As a multimedia reporter, I admit I am occasionally given to bouts of smugness. I may get no respect from the grizzled guardians of old journalism, I tell myself in these moments, but I am the vanguard, the future—-the intrepid journalistic do-it-all wading into the torrent of 21st century technology to bring the world a new form of storytelling.

Or not, as it turns out.

This past Saturday was the last official day of China’s Spring Festival vacation. To mark the occasion, I went to Ditan Park in the northeast corner of old Beijing to catch the last day of the Spring Festival Temple Fair. I went with the vague hope of catching a Beijing Opera performance, which my neighbor told me was available this year. Instead, after twenty minutes jostling my way through the crowds, hands held boxer-like in front of my face to protect myself from the inflatable animals people were wielding like spears, I ran into the man pictured above, whose name (according the placard in the picture) is Chen Qihuan and whom I now humbly respect as a professional forebear.

Chen is among the last performers of something called layangpian (拉洋片，or “pulled movies”), one of the “Eight Great Curiosities of Tianqiao”—a genre of traditional entertainment I’d never heard of before but which apparently was quite popular a hundred years ago. The centerpiece of layangpian is a large box with peepholes cut into the front, through which the audience watches a series of slide-mounted paintings manipulated by an invisible pulley system in back. The entire thing is operated by one person, who stands on a stool to the side of the box using one hand to manipulate the pulleys and the other hand to play the cymbals, all while narrating the story in a delightfully crude mixture of song and poetry. In other words, a turn-of-the-century audio slideshow.

My Mandarin wasn’t good enough to catch the particulars of the story–something evergreen about the Boxer Rebellion and the effort to cleanse China of foreign devils–but his pitch to the crowd was clear enough: “It can’t compare to a modern movie. It’s not that entertaining. But it’s a hell of a lot cheaper.”

Indeed.

More photos from the temple fair available here.

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: