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| Cui Jian, flagging |
Following the talk on Chinese rock music (yao gun) by Jonathan Campbell (see 17 March post), I got around to reading the book. It's good. Hard to imagine what it was like in the early 80s when, despite things opening up, there was simply no pop or rock anywhere in China, nothing, zero. Even when Wham! visited in 1985 it was a Major Event. Things like electric guitars and electronic keyboards and computerised lighting systems and big PAs and high production values were simply unknown. And they sang about regular things like you and me, and waking you up before you go-go.
The first rock band in China was apparently Wan Li Ma Wang. They did covers (nothing so unusual about that - The Stones were pretty much the same when they started out). The first influential artist was Teresa Teng, a pop singer, and she was from Taiwan. Nothing exceptional, but she struck a chord with many on the mainland. The first real bona fide mainland rock star, however, was Cui Jan who had a hit with the (fairly controversial) song 'Nothing to my Name'. Then, for some reason, Heavy Metal took over, with bands like Tang Dynasty, Black Panther etc. China loves HM.
In the 80s and even into the 90s, there were very few places to play, hardly any record labels (the main ones were in Taiwan and Hong Kong - and in any case most people heard stuff on cassette compilations), no management, no magazines... In the early 90s a young guy calling himself Youdai - which means "have cassettes"! - started a series of radio shows in Beijing which became incredibly influential. He was the only one, for example, allowed to play Cui Jian. (I've met him: nice chap). In Shanghai Sun Mengjin did a similar thing. Festivals started happening, management came in, even indie labels.
The Chinese rock scene is now pretty developed. There is alt and grunge and dance and experimental. More western bands come in, and some Chinese bands get to play abroad and generally things are fairly relaxed. But, like elsewhere in the world now, it's getting increasingly hard to sell records, so a lot of the scene is a live scene. To be honest, I barely know it. It takes a lot of perseverance (and a fair bit of language know-how) to throw yourself into it. I'm just inching into it.
Alyssa and I built a teriffic model of St Paul's Cathedral today. Dead fiddly but substantial and satisfying. I told her how my friend Andrew and I once made meticulous plans to cover the real thing in bread & butter, and tested it out - with one slice - exactly 25 years ago. It stuck. But unfortunately left a stain... which is still there last time I looked. Bad daddy.
Never mind running a festival, Alyssa's 10th birthday party put UK Now into the shade. Days of preparation finally resulted in a complex spy-themed afternoon of fun and intrigue for 12 girls. Liz did the lion's share and a great job she did too. Exhausting...
Afterwards we slumped on the sofa to watch Beijing Bicycle... finally. It's been comical; we've been trying to watch it for a year. The first DVD we bought ended up Chinese only despite boasting English subtitles on the package. The second simply didn't work. The third was in German (fine for Liz if not for me). We then tried to see it at MOMA art-house cinema but got the wrong day. But finally we watched it. And it was disappointing. It's a sort of re-make of the classic Italian The Bicycle Thieves from 1948, but transplanted to Beijing. It was well acted and the tension between the naieve young migrant and more knowing urban teen was OK, but it just went round & round in circles, much like the wheels of the eponymous bicycle.
Two books on the go, both about China, but very little time to read these days. One is Colin Thubron's Behind the Wall, an acknowledged classic from the 80s as China was opening up. It's beautifully written (perhaps overly so) and has that certain thoroughness of approach which characterizes all his books - like learning Chinese in advance of the trip. The other is J Maarten Troost's Lost on Planet China which is from the Vonnegut-Bryson School of Writing. I love Kurt Vonnegut for his humorous, surreal fiction of short sentences, shorter words and unsophisticated grammar; and I love Bryson for how he introduced humour into travel writing. There must have been witty travelogues before him but I can't think of any. Anyway, Troost combines pithy with witty, and right now it's about all my addled brain can cope with.
Liz's birthday. Presents over breakfast, an intensive morning in the office, then took the afternoon off to... look at computers. Romantic huh? Along with the rest of the world, we are considering going Apple. But which one? iMac, Powerbook, Air, iPad... 500GB or 1 TB? a 17" screen or 21.5"? So sleek, so seductive, so expensive. In the evening we went to our local Vietnamese, children in tow. So not much romance there either!
Just across the road from my office is a large assortment of buildings dating from 1959 collectively called the Agricultural Exhibition Centre. Contrary to its name, it's not limited to farming stuff (though interestingly there's a slight whiff of it): this afternoon Liz & I popped in to see the annual Art Beijing Fair. We met a Brit exhibitor with a small stand who said she'd been approached by some sort of business consortium for a very large order for work, requesting her to come to their hotel as they were too busy to do the deal at the Fair. It had all the makings of a scam, so she didn't go.
On a lighter note, I received an email today with the subject header: Potato Storage - Top Urgent! Ironically, this was not a scam, though I have left it to others to decide where to store Tony Cragg's Potato Heads in between Beijing and Chengdu showings.
A public holiday today, so we stayed on in Tianjin and explored a bit. There are still pockets of European Concession architecture, like the 1860s Astor Hotel here, a long street lined with imposing, columned British, French, Japanese, Russian etc banks, and some fine 1930s houses in another part. And yet, and yet... it was all a bit sterile. Possibly because it was a public holiday, but then you'd expect more people out & about? Worse was Ancient Culture Street which turned out to be Brand New Tat Street: a soulless, gentrified, cobbled quarter of tacky tourist trash. Depressing. So that's Tianjin ticked off, as we whistled home on the intercity train at 300kph.
PS. Talking of tat, there's going to be a huge Chinese-US film production complex built on the edge of Tianjin called - wait for it - Chinawood.
