From dGenerate films:
STREET LIFE explores the hidden lives of homeless migrants who survive in the shadows of one of Shanghai’s most historic and affluent streets.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of Chinese migrants are drawn to the allure of Shanghai, one of the world’s most vibrant cities, with hopes of earning a decent living. Some end up in the dark alleys of Nanjing Road, Shanghai’s largest shopping street, where they learn to hustle and scrape together any kind of living they can. One migrant, known as Black Skin, faces numerous pressures in his daily existence, including police violence. Black Skin’s story intersects with those of fellow bottle collectors, enterprising thieves and even a young boy who was abandoned. Eventually Black Skin goes mad, dancing wildly through the crowds of Nanjing Road and in the doorways of luxury shops.
That guy & his belly really reminded me of that one actor in Stephen Chow’s films. For the record, Kung Fu Hustle made me love the idea of Shanghai almost enough to forget how much more I love Taipei in reality.
Some words & pictures in honor of National Trails Day today*, and in belated celebration of the Kohala community’s victory in securing public access to even more of the 175 mile long Ala Kahakai National Historic Trail.
Via Damon Tucker:
[The] nonprofit Maika‘i Kamakani ‘O Kohala purchased more than 27.5 acres of undeveloped shoreline at Kauhola Point, located in Hala‘ula, North Kohala.
Kauhola Point has been used as a community-gathering place from wā kahiko (ancient times) to present day. King Kamehameha I, who united the Hawaiian Islands, rested here after warfare and focus on peacetime activities — recreation, marriage and agriculture. Kamehameha taught his most beloved wife, Ka‘ahumanu, how to surf in the waters of Maliu off the property’s shores. As noted on an 1893 Hawaiian government map, the property was the site of Kamehameha’s Taro Patches and Kamehameha’s Fishpond.
Co-Director of the Ocean Warriors Program, Elizabeth Pickett, reflected, “It has been so rewarding to see the surfers, fishermen and regular users of Kauhola Point come together with the Ocean Warriors to hold coastal cleanups, sell t-shirts, and organize a series of fundraising events to protect this place that we all love. The Ocean Warrior students who have been involved in the protection of Kauhola are proud of what they have accomplished and will remember this forever. Hopefully other communities will be able to learn from the ground-up stewardship process that continues to grow at Kauhola Point.”
Image by Kristin Chiboucas
* So I’m actually on the Big Island today as part of a class on Volcanic Hazards, but in Kalapana not Kohala.
Breakfast of champions: ramen & soju! from the Korean film Daytime Drinking
Korea is not a good place to be a teetotaler. Even the Korean drinking spot we frequent here in Honolulu — Little Seoul — has a seven-hour-long happy hour.
I’m thankful none of my professors here demand their students drink Korean car bombs (shot of soju in beer, naturally) but then again, drinking in America is too restricted/restrictive. The Puritan origins of the American colonies peep through. Except for Fourth of July bbqs and those horrible brunch mimosas, I can’t really think of socially acceptable daytime drinking in the U.S.
In contrast, I’m pretty sure every time I walked past the corner store in my neighborhood in Seoul there was someone drinking. Filmmakers having some soju and breakfast, waiting til the morning rush hour was over to hop on the subway. Grandpas sobering up at 2pm before going home to their wives. Troubled SAT cram coaches drowning their complicity in test prep misery with bottles of Cass.
Korean elderly men actually have a sort of fabulous outdoor drinking option near Tapgol Park - pushcart vendors sell single shots of soju and snacks to the men who set up their Chinese checkers and other game boards for all day gaming. But my favorite daytime drinking venue, hands down, is at the top of Korean mountains. After much huffing and puffing, a hiker emerges at the peak, only to greet the grandma who had hiked up there first thing in the morning with a barrel of rice wine.
On our way back down Maisan, we stopped at the side of the road for some rice wine
Prompted by this NYTimes essay “The Subversive Charm of Day Drinking”
I used to frequent a corner bar in TriBeCa that looked like the setting of a Hopper painting. It was down the street from the college where I taught intro literature courses, and I decamped there in the early afternoon for a beer or two while slogging through freshman essays on Blake. But I didn’t get much work done. The company was too interesting: ironworkers, painters, sculptors, people whose workdays started unusually early or uncommonly late — people for whom daytime is nighttime. And unlike their after-dark counterparts, no one was there to party. Pretty soon, I gave up my lonely corner banquette to join the guys sitting at the bar. I never looked back.
Drinking in the day is an occasion unto itself, to be enjoyed on its own congenial terms. And there are terms. It shouldn’t lead to drinking all night. It can’t happen all the time. There is such a thing as starting too early. That said — we’re all adults here, aren’t we? — after lunch sounds about right. There’s still time before the rackety after-work crowd descends; the pace is calmer; and this is the best time to get to know your bartender. Whatever you’re drinking, you’re more likely to savor it.
My sense of interior space is a bit skewed and very urban. These are the formative rooms of the formative cities.
1) A high school classmate a year ahead of me and already at NYU moves into a dorm room closet to get some privacy. I think, so this is how you live in tenements. Later, I sleep over in a 1 bedroom apartment in the Lower East Side converted into a 2 bedroom by erecting a plasterboard partition that carves out a tiny bedroom out of a corner of the living room. I think, this is how you hustle as a young journalist.
1908 New York City tenement housing a family of seven
2) All the living rooms of San Francisco I have lived in. To make rent as activists & artists, someone always had to live in the living room. (Why no partitions? I think the Bay Area despite its high cost of living, always provided more space per dollar of rent. Also landlords still had hope that the internet would rise again and proper dot com minions with proper salaries would move in, so no permanent carpentry). I invested in a loft bed to get me above eye-level and crammed a full drum set underneath, along with a makeshift closet.
A men’s flophouse in St. Petersburg, Russia
3) Seoul. As a kid visiting my grandma, I slept in a pile of cousins and bedrolls on top of the heated ondol floor. In retrospect, my grandma was pretty wealthy, but sleeping in one room made sense. Not all rooms had radiant heat. More recently, I learned how to party in the one-rooms (technically studio apartments, but many were no bigger than a dorm room with a hot plate) of Seoul. Entertaining took place on the floor, no room for sofas or dining tables, or we decamped to the nearby Family Mart for melona bars and cans of beer.
Flophouse sign via the Affordable Housing Institute
Inspired by a passage from sociologist & urban theorist Sharon Zukin’s Landscapes of Power (pg 34):
This sense of spatial and social limitation overpowers the narrator of “The Blue Room,” a story published in the New Yorker. He and his wife, living in a cramped studio on the Upper East Side, begin reading aloud in the evening the autobiography of a nineteenth-century Englishwoman. They become convinced “that the New York we saw most closely and knew best — the New York of graduate students and aspiring artists and writers, the New York of tiny apartments and part-time jobs at libraries and publishing houses — was in its essential forms Victorian.”
They mean this precisely in the sense of living with lowered expectations. On the one hand, office work in the service economy recreates “the condition of clerkship. The new age of New York, as we saw it, looked less like a stockbroker in a Lamborghini and more like a scrivener wrapped in a woolen muffler.” On the other hand, the permanent penury of small apartments at high rents imposes a modest lifestyle. They and their friends have little furniture, few noisy parties, no hope of children as the issue of marriage. Making do in these conditions, “we had the pallor of clerks, the wistful intricacy of naturalists, the complicated scruples of vicars.”
I love the image of the scrivener in his muffler. Especially because most San Francisco housing stock was consistently drafty.
[video]
[video]
![There are more than 1,000 large, enclosed malls in the U.S., according to Green Street [Advisors]. Thus, the firm’s prediction means that roughly 100 of those properties will “de-mall” by 2022. Some likely will be razed to make way for apartments, offices and or mixed-use projects. Others will become home to more nonretailers like medical offices, gyms and community colleges.
Most mall executives queried Monday said more than 10% of U.S. malls will exit the industry. Others agreed with the theory but declined to forecast a number. None said that 10% was too high.
From Wall Street Journal via @urbanphoto_blog. Photo is by aerial landscape photographer Alex MacLean from his book Look at the Land.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4qtmw5rSN1qadfn3o1_500.png)
There are more than 1,000 large, enclosed malls in the U.S., according to Green Street [Advisors]. Thus, the firm’s prediction means that roughly 100 of those properties will “de-mall” by 2022. Some likely will be razed to make way for apartments, offices and or mixed-use projects. Others will become home to more nonretailers like medical offices, gyms and community colleges.
Most mall executives queried Monday said more than 10% of U.S. malls will exit the industry. Others agreed with the theory but declined to forecast a number. None said that 10% was too high.
From Wall Street Journal via @urbanphoto_blog. Photo is by aerial landscape photographer Alex MacLean from his book Look at the Land.
[video]
Frank Bruni is my favorite columnist writing in the NYT. Krugman is great, but he’s kinda like a one-note meal. Bruni, on the other hand, does the dining column, slice of life column, and the political activist column. This is one of his odes to New York City that reminds us city life requires compassion or at the very least, tolerance. In other words, stop thinking that New Yorkers consist solely of cold hearts, aggressive elbows and upturned noses.
It’s the notion that we urbanites are a less neighborly, respectful sort.
Quite the opposite. In the city we can’t get away with the kind of rugged individualism on which country dwellers in fact pride themselves. With every subway ride at rush hour and every brave foray into the blessed, cursed mosh pit that is the Fairway on the Upper West Side, we’re forced to cede our ground, to wait our turns, to budge, to bend.
There’s a contract to urban life, and it’s inked in humility. We agree to sacrifice some of our own will and many of our own whims to what works best for everyone involved. The music is turned down. The poop is scooped. The line isn’t cut. The smartphone is put on silent.
And we trade away private spaces for public ones, which bring us together—force us together—in a manner that tests and ultimately refines our abilities to get along. While the country dweller has his property and the exurbanite his yard, we in New York have Central Park.
Photo of 1969 peace protest in Central Park by Garry Winogrand
[video]
