Street Style Pic @ Beijing

I was in Beijing for a couple of days and a photographer took a picture of me for a Chinese street style website called P1.cn. Beijing is such a cool place - it's a mix of the old and the new, the traditional and the modern. You will see the most trendy people hanging out in "hutong"(very old and narrow streets), near the forbidden city, and around Tian'anmen.

Electronic Books vs. Traditional Books

With the presence of Kindle, iPad and other electronic book readers, it seems like the traditional books are losing to their electronic versions. Geoffrey Flowler and Jeffrey Trachtenberg from the Wall Street Journal think that traditional books may not be able to survive the digital age. Just like in the music industry, people have turned away from physical records and CDs, and embraced the new format of MP3s. David Kusek writes in his book “The Future of Music,” that music is becoming more of a service than a product. It is about “accessing” it, not owning it. Maybe it will be the same for the press industry. For books, it will not be about owning the physical books anymore, but simply about accessing the content. 

However, when Apple first introduced iPad in Hong Kong in July in a book expo, the above theory was not proven. During the expo, it was reported that traditional books appeared more popular than any forms of electronic books. People were more excited about traditional books than the iPad. In the traditional books section, people were lining up to purchase latest traditional books, in contrast to the desolate electronic readers section. 

I was once a “bookworm.”  I am obsessed with the world in these books and well as the physical books themselves. I like touching these books, smelling the scent of the ink, and feeling their weight. I like the cover, the spine, and even the little page numbers in them because they indicate a “process” – from discovering to experiencing, then to loving. For me, reading is not just an emotional experience; it is also a tactile experience. Literature is art, and I like owning the greatest artworks. I like seeing them lining up on my bookshelves, whether or not I have read them all.

And I know I’m not the only one. I asked several of my friends, and most of them told me that they actually prefer traditional books. “Reading on the screen hurts my eye,” they told me, “I just like books. They are so beautiful.”

I also heard from one of my designer friends that today’s book design is all about the tactile experience. It is not about the content anymore. The book design needs to create a tactile experience that readers don’t get from a flat screen. In order to compete with the freely accessible electronic versions online, designers pay much attention to the materials of the book cover, the paper, and the typography. Book design needs to give the book an “edge”, a personality – not just black Times New Roman on a white backlit computer screen. 

Therefore I believe, traditional books are not dead, and will not be. Yes, electronic books will become more popular and more prominent because they are cheap, accessible and easy to store. But some people – people like me, people who see a book as an art – will never give up the touch of the paper, the smell of the ink, and the satisfaction when you turn to the last page.

Documentary: The September Issue

This documentary follows the work process of the Editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine, Anna Wintour, in creating the 2007 September issue.

The documentary focuses on how powerful Anna is in terms of influencing fashion designers and other who work with her such as the creative director of Vogue – Grace Coddington. In this documentary, you can have an idea of how an issue of a fashion magazine is created from initial ideas to the final product. We also see that the designers really respect the editor’s opinions and they would bring in different sketches for Anna to approve on before they actually go on and start working on the collection. So we often see this conflict between the designer and the editor when they do not agree with each other. This demonstrates that the designer’s freedom is limited. A designer cannot just do what he wants to do but he has to listen to different opinions and try to satisfy the needs of the clients and those who will publish your work.

This film also focuses on the relationship between the editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and the creative director Grace Coddington. Both of them have worked for Vogue for a long time and they seem to be in conflict with each other a lot of the times. Sometimes the creative director will have an idea or a photo shoot that she is very excited about but gets “killed” but Anna. In this film, the creative director is portrayed as more of an artist who is really passionate about the work she is doing. There is one line that I remember most clearly. Grace talked about when she started her career, a photographer she worked with taught her to “always keep your eyes open.” She said that no matter where she goes, she never sleeps in the car and just keeps watching everything she sees out of the window and they are all great inspiration. This is the same with design. We just need to pay attention to everything we see around us and they can all become great inspirations.

Vogue is the first magazine that started to put celebrities on the cover and became really successful because of it. It also influenced other publications that followed the trend. There is a conversation that the creative director is talking about how she hates to put celebrities on the cover but she knows that Anna is doing the right thing with the celebrity culture because the magazines will sell because of it. So we can see this clash between art and commerce, and most of the times art will have to sacrifice for commercial purposes because without the money, art could not survive.

In this documentary, we also see that the editor-in-chief is very meticulous about every detail in the magazine. The designers will bring copies of different versions of the cover for her to comment on and approve on. And she often will make very detailed suggestions such as the retouching of the photographs, type treatment and use of color. We can also see the process of the editors get together and determine the order of the pages for the issue. For example, they will put pages that have bright colors and dramatic photographs at the beginning of the magazine because they catch reader’s attention and are good to “open” the magazine.

Film Review: "1428"

2008 5/12 1428 Sichuan

2010 6/21 0800 Los Angeles

I have been hearing about the L.A. Film Festival for the past a few days, but nothing really drove me to go to one of these screenings, until I heard about “1428.”

“1428” – a documentary on the 8.0 mega earthquake happened in Sichuan, China on 14:28, May 12^th, 2008. This documentary was made independently, and will not/can not be distributed in Mainland China due the sensitivity of this issue and, apparently, according to the person from Degenerative film (the distributor of “1428” in the north America region) independent filmmaking is illegal in China. This documentary focuses on the lives of the victims in the disaster zone, and the aftermath of the killing quake. As the director said, this film is a response to all the reports and portrayals of this disaster in the mainstream media in China, and he was aiming to bring the audience something that we could not see in the mainstream media.

And he succeeded in doing so.

When the lights were out, and the first collapsed building appeared on the screen, I knew that I had different feelings and emotions from every other person sitting here with me. For them, it’s a striking, horrifying scene that happened in a remote place in China. But for me, it’s home.

I’m from Sichuan. And the epicenter was only 85 miles away from my home city, Chengdu, where all my family live. I don’t want to talk about the actual event. I have heard and talked too much about this disaster for the past two years. I wasn’t in Chengdu when it happened: I was couple thousand miles away in England. But I remember how I felt when I heard about the number of death in this megaquake on the news, and how I felt when I couldn’t reach my family on phone after the disaster stroke.

But Du Haibin didn’t give us any of those emotions. There have been a number of documentaries before “1428” that are about the Sichuan earthquake, including the Academy-nominated short documentary - China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province. I have watched most of them, and many of them are very emotionally arousing and you break down to tears halfway through the film. But “1428” is different. Despite the emotional attachment I have with this subject, I didn’t have a single tear during the film. The documentary is cold, extremely objective, and blatantly candid. Even there is a strong presence of the filmmaker, he does not offer his own position, or force his emotions onto the audience. He positions himself as an outsider, an observer, and a recorder.

The previous documentaries have mainly focused on the lost lives, the grieving survivors, the collapsed schools, and the conflict between the victims and the Communist government. But Du offers something different. He shows us the lives of the survivors, and how they are trying to move on with their lives after their families and friends are gone. He gives voice to those very ordinary people without any sensitization or dramatization, which filled the mainstream media reports and even the Academy-nominated short documentary. In comparison, “1428” is an honest film, sometimes too honest and can be “boring” for some people. It has many trivial details that have no particular tension or drama. These are the things that we don’t see in the media because they don’t make a “good story.” And this, I think, is what Du means when he said that this film is a response to the mainstream media.

There are a few scenes that stroke me:

When the filmmaker interviewed the survivors, most people expressed that the Communist government had good policies for dealing with the quake, but it’s the local government that did not follow these policies. For remote places like Wenchuan or Beichuan, in a bureaucratic governmental system, it is hard for the central government to monitor what is actually going on at the bottom. In “1428,” you can hear people passionately praise the Communist party, saying that they are lucky to have a government that is willing to help them in such conditions. But at the same time, I also hear scornful laughs coming from a few people sitting behind me – yes, for an average American citizen who has mainly been exposed to the negative aspects and scandals of the Chinese Communist government, these survivors’ appreciation seem like a product of media propaganda. However, when you look into their eyes, you see that the belief is actually their source of hope that helps them to get through the hardest times. It’s very difficult to make a moral judgment here, and Du just simply shows us this, leaving the room for us to make our own meanings based our own beliefs.

Another scene is when an old lady complains to the filmmaker about how she could not get her share of an electric blanket. Later, the people behind her start asking the filmmaker whether he will cut or edit what he films: “if you are not going to cut your film, we will tell you the truth. If you are going to cut your film, we will stop talking now.” This blatantly shows the people’s desire for freedom of expression. They understand that the media is not about the “truth,” and it is extremely difficult to get their voices heard. Censorship and freedom of expression is a very sensitive issue in China, and we have a long way to go for fighting for our “freedom of expression.”

After seeing all kinds of dramatizing and sensationalizing portrayal of this disaster, I’m glad that Du is able to offer us something fresh and honest that stirs more thinking than grieving. We have had enough tears and despairs, and maybe it’s time to look at this catastrophe with a fresh set of eyes. Just like what the high-school student says at the end of this film - he has an unconventional hairstyle, fashionable clothes, and is listening to his iPod near the disaster-restricted zone. Other people tell him to watch his behavior, but he replies, “I lost dozens of family members and friends down there. But the dead are dead. We have to live in reality, don’t we?”

 

Cat 2.55beta

On a sunny summer afternoon, my friend gave my Chanel bag a pair of eyes.

Please click on "Hype" if you like this look. :)

Ginta Lapiņa | Angel & Stardust

I discovered this set of beautiful photographs of Ginta Lapiņa shot by Rony Shram. Her angelic face is gently immersed in the cold morning light and created a other-worldly sense of beauty.