Thursday, April 24, 2014

A Cab That Is Not Moving




It’s hot.  I’m in a suit.  Sitting in the back seat of a cab that is not moving.  Sweat collecting now on my brow, in my pits.  It’s 1:30PM.  The Jing-Cheng Highway would normally be a reasonable bet.  I’m en route to a must-do meeting.  It is clear I will be ridiculously late. 

It’s important to remind oneself, though it is rather difficult, that fretting, yelling, squirming, exhaling loudly, saying “fuck” repeatedly do absolutely nothing to solve the problem.  Up ahead I can see for over a kilometer on an incline. Just  拭目以待[1] Traffic sits all the way through the ochre haze.  We move a few feet.  We change a lane.  Someone cuts in front of us.  I’ve offered the driver a tip if he drives “maximum aggressive.”  We stop again



Someone calls with an offer I would have jumped at nine months ago.  It feels fitting and proper and dignified to say, “no thanks.”  Late, now, I’ve informed people that my situation is what it is.  You try to make it sound wretched, but not so wretched that people question your veracity.  “I’m not moving at all.”  Well, that’s not true.  You just moved forward twenty feet.  “It’s unbelievably bad.”  That’s true, but then again, it’s not hard to believe this soft of rank obstruction could happen here. 

Slowly at first, and then steadily more so, you can feel the pressure start to release.  Things are moving off to the left.  "Mad-maximum" crawls slowly over to the left.  More motion.  We’ve reached a steady clip of 10mph.  I begin to feel like a trout that has beaten his way upstream out a turgid, brackish pool into aerated water.  My gills flex as we rise to 20 mph.  I can feel the life returning to my sprit,  Even the car’s feeble air conditioned air is starting to circulate something like cool air. 

And the culprit . . . ?  It was not a fifteen-car accident as I imagined.  Rather, off to the right at the exit before the one I’ll take, is a concrete sedimentation of truck traffic on the off ramp.  There, no one is moving.  I’ve been through something vexing, but that looks much, much worse.  We sail past doing 30. 

Today’s meeting is off in Shangdi.  It is an odd, transitional part of town, like I suppose most of this town necessarily is.  North of the fifth ring road, about parallel to where I am on the east, Shangdi is on the west.  Near the universities but far enough north to be a major schlep.  This is where many of Beijing’s tech works, foreign and local, are located.  There are ramshackle houses, next to glistening towers.  Perhaps there is more compromise buildings than there usually are in Beijing.  More extant architecture from the initial reform build-out of the 1980s.  

I’m looking for the company logo on a tower.  This is where Beijing's 'Cloud Valley' is located, there off to the left.  This is one of infinite number of places I've visited, trying to replicate the atmosphere of Silicon Valley.  I've spotted my tower.  I will need to put this away.

Now it is much later in the night.  I’ve had the kind of meeting you want to have where people say, “Yes. That’s what we need.”  It was so good in fact that the room full of engineers all applauded our guest at the end of the presentation.  And atmospherics can be deceptive. 

Now I’m in the back of a cab that I had to fight like the devil to secure.  I wound up walking a kilometer or so and then opted for a cab queue at the classic 'yesterday' hotel, that is currently having another big make over “The Kun Lun.”  Riding along in the back, moving at least, I’ve a raging headache.  What ever brought that on?  I think I’ve a package of aspirin somewhere in this bag. It was likely stress, espresso and beer, in that order of importance. 



Not sure if you are familiar with the Menahan Street Band, who are playing in my ears now.    The album, “Make Road by Walking”, is gorgeous.  I ran into it this morning randomly, following links from our featured band yesterday, Le Super Borgou de Parakou from Benin.  I believe some of the musicians were in the neo Afro-Pop, New York, band Antibalas.  The sound is deeply influenced by African jazz, for sure, but the main feeling is a sort of Motown-drenched jazz groove that suggests walking around on an urban day that isn’t quite sunny.   Named after the street in Bushwick, Brooklyn they live on, it isn’t hard to hear the borough’s size and complexity in the sound that should have been written decades ago, but couldn’t have been.  Somehow it brings to mind Amy Winehouse backing band.  She’d have sung beautifully over some of these tracks.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menahan_Street_Band





[1] shìmùyǐdài: lit. to wipe one's eyes and wait (idiom); to wait and see

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