i watched spirited away last night with john, who kept falling asleep. i found this highly insulting, as this was the 3rd time that i was playing the movie for him. what i found even more insulting though was trying to watch the movie with the disney american dubbing, which we did for reasons unbeknownst to me. i suppose it’s kind of a childrens film and yeah, white kids wanna watch it too, but why did they have to redub? why couldn’t they just turn it into a learning exercise and tell the little kids of the english speaking world to learn the fuck how to read? not only is the script completely dumbed down (i assume to further accommodate the small children/idiot adults who just won’t ‘get it’ without everything being spelled out), but the people who voice the characters all have terrible whiny voices and accents and it all just sounds awful. awful awful awful. ESPECIALLY the kid who plays chihiro – that bitch sounds like a smart ass you would never want to babysit.
ohhh, internet, sorry i’m such a dick.
laughing my ass off over this awesome blog post by KAWS. saddest cutest little animals ever. xx
survived yet another crazy monday, and this week is gonna be pretty nutso. looking forward to cooking and biking, the ultimate in post-work relaxation techniques. the photo above is unrelated, and of adrian lai. for some reason the dude is always carrying around cucumbers. he likes them raw, and he always makes a point of buying the prickly ones.
joel at danwei.org posted a collection of front pages from newspapers around china that marked the death of the king of pop today – pretty amazing to see everything laid out like that. the news of his death has been a pretty hot topic around the office, yesterday when i walked out of the elevator, the first words out of the receptionists mouth wasn’t hello, but “michael jackson died! on cab rides yesterday, i noticed that radio stations were playing tribute to him nonstop.
i’ve been talking to my chinese colleagues about his death, and they all told me that michael jackson (chinese name: 迈克尔-杰克逊, pronounced màikè’ěr-jiékèxùn) was one of the first and only foreign pop stars they were able to listen to as kids, and that when thriller finally came out in china, everyone rushed to try and get a copy, even though they cost over 100rmb at the time, which is alot of money for an album in china, even by todays standards. god, just imagine a billion tiny chinese kids trying to do the moonwalk!
(from the danwei post) most of the headlines are variations on either “Michael Jackson dies” or “Goodbye Michael.” a few newspapers went with something different, but the usual punning headlines that accompany major international news stories were fairly uncommon:
* Dongguan Times (东莞时报): “The Whole World Mourns”
* Chengdu Evening News (成都晚报): “Farewell to a Legend”
* New Information (新消息报): “The King Will Not Return”
* Modern Express (现代快报): “Heaven Gets the Moonwalk”
* City Evening News (城市晚报): “Remember”
* Chinese Business View (华商报): “The Black and White Life of a Lonely King”
in addition, major online news portals like Sina, Sohu and even Xinhuanet collected news, music, photos, and memories from chinese and foreign media.
been having alot of fights with the great firewall of china lately – it seems like this great country is intent on taking away everything i love about the internet. youtube, tumblr and blogspot have been down for ages, and gmail hasn’t been working for me for the past two days.
i’ve had countless conversations with people about living in china and how the government affects us – in some ways being here means you have more freedom than you do back home, and for the most part certainly allows you to live a kind of lifestyle that would be difficult to pull off anywhere else in the world. still, there are little reminders that slam you in the face every once in a while – those of us who lived in beijing before the olympics will remember all the hectic measures that were taken to “clean up the city”.
sam and i were over at our friend greg’s place last week and he told us an amazing story of him & his wife being thrown into the back of a van on one of their first weeks in shanghai, ostensibly because they were taking photos outside of an important embassy/residence. since so rarely do us foreigners face anything this extreme, it’s quite the shock to hear your friends talk about experiences like this.
hmmmm. a long rambly post on a buzzing thursday afternoon at the office. work is steady but not unmanageable, and these are my favourite times at the agency.
ps. the photo above is of a really neat lightbox that i saw at my friend nick’s place. sadly, it was stomped on and broken later on that night during a particularly exciteable game of twister.
after a stressful day at the office and a delicious dinner at di shui dong, john and i went to go see my friend ben houge play last night at logo, which was 5 songs of pop syrupy awesomeness. i love the bizarre dichotomy of his seedily endearing sex tourist like appearance (ben, i mean this in the BEST WAY!!) and his amazingly sugar sweet voice. go check out his neocha page to hear his music. some of my favourites are ‘jessica’s scissors’ and ‘love on tv’. also, if you’re good at the internets, try and find that video floating around of him and my friend aric doing an incredible rendition of purple rain, you won’t regret it, i promise.
latest summer jams mix. will provide download link soon. holla. xx
slowly catching up on posting images from my month log blogging hiatus. these are photos from the ratatat show at dream factory in may, and also the jellymon seagull lao ke exhibit at the factory that i participated in – i think the show’s just been taken down but it was so much fun and my friends at jellymon totally know how to put on a party. wheeeeeee!
ohhhh the last week has been fun! ghostface killah was in town, as was fab five freddy doing some spectacular things at the factory. our friends put on a pretty awesome festival on saturday, which kept us all up until the sun came out. lots more pictures, adrian and i have swapped cameras for a while so i’m having loads of fun trying to figure out his G9.
on my way to go pick up my boyfriend from the airport. xx
