率意独驾，不由径路，车迹所穷，辄怮哭而反。
新blog地址：http://jaycong.blogbus.com/
Monday, August 6, 2007
Monday, July 16, 2007
云门舞集 水月
昨天去看《水月》，买了本节目单来翻，《红楼梦》在上海的演出被称为封箱作，应该是此后再没完整演出过。《九歌》这次演的那一出是《云中君》，《挽歌》最早的舞者是罗曼菲。林怀民说很多舞作都多少年不演了，此次重温算是“交作业”。态度真好。听说前天的《水月》开场后有人拍照，舞者开演后又中止，再重新表演；所以昨天林怀民在开场时特意提醒，如果身边有人拍照，请“温柔而坚定地制止他”。
《水月》非常好，看完后浮现“完美”二字。这来自它的纯粹，纯粹的舞蹈语言，纯粹的意象。半点不多使力。它向内用力，奇异地表现了舞蹈如何呈现出“静”的境界。它又似一个圆，无始无终生生不息。舞者们身体挪移的幅度很小，阴柔婉转，愈细小的曲折愈摄人魂魄。后半段静水满台，舞者共水起舞、流淌。起落收放间我想起天女散花，挪肘收腿间，一个个世界被捻开再掐灭。印象最深刻的有两幕，一是全体舞者卧在水上，刹那间仿佛轮回亦停止，流水声更衬出满台的静。再有，当然是舞作最后。无法用语言描述，只是舞者们逐个消失在舞台。不亲眼见到，你无法知道那是怎样一种阴极生阳暴烈宁然的美。本来是镜花水月毕竟总成空，可那只脚，又是怎样的霸道和，美。
《水月》这一时期的林怀民，大概是现在的我最喜欢的。差不多同期的《流浪者之歌》也格外好。
《水月》非常好，看完后浮现“完美”二字。这来自它的纯粹，纯粹的舞蹈语言，纯粹的意象。半点不多使力。它向内用力，奇异地表现了舞蹈如何呈现出“静”的境界。它又似一个圆，无始无终生生不息。舞者们身体挪移的幅度很小，阴柔婉转，愈细小的曲折愈摄人魂魄。后半段静水满台，舞者共水起舞、流淌。起落收放间我想起天女散花，挪肘收腿间，一个个世界被捻开再掐灭。印象最深刻的有两幕，一是全体舞者卧在水上，刹那间仿佛轮回亦停止，流水声更衬出满台的静。再有，当然是舞作最后。无法用语言描述，只是舞者们逐个消失在舞台。不亲眼见到，你无法知道那是怎样一种阴极生阳暴烈宁然的美。本来是镜花水月毕竟总成空，可那只脚，又是怎样的霸道和，美。
《水月》这一时期的林怀民，大概是现在的我最喜欢的。差不多同期的《流浪者之歌》也格外好。
Friday, July 13, 2007
云门舞集
昨夜看了云门的表演。睽违十四年再度入京，观众很热情。厅内如赶集，匆匆入场，等至开场时近乎满座。保利的领位员服务一般。说起来还是首都剧场最严谨。近读赵珩《彀外谭屑》，誉首都剧场为北京剧场翘楚，确是如此。
云门来京共两场演出。这场是精选合辑，林怀民说要让北京人们看看云门这些年的成绩。
白蛇传，九歌，挽歌，红楼梦，行草，狂草，行草二。
对挽歌印象最深刻。一盏昏灯，十分钟旋转，简单又深邃。女舞者似一朵尘埃里的花，开了又败，败了又开。恍惚间生老病死苦集灭道都在这里了。
白蛇是当年的经典，当年正是林怀民让青蛇这个角色活了过来。如今看，这剧倒该再往前走一走。许仙与法海这两个男角弱了些。不过云门的男舞者一向是比不过女舞者的。
九歌也很好，等去找九歌的全篇来看。只是男舞者脚踏两人而动，虽或有深意在，总难免让人为炫技的冒险所悬心，而出离这意境了。
红楼梦有点难看。满台的色彩，看不见身体。男舞者几乎要被淹没。
行草有点拘谨，狂草好看些，但放不开。行草二的黑白阴阳对照很好看。林怀民似乎太迷醉太极导引与拳术了，身体和动作该更开放些才好看。这三部曲也正代表了近年来林怀民呈现意象而忽略故事的倾向。
期待周末的《水月》。
期间又想起了罗曼菲和伍国柱。其实还蛮想看《断章》的。
云门来京共两场演出。这场是精选合辑，林怀民说要让北京人们看看云门这些年的成绩。
白蛇传，九歌，挽歌，红楼梦，行草，狂草，行草二。
对挽歌印象最深刻。一盏昏灯，十分钟旋转，简单又深邃。女舞者似一朵尘埃里的花，开了又败，败了又开。恍惚间生老病死苦集灭道都在这里了。
白蛇是当年的经典，当年正是林怀民让青蛇这个角色活了过来。如今看，这剧倒该再往前走一走。许仙与法海这两个男角弱了些。不过云门的男舞者一向是比不过女舞者的。
九歌也很好，等去找九歌的全篇来看。只是男舞者脚踏两人而动，虽或有深意在，总难免让人为炫技的冒险所悬心，而出离这意境了。
红楼梦有点难看。满台的色彩，看不见身体。男舞者几乎要被淹没。
行草有点拘谨，狂草好看些，但放不开。行草二的黑白阴阳对照很好看。林怀民似乎太迷醉太极导引与拳术了，身体和动作该更开放些才好看。这三部曲也正代表了近年来林怀民呈现意象而忽略故事的倾向。
期待周末的《水月》。
期间又想起了罗曼菲和伍国柱。其实还蛮想看《断章》的。
有人说
记得上小学的时候，有一天我迟到了，上课睡着了，会餐时间打翻饭盒，上厕所的时候摔倒，下午在黑板上写不出答案来，傍晚的时候某个欺负我的女孩继续欺负我，我终于还击，却被老师看见，放学的时候路过办公室，老师对我说，“你今天的表现真是糟透了。”
—当你就站在那里，看见远远的地方，在桥的上面有个人向你走来。他是一个你一直很想见的人，很久没有见了。他微笑的，慢慢的向你走来，你站在那里，你也在微笑，你看到谁了？ －你偷偷的在看距离你不远的、站在斜前面的他，他是一个曾经伤害过你的人，他就站在那里。你就很安静的在看他，心里面在颤抖，像热水在沸腾，导致身体在剧烈的抖动。 －他要走了，你不想他走，用颤抖的身体去挡着他的前进。
—当你就站在那里，看见远远的地方，在桥的上面有个人向你走来。他是一个你一直很想见的人，很久没有见了。他微笑的，慢慢的向你走来，你站在那里，你也在微笑，你看到谁了？ －你偷偷的在看距离你不远的、站在斜前面的他，他是一个曾经伤害过你的人，他就站在那里。你就很安静的在看他，心里面在颤抖，像热水在沸腾，导致身体在剧烈的抖动。 －他要走了，你不想他走，用颤抖的身体去挡着他的前进。
Thursday, June 28, 2007
男性雜志的沒落
I've had it with men
Ten years ago, men's monthlies were making fortunes for publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. And FHM editor Ed Needham was at the heart of it. But, he says, the internet and trashy weeklies have destroyed all that: the party's over, and it's time to move on
Monday June 4, 2007The Guardian
Last summer, I moved back to London after spending seven years in New York editing FHM, Rolling Stone and - most recently - Maxim, the most popular men's magazine in the world. The role of editor-in-chief at a large-circulation American magazine is one of life's more charmed positions, but I decided to step away from the generous salary, sell the SoHo loft and manage without all the other perks and baubles that come with sitting atop a big masthead - such as the five-star hotels, backstage passes, foreign travel, limos to the airport, free (or massively discounted) designer clothes and invitations to premieres and major sporting events, including, had my hosts chosen a more reliable tout, the World Cup final. History may one day show this to be a financially moronic decision, but the internet, other electronic distractions and the UK weeklies have made the month a terribly unfashionable unit of time, and the path ahead for men's magazines increasingly difficult to chart. Of greater concern, it had stopped being fun. This genre, into which I had gleefully poured my heart and soul for so many years, had lost its appeal. I felt it prudent to move on. Someone else can have the tickets and the chauffeur-driven cars.
Just 10 years ago, though, men's magazines were in dazzling ascent, and FHM was the toast of the British magazine industry. I took over as editor in 1997, and by the time I moved to New York in 1999 it had become the biggest monthly magazine in Europe, with an average circulation of over 750,000. Our great rival Loaded was heralded in Vanity Fair as emblematic of "cool Britannia", but it was FHM that was flying off the newsstands in unprecedented quantities, thanks to a - then irresistible - formula of funny, sexy and useful. Our sales were more than those of our three nearest rivals combined. We dwarfed women's magazines. From nowhere, we suddenly found that our business cards could make traffic police tear up speeding tickets and prompt the swift unhooking of velvet ropes. Politicians sought our opinions on "young people". A private jet took us to Morocco for the day. There was lunch with royalty.Like the thrill of punk after the stodge of prog rock, FHM's success came in part from standing in such dramatic contrast to what came before. The previous generation of magazines for men felt there was no higher calling in life than to be an ultra-cool man of both action and urbane knowledge, preferably Steve McQueen, in spite of his being many years dead from lung cancer. FHM realised that generally men do not wake in the hope that each day will bring a fresh descent of the Cresta Run. Or care about fountain pens. Or consider ignorance on the subject of single-malt scotch a source of shame. At the heart of FHM was a belief that men are not noble or heroic, and are better off not trying to be. The idea that it was all right to be funny and self-deprecating about, say, failure in the pursuit of women came as an enormous relief to our readers.
But it was the women - or, more specifically, pictures of famous women in their underwear - who were the single biggest contributor to the magazine's success, and the title's biggest eureka moment came when we realised that men preferred covers of the biggest female stars of the day, such as Britney, Kylie, Gillian Anderson and Jennifer Aniston to, say, Frank Skinner in a jacuzzi or Harry Enfield with a sardine in his breast pocket. It was like the day country music discovered that "rambling" rhymes with "gambling" - once that penny dropped, there was no holding the magazine back. While rocketing sales confirmed that a lot of people liked what we were doing, a number of other people, possibly even readers of this newspaper, viewed what we were doing with some distaste, not to say horror. The magazine undeniably objectified women, in that they were shot, lit, made up, clothed and retouched to make them more appealing to look at, but complaints to the magazine were rare, and we certainly didn't sit around fretting that we were somehow hindering the progress of women's rights. Even 10 years ago, it felt like the debate as to whether such images were inappropriate or demeaning was over. Society had deemed them acceptable. There was a clear difference - clothing - between what we were doing and what you needed to resort to the top shelf for, and similar images were commonplace in advertising, film and television, music videos, even women's magazines. Our benchmark was the "tube test" - could people read it openly on the tube?
In 1999, I moved to New York to launch the US version of the magazine, and while FHM in the UK had seen off all competition with great panache, a very different set of opponents awaited us on the other side of the Atlantic. Felix Dennis had already launched Maxim, and by then was making the great and good of American publishing eat their predictions of its immediate and humiliating failure. (As a sign of that industry's enormous disconnect with the people who buy their titles, they took to calling our brand of men's magazines "laddie books", an expression that has still never been uttered instinctively by a single American male.) We were also drunk on our own brilliance - we had taken one look at the US newsstand, thought our magazine was magnificent, theirs were rubbish and couldn't understand how we could possibly go wrong. But a winning formula in Britain does not guarantee success in the US.
In many ways, good and bad, Britain is like a pub and America is like a university. Some British magazines are literally like a pub - beery and raucous - but the practice of journalism in the US is a solemn and serious activity, and not given to mischief-making. This meant that Maxim was able to grow into a monster, with a circulation of over 2.5m, and a readership six times that, yet it was still considered an aberration and a market for similar titles didn't erupt with the vitality that it had in Britain. There were other more immediate cultural differences to contend with, not least emotional ones. In one week I had to deal with three incidents of staff in tears, all of them male. I am still not sure what the correct response is to that situation. I suspect it may be instant dismissal.
And there was also the culture of litigation. In London we had scoffed at the niceties of libel law and somehow emerged unscathed. In the US such a cavalier approach is unwise. At Maxim the lawyers read every single word we wrote. One such piece was a diagram describing how to ski off the roof of your house on a snowy day, which the lawyers considered so irresponsible that it should be pulled immediately. Eventually we agreed to run a warning. The lawyers wanted it to read: "If you do this, you will die," a warning of such apocalyptic - and inaccurate - portent that we would occasionally put it on other stories because we liked its uncompromising position so much.
At Rolling Stone, I tried to apply some of the lessons I had learned in men's magazines. To a British eye, Rolling Stone looks very foreign and intimidating, with its oversized pages of dense copy. In the US, however, it is a journalistic colossus, especially in certain political, business and entertainment circles. Rolling Stone's problem is that it has to look backwards and forwards at the same time: back to its serious musical and political roots, beloved of its hard-core readership, but also forwards in ways that attract new readers, who in many instances do not have the patience to consume media in the long-form way Rolling Stone serves it up. This is a convoluted way of saying I wanted to get sales up, and believed that more commercial covers didn't have to compromise the quality of the writing inside. One of my first covers was a picture of Christina Aguilera on a red sheet, with a guitar arranged artfully over her naked form. The magazine sold well above average, but proprietor Jann Wenner felt we'd tipped the balance too far. No more red backgrounds and no more women dressed in musical instruments, he decreed. While I was finding out exactly where American journalism's tolerance for red bedsheets lay, however, other forces were at work to turn back the march of men's magazines.
Until recently the magazine industry considered the internet little more than a gimmick, and magazine websites were a place for second-rate journalists and off-cuts of content considered too weak for the print version. By the time publishers woke up to their spectacularly poor judgment, the internet had made a move on its audience. We once had a very genteel conversation at British FHM about whether we should run a photo of a man who had been killed having sex with a chicken. He had been surprised by a large boulder, which had crushed him and the chicken to death. It had appeared in the Spanish press a few years earlier and, while unfortunate, was quite funny, so we ran it, and it was much talked about and widely reprinted. Nowadays, the idea that a monthly magazine can be first with such a "Did you see?" photo is laughable. That image today would be in half the world's in-boxes before they got the rock off him.
Besides the internet, a battery of electronic wonders - iPods, mobile phones, video games, MySpace, instant messaging and the rest - has taken huge bites out of the time formerly allotted to magazine reading. And mass-market men's monthlies, which once stood in such thrilling contrast to everything that came before, are now thought of by a new generation of readers as last year's model, as exciting as black-and-white television. Other magazines, newspapers and websites have plundered their best ideas, which has only diluted their originality further. Men's monthlies in this country made a potentially fatal error in an attempt to shore up flagging circulation when they decided to show bare breasts: overnight, it became impossible to defend against the porno accusation. It didn't help circulation or advertising. They no longer passed the tube test. Worst of all, it meant closing the door on the hope that big celebrities would ever return, and no one sells magazines like big stars. Porn stars, glamour girls and z-listers moved in to fill the void. All this was too much for poor American FHM, which died and was laid to rest in December 2006, its official cause of death "difficult trading conditions".
By then, the bloom was long off the rose. Not even the funniest photo caption can be recycled, yet magazines will insist on trying. There is a law of diminishing returns on the ingredients of men's magazines - franchises such as FHM's "100 great adventures" become less great with each new hundred. We once ran a photo - admittedly revolting, certainly not safe for the tube but a source of immense fascination at the time - of a 13-stone tumour being removed from an eight-stone woman. I have now seen so many freakish images I find even the art of festive biscuit-tins more deserving of attention. Most disappointing of all, celebrity culture has become dull. We didn't care whether actors and actresses were talented or not, but it did matter that they were interesting. Now, thanks to their publicists, glimpses of the stars' special weirdness are all too rare. And some of them are just plain awful. If there is any justice there will be VIP section in hell reserved for the likes of Jessica Simpson and her ridiculous entourage.
The last straw came on a sales trip to Los Angeles last spring, presenting healthy sales figures, desirable demographics and a golden vision to blank-faced advertising executives whose pens sat politely untouched on their notebooks. They trooped back to their cubicles while we drove at walking pace in vile traffic to the next identical appointment. I could see why people end up going berserk with a samurai sword. A magnificent job had become drudgery.
So I got out. I'm also the parent of a two-year-old girl, and while I've never been ashamed of the pictures for which I've been responsible, the "have a good time, all the time" attitude of men's magazines now seems like a message from a different frequency. But essentially my decision is a selfish one: I've taken the ride up, and it was tremendous, thanks, but I think I'll give the ride down the other side a miss.
· Ed Needham now runs an online publishing business called Grand Parade.
Ten years ago, men's monthlies were making fortunes for publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. And FHM editor Ed Needham was at the heart of it. But, he says, the internet and trashy weeklies have destroyed all that: the party's over, and it's time to move on
Monday June 4, 2007The Guardian
Last summer, I moved back to London after spending seven years in New York editing FHM, Rolling Stone and - most recently - Maxim, the most popular men's magazine in the world. The role of editor-in-chief at a large-circulation American magazine is one of life's more charmed positions, but I decided to step away from the generous salary, sell the SoHo loft and manage without all the other perks and baubles that come with sitting atop a big masthead - such as the five-star hotels, backstage passes, foreign travel, limos to the airport, free (or massively discounted) designer clothes and invitations to premieres and major sporting events, including, had my hosts chosen a more reliable tout, the World Cup final. History may one day show this to be a financially moronic decision, but the internet, other electronic distractions and the UK weeklies have made the month a terribly unfashionable unit of time, and the path ahead for men's magazines increasingly difficult to chart. Of greater concern, it had stopped being fun. This genre, into which I had gleefully poured my heart and soul for so many years, had lost its appeal. I felt it prudent to move on. Someone else can have the tickets and the chauffeur-driven cars.
Just 10 years ago, though, men's magazines were in dazzling ascent, and FHM was the toast of the British magazine industry. I took over as editor in 1997, and by the time I moved to New York in 1999 it had become the biggest monthly magazine in Europe, with an average circulation of over 750,000. Our great rival Loaded was heralded in Vanity Fair as emblematic of "cool Britannia", but it was FHM that was flying off the newsstands in unprecedented quantities, thanks to a - then irresistible - formula of funny, sexy and useful. Our sales were more than those of our three nearest rivals combined. We dwarfed women's magazines. From nowhere, we suddenly found that our business cards could make traffic police tear up speeding tickets and prompt the swift unhooking of velvet ropes. Politicians sought our opinions on "young people". A private jet took us to Morocco for the day. There was lunch with royalty.Like the thrill of punk after the stodge of prog rock, FHM's success came in part from standing in such dramatic contrast to what came before. The previous generation of magazines for men felt there was no higher calling in life than to be an ultra-cool man of both action and urbane knowledge, preferably Steve McQueen, in spite of his being many years dead from lung cancer. FHM realised that generally men do not wake in the hope that each day will bring a fresh descent of the Cresta Run. Or care about fountain pens. Or consider ignorance on the subject of single-malt scotch a source of shame. At the heart of FHM was a belief that men are not noble or heroic, and are better off not trying to be. The idea that it was all right to be funny and self-deprecating about, say, failure in the pursuit of women came as an enormous relief to our readers.
But it was the women - or, more specifically, pictures of famous women in their underwear - who were the single biggest contributor to the magazine's success, and the title's biggest eureka moment came when we realised that men preferred covers of the biggest female stars of the day, such as Britney, Kylie, Gillian Anderson and Jennifer Aniston to, say, Frank Skinner in a jacuzzi or Harry Enfield with a sardine in his breast pocket. It was like the day country music discovered that "rambling" rhymes with "gambling" - once that penny dropped, there was no holding the magazine back. While rocketing sales confirmed that a lot of people liked what we were doing, a number of other people, possibly even readers of this newspaper, viewed what we were doing with some distaste, not to say horror. The magazine undeniably objectified women, in that they were shot, lit, made up, clothed and retouched to make them more appealing to look at, but complaints to the magazine were rare, and we certainly didn't sit around fretting that we were somehow hindering the progress of women's rights. Even 10 years ago, it felt like the debate as to whether such images were inappropriate or demeaning was over. Society had deemed them acceptable. There was a clear difference - clothing - between what we were doing and what you needed to resort to the top shelf for, and similar images were commonplace in advertising, film and television, music videos, even women's magazines. Our benchmark was the "tube test" - could people read it openly on the tube?
In 1999, I moved to New York to launch the US version of the magazine, and while FHM in the UK had seen off all competition with great panache, a very different set of opponents awaited us on the other side of the Atlantic. Felix Dennis had already launched Maxim, and by then was making the great and good of American publishing eat their predictions of its immediate and humiliating failure. (As a sign of that industry's enormous disconnect with the people who buy their titles, they took to calling our brand of men's magazines "laddie books", an expression that has still never been uttered instinctively by a single American male.) We were also drunk on our own brilliance - we had taken one look at the US newsstand, thought our magazine was magnificent, theirs were rubbish and couldn't understand how we could possibly go wrong. But a winning formula in Britain does not guarantee success in the US.
In many ways, good and bad, Britain is like a pub and America is like a university. Some British magazines are literally like a pub - beery and raucous - but the practice of journalism in the US is a solemn and serious activity, and not given to mischief-making. This meant that Maxim was able to grow into a monster, with a circulation of over 2.5m, and a readership six times that, yet it was still considered an aberration and a market for similar titles didn't erupt with the vitality that it had in Britain. There were other more immediate cultural differences to contend with, not least emotional ones. In one week I had to deal with three incidents of staff in tears, all of them male. I am still not sure what the correct response is to that situation. I suspect it may be instant dismissal.
And there was also the culture of litigation. In London we had scoffed at the niceties of libel law and somehow emerged unscathed. In the US such a cavalier approach is unwise. At Maxim the lawyers read every single word we wrote. One such piece was a diagram describing how to ski off the roof of your house on a snowy day, which the lawyers considered so irresponsible that it should be pulled immediately. Eventually we agreed to run a warning. The lawyers wanted it to read: "If you do this, you will die," a warning of such apocalyptic - and inaccurate - portent that we would occasionally put it on other stories because we liked its uncompromising position so much.
At Rolling Stone, I tried to apply some of the lessons I had learned in men's magazines. To a British eye, Rolling Stone looks very foreign and intimidating, with its oversized pages of dense copy. In the US, however, it is a journalistic colossus, especially in certain political, business and entertainment circles. Rolling Stone's problem is that it has to look backwards and forwards at the same time: back to its serious musical and political roots, beloved of its hard-core readership, but also forwards in ways that attract new readers, who in many instances do not have the patience to consume media in the long-form way Rolling Stone serves it up. This is a convoluted way of saying I wanted to get sales up, and believed that more commercial covers didn't have to compromise the quality of the writing inside. One of my first covers was a picture of Christina Aguilera on a red sheet, with a guitar arranged artfully over her naked form. The magazine sold well above average, but proprietor Jann Wenner felt we'd tipped the balance too far. No more red backgrounds and no more women dressed in musical instruments, he decreed. While I was finding out exactly where American journalism's tolerance for red bedsheets lay, however, other forces were at work to turn back the march of men's magazines.
Until recently the magazine industry considered the internet little more than a gimmick, and magazine websites were a place for second-rate journalists and off-cuts of content considered too weak for the print version. By the time publishers woke up to their spectacularly poor judgment, the internet had made a move on its audience. We once had a very genteel conversation at British FHM about whether we should run a photo of a man who had been killed having sex with a chicken. He had been surprised by a large boulder, which had crushed him and the chicken to death. It had appeared in the Spanish press a few years earlier and, while unfortunate, was quite funny, so we ran it, and it was much talked about and widely reprinted. Nowadays, the idea that a monthly magazine can be first with such a "Did you see?" photo is laughable. That image today would be in half the world's in-boxes before they got the rock off him.
Besides the internet, a battery of electronic wonders - iPods, mobile phones, video games, MySpace, instant messaging and the rest - has taken huge bites out of the time formerly allotted to magazine reading. And mass-market men's monthlies, which once stood in such thrilling contrast to everything that came before, are now thought of by a new generation of readers as last year's model, as exciting as black-and-white television. Other magazines, newspapers and websites have plundered their best ideas, which has only diluted their originality further. Men's monthlies in this country made a potentially fatal error in an attempt to shore up flagging circulation when they decided to show bare breasts: overnight, it became impossible to defend against the porno accusation. It didn't help circulation or advertising. They no longer passed the tube test. Worst of all, it meant closing the door on the hope that big celebrities would ever return, and no one sells magazines like big stars. Porn stars, glamour girls and z-listers moved in to fill the void. All this was too much for poor American FHM, which died and was laid to rest in December 2006, its official cause of death "difficult trading conditions".
By then, the bloom was long off the rose. Not even the funniest photo caption can be recycled, yet magazines will insist on trying. There is a law of diminishing returns on the ingredients of men's magazines - franchises such as FHM's "100 great adventures" become less great with each new hundred. We once ran a photo - admittedly revolting, certainly not safe for the tube but a source of immense fascination at the time - of a 13-stone tumour being removed from an eight-stone woman. I have now seen so many freakish images I find even the art of festive biscuit-tins more deserving of attention. Most disappointing of all, celebrity culture has become dull. We didn't care whether actors and actresses were talented or not, but it did matter that they were interesting. Now, thanks to their publicists, glimpses of the stars' special weirdness are all too rare. And some of them are just plain awful. If there is any justice there will be VIP section in hell reserved for the likes of Jessica Simpson and her ridiculous entourage.
The last straw came on a sales trip to Los Angeles last spring, presenting healthy sales figures, desirable demographics and a golden vision to blank-faced advertising executives whose pens sat politely untouched on their notebooks. They trooped back to their cubicles while we drove at walking pace in vile traffic to the next identical appointment. I could see why people end up going berserk with a samurai sword. A magnificent job had become drudgery.
So I got out. I'm also the parent of a two-year-old girl, and while I've never been ashamed of the pictures for which I've been responsible, the "have a good time, all the time" attitude of men's magazines now seems like a message from a different frequency. But essentially my decision is a selfish one: I've taken the ride up, and it was tremendous, thanks, but I think I'll give the ride down the other side a miss.
· Ed Needham now runs an online publishing business called Grand Parade.
Monday, June 25, 2007
作為一個google飯
blogspot以驚人的勃起-軟掉、勃起-軟掉、勃起-軟掉……的死循環頻率不停癱瘓。不曉得俺能堅持用它到哪天？
打開文件夾：WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc，用記事本打開文件夾中的hosts文件，寫入72.14.219.190 xxx.blogspot.com 其中xxx.blogspot.com是你要訪問的blogspot位址，然後保存、關閉記事本即可。
這是我目前找到的辦法。
打開文件夾：WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc，用記事本打開文件夾中的hosts文件，寫入72.14.219.190 xxx.blogspot.com 其中xxx.blogspot.com是你要訪問的blogspot位址，然後保存、關閉記事本即可。
這是我目前找到的辦法。
Saturday, June 23, 2007
入蜀小記
一
◎單在錦官城走馬觀花來著，種種皆銘銘在心，以后有機會當重來把盞。先列出隆重感謝名單：老板娘、麥芽、視覺、一霎時，以上排名分前後左右忠奸。一并感謝四個圈公司贊助往返機票……感謝老板娘熱情無私慷慨周到細心耐心愛心陪伴。俺充分履行曲水姑娘遠洋電話之囑：吃窮老板娘！俺發揮不怕辣不怕撐的優良吃貨光榮品質，超質超量完成了任務……再次熊抱老板娘。感謝麥芽指點若干游玩之地；感謝視覺介紹若干地方；不感謝一霎時——該人枉自在成都蝸居半載，除老碼頭火鍋外，居然半個地方紹介亦無，哼哼。
◎可惜是飛到成都，未嘗一覽蜀道雄險。一闋〖蜀道難〗、六卷〖入蜀記〗之類早成絕唱。更可惜只能盤桓三兩日，檢點著僅在市內嬉游寥寥幾地。「峨眉天下秀，夔門天下雄，劍門天下險，青城天下幽」，都告無緣。稍可自慰的是，此次閑閑游蕩，也算占了一味成都的閑適之情。
可惜沒看到滿城芙蓉，古城墻亦只在的士上一瞥而過，只能遙想當年，后蜀孟昶「于成都城上遍種芙蓉，每至秋，四十里如錦繡，高下相照」。據司機說，如今那段古城墻里是西南衛戍軍區駐扎地。多少有些煞風景。相詢老板娘，芙蓉為成都市花，不知以后有否機會金秋入蜀，賞這映日芙蓉。
可惜未能在成都這美人之都，留下些風流把戲。
◎成都向為蜀地心臟，但并不龐大。晚上略一走，低頭查地圖，已過兩個街區。逛到玉林區，臨街精致小店星羅棋布，大街小巷麻辣香襲人，茶館竹椅麻將牌舉目皆是。那晚孤身獨行，暗燈深巷，置身熱鬧人群邊，對成都不由就親切了起來。回去路上，不過是隨便去攤上買包煙，一回頭，兩個粉嫩秀明男女小朋友，手拉手來買冰棒，剎那，路燈都亮了幾分。滿心贊嘆著，真好。
臨近端午，的士車中很多都掛著梔子花，馥郁香氣散滿車廂。也算比別地清雅三分。成都司機路熟，人也不聒噪，真聊起來亦是一肚子龍門陣，從城墻到高爾夫都能侃上幾句。車倒開得生猛。還坐了一趟302路公交車，老車，木地板木椅子木窗戶木車頂，雕花和彩色玻璃點綴著，雖坐著不舒服，倒也值得看看。售票員會用普通話和四川話各報一次站。傍晚時成都也會堵車。地鐵正在修建中。
也去轉了天府廣場和春熙路，滿是現代感的建筑湮漫生長，拐過街角，卻是一條古舊巷陌，「錦華館」，當年的基督教青年會教堂所在，如今是「青青茶樓」和一些酒吧。時光流轉之感，讓人印象不惡。
說起來，成都到底是有文化的。錦里古街雖是新建，也頗秀美。許多本地人也會涌來吃小吃——我大抵相信，本地人會做的勾當，總是值得體驗的。又看到朋友指點說快男王錚亮會來演出的「蓮花府邸」酒吧，亭亭深院坐滿了人，倒也不見惡俗。隨后兩日見到的成都酒吧，包括很多小店，都頗見玲瓏精致之感。想想也是意料中，成都文昌之地，這點小伎倆自然不在話下。
朋友還推薦了張靚穎當年駐唱的「音樂房子」酒吧，我站在玉林廣場門口看了看，到底也沒去。佳人已不在。錯過的還有「白夜」，詩人翟永明的酒吧，是巴黎左岸咖啡館的氣質。我下午尋了去，卻關著門，不知道為什么。只看到白底招牌上「白夜」兩個黑字，在午后沉沉日光下，與旁邊一位冷艷俊男海報作伴。那男人是主演過電影White Nights的「芭蕾王子」Mikhail Baryshnikov，當年的天才舞者，古典芭蕾的頂級大師，水瓶座男人，從蘇聯逃去美國，間歇演一些影劇，近年還在Sex and the City中軋過角色。如今六十歲的他，在海報上依然俊美動人，一支白蠟冷冷豎在他赤裸胸前，似要刺入心臟。
◎單在錦官城走馬觀花來著，種種皆銘銘在心，以后有機會當重來把盞。先列出隆重感謝名單：老板娘、麥芽、視覺、一霎時，以上排名分前後左右忠奸。一并感謝四個圈公司贊助往返機票……感謝老板娘熱情無私慷慨周到細心耐心愛心陪伴。俺充分履行曲水姑娘遠洋電話之囑：吃窮老板娘！俺發揮不怕辣不怕撐的優良吃貨光榮品質，超質超量完成了任務……再次熊抱老板娘。感謝麥芽指點若干游玩之地；感謝視覺介紹若干地方；不感謝一霎時——該人枉自在成都蝸居半載，除老碼頭火鍋外，居然半個地方紹介亦無，哼哼。
◎可惜是飛到成都，未嘗一覽蜀道雄險。一闋〖蜀道難〗、六卷〖入蜀記〗之類早成絕唱。更可惜只能盤桓三兩日，檢點著僅在市內嬉游寥寥幾地。「峨眉天下秀，夔門天下雄，劍門天下險，青城天下幽」，都告無緣。稍可自慰的是，此次閑閑游蕩，也算占了一味成都的閑適之情。
可惜沒看到滿城芙蓉，古城墻亦只在的士上一瞥而過，只能遙想當年，后蜀孟昶「于成都城上遍種芙蓉，每至秋，四十里如錦繡，高下相照」。據司機說，如今那段古城墻里是西南衛戍軍區駐扎地。多少有些煞風景。相詢老板娘，芙蓉為成都市花，不知以后有否機會金秋入蜀，賞這映日芙蓉。
可惜未能在成都這美人之都，留下些風流把戲。
◎成都向為蜀地心臟，但并不龐大。晚上略一走，低頭查地圖，已過兩個街區。逛到玉林區，臨街精致小店星羅棋布，大街小巷麻辣香襲人，茶館竹椅麻將牌舉目皆是。那晚孤身獨行，暗燈深巷，置身熱鬧人群邊，對成都不由就親切了起來。回去路上，不過是隨便去攤上買包煙，一回頭，兩個粉嫩秀明男女小朋友，手拉手來買冰棒，剎那，路燈都亮了幾分。滿心贊嘆著，真好。
臨近端午，的士車中很多都掛著梔子花，馥郁香氣散滿車廂。也算比別地清雅三分。成都司機路熟，人也不聒噪，真聊起來亦是一肚子龍門陣，從城墻到高爾夫都能侃上幾句。車倒開得生猛。還坐了一趟302路公交車，老車，木地板木椅子木窗戶木車頂，雕花和彩色玻璃點綴著，雖坐著不舒服，倒也值得看看。售票員會用普通話和四川話各報一次站。傍晚時成都也會堵車。地鐵正在修建中。
也去轉了天府廣場和春熙路，滿是現代感的建筑湮漫生長，拐過街角，卻是一條古舊巷陌，「錦華館」，當年的基督教青年會教堂所在，如今是「青青茶樓」和一些酒吧。時光流轉之感，讓人印象不惡。
說起來，成都到底是有文化的。錦里古街雖是新建，也頗秀美。許多本地人也會涌來吃小吃——我大抵相信，本地人會做的勾當，總是值得體驗的。又看到朋友指點說快男王錚亮會來演出的「蓮花府邸」酒吧，亭亭深院坐滿了人，倒也不見惡俗。隨后兩日見到的成都酒吧，包括很多小店，都頗見玲瓏精致之感。想想也是意料中，成都文昌之地，這點小伎倆自然不在話下。
朋友還推薦了張靚穎當年駐唱的「音樂房子」酒吧，我站在玉林廣場門口看了看，到底也沒去。佳人已不在。錯過的還有「白夜」，詩人翟永明的酒吧，是巴黎左岸咖啡館的氣質。我下午尋了去，卻關著門，不知道為什么。只看到白底招牌上「白夜」兩個黑字，在午后沉沉日光下，與旁邊一位冷艷俊男海報作伴。那男人是主演過電影White Nights的「芭蕾王子」Mikhail Baryshnikov，當年的天才舞者，古典芭蕾的頂級大師，水瓶座男人，從蘇聯逃去美國，間歇演一些影劇，近年還在Sex and the City中軋過角色。如今六十歲的他，在海報上依然俊美動人，一支白蠟冷冷豎在他赤裸胸前，似要刺入心臟。
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
小買幾本書
《讓·艾什諾茲》
記得是小愛推薦我看的讓·艾什諾茲，《格林威治子午線》，很喜歡。這本是評論集，也來裝文化一下。
《日本手工藝》
中國的手工藝人慢慢風流散盡了吧？
《窺視工作間》
河童老師是我的愛。
《山河入夢》
《人面桃花》
我對當代文學不能不說是有點偏見的。格非的書，我居然都從未讀過。
《伊斯坦布爾——一座城市的記憶》
已經讀畢，跟人推薦，被問起理由，卻無言。大抵卻是因為我喜歡的北京卻少了這樣一本書吧。
《傅山的世界：十七世紀中國書法的嬗變》
作為一個偽書法飯，我忍了這么久，還是買下這本書吧。
《美國人 殖民地歷程》
這是一套書，分為殖民地歷程、建國歷程、民主歷程三本，丹尼爾.J.布林斯廷的名著。我早收過后兩本。買下這本就收全了。書是名著，可惜翻譯并不算好。
《心智的風景線》
我很喜歡王佐良編譯的英國散文，也喜歡他清麗的文字。這本是三聯讀書文叢系列里的，一本記敘他八十年代出國參加各種研討會的游記集子——在飛機上讀畢后，不由立刻想起小說《小世界》：都是以國際文學學術會議為主題，一邊是炫麗虛構的學界妖嬈百態，一邊是誠誠君子浮光掠影的恭謹印象，虛實之間，浮想聯翩。
《京劇名唱一百段 漢英對照》
中國戲曲的翻譯向來難，也頗有趣，以后有暇可以找出具體例子來分析。
附：后三本購于川大書吧37℃，美好的記憶。
記得是小愛推薦我看的讓·艾什諾茲，《格林威治子午線》，很喜歡。這本是評論集，也來裝文化一下。
《日本手工藝》
中國的手工藝人慢慢風流散盡了吧？
《窺視工作間》
河童老師是我的愛。
《山河入夢》
《人面桃花》
我對當代文學不能不說是有點偏見的。格非的書，我居然都從未讀過。
《伊斯坦布爾——一座城市的記憶》
已經讀畢，跟人推薦，被問起理由，卻無言。大抵卻是因為我喜歡的北京卻少了這樣一本書吧。
《傅山的世界：十七世紀中國書法的嬗變》
作為一個偽書法飯，我忍了這么久，還是買下這本書吧。
《美國人 殖民地歷程》
這是一套書，分為殖民地歷程、建國歷程、民主歷程三本，丹尼爾.J.布林斯廷的名著。我早收過后兩本。買下這本就收全了。書是名著，可惜翻譯并不算好。
《心智的風景線》
我很喜歡王佐良編譯的英國散文，也喜歡他清麗的文字。這本是三聯讀書文叢系列里的，一本記敘他八十年代出國參加各種研討會的游記集子——在飛機上讀畢后，不由立刻想起小說《小世界》：都是以國際文學學術會議為主題，一邊是炫麗虛構的學界妖嬈百態，一邊是誠誠君子浮光掠影的恭謹印象，虛實之間，浮想聯翩。
《京劇名唱一百段 漢英對照》
中國戲曲的翻譯向來難，也頗有趣，以后有暇可以找出具體例子來分析。
附：后三本購于川大書吧37℃，美好的記憶。
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