Once
again, writing from my office, here in seat 38D. Once again forced to confront the Air China in-flight
entertainment, projected before me on a large screen. In this case it is the peculiar indignity of not just a
third party company’s advertisement but, rather, an award ceremony for
stewardesses of Air China itself. They
feel no shame to take up thirty minutes of our time, “entertaining" us by advertising
themselves. I must have seen, but
never heard, this nonsense seventeen times by now. The young ladies are all marching out in front of a military
band. This is cast, and coordinated
oddly as news. CCTV is presenting
this epic “news” tale of the carrier’s exceptional service. Sometimes my host country is simply
odd. Anyone else onboard this crack
of dawn flight down to Shanghai from Beijing note how unbelievably facile and
un-entertaining this is? “xingwenlianbo”, “News Broadcast”, how
dare you? How can Air China’s
stewardess award ceremony be considered news or entertainment, something that
needs to be 奔走相告[1]?
The breakfast cart just trotted by. “Chinese or Western breakfast?”
“Neither please.” The wisest thing
I’ve said all day. The beverage
cart followed. “A cup of tea,
please.” Like every lady on the
screen this young lady smiled at me, though oddly, it was genuine. The tea felt good on my sore
throat.
Driving out early, the city is already swelling with
activity in the suburbs at 6:00AM.
My friend who accompanied me marveled all the changes he was ingesting,
from the time he’d lived there ten years prior. Give it another ten years and I presume this New Convention
Center neighborhood will be completely urbanized into sprawl that is in no way
distinguished from what’s inside the fifth ring road, and the fourth ring road,
and the third, like Virginia Lee Burton's "Little House." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_House
I saw sheep yesterday in the woods near Wang Jing along the
Jing Mi road and I recalled how there used to be flocks of sheep and goats
everywhere out here fifteen years ago, and mule driven carts inside of
Dongcheng, twenty years back. My
friend showed me a photo of a sign he’d snapped at Yihuyuan the day before
announcing in bold letters that they would not serve Japanese. I don’t remember that from twenty years
ago either. No Han Chinese
brave enough, it seems to call this racism out publically, as beneath a great
civilization, beneath a great metropolis.
Unexpected it was when I arrived at the check in gate this
morning. “Yes sir, I have your
name on the 7:20AM flight, but the passport number that is in here is
completely different from this one here.”
“Huh? How could that be?” I
do this flight every week. Just
read my blog. “Can you double
check?” My wife had booked the
ticket. I called home. Everyone asleep. I called the travel company: “this
department is closed.”
Increasingly frantic I crossed the line of intimation and suggested that
I’d get a new ticket if necessary.
I couldn’t miss this flight.
I reached my wife finally and she was flummoxed for a bit and then, said
she must have given them my old passport number, (even though CTRIP has the
proper number on file) and when the young lady heard the matching number read
from the phone, suddenly, magically, I was cleared to fly. Walking off I marveled, thankful for
one of those many times where it is so wonderful to be in China, instead of the
United States, where a mis-matched passport number would be a one-way trip to
the ticket purchase line, no exceptions.
Don’t know much about the Brazilian bandleader Ataulfo
Alves. I have his tune “Vida de
Minha” (“My Life”) and it must be from the late forties or early fifties. (remarkably, to me at least, it is from
1962, after the bosa nova craze had begun) To my ears it all sounds rather influenced by, Afro Cuban
jazz. I hear Machito and Benny
More. Rhythmically there is
something essential, perhaps Angolan, that is distinctly Brazilian, though much
of the arrangement is certainly derivative. The Middle Passage for Brazil began largely in modern day
Angola, unlike the Ashanti, Yoruban origins that populated much of the British
colonies in the Americas. As I
write I pause, having just been specific about British colonies, as I assume
that French colonies were sourced with African slaves from Senegal and Benin,
but I’m not sure. Similarly, from
what part of West Africa did Spain procure its human chattel for the cane
fields of Cuba? A quick look on line and it remains unclear.
I presume that the musical influence flowed south from Cuba,
south from New York to Brazil in those early years of jazz, before Antonio
Carlos Jobim and Joao Gilberto reverse the tide in the other direction. Did Brazilian music have much influence
on the Caribbean or in the Jazz scene of the 40s? All this can be pursued when
we land. As, well as discerning
what “minha” means in Portuguese. ("my") The rest of the album has much more typically
“Brazilian” sensibilities. What is
the name of that Joao Gilberto song where he ponders the happiness of the
citizenry at Carnival, in spite of their poverty? I dreamt of that song the other night and this reminds me of
the trombone break in that song, as being some how quintessentially
Carinval-esque. (I just went
through about 30 of his songs and came up short. More on-line researching, some other time.)
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