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Poor Liz. One of her molars flared up on New Year's Eve but because her regular dentist was away for the holidays, she's had to tough it out on antibiotics and nurofen for seven long, painful days. She finally got it got it sorted today. Root canal. Ouch.
How did people manage in 'the olden days'? I'd thought that until quite recently it was limited to just yanking out rotten teeth, but apparently there's evidence of basic dentistry, including - amazingly - a form of drill, going back to 7,000BC (in what is now Pakistan). But really it didn't get going until around 1650, the introduction of some kind of anaesthetic (gas) in the 1840s, and the invention of the high-speed electric drill in 1875.
Nevertheless, I wouldn't want a dental problem in some of the more remote places in China - like Kashgar where I saw this street ad.
Took the girls cycling on the main roads to Sanlitun Village. They're pretty confident now. And Naomi ordered lunch in Chinese. They're dying to go back to school.
Liz and I watched the latest Woody Allen - his 42nd! - To Rome with Love. Naff title. Apparently Allen doesn't even like it; he was going to call it Bop Decameron or Nero Fiddles, but the Italian producers vetoed both. In his autumn years he seems to be working his way through European cities: London, Barcelona, Paris, Rome... I read that he schedules in plenty of museum time in between shooting. He's got it all sussed.
Anyway, usual middle-class rom-com with a bit of magic realism to make it quirky. Some interesting casting: Robertio Benigni (director & star of Life is Beautiful), Jesse Eisenberg (fresh from being Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network), Alec Baldwin in a very slight role as a sort of critical angel, Penelope Cruz again, and Allen himself as his usual neurotic alter ego (first time he's cast himself in several years). It's OK, a bit below par, Allen on auto-pilot.
So, HMV are to close 60 stores. (40 HMVs, and 20 Waterstones which they also own). To be honest, I'm surprised it's not more of the former. They'll still have 245 left. That's a lot more than I thought they had.
Today there was a massive spike in the number of weddings in China. In Beijing there were 12,000 alone. Why? Well, if you'll pardon the pun, it's all in what a date sounds like. If you say 2012 / 1 / 4 in Chinese, it sounds a bit like "Love you for a lifetime". Ah...
I've been reading an abridged version of Johann David Wyss's Swiss Family Robinson to the girls this week. It's a funny book. For a start, why is this Swiss family called Robinson? (The answer is they're a Robinson Crusoe-like family). But the really strange thing is that it's all so easy.
It starts dramatically enough. On their way to a new life in Australia they get shipwrecked somewhere in the East Indies and the crew abandon them. But luckily the ship doesn't sink and they're within swimming distance of a beautiful island which has everything you could want to survive, including running water and a geographically impossible abundance of food and livestock. The ship conveniently remains intact long enough to get all its goodies onshore (more livestock, tools, chest of gold, you name it). They build a fabulous treehouse, including a front door and a staircase up through the trunk. They use rubber trees to make shoes and waterproof coats. There are a several light-hearted adventures, hardly a moment of hardship and Sundays are a day of rest. They live there for 13 years. Nice.
But we mustn't be too critical I suppose. Wyss wrote it for his sons as a series of lessons about family values and self-reliance, and it resembles other early children's books of the 19th century. Of course it's got Disney written all over it, and they obliged with a suitably wholesome 1960 film starring John Mills.
Back to work. Very quiet. Time enough to learn of a fascinating story behind this summer's upcoming Venice Biennale. The theme will be 'The Encyclopedic Palace', based on the project of a self-taught Italian-American artist, Marino Auriti (1891-1980). The Palace was an imaginary museum that was meant to house all worldly knowledge, bringing together the greatest discoveries of the human race, from the wheel to the satellite. Auriti took out a patent and built a scale model in the 1950s - looking like something out of Metropolis or a Le Corbusier blueprint. It never got built of course, and the model ended up languishing for decades in a lock-up storage unit in Newport, Delaware.
The story now transfers to his granddaughter, a certain B.G. Firmani, who with her husband, Damian, managed to attract the attention of the American Folk Art Museum, where it was presented as part of an exhibition in 2004. It then disappeared into storage again before being singled out by the 2013 Venice Biennale's chief curator, Massimiliano Gioni, as the central exhibit and theme for this year's show.
This is a good enough story in its own right - and you can read more here - but there's more. I don't know B.G.Fermani, but I do know her husband, Damian. At risk of sounding like a jetsetting Beatnik, we used to hang out in New York in the late-80s. Small world.
Took the girls to Chaoyang Park for a couple of rides at the funfair and some tobogganing down an artificial hill. Freezing cold (-10C) but fun and good to get out. Less fun was Liz's continued toothache and a rather miserable film, She, a Chinese. It's about a young country girl who moves to Chongqing for work and then, through a twist of fate, ends up in London. The director, Xiaolu Guo, was herself from a peasant family, studied film-making in Beijing and then moved to London in 2002, so there's probably some of her story in this too. Full marks to her for securing the backing of Film 4 etc, as well as getting John Parrish (of PJ Harvey fame) to score the music - all on a shoestring I'm sure. The main character's time in China is bleak, but her experience in London isn't much better, which includes marrying an elderly widower and a relationship with a young Indian immigrant, and ends with her staring out to sea, heavily pregnant by the latter. Guo is actually better known for her novels. Her third, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers, was nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction.
