Beijing

[cranefly]

All quiet on the Western Front. I leave for the airport in two hours.

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

Good luck, my friend. Travel safe. Try not accept offers to go to coffee with pretty young women who admire your fluency with the Chinese language. Come back with all your organs.

[cranefly]

Just so you know, I'm in the soup that is Beijing. Visibility on arrival was 400 meters. Yep, the "clouds" followed us to the ground. Some rain today and better.

Was planning to Skype Lady Cranefly on a regular basis, but internet is horrible here.
TV gets only one station, can't be adjusted for volume, and cannot be turned off. I try to pretend it is a mantra in the background, except it's in the foreground.

Got up in the middle of the night for a pit stop and had diarrhea. Still, I feel fine and have been okay since, so maybe it was just nerves or too many weird foods on the plane and afterwards.

Today I tour the Beijing Film Academy, then we have the awards ceremony. Still have no effin' idea what we'll be doing all week, but we're being taken care of. Actually, I haven't met "we" yet. Seems I was a late-comer of the 5 feature-length dudes.

Still puzzling over the bandage on my lower back when I woke up this morning...

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

You can Skype me if you can find a connection at BAB.greg . But you won't find a connection. They also block Facebook. It's fun. It's China!

[cranefly]

Okay, we got a tour of the film academy, which has a lot of history behind it, though I don't know what it is. Took lots of photos, though lighting was often low.

We had a 12 course meal in the academy cafe. Way too much food. There was a big film crew in there eating at the time. I tried to pick out who were the actors, the director, etc., but without luck. Met my competition. Actually, friends, except for one who is clearly playing everyone. Slick as a snake in the intestines. More on him later.

It's raining pretty hard today. Those who came a week ago say it's rained every day. At least it greatly improves the air quality.

Two hours away from heading for the awards ceremony, to be followed by a really big banquet. The lunch one was just a warm-up. This one will have the real power players, including mayor of Beijing. Someone in the know has warned us that they'll be doing toasts with the intent of getting us drunk. Shades of Jinan, 1991. Need to figure out what to wear.

More later tonight, unless I'm incapacitated.

Oh, yeah. I should figure out a speech.

--cranefly

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

Ooh, take jabs at your hosts during the speech. And don't forget to mention the failure of communism as a political system.

[cranefly]

Greg, the speech you suggested would have been a vast improvement over what I gave. Of the 12 winner speeches, mine was the complete embarrassing flub -- not just embarrassing to me but everyone in attendance for me. That bad.

Many factors contributed. The first was my decision to have some major points in mind but not prepare anything. I hate it when someone reads from a paper. So it would be much more sincere that way. The time comes, the show is like two minutes from starting, and a Chinese girl kneels next to me. "What are you going to say?" she asks. She's the translator, and she'll be repeating everything I say in Chinese. I tell her I don't know what I'll say. She seems rather flustered by that. So I get out a pocket notebook and jot some illegible text, filling one small page. I have to tell her what it says. She keeps saying, "Is that it? Is that all you're going to say?" I tell her yes, because I don't want to be flipping pages up there. Likely they will be dumping stuff in our hands,and even though they're saying we'll have the podium, I don't trust them. She's laughing a bit, incredulous at how little I have to say. Well, they just forced me to the short track, as far as I'm concerned.

I'm second to last, and the other winners are giving amazing and elegant speeches. I mean, really good. An hour or so has elapsed by the time they reach me, and by then I've decided to hell with it; I'll give my more spontaneous speech, which will be more genuine. The translation girl can just give the short version. So finally the guy who just finished his speech hands me the mike. It's like I feared. We don't have the podium. We're standing in the open on stage, needing to hold two things in one hand, along with our speech notes tucked behind, which is my tiny notebook, just in case. And in the other hand the mike. I get 5 words into my free-wheeling speech and the guy up next grabs my mike and lifts it up higher towards my face. He doesn't think it's working. Now I'm not certain what he's doing. As it turns out, it was fine. But he threw me. Making matters worse, the translator girl on the other side of me is now trying to shove her mike into my hand, thinking there's a problem with my mike. I think the guy communicates to her that he was mistaken and all is well, because then she withdraws the mike as I reach for it. Now I have no idea where I'm at, and I need to look down at my notepad and just read from it as a fallback. But my writing is so sloppy I can't make it out. So I blather as few more words and that's it. Utter disaster.

Who needs nightmares when one can have them in real life?


Oh well. I still get the thousand.

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

Awesome. I hope somebody filmed it to put on Facebook and Youtube. Embarrassment of those proportions must be shared.

Still, I'd rather be on that stage feeling like a fool rather than the guy who didn't even enter.

Go get'em, Cranefly.

[lady_cranefly]

Poor Cranefly. Was this before or after they got you drunk. Is Maya Rudolf really there?

[cranefly]

Yes, Maya is here. On a bus she took an interest in my watch, was greatly amused and impressed by its Sisyphus motif. Also the guy who is playing everyone found it great on another occasion.

There's also an interview with me by another Chinese girl, who asked me some really difficult questions, such as, "What three words come to mind when you think of Beijing?" Pollution, crazy drivers, language barrier. Not that I said those, but those might have been better.

Gotta get ready for an outing to blah-blah (did I mention a language barrier?) Am hoping that tonight I can transcribe some of my experiences a little better. For now, let me just say there are some brilliant people here -- among the winners and those in support of the competitions.

--cranefly

P,S, I had 6 or 7 mei tais last night, didn't phase me, much to many people's surprise. Some winners who weren't drinking it later asked how many I'd had, and I don't thinnk they completely believed me when I told them. It helps to have a 30-course meal with it. I need to figure out who all these people are who were toasting me. I have some of their business card.

[Drunk Monk]

We need pix when you get back.

[cranefly]

Maya joined us late for last night's dinner -- a modest 15 course, this time. She sat down next to me. She asked if I was looking forward to the Peking Duck, which had yet to arrive. I told her that I suppose I was. It takes more than that to drag me into a conversation.

Yesterday was the old part of Beijing where we took pedicabs through narrow alleys. Then Tiannenmen Square, followed by the Forbidden City. The dinner was at a place with a big yellow duck outside, fronting a lake.

Gotta go get breakfast. Today is the Great Wall, Ming Tombs, and a kung fu show. This is a holiday, the Dragon Boat festival, so we may have to wait hours for the Great Wall. I've seen it, but figure I should go see it again.

later, cranefly

P.S. In the Forbiddn City a couple guys kept getting pics taken with smitten Chinese women. Me, I had a notable encounter with a four-year-old boy.

[Drunk Monk]

When she first joined SNL, I didn't care for her at all. But later, she really grew on me. Now I think she's pretty funny. And she graduated UCSC. Ask her if she was ever at elfland at UCSC.

Of course, this all begs the question, WTF is Maya doing there?

BTW, I'm thinking you should write the Chollywood column for this issue, CF, when you get back. Do you think you've got 800+ words from this experience that can describe the state of Chollywood now? Of course, you can write it in 1st person. Think about it on the flight home...

[cranefly]

First, yes, I'll give Chollywood Rising some consideration. I brought a copy of the mag, been trying to figure out who to show it to, especially that column. It just seems a pulse they'd like to keep their finger on.

At dinner last night, I started zoning. You know, not following the conversation. Suddenly Joshua, the player, who I've decided is not a player but a decent sort, said from across the table, "What about you, cranefly?" Of course I have no idea what they'v been discussing. "What's one of your guilty pleasure movies?" I think a moment and say, "A Chorus Line." He and others are puzzled by that one but are about to let it go and move on when I add, "Ichi the Killer." Galen, who is Muy Thai and jiu jitzu, says, "Yeah, but that's a great movie." Joshua is nodding, and he positions his hands high and low, low for Chorus Line and high for Ichi, and says, "Now that's more like it."

Some five minutes later I whisper to the guy next to me -- Ben Li, I think -- that I got the title wrong. I hadn't meant A Chorus Line. I'd meant Showgirls. He strongly urges me not to correct myself to the group, the better to maintain my respectability.

[cranefly]

My 12-hour flight turned out to be mild compared to others. Two people had flights from LA to Seattle to Beijing, except that in Seattle there was double booking of their assigned seats and they got bumped. The alternative flight was to Denver and then to Beijing, I think, which in itself involved 24 hours total. Not certain how it got resolved.

Then there was Pamela, who is black. She had the misfortune of having luggage identical to someone else, and that other person took hers. It took a day to track it down. When our handler finally talked to an official about when we could pick it up, there was a long pause. "Where exactly is the luggage?" our handler asked. The answer was Hainan. Still in the works.

Pamela was amused in the Forbidden City by all the families that kept taking pictures of each other but always maneuvring themselves so as to catch her in the background. They really wanted a photo of her. She said she was the negro of the day.

Our handler wanted us to stay close together in Tienenman Square. The concern was that if we drifted apart, we became a bigger target for the guards. She pointed out how long noodles will stretch, then told us, "Be like sticky rice, not noodles."

The two cameramen with their fancy equipment got hassled a lot in Tienanmen. They were finally allowed in with us but forbidden to shoot anything. They still kept getting hassled. Our handler cautiously indicated to us where the big incident occurred back in the '80s, but we stayed clear of that corner and took group photos near a big flag.

The forbidden City of course also required lots of sticky rice just to avoid having everyone get lost. I'd forgotten how big it is overall, and with a succession of ever larger courtyards.

One caucasion in our group who people were always wanting to get their picture taken with came back to the group at one point all embarrassed. He said a family kept motioning to him, and so he was stepping in to join them, but then they made clear that, no, the problem was that he was in the way of their group photo and get the heck out of the way.