Just Call Me The Berkeley-Beijing Axis.

A mystical valley of Chinese provenance.


Am back, like the resurrection of the fucking Christ. Beijing is a crazy, tiring city, a lot of fun, but a lot of work.

So, this is what I learned:

*Beijing has amazing sushi.

*Rickshaw drivers really, really want to take you to your hotel for a lot of money.

*A program of 24 hour construction on hundreds of highrises is bad for the air. (There is going to be a mortarium on construction in Beijing for the year prior to the Olympics, so they are going full bore up until the deadline. There are miles and miles of empty skins, waiting for their guts. It's surreal.)

*Little kids like to practice their English.

*Lane markers on Chinese highways are sort of vague recommendation for position, particularly if you are a giant truck.

*The Beijing art scene is wonderful and legit.

*There are several systems for the Romanization of Chinese words (using western letters to spell Chinese words, in other, uh, words), and when your map uses one and the street signs of Beijing use another, you are in for a long, long walk.

*Chopstick shops are big business, I guess that's not really that surprising, but the concept of the chopstick showroom wasn't one I was prepared for.

*The warriors who manned The Great Wall must have had tight, pert buttocks with all that stairclimbing. Seriously.

*It's the Chinese's century. It really is. Good luck, guys. Unblock Blogger in the meantime.

Friend Dave manned the Mojo Nixon interview and did an amazing job. Will be posted soon.

If you're one of my countrypeople, Happy Thanksgiving. If you are a North American of a boreal dispostion, happy belated Thanksgiving. Everyone else, have a swell Thursday or Friday per local custom.

My globalization breakfast

Had at the hotel buffet:

2 Beef Shu Mai

A pork bun

A banana

A cup of yogurt

Pot of Earl Grey

Fruit Salad (with yummy white Kiwifruit)

A pair of bacon rashers

A puffy South African blathering on and on at the next
table about supplychain issues.

A short memoir about a year spent on the police
department of a sleepy village in Cape Cod,
Massachusetts.

I am now going to walk to a store run by a Canadian
and a Pom.

You know what would be really, really funny?

This: an overfed American business doofus staying at
an overstuffed hotel in Beijing complained about
globalisation. Why? Because he can't find any cool
"authentic" local toys to take to his hyperactive
moppets at home. That'd be hilarious.

In Beijing, the City of the Itchy Throat.

I'm in Beijing for a week or so, blogging via email
because the PRC government thinks that the Bastard of
Art and Commerce is seditious or something. Blogger is
a url non grata, and just like parts of BBC.com and
Wikipedia. So, nyah.

My mo on these trips is to hate a city the night I
arrive, then poke around the next day and decide it's
actually pretty great. The bureaucracy of arrival and
inevitable 1 hour ride on a strange highway to a site
unseen always gets me down, as does checking in to
hotels. The first nights' dinner is also trying, as
it's usually involves some jocularity on the part of
the in-country production company's rep, taking the
group to a 'special' restuarant that only locals go
to, usual to eat some form of horse penis. Or bull's
penis in this case of this past evening. Szechuan hot
pot. Didn't eat the bull dong, looked vaguely like
calamari. Being up 24 hours straight (can't sleep on
planes) makes me less adventurous, vis a vis organ
meats. The rest of the food was delicious, however.

The next day the smell gets to me. Not true in all
cities, of course. But in Beijing it is. It's this
weird combo of saffron and diesel that's everywhere.
It's not even a bad smell, necessarily. It's just so
<i>there</a>, everywhere, like the cooking of the city
gets trapped in the smog. The physiological result of
this shroud is a niggling itchy throat.

But Beijing is an impressive city, full of little
quiet lanes and very wide bike lanes. I took me fat
ass out for bike ride with some colleagues to see the
Forbidden City and Mao's tomb. It was a lot of fun,
and people are friendly. Lots of little kids
practicing their English for their future dominating
the globe. It doesn't seem like a tired city, it's all
go-go for the Olympics. The construction is 24 hours,
7 days a week, and they're expanding the subway lines
from two to seven in just a few years' time. Crazy.

Mao's tomb was fascinating. It's a like funeral that's
been going on for forty years. Thousands of people
cycle through every day, and it's odd to be in a quick
moving line (seriously, if your shoes are untied
that's how they're going to stay for the duration as I
found out. I also experienced the high tolerance the
Chinese adult male has for having his hand pressed to
the fleshy backside of a corpulent American male for
twenty minute intervals) that's dead silent. In the
Masouleum itself you enter a huge room where a giant
white marble statue of Mao smiles at you from a big
comfy chair done up in Chinoise upholstery. And if you
are a superfan, you can purchase a yellow rose outside
(wasn't aware Mao was a Texan) to lay at his feet.

You're in the this antechamber for all of 7 minutes,
then you enter Da Show, Mao's carcass draped in a
hammer and sickle flag in a glass coffin, waiting for
his prince to come. There's a soft spot light on Mao's
head, which for the life of me looks like it's been
carved out of butter. The China Dairy Council must
have paid some boucoup buckage for that product
placement.

You're in there for maybe four minutes, just long
enought to notice that the trademark Mao mole just
isn't there. Then you are shot out directly into the
gift shop, just like Epcot.

Stopped at this huge tourist clothes store, where you
can buy weird knockoff crap (the Burberry tuff was
labeled "Brrrbry". Need a vowel there fucktard.) It's
this crazy five story haggle store with these little
booths. One of the shop girl kept asking me "Why not
get a t-shirt, Happy Buddha?"
Bitch.

Perhaps it was her comment that prompted me to get a
bathing suit and go swimming at the hotel. It's this
sassy little lyrca number that says "Swimming!!" on
the side. Think I might forget this one in the room
come tuesday.

The hotel, the Peninsula, is really posh and all that,
with some kind of douchebag shopping arcade at the
bottom filled with douchey luxury brands. Oh, and a
hooker bar. Want to find the hookers in any given
city? Travel on business.

Tomorrow we go to the Wall, to shoot some footage for
a commercial. That should be amazing. More later...

Rediscover idiocy. Bastard of Art and Commerce.
bastardofaandc.blogspot.com

Questions. From New York City.

Why do New Yorkers tolerate such swillish coffee? Can everyone in one of the largest cities in the world be better dressed than me, including small children? Is the shambling comic book dork community that attractive women go to comic book shops in New York City? How is it that every neighborhood in New York is the NEXT BIG THING? You are playing music at a venue in Williamsburg where I have paid five dollars to listen to you play music, why do you have to be such a whining pile of suck ass? (That’s just the first “band”, Falcon and English Department were really, super good.)Could the main branch of the New York Public Library be somehow baked into a pie so I can eat the fucking thing? Could we just get some more goddamn parks in here? Huh? Do hotel maids sense nudity? If you are the cab driver that drove me in from JFK, could you send me the phone number of your dealer? Because you were in a place that I’d like to visit one day. If I go to an 11:45 pm showing of “The Departed” in Times Square on a Sunday night, how can the next showing be sold out? I mean what do these people do during the day? How many suicides have been attempted by employees of the Times Square Toys R Us? That place is a goddamn nightmare! It’s a smurf’s BDSM dungeon. Why, at one point, did I freakily and involuntarily pronounce “hot dog” as “Hooawt Dawg” to a startled vendor? Is it possible I am a New Yorker trapped in a Californian’s body? How long can the “Lion King” possibly run?

These are my questions. Puzzling.

Postscript -- Am annoyed I didn't get a chance to meet up with blog friend Walking Spanish. It would have been my first blog-meatspace crossover. Dammit. I've heard your first time is magical.

The Rose of Ocean Blvd.

Consuela. She of the burning eyes.

She was my maid, or she was until I let my towel slip.Then she became me, and I her. True I had let my towel slip in front of the room service guy, a guy they had sent up to fix my networking cable, and a family of six in the elevator, but Consuela, she of the almost procine sensuality, was the only one who had lived under the Arbors of Sensuality long enough to understand my cues. Truly, my halitotis worked as a musk, a musk calibated to reach and move only her.

She became my hotel wife, these three heady days. After paying a not-insignificant fee/dowry to the hotel manager, we entered a very specific sort of cohabitation. There is a word for it, a word I cannot repeat, for Consuela (she of the elephantine buttocks) heard it, it would break her heart would shatter, much like if ball peen hammer hit a sparrow made of marizpan, and discretion is my byword, if only for legal reasons.

I worked during the day, and Consuela (she of the bleeding gums) would be waiting with my pipe, my fez and my medical truss. She would then soak her long hair in warm salt water and swab me, taking special care around my ulcerated fat rolls.

We would order room service, and chat, me pacing the room, her locked in the closet. (She of the eyebrows obsessively plucked out -- a nervous condition that in our three days together I could not cure.)

Today when I rose (I had passed out halfway into my second bottle of cough syrup), all traces of her were gone. I wept quietly.

I noticed she had failed to provide fresh towels before her flight. She owns my soul, but I will not be leaving a tip.

Good bye Santa Monica. Good Bye Consuela (she of the pear shaped goiter.)

Taking Dumps In LA

Today I’m down in Los Angeles, where I’ll be for a couple days editing a commercial.

(I might be in Santa Monica. I’m not sure.)

Production services operate in a buyer’s market. The various editorial and music houses are sleepy cocoons designed for maximum comfort for ad agency douchebags like myself. Snacks, food, soda and beer are always at the offing. Masseuses are called in. X-Box consoles litter the low slung coffee tables. Muted colors.

Lunches are served at a group table and everyone is ever so joshing and friendly, likes it’s the best Youth Group meeting ever!!!! The people are all super friendly, they positively gleam and laugh at your jokes, even if you are an unpleasant fat man with halitosis. They chatter among themselves and there are always like five people just hanging with no apparent jobs other than to be toothy and slender. It’s like a cosmetics counter for dopy pasty guys.

They really want to make you feel at home. Which is a problem when you want to take a dump (particularly a trumpety moist one)

The bathrooms are usually temples of coziness, with magazines, cool tiles, scented shit, and fluffy towels. They are only lacking in some genetically modified hamster octopus hybrid that will gentle massage your colon until it descends and deposit its loamy contents without a wink of effort on your part. All fine and great if you are applying a beauty mark. But I’m usually looking to facilitate an entirely different process.

So, today, I’m in one of these womb toilets. All that separates me from the outer hallway is a fogged glass door, one that shows a good half an inch of daylight at the bottom. And I just know I am going to sound like Sousaphone solo in there, never mind the smell. And all these enormously friendly cute LA broads are tee-heeing in the hallway outside, petting the Golden Retriever or some such fucking LA thing. (Seriously, what the hell do they do for a job?)

It’s like taking a dump at a dinner party. I hate that, especially because I am technically at work and so should not feel panicky when taking a dump. Give me the front section of the paper and the anonymity of a stall and I’m in heaven.

And I can’t hold it because I’m going to be here like six more hours. So I Toilet Paper mute as best as I can, I do breathing exercises, I sing softly to myself, I don’t force ANYTHING just in case a high pressure sulphur front is waiting to burst out with a roar. So I’m in there a good fifteen minutes, doing a job that should take all of five, and come out smelling like some new age crap lilac air freshener, LIKE THAT IS GOING TO TRICK ANYBODY.

In fact it maybe worse than a regular old poo smell, because at least poo is honest and hardworking. And now I am a man that had a smelly dump AND I smell like lilacs. It is the poo-equivalent of a boob job: everyone KNOWS I wasn’t romping in Lilacs, just like they know the cantilevered D-Cups of the 65 year old at the bar came out of a caulking gun.

I hate LA.

A lesson learned in Berlin

ALF is kind of funnier dubbed into German.

Hookers attack!!!!! And a mild reassetment ,vis-a-vis St. Petersburg

I was aggressively approached by a particularly vile Russian hooker tonight.

She looked like Stephen King dressed as Cyndy Lauper. Only with larger, hairier arms.

This is what happened: I was have a late dinner at the St. Petersburg Marriott with two very nice people from the vendors I'm working with on this project, crappy bar food (bumpkin me) and osetra caviar (Deee-lish. Ordered by my more worldly and presentable work chums). We were chatting, watching the hotel lounge fill up with older German tourists fresh from the opera. Then the clock struck 11. And the HOOKERS came to work. There were four of them, each with a slightly different hook. The first to arrive, was a sort of frumpy gal in a cocktail dress, something that makes no sense given the temperature was approaching 0*F. I think she was going for the single gal sipping a wine spritzer at the bar.

Then Lady Sherbert, the she-ape who was later to offer herself to me. Ick! She was wearing fruit colors that Ray Charles would find too garish, top off with trowel applied make up and Midwestern owl lady bifocals on a chain. Interestingly, she avoided the bar and went straight to the conversation pit in the front of the lobby.

Three was a spooky goth chick, who was certainly on an opiate of some kind. Who could blame her, really?

And fourth was a gal who was moderately better dressed than than the woman attacked me.

Now here's the weird thing. I think that the three who worked the lounge are on some kind of shift system, 10 minutes on, 20 off, usually spent in the ladies powderroom. I tried to get one of the women I was dining with to go into the Ladies to spy on them, but no such luck.

(This is the fucking filled to capacity with older German couples lounge in the pansy-ass Marriott. Just so we're clear.)

So we finishing eating and I head off to the lobby, that I might catch the whore-free elevator to my room that I might rest.

Sadly, it is a slow elevator in the Marriott, not one of the Otis company's greater models. My waiting for the elevator in the well lit lobby of the regional flagship of a middle of the road hotel chain was disturbed by a flash of tangerine and fushia, puncuated by the fwap-fwap-fwapping of sour cream flesh. The smell of Giorgio filled my nose. It was Lady Sherbert, the ugliest whore in the St. Petersburg Marriott whore collective, ready to bring to BRING the GAME.

"Eckskoos me. Eckskoos me, baybee."

I suddenly develop a deep, newly abiding interesting in the construction and craftsmanship of the Otis Elevator Company of Toledo, Ohio. I stare straight ahead, admiring the copper doors of the slowest elevator east of Estonia.

My plane of view is violated by Lady Sherbert, dancing a little jig like she has to piss: "Let me come to your room. We party, yes?" Her massive forearms were rippling.

Me, trying not to laugh: "Uh, no. No thank you. I'm going to sleep."

The doors slide open, I get in, and suddenly the slab has stood in the doorframe of the elevator. Those doors weren't closing.

"We party. It will be a fon-taz-tica time. CHEAP! One hour!"

"Oh, no thank you. I would like to go to bed now. To sleep. So, good night and please move."

"Okay, baby. I come by later, yes? Gimme your room number, we party?"

"Won't be necessary, ma'am. Good night."

"Okay, good night. Have fun, baby."

"Yeah. Thanks."

--

I think I was harsh on St. Petersburg in my last post. Today the sun was shining and people were out going about their business and it was a wonderful city to be in. The Neva had melted and the river was a glassly blue. The dirty crust of snow had melted off and so the parks were glacial white. Little kids were playing in playgrounds and the pastel colors of the building became neon in the sunshine. A good day.

PETER THE GREAT!!!! AND HOOKERS!!!!!

Tonight I am writing from the Capital of All the Russias, the Brasilia of the 18th century, St. Petersburg -- home of the Hermitage and insane cathedrals up the anus. AND HOOKERS!!! This week I'm in St. Petersburg, next week I'm in Berlin, for work. Not hookers.

And hookers like in 80's movies hookers. At my hotel. At my hotel, THE GODDAMN MARRIOTT. Hookers, dressed like 40 year old skanks in Catholic schoolgirl outfits, probably with PhDs in Dialectical Economics, WAVING and WINKING to all and sundry
(but especially South Korean Biz Dev cocksuckers and Marxist French Agronomists) in the bland business hotel lounge like some hottie in a POPEYE cartoon, only they are not so hot, and are depressing like Cancer. The disconnect, if you are a sociopath, is the hotties in Popeye cartoons are:

a) Sort of hot, as within the self-consistent Popeye universe, where Olive Oyl is considered hot.

and

b) Not three blocks away from the massive, terrifying, and gorgeous St. Isaac's Cathedral, Peter the Great's massive Imperial fuck you to Russian parochialism, and, I think, Jehovah. (Running from whores, you turn an unassuming corner, and BY THE HOLY FECES OF THE JESUS IMMACULATELY CONCEPTED, there is A DOME OF DOLLY PARTON MAGNITUDE, serving as a perch to the host of 50 Foot Archangels and Cuter Saints, who stand in a ring around the quadruple Z-cup Italianate dome, big enough that the bourses of distant Amsterdam and London would enlarge and engorge their credit ratings for the Hottie on the Neva, i.e. Holy Russia.)

and

c) Not hookers. Although, Wimpy would have done anything to anyone, if they had seen fit to furnish the funds for a hamburger today, which would then lead to a golden shower next Tuesday. But that was only implied because the Fleisher Brothers had something called taste, you Pulp Fiction-loving asshole.

Anyways, I'm having zakooska with workmates downstairs late night at the bar (in the fucking Marriott. How bland can a motherfucker get with a hotel chain?), which is the Russian equivilant of smorgasbord, only I guess that the major disconnect between zakooska and smorgasbord is the inclusion of, how you say, putas.

These women had the subtly of, I don't know, clinically insane people who are half way normally dressed who start talking to you about when Malcolm X appeared to them in a toilet stall at the Greyhound station as they rinsed out their wading boots while you wait for the bus to come. They wink. Who the hell winks. I got winked at tonight. WINKED, motherfucker. Last time I got winked at was by your grandma, and I do not mean anything sexual by that.

So, as to St. Petersburg itself... alternately transcendent aesthetic nirvana and the set of Kelly's Heroes. Everything historically worth saving, or new and financially profitable, is in immaculate shape; newer buildings look low-end Scandinavian and there more Mercedes here than I've seen in LA, easily. The banks of the Neva you'll find a stretch of perfect block long Palladian manors, in bright eggshell blues and chiffon yellow, extending for a dozen miles But, holy shit, everything else is a husk. If the Bronx were the size of London, and had equestrian statues and Russian orthodox cathedrals everywhere with gilded domes, it would look like St. Petersburg.

A illustrative case: earlier today, my first full day in St. P's, I went to an unnamed hugely historically significant Russian film studio for some work related hoo-ha. And the place looked like a crackhouse the size of the Louvre. Endless parallelogram hallways with light absorbing, pocked marked plaster walls painted the color green if the word "green" described the act of drowning puppies in the bile of war criminals.

But... big, huge but... the people are nicer than Canadians, they work hard, Jesus, they are rebuilding a continent-size country from scratch. So, golly, I'm some kind of an asshole. I also had the most amazing piroshski of my life, the Budweiser is the real Czech Budweiser (delicious) and really, St. Isaacs Cathedral is a balls out, kidney punching example of yes-I-am-a-giant-tasteless-monstrosity-fuck-you-beauty and I can see its swollen Italianate dome from my window, which I spent the first night gazing at, waiting for sleep. So, I'm conflicted. Lemme see more. I'll get back to you.