I helped Loretta Chao from the Wall Street Journal produce this video on a kid from Henan she saw filming a protest on Tian’anmen Square yesterday. A fantastic, fascinating character. High on China like he’d injected some sort of narcotized liquid patriotism. Wish I could have used more of him, but Internet attention span research tells us to keep everything to under four minutes. Alas.

It’s happened at last, I thought. Well, then, let it come.

I was relieved (and also, I will admit, a little disappointed) to discover I had nothing to fear. There were no new entries in the comments section. No jingoistic outbursts accusing me of hating China. No obscenities leveled at my family. No response whatsoever. Visiting the page that linked to my blog, I was surprised to discover all of the vitriol had instead been bestowed on TBWA, the group that had dreamed up the Adidas campaign.

What landed TBWA on Anti-CNN’s shit list is not the Adidas campaign, which appears to have thrilled most Chinese people, but its contributions to a separate 2008 Games PR blitz being undertaken by Amnesty International.

As one might expect, the Amnesty International ads aim to portray the Beijing Olympics as a travesty for human rights. The organization has taken a variety of approaches in service of this goal, including one ad that replaces the candle in its logo with an Olympic torch, but most of the series uses the Olympic events themselves to highlight the various ways in which Chinese authorities mistreat Chinese prisoners. There appear to be five of these—boxing, shooting, swimming, weight lifting and archery—with TBWA responsible for the last three (Slovakia’s WUW Saatchi and Saatchi did the others).

Like the Adidas ads, TBWA’s work for Amnesty International is striking, with tremendous attention to detail. In the swimming ad, a prisoner lies shirtless and prostrate between the starting blocks, grimacing as one of the two Chinese policeman straddling him lifts his head out of the pool. Likewise, in the archery ad (see above), a Chinese policeman is shown strolling away with a smile on his face, having strapped a prisoner to the front of a target——the poor man’s fate made clear by another blood-stained target lying on the ground opposite a previously dispatched victim, barely visible in the bottom corner of the frame. Each ad is rendered in gritty, washed-out blues and grays with a message proclaiming, “After the Olympic Games, the Fight for Human Rights Must Go On.” The series earned TBWA a 2008 Cannes Press Lions bronze medal.

The ads attracted the attention on the popular Chinese Internet forum Tianya not long after the Cannes Lions awards were announced, and from there to Anti-CNN, where it quickly amassed six pages’ worth of comments. Predictably, the response in these venues has been less than enthusiastic.

A significant part of the Anti-CNNers’ anger over the ads seems to stem from the fact they were produced out of New York-based TBWA’s French offices. Thanks to the disastrous Paris leg of the Olympic torch relay earlier this year, Chinese nationalists now seethe with hatred for anything having to do with France. Hence, Anti-CNN, Tianya and other Chinese discussion sites are now rife with “fuck TBWA, fuck France”-type commentary.

But not all of the criticism has been unhinged.

“One company, two completely different ways of acting,” one poster wrote on Anti-CNN’s discussion board. “If a company doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong, is willing to make money no matter where it comes from, then it shouldn’t be allowed to make a cent here.”

For all its ignominy as a symbol of frothing-at-the-mouth Chinese nationalism, Anti-CNN doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable. It’s basic position on CNN, after all, is one many people have taken at one point or another, regardless of nationality. And in the case of TBWA, at least a few users of the site make valid points, regardless of where one stands on the Olympics human rights issue.

As far as I can tell, no one at TBWA has been publicly forced to explain how the company justifies gorging itself on rah-rah Olympic sentiment one moment only to vomit it all back up the next. How does the company account for itself? Is the Amnesty campaign an effort to balance the corporate karma ledger? Was there some breakdown in communication between the French and Chinese offices?

With a slogan like “Disruptive Ideas Expressed Through Media Arts,” it seems more likely the company is simply trying to milk a controversial event for all its worth——in which case, they deserve whatever abuse they get, whether from within China or anywhere else.

I’m not sure exactly how the Hong Kong transport authority determines which license plates will be auctioned at any given time, but the list for this next auction has some interesting entries. There’s plenty of local-sounding names (MRS CHUM) and animals (SHEEP, BUNNY) but then there’s a whole range of other options ranging from the ironic (EM1SS1ON) to the utterly baffling (TOMCRUZ).

The general portrait this particular list seems to paint is of a religious and, yes, materialistic city, but one with decent taste in secondary Hollywood action movie characters.

First round:

1) ALPHA
2) 1CEMAN
6) HUNG 678 (A reference to the 678 International Club massage parlor in Shenzhen? Or maybe it’s the Best Casinos Online Directory?)
30) 20061122 (The Playstation 3 launched in Japan on November 11, 2006, but that can’t be it. Please help.)
35) 1LUV2EAT, available in 2 rows: 1LUV 2EAT
43) BOBAFETT, available in 2 rows BOBA FETT
49) CASHMERE
62) ANALYST
68) PUKKA
83) CNOOC

Second round:

1) HO ONE
31) P1NG AN
32) FAM1LY
37) BMW M3
49) HEADFAME (For the ultimate administrative assistant)
53) TOMCRUZ
67) VU1TTON
74) DOGAROO (??????)
80) EM1SS1ON
92) W W J D
93) PSALM121
94) HA HA 88

For those who want to get their hands on one of these treasures, the auction takes place July 19th at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wanchai, with the first round starting at 9:25am.

According to the all-time top ten list, the top getter is “18″ (not “8″) auctioned off to some lucky bugger last year for HK$16.5 million. Anyone who knows why someone might pay two million bucks for that number, please explain.

[Image: A genuine Hong Kong license plate, courtesy of Mark Oh!]

I use “casualty” here in the wide sense. The East Asian languages and cultures department at Berkeley will not die next year. It will, however, sustain egregious injury.

Come next fall, according an article in the Daily Californian, classes in Japanese, Korean and Chinese will have to be cut by 40 percent, 66 percent and 54 percent, respectively. The number of students taking those classes will have to be reduced by at least 1,500. As a result, no students outside the EALC will be allowed to study those languages.

In other words, the option of adding a little Chinese or Korean or Japanese to, say, a degree in history or engineering or business will no longer exist as of next year. At one of the world’s foremost institutions for the study of Asia. At an institution that just cut the ribbon on a new building—the C.V. Starr East Asian Languages Library, cost: $46 million—to house it’s world class collection of Asian language materials.

I will admit to taking a certain perverse satisfaction in this turn of events vis-a-vis the library. It pained me to no end to walk by that building while it was under construction, knowing it would open precisely as I was scheduled to leave the school. Oh, how I seethed with jealousy at the convenient access later generations would have to a legendary collection that, in my time, was scattered about campus in various dusty basement corners, half-lost in the abyss of pre-digital card catalogs. Now it seems those later generations won’t have the skills to make use of the collection after all. (“Ha ha,” he chuckles to himself, twiddling his fingers with Burns-like glee. “Suckers!”)

I suspect students inside the EALC may also be secretly dancing a little victory jig, now that they have their department to themselves. While I can’t speak for Japanese or Korean, Chinese classes at Berkeley are woefully over-crowded. I took two semester’s worth of Mandarin under the EALC’s auspices while in journalism school and in both it proved necessary to drag chairs in from neighboring classrooms to accompany the hordes. I spoke an average of two minutes, at most, in each class–not effective when one is trying to learn a language of such infuriating difficulty. Compare that to my undergraduate experience at a private college, where my five Mandarin co-sufferers and I were forced to endure the excruciating and humiliating, but ultimately helpful, ordeal of speaking the language constantly.

In reality, of course, this has the makings of an unmitigated tragedy. An empty CVSEALL will be a sad, sad sight. And the advantage to language majors turns out to be no advantage at all. The way the math works out, classes will still be just as crowded, but without the advantage of those silent non-majors sitting politely–and silently–in the back. Imagine, a whole generation of Berkeley Chinese literature majors who don’t know how to speak the language because they all had to compete madly with their peers for scraps of time with their teachers.

According to an AP report last month, the number of college students studying Mandarin in the US jumped 50 percent between 2002 and 2006.

In view of the decision, one is tempted to assume the university’s administrators may be dipping a bit too often into the campus police station’s stash of confiscated marijuana. In fact, the EALC’s predicament is an unfortunate consequence of how languages are taught–or, rather, who teaches them.

The governor’s budget proposal for next year will cut $30 to $40 million in funds for Berkeley. Since tenure rules prevent downsizing the professorial population, the university has decided to cut positions for non-tenured lecturers. It just so happens that at Berkeley, as elsewhere, the responsibility for teaching foreign languages falls to lecturers.

Students have mounted a valiant campaign to fight the cuts, with a Facebook group, a couple blogs (here and here) and an online petition. I sincerely wish them the best. It’s been bad enough watching the journalism school drift rudderless after it’s failed dean search. Were UC Berkeley as a whole to slide into irrelevance because of this, it’ll just do horrible things to the obituary value of all that tuition money I pumped into the place.

To the students: Should the protest effort fail, here is the best DIY option I’ve found: www.nciku.com. You can start by looking up 涸辙之鲋.

[Image: C.V. Starr library dedication, by Peg Skorpinski]

A new Associated Press revelation that American drinking water contains a pharmacy’s worth of prescription drugs provides ripe territory for all manner of irresponsible commentary—too ripe, alas, for me to ignore.

For those who haven’t seen the news yet, here’s the gist:

People take pills. Their bodies absorb some of the medication, but the rest of it passes through and is flushed down the toilet. The wastewater is treated before it is discharged into reservoirs, rivers or lakes. Then, some of the water is cleansed again at drinking water treatment plants and piped to consumers. But most treatments do not remove all drug residue.

According to AP, trace amounts of various drugs were discovered in water supplies located in 24 major cities (serving 41 million people).

The Senate has already latched on to the most obvious inference, i.e., that the nation’s drinking water authorities have, once again, failed to inform the public about a potential danger lurking in its taps (Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-CA, among others, is “alarmed at the news”). And I imagine it won’t be long before others will take up the report to rail against misguided American faith in Pfizer, et al as providers of pill-form health and happiness. But to me, the truly great thing about this report is what it reveals about the drug-taking habits, thus the travails of life, in different parts of the country, Boxer’s home turf in particular.

Some of the results confirm what most of us already expected: bad eating habits in Philadelphia (high cholesterol and heart attack drugs), bi-polar boredom in New Jersey (mood stabilizers), and sacrilege in San Francisco (sex hormones). Others are gloriously counter-intuitive, as with the anxiety medications found in the drinking water of more than 18 million people in Southern California.

Anxiety? California? Impossible, you say. California is sun. California is George Clooney and Arnold Schwartzenneger. California is oiled bodies on the beach, organic produce, rolling with rag-top down. Tanqueray and chronic, sure. Xanax and Klonopin? Surely not.

Well, I just finished a four-year sojourn in California and I feel considerably less anxiety-ridden since leaving. It probably matters that when I left California, I also left graduate school, where severe mental disorders come free with tuition. Yet even before I entered graduate school, I noticed a persistent emotional instability, coincident with a proclivity to self-medication, not just in myself, but amongst many transplant Californians.

I suspect this has largely to do with expectations. I suspect people who move to California do so anticipating that the sun, the proximity to George Clooney and the locally grown tomatoes in their non-farmed fish tacos will somehow melt their worries away, make them laid back, what have you. After they arrive and realize they are not, in fact, feeling so laid back——life can be shitty anywhere, it seems——they nevertheless pretend to be laid back because that is what everyone else is doing. (“Who wants to be the asshole ruining everyone else’s mood?” they ask. “Not me. No no no.”) The pressure mounts. They have no one to talk to, or at least no one who won’t respond with those earnest platitudes about stopping to smell things or getting in touch with oneself that always make it so much worse. So they start talking to themselves instead. Then they turn to drugs to quiet the voices. If they lose perspective, or are incautious, they end up like Heath Ledger.

Of course, this is just a theory, and one with no basis in science whatsoever. And it probably has no bearing on people of naturally sanguine disposition (the real assholes). But if you’re anything like me and you’re contemplating a move to La Jolla or Newport Beach, it might not be a bad idea to hit up your HMO for a benzodiazepine or two beforehand. Or just trade bottled water for tap once you arrive.

[Image courtesy of klynslis]

The project was a profile of the Society for Creative Anachronism, a global group of Middle Ages Re-creators with upwards of 30,000 members scattered in 19 “kingdoms” ranging from California to Japan. The group was founded in 1966 in Berkeley, CA during a theme party hosted by writer Diana Paxson (co-author with Marion Zimmer-Bradley of the Avalon series of fantasy novels). Paxson still lives in Berkeley, in a Gothic house guarded by gargoyles on El Camino Real, just down the street from where another of the multimedia team members, Zachary Slobig, used to live.

This post contains two videos from the original project, both shot during a minor war staged between two factions within the Kingdom of the West (northern and central California plus Alaska and northern Nevada) in Gilroy, CA in the spring of 2006. There’s also a radio piece I did for North Gate Radio, the journalism school’s radio magazine program, on the SCA’s legendary fighter practice in the parking lot of Berkeley’s Rockridge BART station.

The team: Michael Zhao, Zachary Slobig, James Buck, yours truly.

“Thunder Clap,” War in Gilroy.

YouTube link.

“What is the SCA?”

YouTube link

Radio spot from North Gate Radio’s spring 2007 “greatest hits” show:

The offender this time around is a Cultural Revolution-themed restaurant. The offense? Installing a “Liberation Zone” sign above its toilet. From Reuters:

“Times Gone Past,” a restaurant featuring waiting staff clad in People’s Liberation Army uniforms and decorated with photos of revolutionary heroes and maps of military battles, had taken the “red” theme too far and had been ordered to remove the sign, Thursday’s Beijing News said.

“Many customers had expressed their dissatisfaction, believing that putting ‘liberation zone’ on par with a toilet was akin to blaspheming the revolution and was an overly-casual use of the term,” the paper said.

In a country dangerously starved for the catharsis of national self-deprecation, this comes as a major blow. Seriously.

Full Reuters article here, original Beijing Times report (Chinese) here.

[Image Source: Beijing Times]