Tibet and the Fantasies of Democracy

WELCOME TO TIBET, a land synonymous with avid mountain climbers, California-born Bodhis, dreadlocked caucasians and the occasional Wall Street banker in search of salvation and somewhere to squander his oil bonds. For years, moonbeams of all flavours have been making the pilgrimage to the Tibetan highlands, dieting on banana lassies and free-range yak kebabs, breathing in the crisp mountain air (incensed with said yak) and meditating on the petit-bourgeois proclivities of inner-peace and transcendental self-discovery.

But on March 14, four days after the 49th anniversary of the Lama’s relocation to the Hollywood Hills, the capital Lhasa exploded in riots, as the predominantly ethnic Tibetans took a torch to the ruling Han Chinese. The government went into lockdown, banishing all foreign tourists, journalists, expatriates and Californian yoga instructors – save for a handful of aid workers and covert Christian missionaries – and thus closing the boarder indefinitely to all foreign neophytes and press badge wearing lackeys.

And so once again, the world’s eyes fell upon the mountain mystery of one of the most talked about yet least understood regions on Earth. For four months, the disgruntled accredited press salivated around the Beijing bar streets, rehearsing and reasoning – in between beers and blowjobs – their schlock Hollywood appeal for Tibetan independence and blind zeal against Chinese interventionism.

The blind fanaticism of the ‘Free Tibet’ camp has raged ever since journeymen such as James Hilton, who penned Lost Horizon in 1933, depicted the mythical Himalayan utopia of Shangri-la. Tibet since has been the object of a fantastical Western ideologue bathed in ancient mysticism and religious idealism. And so for the Western hemp wearing neophyte, the capture of Tibet by the Maoists in 1950, was the desolation of an idyll whose antithesis was the decadence and corruption of 20th century modernism, socialist or otherwise. However, the seemingly idyllic picture masked a medieval backwater steeped in serfdom, polygamy, child slavery, infanticide and religious violence, and ruled by an autocratic elite group of monks, a world away from today’s democratic catcalls of the Sharon Stone clique.



WHEN I ARRIVED in early July, Lhasa was a ghost town, vacant of any foreigner – four months scratched from the five million expected in 2008. With the boarders having recently opened, I expected a flood of curious tourists, covert journalists and newly indoctrinated vegans covering their ‘Free Tibet’ tees with Olympic ‘Nothing is Impossible’ tracksuits. Yet in a place usually festering with whiteness, Wally (or Waldo) simply wasn’t there.

The foreigners had been substituted for members of the People’s Liberation Army, a nubile mixture of seasoned soldiers and dumbfounded cadets. In double-file they paraded the junctions and alleys that run between the empty hotels and odious piles of yak cheese in the Barkhor marketplace. In the Muslim quarter, a square flanked by skinned yak carcasses and Halal butcheries, they guarded the Grand Mosque. And just about all over the eastern partition – the Tibetan partition – they stood post every 50 feet, eyeballing anyone with a camera or a paler complexion.

Tibet is split between east and west – east for the Tibetans, west for the Chinese. In the east, the Barkhor Circumambulation Route takes centre stage and is a circular bazaar selling everything from Tibetan prayer wheels to tourist shirts emblazoned with ‘Yak Yak Yak Yak Yak!’ At the core of the Barkhor’s circular track is the 7th Century Jokhang Temple, the holiest site for the majority Tibetan Buddhist population and the end goal of a once-in-a-lifetime three year prostration journey, whereby a pilgrim virtually bellyflops the whole way from his village – scraping up mountains and over highways – to Lhasa.

At any given time there is at least one veteran flopping his way in or out of the Jokhang, marking the end of an excruciatingly tedious three years of belly flopping. It’s common courtesy to give them donations as they prostrate along and by the end of it all they’re allowed to catch the bus home.

Since the 1959 expulsion of Tibet’s theocratic regime to India, Tibet’s economic development has boosted the ethnic Tibetan population of Lhasa from 37,000 to 520,000 and turned a once remote mountain village into a sprawling suburb, providing housing, work and education for a previously nomadic and uneducated people. Today, Tibet has four universities and over 110 secondary schools. Still the worst literacy rate in China (67.5% in 2000), before Chinese intervention, Tibet had virtually no formal education system, with monks having to learn scriptures from oral memory as opposed to written word.

However, today Tibet anxiously shares her developing status with roughly 100,000 newly migrated Han Chinese in the western partition. As Lhasa grew west, so did the hotels, shops and karaoke bars, contrasting the ancient Tibetan mud-brick architecture of the east with the modern outdoor toilet-tile of the west – the toilet-tile that befits so many Chinese cities. It is this massive influx that the majority of Tibetans complain about; that Mandarin is becoming the mainstay over Tibetan and that Tibetan shopkeepers are being pushed out by Chinese economies-of-scale.

Bridging this ethnic wake, and sitting majestically above the skyline, is the Pagoda Palace, the traditional seat of power for the Tibetan Government and the home in life and death to every Dalai Lama, bah number 14. Today, the lights are on, but nobody’s home.



I HAPHAZARDLY MET Roberto, a young Basque gentleman, one night at one of the few remaining bars in Lhasa, a small hole-in-the-wall chipped off the old Tibetan mud block, which proudly owns an oddball collection of donated CDs from a dozen years of music piracy (ungodly amounts of Leonard Cohen) and tech-savvy spiritualists.

Roberto sat in the corner with his Italian fiancé Katrina, drinking Scottish whiskey on a work night. The two are Yin and Yin: both garrulous, both alcoholics and both despised by one another’s company. (Their love affair began when they were sent to some remote outpost of Tibet for three months with nothing better to do but sleep, drink and fuck.)

Together they form the main contingency of aid workers in Tibet, and since the riots, had been forbidden access to the outer-regions, where their particular work is needed most. According to Katrina the government officials are good intentioned, investing heavily in the region, building schools and infrastructure, treating water supplies and aiding village doctors. However they are paranoid to hell of their public image, which often leads to heavy handed and irrational protocols.

Once, when the Olympic torch came through Lhasa on June 21st, the cadre phoned Roberto to tell him not to go to work that day (Saturday). When he said that he was already there, they bafflingly suggested, then don’t look out the window.
Another time when his mother had heard a faint cough emanating over the wires from her baby boy halfway across the globe, he explained, “No mum, I’m not sick. It’s just the 20 Chinese listening in.” On top of that, a simple email can take two to four days to arrive, as the Communist Party raises an army of People’s Linguists to translate a single Italian Christmas card.

As for the riots, Roberto’s positive it was the Dalai Clique’s organisation, that they had planned it long in advance, in order to gain international attention before the Olympics. All the while the Dalai Lama, grinning and posing, had said that he supported, on the one hand, the Beijing Olympics, and on the other, the protests in Lhasa. This was an odd manoeuvre, seeing that the protests were a massive violent abreaction and not a candlelight vigil.

Roberto’s not muddled as to who was doing what. He was there and saw Tibetans, including Buddhist monks (yes monks have as much propensity as being assholes as anyone else), hunting Han Chinese, burning shops and smashing windows. Even his favourite French restaurant was ransacked. The Chinese “crackdown” (a hasty word) was like any other crackdown in the West. He compares it to the 2005 Paris Race Riots. Yes there are issues, but how else do you diffuse a violent mob?



OUTSIDE LHASA, on a five-hour journey to Namtso (Sky Lake) – the highest body of saltwater in the world – the road is desolate. Along the way, piles upon piles of Tibetan prayer flags whip in the castrating wind. Nomads collect under the flags; their lives spent begging and bartering the shards of rock around their necks. Their faces have been hardened by the ferocious winds. Life out here is short and brutish. It takes little wonder to understand the attraction of religion and the compulsion that pushes someone to the desperation of a three-year-long prostration.

The lucky (or unlucky) nomads are given permanent housing and stipends from the government, so that the mother and children can at least remain under one roof whilst the father toils the valleys. However the pro-separatists complain that this is destroying the traditional nomadic culture, breaking apart communities and forcing Tibetans into unwanted work. It’s difficult to argue with this, but at the same time worrying to suggest that a lifestyle that condones education and social progress is worse than one that doesn’t.



WITH HIS LANKY STATURE, flattened face and monotone voice, Dogda, my personal guide, has the air of a garrulous sun-tanned Lurch (Addams). His views are surprisingly well informed from the Internet as well as books his clients would leave for him. Dogda is pragmatic, saying, “If China didn’t rule Tibet, somebody else would: India, Britain, America.” Independence to him is merely an ideal as immaterial as the mystical kingdom of Shambhala, Tibetan Buddhist nirvana.

It’s difficult to get a sense of the bigger picture. The Tibetan mysticism and Chinese bureaucracy cloud too much. Centuries of backwardness, feudalism, serfdom and polygamy were brought to a halt in 1959 when the Chinese Communist Party expelled the Dalai from the Pagoda Palace to live out the rest of his natural life giving speeches, attending cocktail parties and having star-studded birthday bashes along the Californian coast. To cynics, he’s known as “the monk in Gucci shoes,” and when the likes of Sharon Stone lament, “my good friend,” whilst mouthing-off karmic retribution for the Sichuan earthquake victims, you can’t help but imagine the two on Rodeo Drive shopping for Bally leather sandals together.

Thanks to his Hollywood status and 49 years of the type of PR money can’t buy, the Lama languishes in the same regard that slightly dishevelled dark-haired Parisian girls have for Jim Morrison. For many he is the only voice that one need be concerned with when it comes to all things Tibet, never mind he hasn’t been there in five decades or even that the real powerbrokers refuse to have a conversation with him until of recent.

Even Dogda, a Tibetan Buddhist himself, says schools, hospitals and infrastructure has all been built thanks to the Chinese. Tourism (most of the time) is flourishing. Life expectancy has increased and infant mortality has dropped from 430 per 1000 in 1951 to 91.8 per 1000 in 1990. The Chinese built the roads, ironed-out the Qinghai-Tibet railway, and increased trade between Tibet and the other regions. The Chinese President, Hu Jintao, as the only member in the politburo to have served in Tibet, is by far the most sympathetic yet to energising the poverty stricken region.

This is not to suggest, however, that Dogda and most other Tibetans don’t have grievances with the Chinese government: the rumours of police brutality, the monks routinely being forced to publically condemn the Dalai, the red-washing of Tibetan culture, the massive Han Chinese immigration, the urbanisation of pastoral lands, the insurrection of villages, as well as the proposed mining of Tibet’s natural resources. These are all issues at hand.

But with the blind and perpetual affection the West throws upon the leader of an essentially autocratic, theocratic and power-starved group of monks, Beijing is nothing but frustrated when some French moonbeam with a beansprout-a-day diet tries to blowout the Olympic torch with a fire extinguisher whilst screaming “Libérez Tibet!” Not the best methodology for political progress when you’re up against tomorrow’s most powerful economy.

The whole process takes delicate and careful consideration, not to mention allowances on both sides. The whole mess isn’t going to be solved by a screaming Björk, or an unfurled banner by some prissy Briton looking to gain college credit along with the affection of the hemp-mafia. Until there is serious debate, all one hears is, “Yak Yak Yak Yak Yak Yak!”

[Published in Arena UK November Issue]

Tattoos: Do they know they're permanent?

From Ancient Maori and Aztec rites to a way for Angelina to keep track of exactly where she picked up each of her kids, tattoos have played a long and important role in human history, but the other day I saw something that made me wonder if maybe, just maybe, it was a bad idea to introduce ‘the perpetual art’ to this fickle, modish generation hooked on instant gratification and the next, best look.
We’ve all heard the stories about the girl who wanted a sexy, pouncing lynx tattoo and wound up with a malignant-looking blob, or the guy who asked for funky Chinese characters which marked him forever as “a very unattractive boy”. There’ve always been risks in getting ‘inked’ (part of the reason for many countries’ prohibition on tattoo parlours servicing anyone who’s consumed alcohol in the 24 hours prior to visiting), but the greatest risk is the one that will befall them all: with age, it’ll just look crap!
The ink will fade, the edges will blur, the skin will stretch and sag. In short: if you go under the needle, what you get today, even if it looks good now, will not be what you have in twenty years time. Now, in saying that, I’m clearly demonstrating the sort of forethought and appreciation for consequences which make it unlikely that I’ll ever belong to the sort of crowd where tattoos are mandatory, but it also means that in 20 years time I’m not looking for the best way – short of amputation – to con my health insurer into paying for laser removal.
What got me thinking all this was a young guy, twenty-three or so, who’d clearly had an illustrious career as a front-rower: he had calves the size of my torso, and down one entire flank was a huge, black rectangle. A great slab of ink, with perfectly straight sides and exact, right-angled corners on what was otherwise an impressively chunky, slightly spotty canvas. It was awesomely stupid! And yet, so intriguing: maybe it was a critique on the meaninglessness of modern tattoo culture. Maybe it was an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s monolith. Maybe it was covering up an embarrassing, earlier foray, or perhaps he was going to rent it out as a billboard in rugby season. Maybe he just really liked rectangles.
Of course, by now he’d noticed me ogling his calf. “You like it?” he asked, and I said “yes”, because no matter how silly it looked, one flex could cause me a lot of pain. “Yeah,” he grinned with real pride, “I like it. Big!”
One of those ‘there but for a pair of frontal lobes go I’-type moments. But he’s happy, and that counts, but will it count for enough when he starts trading his incredible muscle bulk for something a little less taught? Or when he learns to distinguish his left leg from his right without visual aids?
Perhaps the 24 hour/no drink policy is insufficient. Maybe tattooists should also be required to show a computer simulation of what that tat is going to look like later in life; or maybe a regulatory body where you have to submit your desired design and a member of the Queer Eye team is legally empowered to bitch slap you if your idea is offensive, stupid or…well, mostly stupid. And maybe that same body could be extended to every part of your “look”, from where you shop to how you dress each day, because maybe the fascists were right and there are just some decisions too important, and some people too stupid to go deciding things for themselves.

China Becoming pt.1.1: Time and Sexuality

8.8.2008
Waves of time permeate across Beijing’s darkened sky-scraped horizon. A warm wind blows upon our bodies, tracing our skin with an invisible effigy. A light flickers upon our naked figures, folding and unfolding with time. I trace the length of Marguerite Donnadieu with the efficacy of a surgeon, so that I may open her body to mine, so that I might pry open the perfect creation of an imperfect creator.

We are but outer shells intensely lost within one another, our minds, given, gone to the catacombs of history. There is no context, no ghost, no learned experience; merely the surface of two caressing bodies, as if we were an image of all lovers, mummified carcasses, anxiously looking, kissing, touching and feeling our ways in the darkness and up the banks of the primordial ooze, eventually surrendering ourselves to an impossible immortality or an inevitable finality.

A television broadcasts a light upon our flesh, a distorted montage of the Opening Ceremony, the blueprints for some intoxicated dream of patriotism and globalization: Manchu bannermen, Shaolin monks, a veiled salute to the godless idol Mao, a giant panda two hundred children wide grazing in a sea of red, the smiling Hu Jintao coddled by a whitening Bill Clinton.

All this history laid out, naked, on the flesh of my lover, like a bountiful feast. I want to eat time, to be nourished like a god, on the ambrosia of the universe.

The world’s politicians, celebrities and athletes, one-by-one are imagined on the curve of my lover’s breast, a nipple to nurse the ninety-one thousand representatives of the world, to teach them, as a mother would, about pain and pleasure. Humanity’s mythologies, its psychologies are retold through the shadows of her sinews and echoed through the cage of her ribs. I imagine four billion eyes, gathered in between the crevices of her skin where her ribcage protrudes, gazing at the grand narrative of humankind projected upon her breast. To kiss her breasts would be to suckle the world.

And so on the curve of my lover’s breast, in the midst of the Middle Kingdom, on the 116th parallel, that imperial axis from the heart of which two successive dynasties ruled the world, finally the Chinese promise, two-thousand-two hundred and twenty-nine years in the making, of all-under-Heaven, at last.

To kiss her breasts would be to nestle all-under-Heaven in the arc of my lips.

Across the horizon, a flash of light. A silent thunder splits the Beijing skyline, followed by the echoing roar of a dragon. A dragon along the north-south axis, that same axis upon which ascended and descended the last Ming emperor, Zhu Youjian, hanging from the rope that his eunuch had tied from a tree just outside the Forbidden City. Two hundred and eighty years later, it was Puyi’s turn, the last of the Qing, expelled from his throne whilst his palace was ransacked by Feng Yuxiang’s warlord army. Did he notice the tree, whilst being escorted out from the Gates of Supreme Harmony for what was his first and final time, and think to himself of the impermanence of all things? Was it the possibility of immortality or the inevitability of the end?

The Maoists uprooted the tree, to replace it later with another – a gesture to man’s struggle against the impermanence of all things, particularly dynasties.

Something must be said for time and space, for time and place are essential to the aberrations of Chinese pseudo-psychology – a limp cocktail of Taoist methodology, folk-cosmology and Marxist paternity. On the eight-hour after the sun’s zenith, of the eight day, of the eighth lunar cycle, of the two thousand and eighth year of the anniversary of the birth of someone else’s lord and saviour, we are present, struggling against the impermanence of all things.

On the same celestial axis that the Chou, some 3000 years before, had outlined the canonical layout for all dynastic cities, the Olympic Green stands cosmologically in line with Zhu Youjian’s noose, Puyi’s ransacked palace and a grandiose mausoleum dedicated to another prince of fate, Mao Zedong, tyrannically sitting on the south side of Heaven’s gate, Tiananmen Square.

That is the beauty of the universe – the patterned quilt in which the German poet Schiller weaved his philosophy – that a thread can be traced from the innocent musings of the two year-old Emperor Puyi to the earth shattering terror of Mao’s guilt-ridden Cultural Revolution. It is thus the vocation of the philosopher, the theologian or the rain man to weave-in the patches of the quilt and sew up the holes of the universe. Beijing is but a microcosm of man’s imperative, to align time and space in accordance to the infinity of the stars. With so many stars, so many places to navigate, one can never be at a loss. And just as the heavens unite us cosmologically, they do chemically, for we were all once just dust and matter, awaiting time and space to emerge, to merge, like the treads of Zhu Youjian’s knot.

It was the memory of Mao, the godless idol that they wanted to resurrect in the spring of 1989, to pull his trace from out of the netherworld and into Heaven’s Gate. They wanted to channel the great leader, the people’s Chairman, the rightful inheritor to the Marxist Tao, in order to resist, as he would, the Chinese Communist Party’s capitalistic reforms. Instead, they were given his successor’s tanks; ears and mouths crunched to the ground, they were still not heard.

Now the tanks have gone, to be replaced by rollerblading children and Kazak tourists. But still their ghosts remain, unremembered, but not forgotten, like Marx; like the Party’s official policy on Mao, unremembered, but not forgotten. As the French poet filmmaker Chris Marker had once said – who would have spent an entire lifetime in search for the machinations of memory – ‘History throws it’s empty bottles out the window.’

On this hour of history, on this day of China’s grand opening, like those tanks in 1989, we are consuming flesh.
Today more historic than the eight hundred and fourteen thousand days since the first Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, the first imperial son of China, for whose indefatigable determination to unite ‘all within four seas’, China is named. The Chinese promise, all-under-Heaven, in the arc of my lips.

In the arc of her hips, the television projects its phantasmagorical tattoo, cemented in the embrace of our bodies. On Marguerite’s skin, the amassed history of China, a red moon, its celestial paradox of waning and waxing, of wanting to be both opened and closed. The dream of red mansions, the Middle Kingdom and her lovers, all together for a cataclysmic orgy on this day of days in the wake of natural and manmade calamities. This French woman and a half-caste man, two sets of bodies: China and the world, simultaneously inhabiting one another, all-under-Heaven. Our limbs, for better or worse, an impossible tangle.

If scars will not heal, then one must learn to love them, to fetish over them. And so my lover pulls her hand back upon my shoulders, cupping the tendon from which, for some, in all men angel wings had once grown. Pulling me tighter, closer, she cuts her nails deep into my back, glaring into my eyes to watch me resist, to witness pain silenced, so that she may comprehend that which we all practice our whole lives to withstand. That is, the pain that forms the existential scar for some that holds the same value as God does for others. It is the same pain Zhu Youjian amassed his courage against as his eunuch tied that final knot, connecting together the threads of the universe.

On a fateful day in 1924, did Puyi see the scar on the tree left by that grave knot? Surely the story had been lamented to him on dozens of occasions as an omen to his own dynastic decline, an era the imperial tutors were surely aware of. Did he learn to love his own particular brand of the anxiety that fills the being of all men? Did he learn to love the inevitability of the end?
At the threshold of pain and pleasure, when the heart beats at an irregular pace and the anxiety, which from my pours emanates every day, blankets my entire being, Marguerite pulls my sex close to hers.

Heavy drops of rain pound the window.

[to be continued]

Making a Fantasy out of Thinness

The French government is closer than ever to passing a law banning the idealization of thinness. Pending the bill's approval in the French senate, one may be imprisoned for up to three years and fined $70,000 for having "incited excessive thinness." The authors of the bill, which directly targets pro-Ana and pro-Mia websites, also hope for it to have a spillover effect on the fashion industry, who have often taken the brunt of criticism for idealizing improbable and unrealistic images.

The problem however, is how does one define "incited excessive thinness?" Pro-Mia/Ana networks come under obvious condemnation, as their prescriptions for a healthy body and contented life drift into medical malpractice, however to charr the industry of beauty as a whole - from advertising to fashion to cosmetics - for pushing an improbable and at times impossible aesthetic-world-order seems somewhat absurd.

To what extent can the public legally condemn the individual's will to aspire to an ideal such as beauty? Granted, this ideal - beauty - is tempered by shifting cultural and societal norms and is therefore relative, however, its relativity is by virtue what makes beauty relevant.

In the recent past, the ideal Western woman was more robust, voluptuous, with a lot of time on her hands in between debutante balls and tea parties. Now she's been liberated from her heavy garments and thrown into the chaotic frenzy of bourgeois economics, where she must be more capable - mentally and physically - to take on the challenges of the world. At the same time as delimiting the bounds of the pleasure principle (more sex, more fun), society has rerouted the asceticism of monotheistic religion (no sex, no fun) and sublimated it into our five day work week. We forbid ourselves to eat carbs and instead consume our partners' bodies.

And so today, everywhere we look, a slim bodice - two-dimensional - eyes us from all perspectives of the urban landscape; threatening you with their body, their face. It is a body and a face that does not consume, perhaps nourishment, nor is consumed by you, but however, which consumes you in its very ideological nature. That is, the image of the body totalizes you - the audience (the socio-economic consumer) - it envelops your whole being and casts you back out into the world, somewhat more existentially fulfilled - if not actually physically - than before the rendezvous.

At some point or another we decided that God was the "idea" of "impossibility". That to put faith in God was to aspire to the unattainable impossibility. And at some point Kant equated the ideal of beauty with God; unattainable beauty, the presence of which aspires towards great things impossible or not.

Images of the impossible have always haunted human nature. They are the logical images springing forth from our ids and superegos, as we fantasize ourselves and each other. Why not be caught up in that wave of a dream which sweeps you out to the heavenly bodies and places you inside your the depths of fantasy?

However, the media is consistently called upon to return to Earth; to ground their messages in reality and portray believable images. One affirming response came from Nivea who, for one campaign, sought everyday-women to market their brand. It was heralded as a brave and pioneering move by a veteran beauty corporation. However, noticeably, since their gallant effort, everyday-women models have seemingly dried up.

But who wants to aspire to everydayness, to blandness. To mediocrity. What kind of bland escapist offers up reality as an ideal? This is why consumerism has done so well to learn from religion. One must put hope in the unattainable, so that the ever grinding process of perfectionism can continue. The slow grind of which deters us from death; if not, then at least for a moment.

Purging Bloggers: The Great Firewall of Chinois

Maintaining a blog is difficult in Chinois. For one, Google’s Blogspot – the Internet’s most popular blogging domain – was nationally blocked until only yesterday by the Great Firewall of Sina. This has made my first few weeks here excruciatingly difficult; that is, not being able to consult my compulsory style blog, the Sartorialist, especially when temperatures range between 1-23˚C within 12 hours.

But of course, Mother knows best, and the Great Firewall – an array of the world’s most advanced firewalls and server routers, piloted by a virtual Red Army of an estimated 30,000 techno-police – was set up “to keep the world clean for God.” But when you have Mother, who needs God!?

The majority of these techno resources are put to use assuring a high level of morality against perversions such as pornography, paedophilia, the BBC’s journalism standards and of course, Miranda Devine’s SMH column. However, a great number is also devoted towards liquidating the fourth estate. Mother’s hackers spin their way across the Web, searching keywords, tracing IP addresses and with algorithms, instantaneously and automatically block domains in order to restrict access to particular topics, such as, hmmmmm… well I can definitely think of three that begin with “T”.

At the end of the day, there is an ever-growing string of mainstream websites that are often privy to the government’s omniscient censorship. Such include Wikipedia (after not removing a dubious article on one of the “Ts”), YouTube (clearly to protect brain cells), the British Broadcasting Corporation, Amnesty International, Reporters Sans Frontiers, Blogspot and from time to time the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. One can test which sites are blocked in Chinois by visiting http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/, which, conveniently, is also blocked. And of course, there are many others blacklisted, from the purely irrelevant to the particularly noxious – again, Miranda Devine.

Interestingly though, Blogger – Blogspot’s co-dependent sister domain – was not, and to my knowledge, has never been, blocked. This is significant because with Google’s blogging program, blogs are uploaded through Blogger’s domain, but then viewed through Blogspot. For example, I can login to Blogger to format and edit the Culture Spoon, however its domain remains culturespoon.blogspot.com and hence, blacklisted.

So, until very recently, we in the Chinois region – when using Google’s Blogger – could author blogs, but not view them. So why this selective discrimination? Does Mother’s army of technocratic-spies lack the acumen to suppress Blogspot’s two domains – one for input, one for output?

One theory – opined to me under the breath of a slightly disgruntled British journalist, recently removed from one of those places whose name begins with “T” – is that Mother doesn’t mind her children blogging. After all, it increases their literacy and hence, economic functionalism. At the same time, blogging is the favourite past time of Western journalists and bored Occidentals, and of course, Mother doesn’t want to suppress ALL that they have to say, especially when it’s something favourable or touristy.

So at the end of the day, people will write; it’s a question of who and what is read, and Mother – with the most sophisticated communications surveillance in the world – can at least successfully police this within her own home.

Now, allow me to offer a slightly more cynical and sinister speculation. That allowing blogging – one of the nation’s recently acquired favourite pass times – is an opportunity for Mother to easily detect those questionable elements that attempt to stir the otherwise peaceful surface of la disposition Chinois. Just as witches float, dissenters speak up, and in doing so will rise from the midst of the unconscious masses.

This most recent unblocking of Blogspot comes right on the heels of Mother’s most recent triumphant purge, in which she sent to jail, for three and a half years, a certain dissident – a human rights advocate and prolific blogger – for inciting subversion towards his homeland. Armed with no more than a blog, said dissident lambasted Mother for not keeping her promise to improve human rights conditions leading up to the coming 0lympia.

So then why open the blog gates now? Because with this latest incident, those subversive communities (pro-democratis elements) will be fired-up after five long months of trial and a blanket ban on blog reading. Opening up the floodgate, for one, serves as a warning to those who are fearful to tread water, but also as an incendiary to those who are not. By creating a public discourse, Mother can see which of her children are behaving badly and punish them accordingly.

Now that's smart technocracy.

The Fictional Death of Heath Ledger

It becomes theatrically important, after you die, what your last few days are like. | For me, it was just like any other weekend in my life. I didn’t eat a last meal, I didn’t jerk off any more or any less, I didn’t climb a mountain or end up swinging from a noose with Mozart’s Requiem in the background. But suddenly it’s important exactly what I did, because they are the last few days, and what you do in the last few days, down to your last lunch, becomes a fairy tale.

So begins “The Last Days of Heath Ledger,” easily, the most intriguing piece of “journalism” I’ve read in some time. Penned by Lisa Taddeo, “The Last Days…” is subtly slipped-in towards the end of the April edition of Esquire magazine; though, not so subtly previewed in just about every major newspaper’s culture section.

Taddeo’s pseudo-fiction re-romanticizes Ledger, not in the image of the tragic artist, or the drug-fuelled starlet, but, in that of the self-deprecating narcissist, the apathetic - nothing so special, except that I’m fucking famous - agnostic, dressed in a ski mask - “That’s right, a ski mask… the kind of shit you can get away with when you’re a celebrity… and [] still get laid.”

No doubt the piece channels elements of Gonzo journalism - a consciously self-obsessed celebrity on a bender from London to New York - however, it was the déjà vu, I received, of having read Brett Easton-Ellis' American Psycho (clearly where the self-deprecating narcissism comes from), which drew me into its sinkhole.

I felt as if, that at any point Heath was about to plunge an axe into the Malaysian bodice that he had brought home from the Bar Beatrice to his Manhattan high-ceilinged apartment on his second-last night; just to prove to himself, well, that he could, and then, recollect afterwards, "Yes. Heath Ledger can."

But more potent to my point was the protagonist’s weariness, his disconcern and existential nonchalance, as if he himself was stepping through this so-called dream named Heath Ledger. Today I'm Bob Dylan, tomorrow I'm the Joker, but right now, I'm a guy in the Lower East wearing a ski mask and pretending to be Heath Ledger, whoever the fuck that is.

There is an idea of a Heath Ledger… somewhere between Monday 7:04 and 7:27AM:

[I] get out of bed in this naked body, and I am aware of the very physicalness of myself. I look in the mirror, and this is one of those lucky times when I don’t see the movie-screen face or the love-scene body, just the grease on my face, my not-great hair, a body that is in good form, a body for sex and for running, but just as much for one as for the other.

Or as Easton-Ellis once put it:

There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable... I simply am not there.

Taddeo researched the short piece to quite an extent, tracing his movements down to the very last muffin. And so, what philosophical import am I to receive, safe in the knowledge that Heath Ledger's last meal on Earth was a dry banana-nut muffin from some café on Broadway, you ask; and, that if he were to do it all over again, he'd go out with “an endangered animal’s heart on toast with foie-gras crumbles and black-truffle shavings.”?

Taddeo certainly sees the nonsense in such superfluous observations, and the piece is partly a statement on the media’s psycho-journalistic habits when it comes to grieving over dead stars: “For those of you who will try to define part of my life by my death: Don’t.” This is, I think, where the first-person narration succeeds; that is, as a voice for the recently departed, saying, Hey, you, stop pissing on my grave and fuck off!

*Out now in the back of American Esquire with that other gay cowboy, George Clooney, on the front. I recommend it.

Dirty Dirty Auden

The recent anthology The Best American Erotic Poems – selected and annotated by David Lehman – begs the question of Americans and eroticism. As poet and literary critic Dan Chiasson puts it in his entertaining essay in the New York Times Book Review, such an anthology comes down to "best metaphorical labia! best profane blazon," which more or less pins down the existent of America's brazen erotic. And so in this contest, Chiasson gives it to the good old Anglo-American W. H. Auden's "Platonic Blow," which, as Chiasson proclaims, "is the dirtiest verse written since Rochester - I can't even talk about it here."

So for the sake of metaphorical labia and profane blazon everywhere, we shall talk about it... here:

The Platonic Blow
W. H. Auden

It was a spring day, a day for a lay, when the air
Smelled like a locker-room, a day to blow or get blown;
Returning from lunch I turned my corner and there
On a near-by stoop I saw him standing alone.

I glanced as I advanced. The clean white T-shirt outlined
A forceful torso, the light-blue denims divulged
Much. I observed the snug curves where they hugged the behind,
I watched the crotch where the cloth intriguingly bulged.

Our eyes met. I felt sick. My knees turned weak.
I couldn't move. I didn't know what to say.
In a blur I heard words, myself like a stranger speak
"Will you come to my room?" Then a husky voice, "O.K."

I produced some beer and we talked. Like a little boy
He told me his story. Present address: next door.
Half Polish, half Irish. The youngest. From Illinois.
Profession: mechanic. Name: Bud. Age: twenty-four.

He put down his glass and stretched his bare arms along
The back of my sofa. The afternoon sunlight struck
The blond hairs on the wrist near my head. His chin was strong.
His mouth sucky. I could hardly believe my luck.

And here he was sitting beside me, legs apart.
I could bear it no longer. I touched the inside of his thigh.
His reply was to move closer. I trembled, my heart
Thumped and jumped as my fingers went to his fly.

I opened a gap in the flap. I went in there.
I sought for a slit in the gripper shorts that had charge
Of the basket I asked for. I came to warm flesh then to hair.
I went on. I found what I hoped. I groped. It was large.

He responded to my fondling in a charming, disarming way:
Without a word he unbuckled his belt while I felt.
And lolled back, stretching his legs. His pants fell away.
Carefully drawing it out, I beheld what I held.

The circumcised head was a work of mastercraft
With perfectly beveled rim of unusual weight
And the friendliest red. Even relaxed, the shaft
Was of noble dimensions with the wrinkles that indicate

Singular powers of extension. For a second or two,
It lay there inert, then suddenly stirred in my hand,
Then paused as if frightened or doubtful of what to do.
And then with a violent jerk began to expand.

By soundless bounds it extended and distended, by quick
Great leaps it rose, it flushed, it rushed to its full size.
Nearly nine inches long and three inches thick,
A royal column, ineffably solemn and wise.

I tested its length and strength with a manual squeeze.
I bunched my fingers and twirled them about the knob.
I stroked it from top to bottom. I got on my knees.
I lowered my head. I opened my mouth for the job.

But he pushed me gently away. He bent down. He unlaced
His shoes. He removed his socks. Stood up. Shed
His pants altogether. Muscles in arms and waist
Rippled as he whipped his T-shirt over his head.

I scanned his tan, enjoyed the contrast of brown
Trunk against white shorts taut around small
Hips. With a dig and a wriggle he peeled them down.
I tore off my clothes. He faced me, smiling. I saw all.

The gorgeous organ stood stiffly and straightly out
With a slight flare upwards. At each beat of his heart it threw
An odd little nod my way. From the slot of the spout
Exuded a drop of transparent viscous goo.

The lair of hair was fair, the grove of a young man,
A tangle of curls and whorls, luxuriant but couth.
Except for a spur of golden hairs that fan
To the neat navel, the rest of the belly was smooth.

Well hung, slung from the fork of the muscular legs,
The firm vase of his sperm, like a bulging pear,
Cradling its handsome glands, two herculean eggs,
Swung as he came towards me, shameless, bare.

We aligned mouths. We entwined. All act was clutch,
All fact contact, the attack and the interlock
Of tongues, the charms of arms. I shook at the touch
Of his fresh flesh, I rocked at the shock of his cock.

Straddling my legs a little I inserted his divine
Person between and closed on it tight as I could.
The upright warmth of his belly lay all along mine.
Nude, glued together for a minute, we stood.

I stroked the lobes of his ears, the back of his head
And the broad shoulders. I took bold hold of the compact
Globes of his bottom. We tottered. He fell on the bed.
Lips parted, eyes closed, he lay there, ripe for the act.

Mad to be had, to be felt and smelled. My lips
Explored the adorable masculine tits. My eyes
Assessed the chest. I caressed the athletic hips
And the slim limbs. I approved the grooves of the thighs.

I hugged, I snuggled into an armpit. I sniffed
The subtle whiff of its tuft. I lapped up the taste
Of its hot hollow. My fingers began to drift
On a trek of inspection, a leisurely tour of the waist.

Downward in narrowing circles they playfully strayed.
Encroached on his privates like poachers, approached the prick,
But teasingly swerved, retreated from meeting. It betrayed
Its pleading need by a pretty imploring kick.

"Shall I rim you?" I whispered. He shifted his limbs in assent.
Turned on his side and opened his legs, let me pass
To the dark parts behind. I kissed as I went
The great thick cord that ran back from his balls to his arse.

Prying the buttocks aside, I nosed my way in
Down the shaggy slopes. I came to the puckered goal.
It was quick to my licking. He pressed his crotch to my chin.
His thighs squirmed as my tongue wormed in his hole.

His sensations yearned for consummation. He untucked
His legs and lay panting, hot as a teen-age boy.
Naked, enlarged, charged, aching to get sucked,
Clawing the sheet, all his pores open to joy.

I inspected his erection. I surveyed his parts with a stare
From scrotum level. Sighting along the underside
Of his cock, I looked through the forest of pubic hair
To the range of the chest beyond rising lofty and wide.

I admired the texture, the delicate wrinkles and the neat
Sutures of the capacious bag. I adored the grace
Of the male genitalia. I raised the delicious meat
Up to my mouth, brought the face of its hard-on to my face.

Slipping my lips round the Byzantine dome of the head,
With the tip of my tongue I caressed the sensitive groove.
He thrilled to the trill. "That's lovely!" he hoarsely said.
"Go on! Go on!" Very slowly I started to move.

Gently, intently, I slid to the massive base
Of his tower of power, paused there a moment down
In the warm moist thicket, then began to retrace
Inch by inch the smooth way to the throbbing crown.

Indwelling excitements swelled at delights to come
As I descended and ascended those thick distended walls.
I grasped his root between left forefinger and thumb
And with my right hand tickled his heavy voluminous balls.

I plunged with a rhythmical lunge steady and slow,
And at every stroke made a corkscrew roll with my tongue.
His soul reeled in the feeling. He whimpered "Oh!"
As I tongued and squeezed and rolled and tickled and swung.

Then I pressed on the spot where the groin is joined to the cock,
Slipped a finger into his arse and massaged him from inside.
The secret sluices of his juices began to unlock.
He melted into what he felt. "O Jesus!" he cried.

Waves of immeasurable pleasures mounted his member in quick
Spasms. I lay still in the notch of his crotch inhaling his sweat.
His ring convulsed round my finger. Into me, rich and thick,
His hot spunk spouted in gouts, spurted in jet after jet.