Native Repair #1

I've been giving a lot of walking tours lately. On various themes: Art Deco on the Bund, Shanghai Off the Beaten Track, Creative Shanghai (Art & Markets near the Bund.) I love doing the walks; they bring me close to the textures and details that make the city inspiring to me. (So please contact me if you are game for one!) 

What I love best is that every walk, no matter how well planned, offers itself up as improvisation. I  think of it as the walk throwing out a few gifts & I walk with curious anticipation. As we turn to exit from a derelict building, suddenly, there's a wedding shoot, the bride in a voluminous strapless gown voguing in the doorway, brilliant scarlet against all the concrete grey. Or, as I stop on a corner to show images on my iPad of Little Victories, an mobile art gallery created by artists from the Swatch Art Residency, a posse of rough&tumble three-wheel-deliverymen gather around for a rousing discussion amongst themselves about...well, I don't know exactly what but they sure are excited to see their tricycles on my screen.

Or just something perfect like this:

An improv known from my travels in Africa as "native repair."


For more chair repairs, ones that put my favorite pink plastic string to work, click here. For many more images of variously patched up chairs in Hong Kong, see Michael Wolf's wonderful collection of photographs, Bastard Chairs. And finally, to come make art in Shanghai, click here to apply for a residency at the Swatch Art Hotel.

Drawer # 5.6: Tea & Blankets

It's 104 degrees as I write this, the hottest day thus far in three weeks of stunningly hot weather: I'm getting cabin fever from staying in all day everyday in my air conditioned 9' x 12' studio/office.

So why am I posting about blankets!? Because our ayi (housekeeper) says it's a good time to wash all our winter ones & because I've finally finished my patchwork!

Drawer # 5.6 is somehow about marriage & domesticity.

The blue & white bowls are the most common of old tea cups,  decorated with the character for "double happiness" and the drawing/pattern known as "auspicious clouds." The red cloths that line the boxes, & from which the flowers are cut, are the fabrics, now out of fashion, traditionally used for marriage blankets, as seen in the first of the blanket photos.  

In the top most box of the drawer, the liner cloth is the indigo & white batik known as Nankeen Cloth, another traditional fabric fast disappearing from production, seen, in the photos above, hanging in the secret garden of the  lovely Shanghai Lan Lan Handprinted Blue Nankeen Cloth Museum.  The object in the top box is the remnant of a firecracker casing that landed on our 3rd floor porch one morning as a rousing barrage of firepower kept the demons away from the bride departing her family home next door. 

Drawer photo credit: Bruno David; all others are mine.

Drawer # 2.3 : Beauty

In Colum McCann's fictionalized story of the life of Rudolf Nureyev, Dancer: A Novel, the ballet teacher, Alexander Ivanovich Pushkin, writes to the young dancer:

R-

The magic of a dance, young man, is something purely accidental. The irony of this is that you have to work harder than anyone for the accident to occur. Then, when it happens, it is the only thing in your life guaranteed never to happen again. This, to some, is an unhappy state of affairs, and yet to others, it is the only ecstasy. Perhaps, then, you should forget everything I have said to you and remember only this: The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.

- Sasha

             Drawer 2.3:  From top: 

1. Emptiness 

2. Green dormer window (Cardboard, glass, corrugated paper, milk paint) based on a window once glimpsed from the car while speeding by on the elevated highway.   

3 & 4. Stems of Long Yan, "Dragon Eye" Fruit tied with pink plastic string, found on the street (held by pins, cardboard with milk paint.) The fruits often hang in bunches by their stems from the ceilings of fruit stands.    

For  a companion drawer, click here.   Photo credit: Bruno David     

Things that Don't Fit in a Drawer # 6: University Students

A big thank you to the students from the University of Shanghai for Science & Technology that came to my workshop at the American Culture Center last Saturday! The workshop theme was hat-making out of ordinary household items like the specialty hangers for drying underwear (see row 3, left & center, & below.) Not everyone bought into the idea but a lot of fun & invention filled the day. The students come to USST from all over China, and even from as far away as Ulan Bator, Mongolia (top center) and are as sweet a group as I have met in a long time. (Photos above are thanks to the photographers of the Center's new Media Center...below thanks to a Snake in my neighborhood...)

Jenny Tarlin, the director of the American Cultural Center, does some amazing programming (I say humbly) in her mission to introduce students to American Culture beyond Hollywood & the Big Brands. Two days after my show opened there, we had the wonderful culture-juggling experience of attending a workshop version of Pearl: the Opera, conducted by Sara Jobin.

Named for the daughter of Hester Prynne, the heroine of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, the libretto for the opera was written by Carol Gilligan and her son, Jonathan Gilligan. Jobin, the first woman to ever conduct the San Francisco Opera, and Gilligan, the author of In a Different Voice, a hugely influential book on women's notions of morality, have together founded the Different Voice Opera Project; their mission is to foster the production of contemporary operas in which female roles come to something other than the traditional dire end. The music for Pearl, DVOP's first production, was wriiten by Amy Scurria. Click here to hear the "A" duet of the child Pearl and her mother.

(Fair warning: it's a long one...)

Things that Don't Fit in a Drawer # 5: 2013 Shanghai Literary Festival

Fervent reader that I am, I've always imagined illiteracy to be a terrible thing. But it's one thing to imagine it and another thing to actually live your days unable to read all the text that flows around you...

So I'm always super grateful for March when for three weeks we of the english reading world are treated by M-on-the-Bund to scads of books and writers at the Shanghai Literary Festival. Founded 11 years ago by restauranteur Michelle Garnaut & friends over Martinis, every year the Lit Fest brings an incredible mix of writers to Shanghai, some of them speaking of things China, others ranging far and wide, from breadsticks with Nick Maglieri to the Simpsons with Matt Groening to Bel Canto with Phillip Eisenbeiss. (For this year's schedule including author interviews, click here.)

Some remarkable moments from years past:

Junot Diaz in 2010 inspiring a packed house of a much-younger-than-average festival crowd: "Silence, absence is the basic idiom for artists. What we do is take silence and we make presence...The power of silence is this: when you leave something off the table, people don't even know that it's a choice. Artists give people back their choices. We give people intimate contact with themselves. There's very few professions that do that." (Podcast here.)

Amy Tan several years ago: a Chinese woman in the audience began to ask a question about her daughter's choices in life and it was as though the character of Tam's mother had materialized from the novels to suddenly sit there among us. ("You don't look, you get smash flat. [Like fish, two eyes one side of face.]") It was so universally apparent that everyone in the audience began to laugh. Amy looked up to acknowledge the laughter, and with that look, gently silenced it. She spoke with great empathy to the worried mother, whose well-educated daughter wanted to become an organic farmer, a peasant to her mother's way of thinking. It was one of the greatest moments of grace that I have ever witnessed.

John Banville, the year he won the Booker Prize for "The Sea": the Festival newish then, so on that particularly foggy, dreary day only some 30 souls in the room looking out towards the Huang Pu as Banville read. The silver grey light, the black hulks of coal barges on the working river so in keeping with the novel's voice: "What a little vessel of sadness we are sailing in, this muffled silence thru the autumn dark." When the fog horns began their warnings, Banville paused & we all sat there listening to their echoing calls with great satisfaction at the rightness of it all.

And always, the great Michelle on stage threatening to through your cellphone out the window should it go off during an author's talk...

Drawer # 5.7 : Scraps & Fake Flowers

How one thing leads to another:

I was under some dark theft star one night last week, very unusual here: in the evening, a pickpocket, sneaking up behind me in the dark, tried to get into my purse; the following morning, I discovered that during the night some other knave had nicked the ceramic flower box that was home to our kitchen window morning glories, leaving all their poor naked roots dangling helplessly in the wind. The pickpocket I grabbed and told off (in my best Anglo-Saxon) & got on with things if a little shaky with adrenaline. But the flowerbox broke my heart. Our neighbor & housekeeper, Wu Fang, wrote 素质差 (su4 zhi4 cha4) on my phone which my (life-saving) Pleco translation app translated as “So ignorant! So uneducated!”

All summer the morning glories had brought pleasure to our neighbors who use the narrow walled-in lane behind our block of rowhouses, for washing vegetables in their outdoor kitchen sinks & hanging out laundry on the bamboo poles overhead. I’d look up from my own (indoor) sink to see someone paused in their path to gaze for a moment at the unexpected beauty of the vines. Once, an elderly man who had once lived in America as a chemistry professor, spoke to me approvingly as I watered the flowerbox: “I think you are very comfortable in China.” (Not.)

So morning glories gone but determined not to be robbed of beauty outside my kitchen window, I plotted my own theft…