exactly like the title says. and while a picture may be worth a 1000 words, i’m not sure that the year end/2010 predictions issue of  Caijing this picture came from is worth the 35 RMB i anted up for it at 7-11 in a weak, under-caffeinated haze.

内容已经在标题说好了。可能按照俗语的说法一张图片值得一千词但是我觉得这张图片来自的财经杂志年底版并不值得35元（在7-11还没喝咖啡特别瞌睡的时候买的）！

** 前句话写的特别差，如果有建议怎么该请告诉我！一直到我的汉语水平进步很多我要用更短更简单的话。

Related posts:

1. life in china explained in 1,584,334 words* we all know i can be pretty down on the...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

现在有一些特别好的”bridge”博客把中文的博客翻译成英文: ChinaGeeks, Veggie Discourse, chinaSMACK, ChinaHush, 等等. 这个对不能读汉语或读汉语特别满的人(之一我)有很大的好处. 通过这个博客和写的博客的人的努力我们可以更好理解中国和一些中国的现象. 这些博客的帖子部分常常有很热闹(而有时候很傻)的谈论. 有点儿遗憾的就是这个交流都是英文的所以交通都是单向的. 我希望我们外国人更努力地试试用中文跟我们中国网友联系.

我写这个文章(post怎么说?)的主要的原因是为了请求你们的推荐. 我一直再找好看的博客和别的中文的媒体. 我天天听英文的播客(podcast?), 我想听中文的但是我还没找好挺合适的. 又没有中文播客有人讨论新闻和热话题?

情把你的博客和podcast的建议写在下面或者发给我 (fred at 10tonfunk.com). 我特别喜欢的是关于时事包括政治, 社会, 等, 但是对几乎所有的话题有兴趣. 你也可以推荐你自己的博客.

谢谢你么的合作 ^__^

(中文肯定有问题, 有很大的错误的话请告诉我!)

English summary: There are a lot of awesome bridge blogs out there (click the links above) which are great for those of us who either can’t read Chinese or read really slowly. They’re great for helping non-Chinese readers understand better certain aspects of China/Chinese life which wouldn’t be accessible to them otherwise. There’s also some very good discussion in the comments. Often times there’s also some extremely douchey (how to translate?) “discussion”/debate as well. In both cases it’s almost always in English, which means that there’s not as much communication between the English and Chinese blogospheres as there could be. I think it would be a good thing if we foreigners were more active in the Chinese language blogosphere.

So I’m asking for recommendations: what Chinese language blogs do you like/suggest I read? Feel free to recommend your own blog. Also, are there good Chinese language podcasts out there? I’ve been searching around a bit but without much success for podcasts that discuss news and current affairs/cultural issues. If you’ve got Chinese language recs please post them below or send them to me at fred at 10tonfunk.com.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

black cats

JAN 14: The world lost another great reason to have sex today — Teddy Pendergrass passed away. Driving home at 3am and hearing “Love TKO” on AM 1290 was always to wish that there was a real secret garden, covered in velour, that one could be inside of. Kind of like the garden of eden but with more mirrorballs, bearskin rugs, fireplaces and hotpants. Another grittier soul stirrer that hurts so good is Howard Tate’s “Get it While You Can” which, in a velour covered nutshell, would be my advice to the current democratic majority.

I’m increasingly frustrated at how far left of most of the people I know I seem to have become politically. It’s not like the people I hang around are remotely right wing — I’d like to think that any teabaggers among the bunch are just dangling their nuts on someone’s face and not doing something disgusting like protesting…whatever the teabaggers are protesting. Yet, perhaps because of my way of expressing my political leanings — banging, shouting, swearing, high blood pressure — people seem to think I’m some kind of loony radical. The former part of the equation may be debatable but I’m definitely not a radical. If anything I would consider myself an old-schoolish Democrat. During the last election, when not blogging like a fucking superstar, I thought about the issues that mattered to me and this is what I came up with. I am, broadly speaking:

- pro choice

- anti death penalty

- anti war

- anti gun

- pro public programs like education and healthcare

- pro workers rights

- pro gay rights

- anti nuzzling the nuts of large corporations

- pro paying attention the constitution and individual freedoms

- pro regulation of corporations and markets

and to my great dismay I found that the current Democratic party stands for very few of these things in any concerted, meaningful way. I do not see myself as driven by some Quaker-ish peacenik ideology. I am a big fan of the practical. Some of the reasons I’m against the death penalty are because it’s expensive as fuck, doesn’t work as a deterrent and we often kill the wrong person. I’m totally willing to talk about the death penalty as a crime fighting tool, but not until we stop executing innocent people or sticking them on death row for decades at a time based on a bunch of bullshit.

I think some of the most powerful reasons for universal healthcare are economic: how can we have an innovation economy when people are afraid to leave their jobs or compete globally when Detroit is paying more for healthcare than steel?

I’m all for discussion of what the fuck we’re doing in the Middle East. If someone can explain to me what victory and success actually mean in Iraq and Afghanistan we’d be off to great start. If we’re really going to crunch the numbers is 3 trillion dollars and 4,000 American lives worth the cost of avoiding “another 9-11”?

We’ve now spent 1 billion dollars for each person that died in 9-11 (although firefighters who responded that day are dying painful deaths due to injuries sustained that day — mostly respiratory related — combined with lack of healthcare). What are your core ideals and does your party stand for them? If centrism is one of them than bully for you, you’re just not getting it right now. If Obama + Co. really want bipartisan bills they should let the Republicans write them because their current efforts sure aren’t working. Maybe they should look inward — ‘what did the Bush White House say to me that encouraged me to enthusiastically support the Patriot Act, invading Iraq, FISA, etc.?’ and utilize that firsthand experience in a constructive manner. The Democratic party is embarrassingly right wing and embarrassingly, I would even say dangerously, lame. Democratic pols, and their constituents, need to evaluate what they want and go for it. This should be a great time for the Democratic Party and for some reason they keep being hung out to dry. We’re supposed to trust them to defend us from nuclear-armed rogue stations when their heathcare efforts were derailed for months by a post on Mrs. Going Rogue’s Facebook page? Obviously I would be right chuffed if the new Dem agenda was right in line with mine but more than that I’d like to see some sort of thought and discussion given to what the Democrats stand for in 2kdime, no matter what it is. I think many people voted for Big O even though he did not actually represent their beliefs and are feeling salty about it now. Lack of clear objectives has gotten us mired down in a lot of messes during the last decade.

Politicians are often concerned with legacy, especially as their time draws to a near — and it certainly look like that may be happening for a number of Dems and certainly the “filibuster proof” Demjority [JAN 26: now past tense]. A lot can be learned from Teddy Pendergrass in this area. Teddy P spent the last few decades of his life in a wheelchair after being paralyzed when the brakes went out on his Rolls Royce (True story. The tranny in the car with him walked away uninjured) and he’s still remembered as an ultimate ladies man able to increase birth rates just by opening his mouth and crooning a few notes. Harry Reid may have been a boxer (I know, seriously) but he don’t know nothing about the Love TKO. Heaven Only Knows the left wing needs a little more cohesion and A Little More Magic or You and I and everyone else clinging to the sinking ship are going to Turn Off the Lights, Close the Door and walk away thinking I Don’t Love You Anymore and The Whole Towns Laughing at Me. Can’t we try Dems? Can’t We Try?

SongOTD: T.R.O.Y./Fuck You Max Baucus Edition

quiet griot: mumbled musing

WHY WON’T THE FUCKING DEMOCRATS LISTEN TO ME AND STOP LOSING/HIRE ME????

AMENDMENT

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

harold and kumar escape from guantanamo bay pretty much expresses everything that is manically, delusionally, dangerously great about america. again, i’m not going to bother to explain this; you don’t need to have seen the movie, the title alone demonstrates how amazing/amazingly inappropriate the movie is. basicaly it’s horribly wrong and also terribly right. plus neal patrick harris is on acid and branding prostitutes with his own initials. see above point about horribly wrong and terribly right.

this clip, though it doesn’t have anything to do with china, has a lot to do with communication problems, which, other than food on sticks, is probably what 79% of my life in china is about.

* the title of this post is derived from some super HI-level math having to do pictures being worth a thousand words and my disastrous attempts at learning enough 4th grade math to do decent on the GRE.

Related posts:

1. everything you need to know about geopolitics in 2010 explained with stickers // 一切需要关于2010年的地缘政治的情况知道的知识由用贴纸解释了 exactly like the title says. and while a picture...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

this was actually one of the first posts i ever started writing for this blog. in the hong kong airport on august 28th or 9th, 2006. like avatar, it’ s been a long time coming and cost me 500 million dollars but there aren’t really many changes to it. better late than never (really just an excuse to quote my newest favorite lyric, “pleasa, prayin that her period ain’t late like FEMA”) i’m forgoing my normal florid style and even capital letters and letting the good shit shine.

i think i am less excited by things than i used to be and perhaps have displaced some of my irrational excitement onto totally bizarre/drastically less worthy objects of amuse/bemusement like steven seagal and nicholas cage. increasingly i’ve turned away from the best and embraced the absolute worst (not bad meaning bad but awful meaning amazing). it’s possible i’ve started living more in the “real world” but I doubt it. i believe my excitement remains intact, however. despite my constant bitching about politics and my generally low view of humanity both as a whole and in so many of its constituent parts, i am constantly cheered by creative expression, whether it’s rather ramshackle amateur theater productions or big budget concerts. i’m not that different from the guy lying in front of the oriental chomping y2k mini powerbars after american beauty or lying clothed in my bathtub blown away by the power and depth of otis live at the whiskey a go go. except for being much taller and hairier i might still be the ten year old changing gels with utmost seriousness during intermissions at danceworks. the fact that humans continue to persevere in creativity, in all its forms, is a great joy to me and sustains me during the long hours between my four or five daily meals (food always my number one source of joy). although nothing in the world besides nosh cheers me so consistently as books (almost always mysteries of varying degrees of trashiness) and i spent the last 10+ years studying art and being fortunate enough to see exhibitions of art — from ancient to still not dry — all over the world and in the studios of the artists themselves as they created them, most of the things on this list are performances. though i still shake my noggin with amazement at the skill and vision of many artists, immersion is clearly a major factor for me — i’ve still got a total hard on for the gesamtkunstwerk — and though i tend to sink into books, both as i read them and as i chew them over in my mind for the next couple months, i think i read too much for individual books to shine through for long, although certain authors definitely do. i also reread books a bunch of times and so i experience them differently than a show i saw once. it’s very different to pick a book back up and read it against your memories and your awareness of how highly you appreciated it the first time than to sit through a two hour show and walk away with the experience contained in a relatively contained capsule. there are some big recurring themes here but i think they’re obvious enough that i don’t need to belabor them. perhaps i’ll follow up in 2027: top best points from my post on top shit in the naughty aughties.

a few of my favorite things

Ralph Lemon “Come Home Charlie Patton” — seen at MCA

2k6fred: No matter what you have to do to do it, go see this show. Drive 500 miles, sell your car and buy a donkey, by any means necessary get to see this or probably anything else Ralph Lemon’s company does

2k9fred: The 3rd installment of the ? trilogy was probably the most complete artistic creation i’ve ever had the privilege to experience i.e the best shit i’ve ever seen. there is no way i can even come within miles of describing how fucking amazing it was. if i could create something that was a fraction of a fraction as deep, moving and beautiful i don’t know if i’d die happy but i’d be a fuck of a lot more fun to be around.

Read about it for real here and here

I’m buying this DVD and you should too.

Walid Raad artist talk at UWM

2k6: This is one of the only things I’ve seen in a while where I’ve thought – that’s what I wanna be doing. In addition to having the best Powerpoint presentation I’d ever seen (since superseded by Inconvenient Truth and Al Gore) his work his smart and also very poetic.

Raad plays with history and narrative, fiction and non fiction, inventory, accumulation and abstraction and it’s awesome.

Read this this and this

2k9: The Huang Yongping show at Ullens was similarly inspiring in its interaction with history, myth and the history and myth of art without it being academic. Both are influenced by Joseph Beuys, though Huang much more explicitly so than Raad.

Read this and this

Bruce Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band at the Bradley Center

2k6: The boss is killing it with this 17 person band, rocking the fuck out of old American songs. You’ll know a lot of them but you’ll probably only have heard them with some acoustic guitar backing. This band rocks so fucking hard it’s ridiculous – horns, accordion, banjo all acoustic and this shit is heavy. The best paced show I’ve ever seen and each song was perfectly paced itself. My neck was snapping and when he told us to I screamed til I almost passed out.

2k9: I like old music but never got down so hard to 100 year old songs. Finally copped “Live in Dublin” vid a few months back and it’s just as good as I remembered. That this dealio was far more popular in Europe reflects horribly on the US. There may have been better bands but this show isn’t as close to perfect as one can get; it is perfect. Period.

Ignore the rather halfass, though positive, reviews and buy the damn DVD

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

In no way am I advocating endless self-flagellating. I don’t hate America and I don’t think China is better — a stance I’m sometimes accused of holding. I’m not talking about war, peace, communism, socialism, capitalism or any kind of characteristics. I merely see no benefit in premising discussions that impact the quality of life and death for millions of people on dangerously shaky foundations. I’d like more people to know the stats on health care I’ve mentioned on here before. I’d like to know more about why France’s health care system, a public-private hybrid, ranks above all the single payer systems. Basically, I’d would prefer that living and dying weren’t affected by a bunch of ignorant, purposefully or not, discussions and policymakers.

A few days ago I looked at a list of top 100 speeches of the decade. MLK Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” was number one but “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam” was nowhere to be found. It’s sad how little we — people of all countries and all political systems — seem able to learn from our recent pasts.

“Come down and see, Oh Miguel / that we are young and dwell/ in gardens with too many contestants / we are unfinished and live in rooms without enough instructors, Miguel / we are aging and chosen and poorly trained for mass redemption”// Carl Hancock Rux

I’m going to stop weeping self-indulgently into my whole wheat noodles and go listen again to what I consider the most inspiring song I’ve ever heard. I don’t know how to link to it but it’s Curtis Mayfield’s “I Plan to Stay a Believer” (the live version) and it sounds like a plan to me.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

All the time people are asking me, Fred, what makes you tick? And tick I do, like the 38 kuai Lolex I bought from the guy with a briefcase full of them in Sanlitun while I was watching the coed pole dance routine through the window of one of those clubs across from The Village.

Obviously I can’t fit it all into my Twitter profile, but I do wear a lot of hats besides my vintage pleather yarmulke. I’m a social media marketer. I’m a moody foody (copyright pending bitches) — so-called because of the time I nearly used the thing they make guacamole with to bludgeon a waiter at a “Mexican restaurant” to death over a missing burrito; if my strength hadn’t been sapped by low blood sugar it would’ve been ugly. I’m a black belt level twitterbator and also very good at Taebo. I’m at least a purple belt by now in Krav Maga which is a kosher kind of whupass. I’m a neural networker. I collect avatars like so many ears on a string around my neck so when I say ‘good morning Twietnam’ like the rappers do it’s no joke. Apple products make me hard. Speaking of hard, I love Sting’s recent work and totally know Lady Gaga is not a man. I don’t #followfriday, Friday follows me. Obviously I’m also a SEO genius: type in Fred Dintenfass and guess who comes up first? Yeah, I thought so. (Actually I know so since I Google myself every few minutes.) I spend a lot of time massaging my personal brand and boy has it paid off. Not only in the social sense — I used to have 394 followers on Twitter until I culled it down to just the essentials (@tilatequila and @perezhilton — it’s like black hole vs black hole and could end the world as we know it), and Britney is always trying to hook up with me online by sending me racy pictures — but also in the financial realm (and I should know, VC VIP is yet another one of the hats I wear):  Should I choose to auction off my personal brand, accompanying domain name and vanity plate for my fixed gear bicycle, I’ll be able to get my nom on for at last two courses at the local chuanr place. Provided I don’t order a beverage or squid. Lately I make videos with animals.

I also get a lot of DMs asking me why do I do what I do and that’s confusing to me. Is the pope Roman? Would you ask a panther why it hunts its prey or Putin why he swims with dolphins? No, you wouldn’t. Especially because Putin might judo you, and then what? It’s like the Ying-An quote I memorized before the Buddhist retreat I attended, “When you pass through, no one can pin you down, no one can call you back.” Obviously this was before Google Voice (or maybe he just wasn’t cool enough to get an invite) but it’s still really deep. It’s certainly more useful than Buddha’s last words, “All conditioned things are impermanent. Work out your own salvation with diligence,” which really doesn’t have much use beyond the beauty salon.

Since I’m keeping my personal brand really elite and underground and I owe quite a bit of money to the State of California over an unfortunate misunderstanding, I have  a day job. On my business cards it’s says Editor/Writer but I’m so much more than that. I’m a cultural mediator. I build bridges between the East and West, Mandarin and American English, Madison County and the Middle Kingdom. I howl at the moon, whisper to horses and have a way with white girls wearing overalls — I’m the freaking Robert Redford of rewrites.

I don’t usually do this, but let me give you an example of the magic I summon from the digitally rendered page like some sort of hairy Harry Potter. Sometimes you get a passage like this one:

Zhenbutong Pickle真不同酱菜
Zhenbutong Pickle contains 40 Jinlin-menu-listed products, among which are: pork, barbecued pork, pork elbow, carbon baked pork tripe, baked chicken, fried chicken, carbon baked Corvina, carbon baked dry beef and Zhenbutong Nanchangcai. The production center of Zhengbutong pickle is at the pickle store of Sima restaurant on Yongchun Road.

Actually that one’s perfect already. So’s this one:

“TCT” has become the diversified concentration camp of international delicacies in Shenzhen.

And this one, which honest to Yaweh comes from a translated restaurant review:

Any insolent girls coming here for the first time would be dominated.

These cannot be improved, even by someone with my skills, but fortunately for my food porn habit, which wreaks havoc on my cable bills, there are plenty of English sentences which can be tweaked to make them sing. Mentality is key in this line of work, and to my mind there are no duds out there, only phrases that, like the main character in that movie Shine, are waiting for a large mature woman to clutch them to their bosoms and transform them from bipolar, alcoholic wrecks into concert pianists. In this metaphor I am the large mature woman.

Here’s an example of the maestro at work:

Kunshan’s Beer Festival includes lots of tents, live and entertainment programs for you to come together, enjoy this special event and promote cooperation within China.

Now who doesn’t want to hoist a lukewarm one for harmonious society from time to time? Yet this sentence fails to appeal to the heart of the expat in China — that enigmatic, completely homogenous, pale faced entity. So I give it a squeeze, a whisper and a carrot and voila (yeah, I’m both a polyglutton and a polyglot):

Kunshan’s Beer Festival includes lots of tents, live entertainment, and… you guessed it – plenty of beer.

Witness the fitness.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

This goes down even better if you’re listening to Shook Ones Part 2.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Friday, October 23rd, Obiwan is going to be on super deluxe mode with Beats Royale served up fresh by DJ Markie Royale. 100% quality hip hop, 0% Rap & Bullshit. All the info you need to make the magic happen is right here.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

They Might Be, They Are…Imagination Giants

Everyone knows that if you dig a deep enough hole in your backyard you end up in China. So I wasn’t too surprised, once upon a time not long ago, to be with MIAD’s bestest and brightest in a mad minivan dash to a Shaolin mountaintop, acapellaing ‘Children’s Story’ as our crazed driver raced into the oncoming lane, with the 8 of us packed in among army blankets like so much hay.

As America is going through Kennedy withdrawal, it seems a fitting time to bring up John John’s oft-cited quote, “When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters-one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.” One wonders what Kennedy thought about the Cuban definition of crisis, but the Chinese construction of crisis, as Kennedy interpreted it, also applies to living, traveling and making art.

The creative process is fraught with danger and opportunity, a  journey more dimensional than a simple trek from one spot to the next. While our lives rarely fall into neat segments, artworks must reach a final form — something even great artists struggle with. “The more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it,” said Giacometti. Turner would sneak into the Tate to touch up his paintings.

To avoid becoming as morose as Giacometti, or in a feud with John Constable like Turner, it helps to remember that the journey is the destination. That’s what artist and photojournalist Dan Eldon maintained until he was stoned to death in Mogadishu. Long after one returns home, the sites and sounds keep marinating in our thoughts. The experience of travel is not confined by borders and dates; the journey of the artist doesn’t dead-end in a single work. These works represent one stop along the way; the adventure is far from over. Imagination giants have long legs. Their strides are great, the ground they can cover is boundless.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.