Cakewalk
by Malcolm Parker on May 14, 2013
It must be Friday. Two colleagues are making rounds of the cubicles. They carry thin cardboard boxes, limply open, full of slices of spongy and creamy cake wrapped in cellophane. A friend with a camera follows. You take a piece of cake and you have your picture taken with the cake giver.
It’s the cake giver’s last day at work and this is the tradition. It’s been a few weeks …
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Gogo gobi
by Malcolm Parker on March 23, 2013
The images of China people know are of crowded metropolises, constant construction and factories. It’s too easy to forget that this massive country contains some vast regions of wilderness, from lush jungles to desolate sands, and they are stunningly beautiful.
I have been to Xinjiang, the western-most and largest province, where the people look like they should be in a Emir Kusturica film, not a Zhang Yimou one, and where, on an excursion …
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Going Underground
by Malcolm Parker on March 14, 2013
I was reading John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay, Unnamed Caves, about Native American cave art in Tennessee, from his fantastic collection, Pulphead. He describes a plateau riddled with caverns and tunnels. It is karst topography, soluble bedrock that has been eroded by water worming through. I was familiar with the famous karst landscapes of Halong Bay in Vietnam and the chimneys around Yangshuo, a tourist and climber’s town in nearby province, …
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Shopping in GZ: Haiyin Camera Area
by Malcolm Parker on January 23, 2013
My first camera was a Kodak Brownie I bought from a pawnshop for $5 when I was ten. I have since bought more used camera gear than new – much more. As it is with things for which you have an intense interest or passion, hunting and gathering through shops is a pleasure that can consume hours if not days. In Guangzhou, at the Haiyin camera area, it can take …
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200 Word Reviews: Roadside Picnic
by Malcolm Parker on November 14, 2012
Long wishlisted and newly available on the Kindle*, The Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic is to its filmed version, Tarkovsky’s Stalker, as Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is to Scott’s Bladerunner. From the movies, you’d expect Dashiell Hammet in the 21st century for the Dick and ordure-tinged, post-apocaplyptic Dostoevsky for the Strugatskys, but you get humour from both, and Stalker didn’t have zombies**. Roadside Picnic…
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200 Word Reviews: Anna Karenina
by Malcolm Parker on November 7, 2012
The new film of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, written by Tom Stoppard and directed by Joe Wright, is two things not normally connected with the 19th Russian novel about love, death, and farming: fast and funny*.
This film gavottes giddily through reems of plot. Stoppard and Wright can do so by shocking us from the first scene, transporting us to a theatre, where we are watching a play. It’s an …
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Xinjiang Fathers
by Malcolm Parker on September 25, 2012
Photos from the hospital in Urumqi of fathers and their children.
Originally posted Sept. 20, 2011…
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Mired in Muk
by Malcolm Parker on September 18, 2012
Crowd noise is the same in any language, a cottony roar, and is my background this afternoon. Hundreds of soldiers and police have cordoned off an area of Tian He road, a major east-west corridor, in Guangzhou’s downtown. It’s 9.18 day. 81 years ago Japanese set off a bomb on their own railway near what was Mukden, now Shenyang, in northern China, blaming it on Chinese dissidents and using it as …
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Velambulator: Yunxian 2010
by Malcolm Parker on September 14, 2012
I had not intended to go to Yunxian from Nanjiang on the second day of my bike trip in Dali, February, 2010; however, I had not read my Google Maps route on my iPhone carefully enough. I hadn’t seen that National Highway 214 split and was, contrary to Western ideas of roads, in two places at once. I was happily oblivious that morning under clear skies and in cool mountain …
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Impossible Marketing
by Malcolm Parker on September 11, 2012
It’s fall, the season of serious movies. The Venice Film Festival Cat D9 and TIFF Komatsu D575A are bulldozing the path to the Oscars started by Cannes back in spring but now overgrown by the kudzu of summer. Venice had PTA’s The Master but TIFF has the bulk of the fun-yet-smart-and-well-made set. TIFF knows it’s got the glitz with substance, having opened with Rian Johnson’s Looper (Timecop meets La Jetee?)…
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Calling Kurt Russell
by Malcolm Parker on September 3, 2012
Chinese authorities have denied that they are building a stargate in Guangzhou, insisting that the odd building was planned as a companion to the provincial museum, which was modeled on a lacquer box. ”It’s all about the fengshui.”
An anonymous Chinese official asked this reporter “Whatever happened to Jaye Davidson, I thought she was really hot. Do you have Kurt Russell’s number?”…
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On the Romney/Ryan Storefront
by Malcolm Parker on August 26, 2012
In a small but signicant step, Team Mitt has put healthcare policy to practice, opening its first store for GOP approved health products. I had to go early this morning for a shot without teeming hordes, but I managed to browse yesterday. Some of the big sellers were
The Bible: GOP approved, expurgated version. All the hate, none of the love or kindness.
Mittamorphoil – An essential oil derived from …
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