record of a conversation about art

a series of emails between myself and a girl in LA who makes music
I'm not gonna start at the start of our correspondance so just, we were talking about noise music.
me:
the thing about noise is i feel, it tends to attract lots of smart cool dudes (not girls as much as a generalization) and even though its not very fruitful per se- well, it reminds me of something my friend said the other day,
'it's interesting with japanese films
they are so valuable, but only as catalysts for criticism
they present innumerable avenues to explore ideas
but as primary documents, they can suck my dick
name me a good japanese film
ii mean, you can
i just think that's interesting
a piece of art that's only valuable because it allows a discourse
like damien hirsts work, or jeff koons
not valuable within themselves, but they allow smart people to talk about them
and that recharges them with intellectual and fiscal value'

i feel thats what noise is, a form of art that not many actually enjoy but is a platform from which to discuss/experiment with other things.

(she responded saying she liked noise a lot, but that my friends framework seemed valid, that many artists seemed to be jst kinda dicking around- eg matthew barney, for example, but saying that some, for example damien hirst, escaped it)

well i wonder, i feel like artists used to feel so precocious about their work, like jean cocteau or something, so when we look back its almost like, unattractive how excited they are about it. but the inundation of information and knowledge we have now has made a field of art that nobody is passionate about at all. i feel the same way with noise, i actually DO enjoy it- i have a vivid visual memory of listening to masonna and shaking around

i guess ever since that whole skull thing i've kinda felt that hirst is a fool, i mean i get the point but i feel that art that can be concisely described in words, instead of seen (unless of course its literature) is pretty useless

a distinction i make a lot is between craftsmanship - the idea of making art thats beautiful - cartier bresson, for example,
and art thats a reflection of life- stephen shore, for example, to which beauty is incidental
maybe this is dramatized in photography, a medium i study a lot, but i think its valid elsewhere as well

like for example my ears, really like how cheesy house music sounds, a lot. but i wouldnt say thats the acme of musical art. instead i think a band like say suishou no fune could be because their jams actually begin a conversation, instead of just stating I AM BEAUTIFUL
ya know?

(she said)
I totally agree with all that-
I forgot about the skull, that was pretty dumb-
I think everyone is WAY to hyped up on themselves all the time now... It seems like to be an artist or a musician you get some inflated sense of the importance of what you're doing just by default... It's like on a reality show every single person thinks they are going to win, every a-hole in a band thinks it is the best band ever to exist... It's like a survival mechanism or something
It grosses me out though because I get scared that I haven't actually thought anything through as carefully as I meant to and I'm just dumb...
And that when I look at all these people and say summarily that they're a bunch of losers, that really they are all thinking the same thing, that they are the best one haha...

(and i said)
i think thats why i am often attracted to art that seems reflexive. there are some, relatively rare, cases where i am just blown away by an artist- stephen shore robert mapplethorpe donald judd uh tons of musicians lets just say basic channel, burial, suishou no fune cause i have listened to them in the last hour. but its so hard to make a judgment about what is really, questing towards the truth that sometimes i find myself immersed in work that does that unintentionally. possibly as a cause of my computer being broken for the past year and a half cd burner wise, probably about half of the music i listen to is individual house/rave/trance/techno etc tracks on youtube, that almost anonymously seek to manufacture beauty in a way. similarly i catalogue images that strike me, chinese landscape painting, found photographs, family photographs , images that seem that were taken for reasons that arent per se artistic and yet are communicative in the way that the second category of art can be, as well as beautiful in the way of the first. like if i was to take house music at face value itd be totally stupid, on some levels (though i am totally moved by the idea that, the response to being a gay black man with AIDS under reagan is, to dance and have a party, that is so constructive and optimistic and amazing) but if you take that stuff for what it actually seems to be, it seems that it is 1, totally musically weird if you think about it 2, a record of lives that were literally poured away in futile searching for happiness (i dunno AIDS is really symbolic for me, it is just so amazing, the idea of a plague that punishes transgressive love) (of course i'm romanticizing this stuff but whatever)

for example, an argument i often have is like, many people i know, will be like, man, daft punk or justice or something like that is so great, whereas you listen to this cheesy shit, why? and my response is something like, why is it better to have some stylish middle class dude from suburban paris than an anguished heroin addict with AIDS from chicago, be the guy you are relating to with art? also isnt it so that art is an accoutrement or decoration for the first, but the second instance almost seems to prove the idea that art is necessary for life, that even a trapped, dying human being will use art as a last resort of communication? i dont know if that makes sense, its all so unconnected except in my head. the point is that, educated white people (basically like you or I) are those I am most suspicious of, art wise, because I feel like for us art is just another aspect of a tailored and well groomed life that includes a copy of vice magazine on the table and and american apparel in the closet and a bag of yayo in the dresser,ya know? it just seems so much more dispensable for us as a class, than say, poor black dudes- like i'm always amazed at the true fact that many people weep when listening to 2pac cause it just shows me how out of touch from primal problems i am, cause my main reaction to his work is to be like, this is kinda goofy, kinda sexist, kinda naive and i kinda dont care. so when i listen to it i think i'm actually mostly listening to my perception of the response of other people, 2pac as some kind of equivalent reflection of american urban culture to those french cave paintings for cro magnons. its not the art's quality per se that's relevant, but the extent to which it reflects the context from which it emerges, which gives it quality- the judgment isn't, is it beautiful but is it true (and if you accept like i do that human life is, if not beautiful, at least moving, then truth becomes beauty in that way)
and it strikes me that this is basically the same logic i used to elevate shore relative to bresson- that is, this 2nd category can in some rare occasions come from highly reflective contexts, like our own, but i think more typically comes from a less thought out place. cause when you think things out they just feel like, not as totally necessary. i mean, i think about how much more emotions i felt for high school crushes i didnt even kiss compared to girlfriends who have wanted to marry me and been like, whoa. i've lost that, by the sheer amount of information i have at my disposal, my tastes have become much more discriminating. and i think that loses something.

additional remarks

beyond what i wrote to my friend,
i 'm very happy with everything now. in the last 48 hours i've hung out with tons of people. my chinese is now at a conversational level, which astounds me, but is true, i have made multiple friends who can't really speak english (not more than a marginal amount). i recently saw that woman celine, and it was really good, she's very sweet and pretty and we're going to the beach together sometime soon. we spoke english and chinese in my 12th grade classroom for a while then she took me to her neighborhood and bought me lunch, noodles and soup and some rice cakes- kinda sticky, weird but good.

yesterday night i was out until way late, until the first train came in, at some weird snazzy place playing trance and the amelie soundtrack with some girls i know, my friend michael and his friend scott, talking about ketamine (which scott apparently did a ton of at one time) and stuff like that, what art is, how my glasses are stupid looking, etc. then the girls went home, it was midnight, so me and michael wandered around talking about the whole fucked up situation with him and carol- he lived with her, they were intertangled, then he moved out abruptly at her request- anyway it was really good, i feel like i've made my first real male friend here in him, which rules. we went and saw lucy, a scottish writer/art girl who lives here, at some wine bar, and then after that careened to logo where i talked to hong kong girls who had predictably stupid opinions about shanghai as sin city. i went with a beijing girl north but realized enroute that i couldnt crash at her place because her mom lived there, so i just hopped out of the cab at a metro station and waited for dawn- at 5 o clock i came home and napped for a bit, then woke up to some mustard greens and tofu and a job interview. i got the job, 375 rmb per 2 hour session once a week, pending my first lesson (which will be fine, i expect). so i went and bought some clothes. now i'm preparing to go and meet this girl jenevieve (who cant spell her name correctly, unfortunately) to see a contemporary dance recital; she's a performance artist who doesnt like gross male performance artists of the kind i fancy (chris burden, viennese actionists, gg allin, etc) so we'll have lots to petulantly not talk about. I met her also with michael a few nights ago at a basque restauraunt where she was discussing an upcoming erotica film festival's entry requirements. that night i ended up going to robin's place and spooning with her and talking to her cat and talking to her about LA. this vacation has been so awesome, i've done so much stuff and i still have days of it left- my chinese has honestly skyrocketed.

notes to my virginian friend- on being a young writer

(this is about his agonizing over whether to stay with a girl he loves in DC, a city he doesnt love, or what to do).

i think that being in a couple for a man can be a disability, for a
woman an asset, thats a huge part of the reason why the whole gender
dynamic is the way that it is. here especially i'm very conscious of
it, men have more freedom of action, also i think for various reasons
some chemical some social are - more content as individuals, i think
being alone makes women feel a bit frantic, whereas being single (if
you are getting action, ya know) for a man is better in many ways.

i've thought a lot since forever about how to make myself and my
friends be - people that people like us obsess over in 50 years. all
those groups seem basically social, like bloomsbury, or paris in the
30s or 50s, or how merce cunningham and john cage and rauschenberg all
smoked weed together, or the punk scene, or basically anything
so the question is, how do we make our parties result in the
inspiration for our generation
first answer: to go to parties in a couple is crippling, basically, in
a couple you are representing more than yourself at all times, alone,
you only need to justify your own actions and not even that
and both of us are quite adept at being charismatic, at being in parties
thats how i have been here a month and know so many people already,
just fucking approaching random people ya know (which is very unusual
in china, so even more effective because surprising)
the second answer: not in williamsburg, is where those parties are.
you have to go to the big city. which one? to be honest- if you are as
firmly convinced of the whole base and superstructure thing (reference to the marxist idea that economic growth is the base of which culture is a superstructure, a response laid over it) as me, then i think, this one is a good candidate. think about it, all these
people are going from peasants to rich, they need some oscar wildes,
thats how i go from eccentric and impoverished dude in virginia or
chicago to like, filthy rich and dating gorgeous women and all this
tony stark stuff. because you and i (here i relate ourselves in the
sense that though we are in many ways very different i think we share
ambition and a sense of the importance of culture, and a great bank of
information about it, while a sort of casual, jokey relationship to
high culture- like making toasts to jean genet and jon benet, or
telling weird stories about james dean, that type of stuff- that makes
a kind of double vision of culture, on the one hand an unreachable
plateau and on the other hand the basic landscape of our inner lives,
is a terrain of familiar cultural issues; music, literature, film,
art, etc. that we can basically continue learning about indefinitely
yet already know more about than most people including adult
professionals in those fields).

i came here for a few reasons. i mean, i do find the chinese language,
for example, pretty interesting. and i liked it the first time i came,
and i felt that i didnt know what else to do. but the main one is my
conviction that the cultural skill set i have is very much a commodity
i can sell much more easily here than in say oversaturated nyc or paris.
to say nothing of places like dc where culture beyond taurins hat (our friend taurin has a dumb hipster hat we joked about, and is from northern virginia) is
basically irrelevant and almost offensive. here, this stuff that we've
joked around about for years, is so crucially useful in catapulting my
own, always pathetic seeming in my own mind, self, into like, this
weird life i'm living now. i mean, isnt it weird? it really is true,
i'm wearing pants and typing on a computer with this money, its not
fake, yet its incredible to me that a month ago i was frantic about
how to pay rent and now i am totally like, master of my domain. this
country would be hard for you to adjust to by yourself probably but i
know the ropes and i am probably gonna stay here for a while, with the
possible exception of a one year detour to london, but i'd just come
right back. i mean man there are so many people here with so much
money they are desperate to spend on the kind of court jester
knowledge we have. you want to write or work in arts? firstly, the
question is, i think, what to write about. i'm pretty set on writing
as well, kinda henry miller/kafka/malcolm lowry esque in the sense of
the plot is irrelevant and whats important is the writing as a
document of my perception of reality. so the question then becomes,
whats so special about my perception. and the answer is, i have spent
my whole life thoughtfully parsing what i think about things. and once
i have enough lived experience to comprehend a bit better, cause i
still feel shaky, capable of being surprised as i am right now at my
current situation, then i will write. and it will flow like this
letter will, i can't imagine anyone as verbose as me ever suffering
from writers block, you neither- if we find our subjects- because, my
writing will be an edited anthology of all the things i say to girls
at parties, basically. which again in order to perfect it, being
single is necessary for me.

and i know that thats gonna sound fucked up in your mind. even in a
much more clearly limited situation, i still feel twinges of guilt
about lisa, even though, we talk and we're good, no problems, no hurt
feelings. being in love, is overpowering and you never want to let go,
i always feel like i can build a cave of warmth inside of someone
else's love for me. but- the choice is yourself or (girl), man. and (girl)
might be the right choice. but you know, no offense, but doing google
searches about dolphins seems marginal to say the least as far as a
technique for learning to write. i dont know how much building a
writing resume is useful. cause how many people do that. (our friend A)'s been published, but who cares, ya know, cause what does he
know about anything (i say liking him). i feel that to get published,
you have to be at the right party and meet the right person and
they're like, sounds good, mostly because they're kinda drunk and you
are handsome and charming. at least if it is the kind of speculative
avant garde work i have in mind and i imagine that you do too. i mean,
think of your favorite writers, did they learn how to write, could
they learn how to do what they did, from the kind of work your doing (he works at national geographic researching travel books)?
my inclination is to say nah, the best thing, is to be in a weird and
stimulating place and let your thoughts course along, thats more
important than learning to write cause you already KNOW how to write,
you'll only polish your writing into the stupid way that most american
writers write; do you want to get in the habit of writing like
national geographic, so that you can't stop even when you want to?
cause that seems like a potential hazard to me about what your doing.
you are organizing your thoughts for others to understand, whereas it
seems that at least the kind of writing i have in mind for myself,
will necessarily summon others to try and understand, and not involve
me meeting them in the middle, if that makes sense.

now i'd love it if you were here and can get you a job and introduce
you to people and etc. but maybe some other place is right for you
than here. its just that dc is so obviously, terribly wrong and if you
choose it you're going to buy a convertible when you're 40. you've
written me a few times that my job doesnt sound fulfilling; on the
contrary, it is very good because i hear peoples stories all day long,
and think about what good writing is all day long, on my own standard,
without conforming to anyone else's idea of the english language.
teaching causes me to think about subjects i'd kind of unconsciously
understood without prying too much into them. so the job is
fulfilling; and moreover my life, is extremely fulfilling, i think
this is the exactly perfect way for me to succeed, both in the sense
that i can meet the people who will make me famous with their
patronage here, and in the sense that i am constantly stimulated by
the thrum of strangeness and modernness. in the way that new york, nor
paris, is now. because reality is malleable and changeable here, it
could become anything. there just arent so many rules for what can and
cant happen here. like, a girl i hit on at a party and whose perfume i
smell like next day, can get me a job paying more than the average
monthly salary for 5 hours of work. for example.

take this as what it is, a selfish missive analyzing you as if you
were me. because thats the only way i can understand other people, via
my own experience. but i think we're similar enough that it is a
potentially valid analysis. in my opinion beating yourself up because
you are who you are is stupid. dont do things that make you unhappy,
because its your life, and this is the most important time. if you
dont live for yourself now, when are you going to? when you're a
pathetic old man and its too late? nah bro. take my dad for example.
he spent approximately every weekend of his life age 15-45 getting
wasted. and everything worked out. he even published, did you know
that? 4 books. he [wrote about different topics than the ones i'd like to explore] and i dont aspire towrite as he does. but still, that lifestyle is totally feasible. i
think you'll just make both (girl) and yourself unhappy if you persist in
trying to make something that cant work work. if you realize that
already then you should act on it now, instead of prolonging the hurt
for both. (though thats totally hypocritical, i could never break it
off just like that myself. so i sympathize). anyway i strongly feel
that our similar ambitions dictate that a situation so perfect for me,
would probably be good for you too. and ya know it doesnt have to be
here. could be buenos aires. could be tokyo. could be moscow. but it
cant be DC. and you know that.

sept 25

returning from another rendezvous with yingying (my chinese tutor) where we spoke of chinese perceptions of american culture, gender roles, etc... I met on the train a rather pretty woman, celine, who wants to practice studying english with me in order to emigrate to australia, where she'll work as a plastic surgeon...
a vision of her frantically driving through the muggy night to a suburban home, like the one in which Dr Roberto, his lover, Jordana (my ex) and I ate pizza...

sept 17

(a response to my virginian friend)
i've decided to go on a date with a chinese girl every week. the main benefit i've gotten from these dates so far, apart from not being lonely, is that i hear all these crazy stories about peoples lives, in the social medium that i am best equipped to draw people out; i'm trying, as something that will be the subject of whatever i write, to comprehend the results of this syllogism:
1, every person is almost an infinity of lived experience, emotion, etc (learned from having been in love with a few people)
2, there are 7 billion people alive today

doing this stuff with girls here instead of virginia makes the second part a lot more real. i'm trying to understand how precious human emotion is to me, when there's so much of it... so the other night in an anonymous chinese cafe i drank beer listening to a woman with long, straight black hair hold back tears as she told me about her alcoholic father from anhui province, and her dj boyfriend (he likes dj cam too, made me think of your adolescence). i'm not interested in being a reporter collecting these facts, because facts seem to be too concrete- these feelings are not, they are preserved in aspic. i just want to write a biography of the emotions that zip around this city along with wireless internet, subway trains, police cars...
in some ways, this place is a perfect backdrop because it is so urban, but in an almost less threatening way, i can do whatever i want without fear of any kind here, silhouetted against gigantic neon buildings and handing roses to women and drinking brandy in smoky expensive nightclubs. but its like gotham because its not really identifiable in some ways (even beijing has a more reconizable urban form than here- here, as i suspect bangkok, jakarta, etc, is very repetitive, a constant iteration of the same form).

sept 20

my shanghai life is shaping up so fast and is quickly spiralling out of my control, but pleasantly, because it's spiraling upwards into a life that seems lavish but i can afford with ease (and I'm still planning on saving 20K, my grad school plans in london are shaping up pretty well). last night I went to a house party some french guys were throwing with my friend michael, whose party I went to recently, and my other friend ted from sichuan, and a girl i know named chelsea. i'd heard about it from some guy I met named ukachi, a nigerian who grew up in new york city and takes party pictures for a living now, his girlfriend has her own perfume. I'm getting job offers in text messages while we're drinking chinese plum brandy on a balcony that looks over a gleaming mass of metal that stretches for miles in every direction, an infinite maze of dirty small streets full of sleeping shirtless men and brothels and dumplings burning over charcoal. thursday night i saw some DJs and met some people, an afghani girl who lives in frankfurt, somehow i talked to her in german for an hour while michael talked to her friend who makes pornos in germany and came here to look for talent- the night ended in a soup restauraunt with my friend and I running into, by chance, 2 chinese girls he knew who slurped beef intestines while I wearily drank tea for my throat. last night i was babbling in french for an hour to a thai girl about architecture. this all feels like a big shift from the aimless adolescence i was living so recently; its kinda aimless, maybe, but certainly not adolescent anymore, even if I still am. tonight I'm seeing some chicago DJ with all the 15 party promoters I've met in the past couple of days, I'm trying to charm my way into the poisonous bosom of this city's nightlife and pretty successfully as far as I can tell- though everyone I meet is 5-6 years older than me. All this is frivolous on a surface level but the moments where I find myself staring into the mass of buildings and people from a nighttime rooftop have convinced me that what I am doing is systematically integrating the metropolis into my heart and thoughts. I think nathaniel might move here, which is really exciting, and I'm trying to convince hunter to spend some time here also, though I know he won't.

my work is going great, almost habitually now. I'm scoping out potential jobs in beijing and even other places like moscow; I don't know if these parties are a good enough reason to stay here forever, and I might find more art kids in Beijing. But I'm super happy on a daily level with my work and I think my kids are learning a lot. mostly I'm making everyone write constantly, which has the effect of causing me to have the english language on my mind all the time, and I find I have an instinctual adeptness with grammar points- like when kids get something on the PSAT wrong I know the right answer instantly, and why. there's not been any real new developments in my job; I sit in an office drinking tea and complaining about american politics and scuttle out sometimes to talk about Goethe with 15 year olds, or to eat the delivious noodle lunches that are free for me. My week is really consumed by working, actually, but thats fine- I spend evenings watching HBO movies, to get a better vocabulary of american images, and reading haruki murakami and baudelaire (which I'm trying to do in french, without much luck). I havent done more than a lesson yet, though I'm constantly picking stuff up here and there, but I'm planning on buying some chinese books today even, and working on that very seriously. I think my ambition I had prior to coming here, to become a translator, is pretty stupid; it'd be very hard to get my chinese that good, and plus, why, if I already have an easy and relaxing job that pays me enough to live so nicely and save so much money. however the etymology of chinese characters is really fascinating and once I get a deep enough grasp of things I'm sure I'll be fascinated by it for the rest of my life (I guess I already am, anyway).

I've been thinking a lot about the strange structure of this cities social life, but I don't know if any of you would be interested in that, or have a frame of reference. I do believe especially if our homeland is stupid enough to even consider electing john mccain, that this place is the place to be, compared to the USA or europe even here feels so much more real and happening. like in techno clubs in germany, the club itself is an idea of a city, for consumption by people hungry for the city, or at least it is for me. but here the whole city, and not just those places that seek to be, is hugely urban and fast, which in turn makes the dance parties seem somehow more compelling, as if instead of being a cultural footnote they were an essential expression of a place that is advancing in myriad ways every day. I mention that just cause I like techno and go to parties a lot but in general its like that too, I mean- the streets here are alive in a way that they just arent even in big cities at home, nobody is excited to live in chicago except maybe kids from madison wisconsin but everyone here is excited to live at all in this time and place. living for so many people here seems more tenuous, the poverty of citizens reminding me of the poverty of my friends, so that people of all ages do the things I associate with 20 year olds, frantically rearranging their lives from one day to the next.

sept 6

I feel most of all lucky that I'm teaching english as literature and not just as a basic system. After a week of classes, I know all of my students by name and temperament, enough that I had a 30 minute discussion about one with a chinese teacher yesterday afternoon. I don't know if I mentioned that whenever I feel mildly bummed out about some problem here, I tell myself that nowhere else could I make this much money, live in such a weird place, get to travel, and learn a trade, etc etc. Anyway surprising to report, maybe, because I feel that I gave relatively little thought to it before, but I really enjoy teaching, for the most part. Some of it- grading standardized tests, for example- is totally bogus, but the hour or two of reading students writing per day I've been doing is really wonderful actually. Its strange too because I'm so close to where these kids are- three 12th grade girls from tokyo asked me how old I was, guessing 23 or 24. I don't know what other teachers do, but I know that, when I'm getting dressed in the morning, its as much to impress [M.] and [S.] （two students) as anything else. or in my 10th grade class, where everyones a lot more moody (unsurprisingly) and I see echoes of myself. Strangely or not, I expected strangeness to be characteristic of at least the first little while of being here and so am almost taken aback, still, by how easily I, who 2 weeks ago was in a virginian slumber of lierary magazines, am now wearing a tie to banquets in Gubei- the adjustment has almost not even been one. I havent eaten western food (with the exception of some psuedo- french fries served at one banquet held by the school- but i dont really count that cause they were weird, and also given to me without me asking) since I got here, and typically eat for lunch delicious things like bowls full of dumplings or noodles with spinach and tofu cakes or shrimp with the shell still on.

as far as my social life goes- well- little exaggeration to say that a lot of my needs in that direction, actually, are fulfilled by the dialogues I have with my students,- but I have picked up a few friends, I mean I am superficially friends with all of my colleagues, and theres one or two somewhat smug women who are basically fag hags, except I'm not gay and theres a smidgen maybe of sexual tension. But they take me to places and then take me home and on one occasion even tuck me into bed. One of them is a greek girl from suburban detroit. On the other hand, last night I was at a nightclub in a former bomb shelter, really stupid in the way that all nightclubs are really stupid, and was talking to this one woman- she's a taiwanese from orange county who quit her stockbroker job to open up a store for her fashion designs here, she lives in fuxing park, which is where we went around 2 am to drink tea and kvetch about whether she should break up with her californian boyfriend or not. she lives, for those of you who have seen this book, in one of those cool looking houses memorably captured in greg girard's 'phantom shanghai,' outside all ornate, rotted plaster and woodwork, inside dusty wooden brown hallways strangled with various electrical wires and staircases and tea leaves, leading to, i guess, apartments furnished with ikea by LA fashion designers. I think that tonight I may go with her and some of her friends, also older people (late twenties) and having lived here for a while, to another bar I went to last week, run by a parisian who likes anime and techno and owning a bar full of deadbeat nigerians trying to sell bad drugs.

I remember the first time I came here (to china, not SH specifically) my reaction was, this is so weird, its not like my home, but now my reaction is, this is so normal, this is exactly what I would have predicted shanghai be like. which is, not like home, at all- life feels more exciting here if only because somewhat stranger, and everyone has money, or at least I do. there's a weird sense of the avant garde scene here in that its so undergirded by kind of subpar foreigners, foreigners=hipsters by default here if only in that hipster denotes, 1, especially phyiscally attractive and notable to all strangers on the street, 2, having a tendency to spend money on unusual or only semi necessary things, and 3, possessing a vast deal of cultural capital that everyone else wants to have. so the night scene here is like, half the coolest people in this megacity and half drunk australians. I think thats got to be notable, if only because this country that everyone says is going to be a cultural behemoth is producing a generation of filmmakers and artists and rock musicians and DJs etc who go to the same kind of boliches where I meet taiwanese fashion designers and have headaches. the paradigm of alernative culture here is firmly set to a kind of weird pan-anglophone hip but not too hip level, a city where all of a sudden moderately attractive bob marley fans become high spenders at the cities nicest club. I was thinking about this yesterday at a banquet- leaving a vast hall full of probably 1000 people (my colleagues) all seated at tables for ten, a janitor probably from the provinces was staring in with hungry eyes, at this event which I had been more annoyed by than anything else. its a weird feeling to have a life that I assumed so easily, like donning an article of clothing, be the acme of what everyone here aspires to, to have things I take for granted be seen with ferocious desire. this morning was about to aska policeman for directions, when I saw him interrogating a straggling guy in front of me, rifling through some dirty papers and handcuffing him- I guess he must have been from some lonely poor town, and came to the big city, as immigrants everywhere do, in the hopes of abusive employment as a fry cook or something. All foreigners are required to keep copies of their passport on them- I havent yet made the copy,- but I've never had, nor known anyone, a problem yet. For sure a sense of unreality permeates everything that I'm doing, a woman I went on a date a cold manhattan evening last january lives in beijing now (its her hometown) and we were going to meet up- we couldnt, cause of my work, but she passed on to me the contact information of her friend, director of a modelling agency, who I may potentially work for? I take these events the only way a person possibly could do, which is, basically to ignore them because they have no correspondence to the reality I grew up believeing in. I still feel dissolute- I mean obviously, I'm waking up with headaches on the couches of people met the night before- but in many ways I'm treated, by my students for sure but by the whole society, with a marked respect and interest. I may go to beijing this mid autumn festival, or seoul, where I got into touch with some old military school friends who are from there. its strangely exhilirating, too, to make these cities- bangkok, tokyo, seoul, etc- from wikipedia articles into familiar haunts, in the way that I know and have friends in most big american cities, and some european ones. I really don't know what I'll do after this, I'm still a a loss as to what would offer me most resistance.