It’s
reasonably quiet out there. The air con’s cut off for a while. Someone else’s over there, somewhere
has just started up. I can hear
the neighbors preparing breakfast, across the yard, not far away. It is China so neighbors are
necessarily audible. People pay
more to have audible neighbors. Without
audible neighbors people become nervous.
There are a bunch of crickets telling other crickets that they are
there, and there and here. Looking up the sky is heavy and moist and this may
prove to be a problem. I have
pre-booked today as a day for a family hike.
We’re already thirty minutes to the northeast from down town
so accessing the “countryside” is comparatively easy. Drive in almost any direction and you’ll run into rough,
dark mountains. I’ve found a hike
that is billed as more like a “stroll” to some Tang Dynasty caves in the town
of Yangning, about 1.5 hrs drive from here. Apparently they were inhabited for 200 years or so, until
the Tang fell and the marauding Khitan people, who established the northern
Liao Dynasty, killed all the inhabitants. http://www.beijinghikers.com/hike-in-beijing/view/267/tang-dynasty-cave-dwellings-and-yongning-town/ Local legends involve dragon’s bodies,
meteorites and weapons storage, which will be good to distract people’s mind
from the rigors of hiking but may all prove 空洞无物[1] upon arrival.
The town itself has a Catholic Church, which wouldn’t
signify much in any town in America but here is an oddity worth a look and a
few questions. Last night I held
my hands to the sky and gestured to communicate with the almighty myself, when
my older daughter, who, like her younger sister is usually averse to all things
“hiking” said, “oh, no, hiking’s cool.
I like the hiking we’re going to do at school now.” Now all we have to do is make sure we
don’t get rained on. I’ve already got
a museum lined up as plan ‘B’ in case the chorus rises in negativity should the
first drops fall. We’re going to
go walk somewhere, damn it. Their
brother’s in town so it will be a true quintet. The chances we have to do things together like this, become
ever more rare, or conversely, require ever more planning, determination and
insistence.
Continuing on with this classic Brazilian list my friend in
Portland shared, I’m on to what’s billed as a psychedelic pop classic by
Vanusa, who was a model and poster child for the Jovem Guarda (Young Guard) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jovem_Guarda
movement which sported a TV show of the same name and was a more tame precursor
to the Tropicalismo that would follow.
Her version of “Hey Joe”, from the album “Vanusa” where she is twirling
in a haze, from 1969, complete with racing scooter sound is certainly funky, and
it doesn’t seem to have much to do with the classic tune’s melody or (filtered
through the haze of my modest Portuguese) nothing to do with the original
lyrics, either. Perhaps she has
him doing the terrible deed and speeding away on a moped.
These days a career as a psychedelic pop diva, with a string
of albums to one’s credit isn’t enough to protect one from internet
infamy. Alas, it appears Vanusa had
a bad night, signing the national anthem in 2009, wherein she sang the wrong lyrics
out of time, and people began to applaud mid-way through her performance in the
hopes that she would sit down, and the presenter began thanking her before she
was done so as to draw it to a close.
This anecdote comprises all but two sentences written to testify to the
woman’s career on Wiki.
She later stated that she was
confused because of the medicine she took that morning for her labyrinthitis,
and said she would hire a lawyer to have any suggestion that she was drunk
removed from the internet.[2]
Her words, not mine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanusa
Everyone’s entitled to a bad night.
More on the seventh century cave hike later.
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