Mancini Woah

Completely missed all the Premier League excitement yesterday (which took place around midnight China time). I miss all that. Anyway, glad City won through - makes a change. I bet Fergie's fuming. I gather there's a Mancini chant which goes something like this: 
Mancini Woah 
Mancini Woah   
He come from Italy  
To manage Man City
Mancini Woah
Mancini Woah...
Perhaps there'll be a single, to join the ranks of Leeds Leeds Leeds and Ossie's Dream (both of which I have).
On an equally thrilling note, Alyssa went off on a week-long school residential this morning - to Xi'an, lucky girl. 

DJ Culture

A morning and afternoon of welcome domesticity - or at least taking the girls to & from dance classes - then back to 798. This time for a talk between Samantha Hall (otherwise known as DJ Goldierocks) and Zhang Youdai, also a DJ but, more importantly, one of the key movers & shakers in China's rock scene (see post a few days ago). But I got the time wrong and arrived just as it was ending. Not a disaster -  luckily my colleague Yuxi introduced it - and actually I caught some Q&A and a Chinese electronic duo by the name of Nova Heart who Youdai had brought along.

Afterwards Youdai invited a bunch of us to dinner at a place called China Lounge. Cue incredulous expressions as they got in their cars and I got on my bike for the 4-mile journey back into town. 
Sam's an interesting character. She's the compere for Selector, the radio show that the British Council franchises around the world - 30 countries and counting. In China it's broadcast in Beijing, Nanjing, Shenzhen, Chongqing and Wuhan. Apparently the Guinness Book of Records have got in touch as it may be the world's most widely broadcast radio programme? She's got incredibly eclectic taste, mixing all sorts in a weekly one-hour show. Nice evening, though awkward moment at the end as we wondered who was picking up the tab. I did.

Olympic Dancing Birthday Party

Hectic day trying to combine Naomi's 8th birthday party with three UK Now events. Luckily, Naomi wanted to bring her friends to this great pottery shop-cum-gallery in 798 where you can paint mugs & pots & ceramics puppies, followed by food & cake at a cafe just round the corner - and just round another corner were two of my events. Perfect! So, that went well, followed by... 

...A talk by Akram Khan's producer, Farooq Chaudhry, on the Business of Dance. Interesting guy. Pakistani family, raised in London, tearaway, car-stealer, did time, reformed, enrolled at Sussex University (while I was there but I didn't know him), danced for 12 years or so, much of which was in Belgium for Rosas (pretty much my favourite dance company), retired, did an MA in Arts Management at City University (again while I was there but we didn't meet), met Akram Khan, persuaded him that he needed a producer and the rest is history. Great story.
... Followed by the opening of our Olympic Posters exhibition at Red Star Gallery. Not a big affair: a dozen prints by a dozen artists - all top notch: Tracey Emin, Martin Creed, Rachel Whiteread, Howard Hodgkin, Bridget Riley, Michael Craig-Martin, Chris Ofili etc. The artists were asked to give their visual interpretation of what the Olympic and Paralympic Games meant to them, which inevitably results in a mix of beautiful, weird, conceptual, simple, incomprehensible etc which I'm sure the UK media has batted around at length. 


...And finally Liz and I got to see Akram Khan Dance Company perform Vertical Road at the NCPA (where else?). Brilliant stuff, even with an injured dancer. Deep, primitive, challenging, in a very different way to the above - and with Nitin Sawhney's great music booming out of the speakers.  About 400 of the audience stayed for the after-show talk. A long art-filled day, even by normal standards.   

Half Time Hiccough

End of the week, but the start of a busy weekend. Accompanied the Ambassador to a concert by the Scottish Ensemble this evening at Beijing Concert Hall. They're a strings-only group of 14 musicians and (apart fron the double bass and two cellos) play standing, which gives them a nice, casual style. Interesting programme of Grieg, Tavener, Tchaikovsky and (best of all) Shostakovich's Chamber Symphony, enthusiastically received by - somewhat to my surprise - a full house. But a badly behaved full house nonetheless: constant fidgeting, coughing, talking, children going to the toilet midway through pieces, the constant clunk of an annoying photographer right in front of us, the rustling of sweet wrappers and at one stage someone having what sounded like a fit. But the Scottish Ensemble scored an own goal too. At interval time, their artistic director Jonathan Morton said a few words in English while the rest of the musicians left the stage for what we thought would be a normal, say, 15 minute break, but at the end of his speech it became clear that it was only for 5 mins. It was then translated, but too late, half the audience had gone. The musicians came back, started up again, and the audience filtered back in during Tavener's Tears of the Angels. So, a draw. 

Cassette Culture

This morning I received a cassette in the post. I know vinyl is making a comeback (of sorts), but cassettes? Apart from fogeys like me, who has cassette-players these days?  They take me back... to Boots, BASF and TDK Ds which were pretty lo-fi. Memorex (with their fancy cases and Pete Murphy ads) were OK, but my staple was a good old TDK AD C90, an album a side.
I don't think I ever have had a proper cassette release of a major album (except, bizarrely, PFM's Photos of Ghosts which my sister bought back from Italy). But in the early 80s DIY cassette labels (including my own, YHR) were all over the place, pushing out the weird & the wonderful and the wretched. And then there were the compilations and mix tapes which joined football and beer as top bloke hobby. I still have boxes of the stuff in storage somewhere; in fact I even have a caseful here in Beijing.
And what was the cassette I received today? Wicked Messenger's very dark & dreamy Infinite Presence - which sits nicely next to a TG Live at the Architectural Association and Conrad Schnitzler's Black Cassette.

Super Mario

OK, strategising over, so leave the hotel and go straight to a meeting about more imminent things - in this case a Mario Testino exhibition. We'd known about the prospect of this for several months but it was all hanging in the balance. Now all systems go with a frighteningly soon opening date, just 4 weeks away at Beijing's Today Art Museum. OK, he's Peruvian, but has lived and worked out of London for years, so we're claiming him, and His People are keen for the show to be part of UK Now. I met him once, 10 years ago, when his big Portraits exhibition came to Tokyo. For all the bling and model friends, he seemed a nice chap.    

Strategising

Two days away from my desk, 15 of us in a downtown hotel, figuring out BC China's next three years. I get jittery thinking of all the emails piling up and stuff that needs doing back in the office. But it's been good, pretty focused, and actually quite refreshing to Be Somewhere Else, and to talk about long term things instead of organizing an event next week. And I've got to say, the hotel does a great buffet lunch.