Recall This as a Springboard

Tonight we have a guest in town.  The man from Ferndale Michigan, who has played with nearly every jazz luminary since he first appeared on the scene in 1960, will be playing tonight in rainy Beijing.  Ron Carter is seventy-nine years old and tonight we’ll go see him give life to the enormous double bass, one more time.  

Ron Carter has appeared in over twenty-two hundred albums.  I had his first album “Where?” on the other night:  Sultry Mal Waldron on piano, the ferocious Charles Persip on drums, the unmistakable Eric Dolphy on alto and flute.  Ron is thumping away now in the other room.

My wife had it in mind to go see some jazz for her birthday, which I willingly obliged.  There was nothing on the night of the big day but this appearance leapt out as a must see.  I don’t know that my girls will get it.  But maybe some day, if they become jazz fans, they’ll recall this as a springboard memory: someone who played with everyone that they saw while they could.

Back to Beijing’s new Blue Note to take this in.  Like the Blue Note in New York they’ll take their pound of flesh from us.  But this what you do when you live in a proper city.  And I’ve complained about all the limitations of Beijing, over and over.  Go out and support the arts.  Go out and support someone who still has what it takes to work a room at seventy-nine.  I’ll let you know how he goes and what he makes of the crowd here in Peking.

Considering My Shelves

My older daughter was up late, on Saturday morning.  The Mrs. and the little one were leaving for school event.  I fried some onion and mushrooms and tossed them into a lentil salad for her.  “It’s good.” That’ll do.  “What are you reading in English?”  “‘The Things They Carried.’  Did you read that to me before?  I feel like I’ve already read it.”  “I don’t think so.  I went through a period, I suppose it was twenty years ago when I read everything I could get my hands on about the Vietnam War.  I read it then.  It was powerful.  There is a memorable description of him killing a Viet Cong soldier. But there are other books about that war, that I liked more . . . “  

“What are you up to in Humanities?”  “World War I”  “Really?  Cool.”  I say with a bit too much enthusiasm.  “We are starting this week.”  “Think about the places you’ve been:  The Turks are on the loosing side and its the end of the Ottoman Empire.  The Irish War of Independence starts while the British are sunk into war in France.  The Germans loose and all their colonies are redistributed.  You remember the May 4th Movement?  All those students flipped out because Shandong was turned over to the Japanese for management.”

And as the discussion returned, as it must to the brutality of trench warfare thoughts turn to mustard gas. I imagined the old copy of “The Norton Anthology of Poetry” and felt a pang of remorse because while part of my mind was considering my shelves, another voice quickly shot down the idea:  You don’t have a copy of “Dulce et Decorum Est” here.  And it doesn’t matter, said a third voice.  You have the internet. 

Soon we were tired and deaf to the sounds of the “Five-Nines that dropped behind.  Gas!  Gas!  Quick boys!”  I'd never seen his photo before.  Poor handsome Wilfred Owen.  Poor world. 

Nor the Virtual Real Estate

How do you choose a restaurant in a megapolis?  If you’re in New York and are under a certain age, you may use Yelp. If you’re here in China, you turn to Dianping.  I don’t really use either and have never felt the need to.  But after last night, it is clear that I need to evolve.  The utility of turning to civic magazines, which had worked well enough since the 80’s when I relied on the Village Voice, appears to be, in Beijing at least, running its course.

Beijing’s long had some staple weekly English weekly magazines.  There is the British chain Time Out and the old City Edition founded by back in the late nineties and they always used to have a reasonably rich rendering of different cuisines.  The original hipper-than-thou rag was Beijing Scene, which was salty and authentic for its day, till the editor Scott was bundled up and thrown out of the country at the end of the last millennium. But whatever the magazine, one of the basic services on line or in the free print version was a list of restaurants: what’s new, what’s closed and what is?   In Beijing, you have every cuisine from across the civilization, well represented here.  The central government attracts concentrations of people from every province and every country.   We have a nearly infinite array of possibilities and seemingly no intelligent way to categorize it.

A friend had written.  He was in town and we were going to take out for dinner.  I checked the Time Out Beijing and the City Weekend websites.  Someone has clearly made the editorial decision that listing out cuisines in detail beyond “Best Beijing Duck” and “Best Pizza” is not worth the time nor virtual real estate to maintain.  There were a few new reviews.  Nothing seemed particularly interesting.  Can we evaluate a few different Guizhou restaurants, per chance?  What’s the final word on Dongbei Cai in the capital these days?  The restaurants all still exist.  English speakers are still interested.  But someone else, like Dianping must it seems, be filling the gap.  We ended up going back to an old favorite.   Exploration proved to be too much work.

I’ve looked and there is no shortage of listings for how to get the most out of Dianping.  Evolution is always a struggle.  And the old fave we headed to, pretty great, as usual.  Next time then.

Bravely to the Trees

Green leaves still cling bravely to the trees.  How much longer will they be there for?  Surely by December first, thirteen days from now, all save the pines will be properly denuded.  This view will go yellow to brown, to none swiftly now.  And the bitter wintertime will settle down upon us.  I was ready to snap a picture for you all of the fetching fall colors off to the side of Jing Mi Lu, but a massive green bus pulled up along side, obscuring the view.  I’m feeling smart as I left early this morning.  The traffic needn’t concern me.

I’ve already seen two accidents this morning.  Neither in real time, just the aftermath.  Coming home from the gym at 7:00AM traffic stopped inexplicable on the road between Capital Paradise and Gahood.  We paused for a bit, I was probably lost in my music.  Eventually the driver in front of me pulled out to the left to cut around the car stopped in front of him.  I followed suit, assuming the stationary vehicle had parked on a whim.  Passing by I could see that a motor scooter had been knocked over.  I saw the gloved handle bars that protect the driver in the winter and I thought about who this person was who's morning had been so undeniably interrupted. 

Just now, forty-five minutes later, in a cab not two hundred yards from the site of that accident, I came upon another collision.  This time its at the notorious four corner cross way that no one has seen fit to put a red light up at.  The raw opportunism of Chinese driving norms works until it doesn’t.  The shiny new gold mini van from the north had slammed into an on coming sedan from the west.  The van had got the worst of it.  A middle aged foreign woman was out photographing things.  So was a middle aged Chinese woman. 

The police must have a tally of the ten intersections in the city or in the district that have the most accidents.  Perhaps this is what guides the prioritization of traffic light investment.  I would assume that our crossroad is in-the-running for civic-wide crash volume distinction.  But in a city of twenty million the dangerous intersection list is likely a long one.  What is the worst intersection in the city? Is such information published?  Would you even be allowed to set up a live feed to stream the daily smash ups that must occur at the worse of the worst. 

If memory serves, the Black Panther Party was formed in part after there was one too many deaths on a particular intersection in Oakland.  Citizens took traffic direction into their own hands. Well heeled, but largely disenfranchised, this is ultimately a transient community.  We’re all more likely to keep flashing our lights and crossing our fingers every time we make our way through.