Mic Check yee er, yee er...

Mic Check Yee Er, Yee Er…

So I’ve been halfway expecting to wake up with a plastic placemat stuck to my cheek at the Fortune Cookie on South 7th to be served some variation of Lo Mein with a side of collard greens with hot sauce and a plastic cup of red Flavor Aid. But somewhere between the smells of rice flour and air pollution, sewage and green tea, the feel of the Great Wall beneath my feet, chopsticks between my fingertips, fish lips on my tongue, and the symphony of traffic horns resonating through my tympanic membranes…I’ve realized that this is real. Not a movie on the theater screen behind my eyelids, not a nap at the Fortune Cookie owned by a white man, run by a Vietnamese family. No pajamas and men flying through the air, not cliché music to strike emotional chords for a Shaolin showdown. Not this tune…

I’ve been tapping my finger and my feet to the heartbeat of a different composer, a new aarangement. A curiously familiar yet unknown scale, a heterophonic composition of senses, yet still so syncretic. Not a line or a curve, a predictable progression of chords, novice notes fit to induce auditory narcolepsy. Not this tune. Rather, it emanates without defined measure from cruising bicycles, construction cranes with mechanical calls, and afternoon market exchanges that leave an assortment of shellfish and fruits pressed to the pavement with footprints. It manifests itself in smiles and head nods, bounces from soccer balls kicked through broken brick-paved alleys, rises with the dust stirred by buses, by rickshaws, a breeze…dances down neon billboards and melts away into the horizon, blending with industrial exhalents and orange sun.

This is China…a piece at least. A very small piece, indeed, but ask the 28 million people whose air I breathed and they’ll convince you of its grandness. At least some…perhaps most. 28 million notes on a three dimensional page, inked in an unpredictable but perceptible pattern, revealed in unmetered metrics and unrhymed rhythms of respiration knitted with red…Script down high rises wrapped along rivers, banners in windows, lanterns above doorways. Luck, happiness, and wealth exhaled on streets, on beats… Skies that make you think you have tinted eyes, smoke blotting sun, hands rubbing particles deposited by a gust of PM born from growth—son of industrialization, daughter of a global economy that produces still water the color of winterfresh Scope, outlining those on the margins. An intermixing of old and new (like “nold” or “oew”?). Like a cover song, a sample of historic majesty panning left to right from towers with more floors than Home Depot: concrete speakers of a new generation, a new era built around a bassline heavy with hope and inequality that lingers like a Taj Mahal reverb…

It’s where 70 year-olds on bicycles play chicken against the flow of oncoming rush-(24)-hour traffic, where crossing the street is a game of human Frogger. It’s where Bally Total Fitness is on street corners right next to salons and dumpling stands, almost indistinguishable from the playground across the street where the little ones race to see who can burn the most calories and contract the most microbes in the Mouth Exploration/Taste Testing Olympics (which I won in 1986, by the way). It’s where I ate until my stomach greeted my diaphragm, where 18 dishes spinning on a glass table is the perfect recipe for great, thrice back-translated conversation, taste bud euphoria, and a nap (and carpal tunnel for those new to the chopsticks game). It’s where the Bar Stucks sandwich I ate in the Beijing airport was the most offensive thing my mouth and stomach encountered throughout my endeavors. It’s where I realized I have random and intermittent ADD, my people watching and observation tendencies getting the best of my neck (but I suppose that could have been the 16 hours of flying, the 37 20-minute naps in a pressurized coffee canister with wanna-be Laz-E-Boys and progressive BO and bad breath)…

But my attention was, in fact, paid…in full (shout out to the R). A balcony seat to witness a score with more than one kid of movement. Captivating like an improv beatbox on a crowded city bus or subway car, a freestyle session derived from some random word on a neon sign, or a breakdance in Tiananmen Square. It’s where I spent 8 days without music and never missed a beat, where breathing and being provided the only soundtrack. An of course I want to return for a remix. But until then, I’ll just sample tracks from my memories (pls. post photos, thanks.), and tap my finger as long as the rhythm remains, rhy-rhythm remains, rhythm-rhythm remains, remains, remains (fade out here), remains….

peas,

r to the...