Xiu Xiu Now Taking Women as Lovers, Tour

As you well know, in 1975 Mao Tse-Tung's Cultural Revolution was well under way in the People's Republic of China. Intellectuals were sent to labor camps, and the nation's youth were taken out of school and sent into the rural interior to learn the ways of the proletariat and rebuild the fundamental economy. The 1998 film, Xiu Xiu is a fictional account of one such girl's experience of relocation from Chengdu to remote Tibet for re-education and the disenchantment she discovers in the world outside her home.

Thrust into the vast loneliness of the Tibetan plains, Xiu Xiu despairs in a life of alienation and self-destruction, as she is cheated and abused. Her youthful naivety is torn away as she degrades to that of an exhausted victim of liars, trading sex for empty promise after empty promise.
Relentlessly depressing, Xiu Xiu is wholly appropriate as the namesake for Jamie Stewart's San Francisco band of the same name -- while they both make me sob late at night, they're still really really good.

If you like to dance while you're bumming out:

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