stranger and stranger

The other day I left Tiananmen and moved 'tentatively to venture, down the hutongs....in which were to be discovered little buildings, whole little communities, that existed almost in the crevices of the modern city...Hawkers pushed handcarts of peaches or spinach [read cabbages or oranges]. Tailors worked outside at ancient tradle sewing machines and old men and old women meditatively smoked...As Anna [read little] lost herself there, irretrievably foreign, she felt the gazes of others resting upon her, like the lightest of touches on the nape of the neck, like a lover's caress. And when the gazes at last accumulated to the point of disturbing her, she would make her way back to the main roads...

'The bicyclists of Beijing...moved processionally everywhere: in their inordinate numbers and slow-moving continuity they gave the city a kind of animated and silken effect, recalling a rippling of fabric, a perpectual motino of undulation...' Language 'seemed to have altered...the more keenly she listened the more the language was complicated, the more sounds and circuitous patterns it contained. Her hope of achieving a tiny vocabulary of a few pragmatic phrases faded entirely away. She found herself feeling muted...'

Gail Jones, 'Touching Tiananmen'

aussie beer

last night i had a cascade at the australian embassy's bar in beijing. yessir, contacts.

the bar is horrible and more like a canteen in a 1980s hospital.

ahoy there

the world wide web is a little restricted over here. from beijing, i can't access the bbc's website (though i can get to cnn; or the abc); and i can't see any blogs at blogspot.com.

but i have just found i can post! so i send this out there blindly

beijing is cold and smoggy (on days with no wind it thickens and the light becomes a brown-y orange). the pollution is unbelievable; it feels like you're losing a few years from your lifespan simply through breathing it in. worse is that beijing itself is cleaner than other areas - hard to believe when you first arrive, but travelling out west the smog actually increases. they've cleaned up the beijing area a lot - which means that the industrial factories are still pumping away, just not as near as they once were.

it's rare though to see people wearing breathing masks; in fact, those i have seen wear them are the street sweepers. cyclists usually don't - though this could be because of the time of year; maybe it's worse at other times.

and it really is bike city! there are thousands, millions of bikes! but there are also thousands of cars and trucks. no one bothers with indicators, or at times brakes - people just duck and weave through traffic, sounding a horn now and then, stopping traffic and doing a u-turn in the middle of the road if they make a mistake. it's bizarre and alarming at first, but there are very very few crashes. there are often bike lanes. and i know it's wrong but NO ONE WEARS HELMETS!!! ah, the freedom! i had forgotten that feeling. just jump on your bike and ride away, hair streaming out behind you...loving it.

bikes are cheap and usually oldish; they normally make a clanking sound, whether it's an old mudguard (pretty much all bikes have them) or a wire basket or whatever. also surprising is that most bikes are what at home are girls bikes - without that middle bar. and few have gears. but the city's flat so you don't need them.

will try and post photos if this works -

tomorrow there's a flight.
sunday there's beijing.
then there's the rest of my life.

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8am: what a spectacular morning! such clear, adelaide-light and swimming pool blue sky - and just a little playful breeze now and then. It doesn't get better than this. Why does this always happen when you leave dammit?!!

...so much to answer for

look! A shimmering light display will hover over southern parts of Australia tonight. I wonder if we'll be able to see it
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beijing's weather? 11 clear
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Why Pamper Life's Complexities?
A Symposium on The Smiths
Manchester Institute of Popular Culture

oh no
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"SINGER Delta Goodrem celebrated her 20th birthday in style in Melbourneyesterday. Goodrem enjoyed an intimate lunch at exclusive venue No. 12 inKensington with her mother Lea, several friends and staff from herrecord company, Sony. The theme of the lunch was magic."

attempt to cover it up failed: delta has no friends. people from your record company?? they probably got paid to wear something 'magic' and attend.

DiXiaCheng

on second thoughts, it sounds dreary and potentially creepy; i may not go skating.

but i'll have to pop down to check it out.
--

I'd never heard of beijing's underground city until now. Apparently it's a large ug complex, built during the late 60s when China was worried about the Soviets dropping a bomb in their neighbourhood.

Downstairs are shops, theaters, hotels, restaurants, schools, factories...
Old Chinese documentary films made in the late 1970s show Beijing dwellers growing mushrooms and raising chickens in the dimly lit tunnels.

And there's even a roller skating rink. Skaters can descend to the cool depths 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily to rent skates and whiz over the spacious terrazzo floor.

Maybe I will.

if love had a form, it would be this.

(that soothing call is no metaphor)

write care of...

streets I have lived on (alphabetical):

devon st south
dukes lane
fernhill rd
fuller st
halifax st
penny place
vincent st
william st


halifax: this was the view from the halifax balcony (it's looking on to hutt, early morning)

i was looking for a picture of the one I love this morning when I found the above photo. It's not a good one, but it made me start thinking about places I have lived. Vincent, for instance, had the best house; but dukes was the coolest address. (this was one of the views from dukes:)

Devon st sth I rented from a great lady and a beautiful sleek black cat (Nesbit); I lived in a renovated, old old cottage, which was behind a big old house. After I moved out the lady sent me a note, saying she'd been diagnosed with terminal cancer. I hesitated over how to reply, and then moved house, and then lost the note and then found it again; and the day after I finally drafted a reply to her, I read that she had died. (It was within 5 months of being diagnosed.)

I walk past that house now almost every day. It's a bit out of my way, and it's hard to articulate why I do it; I don't think about it consciously any more, it's just something I do. When the light falls certain ways in that area, I think of her; it's her light, it's the light that coloured her expereinces; it's the light that she lived in.

I often wake at odd times, and, sometimes lately, in that not-awake-verging-on-dreaming state, I am sure I am in my bedroom at fernhill. Quite convinced. So I go back to sleep, and only when I wake up properly the next day do I realise that I am miles - years - away.

It's a strange thing, what the mind does with memories. They accumulate up there, pile upon pile; and they jangle sometimes when you turn your head quickly, or when the wind blows in a certain way, or in that particular light.

the lone custodian

We had Israeli TV, unnamed French officials and a French radio station stating that he was dead. And the Prime Minister of Luxembourg even announced that Mr Arafat had passed away."

ill? alive? brain dead? I thought this was news, but it seems everyone's already thinking about the dead body.

"...the main concern of Israeli security officials is that the Palestinians will try to bury their leader on what the Jews call the temple mount and what Muslims know as the Haram al-Sharif or noble sanctuary in the old city of Jerusalem. And this is arguably the most disputed site in the whole Israeli Palestinian conflict...Israel has said it will not allow Yasser Arafat to be buried in Jerusalem, but Israeli security chiefs fear that thousands of Palestinians could actually march on Jerusalem in an attempt to take Mr Arafat's body to the temple mount, or Haram al-Sharif as it's called. That would inevitably lead to serious clashes."

The world's a complete mess.

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and here's another example:
A United States National Guard F-16 fighter plane has mistakenly fired 25rounds of ammunition at the Little Egg Harbour Intermediate School in SouthNew Jersey...

A lone custodian was inside the building at the time, but was not hurt.

Damage is minimal as the non-exploding, 20 millimetre bullets left onlypuncture marks in the school's roof and the asphalt outside the building...An investigation is being conducted into how the pilot mistook the schoolfor a target range.

election results

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/scorecard/index.html

so much easier to run around town and comment on everyone else's blogs; my own...hmph. rather practice with my bows and arrows.

the sea, the sea

My great desire was to walk out over the sea as far as I could, and then lie flat on it, face downwards, and peer into the depths. I was tormented with this ambition, and, like many grown-up people, was so fully occupied by these vain and ridiculous desires that I neglected the actual natural pleasures around me.

This is about 1859. I'm rereading Edmund Gosse's delicate book, Father and Son. Right alongside Cousteau's The Silent World (1950s). They overlap in beautiful ways; Cousteau's ambitions and successes echo with the same desires that Gosse feels - but dismisses - a century before. And for both, such passion for the sea:

For a long time after the date I have now reached, no other form of natural scenery than the sea had any effect upon me at all. The tors of the distant moor might be drawn in deep blue against the pallor of our morning or our evening sky, but I never looked at them. It was the Sea, always the sea, nothing but the sea.