Micah Sittig - China, Shanghai, Books

December 1, 2002

This page has been quiet lately because I haven't had much news about or done anything related to China lately. For news on the personal front, try my blogspot page and the photo journal, inspired by Ziboy.

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December 14, 2002

First off, apologies all around for not posting in a while. I've been in a funk lately, what with virtual unemployment and a general sense of purposelessness. Christmas is coming, I hope it brings joy to all of us. And that means you too, Julie N.

Drawn By The Orient

I keep saying that I should move to the East Coast because I want to be snobby and cool in that uptight, classy east coast way (that's why I capitalized it). And there are signs; I'm being bombarded by signs that I should move. Like the Bostonians on Change of Heart tonight. They have the cutest accents.

Another reason to leave California (courtesy of Pleasant):

They are beginning, as a group, to dismantle the notion that fashion must be pretty. Not as an anti-fashion movement, such as Punk or grunge—rather, how modernism dismantled the notion that art must be beautiful a hundred years ago.

In the article The Designer is Dead... Long Live the Designer!, Roman Milisic affirms a sentiment I read earlier this week, that American fashion is dead. When people from Monica Lewinsky to rapper P. Diddy are designing and flourishing with purses and sweatclothes (spare me!), you know that the above must be true.

What the author finds in New York is a new notion of twisted fashion, taking unfashionable second-hand clothing and modifying it in oddball ways. The movement's poster boy is the clothing house Imitation of Christ, which has even spawned imitations. The article investigates the philosophy behind the movement, finding nothing. The author concludes that this is prank art, and that

the wearer is left, in the end, with no style value of his own, and a rather ugly outfit. It's the Emperor's New Clothes writ large. And it brings a whole new shade to the term "fashion victim."

The problem is that the fashion world, both the perpetrators and the perpetrated are slaves to the race-for-attention and in the end they all get jilted. If somebody could forget about fame, and concentrate on deconstructing fashion in the same way that modern artists have done for the painted canvas, it would have the potential to cause deep and affecting change. Admitedly, at the same time it would likely go completely unnoticed (cf. Philip Glass). Nonetheless, this all makes me want to move east. It's exciting.

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December 16, 2002

Seven Billion Reason to be a Pacifist

In World War II, only one of the combatants, America had nuclear weapons, and that combatant had only three or perhaps four. One was used to test the prototype in New Mexico. Two were dropped on Japan, and the fourth one was not used.

The Hiroshima blast destroyed more than 10 sq km (4 sq mi) of the city, completely destroying 68 percent of Hiroshima's buildings, another 24 percent were damaged. Nearly 130,000 people were killed; more than 60,000 were incinerated almost instantaneously in a tremendous fireball. In Nagasaki one-third of the city was destroyed and nearly 66,000 people were killed. This was in 1945.

Today the five acknowledged nuclear powers possess about 31,000 nuclear warheads.These weapons are much more powerful and can be delivered anywhere on Earth with the touch of a button.

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