By Julia Cosgrove  June 15th, 2010 10:31 am  |  Comments (2)

One of my favorite San Francisco-based food bloggers, Megan Gordon, posts at A Sweet Spoonful. Megan just returned from a quick trip to China, and posted about it here. For about five minutes this morning, Megan’s photos and writing whisked me away to the World Expo in Shanghai and the Chi Lin Nunnery and Buddhist Halls in Hong Kong. I could taste bean paste sweets, coconut juice, and Din Tai Fung’s famous soup dumplings (featured in the July/August issue of Afar). My favorite description from the post:

I also loved the Sik Sik Yuen Wong Tai Sin Temple, a place where many Chinese and Japanese folks come to worship and pray for a particular wish or blessing. They light incense and place it by the temple as an offering. If their wish comes true, they return to the temple to donate a token of thanks (generally money which keeps the temple running). It’s hazy with incense smoke, it’s colorful and loud and crowded, and filled with a sense of hope and thanks and belief.

Photo by Megan Gordon.

By Derk Richardson  November 2nd, 2009 9:57 am  |  Comments (3)

When it comes to contemporary music around the world, the new Museyon Guide, Music + Travel: Touring the Globe Through Sounds and Scenes, is on the same page with Afar magazine’s Sounds department.

In Afar’s premier issue, Zachary Mexico broke down the history and latest developments in Beijing’s avant-rock scene; in the December-January issue, on newsstands Nov. 10, Dan Strachota does the same for the digital cumbia movement in Buenos Aires.

Music + Travel touches down in 12 locations. Among them are Paris (”New Rap City”), Australia (”Art Rock Confidential”), Addis Ababa (”Swing Shifts”), Mumbai (”Passage to Indipop”), Berlin (”Techno Color”), and, yes, Beijing (”Experimental Methods”) and Buenos Aires (”The Digital Domain”).

Music scenes in Chicago, Southern California, Dublin, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Istanbul get similar close-up treatment.

Not only do Museyon Guides, which include three volumes of Film + Travel and the new Art + Travel, take the Afarish approach of tapping local experts to take readers on “a far-reaching, accessible, and inventive journey into the things they love,” but, like Sounds, they get inside the local culture through a mix of text, photos, time lines, maps, and annotated discographies.

Bringing the synchronicity full circle, at Museyon’s New York City launch celebration for Music + Travel, the special guests will include Beijing avant-rock stars Zhang Shouwang (Carsick Cars and White) and Xiao He. The party takes place from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., Wed., Nov. 4, at Von, 3 Bleecker St. Admission is by RSVP only, but you can find the open invitation on Museyon’s blog. Of course you can become a Museyon Facebook fan and follow Museyon on Twitter.

Related posts:

• Listen to the sounds of Beijing rock
• Imogen Heap spins the globe and scores a hit
• Singing in the Sahara with Tinariwen

By Nicole Solis  September 30th, 2009 2:57 pm  |  Comments (0)

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989

With the anniversaries of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the founding of the People’s Republic of China approaching in October and November, Jeffrey Wasserstrom examines how communism’s biggest defeat helped strengthen China’s Communist Party in an article for Foreign Policy.

Toward the end of the piece, Wasserstrom looks at two key lessons China learned from the end of communism in Eastern Europe:

1. Patriotism is a winning strategy, but it only works for one side.

By capitalizing on national pride, Eastern Europeans were able to unify citizens within each country against Communism, positioning it as a regime imposed on the country from outside forces. Taking control of this powerful tool, the Chinese Communist Party “placed renewed emphasis on patriotic education, stressing the party’s pre-1949 role in chasing out foreign invaders,” Wasserstrom writes.

2. Class divides give rise to dissent, so give people opportunities to bridge those divides.

East Berliners had to merely look over the wall to see how capitalism afforded their West Berlin counterparts a higher standard of living. Within Eastern European countries, Wasserstrom writes, “The only meaningful social divide was between a small privileged coterie of corrupt officials and the rest. And the rest was pretty much everyone.”

China avoided similar problems by encouraging a consumer revolution over the past two decades. As more working Chinese entered the middle class, there was less of a divide between the average Chinese worker and not only the party faithful but also middle-class workers in capitalist Taiwan.

Read the full article here.

Photo by unknown author, released by permission of the Senate of Berlin. CC 3.0.

By Nicole Solis  August 6th, 2009 11:40 am  |  Comments (0)

One of a series of four Puti Tree prints by Nod Young. Courtesy of L'Affiche Moderne.

In Nod Young’s limited-edition Puti Tree series of prints, the Chinese graphic designer and devout Buddhist reinterprets a 1,500-year-old Zen text, the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, and explores what it says about modern creativity.

The poems used in the four prints encourage people to overcome the boundaries of existence to reach a state of Zen. “I believe that creativity generally follows the same path,” Young wrote. “It is difficult to achieve true creative freedom because we are overly concerned with aesthetics and meaning.”

In the captions to his Flickr photo set of the designs, Young goes into more detail about his interpretation of the text and his inspiration for the series.

All four prints are available from L’Affiche Moderne.

By Derk Richardson  August 3rd, 2009 9:21 am  |  Comments (4)

In the premier issue of Afar, writer Zachary Mexico sketches a multifaceted portrait of the post-punk music scene in Beijing. The only thing missing from his “China’s Avant-Rock Revolution” story for the Sounds department is the music itself.

In lieu of booking a flight to Beijing for a firsthand experience of Carsick Cars, Joyside, Subs, P.K. 14, Queen Sea Big Shark, and other bands playing such clubs as D-22 and Mao Livehouse, check out this selected Beijing audio and video guide.

Carsick Cars

• “Zhong Nan Hai” and other tracks at the band’s MySpace page
• Carsick Cars front man Shouwang’s solo guitar playing
• The first Carsick Cars music video, “Mogu Mogu”

CARSICK CARS – 蘑菇 蘑菇 MOGU MOGU (Music Video) from Maybe Mars / 兵马司 on Vimeo.

• Carsick Cars performing “Zhong Nan Hai” at D-22 in Beijing in 2007

P.K. 14

• “Mei yi zhong fen li” and other streaming tracks the band’s MySpace page

Snapline

• “Party Is Over” and “Nice Dream” at the band’s MySpace page

Yan Jun

• “4th Ring Shopping Killer” and other streaming tracks the band’s MySpace page

Subs

• “Red Hair,” “Drew the Line,” and “What More” at Pure Volume
• Onstage at Vuoritalo in Helsinki, Finland