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China

Ai Weiwei Releases Profanity-Laced, Subversive Music Video

SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST (China), AFP

Worldcrunch

BEIJING - Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei has released a foul-mouthed heavy metal music video entitled Dumbass that parodies his months in police detention.

In the video for the top single from his upcoming debut album The Divine Comedy, Weiwei tells the story of his 81 days in secret detention for tax evasion in 2011, which sparked international outrage.

AFP describes the five-minute song as being peppered with bad language, as it includes lyrics like "Stand on the frontline like a dumbass, in a country that puts out like a hooker."

The music video culminates with Weiwei shaving his head and trademark beard and putting on women's underwear.


For the video -- which was shot by Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle, best known for working with Hong Kong film director Wong Kar-wai -- the political activist told AFP that he created an "exact model" of the room in which he was kept for much of his detention.

"Being in that environment makes me realise that for these people, the only available release or means to kill time is music," the 55-year-old Beijing-based artist said in a press release quoted by the South China Morning Post.

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Society

Genoa Postcard: A Tale Of Modern Sailors, Echos Of The Ancient Mariner

Many seafarers are hired and fired every seven months. Some keep up this lifestyle for 40 years while sailing the world. Some of those who'd recently docked in the Italian port city of Genoa, share a taste of their travels that are connected to a long history of a seafaring life.

A sailor smokes a cigarette on the hydrofoil Procida

A sailor on the hydrofoil Procida in Italy

Daniele Frediani/Mondadori Portfolio via ZUMA Press
Paolo Griseri

GENOA — Cristina did it to escape after a tough breakup. Luigi because he dreamed of adventures and the South Seas. Marianna embarked just “before the refrigerator factory where I worked went out of business. I’m one of the few who got severance pay.”

To hear their stories, you have to go to the canteen on Via Albertazzi, in Italy's northern port city of Genoa, across from the ferry terminal. The place has excellent minestrone soup and is decorated with models of the ships that have made the port’s history.

There are 38,000 Italian professional sailors, many of whom work here in Genoa, a historic port of call that today is the country's second largest after Trieste on the east coast. Luciano Rotella of the trade union Italian Federation of Transport Workers says the official number of maritime workers is far lower than the reality, which contains a tangle of different laws, regulations, contracts and ethnicities — not to mention ancient remnants of harsh battles between shipowners and crews.

The result is that today it is not so easy to know how many people sail, nor their nationalities.

What is certain is that every six to seven months, the Italian mariner disembarks the ship and is dismissed: they take severance pay and after waits for the next call. Andrea has been sailing for more than 20 years: “When I started out, to those who told us we were earning good money, I replied that I had a precarious life: every landing was a dismissal.”

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