Absurdity, Allegory and China

Two nights ago (Oct. 29th) I spent a bit of time near the Third Ring Rd. at rush hour. I’ve not taken many shots of the CCTV Bldg. after dark, so for those who are interested here are a few more. (click for larger photo) Oh, and did I mention that the Phillies won the [...]

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A few days back I mentioned how I watched from from afar while Tug McGraw pitched the final inning of Game Six of the 1980 World Series, an unforgettable few minutes for any Phillies’ fan. Tug, who died in 2004, has a son, the wildly popular country/western singer, Tim McGraw who was on hand before [...]

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The sculpture at the east end of the Kerry Centre across the Third Ring Rd. from the CCTV Building is a piece by Sun Yu Li, a Singaporean artist whose website can be found here. I had referred to this piece in an earlier blog post as the “recently installed yin yang-ish sculpture that allows [...]

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I was born on the twenty-sixth day of the eighth month in the absolute middle of the 20th century, 8/26/1950. My first recollected memory, from 1953, is of my father coming home on a Friday evening as I, his eldest son, sat dutifully on the bottom step along the Weaver Street sidewalk waiting for him [...]

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In my grade school, St Raymond of Penefort in Philadelphia, the old desks were attached to wooden runners and grouped in sets of three. The desktops, pitched at an angle to facilitate writing, were hinged at the top from a narrow level ledge/rail that included a hole for an inkwell. Fountain pens were still the [...]

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At the east end of the Kerry Centre’s office building (xiezi lou) is a recently installed yin-yangish sculpture that allows for an interesting juxtaposition with the dramatic CCTV HQ Bldg across the Third Ring Road. There are several symbols on the sculpture that appear to be characters from an earlier script , though I don’t [...]

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Arup, the engineering company partnered with OMA in the building of the CCTV Headquarters Building, has just published their latest issue of the The Arup Journal [2/2008], with an article entitled CCTV Headquarters, Beijing, China: Building the structure. This is the third article Arup has published in their journal concerning this project. The other two [...]

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Interesting opening sentence in the CNN story Latest tests find Chinese milk melamine-free on the milk/melamine debacle: Chinese authorities say the latest test of dairy products found no traces of the industrial chemical melamine that has been blamed for thousands of deaths. My first reaction was, “How did I miss this? I thought the number [...]

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I spent four days in Beijing during the “Golden Week,” the holiday orbiting October 1, Liberation Day. Here are a few photos, one from each day, with the CCTV HQ Bldg. either as subject or background. And there are a lot more where these came from.

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A good look at the machinations of the folks in censorship central of the Propaganda Department can be found in The American Scholar in an article by the Chinese-American and former PLA member Ha Jin entitled The Censor in the Mirror. The office that Chinese writers, artists, and journalists dread and hate most is the [...]

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