Midday. Driving into town on a Sunday for a series of
meetings. The ground has forgotten what
precipitation was. Dust forms atop more
dust, with every dry day passing. The deliberate
conifers and the guardrails and my favorite tree here at the Sanyuanqiao cloverleaf that will bloom
purple in a few month’s time are all blanketed in silt. Every car passing is dirty. Brand new flash vehicles mostly, all
filthy. Dead leaves that remain on the
trees and the shrubs, waiting to fall and flake apart.
Roadside ads set deliberately to attract, immediately
tarnish and fade and act to repulse one’s gaze away. The casings they are set in were never meant
to last and are worn and ruined so what is inside can never escape
their product placement misfortune. Roadside compromise, 乌七八糟[1]
We move into the city.
The air is like an aquarium where the filter is broken. You know what its like to look in and see the
fish swimming listlessly around when the filter is not working properly in what
should be a lovely aquarium? When the
aeration stops, or the cotton balls are thick with muck. They should have been swapped month’s
ago. The water looks thick and
unfortunate. Looking in there is
necessarily a presumption of guilt. I
had fish tanks as a kid. I still have
nightmares of forgetting to change the water and finding all the lovely exotic
fish dead, or worse, near dead, swimming on their side, sickened, gills
inoperative. What was I thinking? How did I let it go so long? I forgot about
them. And now they’re almost dead.
We don’t have gills.
But if we did, we can imagine that drawing oxygen from turgid water
would be a form of torture. Filtering
out a disproportionate quantity of impurity with every passage of the water
over your throat slits would make you want to spin to one side. You’re head would scream and you’d begin to
run up against the tank, again and again, unavoidably. Thump, spin . . . thump. There’s no way out of a tank. Over at the bus stop by a public wastebasket
a man is smoking a cigarette.
The sun, of course, is out there. A winter sun pulsing lamely behind the
haze. A few fish are restless and they
dart about quickly. But most just endure,
slowly. Stuck behind a bus now. Fumes.
Idle. Fumes. Passing a fender bender accident. Sclerotic clogging of this major
passageway. Stop. Stop here and do not move. You either.
Finally, we’re moving again, swiftly now. All the people on the side of the road are
bundled up. No skin exposed, whatsoever
beyond the nose and the chin. Black
mostly and a few muted colors to peoples’ winter attire. Huddle, wait, fumes, bus lurch abruptly to
the side of the artery, the wall of he aquarium.
The countryside, the suburbs, aren’t quite this bad. Riding in sentient, observing the city center
certainly feels worse. Much worse. Turn from Sanhuan
on to Gongtibeilu. Someone is drying their clothes outside on
the porch of the diplomatic compound apartments. What are they like when you pull them back
in? Dry, no doubt. With a trowel full of dust absorbed in the process. Shake them hard. I dare you.
Turn on the air purifier and turn on all the lights and shake that
shirt. Whip it against the wall and set all the dirt free. Slow motion settling of the air born grit.
Saddened. This city I
love, and adore and identify with oddly, is increasingly inhospitable. Like a New Yorker living in the world’s
greatest city as it deteriorated in the seventies, and it was funky but
dangerous and broken and broke and nobody gave a shit or knew what to do and,
people left and more people left and what was left was deemed less valuable and
when people mentioned it from anywhere else in the world it was a joke. A sad, broken joke. We can’t mention our
northern capital without people considering a lung’s worth of particulate matter. Intelligent conversation can’t progress until
you’ve had a throw away acknowledgement of the dominant meme. Yes, well, it is a drag. Yes, well, its not so bad. This week was good.
This problem will take many, many years to solve. Right thinking people all remind each other
to “stay positive.” Soon, we’ll make the trip out to Shandong, to visit the
relatives for Chinese New Year. The
long, flat plain of Shandong three hours drive southeast from here and it is all
the same air. Ninety-six million people
breathing that air. If you drive three
hours south west of here to Shanxi it is all the same air which another
thirty-six million people breathe. So
even if Beijing legislated to something like zero emissions, who cares? It is completely surrounded by so much
humanity, by two or three Europe’s worth, it will be breathing all that
effluence for the rest of my life. That
this is an epicenter of civilizational disruption, that it is a cool and quaint
transformational city and a testimony to modernity like no other, must wait for
articulation before the cymbal crash punch line about the air quality.
Who was Booker Ervin?
He’s on my iPod now. “No Booze
Blues.” Tough luck Booker. I’ve got a glass of wine within reach. “Tough luck John. You’re breathing shitty air.” Touché Booker. Touché. Born in Texas in 1930, he started out on
the trombone and learned to play the tenor saxophone, stationed in
Okinawa. That’ll learn ya’. How many other tenor players sharpened their
chops in Japan? The voice, of course,
behind Mingus “Good Bye Porkpie Hat” which most jazz fans would recognize and
say “ahh, that sound. that guy . . . ” But the thing that caught me was a quote from
Randy Weston the mighty, heroic Brooklyn cum West African pianist whom I featured
on the Dustybrine a few months back. Dig
what he has to say about Mssr. Ervin:
"Booker Ervin, for me, was
on the same level as John Coltrane. He was a completely original
saxophonist.... He was a master.... 'African Cookbook', which I composed back
in the early '60s, was partly named after Booker because we (musicians) used to
call him 'Book,' and we would say, 'Cook, Book.' Sometimes when he was playing
we'd shout, 'Cook, Book, cook.' And the melody of 'African Cookbook' was based
upon Booker Ervin's sound, a sound like the north of Africa. He would kind of
take those notes and make them weave hypnotically. So, actually the African
Cookbook was influenced by Booker Ervin."
He died way too young in New York, of kidney disease:
“surfeit of booze, blues”? He was 39 and
it was 1970. My beloved New York was on its way down, I’m afraid. Jazz, as Phil Schaap would testify was on its
way out. No one could get a gig. No one cared.
People left. If you stayed, you
had better be tough. And eventually,
miraculously, it would get better. It
would also get more sedate and predictable but perhaps that is the cost of a
place being livable. And the mantle of
cool would, necessarily migrate, to a place with new compromises and new
possibilities, new concentrations of people, that hadn’t yet figured it all
out. It’s on here, oddly, in our silted
aquarium. For a while at least. Thump.
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