philip tinari

I love the Official White House Photostream on flickr. Particularly when read from Beijing, it offers a fairly compelling vision of transparency, which of course we realize all the while is just a sequence of manufactured moments, always public, but not until now dispersed with such vernacular ease. One friend who worked in the Clinton White House, a key member of our immediate post-9/11 crew of Chinese-studying expats, would fondly recall how she made it a point to stay friendly with the photographer, the better to insure that the money shots of her and 42 would keep coming her way. And they did, as 8 x 11 prints in Manila envelopes to be horded away for special occasions. She showed me her collection once, right around the time when Wang Qishan, pictured above at center, emerged from Hainanese obscurity to take the mayoralty of Beijing as Meng Xuenong took the fall for the SARS coverup one April Sunday afternoon. This was only a month or so after the Iraq invasion, and the images of a slightly earlier America she had squirreled away already seemed decades old. It’s been a long six years. Wang Qishan spent most of it chairing the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, which earned him the distinction of giving the lone interminable speech of the Olympic opening ceremony (and every Chinese opening ceremony needs an interminable speech). Obama went from Springfield to Washington. And digital photographs got much bigger than three or four megapixels. Now Wang gets a basketball, and we all get to watch, even disseminate, with a choice of six different resolutions. Below, Obama and Berlusconi in L’Aquila, a city which exists for me as the major signpoint on the A24, which is what you take for the first half of the drive from Rome to my ancestral hometown of Guardiagrele. I don’t think Wang Qishan has been to the Abruzzi, not yet.