A great hello to all those who glow (and, most of all, those who glow but only dimly)! The observant reader of this blog would have very quickly identified the shift in diction in this post, and they would be absolutely right to see so. I am not, in fact, Ernest; but a secret other. Goodness knows where he is at the present moment. Is he listening, or doing, or reading? Who might know? And which of us who share in this Ernest-affection might know at the level of precision that we desire? I certainly do not.
Welcome to this special guest edition of Dim Afterglows! Take this however you wish; as a dry run for Ernest’s inevitable lifetime conscription to the film festival jury wing of the Internationale Secret Militia, or for his multi-continent jaunt to salvage (or, to use an Ernest word, “hoover up”,) discarded swag from the 1955 Bandung Conference. Or read this as its own self-testimony – of an ardent fan of the blog invited backstage to high-five the band and sputter wheezily into the backup microphone. Yes, fellow reader, envy me! I am living your dream.
We were in Hong Kong for a spell, and saw lots of stuff. Here I regress to the breathy list-making tendencies of a small child returned home from a school trip. We were on a plane! And then on a boat! And a train! Stations on the Hong Kong subway are tiled in distinct colours, and even then their shades are variegated in the most visually-amusing way.
After having lived in several major cities over the last few years – or even after simply having spent a significant amount of time in international airports – there is a certain worn cosmopolitanism that I’ve acquired. It does feel as though there is more that is similar of ‘global cities’ than there are attributes that differentiate them. And when I set out expressly to find these points of differentiation I am deeply, and resistively, aware of how this search could occur along essentialist lines of what a region’s ‘traditional culture’ might be. Touristic travel might be described as the kind of work that one does to avert their eyes from the overwhelming reality – that global cities work on similar, generalisable, principles. Once one figures out the workings of a subway or a travel guide or a short-term rental somewhere, a world of subways and travel guides and short-term rentals is theirs for the transacting.
Perhaps more to the point, the principles that global cities have in common are ones that facilitate use rather than any other orientation of being (say: observing, or wordless listening). And further, a necessary part of use and utility is its obscuration of its own inner workings. Restaurants and airplanes partition crew areas off from customer seating; subway maps shear away at subterranean geographical complexity with sleek geometrical approximation. When we frame global cities as infrastructures of use, what occurs is that, ironically, it obscures the very built strings that animate and give material form to these flows of use.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot while on holiday. Being on holiday is fun! It feels like playing catch-up with a whole other group of people, who have had years to make a life around and with the vagaries of water bodies and humidity and wind. In the time I spent not knowing Hong Kong (and in the time Hong Kong spent not knowing me), its people have had years to build bridges and trains, and then many more years to stream through them uneventfully.
If I haven’t said so already, being on holiday is so much fun! We saw so much! What a particular joy it is to hop a fence and clamber tentatively down into the wild brambles on the cliffside, only to find waiting stairs paved completely through to the shoreside. So we are not such strangers after all! For all that has been said and can be said of the sublime pleasure of being in an idyllic-nowhere, it also bears mentioning the pedestrian delight of finding that, where one presently treads, people and their little tools have been some time before. An adorably anthropogenic xuenihongzhua 雪泥鸿爪, if you will.
Consider the stairs! How did they get there?
Consider the chairs! And whoever said mutual aid was dead?
To be on a boat or atop a bridge or behind the counter of a kiosk is for the body to know the touch of settlement. Which is not to say that this touch is felt uncomplicatedly; either on account of natural ecosystems or of the communities with whom they are most intimately entwined. But there is pleasure in being surrounded by the things of people. At risk of sounding like I’ve translated something into a foreign language and back again: The flavour of people is all around!
I remember once being especially tickled when a Chinese teacher had described a school building as having grown into a short and plump form (“这座大厦长得矮矮胖胖的”); a descriptor commonly applied when talking about the physical appearances of people. I think of this as belonging to a similar category of “nature is healing” late-pandemic humour when public spaces had begun to open again, and people began to populate the urban wild anew with all of their idiosyncrasies. Why is it so striking to think about the physical-historical lives of other kinds of built structures in organic-biographical terms?
Left and Centre: I was so tickled by the staggered placement of bananas at this stall in Choi Hung – each comb was mounted at different heights (and as single bunches of bananas); almost as if they had each come into their positions through the incidental means of having budded up and sprouted on a tree.
Right: More amusing vegetable placement aboard a Kowloon-Hong Kong island public ferry. The leafy greens are aligned in a positively pleasant file.
How fortunate I am to be surrounded by things – things owned, things created, things passed along with a nod and a gesture to please use it; with no further comment on its communality! I am so very persuaded that the profuse and the material form an excellent matrix for the transcendent! In that copious spirit of things, here are some notes to conclude this special guest edition of Dim Afterglows:
Listening:
I’ve recently taken to Barbra Streisand’s 2009 rendition of “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most” sung at the Village Vanguard in New York. This was spurred by my hearing a tinny instrumental version of this jazz standard in a pharmacy somewhere in Kowloon, and my subsequent craving for its richer, woodier, form. For some reason I have always thought that this song was called “Spring Can Really Get You Down”, and I vaguely recall an apocryphal record that titled it “Spring Can Really Get You Down Or Hang You Up”. This feels like a philological problem of editions! My brother introduced me this week to Sergio Mendes’ version of another standard, ‘Moanin’’, in turn first performed by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. It’s fascinating to think a little about how the song holds a call-and-response structure; but ever since the score’s polyvocal suggestion has been fully inducted into the repertoire of just one performer. To my ear, anyway, in doubly compounding the verses that the single vocalist recites, the verses take on a pleading and feverish roll-roil. Everybody, after all, knows [they’re] moanin’.
Doing:
Lots! Walking, climbing, looking, looking twice, whipping around, funny-walking, languid-looking, trekking, writing, dozing, funny-looking, who are you calling funny-looking?, dizzying, recovering, watching the time, passing the tea, counting, tarrying, dallying, walking, sitting, jolting up again, introducing, learning, quipping, laughing, Googling, biding time, rewinding the mental tapes, remembering, laughing again, lounging, looking, looking and this time viewing – really viewing, glazing, glossing, peering, sleeping, waking, looking again.
Reading:
Not very much in this department, sorry. I brought a book on the trip but never really got to it.
Eating:
Toast and noodles, Bolo Buns, Chocolate-flavoured Vitasoy (down to the last drop), Roast Goose and too much food besides, Degenerate French Toast, Degenerate Noodles (“出前一丁 chuqianyiding”), Soy Beancurd from a roadside stand – this one came with a prior recommendation!, Wanton Noodles with THE fishballs, Coca-cola in glass bottles, curry-and-rice and/or fried beef noodles, Mister Softee vanilla ice-cream, a steaming cup of chamomile in the fog, a state-sponsored dinner and the largest bao known to humankind (or at least the largest known to our correspondents available at press time), almost just the right amount of dim sum (with a little excess, but even the best of us mis-estimate at times – no matter, even more excuse to try again to calibrate our judgment!), Iron Buddha tea (not the pu erh), surfshop ngau lam min, more Degenerate French Toast, Hong Kong Ketchup Fried Rice and pork, two iced milk teas, pork chop rice and an unbelievably good yuzu-and-lime soda, (here plans to have Japanese were thwarted), a bowl of pure protein – fishcake noodles with beef parts – and a comparatively more standard offering of egg noodles and butterfly-cut brisket, more Degenerate French Toast and milks/coffees all around, rice congee, youtiao fritters and soy milk, and a final meal: Borscht (sans beetroot – with apologies (or not!) to our Russian viewers!), pork curry rice, and a grill platter (with a sausage and then without).
That’s it for this week’s irreverent-reverent praise of things! The next time you hear from us at Dim Afterglows, we’ll be back with our regular programming!
Your Gracious Houseguest,
N.
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