What's the sound of one Mao spinning?

One of the joys (anxieties) of moving is finding a place to live. During my visit I looked at some apartment complexes - mostly overpriced high-rise crapshacks with black-lacquered bedroom sets and shoddy installations.

But these complexes aren't without their bourgeois pretensions. They feature names like "President Mansion," "Palace Court," and my favorite, "Richgate: Kinging the Shanghai Buildings."

Yes, "Richgate." Mao should be spinning in his grave fast enough to power a small city.

What happened to the socialist worker's paradise? Apparently it's being paved over to build the Richgate extension: "Mega-Richgate: The Moneyed Place for Kinging and Other Assorted Richly Things."

(Okay, I made that up. ...But wouldn't that be awesome! I would totally live there.)

Vocabu-Suck

I recently downloaded a Mandarin vocabulary-building audio tutorial from i-Tunes called "Vocabu-Learn." It's almost hilarious in its crapitude.

The "lesson" consists of a monotone voice reading an entirely random list of words while a woman repeats them in Chinese. Canned classical music plays in the background giving the whole track a surreal David Lynch vibe. This goes on non-stop for two and a half hours.

How random are the words? Random. Here's a sample in actual sequence:

The Peach
The Memory
The Polygamist
The Voyage

The polygamist? Huh?

I may suck at speaking, but I'll be awesome at Chinese Mad-Libs.

Attention godless yuppies: Put some clothes on!

My neighborhood in Brooklyn is home to one of the world's largest communities of Hassidic Jews, an ultra-orthodox sect that observes very strict rules regarding diet, dress and behavior. The men wear these round hats and thick wool overcoats (even in August!) and the women wear ankle-length muu-muus and always cover their hair. Everyone speaks Yiddish.

So when my building, a former factory, was being converted into condos - the neighborhood went nuts. Hundreds of Hassidic men came out to protest the building and the godless, licentious, Subzero-worshipping, gentrifying yuppies it would bring to the area.

I think they were afraid the new residents would prance around the neighborhood in g-strings and fornicate on the sidewalks while eating bacon, lobster and oyster sandwiches. (Hey, that only happened once ...and I was really wasted!)

The protests quickly subsided, but curiously these signs warning about "Skin Cancer" and the "Dangers of showing too much skin" started appearing around the neighborhood...

(The graffiti commentary was not mine.)

Irrational Exuberance, Part Zillion

Every day there's a story like this one that both confirms my decision to move and gives me uneasy flashbacks of the breathless pronouncements of the Internet bubble (version 1.0, pre-Google.)

HONG KONG -- Only in booming China could double-digit growth be a disappointment.

Spending on advertising in China grew 18% last year from 2004, according to a report released yesterday by CTR Market Research Co. Such a jump is the envy of many markets, but it was off from 22% the year before and a skyscraping 39% jump in 2003, as ad spending was in hot pursuit of the new Chinese consumer.

Multinational ad agencies, spurred by the promise of massive growth, have poured into China, which some industry executives expect to become the world's second-largest market by 2010. By contrast, ad spending in the U.S., the world's biggest ad market, rose just 3% in 2005, to $150 billion, according to TNS Media Intelligence, a joint-venture partner with CTR. - Wall Street Journal, February 21, 2006

Global economy - don't fail me now!

The End

One of the less pleasant parts of preparing to move abroad was writing a will.

I'm in my early-thirties, single and I never really owned anything of value - so it's never something I thought about. But since I'm both a new homeowner and moving to country that's brought the world SARS and the Avian Flu, I thought it would be useful to do some estate planning.

I used an online legal service. It seemed pretty reputable, but I guess I won't know until I die.

The one fun part of writing a will is specifying burial instructions. I thought about writing something high-larious like: "I wish to be ground into a nutrient rich paste and fed to rabid chimps while the surviving members of Devo play Amazing Grace."

Somehow I restrained myself from being a total smart-ass in my afterlife.

After the flood

My Brooklyn apartment was flooded a few weeks ago. Apparently it was quite something - water gushing down through the ceiling at 3AM from a broken pipe in the apartment upstairs. I was away traveling for work that night.

My brand new hardwood floors quickly started to warp, developing the gently rolling topography of a Cambodian mine field. After 4 weeks of yelling, cajoling and whining on the phone, I finally got someone from the building's insurance agency to take responsibility.

At this rate, repairs are sure to start sometime in Spring 2079. Luckily robot workers will be cheap and plentiful then so I expect the work to take no time at all!

In the meantime they ripped up the floor in the entrance and replaced it with plywood so I can open my front door without splintering the floorboards.

The Long Tail

As part of my corporate indentured servitude in the advertising industry, we're frequently rounded up and forced to listen to a guest lecturer (usually a technology type) who delights in telling us how we're hopelessly backwards and out-of-touch.

This time it was the editor of a pop-technology magazine. He talked about something called "The Long Tail" and managed to use both "fractal" and "power law distribution" in the same speech and without even a bit of irony.

The point is always the same:

- TV advertising is dead!
- Audiences are becoming infinitely fragmented!!
- Blogs are great!!!!!!!

Everyone nods in unison, agrees we are hopelessly backward and out-of-touch, grabs the free sandwiches and then goes back to work.

It's not that the resident genius is wrong - he just displays a profound ignorance about the realities of product marketing, existing media business models, and the entrenched interests of almost everyone in preserving the status quo.

When you ask him a simple question like "Who wants to write a blog about dishwashing detergent?" He says something condescending and idiotic like "Maybe your client (giant consumer products company) should sell organic soap. Organic products are going to be very BIG!"

Thanks wizard. I'll take that under advisement.

I'm probably just jealous. I wish someone paid me to be a genius.

The city of the future ...today!

Prior to my visit, everything I read or everyone I spoke with described Shanghai as "hyper-modern" or "the city of the future." Since the city does have a levitating train to the airport, a kitschy sci-fi TV tower and the world's highest per-capita usage of mind-numbingly bright neon signage - I suppose you could make this point.

But a few blocks away from the tourist and business districts, "the city of the future" turns into a pre-industrial Qing Dynasty world of communal living, communal toilets and various animal limbs hanging about. It's like a scene from some psycho-Chinese Charles Dickens story.

But with lots more bicycles.

I've accepted the job

Pending any unforeseen circumstance, I start in Shanghai on April 10th.

As of today, February 20th, my Mandarin Chinese vocabulary consists of:

"Hello."
"I am an American."
"I cannot speak Mandarin."

And most importantly:

"I don't understand."

Ummm, here I go!