friday morning.
Permit me this indulgence.
In our off time we (meaning I, and occasionally James or Rory or Mike) like to sit around and talk music. Or I like to talk, and they listen courteously. It's a problem I have, this obsession, this belief that the wide spectrum that is 'Rock, etc.' is meaningful and artistic, in the sense that John Cheever or Bill Faulkner or Bill Shakespeare (all passed around on this trip) are artistic.
Assuming I would have little or no opportunity to wrangle with contemporary music over the course of the summer, I threw (without so much as an afterthought) a thirty-gigabyte iPod into my bag--brought no charger, no speakers, and the worst, most compact headphones I own. Luckily Mike supplied the first, and the last was supplanted by a wonderfully workable middle, two blue penguin sound-boxes snagged for less than fifteen American at Jishou Normal's neighborhood supermarket. In a matter of days James' and my room became a dorm room, albeit one ten thousand miles from Princeton with a slightly higher concentration of Communist/Maoist propaganda.
When I said indulgence, though, I meant it--I present to you, dear blog-follower, a playlist, hastily assembled over a teacher-family dinner during which Rory explained the 'On-the-go' function. Though I am enamored of travel, I consider this my first extended stay anywhere, and so this written thing is my foray into traveloguing, certainly a big toe in the pool of musical traveloguing. All apologies in advance.
"Did I Step on Your Trumpet," Danielson
Loud and thumping and choral, the song of our arrival in Jishou. A long train ride through moss-covered rock lands and valleys, through rice paddies and fields of unidentifiable vegetation, and we were finally there, or here, surrounded by students, Chinese teachers, enfolded by a red banner with absolutely passable English. I can't say I was in the best of moods, though I should have been and I felt as much. Lots of jostling and a night's sleep punctuated by trips up-cabin had made my smile a little less crisp at the edges. Danielson is a New Jersey band, a derivative of the Danielson Famile known for breaking Rutgers-area artists. And so the whole moment--tiny women lugging our bags down twelve flights of steps--jangled with familiarity, stomping to Mr. Daniels' frenetic cry, "Yes I know how to be quiet/Just one more thing/I made you something." Everyone handing us a bit of food or an email address or a little gift woven for the day.
"Stevie Nix," The Hold Steady
But I'm ahead of myself. As this document attests, we bounced through Henan before the 'e' shifted three spots down-vowel. Some days we listened to music, others we didn't, but on a particular patch of national highway Jack Johnson gave way to Fleetwood Mac and Rumours, and so Stevie Nix entered the mix. Warbling songbird that she is, "Landslide" land-slid over concrete building-tops and mole hills, around city rotaries dotted with peony flower and ancient pottery. Back in Jishou I found nothing to replicate that experience except this, a song name-checking Stevie Nix and drenching pleasant between-tourist-site reverie in reverb. On occasion I'll sit on my bed and blast this three-chord number and think of Deng Pheng, ten minutes from the Shaolin Monastery, taking in the countryside and taking it down.
"Summer Baby [7" version]," Pavement
Teaching with twelve brilliant and motivated individuals has made me more conscious of my own habits. Rory says I'm now a downright feelings man, but I don't believe it. Nevertheless, there is something do-it-yourself about this trip, and not in the balsa-and-wood-glue sense of the phrase. We are in semi-rural China presenting a curriculum we have written or rewritten or completely chucked, dancing at least four hours a day (sometimes more like ten), groping for meaning, dousing our own opinions in heavy, heavy Open-Mindedness. I can't really say this is anything like Pavement, a band far more suited to shopping malls between Passaic and Orange County, but "Summer Baby" is beautiful and whole in an outlandish way, with staples showing and puffy paint hardly dry. Cohesive and effective, but never finished. One gets the impression Stephen Malkmus set each track to a five-cut minimum then took the fifth. We do the same, and it's a blessing. I've never met such dynamic, adaptable people.
"The Funeral," Band of Horses
How easy, too, to become sentimental. We have been missing our students since the second week--imagining a time when they are memories or pictures, still in school in China while we crank out papers and theses and things across an ocean. Not forced or nurtured, just there, a basso continuo of bittersweet every time we step in classroom six for School of Rock or play practice. "At every occasion I'll be ready/For the funeral," B.o.H sings, and we tacitly agree. What motivation: only five weeks and so much to try. We think often of the end (less than a week) then buck up, prepare, deliver. O! the comfort we take in those ten or twenty smiling faces.
I have more note-like stuff to get through, if you don't mind too much. But first a meeting and lunch.
Thanks (and sorry).
chris.