If I should die before I wake, would I really notice?

The only thing worse than a dude with a Napoleon complex is a senile megalomaniac and his son the shaved Ewok with both a Napoleon complex and a rusting Soviet arsenal at their command.

I suppose it bears remarking that the neighbours are having a moment. What's the odd artillery shell between (bitter, estranged) brothers, right? Well, now that the global balance of power is - regionally, if not nationally - up for grabs, no government wants to look soft, especially when their assailant is the maniacal, mangy village idiot starved halfway to madness. So, in the international game of King of the Hill, soft power & compromise take a backseat to saloon diplomacy, which is unhelpful to those of us who wish neither to be shot or blown up, nor to shoot or blow up other people.

But I'll be damned surprised if this fracas leads to war. North Korea's only ally is China, while South Korea have been occupied by an American military presence for over fifty years. Both China and the U.S. stand to lose their asses if Sino-American relations turn actively antagonistic: how could American remain in China's financial pocket if Americans stop buying all the cheap shit the Chinese manufacture, which in turn fosters the economic growth that allows China to buy up U.S. debt? Who would want to disturb that glorious Moebius-strip of bitter commercial codependency?

What's Mandarin for "Your Band Sucks"?

Via the Daily Swarm, I see that NPR and CNN fashioned boderline-unethically-similar stories about the distending Chinese rock 'n' roll scene. Both articles focus almost exclusively on two bands - Carsick Cars and P.K. 14 - and the polestar of the Beijing live scene, D-22. Though two acts on a brief tour of the American east coast and a sole hotspot hardly recommend a monolithic music scene, that two giants of the narcissistic American mainstream media have decided it's attention-worthy suggests one of two things:

1. It's a quirky, below-the-fold human interest piece that dovetails delightfully with coverage of Obama's pan-Asian jaunt.
2. Rock music has reached critical mass in a nation with a full fifth of the world's population, so it's time we pricked up our ears.

"And why wouldn't it be?" the NPR piece smirks. "China has what seems like the fastest-growing everything else."

Anyone who's heard Carsick Cars' eponymous debut knows immediately why Sonic Youth asked them to open SY's inaugural Chinese tour: Carsick Cars sound like Goo or Dirty, SY at their most rockist & crowd-pleasing, minus any irony or subversion, plus a more pleading, earnest melodicism. Basically, like Death Cab covering "Teenage Riot". Or Bloodthirsty Butchers.

Meanwhile, I looked up P.K. 14 on YouTube - hey, if they can get out of Beijing to tour Chapel Hill & Brooklyn, I knew they wouldn't have been blocked by the Great Firewall of China. Judging by their music videos, while a snug double-bill with Carsick Cars, P.K. 14 are further from their tourmates' post-hardcore squall and closer to the lo-fi amateurism of mid-'90s indie-pop... Sebadoh, Hayden, et cetera ad nauseum.

Which is all well & good, but Mandarin lyrics don't provide the shock of the new as much as the tickle of novelty. An accent isn't enough to build a career on - just ask the Proclaimers, or Men At Work, or Gogol Bordello. Then again, if ever there was a time when western audiences were more willing to gulp back the festering leftovers of yesterday's sounds, I ain't lived through it. There may be hope for a "Mandorock" crossover yet.

There's something deeply disquieting about the very existence of Chinese rock. China - a country that has embraced the most pernicious facets of capitalism without loosening its authoritarian bridle - has incorporated an artform that's ostensibly about rebellion, freedom, and bucking convention into its sociocultural ethos. Not only does this testify to how toothless & co-opted rock music has become, but Chinese rock 'n' roll serves as a "soft power" Trojan horse for the CPC: shucks, they can't be that oppressive and despotic - look, they've got kids in leather jackets with CBGB's patches!

The commodification of rebellion is, obviously, the oldest trick in the book. But back when Columbia Records was courting hippies with corny "They can't bust our music!" sloganeering, regimes in the Eastern Bloc fought tooth & nail to keep the corruptive influence of rock's speaker-blowing hedonia off their doorstep. That the last such regime standing* is showboating its punk rock bands is a noxious con indeed.

My hope is that casual music fans, who could give a fuck about political pandering via sham cultural sycophancy, will be turned off by the second-rate mimicry & six-string minstrelsy of these bands. One of the musicians profiled in the CNN article, "a young Chinese rocker sporting lace-up leather pants and teased out long hair," calls himself Ricky Sixx, fer chrissakes! When will China stop selling the west shoddy, slapdash counterfeits of our own crap back to us?

Photo by Arion

(*) - I'm talking about Cold War-era state-corporatist regimes, now. There are undoubtedly worse rulers to live under these days than Hu Jintao.

Truffles & Trivia

Christ, has it really been three weeks since I threw anything up here? Amazing how life gets in the way of mucking about in cyberspace.

So, in the interest of giving cause to occasionally check this site, here's a handful of memetic tchotchkes - great for ice-breakers or the local pub's quiz night - to tide y'all over under the next batch of big-think claptrap. (Which, I promise, is coming swiftly down the pike. I'm just faffing about with word-choice at this point.)

* * *

Two major plane crashes within twelve hours, the latest in an alarming line of aviationary disasters. My set-theory specialist housemate reassured me that the meager probability of getting in a place crash (around 1 in 4.2 million) is the same whenever I set foot on an aircraft. Of course, he had to go on to explain how compound probability would support my jittery suspicion that, yes, I am more likely to die with each flight I take. Thanks, math!

* * *

Via the always-delightful Things Magazine, here's a remarkable collection of photos that suggests China was more livable amid the early-'80s aftermath of the Gang of Four. Shanghai wasn't always a garbage-strewn clusterfuck? And there was once depth and translucence in the skies over Guangzhou? Scenes of natural splendor uncluttered by artificial lights and souvenir vendors? The mind reels.

Meanwhile, the recent Takanashi Yutaka photography exhibition provided an interesting White Lodge/Black Lodge converse to the above Flickr set. A series of bar interiors - also shot in 1983 - from within the warren of Shinjuku's Golden Gai suggests that relatively little has changed in Tokyo over the past twenty-five years. In claustrophobic bars with thematically unified decor, gel-haired rockers and chain-smoking ojisan mingle with heavily made-up gals sporting vinyl Puma shoulder-bags. Throw a couple of cellphones into the frame and the pics could have been taken last night.

* * *

Okay, I get obsessive about stuff I dig - that's why I bothered watching this hokey preview of Twin Peaks' second season. Remember what it was like in the days before user-generated content and constant connectivity? How quaint Alan Thicke's smug tour-guide persona and ABC's proprietary impassivity seem now... But far more shocking than the presumed lack of media literacy circa 1990 is the very existence of something called Cop Rock. Yeah, that other show mentioned in the opening credits. What, pray tell, is Cop Rock?





That's right: from deep within the furrowed grey matter of Steve Bochco, he who cut his teeth on Columbo and achieved nigh-unmatched TV notoriety for creating both Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, comes a pre-ironic musical cop show - complete with every embarrassing, epoch-anchored production gag & genre trope the late '80s had to offer! I'll wager that this here li'l ditty (complete with caricatured "negro drug dealers") about how snorting blow is within the constitutional rights of rich white folks is a reasonable indicator of the show's genesis.

No, this is not some tangential sight-gag from the scathingly self-aware 30 Rock; this show happened for real. But then again, I thought Mad Money was a contextual one-liner created by Arrested Development. Goes to show you never can tell...

Sing a Song of Simians

So apparently the guys behind Gorillaz are back with... Monkey. I'm already looking forward to hearing Marmoset. Basically, Damon Albarn was like, "Blimey! A 1000-page novel about a supernatural chimp running around feudal China! Sounds like an opera to me!" (People seem to have that reaction to almost anything these days.) So he got Jamie Hewlett and Chinese director Chen Shi-Zeng to stage said opera, pizzazzified the tunes to be palatable to skeptical pop consumers (as well as to market the Beijing Olympics), and it hit #5 on the UK album charts, so well done indeed.

But slow down a second: a doorstop-sized novel about a magic monkey? You bet! One of the pillars of China's literary heritage, Journey to the West (西游记) is probably better known by its common English title, Monkey. (Good job, lads, took a lot of time to come up with that one, eh?) Finding its roots in millenium-old Buddhist & Taoist folklore, the epic narrative was anonymously published in the late 16th century and credited retroactively to poet Wu Cheng-En. It possesses a canonical importance equivalent to the Iliad and Odyssey in the West, and boasts more than a few of the same narrative features: instructional pop-ins by dead souls? Check. A kingdom unfathomably run by matriarchy? Check. Attempted seduction by grotesque beast-woman hybrids? Check, except now they're arachnids instead of predatory waterfowl.

The story itself? Well, over the course of 100 chapters, the titular simian, Sun Wukong, races through the three-act rise/fall/redemption arc before becoming the disciple of Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang (a.k.a. Tripitaka, as he is known in most English translations). Together with the literally-nicknamed Pigsy and Sandy Priest, they travel with the sun to fetch the Theraveda Buddhist sutras from India, for the benefit of the Chinese people. And, as they do in folktales, they live happily ever after.

Though the 5.4 billion of us who aren't Chinese can be forgiven for our unfamiliarity with the tale, it's actually been a remarkably popular cultural reference point since its first Occidental publication in the 1942. In China, it's a perennially popular stage production and has spawned at least a dozen films, the most recent of which starred Jet Li and Jackie Chan (a Hollywood blockbuster is currently in preproduction, with Will Smith rumoured to play Tripitaka). Proto-ambient prog-rockers Jade Warrior peppered their albums with references to the story, including song titles like "Water-Curtain Cave" and "The Mountain of Flowers and Fruit". British and Japanese men pushing 40 probably recall the surprise TV hit of the late-'70s, Monkey Magic. Even otaku mainstay Dragonball was conceived as a liberal adaptation, though that pretense was swiftly defenestrated.

So am I recommending Journey to the West as essential to your post-globalisation edification, or as some Rosetta Stone for primate-oriented global junk-culture? Nah. Bottom-line, Journey to the West is handicapped by that same Achilles' heel as all those other big, important books written before paper replaced papyrus: bad writing.

The narrative sputters with the start-stop-stall rhythm of someone making it all up as they go along. There are innumerable passages fattened with pointless kipple, to the effect of:

And Xuanzang knelt by his mother, his hands folded piously within the folds of his robe. "But mother," he said, as he knelt, "how did you come to recognize me as a man for you have not seen me since I was but a baby?"

"My son," said the mother to her son who now knelt by her side, "I despaired that I would not recognize you as a man for not having seen you since you were but a baby. In my despair I decided that I must mark you, so as to recognize you as a man, and thus bit off the last knuckle of your baby toe so that when I saw you as a man I would recognize you by the absence of the last knuckle on your baby toe."

And mother and son embraced, and there was much rejoicing.

This, of course, after a good half-page was already spent in chapter 8 describing the foresight of such knuckle-severing as it happened. Yeesh.

And then, when it comes to the fantastic blood-fountain battle scenes and magical invocations, they race by with less detail than an AP report of some tribal melee consigned to a sidebar on page 14:

And Monkey and Erlang Shen clashed with a ferocity that cannot possibly be imagined, let alone described, until Erlang Shen was exhausted and Monkey returned victorious to the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit.

Then his monkey minions threw a feast, and there was much rejoicing.

Boo. Disappointing. (Dept. of CYA: lest an overzealous Chinese literature major accuse me of mangling the text, the above passages are not quoted from the story; it's called parody, people.)

As a final illustration of how lopsided the story is, please note that chapters 13-99 document the quintet's travels from China to Vulture Peak in India to obtain the sutras, and chapter 100 - the final chapter - describes not only the whole journey back, but also the protagonists' divine recompense in (I shit you not) various bureaucratic posts in Heaven.

A grimly comic footnote about Journey to the West's enduring popularity in China is that Sun Wukong/Monkey was frequently cited by Mao Zedong as a role model for "his fearlessness in thinking, doing work, striving for the objective and extricating China from poverty." Right. A workshy, megalomaniacal chimp prone to hissy fits, who declared war on Heaven for being fired from his post as holy horse-groom for incompetence; who cut such a swath across the celestial palace that Buddha himself imprisoned him under a mountain for five centuries; who only submitted to Tripitaka after being strapped to some alchemical electroshock torture-halo - a good role model. That's like Lenin citing Gogol's madman diarist as an exemplary Bolshevik.

And you already thought Mao was fucked in the head, eh?

So why did I slog through this absurd & seemingly slap-dash epic? Well, aside from a lot of enjoyable picaresque, the friend who lent me the book pitched it as "the story of a flying warrior-monkey whose divine title is Great Sage - Equal of Heaven." Not a hard sell when it's presented as such. Of course, whenever I started skimming pages or furrowing my brow at particularly awkward passages, I kept the issue of translation in mind. Perhaps I was handed the Ford Edsel of English editions, and doubtlessly the cadence gets dismembered when removed from its mother tongue.

That being said, if you've got the time to learn classical Chinese and read a hundred-chapter Lord of the Sutras, get back to me about how that worked out.

Retroreferential Postscript: You know how "Paper Planes" by M.I.A. struck me as the anthem not of third-world animus but of illiquid asset robber barons? Called it. Hoodies with Saturday night specials aren't the only ones who use terror to ply people from their wallets.

The truly maddening thing about the bailout is how close we are to flipping the script in a sweeping way: if only Congress & the Senate looked ex-Goldman Sachs man Paulson in the eye and said, "Yeah, we've got your $700 billion, but this ain't a bailout, this is a buyout. They had their chance and blew it big-time, so no, they can't have their company back once we've resurrected it." But no, instead the gov't is acting like lax parents whose shithead sixteen-year-old just totaled the minivan; shrugging that "kids will be kids," they hand the budding sociopath the AmEx card to rent a car so he can still get around.