On my way home
now. Listening to the cab’s Chinese
radio blare. The same melody to announce the traffic report “lukuang xinxi” has been
in use for more than fifteen years. Waiting
for the light to change beneath the stoplight on Liang Ma Qiao Road where it
abuts the fourth ring road. Meetings on
Sunday. Meetings to discuss the setting
up of more meetings. Toward the end of today’s meeting
I realized we’d have another meeting tomorrow that will mean returning in to
town for.
Why did I hop in the cab before visiting the lavatory? Mistake, that. Will be considering that for the next 45
minutes. I’m wearing a brown, Rubber
Soul-like suede jacket that is more a testimony to spring than it is to
anything cool. I no longer need to wear
an absurd, puffy winter coat! I don’t
have to fret about finding a cab in freezing weather. Last
spring I was wearing this jacket and got it caught on a pole coming out of a jianbing guozi (griddle cake) cart. The sleeve was in shreds. I had it stitched back to coherence rather
than worry about finding another one. Yes, its a bit rough, but its old, and familiar and I like it.
I am trying to force myself to engage with my ladies back
home through weixin. I must.
Otherwise, I can feel that with every SMS or phone call, I am signifying
my steady ossification as an emissary from yesterday. I said something with the walkie-talkie
function. Now I’m waiting for a
reply. Here we go. And it is garbled nonsense. I speak a message indicating as much. I receive another that condenses her
remarkable voice down to a grunt, which says “yes.” I send one to my daughter. The reply is typed. It says “yes.” I know.
Eventually this will seem indispensable.
In bouncing around I came across some discs of the master
drummer Ed Blackwell, on Rdio. He was an
artist in residence at Wesleyan University when I was there in the
eighties. I’ll always remember when the
great saxophonist David Murray came and played at Wesleyan, Ed Blackwell was in
the audience and Murray came out and kissed his hand and embraced him. Looking over his discography there are a
dozen discs I have, such as Don Cherry’s Avant Guard or Ornette Coleman’s “Free
Jazz” where Ed Blackwell is on the trap set.
There’s even a disc with the Yoko and the Plastic Ono Band. I have something on now called “Boogie Live
from 1958” staffed with other New Orleans luminaries, including Ellis Marsalis,
the father of Wynton and Branford. The tribute to Clifford Brown, “To Brownie”
has Blackwell’s rough physicality cut in so assertively. Not hard to understand why Mr. Murray sought him out and puckered up.
The good and the bad succumb to innovation and creative
destruction. Whither live Jazz, and
aggressive trap set playing? I enjoyed
LPs and physical books in my day. I still like to
have them, buy them. And they will
slowly disappear and become collectors items.
But some things have been a nuisance from their inception. The disruption of their life support,
relegating them to steady demise, seems an incontestably grand thing. For a while fed by the need for convenience
they grew cancer-like with no end in site.
The suburban American virus, that eats up land, kills off older cities
and smaller stores and casts monotony, uniformity across the communities of
America, the mall, is now under attack and is not likely to survive.
We’ve all spent time, willingly and under duress in malls. I suppose I enjoyed the record store and the
pet store with the tropical fish in my teens, eagerly anticipating a visit. There was the pizzeria that had
video games and yes, there were people you could technically meet, there. But malls, I think we can all agree, are
awful. They were awful to watch built, awful to see spread, awful work in, they were awful to have to visit and awful to watch die when a
newer, bigger one was built nearby. They
served their convenient purpose, as it was easier, for all of us, to get things in one place. But it
is easier and cheaper now to have most things delivered home. All that awful, wasted space will now need to
be repurposed.
What happens next to it all?
Do people still flock together for things other than shopping? Will the mall be somehow fondly remembered as
a place where we at least talked to other humans face to face? What happens to any sense of suburban
community if no one ever has to leave home for much of anything? Humans will always need some interaction but
something other than the mall, will it appears, need to host it. Malls are not sustainable.
The one ironic bit in the article is that developers see my
neighborhood as the place where mall’s are not passé and may have a 光明前途[1]
Certainly neither China nor South Korea are any strangers to online
shopping. So why are they still building
malls? Perhaps it's a matter of
population density, or high-touch shopping preferences or perhaps it is simply
that people, who have only had automobiles and mega malls for one generation,
aren’t yet sick of them. Perhaps
tourists in the future will find them quaint and anachronistic. Or perhaps their days are actually numbered here, as well.
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