erhebung

THE TRAIN TO MY HOME TOWN

Color, 62 Mins, 2008
Genre: Documentary
Subtitle: Chinese/English
Director and Camera: Ai Xiaoming
Editors: Hu Jie, Ai Xiaoming

Synopsis

At the beginning of 2008, when the Spring Festival was around the corner, the Beijing-Guangzhou Railway, the major traffic line that links South, Central and North China, was interrupted suddenly and many trains on this line were forced to stop indefinitely. Eager to get home before the Eve of the Spring Festival, thousands upon thousands of inland migrant workers congregated at Guangzhou Railway Station and waited for the trains bound for their homes…

The Guangdong Provincial government immediately started a preparatory emergency program of the highest level for the Spring Transportation. For the first time, the halls of the Guangzhou Import and Export Fair were transformed into temporary havens for the stranded migrant workers, volunteers were activated to offer services for them, and the Guangzhou Military Area Command dispatched soldiers to repair the Beijing-Zhuhai Expressway in northern Guangdong.

However, because passengers had been waiting for days for trains that did not arrive, their level of irritation began to intensify. A 17-year old woman named Li Hongxia was killed when she was trampled by the flood of people. A man named Li Manjun, who was returning home to remarry, received a severe electric shock when he jumped from the viaduct to the top of a train, resulting in his death.

"The train to my home town travels to a paradise."… Li Hongxia’s grave lies quietly in a field of wheat in her hometown. Li Manjun’s son, nearly 12 years old, prayed that his deceased father could bless him with good marks in Chinese and Mathematics, so he can enter a university in the future. When being asked, "what do you wish to do after you graduate from university", the boy gave us an unexpected answer…

As an independent filmmaker, Ai Xiaoming is concerned with the needs of the marginalized people. In order to record the scenes and stories that happened during the Spring Transportation, she went to Shenzhen, Shaoguan, Ruyuan, as well as the villages in Jianli, Hubei Province and Yueyang, Hunan Province - the hometowns of Li Hongxia and Li Manjun, respectively. The documentary presents the expectations of Guangdong’s migrant workers, the good wishes of their relatives at home, the ice-snow disaster relief efforts made by the government, and how the police and the migrant workers got through the hardships together. Let us review these scenes and consider what we need to do to ensure better spring travel next year.

A little more information.

The Train to My Home Town
China / 2008 / Col / 62mins
In Mandarin with Chinese & English Subtitles
Dir: Ai Xiaoming
Date & Time: 14#, 20/05 7:30pm

Eager to get home before the 2008 Spring Festival, thousands of
migrant workers congregated at Guangzhou Railway Station for
the trains bound for their homes… But the unprecedented snow
and cold blocked the Beijing-Guangzhou Railway. A 17-year old,
Li Hongxia, was trampled to death. Li Manjun, returning home
to remarry, received a severe electric shock when he jumped
from a viaduct onto a train. “The train to my home town travels
to paradise.” Li Hongxia’s grave now lies quietly in a field of
wheat in her home town. And Li Manjun’s son prays that his
deceased father blesses him with good marks.

I saw this mentioned, briefly, in a free arts and culture magazine.  I'd like to see it.

This report leads to one of those surprising and uncomfortable truths about humanity’s current space travel skills:

If something goes wrong on this mission, Atlantis’ crew will not be able to shelter on the International Space Station (ISS). The station orbits at around 350km (220 miles) above Earth, while Hubble occupies an orbit about 560km (350 miles) up.

The Shuttle can’t fly there. It can’t shed 130 miles of altitude, establish a new orbit on a radically different inclination and maneuver to ISS. Because our things that fly in space still aren’t really spaceships as we’ve been brought up to think of them. In fact, the Endeavour’s on the launchpad now, ready to launch an unprecedented rescue mission if it’s determined that the Atlantis may not survive re-entry.

I hadn't heard about this. It's very worrying, but at least there are now plans in place to send up a rescue mission.

Based on the ideas in the book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler, the novel shows a dystopian early 21st century America dominated by computer networks, and is considered by some critics to be an early ancestor of the "cyberpunk" genre. The hero, Nick Haflinger, is a runaway from Tarnover, a government program intended to find, educate and indoctrinate highly gifted children to further the interests of the state in a future where "wisdom" has replaced military and economic power as deciding factor in international competition. In parallel with this, the government has become a de facto oligarchy whose beneficiaries are members of organized crime.

Nick's talent extends to programming the network using only a touch tone telephone. One of his handlers at Tarnover explains that this is like a classical pianist being able to play entire sonatas and concertos from memory. However Nick also has some personality flaws, amounting almost to a deathwish. These make themselves manifest in exhibitions of his abilities, revealing his identity to his pursuers.

The background to the story includes a massive earthquake laying waste to the Bay Area in California. Millions die in this, and millions more are left to live on government handouts. The subsequent economic depression, coupled with the rootlessness encouraged by access to online data, results in a fragmentation of society along religious, ethnic and even tribal lines, while privileged people enjoy protected lifestyles in their own enclaves. Nick is a survivor of a public education system where teenage gangs run riot while the products of various government-funded initiatives, such as teaching machines, lie broken and unused around them. To be intelligent in this environment is to stand out, and risk being "sanded", the word "sand" being an abbreviation for the Vietnam-era expression "search and destroy".

Recently I've been getting strong cravings for science fiction (Red Mars is in my bag now as one of potential train books), and this one really appeals.

Radiohead attributes a great deal of depth to "Street Spirit", beyond the level typically perceived by its audience. Lead singer Thom Yorke said,

“

Street Spirit is our purest song, but I didn't write it. It wrote itself. We were just its messengers; its biological catalysts. Its core is a complete mystery to me, and, you know, I wouldn't ever try to write something that hopeless. All of our saddest songs have somewhere in them at least a glimmer of resolve. Street Spirit has no resolve. It is the dark tunnel without the light at the end. It represents all tragic emotion that is so hurtful that the sound of that melody is its only definition. We all have a way of dealing with that song. It's called detachment. Especially me; I detach my emotional radar from that song, or I couldn't play it. I'd crack. I'd break down on stage. That's why its lyrics are just a bunch of mini-stories or visual images as opposed to a cohesive explanation of its meaning. I used images set to the music that I thought would convey the emotional entirety of the lyric and music working together. That's what's meant by 'all these things you'll one day swallow whole'. I meant the emotional entirety, because I didn't have it in me to articulate the emotion. I'd crack... Our fans are braver than I to let that song penetrate them, or maybe they don't realise what they're listening to. They don't realise that Street Spirit is about staring the fucking devil right in the eyes, and knowing, no matter what the hell you do, he'll get the last laugh. And it's real, and true. The devil really will get the last laugh in all cases without exception, and if I let myself think about that too long, I'd crack. I can't believe we have fans that can deal emotionally with that song. That's why I'm convinced that they don't know what it's about. It's why we play it towards the end of our sets. It drains me, and it shakes me, and hurts like hell every time I play it, looking out at thousands of people cheering and smiling, oblivious to the tragedy of its meaning, like when you're going to have your dog put down and it's wagging its tail on the way there. That's what they all look like, and it breaks my heart. I wish that song hadn't picked us as its catalysts, and so I don't claim it. It asks too much. I didn't write that song.

This is why I really like Thom Yorke.

Sonic Youth's sound relies heavily on the use of alternative tunings. Scordatura on stringed instruments has been used for centuries and alternative guitar tunings had been used for decades in blues music, and to a limited degree in rock music (such as with Lou Reed's Ostrich guitar on The Velvet Underground and Nico), but Sonic Youth began using a variety of tunings more radical than nearly anything in rock music history. Azerrad writes that early in their career,

[Sonic Youth] could only afford cheap guitars, and cheap guitars sounded like cheap guitars. But with weird tunings or something jammed under a particular fret, those humble instruments could sound rather amazing – bang a drumstick on a cheap Japanese Stratocaster copy in the right tuning, crank the amplifier to within an inch of its life, and it will sound like church bells

—Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life, pg. 243

The tunings were painstakingly developed by Moore and Ranaldo during the band's rehearsals; Moore once reported that the odd tunings were an attempt to introduce new sounds: "When you're playing in standard tuning all the time ... things sound pretty standard."^[36] Rather than re-tune for every song, Sonic Youth generally use a particular guitar for one or two songs, and can take dozens of instruments on tour. This can be the source of much trouble for the band, as some songs rely on specific guitars that have been uniquely prepared.

When I read this a week or so ago I had one of those "ah, you really do learn something new every day" moments.  I need to revisit Sonic Youth.

The reactor vessel itself is immensely thick, held under constant tension by masses of steel cables: the only thing remotely similar to it that I can point to is a suspension bridge's supports. It's literally woven into a cocoon of steel wire strands, bundled into thousands of inch-thick cables. Crash a fully laden 747 into it, and the plane would simply smear itself across its surface.

If you like reading about Big Things, you'll like this piece by Stross. I would really like to have a tour around a Chinese nuclear reactor.

So Penguin books and their iconic covers have a place in history that merits study and appreciation. They have influenced generations of readers and played an important role in our cultural heritage. Over the years new cover designs have appeared, and in the 1950s a transition took place from typographical to pictorial covers. This was followed by the intro- duction of a radically new cover design in the 1960s, and the launch of a Penguin science fiction series with covers featuring reproductions of abstract and surrealist paintings.

This curious linkage of modern art and sf is at the heart of this website, and is made all the more intriguing by the subtle and often ingenious connections between the artworks and the stories within. Following on from this, Penguin continued to publish sf as a number of mini-series, with covers that reveal the influence of Pop Art and to some extent Op Art. But to put these later developments in perspective it is necessary to go back to the first sf titles that Penguin published in the 1930s, for these early covers, now celebrated on a stamp, have come to be regarded as artworks in their own right.

This is a brilliant website, brimming with things of interest.  Definitely worth a look.

Mono no aware (物の哀れ ,mono no aware^?, lit. "the pathos of things"), also translated as "an empathy toward things," or "a sensitivity of ephemera," is a Japanese term used to describe the awareness of mujo or the transience of things and a bittersweet sadness at their passing. The term was coined in the eighteenth century by the Edo-period Japanese cultural scholar Motoori Norinaga, and was originally a concept used in his literary criticism of The Tale of Genji, and later applied to other seminal Japanese works including the Man'yōshū, becoming central to his philosophy of literature, and eventually to Japanese cultural tradition.

The word is derived from the Japanese word mono, which means "things" and aware, which was a Heian period expression of measured surprise (similar to "ah" or "oh"), translating roughly as "pathos," "poignancy," "deep feeling," or "sensitivity." Thus, mono no aware has frequently been translated as "the 'ahh-ness' of things." In his criticism of The Tale of Genji, Motoori noted that mono no aware is the crucial emotion that moves readers. Its scope was not limited to Japanese literature, and became associated with Japanese cultural tradition (see also sakura).^[1]

Notable manga artists who use mono no aware-style storytelling include Hitoshi Ashinano, Kozue Amano, and Kaoru Mori. The quintessentially "Japanese" director Yasujiro Ozu was well known for creating a sense of mono no aware, frequently climaxing with a character saying a very understated "ii tenki desu ne" (it is fine weather isn't it?), after both a familial and societal paradigm shift, such as daughter being married off, against the backdrop of a swiftly changing Japan. Norwegian Wood by the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami is an example of this feeling as well^{[citation needed]}. British author Kazuo Ishiguro also is considered a writer in this style, particularly in his novels Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day. Former Stuckist artist and remodernist filmmaker Jesse Richards employs it in nearly all of his work, along with wabi-sabi.

Some Western scholars have compared it to Virgil's term lacrimae rerum.^[2]

memory + location + uncertainty + fixed time + patience

the challenge is that most of us have become trained like dogs to view photographs as singles on a daily basis through flickr and blogs. we can’t help it. we want to feed the hunger but at the end of the day it’s mostly empty calories which is why i get this sense of dissatisfaction from so many people.

There’s a Flickr paradox. On one hand it allows us to remain social with other photographers and find new work daily, but on the other it trains us to digest photographs in micro bites. Of course, this is the same story with much of the web, be it news, commentary, video, what have you.

This is why I love The Wire so much. It’s a serialized drama with pretty much a fixed end each season. There’s an arch that sets up an expectation for an ending.

Rather basic dramatic tension type shit, but it’s refreshing because you don’t have it on the web. But there’s no reason you can’t and photography is a great medium for it, especially on the web.

There’s no reason other than laziness why you can’t tell a photographic story through Flickr or a blog over a period of say, 6 to 8 weeks. But somehow I think the photographer feels a bit cheated. I mean, you work on something for a year or two and then bang, it’s over and shown over a period of a few weeks.

But that’s the same with most art. It takes a hella long time to produce and relatively short time to consume.

Put simply, I think we’re all fucking lazy because it’s easier to just roam around and say I’m working on a long term project than actually complete something and say, this is it. That’s the end.

“The end is important in all things.” - Ghost Dog