Word: cloud
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...year ago, a slender girl called Cloud had no idea she would dedicate her life to lifting disks of iron above her head. Then a stranger came to her remote village in eastern China's Shandong province, took detailed measurements of her shoulder width, thigh length and waist circumference--and announced she would have the honor of serving her motherland as a weight lifter. The then 14-year-old daughter of vegetable farmers had little choice in the matter. She had been chosen to be a cog in China's vast sports machine, a multibillion-dollar apparatus designed with...
Today Chen Yun (yun means cloud) trains at the Weifang City Sports School, one of 3,000 state-run athletics academies that consign nearly 400,000 youngsters to a form of athletic servitude. Sitting under the watchful eyes of her coach and a man who identifies himself as the school's "propaganda director," Cloud tells me that weight-lifting is her favorite sport. Any hobbies? I ask. "Weight-lifting," she answers. Anything Cloud likes besides weight-lifting? "Weight-lifting," she repeats. I try again. Cloud glances at the two men near her. Behind them is a poster of Chairman...
...East bloc is long gone--and with it, sports by diktat. Today China is one of the few nations, apart from the likes of North Korea and Cuba, to commit so many state resources to athletics. While some young Chinese choose to attend sports schools, others, like Cloud, are little more than pawns of the state...
...while you're at it, you may as well throw in MobileMe, Apple's retooled .Mac "cloud" server, which automatically and wirelessly synchs your e-mail, calendar, contacts and photos among your iPhone and assorted computers. Yes, the .Mac service was a dog that needed a new name - I mean, why pay for something that Google gives you for free? Clearly, MobileMe - at least judging by the demo yesterday - will be better than the various free services that Google offers. In fact, the MobileMe apps, when run via the Web, appear to behave with drag-and-drop fluidity...
...James Turrell. But the blend of heavy and vaporous, declaring and beckoning--that's all Kapoor's. That explains S-Curve. A long wall of bending steel, it's like one of Richard Serra's hulking stretches. But because of its mirrored surface, S-Curve dematerializes, the way Cloud Gate does, into a field of runny reflections that throws the world for a loop. It's art as metaphysical jujitsu...