Absurdity, Allegory and China

As the flap over the audio and video enhancement of the Olympic opening ceremony widens, Zhang Yimou, the director of the spectaculorama, is taking it on the chin. The foundation of his reputation was built upon his portrayal of life in the countryside, showing the world a side of China that the Chinese were not [...]

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The airspace over my neighborhood is loud with helicopters. Haven’t seen so many in one place in a lot of years. Their mission is, as all things are here, not entirely clear. I live, literally, across the street from an Olympic venue, the Tianjin Olympic Center, a new purpose-built football (soccer) stadium that was christened [...]

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Sunday, 6:30 AM: the security guys at the Tianjin Olympic Stadium are running sound checks to the background music of Kenny G’s My Heart Will Go On, a double-shot of Chinese-pop horror. It’s like 1998 all over again, only with more cars and hundreds of thousands fewer bikes. Nothing pegs the last decade’s low point [...]

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Yesterday was a busy one in our neighborhood: Training Day for the security detail at the Tianjin Olympic Center. Busloads of the young and camouflaged, “armed police” vans, and platoons of locals in short-sleeved summer blues, along with a few big dogs and a fleet of water cannons started arriving around 7AM to the background [...]

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Still Standing
Trio of lucky cones on ‘Driving Practice Day’ in the parking lot of the Ping-Pong Palace, northeast of Tianjin Olympic Stadium. I realize I could be wrong on this one. It may not really be ‘Driving Practice Day’. It may actually be ‘Knock Down Cones Day’, in which case I should amend the first [...]

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Love and Pipes, #1I could say that this one here is China when maybe it’s not China at all. Maybe it’s really Iowa or France. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference anymore.
Love and Pipes, #2I feel like I’ve taken liberties with this one, using ‘Love’ in the title when really I have no idea [...]

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Hoons on Parade

Here is a typical shot from ‘Lay a Patch with a Mercedes Day,’ an event that is becoming a quite popular weekend activity in my neighborhood. Mostly young men with locally reasonable wardrobes (no countryside migrant workers in this bunch) step into one of two Mercedes – “the new C-Series” stenciled on [...]

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Geometry and Fog

This image can almost be twisted into life as the first wave of an invasion by the domineering forces of Dome. A Raindrop Assault Dome (RAD) in full attack mode muscles onto the frame from the left, as the thin-ply pillboxes, hopelessly dwarfed, try their best to protect the plant life hidden [...]

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