CBGB OMFUG

Watched CBGB tonight, with an improbable Alan Rickman as Hilly Kristal, the founder of the legendary NY club which ran from 1973-2006. 
Although CBGB actually stood for Country Blue Grass & Blues plus the bizarre suffix, Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers, it was the Other Music that made its name. Basically, Kristal and his club introduced punk to the world: Television, Patti Smith, The Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, The Dead Boys (whom Kristal also managed) and hundreds more.
I saw Suicide play there in '86. It was just as I imagined it: tiny, smokey and claustrophobic, with terrible loos. I wondered if a Chinese band had ever graced its stage. The nearest thing I could find was a (US) band called, inexplicably, Chinese Forehead who played there in '79, didn't release any records and then disappeared without trace - the same fate as hundreds of others. 
The film's overly romanticised, and there's probably a better straight-forward documentary waiting to be made, but it was a fun, easy-going, middle-aged trip down memory lane. 

Year of the Horse

Chinese New Year: a time for being with family. Happily we didn't have to travel 17 hours standing up in a train loo, although with no taxis around we did have to squash ourselves into a silver rickshaw in order to make it over to cousin David and Oddveig's place for dinner. 
At midnight Beijing bubbled with fireworks, ushering in the Year of the Horse. That's Alyssa's year. Apparently she will offend Taisui, the god in charge of fortune, so her finances may be a bit wobbly. But for the rest of us, the year will bring health and prosperity. And it will be an excellent time to travel, which is reassuring...

It's All Greek to Me

My girls are obsessed with Percy Jackson, the teenage demi-god. That's the fictitious son of Poseidon in Rick Riordan's series of books, not some pop star. Actually, they're still of an age when they prefer his female chum Annabeth Chase, but boy are they hooked. Mind you, I'm not complaining. It's as good a way as any to learn about Greek mythology - they know everything: gods & goddesses, demi-gods and demi-goddesses, heroes & heroines, fawns & furies, the Roman equivalents, who's son or second-cousin-twice-removed of whom, who has what powers, and of course who's cool and who isn't. And they genuinely prefer the books to the follow-up films. Me? I know who Zeus is and that's about it.

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

A truck carrying 3,000 chickens overturned on a motorway in China today, with several hundred making a successful dash for freedom. Quoted one policeman, trying to corner some escapees on the hard shoulder: "I didn't sign up for this".

Up the Yangtze

Tonight Liz and I watched what sounds like a Carry On film, but was pretty much the opposite: a good but somewhat depressing documentary of a poor, uneducated family living on the banks of the Yangtze who send their 16-year old daughter to work on a cruise ship which plies China's longest river. It's also about how the reservoir formed by the Three Gorges Dam swallowed up towns, villages and livelihoods, including the family's ramshackle home. 
I don't know which was more depressing: the plight of the family or the big fat western tourists on the ship. Or the other new recruit whose only motivation was to secure as much tip money as possible, or the drab scenery. 
It was directed by Chinese-Canadian, Yung Chang. He 's also directed a film about Chinese boxers called China Heavyweight.

Biogas

Lunch at a Yunnan restaurant with our neighbours & landlords. Mr Jia's main piece of news is that he's now the China rep for a German biogas company, having switched from solar energy. Germany has nearly 6,000 biogas plants, producing energy from crop waste and manure. Mr Jia is introducing the know-how and equipment to China. 
Bio-gas has been used in China for many years but it's really taken off in the last decade. In the poor province of Guangxi, for example,  2.73 million biogas tanks have been built in villages, benefiting about a third of rural households. It is estimated that this has saved 7.65 million tons of coal and 13.40 million tons of firewood annually.

It wasn't used to cook our lunch.

Midwinter Night's Dream

A family outing to see Northern Ballet's quirky version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It's a 10-year-old production but still seems bright and surprising. David Nixon, NB's Artistic Director, turns the story into a dance company (within a dance company) travelling by sleeper train from London to Edinburgh to perform, ironically, Romeo and Juliet. The stage designs are clever but simple, making full use of the train theme, and the dream-sequence middle Act - all technicolour sic-fi complete with upside down suspended Flying Scotsman - contrasts nicely with the monochrome Acts on either side.
The only distraction was Naomi's constant questions: What's going on? Why doesn't he like her? Who's that? Why is he wearing a donkey's head? Exhausting.