And Just Wash Grey

Seventeenth floor apartment.  An uninterrupted view southeast.  I’m already outside the fourth ring road and there are not many buildings of distinction to consider.  Some chimneys in the foreground and clusters of other apartment buildings encircling the view, further out.  If we were in New York we might call them projects, though I imagine the property values are a bit more robust that any projects you might see gazing out at East New York.   There are few thick clusters of activity miles off in the distance.  Perhaps that’s Tongzhou. 

We've a haze over the city.  I warned you.  It would return.  It would have to.  It isn’t bad by Beijing’s standards, but you’d be hard pressed to call it a clear day.  If you were painting a French-wash you’d start up at the apex of the sky with a lovely blue jean blue and as you proceeded downward to level ground you’d add some white and grey for another pass.  Lower still it would grey and white and by the time you reached the horizon you could ignore the white and just wash grey. 

The back of this building has numerous dead store fronts.  Think of all the dead space in China.  All the ghostly vacancies and failed constructions, failed businesses that closed up, move on and were never replaced.  It’s only some developer’s money.  It’s only the nation’s money, the people’s money and that isn’t my concern necessarily, the waste of wasted space.  Rather, is this what people will be nostalgic for?  This is the normal that this current generation is maturing within.  How will this period be memorialized?  Living amidst the overbuild, there are so many compromises it is hard to imagine how anyone could be anything other than glad to see it all go.  The waste and the ugliness and the temporary quality though are not what people remember about New York in the twenties, or Tokyo in the fifties.  Beijing in the teens will be studied and considered and surely, missed, perhaps achingly, when things aren’t so hopeful.

Gene Ammons up in the ears: “Hittin’ the Jug.”  One assumes some Madison Avenue ad man, came up with the names for these fifties and early sixties jazz albums.  Sometimes the photos are so unflattering or simply irrelevant.  Like Dexter Gordon, Mssr. Ammons takes his time, with his boss-tenor self. I’ve got another forty-minutes or so to kill here, looking south east, listening to his fat tone, as the bits of sun that make it through from the west illuminate the particles in the air, warming the wash with a bit of dull red, before it all becomes night. 

Sunday, 01/14/17