The Shuffle Demons just back from China
Yes, the Shuffle Demons just completed a 6 city 3 week tour of China. What an amazing experience. I will have more detailed blog emtries soon, but here's a little sampling of my impressions of the place. Had a wonderful time, ate some great food, played for some bewildered Chinese peasants come city dwellers...the whole trip was drenched in irony, as on May Day, May Day, the holiest of holy days for communism, we were shilling for condo developers in front of a half finished mall that was chalk full of condo demonstration booths. Audience members had to navigate through a phalanx of pamphlet pushers, stuffing ads for condos with names like crystal hills and cool mountain and prideful village into the rusty baskets of their heavy Chinese bicycles, dreaming of the day when they could afford a concrete box in the sky. I'd definitely rather live in the village at street level, seems a lot more fun to me, but I haven't done it all my life, farming the hard soil, fishing the increasingly polluted rivers , breathing the toxic air while dragging the mule out to the fields.
These are the days of the neon revolution, a revolution fired with cheap coal and cheap labour, a revolution built on the backs of a steady stream of cloth shoed workers, digging day and night, 1 floor every 24 hours. They are the Yellow Army, their hard hats gleaming in the night work lights, their wives cooking in the portable labour camps that are set up right next to the job site, cubicles stacked 5 stories high a stones throw from the every present cranes, plumbing on the outside. This is the Yellow Army on the vertical march of progress, leading to mutually assured destruction of heritage and homesteads, the antiseptic Singapore-designed industrial village rising on the ashes of a nearby town where the kids chased pigs through the cool mud and old men fished by the river as they always had. Now gleaming towers stand amid gardens of show plants and odd sculptures, a disney land with the death penalty for expats and the few Chinese who have the connections, balls or education to afford...the good life. Was it such a bad life before? When the kids ran around with slits in their pants, no need for diapers. Now advertisers jump on this vast, emerging market and peddle a whole host of Western vices to a burgeoning middle class. Diapers, so your baby can be like an American baby and be resposible for the death of several trees and the filling of a landfill with kiddie waste and fibre. Whitening cream, so your skin will be a ghastly ghostly pale, more like the white expats here to sell you junk and party with the daughters of the revolution. And for those aspiring daughters, breast enlargement ensured by pill and cream, the little fat molecules driven to the breasts if by magic. And, from a basement warehouse in LA, 70's deadstock fat jigglers, the revolutionary burning belts that were all the rage at one time or another....ahhh, impressions of China.
The air in Beijing thick enough to block the sun, so on a cloudless day it is reduced to an amorphous glow somewhere in the sky. It's impossible to navigate by sun moon or stars because they just aren't visible. climbed the great wall and boy were my lungs sore, let alone my legs! I eventually dubbed Beijing Etobeijing, riffing on the name of a hapless Toronto suburb, it felt so similar, travelling down shapeless freeways past rows and rows and rows of condos and sprawl. We finally rented bikes in Beijing so that we could get downtown and explore the Hutongs, the little backstreets that give the city so much character. Dumplings 8 for 40¢, beer for $1.20, why bother cooking, good food is everywhere! More news soon.