I admit, I liked Shoot ‘Em Up (trailer). Especially the idea to cast Jan-Philipp Reemtsma as the villain. The movie is the more honest sibling of Children Of Men (another movie about Clive Owen saving offspring through showers of bullets, but without giving him the possibility to shoot back). Like one of my student used to put it in one of the short-lived sublines of his blog‘s title: “Putting the laughter into manslaughter”.
Fireworks!!
Happy New Year to everybody!!
Breathing Beijing
It seems I have caught this year’s worst-polluted day in one of the worst-polluted cities on this planet. (If you wanna see how this looks, just follow the link.)
Quote of the Day, late Christmas edition
“You westerners take copyright issues far too serious. The web is not about intellectual property, it’s all about spreading ideas!”
(A Chinese ideasmith, in conversation)
(… and I couldn’t agree more!)
Sohu’s Bloggers (some of them)
On December 23 I was witness (always painfully conspicuous as a foreigner) to the year-end meeting of Sohu’s featured bloggers. All the big chinese portal providers also serve as blog hosters, some with millions of bloggers each. Most of the active bloggers in China have several blogs, hoping to be featured here and there by their hosts on the portal homepages, an instant guarantee for thousands of additional pageviews and a lot of face. So in most cases the different blogs are not filled with different entries, but the contributions are simply copied and pasted to the different blogs.
Many ‘independent’ bloggers (meaning, bloggers without affiliations to some existing brand) look down upon this type of attention-seeking. Their contempt goes so far that some of them use a different word for blog: 网志 wǎng zhì (“net footnotes”) instead of 博客 bó kè (which, tellingly, means something like “winning guests”).
But real bloggers or not, it was fun. There was a lively discussion about the most significant events of the last year (Needle house? Ant Farmers? Lust, Caution?) and even some semi-serious breast-beating for not being more courageous in face of the usual attempts to ‘regulate’ the chinese blogosphere. Some self-declared poets bickered with the attending news bloggers about the proper use of words. Finally, a little boy, son of the director of Sohu’s weblog department, entered stage for a saxophone solo and you could see the pride in the eyes of his father holding the score for his talented offspring.
Measuring Thought’s Pulse
The Mindmeters website was founded in May 2003, originally as an online magazine providing space for contributions made to the Book Review supplement of the Economic Observer weekly (english). In Chinese the name of the website is 思维的乐趣, sī wéi de lè qù, The Delights of Thinking. The wonderful english title was coined by Qin Liwen, then senior reporter at EO, now head of Sohu’s News Center. One and a half years later, in October 2004, the core of the Mindmeters website was changed into a group weblog.
After the majority of Mindmeters’ contributors, something like 10 senior writers, left Economic Observer in the summer of 2005 out of frustration with the paper’s narrowing intellectual scope, Mindmeters became an independent weblog and one of the most interesting experiments in independent group publishing I know of.
The spiritus rector of Mindmeters is Fang Jun (方军), Beijing-based management expert and now head of Sohu.com’s culture department (picture above). The portfolio of contributors includes people like Wu Xiaobo (吴晓波), whose history of New China’s early entrepreneurs is considered to be the best treatment of this subject; Xu Zhiyuan (许知远), renowned essayist and designated biographer of Hongkong tycoon Li Ka-Shing; journalist and writer Zou Bo, (邹波) or Ye Ying (叶滢), head of the Lifestyle department at Economic Observer.
Originally there were less than 10 founding members, now the number of listed members is up to more than 50, but still there are no more than around 10 highly active contributors. The topics range from management theory and history to architecture or arts and literature. There is no commercial ambition in the project, it’s for fun and only for fun. New contributors are recruited like in a very restrictive club: they have to be friends of members.
Even though the members see Mindmeters as a way of sharing their ideas, you will find very little visible discussion between them. The comments come mostly from outsiders, even in the articles themselves other authors are rarely mentioned. When asked about this strange phenomenon, they might say: “We tend to discuss our contributions over lunch or dinner.”
There are no explicit guidelines, everyone is responsible for their own entries. Even the site’s topical banner can be changed by everyone. Of course, Fang Jun is checking the site regularly to make sure there is no crossing the boundaries of decency, political or otherwise, but mostly the blog is a great and courageous attempt in free, distributed thinking and writing.
Christmas in Chengdu
I’m sitting in the Chengdu Bookworm Café, enjoying a free hotspot (very common in China, not as rare as in Germany), the cozy atmosphere of a library and the gorgeous british food… 😉 The capital of the Sichuan province is famous for being homestead to the biggest group of captive Panda bears worldwide, and notorious for its incredibly hot pepper dishes. So yesterday we had the real chinese winter food, a scary Sichuan Hotpot.
But actually, something made Chengdu feel very familiar. During the airplane’s descent we had to cross a thick layer of clouds which didn’t really end when the plane touched ground. The Chinese have a saying: 蜀犬吠日 shǔ quǎn fèi rì, meaning “Sichuan dogs bark when they see the sun”. With 10 degrees centigrade and a permanent drizzle the weather in this place reminds me of Hamburg’s winter and is quite some contrast to the cold and dry dust of Beijing.
Poets and Bloggers
Some notable events from the last days: One day after my arrival in China I was taken along to a poetry reading in some subterranean Beijing bar. Not exactly what you call a poetry slam, but also based on participation. The MC dragged me onto the stage, and as I didn’t have any poems of my own to present, nor brought along any Hölderlin, Rilke, Grünbein or other german cultural heritage, I read Q’s english translation of her Venice poem. I was so nervous that I forgot a good part of the last verse, but it didn’t really matter because there was probably nobody who understood enough english anyway and she provided the chinese original afterwards.
Two days later I was witness (always painfully conspicuous as a foreigner) to the year-end meeting of Sohu’s featured bloggers. All the big chinese portal providers also serve as blog hosters, some with millions of bloggers each. Most of the active bloggers in China have several blogs, hoping to be featured here and there by their hosts on the portal homepages, an instant guarantee for thousands of additional pageviews and a lot of face. So in most cases the different blogs are not filled with different entries, but the contributions are simply copied and pasted to the different blogs.
Many ‘independent’ bloggers (meaning, bloggers without affiliations to some existing brand) look down upon this type of attention-seeking. Their contempt goes so far that some of them use a different word for blog: 网志 wǎng zhì (“net footnotes”) instead of 博客 bó kè (which, tellingly, means something like “winning guests”).
But real bloggers or not, it was fun. Conceptual artist Zhao Bandi, accompanied as always by his trademark stuffed Panda, participated and was the object of much attention. There was a lively discussion about the most significant events of the last year and even some semi-serious breast-beating for not being more courageous in face of the usual attempts to ‘regulate’ the chinese blogosphere. Some self-declared poets bickered with the attending news bloggers about the proper use of words. Finally, a little boy, son of the director of Sohu’s weblog department, entered stage for a saxophone solo and you could see the pride in the eyes of his father holding the score for his talented offspring.
Neue Freiräume
(Below, an article I’ve written for the December 2007 issue of Medium Magazin. In german, obviously.)
Inverted Jet Lag
Back in Beijing and suffering from the worst biorhythmical confusion I’ve ever had after the eastward trip. I wake up in the middle of the night, fully alive and in best mood. Funny thing is, in my regular Frankfurt context that would have been during the evening hours. So what does that mean? My body interprets my Beijing midnight attempts to go to bed as an afternoon nap or what?