PechaKucha

Did a PechaKucha tonight. For those of you who've been living on Mars, PechaKucha was devised by architects Mark Dytham, Astrid Klein and friends in Tokyo in February 2003 as an event for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public.  The name comes from the Japanese term for "chit chat" and the way it works is simple: you can talk about virtually anything with 20 images and 20 seconds per image. It's a good discipline and keeps things moving.

I took part in an early one, in 2003 or 4, at Mark & Astrid's studio, an old taxi depot which they called Deluxe (and where I celebrated my 40th birthday), in central Tokyo. As both their practise and PechaKucha grew, they opened a gallery-cum-cafe called Super Deluxe and that's where they continue to host PechaKucha nights once a month. But to their great surprise, it's turned into a global phenomenon with events happening in hundreds of cities around the world - up to 449 now. Nobody's driving it - it's just happening. 

Each PechaKucha night is run by a city organizer or 'steward' who look after the PechaKucha spirit in each city. All organizers must have a regular day job and they run PechaKucha nights only for the inspiration, love and fun of it.

Beijing has been hosting them for a while now, but tonight was special as we got involved and invited Mark over to introduce it - and he's also going on to Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong. It was great to see him again and catch up. Mark did a 20x20 on how Japan is recovering from the 3/11 earthquake, I did one on UK Now, someone else did a piece on Penguin book covers, etc. All good fun and a nice dinner afterwards where I chatted with the other speakers - and that's what it's about really. 

Gainsbourg, Geldof and Gitanes

Finally got around to watching Joann Sfar's Gainsborg biopic, released last year. Never been a big fan of the French songwriter but this was very engaging. Sfarr is a well-known comic book artist but this was his first film and he brings a very visual, not to say surreal, take on what could otherwise have been a straightforward film dominated by the music.

The film is a homage to wine, women (Juliette Greco, Brigitte Bardot, Jane Birkin etc) and song, but most of all smoking. There is not a moment in its 130 minutes when Gainsbourg is without a Gitanes - even as a child. It tails off at the end as he descends into a perpetual drunken, self-destructive stupor, looking more and more like a cross-between Bob Geldof and Shane MacGowan, and simply fizzles out in the 80s (he died in 1991). Hadn't realised that Je t'aime... Moi non Plus was written for Bardot, although it was Birkin of course who ended up being the other half of the duet.

Remember Remember

The school organized a Guy Fawkes night out at their Shunyi campus. I'm pretty sure it's the first time we've celebrated the event overseas. There were hot dogs, beer, corn-on-the-cob, toffee apples and marshmallows-on-sticks which you could toast over a fire (bit isn't that Hallowe'en?). Sadly, the bonfire was tiddly and the fireworks underwhelming, but the children had a great time running around in the dark.

I have vague but fond memories of standing in a muddy field near Chichester listening to the oooo's and aaaah's as a few pathetic rockets went up into a damp, chilly sky. I also recall a rather sinister Guy Fawkes night in Lewes, the biggest in Britain, just down the road from where I was at college. It not only commemorates the uncovering of the Gunpowder Plot, but also the martyrdom of 17 protestants during the Marian Persecutions, 50 years earlier. So along with Mr Fawkes, an effigy of the Pope also gets burnt to a crisp. The year I went, 1982, they also exploded an effigy of General Galtieri in an orgy of post-Falklands War jingoism. Not nice.

By the way, the Scottish band Remember Remember are well worth investigating.

A French take on China

Chinese movie night. Liz recently read the Paris-based Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress novel so we decided to watch the film he made of it in 2002. Dai is of the generation who grew up during the Cultural Revolution and was sent to be re-educated in the countryside during the early 70s. Both the book and the film recreate that difficult time, but switch the action to two young city boys who woo a local peasant girl by reading foreign literature to her - a dangerous act at the time. 

Dai moved to France in the 80s and made three films there before shooting this one, with a French film-crew, back in China. The Hunan scenery is gorgeous, although it's supposed to be in the Three Gorges area of Sichuan. A nice, unassuming film which plays its politics deftly and lyrically.  

Perspective

Great to get home in time to catch A finishing off a beautiful poster about the travel writer Isabella Bird and learn that she'd been appointed Playground Buddy, as well as to hear that that N had won a poetry competition. Feel very proud of them - and puts work very much into perspective.

A day in the office

What do I actually do at work? Here's a fairly typical day:
0700 - breakfast
0730 - cycle to work
0745 - started looking at overnight emails
0900 - car to Embassy 
0930 - meeting with UK Trade & investment aout their creative industries plans for 2012
1030 - UK Now update for Ambassador and department heads
1130 - car back to BC
1200 - sandwich & emails
1330 - UK Now update to arts team
1400 - meeting with Ogilvy re UK Now PR
1500 - taxi to an office in central Beijing
1530 - meeting with CCTV (equivalent of BBC) about Cultural Olympiad next year 
1600 - meeting with Jackie Chan's agents (don't ask)
1700 - taxi back
1730 - arts budget teleconf with London
1800 - teleconf with UK, Shanghai & Chonqing about an event
1845 - emails
2000 - leave.

Risky Business

Another 12 hours in the office, 6 of which were a Risk Workshop. All organizations have risk, but it was interesting going through our long list. There's all the usual things like employment law, tax, contracts, health & safety, data protection, cyber attacks, IP, envirionmental laws... And then there's stuff like duty of care to people we invite to China and of course some major local issues like (Chinese) Government policy & permissions.  But funnily enough, the most awkward is our status - we're a charity and a Non Departmental Public Body in UK and diplomatic here in China (the 'ands' complicate things to say the least). At the end of the session, we walked back to our desks with huge weights on our collective shoulders.