Shanghai
heading by. Sitting on a porch
outside a Coffee Bean on the corner of Fuzhou Lu and Yunnan Road. East-west traffic has the light, till
it changes and the north-south folks can do their thing. One of those buildings over they may be
from the Thirties. The rest are
all quick and dirty towers. There
was a drizzle twenty minutes ago and though it has stopped, everyone is
stepping lively. It’s 5:30PM on
Friday night and everyone has someplace to go.
Apparently James Baldwin used to sit by a bar window, in my
mind he’s sitting on Terrace of the old Village Gate, but it doesn’t matter,
and he’d hold one of his baggy cheeks up with his tired old hand, melancholy,
and just watch the world go by, for hours and hours. To render accurate fiction, you need to watch the real world
closely. Watching a city closely tends to make
anyone sad.
An older man just got angry at a car that tried to turn
right on red through piles of pedestrian traffic. He gestured down with both hands as he passed in front of
the big SUV as if pressing on an imaginary mattress. “Slow down!” There’s
a hapless guy in black who’s now taken off his blazer who is trying to sign
passersby up for something. He’s
tired. Anyone would be. No one is
interested. No one would be. A gent is selling woman’s handbags on
off a three-wheeled bicycle just in front of me. He’s the got the thing in traffic, right in the middle of a
crosswalk. NYC traffic cops would
have him ticketed and out of there in about forty-five seconds. Perhaps he has a lookout guy working
with him. In this traffic he could
probably make descent time peddling that three-wheeler out of here. Interesting, he just went across the
street and then came back. Across
the street two other three wheelers with Lord only knows what for sale, have
now arrived. I’m just 拱手旁观[1]
The soundtrack for all this pedestrian activity is George
Coleman, the big old tenor player who preceded Wayne Shorter in Miles’ band
back in the early 60s. I searched in vain for an obituary as the man from
Memphis Tennessee is still walking the earth at 79 years of age. This album I’ve got on now, was
recorded much later in his career in 1976. “Amsterdam After Dark” isn’t hard to conjure with this song
“Lo Joe” on. One’s eyes darting around up this street
and down and around that canal over there. But it's a sucker punch when the next song is “Autumn in New
York.” If that’s the case, than I
don’t want to think about Holland.
I’ll consider the “canyons of steel” in New Amsterdam and just be
homesick. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Coleman
If I was sitting here around the time Miles “Four & More”
was released featuring Coleman, this Baldwin-like studied melancholy wouldn’t
have had time to percolate amidst all the rank terror. Standing on this corner I might have
seen counter revolutionaries tied to the front of a truck, driven through town
on their way to the execution ground.
Another sucker punch perhaps, but the mind is back there again. And it’s the news’ fault. The Times profiled a story from Harbin which
has a goofy mock struggle session depicted by some university students that has
now gone viral. http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/graduates-red-guard-photos-cast-doubt-on-what-they-learned/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&ref=asia&_r=1&
And the Chinese web is aghast at their stupidity. But I can’t see why. My kids are in Chinese schools and they
learn absolutely nothing about contemporary Chinese history that isn’t
hagiographic. As one micro-blogger
offered:
“Maybe these college kids think
it’s funny, but these photos expose so
many serious issues. Could German
students pose for graduation photos in Nazi uniforms? The Japanese should
apologize” to the Chinese people for war crimes, “but what about ourselves?”
Indeed.
What are all these hundreds of millions of newly arrived middle class
people going to do once they’ve taken stock of their good fortune and caught
their breath and done their shopping?
Eventually time will collect and congeal leave people with little choice
but to think. And if they’re
thoughts are all the thoughts of sedate people preparing for retirement then,
all their little princely children whom they’ve worked so hard to spoil will dream
contrarian dreams, like all children who aren’t laboring somewhere do, and
they’ll wonder about all the things that don’t make sense. And if they don’t learn some skills of
discernment, they’ll prove just as easy to manipulate as the generation that began stalking this corner, enraged, hunting for phantoms in August of 1966.
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