Tag Archives: China
Reading: Zhao Ziyang – Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang
zhao ziyang – prisoner of the state恭喜天安门
Reading: Jin Xing – Shanghai Tango (A Memoir)
jin xing – shanghai tango (a memoir)恭喜天安门
tiananmen square june 1989sunday tranny-blogging (and spitting in china)
What is it about Sundays that seem to cause a blog upwelling of a more cerebral nature than during the week? My drinking of coffee for the first time in several days? A general Sunday laziness facilitating interestingness? Or was it the dream I had last night in which several bloggers (most of whom I’ve never met, some I don’t even know what they look like) starred along with Monica Bellucci (she can be explained by the superb Agents Secrets I watched last night, with utterly glorious use of wide-screen cinematography, mesmerising editing, and a plot equal to the best of any in the genre) as a fire fighter, thus impelling said bloggers to write the kind of post I go, “ooooh, makes you think, doesn’t it?”, and promptly reblog it.
Firstly from the Tranny Bloggers Social Club from last night’s dream comes Miss K, who is having coke and vodka fuelled weirdness of her own, populated with Pakistani taxi drivers and slobbery blue hungry ghosts, “a strange collection of jointed sticks covered roughly in a misshapen piece of tarpaulin … a small mouth, with blue, cherubic lips fringed by slightly longer fur that rippled slowly in the direction of the mouth, like the fronds of an anemone. The lips had a pronounced underbite, so that a set of pointy, conical white teeth jutted out in front.”
Other tranny bloggers who I recall with certainty made an appearance last night, but neglected to amuse me with writing anything today include Becky and Becca, possible appearances from Helen Boyd, and Siobhan Curran.
Completely departing the trannysphere, but staying by implication with gender (or sex, fuck, I dunno, whichever one is currently ‘nature’ and not ‘culture’) and Data supports a non-invasive prenatal genetic testing. While I can appreciate the immense benefit in being able to diagnose severe genetically caused defects, and yay for that, I also think this: Imagine a technology that among other things allowed early detection of a bunch of chromosomal abnormalities that directly affected what’s between your legs, and consequently – because what is implicit in such testing is the ability to act on the results – the abortion of any bearers of such defects. Inasmuch as there is a genetic diversity that is currently described as ‘abnormal’ so too is there a cultural response that is equally abnormal, and perhaps accompanying such research with some kickarse medical ethics aimed squarely at educating the population that abnormal does not necessarily equal bad would be pertinent right about now.
Barista was not at my somnolent shindig last night but thinks the Tang Dynasty poem Ballad of Mulan is pretty special. Barista also got all emotional about Tintin’s cars, and as someone who grew up with the boy reporter and Captain Haddock, I’m suddenly feeling like spending the afternoon with Hergé and a kilo of Belgian chocolate would be quite pleasant.
花崗齋雜記 Jottings from the Granite Studio was definitely present last night too, but nothing links this blog to those uncouth British crossdressers, so I have absolutely no idea what (singular) they were doing, The Useless Tree also, so I suspect something Taoist in all this. Taoist fire fighters maybe? Anyway, public manners and spitting in Modern China and the anti-spitting campaign of 1950-something (along with the Great Leap Forward, this social experiment also was not so successful).
Finally, Gender identity disorder cases on rise in Bihar. In my academic/research/dangerously curious moments, I wonder whether such a title can be taken literally, and so represents on a broader scale a measurable increase in all types of gender weirdness. Certainly plenty of fish and frogs are getting in on the fun. Of course it could all be a coming out of the shadows caused by the complementary influence of better medical treatment, drugs and surgery, the monumental effect of the internet in distributing information and building communities, and a broader societal shift which Becky (and I’m closing the loop here) summarises as TG Sells.
miss k turns 3 in 2l
the cars of tintin
spitting is bad
smashing small thing together really fast
Maybe I should change my blog name to supernaut … i whore for science, I’ve been blogging so much about planetary physics, Mars, other stuff is totally off the art trail. Anyway, particle physics is one of those things that just gets me delirious with excitement, smashing stuff together at the speed of light and watching pretty new things grow in the universe. I was quite surprised that there is an old not so large accelerator in Beijing, that compared to CERN and Fermilab is merely a sleepy backyard playground, but is both fascinating as a historical artifact of communist science and as a low energy collider that is managing to do some impressive research. And then there’s China’s interest in the International Linear Collider.
The energy range of the Beijing collider, 1 to 2.2 billion electron volts per beam, contained a lot of puzzling left-behind physics, including the tau, a sort of superfat electron, for which nature has no obvious purpose, and the so-called J/psi. The J/psi, consisting of a pair of quarks each exhibiting the quantum property known whimsically as charm, set off a revolution and led to Nobel prizes when it was discovered in 1974.
“There is a lot going on in that energy region,” said Frederick A. Harris, a professor of physics at the University of Hawaii, who works often at the Beijing collider. By tuning the energy of their colliding beams, the Chinese researchers have been able to measure the mass of the tau very precisely, as well as carry out detailed studies of the J/psi and similar particles.
In the collider’s energy range, Dr. Chen said simply, “We dominate.”
Among the collider’s achievements, Dr. Harris said, was the most precise measurement yet of a number called “R.” In the so-called standard model, which currently rules particle physics, this parameter measures the likelihood of fireballs produced in the collider to materialize into so-called hadrons, particles made of quarks as opposed to other, simpler particles known as muons. That involved “changing the machine energy 91 times,” explained Dr. Harris.
large hadron collider, geneva
electron-positron collider, beijingstuff i read and even bookmarked in the last week
Bookmarked, that is, so I could blah on loudly here about it, in lieu of dragging myself through the warm 37 degree afternoon to the nearest bookshop to buy something edifying.
Off to Shenzhen first where the Cultural Revolution has resurfaced, minus the dunces hats and bullets in the back of the neck but still high on public humiliation and incarceration without trial. But once the black-uniformed law enforcers had finished their campaign for moral purity and smashing prostitutes, they in turn got roundly and publicly shafted on the internet for brutal violation of human rights.
Shaanxi, in the opposite end of China is home to some of the last remaining women who had their feet bound. It’s a bit of a filler story, but I often experience a sense of vertigo reading about people who have lived through the length of the previous century, to quantify the unimaginable changes of this period into a single person’s life.
And to remind ourselves repeatedly that despite the impending Olympic trough of slovenly avarice and all the Shanghai rising dragon hubris, China is still a third world impoverished dictatorship full of rural peasants who barely survive on what amounts to small change in the west, and campaigning for filial piety is an obnoxious refusal to provide a proper health, education and welfare system which unlike a dazzling urban skyline is the true measure of a country’s wealth.
Maybe the filial piety line is why a Guangdong school integrates Confucian classics and traditional Chinese cultural practices into a modern elementary school curriculum, or maybe it’s that rote learning and recital is not actually an education, and “creativity and critical thinking” in whatever form is.
Veering off into other old dead writers for a bit, Dream of the Red Mansions gets a literary rewrite or a backstabbing hackjob. Either way it sounds better in Chinese: 红楼梦.
Back to misery. Fancy protesting about your land getting stolen, getting shot for your efforts and if you’re still alive after going to jail? It’s the anniversary of the Dongzhou village killings in Guangdong.
Speaking of extra-judicial killings when peasants get uppity about losing their land to the families that rule, Chen Tao was executed for his part in the protests against the Pubugou dam in Sichuan. His father found out when the police told him to pay the 50 yuan “bullet fee”. It’s all getting a bit depressing actually.
Getting out of China and Asia in one quick go, it’s the 9th Asian History Carnival over at kotaji 거타지. Get your fix.
Queer stuff for a bit. When I first landed in Guangzhou it was decidedly un-queer and I met many guys who were certainly not cock-suckers because they were married ergo not … Then earlier this year it was as if you were nobody if you hadn’t pashed on with your best same-sex friend. So what’s going on? Nothing much?
The New York Times deals gender identity, and all that yucky stuff in a couple of pieces that came out around the time of the New York City’s Board of Health proposal that would have allowed transsexuals to change the gender on their birth certificates even if they hadn’t had “the op”. Seems like everyone got a bit freaked out thinking about bodies with the wrong nasty smelly bits. What if It’s (Sort of) a Boy and (Sort of) a Girl? or how about ‘disorders of sex development’ cos we’re all fucking freaks. Oh well, a lazy “I shit on ya” from me and moving on…
Rolling around to slagging off Australia, How many fucking David Hicks’s can fit on the head of a pin, Prime Minister?, and Phillip Ruddock on illegal detention in immigration jails, “”Look, I won’t detain you long,” he began. Pause. Wry grin. “My wife keeps telling me I shouldn’t say that.”" Reasons You Will Hate Me replies, Die you vicious cunt.
Going all intellectual: “Yes, I agree that the theory cannot be improved. It is simply false”. Philosophers insulting each other. It’s like So Bad—It. Really. Sucks? University Professors insulting their, like, liguistics students, y’know? The question of defamation enters the issue of arts criticism on the blogosphere, Melbourne thespians engage in open and frank discussions.
That’s about it, It’s 40 degrees, windy and smokey. I’m going climbing.
super-condom tranny
I don’t really want to be ‘tranny activist’ and have to get all political and fight-for-your-rights. Or perhaps more accurately I get resentful when I have to deal with stupidity or malice in others, so I tend to overcompensate while lashing out. Or run away crying and plan to rain nuclear death upon entire continents. Either or.
So, I’ve just woken up from a pleasant afternoon nap while reading Li Cunxin’s Mao’s Last Dancer, and reminiscing on what a boon to the world the Chinese post-lunch snooze is. While reading my usual news feed overload of daily blogging I was like “Guangxi’s first tranny? nah there’d be thousands there… nah actually they’re all in Guangzhou”.
Then I got to, “I must say, medical science did a pretty good job on him, eh, her.” Oh really? You must say eh? Oh. And did you pause your typing stumps long enough to consider whether your witty remark had ever possibly perhaps been considered by anyone in the past millennium at all, or were you so caught up in the sheer brilliance of your razor-like mind doing the personal pronoun equivalent of inventing the wheel, you were like, omg! wtf! lol! and went on to hit the ‘post’ button feeling well-smug with yourself?
I’ll probably regret it as I always do when I get snarky, imagining future decreases in employability from my lack of social graces, but once again, educate yourself coz you sound like the “gonna make you squeal like a pig” dude in Deliverance when you post rubbish like that.
Anyway, following the links to Shanghaiist where the title trannies in condom halter tops and anti-theft underwear manages to conjure up such profoundly funny images in my over-active imagination. And on to 变性美眉自创“安全套服装”秀火辣身材妖媚性感 where it all began, hot and spicy Nanning city trannies getting dressed up in condom clothes for World AIDS Day. Oh, and her name is 刘炫怡 Liú Xùanyí.
liu xuanyi’s condom clothes 1
liu xuanyi’s condom clothes 2
liu xuanyi’s condom clothes 3dormitory
Splendidly late blogging, but wtf. I’ve been meaning to drool here about Wang Qingsong’s Dormitory, though equally any of his work from last year or 2004 are worth blogging, all of which have taken a far bleaker turn from previous works like Romantique, and veer towards nihilistic documentary that reaches its aphelion in Dormitory.
dormitory detail 1
dormitory detail 2
dormitory – wang qingsong