Shoeless Schmuck Does Shanghai

I wouldn't be surprised if this 'Sole Man' were a 'Sole Bachelor,' too.

My favorite yuppiehipster-hater just tipped me off to a piece of journalistic gold: an NPR snippet on English filmmaker Arthur Jones, who has decided to spend a year barefoot -- in China. During the barefoot mission, which is taking place in the "urban jungle" of Shanghai, Mr. Jones continues to conduct business meetings and do his "job as a filmmaker," whatever that could possibly entail (actually, I'd rather not know).

And why, you may ask, is this well-off Brit voluntarily forgoing a luxury that, I think it's safe to say, literally millions of people in China cannot afford? Because, he claims, "It opens your eyes. You're suddenly in touch with everything around. And it feels like you're a little child discovering the world for the first time." A few lines later, he shares the downside to barefooting it: "You don't take anything else in; you spend the entire time staring at the floor" (...Could NPR have meant this satirically? Let's hope so). Clearly this guy has no idea what he's talking about, and hasn't even gotten his media spiel down pat.

We do, however, learn of the supposed health benefits to going barefoot -- the kind of shit that yuppies find orgasmic. Mainly, it's been determined that shoeless runners put less stress on their feet, suffering less impact. There's even been a study showing that rickshaw runners in India and China who did not wear shoes had fewer cases of foot fungus and infection than did their shoe-wearing counterparts. Maybe it's just me, but I have a feeling that a case of athlete's foot becomes irrelevant when you're living in a dirty slum and likely to die from a host of horrendous diseases. I'd like to see Mr. Jones shack up with a rickshaw runner and compare foot health with beggar children: hopefully he'll get a sense of how fucking lucky he is to have the option of wearing shoes at all, while others must risk stepping on dangerous materials, not to mention garbage and sewage, everyday.

In fact, unless this filmmaker extraordinaire is willing to buy slippers for every beggar child in the city (and upgrade every middle-class kid's Nikes), he should put his fucking shoes back on. This fool makes Chinese businessmen in $5,000 Gucci loafers seem justified and normal. What an ungrateful moron.

To the self-proclaimed 'Sole Man," who plays childish games in the street like jumping on white lines to avoid scorching pavement, I hope a shoeless Chinese child rips all the clothes off your back and snatches your camera equipment so he can buy himself his very first pair of real shoes. Boo Fucking Hoo, you barefoot hippie.