Up from the roots of
bed, from before the sunrise. Looking
down from the 19th floor. The
city below, Qingdao, is blanketed in snow.
We actually had some accumulation overnight. The snow laid out over the city looks divine
from this high up. City snow has a way
of becoming less than romantic rather quickly, after it’s been trod upon, but we’ll
go soon and have a look. I want to make
a snowball.
Today, I believe we’ll head up to the tip of this Shandong
peninsula. I’ve never been to Weihai,
Yantai and Penglai. All of them are
spotted with historical significance, of visitors who commented on some view or
mountain or native sons and daughters who hailed from this part of the empire. I always remember the story of Qin Shi Huang,
visiting the sea, after he’d conquered the Qi kingdom and being dazzled by the
enormity of it, this being his first time to encounter the boundless blue brine. I believe the place he sent his minions out
to find the elixir of life from was Penglai.
It must be out there somewhere.
The Dutch diplomat, novelist and historian Robert von Gulik who was
stationed in for prolonged stays before and after the War in Japan where wrote the eminently readable Judge Dee
mystery series about the historical Tang dynasty judge who serves as a
sagacious Sherlock Holmes in Chinese imagination. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_van_Gulik. As a Dutch diplomat and a linguist Van Gulik served throughout the region and in postings around the world. Our hero, Judge Dee, forever, 远见卓识[1], always gets his non-gender-specific foil. Von
Gulik has Judge Dee hale from Penglai, if memory serves. However, when I’ve stated this as historical
fact, “Judge Dee, he was from Penglai”, it usually seems to sit at odds with
people’s understanding. I’ll have to
look it up.
OK. It would appear
the real Di Ren Jie is from Taiyuan, in Shanxi, about a few hundred miles to
the west of Shandong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Di_Renjie
Last night we were all hanging out in the hotel lounge and took
a notion to make a mocumentary. We have all
this capacity to make things like, say, a guerilla movie, on our iPhones but
never think to. OK, so what should we
mock? What better to flay then a boring teacher
at in an imaginary school? Originally my
idea was received rather flatly. “Huh? Why?”
But as soon as I managed to get them to do a first take, they were
hooked. We settled on the “boring
history teacher, me, going on and on about Qingdao history, not unlike every
car ride we take around here and the kids provided every more absurd answers to
questions put to them.
During the day we’d visited the house that Jiang Kai Shek
had lived in, during his visits to the city.
The girls were lectured tirelessly about a supposedly famous incident
wherein “Peanut” as General Stillwell used to call the hapless Guomindang leader,
was dressed in his finest and splattered suddenly, with mud. This, as we had a
picture of an older gentleman in a fedora from the day’s touring, taken outside
of the house which was the Generalissimo’s former villa. The shot I’d taken was splattered with snowflakes
hence the origin of the loopy incident. We got an evening’s worth of mileage out of
this routine. Now I need to look into
editing software.
Riding along China’s newly built highway system now, heading
off the G20 on to the G15 now, heading north to the head of the Shandong peninsula,
up to Yantai. To the right, a fair
smattering of snow still covers the fields and the Styrofoam greenhouses. Cameras are flashing overhead, photographing
our license plates. It’s not as
obtrusive as Korea where people have a minimum of three chirping radar detectors
both legal and otherwise that sing out irregularly, causing people to accelerate
and break, in response. Long concrete
houses with red tiled roofs are pocketed into highway-side town, after highway-side
town. None of these shoddy homes will
make it through the decade I’d imagine.
Men now rolling turf down over the tops of a few greenhouses. I think I may have just seen a vineyard.
I haven’t made it to the gym much on this trip but I’ve
managed to get the ball rolling early enough this morning. Pristine new equipment, antiseptic facility
and a view out to the neighboring parking lot.
No people. I got started but I missed
my familiar stair master immediately.
“What’s your age” “What’s your
weight?” “Fuck off, just go.” Not content with my thumbing the “quick
start” button once, it seemed to keep coming up with perky things to ask
me. “Shut up.” In my routine I go backwards for three
minutes around the 12th minute.
My machine back home just rides with it.
This “intelligent” contraption saw it as a chance to chat. And then again, three minutes later.
Fortunately I had Hendrix, Fernanda Abreu, Toots and Maytals
and the Bad Brains to keep me company.
I’ve had Toots “Up From the Roots” album for much more than half my
life. “Enos One Eye” is an odd tune in
which Toots seems to be conveying wise counsel to a woman not to knock out
another man’s eye. It’s a rough
visual. “Suppose you did a knock out de
man’s eye, what you would a do?” But
subject matter, not withstanding Toots Hibbert always seems to tap into this
raw form of positivity that never, ever ceases to lift you up, from wherever he
finds you. “Enos One Eye” lyrics, and a
tasty, earlier version of the song, then the famous one on Up From the Roots. Here
are song’s lyrics. which don’t really
solve much about this tune or its purpose, at a first glance. http://nlyrics.com/Toots_The_Maytals/One_Eye_Enos_Lyrics
iTunes seemed to know I was in a Toots mood as it “randomly”
threw on “Funky Kingston” a bit later.
Good Lord, what song. I’ve heard
it a few hundred times, I suppose but there he is singing from a place so deep
within his bowels as to be essentially unfathomable. More than a few heroes sing from that deep
region behind their omphalos: Kurt
Cobain comes to mind, John Lennon, even deeper.
But Toots on the first break in “Funky Kingston” seems to be pulling
from twenty three feet down through his large intestine well into the small, to
pull out those yells. Listen, for the
first time, or again for the hundredth time, if you will. How does he summon that sound? And in doing, fashion it into something so
unmistakably life affirming?
Reading over his Wiki page I’m reminded of things I knew
about him, such as his origins in Clarendon and the studios he worked at, the
hits he and the Maytals had. There were
also things I didn’t know, such as that he was busted for pot possession in
1966 (one would imagine they’d have to incarcerate a third of the island) and
from the experience wrote the song “54-46, That’s My Number” which I will never
listen to the same way again. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toots_Hibbert
Last year the noble man was hurt badly when an idiot in the
audience at a concert in Richmond, threw a bottle at his head. During the trial of the man, Toots apparently
wrote the judge with these words: "He
is a young man, and I have heard what happens to young men in jail. My own pain
and suffering would be increased substantially knowing that this young man
would face that prospect.” Despite Toots
words of forgiveness, the judge, perhaps as stern though not necessarily as sagacious as Judge Dee, sentenced the lout to six month’s in prison.
And recently with fitting irony Frederick Nathaniel
"Toots" Hibbert, the “criminal” of a crime that should never have
been a crime in the first place, was awarded his homeland’s fifth highest
honor: The Order of Jamaica. Is there
anything like his elemental, plausible, convincing friendliness of spirit
anywhere in todays’ pop world, let alone specifically from the magma opening of
musical innovation that seems to forever flow out from Jamaica? Ahh, for good new popular music that isn’t
simply ironic.
Or for mocumentaries of leaders that are splatter free.
Or for mocumentaries of leaders that are splatter free.
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