OK I have in the past been both slob and a clean freak. There was a time I was neglected and smelled of a heady mix of odiferous human. Like the certain ilk of loner who hangs round community centres/ libraries toting eau de sweat, wee, hair oil and thick glasses. At the opposite end of the spectrum I was scrubbing so often I nurtured an allergy to water (or whatever chemical mix du jour Thames Water was churning out). Would wash twice or thrice daily, hair also, brush teeth after every meal and snooze, and change constantly dependant on room, possibly to make a phone call or take the rubbish out. Which in turn resulted in rashes and allergies to the point of commuting every day red and angry for having passed fleetingly under a shower. By then I’d given up on every chemical taint (basking under waterfalls) but still coming up in hives.
I read somewhere there’s a direct correlation between the amount of bacterial types on one’s skin and the collection of allergies one welcomes in. That we spent the last century trying to kill off bacteria, and the next one will be sending sorry cards and luring the good ones back. When we raise kids in spotless environments they’ll grow up with a host of aversions, hence why it’s particularly a First World Problem, though now the rest is catching it, as hygiene improves globally with the rise of the middle classes. Also, the bacterial garden in our gut functions as a ‘second brain’, affecting our moods and hormones, as anyone with food poisoning will know of the doom and gloom that comes as a side. We are more than one animal to make the self, and a sum of all parts.
Hair grooming is another front, the natural hair movement also dallies a sideline in ridding the body of shampoo, that strips the skin of its natural oils then makes it overcompensate after -which gives you greasy hair, and in turn keeps making you use their product. Apparently after the first stage of a slick mop, and you keep washing with water alone, it’ll revert to its natural state, full of bounce, vigour and cleanliness, plus free you from a life of servitude to Heads n Shoulders.
These movements, however, have been well and truly stymied by the nasty infection that’s currently doing the rounds. The world will change for years to come, in enforced social distancing, non-contact, increased plastic fantastic, car travel and WFH. But also a tsunami of OCD cleaning inside and out, the providers of which are some of the few companies doing roaring stocks in the depression (the other being big pharma). Governments worry that the multinationals will have little monetary motivation to find a cure, when life-long treatment would be so much more profitable.
For the time being though, keeping clean saves lives.
Since those years of manic cleanliness I’ve had to cut down to a shower every morning, shampooing every 2-3 days. Still change outfit daily though, terrible Euro-habit.
Well, fast forward to now.
Days since:
shower: 3
hairwashing: 5
changing T-shirt: 3
changing underwear: 2
shaving: 4
exercising: 5
earwax cleaning: 14
checking phone: 3
checking email: 7
social media: 2
There are other things that men don’t readily admit to.
eyebrow plucking: 7
nosehair trimming: 14
moisturising: 6
random giant hair somewhere on body plucking: 35
I am a version of Worzel Gummidge, or Nicole Kidman in Destroyer (possibly the same person), where a life of hermitage and dragging your feet from car to car looks beckoning. Flies will follow me about and I’ll piss myself where I stop, staring into the distance for a few seconds, mid-convo with the fairies. I’ll take no prisoners. I mean seriously these days, who literally gives a shit anymore.
But in the end, caved into having a good scrubbing down because I’m worth it. Albeit with no change in my countenance after, no ambassadors balls to host or charity galas to attend for all the effort. Once again I do ponder how much of the former life has been spent on pleasing others, how much of the psyche gets tied into appearance, disguise, and what others think in regard. They say a man with a beard is a sign of a free man, though the panoply of beard trimmers, dyes, combs, wax, moisturisers and balms is starting to say otherwise.
So hey ho, onwards into the mire. Am increasingly at a loss for words most of the day, the screen my cold-faced replacement. The days aren’t so much long as irrelevant to time, and the nights obliterate. The difference between inside and out could not be more stark, or relevant in these days of our lives. Upkeep has become the meaning of it.
Slept a good night, woke at 8 then did some scrolling. Slept again at 10, then up for lunch, of a biscuit and cereal. The giant chocolate chip cookie I treated myself to the other day in Lidl has bitten back, so sweet as to be near inedible. Entered a sugar coma till 6pm.
In short have slept for 15hrs out of 24. Can’t be good. They say you need 8-10hrs a night for healthy brainwaves, which is come on, ludicrous with our modern lifestyles. -Working well past our recompense and any accrued efficiency, with that sesh on Netflix our only downtime (which is why we’re so addicted). Mine recently’s been about 5, an hour or two less than normal.
Will casually namedrop this while pretending to look for a spoon:
The day’s been a write-off. But been good to have time with A for a change, in bed and watching shite together on phone or tablet. Picking up the pieces, slowly.
Been witnessing especially lurid dreams recently, as have all of us. Perhaps there’s something in the air, or we’re all hitting a collective stage of isolation-spazz endemic to humans. I have recently, in the land of nod:
chased some old Karen lady out a library after she hit A with a handbag, she tried to escape in a getaway car, hissed at her that she was a cunt
seen the sunlight falling on A‘s face in the dark, woke up crying
getting caught watching porn, can’t remember who by
something about a painting, some woman, yelled in my sleep that she was a cunt too
midway in a dream a big thunder strike that woke me up, the sound equating to an explosion of colours, like a Holi fest. Turned out it was something/ someone falling over in the flat above. Am increasingly convincing myself dreams are another dimension beyond our understanding of 3D sight and timescale. Like a feeling of presence, form and being, inhabiting the space.
Okay, slightly worrying the repeat of calling women the C-word (though Ms Woolf does urge us to claim the word back). Perhaps misogyny embedded and rising to the fore, or as they say, the subconscious trying to tell you something you’ve not heeded, even if it is that you left the fridge door open. I hope it’s that some woman shoplifted from my basket, rather than schizoid serial killering. Or too much Ricky Gervais recently and his love of the word, or anything really that’s crossing the boundary. I just remember being outraged each time.
Was watching some podcasts on weeerk motivation -overcoming procrastination (do the hardest part first), pefectionism (a form of self-sabotage, don’t set your expectations so high), and selling yourself (and not being guilty/ fake/ grasping about it). Can’t remember who it was but it was nicely framed by an author, so she had several nice quips about the book business, albeit from too charmed a position. Namedropping one really should contact movers in the biz, or ask other successful writers to run things past, which to your average hack is far too readily immersive.
On that subject, didn’t mean to leave this lying around.
Made some fajitas, substituting the chicken with Quorn chunks. The tortillas were too bready and a bit like eating a rubber-paper mix, the ‘meat’ flavourless other than the BBQ coating, the packet sauce way too sweet, sour and pungent. Adding lime and raw red onion to it just created a chemical attack. Gawd, supermarket packet food. AVOID.
Never had a good Mexican in the UK, every time they stimp on the chilli, (the WASP repackaging) which is vital to the flavour balance. Also over a hundred ingredients traditionally go into your average fajita, from the spice mix to the dough to the guacamole and sauces, many of which get dismissed. It’s one of the reasons why it was the first of only two cuisines UNESCO listed as world heritage status (the other being pan-Mediterranean). Peeps from the Americas often complain about the starchy, bland substitutes over this side of the pond and I’m inclined to agree without ever having tried the real thing. Even in Mexican run establishments it’s all watered down or catering to local tastes as they lose custom otherwise, the old adage for Asian food the spectrum over, notably Chinese that comes in over-sweet, gloopy sauces unrecognisable in the homeland.
…In other news the UK death toll from C-19 is lowering, albeit still 400-500 daily. A curious thing happens each week, the numbers fall encouragingly with each new day, hitting a nadir by weekend -then shooting back up again Monday.
It remains to be seen when we open up, how much it will again rise. As reminder, the UK has the second highest amount of deaths yet recorded, behind the US, at over 34,000 and 240,000 cases. Our strain appears deadlier than Italy’s.
It’s amazing how we’re used to it now, it barely registers anymore. We are perhaps too engrossed in our domestic lives, the screen that is our inlet now tiresome from the same single note, with a new normal at play. Doom! Gloom! So now we’re knowingly ranking our small dramas, whims and recipe suggestions ahead of the fate of the world, even when we’re the ones so threatened. I’m sure it’s something we all do as per norm, but so brazen and acceptable these days it’s how a sociopath must live. The other option? Lighting a tealight in vigil? Taking to the barricades?
Rather just soldiering on, defeatist to all that shit hitting the fan, from the protests against lockdown to the casual racism, the ineptitude of governments to the people fallen by the wayside, or willingly sacrificed to it. Worra buncha Cunts.
Spent the day doing paperwork, cobbling together the insurance claims and chasing refunds for three holidays we’d booked over this period. Had never planned so many trips in short succession and in one year, having suddenly gotten antsy in January. -Embarrassingly in hindsight, so stricken with wanderlust as to fully exemplify both compounds of the word. We’d been flushed with newfound, short-lived wealth (A finally getting a job) and a bid to revive things. In another life, back when we had money.
It took 6hrs, umpteen phonecalls and chasing up on emails and missives. Never again. At about the 5hr mark started getting tetchy, something long promised I’d never do in life. All too often people get stressed then take it out on others, which is what keeps the world’s psychiatrists in career. Reined it in, but dear lord, half a day of joyless graft, pressure, complexity and concentration without a break changes you. Start off as a guitar-singing nun, end up as crack wrestler Numbnutz Jack.
But things are better than yesterday, that’s for sure. The household drama, the tears, the tightly closed doors, the crying through haircuts. Lockdown doesn’t help domestics.
The work took so long we barely ate, just sloughed through it. Six flights, an overnight train, a stay in a youth hostel, an Airbnb and 5 hotels, to cancel, ask for refunds, liaise with travel agents, booking companies and credit card providers then put into claim with the attached evidence of a refusal of refund. All the while harbouring these empty experiences to mourn, lost to vicarious dimensions when asking a receipt from the Hallstatt Lakehaus or the Lower East Side Digs.
AirBnb is meanwhile laughably still selling rents and experiences, despite you not being able to be there in person. You can have virtual participation via scrolling deleriously through someone’s house, perhaps stare at their sofa or play spot-the-cat. Maybe watch one of them wedge their wobbling arse into a deckchair and sun themselves for an all-inclusive fee. But strangely after noone ever took them up on that (actually I bet some fuckwit somewhere, some time did), they’re now investing in online sessions of say yoga, or a drawing lesson or storytime for the kids. You can watch a middle-aged couple make shitty cupcakes you’ll never taste or interview someone about the wonders of their insurance firm job, at up to £85 a pop.
Okay there are some that look genuinely clickable, such as the cocktail class by Lisbon drag queens (nightclub-in-my-bedroom setting, lots of glitter), someone who set up a 1.5hr long escape room (there’d better be skeletons in the cupboard, or nudity), and various online concerts, from Provencal piano playing with a view to speakeasy Jazz clubs.
Others however looked graspingly doomed -how to propagate houseplants (pic of man watering a plant) for £30 and 1.5hrs, or a woman cooking in her French kitchen (looking exactly like any formica-happy kitchen anywhere, trying to lick the whisk suggestively), or the hour long lecture on how to cut a champagne bottle with a sabre. You can imagine these poor denizens of ex-hospitality thinking, now what is it that I can offer to the world, if not my overpriced, neutrally-colored bedroom?
One that I woulda picked if I absolutely had to, was a Plague Doctor’s Tour of the deserted streets of Prague, the guide dressed in full Black Death monk-and-crow-skull costume. Not sure if it’s legal and he’ll have to streak down alleyways or into bins whenever the copshop shows, but that does resonate right now.
Anyhoo, I procrastinate, back to the weeeeerk. Ah yes, that dish of sweet, pure fuckery. We’d done half the graft the week or three before, this was now the chasing up. Godawful werk you cannot avoid or rebrand as anything else. I’d genuinely rather polish shit.
Spent my childhood being hammered into my skull that werk is misery, werk is shite and something to scream at the moon about, that so long affected my every approach for years after, and fought to overcome. But now I see it true.
Fuckjugglers:
J’s feeling better thankfully, though somewhat islanded in the house with us locked into our rooms the past two days, furtively only out to forage from the kitchen. We treated ourselves after to a trip to the supermarket, the highlight of the day like any granny with no mates, the kind who talks interminably, pitiably with service staff. I would’ve hugged everyone on the street if it wouldn’t now be counted as murder.
Things have been opening up recently with a relaxation of some of the rules, and the lack of a queue seemed to show less people shopping -perhaps a dip in having to stock up. Bought a large, chocolate cookie in Lidl, in recompense for the middle class Riesling I’d otherwise be pretending on the vistas of the Salzkammergut. It’s become properly chilly these past few days, enough for a return to longjohns, squirreled away in the blanket box, but the air itself is sublime, like a blade of cold and life. It burns zephyrs in my head.
We tidied the room, revamping it to clear some clutter and make things minimalist rather than plain and messy. Minimalism only works one way, and takes no prisoners. Otherwise it looks shit. Part of our ongoing negotiations in the new set-up between ourselves, and a facet in the drama beforehand.
A is watching Ricky Gervais’s After Life, a swansong to depression and loss with a comedic bent. He loves it, but I see the pain. So much of it strikes a chord. Sometimes one has so much on their plate, with so little to lose, just being a cunt with zero tolerance is not only the last option but a liberating one. Gervais also demonstrates how it’s a self-defeating way to act, and a vicious cycle. That beneath every miserable card-carrying member of the wanker cub, there may be a painfully beating heart.
Oh but how lovely looks England in it all. Filmed in a glorious summer he does take pains to paint the place as twee and empty, but the peace and history still shines through. Filmed in Hemel Hampstead and Beckonsfield -lair of model villages and a young, bullied Colonel Gadaffi -it is an aria to smalltown Home Counties life, and a tainted amosphere (think moneyed Sky-watching Brexit-land) that Gervais grew up in (Reading) and I know all too well (Windsor). He infamously set The Office series in the black hole that is Slough; this time round he’s just as piss-taking, though quite conducive to leafy surburban life, perhaps from his more moneyed existence these days.
Swansea was deemed the ‘lovely, ugly town’ by hometown boy Dylan Thomas back in 1957, and translated into the ‘pretty, shitty city’ when the film Twin Town premiered 40 years later while I lived there – an opening gala and everything at the local UCI. Then an afterparty in the Barons nightclub, with Rhys Ifans and Kelly Jones turning up!
My other hometown further south, once part of the ‘Staines Massive’ back in the Ali G days, I’d now dub the ‘bullshit beauty that is Berkshire’. Berk as in you berk; it famously came in at No 2 in the Crap Towns series (beaten only by Hull).
I am perhap getting old and nostalgic for an utter cultural shithole. For all its gardens and gracing milk bottles I have to remember Windsor votes as a Tory stronghold, effectively bans mosques (locals taking arms against ‘increasing the traffic’) and the Daily Mail is sold out even in Waitrose. It’s the most racially divided pair of boroughs in the London metro, the other being Slough with the highest minority-majority wards in the country. Maybe just call it as it is, Cunt town.
Turds, polishing, yeah.
Pub quiz fact, Rhys Ifans, before hitting screengold fame as the bod in Notting Hill, was a Versace model in Milan beforehand.
J got sick, feeling back pain and a headache. Then he woke up drowsy as if a hangover, enough to have to get me to do his shopping. No runny nose, cough or fever, taste and smell fine. But still.
So we had to have that conversation, something we should have had way before any of this, months ago: what to do if anyone gets it.
Standing 2 metres away from someone at all times is pretty awkward in a flat like this. J cocooned on the sofa in blankets while we stood in the opposite corner by the door, I might as well have gotten a stick to prod him with, maybe a crucifix.
So we’ll isolate him in his room, and do all the feeding and tending, though J’s idea is to go his partner’s place and sit it out there. I advised against, considering there are other flatmates on that side to consider, who may get infected.
We then awkwardly retired to our bedrooms for the early night; the living room feels a bit in bad taste now.
Next morning we checked up and no sweats, chills and headache had gone, no blue ‘Covid toes’ and the pain had moved down his back. We think it’s been back pain all along.
Lockdown is easing now across the country, people now allowed out for as long as they can exercise, and commuting set for tomorrow. Life is starting again, but it remains to be seen how fast and how large a second wave will be. In Seoul, one super-carrier out at the newly reopened nightlife, visited 5 clubs in one night, infecting dozens. They’re now trying to trace nearly 2,000 other punters.
Greece, a vision of how to do things, with 2,700 cases and only 150 deaths, will reopen for tourism in June. Brits will be allowed by our government to partake.
In contrast NYC is still hammered down, whose death toll is now past 26,000. By contrast San Francisco, who locked down on the same timescale, has only 35 deaths. That’s no mistake, not even a week’s difference, and change in population density take into account such a discrepancy. They believe more strongly it’s due to different strains, NYC infected from a more lethal, contagious mutation from Europe, California a milder one from Asia.
The bungled efforts of the government has doomed much of the nation -epidemiologists say 60% of the 83,000 deaths (about 50,000) so far could have been avoided if they’d locked down a week earlier – a clock has been set in Times Square advertising the fact. The BBC has looked in-depth at the response, comparing it with other nations, and finding that Democrat governors locked down on average after 2.5 days when deaths hit 1 per million. Republicans locked down on average 13.5 days – nearly two weeks later.
New York is currently the world’s deadliest place per capita. The global Top 20 at the mo:
New York – 1,397 San Marino – 1,208 New Jersey – 1,074 Connecticut – 853 Belgium – 756 Massachusetts – 746 Andorra – 621 Spain – 576 Italy – 511 Louisiana – 505 UK – 482 District of Columbia – 476 Michigan – 468 Rhode Island – 419 France – 414 Sweden – 328 Netherlands – 322 Pennsylvania – 306 Republic of Ireland – 301 Maryland – 290
The excess deaths in New York are six times the average, and very likely c-19 is being undercounted. The same for the UK, which if connected would almost double our current total of 33,000 dead. Both New York State and the UK are now seeing a decrease in cases and deaths, but in Italy they are rising again. Russia now has the second highest amount of global cases.
In other words, we’re knowingly opening up again, knowingly killing. Like at the start of the pandemic, we can see it coming, we can work it out personally. But we’re trusting our government to take action despite.
I’ve been checking out some Internet. All fucking day. Still armchair travelling, still in China.
Anyhoo, a welcome getaway from the bickering and racism online, the looks on the street recently, as always. Hot on the trail of yesterday’s rabbit hole into Chinese design I’ve been delving into photography fora from the glorious motherland. And ohmigaaahd there’s so much.
I look at the pics of the Chinese cities, so different from the way the West surmises them, as poor, polluted and cowed, and feel it- pride. Nationalistic, state-posturing pride as an underdog against a more belligerent power. This is perhaps worrying.
First off, the journey: the usual big three most people have seen. Shanghai (the world’s most built-up city), population 30m:
And it’s not just skyscrapers, Shanghai’s old buildings (mostly the shikumen housing and longtang lanes that it spent decades bulldozing but is now restoring) cover an area almost the City of Paris. SH also has a millennium aged Old City, one of three, plus two colonial districts:
Next on the list, to the capital Beijing (pop 22 million), the world’s largest ceremonial centre, and world’s largest pre-industrial city back in the 19th. A terrible place to lump a capital -freezing in winter, boiling in summer, courting sand storms in Spring and smog year round. Another mistake early on: choosing the American freeway-style system to move its inhabitants around -now ridden with 8 giant ringroads and endless traffic, unlike say Shanghai or Guangzhou.
Nowadays it’s cleaned up, planting its Great Green Wall against the Gobi (and Hebei’s factories), banning 5 million cars, growing the world’s biggest, busiest metro system, with Shanghai hot on its tails. Today powered by tourism, the world’s largest bureaucratic sector, and China’s silicon valley. Plus the world’s premier creative industries, notably Beijing’s shock art that has ruled the roost for two decades, and the highest amount of start-ups anywhere. World, world, worlds.
And finally, Hong Kong, the world’s most skyscrapered, and densest city. The ‘mouth of the dragon’, or as Shanghaier’s who are the ‘head’ prefer: the arse end. HK stands out from the Mainland in its older, decaying buildings among the glitzy skyscrapers -here people own the land and prove it harder to revamp and rebuild. Also there’s hardly anything old left despite, due to the lack of space. But what a space.
A note of reality -HK is also China’s most economically divided, unequal city, the world’s freest place to do business where only 20% pay minimal tax in a social experiment that both UK and China would never have dared back home. The populace enjoys some of the world’s highest ‘average’ wages yet 75 percent are working class (for urban China that’s the opposite, 70% being middle class), and 1/5 being desperately poor where a good chunk struggle to even feed themselves. This is in short the world’s most capitalist spot, and contrasting with the socialism next door.
But still a jaw-dropping hive of activity, hustle and bustle, and prone to giving the finger to the regime.
The scope best appreciated from afar, it’s all about the lookout points. It’s double the density of Manhattan and triple the height.
Then there are the megacities, larger than NYC that most peeps haven’t even heard of.
Shenzhen, the world’s most highrise nexus currently adding on the equivalent of the Big Apple’s skyline in the next few years. This is the planet’s hardware capital, now vying with Beijing and California to become the software one too. Over one third of Silicon Valley tech is already sourcing from here.
In the ’80s a fishing village of 30,000 before becoming Communist China’s first Special Economic Zone and a byword for sweatshop labour -now ballooned to 13 million and reinvented as a sparkling arriviste with some of the highest standards of living in the country (with added beach resorts), though still part of a greater whole. Despite being only a few decades old it’s surprisingly quite preservationist, being the only city to protect its illegal buildings, and seeing several ex-industrial and scabby tenement districts becoming state cultural centres. -Regardless of their subversion due to the art, start-ups and creatives they generate.
The city’s newest landmark is just as riddled with lobbying. Plans for the 60m needle atop the 599m/ 1,965ft Ping’An tower, once slated to be the 2nd tallest in the world (now 4th), were shelved in a big spat with the airport, due to the possibility of planes whacking into it. By adhering to local law it misses out on becoming a 600m ‘megatall’ by 90cm. Tis twice the height of the Eiffel Tower.
Guangzhou -centre of the world’s new largest city as of 2015, with 41 million people -Shenzhen anchors the other end. An ancient city of 2,200 years and colonial metropolis but with very little to show for it. Long a cheap parody of HK with endless areas of urban poverty it’s pretending that part of its history never happened, notably swankier and more eco-conscious these days than her eidolon with a slew of green projects, including the 3rd largest metro system, soon to be the first.
It’s plush new centre has a vast ceremonial axis of parkland, under which all the public and private transport is buried, and sided with supertalls (buildings over 300m/1000ft), which in turn lines up with a ceremonial tomb-temple complex on one of the city’s hills. At either end sit 2,000ft tall towers and some stadia, one of them floating. I mean, she had a lot to prove but gaaaahd…
Then the second tier cities. Chongqing, a city of 17m on one of the most tortured urban sites – a confluence of two major rivers and three mountain ranges, riddled with bridges (4,500 of them), tunnels, cable cars, zip lines, monorails and caverns. Trains going in and out of clifftop buildings, some of the world’s largest, tallest bridges, that kinda thing. This is China’s most dramatic city: ugly, beautiful, stunning, and often the visitor’s favourite. It is possibly the world’s most visually epic metropolis.
She debuted on the world stage as the world’s largest city about a decade ago, before they worked out her 35 million inhabitants were in several cities in a catchment the size of Austria. Anyhoo, for the high drama, this is what many people think of when envisaging modern China, grandiose, tawdry, sultry, Bladerunner-y.
Chengdu, China’s hipster centrum and generator of influencers, and the country’s coolest cat of urban tribes, start-ups, 200,000 teahouses, street style, laid back vibes, a UNESCO protected Culinary site and home to an entertainment and leisure complex that’s the world’s largest building.
Oh and panda’s, it’s big on touting the fuckers everywhere you look, from crawling up the sides of skyscrapers to airplane livery -the place you’ll have to fly into if you wanna see any in their natural habitat.
Nanjing, the historic former capital, riddled with history. It’s surrounded by the world’s largest city walls, imperial tombs, former palaces and endless temples among the skyscrapers. It lost out to nearby Shanghai in the city stakes, and whatever you do, don’t just DON’T mention the war.
Qingdao, the seaside resort and attached German colonial old town. Site of the water events during the 2008 Olympics it operates a colonial building code, as well as several marinas and a whole load of beer related branding to lure the nation’s drunks and street pissers. Breweries (notably Tsingtao, the national favourite), festivals, biergartens, all thanks to the mitteleuropan legacy. Coastal walks and sandy beaches complete the picture, handy in soaking up vomit.
Hangzhou, the country’s richest, most livable city long touted as the most beautiful but destroyed in the 1800s, having been the worlds largest too (along with 600 cities it was wrecked in history’s nastiest civil war, and second bloodiest conflict, taking out 30m lives and sending China into decline). Still its heart remains a classical landscape of water, hills and pagodas, and China’s biggest tourist attraction; for decades it banned all highrises. It’s high standards run completely with its reputation.
Suzhou, also traditionally known as China’s most beautiful city, famed for its classical gardens, Venetian canals, sweet food and a white-walled, blue-roofed vernacular. Again one of the country’s richest, and merging into Shanghai with booming growth, though the locals do moan it is a bit boring. Then they built the spantastic, supertall gateway and its megamall entertainment complex for something to look at, soon to be lined with an avenue of skyscrapers; it’s been fast-dubbed the ‘Big Trousers’.
And even the smaller, third tier cities.
Harbin -a cold northern metropolis famed for the world’s largest ice festival, and once belonging to Russia now one of the capitals of China’s northeastern rustbelt. Having seen a fast decline in heavy industry, it’s transformed into tourism (Chinese seeing Russia, Russians seing China), carmaking, trade and gargantuan museum construction.
Guiyang, long the capital of China’s poorest province this multicultural, minority-heavy city appears to have leapfrogged the decades of manufacturing and trade straight into hi-tech. It’s now home to most of China’s Fortune 500 and centre of a tech boom that’s won it accolades as the city most likely to watch and invest in. It’s also infamous for its copycat twin towers- from the World Trade Center to an unlikely pair of Empire State buildings, plus some IFC’s from Hong Kong, why not. For all its classy gloss, there’s always that louche, nouveau riche uncle still elbowing in on every grand plan.
Shaoxing, a reputation once preceded this place as an elegant footnote in history for its timeless poetry, writing, tea, wine, bridges, ducks and the arts -just the reality was an obnoxious centre of decay, pollution and manufacturing. Nowadays it’s shirked off that rep to become more in keeping with its tradition, but still overshadowed by Hangzhou who it lost the regional capital to, and Chaozhou with its preserved buildings and Old Town. Instead it’s become a halfway house of livability and historic restoration, and an examplar to healthy competition, even as the underling.
I could go on, with over 100 cities over 1 million (by some counts 160 – by comparison US has 20), and each of them ploughing the taxes into making them livable, eco-friendly and not just highrise or bombastic. Here even the poor areas have an epic urban scale and ‘Bladerunner’ aesthetic (founded on Ridley’s Scott experience of Tokyo/ HK nightlife), though now heavily threatened -the urban cacophony is fast disappearing, before a sanitised revision. The lair of the famous Chinese street life, where your days were traditionally lived out in public:
Chongqing
Shanghai, catch em while you can.
Hong Kong
Beijing
Shenzhen, and it’s last remaining ‘urban village’- illegally built neighbourhoods put up in the 80s and 90s, and now seeking heritage protection. Locally they’re known as ‘handshake homes’ as that’s how close neighbours are between buildings. Entirely pedestrian, threaded through with alleyways and bursting with streetlife.
Oh and one last thing THIS CITY that has recently been in the news. Home to 11-19 million, a confluence of three seperate cities on different banks of the river, and now locale to several of the world’s largest bridges (plus the biggest lightshow every night). Do click salubriously on the image below:
Wuhan
The metropolis is adversely now featuring highly as the place most Chinese want to visit post-lockdown, intrigued by the constant news and its hardy citizens. However, highly unlikely for foreign visitors, should they ever even return to China, once the world’s fastest growing market for inbound tourists (4th in the world behind the US). It now looks remote that many outsiders will ever see or experience these cities (let alone its multitudinous landscapes) other than through some clickbaiting media lens.
Well, after all that, how buoyant. A breath of fresh air from my lockdown barrage of US films, talk shows, TikToks, vids, reality TV and news news news, all becoming redolent of a Western society I’m excluded from no matter how I identify.
I think a part of me is falling into the nationalism trap. It’s all so comforting when facing a world that’s otherwise against you, redlining you as forever an outsider and rechalking these past few months. You fall into the welcoming arms of a culture that looks like you.
And this is precisely the same trap as anyone else. All those toads, all those hawks, all those okay-boomers, all those Karens, you’ll likely find their equivalent anywhere else, China included. If I filled this thread with the greatest hits of the West (read: White): London, Rome, Paris, NYC, Sydney, Vienna and started celebrating how perfect Westernism all was, even their imperfections, it would surely strike a different tone.
And should it?
I think nationalism and patriotism share a fine line between them, and that dallies with inculcating prejudice. Perhaps one needs to have a sense of victimhood to feel it, and defend it. Question is, who has the upper hand?
I think universality should override both sides. We can fully appreciate the beauty of one place without that meaning you have to shirk the rest, or put it in competition. It doesn’t have to be the clash of civilisations, they long pointed at the Islamic world, but now increasingly looking further.
I’ll finish on an in-betweener from both spheres of influence. Where east meets west: Istanbul.
The sun switched back off today, becoming decidedly Poldarkian from the Mediterranean climes these past few days, and sending all the daytrippers packing, furling back their deckchairs, BBQ sets and parasols, and fleeing back into miserable squalor. The wind whistled throughout, the trees occasionally thrashing.
Almost all the patients coming into A&E this weekend have been due to drunken injury. It beggars belief. Perhaps the UK and US really do have a special relationship. I’d hazard it was Anglo-Saxon too, but Australia and Canada have been doing fine.
The rest of the day a write-off. Migraines again. There’s only so much lying in bed with pain one can do. Tried out some frozen peas on my head, then ate some for lunch (shite). I am a bad cook. Terrible. Even I’m tired of the gunk I come up with; stricken with a terrible habit of appropriating whatever’s dying in the fridge then magicking a marinade from what’s grabworthy while in the pan. Worst ever: a microwaved potato with Marmite.
Did manage to change, shower, exercise and look out the window. A middle-aged man wobbling about with a tennis racket and pounding a brick wall, reminding me of our playground craze of patball (Squash without rackets). Yeah, I’ll take that up again, keep fit. Try and inveigle A to play alongside (an impossibility). But tomorrow.
After I check out some Internet. I’m travelling vicariously, going through every major city in China. In the last 5 years every one has gotten swanky looks like, which in turn has made me look into the local design guilds (20,000 around Shanghai alone) and architects churning out amazing new work. It’s ahead of the rest of the world, and a sign China’s now its own market, as opposed to aping the outside. For all the fuss about trade wars, only 3% of the economy is with US trade, and only 17% with exports. The majority of dough running the place is in services, and domestic, with 5x the start-ups of the US and 10x the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) graduates.
Anyhoo, a welcome getaway from the world, the ethnocentrism and geopoliticking. There’s just something very relaxing about checking out the new and fresh. From another life.
80’s POMO is back in
A new development echoing the karst hills of ancient landscape painting
A shopping mall based on a bookshop aesthetic (those items displayed aren’t books).
The international trend for the 80’s again. I’ve never seen retro come back into fashion twice, once in the early noughties, again in the Twenties.
This circular pavilion is a looping restaurant around a traditional tea garden pond – note the mist vents.
A converted church becomes a bookstore
Wang Shu won the Pritzker Prize a few years back as the world’s best architect. His buildings incorporate the materials of those demolished before them, like strata of alluvial layers of time, and monoliths to passage.
A high-concept store/ cafe in Shanghai -once again the postmodernism, but fucking with it. One side twee, the other brutal.
A kindergarten, that’s also a memory maker.
A store collective in Shenzhen. A mentioned they should have used traditional Chinese instruments otherwise they looked like they were just copying the West. I threw a book at him, the amount of times I’ve heard that shit.
Modernism btw is sourced from the functional, aesthetic styles of Japan and Morocco, where the earlier modernists such as Courbousier went to study. The world we see around us today looks very homegrown in those two countries (which is why Moroccan style is so perfectly balanced and fine, while zen is subtle and understated -almost plain).
This is an office complex – rooms beyond the wooden one lead to steel cages (pop up foodie vans).
Concept store in Shenzhen. Very Force Awakens imo.
Office space -the rest of the development a luxe playground. 80s Pomo creeping in once again.
Mall architecture -the death of retail round the world (worst performing year on record 2019) due to internet shopping is no different in China. However they’re still being built, and like the others have been transmogrified into ‘experience centres’, where restaurants, gyms, after-school clubs and bars have taken over.
A hot day, a weekend, the first time they’ve coincided in about 7 months, of which the last two have been under lockdown. For some – I should say many -that’s irresistible. Apparently all the parks were inundated; the ones in East London, lair of the hipsters in the noughties, kept up their tradition of BBQing in their crappy parks (mostly bare lawns and no landscaping), en masse as they used to do on Sundays. So much so that the fun police gave up, and sent Tweets instead.
Hackney, so full of the city’s yoof looked positively normal. At Broadway Market, the punters flocked anyway -despite the lack of a market:
We decided today would be the day where the second wave would start from, and not to go out. A pledge in blood, with cat sacrifice. But outside it was already kicking off.
We could already hear whooping, as people gathered into picnics on the lawns below, obviously with alcohol thrown in, and still morning. For the rest of the day some guy strummed his guitar too. How very dare they! Totes envied them.
By late afternoon I think they went inside to vomit and die, but a lovely car alarm took their place. For hours on end, we had to watch telly to cut it out.
Norbit was the film, dating from 2003. Eddie Murphy was nominated a few times for the Golden Raspberry Awards for it (opposite of the Oscars for the worst film of the year). I’m sure it would be unreleasable today.
The trailer looked fun, very un-PC (fat woman knocking over stuff, breaking shit, and causing hi-jinx at waterparks), and a guilty pleasure. But when faced with the reality it fell a bit flat; oh how we’ve changed.
Don’t get me wrong I did laugh, but for a large part I was on Rasputia’s side, made ever more the monster by believing herself beautiful and confident against all odds. And Thandie Newton annoying AF as the downtrodden supermodel-type who wants to open an orphanage and falls madly in love with nerds on her wedding day. Also for a large part, every scene is filmed with a real, obese actor, just her head’s replaced by a CGI Murphy, who plays many of the main roles. I mean, poor woman. Also her younger self is played by an overweight girl, face clearly unhappy to be doing the screen time, as she causes ponies to suffer by sitting on them. I mean, how’s she gonna live that down back at school?
Anyhoo, despite the weak reception (scoring only 9% on Rotten Tomatoes) it opened at no. 1 at the US box office, and earned $160m worldwide from a budget of $60m. It also went on to spawn two sequels.
Some mates have suggested I go over to their place in Stockwell and we’ll have a drink. They’ll sit in the doorway and I’ll hang out on the steps, New Yawk in the 70s style. Not sure I’m with that. Also they’ve invited me to an online clubbing experience at the Dalston Superstore. I’m just like NO, £1.50 a ticket to watch other people bouncing on a group chat -Xmas lights behind, while a DJ sorts out the tracks, and one of the little screens will have performers. Seriously???
IT Crowd re-runs finished off the day. That perfect balance of ker-plunk and cheese as to be tongue-n-cheek, with the whole cast and directors in on it. A production taking the piss out of it’s low budget and ham writing. In a way before its time.
I have absolutely degraded into a slob. Scrolling in bed for half the day, getting up to feed. Watching an episode of something on the box while I do. More scrolling, more feeding. A film, then more scrolling. No change of clothes, shower optional. No outside, no exercise. I’m not reading books, that got replaced by scrolling. And now not even that, I’m addicted into TikTok. I wonder if this should feel so normal. What if we just say fuckit to the guilt, we’ve got enough on our plates.
Back in the day, the city calling. Offering up its coolness and grit, but a clean grit. That something in the air where anything’s possible.
And before all that pesky adulthood and reality, responsibilities, history.
Sun’s out, guns out.
Parklife.
Clapham Common busy as always, the temperature hitting 24C at about 3pm. All along the way people strolling, queueing outside the few shops. The usual keep-fitters skipping and cartwheeling but vastly outnumbered by sunbathers and picnics.
PC Plod nowhere to be seen, but the signs everywhere, littering the flat surfaces.
A big no-no the outdoor gyms, now unsightly.
Looking like exotic, unreachable zoo animals, or edgy art.
The bandstand also (apparently the biggest in London), uglified as if to barricade there being nothing to see, nope. Rightly so, it’d be a prime vector from the sun.
The park caff fully open, and suspiciously looking to provide picnic fodder. A queue in and out, with almost a carnival atmosphere surrounding it.
Everywhere else nature returning. Although the parks now more used, quietude still to be found.
Once upon a time a ranger house, or public loos disguised as a wee cottage, pun intended. Looks like the mfing future.
The surrounding streets their own bubble in a quiet decay.
For so many a meaning lost without selling, buying, shopping.
I’ve no idea if that circus ever got there.
The ice cream shop does a roaring trade, and the closest thing to a break we can get. The queue snakes round the corner and down the street, with each punter looking a little embarrassed.
Today’s meant to be the first day of summer, traditionally the windows open, the radios blaring, the lawns littered with bodies and streets drunken. Instead a furtive atmosphere like a held note -fun is not to be had but if so, surreptitiously.
Tomorrow will be Saturday, and even hotter. It’ll happen then.
So discovered Amazon Prime today. The last time I popped in it was the equivalent to the back end of the video store circa 1996, the section littered with films you’d never heard of -for a reason. Low budget TV movies, talky melodramas and an endless flow of has-been flicks everyone had seen some decade or two before. Like How To Make An American Quilt, Moonlighting, A Fish Called Wanda, Jaws IV The Return, The Buddy Holly Story. If they bought this year’s Cats they’d be streaming that 15 years later and touting it on every headline as event of the century.
Well today it looks as if they’ve upped their game. Everyone has of course copied the inordinately successful Netflix format, which makes you scroll for longer than you watch. And right now TV is like a civil right, anathema to an otherwise imprisoned populace likely to riot.
Well last night’s vision was Jexi, a comedy centring on a new bitchy equivalent to Siri or Alexa. The trailer promised it all: Man buys phone, realises something amiss, phone takes over his life in a winning way, makes him a winner via it becoming his snappy, denigrating wingman. Him being a winner means getting rich, sporty, having mates and most importantly, laying a beautiful, intelligent woman (either/and virtual or real).
It tries hard to undo the previous roles that Hollywood’s Americana long promoted: white collar, White-or-impossibly-Jewish protagonist (working in business, law, mid-management), cheerleading romantic interest (blonde, vacuous, skimpily dressed), playing out their lives in a fun American city (sunny, towering, occasionally multicultural). But dear lord, today’s version is still as formulaic and sycophantic to the American Dream, just as steaming with bullshit. The jobsworth is now in the creative fields with a hip, open-plan office (dreaming up social media clickbait yet aspiring to proper journalism), his love interest is now intelligent, fully clothed and mixed race (namedropping that she gave up her winning job at Amazon to open a hipster bike boutique), and the city is now populated with European cars, cyclists and historic housing. But still endearingly studded with minority ‘characters’, so casually, comically obnoxious one does wonder what ‘tolerance’ means to the writers.
Jexi is yet another propagandic offering from the complicit factory that is the American Dream, just as unreachable and just as false. And evil. Like Nazi-evil and baby killing.
The vast majority of Americans do not live in million dollar apartments in heritage clapperboard, with stunning views of the Bay Bridge. They do not ride bicycles (tellingly the night scene showed them up without lights) or drive Minis/ Teslas, or so openly engage into mixed-race relationships (a fraction of what it is in the UK even after four centuries). In short a film that tries so hard to upend the bullshit of the past merely replaces it with its own brand of tripe.
It’s gotta piss off Americans themselves, surely. Everything Sundance was against, but now having to redraw the lines.
Yes, it’s a comedy about a phone, and a sassy virtual assistant. But it’s hard to ignore the lurid attempts to show off from the background, constantly in-yer-face and obliterating the humour -the upturned nose, the ratcheted volume and roving eyes no different from the stage before. Yaaaahs I was just shopping in Monte Carlo darling! has now transmogrified into Yasssss I was just biking round Bra-zil bro! A little embarrassing from a non-American perspective, where living urbane, with history, holidaying, driving small cars or er, cycling isn’t something to constantly namedrop.
It’s not so much embarrassing anymore but tiresome; it feels like a constant dick measuring contest that is thinly disguised State-posturing: a commercial branding of a civilisation. And the way they sell Americana these days is increasingly disconnected with the reality; it jars quite some with the blaring headlines, with the viral vids, with the voting results when we switch channels. -And why oh why is every tale of the downtrodden still coming from the echelons of the upper middle class? Would even just a normal middle class tale so crack the bubble? would -heaven forbid- someone working in a banal office job forever destroy that magical aura? In this day and age, where information defines our era, the suspension of disbelief is no longer one of escapism, rather a weaponised reminder.
Well, ba-limey. All that from just a rom-com. I barely talked about the virtual assistant to which the film gets its name (she has her moments). It was just so screechingly awful and formulaic. Talking about sex or having a dick pic is no longer a brazen, run-round-the-room-screaming display that gets you roaring with laughter. Dating a mixed race woman isn’t the daring, border-jumping adventure into the abyss. Being creative -and making money from it -isn’t throwing off your societal chains. And riding a bike isn’t the coolest, most groundbreaking thing ever, fecund for urban escapades and hilarity. Methinks they doth protest too much.
Next time I watch a cartoon I’ll tersely report on the socio-economic costs of childhood fantasy in our lives.
I do wonder though what would be the equivalent today of breaking form -like really breaking it? What is it we don’t talk about at dinner parties, if not sex, drugs and rock n roll? Maybe a rom-com where dating differing genders (without it becoming a thing) would do the trick -with the world of a non-binary spectrum awaiting. Or having a female lead that isn’t… (please hold on to something solid) a model. Or not dating at all -dear lord, the end of Western civilisation if we had a rom-com where the end goal wasn’t perfunctorily getting laid. A setting that was a suburban town whose shiteness they could easily use to comedic affect. Professions that didn’t define their every standing in life, and was (like to most of us) just a way to a wage -yet just as peppered with kooky characters and situational enterprise.
I think finding magic in the everyday, in the banal is what would make a film stand out. Accepting it’s shitty and going at it with humour would resonate. We kinda need that now. Escapism, though very pretty, isn’t working.
Or maybe we should be rom-comming about a trans Nazi in love with a horse, perhaps a cat. In a Tajik hill village. Ze’s obese, and a dam salesmanperson, struggling to win a contract that will save the countryside (a key scene where ze plugs the hole with zir’s voluminous behind). She’s an animal. With needs and wants and liberated imperfection, battling for veganism. Ze’s a misunderstood extremist, battling for acceptance and the supreme race. Together they find love in a hopeless place.
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