Wednesday, April 23, 2014

I'm So Tired, I Don't Know What to Do




Moving along at a quick pace along the East Fourth Ring Road.   This is no small thing.  I purposefully ended another meeting I had early, so that I could get a cab and get out of Wanda complex before rush hour.  It’s just about to turn 5:00PM.  Twenty minutes later and this would be a mess.  The spring air is thick with particulate God-knows what.  Regardless the trees on the side of the road still look beautiful with their fresh, April leaves. 

I’m yawning here in the back of this cab.  All afternoon I’ve been dragging, 筋疲力尽[1].  I was pinching myself in the meeting two hours back.  My propensity to fall asleep is rather dramatic and I need to be very careful when a meeting calls for me to sit and look intently while another person or two, dialogue.  Very difficult not to drift off into your own head and feel the lull of Hypnos.  If the conversation is in another language that I do not speak, like Japanese, it is a very dangerous situation indeed.  So I do what people do.  I offer up something banal to say: “that’s very important!”  “Is that right?” “Indeed.”  And I start to literally bite my tongue and poke my finger with a pen.  And all seems good, perhaps a bit too good.  A train of thought in my mind then suddenly gains complete authorship rights and leads to a narcotic eddy and before I know I’ve relinquished control, and I awake with a start.  Ooops. 


I always think of the Ronald Reagan presidency.  I was a teen when he was in office and we all loathed him.  I think his age was one of things we’d focus on to critique him.  “Oh yes.  He’s so old.”  And I remember laughing at that time when I learned that he apparently used to take a nap during the day there in the White House.  Indeed all offices in China used to have people leaning over their desks, face on an open newspaper and catching some mid day sleep when you’d get a meeting with someone around 1:00PM.  And we’d all think that was funny too.  It doesn’t all seem so funny just now.  A mid day nap seems like an infinitely sensible thing to do.  Embrace the body’s call for rest and jump back refreshed, or swallow espresso for umph all day.  The latter seems particularly facile when it doesn’t even work. 

I was on about Burkina Faso yesterday and how I’d once headed south from Ouagadougou to Tamale in Ghana.  If I’d headed southeast instead I’d have entered Benin, the site of the ancient kingdom of Dahomey.  Benin is a country I’ve never visited, but it is home to some of West Africa’s most remarkable music. The Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou, about whom I’ve written before are, with the exception of Fela Ransome Kuti and the Africa 70’, in a class by themselves in terms of remarkable recordings over many years of time.  It is to my ears something that spans and even elevates the two distinct sounds on either side of Benin, Nigeria to the east and Ghana (and of course Togo) to the West.

Today at the gym my other Benin faves who actually once bested Orchestre Poly-Rythmo in a battle of the bands the Orchestre Super Borgou de Parakou assisted me in my early morning effort to cultivate sweat.  Just listen to the opening lines of “Ko Guere” (date’s only provided as 1970 – 1976) with accompanying guitar.  Deceptively simple, tight, punchy, utterly plausible despite the fact that the language is indecipherable. http://analogafrica.blogspot.com/2013/04/analog-africa-no11-le-super-borgou-de.html  Apparently they were actually influenced heavily by the Congolese giant Franco, though it's harder for me to hear as they are much more rough and punching to my ears.

For some reason I’d long had it in head that this gritty, guitar, bass, drum, organ combo was actually from Burkina.  The ethnomusicologically refined folks at Analog Africa who re-released the material with a fascinating, almost Maoist cover art, had their good efforts at documentation wasted on me, as I’d somehow overlooked the obvious geographic question.  They are in fact from the north of Benin, about one hundred miles from the Burkina border, in the city of Parakou. 



I was once at a charity event here in Beijing and was ever so excited to learn that the ambassador of Benin would be at our table.  Right on!  I shouldered over to the gentleman and, above the din of the awards music tried to explain my profound respect Benin in general and for the music of his country, from forty years ago in particular.  He smiled and asked me if I lived in Beijing.  “Yes.” I replied.  Undaunted, I redoubled my efforts and tried to reintroduce the topic mentioning one and then another group and my ideas about the distinct “Vodoun” sound within that remarkable neighborhood.  “Yes.” He replied.  Then, smiling he turned to speak with another guest to his left, in French. 

Crestfallen, I slinked back to my seat on the other side of the table.  It would have been a fine time to have fallen asleep.  My host explained that English wasn’t his strong suit.  Indeed.  I once had some French chops but they are buried under decades of Chinese accretions.  Then again, even with compétences suppérieur en Français I might have only learned that the Honorable Ambassador was in fact a fan of Bach, or Miley Cyrus.  Then again, perhaps I'd have gotten the surprise and high-five I was looking for. 




[1] jīnpílìjìn:  body weary, strength exhausted (idiom); extremely tired / spent

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