A friend read the BBC's item. Here's his Ode to Beijing (my title!):
The point of capital is that it's long been a gruesome place to live, noisy, polluted, congested, oppressive. But paradoxically it felt like an endless CBGBs, somewhere where you could go out on a monday night and see a great Xinjiang folk act, French jazz on Tuesday, experimental noise on Wednesday, and so on. And it was at these "gigs" that the writers and intellectuals rubbed shoulders with the painters and the punks, where Westerners met Chinese on one of the most even playing fields in the country (including Hong Kong and Shanghai for sure). A place where the lingua franca was Chinese, when it's English elsewhere. It was where you could meet someone who'd invite you to their poetry reading in the Bookworm or the tea retreat in Yunnan. Yaogun was more than music, it was the glue binding those in China who hadn't just come to get shagged or source pleather bags for export to the Philippines. Without it we lose more than just the music.
Comments
A friend read the BBC's item. Here's his Ode to Beijing (my title!):
The point of capital is that it's long been a gruesome place to live, noisy, polluted, congested, oppressive. But paradoxically it felt like an endless CBGBs, somewhere where you could go out on a monday night and see a great Xinjiang folk act, French jazz on Tuesday, experimental noise on Wednesday, and so on. And it was at these "gigs" that the writers and intellectuals rubbed shoulders with the painters and the punks, where Westerners met Chinese on one of the most even playing fields in the country (including Hong Kong and Shanghai for sure). A place where the lingua franca was Chinese, when it's English elsewhere. It was where you could meet someone who'd invite you to their poetry reading in the Bookworm or the tea retreat in Yunnan. Yaogun was more than music, it was the glue binding those in China who hadn't just come to get shagged or source pleather bags for export to the Philippines. Without it we lose more than just the music.
Bruce Humes, May 25, 2016, 11:25a.m.