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Kind of badass: Stephen Paul Smoker’s “Green City”
The poster image for a series of shows with “unexpected music coming out of Italy and China” (as the organizer described it).
That is:
Beijing: Tango 3rd Floor (Star Live)
May 31, 2012: La Fame di Camilla, Zhou Yunshan, Subsonica
June 1, 2012: La Fame di Camilla, Shanren, Negrita
Shanghai: Mao Live
June 3, 2012: La Fame di Camilla, Shanren, Subsonica
June 4, 2012: La Fame di Camilla, Zhou Yunshan, Negrita
Tibet has often been known to Westerners—and I’d argue that’s the case up through the present—more through myth and foreigners’ accounts than through actual experience with Tibet and Tibetans. Take the replica Potala Palace in Staten Island, complete with monkey statues and built by someone who never went to Tibet, or the Shangri-La of Lost Horizon, created based on National Geographic dispatches.
The Rubin Museum of Art, which is dedicated to Himalayan art, addresses that phenomenon head on in a tiny but fun exhibit, Hero, Villain, Yeti, with comics that feature Tibet—everything from a mountainous encampment of Nazi villains to Scrooge McDuck’s misadventures in Tralla La.
Beijing rocker Muma in a Gap ad with Juliet Simms, shot by Annie Leibovitz.
I might be the only person, but I liked Damsels in Distress. I can see why people walked out hating it (including a bunch of the chix who saw the movie at Landmark Sunshine at the same time as me—and who dressed and talked surprisingly like the girls in the movie). The characters are very affected and don’t seem like real people at all.
The film keeps you off-balance the whole time—just when you think someone is going to say something stupid or satirical, she utters something pointed or slightly brilliant. Writer-slash-slash-slash Whit Stillman doesn’t give a lot of winking clues that he’s being ironic. In fact, a lot of the time, it’s not really clear what he’s trying to do.
Since I grew up in North Florida before the Web was really a thing, watching Stillman’s other movies when I first moved to New York taught me a lot of what I know about being a fancy young lady in the Northeast—although the lessons might be slightly inaccurate since he’s an old man.
Also, the fact-checker in me appreciated the endnotes correcting some liberties he’d taken in naming the inventors of the waltz, charleston, and twist, and in discussing the plural form of doofus. And there are tap routines!
Here’s the New York Times’s interview with Stillman and a clip.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
My new fave of 2012, St. Lucia, who are playing at Santos tomorrow night.
(Source: stlucianewyork.com)
The poster for Beijing’s Strawberry Festival…happening right this second!
A strange/disturbing/offensive ad from 13 Club, a mostly Chinese metal and hardcore venue near some of Beijing’s major universities in Wudaokou (the owner is in the metal band Ordnance). I’ve been hesitating to post this, but I keep staring at it and trying to make sense of it, so maybe someone else can?
The super-cute Enterprise
Highly recommended: Revolutionary Ink: The Paintings of Wu Guanzhong at Asia Society. I saw some of these at the Shanghai Art Museum a couple of years ago—really great modern versions of traditional ink painting.
