The last several weeks, I’ve been doing a bit of dog and cat rescue work, which has been very rewarding and eye-opening. Currently, I’m rethinking a lot of my ideas about what the rest of my life will look like, and trying to figure out how to integrate creative work with animal rights and animal advocacy (of various kinds).
今天早上看到了这寻狗启示。如果有朋友住在这个附近，请帮忙问问邻居们有没有看到丁丁。
2010－11-12
昨日上午小狗从家中自己跑出，名字：丁丁，品种：雪纳瑞，颜色：白色，年龄：4岁。小狗从小与家中小孩一起长大，它的走丢令孩子心理非常难过，想起丁丁救哭，家人万分想念丁丁。如有好心人捉到，请速与我们联系，我们将以2000元做为酬金表示感谢！
电话：13611301221 刘女士
13717738729 邵先生
地址：东城区方砖厂胡同47号
Idea for a movie. It’s called The Most Important Film of the Year. The plot: A team of meme-trackers who hunt down every instance of the phrase “the most important film/movie of the year” and interrogate them: “Where are you from? Who do you work for? Are you an alien fifth column? A harbinger of the Singularity?”
What am it talking about? A friend sent me a movie review today by Andrew O’Hehir who tells us Inside Job “might well be the most important film you see this year.”
O’Hehir’s probably right. But – and this does not contradict my previous statement – “the most important film/movie of the year” is an extremely ambitious grey goo-like meme that could eventually devour the entire world.
Quixotic adventures in three dimensions, a bus stop ad for the upcoming release of Don Quixote in Beijing.
My writing partner Chan and I had a momentous meeting tonight. We decided the near future of the Robot. We talked about prioritizing projects, defining our roles, writing schedules, and picking The Project. Stay tuned for another day or two to learn about that.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but since I shot the video, and wrote and sang the music, I guess this thing counts as my first (and probably last) music video. The words are, um, literally nonsense. I was working on a melody idea, and didn’t have any lyrics, so just sang the first thing that came up. Later, when I was fiddling around with Photoshop to sorta ‘rotoscope’ the video footage, I didn’t have any music, so I grabbed the half-finished melody idea with the nonsense lyrics. So, there ya go. I do like the idea of “falling like fairy tales,” which came up spur of the moment.
In China, since at least as far back as the 1990′s (perhaps earlier, and beginning with visual artists and some literary writers), there’s been a ironicization of everything pre-Opening and Reform. Revolutionary, communist and Cultural Revolution-terminology and symbols have become fodder for kitsch-production. Of course, this is healthy. A kind of distancing. A turning of the mental soil. The speed by which something in the “past” becomes ironicized and kitsch-worthy enough to recycle safely onto a t-shirt must be approaching some kind of singularity, and that’s all good. Humor of any kind is a good defense against oppression, whether it’s a system or one’s own ego doing the oppressing. But this morning, walking past a t-shirt shop with yet another “Obamao” t-shirt, this time holding a gun, I wanted to vomit out of boredom and the escalating proliferation of McKitschification of Everything. Never mind that it’s got American and Chinese political references, both textual and visual, mashed-up into one t-shirt. It’s just unoriginal rubbish from the memetic recycling bin, and now it’s got a gun. A more ironic t-shirt might simply read Love Your Neighbor or Be Kind to the Elderly.
On Monday, I went to a film company’s post-production offices to do some final adjustments on subtitle translation for a Chinese-language version of Don Quixote. This was the first time I’d been to the Huantie Art District. The directions I got were pretty good, but I still couldn’t find the exact building. So I called the producer, and learned that I was very close to my destination, as she said, “Just go around the corner. We’re right next to the transformer.” Sure enough, there was a massive transformer in the courtyard just outside their offices. This vegan robot — “freedom is the right of all sentient beings” says Optimus, you can look it up — was made by an art student, apparently, and then sold to someone who shares a common courtyard with the movie company.
Giant robot crafted from a "Liberation"-brand truck.
And this is me, with "morning face" (dopey not-yet-conscious look) -- even though it was already post-morning by this time -- standing in front of the robot and the sun.
This Beijing-based asbestos supplier has a goofy idea of visual communications. Piles of asbestos? Check. Fields of grain? Check. Windmills? Check. All that’s missing is a small brigade of workers taking shovels to the stuff, launching it into the air behind the windmill blades and spreading the White Wonder Dust of Death all over those fields of grain. Normally, it’s difficult for me to work up a laugh about asbestos, which killed my father at a very young age. But there’s something about the utter disregard for human health on a vast, industrial scale brightened up with a few horrifically whimsical touches of kitschy I-don’t-know-what-the-hell that makes me want to giggle. “What were they thinking?” is clearly not the appropriate question. (Creative services courtesy of Klusterfuck Worldwide Advertising & PR.)
click for full absurdity