Absurdity, Allegory and China

Below find several photos from my good friend, Karamibu, who has traveled back to Jiegu (Gyegu, Jyekundu). Click on the photos for a larger version. I would encourage you to also check out the Yushu Earthquake Response team, a coalition of Tibetan NGOs who are frantically busy on the ground in Yushu and coordinating relief [...]

[Read more →]

Here are some photos of the CCTV in color, all taken in the late afternoon/early evening, April 23, 2010

[Read more →]

Photos of the continuing project. (click for bigger pic)

[Read more →]

(This post began as a comment in response to comments to my previous post, Civilized Chaoyang: What Was It Before?. It “grew” into this. I could post another photographic example of the Civilized Chaoyang Campaign, but I won’t. Even I’d consider that as “piling on.” The “new grads” alludes to one of the comments, by [...]

[Read more →]

I am trying to imagine how I would feel if I went to New York and was confronted with billboards that said, “Civilized Brooklyn.” Or if I were walking through Paris and ran into large public displays that said “Civilized Belleville.” Of course I would wonder, “Why is this being addressed at all?” A weekend [...]

[Read more →]

I have a television, but it stopped working a year ago, and it had probably stopped working long before that. I wouldn’t have known since I’d rarely turned it on. Discovering that it was broken was a mei banfa (what are you gonna do!) moment, the thought of getting it fixed never considered. I am [...]

[Read more →]

Melissa Chan, Al Jazeera’s China correspondent, has written about the gathering of the monks in Jiegu (aka Gyegu, Jyekundu), the county seat of the Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) which is the devastated center of the latest fatal earthquake in China. Monks from the entire Tibetan cultural region have traveled to Jiegu to offer both [...]

[Read more →]

Now that the media have their story in Jyekundu (aka Jiegu and Gyegu), the county seat of Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (TAR), the real work of material relief, emotional support and infrastructure rebuilding is shifting into gear. This is the hard, everyday grind of post-disaster work, which is usually not deemed newsworthy unless it involves [...]

[Read more →]

I have a good friend, a young Tibetan man, who has traveled to Jyekundu (Jiegu) – the center of the Yushu earthquake devastation – to distribute relief aid. He is also a fair hand with a camera. His photos are starting to come in now, and they can be found at Karamibu’s Flickr site. He [...]

[Read more →]

Over the past day I have read several blogs, tweets and comments addressing, once again, the collapse of schools in an earthquake, the latest in the Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (TAP) in Qinghai province. We still have no idea of the numbers of students killed or injured by crumbling schools, though if we can draw [...]

[Read more →]