Shanghai. I hung out with friends, explored random neighborhoods, read a few books. I mean, it's not as though I haven't seen plenty of temples and historic sites, and I find that I just as much enjoy slowing down, wandering around, looking at "ordinary" things - trying to take the measure of what the rhythms of life are like in this place, imagining my own life, in a way, if I'd ended up here instead of there.

My last two days in Beijing, I'd thought maybe I'd go visit a mountain village I'd read good things about - you know, a scenic, quaint sort of place, the China of one's imagination rather than the urban realities that I'd been experiencing. But I didn't get around to it. Instead, one day while looking for a restaurant, I went the wrong way and came upon Tuanjiehu Park - and the "hu" in "Tuanjiehu."

Tuanjiehu means "Unite Lake." Though Tuanjiehu is a pretty cute little neighborhood, I figured the lake part was one of those left-over place names, a palimpsest from the Ming Dynasty or some time when there was a lake, back when this part of Beijing just inside of the 3rd Ring Road was countryside instead of city. But the lake is a more recent artifact, from China's Maoist past, though at times that era seems as impossibly remote as any other dead emperor's. Tuanjiehu Park was founded by workers, who were exhorted to create a peoples' park on the site of an old cement works. Or papermill. Unfortunately I didn't take notes. Along with the lake, it features a "southern style garden layout," pavillions, a roller rink, a "children's carnie" and a massive artificial beach and pool with wave machine. The beach was closed, unfortunately, drained and faded in the last days of winter, its blues and yellows bleached and peeling. But it's a nice park. Fat goldfish swim in the murky lake. At the entrance, an older man wrote lines of calligraphy with a giant brush on the pavement, using water for ink. The characters were beautiful, it seemed to me, and watching him write them was poetry itself, the way he handled the massive brush with such a light touch and precision; then watching the characters shrivel and fade into blotches on the cement.

I strolled through the park. In one area, a group of middle-aged ladies practiced a drum and cymbal dance routine, marching in circles, led by the cymbal player. Further along, a man wearing hipster black sunglasses played a traditional Chinese tune on a saxophone. I loved that, thinking, it was so nice for once to hear someone making live music, not to hear some cheesy, distorted recording blaring in a public place. I got that around the next bend, at the roller rink.

Back at the entrance, some elderly men and women had begun a tai chi session, and a few high school students had gathered to watch a younger man attempt the water calligraphy.

"Hello!" one of them called out to me. "Hello!" And then: "Welcome to China!"

"Xie xie nimen," I called back.

They giggled, said, "oh, she speaks Chinese," and in a way it surprises me that people in a city like Beijing, where there are so many foreigners who speak Chinese would still be surprised by a foreigner who does (and mine is not great). Regardless, I walked away with a big smile on my face, because how many times does someone out of the blue welcome you to their country?

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."