Absurdity, Allegory and China

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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One of the fallouts from the new visa restrictions is that foreign tourism has dramatically fallen off just at the time when it should be on the rise. No surprise, really. The official fear of protests and social unrest, as well as the equally official and severe reaction to that fear, may end up causing [...]

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I have a hard time sleeping. Always have. Living in a construction site – ten years in Tianjin – has done little to help me quietly nod off. Odd and loud sounds can break the quietest nights, and we’ve given up sitting outside on our open porch since it is hardly relaxing sharing the soundscape [...]

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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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In case you missed it – I did – on May 31, 2008 Nike projected a slideshow on four sides of the two-legs of the CCTV Headquarters Building. Twenty-six years ago when Ridley Scott gave us Bladerunner, China wasn’t geared up enough to show it (something tells me that, given the opportunity, SARFT would do [...]

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On January 3, 2008 the China Daily carried the story China players make million-dollar World Cup pledge. The pledge itself was a bit scary in light of the China’s men’s team past record and their unlucky draw in the qualifying rounds. The line that caught my interest the most was, “We swear by death to [...]

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My silence lately has everything to do with my personal project of the past seven months. I have been wandering around the east Third Ring Road photographing the CCTV construction project and the adjoining neighborhoods. Though my reasons for doing this are various, I seem to understand the underlying motivations more so than I [...]

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