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
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