BRENDAN DAVIS ON "FEI'S WORLD" PODCAST
Today the new episode of Fei Wu's podcast "Fei's World" was released, and it features me - "Big Fish in the Middle Kingdom" host Brendan Davis.
You can read Fei's excellent Show Notes and find the episode here: https://www.feisworld.com/blog/brendan-davis
In it, we discuss my unsettled childhood, spending my 20s as an aspiring pro rock guitarist, my years as a film and TV technician based out of Atlanta, Georgia, how 9-11 spurred my move to Los Angeles to commit to my creative filmmaking career, and ultimately, my interest in and eventual move to China.
Basically: If you REALLY want to know what makes me tick, this is a great starting point.
The episode also contains practical tips for happy expat living and lots of laughs, so it's not all "heavy", but it is by far the most personal, in-depth interview anyone has ever done with me, and I think Fei and her team did a great job putting it together with skill and sensitivity. It inspires me to up my game, and if you listen to it, I hope you enjoy.
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM BEIJING!
I just posted a super short audio and video bonus episode showing you a couple of the holiday items that came my way in Beijing this year, including the "Christmas apple” (what? details below). We have ONE more regularly-scheduled episode coming up this year on Thursday, plus a big wrapup / retrospective of Season 1 of the podcast with a look ahead to Season 2 in 2018. Next year looks to hold some amazing new developments for me personally and professionally here on China, in both the podcasting and film worlds, and I can’t wait to give you a little preview of all that on New Year’s Eve.
But for now: have a great holiday if you get one, and I’ll see you again on Thursday!
"Christmas Apples":
the long version - http://www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-christmas-china-apple-20131225-story.html
the short version - https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Chinese-people-give-red-apples-for-Christmas-gifts
Holiday FUNDRAISING Drive - SUPPORT BFMK via PayPal or WeChat:
https://www.crazyinagoodway.com/donate/
Brendan Davis on WeChat:
BrendanDavis
Brendan Davis on Twitter:
@VeritasInLux
BFMK website:
https://www.crazyinagoodway.com
Other links to LISTEN:
https://www.crazyinagoodway.com/podcast-links/
LIVE Event: "BECOMING AN ENTREPRENEUR FOR LIFE"
Bonus Episode, Nov 25, 2017 - “Becoming an Entrepreneur For Life” | Entrepreneur’s Organization (EO), Beijing Sanlitun chapter
Today I am happy to share another special LIVE episode with you, a panel presentation on the topic of "Becoming an Entrepreneur For Life”. The event was sponsored by the EO Beijing Sanlitun chapter, and was recorded from the naked HUB in Sanlitun.
For more information on the numerous speakers and sponsors, please search them using the information below. Enjoy!
Speakers:
Mike Wester (host) - Founder & CEO, True Run Media
Claudia Masueger - Founder & CEO, CHEERS Wines
Katherine Lui - Founder & Managing Partner, CanAsia Consulting
Christopher Dobbing - Founder & CEO, Cambridge Masks
Stacy Palestrant - Founder & CEO, Elite Scholars of China
AJ Warner - Co-Founder & Board Member, Touchdown!
Sponsors:
EO Beijing Sanlitun
naked HUB
Gung-Ho Pizza
CHEERS Wines
Awa Health
EO Beijing Sanlitun contact (AJ Warner):
email - ajwarner@touchdown.org.cn
WeChat - ajwarner
Entrepreneurs' Organization:
https://www.eonetwork.org
Ronald Paredes (“BFMK” logo):
WeChat, Instagram, Facebook - mundosanto
Brendan Davis on WeChat:
BrendanDavis
Brendan Davis on Twitter:
@VeritasInLux
BFMK website:
https://www.crazyinagoodway.com
Other links to LISTEN:
https://www.crazyinagoodway.com/podcast-links/
SUPPORT BFMK via PayPal or WeChat:
https://www.crazyinagoodway.com/donate/
CORO URDANETA: Interior Architecture in China
#026 - Interior Architecture in China | Coro Urdaneta
My guest this week is architect Coro Urdaneta. Much like previous guest Ronald Paredes, Coro left the upheaval in Venezuela to seek a better life for herself. Her first stop was Miami in the US, but China was next, and in 6 short years Coro has established herself very well in Beijing with her work designing the interior architecture of Moka Bros, the Q-Mex Taqueria, La Social, Mosto, and many other local F&B standouts.
In “small world” news, I happened to meet her youngest brother Rafael last night while out and about. The expat community here in Beijing is very close-knit, and the more I dive into it, the smaller it becomes as well.
Links to contact Coro or me or to find out more about the show are below. Enjoy!
CoroMoto website:
coromotoad.com
Brendan Davis on WeChat:
BrendanDavis
Brendan Davis on Twitter:
@VeritasInLux
BFMK website:
https://www.crazyinagoodway.com
Other links to LISTEN:
https://www.crazyinagoodway.com/podcast-links/
SUPPORT BFMK via PayPal or WeChat:
https://www.crazyinagoodway.com/donate/
MATT WILLIAM KNOWLES: Acting in China, Los Angeles & London
#008 - Acting in China, Los Angeles & London | Matt William Knowles
My guest this week is American actor Matt William Knowles. Matt's story is pretty incredible: he played football at Clemson and had a real shot at playing professionally, but had his NFL dreams crushed along with his knee during his senior year. A humble guy, he decided to take a break and help others while he healed himself, and he ended up teaching English in Guizhou Province in rural China. He mastered Mandarin, was discovered singing Chinese karaoke by a talent agent in a bar, and was launched on his path to becoming a TV star and film actor in China. Along the way, he became the first non-Asian to study acting at the prestigious Beijing Film Academy, which is essentially the Harvard of filmmaking in China, only more selective.
Cut to 2017: having made a significant name for himself in China, Matt has relocated to London to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and master stage acting. Meanwhile, he looks forward to the 2018 release of Asura, a giant Chinese $100M USD fantasy movie that provided him with what looks to be his breakout role, starring as Rawa, a heroic demigod battling evil. The film looks awesome and will hopefully cross borders and bridge cultures in much the same way that Matt himself has been doing in his work and in his life. Enjoy!
One quick reminder that we are still a featured show on the Castbox.fm website and the Castbox podcast app! Castbox works in your web browser and they also have an iOS app, but they have an especially nice app for Android devices. Please check us out on Castbox, and subscribe to the show wherever you listen to us.
Matt William Knowles:
http://mattwilliam.com
"BFMK" Website:
https://www.crazyinagoodway.com
Brendan Davis on Twitter:
@VeritasInLux
"Big Fish in the Middle Kingdom" on Apple Podcasts:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/big-fish-in-the-middle-kingdom/id1237037187?mt=2
on Castbox:
https://castbox.fm/channel/Big-Fish-in-the-Middle-Kingdom-id571573
Carl King (composer):
http://carlkingdom.com
DOMINIC JOHNSON-HILL: Building a Brand in Beijing
"And then suddenly, like 10 million people knew my telephone number, and it was a turning point for the brand, because when that show started to air China-wide, my phone didn’t stop ringing for two years.” - Dominic Johnson-Hill, Plastered 8
#007 - Building a Brand in Beijing | Dominic Johnson-Hill
Dominic Johnson-Hill is a British punk-rock Renaissance man. He’s famous in China for many things but he is probably best known as being the man who single-handedly began the transformation of an almost 800 year old (!) hutong called Nan Luo Gu Xiang - dating back to the days of Kubla Khan - into becoming one of the busiest and most popular tourist and shopping / nightlife destinations in Beijing around the world. If you have ever visited Beijing or looked into it on travel websites, you’ve seen the area featured as a must-see. Dominic was the very first person to open a store there, and the rest is history.
He did this as the founder of iconic street wear brand Plastered 8, a truly “only in China” success story that you have to hear for yourself. I am an unofficial brand ambassador for Plastered myself, being a huge fan of their crazy and cool t-shirts (owning about 20 as of now), so I was excited to hear the tale of how he built the brand straight from the horse’s mouth. The story quoted above starts at about the 10-minute mark of the interview, but the whole thing is a wild ride that you have to hear for yourself. Among Dominic's other innovations and “media moments”, he has gotten worldwide press as being the creator of canned “Beijing Air”, but that only scratches the surface of his innovation and creativity. He has created a 30 square meter mural in the high-end Beijing art hotel The Opposite House, has been a TV host and presenter as well as frequent guest on talk and game shows here, he's a filmmaker who directs his own commercials, and much more.
This one is full of inspired and occasionally raunchy, hilarious content; if you’re highly sensitive you might wince a few times, but I grew up on Monty Python, Benny Hill, and other English humor, so I laughed throughout the talk. One note is that we did have a few Skype issues. I edited around them as well as possible, and as always I strive to make those edits seamless, but this week there are a small handful that you will probably hear. There are also a couple of places where the audio quality gets weird in general for maybe 5-10 seconds, but I don’t think it detracts from the comprehension of the stories being told, so I hope you can bear with those brief moments when they pop up.
Lastly, I’m excited to announce that starting this week, we are a featured show on the Castbox.fm website and the Castbox podcast app! Castbox works in your web browser and they also have an iOS app, but they have an especially nice app for Android devices. Please check us out on Castbox, and subscribe to the show wherever you listen to us. Enjoy!
"BFMK" Website:
https://www.crazyinagoodway.com
Brendan Davis on Twitter:
@VeritasInLux
Plastered 8:
https://plasteredtshirts.com
about Dominic Johnson-Hill:
http://plasteredtshirts.com/category/dominic/
Castbox:
https://castbox.fm
"Big Fish in the Middle Kingdom" direct links -
on Apple Podcasts:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/big-fish-in-the-middle-kingdom/id1237037187?mt=2
on Castbox:
https://castbox.fm/channel/Big-Fish-in-the-Middle-Kingdom-id571573
Carl King (composer):
http://carlkingdom.com
STEVE BARR: Screenwriting and Producing in L.A., New Zealand, and Beijing
#006 - Screenwriting and Producing in L.A., New Zealand, and Beijing | Steve Barr
“Over the last 30 years, they (China) have raised more people out of poverty than ever before in the history of the human race, which is amazing. (Most of) the young people in China have such an optimistic view of the future because their life has gotten better every single year.” - Steve Barr
This week’s episode was recorded on location from the 2017 Shanghai Film Festival, but the guest is one of my best friends from L.A. Steve Barr is a writer, producer, and occasional actor who has worked and traveled extensively throughout and between the very different film industries in Los Angeles, China, and New Zealand. His recent credits in one or more of those capacities include Born to Dance, Chronesthesia, Hang Time, and the remake of Pete’s Dragon, in which he had a small but memorable supporting role.
In this interview, Steve discusses the unique challenges and opportunities inherent to the various filmmaking systems, and he explains his working process with a level of detail and candor that will be especially useful to anyone working in a creative industry such as film. He also shares lessons and thoughts that will particularly resonate with anyone who’s spent significant time in China, but which are applicable to travelers in foreign lands regardless.
We cover a lot of ground in this one. As we say in the interview, I want to give full disclosure upfront that Steve and I are not only long time friends, but that we are and have been business colleagues in all three countries, too. Steve was a part of my previous company based in L.A., we are currently partners in a film production company in New Zealand with our friend Andy Conlan, and the partners in my Beijing film company hired him to write the screenplay for an upcoming historical epic film of ours. Steve is now part of that company too, so there are a lot of interrelationships here. Still, we make a serious effort to not be overly self-serving, as the goal of discussing some of our projects past and present is not promotional, but educational and practical. Because we have lots of shared real-world examples to draw from in our discussion, it helps us to be much more real than if we stayed strictly theoretical.
The episode is now available on Apple Podcasts, on most of the popular Android / Google apps, on the Chinese service Ximalaya - please search it in your favorite of those places - and of course on the Podcast player here. Of course I’m biased, but I do think it’s a fun conversation, and I hope you enjoy it! Please tell a friend, subscribe, or send me feedback below as you like.
"BFMK" Website:
https://www.crazyinagoodway.com
Brendan Davis on Twitter:
@VeritasInLux
Steve Barr on Twitter:
@BarrSteve
Steve Barr writing website (with Casey Zilbert):
http://www.scwheelbarrow.com
Carl King (composer):
http://carlkingdom.com
JENNIFER HSIUNG: Comedy & Family
Jennifer Hsiung - Comedy & Family
This week’s guest is Jennifer Hsiung. Jennifer is a Canadian born to Taiwanese parents; she lives and works in Beijing as a TV anchor and reporter, a budding standup comedian, and - as she is 7 months pregnant at the time of posting this - is a very busy mother of “two and a half” kids.
Jennifer first came to China on a cultural exchange trip, but her big break after she moved to the mainland was when she became a sports reporter for CCTV during the 2008 Beijing Olympics. That opportunity led to many others as a reporter and news anchor, and Jennifer is now a host of the popular show “Culture Express” on CGTN, formerly CCTV English International, where she interviews prominent guests from the arts and entertainment world. She is also part of the growing standup comedy scene in China, which we discuss in detail.
This episode is as real as it is comedic. Jennifer brings a very interesting perspective to the show; as someone who is a foreigner from North America, but is of Asian ancestry, she has unique insights into both worlds that are worth hearing, and she has a way of making the truth funny that I think you’ll really enjoy.
If you DO enjoy it, please SUBSCRIBE to the show if you are new here, tell a friend or two about us, and check out the links below to get in touch or learn more!
"BFMK" Website:
https://www.crazyinagoodway.com
Jennifer Hsiung links:
https://www.facebook.com/JenExpress
https://www.youtube.com/user/pumpkinvive88
Weibo / WeChat: JenniferHsiung熊邦欣
Carl King (composer):
www.carlkingdom.com
FOUNDATIONS
How does where we are from and where we live and have traveled influence who we are?
The above photo of me was taken in early December, 2007 at sunrise in Carthage, Tunisia. The story behind it isn't as epic as the history of the place itself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthage), but it was a pretty profound experience for me all the same...
I was accompanying my great friend and then producing partner Blue Nelson on one leg of a particular long-term, record-setting-attempt road trip he's been on and off of in one way or another since 1998. This kicked off the North African leg. We'd previously been through Central and Southern Italy as well as the Southern European island nation of Malta together. This was the morning we woke up in Tunisia, having ferried over from Reggio, Italy 22 hours before, and it began a journey around the entirety of pre-Arab Spring Tunisia that took us down into the entrance of the Sahara Desert and back, with stops across the borders into both Algeria and Libya (past the old Star Wars sets, a movie his uncle helped produce...but that's HIS story to tell).
Blue, Brendan and Bigfoot. On location in the Angeles National Forest, CA, 200...3(?)
Scouting in Rome, Italy. 2007
Delivery "van" somewhere in Southern Italy, 2007
On the road outside Bizerte, Tunisia. 2007
Inside Blue's car at the Libyan border. Note Big Brother Leader (deceased) in the background. They wouldn't let us in but at least they let us leave. 2007
I say all this because I've had a lot of opportunity to reflect on the impact of travels and relocations in the slightly over 9 years since this trip. I woke up on January 1, 2017 in Auckland, New Zealand. The next day I travelled to Wellington, where I woke up January 3rd. On that day I meditated for an hour on the nature of my year just past, and was struck by the realization that in just the roughly 6 months previous I'd been in: Auckland and Wellington, New Zealand; Los Angeles, California, Seattle, Washington and Birmingham, Alabama in the US; various tiny towns in Inner Mongolia that I can't type properly in Roman characters; and in Gannan, Xi'An, Anyang, Erenhot, and Beijing, China.
Which of these things is not like the others? Getting to take part in a traditional celebration in Gansu, Gannan, China. July 17, 2016
Newspaper boardroom giving a talk, Xi'An, China. August 25, 2016
At the airport. Erenhot, China. August 30, 2016
Yakking about something at Sundance: Hong Kong. September 24, 2016
With a 2008 Olympic Torch at the SiMuWu company, which made it, in Anyang, China. November 28, 2016
With Steve Barr in Wellington (I think). Jan 2, 2017.
How did I get here - all of those "here"s - from whence I came? That'll take more than one blog post to explore, but the short version is that it was a combination of accident and effort. I'm going to brain-dump the outline below, without a lot of editing, and then will flesh out details in subsequent posts as I get around to it. :)
I was born in Augusta, Georgia in the Southern US. Mostly raised in and around the Atlanta area, and in Anniston, Alabama, where my maternal grandparents lived. They were the closest thing I had to a stabilizing influence in my young life so I adopted Anniston as my hometown of choice. I lived a few "interesting" years in Southwest Georgia, which will also merit it's own post. I spent one year of college in Birmingham, Alabama back before my mom lived there, which she does now, and I commuted an hour back "home" to Anniston most weekends to visit with my Grandmother, which was (in retrospect) probably why I am not dead or in jail as I type this. I had a sweet fake ID so I would go out and see my friend / guitar teacher Will (then "Bill") Owsley's bands playing in area clubs when I could - he gets a blog post too someday - but mostly I'd sit at home with "Ma" and do laundry, read or chat about things with her, and eat her amazing food. But after that one year in Birmingham, then a regrouping year back in Albany, Georgia at the then-junior college resurrecting my grades (I HATED my college in Birmingham, and avoided studying as much as possible in some creative ways, which is also it's own story), I finally moved to Athens, Georgia to attend the University of and get my life back on track. I lived in Athens for 8 years and have loads of stories and experiences involving the art and music scenes there that I will also dig into another time. For now, the key part of this narrative is that Athens and then Atlanta (where I moved next, the last stop before Los Angeles, and where I earned Bachelor's Degree in Film) are the two cities that most shaped me immediately prior to my move West.
As a Southern expat of 15 years now, I'm unqualified to talk about their values and virtues today. But when I was there, in addition to all the good and bad that are topics for still other discussions, there was a sense of fundamental community that I later had in Los Angeles, believe it or not, in the tight-knit concentric circles of the entertainment business, but which seems so far away from my 2017 perspective as an expat yet again, this time halfway around the world in Beijing.
First stop on the Beijing move: Tuanjiehu. June, 2016
Building a brand at Adamas Film HQ, Beijing, China. 2016
The plan is to be mostly here for ~5 years, give or take, with stops back home and at points elsewhere and in between as needed. The things that I'm building with friends and partners here are worth the tradeoffs, but those tradeoffs are real, and they are significant, starting with the ability to communicate fluently with close friends who share a somewhat similar frame of reference to me. It's why I spend any time at all on Facebook these days, even though the sorry state of affairs in our political system back home is hugely depressing. Still, it's the closest thing to a virtual town square I have, so for better or worse there I will be, for now.
Where have your travels taken you, and what are the lessons learned along the way that you think are universal? I'll have more thoughts on mine later. For now, I'd like to know yours. Please comment below, via the Contact form or any social sites I link this too if you want.
A BEGINNING, A.K.A. WHAT IS THIS BLOG ABOUT?
For this first post, let’s start with a confession:
More than anything else I do or have done professionally (i.e. for money) in my entire adult life, for many years I've secretly fancied myself to really be, underneath it all, a writer.
With a snappy cap and a bottle of Scotch, you, too can be a screenwriter! 2004, Los Angeles, CA
The truth is, though, that it's been many years since I've actively DONE much of it; any that I've shared publicly at least, aside from the random social media screed. Besides the other obvious limitations of that form, there are also issues of sharability, ownership, and permanence to consider.
For a long time now I've been sorting out how, exactly, to rectify this situation, and I’ve decided that this blog is the solution. I operate in a world of bilingual, cross-cultural communications every day, so I know that getting the tone right in this adventure will sometimes be a challenge, but I figure that if I at least state my (good) intentions up front and am candid and clear about things as I proceed, then I can be forgiven the occasional misstep - in theory. Right?
Cool. So: why a blog?
Well, for one thing, I need a regular creative outlet to encourage a proper writing habit, and having a personal platform that begs to be filled is a great motivator. And in an effort to integrate and consolidate my online presence, I want my thoughts to show up in one central place instead of being scattered across a half-dozen different websites, none of which I actually own. So I'll push OUT to social media, but things will START here.
I also have lots of random stories to tell, things that don’t necessarily fit cohesively into any one other place, which leads us to the next question:
What’s with the title?
This is where it gets weird, or maybe more interesting, depending on your point of view:
The short version is that given where I started from, in all ways, the expectations any reasonable person would've had for the trajectory of me and my life versus where I've actually ended up is nothing short of - well - crazy. The gap between those two things - what psychologists call cognitive dissonance, but what I call my reality - has at times made me feel a little crazy, too, hence the blog title. So acknowledging that it’s okay to be “crazy, but in a good way" has become the unofficial organizing principle of my life. It’s the only thing that - ironically - consistently makes sense as a philosophy for me, and I suspect that even more people will come to similar conclusions of their own as the reshuffling of the geopolitical order continues.
High school graduation pic. 1986, Albany, GA
Hair farmer extraordinaire. Jan 1996, Atlanta GA
All growed up. New Years' Day 2017, Auckland, NZ
Okay, great. So how does this fine idea look in practice? Your mileage may vary, but my operating philosophy is try to take (only) smart risks, learn from mistakes, share the wealth of successes and the (usually) helpful pain of hard lessons learned freely, with others, in order to help flatten their own learning curves, and then I trust that they will share their own relevant lessons when I most need to hear them. In my case, self-reinvention has been both the secret weapon to my forward momentum, and the self-reinforcing result of it’s application. In the process, I try to do as little harm to myself or others as possible while avoiding stagnation at all costs. Then, repeat. GO.
The longer / more candid version is that, if you know the details, from an outside perspective my life story so far reads like the adventures of a slightly more self-aware Forrest Gump adrift across the entire spectrum of the international entertainment business, which isn’t horribly far from the truth. In my travels from Anniston, Alabama to Athens and later Atlanta, Georgia, then across the country to my long-time home of Los Angeles, and then now, all the way across the Pacific Ocean to my current home in Beijing, China, I've been fortunate to have and make and experience far more than my fair share of random and amazing connections and coincidences and collisions with notable and/or fascinating people, places and things along the way, and many of the stories and lessons learned are just too good / funny / weird and/or instructive not to share.
So I wanted to create a place to collect them all, in a way that hopefully doesn't make me look like a self-promoting jackass. That’s (frankly/admittedly) an inherent occupational hazard of the entertainment business, and will likely prove easier said than done sometimes, but that's the goal anyway.
"Whoa-OH! LIV-in on a preh-ER!" KTV with the squad, as you do. Jan 2017, Beijing China
And I figured that sharing these tales will not only help ME to work out and integrate some of the stranger questions and tangents and insights of and from my life into one cohesive meta-story, it might also help someone ELSE to identify and sort out the overarching themes of their own seemingly random lives as well - and then they can tell me or others what they learned, and the positive cycle continues.
Because - to get back to that Forrest Gump comparison for a minute - in retrospect, my own journey HASN’T been completely random. Along the way, I’ve used both conscious and unconscious strategy and tactics, combined with a massive amount of good-to-great fortune, plus some lucky recoveries from a few tragic, potentially debilitating missteps - moments that could have and nearly did end me - to get where I am and wherever I am going...but that’s getting ahead of the story.
For now, at the very least, I think this project could be fun for me and my friends to reflect on and engage with, plus maybe it's interesting for any of THEIR friends who see it, and in this day and age that ain't nothing, so off we go.
In terms of content, I'll use this forum to post about any and everything I want to, but will tag and categorize it in order to be easily searchable to anyone who randomly (there’s that word again) stumbles across it as well. When I have a lot to say on a subject, like right now, I can be a little bit long-winded (insert friends' and former students' knowing laughter HERE), so I'll try to be succinct wherever I can or should be. But I won't put artificial limitations on what I write, either. It's my blog, and I'll ramble if I want to. ;)
I imagine that I’ll mostly write about current events and relevant developments in the film business between the US and China, plus notes from my travels and then anything else I want to get off my chest or discuss with you here. And in between those topics, I'll add chapters to the backstory of my life as they occur to me - for fun, or posterity, or just to share the learning experience (and wow, have I had a few).
Think of this site as an asynchronous memoir of a guy who isn't famous, but who has some unusual stories to tell. I hope you enjoy it, and that this is worth the time it takes to read and write for all of us. Comment below if you like. Thanks. :)