The Beijing Olympics - Harmony vs. Openness, assumption that "message is clear," choreography internalized, references to book culture, three faith traditions (the apsaras, the Confucian scholars, etc.), T'ang period, piano number, Tai Chi, astronauts in space, human awareness and human technology, questions about authenticity (fireworks footsteps and girl singer)
Opera of Cultural Revolution, Beijing Film Academy, Hong Kong action cinema, Busby Berkeley
The Mass Games as an example of what Gamboni calls "composing the body politic"
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
Democracy and communism present spectacles
III. Unity and Division within Appearance
One divides into two vs. two fuses into one
57: "Just as it presents pseudo-goods to be coveted, it offers false models of revolution to local revolutionaries"
59: "dissatisfaction itself became a commodity"
60: celebrity and the "star" as "embodying the image of a possible role" and "specializing in the seemingly lived"
64: "concentrated spectacle" and "bureaucratic capitalism"
69: "image of the society happily unified by consumption"