Intelligent Design

After five days straight of teaching 6 hours a day and eating at restaurants in the other hours, I had two days free. The first, yesterday, was the 4-hour bullet train ride to Shanghai. I looked forward to taking in some landscape beyond the urban and it was more pleasant than the plane. But at least from the train window, it was hard to get a feeling for anything that might have passed for an interesting village. No sight of charming towns with unique architecture and each house different. Just the generic hi-rise apartments and some low-rise as well amidst fields and occasional waterways. 

 

Not that any conclusions can be drawn from that little slice of experience, but I do know that all the hutongs in Beijing, those neighborhoods that had their intimate and unique characters, were purposely razed to make way for the generic, with practicality, economics and efficiency winning over character and tradition. In fact, during Mao’s time, there was a mandate to reject the “Four Olds”— old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas. Like any culture, there was good reason to reject some of the old ways and good riddance— foot-binding, for example. But it makes no more sense to mindlessly reject everything— the wisdom of Lao Tzu or the teaching of the Zen Buddhist patriarchs, for example— than to mindlessly perpetuate everything. What’s left— at least architecturally— is a monochromatic one-size-and-shape-fits-all aesthetic. Not my style, to say the least. 

 

Greeted by Chen Ro, long-time Orff colleague who will be my translator and her assistant who handed me an enormous bouquet of flowers to welcome me. Off to the hotel in 95-degree heat and out to an early dinner in an outdoor mall built around artificially-made canals. It was all new and “fake,” yet certainly more pleasing than the indoor malls and sitting out by the water reminded me of the lovely time in Llubljana, Slovenia. Except it actually was too hot to sit outdoors. Still, I could enjoy the view from the window at our Spanish tapas place eating churros with chocolate. 

 

An evening collating the notes from the last course and considering what new things to do for this one and an early bedtime. Awoke at 5:30 am pretty much ready to start the day and had the good sense to get out walking in the early morning before the projected 97 degrees hit its stride. Even at 6 am, it was already 83! So off to explore the neighborhood, which turns out to be a very wealthy residential area, with tree-lined streets thankfully providing welcome shade and a few little parks already filled with folks exercising their way into the day. From the individual joggers to the group dance classes and even some folks playing basketball. Passed an area with various stores and it’s mostly the same-old same-old American colonialism—Starbucks, Burger King, Subway and the like. 

 

Back to the hotel for the buffet breakfast and there was the same background piano music playing as in Beijing. I have an obvious affection for the pentatonic scale (do-re-mi-so-la), having taught so much pentatonic music to kids and teachers. I named my publishing company Pentatonic Press and my jazz band is called Doug Goodkin & the Pentatonics. But when you play insipid pentatonic melodic ramblings on the piano accompanied by arpeggiated F, G and A-minor chords in the left hand, the effect is maddening. I imagine it’s politically incorrect to evoke the Chinese water torture, but the metaphor is apt as those maddening plinkings hit the ear without a break while trying to enjoy one’s breakfast. Aargh! The quiet equivalent of the unchanging pulsing disco beat I’ve ranted about before. Variety, subtlety, nuance and intelligent design is what we should all aspire to, be it in music, architecture, poetry or thoughtful discourse. 

 

Which brings me to 9:00 am, the thermometer at 92 and the hotel swimming pool beckoning me.  (8/25)