10tonfunk

Stallone, Carter, and Kim Jong-il Walk Into a Bar

fred dintenfass — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 06:35:34 +0000

Actually, what I suspect happened is that an editor walked into a meeting at the beginning of September and said, “Alrighty: the dudes of the week, improbably enough, are Jimmy Carter, Sly Stallone, and Kim Jong-il. One of you lucky suckers is going to get to write a cover story that somehow links the three together.”

Zhang Yue (张悦) got the job, and did an admirable job of uniting this terrible trinity in an article entitled: “Kim Jong-il, Carter, Stallone: Old Men Who Haven’t Yet Responded to Their Curtain Call” (金正日，卡特，史泰龙：老男人未到谢幕时). Opening with a commentary on Hollywood (“Be careful, we’re being haunted by old guys”), the intro gives several examples of the staying power, so to speak, of old men in Hollywood, Cantopop, and global politics.

In addition to the aforementioned “old warhorses that cherish further exploits” (老骥伏枥), the author points out that Deng Xiaoping was already way past retirement age (mid-70s) when he launched reform and opening. When Deng became the first Chinese leader to visit the US in 1979, Prez Jimmy Carter was dealing with fuel prices, an invasion in Afghanistan, and problems in Iran.

Most of the article deals with the on and off relationships between Carter, China, and North Korea — pointing out along the way that North Korea and its leaders are generally written about and received very differently in the US and China. Zhang brings everything together in 1994, the year Kim Jong-il succeeded his father as supreme leader. Earlier that year, Carter made his successful secret trip to Pyongyang to talk a fading Kim Il-song and his nuclear research program off the ledge.

Jimbo’s attempt to reprise the role this year wasn’t so successful. North Korea agreed to release a jailed American if Carter showed up to collect him. Carter, now 86, flew to the DPRK and secured Aijalon Gomes’ release, but was punked by Kim Jr. who’d decided to make an unexpected trip to China on his armored train. Zhang uses diminishing returns as a transition, noting that by 1994, Stallone’s “Cold War hero” (冷战英雄) act was also losing traction in sequels, and he was reduced to making The Specialist.

Though I would’ve liked to see a bigger role in the article for Stallone, any article that brings together Sly, Jimmy Carter, Kim Jong-il, Kim Il-sung, Michael Douglas, Chiang Ching-kuo, and musicians Dou Wei, Zhang Chu and He Yong, gets points from me. I bought the magazine purely due to the greatness of the cover, but the article delivers.

I would love to see Kim Jong-il make an appearance in the inevitable Expendables II. It’s been clear for years that Kim just wants attention from the US. His father (re)wrote plays; he wants to star in movies. Kim (purportedly a Mel Gibson fan) is definitely ready for Hollywood — always wearing shades, personal sushi chef, infamous ‘pleasure parties’. I propose three party talks with Stallone, Kim Jong-il, and Wen Jiabao (no spring chicken himself) as the mediator. Carter? I respect his efforts to make up for a terribly failed presidency, but he should stick to Habitat for Humanity at this point. Maybe he can organize some efforts to build sets for the film.

What’s Been Goin On: Latter Half of March

fred dintenfass — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 01:47:51 +0000

That Statue of Liberty is comprised of 18,000 soldiers standing in formation!

Been keeping busy in NYC — the city so nice they had to name it twice. Here’s a brief roundup of for the latter half of March:

On March 14th, went with family friends to Dance New Amsterdam (DNA) for a program of pieces choreographed and performed by students in their ISVP program international program. The highlights were some really nice partnering choreography, and the extended use of the Da Rockwilder instrumental.

March 15th was the Mandarin Meetup at Great Sizhuan restaurant. Overall win-win: two hours of Mandarin convo, good food, new friends.

The screening of Vincent Who? was the first trip of several to the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA). While the film — a documentary featuring Asian American activists talking about the effect the beating death of Vincent Chin in 1982 had on them and the formation of the Asian American community — could’ve been stronger, the Q&A that followed was excellent. A spirited dialogue (punching people was mentioned several times) highlighted the cultural differences between an older generation of Chinese who’d grown up tough in New York in the 60s and 70s, and the realities of their children who, growing up sheltered in the suburbs, feel like they’ve yet to experience discrimination.

The 19th was a full day: seven hours of China-related panels at The Left Forum, followed by an excellent Oh Liza Jane gig, and Mr. Fine Wine’s funk night at the Commodore. The highlight of the panels was the one on Ethnic Relations in China. Particularly interesting were the presentations by Grace Cheng and Ying Li. The latter’s talk on Yi-Xia and the role the resurrection of Confucianism plays in framing ethnic conflict in contemporary China was excellent. My notes from the Ethnic Relations in China panel.

Dan Rochford’s “Girls I Have Known”

Ha-Joon Chang’s talk about his book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism at NYU on the 21st was fantastic. I’ve posted notes from the talk, but you really need to just buy the book and see him speak if you get a chance. If he’s not coming to a city near you, check him out on Democracy Now. So far the lectures I’ve seen on economics — this and Pranab Bardhan’s talk on assessing the rise China-India — have been among the best events I’ve attended.

To mark the beginning of Asia Contemporary Art Week on the 24th, the ultra-talented Nadav Benjamin and I went to In a Perfect World at Meulensteen Gallery, Layers: Recent Works by Xiaoze Xie at Chambers Fine Art, and the book signing for Chinese Artists: New Media 1990-2010 at James Cohan Gallery. The book by Xhingyu Chen looks great, and the gallery also had some great drawings of moon phases, rendered in painstaking detail, night after night, with graphite. The Meulensteen show was mixed — the groups of drawings by Zhou Yilun, were the best. The wood patterns on silk by Hu Xiaoyuan were also promising. Xiaoze Xie’s work was nicely presented at Chambers. The large paintings of stacks of newspapers were intriguing, and well rendered. The video installation featuring books burned by the Nazis projected onto a wall of books could’ve used better installation (the projector was at waist level), but raised interesting parallels between the Cultural Revolution and the Nazi experience. The use of the German footage highlighted the amazing level of distance implied by the Nazi’s meticulous documentation of their atrocities, and the consuming passion that seems to have marked the Cultural Revolution.

The 25th was the Dialogues in Asian Contemporary Art: International Biennials panel at the Guggenheim. The topic was the curation of international biennials in Asia. All the panelists (and moderator Joe Martin Hill)were white westerners, a point raised in a question from noted art historian Linda Nochlin — and responded to somewhat testily by the panelists. The presentations by the three curators — Suzanne Cotter, Massimiliano Gioni, and David Elliott — did provide an illuminating look into the different methods used to create these massive shows, and the issues faced with creating a show for the people (biennials are often an element of city branding strategy) in a place where you’re a foreigner.

Peter and I attended Some Day: Chen Jiao at Tallybeck Contemporary on the 26th. The daikon with dots of miso and wasabi hor d’ouvres were, frankly, more colorful and challenging than the work itself. Like many Chinese painters, Chen has no idea what to do with a background (I suspect this stems from the fact that traditional Chinese painting rarely has an actively plainted ground) and there was little going on in the paintings. We chose dinner over Qin Feng’s exhibition at Ethan Coen Fine Art. When I visited Qin’s studio in Beijing a few years ago he was doing similar work, and congee won out over art. Ethan Coen was at nearly all, if not all, of the ACAW events I attended.

Ushio Shinohara

The 28th marked a departure from the China crawl. I attended the Neo-Dada Mix/Remix discussion with Ushio Inohara and Tomokazu Matsuyama at the Asia Society. While both artists are doing interesting work, Ushio-San definitely stole the show. Almost 80, he continues to pursue his avant garde agenda, obliterating large murals like the Michael Jackson/Kabuki piece from 2009 with paint covered boxing gloves, even when he’d rather let it be. (Some pics here)His dedication to pursuing his ideals, even when they’ve failed to garner him much attention or money, was inspiring. A hint of the difficulty of this path was exposed when his wife in the audience answered a question for him, prefacing it with a completely serious, “Sadly, I’ve been married to Ushio for 30 years…” (I saw her the other day in Dumbo looking badass.)

March 30th, photographer Brian Zbichorski and I attended the panel at the Drawing Center featuring Nicholas Frank and a number of French curators and artists, marking the publishing of the Spatial City: An Architecture of Idealism catalog. The catalog and exhibition was curated by Frank and edited by Polly Morris, my mother. Based on work from France’s innovative FRAC — regional collections of contemporary art spread out over the country with mission to respond to the needs of each community and local artists — it toured to Milwaukee, Chicago, and Detroit — growing at each stop. The Drawing Center was also featuring an excellent show of work by artists responding to news photos. The drawings of soldiers and news photos reminded me of my own work ‘back in the days’ when I still made work.

That day we also went to the excellent and highly recommended Glenn Ligon show at The Whitney. Per usual, there was the usual uncomfortable specter of an all-white audience viewing a show which was often about being black, in front of an all-black guard staff. Go see this show.

Pol and I also went up the The Met and caught some great shows there. My fave was Our Future is in the Air: Photographs from the 1910s. Great curation brings together Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz‘s innovative photos with the Dowager Empress Maria Feoderovna’s travel albums from the year before the Russian Revolution, and Girls I Have Known (above) — a compilation of pin up-y photos and essays on meeting girls by tthen-teenage-sportswriter Dan Rochford.

Back to MOCA on the 31st for From Jean-Paul Sartre to Teresa Teng: Contemporary Cantonese Art in the 1980s, a great documentary by Asia Art Archive about the development of contemporary Chinese art in the south, away from the political and cultural center of Beijing. A great panel followed. The emphasis on reading — the flood of translations of Western philosophical texts — was especially interesting. As was the portrayal of a relatively brief period — essentially 82-85 to about June 4th, 1989, when artists were relatively (the meetings of the local art group were closed by the PSB) free.

I walked over a few blocks to Santos Party House to catch Juiceboxxx and my brother Willy D play. A great show as always, they’re moving in a new musical direction that seems to be drawing — intentionally or not — on the Sex Pistols, Talking Heads, Springsteen, Public Enemy (who they toured with last year), and Baltimore club music. Jeff and the Brotherhood and Screamales also made noise.

Normally you’d have two weeks off before the next missive, but Apr 15 is already here. Gonna try to speed these up.

What I’ve Been Up To Lately

fred dintenfass — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 07:12:40 +0000

Being a real culture vulture, it’s sometimes hard to keep track of all I’ve been up to. I can’t tell you how many times I wake up, shove the pile of critical theory books off my ultra-high thread-count sheets, and struggle to recall what kind of mind expanding event I attended or appeared at the night before. Bouncing around between Beijing, Hengdian, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and New York hasn’t made it any easier. Now that I have a permanent residence again — New York City — I’ve decided to do a roundup of the highlights of the last few months.

- Debating the merits of the Human Flesh Search Engine on BON TV in Beijing.

- Soon after that show was recorded, I spent 2.5 months in Hengdian (the Hollywood of China) as the teacher/assistant/bodyguard/etc. to Vincent Zhao (赵文卓). This is him in action. Here’s an interview on Chinese TV from the first day of shooting, I make a brief appearance around 2:21. I also wrote a series of poems documenting the experience..

- Milwaukee was cold, snowy, and dismal, the latter being mostly due to the political upheaval in Wisconsin at the moment. We got a bit of a respite from it at the Lynden Sculpture Garden’s YouSnow event. I spent a few hours up to my ankles in freezing water, breaking ice atop a pond, and doing a lot of snow shoveling assisting Roy Staab in the creation of this ethereal art piece.

- While in MKE, I also stopped by Danceworks to catch the first night of the Danceworks Performance Company’s “Vaudeville!” show and wrote a brief review of the hour-long performance.

- I only just arrived in NYC, but caught a fantastic lecture at The New School on China and India’s economies. I took copius notes and posted them here.

More to follow. Stay tuned for Danger in the Manger Part Deux: The Second Coming. For more frequent updates, follow me on Twitter, Sina 微博, or Tumblr.

Songs of Song

fred dintenfass — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 04:16:37 +0000

Loyal reader: since you check this space daily, you’ve probably already noticed that I haven’t been blogging up a storm lately. In fact you can keep that umbrella for drizzle, because, since I usually get home and pass out before any profundity can be recorded and posted on the interwebs, the window of blogportunity (TM) is narrower than Snoop’s eyes. I’m tired because I spend 13 or so hours a day on the set of a kungfu TV show. It’s a long story but I’m documenting it, when not busy trying to steal swords from the prop guys, in mercifully brief pomes. Like Danny DeVito, the poems are short, pop up at weird times, and are lacking polish. They’re called Songs of Song because the show is set in that dynasty, and because Jesus, or one of his crew, said so.

I’m doing a lot of reading and posting a lot of the links on Tumblr. I am managing to post Tracks o the Day on Beats Royale fairly frequently. If you’re into the whole 中文 thing, 我平常发微博。我的同事常常在微博上传当天的现场照片和消息。

Below are some blurry images that, like the poems themselves, are short on clarity but are hopefully expressive nonetheless. If you’re impatient, click each photo to get to the next.

[[Show as slideshow]]

Pome o the Day: Jan 5

fred dintenfass — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 03:51:24 +0000

Standing in the freezing courtyard of a Daoist temple
listening to Jay Z
mean muggin young peasant extras and feeling bad
drinking Italian coffee out of a tupperware cup covered in stickers
breath hanging in the air like the bags under actresses eyes
Can no longer tell what’s a set and what’s history

Dark sides of meat hanging off the ribs of a panel truck
A corner electronics store offering a shiny display of rice cookers
to a dead street and a bend in the highway
Jackie Chan ad smiling down upon the folly
One child slogans painted on brick walls and houses
mixed with ads for car repair, cell phone stores
Life with one baby is so much better

Those that can afford to have built their own houses
studded with bizarre tile patterns, motley assortments of columns and balconies
a decorator’s catalog thrown into the air
scraped off the floor and shuffled into a floor plan
ample meterage for an Evita-style serenade

The countryside still wriggling in Deng’s embrace
a short man with a long reach

Pome o the Day: Dec 18

fred dintenfass — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 14:09:28 +0000

A funeral procession trundles through the chilled gray streets
unfocused
staring at the RV as it rolls past
Fireworks popping ineffectively at the hazy morning chill

I just came from the place in
my memory palace where
the black girls go missing,
your mausoleum
floor spattered with gleaming charcoal splotches of hair dye

it’s getting so I can’t afford the mortgage on these memories
black clad assassins keep putting holes in the roof

Pome o the Day: Dec 18

fred dintenfass — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 05:26:48 +0000

Real gods, fake fur
legs of ham in handy tennis racket shaped carrying cases
just sling the parma over your arma
snow drips off the tiled roofs
hissing steam when it kisses the ground

In the shoe store a leg is extended from underneath a robe
and a heavy down coat
a foot clad in a black boot with embroidered patterns
laced up to near the knee
emerges
The slipper-soled boots are exchanged
for cheap, puffy black moon boots
shoe shopping in costume concluded
we head back to the set

The dating show contestant, 25
lists his criteria for women
with his mom at his side
arguing over how many years older or younger
shorter or taller
is okay
additional requirements
“has to love me”

Pome o the Day: Dec 14

fred dintenfass — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 14:24:25 +0000

Patient chorus of frogs in the crisp gray morning
park not yet open to human visitors
‘Run for thousand of miles’
‘Good luck in making money bridge’
‘It is a kind of fashion and fallow foodstuff’
Trading coffee for a sword
Exchanging words, then frenzied punches
The old couple trots
     each with a bag of sweet potatoes inside their
     North Face jackets
Trying to get them back still warm
Brilliant orange flesh still steaming
Sweet
squeezed out of the charred skin
     like a popsicle
China is a country of smokers
An old man with a blow torch slips and almost topples
     off the roof of the closed concession stand
Are the two fish in the pink pail part of the set
were they meant for the director’s daily soup
     and forgotten?
are they still next to each other
nearly still
in the small pink bucket in the back room?

Pome o the Day: Dec 13

fred dintenfass — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 03:10:50 +0000

SARS 1019 AD
Everyone is wearing surgical masks in the plaster cave
The dusk clogs the beams from the lights
in no hurry to move along
Blue lights reflects from cell phones onto made up faces
the glare catching the peaks of the elaborate wigs carefully glued on every morning

Someone has shown the 59-year-old director Weibo
He spends much of the day leaned back in his folding lawn chair
chuckling
adding the young crew members to his friends list
Somehow
he’s already uploaded a much younger picture of himself

He’s fascinated for several minutes when he finds a young man
with the same name
staring at his avatar, uncharacteristically silent
It could be you from the past
Chimes the makeup girl with round white teeth

In the same set
a large two story building
is being constructed from charred logs and wood from other sets
The men work without consulting each other, or a plan
The saws whine
and sigh as they decelerate

Still in the underground compound
we doze in the trailer
with the red camping light and hindi beats
teeth clacking against sunflower seeds
clouds of conversation gently fogging the air outside

In the courtyard the light is dying
sliding off the fake cherry blossoms
A man with eyes like a burnished antique desk
once used by an important minister
talks with me about China-US relations
rivulets of fake blood
dissecting his face
Two lion metaphors and a 200-year warning for the US later
Don’t scare, Fred
Comes from the men laughing behind the monitors
The rain falls all around, dying the night outside the spotlights
a deeper shade of black

Pome o the Day: Dec 12

fred dintenfass — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 03:37:08 +0000

Bad for the actors, good for the farmers
Of flesh and fauna, mice and men
and indescribable, pinkish lunch meats

The old couple moves arm and arm down the seventy or so steps
She digs lunch out of his teeth with a toothpick
both patient
Your mom and I…

Language can be courage
Silence cowardice
And the space between two people filled with the mild buzz
of discomfort
like an errant Sichuan pepper

I think you are lucky
In the deep night I think so too
Mornings are rougher