sushipanda

• At Constellation 2 with my good friend Mr. Moscow Mule: http://twitpic.com/wzt7 #
• At constellation 2 after all u can eat japanese after buffet brunch at golden jaguar. My body hates me. #
• @jennwong went to thai place on jinxian, then kiito’s, then shelter. Looks like we switched places for a night. in reply to jennwong #
• Another religious experience at Shelter. Cloud of pot smoke helped. Now in search of late-night burritos. #
• Huge draught Hoegaarden is my dessert: http://twitpic.com/wocz #
• @peijinc TMD 那你干嘛还要回到那个无聊的地方呢? 你也不是很少见你爸妈. 还是上海好, 你别忘记. in reply to peijinc #
• Laris was pretty dead on this Christmas Thursday. Brown Sugar was a total rip-off: 128 RMBfor a Bud and a Henineken. Don’t go. #
• Biting cold, piercing wind: steaming hot Coco curry to the rescue. #
• Just wrapped up Christmas brunch at Jade Garden with family. Stay away from tea smoked duck, chili tofu and fish not bad. #
• Let my staff work from home today cuz I figures I’d have a Christmas hangover today. I was quite prescient. #
• At Glismatti for some festive Swiss fondue for Christmas. #
• @cupofjoe108 welcome to twitter! You may want to turn off SMS alerts once you start following twitter geeks who update all the time! in reply to cupofjoe108 #
• @danwashburn I’ll lay down a bet right now if you’re down: no Yankees WS in 2009. in reply to danwashburn #
• @danwashburn just woke up and saw the news. This is kind of ridiculous, isn’t it? As in, completely offensive. in reply to danwashburn #
• Does this really work? I am now going to proceed to type a bunch of
  shit in this e-mail and see if it’s going to be posted in the cor … #
• excited about using ping.fm to tie all of this social feeding together. hoping i can find a way to update my blog via email. #
• @cmar55 what, fart porn not good enough for ya? now it’s foot porn? you, my friend, are a massive perv in reply to cmar55 #
• @dedlam this is true. I have changed the title. in reply to dedlam #
• in the mood to watch Ratatouille again for the umpteenth time. #
• just had dinner with Franck Crouvezier, GM of Kathleen’s 5. He has an idea for a beer pairing (vs. wine pariing) that I think might work. #
• Having a great California Zinfadel at Tale of 4 Cities now. Made me miss Napa and Its wine and blueberry chocolates. #
• @terencelau i don’t remember, i was too stricken by her celebrity in reply to terencelau #
• Pretty sure I just saw shopgirl right outside the portman. #
• You know the real power of Girl Talk’s music? It makes everyone smile, like I’m doing right now. #
• Good seeing @msittig @danwashburn and @shanghaiist at the SHist Xmas party. On way back from late night snack at Charmant. #

From Adrants, we learn of this new ad campaign from ConAgra foods for their line of Asian Inspired Healthy Choice dinners. When we first saw the image we agree with the poster at Adrants: lame. But it wasn’t until we actually clicked on the interactive that we just felt sad. Once again, an annoying and worn-out stereotype takes the place of something that could truly have been creatively Asian/Chinese inspired. Instead, we get this lazy excuse for ethnic cuteness that hearkens an unenlightened past. Am I being too sensitive? Sure, but this isn’t a stand-up routine, it’s a broad-based marketing campaign devised by ad hacks that should have been more thoughtful about their work. I’ve shrugged off cluelessness before, but in this case I’m more offended by the sheer lack of creativity on a creative project than I am by its explicit insensitivity. And the guy who plays this dude should be hung upside down a ferris wheel with a cactus atop his inverted ass.

Just received this e-mail greeting card from the PR agency AsiaMedia. They do a pretty good job with their clients, as I frequently get e-mails and invites to events even if I don’t always mention them in my writing. Sure, it’s their job, but I know plenty of flaky PR agencies who live off of a handful of big pocketed global firms and do some very superficial outreach.

Having said that and given that many of AsiaMedia’s clients as well as the media contacts they have are foreigners, I had to marvel at either the agency’s sly sense of humor or its insane obliviousness to Christian religious iconography. The Chinese propaganda-era imagery of the happy, braided youths in the foreground pointing to China’s Communist red star atop the Shanghai Exhibition Center, with the nativity title “We looked up and saw a star shining in the East,” is a masterstroke of ironic dissonance.

Ok, so it’s obviously a joke; the people at AsiaMedia aren’t that stupid, especially now that the venerable Dan Washburn has indicated that the firm is headed by a very liberal American — wait, so liberal he’s a socialist, mayhaps? In any case, it made cynical media types like me (yes, that’s right, I just called myself a media type) pause and take notice. Good Christmas cheer, everyone.

I just had a brief Google chat with my friend Jean. She’s living in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, with her husband and son. She’s very pregnant and is returning to the hometown in which we both grew up to have her second baby. She is a Wellesley and Georgetown grad and used to play volleyball and basketball when we were in high school. She doesn’t know this but in junior high I went to my first ever school dance and was velcroed to the wall the entire time. Later that night I showed a picture of Jean in the yearbook to my dad and told him that that was the girl I had gone to the dance with. He was proud and I was ashamed.

I haven’t seen her in person since January of 2006, and the last time before that was probably in 2004, when I visited her in New York and we ate pastrami sandwiches and checked out random art galleries together. The last time I was in our hometown was the winter before I left for China. She came over to my house, the one that was about to be sold. It was late at night and we walked to the park behind my house and sat on the swings and ate Oreo cookies and drank beer. It was a terrible combination. The cookies and the beer, that is. Jean and I were always a dynamite combination. We had sat on those swings before, when we were in high school and I was inspired by James Joyce to write bad poems that rhymed. The poems were about comets and candles and stars and loving things so much that our hair would catch on fire. They were also about Jean, even though she pretended she didn’t know what they were about. Her other friends were jealous because no hopeless adolescent boys wrote them bad poems. Years later we would spend a week in Paris drinking wine and eating Cuban food and hot chocolate. Months after that, it was San Francisco and Yosemite and Napa Valley. It was a big world for such small happinesses (that’s not a word).

Tegucigalpa is 8783 miles (14,135 km) away from Shanghai. That’s 7632 nautical miles, bitches. And on this particularly lonely night in Shanghai, for the 2 minutes that we joked about boobs and penises like we did in those little alleyways along the Seine, it was as if she was inches away. For 2 minutes, the comets and the candles and the stars and my hair caught a bit of fire, and Shanghai got a little warmer.

Oscar season is upon us, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association has named their award recipients. Kudos to giving some shine to Disney/Pixar’s WALL-E which I saw by my lonesome self on a late August afternoon at the Pacific Place movie theatre in Hong Kong. I saw that right before Dark Knight, which was the flick that I was really jonesin’ to watch, and somehow walked away after both viewings more impressed by the sublime and perfectWALL-E.

I was more taken aback by the selection of Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (山峡好人) as the winner of the best foreign film, not least because this was a movie released almost 2 years ago here in China, and had clearly fallen off my cinematic radar screen. Still Life is a good film, Jia is still the paragon of modern China neo-realism, and this and his other pictures continue to demonstrate how much awesome acting talent there is in this massive country. Still, it’s not one of Jia’s best, and if I remember correctly my initial reaction when I saw the film was that he had extended a little too far into the realm of precious flourish. Where his animated vignettes worked as an ironic counterbalance in his much better The World, the telephone tower that turns into a 3D rocket that blasts off into the night sky is just a baffling distraction. For the most part I agree with Chi Tung’s review of the film for Shanghaiist, particularly about Jia’s affectation of meaningful despondency. The thing is, he does this in all his films, and to a much better result.

Compared to some of the other foreign language films I’ve seen of late (notably 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days) and with my keen interest in checking out Waltz with Bashir, which happened to win the best animated feature award from the LA critics, Still Life just seems a bit like an undershoot. Jia Zhangke should not yet be trading on his reputation.

There has been lots of buzz surrounding Burger King’s Whopper Virgins (agency: Crispin Porter + Bogusky) campaign, in which documentary filmmaker (and 70’s skateboard phenom) Stacey Peralta travels with a Burger King funded production crew to remote parts of the world and conducts Big Mac/Whopper taste tests for people who have no concept of what a hamburger is.

I love this campaign and hate it, too. I love it because it’s sneakily slick, impressive in its ability to render real emotion from images of friendly, curious, untarnished citizens of humanity. I hate it because it then proceeds to shamelessly tarnish them with the literal processed meat of the inching soldiers of global corporate hegemony. At the end of the day, this whole thing is purely fascinating, akin to scene in the movie theatre in Outbreak where the camera zooms in on the airborne particles carrying a fatal African virus traveling from one unknown audience member to another. That’s right, I just equated Burger King to a disease; anyone want to disagree?

A WTF moment when I came across the following paragraph from a Bloomberg piece on the famous Shanghainese establishment Jesse:

I personally consider roast fatty pork to be the pinnacle of Shanghai cuisine. It is to this city what the cheese steak sandwich is to Philadelphia or Rice-A-Roni to San Francisco. The incarnation on offer at Jesse’s is the best I’ve had.

Whether roast fatty pork (红烧肉) represents the pinnacle of Shanghai cuisine, a cuisine that includes the delicate yolk from the seasonal hairy crabs and the beloved dumplings (小笼包) that incite strong opinion no matter who the diner is or where he/she is dining, is clearly a debatable but valid point. The issue of Rice-A-Roni being the face of San Franciaco’s cuisine is, in my humble estimation, completely laughable. Somewhere, along the wharf, sourdough bread bowls are rolling in their baking pans.