I
am in a cab on my way to the Beijing South Station. This morning, early, I’ll head to Shanghai by high-speed
train. I’ve done it at least once
before. It’s a better way to go
than flying, except for this ride over to the South Station that takes three
times as long as the ride to the airport from my house.
Back in Beijing for about 18 hours or so. Way too few of them horizontal. Certainly too little time away for this
to register as anything other than rather normal. I’ve been in four time zones in eight days and I this
morning I feel every single one of them.
My dad wanted me to check out an Ethiopian musician whom a
friend had recommended. My dad is
not usually recommending any music whatsoever, so when he pipes up about a
saxophonist from Ethiopia, I tend to pay attention. I searched for the gent, Getatchew Mekuria and only found
one tune of his on Rdio. It was on
a “The Rough Guide to the Music of Ethiopia.” I don’t usually turn to these as they cast the net broadly
and there was such a flowering of released Ethiopian materials through the
“Ethiopiques” series. The
tune is a remake of the old song by the Wallais Band, whom Mulatu Astatke
played with and who backed up Mahmoud Ahmed when he played the U.S. On first listening I still prefer
Wallais Band original, though I appreciate the attack on this newer version,
just not as much space inside somehow.
Any rate, we’ll keep our eyes out for more of this gent’s work. His solo is certainly haunting and his
career spanning the Addis Municipality Band of 1949, through the famous Police
Bands of the 60s on till regular performances in Addis today, suggest there is
much more material out there to sample.
It obviously rained while I was away. The ground looks moist, the sky is
relatively clear. Even the nasty
chalky channel that runs down to the canal is flowing a bit more clearly. And it will take the dust at least a
few days to accumulate beside the road.
Off to Shanghai today and I’ll be down there for a
while. This, tiring as I only just
got home and was away from my kids for too long, as it is. My wedding band just struck a bottle
and the driver turned around. I’m
a bit thuggishly pulling from a bottle here in the back side, I’ve brought with
me in the car. It is merely a
bottle of San Pellegrino mineral water, but I presume my driver cannot tell
that and is musing, quietly as to why I’m having a beer at 7:37AM.
I’m supposed to ride down this train this morning with
someone. “It’ll be a good chance
to talk.” But confidentially, I
just want to crash. Not much sleep
last night with deadlines and jetlag.
One thing my body can be counted on is to wrest the sleep it needs when
it does, regardless of niceties, like conversation, or audience
participation.
The trip by train is always a remarkable chance to watch the
arid north turn into the rice fields and canals of the south. It used to be a rolly polly plodding
ride at Fifty miles per hour, I suppose.
Now we tear-ass down like a plane on the runway just before take off,
only we never take off. This is a view that would be remarkable back home. What if you could do James Brown’s “Night
Train”, from Boston to Georgia in eight hours or so? That would be a contrast of comparable profundity. That I or anyone else think it
cool and convenient won’t change the fact that it isn’t gonna happen any time
soon.
Now while I’ve been gone the gents in Zhong Nan Hai have
apparently cranked down twice as hard on Google products around the
twenty-fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen tragedy. I hope it isn’t to the point of impossibility. It was interesting to read about
Wuer Kaixi and Wang Dan over in Taiwan.
The prior’s parents have not been allowed to go and visit them, where as
the latter’s has. Insult to injury
Wuer Kaixi’s family are ethnic Uyghurs.
One element of mystery has been revealed in the moments
between when I last wrote and now.
It was still possible to get a seat on the G1 express train down to
Shanghai at 9:00AM. It could have
been that I was wandering around here for hours trying to catch the next thing
I could find. Now I’m at the north
end of the south station’s main hall having a triple espresso to prop the old
craft up for a conversation pending.
The visuals as we speed out of SH are remarkable. Perhaps this is what it was like for
people who first rode in trains at 30 MPH. Perhaps this is what it was like when the “Six Million
Dollar Man” first aired on whatever network it did and showed Steve Austin
running, at unfathomably fast speeds.
Things are not supposed to fly by that quickly. What is the visual like if you double
this land speed and then double it again.
Is there a point where all cognition just submits because the velocity
is too great? H.G. Wells “Time Machine” rendered years this way.
Certainly 凭轼结辙[1] is the right metaphorical tone for how I’ve
been driving my life this past while.
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