Monday, October 3, 2011
Typography for 2D Design
I was finding it hard to form an emotional connection with any of the fonts I was looking at, so I chose to take an easier root and look at fonts that are used by my favorite authors. The fonts that authors or their designers use often help a reader form a bond with the work of that author. This turned out to be more difficult than I thought, since it was hard to actually determine what the fonts were in many cases. MyFonts.com was pretty helpful for this.
The first author I wanted to find was Jean Rhys.
The font used on her books is called Parisian. Many of her books are set in Paris. I found this on this woman's blog about design for for wedding dresses: http://joanneflemingdesign.blogspot.com/2011/02/beautiful-and-damned.html
Douglas Coupland was one of my favorite authors in college. He kind of got crappy but I still like his old books and his art. He was into Helvetica before the movie came out. He generally is up on trends though no one usually notices, perhaps because he is Canadian. He coined the term "generation-x."
He loves Helvetica, but ironically, the text of his books are not Helvetica. They're some serif, I don't remember exactly what it looks like. He even wrote a New York Times article about Helvetica.
http://coupland.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/08/27/i-luv-helvetica/
John Updike was my favorite author in high school. His books all have a note about the typography in the back. They all use the same typography.
I prefer the italic version.
Rachel Ingalls was the hardest to find. She is a relatively obscure author but I think Mrs. Caliban is one of the best novels written after World War II. I'm not a huge fan of this font but I like the cover design a lot.
This font is called Plaza Regular. It was hard to find.
Like Coupland, I was really into Haruki Murakami in college but kind of hate him now. I thought he would be a good choice though, because the cover signs for the American versions of his books are very recognizable. They were designed by John Gall. He used Futura Light. He uses it well, but I don't think it looks great with my name.
Danny Bowman is my best friend a very good blog writer. His favorite font is Din.
The first author I wanted to find was Jean Rhys.
The font used on her books is called Parisian. Many of her books are set in Paris. I found this on this woman's blog about design for for wedding dresses: http://joanneflemingdesign.blogspot.com/2011/02/beautiful-and-damned.html
Douglas Coupland was one of my favorite authors in college. He kind of got crappy but I still like his old books and his art. He was into Helvetica before the movie came out. He generally is up on trends though no one usually notices, perhaps because he is Canadian. He coined the term "generation-x."
He loves Helvetica, but ironically, the text of his books are not Helvetica. They're some serif, I don't remember exactly what it looks like. He even wrote a New York Times article about Helvetica.
http://coupland.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/08/27/i-luv-helvetica/
John Updike was my favorite author in high school. His books all have a note about the typography in the back. They all use the same typography.
I prefer the italic version.
Rachel Ingalls was the hardest to find. She is a relatively obscure author but I think Mrs. Caliban is one of the best novels written after World War II. I'm not a huge fan of this font but I like the cover design a lot.
This font is called Plaza Regular. It was hard to find.
Like Coupland, I was really into Haruki Murakami in college but kind of hate him now. I thought he would be a good choice though, because the cover signs for the American versions of his books are very recognizable. They were designed by John Gall. He used Futura Light. He uses it well, but I don't think it looks great with my name.
Currently, my favorite publishing house is Archipelago, based in Brooklyn. I have read a lot of their books and I like all of them. In general their books are very well designed, both the books themselves and their covers and interiors. My favorite of theirs is The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker. I wasn't able to find the exact font for his book, but the Dante font was the closest I found.
Danny Bowman is my best friend a very good blog writer. His favorite font is Din.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Shanghai in cell phone photos
//mao art pic with me in the reflection
In the Toronto Airport I paid five bucks to use the Internet for an hour. I wrote a weird sort of Gchat message to my sister, who wasn't responding, since it was seven in the morning. I wrote, "hey u there?" and she didn't respond, so I kept writing, "sorry i didn't call last night, i was busy..." leaving a message somewhere between email and voicemail.
//walking mall at night
On the first night I was able to go into the city, I ended up in what is Shanghai's version of Times Square. I was told to be aware of scammers, girls who would pretend to want to hang out or whatever, and then take you to a bar or restaurant and order fancy drinks in Chinese and stick you with the bill. So when women approached me I avoided eye contact. Then a cute girl insisted on taking a photo with me. We started talking and I thought for a moment that she really just wanted to be friends until another girl appeared out of nowhere, she was much more physically attentive, and it creeped me out. They asked if I had a girlfriend and I said yes, and then they asked where she was and I tried to tell them I was meeting her down the street, but I hesitated too long. "You are Shanghai single." Embarrassed, I made it very clear that I was not interested. Their smiles faded and they started talking to each other in Chinese, not even bothering to walk away. No more, "Your eyes are beautiful," and "You have nice long legs."
//zhang dali
I had seen an add for a gallery opening in an old hotel on "The Bund," the row of buildings on the west side of the Huangpu river, famous for their colonial architecture, where the decadent balls of the 20s and 30s were held. Zhang Dali is famous for being the only Chinese graffiti artist of the 1990s. There was no one at the opening. It was on the fifth floor of a bizarre fancy mall built into one of the old government buildings, most of the floor belonged to a cheesy bar/lounge thing.
//old photo of the bund from wiki
Looking upward in Shanghai is completely disorienting, unlike New York. In New York when you look up you see buildings in a row, planes defined by building faces, angles and perspective. In Shanghai it is as if the buildings are all floating in space, ready to collapse in on you. They all face different directions, the architecture of each belonging to a different city and time, and often I had no idea how I would get to any one of them by road. Many of the skyscrapers disappear into the pervasive fog of pollution.
My aunt's family lives in a suburban neighborhood built for expats, called "Willow Brook." Like Jersey or Connecticut, you can take a train into the urban center of the city in about twenty minutes. Unlike Jersey or Connecticut, you'll find poverty, neighborhoods of shacks and crumbling concrete, on the other side of a wall just beyond the neighborhood, people fishing in a black, polluted canal.
//guy in boat
To prove that the pashmina that cost fifty yuan was better quality than the other pashmina, the woman at the pashmina booth on the third floor of the fabric market borrowed a lighter from a man in the booth and lit the ends of both scarves, showing us the difference between the smell and texture after burning. So we got the fifty yuan pashmina, about $6.50 USD, having looked through about ten other identical booths in the giant warehouse filled with a small variety of identical booths.
//old blue drawing of shanghai from wiki
The British first established a colonial municipality, the "British Concession," in 1843, and Shanghai became the most important Chinese port city. The British made opium, which had previously only been enjoyed by the aristocratic class, available for common people, and soon millions of Chinese were hooked. American and French concessions were established. Even today you can tell when you walk into the old French concession, now the neighborhood called Luwan. On The Bund, many of the old buildings are empty, their entrances and windows boarded up, neglected during the cultural revolution and left to decay.
//me in the library case
Somehow, I found myself in front of the Shanghai Library , without even meaning to. I guess I spend so much time in libraries I've developed a sixth sense that pulls me to them unconsciously.
//other book in the library
In high school I discovered in the University of Richmond library, while I was supposed to be researching a paper on either JD Salinger or Samuel Beckett, a book called The Carnal Prayer Mat, which is an ancient, erotic Chinese novel, and was obsessed with it. That was a long time ago but I thought about it today while I was in the ancient books room in the library, where the signs in front of the display books were marked only in Chinese, not in both Chinese and English like most things around Shanghai, so I it's possible, maybe unlikely, I was looking at original copies of The Carnal Prayer Mat.
//soda can dragon
In the car on the way to Mogonshan Lu, where rezoned industrial lofts house art galleries, Hilary said that she was good at bargaining with the Chinese merchants. She doesn't like bargaining, but she's good at it because she doesn't actually want anything, so if she doesn't get her price she just walks. The other expat women she knows just buy tons of crap.
//life art space
Taikang Lu, a famous block with tons of galleries as well as tiny coffee shops and little shops, reminds me of my problem with art, that I can't keep any of this stuff, that it's physical existence for me is so ephemeral. That I'll barely even remember it, except when I maybe attempt to recall an event sometime later.
Like the fabric market, it feels like there are a million of these little galleries, too many to process, so the experience becomes one of saturation, like surfing the Internet in real life. It's impossible to know if the art in any given gallery will be schlock made for tourists or "high art." The distinction loses meaning.
//taikang lu map
A gallery in Luwan, freestanding and more Western in design than the galleries at Taikang Lu or Moganshan Lu, and curated by a European woman, featured art addressing the upcoming World Expo, which is in Shanghai this year. They are completely remaking parts of the city in order to prepare for it. It comes up again and again in my reading and conversation, the Chinese disregard for history and the constant rebuilding and refurbishing of their cities. The Expo represents another redecoration of the city of Shanghai; the slogan: "Better City, Better Life."
//bamboo raftings
Before leaving for China I read in an Eliot Weinberger essay that the Chinese government does not censor artists the way it does writers and intellectuals, because no one cares about art. Mogonshan Lu is more deceptive in its presentation of art as "high art."
At another gallery I ran across walking between Luwan and a DVD store where I had read you could find old vinyl records in the back (this turned out to be untrue) I saw some video art. One of the pieces looked really cool, and when I put on the headphones to hear the soundtrack I realized that it had been shown at a Performa '09 event in New York, which I had been working at. It was a piano piece that accompanied the video. In the screening at the Anthology Film Archives in November there had been live keyboard accompaniment, and I had set up the keyboard with the PA in the theatre.
//pearl tower
I dreamed that my friends were making fun of me for liking narrative.
//purple
I saw maybe fifty galleries in Shanghai, but one stuck out, because the digital and interactive art reminded me of my own. I talked to the curator's assistant, a French guy probably my age. He came to study Chinese for six months, but dropped out of his program and started working for the gallery. "Shanghai is like a trap," he said, "It's like Hell." He said he has no intention to go back to Paris.
//liu dao piece
At first I didn't realize that Liu Dao, the name on all of the art that I like, and most of the art in the gallery, is the name of a collective of artists, mostly Chinese and some European, and not one Chinese guy, as I had been imagining. The work is a lot like digital and interactive art that I've seen before, but it's cleaner and more complete. It seems like art and not like a technological experiment, the way the work I did in college was. My favorite piece is called "Birds on a Wire." In a frame about two feet wide and three feet tall, two birds animated by red, orange and green LEDs move subtly behind a translucent yellow screen of paper filled with Chinese text.
//obama and shit
Some of the more sexual and violent art makes my aunt uncomfortable, and I felt a bit embarrassed. We both reserved comment in front of the more graphic pieces, except occasionally she'd say something like "I don't get all this violent imagery." Later, Hilary said something to the effect of "I don't really understand art," or "I'm not an artsy person," which is something that I often hear from older people like my parents. It seems to be an expression of feeling unfamiliar and slightly out of place in a hip art gallery, but Hilary is comfortable navigating her away around Shanghai, bartering in Chinese with aggressive merchants and vendors. I don't imagine most middle aged expat house wives have can say they have the same relationship with the city.
//dark city
The Urban Planning exhibition was housed in one of the futuristic spaceship buildings near People's Square. The displays inside were new and shiny but poorly made. On the second floor I found facsimiles of old maps in a bizarre display device, a wooden box with frames that slide out of the sides. On the third floor a World Expo display featured scale models of different buildings, many of which didn't exist yet. On the fourth floor there was a massive scale model of the entire city of Shanghai.
//city model
After the Urban Planning Exhibition I met up with my roommate's cousin, Lara, the only person my age I had contacted when I arrived in Shanghai. Her and her boyfriend Trip walked with me along Foushou Lu toward the river. After graduating college and having difficulty finding work in the US, they came to Shanghai, where Trip had studied during a semester abroad, to teach English and live cheaply. When I met them they were frazzled by their work situation. They have been in Shanghai since October, but they had learned recently that the company employing them to teach English had forged some of their qualifications in order to get them work visas. "They think lying is just being crafty, or clever," Trip said, reminding me of my aunt's description of merchants in the fake market. Still, they were positive about living in Shanghai. They said they had planned to stay for only a year but were now thinking of staying longer.
//kungfuclass
On Friday I picked up my cousin's, Michael and Jack, from school and took them to Kung Fu class. Then we ordered pizza and watched cartoons. I slept in my aunt's bed, reading to the kids from a book of Peanuts cartoons I brought Michael before putting them to bed. After they were asleep I watched a Chinese bootleg copy of Avatar for an hour and got bored. Michael jumped into the bed the next morning at exactly seven. "I've been waiting for an hour," he told me. "I think I have hair growing on my elbow." "What are you talking about, Michael?" I said, sitting up in bed, trying to focus. "I think you need to turn on the light to see it," he said. I turned on the light and realized it had been a trick to wake me up faster. We went downstairs to play Wii. I had to convince them to eat breakfast so I could make myself coffee.
//intersection
At the airport I had Korean fast food. I read the book by Eileen Chang ("We call her Chang Eileen") I got at the foreign book store. I had been to Shanghai and in a few hours I would be somewhere else.
After Owen Roberts is a writer living in Brooklyn...
//mao art pic with me in the reflection
In the Toronto Airport I paid five bucks to use the Internet for an hour. I wrote a weird sort of Gchat message to my sister, who wasn't responding, since it was seven in the morning. I wrote, "hey u there?" and she didn't respond, so I kept writing, "sorry i didn't call last night, i was busy..." leaving a message somewhere between email and voicemail.
//walking mall at night
On the first night I was able to go into the city, I ended up in what is Shanghai's version of Times Square. I was told to be aware of scammers, girls who would pretend to want to hang out or whatever, and then take you to a bar or restaurant and order fancy drinks in Chinese and stick you with the bill. So when women approached me I avoided eye contact. Then a cute girl insisted on taking a photo with me. We started talking and I thought for a moment that she really just wanted to be friends until another girl appeared out of nowhere, she was much more physically attentive, and it creeped me out. They asked if I had a girlfriend and I said yes, and then they asked where she was and I tried to tell them I was meeting her down the street, but I hesitated too long. "You are Shanghai single." Embarrassed, I made it very clear that I was not interested. Their smiles faded and they started talking to each other in Chinese, not even bothering to walk away. No more, "Your eyes are beautiful," and "You have nice long legs."
//zhang dali
I had seen an add for a gallery opening in an old hotel on "The Bund," the row of buildings on the west side of the Huangpu river, famous for their colonial architecture, where the decadent balls of the 20s and 30s were held. Zhang Dali is famous for being the only Chinese graffiti artist of the 1990s. There was no one at the opening. It was on the fifth floor of a bizarre fancy mall built into one of the old government buildings, most of the floor belonged to a cheesy bar/lounge thing.
//old photo of the bund from wiki
Looking upward in Shanghai is completely disorienting, unlike New York. In New York when you look up you see buildings in a row, planes defined by building faces, angles and perspective. In Shanghai it is as if the buildings are all floating in space, ready to collapse in on you. They all face different directions, the architecture of each belonging to a different city and time, and often I had no idea how I would get to any one of them by road. Many of the skyscrapers disappear into the pervasive fog of pollution.
My aunt's family lives in a suburban neighborhood built for expats, called "Willow Brook." Like Jersey or Connecticut, you can take a train into the urban center of the city in about twenty minutes. Unlike Jersey or Connecticut, you'll find poverty, neighborhoods of shacks and crumbling concrete, on the other side of a wall just beyond the neighborhood, people fishing in a black, polluted canal.
//guy in boat
To prove that the pashmina that cost fifty yuan was better quality than the other pashmina, the woman at the pashmina booth on the third floor of the fabric market borrowed a lighter from a man in the booth and lit the ends of both scarves, showing us the difference between the smell and texture after burning. So we got the fifty yuan pashmina, about $6.50 USD, having looked through about ten other identical booths in the giant warehouse filled with a small variety of identical booths.
//old blue drawing of shanghai from wiki
The British first established a colonial municipality, the "British Concession," in 1843, and Shanghai became the most important Chinese port city. The British made opium, which had previously only been enjoyed by the aristocratic class, available for common people, and soon millions of Chinese were hooked. American and French concessions were established. Even today you can tell when you walk into the old French concession, now the neighborhood called Luwan. On The Bund, many of the old buildings are empty, their entrances and windows boarded up, neglected during the cultural revolution and left to decay.
//me in the library case
Somehow, I found myself in front of the Shanghai Library , without even meaning to. I guess I spend so much time in libraries I've developed a sixth sense that pulls me to them unconsciously.
//other book in the library
In high school I discovered in the University of Richmond library, while I was supposed to be researching a paper on either JD Salinger or Samuel Beckett, a book called The Carnal Prayer Mat, which is an ancient, erotic Chinese novel, and was obsessed with it. That was a long time ago but I thought about it today while I was in the ancient books room in the library, where the signs in front of the display books were marked only in Chinese, not in both Chinese and English like most things around Shanghai, so I it's possible, maybe unlikely, I was looking at original copies of The Carnal Prayer Mat.
//soda can dragon
In the car on the way to Mogonshan Lu, where rezoned industrial lofts house art galleries, Hilary said that she was good at bargaining with the Chinese merchants. She doesn't like bargaining, but she's good at it because she doesn't actually want anything, so if she doesn't get her price she just walks. The other expat women she knows just buy tons of crap.
//life art space
Taikang Lu, a famous block with tons of galleries as well as tiny coffee shops and little shops, reminds me of my problem with art, that I can't keep any of this stuff, that it's physical existence for me is so ephemeral. That I'll barely even remember it, except when I maybe attempt to recall an event sometime later.
Like the fabric market, it feels like there are a million of these little galleries, too many to process, so the experience becomes one of saturation, like surfing the Internet in real life. It's impossible to know if the art in any given gallery will be schlock made for tourists or "high art." The distinction loses meaning.
//taikang lu map
A gallery in Luwan, freestanding and more Western in design than the galleries at Taikang Lu or Moganshan Lu, and curated by a European woman, featured art addressing the upcoming World Expo, which is in Shanghai this year. They are completely remaking parts of the city in order to prepare for it. It comes up again and again in my reading and conversation, the Chinese disregard for history and the constant rebuilding and refurbishing of their cities. The Expo represents another redecoration of the city of Shanghai; the slogan: "Better City, Better Life."
//bamboo raftings
Before leaving for China I read in an Eliot Weinberger essay that the Chinese government does not censor artists the way it does writers and intellectuals, because no one cares about art. Mogonshan Lu is more deceptive in its presentation of art as "high art."
At another gallery I ran across walking between Luwan and a DVD store where I had read you could find old vinyl records in the back (this turned out to be untrue) I saw some video art. One of the pieces looked really cool, and when I put on the headphones to hear the soundtrack I realized that it had been shown at a Performa '09 event in New York, which I had been working at. It was a piano piece that accompanied the video. In the screening at the Anthology Film Archives in November there had been live keyboard accompaniment, and I had set up the keyboard with the PA in the theatre.
//pearl tower
I dreamed that my friends were making fun of me for liking narrative.
//purple
I saw maybe fifty galleries in Shanghai, but one stuck out, because the digital and interactive art reminded me of my own. I talked to the curator's assistant, a French guy probably my age. He came to study Chinese for six months, but dropped out of his program and started working for the gallery. "Shanghai is like a trap," he said, "It's like Hell." He said he has no intention to go back to Paris.
//liu dao piece
At first I didn't realize that Liu Dao, the name on all of the art that I like, and most of the art in the gallery, is the name of a collective of artists, mostly Chinese and some European, and not one Chinese guy, as I had been imagining. The work is a lot like digital and interactive art that I've seen before, but it's cleaner and more complete. It seems like art and not like a technological experiment, the way the work I did in college was. My favorite piece is called "Birds on a Wire." In a frame about two feet wide and three feet tall, two birds animated by red, orange and green LEDs move subtly behind a translucent yellow screen of paper filled with Chinese text.
//obama and shit
Some of the more sexual and violent art makes my aunt uncomfortable, and I felt a bit embarrassed. We both reserved comment in front of the more graphic pieces, except occasionally she'd say something like "I don't get all this violent imagery." Later, Hilary said something to the effect of "I don't really understand art," or "I'm not an artsy person," which is something that I often hear from older people like my parents. It seems to be an expression of feeling unfamiliar and slightly out of place in a hip art gallery, but Hilary is comfortable navigating her away around Shanghai, bartering in Chinese with aggressive merchants and vendors. I don't imagine most middle aged expat house wives have can say they have the same relationship with the city.
//dark city
The Urban Planning exhibition was housed in one of the futuristic spaceship buildings near People's Square. The displays inside were new and shiny but poorly made. On the second floor I found facsimiles of old maps in a bizarre display device, a wooden box with frames that slide out of the sides. On the third floor a World Expo display featured scale models of different buildings, many of which didn't exist yet. On the fourth floor there was a massive scale model of the entire city of Shanghai.
//city model
After the Urban Planning Exhibition I met up with my roommate's cousin, Lara, the only person my age I had contacted when I arrived in Shanghai. Her and her boyfriend Trip walked with me along Foushou Lu toward the river. After graduating college and having difficulty finding work in the US, they came to Shanghai, where Trip had studied during a semester abroad, to teach English and live cheaply. When I met them they were frazzled by their work situation. They have been in Shanghai since October, but they had learned recently that the company employing them to teach English had forged some of their qualifications in order to get them work visas. "They think lying is just being crafty, or clever," Trip said, reminding me of my aunt's description of merchants in the fake market. Still, they were positive about living in Shanghai. They said they had planned to stay for only a year but were now thinking of staying longer.
//kungfuclass
On Friday I picked up my cousin's, Michael and Jack, from school and took them to Kung Fu class. Then we ordered pizza and watched cartoons. I slept in my aunt's bed, reading to the kids from a book of Peanuts cartoons I brought Michael before putting them to bed. After they were asleep I watched a Chinese bootleg copy of Avatar for an hour and got bored. Michael jumped into the bed the next morning at exactly seven. "I've been waiting for an hour," he told me. "I think I have hair growing on my elbow." "What are you talking about, Michael?" I said, sitting up in bed, trying to focus. "I think you need to turn on the light to see it," he said. I turned on the light and realized it had been a trick to wake me up faster. We went downstairs to play Wii. I had to convince them to eat breakfast so I could make myself coffee.
//intersection
At the airport I had Korean fast food. I read the book by Eileen Chang ("We call her Chang Eileen") I got at the foreign book store. I had been to Shanghai and in a few hours I would be somewhere else.
After Owen Roberts is a writer living in Brooklyn...
Shanghai in cell phone photos
//mao art pic with me in the reflection
In the Toronto Airport I paid five bucks to use the Internet for an hour. I wrote a weird sort of Gchat message to my sister, who wasn't responding, since it was seven in the morning. I wrote, "hey u there?" and she didn't respond, so I kept writing, "sorry i didn't call last night, i was busy..." leaving a message somewhere between email and voicemail.
//walking mall at night
On the first night I was able to go into the city, I ended up in what is Shanghai's version of Times Square. I was told to be aware of scammers, girls who would pretend to want to hang out or whatever, and then take me to a bar or restaurant and order fancy drinks in Chinese and stick me with the bill. So when women approached me I avoided eye contact. Then a cute girl insisted on taking a photo with me. We started talking and I thought for a moment that she really just wanted to be friends until another girl, her friend, appeared out of nowhere. They asked if I had a girlfriend and I said yes, and then they asked where she was and I tried to tell them I was meeting her down the street, but I hesitated too long. "You are Shanghai single." Embarrassed, I made it very clear that I was not interested. Their smiles faded and they started talking to each other in Chinese, not even bothering to walk away. No more, "Your eyes are beautiful," and "You have nice long legs."
//zhang dali
I had seen an add for a gallery opening in an old hotel on "The Bund," the row of buildings on the west side of the Huangpu river, famous for their colonial architecture, where the decadent balls of the 20s and 30s were held. Zhang Dali is famous for being the only Chinese graffiti artist of the 1990s. There was no one at the opening. It was on the fifth floor of a bizarre fancy mall built into one of the old government buildings, most of the floor belonged to a cheesy bar/lounge thing.
//old photo of the bund from wiki
Looking upward in Shanghai is completely disorienting, unlike in New York. In New York when you look up you see buildings in a row, planes defined by building faces, angles and perspective. In Shanghai it is as if the buildings are all floating in space, ready to collapse in on you. They all face different directions, the architecture of each belonging to a different city and time, and often I had no idea how I would get to any one of them by road. Many of the skyscrapers disappear into the pervasive fog of pollution and mist.
My aunt's family lives in a suburban neighborhood built for expats, called "Willow Brook." Like Jersey or Connecticut, you can take a train into the urban center of the city in about twenty minutes. Unlike Jersey or Connecticut, you'll find poverty, neighborhoods of shacks and crumbling concrete, on the other side of a wall just beyond the neighborhood, people fishing in a black, polluted canal.
//guy in boat
To prove that the pashmina that cost fifty yuan was better quality than the other pashmina, the woman at the pashmina booth on the third floor of the fabric market borrowed a lighter from a man in the booth and lit the ends of both scarves, showing us the difference between the smell and texture after burning. So we got the fifty yuan pashmina, about $6.50 USD, having looked through about ten other identical booths in the giant warehouse filled with identical booths or different clothing things.
//old blue drawing of shanghai from wiki
The British first established a colonial municipality, the "British Concession," in 1843, and Shanghai became the most important Chinese port city. The British made opium, which had previously only been enjoyed by the aristocratic class, available for common people, and soon millions of Chinese were hooked. American and French concessions were established. Even today you can tell when you walk into the old French concession, now the neighborhood called Luwan. On The Bund, many of the old buildings are empty, their entrances and windows boarded up, neglected during the cultural revolution and left to decay.
//me in the library case
Somehow, I found myself in front of the Shanghai Library , without even meaning to. I guess I spend so much time in libraries I've developed a sixth sense that pulls me to them unconsciously.
//other book in the library
In high school I discovered in the University of Richmond library, while I was supposed to be researching a paper on either JD Salinger or Samuel Beckett, a book called The Carnal Prayer Mat, which is an ancient, erotic Chinese novel, and was obsessed with it. That was a long time ago but I thought about it today while I was in the ancient books room in the library, where the signs in front of the display books were marked only in Chinese, not in both Chinese and English like most things around Shanghai, so I it's possible, maybe unlikely, I was looking at original copies of The Carnal Prayer Mat.
//soda can dragon
In the car on the way to Mogonshan Lu, where rezoned industrial lofts house art galleries, Hilary said that she was good at bargaining with the Chinese merchants. She doesn't like bargaining, but she's good at it because she doesn't actually want anything, so if she doesn't get her price she just walks. The other women just buy tons of crap.
//life art space
Taikang Lu, a famous block with tons of galleries as well as tiny coffee shops and little shops, reminds me of my problem with art, that I can't keep any of this stuff, that it's physical existence for me is so ephemeral. That I'll barely even remember it except when I maybe attempt to recall an event sometime later.
Like the fabric market, it feels like there are a million of these little galleries, too many to process, so the experience becomes one of saturation, like surfing the Internet in real life. It's impossible to know if the art in any given gallery will be schlock made for tourists or "high art." The distinction loses meaning.
//taikang lu map
A gallery in Luwan, freestanding and more Western in design than the galleries at Taikang Lu or Moganshan Lu, and curated by a European woman, featured art addressing the upcoming World Expo, which is in Shanghai this year. They are completely remaking parts of the city in order to prepare for it. It comes up again and again in my reading and conversation, the Chinese disregard for history and the constant rebuilding and refurbishing of their cities. The Expo represents another redecoration of the city of Shanghai; the slogan: "Better City, Better Life."
//purple
I saw maybe fifty galleries in Shanghai, but one stuck out, because the digital and interactive art reminded me of my own. I talked to the curator's assistant, a French guy probably my age. He came to study Chinese for six months, but dropped out of his program and started working for the gallery. "Shanghai is like a trap," he says, "It's like Hell." He said he has no intention to go back to Paris.
//bamboo raftings
Before leaving for China I read in an Eliot Weinberger essay that the Chinese government does not censor artists the way it does writers and intellectuals, because no one cares about art. Mogonshan Lu is more deceptive in its presentation of art as "high art."
At another gallery I ran across walking between Luwan and a DVD store where I had read you could find old vinyl records in the back (this turned out to be untrue) I saw some video art. One of the pieces looked really cool, and when I put on the headphones to hear the soundtrack I realized that it had been shown at a Performa '09 event in New York, which I had been working at. It was a piano piece that accompanied the video. In the screening at the Anthology Film Archives in November there had been live keyboard accompaniment, and I had set up the keyboard with the pa in the theatre.
I dreamed that my friends were making fun of me for liking narrative.
//liu dao piece
At first I didn't realize that Liu Dao, the name on all of the art that I like, and most of the art in the gallery, is the name of a collective of artists, mostly Chinese and some European, and not one Chinese guy, as I had been imagining. The work is a lot like digital and interactive art that I've seen before, but it's cleaner and more complete. It seems like art and not like a technological experiment, the way the work I did in college was. My favorite piece is called "Birds on a Wire." In a frame about two feet wide and three feet tall, two birds animated by red, orange and green LEDs move subtly behind a translucent yellow screen of paper filled with Chinese text.
//obama and shit
Some of the more sexual and violent art makes my aunt uncomfortable, and I felt a bit embarrassed. We both reserved comment in front of the more graphic pieces, except occasionally she'd say something like "I don't get all this violent imagery." Later, Hilary said something to the effect of "I don't really understand art," or "I'm not an artsy person," which is something that I often hear from older people like my parents. It seems to be an expression of feeling unfamiliar and slightly out of place in a hip art gallery, but Hilary is comfortable navigating her away around Shanghai, bartering in Chinese with aggressive merchants and vendors. I don't imagine most middle aged expat house wives have can say they have the same relationship with the city.
//dark city
The Urban Planning exhibition is housed in one of the futuristic spaceship buildings near People's Square. The displays inside are new and shiny but poorly made. On the second floor I find facsimiles of old maps in a bizarre display device, a wooden box with frames that slide out of the sides. On the second floor a World Expo display featured scale models of different buildings, many of which didn't exist yet. On the third floor there was a massive scale model of the entire city of Shanghai.
//city model
After the Urban Planning Exhibition I met up with my roommate's cousin, Lara, the only person my age I had contacted when I arrived in Shanghai. Her and her boyfriend Trip walked with me along Foushou Lu toward the river. After graduating college and having difficulty finding work in the US, they came to Shanghai, where Trip had studied during a semester abroad, to teach English and live cheaply. When I met them they were frazzled by their work situation. They have been in Shanghai since October, but they had learned recently that the company employing them to teach English had forged some of their qualifications in order to get them work visas. "They think lying is just being crafty, or clever," Trip said, reminding me of my aunt's description of merchants in the fake market. Still, they were positive about living in Shanghai. They said they had planned to stay for only a year but were now thinking of staying longer.
//kungfuclass
I slept in my aunt's bed, reading to the kids from a book of Peanuts cartoons I brought Michael before putting them to bed. After they were asleep I watched a Chinese bootleg copy of Avatar for an hour and got bored. Michael jumped into the bed the next morning at exactly seven. "I've been waiting for an hour," he told me. "I think I have hair growing on my elbow." "What are you talking about, Michael?" I said, sitting up in bed, trying to focus. "I think you need to turn on the light to see it," he said. I turned on the light and realized it had been a trick to wake me up faster. We went downstairs to play Wii. I had to convince them to eat breakfast so I could make myself coffee.
//intersection
At the airport I had Korean fast food. I read the book by Eileen Chang ("We call her Chang Eileen") I got at the foreign book store. I had been to Shanghai and in a few hours I would be somewhere else.
After Owen Roberts is a writer living in Brooklyn...
//mao art pic with me in the reflection
In the Toronto Airport I paid five bucks to use the Internet for an hour. I wrote a weird sort of Gchat message to my sister, who wasn't responding, since it was seven in the morning. I wrote, "hey u there?" and she didn't respond, so I kept writing, "sorry i didn't call last night, i was busy..." leaving a message somewhere between email and voicemail.
//walking mall at night
On the first night I was able to go into the city, I ended up in what is Shanghai's version of Times Square. I was told to be aware of scammers, girls who would pretend to want to hang out or whatever, and then take me to a bar or restaurant and order fancy drinks in Chinese and stick me with the bill. So when women approached me I avoided eye contact. Then a cute girl insisted on taking a photo with me. We started talking and I thought for a moment that she really just wanted to be friends until another girl, her friend, appeared out of nowhere. They asked if I had a girlfriend and I said yes, and then they asked where she was and I tried to tell them I was meeting her down the street, but I hesitated too long. "You are Shanghai single." Embarrassed, I made it very clear that I was not interested. Their smiles faded and they started talking to each other in Chinese, not even bothering to walk away. No more, "Your eyes are beautiful," and "You have nice long legs."
//zhang dali
I had seen an add for a gallery opening in an old hotel on "The Bund," the row of buildings on the west side of the Huangpu river, famous for their colonial architecture, where the decadent balls of the 20s and 30s were held. Zhang Dali is famous for being the only Chinese graffiti artist of the 1990s. There was no one at the opening. It was on the fifth floor of a bizarre fancy mall built into one of the old government buildings, most of the floor belonged to a cheesy bar/lounge thing.
//old photo of the bund from wiki
Looking upward in Shanghai is completely disorienting, unlike in New York. In New York when you look up you see buildings in a row, planes defined by building faces, angles and perspective. In Shanghai it is as if the buildings are all floating in space, ready to collapse in on you. They all face different directions, the architecture of each belonging to a different city and time, and often I had no idea how I would get to any one of them by road. Many of the skyscrapers disappear into the pervasive fog of pollution and mist.
My aunt's family lives in a suburban neighborhood built for expats, called "Willow Brook." Like Jersey or Connecticut, you can take a train into the urban center of the city in about twenty minutes. Unlike Jersey or Connecticut, you'll find poverty, neighborhoods of shacks and crumbling concrete, on the other side of a wall just beyond the neighborhood, people fishing in a black, polluted canal.
//guy in boat
To prove that the pashmina that cost fifty yuan was better quality than the other pashmina, the woman at the pashmina booth on the third floor of the fabric market borrowed a lighter from a man in the booth and lit the ends of both scarves, showing us the difference between the smell and texture after burning. So we got the fifty yuan pashmina, about $6.50 USD, having looked through about ten other identical booths in the giant warehouse filled with identical booths or different clothing things.
//old blue drawing of shanghai from wiki
The British first established a colonial municipality, the "British Concession," in 1843, and Shanghai became the most important Chinese port city. The British made opium, which had previously only been enjoyed by the aristocratic class, available for common people, and soon millions of Chinese were hooked. American and French concessions were established. Even today you can tell when you walk into the old French concession, now the neighborhood called Luwan. On The Bund, many of the old buildings are empty, their entrances and windows boarded up, neglected during the cultural revolution and left to decay.
//me in the library case
Somehow, I found myself in front of the Shanghai Library , without even meaning to. I guess I spend so much time in libraries I've developed a sixth sense that pulls me to them unconsciously.
//other book in the library
In high school I discovered in the University of Richmond library, while I was supposed to be researching a paper on either JD Salinger or Samuel Beckett, a book called The Carnal Prayer Mat, which is an ancient, erotic Chinese novel, and was obsessed with it. That was a long time ago but I thought about it today while I was in the ancient books room in the library, where the signs in front of the display books were marked only in Chinese, not in both Chinese and English like most things around Shanghai, so I it's possible, maybe unlikely, I was looking at original copies of The Carnal Prayer Mat.
//soda can dragon
In the car on the way to Mogonshan Lu, where rezoned industrial lofts house art galleries, Hilary said that she was good at bargaining with the Chinese merchants. She doesn't like bargaining, but she's good at it because she doesn't actually want anything, so if she doesn't get her price she just walks. The other women just buy tons of crap.
//life art space
Taikang Lu, a famous block with tons of galleries as well as tiny coffee shops and little shops, reminds me of my problem with art, that I can't keep any of this stuff, that it's physical existence for me is so ephemeral. That I'll barely even remember it except when I maybe attempt to recall an event sometime later.
Like the fabric market, it feels like there are a million of these little galleries, too many to process, so the experience becomes one of saturation, like surfing the Internet in real life. It's impossible to know if the art in any given gallery will be schlock made for tourists or "high art." The distinction loses meaning.
//taikang lu map
A gallery in Luwan, freestanding and more Western in design than the galleries at Taikang Lu or Moganshan Lu, and curated by a European woman, featured art addressing the upcoming World Expo, which is in Shanghai this year. They are completely remaking parts of the city in order to prepare for it. It comes up again and again in my reading and conversation, the Chinese disregard for history and the constant rebuilding and refurbishing of their cities. The Expo represents another redecoration of the city of Shanghai; the slogan: "Better City, Better Life."
//purple
I saw maybe fifty galleries in Shanghai, but one stuck out, because the digital and interactive art reminded me of my own. I talked to the curator's assistant, a French guy probably my age. He came to study Chinese for six months, but dropped out of his program and started working for the gallery. "Shanghai is like a trap," he says, "It's like Hell." He said he has no intention to go back to Paris.
//bamboo raftings
Before leaving for China I read in an Eliot Weinberger essay that the Chinese government does not censor artists the way it does writers and intellectuals, because no one cares about art. Mogonshan Lu is more deceptive in its presentation of art as "high art."
At another gallery I ran across walking between Luwan and a DVD store where I had read you could find old vinyl records in the back (this turned out to be untrue) I saw some video art. One of the pieces looked really cool, and when I put on the headphones to hear the soundtrack I realized that it had been shown at a Performa '09 event in New York, which I had been working at. It was a piano piece that accompanied the video. In the screening at the Anthology Film Archives in November there had been live keyboard accompaniment, and I had set up the keyboard with the pa in the theatre.
I dreamed that my friends were making fun of me for liking narrative.
//liu dao piece
At first I didn't realize that Liu Dao, the name on all of the art that I like, and most of the art in the gallery, is the name of a collective of artists, mostly Chinese and some European, and not one Chinese guy, as I had been imagining. The work is a lot like digital and interactive art that I've seen before, but it's cleaner and more complete. It seems like art and not like a technological experiment, the way the work I did in college was. My favorite piece is called "Birds on a Wire." In a frame about two feet wide and three feet tall, two birds animated by red, orange and green LEDs move subtly behind a translucent yellow screen of paper filled with Chinese text.
//obama and shit
Some of the more sexual and violent art makes my aunt uncomfortable, and I felt a bit embarrassed. We both reserved comment in front of the more graphic pieces, except occasionally she'd say something like "I don't get all this violent imagery." Later, Hilary said something to the effect of "I don't really understand art," or "I'm not an artsy person," which is something that I often hear from older people like my parents. It seems to be an expression of feeling unfamiliar and slightly out of place in a hip art gallery, but Hilary is comfortable navigating her away around Shanghai, bartering in Chinese with aggressive merchants and vendors. I don't imagine most middle aged expat house wives have can say they have the same relationship with the city.
//dark city
The Urban Planning exhibition is housed in one of the futuristic spaceship buildings near People's Square. The displays inside are new and shiny but poorly made. On the second floor I find facsimiles of old maps in a bizarre display device, a wooden box with frames that slide out of the sides. On the second floor a World Expo display featured scale models of different buildings, many of which didn't exist yet. On the third floor there was a massive scale model of the entire city of Shanghai.
//city model
After the Urban Planning Exhibition I met up with my roommate's cousin, Lara, the only person my age I had contacted when I arrived in Shanghai. Her and her boyfriend Trip walked with me along Foushou Lu toward the river. After graduating college and having difficulty finding work in the US, they came to Shanghai, where Trip had studied during a semester abroad, to teach English and live cheaply. When I met them they were frazzled by their work situation. They have been in Shanghai since October, but they had learned recently that the company employing them to teach English had forged some of their qualifications in order to get them work visas. "They think lying is just being crafty, or clever," Trip said, reminding me of my aunt's description of merchants in the fake market. Still, they were positive about living in Shanghai. They said they had planned to stay for only a year but were now thinking of staying longer.
//kungfuclass
I slept in my aunt's bed, reading to the kids from a book of Peanuts cartoons I brought Michael before putting them to bed. After they were asleep I watched a Chinese bootleg copy of Avatar for an hour and got bored. Michael jumped into the bed the next morning at exactly seven. "I've been waiting for an hour," he told me. "I think I have hair growing on my elbow." "What are you talking about, Michael?" I said, sitting up in bed, trying to focus. "I think you need to turn on the light to see it," he said. I turned on the light and realized it had been a trick to wake me up faster. We went downstairs to play Wii. I had to convince them to eat breakfast so I could make myself coffee.
//intersection
At the airport I had Korean fast food. I read the book by Eileen Chang ("We call her Chang Eileen") I got at the foreign book store. I had been to Shanghai and in a few hours I would be somewhere else.
After Owen Roberts is a writer living in Brooklyn...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
