This is a sound walk that 谢婷婷 Hailey Xie and i made in January, seven days after another big snow storm in Beijing. It was originally intended as material for the second issue of wear journal, but it felt a pity to turn all of these sounds into text-only format. We ended up leaving it out, though now in light of a recent conversation with Bruno and Hlynur in Buenos Aires, we could imagine the winter again.

I am walking with the ZOOM H4n digital recorder with built-in mics (now panned for left ear), Haxi is using a minidisc player and Sound Professionals in-ear binaural mics (now panned for right ear). If you listen carefully you’ll hear some things in a strangely layered effect, though i’m sorry though to say, i’ve destroyed the binaural in putting our tracks together. Here’s from the doorstep of HomeShop to the edge of the alleyway, before everything gets lively. Download the mp3 version [256kb/s, 11.4 mb] here.

When I was exporting the file for this, somehow the file became corrupted and time-stretched… Thought some of you might enjoy that, too.

pyjama talk

家作坊门口, 2008年8月11日，11:36.
小郑借了棉线和针来缝国旗在车天线上。
HomeShop doorstep, 11 August 2008. 11:36.
Xiao Zheng borrows needle and thread to securely fasten a small Chinese flag to his car antenna.

“为什么你现在突然决定挂旗在你车上？”
“它一直在我车里，就没有放。能放在车屁股就放了吧。”
“想喝多一杯酸梅汤吗？”
“不要，谢谢。”
“是不是做了太酸？”
“酸。”
“下次做再放多一些冰糖。”
“没关系，只要你自己喜欢喝就行。不用考虑别人。”

“Why did you decide now to add the flag to your car?”
“I’ve always had it in my car, just hadn’t put it up yet. Since I can fasten it to the back of the car, I’ll do it now.”
“Would you like to have more plum juice?”
“No thanks.”
“Do you think it’s too sour?”
“Yes, sour.”
“Next time I’ll add more sugar.”
“It doesn’t matter. What’s most important is that you like to drink it. Don’t worry about what anybody else thinks.”

beijing, CN weather for 10 august 2008: humid and overcast, with chance of sudden showers, high 32° C – low 23° C.

对面的街坊正天开电视放奥运会比赛。
The neighbours across the street have the television on and Olympics events playing at all hours of the day.

北京鼓楼东大街 Guloudongdajie, 15:38。因叔叔的moto车而自豪，很欢迎停下来给人拍照片。阿姨坐后面没表情想赶紧回家。

mobility to identity? 高灵和逗号动到黑也累… images by Ling & Comma, July 2008

this was shared on behalf of fotini as seen right off of alexanderplatz in berlin—-extremely extremely disturbing!!! i wonder how the germans would view it, as it’s from Hainan airlines and either just a complete faux pas of a bureacratic slip, or just a lack of cultural competency, maybe?

but the really sick part: the fares are really really low…

somehow adding the possessive onto land, culture and state i find a very disturbing thing, in one sense, and i wonder if it is really possible to create a multiplicity of all these “my beijing”s or “my switzerland”s. hierarchies will always develop, and someone’s beijing, or someone’s border territory, someone’s right to do this or that —- will always conflict with another’s. so is the city really a multipli-city? or just the nether spaces formed by the holes left when one version stamps on another, because we would like to believe that our versions of the city, the vision that we see, supposedly exists and is true, some sort of concreteness and counter-confirmation of our own existence in the world?

i am interested to know yes more about how tremblement may intersect with this, the nether spaces and the disjunctures. is public something collective or just a throwing together of the private interests with the most money and power? “one world, one dream”. it’s a funny hallucination of the collective imaginaire.

and yes, when does the interest of an individual become a collectivity? when does the collective become representative? when and where do individual migrations influence social security, or personal sentiments? i’m not sure how to consider all of this under the umbrella of a “collectivist society” in the first place.

oh…we have so much to talk about!

a friend just sent this link to the news about the reprinting of La Jetée, reminding me about how amazingly beautiful this work is and what a destructuralist achievement it represents for cinema. how it plays with time so integrally, through the narrative and the way it is made. and then, hmm… the parallel thought occurred that perhaps this way of disjointed time is something relevant for us. the chinese sense of time is something of ceaseless fascination for me, historically and how contemporary China seems to cancel/reverse/contradict itself (and its history) in so many ways… all of these show senses of time that have become unpredictable, 没有希望的，and just plain 没办法的… and today i overheard a woman of 30-something say she 很讨厌 the 后年代 generation.

and then, and then?

from the fifteenth floor…

“乌龙公司，换我血汗钱” [Shanghai, 23 January 2008]