Tag: First-hand

  • Celebrating May Fourth With Slow Internet

    The internet is unusually sluggish today. I wrote a bit about some possible reasons why at Sinobyte. Blogspot has re-disappeared, MSN Messenger is inaccessible from an artsy Beijing cafe, searches for Carrefour are just back from going unanswered, and the spring sky is clear. It’s the 89th anniversary of China’s May Fourth Movement. In 1919,…

  • New Banner Image: A Wall Near Shanghai's Moganshan Lu

    Today I’m introducing Transpacifica’s third banner image. This wall near the Moganshan Lu (莫干山路) art district in Shanghai caught my eye. That placard advertising English tutoring is hanging several yards off the ground. We’re also saying goodbye to the previous image. Here it is full-frame below, in a wallpaper-worthy high resolution version.

  • My Article for TBJ's New 'Urbane' on Beijing's Ullens Center for Contemporary Art

    That’s Beijing‘s design and lifestyle companion known until now as tbjhome became urbane with the January 2008 issue. It also contains my first story for the publication: a look at French architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte’s rework of a 1950s weapons factory for the new Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing’s 798 Art District. Urbane‘s website…

  • Librairie Avant-Garde – Brilliant Nanjing Bookstore

    Today, just as my wandering was turning into a walk home, I passed the Librairie Avant-Garde in Nanjing, a bookstore in an apparently never-used parking garage. Needless to say, I was not able to resist. Though its selection of foreign-language books is apparently zero, the range of subjects and the atmosphere of the store and…

  • Me in the Boston Globe on Deval Patrick and China

    Among the several reasons this site has been slow recently is that I’ve had a glut of work. Yesterday, I covered Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s trip to China. The story appears in Tuesday’s Boston Globe business section. Gov. Patrick pushes state trade ties with China By Graham WebsterGlobe CorrespondentDecember 3, 2007 BEIJING — On his…