滚着滚着 rolling china + sinosphere 2013

there are more pics like that, i posted them to the catalogue famous people thread... hol up

http://photographyofchina.com/Zhang-Yaxin#.US44LOvF00x

http://www.brandchannel.com/home/post/2013/04/23/Shanghai-Auto-ZX-Libyan-Rebel-Model-042313.aspx

i need to drive this.

...it's hard to imagine any attendee out-crazying China's Hebei Zhongxing Automobile Co. Ltd or "ZX Auto." ...the automaker presented a "Libyan Model" of its Grand Tiger truck, complete with rear heavy weapons mount, Arabic stenciling and an accompanying photo gallery showing the model in action against Muammar Gaddafi.

see also: How I took my ZX Auto Grand Tiger To War Against Gaddafi

Thanks for the Shandong tips, dylannn. I'm going to Weihai for work so not much flexibility there but hopefully I can find a few days afterwards to potter around the area.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/apr/26/iron-man-3-chinese-edition

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/films/1371

dylannnnnnnn, any recs from this list??

for mordy, more zhang yaxin: http://photographyofchina.com/Zhang-Yaxin-1#.UYEe5yvF1Fo

as far as change the world documentarymaking, i don't think anything like river elegy has been reproduced. it was the most widely available piece of critical thought around in china in 1988 (summary: all the symbols of civilization that are cherished by the chinese people are a sham. the great wall is a symbol of isolationism. the yellow river is a stagnant shitsmelling puddle. china was conservative and introverted. meanwhile, the europeans went out onto the big blue ocean and created a market economy and allowed intellectual freedom that led to amazing scientific discoveries)-- when deng xiaoping and his faction had destabilized the chinese political elite and the entire country, it was also a broadside in support of their reformist goals, which is why i suppose it was allowed to be broadcast in the first place. 77 to 89 was not a solid period of dengist reform but a series of freezes and thaws as various factions within the party jockeyed for position. river elegy and the little island of intellectual freedom created in the press + academia at the time was met by a hard freeze and the people that worked on it and supported it in the press (right up to the highest levels in the party) didn't escape criticism or punishment. even if the neoliberal crew in the party eventually wrested control back, the critique of the pillars of chinese nationalism (esp their use within narrative of chinese civilization growing from yellow river, glorious great wall etc) still doesn't fly.

i'm not sure how it would work condensed into an hour. there's lots of good background material to read on it, including a great annotated translation of the script, deathsong of the river. i'd probably go see it.

i'd want to go see wu wenguang in conversation! he made that artists in beijing documentary that i embedded somewhere up there. and he made fuck cinema, which is another one i'd go see.

out of phoenix bridge is beautiful and sad.

i love jia zhangke but you might have already seen 24 city and you've probably seen qiu ju.

if i had to pick something that i think you might really like, i'd say san yuan li + disorder.

i think longing for the rain sounds amazing from the description. i need to see that.
erotic ghost story + surreal depiction of female sexuality + social documentary.

also, petition is worth it, if you haven't seen it. and west of the tracks is pretty wellknown as like an over the top concept, 10 hour documentary on postindustrial shenyang wasteland. i think i quite liked it. but i also just sat through wang bing's labor camp nondocumentary the ditch.

i feel like amateurist could also offer some pointers here.

i've seen disorder! i will try to go and see the ones you mentioned. just my luck that this stuff happens in the midst of finals season

i didnt realize rian dundon was a personal english tutor for fan bingbing, also took lots of pictures http://www.chinafile.com/being-bingbing

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/wp-content/gallery/china-report/z-10-china-daily-forum.jpg

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/05/china-report-weapons/

yeah, MoMA series is starting as my work leave is coming to an end...

I reviewed the short version of Petition, wd love to see the long one but don't know if I could last 5 hours right now outside of home.

i saw the fan bingbing series before and i really liked it, grainy out the window of a mercedes pictures, the shot of her in the long parka, theres so much emotion and detail in them especially in the direct contrast between fan bingbing's usually sunglassed distant elegance and her environment and the shots of movie sets and the raw blankness of an school auditorium in smalltown jiangnan adoring fans. im stuck on that shot of her getting out of her car with her team wrangling her into an appearance at a shoe wholesaler in shenzhen, the crowds behind her, the intersuburban bus idling. i really like them, even if my description here of why i really like them might not be clear. if he could extend the fan bingbing series to a booklength project i'd buy that too.

i hate to hear him sound so dejected about photography. honestly, the changsha series meant a lot to me: the material is so compelling and familiar to me and im deeply impressed with the way he shot those subjects, that setting.

and i also had no idea he was fan bingbing's personal english tutor!

heh his thoughts on photography in his latest tumblr post almost exactly mirror mine, down to the getting depressed if not making pictures / BUT questioning the value of it all.

is it possible he made any money off changsha or does it have the potential to make him any money in the future?

big mo, i'd love to hear your thoughts on petition and other films on the programme! some of the selections struck me as a bit odd but lots worth checking out.

if anyone has a chance to go see chris berry talk, i think they should. his writing has introduced me to a lot of chinese filmwork / theory on + hes had the biggest impact on how chinese film is treated in academia + is a good writer and speaker.

the total funding for changsha was like, 17,000, probably there's a couple thousand dollar profit built into that.... 8 years of work turned into rent money for a couple of months, i guess

photobooks don't really make money except in the secondary market, you can't pump them out w/ regularity unless one becomes a megasuccess i think, haven't really heard of a 50 shades phenomenon in the photo community, not even sure how many copies these new vivian maier monographs are shipping

i remember a comment about steidl, like, publishing the steidl version of the americans is what enables them to do so many other cool photobooks that lose money

if rian were smart he'd print 1000 copies, sell 500, wait for prices to hit $1000 on the used market and then slowly sell his others on the used market

http://www.amazon.com/Wonderland-Fairytale-Monolith-Jason-Eskenazi/dp/0974283673

i bought this for $35 from jason -_-

would they hit $1000 on the used market? wht would that take?

i have no understanding of this kind of thing. from reading talking barnacles' behind the scenes photobusiness stuff, i got the impression patrick tsai made very little money but was able to pay for a modest lifestyle with a lot of hustling and maybe a bit of photobook cash.

nah they probably wouldnt hit $1000, $1000 sticks in my mind because it was the high price for a copy of wonderland according to TOP, but i'm sure that didn't sell. realistically probably would be looking at 1-200. even something like http://www.amazon.com/Winogrand-1964-Trudy-Wilner-Stack/dp/1892041626 sells at like, $2-400 for an average copy.

photobooks just don't sell in the same way that books sell, and when you want to do a reprint i imagine you have to secure time on a printing machine, of which there are gonna be a lot fewer + a lot more expensive than a normal printer, that's my guess.

well a critic friend and I lol'd when independently we both wrote that Petition was a doc mix of Bleak House and Kafka, so perhaps my insights are not that vital.

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/05/chinese-diy-inventions/100511/

i recognize this diy impulse very much

http://micgadget.com/34884/wtf-chinese-woman-poops-in-glass-elevator-in-shenzhen-subway-video/

what an appealing URL

does what it says on the tin

diy china and slightly more life or death than robot rickshawmen, homemade dialysis machine built from surplus medical equipment: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2266412/Chinese-man-kept-alive-13-years-HOMEMADE-dialysis-machine.html

this is where i mention half the furniture in our house was DIY built by my dad

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/09/zhang-yimou-seven-children-claims-china

this isn't very important but
there was a story a few days ago on my qq popup news thing about zhang remarrying and i noticed, woah, the guy has a lot of kids, eh?

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1232976/chinas-underdog-youth-find-success-diaosi-or-loser-identity

ive seen this piece + a few others in english over the last couple weeks trying to figure out the meaning of 屌丝, including one piece that says:

...I want to argue that one of the latest of these, the rise of "diaosi" – or "loser" – culture on the Chinese internet, is interesting enough to deserve close attention from a political perspective. The popularity of this identity among people who do not seem like natural losers is a major challenge for Xi Jinping as he makes his current push for legitimacy on the strength of the "Chinese dream." China PowerA New World Order‹ Back to China Power Could This Be China’s Youth Movement? (short answer: no)

scmp gets a bit closer, identifying it with smallscale achievement, online diy culture. but goes wrong looking at the overachiever diaosi and talks about wei xiaobo from the deer and the cauldron and ah q as prototypical diaosi heroes-- maybe wei xiaobo gets a bit closer but i still don't think so, and ah q has a very specific meaning, i think, as someone who's self-deluding, whereas i think of diaosi as very aware/resentful of their social position. and i think lots of these pieces ignore the very male resentment embodied by the term, dudes who can't get pussy.

although the term is so widely used now that my reading of it is probably too narrow. and i see it more often used now to talk about backdoor achievement and more of the general stuff that the scmp article talks about, but i still think it's missing the point to talk about diaosi as overachieving slackers! that's how i feel.

so, i guess it's okay to use the term for guys that can't get any pussy and resent their social situation but i also understand exactly when people refer to <a href="http://shanghaiist.com/2013/03/19/zhao_xiyong_fake_communist_official.php";>zhao xiyong</a> as diaosi.

always forget that convert simple html to bbcode button.

my friend when i asked about a good working definiton said, you are totally diaosi.

it also calls to mind 草食男子 in japan i think but i'm not an expert on that term either, but i think it has its similarities in that it refers to men turning their back on traditional masculine pursuits because of deep resentment about their social situation + economic situation.

grass-eating boy? hehe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbivore_men

ah okay, i'm familiar w/ the phenomenon but had not heard that term!

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia-pacific/2013/05/201351364213913782.html

good on u guys

i saw that. i assume it'll allow a change in the legal status of same sex marriages, too, and maybe push the situation in china.

http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1236762/ai-weiwei-shares-video-beijing-street-brawl-between-chinese-and

what's ai weiwei up to? producing content for the ilx street fights thread, stoking ethnic tension

how is ai weiwei not already dead dot com

something less depressing: http://boingboing.net/2013/05/13/inside-the-worlds-largest-gh.html

south china loll could become a business park

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/15/chinese-internet-censorship-campaign?CMP=twt_gu

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwdemery/sets/

a lot of photos here but dang i just love old photoso

http://gawker.com/abducted-23-years-ago-man-uses-google-maps-to-find-his-508302419

my girlfriend's mother was abandoned on the streets of shanghai in 1961, sometime during the tail end of the great leap forward. she has some memories of her hometown, somewhere in zhejiang. she was was given a new name and sent to an orphanage in northern jiangsu. she's done lots of work with groups that try to reunite missing children with their parents. there's an uncountable number of kids in that situation: abandoned or kidnapped or just misplaced, usually at a very young age, and with no real network or government agency or anything like that to help them out.
yeah.

yeah i donated a lil' to charlie custer's documentary project about that phenom http://livingwithdeadhearts.com/