Posts of the Week
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The Hong Kong Handover Dave C - 05:09pm Aug 20, 1997 PST (#1019 of 1020)
... This is my last post from Guangzhou. Nicole and I are flying back to Chengdu in a couple of hours. Ive been in this part of China since June 18 and in that time my attention has been taken up by three HongKong-related events: 1) The Handover, 2) The Handover thread in TT, and 3) retail clothing sales. The main event, though over, continues to hold at least some part of the worlds attention. What will eventually become of Hong Kong now that it is being run by the same government that brought us Tiananmen? To the skeptics, I would like to point out that its also being run by the same govt that has successfully run up high growth rates and recently turned around a threatening inflation rate. The growth rate for China is in the neighborhood of 10%. Real inflation rate, according to US corporate sources I know personally, is in the neighborhood of 5%. Of course, theres more to life than economic statistics, but before you condemn China, you should consider how bad things could be for the average Chinese person if China was bestowed with the blessings of--for example--the Indian Democracy. [This is not an argument against Democracy, just a word of consideration for the Big Picture.] As for the TT thread, though its fading compared to other threads in Headlines--as it should, now that Hong Kong is no longer in the headlines--I will continue to post at least some of my China experiences here. I believe that Hong Kong will change China, maybe subtly, maybe dramatically. So any story about China has a Hong Kong component. The Return of Hong Kong was billed in China as a Great Patriotic Event. The Chinese govt is going to try to have it both ways, try to have its One Country Two Systems, try to own the property and the cashflow without allowing any of the Attitude to seep into the rest of China. I wonder if thats possible. I wonder if the Return of Hong Kong--along with things like grassroots organizations taking the PSB to court--is not going to be felt all the way down to the countryside village level. For that reason, I believe that any posting about China has relevance in this thread.... Hollywood's obsession with JD Salinger Bill Norris - 12:45am Aug 19, 1997 PST (#1 of 12)
...Like many bookish, American male teenagers, I had a love affair with Salinger when I was about 14 and was assigned to read "Catcher in the Rye" for a high school English class. I read everything by ol' JD that I could get my hands on after that, pursued his work in one of my first critical papers (and, it must have been god awful), and then as I got older and found other writers, lost intrest. Since then, I've shared apartments and houses with people who praise Salinger as a God, and I've tried, but his work hasn't held up for me. With the very notable exception of "Franny and Zooey," with an emphasis on the "Franny" section. And, the one short story that everyone reads at some point, "A Perfect Day for Banannafish," annoys me seriously. I've never felt that the ending is earned. A very bad playwright who is pretty good at teaching playwrighting to college students once said to me, "If you don't know what to do with a character, you can't just have her walk out of the house and get hit by a bus--I've always thought Salinger has Seymour Do movies suck? Losing interest in movies . . . Ralph Hummel - 06:31pm Aug 19, 1997 PST (#7 of 10)
... Producing a movie these days costs so much more than it used to that the money-men are increasingly cautious about ensuring a return on their investment. Who wants to take risks with $50-100 Million? This leads to formula plots and star vehicles where lack of creativity is seen as a virtue. The obvious calculation and compromises behind such efforts yield movies of little distinction. By contrast, the films I've admired recently have all been made outside the traditional channel and were labors of love by filmmakers who wanted to create art. Small and quirky, some of them even became popular (e.g., "Big Night", "Slingblade") -- disproving the "wisdom" behind conventional studio production. |
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