holga068

I am pretty sure this will be me within the next 10 years.... except instead of india I will be loitering outside the imperial terrace chanting in hopes of scoring a pu-pu platter.

Murderball Gold 2008

Last night I went to watch the Paralympic rugby gold medal finals ( aka Murdernball ) and saw America reclaim that which was stolen away from us by those sneaky canadians 4 years ago. Anyways America came back with a vengeance. They kicked Australias ass 53-44. No matter what australia did the americans were all over the court smashing australians around. Australia didn't seem to stand a chance even though they had the kobe of murderball. australias #3 Ryley "Magic Boy" Batt scored 23 points and was all over the court he played offense and defense, he scared the shit out of me. There is nothing like seeing a disabled person violently smash another disabled person so hard it not only knock them out of their wheelchair they also need the coach to come out with replacement parts to get the chair back up and running. Think rugby meets nascar meets jimmy and timmy from south park. And the beers were only 5 kuai.... which is also a down point seeing as though the beer was so cheap it sold out by half time. There is nothing on earth like a bunch of drunken paraplegic rugby fans. And I am referring to both the drunken fans OF paraplegic rugby and the drunken paraplegics who were also very drunk and fans of paraplegic rugby. The other crazy thing was randomly just about everyone in beijing i know seemed to be there. The murderball finals was the social event of the season.

holga067

this is rajastan it is very cool thats why its full of hippies!

Holga066

Here's a holga of an indian cow.

holga065

Heres a couple more gratuitous taj mahal shots for the blog....

holga064

paralympics

Last night my cousin bob was in town on business. He works for microsoft and got hooked up with some tickets to the water cube for the paralympics. I had been sold on the olympics but was skeptical about the paralympics. but after last night i say screw the olympics. You do not know excitment until you see a guy with no arms compete with a guy missing 1 foot and then kick his ass!

I really dont understand how they organize the competitions but everyone appears to have different disabilities and compete against one another.

Last night was the team swim where 4 teammates each did 50 m lengths of the pool. I saw china who was a bit behind then the next swimmer had NO ARMS. He dove right into the pool and swam like a freaking dolphin on steroids gaining a huge lead putting china in first and then they won the gold and broke the world record. It was AMAZING.

all i could think about was the fact i could even swim 50 yards with everything intact.

Other than that it was also my first time in the water cube which is amazing.

holga064...1/2

I pity the fool who don't buy my oranges!

Don't ever listen to me....

here is a letter from my latest love advice column ( yes i'm still writing it ). I submitted this to the editor last night. I keep expecting to be fired yet it never happens....

Dear Ben,
I have fallen deeply love with a girl I have recently met. She seems to also like me but I am not sure as it is hard to tell. She is an introverted and quiet girl and when I talk to her sometimes she only responds with silence. I am looking for a way to some how make a connection with this girl so that she will open up to me. I have asked lots of my female friends what to do but they have only given me bad advice. What are some ways that i can break this silence and win her heart. Please let me know the secrets to melting a girls heart and making her fall in love with you.
Blue

Dear Blue,
I think first off if your hanging out with your female friends looking for advice then your doing your research in the wrong library. I think if your reaching out to this girl she is still giving you the cold shoulder you might be trying too hard. Don't go chasing this girl trying to impress her instead I think you need to be strong and your own man which in turn will impress her even more. Try and be like a cowboy. You know that guy on a horse alone riding through the desert. The cowboy has his own code of honor, ethics, and his own rules of living. He never, ever tries to impress the women but in the end he always gets the girl and they ride off into the sunset together. I think you need to reach down deep and find some of these qualities inside yourself and let her discover you. In the end if she doesn't care about you for who you really are than no trick in the book is going to melt her icy heart.

I would love to hear your thoughts....

holga 063

holga 60 something

here is a shot of on of the boat guys in the river that divides dhaka the capital of bangladesh. I first he wanted $500 USD to take me out in a boat but i finally negotiated him down to about 10 cents or something.

holga a day

Ok. I got really slack on my goal of a holga photo per day. But I was broke and kind of busy. Now I am bored again and have money and just got 60 rolls of film developed. So I am starting up again.

i figured I would start off light. I was toying around with infrared film in my holga and shot these. it doesn't have much IR effect because i used the wrong filter. I tried using a standard $5 red 25A filter instead of the $100 red R72 filter. Anyways I still thought the dark sky gave it an interesting look. The rest of the week i am going to post portraits and such from bangladeshy villages.

D.P.R.K.

So I have decided that I am gonna try and take a little pleasure trip to The D.P.R.K. ( aka north korea )

I figure I want see an actual axis of evil before McCain claims his destiny and bombs them back into the stone age.

I am an american ( obviously ) so I just submitted the application to the tour agency to see if I can actually get a visa to visit north korea.

The highlight of north korea would be getting the chance to see the mass games. The mass games is a 100,000 people in a synchronised gymnastics show that makes the beijing opening ceremonies seem like a community theater performance.

Anyways I will keep you posted on the details if i get greenlit or rejected.

here is a clip of the DPRK mass games :



What are Mass Games?....in a nutshell:

The Mass Games organisers state that 'Juche orientated mass gymnastics of Korea originated from Flower Gymnastics, a work by President Kim Il Sung created in 1930, the early days of his anti Japanese revolutionary struggles'. 1961 marked the fist truly Korean style Mass Gymnastics piece with the catchy title of 'The Era of the Workers' Party'. Today, Mass Gymnastics represents 'the ideological theme of the history of the country and nation splendidly through combination of gymnastic formations, backdrops involving tens of thousands of people and music'. The original aims were to train the people's physique but this led into a form of gymnastic art, 'the ideological theme promotes social development and it trains not only the people's physiques but also their spiritual power'.

Unlike a sports competition, where the athletes compete for a prize, the mass gymnastics of Korea brings 'pleasure and satisfaction to the performers as well as to the audience and instils in their hearts hope for the future'.

As Kim Jong Il pointed out in a meeting with the mass gymnastics organisers in 1987 'the Korean style of mass gymnastics is a mixed form of comprehensive physical exercises with a combination of high ideological content, artistic quality and gymnastics skill'.

'Developing mass gymnastics is important in training children to be fully developed communist people, to be fully developed communist man, one must acquire a revolutionary ideology, the knowledge of many fields, rich cultural attainments and a healthy and strong physique. These are the basic qualities required of a man of the communist type. Mass gymnastics play an important role in training schoolchildren to acquire these communist qualities. Mass gymnastics foster particularly healthy and strong physiques, a high degree of organization, discipline and collectivism in schoolchildren, The schoolchildren, conscious that a single slip in their action may spoil their mass gymnastic performance, make every effort to subordinate all their thoughts and actions to the collective.'

holgaroid

I just scanned this. before i moved to beijing i bought a ridculously expensive polaroid back 2 weeks before polaroid discontinued making film for it. Anyways i shot a ton of polaroids back then lost them and just refound them so here is one. I am too lazy to post anything else. tomorrow i pick up about 20 rolls of film from the lab so expect tons of fress holga shots from india and bangladesh this week.

Benjamin Radcliffe Biography

Benjamin Radcliffe was born in Massachusetts in 1975. He graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1997 with a B.F.A. in Computer Art. Since then he has lived all over the U.S.A. working as a Lighting & Compositing artists for studios like PDI/Dreamworks, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Walt Disney Feature Animation. In january of 2007 he left his job at Disney and proceeded to spend the next 18 months traveling to the remote corners of China, Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, India, and Bangladesh. During these travels he documented his adventures using a cheap toy plastic Holga camera shooting medium format film. The artist currently resides in Beijing, P.R.C. working as a Computer Graphics Artist for Technicolor Beijing and is also writing a weekly love advice column for the chinese newspaper 21st Century. When not busy planning his upcoming adventure to Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea ( aka North Korea ) Benjamin can often be found in the Beijing hutongs at Huxley's Bar solving the world's problems one beverage at a time.