Imagethief

Tag: Rants

  • I suck at Christmas trees

    So I’m back in the US of A for Christmas and based on a sample size of two (my parents), I can report that the political mood here is bleak. My mom’s dog of many years died a week or two ago and one of the pressing post-mortem issues is what to do with the now faintly embarrassing “Obama” dog leash. Two years ago this was the shizznet. Today, like the word shizznet, it pretty much just annoys people.

    When you only come home occasionally, you notice strange things. Tonight I noticed that mom’s new oven, part of her recent kitchen renovations, displays not just the time, but also the day and date. Today, the oven announces, is Tuesday, December 21st, 2010. Why the hell does an oven need to know the date? It’s not like you’re going to put a turkey in and then program the thing to start it three weeks hence, right before you get back from London. I mean, you could, but no matter how you dress that turkey, it’s coming out stew.

    Still, it’s always nice to be back for Christmas. But now that we have a child it’s a much more fraught exercise. There’s nothing wrong with the child himself. He’s handsome, charming and funny — at least, inasmuch as any three year old can be. But he is also, like any three year old, the Amazing Human Vector, capable of introducing disease into any population anywhere. If we dropped him out of a B-2 over Afghanistan, our problems there would be over. Indiscriminate use of biological weapons is technically a violation of the Geneva Conventions, but that kind of thing doesn’t seem to bother us so much any more, so the US Air Force can contact me care of this blog if they’re interested in picking him up for, oh, let’s say 200 million bucks. It seems like a lot for a small boy, but is totally reasonable when you consider the strategic impact and the $2.2 billion sticker on the B2.

    Anyway, speaking of coming out stew, last year the Human Vector gave my entire family some kind of awful stomach illness that destroyed Christmas as thoroughly as if I’d filled the stockings with an emulsion of dogshit and gasoline and set them alight, presents and all. On one particularly bleak night Imagethief read all of Nathaniel Philbrick’s “Mayflower” in the bathroom, and that is not a svelte read. So we were pretty sure that by comparison this Christmas would be candy canes and cinnamon pixie-farts.

    With cinnamon pixie-farts in mind, we went over to the little-league field where the Sea Scouts run their Christmas tree lot. My mom’s current tenant had actually left an artificial Christmas tree, but I think artificial Christmas trees are like fat-free ice cream: unnatural simulacra of things that should be by nature joyous and indulgent. If you described a Christmas tree to a police sketch artist from Mars, you might get something that looked like this artificial tree.

    The Sea Scouts were in high spirits, busy dragging one of the volunteer clerks through the ring-like device they use to “net” Christmas trees so they are more compact for driving home. “It’s a boy!” yelled one, capturing in a nutshell what the scene was spookily reminiscent of. But it’s Christmas, so you have to celebrate a virgin birth, even if it’s the simulated virgin birth of an eighteen year old man being passed through a hoop of disposable red-and white netting. While they were cutting him out of the net we found a suitable tree: a six foot noble fir for $51. “Would you like the stand with that?” asked our clerk, who had not been run through the netting machine and was therefore still able to serve us.

    All the Sea Scouts trees come already mounted on broad stands made of green rebar and plastic buckets. The stands cost an extra twenty bucks, but make the tree “ready to trim”, as it were. My mom already has a Christmas tree stand that dates approximately from the Lyndon Johnson administration (really), but which has always been serviceable if a bit fiddly. It seemed excessive to me to pay an extra twenty bucks for a big hunk of rebar that would just get heaved into the recycling along with the tree two weeks hence, so I declined.

    Dumbest mistake ever.

    Here’s a bit of straightforward advice: get the stand. Just swallow the environmental consequences and the measly two bills and get the goddamned included stand. The tree will come in the front door and be ready for trimming and presents. No hassle. And no back problems.

    Ah, the back problems. Part of Imagethief’s genetic inheritance, along with a big schnozz, sweet tooth and tendency to wordy rants, is a gimpy back passed down from my father and exacerbated by years of sloppy gym technique and poor work posture. I am, it must be confessed, a sloucher. This has been my year of back problems. At 43, I should probably be grateful. My father blew his back out like a discount whitewall when he was ten years younger than I am now, and I’ve never found myself laid out on a living room floor for three days like he was. But I did have several spells of pain and stiffness culminating in a stinging pinched nerve that popped up a month ago after an ill-advised encounter with a leg-press machine (never again) and a weekend of vigorous walking, of all things. This made it impossible to run for two weeks.

    I like to run. With my eye on taking advantage of the pristine Bay Area air for some running (while I write this in fragrant Palo Alto, Beijing’s air is once again “hazardous”), I spent the last month carrying myself like an octogenarian grandmother in a Venetian glass factory. I bent from the knees to pick up lint. I even managed to preserve my back while handling my son, who is probably the single biggest factor in its recent deterioration. Three year olds, unlike dumbbells, are prone to suddenly squirm and throw you off balance in ways that can cause discs to rocket out of your spine like ninja throwing stars. They think this is funny and they learn interesting new words when it happens.

    I was rewarded for my care with a pain free back and more or less full range of motion. I even managed to get our two 23 kilo suitcases into PEK out of SFO without re-injuring myself, a feat roughly on par with creating cold fusion using two glasses of flat Dr. Pepper, some kidney beans and a soiled fork.

    But then I had to set up the Christmas tree.

    When you think about it, a Christmas tree is a really ungainly thing. It’s heavy, asymmetrical and the best handholds are buried deep inside, especially when you pay extra for a lush noble fir instead of some threadbare, piece-of-crap douglas fir. I lugged the thing awkwardly from the garage to the living room, only to find that the trunk was too short to fit into the LBJ retro-stand. This meant laying the tree down, going into the garage to dig the hacksaw out from behind the stack of plastic tubs in which my mom’s tenant is apparently storing his collection of lead ingots and anvils, and then getting on my hands and knees to saw the bottom ring of branches off of the tree so it would fit in the stand. Then a little more time on my hands and knees tightening the little collar bolts that hold the tree upright.

    When I was done with this, the tree stood proudly erect but I looked like the hunchback of Notre Dame after a night of rejection and a vicious beating by dockworkers drunk on mezcal shooters. An ill-advised attempt to take an afternoon run lasted exactly one half a block before I had to stop because every step felt like I was driving lemon-zest tent pegs into my hips. With fitness clearly out of the picture, I’ve pretty much been confined to an armchair and living on a diet of chocolate and ibuprofen ever since. I really, really wish I’d just paid the twenty bucks and got the tree with its included stand.

    But the good news is that it’s Christmas and my son, for all his proven lethality, was old enough to enjoy helping with the trimming of the tree and appears to have not imported some terrifying Chinese nursery school pathogen this year. Tomorrow my brothers arrive and the whole family will be together for the first time since last Christmas. In the face of so much good cheer, pissing and moaning about not having a working spine just seems like so much crabbiness. And we won’t be having any of that, will we?

    A merry Christmas to all Imagethief readers.

    Merry Christmas from the human vector.
    Merry Christmas from the human vector.

  • Not enough radiation in your skull and other problems with retail

    Modern Beijing, as distinct from the leafy, 1960s loufang neighborhoods and the hutongs, is an unlovely town at the best of times. No acreage of hanging glass curtain walls can make up for the viscerally alienating nature of the razor-edged, neo-Stalinist SOE office buildings lining the boulevards on the west side of town. The malls and commercial developments of the east side are little better. Wanda Plaza looks like what Albert Speer would have built in Berlin if the Third Reich had lasted into the age of shopping malls. And there are plenty worse than that.

    My own neighborhood is no great prize. It abuts one of those monster intersections on greater Chang’an Avenue that are like urban planning fever dreams – a vast and lethal plane of asphalt ruled by a squawking tribe of crossing-guards that lives in the permanent shadow of a monster overpass, like Brothers Grimm trolls with orange vests. At rush hour the whole thing seizes into gridlock, offering a pretty good preview of what the traffic in Hell will be like. The Guohua power plant’s 500 foot visible-from-space smokestack looms over everything. One of my favorite mental games is looking up at it from different spots in the neighborhood and trying to work out whether it would land on me if it tipped over in my direction. The answer usually is yes.  And people think high school trigonometry is useless.

    Two factors redeem the neighborhood. First, it is within walking distance of the congenial Tuanjiehu, Hujialou and Yanjingli neighborhoods, and the Tonghui canal, which isn’t exactly scenic but is useful for running. Second, it’s convenient, with a subway station, easy access to the Third and Fourth Rings (important for my commute), and a dynamite selection of amenities.

    There is naturally some ebb and flow in those amenities. In early 2008, when Mrs. Imagethief and I returned from a year in Shanghai, we moved into China Central Place Apartments. Soon thereafter workers started converting the previously vacant commercial building in front of  the apartments into an Italian delicatessen and restaurant complex. Having then recently spent a week immersed in the culinary delights of Tuscany, this seemed like a fantastic thing. Exotic sausages and cheeses on our doorstep! Score!

    The reality was rather less inspiring. The Piazza Italia turned out to be three floors of mediocrity: A middlebrow Italian supermarket attached to a cafeteria and an unremarkable restaurant. The curse of the Piazza Italia was demonstrated by its deli. With all the treasures of Italy to choose from, it stuck resolutely to Italian food cliches. I like Parma ham and Parmesan cheese as much as the next guy, but trust me when I say there is much more to Italian deli. For me, the Piazza’s high point came the day Mrs. Imagethief, Zachary and I ate lunch at the cafeteria and found ourselves dining at the table next to Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Say what you will about the Italians, they’re not hung up about who’s in the restaurant with their leader.

    It was thus moderately disappointing but not in the least surprising when the Piazza rolled over and died. I expressed my grief by rummaging through the wine area and buying several bottles of nice Brunello at knockdown prices. Merchants at Sanyuanli market did a roaring trade in surplus Parmesan for several months thereafter. And Mrs. Imagethief and I started wondering what business might occupy the three newly vacated floors of retail space with an eye watering rent bill.

    I was hoping for a three-floor Jenny Lou, which will tell you how realistic I am. Our neighborhood lost its Jenny Lou three or four years ago, which is a shame because none of the other local shopping options is much good for imports. The BHG Marketplace in the basement of the Shin Kong Place ultramall has pretensions, but mostly it just charges otherworldly prices for produce available for one quarter the price 300 meters away. But, hey, you can get Japanese Cokes for 12rmb.

    In that way, BHG Marketplace is representative of Shin Kong as a whole: glossy, but mostly useless. Take out the Din Tai Feng, the food court and the coffee places, and rest is a waste of space. But maybe that’s just me. I am a man of plain tastes and there are only so many Bvlgari trinkets that I need. And, as I discovered when I tried to buy a jacket a couple of years ago, nothing in the department store fits me. I’m much better off at the Jimmy and Tommy Foreign Trade Club in Sunshine 100. So I guess I have no business assaulting the Piazza Italia for being “middlebrow.”

    After it lay fallow for a few months, work finally began on the abandoned Piazza. We asked the security guards what was being put in, but nobody seemed to know. “A car showroom,” said one. The first sign of trouble came when workers erected an enormous, welded hoarding around the building, concealing it from sight. Concealed buildings in China seldom lead to anything good. A second sign came when the hoarding on one part of the building indicated that it was being subdivided into a cluster of luxury watch boutiques. Finally, the took down the hoardings from the other part and revealed…a three story Burberry boutique.

    If you had asked me to make a list of things that they could have put in the abandoned Piazza that would have been of the least use to me, it would have read like this:

    1. A minefield.
    2. A malarial swamp.
    3. A smelting works.
    4. A Burberry boutique.

    The black, plasticky facade of the Burberry boutique would have been bad enough on its own, but it gained that extra measure of vulgarity thanks to that defining architectural cliche of modern Beijing (after the hanging glass curtain wall), the colossal video screen. In fact, it being a corner lot, one video screen wasn’t enough. There are two house-sized video screens from which endless loops of prancing Eurotrash in plaid trenchcoats can be beamed to the entire neighborhood.

    Our neighborhood was already blessed with an abundance of kinetic distractions, including the semi-animated front of the over-lit Shin Kong mall itself and the usual assortment of kaleidoscopic neon signage and red LED crawls in office windows. But if there is one thing I’ve learned over my years in Beijing, it is that there is no neighborhood so tacky that it can’t be debased just that little bit more.

    It’s hard to transmit the effect of these screens unless you stand in front of them. They’re so bright they can etch your shadow into the sidewalk like atomic explosions. When people stand in front of these things you can see their skeletons and surgical implants. They literally cast a glow over the entire area. The first time Burberry started them up I thought it was large-scale welding works reflecting off of the neighboring buildings. At least my apartment gets only what reflects off of the side of Shin Kong. God help the poor souls living on the east side of Blue Castle who will now be bathed in a nonstop glow of high-energy Burberon particles. They’ll have to install lead-lined curtains or eventually the poor souls will all go thoroughly insane and have to be exiled to some remote corner of Hainan where they can wile away their miserable last days fruitlessly banging damp coconuts together in a wretched attempt to rediscover the technology of fire and cook their meager strands of monkey meat.

    Admittedly, a worst-case scenario, but when you see these screens you’ll know what I’m talking about. If this was Ginza, fine, but this is a partially residential neighborhood. A MyGym looks out over that intersection. Think of the little children!

    I presume they’ll take a cue from the Shin Kong mothership and shut down the illumination at 10:30, but Beijing’s winter sunset comes at about 4:30 PM, which is a lot of time to be exposed to a nonstop loop of fluorescent luxury propaganda. And during the testing phase, all bets are off. A few nights ago I woke up at 2AM and the damned things were on, casting a ghostly flicker across my living room walls.

    I should not be surprised. Our descent into neighborhood tackiness began earlier this year when the property office made the catastrophic decision to line the clubhouse in the middle of our courtyard with animated, green strip lights. This not only made it completely impossible to sit at the outside tables at the coffee shops in the courtyard, but it cast the entire courtyard in a color drawn straight from Pantone’s “Radioactive Monster Puke” palette. Giant video screens were a logical next step. Face the courtyard. Face the street. Face the vast power station. You’re pretty much damned in any direction.

    I guess I should count my blessings. Burberry may have colossal video screens, but at least they didn’t stoop to that other well-worn tactic of Beijing retail marketing: a pair of blown speakers outside the front door blasting distorted Mandarin-pop at a volume that can kill small dogs and knock the magpies out of trees two neighborhoods away.

    But they haven’t opened the watch boutiques yet, so that could still be coming.

    Only much, much bigger.
    Only much, much bigger.

  • Absolutely the last post on nasty furniture…

    …at least until I move again, I suppose.

    Imagethief is pleased to report that he has found  a suitable apartment all of 100 meters away from his current apartment in China Central Place. Among this apartment’s distinguishing characteristics are its simple and unadorned light fixtures, the willingness of the landlady to remove whatever furniture we didn’t need (a lot), and the relative tastefulness of the furniture that remains. And the price was decent, for what that’s worth.

    As part of the move I am abandoning my old desk, a 200RMB piece of Ikea crap that has been with me for a few years and that is so flimsy that my monitor bounces when I type. This is not one of those colorful exaggerations for which I am justly renowned. It is literally true. The desk now has a pronounced sag in the middle, and I figured it was worth replacing with something more solid before it either delaminates into toxic splinters or dumps my 24″ monitor onto the floor in a shower of sparks and shattered LCD panel. Or both, I suppose.

    On Sunday Mrs. Imagethief, Zachary and I went down to the Macalline Red Star Furniture Mall on the southeast fourth ring road, not too far from where we live. You may know this mall, which is coincidentally next door to the Macalline Red Star Building Materials Mall and a Decathlon, thus covering all your home furnishing, renovation and fitness needs in one fell, commercial swoop. We had never been there before, and simply thought it was worth seeing something new, rather than either retreating to Ikea or my old standby, the Classic Furniture City mall near Panjiayuan.

    I have tried to foreswear Ikea for several years, but like a junkie who pawns his sister’s DVD player to buy a dime rock I keep on sliding back for a cheap furniture fix despite my earnest vows to stay clean. This leaves me feeling filthy and awash with regrets as I invariably end up hating whatever I buy, whether it’s the balsa-wood table that picks up dings when you look at it wrong, the shelves that wobble when the cat sneezes on the far side of the apartment, or the sofa that loses another support strap with a huge TWANG!every other time I sit down on it (really). So I swear off again, but a year passes and there I am checking out yet another “Knasti” bookshelf, the primary value of which is that it comes from a company that apparently provides meaningful employment as product name developers for Sweden’s dwindling population of consonant-happy illiterates. So I feel socially virtuous but poorly furnished and extremely generic.

    In the last couple of years my standard dodge has been to go to the Classical Furniture City on the east third ring, near the Panjiayuan flea market and repro propaganda extravaganza. This is one of dozens of malls and neighborhoods (including the entire village of Gaobeidian) that offer reproduction Chinese antique furniture at knock-down prices, and it’s magic for bookshelves, TV cabinets and such, especially if you need small customizations like holes for hard-drive cables. On the other hand, it’s really nothing more than Ikea for Sinofied expats, and if you prowl my friends’ houses you can pretty much see that we all use the same approach and all buy the same rosewood tables and camphor chests. We’ve simply traded Scandinavia for Shenzhen in one episode of culturally semi-appropriate mass unoriginality. But at least it ain’t Ikea and by god, we feel Chinese. Just don’t let your kids lick the furniture, because who knows what’s in that lacquer.

    Anyway, the point is that in an attempt to break out of this two-fold rut we went to the Macalline Red Star Furniture mall, mostly because it looked big, and anyplace that big must have something worth looking at. This is a classic example of false logic, like my old college rationalization: Beer is good, therefore more beer must be better. That bit of logic worked right up until it failed spectacularly, with a juvenile Imagethief closely scrutinizing the accumulated plaques on the inside of his dormitory bathroom’s toilet bowls. Surprisingly colorful, if you must know, but harder to see after the third round of violent retching leaves your eyes permanently crossed.

    Speaking of violent retching, that’s what I felt like doing Sunday when, upon entering the mall, I realized that this is where all the landlords of all the ghastly apartments I have seen go to buy their preposterous, eye-boiling furniture. This is the place. The Mecca of repulsive, radioactive, filigreed furniture. The Source. The mother lode. As my father observed one day upon watching me sweep the cat litter off my floor for the third time in an hour, when I die and go to hell my job will be to sweep up the cat litter. What he didn’t point out, but which is almost certainly also true, is that my hell will be furnished from this mall.

    Imagethief firmly believes that the best way to reduce one’s pain is to share it. Therefore I want to share with you, my faithful (and dwindling) readers, some of the most luminous examples of apalling furniture ever conceived by the mind of man. Should you decide to buy an apartment and furnish it in accordance with the Chinese nouveau-riche-低素质 school of interior design, you’ll know right where to go (you’ll also need to buy a Porsche Cayenne — more on that later). I’m sorry the pictures are a bit blurry. They were taken with a phone somewhat surreptitiously as I didn’t want to be beaten by the furniture ladies. Day after day standing around that stuff must lead to some kind of violent psychosis.  And trust me: More detail would not necessarily improve the experience.

    Allow Imagethief to escort you on a tour:

    Louisiana Bordello Moderne

    louisiana bordello

    What could be a better way to put that spare square-footage to work than renting out girls by the hour? In a country with no property tax that’s like printing money. All that’s missing is some furniture appropriate for displaying your collection of emaciated meth-heads in lingerie. That’s where this collection fits in. Because nothing preserves the illusion of virginal innocence like white lacquer, gold trim and purple lace. Just remember to keep the customers off of the couch. The dry cleaning bills are murder.

    Charles Taylor’s Mango Lounge

    Charles Taylor

    Had a hard day sawing off people’s hands? You’re going to want to put your feet up for some well deserved rest and recreation. This understated set, with its gold-tasseled crimson and zebra pillows, says, “I may decide life and death in this town, but I still know how to relax in style.” Leather arm rests and muted upholstery resist bloodstains and match the seats in your open-top Hummer limo. When you’re done reviewing the latest catalog of small arms from Vyatsky Polyany’s 2010 line (it makes a great coffee table book for that coffee table), you can have the drugged, underage concubines of your choice dumped onto the tasteful king-size bed in the background. The mangoes are wax, so they’re not good for eating, but they’re superb for hurling at the heads of cowering underlings.

    You’re Not Important Enough to Suck My Toes

    suck my toes

    Want something a little more intimate than the Mango Lounge? For the psychotic despot who might fly into a vicious rage at any moment we offer this set. It includes both a throne fit enough to stroke even the most volatile and insecure delusions of godhood and lethal candlesticks for when you suddenly feel the need to beat one or more of your supplicants to death in order to cow the others into submission. This seat is recommended for the fey and serpentine living god who oozes honey but turns dangerous on a whim rather than angry,  broad-shouldered Norse warrior types better suited by rough-hewn wood and leather. Also good for lonely people who think they live in Anne Rice novels.

    The Chandelier of Damocles

    chandelier of damocles

    Hosting a dinner party of the damned? You’ll set a properly infernal mood with this elegant dining set in blood-red leather, complemented by a one-of-a-kind chandelier that audaciously combines equally blood-red globes with white leopard-spot lamp shades. Is it hell or Kisangani? We’re not sure, but turn on the lights and watch pure-hearted guests and small animals recoil in terror. Then serve the roast.

    Purple Rain

    purple rain

    So you finally showed those uppity punks Morris Day and the Time who’s funkiest in Minneapolis and you’re looking for someplace to throw down with the girls from Vanity 6. This tasteful set is fit for even the purplest, if not necessarily for anyone else. Sure, it’s not technically paisley, but with lacy, black filigree and bathed in the tasteful light of a mauve chandelier, who’s going to notice? Accessorize with a marble coffee table and assorted cocaine goblets and get ready to party like it’s 1999. Rear wall mirrors not included.

    And Here Is Where You’ll Live

    chariots of the gods

    Once you’ve picked out the furniture of your dreams you’re going to need to a crib to put it in. Imagethief recommends Beijing’s Park Royale apartments in the up and coming Shuangjing neighborhood. I have no idea what they look like inside, but with a forecourt statue of a winged goddess in a chariot being pulled by eight raging stallions, all rendered in gold, it seems like one of the few places likely to be able to withstand your taste in furniture.

  • Journey to the planet of the electro-squids

    It’s time to move.

    We’ve been in the same place for nearly three years. It’s been good, but Mrs. Imagethief’s business is growing, I’m spending some of my time working at home, and let’s not even get into the whole child-number-two discussion. The upshot is that we need a bigger place.

    I hate almost everything about moving. It’s disruptive. It’s a pain in the ass. It’s expensive (although less so in China than elsewhere). There is the great mystery as to whether you’re trading your current decent landlord (I’ve been lucky) for Empress Wu. There’s the great computational axis of price vs. commute vs. school vs. amenities vs. could our ayi get here? The only good things about moving are being able to slough off a layer of useless house-cruft — all that stuff at the backs of closets– and the feeling you get when you finally have the new place set up the way you want, before the cats have salted everything in summer cat hair and little, scattered pills of cat litter. I have many miles to go before I have my feet up on that particular ottoman of satisfaction.

    Until then, I must endure the great drudgery of plodding through empty apartments. The other day I had to reel in an agent who was about to take us to look at some places renting for RMB40,000 a month. Hold on there, tiger. I know you’re paid based on the rent, but if I could afford that kind of ticket my personal flunky would be taking the first look. Not me. Our budget is decent, but we’re still squarely in the making-some-compromises bracket. It says something about China that our current leading-candidate apartment had an unflushed toilet full of shit and yet our conclusion was still, say, not bad. In the US realtors tell you set out fresh cookies when people are coming to look at the apartment. In China you get a bog full of crap. But you also get new floor boards, so take the bad with the good, I guess.

    I don’t want to complain at length about all the miseries of hunting for an apartment in China. Well, strictly speaking, that’s not true. I do in fact want to complain about them and I have done so at length. But I also want to focus on just one thing that gets up my nose every time I tour apartments in China. It is not, despite what you might think, piles of human waste. It is the light fixtures.

    To gather all my complex feelings about this into just three words, what the f***?

    It’s true, many Chinese apartments have appalling furniture. My solution to that has been to buy my own furniture and look for unfurnished or partly-furnished places. I’m completely willing to have redundant crap dragged out of the apartment as a condition of rental. That couch that I wouldn’t sit on without wrapping my ass in saran-wrap and sunscreen? Adios, muchacho. But lights are built in. There is wiring, and screws and god knows what. And if I unplug this wire, this being China and all, there is a chance, however small, that all the stop-lights in the neighborhood will turn green at once or the neon sign on the restaurant across the road will spell out a dirty word and my visa will be canceled for gross disturbance of public order.

    None of which would matter if the light fixtures weren’t so consistently awful. I’m not talking some rarefied, well that’s a bit unsightly thing. I’m talking full-on psychotic awful, like having Damien Hirsch Hirst* as your interior decorator and coming home to find pickled sharks lined with halogen bulbs hanging from your ceiling at face level. I’m talking 1970s Disco Inferno throwback nasty that makes me think of lime green shag carpets and Ford Econoline vans with bubble windows and airbrushed paintings of topless space-vixens deflecting lightning bolts with Gibson “Flying V” electric guitars. If you’ve ever wanted to see what it would look like if the space-ship from the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind landed in your living room, I’ve got the apartment for you. If you want to know what it would look like if Louis XVI had escaped the guillotine, sneaked out of France disguised as un ouvrier Chinois (quelle humiliation!) and wound up in a downtown three-bedroom in Beijing on a middle-class Chinese salary, I’ve got the apartment for you.

    What is this fascination with chandeliers? Listen: If you’ve got a stately pile in the countryside with forty acres (or, this being China, 240 mu) of grape vines and a grand hall with a thirty-foot ceiling that requires banquet illumination, then fine. Get a chandelier. I’m not saying it’s a good decision, but it’s at least technically defensible on some kind of inbred, blue-blood clause. But if you’ve just bought an urban pre-fab concrete box with eight-foot ceilings, a three-foot chandelier is simply not going to work unless you’re renting your apartment to Wee Man from the “Jackass” movies. Sooner or later, someone is winding up in the hospital having bits of Swarovski shrapnel irrigated out of their eyes. Plus, if you are renting your apartment to Wee Man, a stack of turds in the hall bathroom is likely to be the least of your problems when he moves out. Make sure you get the deposit in cash.

    Lights, dude. How hard can it be? It’s the illumination that counts, not the number of fronds on the fixture or getting it exactly the same shade of pink as Aphrodite’s hemorrhoids. A big factor in choosing our current apartment was that it had naked bulbs in the ceiling. All we had to do was hang shades on them. Less is more. Think minimal and simple. Especially –and I cannot stress this enough– if you want to rent to foreigners. We’re weak. Our eyes bleed if we see too much brass filigree at any one time. Easy test: if your light fixtures make my son either giggle or cry, I’m not renting your apartment, even if the fridge is colossal and the toilets just came out of an autoclave and the bathrooms smell like a strawberry muffin factory. It’s that simple. When I stagger home from work late and flick on the living room light, I don’t want my first reaction to be cardiac arrest. I don’t want to feel compelled to place a panicky phone call to SHADO.  I don’t want to crack my head into the goddamn thing when I stumble into the kitchen in the middle of the night for a biscuit. I don’t want to find freaking bats hanging from it.

    I don’t, in a word, want this:

    electro squid

    Now, really, is that too much to ask?

  • Poorly thought out adventures in commuting

    In the grip of my darkest and most bourgeois moments I actually considered buying a car and hiring a driver. So, it’s come to this… I thought, as I hovered over a digital map of Beijing. I have to get one of those Buick vans. No matter how I traced the route or arranged the useless layers of meta-data in Google Maps I had to face up to reality. My new office was in the sticks.

    More specifically, it was in Wangjing. North Wangjing, hard against the Fifth Ring Road. The Fifth is commonly accepted as the dividing line between the frothy, urban Beijing of Apple Stores and upscale dining and the great void of the Chinese hinterland where all is windswept grist for broody New York Times articles about how miserable the rest of the world has it. Well, and also Tongzhou. Never mind that when I moved to Beijing the Fourth Ring Road was that line.

    You can tell the office is in a neighborhood that didn’t exist three years ago. The building is as gorgeous and new as a space station and just as isolated from amenities and comforts. The nearest Starbucks is at least two kilometers away. In Beijing in 2010 more than two kilometers from Starbucks is the qualification for a rural hukou. I brought a French press to office.

    I am strong enough to confront my flaws (although weak enough wrap that confrontation in a layer of prickly humor). By the standards of my Chinese colleagues this is, I admit, jello-kneed schoolgirl bitching. Many of them live outside the Fifth and have commutes that sound lifted from the darker pages of Jack London novels, where people die freezing for want of a twist of jerky somewhere on the track from Fort Yukon to Unalakleet. Just substitute a bendy-bus for the dog sled. Against this, even the commute from Dawang Rd. to Wangjing is lower middle-distance at best, like one of those mid-range Olympic track races that is too long to be exciting but too short to be impressive and that nobody remembers who won.

    I, however, have been spoiled. For six years my distance from the office has ranged from a five minute walk to a five-stop straight shot on subway line 1. Even the latter is the Beijing commute equivalent of schlepping from the couch to the fridge during a commercial break for a half-full can of Duncan-Hines frosting and a Pabst Blue Ribbon.

    Although I toyed seriously with the idea of either buying a car or hiring a car and driver, in the end my socialist* pedigree won out. For my first day at the new job I decided to take public transport.

    Man, was that stupid.

    It looked good on the map, though. From my house I can take the line 1 subway one stop to Guomao. Then it’s a straight shot north on line 10 to the Shaoyaoju interchange and one more stop on line 13 to Wangjing West. From there a short bus ride. Simple!

    If you read the New York Times you probably scan the occasional Tom Friedman column where he hyperventilates about how fast the Chinese are building infrastructure for which Americans have lost the blueprints. Subways, for instance. The statistics for Beijing are magnificent: Thirty lines planned, totaling over 1000 kilometers of track. Everyone living within the Fourth Ring to be able to walk to a station in fifteen minutes. Sounds like The Future!

    Sure. It’s Logan’s Run. But with the subway system from The Warriors.

    There are two reasons for this. First, adding more lines and interchanges has certainly made the entire system more useful. But the number of people riding has gone up as something like a cubic function of the number of track kilometers. In the course of two years my old line 1 commute went from crowded but tolerable to needing to lubricate yourself with Astroglide and use a prybar to get on or off the train. Combined with the casual Chinese disdain for off first, on second it’s a miracle the platforms aren’t entirely covered with bits of scalp and shards of broken teeth.

    Second, the planners of the Beijing subway system haven’t really figured out the whole idea of the subway interchange. In Singapore, subway interchanges are designed such that trains that make the most natural connections pull up on opposite sides of the same platform. Walk thirty air-conditioned feet, get on the next train. Now that’s the future!

    But why build an actual subway interchange when you can just build a long, sweaty tunnel between stations in adjacent neighborhoods? Changing trains in Beijing is a little bit like changing airport terminals, right down to the surprising number of people dragging luggage. Add the rush hour crowds and idiotic security screening chokepoints and it’s almost (though not quite) as bad as checking in at JFK.

    It took me an hour to get from my house to Wangjing West station. When I finally staggered off the third train I was ready to bail on the bus and head for a taxi. Except that Wangjing West apparently serves as the informal transportation hub for the entire Wangjing new town, which means that at any given moment there are zero authorized taxis and about fifty black cabs. I don’t generally like taking black cabs, although I do it from time to time, so I reverted to the bus.

    Big mistake. Should have taken the black cab. Beijing subway platform minders are good at cramming an apparently limitless number of people onto a train, but they have nothing on the bus drivers. Beijing’s bus drivers have taken that skill and extended it into a rarefied art form of otherworldly magnificence. The driver of the bus I took used a combination of eye-watering verbal abuse, physical bullying and backyard-steel-furnace socialist will power to get people stacked three deep in the bus. Mine was the Very. Last. Stop.

    Except that I accidentally got off a stop early and had to walk the last kilometer. There isn’t much in Wangjing and they space out the bus stops like railroad towns. An hour and twenty minutes after leaving the house I got to the office, late and looking like I had been caught in a kitchen fire at a Bob’s Big Boy. I felt virtuous, but exhausted and dumber than a chicken on roofies. Some of my colleagues do this daily. In both directions. This, not the threat of cyberwar, is why America should be scared of China.

    So I’ve been taking the taxi. I did the math. Sure, it adds up, but it’s still way cheaper than a regular car and driver, let alone buying my own car. About 25% of the taxi cost is offset by my having to brew my own coffee (which says something about the magnitude of my coffee habit). And it gave me the gossamer thin rationalization I needed to justify my iPad (thus instantly cancelling out something like two year’s worth of coffee savings). A quiet half-hour each way alone with my electronic newspapers. Well, quiet except for the ubiquitous radio story teller who makes wet lightning-and-thunder noises with his mouth.

    I’ve come to terms with the cost. I’ve come to terms with my increased contribution to global warming. The only thing that really worries me is the feeling that a taxi-based commute in Beijing is actuarial equivalent of moving to Detroit and developing a habit for convenience store robbery. After all, few Beijing taxis have seatbelts and most are driven by people with the patience and deliberation of a fox terrier that has been whipped with car antennas. If you hear of a pileup on the fourth ring and a white man being whisked to hospital to have an iPad removed from his abdominal cavity that’ll be me. If you hear of a taxi driver being whisked to hospital with an iPad embedded in his skull and an angry white man being questioned by police, that will also be me.

    *by American standards.

    You can't get there from here.
    You can’t get there from here.

  • Down the rabbit hole in Kansai

    So here’s how it goes. Someone inconveniently dies on your airplane just as it is about to take off. You experience an odd mix of feelings. On the one hand, you sympathize with the family and feel bad for their tragic loss in the least dignified of circumstances. No one should have to die in the economy class of a non-moving airplane. On the other hand, you think to yourself, man, is my connection screwed. You are a bad person and will burn in hell.

    But first you will burn in Kansai. Kansai is the international airport in Osaka. That is a lie. Kansai is the international airport that is somewhere in the same general vicinity of Japan as Osaka. On a clear day, you might see Osaka in the distance as you fly into Kansai. Or, then again, you might not. Kansai is where you are supposed to change planes for Hawaii. You want to be in Hawaii. Hawaii has warm breezes, palm trees, and girls in bikinis. You have packed clothes for Hawaii. They are thin clothes.

    Kansai is on an artificial island they built somewhere in the general vicinity of Osaka because to build an airport on existing land near the city would have been a silly idea, and not used enough concrete. Kansai is apparently sinking slowly. This must really piss people off. Or, then again, maybe it doesn’t. After all, keeping the airport from sinking will keep construction companies busy for decades. Japan likes to keep its construction companies busy. Japan invented the idea of the “bridge to nowhere”. Most places build a useless bridge from somewhere to nowhere. In Japan, they build a bridge from nowhere to nowhere. They are that committed.

    There is a bridge from Kansai Airport to Rinku. Rinku is nowhere. It is certainly not in Osaka. Arguably the airport is somewhere, but it’s nowhere you would want to be. The bridge from Rinku to Kansai is a bridge from nowhere to nowhere. It also has a train. Eat that, Gravina Island.

    You need to take a bus over the bridge to nowhere. A young lady from the airline meets you at the jetway, escorts you through the airport and puts you on the bus. She bows and scrapes constantly. She is a professional bower and scraper called into service to apologize for the inconvenience of your delay. She bows and scrapes so hard that she leaves a scuff mark from the jetway through the terminal, through quarantine, through immigration and through customs. She is, however, incapable of arranging meal vouchers for you. This leads to more bowing and scraping. Your back gets sore as you watch her. You are disarmed but feel like an idiot for it.

    Waiting for the bus you realize that clothing for Hawaii is inappropriate for late winter in Osaka. Or Rinku. Or wherever the hell it is you are. You are cheered, however, by the fact that the bus is full of pretty ANA stewardesses. ANA has very pretty stewardesses. And they can do CPR. This may be useful if you pass out from the cold while waiting for the bus. On the other hand, it didn’t help the guy on the plane you were on earlier. They told that guy not to fall asleep, and look what happened to him. If you hear a stewardess telling you not to fall asleep, panic.

    The bus drives you and the stewardesses over the bridge to nowhere and drops you in front of a splendid, gleaming hotel. This is not your hotel. This is the stewardesses’ hotel. Your hotel is across the street, over a footbridge that you must drag your bags over. It is not tall and gleaming. It is short and squat and looks like a Chinese hospital with a Japanese convenience store embedded in it. There are no stewardesses staying there. There is apparently nobody staying there except for you. The convenience store is useful because the restaurant is closed. Who would want to eat dinner in the evening? Who stays in Rinku? Only the stewardesses, and they’re in the nice hotel across the street. Tough shit, hombre.

    The hotel room is small. It reminds you of the single-occupancy dormitory room you stayed in twenty years ago in college except with a tiny, little, Munchkin-sized ensuite bathroom with an intergalactic toilet in it. They spared no expense on the toilet. The pillows, however, are apparently stuffed with something that gives them the consistency of sacks full of Tylenol gel-caps. This does not seem restful. There is a bilingual New Testament and a bilingual Teachings of Buddha. If you’re an atheist, you’d better have brought your own reading material.

    The room has a view of Rinku. Rinku is nowhere. From this room you cannot even see the bridge. That is one of the room’s redeeming features. Another redeeming feature is that it has a television. The guide on the desk says that channel 1 is the BBC. This is a lie. Channel 1 is showing an infomercial for Japanese lingerie. This is not as exciting as it sounds. This is your grandmother’s lingerie. This is almost certainly not the lingerie that the stewardesses are wearing. The BBC is nowhere to be found. There is Internet, however. Thank god for that, because this is Japan and your mobile phone and Blackberry are only good for talking to the voices in your head. Those voices are telling you to turn off the TV.

    The mini-bar is not a redeeming feature. It is empty. Foreigners are not trusted with a full mini-bar. They might get drunk and head for the stewardess hotel across the street. This would be disorderly. You flip through the hotel service guide in the desk. There is an entry for the mini-bar. It says “Room refrigerators have no drinks.” No shit, Sherlock. I guess the money for the toilet had to come from someplace. You are referred to the convenience store. The Japanese have an answer for everything. But they still have no meal vouchers.

    Breakfast isn’t until 9 tomorrow morning and you are in Rinku in winter watching an infomercial for bad Japanese lingerie in a hotel room with an empty mini bar and James T. Kirk’s crapper. You should be on your way to Hawaii. Travel is great.

    IMG_0263
    Phasers on kill.

  • A few other people that China could helpfully quarantine

    Imagethief has been watching with some interest the resolution of the drama concerning the quarantining of Mexican passport holders, some of whom hadn’t even been to Mexico in recent months. Given that my own country, the United States, was only recently contemplating the building of a border wall specifically designed to keep Mexicans out even before the flu, it seems small of me to criticize China for this policy. Especially now that news has surfaced that four Americans and a bunch of Canadian students have joined the Mexicans already enjoying government-sponsored stays in luxurious, one-star accommodations.

    Fortunately, I am a small man. Charitably, the jury is still out on the epidemiological efficacy of quarantining the Mexicans. Uncharitably, it was a scattershot, poorly-thought-out bit of knee-jerk policy that did for Chinese-Mexican relations what the notorious P3 incident off of Hainan did for Chinese-US relations in 2002.

    There is something rather 19th century about the whole idea of “quarantine”, conjuring as it does visions of smallpox and death ships. Not that there aren’t situations in which quarantine is a perfectly reasonably option. Infectious diseases are simply the most obvious application. But if the Chinese authorities are going to get all quaranteeny, Imagethief is happy to suggest a few other groups of people that the government should consider holding in isolation, for the benefit of society at large:

    • Taxi drivers who piss and moan under their breath about the traffic. It’s Beijing. You’re a taxi driver. What were you expecting?
    • Sanlitun bar touts.
    • Those girls with blue-frosted eyelids at Oriental plaza who try to waylay me for the tea-house scam when all I want is a coffee from Starbucks.
    • People who walk slower than me and follow an unpredictable path that makes it hard for me to get around them, or who stand two abreast on escalators.
    • People who cram huge trolley bags onto the subway at rush hour.
    • Drivers at the back of a line of thirty cars who honk the instant the light turns green. In fact, all drivers.
    • People who tell me my son needs to wear more clothes. Or less clothes. Or offer any kind of unsolicited parental advice based on folk wisdom.
    • People who put smiley-face emoticons in otherwise unpleasant e-mails: “You’re being audited. :) ”
    • Anyone who sends me an SMS that begins, “本公司…”
    • The Bank of China.
    • Snarky foreign bloggers.

    All of them would benefit from a spell in isolation, if only as a precautionary measure.

    Addenda:

    • People who smoke in elevators or office-tower bathrooms
    • People who instant-message you from ten feet away.

  • Will we all burn in a fire made of mooncake packaging?

    Imagethief likes the Mid-Autumn Festival. I like it because even though it actually comes in late summer, it reminds me of autumn, and autumn is famously the nicest time of year in Beijing. In any year devoid of Olympic rigging, late summer in Beijing is intolerably hot, muggy and polluted. This year it was merely hot.

    Over the years many people have told Imagethief that the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival falls in summer because of inconsistency between the Chinese lunar and western Gregorian calendars. This is total BS and I see no reason why I should accept obviously finagled explanations from people just because they are “Chinese”. The real reason is that without some reminder of imminent autumn and its much improved climate, half the population of Beijing would commit suicide in late August and early September, in the dregs of the Venusian summer atmosphere. In Scandinavia it’s the lightless winters that do it. In Beijing it’s the airless summers.

    If you assume that Beijing has fourteen million people (and don’t bother controlling for migrant labor, tourists, etc.) a one year half-life would leave Beijing with a population of just thirteen people in a mere twenty years. This would obviously be totally unacceptable to government mandarins, who would no longer be able to feel the satisfaction of clearing out an entire lane on Chang’an Ave. and making millions of gridlocked commuters watch them roar past in a motorcade. Roaring past one peasant and his donkey cart on an otherwise completely deserted twelve lane boulevard just doesn’t have the same effect, and anyway the same effect can be had in the new Burmese capital-cum-supervillain hideout of Naypyidaw.

    So Mid-Autumn Festival is a good thing. We all agree on that. However, just as the miracle of a Tex-Mex dinner comes with the heartbreak of punishing day-after flatulence, the miracle of Mid-Autumn Festival comes with its own curse: Mooncakes.

    Mooncakes are the Chinese fruitcake: Cloying pastries that appears once a year for traditional reasons that everyone has forgotten, generally as gifts, and which, cockroach-like, resist all attempts at eradication. If you must know the history, it’s on Wikipedia. Scroll right to the bottom, since most of the entry is devoted to the culinary characteristics.

    Many people complain to Imagethief about mooncakes. Inedible. Gross. Heavy. Burn longer than a tin of Sterno. And so on. To direct all this anger at the innocent and humble mooncake itself is to miss the point. First, Imagethief likes mooncake, albeit in small doses (it’s best cut with Chinese tea on the side). Of course, Imagethief also likes fruitcake. In fact, Imagethief pretty much likes anything sweet. I’d eat gravel if you mixed it with brown sugar.

    But the other thing is that is that the main problem with the mooncake is not the cake itself. It’s the packaging, which could be the least green consumer item since the Hummer.

    I was reminded of this when the translation company delivered a palletload of mooncake boxes to me and my team as part of the obligatory upward mooncake flow from vendor to client. Each of us received a heavy, embossed and foil stamped bag with rope handles. In the bag was a heavy cardboard box with a tri-fold faux-embroidery lid with faux-embroidery dragon applique. Within the box was a cardboard frame wrapped in a faux-silk shroud and lovingly cradling eight mooncakes. Each mooncake was in an individual cardboard box, a sealed plastic wrap and a plastic cup. Two pairs of wooden chopsticks in a fabric envelope were included for good measure. The theme throughout was tasteful and subdued imperial yellow garnished with dragons.

    Gross weight: About two and a half kilos. Net weight: About 640 grams. Multiply by a nation of 1.3 billion people. Sure, not everybody gets mooncakes. But some of us get lots of mooncakes. You can see where the environmental toll will start to add up.

    Fortunately, the picture is not as grim as it seems. Like fruitcakes, mooncakes are, if not an infinitely renewable resource, at least an infinitely recyclable one. Every year at this time the hand-lettered “recycle mooncakes” signs go up outside neighborhood shops and on curbside stands. Like overpackaged Chinese brandy sets, mooncakes are infinitely re-giftable. Shanghai, ever the city of commerce, has brought the mooncake recycling market to unprecedented levels of trading sophistication. Rather than give physical mooncakes, it’s common to give a coupon that can be redeemed for mooncakes. These coupons are then traded on an informal exchange of office ladies and household ahyis that offers NYMEX-like liquidity. Like the oil futures market, it seems that the actual mooncakes rarely enter into the final equation. However there is some risk as, like a bank run, its unclear if the system could actually withstand a mass-redemption event.

    The upshot is that while approximately four billion tons of mooncakes are gifted every mid-autumn, only about ten pounds are actually consumed. This means that the packaging situation is perhaps not as bleak as it first appeared.

    Imagethief sees this as yet another sign of Chinese technological advancement. Like an MRE a mooncake has a nearly infinite shelf life, allowing for century after century of suck-up regifting on a highly leveraged environmental footprint. Surely this is a system worthy of the inventors of moveable type, the compass, paper money, rhinestone dog collars, the Slinky, aerosol breath freshener, etc. etc.

    The mooncake tradition traces its history back to the fourteenth century. How charming and ecologically sensible that the mooncake you are now slicing into may also date back to that same century.

  • E-Z steps to make your own Beijing air at home

    Imagethief realizes that he and much of the journalistic and blogging community have been doing a grave disservice to our readers who don’t live in Beijing. We beg your forgiveness. Living in Beijing is such an all-consuming experience that we sometimes forget there is a world beyond the fifth ring road. Although we are, of course, tangentially reminded of this world every time we go to our beloved import supermarkets, which thrive on the business of bringing us Doritos, Haagen Dazs and other nibblicious, western treats from beyond the Great Barrier.

    The disservice we have perpetrated is to groan on at length about Beijing’s shabby, noxious air while never giving you, the reader abroad, the chance to understand for yourself what we really mean. Beijing in August is not best experienced as some kind of abstract mental construct based on the fulminations of bloggers, or the moralizing of the mainstream media. It is a physical experience, and has to be experienced viscerally and immediately. After all, reading about a rock band simply isn’t the same as standing in the mosh pit in front of the stacks, with the thump of the bass separating the cartilage from your bones and slow-cooking the fluid in your eyes.

    Part of the reason why Imagethief thinks that first-hand experience is valuable is that it provides perspective when one reads the dissembling of official apologists who are doing their best to insist that the air is not really as bad as it looks, tastes or feels in our eyes. In fairness, it has been much better the last couple of days than it was the past week, thanks to a welcome breeze and a touch of rain. But the mandarins have passed much of the last few days demonstrating that they are either disconnected from reality as the rest of us understand it, or that they have a less than satisfactory understanding of the meaning of the word “good” as it is commonly employed in English.

    It is hard to know which of these two situations is correct. Imagethief suspects that faulty dictionaries may be the problem, since the word “moderate” is used in SEPA reports to describe air quality that Imagethief would label “hopelessly toxic”, “depressing” or “squalid”. Adjectival nuance can be tricky, especially in a language as eccentric and irregular as English.

    It may also be that the authorities are simply trying to be “hip with the times”, and have noted the tendency of English-speaking youth to use negative adjectives as endorsements, e.g. “sick*” (what we who went to high school in the ’80s used to call “cool”, “awesome” or, in the most rarefied of circumstances, “radical”). If this is the case, then the fault is ours and when the authorities say “good” they actually mean “screwed”. Athletes are overwhelmingly young, so this is perhaps a forgivable error in these Olympic times. If SEPA, or its ministerial successor, refers to one of our rare blue-sky days as “sick”, then this theory may gain credence.

    The shame of this situation is that Beijing is in many ways a great city. It’s interesting and fun enough that many of us live here despite the often crummy air, which is really saying something. And when, every now and then, the air is truly clear, Beijing verges on beautiful. Colors pop out. The hills are visible to the north and west. The gorgeous parks and temples beckon. These clear days cluster in the brief spring and autumn, when temperatures and winds are favorable (although spring also gets dust storms). By any standard, however, they are rare. An enveloping, noxious fug is far more typical.

    Which brings me back to the point. I want to help you, the reader abroad, understand exactly what we’re talking about when we refer to Beijing’s poor air quality. After long experimentation at Imagethief Laboratories SA, I am pleased to report that we have developed a method of simulating Beijing’s typical August atmosphere with nothing more than a few easily obtainable ingredients and a common household appliance.

    Here is what you will need:

    • A serving plate.
    • Large bowl that can be used to cover the serving plate.
    • A bucket of water.
    • A Yorkshire terrier, Pekingese or similar small dog (at a pinch, a dog pelt can be used, but a whole dog is more reliable). Important: If the dog is wearing a metallic collar or tags, remove them.
    • A packet of bad cigarettes. Ideally, Chinese Red Pagodas. But at a pinch, Gitanes or Parliaments will do.
    • A non-metallic ashtray.
    • A turd.
    • A microwave oven.

    Steps:

    • Soak the dog in the bucket until wet to the skin.
    • Place the wet dog on the serving plate with the turd and the ashtray.
    • Place three lit cigarettes in the ashtray.
    • Cover the serving plate and all ingredients with the bowl.
    • Microwave on “high” for sixty seconds.

    Congratulations. What’s under the bowl is a close recreation of typical August Beijing air. Use a fork or butter knife to carefully lift the edge of the bowl (it’s hot!) and have a sniff. Now you’ll have something to visualize (or “olfactorize”) when you read the inevitable thousands of stories still to come on Beijing’s Olympic air quality. If you’re daring, you may want to get a garden hose, have a few of the frat brothers over and challenge each other to do “hits” of Beijing. You may need more than one dog**.

    *Probably already hopelessly out of date.
    **Imagethief does not actually condone microwaving yappy dogs, although he does sometimes fantasize about it.

  • Let me tell ya about Edison Chen’s dirty photos

    With the possible exception of Disney villains, Imagethief cannot think of a group of people that more richly deserve their miserable fates than Hong Kong celebrity Edison Chen and his cavalcade of cupcakes.

    If I sound unsympathetic here, that is because I am unsympathetic. Really, how dumb do you need to be? On all sides? Girls, here’s a free piece of advice for you from your friendly neighborhood PR man: If you let a guy take digital nudie pix of you, sooner or later those pix are going to end up on the Internet. Not maybe. Not could be. Inevitably. The Internet is like a gravity well for nudity, and there is a 100 percent chance those pictures will end up there someday. Probably the week of your wedding.

    And the guy might not even mean to do it. Edison Chen presumably didn’t mean to plaster Gillian Chung’s ass all over the Internet, thus ensuring that formerly semi-wholesome pop group Twins is now destined to be remembered forever as some kind of tawdry porn-o-rama. (This is the same Gillian Chung who was a spokeswoman for premarital chastity, by the way, illustrating once again a timeless lesson about the value of celebrities as role models.) I’m sure he thought he’d keep those snaps as his private treat. Or maybe share them with just a couple of close friends over beers.

    But –and I say this with affection for my gender– dudes are stupid. We’re especially stupid when it comes to managing technology effectively. We like to portray ourselves as masters of technological realm, with amazing powers of digital wizardry. But a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and in reality we’re as screwed over by modern technology as your grandmother. Probably worse, because at least she doesn’t pretend to understand it. We’d rather die –or inflict crushing humiliation on our girlfriends– than admit weakness.

    This is important, because only someone who is totally screwed over by modern technology would think to leave hundreds of pictures of himself banging eight different starlets sitting on an unencrypted laptop hardrive. Laptops get lost. Laptops get stolen. Laptops get filched off the back seat of your Lexus when no one is looking. Laptops fall out of overhead bins on airplanes and land on people’s heads, causing the porn to fall right out of them. Laptops break spontaneously, like Chihuahua dogs, and need to be sent in for repairs.

    Edison Chen had a customized pink Macbook that broke. He took it in for repairs. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a computer repaired before, but certainly on the mainland many such repairs are handled by spotty young men who have never had sex and have no immediate prospects of having sex. A customized pink laptop might as well be stenciled, “raid me for porn”. If you didn’t know otherwise you’d probably think it belonged to a chick (or an incredibly flamboyant gay man, but odds favor a chick). And that’s pure temptation, because the kind of girl who would have a customized pink Macbook would probably also have vanity lingerie shots somewhere on the hard drive. You might as well hand a mirror with six lines of primo Andean nostril icing and a rolled up twenty to a Hollywood agent and say, “Dude, I’m going out to have my ass waxed. For the love of god, whatever you do, don’t snort this excellent coke!”

    For people who must indulge in personal porn, Imagethief offers two words: encrypted + files. It just ain’t that hard, even for troglodytes.

    And the stakes are high. There’s no getting the porn genie back in the bottle. Even the Chinese government and their splendiferous Golden Shield (which, now that I think about it, really sounds like a condom brand) can’t keep smut under control. Rabbits on Viagra and Benzedrine have nothing on the speed with which anything having to do with female nudity replicates on the Internet. Like the herpes virus, it can be driven out of sight for a while, but it’s always still there, waiting to erupt painfully at the worst possible moment. So, as always, an ounce of prevention is worth is a pound of cure, especially when what you’re preventing is every newspaper in Hong Kong running a four page spread (and I don’t use that word lightly) of gynecologically explicit photographs of you.

    Now, about the reaction to the photos. ESWN has posted an exhaustive chronicle of fifteen days of breathless (but certainly not breastless) Hong Kong media coverage of the scandal. Tianya is, I gather, now all Edison & Co., all the time. Nobody anywhere should be shocked. I come from the country that has documented the decline and fall of Britney Spears with a ruthless detail that would give Edward Gibbon the sweats, if he hadn’t died in 1794 when carrier pigeons were still all the rage in high speed communication. There is really nothing a society likes better than celebrities imploding. Especially if it’s imploding naked starlets.

    Just say it out loud once, to get the taste of the words in your mouth: Imploding, naked starlets. Then tell me how any free media anywhere is going to resist. Now, imagine in particular the Hong Kong media, with its tradition of restraint, good taste, and sober, intellectual journalism. Now stop tut-tutting and go pick up the latest Oriental Sunday. You know you want to.

    I suppose I would be slacking if I didn’t offer some PR advice to all of the affected parties. This should be taken lightly as I freely admit to being a corporate PR person with no experience as a celebrity publicist. No crisis I have ever worked on has involved public nudity (although I keep hoping. as long as it’s not my own public nudity).

    The sad fact is that it’s going to be much easier on Edison than on Gillian, Cecilia, Bobo (oddly named for a girl, even in Hong Kong) and the other women. That’s because the universal double standard will unfortunately apply. Dudes who bed strings of starlets are swinging studs who will be admired by other men everywhere. Even if, inexplicably for straight guys, they have pink laptop computers. (Although it does occur to me now that I read this back that the entire episode has an air of “prove you are straight” overcompensation about it.) Edison needs only issue a public apology to the fans and affected girls and retire from the limelight for an appropriate spell of restorative contemplation before re-emerging a better man and, purely by accident you understand, using the momentum of the scandal to plug his latest project.

    Unfortunately girls who allow themselves to be photographed in flagrante by their boyfriends and who are then unlucky enough to have those pictures sucked into the vortex of the Internet face a tougher path. Their public images will most likely not be enhanced, at least not in the circles that count for a mainstream career. Unless they’re Paris Hilton, who, in Imagethief’s book, is the exception that proves the rule. Remember, unless that camera was disguised as a riding crop or a tube of Astroglide, these weren’t sneak pix.

    Apologies all around then, and perhaps a confession that the pictures were taken at “a difficult time” (it’s going to be funny how many of these girls were dating Edison at “a difficult time”). This can be followed by a spell in rehab, which is the modern equivalent of slinking away to join a convent without the shaven head or any of the other obnoxious religious rituals and the added bonus that it is temporary. After that we’ll see how it goes. Gillian probably survives. As for Bobo, well, it’s anyone’s guess.

    So girls, next time the camera comes out in that moment of passion, remember the Internet porn gravity well, poor Bobo, and the fact that dudes are idiots. If a late-career resurrection is what you want, pose for a professional so you can reap the benefits of props, makeup and –most important– airbrushing. Otherwise, gently demure and preserve the element of mystery that is so critical to a woman’s public image. Nobody looks sexy photographed up close on a cheap digital camera under bedroom lighting with their lips wrapped around some guy’s, um, memory stick.

    And if your boyfriend insists, kick him in the pills. It’ll be much harder for him to take a steady picture while he’s staggering around holding his crotch and you’ll have time to make a quick getaway.

    See also:

    • John Kennedy’s piece on the police response to the scandal on Global Voices
    • The extensive Wikipedia page (B) on the scandal, which includes almost sixty references and an invaluable though slightly out-of-date chart of how many photos have been posted of each starlet (Cecilia Cheung led at press time). And to think some people say Wikipedia is a waste of time:

    Updates:

    • I knew this would happen and I didn’t control for it, which perhaps I should have. You should see the Google strings that are turning up in my referrals now. Example:http://google.com/search?q=edison+chen+eating+out+gillian&hl=en&start=10&sa=n

      I don’t think that string is looking for a picture of the two of them at a restaurant.

    • Further proof of idiocy. This clown sold his computer on E-bay with his illegally videotaped k!ddie p*rn still on it. One assumes he secretly wanted the pain to end. I think we can all be happy he *didn’t* encrypt his hard drive.