When I was a little kid spouting the Pledge of Allegiance, I really believed all that “Indivisible with Liberty and Justice for all” stuff (after I figured out that it was “indivisible” and not “invisible.”) Kid-idealism, of course; but with a grain of truth, at least at the time.
No more. One of the saddest and most heartbreaking results of the incumbent administration’s complete and total “epic fail” is the fact that my countrymen and women are at each other’s throats. I have never witnessed extreme polarization like this in all my 50-plus years, including the dinner-table wars I had with my Dad over Vietnam back in the early 1970s.
It’s not just that the voters prefer one candidate over the other. It’s that the voters who prefer one candidate hate the other candidate’s guts, and on top of that, they also hate the guts of anyone who’s going to vote for the Other Guy. I cannot believe the hateful (and in some cases, ignorant and misspelled) rhetoric that I see on the blogs, in reader response columns, or even hear on the street. And I’ve been guilty of it myself – there is one player on the political scene that I can barely watch on TV out of dread and horror that she could actually sit in the oval office if a certain convergence of tragedies should take place. It’s inconceivable to me that anyone could even entertain the idea, and yet there are people out there who like her. By the same token, I’ve already voted for someone who is viewed as one of those "dangerous Moozlim commies” by people whom I would otherwise think are relatively sane. You see, I am just as polarized as everyone else.
What the hell is it going to take to get us together, people? An alien invasion? Because let me tell you, another war or a terrorist attack is NOT going to do it—that’s already been proven; twenty minutes after 9/11 the seeds for the deterioration of our civil rights had already been sown, and Clear Channel was already drawing up its list of Songs You Can’t Play on the Radio Anymore (like John Lennon’s “Imagine” – so much for “and the world will live as One.”) The event may have initially brought us together, but the response of our leaders over the long haul sowed some mighty divisive seeds. How? By doing the best they could do to make sure that we were all afraid, all the time. The Department of Homeland Security has set the current Fear Level at Orange (or possibly Red, at this point.) The sad polarization of this country has arisen because the current Powers That Be have managed to cultivate a state of omnipresent Fear and Loathing, exacerbated by the goose-squawking frenzy of the media – both sides of the fence – gobbling and clucking about how the sky is falling. Well, it IS falling, but it’s falling because of the situations that are being inflamed by the Fear, and the propaganda that says that Everything That’s Wrong is caused by those Other Folks Who are Not Like You. For some people that means immigrants, hippies, socialists, both welfare recipients AND Fat Cats, and “Muslims” and anyone else that professes to any religion that isn’t “Christian” (whatever the hell that means anymore.) For others that means neo-cons, people on the extreme right, “rednecks,” Bible-thumpers, pro-life activists, and corporate interests (and you know there has been some creative politicking in the last 30 years when Bible-thumpers, rednecks, and corporate interests are now represented by the same party – how the hell did that happen?)
Well, guess what. Everyone wants to be happy. No one wants to suffer. We all have that in common. This is the oldest cliché in the book, but if you want to work for peace, you simply have to start with yourself. Whatever you need to do to pour a bucket of cold water on your rage, do it. As I mentioned in a recent post, one of my spiritual teachers told me that when you are angry or in any kind of extreme state, the only way to get to the other side is to pass through “neutral mind” first. These teachers also suggested the radical idea that it’s possible to work for change with a great deal of conviction and still maintain a peaceful mind—and a mind full of rage may be motivated, but it sure ain’t peaceful, and I know that my mind won’t be peaceful until I can get from extremely frustrated and agitated to neutral. I don't mean a mind without opinion, without conviction, without motivation – but peaceful in the sense of having equanimity. And we won’t have one iota of success at equanimity as long as we are afraid. Am I afraid? Shit, yes—but I’m working on it. It’s important to work on it – because the true opposite of Love is not Hate, but Fear. Fear is the root; it causes all the hate, frustration, anger and venom to arise. I believe that there is a way to exist in the same space as Fear and act sane in spite of it; and I will continue to try. But most of us just fling ourselves against the side of the box and try to find someone to blame, someone or something to eliminate, or - most dangerous -- some authority figure who represents "safety," to whom we will sacrifice anything from money to our civil rights so that the nasty fear will go away. And those who would take away our civil rights know this, and they know that if they keep us all scared and hating each other’s guts, they have us right where they want us.
In her book Practicing Peace in Times of War,” Pema Chödrön writes:
If we want there to be peace in the world, we have to be brave enough to soften what is rigid in our hearts, to find the soft spot and stay with it. We have to have that kind of courage and take that kind of responsibility. That’s the true practice of peace.”
So friends, let’s wake up. Have you never heard the phrase “Divide and Conquer?” Don’t let this polarization and hate continue. Don’t you get it? That’s the bulls-eye that both the Rove-Cheney axis and Al-Qaeda have been aiming for.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Monday, September 22, 2008
Quote of the Day (week? month?)
Found this quote from Zen teacher John Tarrant in his short article "Not Knowing is the most Intimate," featured in the new Shambala Sun's series of articles on relationship:
Most projects to change other people or ourselves are really projects about interior decoration for the prison. A spiritual practice is really about jail-breaking."
Wow.
Most projects to change other people or ourselves are really projects about interior decoration for the prison. A spiritual practice is really about jail-breaking."
Wow.
Friday, September 12, 2008
Norbu
About 15 or 16 years ago, our medieval music ensemble Altramar decided that we needed to do some intensive group meetings to figure out what it was, exactly, that we wanted to do as a group, and what kind of direction we wanted to take artistically. We decided that we would have a formal meeting day – a retreat – and we would work together to come up with a mission statement.
We wanted to do this in a quiet, peaceful, neutral place – in other words, not at one of our homes, and definitely not crammed into some practice room at IU. However, we were graduate students, and we just didn’t have the money to rent any kind of retreat center (or even a room at a retreat center!)
At that time, in the early 1990s, Chris and I had been going for walks on weekends at the Tibetan Cultural Center in Bloomington. We used to circumambulate the stupa that was there, talk to the enormous shaggy dogs that patrolled the place, and once or twice we had stayed for prayers. Altramar had performed at a fundraiser for the Center as well, so they were familiar with us. And they kindly allowed us to use their beautiful main hall for our retreat.
The founder and director of the Tibetan Cultural Center (now the Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center) was a distinguished Tibetan lama named Thubten J. Norbu, also known to his students as Takster Rinpoche, elder brother of the Dalai Lama. Norbu was a world-renowned Tibetan scholar who taught for many years as Professor of Tibetan studies. Before the Chinese invasion of Tibet, Norbu had been the Abbot of Kumbum Monastery.
At intervals during Altramar’s retreat, this kind and amiable man came into our room and brought us Tibetan chai and cookies. At the time, I had no idea who he was. Well, I mean, I knew he was the Dalai Lama’s oldest brother, but I had no idea of his status in the Tibetan world, or in the world of Tibetan Buddhism. I had no idea about his history, his political activism, the trials and tribulations he had gone through after the Chinese invasion. I didn’t know that several years later I would sit with Coyotebanjo on the grounds of this Tibetan Cultural Center and take the Refuge Vow from the Dalai Lama with about 500 other people. I didn’t yet know anything about the history of the Tibetan Buddhist community in Bloomington (Americans, Mongolians, and Tibetans); the things they shared with each other; the difficult differences that existed or would exist between some of these groups; none of it. Not yet. All I knew was the experience I was having at that moment. I knew I was in a place that had a strong spiritual energy, and I was grateful for the generosity of this man, to allow us to use their hall and then, on top of it, to come in and chat with us and actually serve us and wait on us; because of course none of us really realized the extent to which it should have been the other way around.
Mr. Norbu died last Friday. He was 87, and had been in failing health for some time since a stroke several years ago. Over the next few days, scores of people from Bloomington came to pay their respects, only to find his body sitting on a bed in lotus position. Some offered him katas (ceremonial scarves) as one does when one takes a teaching from an honored Tibetan lama. On Thursday his sons and some of his students and volunteers carried him out to a brick and clay structure in back of the temple that now sits on the grounds of the Cultural Center, and he was cremated, while many monks from around the country chanted him into the Pure Land.
We wanted to do this in a quiet, peaceful, neutral place – in other words, not at one of our homes, and definitely not crammed into some practice room at IU. However, we were graduate students, and we just didn’t have the money to rent any kind of retreat center (or even a room at a retreat center!)
At that time, in the early 1990s, Chris and I had been going for walks on weekends at the Tibetan Cultural Center in Bloomington. We used to circumambulate the stupa that was there, talk to the enormous shaggy dogs that patrolled the place, and once or twice we had stayed for prayers. Altramar had performed at a fundraiser for the Center as well, so they were familiar with us. And they kindly allowed us to use their beautiful main hall for our retreat.
The founder and director of the Tibetan Cultural Center (now the Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center) was a distinguished Tibetan lama named Thubten J. Norbu, also known to his students as Takster Rinpoche, elder brother of the Dalai Lama. Norbu was a world-renowned Tibetan scholar who taught for many years as Professor of Tibetan studies. Before the Chinese invasion of Tibet, Norbu had been the Abbot of Kumbum Monastery.At intervals during Altramar’s retreat, this kind and amiable man came into our room and brought us Tibetan chai and cookies. At the time, I had no idea who he was. Well, I mean, I knew he was the Dalai Lama’s oldest brother, but I had no idea of his status in the Tibetan world, or in the world of Tibetan Buddhism. I had no idea about his history, his political activism, the trials and tribulations he had gone through after the Chinese invasion. I didn’t know that several years later I would sit with Coyotebanjo on the grounds of this Tibetan Cultural Center and take the Refuge Vow from the Dalai Lama with about 500 other people. I didn’t yet know anything about the history of the Tibetan Buddhist community in Bloomington (Americans, Mongolians, and Tibetans); the things they shared with each other; the difficult differences that existed or would exist between some of these groups; none of it. Not yet. All I knew was the experience I was having at that moment. I knew I was in a place that had a strong spiritual energy, and I was grateful for the generosity of this man, to allow us to use their hall and then, on top of it, to come in and chat with us and actually serve us and wait on us; because of course none of us really realized the extent to which it should have been the other way around.
Mr. Norbu died last Friday. He was 87, and had been in failing health for some time since a stroke several years ago. Over the next few days, scores of people from Bloomington came to pay their respects, only to find his body sitting on a bed in lotus position. Some offered him katas (ceremonial scarves) as one does when one takes a teaching from an honored Tibetan lama. On Thursday his sons and some of his students and volunteers carried him out to a brick and clay structure in back of the temple that now sits on the grounds of the Cultural Center, and he was cremated, while many monks from around the country chanted him into the Pure Land.
Monday, September 08, 2008
Confronting the Confrontational Culture
One of my colleagues this morning (a rainy Monday here) asked me if I had experienced an unusual amount of confrontational energy lately.
Yes, I have. And why do you suppose this is so? The political atmosphere in this country right now is like a powderkeg waiting to blow. The Left is sickened by Right and vice-versa, and everyone is sickened by the divisiveness of the whole thing. Meanwhile, every citizen who isn’t hiding in a cave is being assaulted with vituperation and hateful rhetoric (especially from the Right – sorry, but it’s true) every time we turn on a radio or TV, open up a newspaper, or have to suffer through a moronic rant happening at a nearby table in a Starbuck’s. Too many politicians are counting on the divisiveness to help them; they are attempting to capitalize on the Three Poisons of hatred, greed and attachment-revulsion as much as they possibly can. And we wonder why there’s a lot of confrontational energy generating?
The side-effect of this confrontational, divisive, thick energy is exhaustion. I have never, in my seven years of university teaching, seen this many students so completely wasted with exhaustion only 3 weeks after the semester has started. My courses are not any more difficult this semester than they have ever been, and I doubt anyone else’s are either. And yet they are pale, tired, and clearly suffering.
In a supreme example of “as above so below” and group Karma, these churning energies are manifesting at all kinds of levels. The Northwest passage has opened, hurricanes are howling in the western hemisphere, the headlines are even more sordid than usual, and the world seems fueled by anger and fear.
But every moment in history is both unique and not unique; we are a constantly changing continuum. Nothing, even the bad stuff, is permanent. Nothing is permanent.Not you, not the Republicans, not the Democrats, not the hurricanes. And although we are all impermanent, we are also all interconnected. So there IS something that we can do as individuals, and that is to change the energy one mind at a time. Whether that is possible or not is irrelevant – it is what must be done.
Put your work away; it will be there tomorrow. Turn the TV off, put the newspaper down, sit comfortably, and do whatever it takes to quiet your mind: repeat a mantra, count your breaths, pray…whatever works for you. We all have the Buddha-nature even when we are yelling at the TV. Let yourself contemplate the Six Perfections: Generosity, patience, ethics, effort, concentration/meditation, wisdom. Visualize how you would feel if tomorrow your thoughts were able to lean toward how you might support the political candidates of your choice instead of leaning towards how much you’d like someone to murder the other ones.
One of my Tibetan teachers told me once that it is not possible to go from an agitated mind to a happy mind without passing through the place where the mind is neither agitated nor happy, but is simply in a state of equanimity or equilibrium. We must all allow ourselves to do what we need to do in order to get there. If this takes time away from work, study, or any other aspect of the rat-race, so be it.
May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness.
May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
May all beings know the joy of true freedom.
May all beings have equanimity, free from attachment and aversion.
Yes, I have. And why do you suppose this is so? The political atmosphere in this country right now is like a powderkeg waiting to blow. The Left is sickened by Right and vice-versa, and everyone is sickened by the divisiveness of the whole thing. Meanwhile, every citizen who isn’t hiding in a cave is being assaulted with vituperation and hateful rhetoric (especially from the Right – sorry, but it’s true) every time we turn on a radio or TV, open up a newspaper, or have to suffer through a moronic rant happening at a nearby table in a Starbuck’s. Too many politicians are counting on the divisiveness to help them; they are attempting to capitalize on the Three Poisons of hatred, greed and attachment-revulsion as much as they possibly can. And we wonder why there’s a lot of confrontational energy generating?
The side-effect of this confrontational, divisive, thick energy is exhaustion. I have never, in my seven years of university teaching, seen this many students so completely wasted with exhaustion only 3 weeks after the semester has started. My courses are not any more difficult this semester than they have ever been, and I doubt anyone else’s are either. And yet they are pale, tired, and clearly suffering.
In a supreme example of “as above so below” and group Karma, these churning energies are manifesting at all kinds of levels. The Northwest passage has opened, hurricanes are howling in the western hemisphere, the headlines are even more sordid than usual, and the world seems fueled by anger and fear.
But every moment in history is both unique and not unique; we are a constantly changing continuum. Nothing, even the bad stuff, is permanent. Nothing is permanent.Not you, not the Republicans, not the Democrats, not the hurricanes. And although we are all impermanent, we are also all interconnected. So there IS something that we can do as individuals, and that is to change the energy one mind at a time. Whether that is possible or not is irrelevant – it is what must be done.
Put your work away; it will be there tomorrow. Turn the TV off, put the newspaper down, sit comfortably, and do whatever it takes to quiet your mind: repeat a mantra, count your breaths, pray…whatever works for you. We all have the Buddha-nature even when we are yelling at the TV. Let yourself contemplate the Six Perfections: Generosity, patience, ethics, effort, concentration/meditation, wisdom. Visualize how you would feel if tomorrow your thoughts were able to lean toward how you might support the political candidates of your choice instead of leaning towards how much you’d like someone to murder the other ones.
One of my Tibetan teachers told me once that it is not possible to go from an agitated mind to a happy mind without passing through the place where the mind is neither agitated nor happy, but is simply in a state of equanimity or equilibrium. We must all allow ourselves to do what we need to do in order to get there. If this takes time away from work, study, or any other aspect of the rat-race, so be it.
May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness.May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
May all beings know the joy of true freedom.
May all beings have equanimity, free from attachment and aversion.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
If I had a time machine...
If I had a time machine, and were told I would have 10 minutes to go for it, I would give up the chance to talk to any number of famous musicians and other luminaries if I could go back to August 28, 1963, the day that Martin Luther King Jr gave his “I Have a Dream" speech, and tell Dr King about the speech I am listening to right now.
Thursday, August 07, 2008
BANG!
So I’m sitting at the junction of the Loop and Slide Road this morning, minding my own business and waiting for a break in the traffic so I can head north on Slide Road, when BANG! A huge jolt, with a simultaneous huge thundercrack of sound, scaring me half out of my wits, and I realize: holy crap, I have just been rear-ended.
It was not that serious. Of course, it was some youngster driving his Dad’s car, or at least the car was in his Dad’s name. I have no idea what distracted the kid; when I looked in the rear view mirror I didn’t see a cell phone, but he could have dropped it by then, or he could just as easily been fiddling around with the radio, or taken the ramp too quickly to stop, or he could have just been in La-La Land. Either way, he got the worst of it -- I have a Honda CRV, and that big spare tire on the rear end of the car saved my car’s bacon, but did quite a pitiful job on his; I had a teeny little dent behind the tire, but his right front lights were smashed and the hood and front fender bent up.
An interesting thing happens to me in unexpected situations like this. I’ve only been in one other wreck – MUCH more serious – but I observed the same thing. When it happens, I feel an initial surge of shock and intense anger. (Like today, when I whirled around and yelled “What the &*%$ is the matter with you!” although I doubt he heard that, unless he reads lips.) This dissipates in about 5-10 seconds, after which I feel pretty calm and go into a sort of “OK, now what needs to be done” mode. I don’t know if this would be true if I were bleeding all over the place or had a dead passenger, but fortunately, knock wood, I haven’t had to find that out.
When I got out of the car I didn’t yell at the kid or even chastise him; I just looked over both cars with him, took his information, gave him mine, and told him that “these things happen” and “we were both very lucky that no one got hurt,” and “It could have been much worse.” I did scold him a little and tell him that he needed to be more careful, but at that point I think he was just relieved that I wasn’t screaming at him, or that I wasn’t some cowboy with a shotgun. I didn’t call the police; I decided that it wasn’t serious enough to cause a traffic jam on the busiest street in Lubbock at 10:45 in the morning, so we just drove away. My guess is that I will probably hear from his insurance company, or his Dad, or both.
After that, I calmly drove away and did the following:
1) visited my mechanic to make sure I was correct that there was no damage;
2) called my insurance company to report that it had happened and tell them my side of the story, just in case Junior gets creative with his explanation of the incident;
3) at the insurance company’s request, filed a crash report with the police, who told me that I did everything correctly and it was not necessary to call the police in the case of a fender-bender where there were no injuries;
4) called the insurance company again to report that I didn’t have some of the information they asked for, and was assured that I had enough info and it was OK.
So basically it was not that big a deal. But during the course of all this, I realized that this “calm” thing that happens is actually not cool level-headedness. I think it’s some kind of protective biological thing. You may not be freaking out, but you’re actually not thinking completely clearly. I realized that although I had felt “in control” (hah), I was actually quite shaken up – for example, I didn’t notice what make of car the other guy was driving, and you’d think that would be a no-brainer. I only knew it was crumpled in the front, and it was red. I also realized that my neck hurt. Shit! How can I have whiplash when my car isn’t even damaged? I also felt very disoriented. That’s when I started to feel really upset. Coyotebanjo graciously offered to have lunch with me, and after that I went to the chiropractor (whom I had just seen, since I managed to give myself a slightly swollen disk sitting on the diabolical chairs at Viol Conclave wrestling with an instrument I didn’t know how to hold yet.) He re-adjusted everything and put my neck back where it was supposed to be quite handily. (Digression: I’ve heard there are bad chiropractors out there, just as there are bad doctors and everything else, but chiropractors have improved the quality of my life consistently since the first time I managed to yank my 3-year old arm slightly out of its little socket and old Dr Fiske stuck it back in; I thought he was Jesus. Over the subsequent years I watched him put my stonemason Dad back together dozens of times. I have had nothing but good luck with chiropractors ever since, including the two I see now, one of whom once brought Coyotebanjo from being an immobile agonized wreck lying on the floor to a condition of walking upright in the space of about 20 minutes.)
So I’m OK now; I’m sitting in a comfy chair, with an Advil doing its work. But the real thing that stays with you after an incident like this is how fast and how unexpectedly something really screwed up can happen to you. We all know this, of course, and see examples of it every day, but until it hits you on your own noggin, it doesn’t really sink in. We have all these great plans for our lives, and of course that’s not a bad thing, but at the same time we don’t know what the hell is going to happen to us from one moment to the next.
About 12 years ago I was in a serious car accident in Bloomington, Indiana. I was going down a main road at about 25-30 mph when some cub scout in his Firebird ran a stop sign on a side street and T-boned my car on the left. Fortunately I saw him shooting out from behind the trees just in time to swerve my car sharply to the right, so he hit me an angle instead of directly hitting the driver’s side. (The cops told me this quick-thinking move is what saved me from serious injury or worse.) The sound of two vehicles colliding like that is indescribable; it gave me nightmares for weeks, and brought the inhabitants of the neighborhood at 10th and Lincoln streaming out of their houses like ants. Both cars were totaled. After climbing out of the steaming wreck, I stood there bewildered; my car was a complete accordion, but I appeared to be suffering nothing more serious than a seat-belt welt, a torn dress, an aching toe and a jolting but not-serious bump to the head. My hands and my head hurt, but nothing else hurt. I could not believe that I could be uninjured. I was so flabbergasted by this that, having read one too many near-death-experience books, I actually walked over to the totaled car and looked into it to see if my dead body was in it (my Tibetan monk friends laughed uproariously when I told them I had done this.) When I realized I was in fact not dead, I opened the car door and started gathering up all the junk in the back seat, because I had a bunch of CDs in there, some of which I had borrowed and needed to return. At the time, I felt like I was being very level-headed; I realized later that it was crackers. (My car’s a steaming wreck; let’s check to see if our physical body is still in there, and oh by the way let’s get the CDs out.) When the paramedics came, they all rushed over to both cars; half of them started removing the poor bleeding (but OK) kid from the Firebird, and the others looked confused, and then ran over to me a said “Where’s the driver of the white car?” I said “I’m the driver of the white car,” and they just stared at me for a moment. One of them finally said (in disbelief) “You’rethe driver of the white car?” I guess I wasn’t the only one who was surprised. At that point they all went bananas with questions, but all I remember is saying “My hands hurt, and I think I bumped my head, but I’m not injured.” They tried to drag me to the hospital, but I steadfastly refused – can’t they see that I’m fine? They kept asking me my name, how old I was, and questions like “Who is the President?” while I stood there thinking “Why are they asking me all this crazy shit? The kid in the Firebird is covered with blood!” Finally, after the cops came and took all the reports, the cops put me and the driver of the Firebird in the squad car. I remember asking the kid if he was OK, and he said “Yes” and said he was sorry, and I said it was “OK.” I insisted on being taken back to work, which they did; when I got to work, Coyotebanjo ran over to me and said “What happened?” and that’s when I collapsed sobbing in a chair.
That night, I remember thinking that I could have been killed in a flash; and when the enormity of that had sunk in, so did the dharma lesson that comes with it, which is that any of us could die at any moment. I remember thinking that if I had been killed, and if in fact any part of our consciousness as-we-know-it survives death (a big if), I would not have regretted the way my life had gone. Even though I was a penniless graduate student, I had followed the path I wanted to follow, and I felt pretty good about the choices I had made and the things I had accomplished. I told several of my friends about this, and in fact one of them reminded me of it many years later after he had a health scare, and said that he had felt the same way.
The sad mystery of this is that it is no longer true, and I can’t quite articulate why. Oh, I still believe that my life for the most part has been fine, and very fortunate -- as I said in my “Great Wall of China” post, I had an experience up there that reminded me that I have had a lot of remarkable experiences, and enjoyed the fruits of a lot of good karma, and that I am deeply grateful for all of it and for the life I’ve been privileged to lead. But, whether because of more focused spiritual practice, or because more people I love have grown old and died (or didn’t grow old and died anyhow), I seem to feel a greater awareness now of all the things I could have / should have done, or said, or decided differently; of the consequences of my actions and choices, and of things that I have not done. And when I have an experience in which one is reminded of the tenuous nature of our existence, I seem to have the overwhelming inner response I’m not finished with this one yet. Why? Perhaps there is something urgent that still needs to be done; but at the same time, I feel quite convinced that most of us will still feel as though we’re “not finished” while lying on our death-beds. I only know of one way to deal with that conundrum, and that is to muddle along and try daily to remain mindful of the old Zen dictum: do not waste your life. That holds true whether you believe that you will simply become compost, or if you believe that in addition to becoming compost your "continuum of consciousness" will continue in some way. For that matter, if you believe the latter, you aren't finished, are you? And if you've taken the Bodhisattva vow to return and help other sentient beings "as long as space remains," you ain't gonna be finished for a long, long time.
It was not that serious. Of course, it was some youngster driving his Dad’s car, or at least the car was in his Dad’s name. I have no idea what distracted the kid; when I looked in the rear view mirror I didn’t see a cell phone, but he could have dropped it by then, or he could just as easily been fiddling around with the radio, or taken the ramp too quickly to stop, or he could have just been in La-La Land. Either way, he got the worst of it -- I have a Honda CRV, and that big spare tire on the rear end of the car saved my car’s bacon, but did quite a pitiful job on his; I had a teeny little dent behind the tire, but his right front lights were smashed and the hood and front fender bent up.
An interesting thing happens to me in unexpected situations like this. I’ve only been in one other wreck – MUCH more serious – but I observed the same thing. When it happens, I feel an initial surge of shock and intense anger. (Like today, when I whirled around and yelled “What the &*%$ is the matter with you!” although I doubt he heard that, unless he reads lips.) This dissipates in about 5-10 seconds, after which I feel pretty calm and go into a sort of “OK, now what needs to be done” mode. I don’t know if this would be true if I were bleeding all over the place or had a dead passenger, but fortunately, knock wood, I haven’t had to find that out.
When I got out of the car I didn’t yell at the kid or even chastise him; I just looked over both cars with him, took his information, gave him mine, and told him that “these things happen” and “we were both very lucky that no one got hurt,” and “It could have been much worse.” I did scold him a little and tell him that he needed to be more careful, but at that point I think he was just relieved that I wasn’t screaming at him, or that I wasn’t some cowboy with a shotgun. I didn’t call the police; I decided that it wasn’t serious enough to cause a traffic jam on the busiest street in Lubbock at 10:45 in the morning, so we just drove away. My guess is that I will probably hear from his insurance company, or his Dad, or both.
After that, I calmly drove away and did the following:
1) visited my mechanic to make sure I was correct that there was no damage;
2) called my insurance company to report that it had happened and tell them my side of the story, just in case Junior gets creative with his explanation of the incident;
3) at the insurance company’s request, filed a crash report with the police, who told me that I did everything correctly and it was not necessary to call the police in the case of a fender-bender where there were no injuries;
4) called the insurance company again to report that I didn’t have some of the information they asked for, and was assured that I had enough info and it was OK.
So basically it was not that big a deal. But during the course of all this, I realized that this “calm” thing that happens is actually not cool level-headedness. I think it’s some kind of protective biological thing. You may not be freaking out, but you’re actually not thinking completely clearly. I realized that although I had felt “in control” (hah), I was actually quite shaken up – for example, I didn’t notice what make of car the other guy was driving, and you’d think that would be a no-brainer. I only knew it was crumpled in the front, and it was red. I also realized that my neck hurt. Shit! How can I have whiplash when my car isn’t even damaged? I also felt very disoriented. That’s when I started to feel really upset. Coyotebanjo graciously offered to have lunch with me, and after that I went to the chiropractor (whom I had just seen, since I managed to give myself a slightly swollen disk sitting on the diabolical chairs at Viol Conclave wrestling with an instrument I didn’t know how to hold yet.) He re-adjusted everything and put my neck back where it was supposed to be quite handily. (Digression: I’ve heard there are bad chiropractors out there, just as there are bad doctors and everything else, but chiropractors have improved the quality of my life consistently since the first time I managed to yank my 3-year old arm slightly out of its little socket and old Dr Fiske stuck it back in; I thought he was Jesus. Over the subsequent years I watched him put my stonemason Dad back together dozens of times. I have had nothing but good luck with chiropractors ever since, including the two I see now, one of whom once brought Coyotebanjo from being an immobile agonized wreck lying on the floor to a condition of walking upright in the space of about 20 minutes.)
So I’m OK now; I’m sitting in a comfy chair, with an Advil doing its work. But the real thing that stays with you after an incident like this is how fast and how unexpectedly something really screwed up can happen to you. We all know this, of course, and see examples of it every day, but until it hits you on your own noggin, it doesn’t really sink in. We have all these great plans for our lives, and of course that’s not a bad thing, but at the same time we don’t know what the hell is going to happen to us from one moment to the next.
About 12 years ago I was in a serious car accident in Bloomington, Indiana. I was going down a main road at about 25-30 mph when some cub scout in his Firebird ran a stop sign on a side street and T-boned my car on the left. Fortunately I saw him shooting out from behind the trees just in time to swerve my car sharply to the right, so he hit me an angle instead of directly hitting the driver’s side. (The cops told me this quick-thinking move is what saved me from serious injury or worse.) The sound of two vehicles colliding like that is indescribable; it gave me nightmares for weeks, and brought the inhabitants of the neighborhood at 10th and Lincoln streaming out of their houses like ants. Both cars were totaled. After climbing out of the steaming wreck, I stood there bewildered; my car was a complete accordion, but I appeared to be suffering nothing more serious than a seat-belt welt, a torn dress, an aching toe and a jolting but not-serious bump to the head. My hands and my head hurt, but nothing else hurt. I could not believe that I could be uninjured. I was so flabbergasted by this that, having read one too many near-death-experience books, I actually walked over to the totaled car and looked into it to see if my dead body was in it (my Tibetan monk friends laughed uproariously when I told them I had done this.) When I realized I was in fact not dead, I opened the car door and started gathering up all the junk in the back seat, because I had a bunch of CDs in there, some of which I had borrowed and needed to return. At the time, I felt like I was being very level-headed; I realized later that it was crackers. (My car’s a steaming wreck; let’s check to see if our physical body is still in there, and oh by the way let’s get the CDs out.) When the paramedics came, they all rushed over to both cars; half of them started removing the poor bleeding (but OK) kid from the Firebird, and the others looked confused, and then ran over to me a said “Where’s the driver of the white car?” I said “I’m the driver of the white car,” and they just stared at me for a moment. One of them finally said (in disbelief) “You’rethe driver of the white car?” I guess I wasn’t the only one who was surprised. At that point they all went bananas with questions, but all I remember is saying “My hands hurt, and I think I bumped my head, but I’m not injured.” They tried to drag me to the hospital, but I steadfastly refused – can’t they see that I’m fine? They kept asking me my name, how old I was, and questions like “Who is the President?” while I stood there thinking “Why are they asking me all this crazy shit? The kid in the Firebird is covered with blood!” Finally, after the cops came and took all the reports, the cops put me and the driver of the Firebird in the squad car. I remember asking the kid if he was OK, and he said “Yes” and said he was sorry, and I said it was “OK.” I insisted on being taken back to work, which they did; when I got to work, Coyotebanjo ran over to me and said “What happened?” and that’s when I collapsed sobbing in a chair.
That night, I remember thinking that I could have been killed in a flash; and when the enormity of that had sunk in, so did the dharma lesson that comes with it, which is that any of us could die at any moment. I remember thinking that if I had been killed, and if in fact any part of our consciousness as-we-know-it survives death (a big if), I would not have regretted the way my life had gone. Even though I was a penniless graduate student, I had followed the path I wanted to follow, and I felt pretty good about the choices I had made and the things I had accomplished. I told several of my friends about this, and in fact one of them reminded me of it many years later after he had a health scare, and said that he had felt the same way.
The sad mystery of this is that it is no longer true, and I can’t quite articulate why. Oh, I still believe that my life for the most part has been fine, and very fortunate -- as I said in my “Great Wall of China” post, I had an experience up there that reminded me that I have had a lot of remarkable experiences, and enjoyed the fruits of a lot of good karma, and that I am deeply grateful for all of it and for the life I’ve been privileged to lead. But, whether because of more focused spiritual practice, or because more people I love have grown old and died (or didn’t grow old and died anyhow), I seem to feel a greater awareness now of all the things I could have / should have done, or said, or decided differently; of the consequences of my actions and choices, and of things that I have not done. And when I have an experience in which one is reminded of the tenuous nature of our existence, I seem to have the overwhelming inner response I’m not finished with this one yet. Why? Perhaps there is something urgent that still needs to be done; but at the same time, I feel quite convinced that most of us will still feel as though we’re “not finished” while lying on our death-beds. I only know of one way to deal with that conundrum, and that is to muddle along and try daily to remain mindful of the old Zen dictum: do not waste your life. That holds true whether you believe that you will simply become compost, or if you believe that in addition to becoming compost your "continuum of consciousness" will continue in some way. For that matter, if you believe the latter, you aren't finished, are you? And if you've taken the Bodhisattva vow to return and help other sentient beings "as long as space remains," you ain't gonna be finished for a long, long time.
Monday, August 04, 2008
Final Installment, China Trip Notes, Chapter 14: Beijing 05.27-28.2008
OK – it’s true; I didn’t finish posting all the China Trip Notes, having been waylaid by Massachusetts, family visits, and a desperate attempt to learn the rudiments of the viola da gamba (see previous post.) Since historically one of my character flaws is not finishing things that I start (see all previous references to the doctoral degree), I feel it would be good for the continued progress of my particular mental continuum to bring the Trip Notes to a close…so here they are, from the pub session we played at Paddy O’Shea’s to the last concert in at the PLA Military Band Hall. They should be a good lead up to your Olympic viewing activities later this week.
Beijing: 5.27.2008 Evening
There is an Irish pub in Beijing. That may sound a little weird, but having traveled around quite a bit, I am now pretty much convinced that there is probably an Irish pub in Ulan Batar and maybe even a few in Khazakstan or Antarctica. There’s even an Irish pub now within a 3 mile strike of my childhood hometown, and there isn’t even a damned Borders or Starbucks there yet.
Paddy O’Shea’s is a very attractive area of Beijing, with tree-lined streets. The front is open in a kind of Euro-boulevard-café style that permits folding back the doors so that the sidewalk tables and the interior are contiguous. It was a strange sight, in a way; suddenly, in the middle of this extremely foreign city, there’s a typical-looking Irish pub full of white people drinking Guinness and eating pub food, presto! as if we had just clicked the heels of our ruby slippers and said “There’s No Place Like Home.”
But enough about Oz, and down to the business at hand: Guinness and pub food. I don’t even like Guinness (I think I ordered a Newcastle Nut Brown), but oh Lord the food. Salad, by God, and chips, and Irish-style vegetable soup…at least one of the guys had fish and chips; someone had a club sandwich, I think. I don’t remember anything for about a half-hour after that except grateful hoovering of food that had not been soaked in oil or have a previous life as an invertebrate.
The publican was a gentleman who obviously had some skills in the pub business. He seemed to understand both the thing he wanted to create and the local environment, and how each would have to accommodate the other. He was incredibly friendly. The situation had enough of an Irish context that one felt secure in proceeding exactly the way you would in Ireland, and that everyone would have a set of perspectives in common; you felt as though you could relate, and as though Glen had that same respect for the music and the musicians; you trusted that he would take care of you the way an Irish barman would. And he did, from the food and drink to the posters he had made for our appearance there, featured prominently on the door.
We didn’t know exactly what to expect in terms of who might show up. Before we left for the trip, we had found a clip on YouTube that suggested a very high caliber of music was being made at Paddy O’Shea’s; it later transpired that the players on YouTube ringers brought in from Ireland for Paddy’s Day. On the evening that we were there, it was mostly the three of us playing. We had located ourselves at a table near the front of the building, but it wasn’t an ideal placement, because we had our backs to the sidewalk (no corner tables were available.) But it was fine. We played typical Irish session music (jig and reels, mostly); it was too noisy to play songs, especially as it got very crowded after awhile (a large contingent of our Band Student Fellow Travelers eventually showed up for the festivities, as we had hoped they would.) There was also a variety of people who had made a special effort to come hear the music. Among the interesting folks we met:
1) A Scottish gentleman who was a professor and a consultant for a Chinese education agency. Coyotebanjo noticed him singing along, and it turned out that he was Glasgow-born of a Donegal singing family. He had come especially as a result of the advertising Glen had done.
2) A young Californian and his Chinese wife, with several of their friends, sitting at the table next to us. They were in the embassy district because they were headed to the American Embassy the next day to try to get her a visa so she could visit the US with him. They were anxious about this impending meeting; and, perhaps in an attempt to relieve the pressure, became drunk as lords.
3) A fellow from the US Embassy, who had tried to book us for an embassy reception on the same night as our concert, but failing that, had come along to listen (and brought reinforcements in the form of several young female friends who attempted a few Riverdance moves.) Mind you, we only knew he played because he approached some of the Band Students present, and asked if they thought we would mind if he were to ask to play. Turned out he was a whistle player. If I remember correctly, there was some problem with the whistle, because Coop ended up loaning him one of the extra D whistles he’d brought. He played enthusiastically along with us, and it became quite clear that he wanted to sing as well. We agreed upon a song we both knew (he knew mostly pub songs) and whoa! didn’t he have the loudest, most piercing, huge Clancy Brothers tenor voice you’ve ever heard. You could hear him over the entire lot of the hollering masses in the bar.
In all, it was a lovely evening and pretty much a success; I certainly think the Band contingent greatly enjoyed themselves. (They were probably so elated over having fish and chips and real beer that we could have sung Happy Birthday all night and they would have been content!). As we were leaving, a woman came up to me and told me that she had loved the music, that it had taken her back to Galway and reminded her of the music at the Crane (for those who are not familiar with the whole Irish music culture, this is extremely high praise). She asked me if we’d ever played there; I said that the guys had done some sessions there. Turned out that she lived in Australia for a long time, and I don’t remember what had brought her to China – all I remember is that she then asked me my name, and it transpired that we both had the same first name; we both marveled over that coincidence.
Our driver, a Chinese fellow named John with excellent English, had assured us that we could call him for a pick-up and drive back to the hotel “even if it was very late.” Further questioning about “how late” seemed to suggest that anytime was OK, so we took him at his word and called, although it was midnight. He did come to pick us up promptly, and although I had the distinct vibe that we may have pushed the envelope on “how late” was acceptable, he was perfectly courteous about it – and back to the hotel we went.
Beijing, 5.28.2008: Tian’anmen Square and the Forbidden City
Reflections on Tian’anmen Square, with polemic
The first week of June 1989, I was driving from Massachusetts to Indiana with an early music friend. We were on our way back from an early music camp. Every time we turned on the radio, more horrible reports came in about the Chinese government’s violent crackdown on student protests in Tian’anmen Square, Beijing. The protests, by students, intellectuals, labor, and others calling for democratic reform, had been gaining steam for a couple of months before that. The matter came to a head the first week of June, when the movement was crushed with great force by the Chinese army.
This is the incident that most over-35 Americans think of instantly when someone says “Tian’anmen Square.” The image of that defiant student became world-famous, and is emblazoned on the collective memory.
But today, May 28, 2008, I am standing in Tian’anmen Square, and Coop has just asked our tour guide where the “world-famous picture of the student standing in front of the tank” was taken, since he wants to take a photo. She has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. She has never seen this picture he describes.
It’s interesting to examine one’s first reaction to this. It’s a kind of knee-jerk American guns-up reaction: "of course, the Commies have suppressed this information from their people." But is our guides’ lack of knowledge genuine? Do they really not know about the 1989 protests, or have they been trained that they must under all circumstances avoid any discussion of this event? Many Americans would assume the latter, but I would just as quickly believe the former. Why? Because when I teach History of Rock and Roll, and I play Neil Young’s “Four Dead in Ohio,” I have to explain Kent State to my American students. A sobering majority of them have never seen the 1970 photographic image of the young Kent State co-ed screaming while her friends, protesting the Vietnam War, are shot down by the National Guard. In fact, not only have they never seen the picture -- they don’t know it happened. They are shocked. That photo was also famous, and I would have thought that it was also emblazoned on the collective memory. Our tour guide’s perplexity, just like my student’s lack of information, is a wake-up call: we cannot continue to allow the suppression of history. We cannot stand around and point the finger at places like China while our own students barely know that a bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. We can not, we must not continue to allow the suppression of history as it is happening here, in our own country.
End of polemic.
Today, Tian’anmen Square is full of tourists, Chinese people queue-ing up to see Mao’s Tomb, and vendors selling hats and watches whose face features images of a hand-waving Chairman Mao. (I wonder if anyone during the Cultural Revolution could have imagined that scenario in their wildest dreams.) They descend on our tour group as we stand there. Coop buys several Mao watches, and when he is finished haggling, another vendor comes up and tries to sell him three more. (As Coop said, “He needed those three, he might need three more!”)
This absolutely huge, paved area is clearly a source of civic pride to the Beijing-ers. At 100 acres, it’s the world’s largest open-air urban public square. We saw a whole team of workers whose job is apparently to weed and clean out the cracks between the squares of pavement (think about this when you have a day when you hate your job.) Our tour guides herded all of us into a group for a photo shot, and I noticed that there were other groups involved in this same activity. It became apparent that the organized tour companies bring their large groups here for the “group photograph.” In the case of our company, they develop the photo and put into a nicely bound tourist booklet which you can order and pick up the next day for about 14 bucks. (Of course I bought one.)
At the end of the square is the entrance to the Forbidden City. In fact, “Tian’anmen” means Gate of Heavenly Peace, so Tien’anmen Square is the Square that leads up to the Forbidden City gate. Above the arched opening that leads through the gate into the Forbidden City is a huge picture of Mao. We spent some time trying to get humorous photos posed as if the picture of Mao was between Coop’s thumb and forefinger (the place had so much historical import, and such heavy vibes, that a little comic relief was really welcome, for me at least.)
The Forbidden City
From the DK Eyewitness Guide to China:
Forming the very heart of Beijing, the Forbidden City, officially known as the Palace Museum (Gugong), is China’s most magnificent architectural complex and was completed in 1420. The huge palace is a compendium of Imperial architecture and a ;asting monument of dynastic China from which 24 emperors ruled for nearly 500 years. The symbolic center of the Chinese universe, the palace was the exclusive domain of the imperial court and dignitaries until the 1920s. It was fully opened to the public in 1949.
I must begin by admitting that by this point in the trip, I was pretty much totally overwhelmed, and it was difficult to soak in a lot of new input. That being said, the Forbidden City is a marvel. It inspires some interesting emotions: like a lot of the Hapsburg extravaganzas that one sees in Vienna, one is sort of torn between admiration and wonder for the artisans and laborers (a million plus, apparently) who hauled rare and precious wood and stone from all over China to create it – and disgust over the fact that it was all built for one very small group of privileged aristocrats to enjoy. The “palace” is actually a complex of 980 (!) buildings, all containing a number of treasures. Everywhere you turn there is some new wonder – carved walls, exquisitely painted exterior screens, stairways, statues, sweeping courtyards, gorgeous gardens.
If by some weird stroke of fate I should ever return to Beijing, I will go back to the Forbidden City by myself, or maybe with one or 2 other traveling friends, and I will go in the early morning and take my time seeing the whole thing. I say this because it was so incredibly beautiful and awe-inspiring that having to whiz through it at such a breakneck pace was actually a rather frustrating experience for me. It was incredibly crowded, it was extremely hot, and we were absolutely rushed through in a big group. There were 60-something of us trying to follow the tour guide, and even with her little flag held high, I couldn’t always see her. I also didn’t really want to stay with the group, but at the same time I didn’t want to lose them either. I couldn’t see into any of the buildings because I couldn’t see over anyone’s head, and there was no time to really investigate anything. The tour included no time at all to see the gorgeous garden at the end, and very little time at all to even browse in the gift shop (which normally isn’t really a big deal for me, but with only one day left, I had been hoping to grab a couple more presents.) Thank God Coop took a whole slew of outrageously good pictures of it; they have really helped me remember how amazing it was, even if I was zooming through it at the time.
The Tour Continues...
Our next event was a ride in the bus over to the Olympic Village. This was amazing, and I’m glad that they brought our buses over there so that we could gawk at it. Architecture freaks will have a field day with this: the Chinese have gone all out. The Bird’s Nest Stadium, which is literally shaped like a bird's nest, holds about 100,000 people. These pictures simply can’t portray how massive it is. The swim stadium looks like a giant luminous blue rectangular cube that has been bubble-wrapped.
There’s another very striking building, a high-rise actually shaped like the Olympic Torch, that will house the athletes; this caused quite a stir among all of us. They gave us a few minutes outside the buses to gawk at the Olympic Village and take photos (all from a distance – not allowed to go in yet). It is really quite magnificent – but I have to admit that none of it can solve the problem of how on earth the athletes are going to breathe in China’s staggering air pollution. That remains to be seen.
After leaving the Olympic area, we were escorted into a large Teahouse. This is not something that we were expecting; we knew we were going to have lunch, but that’s all. For those who are headed to China: be aware of this when signing on for guided tours – I feel quite certain that the tour companies have agreements with certain establishments that count on tourist trade, and you may very well be spirited away to a silk factory, pearl market, or other consumer opportunity that was not mentioned on the day’s itinerary. I’m not saying that these excursions aren’t enjoyable – they are, but you need to know what you’re getting into.
This particular Teahouse had nothing to do with the actual eating-establishment teahouses we encountered, and is actually a large organized entertainment for western tourists. It’s a large structure with many rooms, including several that are dedicated to demonstrations of the traditional preparation of various kinds of tea, and a kind of “tea tasting” demo. You are greeted by the “Ni haos” (hellos) of a huge gaggle of gorgeous young women, all decked out in pink traditional-looking silk costumes. They are very charming and funny, and give a very entertaining tea-brewing and tea-tasting presentation, in which you are shown the traditional and quite complicated methods of preparing cha. After, you are given the opportunity (of course) to buy the teas that you have tasted (which you do, even though they are basically price-gouged for the tourists.) You are then whisked into the main store (more shameless consumerism), and then escorted downstairs for a meal. Just as you’re about to partake, music starts, and to our surprise, it’s a floor show, complete with costumed dancers doing various ethnic dances, songs, etc. It’s a little bit Disneyland, and a little surreal – but if you just go along with the game and accept that it’s all aimed at the western tourists, (which you are, after all), it’s actually quite entertaining. (And the food was very good.)
We would then have been whisked away to the Pearl market, but the Band Director wisely explained to the tour guides that we all had an important concert that night, and it was extremely important to give us all an opportunity to rest. I personally also needed some time to absorb all the experiences – it was, in hindsight, an awful lot of input for one day.
Beijing, 5.28.2008: The Last Concert
The final concert of the tour took place that night, in the People’s Liberation Army Military Band Hall in Beijing.
You know, it would have been easy, as an American Buddhist with several Tibetan teachers, to be a little freaked out by playing this particular gig. In fact, when I first found out that I was going to China, I told one of my Tibetan teachers that I was having ambivalent feelings about the trip because of the politics. He told me that I shouldn’t be concerned with the politics; that I was “not playing for the Chinese Army,” but that I was playing for people, for sentient beings, and all sentient beings want to be happy, and all people want to be free from suffering. And, to the extent that music can lessen people’s suffering, at least temporarily, playing music for people was a good thing to be doing, anywhere.
Well, my dharma lesson turned out to be this: hello, you are playing for the Chinese army. More on the dharma lesson below, but first, the tale of the concert.
The tour organizer was clearly excited and not a little nervous about this; he was dressed more formally than the other concerts, and he told us that there would be various dignitaries there, and some very prominent Chinese musicians. He was obviously quite concerned that everything be perfect.
The hall was big, but not huge. It was beautifully kept, as you would figure for a military band hall, and it was acoustically by far the best hall we played in. It’s a fantastic performance space. They put an ambient mic on our small acoustic group, as usual, but we barely needed it – the sound carried really well. They had coffee and snacks backstage for the players.
Just as we had done in the 2nd and 3rd concert, we three Irish music persons played out in the lobby before the concert. We drew a very large and appreciative crowd, including one guy who video’d the whole thing on his cell phone. As happened on the other evenings, many people asked about the instruments; they were always especially interested in the wooden flutes.
There were a lot of musicians in the audience. One of the notables was a very gracious older woman who, it turned out, had been the first woman to hold the rank and post of Conductor of the People’s Liberation Army Military Band. Another was the current conductor of the PLA Military Band. The “Small World” award for the evening went to an older American ex-pat who came to the concert by himself. He introduced himself to us and told us that he used to teach at a large University in the Midwest. When he found out that the three of us in the Irish group were all affiliated with Big Flat Place University, he told us that before he was in the Midwest he had taught for many years at a university that is a 3-hour drive away from us – next door, by Texas standards. Now what in hell are the chances of that? One American comes to the concert, and he used to teach at Neighbor of Big Flat Place. As if that weren’t enough, he and Coop started exchanging names of mutual acquaintances, and they discovered that the fellow had known the father of Coop’s best friend. Six thousand miles from home…
The concert was a great success. The students and faculty performed brilliantly, the audience was enthusiastic, and there was a lot of good energy flying around. The audience loved the Irish set, and clapped along enthusiastically. The band did their two encores – the Stars and Stripes Forever, and the PLA March. However, this time they invited the director of the PLA Marching Band to come up and conduct the UK Band for the PLA March He was a very dramatic conductor and he went for it, and the crowd went crazy.
Afterwards, our tour guides told us that the concert was very emotional for the audience, and that during the PLA March in particular, there were tears in the eyes of many of the audience members. I understand. How can we overestimate the power of music to bring people together? From my point of view, I was still playing for a bunch of individuals – people who want to be happy, too, and don’t want to suffer. God knows many members of that audience had recently suffered, since we were told that most of them had spent the previous week pulling dead bodies out of the earthquake rubble in Szechuan Province. Sure, they’re soldiers -- is the average American soldier responsible for some oil baron’s decision to start a war in Iraq? We aren’t catering to policymakers here – we’re playing music for men and women, probably yanked out of high school either because they had to do compulsory service or because they had the talent to play in the military bands, and now they’ve been pulling bodies of children out of demolished buildings. You damn betcha I’m going to play for them. You know, when I got back to the US, I had the opportunity to tell the same aforementioned Tibetan teacher about this experience, and how we had in fact ended up playing music for military people as well as civilians, and about the fact that many of them had spent the previous 2 weeks doing earthquake rescue. I told him that it reminded me of exactly what he had told me, and what the Buddha had said – that all beings suffer, and all beings want to be free from suffering. He told me that this was indeed a very great dharma teaching.
After the concert, we were given a huge banquet in the Military Band’s Mess Hall. We were seated at various tables. It was the usual set-up: communal food placed on round revolving serving trays (and the food was excellent.) In addition, on each table there were 4 or 5 large bottles of Chinese beer. But wait – one each table there was also one bottle of (you guessed it) some kind of white baijiu, Coop’s so-called Chinese Bang Bang. He and Coyote instantly introduced this to the percussion and brass guys, who choked it down (several times), defending their manhood bravely.
Well, this party got very merry very fast. There were two things we didn’t know until later: 1) This is the hooch the Chinese soldiers give to their young recruits as a sort of mild hazing, and 2) our Chinese hosts were probably shocked that a large number of the American females drank it too – apparently that’s not polite company behavior. Oh well. I can’t choke down the stuff, so I was sober as a judge; and no one else had to do anything more complicated than sleep on a 13 hour flight the next day, so all was well.
In all, the night was a great success, and a great way to end this extremely unusual voyage.
Postscript
The story of the journey home is pretty straightforward. We were totally exhausted.
We left from the new International terminal at the Beijing airport, which like Shanghai was huge, incredibly modern, architecturally fascinating and impressive. We got through ticketing and security without much hassle. Coyote, Coop and I spent most of the wait in the Starbucks, which was very nice (and where else could you get a Red Bean scone, but a Starbucks in Beijing?)
The flight was long and incredibly uncomfortable. We were in the LAST seat in the airplane, and the flight had several periods of pretty considerable turbulence. Thank god for Dramamine. (I took a second hit somewhere above the Pacific, and I don’t even remember last leg of the flight.) We got to The Big Flat PlaceThursday evening.
We were home.
Beijing: 5.27.2008 Evening
There is an Irish pub in Beijing. That may sound a little weird, but having traveled around quite a bit, I am now pretty much convinced that there is probably an Irish pub in Ulan Batar and maybe even a few in Khazakstan or Antarctica. There’s even an Irish pub now within a 3 mile strike of my childhood hometown, and there isn’t even a damned Borders or Starbucks there yet.
Paddy O’Shea’s is a very attractive area of Beijing, with tree-lined streets. The front is open in a kind of Euro-boulevard-café style that permits folding back the doors so that the sidewalk tables and the interior are contiguous. It was a strange sight, in a way; suddenly, in the middle of this extremely foreign city, there’s a typical-looking Irish pub full of white people drinking Guinness and eating pub food, presto! as if we had just clicked the heels of our ruby slippers and said “There’s No Place Like Home.”But enough about Oz, and down to the business at hand: Guinness and pub food. I don’t even like Guinness (I think I ordered a Newcastle Nut Brown), but oh Lord the food. Salad, by God, and chips, and Irish-style vegetable soup…at least one of the guys had fish and chips; someone had a club sandwich, I think. I don’t remember anything for about a half-hour after that except grateful hoovering of food that had not been soaked in oil or have a previous life as an invertebrate.
The publican was a gentleman who obviously had some skills in the pub business. He seemed to understand both the thing he wanted to create and the local environment, and how each would have to accommodate the other. He was incredibly friendly. The situation had enough of an Irish context that one felt secure in proceeding exactly the way you would in Ireland, and that everyone would have a set of perspectives in common; you felt as though you could relate, and as though Glen had that same respect for the music and the musicians; you trusted that he would take care of you the way an Irish barman would. And he did, from the food and drink to the posters he had made for our appearance there, featured prominently on the door.
We didn’t know exactly what to expect in terms of who might show up. Before we left for the trip, we had found a clip on YouTube that suggested a very high caliber of music was being made at Paddy O’Shea’s; it later transpired that the players on YouTube ringers brought in from Ireland for Paddy’s Day. On the evening that we were there, it was mostly the three of us playing. We had located ourselves at a table near the front of the building, but it wasn’t an ideal placement, because we had our backs to the sidewalk (no corner tables were available.) But it was fine. We played typical Irish session music (jig and reels, mostly); it was too noisy to play songs, especially as it got very crowded after awhile (a large contingent of our Band Student Fellow Travelers eventually showed up for the festivities, as we had hoped they would.) There was also a variety of people who had made a special effort to come hear the music. Among the interesting folks we met:
1) A Scottish gentleman who was a professor and a consultant for a Chinese education agency. Coyotebanjo noticed him singing along, and it turned out that he was Glasgow-born of a Donegal singing family. He had come especially as a result of the advertising Glen had done.
2) A young Californian and his Chinese wife, with several of their friends, sitting at the table next to us. They were in the embassy district because they were headed to the American Embassy the next day to try to get her a visa so she could visit the US with him. They were anxious about this impending meeting; and, perhaps in an attempt to relieve the pressure, became drunk as lords.
3) A fellow from the US Embassy, who had tried to book us for an embassy reception on the same night as our concert, but failing that, had come along to listen (and brought reinforcements in the form of several young female friends who attempted a few Riverdance moves.) Mind you, we only knew he played because he approached some of the Band Students present, and asked if they thought we would mind if he were to ask to play. Turned out he was a whistle player. If I remember correctly, there was some problem with the whistle, because Coop ended up loaning him one of the extra D whistles he’d brought. He played enthusiastically along with us, and it became quite clear that he wanted to sing as well. We agreed upon a song we both knew (he knew mostly pub songs) and whoa! didn’t he have the loudest, most piercing, huge Clancy Brothers tenor voice you’ve ever heard. You could hear him over the entire lot of the hollering masses in the bar.
In all, it was a lovely evening and pretty much a success; I certainly think the Band contingent greatly enjoyed themselves. (They were probably so elated over having fish and chips and real beer that we could have sung Happy Birthday all night and they would have been content!). As we were leaving, a woman came up to me and told me that she had loved the music, that it had taken her back to Galway and reminded her of the music at the Crane (for those who are not familiar with the whole Irish music culture, this is extremely high praise). She asked me if we’d ever played there; I said that the guys had done some sessions there. Turned out that she lived in Australia for a long time, and I don’t remember what had brought her to China – all I remember is that she then asked me my name, and it transpired that we both had the same first name; we both marveled over that coincidence.
Our driver, a Chinese fellow named John with excellent English, had assured us that we could call him for a pick-up and drive back to the hotel “even if it was very late.” Further questioning about “how late” seemed to suggest that anytime was OK, so we took him at his word and called, although it was midnight. He did come to pick us up promptly, and although I had the distinct vibe that we may have pushed the envelope on “how late” was acceptable, he was perfectly courteous about it – and back to the hotel we went.
Beijing, 5.28.2008: Tian’anmen Square and the Forbidden City
Reflections on Tian’anmen Square, with polemic
The first week of June 1989, I was driving from Massachusetts to Indiana with an early music friend. We were on our way back from an early music camp. Every time we turned on the radio, more horrible reports came in about the Chinese government’s violent crackdown on student protests in Tian’anmen Square, Beijing. The protests, by students, intellectuals, labor, and others calling for democratic reform, had been gaining steam for a couple of months before that. The matter came to a head the first week of June, when the movement was crushed with great force by the Chinese army.
This is the incident that most over-35 Americans think of instantly when someone says “Tian’anmen Square.” The image of that defiant student became world-famous, and is emblazoned on the collective memory.
But today, May 28, 2008, I am standing in Tian’anmen Square, and Coop has just asked our tour guide where the “world-famous picture of the student standing in front of the tank” was taken, since he wants to take a photo. She has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. She has never seen this picture he describes.
It’s interesting to examine one’s first reaction to this. It’s a kind of knee-jerk American guns-up reaction: "of course, the Commies have suppressed this information from their people." But is our guides’ lack of knowledge genuine? Do they really not know about the 1989 protests, or have they been trained that they must under all circumstances avoid any discussion of this event? Many Americans would assume the latter, but I would just as quickly believe the former. Why? Because when I teach History of Rock and Roll, and I play Neil Young’s “Four Dead in Ohio,” I have to explain Kent State to my American students. A sobering majority of them have never seen the 1970 photographic image of the young Kent State co-ed screaming while her friends, protesting the Vietnam War, are shot down by the National Guard. In fact, not only have they never seen the picture -- they don’t know it happened. They are shocked. That photo was also famous, and I would have thought that it was also emblazoned on the collective memory. Our tour guide’s perplexity, just like my student’s lack of information, is a wake-up call: we cannot continue to allow the suppression of history. We cannot stand around and point the finger at places like China while our own students barely know that a bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. We can not, we must not continue to allow the suppression of history as it is happening here, in our own country.
End of polemic.
Today, Tian’anmen Square is full of tourists, Chinese people queue-ing up to see Mao’s Tomb, and vendors selling hats and watches whose face features images of a hand-waving Chairman Mao. (I wonder if anyone during the Cultural Revolution could have imagined that scenario in their wildest dreams.) They descend on our tour group as we stand there. Coop buys several Mao watches, and when he is finished haggling, another vendor comes up and tries to sell him three more. (As Coop said, “He needed those three, he might need three more!”)
This absolutely huge, paved area is clearly a source of civic pride to the Beijing-ers. At 100 acres, it’s the world’s largest open-air urban public square. We saw a whole team of workers whose job is apparently to weed and clean out the cracks between the squares of pavement (think about this when you have a day when you hate your job.) Our tour guides herded all of us into a group for a photo shot, and I noticed that there were other groups involved in this same activity. It became apparent that the organized tour companies bring their large groups here for the “group photograph.” In the case of our company, they develop the photo and put into a nicely bound tourist booklet which you can order and pick up the next day for about 14 bucks. (Of course I bought one.)
At the end of the square is the entrance to the Forbidden City. In fact, “Tian’anmen” means Gate of Heavenly Peace, so Tien’anmen Square is the Square that leads up to the Forbidden City gate. Above the arched opening that leads through the gate into the Forbidden City is a huge picture of Mao. We spent some time trying to get humorous photos posed as if the picture of Mao was between Coop’s thumb and forefinger (the place had so much historical import, and such heavy vibes, that a little comic relief was really welcome, for me at least.)
The Forbidden City
From the DK Eyewitness Guide to China:
Forming the very heart of Beijing, the Forbidden City, officially known as the Palace Museum (Gugong), is China’s most magnificent architectural complex and was completed in 1420. The huge palace is a compendium of Imperial architecture and a ;asting monument of dynastic China from which 24 emperors ruled for nearly 500 years. The symbolic center of the Chinese universe, the palace was the exclusive domain of the imperial court and dignitaries until the 1920s. It was fully opened to the public in 1949.
I must begin by admitting that by this point in the trip, I was pretty much totally overwhelmed, and it was difficult to soak in a lot of new input. That being said, the Forbidden City is a marvel. It inspires some interesting emotions: like a lot of the Hapsburg extravaganzas that one sees in Vienna, one is sort of torn between admiration and wonder for the artisans and laborers (a million plus, apparently) who hauled rare and precious wood and stone from all over China to create it – and disgust over the fact that it was all built for one very small group of privileged aristocrats to enjoy. The “palace” is actually a complex of 980 (!) buildings, all containing a number of treasures. Everywhere you turn there is some new wonder – carved walls, exquisitely painted exterior screens, stairways, statues, sweeping courtyards, gorgeous gardens.
If by some weird stroke of fate I should ever return to Beijing, I will go back to the Forbidden City by myself, or maybe with one or 2 other traveling friends, and I will go in the early morning and take my time seeing the whole thing. I say this because it was so incredibly beautiful and awe-inspiring that having to whiz through it at such a breakneck pace was actually a rather frustrating experience for me. It was incredibly crowded, it was extremely hot, and we were absolutely rushed through in a big group. There were 60-something of us trying to follow the tour guide, and even with her little flag held high, I couldn’t always see her. I also didn’t really want to stay with the group, but at the same time I didn’t want to lose them either. I couldn’t see into any of the buildings because I couldn’t see over anyone’s head, and there was no time to really investigate anything. The tour included no time at all to see the gorgeous garden at the end, and very little time at all to even browse in the gift shop (which normally isn’t really a big deal for me, but with only one day left, I had been hoping to grab a couple more presents.) Thank God Coop took a whole slew of outrageously good pictures of it; they have really helped me remember how amazing it was, even if I was zooming through it at the time.
The Tour Continues...
Our next event was a ride in the bus over to the Olympic Village. This was amazing, and I’m glad that they brought our buses over there so that we could gawk at it. Architecture freaks will have a field day with this: the Chinese have gone all out. The Bird’s Nest Stadium, which is literally shaped like a bird's nest, holds about 100,000 people. These pictures simply can’t portray how massive it is. The swim stadium looks like a giant luminous blue rectangular cube that has been bubble-wrapped.
There’s another very striking building, a high-rise actually shaped like the Olympic Torch, that will house the athletes; this caused quite a stir among all of us. They gave us a few minutes outside the buses to gawk at the Olympic Village and take photos (all from a distance – not allowed to go in yet). It is really quite magnificent – but I have to admit that none of it can solve the problem of how on earth the athletes are going to breathe in China’s staggering air pollution. That remains to be seen.
After leaving the Olympic area, we were escorted into a large Teahouse. This is not something that we were expecting; we knew we were going to have lunch, but that’s all. For those who are headed to China: be aware of this when signing on for guided tours – I feel quite certain that the tour companies have agreements with certain establishments that count on tourist trade, and you may very well be spirited away to a silk factory, pearl market, or other consumer opportunity that was not mentioned on the day’s itinerary. I’m not saying that these excursions aren’t enjoyable – they are, but you need to know what you’re getting into. This particular Teahouse had nothing to do with the actual eating-establishment teahouses we encountered, and is actually a large organized entertainment for western tourists. It’s a large structure with many rooms, including several that are dedicated to demonstrations of the traditional preparation of various kinds of tea, and a kind of “tea tasting” demo. You are greeted by the “Ni haos” (hellos) of a huge gaggle of gorgeous young women, all decked out in pink traditional-looking silk costumes. They are very charming and funny, and give a very entertaining tea-brewing and tea-tasting presentation, in which you are shown the traditional and quite complicated methods of preparing cha. After, you are given the opportunity (of course) to buy the teas that you have tasted (which you do, even though they are basically price-gouged for the tourists.) You are then whisked into the main store (more shameless consumerism), and then escorted downstairs for a meal. Just as you’re about to partake, music starts, and to our surprise, it’s a floor show, complete with costumed dancers doing various ethnic dances, songs, etc. It’s a little bit Disneyland, and a little surreal – but if you just go along with the game and accept that it’s all aimed at the western tourists, (which you are, after all), it’s actually quite entertaining. (And the food was very good.)
We would then have been whisked away to the Pearl market, but the Band Director wisely explained to the tour guides that we all had an important concert that night, and it was extremely important to give us all an opportunity to rest. I personally also needed some time to absorb all the experiences – it was, in hindsight, an awful lot of input for one day.
Beijing, 5.28.2008: The Last Concert
The final concert of the tour took place that night, in the People’s Liberation Army Military Band Hall in Beijing.
You know, it would have been easy, as an American Buddhist with several Tibetan teachers, to be a little freaked out by playing this particular gig. In fact, when I first found out that I was going to China, I told one of my Tibetan teachers that I was having ambivalent feelings about the trip because of the politics. He told me that I shouldn’t be concerned with the politics; that I was “not playing for the Chinese Army,” but that I was playing for people, for sentient beings, and all sentient beings want to be happy, and all people want to be free from suffering. And, to the extent that music can lessen people’s suffering, at least temporarily, playing music for people was a good thing to be doing, anywhere. Well, my dharma lesson turned out to be this: hello, you are playing for the Chinese army. More on the dharma lesson below, but first, the tale of the concert.
The tour organizer was clearly excited and not a little nervous about this; he was dressed more formally than the other concerts, and he told us that there would be various dignitaries there, and some very prominent Chinese musicians. He was obviously quite concerned that everything be perfect.
The hall was big, but not huge. It was beautifully kept, as you would figure for a military band hall, and it was acoustically by far the best hall we played in. It’s a fantastic performance space. They put an ambient mic on our small acoustic group, as usual, but we barely needed it – the sound carried really well. They had coffee and snacks backstage for the players.
Just as we had done in the 2nd and 3rd concert, we three Irish music persons played out in the lobby before the concert. We drew a very large and appreciative crowd, including one guy who video’d the whole thing on his cell phone. As happened on the other evenings, many people asked about the instruments; they were always especially interested in the wooden flutes.
There were a lot of musicians in the audience. One of the notables was a very gracious older woman who, it turned out, had been the first woman to hold the rank and post of Conductor of the People’s Liberation Army Military Band. Another was the current conductor of the PLA Military Band. The “Small World” award for the evening went to an older American ex-pat who came to the concert by himself. He introduced himself to us and told us that he used to teach at a large University in the Midwest. When he found out that the three of us in the Irish group were all affiliated with Big Flat Place University, he told us that before he was in the Midwest he had taught for many years at a university that is a 3-hour drive away from us – next door, by Texas standards. Now what in hell are the chances of that? One American comes to the concert, and he used to teach at Neighbor of Big Flat Place. As if that weren’t enough, he and Coop started exchanging names of mutual acquaintances, and they discovered that the fellow had known the father of Coop’s best friend. Six thousand miles from home…
The concert was a great success. The students and faculty performed brilliantly, the audience was enthusiastic, and there was a lot of good energy flying around. The audience loved the Irish set, and clapped along enthusiastically. The band did their two encores – the Stars and Stripes Forever, and the PLA March. However, this time they invited the director of the PLA Marching Band to come up and conduct the UK Band for the PLA March He was a very dramatic conductor and he went for it, and the crowd went crazy. Afterwards, our tour guides told us that the concert was very emotional for the audience, and that during the PLA March in particular, there were tears in the eyes of many of the audience members. I understand. How can we overestimate the power of music to bring people together? From my point of view, I was still playing for a bunch of individuals – people who want to be happy, too, and don’t want to suffer. God knows many members of that audience had recently suffered, since we were told that most of them had spent the previous week pulling dead bodies out of the earthquake rubble in Szechuan Province. Sure, they’re soldiers -- is the average American soldier responsible for some oil baron’s decision to start a war in Iraq? We aren’t catering to policymakers here – we’re playing music for men and women, probably yanked out of high school either because they had to do compulsory service or because they had the talent to play in the military bands, and now they’ve been pulling bodies of children out of demolished buildings. You damn betcha I’m going to play for them. You know, when I got back to the US, I had the opportunity to tell the same aforementioned Tibetan teacher about this experience, and how we had in fact ended up playing music for military people as well as civilians, and about the fact that many of them had spent the previous 2 weeks doing earthquake rescue. I told him that it reminded me of exactly what he had told me, and what the Buddha had said – that all beings suffer, and all beings want to be free from suffering. He told me that this was indeed a very great dharma teaching.
After the concert, we were given a huge banquet in the Military Band’s Mess Hall. We were seated at various tables. It was the usual set-up: communal food placed on round revolving serving trays (and the food was excellent.) In addition, on each table there were 4 or 5 large bottles of Chinese beer. But wait – one each table there was also one bottle of (you guessed it) some kind of white baijiu, Coop’s so-called Chinese Bang Bang. He and Coyote instantly introduced this to the percussion and brass guys, who choked it down (several times), defending their manhood bravely.
Well, this party got very merry very fast. There were two things we didn’t know until later: 1) This is the hooch the Chinese soldiers give to their young recruits as a sort of mild hazing, and 2) our Chinese hosts were probably shocked that a large number of the American females drank it too – apparently that’s not polite company behavior. Oh well. I can’t choke down the stuff, so I was sober as a judge; and no one else had to do anything more complicated than sleep on a 13 hour flight the next day, so all was well.
In all, the night was a great success, and a great way to end this extremely unusual voyage.
Postscript
The story of the journey home is pretty straightforward. We were totally exhausted.
We left from the new International terminal at the Beijing airport, which like Shanghai was huge, incredibly modern, architecturally fascinating and impressive. We got through ticketing and security without much hassle. Coyote, Coop and I spent most of the wait in the Starbucks, which was very nice (and where else could you get a Red Bean scone, but a Starbucks in Beijing?) The flight was long and incredibly uncomfortable. We were in the LAST seat in the airplane, and the flight had several periods of pretty considerable turbulence. Thank god for Dramamine. (I took a second hit somewhere above the Pacific, and I don’t even remember last leg of the flight.) We got to The Big Flat PlaceThursday evening.
We were home.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Gambapalooza
Some people have normal midlife crises. They buy cars, go back to school, change careers, or have a disastrous affair with some tyke. I, on the other hand, decided to learn how to play the viola da gamba.
I am blogging from the Viola da Gamba Society’s annual Conclave -- essentially a music camp / workshop devoted to the viola da gamba. I did not know this before I came here, but the VDGSA has been in existence for 45 years (!), which means over a decade before early music became fashionable for Baby Boomers in Birkenstocks. And yes, there are a lot of Boomers here like myself and my slightly older colleagues, but there are also a fairly respectable number of players who are half that age – very encouraging, since one of the most frequent laments in the early music world is the preponderance of grey heads both onstage and in the audience. (Actually, that’s happening in this country with a number of different kinds of music; a topic for another blog post.) There is also a huge range of participants here in terms of playing level: professionals (most of these are the teachers), semi- and “pre” professionals (such as advanced students), extremely proficient avocational players, amateurs at various levels, absolute newbies, and the occasional person like myself who is accomplished at some other kinds of music-making but tabula rasa on the viol. As a pretty limited player, I’m finding it to be extremely intense work, but quite enjoyable as well; and since my brain is fried at this point, I have put down the bow and picked up the laptop to muse on the different factors that brought me here.
First of all, I have this job, you see, part of which entails directing a university early music group. Quite a few of them are instrumentalists, and although I can play several instruments with varying degrees of skill, most of my formal training has been in the singing department. About 15 years ago I did take some gamba lessons from Wendy Gillespie, a highly-acclaimed virtuoso on the instrument who teaches at IU. I don’t remember much, but it was a beginning. At Big Flat Place University, we have several viola da gambas (or viols, as the English call them), and willing players to take them on; but there is no viol teacher at our school and, unless there is a seismic shift or some Texas oil tycoon suddenly becomes obsessed with early music, hell is likely to freeze over before we get one. So I must get these folks started on the rudiments of the instrument, and it would be very nice if I could demonstrate the rudiments instead of just yakking about them. It would also be nice if I could explain to them – most of them are cellists and string bass players – some of the details of bowing, phrasing, and performance practice, and get them started, so that when I get the money to have a pro come in to do a workshop, they get the maximum benefit out of it. So why not learn the rudiments myself? I mean, really, despite being an Irish music fellow-traveler with a DADGAD guitar, I think I am supposed to be an Early Music Person.
So why haven’t I done it until now, especially since I actually have “practical” reasons? Well, it was partly the expense and partly the commitment of time, but there’s also a little Calvinist devil, courtesy of about 8 generations of ancestors, who has been renting a room in my head since I was about 2. The following dialogue has been looping:
Little Calvinist Devil: Why do you want to screw around with some new instrument? Every moment you spend practicing an instrument is one step farther from finishing your doctoral work. And if you do persist in this folly, why not just get better at the instruments you already play, since you’re not particularly virtuosic on any of them?
Dharmo: Puhleeze, Devil, that’s not a midlife crisis pursuit. That’s sensible, like jogging and putting skim milk in coffee. Instruments we already play have Baggage – and I don’t mean the airplane kind, I mean the therapy kind. Don’t you remember? You packed about 5 of the bags yourself.
Little Calvinist Devil: You have no discipline and you will always suck. The Incubus who rents the room next to me agrees, and he’s a Catholic for God’s sake.
I’ve decided that my ultimate response to this dialogue is “there is no virtuosity, neither is there lack of virtuosity; neither is there a gamba, nor is there the absence of a gamba.” The best way to get rid of demons is to confuse the crap out of them. The truth is, I’ve wanted to play this instrument for a long time. When I was at the Early Music Institute I used to joke around with my colleagues and say that “in my next life” I would play the viola da gamba. (Indian classical music and uilleann pipes are also fairly appealing, but appear to require more than one lifetime.) You’d think that a good Buddhist would just let it go at that. The problem is, there is no guarantee that the next life will include opposable thumbs. So, in the event that my next life might be spent as a Formless Energy Being or an otter (hang on – I believe otters may have opposable thumbs), I decided what the hell, why wait? If I want to learn something new, let’s learn it now, or at least put some imprints on my mental continuum so that I can learn it faster if I find myself with human hands again.
There is nothing like a virtuosic consort of bass, tenor and treble viols; and the solo viol repertoire is also gorgeous. If you have never heard a viol consort or music for viola da gamba, I refer you to any recording by Fretwork, Hesperion XX (or XXI), Jordi Savall, Phantasm…there are many more, but that’s a place to start. Also check out the soundtrack to the film Tous les matins du mond.
Another appealing aspect of the viol is the people who play it. There are a good number of people here who obviously have known each other for years, and yet they also seem extremely willing to reach out to the new people they see. The first night, a former president of the organization came over to my table at dinner and invited me to join his table because “no one at Conclave has to eat by themselves.” It may seem like a ridiculous generalization, but when I started the Early Music Immersion part of my life, I noticed within a fairly short amount of time that I really, really liked virtually all the gamba players I met. Seriously folks, there’s a reason why there are stereotypes associated with certain instruments, and the viol seems to attract a large number of highly intelligent, literate, multi-talented, musical, capable, good-natured, mostly-level-headed and witty people. This last one is especially noticeable – they are all pretty good- humored, and a surprising number of the gamba players I have known are just plain funny and entertaining people. I just spent the evening at a fundraising auction with over a hundred of them, while they auctioned off donated items ranging from a stuffed toy rabbit made of fabric with musical notes all over it, to a two-week stay at someone’s lovely house in London, and they somehow raised almost five thousand bucks while everyone laughed their asses off for two hours. This just does not happen in all organizations (of course, not all fund-raising auctions place their coffee urn next to six bottles of alcoholic flavor-enhancements, either… but my point still stands.) I have always found that the viol players were a blast to hang around with. And I think I know why: although there is a certain amount of solo repertoire for the instrument, it was conceived as a consort instrument – it needs other people to play with. In other words, it’s community music, best appreciated while playing in community with other players. It doesn’t require a conductor, and while there are virtuosic pieces for the super-accomplished players and soloists, most pieces are written for several players to play together for their own edification.
So here I am. There’s lots of great music being played here every day, including wonderful faculty mini-concerts. The Early Music world being relatively small, there are a number of people here whom I know, many of whom I haven’t seen for some time. My classes are being taught by incredible players who also have excellent pedagogical skills and are generous enough to still be willing to spend time with relative beginners. And all of the classes I’m taking are going to greatly help me communicate with the viol players in my own Collegium, even the classes that spend time on rather specialized technical issues that are a little beyond my present ability. I can’t really do much in the way of subtle articulations when I am still trying to figure out where to poot mah wee fenghers, but I now know how to ask my Collegium viol players to match their articulations with the singer’s consonants, for example, even if I can’t do it myself.
I am also getting an excellent lesson in killing the Big Ego and swallowing one’s pride; I would recommend that all music teachers try something like this every couple of decades. It is very odd to look at a single line of music that you could sight-sing with one eye closed or instantly dash off on the piano, and listen to yourself making clam chowder out of it because your left hand is going Where the Hell is Middle C, your eyes are reading Alto Clef, and your right bow-hand is sending memos to the brain such as What Is This Diabolical Implement and Why Am I Holding It.
It’s also wonderful, once in awhile, for a professional musician to undertake some musical activity purely for the love of it. That’s why I climbed up on the piano at age 3 and plonked out “Silent Night” by ear; and ultimately, despite all the above practical rationalizations, I think it’s the real reason why I am plonking out the alto part of “Innsbruck Ich Muss Dich Lassen” by ear 50 years later. An instrument with no “baggage” – what a concept: music with no expectation of specific results, no pressure to get Really Good, or be fashionable, or get some blasted PhD in it, but music that’s played just because of some ineffable heart-connection that leads you to want to play it. And I played it today. I got through a piece in my “How to Practice” class, and during my “Viola da Gamba Dojo” class I actually (one time anyhow) got all the way through the alto part of Innsbruck on a tenor gamba with 7 other people, and no one cared if my tone sucked or if I was a beginner. Gassho!
I am blogging from the Viola da Gamba Society’s annual Conclave -- essentially a music camp / workshop devoted to the viola da gamba. I did not know this before I came here, but the VDGSA has been in existence for 45 years (!), which means over a decade before early music became fashionable for Baby Boomers in Birkenstocks. And yes, there are a lot of Boomers here like myself and my slightly older colleagues, but there are also a fairly respectable number of players who are half that age – very encouraging, since one of the most frequent laments in the early music world is the preponderance of grey heads both onstage and in the audience. (Actually, that’s happening in this country with a number of different kinds of music; a topic for another blog post.) There is also a huge range of participants here in terms of playing level: professionals (most of these are the teachers), semi- and “pre” professionals (such as advanced students), extremely proficient avocational players, amateurs at various levels, absolute newbies, and the occasional person like myself who is accomplished at some other kinds of music-making but tabula rasa on the viol. As a pretty limited player, I’m finding it to be extremely intense work, but quite enjoyable as well; and since my brain is fried at this point, I have put down the bow and picked up the laptop to muse on the different factors that brought me here.
First of all, I have this job, you see, part of which entails directing a university early music group. Quite a few of them are instrumentalists, and although I can play several instruments with varying degrees of skill, most of my formal training has been in the singing department. About 15 years ago I did take some gamba lessons from Wendy Gillespie, a highly-acclaimed virtuoso on the instrument who teaches at IU. I don’t remember much, but it was a beginning. At Big Flat Place University, we have several viola da gambas (or viols, as the English call them), and willing players to take them on; but there is no viol teacher at our school and, unless there is a seismic shift or some Texas oil tycoon suddenly becomes obsessed with early music, hell is likely to freeze over before we get one. So I must get these folks started on the rudiments of the instrument, and it would be very nice if I could demonstrate the rudiments instead of just yakking about them. It would also be nice if I could explain to them – most of them are cellists and string bass players – some of the details of bowing, phrasing, and performance practice, and get them started, so that when I get the money to have a pro come in to do a workshop, they get the maximum benefit out of it. So why not learn the rudiments myself? I mean, really, despite being an Irish music fellow-traveler with a DADGAD guitar, I think I am supposed to be an Early Music Person.
So why haven’t I done it until now, especially since I actually have “practical” reasons? Well, it was partly the expense and partly the commitment of time, but there’s also a little Calvinist devil, courtesy of about 8 generations of ancestors, who has been renting a room in my head since I was about 2. The following dialogue has been looping:
Little Calvinist Devil: Why do you want to screw around with some new instrument? Every moment you spend practicing an instrument is one step farther from finishing your doctoral work. And if you do persist in this folly, why not just get better at the instruments you already play, since you’re not particularly virtuosic on any of them?
Dharmo: Puhleeze, Devil, that’s not a midlife crisis pursuit. That’s sensible, like jogging and putting skim milk in coffee. Instruments we already play have Baggage – and I don’t mean the airplane kind, I mean the therapy kind. Don’t you remember? You packed about 5 of the bags yourself.
Little Calvinist Devil: You have no discipline and you will always suck. The Incubus who rents the room next to me agrees, and he’s a Catholic for God’s sake.
I’ve decided that my ultimate response to this dialogue is “there is no virtuosity, neither is there lack of virtuosity; neither is there a gamba, nor is there the absence of a gamba.” The best way to get rid of demons is to confuse the crap out of them. The truth is, I’ve wanted to play this instrument for a long time. When I was at the Early Music Institute I used to joke around with my colleagues and say that “in my next life” I would play the viola da gamba. (Indian classical music and uilleann pipes are also fairly appealing, but appear to require more than one lifetime.) You’d think that a good Buddhist would just let it go at that. The problem is, there is no guarantee that the next life will include opposable thumbs. So, in the event that my next life might be spent as a Formless Energy Being or an otter (hang on – I believe otters may have opposable thumbs), I decided what the hell, why wait? If I want to learn something new, let’s learn it now, or at least put some imprints on my mental continuum so that I can learn it faster if I find myself with human hands again.
There is nothing like a virtuosic consort of bass, tenor and treble viols; and the solo viol repertoire is also gorgeous. If you have never heard a viol consort or music for viola da gamba, I refer you to any recording by Fretwork, Hesperion XX (or XXI), Jordi Savall, Phantasm…there are many more, but that’s a place to start. Also check out the soundtrack to the film Tous les matins du mond.
Another appealing aspect of the viol is the people who play it. There are a good number of people here who obviously have known each other for years, and yet they also seem extremely willing to reach out to the new people they see. The first night, a former president of the organization came over to my table at dinner and invited me to join his table because “no one at Conclave has to eat by themselves.” It may seem like a ridiculous generalization, but when I started the Early Music Immersion part of my life, I noticed within a fairly short amount of time that I really, really liked virtually all the gamba players I met. Seriously folks, there’s a reason why there are stereotypes associated with certain instruments, and the viol seems to attract a large number of highly intelligent, literate, multi-talented, musical, capable, good-natured, mostly-level-headed and witty people. This last one is especially noticeable – they are all pretty good- humored, and a surprising number of the gamba players I have known are just plain funny and entertaining people. I just spent the evening at a fundraising auction with over a hundred of them, while they auctioned off donated items ranging from a stuffed toy rabbit made of fabric with musical notes all over it, to a two-week stay at someone’s lovely house in London, and they somehow raised almost five thousand bucks while everyone laughed their asses off for two hours. This just does not happen in all organizations (of course, not all fund-raising auctions place their coffee urn next to six bottles of alcoholic flavor-enhancements, either… but my point still stands.) I have always found that the viol players were a blast to hang around with. And I think I know why: although there is a certain amount of solo repertoire for the instrument, it was conceived as a consort instrument – it needs other people to play with. In other words, it’s community music, best appreciated while playing in community with other players. It doesn’t require a conductor, and while there are virtuosic pieces for the super-accomplished players and soloists, most pieces are written for several players to play together for their own edification.
So here I am. There’s lots of great music being played here every day, including wonderful faculty mini-concerts. The Early Music world being relatively small, there are a number of people here whom I know, many of whom I haven’t seen for some time. My classes are being taught by incredible players who also have excellent pedagogical skills and are generous enough to still be willing to spend time with relative beginners. And all of the classes I’m taking are going to greatly help me communicate with the viol players in my own Collegium, even the classes that spend time on rather specialized technical issues that are a little beyond my present ability. I can’t really do much in the way of subtle articulations when I am still trying to figure out where to poot mah wee fenghers, but I now know how to ask my Collegium viol players to match their articulations with the singer’s consonants, for example, even if I can’t do it myself.
I am also getting an excellent lesson in killing the Big Ego and swallowing one’s pride; I would recommend that all music teachers try something like this every couple of decades. It is very odd to look at a single line of music that you could sight-sing with one eye closed or instantly dash off on the piano, and listen to yourself making clam chowder out of it because your left hand is going Where the Hell is Middle C, your eyes are reading Alto Clef, and your right bow-hand is sending memos to the brain such as What Is This Diabolical Implement and Why Am I Holding It.
It’s also wonderful, once in awhile, for a professional musician to undertake some musical activity purely for the love of it. That’s why I climbed up on the piano at age 3 and plonked out “Silent Night” by ear; and ultimately, despite all the above practical rationalizations, I think it’s the real reason why I am plonking out the alto part of “Innsbruck Ich Muss Dich Lassen” by ear 50 years later. An instrument with no “baggage” – what a concept: music with no expectation of specific results, no pressure to get Really Good, or be fashionable, or get some blasted PhD in it, but music that’s played just because of some ineffable heart-connection that leads you to want to play it. And I played it today. I got through a piece in my “How to Practice” class, and during my “Viola da Gamba Dojo” class I actually (one time anyhow) got all the way through the alto part of Innsbruck on a tenor gamba with 7 other people, and no one cared if my tone sucked or if I was a beginner. Gassho!
Monday, July 14, 2008
China Trip Notes, Chapter 11: The Great Wall of China (5.27.2008)
There’s a whole genre of travel books that have titles like “Fifty Things to See/Do Before You Die.” I have a list like that in my head. My list is much longer than 50, and some of them have always seemed far more accessible than others. I started checking them off when I was a little girl, starting at age 12 with “See New York City,” and have slowly but surely gone through quite a few.
One of the more exotic items on my list was to “Stand on the Great Wall of China.” I never took this one very seriously, even though it was sincere, because I never dreamed that it would ever happen. It was on the part of the list that contained things like “talk to John Lennon” and “see Earth from space” – not bloody likely.
Which only goes to prove that You Never Know.
The Great Wall of China is the world’s longest human-made structure. Built as a fortification to protect China from Mongol invaders, it is 4000 miles long and was built between 221 BC and the 1600’s. Great controversy existed for many years over the notion that the Great Wall could be seen from space. This idea was pretty much pooh-poohed by science, but in 1994 this false-color radar image was taken by the space shuttle. So I guess it depends on whether your definition of space includes the low orbit of the shuttle, and whether your definition of “see” means “with the naked eye.”
Long a contender for the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” the Wall finally made the list of the Seven Wonders of the World when that list was recently re-created to reflect things that are still present in the modern world (as opposed to the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, only one of which, the Great Pyramid of Giza, is still extant).
The tour guides brought us to one of the restored parts of the Wall, a section known as the Juyong Guan Pass, in an area known as BadaLing.
The first thing to understand about the Great Wall of China is that it’s not a smooth path on top of a giant Wall, like one finds on certain Stone Age fortresses in places like Ireland. It’s actually an endless stairway, with steps set at uneven heights – much easier to defend from above, I imagine. Having had a stonemason Dad, I can’t even imagine the labor involved in carrying the bumpteen hundred zillion rocks that were hauled up the hills to build this thing. (One of the brighter bulbs among the band students declared - cue Bart Simpson accent - “I don’t get it. It’s just a wall.” Here, son – you carry these rocks up and down the hill for a few months, and tell me again that it’s just a wall.)
For those of us with the physique of the Pillsbury Doughboy, that steep, rocky stairway is quite the challenge. If I understood correctly, that section of the wall rises eventually to 800 meters above sea level; but I don’t know where it starts, so I can’t give you an exact estimation of the ascent. All I know is, Coop, having been a serious climber who’s gone to the top of Rainier in Washington and Cotopaxi in Ecuador, jaunted up to the top like a goat, while I damn near needed a heart transplant by the time I got to the top and back down again. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
In truth, I did a pretty good job of pacing myself, having some idea of what I could and couldn’t do. I was exhausted before I began, and as I mentioned, I was having digestive troubles that day, so I didn’t try to do anything foolish. I rested when I needed to, and tried not to be bothered by all the 20-somethings ripping past me. I also took the time to stop at each one of the lookout posts and survey the landscape, which was mind-boggling: from the high points, you can see into Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, if I understand what I was told. The weather was beautiful; clear and dry, and while it was definitely warm, it was much (much!) cooler than the Yangtze river basin where we had spent the earlier part of the trip. The wind was very strong, and whipping dust occasionally. Some people were whining about that, but 80 dry degrees with the wind whipping dust around is Sunday picnic weather in the Big Flat Place, proving that the perception of all experience depends on the mind experiencing it.
As I climbed, the exhaustion and exhilaration combined to make it a rather numinous experience. Vivid memories of other travels kept welling up in my mind’s eye: standing on the Salisbury Plain staring at Stonehenge; driving across the North American continent with the other members of our medieval band; playing medieval music for packed houses in the Netherlands; staring up at the giant trees in California’s Muir Woods; getting a tour of the Romanesque churches in Cologne from my teacher and friend Ben Bagby; laying eyes on Taos Mountain for the first time; walking over the cobblestones of Gradoli, near Lake Bolsena in Italy, where my grandmother was born; staring at the Brueghels and Caravaggios in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna, while tears ran down my face; standing with Coyotebanjo on the stone-age fort at Dun Aengus, on the Irish island of Inis Mor, staring across the sea to the Cliffs of Moher and feeling as old as Elrond. And Coyote was there now, too, standing there patiently waiting for my 53 year old legs to catch up to him, standing on the Great Wall of China. I felt overwhelmed with gratitude and wonder; I’d better keep trying to “generate merit,” as the Tibetans say, because I sure have drawn a lot of good karma out of my cosmic bank account. As stressful as this trip had been, on this day, the Universe reminded me that despite whatever hardships I’ve had, and despite the sorrows that Samsara brings to us all, I have had a pretty damned cool life. And that moment, my friends, was worth the entire journey.
China Trip Notes, Chapter 10: Beijing, First Impressions (5.27.08)
I think it’s fair to say that most people, in any area of the world, develop certain notions about faraway locations on the basis of either fiction, propaganda, or fairly flimsy information – the old “streets of America paved with gold” nonsense.
Before actually setting foot in Beijing, here’s what I pictured:
1) Places like The Forbidden City and every bit of colorful exotica one could imagine.
2) Large, blocky, grey Communist architecture, rampaging Red Guards, and tanks in Tian’anmen Square mowing down courageous students.
3) Areas of crowded squalorous markets with piles of garbage fuming up the atmosphere and vendors selling food that’s still moving.
4) Neighborhoods of shanty-like slums in rather industrial looking areas (we did see a few of those from the train.)
Not completely wrong, but not completely right either.
Here’s what I saw:
1) An absolutely beautiful 21st century city with incredible modern architecture juxtaposed against exotic ancient buildings.
2) An amazing and very modern system of freeways.
3) Dozens of gorgeous parks.
4) A city in which every square inch of dirt has been landscaped; where the median strips in the highways are gardened; where there are flowers everywhere, including vast tracts of roses stretching along the side of the road.
The only drawback was the pollution, which was pretty terrible (not quite as bad as Shanghai, which is gas-mask material, but the haze is quite present.) Apparently they have recently attempted to address this by taking Beijing’s entire fleet of 45,000 taxicabs off the road and replacing them with Honda natural-gas vehicles. (Can you imagine trying to pull that off in an American city?)
Now, I realize that the Chinese have gone overboard to make Beijing look like Shangri-la because of the Olympics, but there’s only so much you can change a place in several years; you’ve got to have something good to work with in the first place (and our cab driver told us that the roads were always landscaped like that, even before any of the Olympic business.) At any rate, if you’re an American over 40 who has never been to China, I can pretty much promise you that whatever your mental image of Beijing might be, it’s probably wrong. As humongous cities go, it’s one of the most beautiful ones I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been around the block a couple times. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not in any hurry to move there. I know about the slave labor, the huge number of human rights issues, the constant surveillance, and all that stuff. And although we Americans have our own fish to fry in those departments, we do still have the Bill of Rights (despite Dick Cheney & Company, and several old farts on the Supreme Court). Plus, I like the idea of “innocent until proven guilty,” and the notion of “trial by a jury of one’s peers,” so I get nervous in places where there are signs in bars that say “Drug Dealers will Be Summarily Executed” (even though I suspect that sign would be rather popular with the gun-totin' yahoos here in the Big Flat Place if it were legal.) Nevertheless, Beijing is an incredible city, and I am grateful to the universe for having provided the opportunity to see it after it had been spruced up for the Olympics, but before the ravening Olympic hordes descended on it. I figure we got the best of both worlds there.
When we reached our desintation in Beijing, exhausted from the train trip, we all checked into our hotel, the Longdhu Hotspring Spa Hotel, so-called because it is actually built over a hotspring which is used for all the bathing and tap water. They’re not kidding – once you let it run for awhile, the water is HOT. (It’s also very light brown, which is a little disconcerting, but we weren’t about to drink it anyhow, especially after Maggie and Lisa told us we would be “going all the time to the bathroom” if we drank it.)
Frankly, I think there could be no better way to explain the hotel to you, dear readers, than to simply quote verbatim from the Longdhu Hotspring Hotel Brochure:
The cozy and graceful lobby together with the hospitality and excellent service of our staff make you feel at home in glory.
Well, thank God for that; the Baptists on the trip will be relieved to be at home in glory without having to experience the considerable inconvenience of dying first. To continue:
The hotel is the first environmental protection hotel in Beijing, the characteristic of traditional hotspring culture of China, for you with service sprite of wisdom, sincere and believes. “Dragon” is the Chinese symbol; “Lake” is the symbol of lakewater environmental protection. “Hotspring” means all lifewater inside hotel completely coming from hotspring. the water temperature is about 50 C. The water is good for health. So, the name of hotel and coluture characteristic are in one. Facilities material inside the hotel is environmental protection centified by Government. The ground and the wall in the lobby is decoated with import natural manable. The park is laid with hatmal rock.
Close observation of the ground and wall in the lobby suggests that “manable” is the shiny white rocky stuff from Italy – you know, as in "Manablehead,” where Coyotebanjo was born. I have no idea what hatmal rock is.
Enjoy the fractional food and customs of the Chinese from the Northern and Southern part of China.
Actually, I would have expected to find fractional food from the North and South in Ireland. (Or perhaps that would have been “fractious?”) I think this might have been a thesaurus mishap involving the word “diverse.”
And, the 99 Disco Club on the second floor will thoroughly release you from fatigue.
A quick evening glimpse into the 99 Disco Club later suggested that it might also thoroughly release you from any pesky marriage vows that might be cramping your style. Anyhow, no rest for the weary: we had about an hour to enjoy being “at home in glory,” and then the bus was taking all interested parties to the Great Wall of China, a plan certain to thoroughly release us from our fatigue.
Before actually setting foot in Beijing, here’s what I pictured:
1) Places like The Forbidden City and every bit of colorful exotica one could imagine.
2) Large, blocky, grey Communist architecture, rampaging Red Guards, and tanks in Tian’anmen Square mowing down courageous students.
3) Areas of crowded squalorous markets with piles of garbage fuming up the atmosphere and vendors selling food that’s still moving.
4) Neighborhoods of shanty-like slums in rather industrial looking areas (we did see a few of those from the train.)
Not completely wrong, but not completely right either.
Here’s what I saw:
1) An absolutely beautiful 21st century city with incredible modern architecture juxtaposed against exotic ancient buildings.
2) An amazing and very modern system of freeways.
3) Dozens of gorgeous parks.
4) A city in which every square inch of dirt has been landscaped; where the median strips in the highways are gardened; where there are flowers everywhere, including vast tracts of roses stretching along the side of the road.
The only drawback was the pollution, which was pretty terrible (not quite as bad as Shanghai, which is gas-mask material, but the haze is quite present.) Apparently they have recently attempted to address this by taking Beijing’s entire fleet of 45,000 taxicabs off the road and replacing them with Honda natural-gas vehicles. (Can you imagine trying to pull that off in an American city?)
Now, I realize that the Chinese have gone overboard to make Beijing look like Shangri-la because of the Olympics, but there’s only so much you can change a place in several years; you’ve got to have something good to work with in the first place (and our cab driver told us that the roads were always landscaped like that, even before any of the Olympic business.) At any rate, if you’re an American over 40 who has never been to China, I can pretty much promise you that whatever your mental image of Beijing might be, it’s probably wrong. As humongous cities go, it’s one of the most beautiful ones I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been around the block a couple times. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not in any hurry to move there. I know about the slave labor, the huge number of human rights issues, the constant surveillance, and all that stuff. And although we Americans have our own fish to fry in those departments, we do still have the Bill of Rights (despite Dick Cheney & Company, and several old farts on the Supreme Court). Plus, I like the idea of “innocent until proven guilty,” and the notion of “trial by a jury of one’s peers,” so I get nervous in places where there are signs in bars that say “Drug Dealers will Be Summarily Executed” (even though I suspect that sign would be rather popular with the gun-totin' yahoos here in the Big Flat Place if it were legal.) Nevertheless, Beijing is an incredible city, and I am grateful to the universe for having provided the opportunity to see it after it had been spruced up for the Olympics, but before the ravening Olympic hordes descended on it. I figure we got the best of both worlds there.
When we reached our desintation in Beijing, exhausted from the train trip, we all checked into our hotel, the Longdhu Hotspring Spa Hotel, so-called because it is actually built over a hotspring which is used for all the bathing and tap water. They’re not kidding – once you let it run for awhile, the water is HOT. (It’s also very light brown, which is a little disconcerting, but we weren’t about to drink it anyhow, especially after Maggie and Lisa told us we would be “going all the time to the bathroom” if we drank it.)
Frankly, I think there could be no better way to explain the hotel to you, dear readers, than to simply quote verbatim from the Longdhu Hotspring Hotel Brochure:
The cozy and graceful lobby together with the hospitality and excellent service of our staff make you feel at home in glory.
Well, thank God for that; the Baptists on the trip will be relieved to be at home in glory without having to experience the considerable inconvenience of dying first. To continue:
The hotel is the first environmental protection hotel in Beijing, the characteristic of traditional hotspring culture of China, for you with service sprite of wisdom, sincere and believes. “Dragon” is the Chinese symbol; “Lake” is the symbol of lakewater environmental protection. “Hotspring” means all lifewater inside hotel completely coming from hotspring. the water temperature is about 50 C. The water is good for health. So, the name of hotel and coluture characteristic are in one. Facilities material inside the hotel is environmental protection centified by Government. The ground and the wall in the lobby is decoated with import natural manable. The park is laid with hatmal rock.
Close observation of the ground and wall in the lobby suggests that “manable” is the shiny white rocky stuff from Italy – you know, as in "Manablehead,” where Coyotebanjo was born. I have no idea what hatmal rock is.
Enjoy the fractional food and customs of the Chinese from the Northern and Southern part of China.
Actually, I would have expected to find fractional food from the North and South in Ireland. (Or perhaps that would have been “fractious?”) I think this might have been a thesaurus mishap involving the word “diverse.”
And, the 99 Disco Club on the second floor will thoroughly release you from fatigue.
A quick evening glimpse into the 99 Disco Club later suggested that it might also thoroughly release you from any pesky marriage vows that might be cramping your style. Anyhow, no rest for the weary: we had about an hour to enjoy being “at home in glory,” and then the bus was taking all interested parties to the Great Wall of China, a plan certain to thoroughly release us from our fatigue.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
China Trip Notes, Chapter 9: The Night Train (5.26-27.08)
Our concert in Yangzhou was very successful. Our Irish music “warm up” set in the lobby was very well-received. Each time we did one of these sets, people would stop and crowd around us, asking questions and applauding between numbers. The concert itself was great; we all felt very welcomed, and there was the usual abundance of flowers and gifts at the end.
After the concert, though, began a chapter of the trip that I personally found fairly stressful. There was a mad rush to get all the instruments and equipment back on the bus, because we had to catch the night train to Beijing. That was done with amazing efficiency, thanks to a number of very proactive students (especially the percussion section leader, who was a great organizer). The bus to the train station was longer than I thought it would be, so people were fairly sleepy by the time we got there – and then we had the incredibly challenging task of getting everyone’s instruments, equipment, luggage, and bodies through the train station (and its security x-ray machine) and onto the train platform. This took a LONG time, and was done with much sweat and scurrying, even though the same aforementioned percussion and brass guys did yeoman service. Then, we went down to the platform and prepared ourselves for the real mad dash -- getting all the equipment onto the train when it pulled into the station. The tour director had organized two teams of Chinese helpers in addition to the band guys, and to their credit, they did an absolutely amazing job of getting all the stuff onto the train. They had a kind of assembly line going – guys on the platform throwing luggage up to the boys on the train, who hauled the stuff as fast as they could into the compartment. Efficient – thank god for big strong Band guys and the Chinese helpers, not to mention Coop and Coyotebanjo – but extremely stressful, as Chinese trains are only allowed to stay at any given stop for 3 MINUTES. The tour director tried to get around this by assigning a small group of the girls to remain on the platform until everything was loaded – apparently the 3-minute rule could be circumvented by the fact that the train is not allowed to leave if there is anyone left standing on the platform. (I wonder how the train conductors deal with this conundrum?)
When all was loaded (hardly settled, but loaded), we all piled onto the train and found our sleeping compartments. These really were not too bad. (The Chinese hotel beds were about as cushy as a marble slab anyhow, so it didn’t seem that much different.) There were 6 beds in each compartment, 3 beds on each side, one above the other. The band director had assigned lower bunks to me and Coyotebanjo and a middle one to Coop, but I traded with Coop because the headroom wasn’t really enough for a guy (I pity the poor big American band guys in the top bunks, but they fell asleep instantly, so I guess they were fine.) My only problem was that the KFC chickenburger (absolutely no vegetarian options, so forget it) had my guts in a knot, which caused a difficult and not-very-restful night for me. (Squat-potties on a moving Chinese train at 3 am . . . the hostels in Ireland are going to seem like palaces.)
Coyotebanjo and Coop seemed to be fine, and I think they had fun. The tour director had gotten a bag of snacks for each of us, so there were sweets and some chips and fruit. Coyote & Coop bought a few beers from the vendor on the train (that guy did land-office business that night – he had a compartment full of American band kids who were legal in China.) There was a short search for a bottle opener, whereupon someone found the following sign on the table between the sleeping bunks:
Below the table is device for
liberating bottles from their caps.
Coop also opened the most recent bottle of Chinese baijiu they had procured back in Suzhou, I think, or was it Changzhou? Anyhow, this stuff, made out of sorghum, makes Irish poitín seem like Dom Pérignon. When searching for a picture of baijiu, I found the following description on the web:
Usually made by distilling sorghum, it is not unlike vodka in looks. The similarities end there however. Its subtle sweetness gives one an initial "this ain't so bad" feeling, which is quickly followed by panic and a rapid search of your memory for all available objects that might assist you in removing it from your system.
Seeking to share the abundance, Coop went up to one of the University Band professors and offered him some of the baijiu, asking him if he wanted to “try some Chinese Bang Bang.” This became one of the Most Memorable Quotes of the trip.
The train trip was pretty stressful for a number of our group. The train did move around a lot, which oddly didn’t bother me in terms of motion sickness (I knew trains don’t bother me, unlike boats and planes), but the motion got to some people. Also, being a train in Asia, there were only squat-pots, and if you’re not terribly adept at them, the motion of the train doesn’t help. I did fine with it, but I think there were some people on that train who held it for 10 hours, which is just not healthy.
When morning came, we all sat around and looked out the train window, watching the scenery change as we approached Beijing. One of the things we noticed was the staggering amount of construction that was happening all over China, but it got even more pronounced as we approached Beijing. The country is changing, at lightning speed. We saw quite a diverse landscape out the window: beautiful gardens on the one hand, depressing slums on the other. There were also a lot of brick-making construction sites (which are apparently the hot-point of a number of slave-labor and forced-labor issues, I discovered later.)
Finally, we reached Beijing, and the same scramble for bags and equipment happened in reverse order. Miraculously, everyone had all their belongings, except for the little red and black bag Coyotebanjo and I had bought in Changzhou, which had in it all the presents Ming gave me and a bunch of other stuff. (Our bags had been distributed all over the train compartment in order to have enough room.) Coyotebanjo and The tour director somehow talked the conductor into letting us back into the now-locked train, and Coyotebanjo found the bag quickly.
The heavy equipment was put on a van. It then became clear that we all had to walk, with all of our suitcases, instruments, and various paraphernalia, out of the train station (not a small distance) and then a couple of city blocks to where the buses were waiting. At this point in the story, I ask you to ponder the concept of a train station in a country with 1.3 Billion people. Perhaps a picture would work better:
The street was a total mass of humanity, and we were all moving at different speeds. In this sort of situation, someone my height has trouble seeing the rest of the group, but I did OK, although I frankly thought that for most of us, it was way too long a walk to carry that much crap.
Somehow, all 66 of us got to the buses. We were introduced to our tour guides, Maggie and Lisa (it’s very common for the guides to assume a western name. It’s supposedly for the ease of the western tourists, but probably also so they don’t have to be subjected to hearing us butcher their Chinese names.) They were wonderful; friendlym entertaining, and informative. Off we went to the hotel in Beijing – tired, but full of adrenaline to finally be in Beijing, where the biggest concert would take place, where many of us were greatly anticipating some of the sight-seeing activities, and where Coyotebanjo, Coop and I actually would play a session at a pub.
Next: climbing up the Great Wall of China.
After the concert, though, began a chapter of the trip that I personally found fairly stressful. There was a mad rush to get all the instruments and equipment back on the bus, because we had to catch the night train to Beijing. That was done with amazing efficiency, thanks to a number of very proactive students (especially the percussion section leader, who was a great organizer). The bus to the train station was longer than I thought it would be, so people were fairly sleepy by the time we got there – and then we had the incredibly challenging task of getting everyone’s instruments, equipment, luggage, and bodies through the train station (and its security x-ray machine) and onto the train platform. This took a LONG time, and was done with much sweat and scurrying, even though the same aforementioned percussion and brass guys did yeoman service. Then, we went down to the platform and prepared ourselves for the real mad dash -- getting all the equipment onto the train when it pulled into the station. The tour director had organized two teams of Chinese helpers in addition to the band guys, and to their credit, they did an absolutely amazing job of getting all the stuff onto the train. They had a kind of assembly line going – guys on the platform throwing luggage up to the boys on the train, who hauled the stuff as fast as they could into the compartment. Efficient – thank god for big strong Band guys and the Chinese helpers, not to mention Coop and Coyotebanjo – but extremely stressful, as Chinese trains are only allowed to stay at any given stop for 3 MINUTES. The tour director tried to get around this by assigning a small group of the girls to remain on the platform until everything was loaded – apparently the 3-minute rule could be circumvented by the fact that the train is not allowed to leave if there is anyone left standing on the platform. (I wonder how the train conductors deal with this conundrum?)
When all was loaded (hardly settled, but loaded), we all piled onto the train and found our sleeping compartments. These really were not too bad. (The Chinese hotel beds were about as cushy as a marble slab anyhow, so it didn’t seem that much different.) There were 6 beds in each compartment, 3 beds on each side, one above the other. The band director had assigned lower bunks to me and Coyotebanjo and a middle one to Coop, but I traded with Coop because the headroom wasn’t really enough for a guy (I pity the poor big American band guys in the top bunks, but they fell asleep instantly, so I guess they were fine.) My only problem was that the KFC chickenburger (absolutely no vegetarian options, so forget it) had my guts in a knot, which caused a difficult and not-very-restful night for me. (Squat-potties on a moving Chinese train at 3 am . . . the hostels in Ireland are going to seem like palaces.)Coyotebanjo and Coop seemed to be fine, and I think they had fun. The tour director had gotten a bag of snacks for each of us, so there were sweets and some chips and fruit. Coyote & Coop bought a few beers from the vendor on the train (that guy did land-office business that night – he had a compartment full of American band kids who were legal in China.) There was a short search for a bottle opener, whereupon someone found the following sign on the table between the sleeping bunks:
liberating bottles from their caps.
Coop also opened the most recent bottle of Chinese baijiu they had procured back in Suzhou, I think, or was it Changzhou? Anyhow, this stuff, made out of sorghum, makes Irish poitín seem like Dom Pérignon. When searching for a picture of baijiu, I found the following description on the web:Usually made by distilling sorghum, it is not unlike vodka in looks. The similarities end there however. Its subtle sweetness gives one an initial "this ain't so bad" feeling, which is quickly followed by panic and a rapid search of your memory for all available objects that might assist you in removing it from your system.
Seeking to share the abundance, Coop went up to one of the University Band professors and offered him some of the baijiu, asking him if he wanted to “try some Chinese Bang Bang.” This became one of the Most Memorable Quotes of the trip.
The train trip was pretty stressful for a number of our group. The train did move around a lot, which oddly didn’t bother me in terms of motion sickness (I knew trains don’t bother me, unlike boats and planes), but the motion got to some people. Also, being a train in Asia, there were only squat-pots, and if you’re not terribly adept at them, the motion of the train doesn’t help. I did fine with it, but I think there were some people on that train who held it for 10 hours, which is just not healthy.
When morning came, we all sat around and looked out the train window, watching the scenery change as we approached Beijing. One of the things we noticed was the staggering amount of construction that was happening all over China, but it got even more pronounced as we approached Beijing. The country is changing, at lightning speed. We saw quite a diverse landscape out the window: beautiful gardens on the one hand, depressing slums on the other. There were also a lot of brick-making construction sites (which are apparently the hot-point of a number of slave-labor and forced-labor issues, I discovered later.)
Finally, we reached Beijing, and the same scramble for bags and equipment happened in reverse order. Miraculously, everyone had all their belongings, except for the little red and black bag Coyotebanjo and I had bought in Changzhou, which had in it all the presents Ming gave me and a bunch of other stuff. (Our bags had been distributed all over the train compartment in order to have enough room.) Coyotebanjo and The tour director somehow talked the conductor into letting us back into the now-locked train, and Coyotebanjo found the bag quickly.
The heavy equipment was put on a van. It then became clear that we all had to walk, with all of our suitcases, instruments, and various paraphernalia, out of the train station (not a small distance) and then a couple of city blocks to where the buses were waiting. At this point in the story, I ask you to ponder the concept of a train station in a country with 1.3 Billion people. Perhaps a picture would work better:
The street was a total mass of humanity, and we were all moving at different speeds. In this sort of situation, someone my height has trouble seeing the rest of the group, but I did OK, although I frankly thought that for most of us, it was way too long a walk to carry that much crap.
Somehow, all 66 of us got to the buses. We were introduced to our tour guides, Maggie and Lisa (it’s very common for the guides to assume a western name. It’s supposedly for the ease of the western tourists, but probably also so they don’t have to be subjected to hearing us butcher their Chinese names.) They were wonderful; friendlym entertaining, and informative. Off we went to the hotel in Beijing – tired, but full of adrenaline to finally be in Beijing, where the biggest concert would take place, where many of us were greatly anticipating some of the sight-seeing activities, and where Coyotebanjo, Coop and I actually would play a session at a pub.
Next: climbing up the Great Wall of China.
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
China Trip Notes, Chapter 8: Lost in Yangzhou (5.26.2008)
To Secretary Chiu on an Autumn Night
Out walking and singing of cooler days
I think of you on an autumn night
Pinecones falling on deserted slopes
The recluse I suspect not asleep
[Wei Ying-Wu, from Poems of the Masters: China’s Classic Anthology of T’ang and Sung Dynasty Verses, transl. Red Pine (2003.)]
In his notes to the above poem, translator Red Pine tells us that Wei Yin Wu (737-792), prefect of Suzhou, wrote this poem to Ch’iu Tan, who had served briefly as his secretary and was the younger brother of the poet Ch’iu Wei. Ch’iu Tan had left his secretary post and retired to a hermitage to cultivate the Tao. The poem was written during the Mid-Autumn Festival, when relatives and friends usually gather, and Wei is imagining that his friend must be lonely. The hermitage was Pingshan -- which was also the location of Daming Temple, in Yangzhou.
The city of Yangzhou is 2500 years old. Being a major port of Silk Road trade, it was home to a number of Arab and Persian merchants in the 7th-8th centuries, until they were massacred in a rebellion. In 1280, according to Wikipedia, it was the site of a massive gunpowder explosion that was felt a huge distance away. Shortly thereafter, Marco Polo lived there while working for Kublai Khan; and there is evidence of an Italian community there as late as the 1400’s (!). Later, in the 19th century, the city fell into decline as railroads took precedence over the canal. The restoration of the canal and the construction of a railway line between Yangzhou and Nanjing have put it on the map again as a center of trade. Wikipedia tells us that Yangzhou is famous for its public bath houses, lacquerware, jadeware, embroidery, paper-cut art, and its toy industry.
As you approach the city by car or bus, you go over an absolutely enormous and quite dramatic suspension bridge over the Yangtze river. It reminded me a lot of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, except that the scenery below it was utterly different (subtropical, flat river valley rather than temperate, hilly ocean bay.) It was almost unbelievable to me that I could actually be looking out at the Yangtze, the third longest river in the world (only the Nile and the Amazon are longer), roughly 3900 miles long from its source in the Himalayas to Shanghai, where it flows into the East China Sea. Now sadly quite polluted, it is still an awesome sight.
As for the experience of Yangzhou itself, well, that turns out to be one of the more dramatic three-hour periods of the trip. It happens sometimes that you go to a place, and you’re not there for very long – but the memory of what happened there is engraved on your brain. When writing in my travel notebook in the bus on the way to Yangzhou, I prophetically wrote “This day will be interesting.”
The bus got to Yangzhou just before lunch, and there was a big meal prepared for us at the hotel. (French fries appeared on the buffet, to great collective joy.) There wasn’t much point in unpacking, because we were scheduled to go directly from the evening’s concert to the train station in order to catch an overnight train to Beijing – too bad, it was a very nice hotel (Guangyuan Dingshan Hotel.)
Anyhow, we had about 3 and a half hours for some R&R, so Coyotebanjo and I decided to go check out the Daming Temple. We took along the map provided in the hotel magazine, complete with Chinese characters for different locations (quite handy), and caught a cab at the hotel. The cab driver seemed concerned, and gave us a long explanation in Chinese, complete with hand gestures done in a circular motion. Finally, he pointed to the city map, made a small version of the same circle, and we understood that for some reason he couldn’t take us directly there via the shortest route, but had to go around the city. We said that was OK.
He wasn’t kidding – it took a long time. But halfway there, we discovered why – we saw tens of thousands of people lining the streets, and several street blockades. The Olympic Torch! It had left Suzhou and made it up to Yangzhou.
At long last, we arrived at the hill where Daming Temple is located. It’s a gorgeous area, on the north-northwest side of town; actually a whole compound that includes several temples and a pagoda – I would say an entire monastery complex. It’s accessed by a very long succession of shallow stone stairs that goes all the way up the hill, assuring that you’ll be winded (in that heat) by the time you reach the top. When we reached it, we had a decision to make: go into the temple (admission charge), or go down to the lake-park at the bottom of the hill? We went with the temple, which was the right choice.
According to the DK Eyewitness Guide to China, Daming Su is the “Temple of Abundant Light” and was built sometime in the 5th century; however, it’s been rebuilt, since it got wrecked in the Taiping Rebellion in the 1800s. Its central hall was put up in 1973 to honor the 8th century monk Jian Zhen (Ganjin in Japanese, I think) who is credited with introducing many aspects of Chinese culture and Zen to Japan. In fact, the Toshodai-ji temple in Nara, Japan, was the model for the rebuild, which was also at least partially funded by the Japanese. 
I wish I could describe the inside of these temples adequately. There are huge golden statues of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The walls are lined with statues of dozens of Arhats (Enlightened ones). There is every kind of decorative painting, carving. sacred objects, incense, flowers, candles, lamps, altars, floor cushions…and I mean from the floor to the high ceiling. 
After viewing the main altar, one walks around to the back, only to discover another absolutely huge (25 feet? 30 feet?) statue of Kuan Yin, the somewhat androgynous Chinese and Japanese version of the compassionate Avalokiteshvara or Tara figure. She is emptying her vase of compassion onto the world. All around her and above her are dozens of creatures, humans and otherwise, representing all the Six Realms (Coyotebanjo said, “It’s Indra’s Web.”) The figures are carved in such a way that they jut out from the wall, which instead of going straight up vertically, curves inward in such a way that the figures all sort of loom above the viewer very dramatically. Coyotebanjo and I were completely blown away by this, and stayed for a few minutes to just look at it and attempt to take some pictures.
After that mind-blowing experience, we strolled around the grounds, looking at the various buildings (tea house, huge pagoda, various temples, gardens…) all of which were quite amazing. We had not expected it to be a whole compound, so we were starting to get a little concerned about the amount of time passing – we were supposed to get on the bus with the band at 4:30, and we wanted to be back by 3:30 to shower and relax a bit. Reluctantly, we left, and walked back down the narrow stone steps to the street.
Having left Daming Temple, we found a cab fairly quickly. The cab driver once again delivered a long and involved disquisition in Chinese, which we understood to be about the Torch procession. We tried using the same “go the long way around” sign language, pointing to the map that we had used before, and the cab driver appeared to agree.
To our chagrin, however, he got to a point that was probably all of a half-mile north of our hotel, and reached a place where both the east-west road, on which the procession was taking place, and the north-south road that crossed it, were both blocked. There he stopped and made us get out. We tried to communicate the “Go the long way around” thing again, but he either didn’t understand or was having none of it. A couple of local officials noticed, strolled over and tried to figure out what was happening, but were unhelpful. Finally the cab driver pantomimed “walking,” and we thought OK, that’s that – he’s saying You Walk Now, and there’s no two ways about it. We decided that we would try to find another cab and see if we could point to the hotel on the map (again) and communicate the “long way around” option.
Well, there was no such luck. No cabs to be found – they were all avoiding the area because they couldn’t get anywhere. So we walked a block south up to the road where the crowd was gathering (and a noisy insane mess it was), and tried to explain to the cops that we needed to get to our hotel (enthusiastic smiling and map-pointing) and simply needed to cross the street. No way – no one got to cross the street, not Chinese, not lost Americans, not nobody. This was all being communicated while dozens of Chinese citizens on their bikes and scooters were also howling at the cops in Chinese, because they also wanted to get across the street, and the police simply weren’t having it.
So, we turned east and attempted to walk in the opposite direction from the crowd. Since many of them were emanating from that direction, we figured that there must be a parking area somewhere to the east, and might therefore find the nearest cross-street that was just beyond the barricade. We walked… and walked… and walked. It was sweltering; high 80s and extremely humid. I was soaked. It’s probably an exaggeration to say that we were totally lost – we were going east in a fairly straight line, and we did have a map, but our anxiety was starting to build. We finally came to a group of cops who did attempt to help, but were absolutely not going to allow us to cross to the south. One of them, a woman who spoke a few words of English, said “Wait one moment please,” which we did, expectantly, and finally she said “Wait one moment until 5:00.” (It was 3:15.) Well, that wasn’t going to work, because the band bus left at 4:30, but there was no chance of us communicating that. Finally Coyotebanjo managed to somehow communicate (he is very good at this) that we were looking for a route to get around the barricade even if we had to walk. One of the cops pointed east and pantomimed that we should keep walking that way (at least our instincts were right.). So we walked…and walked…some more. Sweat. Pouring. Down. Faces. Coyotebanjo was starting to say “We’re going to miss the concert. We’re going to miss the bus.” I suggested that we call the tour director and the band director, and simply tell them the situation, and say that we would get a cab to the gig later. Unfortunately, though, as often happens in a foreign country, we obviously didn’t have the right code or exchange, because the calls did not go through, raising our stress levels even farther.
If you ever want a recipe for anxiety, try being lost in a city where you can’t even read street signs, can’t communicate, can’t make your calls work, everyone around you is in a state of high mob excitement, and you’re sweating so profusely that the salt is rolling into your eyes and making them sting. It really sucks. I wasn’t exactly panicked; I mean, we were not in any physical danger (except maybe heat-stroke). I knew that even if we missed the bus, we would be able to get back to the hotel eventually, even if we walked all the way; and that eventually the torch parade would go by, and we could get a cab to the concert venue. What troubled me was that we couldn’t reach anyone back at the hotel, and if we didn’t show up for the bus everyone there would be in a panic wondering what had happened to us, and they’d have half the Yangzhou police force looking for us. (In retrospect, I realize that would have worked rather well; several of the cops had encountered us, after all.)
We walked for what seemed like miles through an area that appeared to be some sort of pedestrian market, with a narrow paved lane in the middle, but not wide enough for traffic. It went on and on and on.
Then we saw some large modern high-rise buildings in the distance. Aha, we’re getting somewhere – but no, it was clear from the crowd movement that the torch blockade still extended to this point. Now we were really feeling desperate.
In the Buddhist pantheon, there is a deity called Tara. She is the female Buddha of Compassion and Enlightened Activity, and it is said that “Tara comes swiftly to help those in need.” My Tibetan teachers had told us this many times; if you are in extreme physical or emotional circumstances, call upon the swift and helpful energy of the Tara mantra. I actually hesitated for a moment, because I didn’t want to use the Tara mantra “call for help” lightly. It seems to me that this particular use of the Tara mantra calls for situations such as extreme turbulence at 30 thousand feet or a truck barreling down the road at you. However, I thought: OK—we’re in China, we’re lost, I’m getting pretty freaked out, Coyotebanjo is getting freaked out, we can’t speak Chinese, we’re seriously overheated, we can’t find a cab, and we can’t reach our friends, so I guess we qualify as being in need. And, for goodness sake, I was just standing in front of her statue at Daming; or at least her Chinese-Japanese manifestation! So I started saying Tara mantra quietly to myself. After the equivalent of about another city block we could see a large street with the canal just beyond it – there was no going past the canal, but maybe – just maybe -- the main thoroughfare would be open to traffic, since it was running perpendicular to the Torch route…we got to the street and crossed, and started looking in vain for a cab. Om Tare…Very few cabs passed; the ones that did were full. No one was stopping at all, or even slowing down; it was decidedly not a place where vehicles stopped. Om Tare tuttare ture soha! Help!
Suddenly, a small black car passed, pulled a (terrifying) U-turn in the middle of the thoroughfare, and screeched to a halt next to us. About 5 or 6 young Chinese people piled out of the car, including the driver, who had a camera, and the young woman who’d been in the front passenger seat, who had a reporter’s notepad in which she was scribbling quickly. They rushed up to us and explained – In English! English! – that they were from the Yangzhou Daily News, and were we American? Were we here to see the Olympics? Of course – being the two obvious Americans in a huge crowd of Chinese, we had instantly attracted the attention of reporters. We were still so stunned that they spoke English that we were sort of stuttering out answers – Coyotebanjo explained that we were musicians, and that we had a concert, and we were quite worried because we got caught up in the street blockade, and were lost, and trying desperately to get back to our hotel…and while he was explaining this, they were thrusting little red Chinese flags and Olympic flags into our hands, and snapping photos and asking questions excitedly. “You like China?” Correct response: smile, brush salty sweat out of eyes, wave little flags, and say “We love China!” (And we did love the Chinese people we met...later for all the politics!) When they finally understood the hotel situation, the woman with the notepad had a quick conversation with the three young women who had been in the back seat – I am quite certain from her gestures that she said “Stay here, we’ll come back for you,” and then gestured to us, pointed to the back seat of the car, smiled, and said “We will take you directly to your hotel.” Who knew that Tara works for the Yangzhou Daily News, and rides in a tiny little black car? They did, in fact, maneuver through the crowd, find the one allowable crossing through the roadblock, and take us back to the very door of the hotel, while we tried repeatedly to express our gratitude to them.
Incredibly, we had enough time to go back to our room, stand exhausted, dumbstruck, and grateful in the shower (never has a shower been so welcome!), pack our stuff for the overnight train, make ourselves presentable for the gig, and get to the band bus with a few minutes to spare. As for having time enough to let the experience “sink in” – I don’t think that’s happened yet.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)