Generation Y : sneak peak

For those of you who have asked, here is a little preview on an article on which I'm working at the moment! Stay tuned for the full article! 

GENERATION Y: Y SO ANGRY?

I recently came across an article on the New York Times, published a year ago: The Entrepreneurial generation. It tried to paint a picture of my generation, a generation of self-absorbed nihilistic young adults. And the punch line was this: we are a “post-emotional generation”. We have “no anger, no edge, no ego”. Suddenly, my generation wasn’t a statistic anymore, this felt like a personal attack. I looked around me and my friends and felt that actually, we are an angry generation, we are a generation of deceived believers, a generation that is fuming at the world we are being left to deal with. It is true that we spend more time on social media than in the public library; that we consume more than any other generation –be it knowledge, media or products. Yes, we are a generation of consumers, of sellers, of young entrepreneurs… But above all, we are an angry generation, we are generation Y.

Suzanne Zhang

On Beijing Punk

We often think of punk music and chinese people as polar opposites, but it has recently come to light that these two can sometimes merge into one and produce some of the most promising punk rock bands, at least according to Shaun Jefford's documentary "Beijing Punk".

Misandao

His documentary follows a few Beijing based punk groups: Demerit, Misandao and Hedgehog. All three are underground punk bands and all three of them have the same motto: truth. What you find in common between these bands is not the anti-Chinese government lyrics but rather a search to expose truth and to "stay real", in their own words. When asked if they wanted to become famous and live the lives of real punk rockstars, they simply answered " We just want to stay true". A nice philosophy nicely put in action when we see their houses and their recording studios. Most of these bands share a little flat in the dark areas of Beijing, but admit they wouldn't trade it for anything. Between the lack of financial support, the censorship from the government and the bad reputation they have to deal with (Misandao, in particular, have been known to strike fights during their concerts), these punk artists are finding it a real struggle to have their music streamed internationally. All three bands sing in English about their conditions of living, the Chinese mentality, and of course, alcohol and drugs.

Hedgehog

What is striking about these young adults (Demerit and Hedgehog) is that even though they might have some recognition in the punk underground scene of Beijing, they still really are trying to have fun with everything they do. The documentary follows several of them on a night out, drinking cough syrup to get high, illegally smoking weed on the outskirt of Beijing, and generally waking up with no memory of the previous night. A particularly funny incident occurred when the cameraman drank too much cough syrup and Chinese "Bai Jiou" (A strong chinese alcohol that "kills you if you drink too much of it"), and consequently ended up in the hospital for a diabetic shock.

When asked about the Chinese government, the chinese Olympics and their way of living, most of them are completely lucid and aware of what is happening. They sing about it in their songs, but rather than calling themselves rebels or anarchists they simply call themselves musician. All of them make a point of making themselves apolitical when it comes to governments, although one does get the sense that everything they say is doused with double-meanings and innuendos. On one occasion, Misandao's manager had to censor some words for fear of being caught by the government, who greatly disregards the Chinese punk scene.

Not all chinese punk bands struggle to strive internationally, Misandao has toured in Germany and Hedgehog just finished their American tour. As to Demerit, they were denied Visas and are still trying to perform in Europe. 

What finally emerges from this documentary and these punk "skinheads" screaming Oi is their will to explore, to live passionately and to produce good music. As the lead singer of Demerit said : "We don't care about the future". Rather focus on the good right now, right in front of us.

Watch the trailer here: Bejing Punk

Wine

If you were wine, I would drink you and leave three drops:
One for my heart
One for the lilies by my bed
And one for the times when I am sad

Berlin, or the city where people are unhappy

I just got back from a crazy week in the capital of beer and electro music: Berlin! I was there to explore the post-war atmosphere of the city, which is meant to be buzzing with art, underground music and parties (most of the time the parties are so underground you cannot find them. I swear. ). After some rather disappointing sight-seeing trips and non-concluding talks with locals, Berlin makes up for it with its crazy music (and by crazy I mean the DJ-Panda playing violing at an electro-techno rave), crazy drugs (maybe too much? The only drug you need is loooove, mate), underground parties, graffiti and an excellent music festival line-up.

The problem with Berlin is this: they hate tourists. I understand that they can be fu**ing annoying, as I often curse the gods when I see them in London, but they're part of the economy and part of life, so, the best way is to smile and not lie to them about where that museum really is (Come on, it happened to the best of us...). On many occasions, my friends and I (all of them are London based internationals and speak perfectly good english) were being told we were too loud and too foreign. I can't keep track of the number of times people have stopped by in the streets to stare at us (in a rather disgusting way). I also couldn't believe how rude and impolite some of the stares, whistles and insults were. I have had my ass groped by an old man in daytime, and after causing a scene about this he simply walked away without embarrassment. On another occasion a man called us "dirty whores" then proceeded to ask for cigarettes. Is this really what the streets of Berlin have come to?

Despite Berliner's rude attitude, I had a really fun time there, especially at the Helmut Newton Foundation and the festival. The food was also really good, and those mini-eggs really helped my daily hangover, which usually consisted of wine, tequila shots and bad decisions. The clubs were also very good (once you knew where to find them... mmh mhh Goldengate & Magdalena!) though sometimes unnecessarily selective and rude (berghain.. :( ). The only time I felt truly accepted by the people was at the music festival, which had really big names like SBTRKT, Paul Kalkbrenner, Bonaparte and Django Django. I won't spend too much time describing how fun it was, so I'll just say that it was so crazy I fainted (oops!) and that I discovered a new band called Sizarr! You should check out their songs Icy Martini and Purple fried!

A sad story about work

    It is almost 11AM and I am browsing a complex and dull-looking website that will tell me how much money the clients of the bank I'm working at will lose today with the stock market. It's called current liquidity excess, it is repetitive and uninteresting, and it needs to be done twice a day to ensure that no one loses a vast amount of money, like, say, 3 million dollars. All is well, none of the clients have their names in red.

I started my internship on the 25th of June 2012, and in two weeks I will be done. As a media undergraduate who attends an Arts College, working in a bank goes against all my beliefs and principles. I hate money and how it enslaves people, I hate that money is the biggest entity in the world, I hate the political schemes of corporations and banks, I hate what it makes people do. But most importantly I hate that I have to work for money, eight hours per day, five days a week, all year long. I guess you could call me a naïve idealist who believes that we can live on poems and flowers. 

What my job consists of is making sure the clients' transfers are archived by numbers and dates, that the stocks they've bought are correct, that their amount of cash at the end of the month does not differ from the one in the bank's system... Hours of archiving and numbers and maths, and Excel graphs and tables. HSBC, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Merril Lynch have become part of my daily vocabulary. As a student who used to cheat her way through her maths class (and still miserably failing to get a simple PASS), this was torture. I could never get the same result twice, and would often opt for the number that seemed most appealing to me (34500 or 256... mm 256 pounds seems reasonable I guess). I found it hilarious that I couldn't get the same result for a simple addition of numbers, even with a calculator. But this was overestimating my capacities in maths: 38000 dollars became 83000 dollars, pounds became euros, hong kong dollars became swiss francs... I was a disaster. And when the cash at the end of the month did not match the bank's system, it was my task to find out why they had lost so much money (we are talking millions here). I thought it was completely absurd to let a 19 year student (who, to make it worse, got the internship without any interviews or skill assessment... Nepotism at its best) find out why the client had lost so much money, but they thought it was normal. After pretending to find mistakes in a twenty pages long cash statement, I finally asked the un-askable : "Maybe someone stole his card and then spent all the money! That would explain why he lost 38million euros and 256 million dollars! That explains it all!!". To which my boss looked at me as if I were a dinosaur. After a couple of hours, it came to light that I had entered the wrong data and thus the whole incident had been engendered by my maths mistakes. Oops. 

Another incident that makes me giggle (but shudder in shame at the same time) is the day I inadvertly printed out 250 pages of cash statement. It lasted around 10minutes, during which my infuriated colleagues  couldn't get hold of their faxes or prints. It was hilarious. After realizing that I had printed the wrong pages, I quickly flipped them over and put them back in the printer, as I did not want to look like a stupid, soulless and tree-loathing person. But in my purely altruistic act, I had not flipped the pages on the right side, and my colleagues were both shocked ( at my stupidity..) and irritated to find that their prints and faxes had been printed on my printed pages. They couldn't read a thing and we had to throw everything away. I couldn't stop laughing, but I was the only one. After that, they ceased giving me complex things to do, like printing out excel charts  or anything that involves numbers. Instead, I am now in charge or the archives and spend all my hours on 9GAG, because it is one of the few websites that is infinite. Sometimes I watch movies without the sound, because I like living on edge. It also makes for interesting plot twists. 

Apart from the sporadic hilarious incidents (mostly caused by me...), work is a dull pain in the ass.

I've only just come to the sudden realization that I will be graduating from university in two years. And then what? The real world? A job? I don't feel ready to become a person with a job. The only thing that I learnt from my internship is that I do not want to work in an office, I do not want to work in an environment that involves money or dealing with numbers. I want to learn new things everyday, I want to have a job where ideas are thought-provoking, a job where I can discuss compelling issues and contemporary problems that affect me... It pains me to see that people have jobs that they hate, but cannot quit for financial reasons, I hate that not everybody is given the chance to choose what they really want to do in life, it pains me to see that everyday is a repetition of the day before and before and before that... And it's worrying, because if I can't enjoy a simple and secure job like what I have right now, what will life be after university? Will I have to wake up everyday to a job I don't like? A lifetime seems pretty long...

Is it normal to be this scared? 

Written on the 2/03/2012

I am constantly confused, dissatisfied and tormented by the idea that there is ''something more'', ''something better''.There has to be more than what I have, there has to be a wider range of feelings, a wider range of views, of emotions, of experiences- be it spiritual or simply anodyne. There has to be something more beautiful, something so overwhelmingly good and perfect that man can never touch except with his fingertips, in his dreams. But, concretely, there has to be something more. I long all day to find it, but the question that there is nothing more for me always haunts me at night.

Nostalgia for a place

Unknown

I always find myself longing for something that I cannot have. Travel and family is one of them. I am constantly longing for the place I have just left, only to return and long for someplace new. 

Can I never be content in being in an exact place at an exact moment? Will I ever learn to let go of nostalgia and longing and realize that I must live in one place only? My problem, unlike others, is not living in the future or the past, it is living in a given space, a given location.

I would like to be everywhere at the time, to be everything at the same time, to be everyone and experience everything at the same time


Written on the 14.02.2012