• Tag Archives China

  • OK, So Spitzer Is a Hypocrite and an Unfaithful Husband.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    34  bar falls 29.57  0mph WSW windchill 34

       Waxing Crescent Moon of Winds

    “The World” is a Chinese movie, a recent one about a theme park in Beijing.  “Give us a day and we’ll show you the world.”  It has smaller versions of such landmarks as the Eiffel Tower, Manhattan skyline, Acropolis and St. Peters.  The movie follows Tao, a 20 something dancer, and her off and on boyfriend, Taisheng, through the ups and downs of a love affair.

    This is a slice of life film most interesting to me in its depiction of rural folks who’ve come to the Capital to make a life.  The rural to urban story is a global story, retold time and time again in Bogota, Rio, Paris, Athens, Lagos, Shanghai and Minneapolis.  The tentativeness of relationships, particularly among the young, is also a global story, especially among young, recently emigrated urban folk.

    Not a thrilling movie, but moving.

    OK, so Spitzer is a hypocrite and an unfaithful husband.  And, yes, he drug his wife along to his confession.  The Daily Show did a great piece on that last night, showing several governors with their wives by their side as they confess sexual dalliance.  They could have added evangelical preachers and congressman.  They did include Bill Clinton.

    The implication I don’t find helpful is that because he paid money for sex he was not a good prosecutor.  The guilt or innocence of the persons on Wall Street that he prosecuted are not less or more responsible for their crimes because he’s a schmuck.  The quality of his prosecution does not depend on his sexual fidelity any more than it depends on his perfect health.  

    Someday, America, we’ve got to get over this fascination with sex and public people.  We need pay much greater attention to the policies they pursue and not so much to their bedrooms.  And, yes, I even believe that’s true of Larry Craig, although his mendacity following his arrest has put him in a different category altogether. 


    📂This entry was posted in Cinema and Television Politics 📎and tagged

  • A Chingis Khan Red Water Buffalo Wallet

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    30  77%  24%  3mph NNW bar30.04 falls windchill28 Imbolc

                    Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    Got a package today from Mary in Singapore.  It came with many, many stamps bearing the picture of the large golden tree squirrel.  Looks like a lemur to me.  She sent a wonderful anthology of contemporary Asian art and, as has become her habit, knowing my interest in cinema, the largest grossing Asia movie for 2007.  And a red water buffalo wallet with Chinghis Khan on the front.  The only one in my neighborhood.

    Having kin in Southeast Asia makes it feel less foreign, less faraway.  It also means I get a ground level view of events there like the tsunami and the political unrest in Thailand for example.  It is a privilege to have this window on these Asian cultures and one I cherish.

    Today I will finish Hero, the Jet Li wu shu feature about the assassin and Qin Shi Huang Di.  It is one of two recent Chinese movies dealing with the king of Qin, Shi Huang Di, who unified the six warring states at the end of the eastern Zhou dynasty.  He has a peculiar position in Chinese history, since he is seen as the father of a unified China, but also as a tyrant and a destroyer of cultural treasures.  In the interest of a common language and culture for a unified China he is said to have burned all the books he could get his hands on at the time. 

    He then decreed a common script and common laws, using the political philosophy of Han Fei-Zi.  Han Fei-Zi was a political thinker whose general type of thought became known as Legalism since it elevated a strict system of laws and punishment even above the ruler.  His political philosophy reminded me most of Machiavelli’s Prince, but I may not understand them either of them very well.  In my view they both see themselves as realists, preferring the pragmatic to the ideal, the functional to the just.  In this sense neither of them are as villianous as history has cast them; they might be seen as situational relativists, creating a system of governance that works for the times, not for all time.

    Hero and The Emperor and the Assassin both portray Qin Shi Huang Di as a clever, courageous and intelligent ruler. Both also portray him as relentless, paranoid and unyielding.  In Hero the focus is on the Jet Li character, Nameless, the prefect of a Qin ten mile square area.  In the Emperor and the Assassin the focus is on the king himself and his lover from the stater of Zhao, where they both grew up.  They are very different movies with, I think, very different intentions, but both present an interesting take on this controversial man, the first Emperor of China.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Cinema and Television Family World History 📎and tagged

  • Ten Thousand Schools

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    29  87%  26%  5mph NNW  bar29.89 rises windchill25  Imbolc

                      Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    Saw Scarlet Johanssen talking to a group of Minnesota students tonight.  She’s pushing Barrack.  The political firestorm that will sweep the nation tomorrow will have a brushfire here in the Minnesota caucuses.  It remains to be seen whether a strong youth turnout for primaries and caucuses will  translate into votes in November, but I find the youth surge a hopeful phenomenon.  Maybe we’re getting back to a situation where the politics of compassion, not compassionate conservatism, and the politics of economic justice, not unjust foreign policy will prevail.  It’s got my vote.

    The snow petered out, a dusting only after the vigor of the mid-morning.  Things did get freshened up.

    Watched an anime on the Science Fiction Channel.  Saw why Miyazaki is considered an anime god.  This stuff is much more slapdash, also has a slasher feel to it without the grace of the samurai or wu shu movies like Crouching Tiger. 

    I seem to find myself digging deeper and deeper into ancient China, especially the Warring States period when Taoism, Confucianism and Legalism plus many others–the Ten Thousand Schools–emerged.  It is also the time of the Qin unification and Qin Shi Huang Di fascinates me.  After the Qin the Han dynasty began and lasted for four hundred years or so, one of the first golden ages of China.  Later, the Tang, Song, and Ming dynasties would, each in their own time and in their own way, count as golden ages, too.


    📂This entry was posted in Cinema and Television General Politics World History 📎and tagged

  • Castrate Him!

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    26  87%  28%  2mph NE bar 29.88 steady  windchill23 Imbolc

                    Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    A good senate race has run under the radar of the Clinton/Edwards/Obama vs. Romney/McCaine/Giuliani primaries.  It’s a shame, too, since the Democrats have a real opportunity to win back a Senate seat.  I was skeptical of Al Franken, but it seems he’s run hard, straight and with serious intent.  I’m gonna support him on Tuesday, along with Barrack Obama.  I read a convincing article in the Nation that portrayed Obama as the only candidate with true left credentials.  Progressive is a weasel word, not least because Bull Moose Teddy Roosevelt used it of himself and his movement.

    If you enjoy the numbers and drama of politics, this has been a great year.  Lots of poll data, lots of actual votes and plenty of campaign back and forth without, so far at least, too much mudslinging.  Even a pinch of political junkie in your bloodstream would get you into the fray.

    Wish for snow and voilá, it snows.  Six inches today they say.  Paul Douglas called this one.    

    The perfect week shapes up for me:  up north for four days in a time of snow, home for a night and then off to the Sandwich Islands. 

    Started reading last night in the annals of the Grand Historian, Sima Qin.  He’s a fascinating character. He inherited the task of completing the history of the Chinese people his father, also the Grand Historian, began.  Living in the time of Emperor Wu, a great Han dynasty emperor, he made the Emperor mad.  Apparently, at the time, making Emperor’s mad resulted in castration.  And, the usual response was suicide.

    Sima Qin, however, felt he had a duty to finish his history so he lived for 21 more years, in spite of the indiginity.  His work is readable, at least in translation, and more than that, interesting.  Just ordered his volume on the Qin dynasty.

    Now then, off to Maple Plain for some new shoes and to the coop for bread and cheese.


    📂This entry was posted in Politics World History 📎and tagged

  • Crossed Speaker Wires

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    26  80%  21%  0mph SSE  bar29.64  steep fall  Windchill26  Winter

              Waning Gibbous Winter Moon

    Performed the test of the sound system today with the microphone that listens to output from the speakers and adjusts them according to prestablished program.  It sounds out whistles, clicks, rolling thunder, static and a loud rush of static.  Then it tells you if things are optimal.  First problem:  I’d crossed one set of speaker wires, the smooth to the positive instead of the ridged.  Checked all twenty connections, on speakers and on the receiver, found one set wrong and fixed it.  Second problem:  difference in volume excessive.  No idea what that meant, but one of the solutions was to move speakers around.  I did that and the next time through, pass number 3, No Errors.  This ends the first phase of the new video and sound system.  All of it is in place.  All of it works as intended.  

    Next phase will be optimization of various aspects of the receiver, the DVD player and the TV.  This will take place over time and really never ends.  Fun.  A hobby in itself.

    Watched an interesting Discovery channel program tonight on the Great Wall.  It presented the Great Wall as largely a product of one general in the early Ming Dynasty.  While the existing wall traces much of its current form to that era, wall building as a defensive strategy began much earlier, in the Spring and Autumn Period of the Eastern Chou dynasty.   Various pieces of walls got built at many stages in Chinese history.  The reason the Ming Dynasty effort was so vast lies in their resting power away from the Yuan Dynasty.  During the Yuan Dynasty China became a part of the Mongol Empire, ruled by Kublai Khan first.


    📂This entry was posted in GeekWorld World History 📎and tagged

  • Mondrian’s Glasses

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    19  74% 20%  0mph SSW  bar29.93 rises  windchill19  Winter

              Waning Gibbous Winter Moon

    Another workout in the past.  Another pre-trip prep formats my workouts for outside aerobics and a few in the gym activities.

    Started rewatching the Emperor and the Assassin, the first of two relatively recent films that feature Qin Shi Huang-Di, the first emperor of China.  He unified the warring states and created Qin-A, or China.  There were dynasties before him, but they had kings, not emperors.  During the Warring States Period, which immediately preceded Qin Shi Huang-Di’s feat of unification, several different philosophical systems arose in an attempt to find a way toward peace.  This was the era of Kong, the creator of Confucian thought, the legendary Lao-Tze, to whom the Tao Te Ching is attributed and the founders of the Legalist school of governance.  Many more systems arose, but these three had lasting impact.

    In the Frederick Scheel photography exhibit I went to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s image of Piet Mondrian’s glasses.  Sure enough, they look like the ones I wear now, not surprising, perhaps, since mine are of German manufacture.  Michelle Yates suggested I look at it.  I also spent some time in the Islamic gallery.  The Koran pages and the miniatures that illustrated Persian books reminded me that the illustrated manuscripts of the Middle Ages also marry word and image.  They represent yet another instance in which literary analysis can abet art history.


    📂This entry was posted in Cinema and Television 📎and tagged

  • Korean soap operas and the Silk Road

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    Back from a night at the U of M’s Institute for Advanced Studies.  The occasion was a lecture on Chang’an, the capital of the Tang empire and site of the present day city of Xi’an.  The lecture, as well as a pipa concert on Sunday at 3 PM at Kaufman, celebrates the 25th anniversary of a relationship between Minnesota and Shaanxi province as sister states.

    A supper preceded the event, paid for by somebody, and had a variety of Chinese dishes, whether indigenous to Shaanxi or not, I do not know.  Over supper I met a Korean woman, a Catholic, who is a professor of history at the Catholic University of Seoul.  She’s here on a one year research fellowship to study Asian history.  Why Minnesota?  We have a good Asian history contigent here at the U.  Her name was Seon-Hye.  Next to me was a graduate student in history, a Chinese woman, who has as her dissertation project women’s writing in China from the 18thC on.  Seems women wrote poems to celebrate their locality.  Beside her was Yoshimi, a Japanese graduate student.  We got to talking about Korean soap operas.  Yoshimi said they were very popular in Japan, so much so that Japanese young women take tours to Korea to see sites where their favorite soap operas happen.   The Chinese woman, whose name I didn’t learn, agreed, saying the Korean dramas were very popular in China, too.  

    Huang, a young Mandarin man, is a student of the Qin dynasty.

    The lecture that followed supper was on Chang’an and its cosmopolitan nature, demonstrated through art and a mini-history of the silk road.  The lecturer was Kathy Ryor, a professor from Carleton College. 

    Also picked up a pair of new sunglasses today.  Snazzy and gray/blue in tint.  Gives the world a slight wintry cast.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture 📎and tagged