Takin' It Easy For All Us Sinners.

In the future, our society is so advanced that our buildings breathe. They also look like beehives and change colors every few seconds.

And there you are, with your wifi and wikis and iPhones. I can't imagine living without breathing buildings.

To quote the Big Lebowski's cowboy-poet narrator, "This is how the whole durned human comedy perpetuates itself."

The Bald One Was Cracking Jokes About the One in Pink Wearing His Kid Sister's Old Gear.

The Soviets, the Chinese and the East Germans walk into an industrial relationship.

In the future, there is the Factory 798 or 798 Art District. It’s in an old factory area that was used to build crazy new electronic components and military weapons.
This huge complex, that now houses a whole load of art galleries, began as a piece of the “Socialist Unification Plan” of the military-industrial relationship between the Soviets and the brand spanking new People’s Republic of China.

China wanted to build and sell stuff. The Soviets wanted to help and so did the Germans of the East. The Soviets with the military business and the dissemination of said products, while the Germans would help with the components and the architectural plans.

The Germans chose a Bauhaus-influenced design over the more ornate Soviet-look and that was the first in a long line of fisticuff matches for these two highly tense countries.

The Kraut’s plans were to build large indoor spaces designed to let the maximum amount of natural light into the workplace to save on energy. They built huge ceilings with large arches and insanely big windows. The buildings were huge because everyone had delusions of grandeur and shit needed to be big.

So skip over a bunch of details, all these factories pumped out weapons and devices and trinkets and other hastily made things and the complex was under a lot of pressure during Deng Xiaoping’s reforms of the 1980’s. Not many state-owned enterprises got the money they needed and eventually the Dashanzi Factory Complex was rendered useless by the early 1990’s.

Well, the buildings in the complex were now empty and Beijing’s Avant Garde artists were looking for a home around the same time. So they packed up their scarves and headed on over.

In our future time, 798 gets in demand art exhibitions from all over the world (ranging from rad to slightly above a bag of shit), tons of stinky artists looking for a home and foreign hipster doofuses looking for the free booze.

Oh yeah, it almost got demolished to make room for the Olympic stadiums, I guess. But people from all over the world got all crazy about it and now they’ve redone the roads and started charging more for coffee! Three cheers for communist capitalism in the future!

The Tranquility of The Temple of Heaven

I am going to email this to Slayer to see if they can make a concept album around it...

The Sprite Holster.

The other future day, I was meeting a friend for dinner and she was running a bit late. No problem. It was a nice evening and I was just going to wait on the corner for her. I was minding my own business observing the hierarchy of taxi drivers. You can tell the more respected ones because they make the others take the foreigners. Since no one tips, taking the foreigners usually sucks because they assume we don't know how to tell you where were going. It's all pretty amusing. Anyway...

I noticed this woman walking towards me and howling some nonsense. I didn't think it was directed at me. But I was the only one standing there. She was in her early 30's, was wearing some horrible insect killing perfume, dressed even worse and she had a Sprite can wedged in her cleavage. I turned away from her, hoping that if I didn't acknowledge her, she wouldn't speak to me. No such luck.

NI HAO! She gave me an open-palmed slap on the ass. I turned around and started backpeddling. She got all up in my face and told me that I was going to take her salsa dancing. I was trying to picture us salsa dancing, but I could only wonder why she had a soda can wedged in between her mopey looking breasts. Perhaps she was trying to smoke and talk on the phone at the same time and couldn't part with the rest of her soda? Maybe she always wanted to yell "No hands!"? Or she was waiting to bum rush a foreigner...

I ended up telling her that I wasn't interested and "No No No..." about 100 times before she took her can out of its holster and slammed it into the concrete and started cursing me out in Mandarin.

She stomped on down the block, turning around and yelling at me every few yards until I couldn't hear her any longer. Hopefully, she got some one to take her salsa dancing or at least buy her a new Sprite.