Ich Bin Ein Beijinger

Cool gadget of the month

What is this thing? It's called--or will soon be called--the Flip, and if I'm any judge of such things, I think it'll sell like jianbing if and when it's introduced here. I was invited along by Jim Boettcher of Focus Ventures to see the Flip (currently being sold as "Point & Shoot" by U.S.-based Pure Digital Technologies) demo'd by Taylor Libby, an impressively fluent Mandarin-speaker from Seattle who's plotting China market entry for Pure Digital. It's priced very reasonably, listing at about $130 though you can pick 'em up cheaper on Amazon and at lots of retail outlets.

Think of it as the Lomo of video cameras--it's light, compact, and ideal for guerilla vloggers. It could get a cult-like following the way Lomo has. Or then again, depending on how it's marketed, it might just take with new parents who always want to have a video recorder handy.

It's ODM'd in Taiwan, not surprisingly, and has been on the market in the U.S. since fall of last year.

The cool things about it: it's the size of an iPod, nice form factor, records up to an hour of DVD-quality video; has the most incredibly simple interface imaginable--no on-screen UI, no menus, just super intuitive buttons; has that flip-up USB arm you can see in the pic that plugs right into your Mac or PC; and has all the software onboard--installed in seconds on your machine. The sound quality's surprisingly good. Oh, and on the software interface, you can upload your videos at a click to either YouTube or Grouper. It also comes with a simple auto editor that intelligently identifies highlights from selected clips and stitches them together. Don't take it from me: Walter Mossberg, the tech guy at the WSJ, praised it saying "stunningly simple to use... quality is remarkable."

Drawbacks? No SD card slot, but I can live without that because of the USB, and I suppose some will complain that there's no still photo capability. (That would have spoiled the simplicity of the interface, Taylor argued convincingly). This sucker's going with me everywhere and may even inspire me to start vlogging. I'll take it to my show tonight and try it out.

Oh, the handsome guy in the video screen in the pic is Tony Lo, a good VC friend of mine who lives in Shanghai. Tony just got married earlier this year. Congrats, Tony!

Metal Fest Friday

Chunqiu/Suffocated (Zhi Xi) axeman Kou Zhengyu turns 28 on Friday, and he's celebrating as he has for the past six years by putting on a big Metal fest. Kou's one of the coolest guys and best players on the scene, well loved by pretty much everyone who knows him.

See the reminder a few posts down, which has details about our Thursday show at Star Live, which will showcase some of Beijing's Chinese folk-inflected bands. (Spring & Autumn, despite our foundations in Metal, has some discernibly Chinese minzu stuff going on musically). Hope to see some of you at one or both of the shows! Come up and introduce yourselves.

And ponder with me if you will the deep mystery of why so many Metal bands insist on rendering their logos in that illegible thorn-like font. I have no idea what the two of the three on the bottom of this flyer actually say, but the bands--Evil Thorn (there they go with the thorns again!), Ritual Day, and Bloody Climax are all actually pretty fun.

By the way, we rehearsed tonight in a new place in Beijing called Jin Nezha (金哪吒) near Gulou, at 9 Baochao Hutong (宝抄胡同9号). Great place with excellent amps and drums, clean rooms, and only 40 kuai an hour for the big room. Sorry, didn't think to write down the phone number but I'll post it later.

Blogspot Blogs Unblocked in Beijing

As of Wednesday afternoon at 4:52, it appears that Blogger/Blogspot blocks are no longer being blocked. China-based readers, please let me know what you're seeing from where you sit.

And while you're at it, please see whether Wikipedia is unblocked, as I've been reading on a couple of blogs in the last hour. (No luck for me here at the office).

Fixing Chinese Journalism - the "Authority of the Community"

David Bandurski, project researcher at the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre, posted translated excerpts from this fascinating editorial by Oriental Morning Post deputy editor Chen Jibing (陈季冰), which appeared in the China Youth Daily on 27 March. The upshot: Chen's diagnosis for the ethical ailments which plague the Chinese media isn't governmental regulation and oversight, but rather civil society--stronger non-governmental associations capable of setting their own ethical guidelines.

The most basic reason why we cannot establish effective "norms" in many sectors is that we lack the necessary social "communities". Academic freedom needs to be supported by an "academic community", and journalistic norms need to be supported by a "media community". Of course, these sorts of communities are different from the government in that they are not backed up by legal force (the power to restrain under the law). Nevertheless, anyone who challenges the authority of the community will automatically lose their credentials as a community member, and owing to the internal operation of mutual acknowledgement and censure within the community, the community works as a strong binding force.

Chen goes on to cite as an example European football associations, which he says work their ethical suasion even without legal teeth.

What I'm arguing is that journalistic norms are the precondition for freedom of speech, and the creation and protection of journalistic norms relies upon the emergence of a "media community".

Some boiler-plate caveats follow: this is the China Youth Daily, after all.

I don't mean that we should give the work of propaganda offices entirely over to a news media association. And I'm not saying the government should not control [the media] from here on out. What I'm saying is that because the functions and resources of the government and industry communities are different, they should have different spheres of management. In light of China's national realities, propaganda authorities should be responsible for questions of guidance in the ideological realm of media.

Despite this, there's meat in the message, and I'm sure everyone agrees that it's a nice idea: peer censure, and not government regulation, is the basis of a responsible media in those geographies where one can be said to exist. But let's be realistic here. Civil society in China is embryonic, feeble, and exists in China at the pleasure of Beijing. It's allowed to develop when it serves the interests of the state. Chen argues that those interests are indeed aligned:

Media professional associations should be charged with ordering market competition, professional principles for journalists and other questions belonging to the "social" sphere. Once this pattern of assuming respective roles and working together emerges, "freedom" and "regulation" will complement one another.

But I wonder whether a public sphere professional media association in China could be expected to circumscribe its activities to "ordering market competition" and urging "professional principles for journalists." How long would it be suffered to live? Any better suggestions?

Reminder: Chunqiu (Spring & Autumn) Shows Thursday & Friday

Hair's gonna fly, heads will bang, and the Cloven-Hooved Prince of Darkness will have his due on Thursday and Friday night. Please do come check out my band, Chunqiu (Spring & Autumn). We're playing the Star Live (Xingguang Xianchang, 星光现场) on Thursday and at the New Get Lucky (Xin Hao Yun, 新豪运) with a few other bands--including Suffocated, which will rock your face quite off.

If you want a great venue, come to the Thursday show. If you're more into the lineup and the venue doesn't matter as much, come to the Friday show: that's bound to showcase some of the 'Jing's  finest Metal acts. Both shows start 9-ish. Oh, that's me on the right. Hail, Satan.

An IAB for the Chinese Internet?

Anyone who works in the world of the Chinese Internet knows that it's plagued by more than just bad designers of the maximalist school (where did I hear it once refered to as the "Las Vegas school of Web design?), and by more than overzealous censors who make us bother with proxies.

A third pox on the Sinic Web is the lack of reliable metrics, and of a neutral regulatory body that can keep everyone more or less honest. It doesn't just hurt advertisers, who can't get a good sense for effectiveness of online ads. It's kept the economics of the Chinese Internet in a state of arrested development. It's created an online landscape plagued by forced pop-ups (they drive page-views, after all) and all sorts of malware created by Internet entrepreneurs to impress gullible Sandhill Road venture capitalists. In fact, the lack of trustworthy numbers perpetuates the pack-the-page full, make-everything-blink look of Chinese Web sites: in this world without reliable metrics, the portals can't be blamed for selling online advertising by time and page placement rather than on a CPM or CPC basis, and for crowding their most popular pages with ads.

Help is on its way, I'm told. The director of the Internet Society of China, Hu Yanping, pictured above, stopped by the office briefly today to talk to me about an upcoming conference on Internet video and advertising, and to enlist Ogilvy's support in an initiative now underway to create a sort of Chinese IAB. Glad to see they're involving the agencies on this. The Internet Society's efforts should dovetail well with Amcham's Online Audit Initiative, headed up by Tom Melcher, Anne Stevenson-Yang, and Matt Roberts. (Anne in particular has worked hard to write an excellent white paper for the Amcham Media & Entertainment Forum, of which this is initiative is a part).

No one expects things to improve overnight, but it's encouraging to see that Hu's group is working with Nielsen/NetRatings and with the IAB to establish industry standards where none really exist. I expect Hu will come speak to the Amcham group about what they're trying to do and how they're going about it. He's said he's very interested in their perspectives. The one Online Audit Initiative meeting I attended was well-attended, which I took to be an encouraging sign.

But there were planes to catch, and bills to pay

Yes, he really did learn to walk while I was away, just like in the Harry Chapin song. Okay, little Johnny can't quite walk--it's more a stumble, lasting anywhere from four to fourteen wobbly paces taken with arms outstretched--but still, I hear "Cats in the Cradle."

But the travel's been worthwhile. SXSW was wonderful on balance, though admittedly I didn't have the best of luck in my last night at SXSW, and ended up guessing poorly based on advice of various half-drunk indie-music geeks. I've noticed that indie music geeks can't describe bands without reference to the Velvet Underground, which I suppose is the archetypal indie band anyway. The very last band I saw was the biggest downer: soundtrack to a suicide, I thought, plagued by the poor musicianship and odd combo of narcissism and excess self-pity that's so common among post-rock bands.

Bad luck with luggage, too: I spent much of last weekend fretting about a suitcase containing dozens of irreplaceable photos lost somewhere in the vast expanse of the American Midwest. It turned up intact, at last, in Madison, and wasn't enough to ruin things. Had some fun jams in Madison with my two best friends, including some with me playing banjo however ineptly. I find I enjoy playing old time/bluegrass stuff, I've found. Ate hearty German food, attended a Tequila tasting, threw an impromptu dinner party where I cooked seven or eight Chinese dishes, went out and threw a frisbee, and had a generally terrific time. To cap it off, Drew--not that this surprised me given how happily and profoundly in love he's been--informed me that he popped the question and got a "yes" from his lovely girlfriend Rachel.

Home to Beijing for a day, long enough to install WIndows Vista and play around with it for a bit. (I'll write something up on my Vista experience at some point).

Then it was off to Taipei for--I know, it's inexcusable--the very first time. I've been living in this part of the world for this long, and for some reason I've just never gotten over there until Thursday. I suppose what I'm struck most by is the similarity to the more developed (especially Southern) Chinese cities: I somehow thought it would feel more different. Just felt, well, like a fantizi version of Shanghai, but with mountains ringing it and slightly older roads. They even use reasonably standard Hanyu Pinyin on road signs: I saw few vestiges of Wade-Giles. My Ogilvy and ERA colleagues were most gracious hosts, and packed my schedule full of very productive meetings and delicious meals. Head of PR Dr. Joseph Pai even accompanied me to the Academia Sinica at Nangang, where I visited the library named in honor of my paternal grandfather, Kuo Ting-yee, who was head of the Academia's modern history bureau. There's a memorial room in an adjacent building (picture by David Spindler), where I spent a good hour reading about a life I knew so little about. (He died in New York when I was just 9, but I saw him often as a boy and my memories of him are very clear).

Fathers and sons. Growing up, somehow I was considered to tilt toward the distaff side, probably owing to stronger expression of Liu family genes in me. But I've grown very close to my father in the last ten years, what with him living in Beijing (and, especially since I quit Tang Chao and found something like professional direction in life). The man we once knew as "Old D&T" (Old Dour-and-Taciturn") has become downright cuddly as a septogenarian. He probably won't have a memorial room or a library named after him, but he'll be my model for fathering, that's for sure. Something he once told me about his own father haunts me: that until his funeral in 1975, he never remembers having touched him.

SXWS Day 2

I'm developing a real fondness for Austin--the hospitality of the local folks, the evident pride they have in the music culture that's grown up here, the efficiency with which the town's handled the massive inflow of people for the Festival. Wandering 6th street and hearing all this music--some of it fabulous, some of it, meh--I keep thinking whether it'd be possible, one day, to do something like this in a city in China. Maybe when my kids are grown up and playing in bands.

The panel on the Chinese music industry I just appeared on seems to have gone over well: we had one curmudgeon in the crowd to said we sounded like a bunch of condescending ugly Americans, but I think he was just put off by the fact that everyone on the panel was a North American. He seemed to paritcularly dislike me. i believe the concensus among others listening was that the guy was a dick.

The other panelists were Michael LoJudice, who runs North American operations for Beijing-based Modern Sky (he was heavily sedated, having had his wrist broken by a bounder for one too many stage dives the night before), Adam Lewis, from Planetary, which bring indie acts to China; my friend Jon Campbell, who works with the Midi Festival, also brings bands over, and is an all-around great person to know on the Beijing music scene despite our sometimes widely divergent musical tasts; and Matthew Kagler, owner of Tag Team Records, which has at least one verh good Chinese band--Lonely China Day (寂寞夏日, EP cover pictured left), a band now moving in a sort of electronic-heavy Mogwai direction but which used to play pretty straight-ahead, Chinese-inflected guitar rock and frequently opened for Chunqiu back in 2002 to 2003. Matthew says they're going lap-top, which to me, an unreconstructed rock guy, is disconcerting. He's brought them and another Beijing band I haven't heard, "Rebuilding the Rights of Statues," to SXSW and says they were well received at their show last night.

For the most part, judging from questions from the audience, they didn't approach with preconcieved notions (excpet the correct ones, about piracy and other IPR issues), were genuinely curious, and asked some very intelligent questions. I'd say a good third of them raised their hands when moderator Vickie Nauman asked whether they'd been to China.

Alas, the timing of the panel caused me to miss the Metal party--a genre conspicously absent from this festival. It's really dominated by post-punk Indie rock bands, though a few of those I've found to be quite entertaining. Tonight I'm hoping to meetup with my old colleague from Linktone, Mark Begert, who has settled in Austin. He's always fun. I'm hoping he'lll join me in seeking out some of the more brutal musical offerings available.

The musical highlight for me so far, by a long shot, was seeing Hayseed Dixie at a club called MoMo's. I had to pull Jon Campbell and Martin Hansen, project manaer of the Danish Rock Council who spends a lot of time in China, away from the horrid Brit-pop band they insisted on seeing so that we could hoof it down to Momo's in time to catch Hayseed's 1am set, and even though we arrived late, I was in utter ecstasy.

Hayseed Dixie's a Nashville-based quartet composed of: a smoking banjo player, an acoustic bassist, a guitarist who doubles on fiddle, and one of the meanest mandolin players I've ever seen. They''re most famous for their country/bluegrass covers of AC/DC songs--thus the name-- but there were some other fabulous surprises in last night's set--including Queen's "Fat Bottomed Girls", replete with vocal harmonies and sped up about triple speed, and a rollcking version of Duelling Banjos. I snagged their set list, which you can see to the right. You can see they did the Sabbath tune "War Pigs," which must have been a gas--had to content myself to watch it on YouTube here, it's awsome--as well as Aerosmith's "Walk This way" and Motorhead's "The Ace of Spades." I'd love to see these guys come to China. Jon, make it happen man!

I'm flying out tomorrow, and going to miss lots of great music. But I'll be spending the weekend with my two best friends--meeting Drew's new girlfriend, and possibly Dave's. They've both settled in the Midwest--Dave (left) in Chicao, where this picture was taken six or seven years ago, and Drew (right) in Madison. I'm glad they've lost the goatees. So late Ninetees.

A bunch of us bought Drew a banjo for his 40th birthday in October, and he made a funny little YouTube short you can see here. Knowing him he's probably highly proficient on the thing by now.

Austin, adieu. I really hope to come back next year.

Pete Townshend at SXSW

Absolutely nothing to do with China--oh wait, something the Who's Pete Townshend said about rock and politics did resonate with me and my thinking about the Chinese rock scene--but I took good notes as this massively iconic figure presented the keynote to the SXSW Conference and Music Festival, and thought I'd share some of what he said.

The Who has iong ranked among my favorite bands, and as much as I love Roger Daltrey's voice, loved the late Keith Moon's drumming, and adored the more recently late John Entwhistle's bass lines, it was Townshend who of course was always the sould of the band. For me, they're the band that produced for me ranks as the most perfect album (Who's Next, though Quadrophenia is up there among my all-time loves too) and best rock song ("Won't Get Fooled Again") to date.

So naturally I was thrilled to hear Townshend speak. He was lucid, as expected, and funny, at time way out there in space, especially when talking about his new project, which will formally launch with a webcast news conference on April 25. That project, which he calls "The Method," was based on the rather abstract concept originally behind Who's Next: that seminal album was originally written as another rock opera in the vein of Tommy called Lifehouse, but the concept-album idea was scrapped. (See the Wikipedia article on Who's Next for the whole story.)

"The Method," which will be Web-based, will supposedly allow subscribers to sit for a musical "portrait," based on inputs (physical? verbal? it's not enitrely clearr) supplied by the subscriber. The result is a unique piece of music corresponding to the subscriber. Townshend says he came up with the idea back during the creation of Lifehouse but "in 1971 there were no computers powerful enough to do what I wanted." He was told, "Nice idea--but you should get treatment. That came later. [audience laughs]."

In his own words, as nearly as I was able to transcribe:

You come to the Website and we give you a piece of music. You own a third of the copyright. This music is elaborated; we bring it all together, and play it in a big event. We gather and share our music together. My idea is that it might sound terrible, like a plane going by, or the gentle undulations of the sea.

On the Punk Rock revolution, he had this to say:

Punk triggered something. It vented something that was there, that needed to be vented. There was nothing wrong with the Electric Light Orchestra. There was nothing wrong with Ian Anderson's [sic] Yes. I was shopping the other day and heard some music, and said, "What an interesting blend of folk and classical--and it was fucking Yes."

Oh, and this is what made me think of Beijing rock, where a political/dissident patina gets painted onto so much music as a marketing ploy, or out of juvenile, misguided iconoclasm:

I didn't know what politics was when I was a kid. If we're going to make [rock music] political, let's make it fucking political.

Hallelujah, brother Pete. I have no objection per se to politics in rock music: I just want rock musicians to acknowledge that most political issues we confront just aren't that simple. For me, 99.99% of the time, reducing any issue to rhyming verses and a repeating chorus is just bullshit sloganeering that doesn't contribute to intelligent discussion. If I had a choice between allowing the ideas of rock musicans or, say, college professors to influence my political thinking, the choice for me wouldn't be a tough one.

My Brother John

My parents aside, there's no individual I owe more to in my personal intellectual and ethical development than my odler brother, John. From my earliest memories, he took a proactive role in teaching me: the basics of grammar and spelling, mathematics, and above all, the natural world. He read Ranger Rick as a boy, and knew the flora and fauna of the hilly, deciduous woodlands of Upstate New York where we grew up. He had a knack for finding Indian arrowheads, for cracking open rocks to reveal fossils, for trapping rare butterflies. He took me along with him, never treating me like the tagalong that I was.

He taught me my respect for science. He taught me the scientific method--not the simple version we learned in school, but the epistemology behind it, the skepticism that must pervade it. He was always a big thinker: while still barely into our teens, he would hold forth on theories that later took root in the works of sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, about the ways that human behavior has evolved, bound up intimately in our very biological being.

I thought of him just now because he posted a comment on a recent blog entry about my time in Austin. "Bro, you have to check out the bats," he said.  The Bats. Couldn't find a band by that name among the hundreds playing here. So I pinged him again, and he sent me this link. Oh--real bats. Pity I'm not going to have the time to see them.

John taught me a love of books, and though our literary tastes have diverged--he's still an avid sci-fi and fantasy reader, while I rarely touch the stuff--he still points me to excellent science writing, concerned to this day that my liberal arts background is a handicap to understanding the realities underpinning our universe.

Of the four siblings In my family, John is easiily the most Confucian in character: scholarly, fierecely familial, ethical. Filial too--though in his own way, and my parents might not see it that way. Ironically, he's the one who's probably least interested in China--in actually living in China, at least.  For that reason, we've fallen somewhat out of touch. I understand: he has a wife and three daughters, a busy job at a software startup in Northern California. But you don't know how I'd value some quality time alone with him, for one of those talks like we used to have lying there at night in the room we shared.