The Chongqing Sino Circus: The Last Two Acts

Despite having to drive in from the piney woods to access the internet at my local library (a brilliant resource), life is good.

Last night BBC reported that Gu Kailai- The Deranged Red Queen of Chongqing, wife of loser Bo Xilai and mother of that piece of human excrement son Guagua – has been arrested for the murder of British confident/Bo family financial fixer Neil Haywood, which apparently took place in a Chongqing hotel last November.

Arrested for investigation. Forget it! Gu is already painted guilty as pig shit. This verdict is pre-ordained, signed, sealed and delivered, despite the editorial cant by the China Daily that nobody is above the law.

All that is left is to envision the last couple of acts in this CCTV mini-series.

So here goes.

Gu will be given a short clinical trial and, after evidence by Wang Ligun and a few other formerly-close family flunkies, will be sentenced to death by lead. On the appointed day, she will be paraded around Chongqing in the back of a rusty Liberator truck. Up hill and down dale in the full butterfly position and wearing a dunces cap. Possibly a few banners proclaiming her crimes at variance with the PRC’s legal code. A necklace of ping pong balls would add some fitting retro CR significance.

When the good citizens of Chongqing had sufficiently imbided the political lessons of this street theatre, the truck will head for the outskirts of Chongqing where the apartments meet the rice paddies. Without further ado, Gu will be unceremoniously bundled from the truck into a shallow grave dug in a pile of landfill and rapidly dispatched with a couple into the back of the brain pan. Earthmoving equipment will then cover her mortal remains, and the PLA officer in charge of the detail will finally distribute red envelopes to all participants.

Curtain closes.

Postscript Meanwhile, Young Guagua, having been sent down from Oxford, decides to apply for political assylum. The British authorities decide however that his case in without merit.

“Son. You have run out of visa time, know nothing about Premier League, so it is time for you to return to your Motherland”.

He decides to make a low key reentry via Louhu, but is red flagged at Mainland passport control. Since all members of the Bo family are now deemed national security risks, the Shenzhen authorities wishing to wash their hands of the whole affair, bundle him into a Santana and dump him outside the city limits.
Guagua, now bereft of friends who treat him as the equivalent of Ebola, joins the transient world of the prostitute, the migrant worker and the street peddler, drifting from city to city.

One morning after a hightime in a low dive, he wakes up under a formica table covered in a rich effluvia of spit, vomit and Pearl River Lager. Slowly in his return to consciousness, he begins an assessment of his skill set but not a lot is forthcoming, until he recalls that quaint practice of the British upper classes – cottaging.

That’s it, he decides. I must make my own way in this vale of tears now that Mummies monthly allowance is no longer forthcoming. I will become a male prostitute until something better turns up.

Alas, Young Guagua is not made of the right stuff. In his first attempt to corall a customer, he was beaten to a pulp by a retired duck farmer from Guizhou province in a public lavatary in a third tier city. The Chengguan duly arrive, check IDs, pocket everybodies loose change, and promptly dispatch Guagua to No.3 Juvenile Reeducation Centre for an indefinite term.

Some months later, the local paper devotes a single paragraph to his passing. There was no mention of the shower stall, the bar of soap and the sharpened toothbrush.

So ends the mad dreams of the Great Helmsman.

And no, any references to KMs remarks about tragedy and farce will be deleted with extreme prejudice.

We owe the Party a Vote of Thanks.

Gu Kailai the deranged Red Queen of Chongqing

The Bo Xilai-Wang Ligun mini series is exceeding all expectations. Readers will be well up of developments as they have been comprehensively covered by media including John Garnaut and numerous sites including Peking Duck where I blogged on Bo’s fall from grace just hours before BBC reported his removal as Chongqing’s Maximum Leader.

A delicious mix of serendipity and schadenfreude with the rumour mill going into hyper-drive. Guns on the roof of the Zhongnanhai, tanks on Chang’an Avenue, black Ferraris and a whole lot of other silliness. Whatever, as I written on China Divide and other sites many times in the past, rumour in the PRC is a currency every bit at valuable and exchangeable as a fist full of rmb.

Rather than retrace the whole business and context in forensic detail, I recommend a visit to Seeing Red in China, Sinostand or JRs site or simply undertake a decent google news search.

Clearly, the Bo family is a bit dysfunctional. The son Bo Guagua (is this a take on Ga Ga?) is most definitely a Sino-version of a Hooray Henry right out of a P G Wodehouse novel as evidenced by this article from the Mail Online.

As I’m using a friends pc, unable to reproduce the Mail’s photographic record of this essentially worthless piece of shit, plus his tenuous relationship with the course work reading list while attending one of England’s more illustrious institutions of higher learning. So hit the link and grasp the evidence. Guagua’s excellent foreign activities are hardly newsworthy as they are the norm for the young, rich and brainless spawn of the PRCs current politico-money elite.

However, it is Bo’s wife lawyer Gu Kailai who really concerns me as she appears to be in the throes of some sort of Lady Macbeth psychiatric disorder. Following reports on the suspicious death of non-Sino fixer Neil Heywood as reported by The Telegraph HERE.

On Saturday a startling new report surfaced that Mr Heywood had told friends in China that he feared for his safety after falling out with Gu Kailai, Mr Bo’s wife. Concerned that somebody in the family’s inner circle had betrayed them, she was said to have asked Mr Heywood to divorce his wife and swear an oath of loyalty, which he refused, according to the Wall Street Journal, the newspaper which broke the original story about Heywood’s death last week.

Apparently, Gu’s invitation to Heywood to divorce his present legal significant other and swear an oath of allegiance to her good self was also extended to other individuals with close proximity to the family’s business dealings.

Clearly we are looking at a family with issues. Bo’s naked retro-ambition obviously pissed off a Politburo which places great value on a public face of unity and collegiality, undoubtedly helped along by Guagau’s excellent foreign adventures. But it is wifey’s Macbethean paranoia which raises the dysfunctional ante.

Just imagine if she were able to enforce these oaths of allegiance beyond the inner power elite to the general populace in that massive populace of 23 million. Rather than the Rev Moon’s mass public weddings, Gu could reengineer the whole process and have mass public divorces in Chongqing followed by community oaths of allegiance to herself and the Bo family. The mind boggles.

This reminds me of Lady Macbeth in Kurosawa’s exemplary feudal take on Shakespeare in his Throne of Blood. Heaven help the populace in Chongqing if she totally lost touch with the reality principle and called for mass loyalty suicides a la Jonestown in Guyana.

While we are focussing on the mysterious death of British fixer Neil Heywood, keep in mind the 11 year jail term just handed out to Australian national Matthew Ng by the court in Guangzhou. One treads a very fine line in China when owning a successful business which come to the attention of domestic competitors and pirates.

With luck, this same fate could also descend on that major Though Leader of the Sino-West interface, Shaun Rein.

Apologies for failed links. I shall return to this post when I find a more congenial computer.

A Free Kick, Surfing Update and a Sabbatical

Sometimes one has to cast diplomacy aside and exorcise the demons. And I will no doubt get flamed but who cares, and this brings me to the website Seeing Red in China and the gormless piece titled I Love China

As my wife, whom I love very much, reminds me from time to time, I assume too often that the readers of the blog actually know me. I hope this post helps you better understand where I am coming from as you read about the China that I know.

We then get the weblord’s whole (and insigificant) academic cv and history of self-sacrifice bringing ESL to the downtrodden in the Sino-back blocks. This, like many other entries, reads like the memoirs of a 19th US missionary in China grappling with strange customs, dysfunctional institutions, etc. Also, something of a renaissance man: book editor, sino sociologist, HR advocate etc, all enveloped within a liberal dose of good old Yankee self-promotion. And lets not even mention the mostly adulatory Greek chorus occupying the comments section. Now that I have this unpleasant task out of the way….

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In the last Surf Report we trekked into very isolated south-east Tasmania, braved white pointers – a particularly vicious Noah – and surfed Shipstern Bluff.

Major league predator -the White Pointer cruises the Southern Oceans

Dr Phil Chapman surfer and medical emergency dude: Shipstern Bluff in background

Nice interview with Chapman in Zigzag.

But here is the news.

Kelly Nordstrom: 14 year old Tasmanian high school student.

The Tasmanian Mercury reports that 14 year old Kelly Nordstrom successfully surfed this humungous break. Could you imagine a power tiger mum in Shanghai or Beijing having a son like this? Nah. Myopic human calculators who have problems tying their shoe laces.

And while testing the limits, we should visit Pedra Blanca also located in south-east Tasmania and home to some interesting bird life. Not to be mistaken for Pedra Blanca off Brazil and another off Singapore.

Read about the wildlife HERE thanks to Simon Mustoe, and experience some mf… big waves with this 60 minute video The Storm Riders HERE. Link lazy. This is your mission.

Thanks to Storm Riders for this image of Pedra Branca

I was going to enter into the inane debate as to whether surfing should be included in the Olympics (alongside kiddie porn events such as gymnastics and synchronised swimming), but decided to continue with this visual essay.

The Telegraph hosts the 2012 Nikon Surf Photo of the Year.
Of the twenty entries, I went with this one in the above gallery of 20 images.

Photog: Ray Collins. The Sweet Spot

And a similar gallery – Australian Open of Surfing Women’s open event at Manly beach – HERE. While Hawaiian Alana Blanchard in this set will give you heart palpitations, the rest of the entrants at this event will also sort out your yellow fever issues.

Rising female surfing stars (l-r), Dimity Stoyle, Ellie-Jean Coffey, Laura Enever, Sally Fitzgibbons, Tyler Wright, Nikki Van Dijk and Phillippa Anderson. Picture: Mark Evans

This is my 47th post on the new site, and since I am heading for a blog sabbatical for a few weeks, lets close with La Gondalrina by Jerry Fielding from Peckinpah’s Old Testament ode The Wild Bunch

Link didn’t take, but a cut and youtube paste is recommended.

Note: Being a publicity hound like most bloggers, another 24 posts can be found on my superceded site Garage Land:

HERE.

A total of 71 entries since March 2011.

See you soon and take care.

Shipstern Bluff and Digital Technologies

Prologue. I was going to do a follow-up on the Bo-Wang power dance, but decided it was a pure waste of keyboard energy, since every Sino-expert and a few besides have waded into the speculation-reading of the tea leaves. Your guess as to what took place behind the Chinese curtain is as good as mine, and at least it does not assume any secret knowledge by an another academically tenured China expert, to wit Joseph Fewsmith.

“You’re really talking, I think, about development models, where China goes from here,” says Joseph Fewsmith, an expert on Chinese elite politics at Boston University. “This takes on much broader ideological dimensions than anything we have seen in 20 years.” WSJ

As if domestic uber politics in China was/is so easily explained away with such a comprehensive all-knowing text bite.

And a holiday in the Caribbean for the reader who takes me to task for an absolute factual howler.
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Now to the main course and a further supplement to my Surfing File, which is certainly the sport of kings after the horsies. After all, surfing was introduced to tubbyland in 1915 by the legendary Hawaiian waterman (which is the correct term) Duke Kahanamoku. Okay, lets not quibble. A Duke is a sort of King in training.

Now, lets look for some pre- and post-modern contrasts ushered in by the digital age. In a pre-post-modernist history, board riders adopted the Captain Goodvides approach to professionalism and built their courage on the big waves with a mix of chicks, booze and drugs.

Captain Goodvibes: sexist, disgusting and excessive

At a more professional level, we have this b/w photograph by Alby Falzon capturing Gregg Noll descending into the biggest wave ever at Makaha, North Shore on Dec 4, 1969, and the excellent supporting read is found HERE.

Greg Noll: the surfer who broke through the fear at Makaha

Only thing is there were multiple cameras at Makaha in 1969. Tracks cofounder and surf filmmaker, Alby Falzon had several. Falzon hawk-eyed the action all day from an apartment overlooking the point. He watched the swell build, the first guys paddle out and the last guys get washed in. When he wasn’t looking directly at the ocean, he was squinting through his 500mm lens or making adjustments to his 16mm film rig. Falzon shot rolls of film that day including, he maintains, a three shot sequence of Noll’s famous wave.

Water-proofed film and digital cameras amped up the possibilities of getting right into the wave action, as evidenced by these truly magnificent images: HERE.

And being a pirate, here is a sample.

Mark Healey, Backdoor Pipeline, Hawaii. April issue, 2009. Photo: Pat Stacy

To date, the State of Tasmania has been noted for possibly the most vicious penal system run by the British Foreign Office in the heyday of Empire. Try reading For the Term of his Natural Life by Marcus Clark. Within the pantheon of national humour, it is also noted for its mullet haircuts, plaid shirts and isolated, inbred Deliverance-type communities.

Thanks to DW TV, or at least the very non-teutonic, drop-dead- gorgeous anchor person, channel surfing abruptly halted, and Shipsterm Bluff came into view. Just so we are on the same page, here is the location.

Shipstern Bluff: South East Tasmania cold as hell and in the middle of nowhere

As most surf broadcasting sites delight in telling us, Shipstern Bluff is rarely crowded and beware of rips, rocks, isolation and sharks. Not surprising, given its location in an equally forgotten past appendage of Empire. Nonetheless, this is the spot for you if you have organised your affairs (ie prepared a will and kissed your loved ones). Google images HERE.

Returning to the technology thread, it occurred to this scribbler that we have now crossed over into a post-modernist phase in surfing history. Take Jeff Rowley big wave surfer from Victoria. Big wave stuff is truly a team and corporate sponsorship effort these days. You need the board dude who knows no fear, a highly experienced wave rider team for tow-ins and rescues, plus your own dedicated videographer, in Rowley’s case his gf Minnie Voung. And the final ingredient, some basic keyboard skills and your own website.

I fail to understand people who focus on the dystopian aspects of the digital world at the expense of outcomes such as this which give autonomy and control over their surfing lifestyle. To be sure, this autonomy is strewn with sponsorship deals, but hey, the clothing, logos etc are also pretty cool.

Maggots in the Chongqing Wood Pile

Okay. Promises are meant to be broken.

Opened my Bo Xilai file months ago, mostly HERE, and you need some of the the links for the full import. In particular, the John Garnaut link.

Well, HERE is an interesting development for the Dark Princeling.

This will be a truly delicious tale of power politics Sino-style. Bet the farm and your wife’s jewellery on it.

And I strongly suspect Bo Jnr will end up in the female position and without the benefit of an enviromentally friendly lubricant.

Whatever, anyone who drives a Jaguar and marries an all-singing all-dancing PLA hussy deserves a little invasive rough handling.

John Garnaut, who is better informed than most reporters, updates HERE: China power play: anti-corruption officials vanish.

Sort of Update.

There are almost 700 entries on the Bo-Wang affair as of now, and the great manjority are total retreads. The Bo-Wang Chongqing crime crackdown – the bullet or the Big House – was selective as noted by this REPORT by John Garnaut of the SMH last year. A news search of Garnaut’s other highly detailed reports on the Chongqing manure pile throws up lots of detail on Bo’s hitherto networks to the top in Beijing.

That aside, the only interesting, and possibly close-to-the-truth speculation (now there is an oxymoron) as what what actually took place is blogged by Inside-Out China.

Think of the bright side. We will no longer have to put up with Bo’s shiteating grin. More like a grinace as he is politically raped in a serial manner. Irrespective of the political culture, there is always a degree of pleasure to be obtained when a showboat get his comeuppance.

KT at the Cross Roads: Compact with the Devil

I’m approaching another personal crossroads in life, and am in the process of abandoning edgy inner-urban life for a bucolic rural existence, and quite possibly rural idiocy (pace Marx).

So lets put this change on the scales of life and examine some of the pluses and minuses involved.

Rural life involves truly crap internet, questionable BBC access and the unavailability of SBS television, which is tubbylands truly multicultural broadcaster. Consequently, I will no longer be bombarded with blog entries on the Hong Kong locust plague and home videos of Mainlanders soiling their streets with excrement. Nor will I have to read truly dated op pieces on Troy Parfitt’s vanity publication account of his unpleasant travel experiences in Sino-land.

The same goes for the Dikkoter piece on the GLF which is getting down to how many angels can stand on the head of a pin. Unlike most of the commenters, I’ve actually read the book plus footnotes in two sittings, and have also corresponded with the author.

I was particularly struck by the fact that no one has yet referenced any of Dikotter’s other publications (ie his excellent monograph The Age of Openness in particular), or Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (John Murray 1996). And it seems that the free-ranging chatterati are blissfully unaware of Annie Applebaum’s authoritative Gulag: A History (2003). Why bother with links!

After a couple of sessions with my analyst, I feel confident that I will be able to break with BBC’s vox pop journalism, but am not sure if I will be able to cope with non-access to their Five Alive Football reportage. Here I should note that sometime ago, I adopted Arsenal as my team to support. This was not done on the basis of Robin Van Persie’s goal scoring prowess however. Arsenal was chosen simply because Arsene Wenger came across as an incredibly talented individual (read his Wiki CV) in contrast to functional illiterates like Fergusan, Rednapp and Dalglish. Note to ESPN: Provide sub-titles when you interview these challenges to the English language.

Now to the three elements required for a life of rural idiocy.

A shack with a verandah for those evenings after a hard day in the field.

A Dobro which means 'goodness' in Slovak

Balkan countries are basically sewers, but this Wiki entry on the history of this blues, bluegrass instrument gives them a free pass.

Finally, a good conversational companion.

Blue Heeler cattle dog indigenous to tubbyland: smarter than most of the chatterati.

With this context in place, time for some suitably rustic music, and where better to start than with Blind Willie McTell (and no Dylan references pls). Unlike Robert Johnson’s small discography, this truly great musician captured the old and the new, 19th century ragtime and 12 bar blues, and with a perfectly dazzling guitar technique.

Duane Allman also covered the above, but I go with Allman’s collaboration with Johnny Jenkins, taken from a double LP covering all his studio work.

I don’t want you enjoying too much of a good thing, so let’s conclude with some JJ Cale, prolific song writer and master of pre-digital recording techniques at Bradleys Barn with Audie Ashworth pushing the buttons.

On that note, time to say good night to the hound and turn in for another day in the cotton fields.

“For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.”

Afro-American Music

If you were expecting more Garage Sounds, forget it as we are heading into serious listening today. I suppose I should provide some context. Having been called out by the resident troll keyboard psychopath Cookie Monster as a Black Dude intent on the deflowering Sino-sisters #81 over at Peking Duck, it is a timely moment for a retrospective on some of my great moments in Black Music. Apologies for the youtube limitation, since I no longer have a vinyl collection for fact checking, etc.

We all have seminal moments which changed out musical directions and interests. One of mine took place in 1972 when I was walking home thru an inner city suburb of terrace houses in Sydney in the wee hours. The city was at peace, the garbage was out awaiting collection and the street cats had settled in for the night.

Passed a door and was stopped mid-step by a cacophony of very intense sound. Being in another cultural epoch, I knocked on the door and made inquiries. Mine host, far from being taken back, ushered me into the lounge room, offered me a cup of tea, a weapons grade spliff and cranked up the stereo. This was the track by John Coltrane – from In Transition recorded live at the Village Vanguard in 1965. The John Coltrane Quartet was unquestionably the most powerful jazz unit to ever grace a stage. Afro-American Wagner powered by Trane’s tenor sax and Jimmy Garrisons polyrhythmic drumming.

Most jazz, or should I say the best jazz pianists, treat the piano as a percussion instrument. Wood, springs, hammers and a soundboard, and this is not surprising given the role of drums, marimbas and the mbira in traditional African music, and after the period of colonisation when some European instruments were appropriated.

Mbira or thumb piano

More images of this DIY instrument from google HERE.

One has a great choice of pianists, some of whom are even white, such as Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Lenny Tristano, Keith Jarrett, Randy Weston, Dollar Brand and the truly brilliant Thelonious Monk to name but a few.

In the absence of Jitney Silent Tongues – Live at Montreux, here is a similar piece by Cecil Taylor recorded in Italy 1968. Demanding listening true, and it exemplifies my point about the percussive qualities of the piano. Taylor, whom I was fortunate to see in the 90′s is well represented on the net, if he becomes your pianist of choice.

Choosing something by Miles is a hard gig as his playing went thru so many reinventions. While In a Silent Way was probably my period of choice, due in part to Tony Williams awesome drumming, lets look for something from his later Jungle Funk period.

And if your Chinese neighbours are really pissing you off, try Mile’s Tribute to Jack Johnson. Micheal Henderson’s bass playing will bring the chanderliers down on their ill-mannered heads.

To be finished later this ave, and with a change of direction.

Coffee Table Books

Coffee table books are guilty pleasures, and here in tubbyland citizens tithe a percentage of their earning for their purchase and circulation in public libraries.

Where to begin?

Deborah Harry and Blondie Picture This by Mick Rock (Palazzo 2010).
Hollywood has a long and promiscuous relationship with dyed peroxided blonde femme fatales beginning with Mae West. Deborah Harry, the Queen of Power Pop who is 67 this year, changed the equation somewhat by avoiding the direct sexual come-on dimension, and established a new relationship between the lens and subject. A mix of alternative blonde glamour, fun and pop art. Anyway, Rock’s photos are fab as instanced below.

However, we must go west to California for the real beginning of this post, and the construction of The Garden of Allah apartments on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood in 1927 by the multi-skilled silent movie actress Alla Nazimova.

This was the abode for you if you were a rich, talented amoralist with an appetite for alcohol, Bolivian marching dust, brawling and promiscuity. This truly degenerate home-away-from-home for literary and acting luminaries of the day, including that arch-skunk from Tasmania Errol Flynn.(1)

Like yours truly, Flynn had an enviable school record. “In 1926, he attended Sydney Church of England Grammar School (Shore School)[11] where he was the classmate of future Australian Prime Minister, John Gorton.[12] He was expelled for fighting and, allegedly, having sex with a school laundress.[13] He was also expelled from several other schools he had attended in Tasmania”.

Celebrated in song by Joni Mitchell and Don Henley

And this brings me to Canyon of Dreams: The Magic and Music of Laurel Canyon by Harvey Kubernich, lushly produced by Sterling Publications in 2009, and chockfull of luscious photos and reminiscences by the musical progeny of this section of the Hollywood Hills.

My favourite has to be the snap of Jackie De Shannon, brilliant songwriter, escapee from the Brill Building and all round mistress of her own destiny. (Why she is not lauded by feminist scribblers today is totally beyond me.) When You Walk in the Room still resonates today as does Don’t Doubt Yourself Babe.

Perfect 360 degree singles.

Jackie De Shannon and Ford Mainline

A full review of Canyon of Dreams by Holly Cara Price (what is it with Americans and their names) in the Huffington Post can be read HERE.

While this is a fabulous read about an epoch saturated in innocence and possibility in The Promised Land before smack etc dampened the party, I have serious retrospective concerns about the musical product turned out by The Beach Boys, Joni Mitchell, the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Frank Zappa, Linda Ronstadt, Crosby Stills @ Nash and The Doors to mention but a few.

The list is bloody endless, since the LA sound dominated much of the sixties and all of the seventies. In fact, I cringe when I think of all the lunch money spent buying vinyl on the above. However, Tim Buckley gets a free pass with Sweet Surrender from his Greetings from LA.

Sexy stuff with a serpentine rhythm section.

Maybe a few other things survive in 2012, namely Cruising with Ruben and the Jets, Zappa’s homage to Doo Woop and the first incarnation of the Byrds with their warm jangly Rickenbacker sound combined with visual style. And no prize for the reader who can provide the Peter Fonda joke about the Byrds. The massive wiki entry HERE should provide the clue.

If I were to highlight the LA sounds which still grace my fond memory bank, I would opt for the year 1966 before the City of Angels sound-zeitgeist adopted the country-lite sound of the Eagles et al. This was the year of the Sunset Strip riots when long haired pot smoking youth rebelled against the heavy- handed street clearance tactics used by the para-military LAPD, which is brilliantly described by Mike Davis and who is America’s greatest living social historian HERE. My previous references to Mike Davis in the backpost: Manifest Destiny Meets the Pacific.

1966 saw guitar-based psychedelia reach its peak with bands like Love, The Seeds, Chocolate Watch Band, Count Five, Shadows of Knight and numerous lesser lights, who had parents able to afford fuzz boxs and farfisa organs. As far as the recommendation department goes, I suggest some of the lesser lights and this Volume 20 compilation in particular, which is in turn part of a 26 disc series of garage compilations.

Volumes 1, 2,and 3 also cover the LA scene circa '66 and '67.

Lets conclude with some sound illustrations. The Third Eye by The Dovers. Guys, lets emulate the Byrd’s, make millions, buy a Mustang and meets lots of chicks.

And another favourite. The Trip by Kim Fowley who is a whole other post in HIMSELF.

I’m done and didn’t mention China once.

Oh yes, Footnote 1. Errol gets a mention since I’m ebaying a copy of Showdown his second novel. First ed, Invincible Press, 1946 with half a dust cover. Very good condition. No foxing.
The cost of all the hired help employed around tubbyland is killing me.

Offline..Content Purge and New Directions.

Leave you with a back post on the Sport of Kings.
Fine Cotton Races in Wuhan.

Sayonara Sino content.

This site is presently being reoriented content-wise towards musicology, cinema and reading materials (plus some of my truly lousy photography) as time permits, since I’m also in the process relocating residences.

Hopefully, this shift will result in a new reader demographic which hopefully includes some female representation, but only time will tell. Whatever, blogs are first and foremost platforms for self-expression.

In line with this full paradigm shift content purge, China henceforth will be little more than a reference to crockery. And the blood-letting begins with my Blog Roll and the insertion of two new and highly recommended entries.

Fittingly, lets start with a quick obit on one of the Queens of the Chitlin’ Circuit Etta James. While Etta isn’t one of my favourites, she nonetheless does a killer version of I’d Rather Go Blind with equally killer brass lines.

Informed musical comment/suggestion most welcome, but I have to say that most discussion of this nature already takes place on Mike’s site (the Beatles notwithstanding).

Riders on the Sino-Storm

This is an unpleasant subject, but dire times call for integrity, a strong stomach and a modicum of google research. Some context. The Telegraph recently reported that:

13,000 officers and two force helicopters have been deployed in the blanket search for Zeng Kaigui, a former People’s Liberation Army policeman, after he shot dead his latest victim in a £20,500 bank heist in the eastern city of Nanjing over the weekend.

Zeng is also suspected of killing six people and injuring two others during separate armed robberies in major cities in the south west of the country since 2004, stealing an estimated £50,000.

We learn that Nanjing is in total lockdown, and that Zeng, the really bad element in question, is highly skilled in avoiding surveillance, a master of disguise and weapons expert who only communicates with body language when ordering his daily noodles. Furthermore, this murder and heist artist has been into this gig since 2004.

{For fans of Japanese cinema, the apt movie reference is Vengeance is Mine made by the director Shohei Inamura in 1979. Great review by Midnight Eye.
Always a brilliant site.]

The Peoples Daily and numerous other tabloids come up with virtually the same information, so I will spare you more links and provide some musical background for the rest of the read.

Now Danwei, a Shaun Rein-type site, resurrects itself in one fell swoop with a long must-read piece, although it took a guest writer – Robert Foyle Hunwick – to perform this christian miracle with his reportage on Chinese Serial Killers.

Now, China is always playing the victimhood game, must-catch-up- with-the-West card, but when it comes to mass murderers with a truly gruesome bent, this drivel does not apply. It is producing serial killers at an exponential rate, and they are right up there with the competition in terms of ingenuity and strange fixations: necrophiliacs, hammer murderers, vivisectionists, child murderers, devotees of dungeon incarceration, cannibals, etc.

In brief, we are talking about really sick creatures who prey on the weak and transient: children from dirt poor villages to sex workers and mobile migrant workers. And these are just some of the instances which have come to public attention. Hunwich’s bibliography provides further reading in the same vein HERE, and I can add HERE and HERE.

And it is within this context that Henan province is getting more than its fair share of attention, such that there is now a backlash by the citizens of that grubby backwater HERE. Now, given the general characterisation of the Uighurs as shiftless, criminal layabouts, all I can say is good luck, suckers.

This brings us the East-West literary conundrum. Popular western fiction is so overloaded with novels featuring CSI/profiler detectives-types matching wits with high IQ mass murderers, that one almost risks one’s sanity when perusing the shelves of any lending library or bookshop. Yet, we find no equivalent popular literature in Sino-land. Or, for that matter, straight biographical accounts of mass murderers and the man hunts which bought them to justice and the bullet.

And the reasons are obvious. Such a popular literature would point to total police indifference to the fate of those of its citizens lacking guanzi, money or political connections, not to mention the non-existence of modern forensic investigation techniques. Finally, the bleeding obvious, being the lack of a free press. At best, if you are a Chinese reporter investigating this type of criminal malfeasance, restrict yourself to mass murderers in adjacent provinces and keep you job. All taking place in a social formation which now spends more on domestic public order personnel than it does on its military forces.

This is in stark contrast to that very popular form of fiction writing in China known as Officialdom Fiction. OF is both a fiction of public cynicism and also a civil-ethical pedagogy. It realistically represents public expectations of Sino-bureacracy, and is also a learning tool for bureacrats-to-be, teaching them an array of tried-and-true techniques to climb the greasy pole of government employment. If you are not acquainted with this genre, try HERE, HERE, and this website HERE.

It is high time China’s mass murders demanded their five minutes of sunshine and a Truman Capote of choice, so they could have their exploits recorded for posterity. They would be dark, gruesome narratives of blood rage, greed, cruelity and social rootlessness, told within a context of official apathy and investigative ineptitude. Officialdom Fiction is a literary form which is positively seductive in contrast.