When your heads clouds over with plumes of dust and car exhaust and cigarette smoke, and the room feels like the inside of a boiler room, it’s comforting to hear a subtle, heartfelt song exhaled from the lips of your workmate. A Chinese ballad, half-hummed, half-spoken, not fully realized in the public realm of the [...]
She pedals across a few lanes of relentless traffic, maneuvering around impatient pedestrians, digging machines and the occasional unleashed dog. The back of the bike quivers with the weight of the days’ groceries and an exhausted toddler, sleeping her way through another evening sandstorm, absently gripping her mother’s sweater. When the cabs flick alongside [...]
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a young waiter, no older than fifteen and with a smile of uneven teeth, plucking a patron’s fedora from the coat closet. He ran a palm down the dent of the hat and surreptitiously placed it on his head. Swallowing a shy laugh, he glanced at [...]
It’s soccer season in Beijing, and though it’s no replacement for the Columbus Park crew, I’m glad to have found a group of local soccer fans to keep me in the game. Shu and I have have been playing Sunday nights at the newly opened Red Ball soccer facility, just steps away from Yu Gong [...]
Also launched a new folio site for some of my own stuff at still-leven.com. My old site nomadthought.com has some photos up, if you care to see.
Just finished putting together a portfolio site for good friend Tom Barnes. Tom’s done some very smart–and some very funny–work for broadcast and film. Check the site.
Back in February, Shu and I got to see where some of Beijing’s local punk acts practice their craft. Buddy Li Bo, drummer for what may be Beijing’s only ska band, The End of the World, took us into a handful of basement-level practice rooms clustered around the Andingmen neighborhood. Photos from the trek were [...]
I’m fascinated by the mundane. By the things that surround us without asking for attention. They exist, maybe serve a purpose or perform a task, and then fade into the background. Sometimes they simply get tossed into the bin – like a water bottle.
The water bottle, so easily overlooked, is an object of concern [...]
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
The weather in Beijing can be strange. Some mornings you wake up to find the streets covered with a reddish silt carried on the wind from the Gobi desert. Other days, the air is filled with puffs of cotton-like tree pollen, drifting lazily like wish-blown seeds from a dandelion.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Innovation lives everywhere in Beijing. A paraplegic sails down the road in a contraption of his own design. One hand holds a burning cigarette while the other grasps a steering wheel that effortlessly controls a set of four wheels. He maneuvers his way through potholed streets with the efficiency of a cab driver, at 1/100th [...]