Beijing – Waltzing in the headlights of a fast-coming future in the new Tokyo

The future is bright and dazzling in Beijing - the new Tokyo.

I am sitting in my hotel room on the 13th (top) floor of a 4-star hotel in Beijing.

I was in Beijing in 1984, 1985 and 1986.

My memory of Beijing in 1984 is of almost everyone wearing green or blue Mao suits – a uniformity of dull colours. The next year, some lighter pastel colours were creeping in and I stumbled on a fashion shoot by the lake in Beihai Park where the glamorous model was wearing a mini skirt.

Back then, I remember a rather dusty, occasionally misty city with Dickensian factory chimneys, streets swamped with tsunamis of bicycles and building sites each with hundreds of workers instead of machines. This was not – and is not – a country with a labour shortage.

Today, on the 45-60 minute drive to the city centre from the giant fuck-off-and-die airport (built for the 2008 Olympics), we passed through a new city with giant, often very well-designed buildings and loads of cars on busy four and five lane carriageways.

Then we hit Tiananmen Square with its new monument to distract and disguise where the demonstrators were in 1989. It now also has an apparently permanent visible police presence plus parked police cars and vans.

Once past Tiananmen Square, we hit the more crowded, narrow streets with jumbled shops and narrow, greyish, busy alleyways I remembered.

The TV in my hotel seems to cater mostly for Chinese, not English-speaking, businessmen – a not insignificant point. And the BBC World news channel is reporting that Sony has announced a whacking $6 billion loss.

The Japanese are on their way out.

The Chinese are on their way up.

More surprisingly, the BBC still has a TV reporter inside North Korea. Why has this man not been thrown out of the country? He is still telling and showing the truth about what life is like there. He was invited in to show the glorious start to the celebrations of the 100th birthday of the Great Leader Kim Il-sung – and to report on the ‘fact’ that the North Koreans’ upcoming rocket launch is to put a satellite into space, not to test an ICBM capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.

Fat chance. He is making it clear North Korea is a fantasy land of literally incredible facades.

The North Koreans have said their rocket will be launched “by 16th April”. As the late Kim Il-sung’s 100th birthday is on the 15th April, guessing which day it will actually be launched does not seem like, err, rocket science.

Back on the TV in Beijing, BBC World is reporting that someone called (as far as I can figure phonetically) Nee-lu-yang, disabled and on crutches after being beaten up by the police, has been sentenced to three years imprisonment – and her husband to two years – for “provoking trouble” by campaigning against the eviction of people from their homes to make way for new building developments by the Chinese authorities.

In China, rapid modernisation comes at a price which would be unacceptably high in the UK.

I took a walk out tonight and, over the course of an hour, I passed nine people walking their pet dogs. In the mid 1980s, a friend of mine went into Canton free market a meat-eater and came out a vegetarian: “It was the live dogs and cats and owls that did it,” she told me. “All in small cages, ready for eating. It was the owls that really got to me, with their big eyes staring out at me.”

Now dogs are kept by some as pets. The sign of an increasingly moneyed society and probably the sign of an increasingly something else society which I can’t put my finger on.

People were still doing that deep, throaty Chinese spitting in the street back in 1984.

Things have advanced at an amazing rate.

And yet… And yet…

There is still that protester disabled and on crutches after being beaten up by the police, sentenced to three years imprisonment for “provoking trouble”.

Some might argue that 2012 in China is more like Nineteen Eighty-Four than it was in 1984. But with a glittering veneer.

On my walk tonight, in a darkened open space about 20 feet from one of Beijing’s busy ring roads, I heard the faint sound of traditional Chinese music and saw about thirty people of various ages dancing in slow motion. Some were waltzing; some appeared to be practising slow-motion line-dancing.

Perhaps this is a new 2012 version of tai-chi.

In 1968, Country Joe and The Fish recorded a song called Waltzing in the Moonlight. In Beijing, they are waltzing in the headlights of a fast-coming future.

China is the new Japan… with Japan, like Atlantis, cut down to size by the Gods with a national catastrophe.

It only took water to overwhelm Atlantis.

Japan, a more advanced civilisation, had visited on it by the Gods the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster. Japan has stumbled if not yet been humbled..

The road signs in Beijing – and many local shop signs – are in both Chinese and English. The government is preparing for and has already entered an international future.

And yet… And yet…

The girl in this 4-star hotel’s Business Centre not only does not speak English, she does not know how to print off text from the computer she supervises onto the printer sitting beside it.

And the BBC World channel reports that the wife of prominent Chinese politician Bo Xilai has been arrested on suspicion of killing a British businessman last year. No motive is given; the businessman seems to have been a friend of the anti-corruption Mr Bo and his wife; and the Chinese leadership is changing this year.

Now, presumably, Mr Bo has been knocked out of the running.

Don’t mess with the Chinese.

*****

Here is the sound of Country Joe and The Fish Waltzing in the Moonlight…

The music business is evil; the comedy business is double evil

Doyenne of Edinburgh Fringe comedy critics Kate Copstick has an interesting piece published in Scotland on Sunday today in which she says:

“What is that sound you hear? Ah yes, it is the Spirit of the Fringe being throttled by Big Business. Not a nice sound.”

When Copstick presented the Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards on Saturday night, she attacked the large comedy promoters and four ladies who may or may not have been from one of those large promoters (the one Copstick had just named a few seconds before) walked out.

There has been a lot of talk this year, as in many recent years, of the Fringe being destroyed because comedy has become Big Business. But, this year, it seems to have had more urgency. People are openly talking of alternatives, while the two young whippersnapper alternatives to the big paid venues – the Free Fringe and the Free Festival – seem to gain in strength each year. Why, there is even now an established alternative to the large corporate-sponsored comedy awards!

Comic, promoter and Malcolm Hardee Award nominee Bob Slayer, who performs as part of the Free Festival, tells me he was inspired to become part of the comedy business when he read Malcolm Hardee’s autobiography I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake. I think what may have attracted him was another excuse for excess.

At the Malcolm Hardee Awards Show on Saturday, his trouserless crowd-surf and unexpected contribution to Puppetry of the Penis’s ‘hamburger’ routine was not out of character.

For ten years before comedy, Bob was in the music business under various guises, latterly managing Japanese band Electric Eel Shock. They and he appeared in the movie Killer Bitch, which may or may not be categorised as comedy, depending on the extent of your taste for oddity.

But Bob’s straddling of the music and comedy business – he likes a bit of a straddle, does Bob – has given him an interesting insight into the way the comedy industry functions in the UK and particularly in Edinburgh:

“The music industry, we all know,” he told me yesterday, “is evil, evil, evil.”

“What the music industry does is sign a band who sell loads of records and then the industry cleverly accounts so the band gets none of it. They steal your money, but at least they help you make it first; they steal money they have helped to create. Whereas the comedy industry dips directly into your pocket before you have done anything. The comedy industry is double evil.

“They have the same horrible accounting ways as the music industry. But the difference is that at least the music industry make the money before they steal it, whereas the comedy industry and in particular the Edinburgh Fringe industry – and it is an industry – steals it before the performer even makes it and there’s no guarantee you’ll make it back.

“They call themselves promoters but they’re not. They rent rooms. They’re rack-rent landlords. They rent their rooms by the hour and the minimum to get an hour in one of those rooms is £100… ten shows in a day and that’s £1,000 a day and that’s a minimum for a small broom cupboard and then that money is spent on propping up an unnecessary PR, propping up unnecessary posters. All of the Edinburgh Fringe is paid for by the performers.

“I think it’s institutionally evil. The individual people doing it believe Oh, we’re doing the right thing. They’re able to justify it to themselves because nobody’s making absolute masses of money. But they are taking money from people before the money is made.

“Comedy lags behind music. You had punk in 1978 and you had alternative comedy in 1981/1982… I spent the last ten years watching the music industry change because artists realised Whoa! We’re being treated really badly! We’re propping this up but we’re being ripped off.

“The music industry has turned itself inside out… Universal, Sony, BMG still exist but they’re more in service to the artists who say No. We want a better deal. You’ve had it really good for a long while but been really inefficient.

“The music industry used to sign ten acts, throw money at the wall and one of the bands might work. The comedy industry model is Let’s have ten acts give us all their money up front, then we’ll throw their money at the wall and one of them might work.

“Comedians are accepting this. What dickheads we all are!

“Music is evil but comedy is double evil.”