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The Guardian have reported on a shocking story from Beijing that brings home a certain issue here to the arts community.

Basically, landlords came to parts of 798 and told studio owners that developers were getting the land and they had to evict immediately. The artists, of course said no as they had contracts and leases ranging from 5 to 30 years on the buildings. They wanted to check the details first. Finally, fearing that the buildings may be demolished during the night on Sunday, they stayed over - and a gang of 100 masked men showed up with bats and knives. The photo shows the current situation.

I have recently written about the Expo and Top Floor Circus - 

- and one of the big issues in Shanghai regarding the Expo has been accelerated gentrification and demolitions. The band brought the song in question back partly as a reaction to the forcing out of 0093 studios. 

Let this story be a reminder, again, to those of us writing about the Expo and related issues, who also claim to support the arts here. There is a wider context and many issues. It is irresponsible and dangerous to report it while ignoring the negatives. Shame on anyone who is buying the hype and enthusiastically backing the brand. 

Where to start with this?

The day has finally come. 

OK. Fei Yue shoes are Shanghai made canvas shoes that are simple, affordable and have for years been the staple shoe of sports practice in the area.

It is important to point out that while they look dated to us, they are not retro. They have just stuck with the same design from the start increasing price only with inflation. There has never been a break in production or a conscious choice to keep or exploit a dated design. Retro implies that a new product is made with an intentionally dated design because it gives it a unique look. Anyone who tells you they are retro is just lying.

I came to Fei Yue shoes through kung fu clubs, starting with when I trained at the Jing Wu centre in Hong Kou from 2001. However, I don't want to add on yet another misleading association. We should think of it more like this: I came to Fei Yue shoes through playing sports at local clubs with people on working class wages. Back then a pair was less than twenty CNY and now they fall somewhere between twenty-five and twenty-eight. That's fairly restrained when you look at other indicators for the same period. 

I don't like to think of Fei Yue's as cheap exactly. I think of them more as sane. They are locally made and don't feature by products of the meat/factory farming industries. This accounts for low prices and gives them the bonus of being the greenest shoes you can buy here. All this in a world where large shoe companies continually find nasty ways to keep their costs at all time lows while charging more and more to the customer. 

Now for the next chapter. For a while and from many different sources, Fei Yue have been the target of unscrupulous entrepreneurs whose eyes lit up with dollar signs when they saw the cheap prices. Some connections were fairly obvious, like the kung fu connection. People who trained kung fu here and found them to be cheap and practical started importing them to their club after returning home. In the early days though, this was considered no more than a sideline to the Fei Yue factory. A lot of that, you may be surprised to know, was with Japan. Next up though were those who wanted to resell them as a kind of designer retro brand and make big money from it. 

As soon as this happened the first time, a few years ago now and still kung fu themed with custom versions called shaolin and mantis, I could see the future. These guys were selling them overseas for upwards of 200 Euros. That's right, more than sixty times the Shanghai price. For a start. It's simply a microcosm of gentrification or any kind of yuppie plague. Come in on some cheap land or product and exploit it, eventually driving prices up and cutting out the original users who can't afford the new prices. Those working class wage people, you know, the majority. 

As a relevant aside here, my high street real estate agent was firebombed by Welsh activists for the same thing. That time involving holiday homes in North Wales. 

The problem, or tipping point, was obviously going to come when these re-brands started to catch on or be available in Shanghai itself. Even that was going to be tolerable as long as you could still dismiss the whole ridiculous situation by just buying them from local shops for true prices.

So. Here's the news. And this comes from three sources. My friends in the kung fu clubs who order direct, my local branch of East Sports (Dongfang tiyu) and Culture Matters on Dongping Road. The original design pictured above with the green triangle in the bottom are now no longer being made. Once they run out, they are out. The staple shoe of Fei Yue is now being replaced with the red circle in the sole model. It looks basically the same but has a thicker sole and supposedly better quality laces. This is taken directly from their export model.

The result - an immediate doubling of the starting retail price to over 50 CNY.

Who knows where it will go from here. That's Shanghai just ran a huge cover feature on Chinese retro brands, predictably free from any kind of analysis or wider context. I personally think it's a sign that the last vestiges of sane cheaper living in downtown Shanghai are going. Not that there's much left.

I just want to mark this occasion with a message to all of those who participated in the gentrification of my shoes. From the people who took Fei Yue's and re marketed them as a retro brand at sky high new prices to the writers and blogs who big upped these new brands ... ...

f*ck you all, there are people here who need those shoes to be cheap, you selfish w*nkers

Howard Zinn passed away yesterday. Maybe you don't know him or have only heard of him in passing but compassionate and decent people everywhere have lost one of our brightest lights.

Most people will know him through his masterwork:

It redefined history away from the sickening, oppressive narrative of 'great men' and rulers, of victors law.  It shined a light on our history much the same as did Edward Said in his work Orientalism. Edward is also gone now. 

Well, we still have another of our own great people in Amy Goodman and her show Democracy Now is where i'll take the tribute from:

Let me take this opportunity to urge you to watch Democracy Now. They have a show every weekday, it's an hour long and free at the site. You will see real journalism that asks the right questions and then listens. Pretty much all other news outlets are shallow and agenda based in comparison.

Let's finish with a Howard quote that I took from Mickey Z's write up:

Well, one more for the road then back to music I suppose.

I quoted activist Derrick Jensen in that last post. Then it occurred to me that people generally don't know him. Derrick is amazing. He is a prolific writer and possesses a brilliant mind. He is also a qualified mining engineer and has quite the CV. He is one of the most significant writers of our time.

Check it out here and also buy his books from here. 

So, in his two part book, Endgame, Jensen lays out his famous premises. There are twenty of them, so here you are:

Premise One: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization.

Premise Two: Traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up or sell the resources on which their communities are based until their communities have been destroyed. They also do not willingly allow their landbases to be damaged so that other resources--gold, oil, and so on--can be extracted. It follows that those who want the resources will do what they can to destroy traditional communities.

Premise Three: Our way of living--industrial civilization--is based on, requires, and would collapse very quickly without persistent and widespread violence.

Premise Four: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

Premise Five: The property of those higher on the hierarchy is more valuable than the lives of those below. It is acceptable for those above to increase the amount of property they control--in everyday language, to make money--by destroying or taking the lives of those below. This is called production. If those below damage the property of those above, those above may kill or otherwise destroy the lives of those below. This is called justice.

Premise Six: Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses. The effects of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a very long time.

Premise Seven: The longer we wait for civilization to crash--or the longer we wait before we ourselves bring it down--the messier will be the crash, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after.

Premise Eight: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system.

Another way to put premise Eight: Any economic or social system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral, and stupid. Sustainability, morality, and intelligence (as well as justice) requires the dismantling of any such economic or social system, or at the very least disallowing it from damaging your landbase.

Premise Nine: Although there will clearly some day be far fewer humans than there are at present, there are many ways this reduction in population could occur (or be achieved, depending on the passivity or activity with which we choose to approach this transformation). Some of these ways would be characterized by extreme violence and privation: nuclear armageddon, for example, would reduce both population and consumption, yet do so horrifically; the same would be true for a continuation of overshoot, followed by crash. Other ways could be characterized by less violence. Given the current levels of violence by this culture against both humans and the natural world, however, it's not possible to speak of reductions in population and consumption that do not involve violence and privation, not because the reductions themselves would necessarily involve violence, but because violence and privation have become the default. Yet some ways of reducing population and consumption, while still violent, would consist of decreasing the current levels of violence required, and caused by, the (often forced) movement of resources from the poor to the rich, and would of course be marked by a reduction in current violence against the natural world. Personally and collectively we may be able to both reduce the amount and soften the character of violence that occurs during this ongoing and perhaps longterm shift. Or we may not. But this much is certain: if we do not approach it actively--if we do not talk about our predicament and what we are going to do about it--the violence will almost undoubtedly be far more severe, the privation more extreme.

Premise Ten: The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.

Premise Eleven: From the beginning, this culture--civilization--has been a culture of occupation.

Premise Twelve: There are no rich people in the world, and there are no poor people. There are just people. The rich may have lots of pieces of green paper that many pretend are worth something--or their presumed riches may be even more abstract: numbers on hard drives at banks--and the poor may not. These "rich" claim they own land, and the "poor" are often denied the right to make that same claim. A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of pieces of green paper. Those without the green papers generally buy into these delusions almost as quickly and completely as those with. These delusions carry with them extreme consequences in the real world.

Premise Thirteen: Those in power rule by force, and the sooner we break ourselves of illusions to the contrary, the sooner we can at least begin to make reasonable decisions about whether, when, and how we are going to resist.

Premise Fourteen: From birth on--and probably from conception, but I'm not sure how I'd make the case--we are individually and collectively enculturated to hate life, hate the natural world, hate the wild, hate wild animals, hate women, hate children, hate our bodies, hate and fear our emotions, hate ourselves. If we did not hate the world, we could not allow it to be destroyed before our eyes. If we did not hate ourselves, we could not allow our homes--and our bodies--to be poisoned.

Premise Fifteen: Love does not imply pacifism.

Premise Sixteen: The material world is primary. This does not mean that the spirit does not exist, nor that the material world is all there is. It means that spirit mixes with flesh. It means also that real world actions have real world consequences. It means we cannot rely on Jesus, Santa Claus, the Great Mother, or even the Easter Bunny to get us out of this mess. It means this mess really is a mess, and not just the movement of God's eyebrows. It means we have to face this mess ourselves. It means that for the time we are here on Earth--whether or not we end up somewhere else after we die, and whether we are condemned or privileged to live here--the Earth is the point. It is primary. It is our home. It is everything. It is silly to think or act or be as though this world is not real and primary. It is silly and pathetic to not live our lives as though our lives are real.

Premise Seventeen: It is a mistake (or more likely, denial) to base our decisions on whether actions arising from these will or won't frighten fence-sitters, or the mass of Americans.

Premise Eighteen: Our current sense of self is no more sustainable than our current use of energy or technology.

Premise Nineteen: The culture's problem lies above all in the belief that controlling and abusing the natural world is justifiable.

Premise Twenty: Within this culture, economics--not community well-being, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself--drives social decisions.

Modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are determined primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the monetary fortunes of the decision-makers and those they serve.

Re-modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are determined primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the power of the decision-makers and those they serve.

Re-modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are founded primarily (and often exclusively) on the almost entirely unexamined belief that the decision-makers and those they serve are entitled to magnify their power and/or financial fortunes at the expense of those below.

Re-modification of Premise Twenty: If you dig to the heart of it--if there were any heart left--you would find that social decisions are determined primarily on the basis of how well these decisions serve the ends of controlling or destroying wild nature.

Well, it was a happy New Year and we all had a right old time at the Mushrooms gig, despite a brief 30 minutes or so while the police inspected the premises. 

However, outside the world of music is quite another world that we shouldn't forget about. If we had a good year and had a job and some mobility, food on the table and all that - then we were in the minority.

Forget Copenhagen or if you believe in man made global warming or not. Even if it's not true, there's still enough pollution, deforestation and extinctions (100 species a day) to crash our eco-system in no time at all. 

What's more, they go largely unpunished. Know what a superfund site is? There's even a list and maps. Check it out. If you or I took a truck load of barrels with that amount of toxic waste in them and started dumping them into a river, we'd be locked up in a jiffy and made an example of. But those guys are all good. When you look at the delegations to meetings like Cophenhagen, you're looking at the offenders and enablers, not the saviours.

Almost half of all deforestation in the global south comes from the cattle industry. Beef and leather. Not to mention the emissions. So if we all go veggie, there's no need for leaders to blow more meetings. Here's 10 more good reasons. In fact, if we all went veggie, rode bikes to work and stopped buying so much junk and luxury goods, a lot of problems would go away and the death-race consumer system would collapse.

Also, war inc. plods on. The US military is the world's biggest, the world's biggest polluter, biggest domestic taxer and the world's biggest killer. The UK are not much better. And they are lying b*stards too. As the Guardian runs this story on Iran and has the balls to put a footnote on it stating there's no evidence, consider this on the last Iran incident story in The Times: It was made up.

So here's my New Year's message to you all, courtesy of Derrick Jensen:

Read the rest: 5 radical actions that will get you arrested and 5 that won't.

Tomorrow night is the Roots And Shoots benefit at Yuyintang. This is for a great cause and your money goes towards planting trees in Inner Mongolia, you should go.

But ...

Only a couple of days back, I watched Jane Goodall herself on The Daily Show getting stuck into serious activists and calling them extremists. Fundamentalists was used too, making the sick comparison complete between vegans and beheadings. Then she later lamented that, despite her good work, animals and the environment were still on their way out at a high rate. Seriously, WTF. Then why disparage the people trying to address the real problems? This is a widespread attitude that people have.

Have you ever tried out a carbon footprint calculator? To make the 2050 targets (conservative in my view) you will have to say goodbye to meat diets and private cars - and everyone will have to do it. Think it's going to happen without some pushing? 

But here's the news. That's just for carbon output. It doesn't wholly address general pollution and the rabid assault on animals and the environment. So now it's time to really get extreme. Have you ever had a proper search around the net for respectable reports on this? I have - and here's a pretty good summary:

And before you baulk or reach for your kneejerk reaction, consider the level of denial going on even in amazing people like Jane Goodall - devotes her life to the study, care and conservation of animals, then takes pot shots on national TV at organisations devoted to their survival and full rights. So reader, do you consider yourself to be a reactionary bigot who froths at the mouth and whips out the disdain at people who care? No? Why attack people who advocate for green causes more than you speak out against pollution and animal cruelty? Think about it, do you have your head in the sand too?

From Wikipedia, which quotes an amazing book I read at college Subculture, The Meaning Of Style.

I was reading around the topic of director Roman Polanski's arrest in Switzerland lately. That's not him pictured, read on. Due to the various high-profile reactions, there is now a debate going on around it. However, it is confused. It is at least three debates.

1) Should he be arrested, is he a criminal.

2) Should Hollywood have let him work (release and reward his works).

3) Do artist's behaviour/crimes affect their art, should we condemn his work.

I'm writing now because I'm interested in number three. The mainstream debate, excellently reproduced here,

The Polanski Uproar - NYT

... tends to come down on yes or no art is or isn't separate from the artist. I believe it's more complex than that, but easy enough to lay out. Let's clear up number one first so we can let it go.

In one of the essays presented in the NYT article there, Geraldine A. Ferraro says,

"New rule: If your family is killed in the Holocaust and your wife is killed by Charles Manson, you are allowed one free rape."

Indeed. Okay, we'd better go after the jump for the next part on art and artist's beliefs/behaviour.

I blogged recently about someone I knew who was killed on his bike in New York City. Revisit the post and watch his funny, thought-provoking video on bicycle philosophy.

He has a special memorial this week by other cyclists involving a Ghost Bike installation at the site where he died. 

The photo shows the spot where he was killed, but the bike will now be chained to an adjacent fence. If you look carefully at the top right corner you'll see that in addition to the oncoming split six lanes, there are more for traffic going the other way. Right through a residential area. 

While were on the subject, some of my younger students were telling me that Shanghai has the worst traffic in the world. They are mistaken of course. Elsewhere on Streetsblog is a great post about a rush hour 'race' in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The bicycle won coming in at 22 minutes, where a car came in at over an hour, also losing out to the walker. But the amazing thing is the hook of the post. The bike beat the helicopter. That included starting at the same point of course, so the helicopter guy had to go to the heliport and get clearance etc. 

Here's what Mickey Z said about James at the blog where we all met and talked every day.

That's bicycles, the none motorized ones. James was a committed advocate and activist in New York on behalf of bikes. The video above is footage from one of his Bike TV segments reproduced from this tribute. He did most of his work through volunteering at TA - here. 

James was one of the few people who lived in a way which did not make a mockery of his values. 

I have biked every day of my eight years in Shanghai and have proudly not owned a car for ten. Tonight when I go on my usual ritual early-hours ride on the night of the first day off that week, ghosting at speed through the near deserted city streets, James will be with me.