Having uploaded this stencil design to the internet, and having told you you can do whatever you want with it (you can), I couldn’t be responsible for your own autonomous deployment of this image, wherever you wish.
Here at POSZU, when I’m not lecturing you, I like to think I keep you informed. And when I learn about the hot shit from Rupture, well, I think I ought to pass it on.
This. If you read the blog post from Mudd Up, apparently the pointy boots is a thing.
Back “home”, if you want to call it that, after probably one of the most enlightening and invigorating trips in a long time. I wouldn’t say that I fell in love with China, but I did fall in love with the sense of de-centering, the uncanny cultural forces cathecting in and out of everything around me, the juxtaposition of one’s culture with another that cannot be duplicated or simulated in anyway, and at the same time, the world-embracing sense of human species-hood that comes from stepping outside of one’s comfort barrier, and landing on one’s feet. I was reminded that travelling can be one of the hardest and most expensive things to do, but it can also be rewarding to the point at which it is absolutely necessary for an intelligent human being to do, at least in some degree. The rut of routine is the demon of society. Without experiencing difference of some kind, we retreat to the worst of human habits and short-circuited urges that our id can find within itself, with which it occupies the mind, praying to the brute god of undifferentiated sameness.
A good month, to cut all the It’s a Small World, Cosmopolitan crap. And now it’s the busiest August ever, with quite a lot planned for POSZU.
After I decompress and sort everything I noted, photographed, and thought about over the last month, I should have about four good posts here. There are also the things that don’t involve China directly that I’ve thought about, that I need to get on.
So no more introduction than that. Let’s stop messing around and get busy.
[This post got stuck in blog purgatory about two weeks ago. But better late than never!]
Over 700 photos taken so far. I’ll sort them out and have a couple marathon photo sets when I get back, when I’m not trying to blog via cell phone.
One thing you’ll see many of is the outside of apartment blocks. The locals think I’m crazy, wandering through neighborhoods snapping photos of windows. Maybe you do too? But the locals stare at my hair, so I feel I’m even with them at least.
Went to the 798 Art District today, which is out in a bunch of former factories.
Which is an awesome idea, right? On of the first major Chinese electronics factories from the late fifties, repurposed by avant-garde artists.
Except, as naturally happens, good art space becomes good gallery space, and good gallery space gets expensive. Or in this case, officiated by the state into a modern art tourist attraction.
Old steam conduits now hold billboards, and the place is crawling with people, yet no artists to be seen.
It’s characteristic China. If something is going to be official, it’s going to be big. There’s like 200 galleries here.
Is this ironic? In China, it’s hard to tell, and I have a suspicion that what is lost in translation is actually siphoned off in some sort of surplus value profit taking, some kind of currency exchange. Or maybe the irony is the value that we are taking?
Some good stuff. We saw some good art, though we saw crap too, just like anywhere else. Look at this exterior to a gallery above, made from glass half-enclosing some turbines or transformers of some sort. That’s China. The expanding consumerism is a bit sickening, but as a hayseed American in from the sticks to visit the new superpower, it’s still a sight to be seen.
OMG you guys. We are in so much trouble. We went to Joy City tonight, which is the mall that puts every shopping center in America to shame. Also, .9 Full-Bladerunner. If it had been raining, maybe .93.
This is the expensive mall in Beijing, with all the foreign brands. It had every brand I’ve ever heard of, and that many again that I hadn’t. I submit to you the diagram of the fourth floor. Coolhunters, feel free to crib these names.
But that is not it, because there are ELEVEN of these floors. And each has a hip name, to help you remember where you’re at.
Each floor has a name, so you can remember where you are.
This is not an event ending, this is just the sidewalk in the evening. Too many people to cross the busy street, right? Well they thought of that.
This is the pedestrian viaduct over the street. You can see the lights better from up here anyway.
The cyberpunks thought we’d be assimilated by Japanese culture. They were wrong, but only by several hundred miles.
My itchy shutter finger aside, I find myself pretty much gawking my way through Beijing.
These reminded me of the arcologies from Simcity 2000. There were four of them, but I couldn’t get them all in one shot.
I’m probably one of the few tourists that photographs subways out of genuine interest. These doors keep you from falling on the tracks when there’s no train in the station, but I’ve only seen them on the 5 Line so far.
The National Museum of China. There is no way to impress upon you through photographs how massive this building is.
Basically, the people on the other side of the entrance hall are so small they don’t show up on this photo.
Art from inside the museum, which is dedicated to Chinese history, both classical and revolutionary.
This hall was apparently dedicated to images of soldiers, police, and emergency personnel. No translations were available.
I like to think that inside each eyeball of a statistician, lies one of these little whirligigs, constantly spinning as he or she apprehends the world.
These are some of my favorite Small Stuff pictures so far. Passports are one of the few instances of really quality print today. While much of bureaucracy is trending towards the electronic, and thankfully so, passports remain an application of delicate print, where the delicacy is used as a security measure. This is my old passport, pre-RFID, so the design has changed. But you can see the important of the grain of the paper, as well as an overlay of litho inks done in precise colors. A color copy of a passport, done on even the best quality digital equipment, would be instantly recognizable on simple magnification. To create a decent forgery, one would have to have the exact plates, ink, and paper used in the official version, and even then I am sure there are other techniques and indicators in the print process I don’t know that would let an expert tell the different.
The imprint of a typewriter compared to a black and white copier shot from Monday. A typewriter is similar to a letterpress, in which every character is created by a pre-molded piece of type. This creates sharp lines and the characteristic imprint in the piece of paper, but also necessitates setting each page of text before hand. A “laser” style toner machine uses an image loop charged with ions to create a one-off “plate” for adhering toner to paper. The lines are much less precise, but can be reset hundreds of times a minute during printing.
Digital color printers also use the 4 color process method, but with toner rather than ink. Compared to litho printing, the toners can melt and achieve a smoother color gradient, depending on the size of the toner. Also, because the toner is more translucent than ink, overprinting achieves a color gradient as well.
“Full color” print is typically achieved by mixing different dot densities of four main colors, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, in what is known as the four color process. While this is standard full color print in your magazine or postcard, different effects can be achieved by mixing more particular colors in a similar process. Check out the color bars on the flap of your cereal box or other packaging to see the different inks that went into creating the image as you eye perceives it.
These dot patterns are the detail of a image of a grassy field from a magazine.
