Recently my hometown Urumqi was in the news for all the wrong reasons.

What was initially a protest by the local Uighur community turned into a riot. I didn’t want to get into the details of this incident as I myself was not there and therefore the best I could say about it was how sad this made me feel.

Instead I wanted to tell you my experience growing up in Urumqi, XinJiang. My parents were part of the Chinese government’s initiative at the time to encourage Han Chinese to migrate to XinJiang in the 50′s and 60′s. It was interesting that I saw XinJiang being described as a ‘desolate and arid’ place, because when my parents arrived in XinJiang in their 20′s it was a lot emptier then.

I spent 14 years in Urumqi, and went to primary school and 3 years of high school in this beautiful city. Urumqi the name translates into ‘a beautiful prairie’. It’s laced with the snow-capped TianShan mountain in the backdrop, which you could see in the distance regardless of where you are in the city. Surrounding it were clusters of pine forrests and pristine rivers and lakes that formed from the melting snow.

I remember many fond memories of going on summer camps to escape the heat with my school friends. We would load up on the water-melons and leave them inside fishnet bags and cool in the clear water that runs down from the mountain. This is what I really want to tell you about. My high school class was filled with students from many ethnic groups. One of my best friends is A’setti, he is a Khazak. The photo below was taken when we were in year 8 on a school excursion during the summer. He is the one on the left of the photo. I joked with him that I should call him ‘Lenin’, because I thought the shape of his forehead bore a remarkable resemblance to the leader of the Soviet Russia. We spent a lot of times together, playing soccer, at the local bazaars, in school studying and going on camping trips. All this time, I always knew that A’setti’s background was different to mine. I met his parents, both were school teachers working at the local Khazak high school teaching in their own language.

A'sseti, Zhang Din and me on Summer camp

A recent photo of my friend A'sseti in 1994

There were many others, Ton’nur, a lively girl that shared a desk with me for 2 years, she was Uzbek, their language shared some similarity to Uighur, but with its own very distinct culture and customs. She told me that her grandmother made her learn their alphabets by writing them in an exercise book. She opened the book in front me, and I remembered seeing the familiar cursive Arabic alphabets, and thought how good her hand-writing were. There were Kuza’ti-jian, and Kudu’si-jian, two Uighur brothers with curly brown hair and large eyes. They had relatives living near my home in a small village. They were naughty, taking out their relative’s donkeys, and riding them on the main road. We were just kids doing what kids do and growing up in what we must thought was the best place to be.

There were tensions between the Chinese and the Uighurs. I remembered the odd fights and quarrels in the streets. I dare say it was no more frequent or violent than anywhere else in the world. One thing I would however say that there was always a pang of regret in me for not learning more of other cultures than my own, for the Chinese culture at least in Urumqi was dominant.

In Urumqi, you could get by quite easily if you just spoke Mandarin, apart from the odd swear words that you learn in Arabic, I really didn’t learn other much of other cultures. I think to a large extent, while there were high schools taught in their own languages, there was a tacit recognition that learning Chinese was imperative for the ethnic minorities to do well in the society at large.

I am sad to see the escalating ethnic violence that is going on now in Urumqi, seeing my home going up in flames, I wonder what A’setti would have said about that too. He is now an electrical engineer working in BeiJing, I manage to get in touch with him in 2002 when I was travelling in China. There is no doubt in my mind that we both want to see everyone in XinJiang to live in harmony and peace.

~paul

My fascination and love of food flourished at a very young age, where I would eat til I burst and then start all over again! We’ll nothing much has changed apart from fine tuning my photography and documenting how dishes are prepared, cooked, presented and consumed in my home and that of my family and friends.

While I was born in Australia, my parents herald from Malta, a small old world place in the Meditteranean. I grew up accustomed to stewed rabbit, baked or fried fish, minestrone soup, baked rice, macaroni, egg stew, chicken noodle soup, pastizzi and meat with crispy potatos.

Through Paul, his mother and my family and friends, I have learnt the Joys of Cooking and Eating. I hope you enjoy my photographs and commentary. Some of the asian dishes have come from my mother in laws kitchen and others are a result of my own adventures.

It is my dream in the near future, to provide a resource on asian cooking that I have experienced from my husbands motherland ~phyllis

End Note: All photographs and text copyright Phyllis Li

Recently I was given a number of sites to look at.

I felt the time dial winding backwards. A cursory glance of the source revealed that it complied with HTML 4.0, hang on or was it xhtml 1.0 transitional? Anyway it probably didn’t matter.

There were some standard meta tags in the header, fairly vanilla, I assume to make the search somewhat easier, which means that the search was not based on the content of the pages but just with the infos in the meta tags. (I could almost hear someone say how 1990 is that?)

It was a fairly standard affair as for the layout, a header menu, a side bar of navigation links, a copy-right info down the footer, which are of course done with a minimal of table and div tags. It had no dynamic content as far as I could tell, no javascript doing asynchronous pull of info, no flash widgets no nothing.

The search seems to be calling a CGI routine which seems to pull a standard export of crawled content. Again, no page ranking, no what others have clicked on, no similar pages, no sorting of content by say the newest page to the oldest, FYI the first link was from 1990, while the 2008 link was on the 9th. The search layout and styling is not consistent to the main landing page, in fact I should say it is completely different

And here is the clincher, this site is open to the general public, you would have thought they could make this at least a little bit friendly and a little bit more … well ‘up to date’.

That aside, in this day and age, if you have even but a tiniest presence on the web, then you are your own social media company. Everything that you put up there is a direct representation of you, whether you like it or not. So be it you are a private company, a government agency or a self-starting entrepreneur, you need to be aware of what is going around you. A half-hearted treatment on any site just won’t do. (Ahem, especially those important government sites) Your site is the new social marketing tool for yourself, your agenda, your goals, and social it certainly needs to be.

This blog for example, I had friends telling me what I write up here during casual catch-ups, its content, its presentation, I as myself is in full view of the general public, to their critique, their scrutiny, and most important their support. (Maybe that’s what I think too long before writing anything hehe)

~paul

Today is 1st March 2009, it marks a psychological point in my mind that 2009 has well and truly started. (yes for some of us, it takes a little more prompting than others).

Only last week, the haze of smoke that swept through the suburbia of Melbourne reminded all of us that, lying beneath its stunning beauty, there lies another side of Australian nature, forever untamed and relentless.

Houses burnt, dreams shuttered, but the human spirit soared.

Gripped by fears, jobs lost, factories close, leaders pledge their visions and money, countries forge their pact.

I am trying to spend more time in my garden, growing vegetables, and reconditioning the soil. The ferns are growing well under the shade of the trees in the front yard. Our neighbour helps us with some tomato seedlings. We have had several good harvest of bok-choys and the beans are looking good. I got some sea weed fertilizers putting them deep in the soil, as I listen to Ruper Murdoch’s Boyer Lecture

And I wonder the ramifications the world climate might have on my tiny garden, listening to those postulate on the implications of a climate war on countries.

Somehow the fact I managed to recycle half bucket of water from the weekend lunch for the garden made me feel that little bit better.

All is well and life goes on.

~paul

It’s been just over a year since the Li family has installed the York x202 anniversary cross trainer. It’s still shiny. It still sits near the back corner of our lounge. Please allow me to digress

If the cross trainer was a religion, then it’d have many of its trials and tribulations already. It dealt with the atheist TV that gloats with its big cathode ray tube and stereo sound. It dealt with the house dwellers whom are swinging constantly amongst ‘born-again’ “cross trainer faith holders”, alternative religious sects and non-believers that pay tribute to the atheist TV. (Well you get the picture at least the metaphors do).

Now as I inspect its wonders of modern sports science, its smooth leg struts tracing out perfect ecliptic, the electronic motor power train assembly, wiping the sweat off its heart rate monitor handles I know I have done well with yet another 30 minutes of ‘program 10′ fat burn #2 at the distance of 9.8 km. (Wow, the last time I ran that sort of distance I was at least 10 years younger and going for one of those fitness assessment in the army reserve…)

It has been a bit over 2 weeks, 30 minutes every day. As I pick up the good gospel, I start to notice my weight dropping, sweat flowing, and endorphins taking its sweet time in me. Yes I am a born-again cross trainer believer… (yet again) The sceptics abound as always. The red leather couch is laughing right now “you will be back, just you watch, your f*t arse will be parking right here in no time”

let’s how long this time it lasts… I found the sales receipt for the cross trainer the other day, its 1 year warranty has just expired

~paul

The other day as I was driving home in pouring rain (typical Melbourne weather), stuck in not-so-typical bad traffic, I decided to catch up on my overdue pod casts, one of them being the ABC counter point program. If you listens to AM radio at all, I highly recommend taking a look at this program, as at times I have found this very thought provoking.

Last week’s counter point program interviewed Matt Mason, an ex-pirate DJ who recently wrote the Pirate’s Dilemma, The book takes an interesting look at the whole piracy issue in the music industry. And as you’d expect from a veteran pirate radio DJ, he has decided to make the book available completely free. Well… as you check out the book, you can decide how much money to pay him, and if you pay $0, your copy of the ebook shall be aptly named “thepiratesdilemma-pirate_copy.pdf” Nice one Matt

But Matt Mason delves much further than that, tracing back in history early signs of underground movement initiated by the public to go against the huge corporations. He terms this as punk.

Punk in its broad sense defines the underground subversive movement where the individuals defy convention, either by operating outside the existing legal framework or creating an entirely untested territory. And punk capitalists are those pioneers that took advantage of such niche and vacuums where traditional businesses or organisations fail to satisfy or fulfil that demand.

Given his background in the entertainment and music industries, most of his examples are from there. He went into considerable length in describing the activities of pirate radios where local DJs can experiment on alternative music genres. This ultimately can not be stopped by commercial radio stations as they can not cater for all music tastes and instead stick with the fail-safe option of the pop charts. Pirate radios on the other hand allows for specific focus on particular music tastes and become real incubators for up-and-coming musicians and in turn en-mass a considerable number of listeners. Once this has created enough listenership, the mainstream media cannot help but accept defeat in the most fluttering manner, i.e. broadcast music that originally was showcased on pirate radio. In fact many pirate DJs have gone mainstream and finding themselves running commercial radios after they have gained respect and acceptance in the pirate ether.

Matt then further proposes that history has shown such pirate movements before.

…Edison, in turn, went on to invent filmmaking, and demanded a licensing fee from those making movies with his technology. This caused a band of filmmaking pirates, among them a man named William, to flee New York for the then still wild West, where they thrived, unlicensed, until Edison’s patents expired. These pirates continue to operate there, albeit legally now, in the town they founded: Hollywood. William’s last name? Fox.

He obviously isn’t endorsing patent infringements. What’s really important here is that;

1. Technologies like peer-to-peer when used by pirates are ‘game-changing’ to the music and entertainment industry. How can any corporation compete at the scale and value which digital pirates are? The price free, mode of distribution the on-demand torrent network, which is infinitely scaleable and would dwarf any commercial distribution networks.

In that respect, musicians and artists in general are far more adaptable and therefore are abandoning record labels and using the internet themselves to distribute their content. No longer are they tethered by the strict contracts that record labels force them to sign, and they also have far more control over the revenues that their concerts and shows command. Many shows now broadcast freely on youtube, the latest US TV series are now made simultaneous available on the net, on air globally. Alternative revenue streams are sought rather than the traditional TV advertising.

2. Sometimes patents will impede the progress of innovations. Matt shows what’s already happening in our daily lives. Around the world, companies are patenting cure for diseases or genetic codes of 200 plus variety of wheat stocks. Such corporate greed is causing backlash in many third world countries, where its citizens can not afford the exorbitant prices demanded. Many countries have put up provisions in law where the patents concern genetic materials and life-saving drugs.

The idea that capitalism will thrive by individuals pursuing purely for their own self-interests are numbered. Increasing evidence is there that a sense of altruism that exists and prevails. That we do indeed derive satisfaction by helping each other to move forward.

Many open source software are made better by thousands of people around the world devoting free time and effort for the betterment of the general public. Many technologies are now developed and incubated in the open source world, before they get picked up by corporations. Why stop at music and softwares? How about the next battery operated car? People are sharing more than ever before and in the process becoming individual enterprises interacting with the mainstream organisations on level playing fields like never before…

Perhaps this is what Matt meant by punk capitalism. There will forever be punks and pirates, turning what’s happening at the fringes into mainstream, tapping into the trickles of information and transforming that into torrents. May there be a bit of punk in all of us

~paul

My patience is sorely tested with the current supposedly public stance of ‘stamping out child sexual exploitation’ with the recent art exhibition of an Australian photographer, artist Bill Henson.

The NSW police seized a number of photographs by Bill Henson from the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney, on the grounds of depicting minors in an ‘indecent sexual manner or context’. Since we are so focused on the term context, I think it is only just to describe the ‘full’ context under which this event takes place and the significance of it.

Bill Henson is a well known artist, who had his first exhibition at the age of 19, at the National Gallery of Victoria. Since then he has had many exhibitions of his work both nationally and internationally. In 1995, he represented Australia at the 46th Venice Biennale. The exhibition in question at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery contained a number of images depicting girls under the age of 16 in the nude.

It is important to point out that Bill Henson’s artistic interest on his teenage subjects. During an interview by Dominic Sidhu at EGO magzine, this very question was asked:

Your teenage subjects seem to exist outside of society in an almost hypnotic state.

The reason I like working with teenagers is because they represent a kind of breach between the dimensions that people cross through. The classical root of the word “adolescence” means to grow towards something. I am fascinated with that interval, that sort of highly ambiguous and uncertain period where you have an exponential growth of experience and knowledge, but also a kind of tenuous grasp on the certainties of adult life.

Great, so now we have the full context of which we can now see and examine Bill Henson’s work.

Now my own personal critique of this quagmire which Bill has himself now landed in. I am saddened by the fact that we now live in an age of political correctness so pervasive that every facet of a modern man/woman’s life now must pay homage to.

Our media would sensationalise when Madonna (a pop icon) kisses Britney Spears (uhmmm … another sorta icon?) full on the lips; glamourise the Royal families and run images of their babies full across our high-definition LCD screens; and have you and me fixated on the goings-on around us in 5 seconds sound bites that would have you submerged in this soup of headlines and trite stories that even a full F-18 sonic boom would not shake. phew… that felt good

Our legal systems seem to be marching to the same tune, I wonder if great artists of the world would now be tossing and turning in their graves. What would Leonardo Da Vinci say about Bill Henson’s work? What if the famous Mona Lisa smile is from that of dare I say a 14 year old teenage girl? Considering the fact that some of his sculpture works all explored the nude human bodies, it is probably highly likely that he would had young models working for him at the time.

Naturally, I digress After all we are living in an age of ever insurmountable dangers, danger from terrorism, danger from global warming, danger from global recession, and last not least danger from dangerous elements in our society who sexually exploit children. Our legal systems and the incumbents of the government of the day must and shall uphold that very delicate veil of security in this age of dangers and uncertainty.

So it seems that our politicians and governments keep telling us, we need to be so vigilant that Bill Henson’s work can not and will not be shown in this society, without understanding the very context under which his works are shown.

Maybe one day, some of the seized works from the Roslyn Oxley9 would see the day of light in a public forum where we all get to vote if these works are indeed works of a sexual intent or otherwise.

~paul