Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune) is an orchestral work composed by Claude Debussy in 1894. It was inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem L’Après-midi d’un faune, which evokes the dreamy, sensual thoughts of a faun on a languid afternoon. It’s called a prélude because Debussy meant it as a musical introduction to the poem’s atmosphere, not a literal retelling. A Faun’s Afternoon (Snippet) Stéphane Mallarmé and Richard Howard...

Meituan, the parent company of DianPing (often called “China’s Yelp”), has quietly launched a new food rating app called Duck Finding Food. Screenshot of the app’s logo, UI, recommendation policies. The app is still very beta — currently only available in Beijing. At its core, the app is for finding good places to eat. What makes it interesting is its ambition: 100% ad-free, bot-free, and purely based on authentic recommendations....

In 1936, critiques were targeted towards Shostakovich’s successful opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1932), which led to his first downfall. Cause the plot of Lady Macbeth is, well, very wild: TL;DR for Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Katerina Izmailova, a bored and lonely merchant’s wife in a provincial Russian town, begins an affair with a worker named Sergei. To escape her stifling life, she helps him murder her father-in-law, then her husband....

In memory of one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, Dmitri Shostakovich (Sept. 25, 1906 — Aug. 9, 1975): Shostakovich’s life reads like a legend. He seemed to live with his whole heart, navigating both artistic triumph and personal turbulence. His early breakthrough came with his Symphony No. 1 (1925), written at just 19, which won acclaim in both Russia and the West. But in 1936, official criticism targeted his work — especially his successful opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1932)....

and let’s read this: Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven’s Time By Nicolas Slonimsky Amazon Link The prelude by the author ‘Non-Acceptance of the Unfamiliar’ gives a nice bird-eye view for all the trash talks upcoming in the later chapters. Critics find faults from every perspectives, and came up with thousands of ways to say “this piece is bad”. It can be ’too modern’, ’not melodic enough’, ‘sounds like Chinese/animal noises/etc’, ’too loud/weak’, or even, comparable to math:...

Kunming’s Dounan Flower Market I visited the Dounan flower market today — ha! So naturally this is the time to talk a bit about The ‘Dutch Auction’ The modern flower auction began in the Netherlands in the early 1900s. Specifically, in Aalsmeer, now home to the world’s largest flower market. Before that, flower growers sold fresh-cut flowers directly to wholesalers or middlemen. Prices were opaque and growers had weak bargaining power....

In the middle of downtown Kunming lies 翠湖 (might as well be translated to the ‘Green’ Lake?) — a small, quiet lake locals call “the eye of the city.” Around 1940s when Japanese troops pushed deep into China, our top universities — Peking University, Tsinghua, and Nankai — merged and moved south to Kunming, forming the National Southwest Associated University (西南联大). Among its students was the writer 汪曾祺. He later wrote about 翠湖 with the same tone that runs through much of his work: humorous, subtle, warm....

July and August in Yunnan are jùnzi season — the local word for the wild fungi that spill out of the mountains and into dinner tables. Among all these one stands out: the truffle. Truffles shaved in paper-thin slices over pasta are certificates for good dating dinner, their price that can hit USD$50 for just 28 grams. In Yunnan, they’re tossed into scrambled eggs without ceremony, folded into a bowl of noodles, or dropped straight into a pot of rice noodles — as casually as tossing in a handful of button mushrooms....

Guiyang’s food mirrors the city’s geography and spirit — rugged, unpretentious, and joyfully rebellious. As I wrote before (Why the food here is so spicy…), history gave China Southwest people a deep bond with chili. Add to that the fact that Guiyang has never been a major economic, political, or trade hub, and you get a food culture that defies easy categorization — a kind of culinary anarchy. In Guangzhou — arguably the city with the best food in China — cooking is treated like a form of high art....

When asked why he wanted to climb Everest, adventurer George Mallory famously replied: “Because it’s there.” Turns out, Fanjing Mountain (2,336m) was also there—when we’ve paid the sunk cost of an expensive ticket and the cable took us to the foot of the mountain—so up I went. Halfway up, Li Bai’s 《蜀道难》 (The Hard Road to Shu) rang painfully true: “噫吁嚱，危乎高哉！蜀道之难，难于上青天！” “Ah, wretched heights! The road to Shu is harder than climbing to heaven!...