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Channeling the France Trance

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In terms of places I’m least excited to go, the airport is up there for me with the proctologist’s office. That is unless it’s the airport in Rennes, France. Admittedly, its not my usual layover stop when I fly back and forth from Cornell to home in San Francisco, but every year in the early days of winter, I should try to make an exception. Annually, in early December, the city shelters a music festival in the hangars of the Rennes Airport. They call it Les Transmusicales, because it spans all genres and all up-and-coming artists from all over the world. Kind of like South by Southwest with crepes.

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"This One Is … Special Taste"

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It seemed to me that with my face smushed up against the precipitating window of our crowded airport bus, I had an optimal view of the city of Beijing as we traversed the outer rings of the city. I tried to turn my head to comment to Jonny Lieberman ’08, Sun editor in chief, that it felt like we had just entered the world’s most giant Chinese restaurant, but my neck couldn’t make it past 15 degrees of lateral movement, so I just hoped the sounds waves of my voice reflected off the window. When you think about it, the most interaction that typical Americans have with Chinese culture is through their outings to Chinese restaurants, so the metaphor was kind of appropriate.

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Shanghai, Oh My! Nanjing, Ka-Ching!

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Shanghai

The city of Shanghai has done a better job preserving all that lies in between the ancient and the futuristic, so while we were there we spent our time exploring that middle ground that Beijing has basically paved over. Jonny Lieberman ’08, Sun editor-in-chief, and I took a trip over to the Jewish Quarter of Shanghai called Hongkou.

In a nutshell, is where around 30,000 Jews stayed for around 10 years during the Holocaust because of Shanghai’s lax immigration rules (to foreigners — within China is a different story). The mini museum there isn’t too notable, but what struck us was what China looked like in the 20th century because we hadn’t been able to figure that out in Beijing.

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Seeing Red

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Shang-Hi! Hey-Jing! Nan … okay that one doesn’t really work. But anyway, after our many serious appointments and the long hours we spent investigating Cornell in China and whatnot, we were soooo ready to do some touristing and paint the town red! It turns out that some guy named Mao beat us to the punch with that red thing, but regardless, we wanted to see ourselves some China.
In Beijing, our main destinations were the Summer Palace, Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City and the Great Wall. We grouped the first three together on one day, basically a Beijing bonanza, and left the Great Wall in all its grandiose wall-ish glory for a later date.

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What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

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After our shenanigans in Beijing, we were pretty sure that the more international and generally more western city of Shanghai could provide more fun or at least more familiar experiences. We found a little convenience store kitty-corner to our hotel, so Rebecca Shoval ’08, Sun Managing Editor, and I went over there to grab some drinks. Rebecca was the person on our trip arguably most interested in doing what the Chinese do, so she picked out a random liquor and some Diet Cokes (which are harder to come by in China for some reason.) We went back up to our room and she mixed some “ ________ and Cokes,” and we continued to getting ready. She tasted hers and made a sort of squelching noise that can’t have been good for her esophagus.

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Far Out in The Far East

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CHIIIINNAAAA!!!! WOOO CHINAAAAA!!! We are halfway across the world! Let’s get smashed! Anyway, that’s the general idea when The Sun goes down in a foreign country (or when The Sun goes out). Red flag. No pun intended.
There are approximately 15 million people in the city of Beijing, and 99 percent of them go to bed before you begin pre-gaming. Despite this, we managed to find our way to some hotspots (and not-spots) over the course of our stay in China.
On our first night of going out, we were still quite jetlagged and didn’t feel like braving the 8-lane crosswalks of Beijing without surgical masks or fully replenished flasks. Still, being hearty Cornellians, we wanted to get our drink on somewhere to celebrate the Big Red in the biggest, reddest country there is.

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The Cornell Connection: Carol Mendelsohn '73

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Move out of the way Law & Order. You old-timers with your faux presidential candidates and walkers are so passé. There’s a new (well, sort of) show in town with spin-offs sassier than wearing nothing under judges’ robes. Science trumps detectives every time. In fact, CSI is so mammoth that it’s the only thing that happens in Vegas that doesn’t stay there: it chills in Miami and New York as well, via production in Los Angeles. And this is where Carol Mendelsohn ’73 comes in. The veteran writer-producer came to CSI in its baby days for the pilot after having worked on shows like Melrose Place and surviving a pilot with O.J. Simpson. The Sun caught up with her as season 8 was getting ready to premiere to talk about her time at Cornell, CSI, and her career in the biz.

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The Cornell Connection: Jesse Harris '92

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You know, if the Sun has learned anything in its pursuit of finding out the meaning of a Cornell education in the real world, we’ve found that it takes all kinds. By all kinds, we mean all kinds of GPA’s and all kinds of majors don’t count for anything three seconds after graduation. Grammy-winning songwriter and troubadour Jesse Harris ‘92 certainly found that out when he got to Cornell. But he also found out that Ithaca was “gorges.” He may have even been the one that coined the phrase and put it on a bunch of t-shirts.

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Spotlight On Tokyo Police Club

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Back in San Francisco, the Sun caught up with the guys of Tokyo Police Club in their cracker-dusted van as confused fans milled around waiting to gain admission to the sold-out show and had no idea that the four skinny, college-age guys in the vehicle were the band. Occasionally, the guys narrated each other, so as to remain distinguishable on The Sun’s recording, and because that’s the kind of guys they are. (Read: Canadians narrate each other.) Here is an excerpt of that conversation:

Graham: Before you go on tour no one wants to be the one that’s vacuuming the van and no one wants to get together just to vacuum the van.
The Sun: Do you have a vacuum or do you have a dustbuster?

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Record Review: Art Brut

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Eddie Argos talks with a range of timbre. The guy definitely does not sing, as evident on both of Art Brut’s albums. Don’t mistake it for “rapping,” which you wouldn’t anyway after listening. No one who has ever heard any rap music ever in their entire existence would ever mistake what Argos does for rapping. But it’s certainly not quite singing either, since the guy barely even cares whether his talking has any correspondence with the melodies of the music — he makes it seem a coincidence that the vocal phrases correspond with the music phrases at all. This is why Argos and Art Brut are the masters of a new form of music I like to call Talk Rock.